The sister-in-law of hostage Shiri Bibas said the family is “not seeking revenge right now” and called for her return from Gaza after Israel said Hamas had released the body of an unidentified woman.

Ofri Bibas Levy said in a statement that the family could not mourn Shiri’s sons, whose bodies were handed over, until their mother is returned.

Israel accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire after forensic testing revealed the body returned on Thursday was not Shiri.

A Hamas spokesman said her remains seem to have been mixed up with other bodies under rubble after an Israeli air strike. The group said it was investigating and affirmed its “full commitment to all our obligations” in the ceasefire.

The three other bodies given back to Israel on Thursday have been identified as Shiri’s sons Ariel and Kfir, who would have been aged five and two, and peace activist Oded Lifschitz, 84, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.

Hamas previously said the mother and her two children were killed in an Israeli air strike.

However, Israel said on Thursday intelligence and forensics show the boys “were brutally murdered by terrorists in captivity in November 2023”.

Ms Bibas Levy, sister of Shiri’s husband Yarden Bibas, who was released by Hamas on 1 February, said: “We are still waiting for Shiri and fear for her fate.”

The events of recent days “emphasizes the urgent need to bring Shiri back to us, save the lives of the living hostages, and return all the fallen for burial”, she said,

Her statement came after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would “take revenge”.

“For Ariel and Kfir’s sake, and for Yarden’s sake, we are not seeking revenge right now,” Ms Bibas Levy said. “We are asking for Shiri.”

Ms Bibas Levy said it was “Israel’s responsibility and obligation” to bring her family members back alive after they were taken hostage during the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.

“There is no forgiveness for abandoning them on October 7, and no forgiveness for abandoning them in captivity,” she said.

In a statement earlier on Friday, Netanyahu said: “Ariel, Kfir and Oded: I am so sorry we couldn’t save you from the monsters who did this.”

The “devastating news” that Shiri’s body had not yet been returned has brought “profound grief” to the family, her sister-in-law said.

To her deceased nephews, Ms Bibas Levy said: “I’m sorry I cannot yet cry for you. We are waiting for Mommy Shiri.”

Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were aged 32, four and nine months when they were kidnapped during the 7 October attacks.

About 1,200 people – mostly civilians – were killed in the attacks and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Israel launched a massive military campaign against Hamas in response, which has killed at least 48,297 Palestinians – mainly civilians – according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel’s announcement that a body returned from Gaza on Thursday was not that of Shiri Bibas, as Hamas had said, throws up another stumbling block in this ceasefire deal.

It was thought the remains of Shiri, a mother of two, had been handed over along with those of her children.

But the Israeli military said forensic testing could only confirm the bodies of Ariel and Kfir, who would have been aged five and two, and not those of their mother.

Instead, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas had “put the body of a Gazan woman in a coffin”, with Ismail al-Thawabta, a spokesman for Hamas, suggesting Shiri’s remains had been mixed up with other bodies under rubble after an Israeli air strike.

In a separate statement, the group said it affirmed its “seriousness and full commitment to all our obligations” under the ceasefire – and that it had “no interest in non-compliance”.

It also said an investigation into the mix-up was under way, and called for the remains of the alleged Palestinian woman mistakenly handed over to Israel to be returned.

The Bibas family were among 251 people taken hostage during Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel, along with Shiri’s husband, Yarden, who was released earlier this month.

Israel launched a massive military campaign against Hamas in response, which has killed at least 48,297 Palestinians – mainly civilians – according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Ariel and Kfir, the youngest of the Israeli hostages, were aged four and nine months when they were kidnapped. Their mother was 32.

Netanyahu has threatened that Hamas will pay the “full price” for failing to hand over Shiri’s body, calling it a “cruel and evil violation” of their agreement.

No measures have yet been announced beyond Netanyahu saying Israel will act “with determination to bring Shiri home”.

But a further claim from Israel that Ariel and Kfir had been “murdered by terrorists in cold blood” will further inflame feelings in Israel. 

In November 2023, Hamas claimed the boys and Shiri had been killed in an IDF air strike. The BBC has not been able to independently verify this.

On Friday, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari claimed forensic tests had revealed that Hamas killed Ariel and Kfir “with their bare hands”.

“Afterwards, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities,” he said, without giving specifics about the alleged injuries. Hamas has not yet responded to these accusations.

For Israeli politicians inside and outside Netanyahu’s government who have been demanding a resumption of the war in Gaza, these claims will be seen as more evidence that Hamas must be utterly eradicated. 

The ceasefire is entering a new period of uncertainty, with the first phase drawing to an end – while negotiations on the next stage have yet to begin in earnest. 

The second phase – in which all the remaining hostages, alive or dead, are due to be released – has been seen from the start as potentially more challenging than the first one.

Israel is demanding the complete disarmament of Hamas, while Hamas rejects the prospect of Israel continuing to maintain tight security control over Gaza. 

Any major breakdown in the deal could see a return to fighting. 

On the other side, though, is perhaps the majority of public opinion in Israel – that nothing should get in the way of all the remaining hostages being returned.

In expressing his condemnation of the latest developments, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog made clear that Israel must remember what he called its “highest duty – to do everything in our power to bring every one of kidnapped sisters and brothers home”.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum echoed this, saying “every step” must be taken with “careful responsibility” to ensure the safe return of all hostages.

A fourth body was returned to Israel, from Gaza, on Thursday – that of 84-year-old peace activist Oded Lifschitz. Just like Ariel and Kfir Bibas, the Israeli military said Oded’s remains had been confirmed by forensic testing.

US President Donald Trump’s remark that his country spent $21m to boost voter turnout in India’s elections has triggered a political slugfest in the country.

He made the remark days after a team led by Elon Musk said it had cancelled the payout as part of its crackdown on a US agency providing foreign aid.

India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called the payout an “external interference” and accused the opposition Congress party of seeking this intervention.

The Congress denied the allegation, calling Trump’s claims “nonsensical”. The US has not provided any evidence to support its claim.

On Friday, India’s foreign ministry said it found the claims “deeply troubling”.

Foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said it was “premature” to make public statements about the matter at this stage and that relevant authorities were investigating it.

Trump vowed to boost the US economy and soon after returning to office, he created the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), led by Musk, to slash federal spending and jobs. Musk says Doge’s mission is to save taxpayer money and cut national debt.

One of its biggest moves – now making global headlines – is a crackdown on USAID, the US agency overseeing humanitarian aid since the 1960s. Musk, who has called USAID a “criminal organisation”, announced on Sunday that funding for several projects had been cancelled.

The cuts included $486m for the “Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening”, with “$21m for voter turnout in India” and “$22m for inclusive and participatory political process in Moldova”.

Defending Doge’s cuts, Trump said India “had a lot of money” and was among the world’s highest-taxing nations.

On Thursday, he doubled down, questioning the $21m spend on “India’s voter turnout”.

The latest comments came a week after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first Washington visit under Trump’s second term, where Trump announced expanded military sales, increased energy exports and plans for a trade deal and new defence framework.

“I guess they were trying to get somebody else elected. We have got to tell the Indian government,” the US president said at a summit in Miami.

The same day, BJP leader Amit Malviya shared a clip of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi speaking at an event in London before the 2024 general election.

In the clip, Gandhi can be heard saying that major democracies like the US and European countries were “oblivious that a huge chunk of democratic model has come undone [in India]”.

“Rahul Gandhi was in London, urging foreign powers – from the US to Europe – to intervene in India’s internal affairs,” Malviya alleged in his post on X.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh dismissed the claim and urged the government to report on USAID’s decades-long support to governmental and non-governmental institutions during PM Modi’s tenure.

Despite widespread reports, neither Doge nor Trump has provided evidence that USAID gave India $21m for voter turnout.

India’s poll panel has not responded, but former election chief SY Qureshi denied receiving such funding during his tenure, which ran from 2010 to 2012.

Earlier, Malviya claimed that in 2012, under Mr Qureshi, the panel signed an agreement with a group linked to George Soros’ foundation – primarily funded by USAID – to support a voter turnout campaign.

Mr Qureshi dismissed the allegation as “malicious”, stating that the agreement explicitly imposed “no financial or legal obligation on either side”.

On Friday, the Indian Express newspaper said in an investigative report that the $21m was sanctioned for Bangladesh and not India.

It was meant to run for three years until July 2025 and that $13.4m had already been spent, according to records accessed by the newspaper.

The leaders of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party have announced plans to dissolve what was once the city’s largest opposition group.

Members will soon vote on the final decision on whether to shut down the 31-year-old party, chairman Lo Kin-hei said.

The party has been struggling to survive following moves by China to crack down on dissent in the city in the wake of the 2019 protests.

Beijing and Hong Kong’s government have argued that such moves were necessary for national security.

As part of the crackdown, Beijing overhauled the former British colony’s polling systems.

The so-called “patriots law” was passed in Hong Kong in 2021 that ensured only people regarded as loyal to the Communist regime in Beijing could serve as lawmakers or local councillors in the semi-autonomous territory.

This law effectively barred the Democratic Party from taking part in elections.

At a late-night press conference on Tuesday after a party meeting, Mr Lo said the party’s leaders had made the call to wind down based on the “current political situation”.

“Developing democracy in Hong Kong is always difficult, and it’s especially difficult in the past few years,” Mr Lo said to reporters.

He did not comment when asked if the party’s leaders’ decision had been made under political pressure.

The party has set up a work group for the shutdown process. At least 75% of its members attending an upcoming general meeting will have to approve the move before it is final. A date for that meeting is yet to be set.

On Wednesday, Hong Kong government adviser Regina Ip accused the Democratic Party of pursuing an agenda that opposed China and “constantly causing trouble inside and outside parliament”.

“Therefore I am not surprised at all that they have been losing supporters in recent years… the Democratic Party has already reached a dead end,” said Ms Ip, co-convener of Hong Kong’s cabinet-like Executive Council.

The Democratic Party was notable for having rare direct negotiations with the Liaison Office – the Chinese Communist government’s representation in Hong Kong – in 2010, to discuss plans for more liberal elections.

Its younger members, however, saw those negotiations as a betrayal. The move triggered a split while the party lost support.

It subsequently regained strength and became the most successful opposition political force in the city after acquiring the most seats in the 2019 local council elections, which took place during the violent anti-government protests.

A number of the Democratic Party’s members – including prominent pro-democracy figures Helena Wong, Lam Cheuk-ting, Wu Chi-wai and Albert Ho – are among the Hong Kong 47 group of campaigners jailed under the controversial national security law.

Another member, former legislator Ted Hui, is now living in Australia in exile and is wanted by the Hong Kong government for alleged national security offences. Earlier this week a court issued an order to confiscate his assets and money in Hong Kong, which are held by his family and a law firm.

In December, Hong Kong stripped the honorary Justice of the Peace title from Martin Lee KC, a key founder of the Democratic Party, after the veteran barrister lost his appeal against an unauthorised assembly conviction.

Planes flying between Australia and New Zealand have been diverted as China conducts a closely-scrutinised military exercise in nearby waters that may involve live fire.

The rare presence of three Chinese naval ships in the Tasman Sea has put both antipodean countries on alert in recent days, with Australia calling it “unusual”.

Australian airline Qantas told the BBC it “temporarily adjusted” the routes of its planes and other carriers have reportedly done the same.

China has said the exercise, which is taking place in international waters, is in accordance with international law.

The ships are now reportedly 340 nautical miles east of the New South Wales coast of Australia, although they were said to have come as close as 150 nautical miles from Sydney at one point.

Australia and New Zealand have been closely monitoring the Chinese fleet – a frigate, a cruiser and a supply tanker – since last week, and have dispatched their own ships to observe them.

