World leaders fly in for funeral as thousands queue to pay last respects

Mourners are paying their respects to Pope Francis for the final time as the late pontiff lies in state at St Peter’s Basilica ahead of his funeral on Saturday.

With world leaders attending, snipers are stationed on rooftops, drones are grounded, and fighter jets are on standby. Streets surrounding the Vatican are under strict control, with law enforcement agencies coordinating to manage the expected influx of hundreds of thousands of mourners.

World leaders, cardinals, and crowds of pilgrims are expected to attend the funeral, which will be held at 10am on Saturday in St Peter’s Square.

A retired US cardinal who has faced accusations of mishandling sexual abuse cases was chosen to help seal Pope Francis’s casket and entomb his remains during the burial rites.

Advocates for Catholic clergy sexual abuse victims are criticising the appointment of Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles from 1985 to 2011, for the ceremonial role at the Pope’s funeral. Mahony denies any wrongdoing.

Catholic faithful paying their final respects to Pope Francis as he lies in state at St Peter’s Basilica have also expressed outrage at fellow mourners taking selfies with the late pontiff’s open casket.

The reason Michelle Obama skipped Trump’s inauguration is powerful

I have long been a Michelle Obama fan: impressed by the the grace with which she handled being first lady, and her extraordinary autobiography Becoming, which revealed her to be as funny and opinionated as she is whip-smart. I was also once lucky enough to witness her mesmerising a class of girls in east London, as she told them about growing up poor, sharing a bedroom with her brother in a deprived part of Chicago.

“When I see you – I see myself,” she told them, saying that if they worked hard and seized the opportunities that education afforded them, they too could flourish and make something of themselves in the world. Her talk centred on deferred gratification, working hard for the long term, duty, and doing the right thing.

This is a woman who has grafted for everything she has in life. Which is why I cheered while listening to her latest podcast, IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson (Craig is the brother she shared that tiny bedroom with).

“No is a full sentence,” she proclaimed. “It’s so important to give ourselves permission to make decisions that protect our peace.”

Michelle, now 61, was properly explaining for the first time in public why she decided not to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in January (nor Jimmy Carter’s funeral the week before) alongside her husband, former president Barack Obama.

For the “sin” of not showing up, she had to contend with months of rumours about the state of her marriage, and vicious, unfounded gossip about her husband’s supposed affair with Jennifer Aniston, with commentators taking her absence as proof that the couple were divorcing.

However, Michelle says the real reason was much more mundane: she didn’t go because she didn’t want to. It was that simple. And after decades of taking one for the team – putting her own career on hold to support her husband and daughters – she finally did what she wanted to do, put her own needs first, and said no.

But it wasn’t easy

“My decision to skip the inauguration – you know, what people don’t realise – or my decision to make choices at the beginning of this year that suited me – were met with such ridicule and criticism,” she said.

“People couldn’t believe that I was saying no for any other reason; they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart. While I’m here really trying to own my life and intentionally practise making the choice that was right for me.”

She added, “It took everything in my power not to do the thing that was perceived as right, but to do the things that were for me – that was a hard thing for me to do.”

When we fall into the trap of serving others instead of ourselves, as her co-host notes, women become “shock absorbers” – absorbing the needs of our partners, our children, our family and our bosses. It is both exhausting and unfair.

Michelle’s generation of women have been bred to please (don’t believe me? Just read the Girl Guides manual from the 1980s – it’s all about being good hostesses, and above all, never seeking credit or praise). We were taught that being a good woman meant prioritising everyone else over ourselves. If we worked, then we worked harder than men to prove ourselves, and being Superwoman meant not having it all, but doing it all too. The double shift – home and work – is all too real, as Michelle Obama documents in Becoming.

In midlife, that finally begins to change. Research conducted by Noon.org.uk – The Secrets of Midlife Women – found that 43 per cent of ABC1 UK women aged 45-60 agreed that “this period of my life is finally about looking after me, not everyone else – it’s finally MY turn”. Midlife, as Michelle is now discovering, is when we can finally put our own needs first.