Earlier this week, New Zealand’s Defence Minister Judith Collins said China had not informed them they would be sending warships to their region and “have not deigned to advise us on what they are doing in the Tasman Sea”, according to the New Zealand Herald.

Meanwhile, Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles said that the ships’ presence was “not unprecedented, but it is an unusual event”.

China’s foreign ministry confirmed on Friday they were doing naval training and exercises in “distant waters”.

“The exercises were conducted in a safe, standard, and professional manner at all times, in accordance with relevant international laws and practices,” spokesman Guo Jiakun said.

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the Chinese fleet issued an alert on Friday that they would start conducting exercises which may involve live fire.

“This is activity that has occurred in waters consistent with international law… there has been no imminent risk of danger to any Australian assets or New Zealand assets,” he said.

But Marles said the Chinese had not directly notified Australian officials when they put out the alert.

“What China did was put out a notification that it was intending to engage in live fire, and by that I mean a broadcast that was picked up by airlines, literally commercial planes that were flying across the Tasman,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, adding that usually such notices would be given 12 to 24 hours in advance.

On Friday an Emirates plane was reportedly informed about the exercise by Chinese authorities, while it was still in the air as it flew from Sydney to Christchurch. The BBC is seeking confirmation.

In a statement to the BBC, Qantas confirmed that it had changed the routes of its planes flying across the Tasman Sea and said it was continually monitoring airspace.

“We continue to work with the Australian government and broader industry to monitor the situation,” it added.

Virgin Australia and Air New Zealand have reportedly done the same.

The drill comes just days after Australia and China held a defence dialogue in Beijing where they had discussed military transparency and communication, among other things.

The two countries have seen several recent tense maritime encounters.

Earlier this month, Canberra said a Chinese fighter jet had released flares in front of an Australian military aircraft while flying over the South China Sea. Beijing said the aircraft had “intentionally intruded” into its airspace.

In May last year, Australia accused a Chinese fighter plane of dropping flares close to an Australian navy helicopter that was part of a UN Security Council mission on the Yellow Sea.

Canberra accused Beijing’s navy of using sonar pulses in international waters off Japan in November 2023, resulting in Australian divers suffering injuries.

A notorious gang leader has died after he was shot inside a courthouse in Sri Lanka by a gunman disguised as a lawyer, say police.

Police say the gunman used a revolver which was smuggled in a hollowed-out book by a female suspect, who remains at large.

Gang leader Sanjeewa Kumara Samararathne had been escorted to court to face proceedings when he was shot. Police say he was a suspect in multiple murder cases.

The shooting in the capital Colombo is among a series of killings by rivalling gangs, which has persisted as authorities vow to crack down on gang violence in the country.

The gang leader, popularly known as Ganemulle Sanjeewa, had been in custody since he was arrested in September 2023.

Police said he had been escorted to the courthouse on Wednesday by a dozen police officers. He was taken to hospital after he was shot but was pronounced dead on arrival.

The gunman managed to flee the scene but was later captured by police. He has been identified differently by authorities and local media, but police say that he used several names.

Police have identified the female suspect as 25-year-old Pinpura Dewage Ishara Sewwandi.

Authorities have put out a notice promising a reward for anyone providing information on the woman. Police say they have also arrested a policeman and van driver suspected of helping the two suspects in the shooting.

Lawmakers discussed reining in gang violence in parliament on Wednesday, with an opposition MP calling it a “major security issue”.

Health and mass media minister Nalinda Jayatissa, who in December had pledged to crack down on such criminal activity, said on Wednesday that the government would “take the actions of organised underworld gangs seriously.”

The incident has also raised questions about security in the courthouse, with authorities currently reviewing security measures.

New security protocols are being implemented in the wake of the shooting, including deploying armed guards when certain people are brought to court. Armed security personnel are not typically allowed in court, justice minister Harshana Nanayakkara said on Thursday.

At least nine people have died this year in a spate of shootings blamed on gang rivalry, according to AFP citing police data.

It looked small at first, in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Yet as we approached the USS Carl Vinson it filled the view out of the back of the Osprey tilt-rotor which was carrying us there, its deck packed with state-of-the-art warplanes. At nearly 90,000 tonnes, and more than 300 metres in length, the nuclear-powered Carl Vinson is one of the largest warships ever built.

Watching its FA18 and F35 fighter jets being hurled into the air every minute or two by the carrier’s steam catapults is a spine-tingling experience, a procedure managed with impressive composure by the crew on the crowded deck.

An untimely Pacific squall which drenched us and everything else did not slow them at all.

Even after years of rapid advances in Chinese military capabilities, the United States is still unrivalled in its capacity to project force anywhere around the world with its fleet of 11 super-carriers.

But does a $13bn (£10bn) aircraft carrier which the latest Chinese missiles could sink in a matter of minutes make sense any more – particularly in the age of Donald Trump?

We had been invited onto the Carl Vinson to see another side of US carrier strategy, one which emphasises American friendliness, and willingness to work with allies – something you don’t hear much in Washington these days.

The Carl Vinson was taking part in an exercise with two other aircraft carriers and their escorting destroyers from France and Japan, about 200km east of the Philippines. In the absence of wars to fight, US carrier groups spend much of their time doing this, learning how to operate together with allied navies. Last year they held one exercise that brought together ships from 18 navies.

This one was smaller, but was the first in the Pacific involving a French carrier for more than 40 years.

Down in the massive hangar, below the noisy flight deck, Rear Adm Michael Wosje, commander of the Carl Vinson’s strike force, was sitting with his French colleague, Rear Adm Jacques Mallard of the carrier Charles de Gaulle, and his Japanese colleague Rear Adm Natsui Takashi of the Kaga, which is in the process of being converted to Japan’s first aircraft carrier since World War Two.

The Charles de Gaulle is the only warship in the world which matches some of the capabilities of the US super-carriers, but even then is only half their size.

All three admirals were brimming with bonhomie.

The fraught scenes in Europe, where President Trump’s men were ripping up the rule book which underscored the international order for the past 80 years, and telling one-time allies they were now on their own, seemed a world away.

“Our network of strong alliances and partnerships, such as those that we share with France and Japan, is a key advantage of our nations as we confront our collective security challenges,” said Adm Wosje. In impeccable English Adm Mallard concurred: “This exercise is the expression of a will to better understand each other, and to work for the defence of compliance in international law.”

No one mentioned the radical new views emanating from Washington, nor did they mention an increasingly assertive China, although Adm Natsui might have had both in mind when he said Japan now found itself in “the most severe and complex security environment. No country can now protect her own security alone.”

Down in the warren of steel corridors which make up the living quarters of the 5,000 men and women on the Carl Vinson, the official portraits of the new president and vice-president were already hanging, the one of Trump with its now familiar pugilistic glower. We were not permitted to interview the crew, and politics would have been off-limits anyway, but some of those on board were curious what I thought of the new administration.

Internet access on board is spotty, but they do keep in touch with home. We were told they even get Amazon deliveries while at sea, picked up from designated collection points.

It is a fair bet then that there is plenty of discussion of what President Trump has in store for these giants of the navy. Elon Musk has already vowed to bring his cost-cutting wrecking ball to the Pentagon and its $900bn budget, and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has welcomed that, although, he stressed, the Pentagon is not USAID which President Trump has vowed to shut down completely.

In the hangar we watched the crew maintaining the aircraft, surrounded by packing cases and spare parts. We were warned not to film any exposed parts of these technological marvels, for fear of revealing classified information. We could not even risk touching the F35 fighters, which have a prohibitively expensive special coating to help conceal them from radar.

They showed us the “Jet Shop” where they repair and test the engines, a technician who identified himself as ‘082 Madeiro’ explained that they needed to carry enough spare parts to keep the planes flying on long deployments, and that after a certain number of hours the engines had to be completely replaced, whether or not they were faulty. There was a brand new engine in its enormous packaging next to him. Cost, around $15m.

Running the Carl Vinson costs around $700m a year.

So will the Trump administration take a knife to the Pentagon budget? Hegseth has said he believes there are significant efficiencies to be found. He has also openly mused about the value of aircraft carriers. “If our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers, and if 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our ten aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of conflict, what does that look like?”, he said in an interview last November.

The debate about the utility of aircraft carriers is not new. It goes right back to when they first appeared a century ago. Critics today argue that they are too vulnerable to the latest generation of Chinese ballistic and hypersonic missiles, forcing them to stay at a distance from the Chinese coast which would put their aircraft out of range. The money, they say, would be better spent on newer technology.

There is something archaic about these massive, welded hunks of steel, that seemed to have their heyday in the Pacific War of the 1940s. Yet in the vast expanse of the ocean, with few airfields, it has proved difficult to do without them. Supporters argue that, with their escorts of guided-missile destroyers, the super carriers can defend themselves quite well, and that they are still hard to sink. Downsize these carriers, to carry only helicopters or planes which can land and take off vertically as many countries have done, and you end up with vessels which are even more vulnerable.

It is worth noting that China too believes in the value of aircraft carriers; it has already built three. And as floating symbols of US prestige, they may appeal to President Trump, a man known for his love of flamboyant structures, whatever the economic arguments for and against them.

At his Senate confirmation hearing Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration would prioritise increased ship-building, although he did not say how this can be achieved. The US has only four naval shipyards left; China has, by some estimates, more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the US. He also told his counterparts in Japan and South Korea that he wanted to deepen defence co-operation with them. Europe may be on its own, but it seems Asian allies will get the attention of this White House as it focuses on the strategic challenge posed by China.

Three new Ford-class nuclear carriers, the next generation after the Carl Vinson, are currently under construction, although two will not be in service until the next decade. The plan is to complete ten of this new class of carrier, and so far there have been no indications that the Trump administration wants to change that. For all its many critics, the US super-carrier is probably here to stay.

A political tidal wave is crashing across Germany. That’s what the hard-right nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party firmly believes.

It is labelled “radical”, “racist” and “anti-democratic” by opponents. Germany’s domestic intelligence service says the party is “anti-constitutional”.

But if polls are right, the AfD will become Germany’s second largest political force after elections this Sunday.

That would be a huge shift in tectonic plates, not just at home but across Europe.

Why is the AfD such a big deal, you might ask? Parties on the populist right have grown in support across much of Europe.

The AfD points to Donald Trump as well. They share his “anti-woke”, tough-on-migration, pro-fossil-fuel message. They too are keen to stop sending weapons to Ukraine, and to de-escalate tensions with Russia.

The Trump administration supports them right back – publicly, to the outrage of many Germans.

The thing is, Germany isn’t just any other country.

It is Europe’s largest economy, one of its most influential nations. It still carries the weight of its Nazi past. Alongside the UK and France, it’s one of the Big Three that helped shape and secure Europe’s liberal order and defence structures following both World War Two and the Cold War.

Never before in post-war Germany has a hard-right party been so successful, while on the cusp of being identified as a threat to the Federal Republic and its liberal constitution.

France’s influential opposition leader, Marine Le Pen, whose party is also considered far-right, has distanced herself from the AfD on the European stage, apparently judging its positions and ethno-nationalist reputation too radical.

The long-held assumption among the mainstream at home and abroad had been that Germany’s dark past immunised it against any serious flirtations with the extreme right.

But there’s a lot about this election that’s making observers shift their view of Germany. And I will come back to the AfD, which vigorously denies its “extremist” label.

Germans have suffered a kick in the gut – in terms of self-image and their country’s international reputation.

For years, they got used to being admired – and envied – as the economic powerhouse of Europe.

, roughly translating as “progress through technology”, was an advertising slogan for Audi cars in the 1980s. For decades it encapsulated Germany’s reputation in the international imagination.

The country was seen as modern, dynamic and technologically advanced. And the automobile industry was one of the main arteries pumping wealth into Germany’s economic heart.

But fundamental flaws have now been exposed in the German economic model.

It is widely viewed as (broken) – relying too heavily on energy-intensive, old-fashioned industries like combustion-engine cars and the chemical industry.

Critics question Germany’s lack of foresight, or ability to move with the times. Where was the serious investment in R&D? In big tech? In AI?

To make matters worse, during Angela Merkel’s 16 years as chancellor – she stepped down in 2021 – Germany became increasingly dependent on:

• exports to China
• cheap gas from Russia
• a US defence umbrella.

All this left Germany very exposed.

Donald Trump now says Europe can no longer rely on US security support and guarantees.

China has made rapid advances in the automobile industry and dominates electric car technology. So far less need for German imports.

And Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine left Germany scrambling for alternative energy sources. Buying liquid natural gas, from the US and others, is expensive, leading to financial strain on many energy-intensive German businesses.

The result: Germany’s economy is sluggish and sticky. As the biggest member of the eurozone currency, that has an impact way beyond its borders. European allies are frustrated.

Germany’s military is also a source of irritation (that’s putting it politely) among European neighbours. Berlin is a key power in the defence alliance, Nato. Donald Trump’s return to the White House means Europeans need to provide more of their own capabilities.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged a – a turning point – for his country’s depleted military, after Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Yet Germany’s military remains in a debilitated state – less battle-ready, we are told, than three years ago.

Partly due to its donations to Ukraine.

Germany, after the US, has been the biggest donor of military aid to Ukraine and most political parties in Germany are in favour of continuing to support Kyiv.

The AfD takes a very different stance. “Peace” is one of the most frequent signs you see at their rallies.

They want a rapprochement with Russia, to immediately stop sending weapons to Ukraine, and to use resources instead to build up Germany’s armed forces for protection at home.

More than 4,000 bridges in Germany are broken or in a dubious state. I could hardly believe my ears when I first heard that. But it is the reported figure in a country whose infrastructure has been quietly crumbling for years due to chronic under-investment – public and private.

Train punctuality in Germany is appalling – worse than in the UK, which will astound weary British commuters.

Digitisation is lamentable too. Mobile phone reception is patchy outside cities and people are still known to use faxes!

But even if recent German governments had wanted to invest more, they faced legal limits on spending.

A debt brake was written into the German constitution following the financial crisis of 2008/9, with a constraint on new debt of no more than 0.35% of GDP, except in times of national emergency.

Germans didn’t trust their politicians any more.

They had seen government spending spiral at home and abroad. The euro currency, which Germany depends on, almost collapsed.

But what seemed to voters an anchor of financial stability then, now appears to many, a block to economic growth.

Rows about reforming the debt brake were the final straw leading to the collapse of Germany’s outgoing coalition, and the snap election this Sunday.

But, new German government beware: breaking the debt brake will be no mean feat. You need a two-thirds majority in parliament to change the German constitution.

Migration is a huge issue in Germany. And a big vote winner for the AfD.

It is far from the only country worrying about migration levels in Europe, but Germany alone took in over a million asylum seekers, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, during Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015/16.

The country has also opened its doors to 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees.

Many Germans were proud of what they called their “welcome culture”.

But a spate of attacks by asylum seekers from the Middle East and Afghanistan has re-ignited a debate about how open Germany’s borders should be.

There have been stabbings, a machete assault, a car ramming into civilians at a Christmas market and again at a recent trade union demonstration in Munich, where yet another small child was killed.

The AfD insists it is not racist or anti-migration, and that anyone is welcome in Germany if they arrive by legal means, get a job, contribute to society and respect local norms and culture.

The party says it would immediately deport all immigrants who commit a crime, and anyone who arrives here illegally.

That stance was applauded by numerous AfD supporters I spoke to at rallies in the lead-up to Sunday’s election – including young women who told me they no longer felt safe on the streets.

It’s also worth noting that in May, a German court found that “at least a significant part of the AfD” believed that anyone with a migrant heritage was not “properly German” – even if they held German citizenship.

It concluded that the AfD aimed to “grant German citizens with a migration background only a legally devalued status”. This goes against the German constitution.

Worried they could lose voters to the AfD over the question of migration and borders, Germany’s centre left and centre right have moved to the right in their rhetoric. This is a victory for the AfD, whatever the outcome of the election.

Even if it becomes the second largest force in parliament, as predicted, it is very, very unlikely to make it into Germany’s next government.

The post-World War Two political system in Germany is designed so that no single party can dominate parliament as the Nazis did after they were first voted in, in 1933.

Coalition-building is the name of the game. And there has been a so-called firewall in place since the end of World War Two – a cross-party consensus to keep the extreme right out of government.

The AfD insists it is conservative and libertarian, not a radical, right-wing force.

It points to its growing support base, in west as well as east Germany and among younger voters too. It accuses opponents of trying to shut it up, shut it down and keep it out of power. That, it says, is anti-democratic.

Elon Musk grabbed headlines Europe-wide when he proclaimed in December that only the AfD can save Germany.

The majority here still insists their country needs to be saved from AfD.

Apple is taking the unprecedented step of removing its highest level data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded access to user data.

Advanced Data Protection (ADP) means only account holders can view items such as photos or documents they have stored online through a process known as end-to-end encryption.

But earlier this month the UK government asked for the right to see the data, which currently not even Apple can access.

Apple did not comment at the time but has consistently opposed creating a “backdoor” in its encryption service, arguing that if it did so, it would only be a matter of time before bad actors also found a way in.

Now the tech giant has decided it will no longer be possible to activate ADP in the UK.

It means eventually not all UK customer data stored on iCloud – Apple’s cloud storage service – will be fully encrypted.

In a statement the Home Office said: “We do not comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices.”

In a statement Apple said it was “gravely disappointed” that the security feature would no longer be available to British customers.

“As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products, and we never will,” it continued.

• How does encryption work?

The ADP service is opt-in, meaning people have to sign up to get the protection it provides.

From 1500GMT on Friday, any Apple user in the UK attempting to turn it on has been met with an error message.

Existing users’ access will be disabled at a later date.

It is not known how many people have signed up for ADP since it became available to British Apple customers in December 2022.

Prof Alan Woodward – a cyber-security expert at Surrey University – said it was a “very disappointing development” which amounted to “an act of self harm” by the government.

“All the UK government has achieved is to weaken online security and privacy for UK based users,” he told the BBC.

“It was naïve of the UK government to think they could tell a US technology company what to do globally,” he added.

The request was served by the Home Office under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), which compels firms to provide information to law enforcement agencies.

Apple would not comment on the notice and the Home Office refused to either confirm or deny its existence, but the BBC and the Washington Post spoke to a number of sources familiar with the matter.

It provoked a fierce backlash from privacy campaigners, who called it an “unprecedented attack” on the private data of individuals.

Two senior US politicians said it was so serious a threat to American national security that the US government should re-evaluate its intelligence-sharing agreements with the UK unless it was withdrawn.

It is not clear that Apple’s actions will fully address those concerns, as the IPA order applies worldwide and ADP will continue to operate in other countries.

In its statement, Apple said it regretted the action it had taken.

“Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end-encryption is more urgent than ever before,” it said.

“Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in future in the UK.”

The row comes amid growing push-back in the US against regulation being imposed on its tech sector from elsewhere.

In a speech at the AI Action Summit in Paris at the beginning of February, US Vice President JD Vance made it clear that the US was increasingly concerned about it.

“The Trump administration is troubled by reports that some foreign governments are considering tightening the screws on US tech companies with international footprints,” he said.

Beloved Australian soap drama Neighbours has been cancelled again, two years after it was saved by Amazon MGM Studios.

Without specifying a reason, Amazon confirmed the series will finish at the end of 2025 – 40 years and more than 9,000 episodes after its television debut.

It was dropped by Channel 5 in 2022, but revived by Amazon for its streaming platforms just four months after a star-studded farewell episode watched by millions.

The soap – which helped launched the careers of Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie – has long been a huge hit with Australian and UK audiences, and last year received its first Emmy nomination.

A statement on the show’s social media said the soap would be “resting” from December.

“Audiences all around the world have loved and embraced Neighbours for four decades and we are very proud of the huge success over the last two years,” executive producer Jason Herbison wrote.

“We value how much the fans love Neighbours and we believe there are more stories of the residents of Ramsay Street to tell in the future,” Mr Hebrison added, hinting that the producers will again hunt for a new backer.

New episodes will continue to air on Amazon Prime Video and Australia’s Channel Ten four times a week until the end of 2025.

In a statement, Amazon MGM Studios said it was “proud” to have played “a small part” in Neighbours history.

“Forty years is an incredible milestone,” a spokesperson said.

Fans vented their disappointment at the decision.

One wrote on social media: “I refuse point blank to accept that they will try to take @neighbours from me AGAIN!!! It’s sometimes the only 20 minutes in the day I can escape. Absolutely blooming well not!!”

Someone else wrote: “I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve logged into @primevideouk to be greeted by #Neighbours sitting at the top of the weekly charts.

“Now @amazon have cancelled the soap. At least a few of us will save money when we cancel though, right?”

Another said: “Will be so sad to say goodbye again, the joy & comfort this show has given for 40 years.”

Set and filmed in Melbourne, Neighbours was first broadcast in Australia in 1985 and launched on BBC One a year later.

The show has lately featured more diverse characters and storylines, amid questions over how well it reflected modern Australia. It featured the first same-sex marriage on Australian TV.

It also had its controversies, however. A number of actors recently came forward with racism allegations, prompting production company Fremantle Media to promise a review.

News of the show’s cancellation comes after actor Ian Smith – who plays Ramsay Street stalwart Harold Bishop – last year announced he would leave the show, revealing he has terminal cancer.

It also follows cutbacks elsewhere to TV soaps, including to the numbers of episodes of British shows Coronation Street, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks.

Swedish police have been investigating the suspected sabotage of an undersea telecoms cable in the Baltic Sea, connecting Germany and Finland.

A series of undersea cables and gas pipelines have been damaged in suspected attacks since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, prompting Nato to launch a monitoring mission in the sea last month.

The Swedish coastguard has dispatched a research vessel to the east of Gotland, which is the country’s largest island and the reported location of the latest breach.

Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has said the government is aware of the cable break and added it “must be seen in the context of the current serious security situation”.

The owner of the cable, Finnish telecom operators Cinia, said it detected minor damage to its fibre-optic cable but added it was still functioning as usual.

Cinia also said it is the third time this cable has been damaged in recent months.

The cable was severed in November last year.

There has been an increase in damage to undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea over the past few months, largely caused by civilian ships dragging their anchors across cables.

Swedish police have said “the preliminary investigation relates to suspected sabotage”. The Swedish coastguard has said they do not know when the damage occurred.

“We have a ship called KBV 003 on its way to east of Gotland. It is in the Swedish economic zone and we are assisting with the crime scene investigation,” the coastguard added.

• Putin’s secret weapon: The threat to the UK lurking on our sea beds

European leaders have suspected Russian involvement in breaches.

However, poor weather, inadequate equipment and human error has been found to be responsible for some damages.

Bulgarian ship the Vezhen was cleared of sabotage by the Swedish authorities earlier this month.

An Indian pharmaceutical company is manufacturing unlicensed, highly addictive opioids and exporting them illegally to West Africa where they are driving a major public health crisis in countries including Ghana, Nigeria, and Cote D’Ivoire, a BBC Eye investigation has revealed.