For the former first lady, this was a conscious and intentional decision. Not just for herself, but to model putting her own needs first – finally – to her daughters Malia and Sasha Obama. “I want them to start practising now the art of saying ‘no’,” she said. “It’s a muscle that you have to build, because if you don’t constantly build it, you don’t develop it.”

This is not a one-off. Earlier this month, on Sophia Bush’s Work in Progress podcast, she talked about how women are often criticised for putting themselves first.

“So much so that this year, people… they couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself, that they had to assume that my husband and I were divorcing,” she said. “This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions for herself, right? But that’s what society does to us. We start actually finally going, ‘What am I doing? Who am I doing this for?’” she continued. “And if it doesn’t fit into the sort of stereotype of what people think we should do, then it gets labelled as something negative and horrible.”

She added, “I feel like it’s time for me to make some big girl decisions about my life and own it fully.”

It’s a sentiment that I see echoed by the community I run for women in midlife. Many of the women talk about feeling lost, having put their own needs, dreams and wishes at the bottom of the pile for so long they’ve forgotten what they are.

One woman said she looked at her life and felt, “I haven’t chosen any of it – it’s like I’m sleepwalking through my own life.” When I ask them what they love doing, what reliably brings them joy? Many look blank – often they have spent so much of the last 25 years looking after everybody else’s needs, they’ve forgotten their own. “My kids have both gone off to university,” said one. “I was walking around the supermarket buying food, and I’m so used to getting everyone else’s favourites that I had no idea what to buy for myself…”

Recovering a sense of who we are as grown-up women, with our own agency – not as mums, partners, daughters or employees – is crucial. Life spans have doubled in the last century – the average 50-year-old now can expect to live into their late eighties, nineties or even to 100. Yet there are very few models in our culture, or maps to show what the later stages of women’s lives might look like. That’s why Michelle articulating putting herself first matters so much.

And there is a biological imperative, too. As women hit midlife, the hormonal changes of menopause mean the “pleasing”, “love hormone” oxytocin wanes in our bodies. Oestrogen goes down and testosterone increases. We stop being primed for love, nurture, and doing what everyone else wants – and start naturally leaning into our own needs instead.

Midlife isn’t a crisis – it’s a chrysalis. Everything begins to shift: by 50, over half of women have been through many of the big life events, be that divorce, bereavement, redundancy, caring for a dying or elderly parent, raising a child with anxiety, facing an empty nest, or dealing with their own health issues.

But I’ve found the women who have been through the most – who have shed the most – end up the happiest. They end up with a life they have chosen, one which matches on the outside who they feel they are on the inside. But to get to that point takes a lot of sloughing off the dead wood, a lot of pruning what no longer serves us. It takes a lot of saying NO.

Eleanor Mills is the Founder of Noon.org.uk, the UK’s premium community for women in midlife, and the author of the Times-bestselling book ‘Much More to Come: Lessons on the Mayhem and Magnificence of Midlife’, published by HarperCollins

Trio jailed for plot to murder cagefighter involved in notorious heist

Three men have been jailed for plotting to kill a former cagefighter convicted of Britain’s largest cash robbery.

Paul Allen, then 41, was paralysed for life after shots were fired at his large detached rented home in Woodford Green, north-east London, in 2019.

A jury at the Old Bailey was told the intention was to kill him, and that the attackers “very nearly succeeded”, before convicting brothers Louis Ahearne, 36, and Stewart Ahearne, 46, and Daniel Kelly, 46, of plotting to murder Allen with others unknown.

Judge Sarah Whitehouse KC sentenced Kelly, who did not appear at court, to 36 years in prison with an extended licence period of five years while she jailed Louis Ahearne for 33 years and Stewart Ahearne for 30 years.

The judge said on Friday: “I have no doubt that this agreement to murder Paul Allen involved other people apart from the three of you and that you three were motivated by a promise of financial gain.

“The culpability of each one of you is very high.

“The harm caused to the victim was very serious – indeed short of killing him it could hardly be more serious. He is currently paralysed and relies on others for every single need.”

Chris Eubank misses weight and receives £500,000 fine

Chris Eubank Jr’s grudge match with Conor Benn is just over 24 hours away and the British rivals will face off one final time in today’s weigh-in ahead of tomorrow’s highly-anticipated fight at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

The bout has been a long time coming, having initially been schedule to take place two-and-a-half years ago, only to be scuppered by Benn’s adverse drug-test results, and will finally happen more than 30 years after their fathers, Nigel Benn and Chris Sr, fought each other for the second and final time in a legendary contest.