Aveo Pharmaceuticals, based in Mumbai, makes a range of pills that go under different brand names and are packaged to look like legitimate medicines. But all contain the same harmful mix of ingredients: tapentadol, a powerful opioid, and carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant so addictive it’s banned in Europe.

This combination of drugs is not licensed for use anywhere in the world and can cause breathing difficulties and seizures. An overdose can kill. Despite the risks, these opioids are popular as street drugs in many West African countries, because they are so cheap and widely available.

The BBC World Service found packets of them, branded with the Aveo logo, for sale on the streets of Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Ivoirian towns and cities.

Having traced the drugs back to Aveo’s factory in India, the BBC sent an undercover operative inside the factory, posing as an African businessman looking to supply opioids to Nigeria. Using a hidden camera, the BBC filmed one of Aveo’s directors, Vinod Sharma, showing off the same dangerous products the BBC found for sale across West Africa.

In the secretly recorded footage, the operative tells Sharma that his plan is to sell the pills to teenagers in Nigeria “who all love this product”. Sharma doesn’t flinch. “OK,” he replies, before explaining that if users take two or three pills at once, they can “relax” and agrees they can get “high”. Towards the end of the meeting, Sharma says: “This is very harmful for the health,” adding “nowadays, this is business.”

It is a business that is damaging the health and destroying the potential of millions of young people across West Africa.

In the city of Tamale, in northern Ghana, so many young people are taking illegal opioids that one of the city’s chiefs, Alhassan Maham, has created a voluntary task force of about 100 local citizens whose mission is to raid drug dealers and take these pills off the streets.

“The drugs consume the sanity of those who abuse them,” says Maham, “like a fire burns when kerosene is poured on it.” One addict in Tamale put it even more simply. The drugs, he said, have “wasted our lives”.

The BBC team followed the task force as they jumped on to motorbikes and, following a tip off about a drug deal, launched a raid in one of Tamale’s poorest neighbourhoods. On the way they passed a young man slumped in a stupor who, according to locals, had taken these drugs.

When the dealer was caught, he was carrying a plastic bag filled with green pills labelled Tafrodol. The packets were stamped with the distinctive logo of Aveo Pharmaceuticals.

It’s not just in Tamale that Aveo’s pills are causing misery. The BBC found similar products, made by Aveo, have been seized by police elsewhere in Ghana.

We also found evidence that Aveo’s pills are for sale on the streets of Nigeria and Cote D’Ivoire, where teenagers dissolve them in an alcoholic energy drink to increase the high.

Publicly-available export data show that Aveo Pharmaceuticals, along with a sister company called Westfin International, is shipping millions of these tablets to Ghana and other West African countries.

Nigeria, with a population of 225 million people, provides the biggest market for these pills. It has been estimated that about four million Nigerians abuse some form of opioid, according to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics.

The Chairman of Nigeria’s Drug and Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Brig Gen Mohammed Buba Marwa, told the BBC, opioids are “devastating our youths, our families, it’s in every community in Nigeria”.

In 2018, following a BBC Africa Eye investigation into the sale of opioids as street drugs, Nigerian authorities tried to get a grip on a widely abused opioid painkiller called tramadol.

The government banned the sale of tramadol without prescription, imposed strict limits on the maximum dose, and cracked down on imports of illegal pills. At the same time, Indian authorities tightened export regulations on tramadol.

Not long after this crackdown, Aveo Pharmaceuticals began to export a new pill based on tapentadol, an even stronger opioid, mixed with the muscle-relaxant carisoprodol.

West African officials are warning that opioid exporters appear to be using these new combination pills as a substitute for tramadol and to evade the crackdown.

In the Aveo factory there were cartons of the combination drugs stacked on top of each other, almost ceiling-high. On his desk, Vinod Sharma laid out packet after packet of the tapentadol-carisoprodol cocktail pills that the company markets under a range of names including Tafrodol, the most popular, as well as TimaKing and Super Royal-225.

He told the BBC’s undercover team that “scientists” working in his factory could combine different drugs to “make a new product”.

Aveo’s new product is even more dangerous than the tramadol it has replaced. According to Dr Lekhansh Shukla, assistant professor at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bengaluru, India, tapentadol “gives the effects of an opioid” including very deep sleep.

“It could be deep enough that people don’t breathe, and that leads to drug overdose,” he explained. “And along with that, you are giving another agent, carisoprodol, which also gives very deep sleep, relaxation. It sounds like a very dangerous combination.”

Carisoprodol has been banned in Europe because it is addictive. It is approved for use in the US but only for short periods of up to three weeks. Withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, insomnia, and hallucinations.

When mixed with tapentadol the withdrawal is even “more severe” compared to regular opioids, said Dr Shukla. “It’s a fairly painful experience.”

He said he knew of no clinical trials on the efficacy of this combination. Unlike tramadol, which is legal for use in limited doses, the tapentadol-carisoprodol cocktail “does not sound like a rational combination”, he said. “This is not something that is licensed to be used in our country.”

In India, pharmaceutical companies cannot legally manufacture and export unlicensed drugs unless these drugs meet the standards of the importing country. Aveo ships Tafrodol and similar products to Ghana, where this combination of tapentadol and carisoprodol is, according to Ghana’s national Drug Enforcement Agency, unlicensed and illegal. By shipping Tafrodol to Ghana, Aveo is breaking Indian law.

We put these allegations to Vinod Sharma and Aveo Pharmaceuticals. They did not respond.

The Indian drugs regulator, the CDSCO, told us the Indian government recognises its responsibility towards global public health and is committed to ensuring India has a responsible and strong pharmaceutical regulatory system.

It added that exports from India to other countries are closely monitored and that recently tightened regulation is strictly enforced. It also called importing countries to support India’s efforts by ensuring they had similarly strong regulatory systems.

The CDSCO stated it has taken up the matter with other countries, including those in West Africa, and is committed to working with them to prevent wrongdoing. The regulator said it will take immediate action against any pharmaceutical firm involved in malpractice.

Aveo is not the only Indian company making and exporting unlicensed opioids. Publicly available export data suggest other pharma companies manufacture similar products, and drugs with different branding are widely available across West Africa.

These manufacturers are damaging the reputation of India’s fast-growing pharmaceutical industry, which makes high-quality generic medicines upon which millions of people worldwide depend and manufactures vaccines which have saved millions of lives. The industry’s exports are worth at least $28bn (£22bn) a year.

Speaking about his meeting with Sharma, the BBC’s undercover operative, whose identity must remain concealed for his safety, says: “Nigerian journalists have been reporting on this opioid crisis for more than 20 years but finally, I was face to face… with one of the men at the root of Africa’s opioid crisis, one of the men who actually makes this product and ships it into our countries by the container load. He knew the harm it was doing but he didn’t seem to care… describing it simply as business.”

Back in Tamale, Ghana, the BBC team followed the local task force on one final raid that turned up even more of Aveo’s Tafrodol. That evening they gathered in a local park to burn the drugs they had seized.

“We are burning it in an open glare for everybody to see,” said Zickay, one of the leaders, as the packets were doused in petrol and set ablaze, “so it sends a signal to the sellers and the suppliers: if they get you, they’ll burn your drugs”.

But even as the flames destroyed a few hundred packets of Tafrodol, the “sellers and suppliers” at the top of this chain, thousands of miles away in India, were churning out millions more – and getting rich on the profits of misery.

When Sir Keir Starmer visits the White House next Thursday, he will be treading a fine diplomatic line.

He will want to maintain his support for President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine’s government. But he will also want to gain the ear of President Donald Trump over the talks he has begun with Russia to end the war.

All this while keeping out of the venomous verbal crossfire between Washington and Kyiv.

That will be no easy task.

Transatlantic relations are in pieces. The US president has upended America’s longstanding support for Ukraine and sidelined Europe in the process.

US defence secretary Pete Hegseth says European security is no longer a US priority. Vice-President JD Vance attacks the very nature of European democracy.

It is into this cauldron of ideological enmity that Sir Keir will seek a hearing when he meets the president and his team at the White House.

So what can and should the prime minister do?

Diplomats say he has one advantage over European allies, namely his permanence. Trump, they say, knows Sir Keir is one of the few European leaders who will stay in power throughout his presidency. Trump, it is said, likes the fact the prime minister has a healthy parliamentary majority.

“I get along with him well,” Trump told the BBC a few weeks ago. “I like him a lot. He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and I think he’s done a very good job thus far.”

But warm words and familiarity do not pay for lunch inside the Washington beltway.

What could Sir Keir offer the famously transactional president? He has already made a downpayment by offering to deploy British boots on the ground in Ukraine as part of a post-war reassurance force.

This angered some European leaders who thought it premature and divisive. It also risked Europe getting excluded from discussions about more fundamental issues such as Ukraine’s territory and sovereignty. But the troops offer may gain Sir Keir some diplomatic brownie points in the West Wing.

The other thing Sir Keir could offer Trump is the strongest possible language he can muster promising to increase UK defence spending. Starmer is not expected to announce when he will meet his target of spending 2.5% of national income on defence. But he may talk up both the UK’s commitment and his calls for other European allies to do likewise.

Sir Alex Younger, former chief of MI6, told BBC Two’s Newsnight: “We need to demonstrate that we are prepared to play a role, take control of our own environment, recognise that we have got to develop our power and that has got to happen quickly.”

But diplomats say the main argument Starmer must make is to convince Trump that a fast deal on Russian terms would be against his own interests. Namely that the terms of any ceasefire – its fairness, its permanence, its safeguards – were as important as any short term cessation of hostilities. In other words, that there is no point in having a triumphant ceasefire agreement which does not survive for long, risking Trump’s reputation.

“If I were Starmer, I would say to Trump that this is your chance for your place in history, the man who brought peace and ended this war,” Lord Darroch, the former UK ambassador to the US, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“But it has to be a fair deal. If it’s a bad deal, you are not going to get that praise, you are going to get a load of criticism and that will be your record in the history books.”

Key to that would be urging Trump to put pressure on Vladmir Putin by threatening to seize frozen Russian assets, increase support for Ukraine and tighten up sanctions.

But the risks of the prime minister’s trip are huge. The famously thin-skinned president could take offence at Sir Keir’s outright contradiction of his claim that Zelensky is a dictator. He could be irritated by Sir Keir’s insistence that any European reassurance force deployed to Ukraine must have a US “backstop”, expected in the form of aircover.

The diplomatic pitfalls of cross words and cancelled press conferences will be troubling the minds of British officials as they prepare for the trip. They will be acutely aware President Emmanuel Macron of France will be in Washington before them on Monday, competing for Mr Trump’s ear.

Sir Keir likes to say that in these troubled times, the UK can once again become a bridge between Europe and the US. France may be keen for that role too.

Another potential point of tension will be trade. Team Trump is promising to impose tariffs on UK goods entering the US that match VAT levied on American goods entering the UK. One argument the UK could make is that hitting British and European trade will make it harder for them to spend more on defence. But officials say that would be a hard argument to make to a president who thinks Europe is ripping off the US both economically and militarily.

The greatest risk, however, is that no manner of charm, politics or diplomacy may touch the sides of this new administration, that there is simply no transactional offer that can bridge the vast ideological divide that now exists between Europe and the US. That may be the cold hard lesson the British delegation learns in Washington.

“We are living in a US presidency which is based on great power diplomacy,” one official said. “If we can work within that, fine. If not, God help us.”

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US President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky have entered a war of words after the US leader initiated talks with Russia about ending the conflict, but did not include Ukraine.

After Zelensky said Trump was in a “disinformation space”, Trump called Zelensky a “dictator” – a remark condemned by Kyiv’s allies.

The two have traded barbs in the past, but Zelensky has usually tried to toe a diplomatic line with Trump.