February’s first press conference between Eubank Jr, 35, and Benn, 28, saw the former slap his rival with an egg, while the follow-up that week was without physical action, though it was still captivating. Yesterday’s press conference was similarly enthralling, as Eubank Jr spoke deeply about his “pain”, including around the loss of his brother Sebastian and the poor state of his relationship with his father.

It sets the stage for another fascinating head to head at today’s weigh-in, as Benn moves up two divisions to face Eubank Jr, who is set to be restricted by a rehydration clause.

Follow all the action from the weigh-in at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium below:

Australian politicians slam ‘neo-Nazi hecklers’ at Anzac Day service

A group of hecklers booed Indigenous Australians as they gathered in Melbourne to commemorate their war dead on Anzac Day.

Boos and jeers echoed around the Shrine of Remembrance where some 50,000 people had gathered for the dawn service on Friday.

Anzac Day is one of the most crucial national days in Australia and New Zealand, commemorating the anniversary of the first major military action by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, or Anzac, during World War I.

On 25 April 1915, Anzac forces landed in Gallipoli in Turkey as part of an Allied campaign to capture the Dardanelles and weaken the Ottoman Empire. The campaign proved ill-fated, resulting in the deaths of around 8,700 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders over eight months of brutal fighting.

The solemn mood of the event to remember fallen soldiers was disturbed as hecklers started booing and yelling when a local Indigenous man named Mark Brown began the service with a ceremony in which Indigenous Australians welcome visitors to their traditional land.

Yelling “this is our country” and “we don’t have to be welcomed”, the hecklers said, echoing a slogan of the minor party Trumpet of Patriots.

The group of hecklers allegedly included prominent self-described Nazi Jacob Hersant, who was seen being escorted from the service by police.

Members of the crowd tried to suppress the boos with applause to show respect for the occasion.

The incident was condemned by politicians, including prime minister Anthony Albanese, who said such incidents at Melbourne and Perth services were a disgrace.

“The disruption of Anzac Day is beyond contempt and the people responsible must face the full force of the law,” Mr Albanese said. “This was an act of low cowardice on a day when we honour courage and sacrifice.”

“A neo-Nazi disrupting Anzac Day is abhorrent, un-Australian and disgraceful”, Mr Albanese said. “The people responsible must face the full force of the law.”

The Victoria police said a 26-year-old man from Kensington who was removed from the event was being investigated over the heckling and could be charged.

“Police are aware of a small group of people disrupting the dawn service at the Shrine of Remembrance this morning,” the police said. “He has subsequently been interviewed for offensive behaviour and police will proceed via summons.”

Victoria premier Jacinta Allan said she absolutely condemned the suspected neo-Nazi who came to disrupt the event. “To pierce the sombre silence and to pierce the solemnity of the dawn service isn’t just disrespectful, it dishonours the very thing that the men and women who fought and lost their lives is about,” Ms Allan said.

“For a neo-Nazi to come along and show that level of disrespect and dishonour to every man and woman who has served our nation with pride, honour and dignity – I absolutely condemn this behaviour.”

Mr Albanese and opposition leader Peter Dutton took the day off campaigning ahead of the general election on 3 May as a mark of respect.

“They have no place at all and they are a stain on our national fabric and they are not part of the Australian culture,” Mr Dutton said about the hecklers.

“Nothing should overshadow what it is to be here to commemorate and to celebrate the contribution over successive generations of those that have served in uniform…I’m sure that every right-thinking Australian would be disgusted and appalled by the behaviour.”

Veteran affairs minister Matt Keogh said the “booing was led by someone who’s a known neo-Nazi”.

“We’re commemorating some of those soldiers who fell in a war that was fought against that sort of hateful ideology and so it was completely disrespectful and it’s not something that is welcome at Anzac Day commemorations ever,” Mr Keogh said.

New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon traveled to Gallipoli to commemorate the 110th anniversary of the landing day.