Here is a look back at what the two have said to, and about, one another, and how their public relationship has developed over the years.

21 April 2019: On the day Zelensky is elected president of Ukraine, Trump, still in his first term, calls Zelensky to congratulate him. Trump says it was an “incredible election” and adds that “you will do a great job”.

2019: Allies of Trump begin stoking allegations that Joe Biden, then Democratic frontrunner for president, lobbied Ukraine to dismiss its top prosecutor to stymie an investigation into energy firm Burisma, of which his son, Hunter, sat on the board. The allegations were later found to be fabricated, and the prosecutor was removed from office for corruption.

25 July 2019: In a phone conversation that would become the basis for Trump’s first impeachment, Trump asks Zelensky to “get to the bottom” of the allegations. Zelensky says the evidence would reviewed later that year.

29 September 2020: In the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden, Trump alludes to the allegations, saying: “Once you became vice-president, [Hunter] made a fortune in Ukraine and China and Moscow and various other places.”

24 February 2022: Russia begins its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which Trump describes as “appalling”. He adds that Zelensky is “brave” for remaining in Kyiv, and claims the invasion “would never have happened” if he had been elected in 2020.

5 March 2023: “Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” Trump tells a conservative conference. “And it will take me no longer than one day.”

May 2024: Zelensky’s term expires but he remains in office, as scheduled elections in Ukraine do not go ahead because the nation remains under martial law. He previously said that “now is not the time for elections”.

22 September 2024: Zelensky tells the New Yorker magazine: “My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war, even if he might think he knows how.” He adds that “many” leaders have thought they could, but have been unable to.

25 September 2024: On the campaign trail, Trump accuses Zelensky of “making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me”, adding: “Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.”

27 September 2024: Zelensky and Trump meet in New York. Zelensky says they have a “common view that the war has to be stopped and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin can’t win”, while Trump says he will resolve the war “very quickly”.

6 November 2024: Trump is re-elected US president. Zelensky is among the first world leaders to call to congratulate him, writing shortly after that he looked forward to a “strong” US under Trump’s “decisive leadership”.

22 January 2025: “It’s time to MAKE A DEAL,” Trump writes on Truth Social. “We can do it the easy way or the hard way.” He adds that without a deal, he will be forced to place further economic restrictions on Russia.

23 January 2025: Trump tells the World Economic Forum that Zelensky “wants to make a deal” but Putin “might not”.

15 February 2025: Zelensky writes that he has begun working with Trump’s team, adding: “The world is looking up to America as the power that has the ability to not only stop the war but also help ensure the reliability of peace afterward.”

18 February 2025: US-Russia talks about ending the war begin in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Zelensky tells reporters that the talks took place “behind Ukraine’s back”, adding: “Once again, decisions about Ukraine are being made without Ukraine.”

18 February 2025: After the talks, Trump says he was “disappointed” by Ukraine’s reaction and appeared to blame Ukraine for starting the war, adding that the country “could have made a deal” earlier.

19 February 2025: Zelensky says the US president is caught in a Russian “disinformation space”. He adds: “We are standing strong on our own two feet. I am counting on… the unity of Europe and the pragmatism of America.”

19 February 2025: Trump accuses Zelensky of talking the US into spending $350bn (£277bn), and of claiming that half of that money was now missing. Trump calls Zelensky a “dictator” who has “done a terrible job”.

European nations may need to offer reliable security guarantees to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal with Russia if the US will not, the former head of the UK armed forces has said.

Retired General Sir Nick Carter said ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty was fundamental to a fair deal, and that Europe must set out its vision of peace that deters Russian aggression.

He said the UK could take a lead in doing this, ahead of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s meeting with US President Donald Trump next week.

US efforts to bring the war in Ukraine to an end have recently caused a growing rift between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and sparked discussions among European leaders.

The US has announced it will soon begin direct negotiations with Russia on a peace deal as the Trump administration seeks to take a smaller role in securing Europe.

However some of Trump’s recent remarks about Ukraine and its leader have caused concern about the direction those talks may go. On Thursday night, Zelensky said Ukraine needed “reliable and well-defined” security guarantees.

Gen Carter, who was chief of the UK’s defence staff between 2018 and 2021, said it was for Ukraine to decide what a “fair settlement” to end the war meant.

But the UK and other European allies needed to make clear their position on “what the minimum acceptable level might be”, he told a BBC One Question Time special on the war in Ukraine.

“Fundamentally, there has got to be some form of guarantee of Ukraine’s sovereignty in the future.

“That means there’s got to be a copper bottom security guarantee, and if America’s not prepared to do that then some others are going to have to step up to the plate to provide that.

“You can add to it accession to the European Union, you can add a viable economy – there are other ingredients that would look like a just and viable peace. But the bottom line is a security guarantee.”

• Follow updates on this story

Sir Keir has previously said a “US security guarantee” is “the only way to effectively deter Russia”.

But he also said the UK would be willing to provide peacekeeping troops if a US “backstop” was provided. Allies have suggested this could involve US air support, logistics and intelligence capabilities.

Trump said earlier this week that he “would not object” to Europe sending in peacekeeping troops, but the US “won’t have to put any over there”.

Washington has suggested more generally that Europe needs to take greater responsibility for its own defence.

Gen Carter warned the UK armed forces were “remarkably hollow” after a “process of neglect over a 30-year period”.

“We are in a position, I think, where we are massively vulnerable at the moment,” he said, describing how much of the UK’s critical infrastructure was dependent on undersea cables or “not properly protected by cyber defences”.

He continued: “Whether we like it or not, that means we’re going to have to start protecting ourselves.

“And the sort of onslaught that Ukraine has suffered from the air via drones and missiles over the course of the last three years is unsustainable as far as the UK’s concerned.

“We might be able to park a destroyer in the Thames to protect parts of London but nothing more than that.”

In the US, the prime minister is expected to maintain his support for Zelensky and Ukraine while seeking to gain Trump’s ear over talks with Russia.

He will visit the White House after French President Emmanuel Macron, who is seeking to co-ordinate a European response.

China, a vital partner for Russia, has offered its support for the US-Russia talks, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi saying “a window for peace is opening”.

But Foreign Secretary David Lammy appeared sceptical of whether Moscow was serious about peace, after listening to his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov’s speech at a G20 summit in South Africa.

He said the UK was “ready to listen” to Russia if it was serious about peace and rejected “Tsarist imperialism”.

During Thursday’s programme, Ukrainian refugees in the audience spoke about the trauma of seeing their country torn apart by war.

One woman began crying as she said she wanted to return home to her parents, adding: “I wish I would see my family all together.”

Millions of Ukrainians have fled their homeland since Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly three years ago.

Accurate casualty counts are hard to come by, but it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people, most of them soldiers, have been killed or injured in the conflict which continues to rage while talks begin.

At least six people were killed in Russian strikes on three separate regions on Thursday, according to local authorities.

Meanwhile, on the frontlines, Russia has been gaining ground faster than at any time since the start of the war.

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A meeting between Chinese president Xi Jinping and some of the country’s foremost business leaders this week has fuelled excitement and speculation, after Alibaba founder Jack Ma was pictured at the event.

The charismatic and colourful Mr Ma, who was one of China’s most prominent businessmen, had withdrawn from public life after criticising China’s financial sector in 2020.

His reappearance at Monday’s event has sparked a wave of discussion, with experts and analysts wondering what it means for him, China’s tech sector and the economy in general.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive – tech stocks, including those of Alibaba, rallied soon after the event.

On Thursday, the e-commerce giant reported financial results that beat expectations, with shares ending the trading day in New York more than 8% higher. The company’s shares are up 60% since the beginning of the year.

So what are analysts reading into Mr Ma’s appearance at the event alongside other high-profile guests – including DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng?

Analysts began looking for clues about the significance of the meeting as soon as Chinese state media started releasing pictures of the event.

“Jack Ma’s attendance, his seating in the front row, even though he did not speak, and his handshake with Xi are clear signs he has been rehabilitated,” China analyst Bill Bishop wrote.

Social media was abuzz with users praising Mr Ma for his return to the public spotlight.

“Congratulations [Jack] Ma for the safe landing,” said one user on Chinese social media platform Weibo.

“The comeback of [Jack] Ma is a shot in the arm to the current Chinese economy,” said another.

It is unsurprising that observers have attached so much significance to an appearance by Mr Ma.

Before his disappearance from public life in 2020 – following comments at a financial conference that China’s state-owned banks had a “pawn-shop mentality” – Mr Ma was the poster boy for China’s tech industry.

An English teacher with no background in computing, Mr Ma co-founded Alibaba in his apartment more than two decades ago after convincing a group of friends to invest in his online marketplace.

He went on to build one of China’s largest tech conglomerates and become one of the country’s richest men.

That was before his “pawn shop” comment, when he also lamented the “lack of innovation” in the country’s banks.

It led to the cancellation of his $34.5bn (£27.4bn) stock market flotation of Ant Group, his financial technology giant.

This was seen at the time as an attempt by Beijing to humble a company that had become too powerful, and a leader who had become too outspoken.

Analysts agree that the fact he’s back in the spotlight, at a symposium where Xi Jinping himself presided, is a very good sign for Mr Ma.

Some caution, however, that the fact he was not among the speakers may show that he has not fully returned to the exalted status he once enjoyed.

Also, the lack of coverage his attendance received in Chinese media outlets seems to confirm he has not been completely rehabilitated.

Xi Jinping told participants at the symposium that their companies needed to innovate, grow and remain confident despite China’s economic challenges, which he described as “temporary” and “localised”.

He also said it was the “right time for private enterprises and private entrepreneurs to fully display their talents”.

This has been widely interpreted as the government telling private tech firms that they too are back in good graces.

Mr Ma’s downfall had preceded a broader crackdown on China’s tech industry.

Companies came to face much tighter enforcement of data security and competition rules, as well as state control over important digital assets.

Other companies across the private sector, ranging from education to real estate, also ended up being targeted in what came to be known as the “common prosperity” campaign.

The measures put in place by the common prosperity policies were seen by some as a way to rein in the billionaire owners of some of China’s biggest companies, to instead give customers and workers more of a say in how firms operate and distribute their earnings.

But as Beijing imposed tough new regulations, billions of dollars were wiped off the value of some of these companies – many of them tech firms – rattling international investors.

This, along with a worsening global economy that was affected by the pandemic as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has contributed to considerable changes in China’s economic situation.

Growth has slowed, jobs for the country’s youth have become more scarce and, amid a property sector downturn, people are not spending enough.

As rumours that Mr Ma would attend Monday’s meeting began to spread, so did a glimmer of hope. Richard Windsor, director of technology at research firm Counterpoint, said Mr Ma’s presence would be a sign that China’s leadership “had enough of stagnation and could be prepared to let the private sector have a much freer hand”.

Aside from Mr Ma and Mr Liang, the list of guests also included key figures from companies such as telecommunications and smartphone firm Huawei, electric-vehicle (EV) giant BYD, and many others from across the tech and industrial sectors.

“The [guest] list showcased the importance of internet/tech/AI/EV sectors given their representation of innovation and achievement,” said a note from market analysts at Citi.

“[It] likely indicates the importance of technology… and the contribution of private enterprises to the development and growth of China’s economy.”

Those present at the meeting seemed to share that sentiment. Lei Jun, the chief executive of consumer electronics giant Xiaomi, told state media that he senses the president’s “care and support” for businesses.

The symposium took place after the country experienced what some observers have described as a “Sputnik moment”: the arrival of DeepSeek’s disruptive R1 artificial intelligence (AI) model at the end of last month.

Soon after its release, the Chinese-made AI chatbot rose through the ranks to become one of the most downloaded in the world. It also triggered a sudden sell-off of major US tech stocks, as fears mounted over America’s leadership in the sector.

Back in China, the app’s global success has sparked a wave of national pride that has quickly spread to financial markets. Investment has been pouring into Chinese stocks – particularly those of tech companies – listed in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has also upgraded its outlook for Chinese stocks, saying rapid AI adoption could boost companies’ revenues and attract as much as $200bn of investment.

But the biggest significance of this innovation was that it came as a result of DeepSeek having to innovate due to a ban on the export of advanced chips and technology to China.

Now, with Trump back in the White House and his fondness of trade tariffs, Mr Xi may have found it necessary to recalibrate his approach to China’s entrepreneurs.

Instead of a return to an era of unregulated growth, some analysts believe Monday’s meeting signalled an attempt to steer investors and businesses toward Mr Xi’s national priorities.

The Chinese president has been increasingly emphasising policies that the government has referred to as “high-quality development” and “new productive forces”.

Such ideas have been used to reflect a switch from what were previously fast drivers of growth, such as property and infrastructure investment, towards high-end industries such as semiconductors, clean energy and AI.

The goal is to achieve “socialist modernisation” by 2035 – higher living standards for everyone, and an economy driven by advanced manufacturing and less reliant on imports of foreign technology.

Mr Xi knows that to get there he will need the private sector fully on board.

“Rather than marking the end of tech sector scrutiny, [Jack Ma’s] reappearance suggests that Beijing is pivoting from crackdowns to controlled engagement,” an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, Marina Zhang told the BBC.

“While the private sector remains a critical pillar of China’s economic ambitions, it must align with national priorities – including self-reliance in key technologies and strategic industries.”

It looked small at first, in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Yet as we approached the USS Carl Vinson it filled the view out of the back of the Osprey tilt-rotor which was carrying us there, its deck packed with state-of-the-art warplanes. At nearly 90,000 tonnes, and more than 300 metres in length, the nuclear-powered Carl Vinson is one of the largest warships ever built.

Watching its FA18 and F35 fighter jets being hurled into the air every minute or two by the carrier’s steam catapults is a spine-tingling experience, a procedure managed with impressive composure by the crew on the crowded deck.

An untimely Pacific squall which drenched us and everything else did not slow them at all.

Even after years of rapid advances in Chinese military capabilities, the United States is still unrivalled in its capacity to project force anywhere around the world with its fleet of 11 super-carriers.

But does a $13bn (£10bn) aircraft carrier which the latest Chinese missiles could sink in a matter of minutes make sense any more – particularly in the age of Donald Trump?

We had been invited onto the Carl Vinson to see another side of US carrier strategy, one which emphasises American friendliness, and willingness to work with allies – something you don’t hear much in Washington these days.

The Carl Vinson was taking part in an exercise with two other aircraft carriers and their escorting destroyers from France and Japan, about 200km east of the Philippines. In the absence of wars to fight, US carrier groups spend much of their time doing this, learning how to operate together with allied navies. Last year they held one exercise that brought together ships from 18 navies.

This one was smaller, but was the first in the Pacific involving a French carrier for more than 40 years.

Down in the massive hangar, below the noisy flight deck, Rear Adm Michael Wosje, commander of the Carl Vinson’s strike force, was sitting with his French colleague, Rear Adm Jacques Mallard of the carrier Charles de Gaulle, and his Japanese colleague Rear Adm Natsui Takashi of the Kaga, which is in the process of being converted to Japan’s first aircraft carrier since World War Two.

The Charles de Gaulle is the only warship in the world which matches some of the capabilities of the US super-carriers, but even then is only half their size.

All three admirals were brimming with bonhomie.

The fraught scenes in Europe, where President Trump’s men were ripping up the rule book which underscored the international order for the past 80 years, and telling one-time allies they were now on their own, seemed a world away.

“Our network of strong alliances and partnerships, such as those that we share with France and Japan, is a key advantage of our nations as we confront our collective security challenges,” said Adm Wosje. In impeccable English Adm Mallard concurred: “This exercise is the expression of a will to better understand each other, and to work for the defence of compliance in international law.”

No one mentioned the radical new views emanating from Washington, nor did they mention an increasingly assertive China, although Adm Natsui might have had both in mind when he said Japan now found itself in “the most severe and complex security environment. No country can now protect her own security alone.”

Down in the warren of steel corridors which make up the living quarters of the 5,000 men and women on the Carl Vinson, the official portraits of the new president and vice-president were already hanging, the one of Trump with its now familiar pugilistic glower. We were not permitted to interview the crew, and politics would have been off-limits anyway, but some of those on board were curious what I thought of the new administration.

Internet access on board is spotty, but they do keep in touch with home. We were told they even get Amazon deliveries while at sea, picked up from designated collection points.

It is a fair bet then that there is plenty of discussion of what President Trump has in store for these giants of the navy. Elon Musk has already vowed to bring his cost-cutting wrecking ball to the Pentagon and its $900bn budget, and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has welcomed that, although, he stressed, the Pentagon is not USAID which President Trump has vowed to shut down completely.

In the hangar we watched the crew maintaining the aircraft, surrounded by packing cases and spare parts. We were warned not to film any exposed parts of these technological marvels, for fear of revealing classified information. We could not even risk touching the F35 fighters, which have a prohibitively expensive special coating to help conceal them from radar.

They showed us the “Jet Shop” where they repair and test the engines, a technician who identified himself as ‘082 Madeiro’ explained that they needed to carry enough spare parts to keep the planes flying on long deployments, and that after a certain number of hours the engines had to be completely replaced, whether or not they were faulty. There was a brand new engine in its enormous packaging next to him. Cost, around $15m.

Running the Carl Vinson costs around $700m a year.

So will the Trump administration take a knife to the Pentagon budget? Hegseth has said he believes there are significant efficiencies to be found. He has also openly mused about the value of aircraft carriers. “If our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers, and if 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our ten aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of conflict, what does that look like?”, he said in an interview last November.

The debate about the utility of aircraft carriers is not new. It goes right back to when they first appeared a century ago. Critics today argue that they are too vulnerable to the latest generation of Chinese ballistic and hypersonic missiles, forcing them to stay at a distance from the Chinese coast which would put their aircraft out of range. The money, they say, would be better spent on newer technology.

There is something archaic about these massive, welded hunks of steel, that seemed to have their heyday in the Pacific War of the 1940s. Yet in the vast expanse of the ocean, with few airfields, it has proved difficult to do without them. Supporters argue that, with their escorts of guided-missile destroyers, the super carriers can defend themselves quite well, and that they are still hard to sink. Downsize these carriers, to carry only helicopters or planes which can land and take off vertically as many countries have done, and you end up with vessels which are even more vulnerable.

It is worth noting that China too believes in the value of aircraft carriers; it has already built three. And as floating symbols of US prestige, they may appeal to President Trump, a man known for his love of flamboyant structures, whatever the economic arguments for and against them.

At his Senate confirmation hearing Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration would prioritise increased ship-building, although he did not say how this can be achieved. The US has only four naval shipyards left; China has, by some estimates, more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the US. He also told his counterparts in Japan and South Korea that he wanted to deepen defence co-operation with them. Europe may be on its own, but it seems Asian allies will get the attention of this White House as it focuses on the strategic challenge posed by China.

Three new Ford-class nuclear carriers, the next generation after the Carl Vinson, are currently under construction, although two will not be in service until the next decade. The plan is to complete ten of this new class of carrier, and so far there have been no indications that the Trump administration wants to change that. For all its many critics, the US super-carrier is probably here to stay.

This week saw the US president appear to blame Ukraine for starting its war with Russia, a Liverpool fan scoring the first goal at Everton’s new stadium and the discovery of a pharaoh’s tomb for the first time in more than a century.

But how much attention did you pay to what else has been going on in the world over the past seven days?

Quiz compiled by George Sandeman and Grace Dean.

Fancy some more? Try last week’s quiz or have a go at something from the archives.

A cult-like US group known as Zizians has been linked to a string of murders, sparking several arrests – who are the people behind this group and what do they believe?

Jack Lasota, 34, who allegedly leads a group of a few dozen followers known as Zizians, was arrested on Sunday alongside Michelle Zajko, 32, and Daniel Blank, 26, on charges including trespassing and obstruction.

Authorities say they are investigating at least six killings across the US that are allegedly connected to members of the group, including a double homicide in Pennsylvania, a knife attack in California, and the shooting of a US border guard in January.

Three other alleged members of the group have already been charged with murder.

Lasota, a transgender woman, is allegedly the leader of the group.

She earned a degree in computer science from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 2013 and, according to her blog, moved to the San Francisco area three years later.

There, she wrote that she applied for a series of jobs at tech companies and startups – including a brief internship with Nasa – and began to associate with people involved in the rationalist movement, an intellectual trend popular in Silicon Valley that emphasises the power of the human mind to see clear truth, eliminate bias and bad thinking, and improve individuals and society.

Lasota began blogging using the alias “Ziz”, but soon fell out with mainstream rationalists as her writings spun off in bizarre directions.

The blog included posts of thousands of words, blending Lasota’s personal experiences, theories about technology and philosophy, and esoteric comments about pop culture, computer coding and dozens of other subjects.

At one point, during a long diatribe about the TV series The Office, artificial intelligence and other subjects, she wrote: “I realized that I was no longer able to stand people. Not even rationalists anymore. And I would live the rest of my life completely alone, hiding my reaction to anyone it was useful to interact with. I had given up my ability to see beauty so I could see evil.”

Other themes included veganism – total avoidance of any animal food or products – and anarchism.

In 2019 Lasota and three others were arrested while holding a protest outside an event held by a rationalist organisation. The last posts on her blog date from around this time.

Over the next few years, Lasota and others would move around the US, according to reports, at one point living on a boat, and later staying on property owned by others in California and North Carolina.

In 2022, a warrant was issued when Lasota failed to show up for a court hearing, related to the protest outside the rationalist organisation meeting. But her lawyer at the time stated she was “now deceased after a boating accident in the San Francisco Bay area”.

An obituary – noting that Lasota loved “adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals” – even appeared in an Alaska newspaper.

But the story was wrong: Lasota was still alive.

Jessica Taylor, an artificial intelligence researcher who says she knew several of the group members, told the Associated Press that Lasota and the Zizians stretched their rationalist beliefs to justify breaking laws.

“Stuff like thinking it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted,” Taylor said.

Poulomi Saha, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies cults, says that while there is no strict legal definition of such a group, several of the Zizians’ attributes align with the popular cultural conception of the term.

“This is a group of individuals that seem to share some unorthodox viewpoints,” she said. “That in and of itself wouldn’t open up them up to the cult label… but then there is this leadership figure ‘Ziz.'”

Saha noted, however, that there is still significant uncertainty about the relationships between group members and about what may have motivated alleged acts of violence in recent years.

Not long after the obituary was published, Lasota resurfaced along with other members of the group in Vallejo, California, which is north of San Francisco. Several members were living in vans and trucks on land owned by a man named Curtis Lind.

At some point the Zizians allegedly stopped paying rent, and Lind sued to evict them.

But the dispute escalated and in November 2022, Lind was attacked, stabbed 50 times and blinded in one eye. In an act of what police would later say is self-defence, he fired a gun, which killed Emma Borhanian, a former Google employee who was one of the Zizians and who had previously been arrested at the rationalist protest.

Two other members, Suri Dao and Somni Logencia, were arrested and charged with attempting to murder Lind. They remain in prison awaiting trial. Lasota was also at the scene of the attack, but was not charged with a crime.