He told a dawn service at Anzac Cove that New Zealand’s contribution of 16,000 soldiers to the Gallipoli campaign was disproportionately large from a national population that was then only about a million.

The service was attended by King Charles’ sister Princess Anne, who represented the British royal family, as well as the king’s representative in Australia, governor general Sam Mostyn.

Additional reporting by agencies.

What smart investors need to know about changing status symbols

“It’s not a bag, it’s a Birkin.”

In 2001, Sex and the City introduced us to the Hermès Birkin, with character Samantha Jones being told there was a five year waiting list for would-be buyers. The fashion set’s favourite accessory went mainstream.

The Birkin continues to sell well over 20 years later, both new and second hand. Resale values have reportedly risen faster than gold. The Birkin has helped Hermès to outperform in what has been a torrid time for luxury brands.

But how long can that appeal sustain?

Apple plans major iPhone production shift in response to Trump tariffs

Apple is reportedly preparing to move production of all iPhones bound for US sales from China to India, in a switch designed to evade the worst of the tariffs set by US president Donald Trump.

More than 60 million of the flagship product are sold in the US each year, but with many of the parts either made or the entire phone assembled in China, these are now subject to heavy additional costs upon arrival to the States.

Over the past few years Apple had already started to move a significant amount of production out of China, to both India and Vietnam in particular. The Financial Times has now reported that the company is attempting to double output from India to ensure they avoid the most severe tariffs.

Additional reports suggest the tech company are set to attempt to increase production in India by up to ten per cent this year, from the current level of assembling between 30-40 million iPhones annually – with a view to having total assembly for US-bound iPhones moved by 2026.

More than 75 per cent of iPhones sold around the world are currently produced in China.

Apple reportedly moved around 1.5m phones out of India to the US earlier this month, chartering flights specially to beat the tariff imposition after the 90-day pause was announced on other nations’ tariffs.

India was initially subject to a reciprocal tariff of 26 per cent, while China’s effective rate rose above 100 per cent before Mr Trump announced mobile phones would be one of the products given a temporary exemption from additional new tariffs.

More than a trillion dollars was wiped off Apple’s share price in the weeks following the initial tariff announcements, though it has recovered around seven per cent across the past week as markets begin to settle.

The company sold more than 230m iPhones in total last year, meaning the US market accounts for more than a quarter of that. Apple are due to report first quarter earnings next week, which will incorporate the very end of the pre-tariff era from the start of this year – though consumer confidence early on in the year may still impact.

“Given that the furore has also knocked consumer confidence around the world, shoppers may still be more cautious about spending big on little devices in the months ahead, whatever AI promises are dangled,” said Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown.

“Apple still boasts enviable brand power, but iPhone sales have underwhelmed in the US, due to fewer upgrades than hoped.”

Ukraine has a chance of defying the odds – but it depends on one thing

The latest massive, deadly attack carried out by Russia on civilian targets in Kyiv is a timely reminder that this conflict – and its eventual resolution – is not just about territory and lines on a map.

It cannot be, in other words, some Trump Organisation real estate project writ large. People live in these faraway partitioned oblasts. Making peace is about the fate of millions of Ukrainians, people soon to be left to colonial-style subjugation and reprisal by an enemy that wishes to crush their spirit and their culture. Abandoning them to Russia feels wrong – because it is wrong. It is appeasement – and will work no better now than it did when President Obama and the West allowed President Putin to annex Crimea in 2014.

The Trump peace plan, now leaked, carries with it the unspoken but lethal notion that various tracts of Ukraine can be transferred to Kremlin control with few ill effects for the inhabitants, and that those driven out as their homes were smashed and whole cities flattened can just return in safety or start again elsewhere. It is heartless beyond words.

The Ukrainian people are being treated as if they need not have a say in the matter – and if their democratically elected leader so much as questions Donald Trump’s “deal”, he is mocked, bullied and vilified, while there are invariably only warm words and endless concessions to Russia. The indulgence of the Kremlin by America is as incomprehensible as it is obscene, and the world knows it.