The following month, two parents of a Zizian member were killed in a small Pennsylvania town.

Richard Zajko, 71, and his wife, Rita, 69, were found shot in the head in their home.

The Zajkos were the parents of Zizian member Michelle Zajko, who was briefly held by police but not charged with a crime.

Lasota was arrested and charged with obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct in connection with the incident.

Despite the links to those two attacks, the group mostly flew under the radar without receiving much wider public attention until earlier this year.

On 17 January, Lind, the California landlord who had allegedly been attacked by members of the group, was killed.

Vallejo Police Department say he was stabbed to death by an assailant wearing a mask and black beanie.

Police later charged Maximilian Snyder with murder, and alleged that Snyder killed Lind in order to stop him from testifying during the attempted murder trial.

That was followed just a few days later by the killing of a US border patrol agent on the other side of the country.

Two Zizians, Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt, were pulled over by US Border Patrol Agent David Maland near the Canadian border in Vermont.

A firefight ensued. Bauckholt, a German citizen who also went by the name Ophelia, was killed in the shootout along with Maland.

Youngblut – who was previously known as Milo – was wounded and later arrested on firearms charges.

The shooting led to a wider hunt for members of the group after police said the gun used to kill Maland was bought by Michelle Zajko.

After the Vermont shootout, police in Pennsylvania said they had uncovered new evidence about the shooting of Zajko’s parents, and Lasota was wanted for failing to appear at several court hearings.

The whereabouts of the pair were unknown until Sunday, when they were arrested with fellow group member Daniel Blank in Maryland.

A police report said a resident of Frostburg, about 160 miles (260km) north-west of Washington DC, had called police saying he wanted three “suspicious” people off his property after they asked to camp on his land for a month.

Maryland State Police said that the trio were charged with trespassing and obstruction, and that Lasota and Zajko were additionally charged with weapons violations. All three were denied bail.

A lawyer for Lasota, Daniel McGarrigle, declined to comment on the arrest but instead sent the BBC a statement he had previously issued about his client, saying: “I urge members of the press and the public to refrain from speculation and premature conclusions.”

The closing credits of 2021’s No Time To Die, the most recent film in the 007 series, ended with a familiar message: “James Bond will return.”

But for the last few years, fans haven’t been so sure.

A year after the release of Daniel Craig’s final film in the franchise, Amazon bought the series’ parent company MGM. Since then, very little has happened.

That finally changed on Thursday, when Amazon announced a new joint venture that will see long-term Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson step back, and Jeff Bezos’s company take full creative control.

In the intervening years, it’s been widely reported that there was tension between Amazon, who understandably wanted a return on their investment, and Wilson and Broccoli, whose top priority remained protecting the Bond brand.

The news of the deal has been met with mixed reaction from 007 fans.

“I’m in two minds,” says David Zaritsky, creator of The Bond Experience fan channel on YouTube and Instagram.

“The nostalgic part of my mind feels a little bit of sadness. Broccoli and Wilson have been the custodians for all these years, so it feels like a bit of royal blood in lineage has been severed.

“That being said, nobody likes inactivity. And there’s been a lot of inactivity around the James Bond franchise for many years, and I know that Amazon as a company will not have patience for inactivity.

“So I’m very hopeful, and dare I say even a little bit excited, that they’re going to do something with the franchise that will be interesting nonetheless.”

Other franchises which have drastically expanded perhaps offer some clues about what we can expect from the forthcoming Amazon era of Bond.

Lancelot Narayan, a James Bond historian, journalist and filmmaker, told BBC Radio 5 Live a good comparison is George Lucas selling Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, giving the company control of the Star Wars brand.

“They went off and made that sequel trilogy, and whether you like it or not, it got made rather quickly,” he notes. “There wasn’t a three-year wait between films.”

However, despite the explosion in productivity, there is a feeling that both Marvel and Star Wars have overstretched themselves with their spin-off products.

Narayan says he believes Star Wars has become “creatively redundant” since the explosion in productivity.

“The Star Wars TV series have been very hit and miss – Andor is fantastic, The Mandalorian is OK, I haven’t seen Skeleton Crew… but there are very disparate creative voices going on there,” he notes. “So this is the worry, you need the correct creative people to run the show.”

Similarly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe built on the films by launching a string of Disney+ TV shows.

The subsequent decline in Marvel’s popularity arguably owes much to fan fatigue, something which won’t have been helped by the huge number of story strands they had to keep up with.

Both cases, Marvel and Star Wars, highlight the risks of brand expansion, which can cause long-term damage for short-term financial gain.

Fans will be hoping any Bond extensions will be better than 2023’s dubious game show 007: Road to a Million, hosted by Succession’s Brian Cox, which was poorly received.

The James Bond franchise, and particularly the subject of which actor will take over from Craig, is of such fascination to the public that it’s the focus of a new show currently playing in Cirencester, called A Role To Die For.

“There are a lot of people who have grown up with it, for whom James Bond has been part of their culture their entire lives,” says the appropriately named Derek Bond, who directs the show.

“As time has gone on, being able to reinvent that character and have him perhaps change with the times, has been the secret to his longevity.

“But I wonder if we’re now in a situation where the times have changed so much, that James Bond now feels as if he belongs in a different era, and it needs something really radical to keep him relevant today.”

One area the company will almost certainly be looking at now they’re in creative control is the potential for character origin stories, in a similar vein to other famous and beloved film characters who have received their own spin-off films.

Cruella, an extension of the 101 Dalmatians villain, and Wonka, of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, have both been hugely successful film spin-offs in their own right in the last five years, with Emma Stone and Timothée Chalamet respectively bringing the characters and worlds to a whole new audience.

It’s not hard to imagine the popularity of a similar film or show based on famous Bond villains such as Jaws, Oddjob, Blofeld, Goldfinger or May Day – all big brands in their own right.

“I mean, why has nobody made Moneypenny?!” laughs Derek Bond. “There’s a great series to made about her and her journey.

“Also M, I’d love to know how Judi Dench’s M ended up in that role. And the villains especially, it’s a very rich universe, and it’s easy to imagine the Marvelisation of it, where you have a kind of spin-off for every character that James Bond ever passed in a corridor.”

But Zaritsky notes: “I think Amazon will stop short of doing it ad nauseum, to the point where they’re having spin-offs about the MI6 janitor that sleeps in the corner. If they do have spin-offs, I think it’s going to be prime characters.”

Not everyone is a fan of the idea. “This is quite possibly the WORST thing to happen to this franchise,” tweeted Griffin Schiller of Film Speak after Amazon’s announcement.

“James Bond was more than your average franchise. It had class, prestige, they were indie films made as blockbusters… now? It’ll be milked dry. It’s truly the end.”

Broccoli has been seen as a steward of the brand throughout her tenure; a safe pair of hands who protected the traditions of the original character.

That may not necessarily have been compatible with Amazon, who were presumably looking to buy a brand rather than only a film franchise, in an effort to maximise profit.

“It does tend to be a slightly older generation that it skews to, and there’s a whole generation of people who have not experienced a James Bond film, and now, I wonder if they will,” Bond says.

In her own tenure, Broccoli has made efforts to keep attracting young audiences in other ways, however, such as selecting popular young artists such as Billie Eilish to sing the theme songs.

A repositioning of of the brand could see Amazon try to take the franchise in a direction that appeals more to a younger audience as well as an American market, which is culturally slightly cooler on the Bond brand than the UK.

“I think it’s quite bad news for the franchise, and British film as a whole,” movie journalist Hannah Strong told Radio 4’s PM following Amazon’s announcement.

“It’s the premier British film property, and I think the control reverting to an American company, not least one that hasn’t shown that much commitment to great cinema, is probably quite a worrying sign.”

That said, Amazon will be aware that Bond makes a huge amount of money as it currently is – and that altering the core product itself in a way that appeals more to an American audience would be a huge risk.

Strong added: “When Amazon bought MGM, Barbara Broccoli was quite outspoken about the fact she was finding it difficult to come to a middle ground with Amazon. I suspect the middle ground involves an awful lot of money.”

The biggest decision remains who will replace Craig in the leading role.

Broccoli previously said James Bond could be any race, but that he would remain male. That guarantee may no longer stand now she is has handed over the reins, although her approach was widely regarded as sensible and Amazon are unlikely to rock the boat too much.

How long could it be until we see the first new Bond product? Zaritsky suggests Amazon won’t wait around, although the first thing to launch may not be a film.

“It could be with merchandise, or in the form of fan outreach,” he says. “Whatever it is, I think we might see something extremely fast.”

US President Donald Trump’s remark that his country spent $21m to boost voter turnout in India’s elections has triggered a political slugfest in the country.

He made the remark days after a team led by Elon Musk said it had cancelled the payout as part of its crackdown on a US agency providing foreign aid.

India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called the payout an “external interference” and accused the opposition Congress party of seeking this intervention.

The Congress denied the allegation, calling Trump’s claims “nonsensical”. The US has not provided any evidence to support its claim.

On Friday, India’s foreign ministry said it found the claims “deeply troubling”.

Foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said it was “premature” to make public statements about the matter at this stage and that relevant authorities were investigating it.

Trump vowed to boost the US economy and soon after returning to office, he created the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), led by Musk, to slash federal spending and jobs. Musk says Doge’s mission is to save taxpayer money and cut national debt.

One of its biggest moves – now making global headlines – is a crackdown on USAID, the US agency overseeing humanitarian aid since the 1960s. Musk, who has called USAID a “criminal organisation”, announced on Sunday that funding for several projects had been cancelled.

The cuts included $486m for the “Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening”, with “$21m for voter turnout in India” and “$22m for inclusive and participatory political process in Moldova”.

Defending Doge’s cuts, Trump said India “had a lot of money” and was among the world’s highest-taxing nations.

On Thursday, he doubled down, questioning the $21m spend on “India’s voter turnout”.

The latest comments came a week after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first Washington visit under Trump’s second term, where Trump announced expanded military sales, increased energy exports and plans for a trade deal and new defence framework.

“I guess they were trying to get somebody else elected. We have got to tell the Indian government,” the US president said at a summit in Miami.

The same day, BJP leader Amit Malviya shared a clip of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi speaking at an event in London before the 2024 general election.

In the clip, Gandhi can be heard saying that major democracies like the US and European countries were “oblivious that a huge chunk of democratic model has come undone [in India]”.

“Rahul Gandhi was in London, urging foreign powers – from the US to Europe – to intervene in India’s internal affairs,” Malviya alleged in his post on X.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh dismissed the claim and urged the government to report on USAID’s decades-long support to governmental and non-governmental institutions during PM Modi’s tenure.

Despite widespread reports, neither Doge nor Trump has provided evidence that USAID gave India $21m for voter turnout.

India’s poll panel has not responded, but former election chief SY Qureshi denied receiving such funding during his tenure, which ran from 2010 to 2012.

Earlier, Malviya claimed that in 2012, under Mr Qureshi, the panel signed an agreement with a group linked to George Soros’ foundation – primarily funded by USAID – to support a voter turnout campaign.

Mr Qureshi dismissed the allegation as “malicious”, stating that the agreement explicitly imposed “no financial or legal obligation on either side”.

On Friday, the Indian Express newspaper said in an investigative report that the $21m was sanctioned for Bangladesh and not India.

It was meant to run for three years until July 2025 and that $13.4m had already been spent, according to records accessed by the newspaper.

A notorious gang leader has died after he was shot inside a courthouse in Sri Lanka by a gunman disguised as a lawyer, say police.

Police say the gunman used a revolver which was smuggled in a hollowed-out book by a female suspect, who remains at large.