What we see in the mass bombings of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and, on Palm Sunday, Sumy, is proof, as if any were needed, that Vladimir Putin is not interested in peace. He has a total disregard for international humanitarian law and nothing but malign intentions towards Ukraine. More specifically, it shows that President Putin holds the American proposal for a ceasefire in utter contempt. As Volodymyr Zelensky points out, it is now some 44 days since Ukraine agreed to Donald Trump’s call for a full ceasefire and a halt to strikes. And for each of those 44 days, the Russians have been continuing to take the lives of innocents.

It is not, as President Trump claims, President Zelensky who is responsible for these “killing fields”, but the man who he clearly counts as a friend and ally: President Putin. And it is not just sorrow and righteous anger that Mr Zelensky feels as he tries to defend his people, but surely bewilderment and betrayal as the US has changed sides so dramatically. Those are feelings shared by Ukraine’s more faithful allies across the world.

There are, in other words, no consequences for Russia if it continues to commit war crimes, kidnap children, allows its troops to rape, maim, murder and plunder their way through occupied lands, and advances further into sovereign Ukrainian territory. President Trump says he’s “not happy” about the latest bombings, and that they are “unnecessary”, as if mildly chastising a badly behaved guest at Mar-a-Lago.

That is not going to be taken seriously by Putin, because the Trump plan continues to reward Putin for his aggression. The plan will effectively draw a new border along the eventual armistice line, so President Putin has every incentive to push on.

And, apart from one outburst about being “angry” and “pissed off”, Mr Trump has allowed Putin to drag the process out almost indefinitely. Now, the Trump administration says that it will walk away if the Russians and Ukrainians don’t agree to the plan – but that would suit Putin equally well.

He calculates that without American military and intelligence support, Ukraine will quickly collapse – and instead of having to settle for the one-fifth of Ukraine that Mr Trump is offering, he will win far more on the battlefield. That is why there is no ceasefire. Putin has everything to gain by wasting time.

When Mr Zelensky raises legitimate questions about the peace plan, he is threatened and abused – but the reality is that the ceasefire and the Trump peace deal would have been signed long ago had President Putin not been inventing new excuses for delay and inserting unworkable preconditions into the process. “Ceasefire first, then talks” was the Trump plan – yet he has somehow allowed Putin to reverse the order.

The terrifying question that has been emerging for some time is now crystallising. If the US does finally abandon Ukraine and give Russia a free hand, can the Europe-led “coalition of the willing” fill the void and save the Ukrainian people? It is, in effect, the choice that faces President Zelensky: to accept the deeply flawed Trump plan, which guarantees virtually nothing about the future of his people (especially those under occupation), or to try to fight on against the odds, and with the risk that all will be lost.

It is certainly easy to be pessimistic. Ukraine would struggle without US military supplies and financial support, and Elon Musk said that Ukraine’s resistance would collapse if the Starlink satellite system controlled by him was shut off. When US assistance was “paused” briefly earlier in the year, the front line was turned into a turkey shoot for the delighted Russians. If Mr Trump pursued his strategic alliance with Russia, lifted sanctions and boosted trade, that would transform Russia’s highly stressed economy – and the Kremlin’s war machine with it.

Yet, as he pointed out to Mr Trump and the vice-president JD Vance in his most famous visit to the Oval Office, Mr Zelensky and Ukraine have been written off before and survived far longer than the few days or weeks they were previously given. Ukraine’s own military-industrial base and expertise in modern drone warfare has also been transformed – and would be useful indeed for the future security of what remains of “the West”.

Europe, with loyal allies such as Canada and Japan, has enormous industrial, technological and financial resources at its disposal – and there is no reason in principle why it cannot bolster Ukrainian resistance. Of course, Mr Trump could regard such actions as unfriendly to the United States, but given the way his trade wars have weakened the superpower, he might not want to start a cold war with his remaining nominal allies.

The success of the “coalition of the willing” depends on how willing the coalition proves to be. If Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, ad hoc leaders of this ad hoc alliance, manage to inspire their allies half as much as Mr Zelensky has, then Ukraine still has a chance of defying the odds.

It might not win Crimea back in the near future, but it would mean that President Putin would be forced to negotiate a more satisfactory and sustainable peace, after which Ukraine can build its defences and deepen its newly strengthened partnerships, at least until the Trump-Putin era passes.