Gang leader Sanjeewa Kumara Samararathne had been escorted to court to face proceedings when he was shot. Police say he was a suspect in multiple murder cases.

The shooting in the capital Colombo is among a series of killings by rivalling gangs, which has persisted as authorities vow to crack down on gang violence in the country.

The gang leader, popularly known as Ganemulle Sanjeewa, had been in custody since he was arrested in September 2023.

Police said he had been escorted to the courthouse on Wednesday by a dozen police officers. He was taken to hospital after he was shot but was pronounced dead on arrival.

The gunman managed to flee the scene but was later captured by police. He has been identified differently by authorities and local media, but police say that he used several names.

Police have identified the female suspect as 25-year-old Pinpura Dewage Ishara Sewwandi.

Authorities have put out a notice promising a reward for anyone providing information on the woman. Police say they have also arrested a policeman and van driver suspected of helping the two suspects in the shooting.

Lawmakers discussed reining in gang violence in parliament on Wednesday, with an opposition MP calling it a “major security issue”.

Health and mass media minister Nalinda Jayatissa, who in December had pledged to crack down on such criminal activity, said on Wednesday that the government would “take the actions of organised underworld gangs seriously.”

The incident has also raised questions about security in the courthouse, with authorities currently reviewing security measures.

New security protocols are being implemented in the wake of the shooting, including deploying armed guards when certain people are brought to court. Armed security personnel are not typically allowed in court, justice minister Harshana Nanayakkara said on Thursday.

At least nine people have died this year in a spate of shootings blamed on gang rivalry, according to AFP citing police data.

Apple is taking the unprecedented step of removing its highest level data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded access to user data.

Advanced Data Protection (ADP) means only account holders can view items such as photos or documents they have stored online through a process known as end-to-end encryption.

But earlier this month the UK government asked for the right to see the data, which currently not even Apple can access.

Apple did not comment at the time but has consistently opposed creating a “backdoor” in its encryption service, arguing that if it did so, it would only be a matter of time before bad actors also found a way in.

Now the tech giant has decided it will no longer be possible to activate ADP in the UK.

It means eventually not all UK customer data stored on iCloud – Apple’s cloud storage service – will be fully encrypted.

In a statement the Home Office said: “We do not comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices.”

In a statement Apple said it was “gravely disappointed” that the security feature would no longer be available to British customers.

“As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products, and we never will,” it continued.

• How does encryption work?

The ADP service is opt-in, meaning people have to sign up to get the protection it provides.

From 1500GMT on Friday, any Apple user in the UK attempting to turn it on has been met with an error message.

Existing users’ access will be disabled at a later date.

It is not known how many people have signed up for ADP since it became available to British Apple customers in December 2022.

Prof Alan Woodward – a cyber-security expert at Surrey University – said it was a “very disappointing development” which amounted to “an act of self harm” by the government.

“All the UK government has achieved is to weaken online security and privacy for UK based users,” he told the BBC.

“It was naïve of the UK government to think they could tell a US technology company what to do globally,” he added.

The request was served by the Home Office under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), which compels firms to provide information to law enforcement agencies.

Apple would not comment on the notice and the Home Office refused to either confirm or deny its existence, but the BBC and the Washington Post spoke to a number of sources familiar with the matter.

It provoked a fierce backlash from privacy campaigners, who called it an “unprecedented attack” on the private data of individuals.

Two senior US politicians said it was so serious a threat to American national security that the US government should re-evaluate its intelligence-sharing agreements with the UK unless it was withdrawn.

It is not clear that Apple’s actions will fully address those concerns, as the IPA order applies worldwide and ADP will continue to operate in other countries.

In its statement, Apple said it regretted the action it had taken.

“Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end-encryption is more urgent than ever before,” it said.

“Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in future in the UK.”

The row comes amid growing push-back in the US against regulation being imposed on its tech sector from elsewhere.

In a speech at the AI Action Summit in Paris at the beginning of February, US Vice President JD Vance made it clear that the US was increasingly concerned about it.

“The Trump administration is troubled by reports that some foreign governments are considering tightening the screws on US tech companies with international footprints,” he said.

Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago.

King Thutmose II’s tomb was the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty.

A British-Egyptian team has located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near the city of Luxor. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings.

The crew found it in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh.

“Part of the ceiling was still intact: a blue-painted ceiling with yellow stars on it. And blue-painted ceilings with yellow stars are only found in kings’ tombs,” said the field director of the mission Dr Piers Litherland.

He told the BBC’s Newshour programme he felt overwhelmed in the moment.

“The emotion of getting into these things is just one of extraordinary bewilderment because when you come across something you’re not expecting to find, it’s emotionally extremely turbulent really,” he said.

“And when I came out, my wife was waiting outside and the only thing I could do was burst into tears.”

Dr Litherland said the discovery solved the mystery of where the tombs of early 18th dynasty kings are located.

Researchers found Thutmose II’s mummified remains two centuries ago but its original burial site had never been located.

Thutmose II was an ancestor of Tutankhamun, whose reign is believed to have been from about 1493 to 1479 BC. Tutankhamun’s tomb was found by British archaeologists in 1922.

Thutmose II is best known for being the husband of Queen Hatshepsut, regarded as one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and one of the few female pharaohs who ruled in her own right.

Dr Litherland said the “large staircase and a very large descending corridor” of the tomb suggested grandeur.

“It took us a very long time to get through all that,” he said, noting it was blocked by flood debris and the ceilings had collapsed.

“It was only after crawling through a 10m (32ft) passageway that had a small 40cm gap at the top that we got into the burial chamber.”

There they discovered the blue ceiling and decorations of scenes from the Amduat, a religious text which was reserved for kings. That was another key sign they had found a king’s tomb, Dr Litherland said.

They set to work clearing the debris – expecting that they would find the crushed remains of a burial underneath.

But “the tomb turned out to be completely empty”, said Dr Litherland. “Not because it was robbed but because it had been deliberately emptied.”

They then worked out that the tomb had been flooded – “it had been built underneath a waterfall” – just a few years after the king’s burial and the contents moved to another location in ancient times.

It was through sifting through tonnes of limestone in the chamber that they found fragments of alabaster jars, which bore the inscriptions of the names of Thutmose II and Hatshepsut.

These fragments of alabaster “had probably broken when the tomb was being moved,” said Dr Litherland.

“And thank goodness they actually did break one or two things because that’s how we found out whose tomb it was.”

The artefacts are the first objects to be found associated with Thutmose II’s burial.

Dr Litherland’s said his team had a rough idea of where the second tomb was, and it could still be intact with treasures.

The discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb caps off more than 12 years of work by the joint team from Dr Litherland’s New Kingdom Research Foundation and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The team has previously excavated 54 tombs in the western part of the Theban mountain in Luxor, and had also established identities of more than 30 royal wives and court women.

“This is the first royal tomb to be discovered since the ground-breaking find of King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in 1922,” said Egypt’s minister of tourism and antiquities Sherif Fathy.

“It is an extraordinary moment for Egyptology and the broader understanding of our shared human story.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could not resist a dig at President Donald Trump moments after Canada’s ice hockey team beat the USA in a close final.

“You can’t take our country – and you can’t take our game,” Trudeau wrote on X.

Canada’s thrilling 3-2 overtime win in the 4 Nations Face Off final in Boston took place amid rising tensions between the two neighbours.

Not only is there the looming threat of an economically damaging trade war, there are Trump’s persistent musings on making Canada the 51st US state.

The American national anthem has been regularly booed by Canadian sports fans in recent weeks but this time it was the US home fans doing most of the booing.

As their jeers rang out, the Canadian national anthem was sung with different lyrics in protest over Trump’s statements.

A representative for singer Chantal Kreviazuk told CBC News she intentionally sang “that only us command” instead of “in all of us command”.

In a post on Instagram with a photo of the adjusted lyrics, Kreviazuk said: “We should express our outrage in the face of any abuses of power.”

On any ordinary day, this fixture would have been a significant one for the two neighbouring countries who have long been friendly rivals on the ice. But recent events gave it added spice.

And the sudden-death goal from Connor McDavid which sealed the win prompted delirium among the travelling fans.

The US president was unable to make the game but he called the team to wish them good luck.

He also repeated his desire to absorb Canada, writing in a Truth Social post ahead of the game that he hoped the country “will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished and very important, Fifty First State”.

For fans across North America, the final was a “dream match-up,” ice hockey writer Daniel Nugent-Bowman told the BBC. Not since the 2014 Winter Olympics had the top men’s ice hockey players from Canada and the US faced off in such a consequential game.

Both countries boast some of the biggest stars in the National Hockey League (NHL), like Canadians Mitch Marner and McDavid, and Americans Auston Matthews and Jack Eichel. The game was a chance for this new generation of players to prove themselves.

But in Canada, the game was also a personal one, giving both die-hard and casual fans an opportunity to bask in national pride at a time when the country’s sovereignty looks to be threatened by its closest neighbour.

Few Canadians would dispute how integral ice hockey is to the country’s national identity.

The sport has served as a backdrop to some of the most patriotic moments in Canada’s history, like Sidney Crosby’s overtime gold medal goal at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Historically, Canada has had the upper hand against the US. The two countries have met 20 times in best-on-best tournaments since the 1976 Canada Cup, with Canada winning 14 of those games.

The sister-in-law of hostage Shiri Bibas said the family is “not seeking revenge right now” and called for her return from Gaza after Israel said Hamas had released the body of an unidentified woman.

Ofri Bibas Levy said in a statement that the family could not mourn Shiri’s sons, whose bodies were handed over, until their mother is returned.

Israel accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire after forensic testing revealed the body returned on Thursday was not Shiri.

A Hamas spokesman said her remains seem to have been mixed up with other bodies under rubble after an Israeli air strike. The group said it was investigating and affirmed its “full commitment to all our obligations” in the ceasefire.

The three other bodies given back to Israel on Thursday have been identified as Shiri’s sons Ariel and Kfir, who would have been aged five and two, and peace activist Oded Lifschitz, 84, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.

Hamas previously said the mother and her two children were killed in an Israeli air strike.

However, Israel said on Thursday intelligence and forensics show the boys “were brutally murdered by terrorists in captivity in November 2023”.

Ms Bibas Levy, sister of Shiri’s husband Yarden Bibas, who was released by Hamas on 1 February, said: “We are still waiting for Shiri and fear for her fate.”

The events of recent days “emphasizes the urgent need to bring Shiri back to us, save the lives of the living hostages, and return all the fallen for burial”, she said,

Her statement came after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would “take revenge”.

“For Ariel and Kfir’s sake, and for Yarden’s sake, we are not seeking revenge right now,” Ms Bibas Levy said. “We are asking for Shiri.”

Ms Bibas Levy said it was “Israel’s responsibility and obligation” to bring her family members back alive after they were taken hostage during the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.

“There is no forgiveness for abandoning them on October 7, and no forgiveness for abandoning them in captivity,” she said.

In a statement earlier on Friday, Netanyahu said: “Ariel, Kfir and Oded: I am so sorry we couldn’t save you from the monsters who did this.”

The “devastating news” that Shiri’s body had not yet been returned has brought “profound grief” to the family, her sister-in-law said.

To her deceased nephews, Ms Bibas Levy said: “I’m sorry I cannot yet cry for you. We are waiting for Mommy Shiri.”

Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were aged 32, four and nine months when they were kidnapped during the 7 October attacks.

About 1,200 people – mostly civilians – were killed in the attacks and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Israel launched a massive military campaign against Hamas in response, which has killed at least 48,297 Palestinians – mainly civilians – according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Planes flying between Australia and New Zealand have been diverted as China conducts a closely-scrutinised military exercise in nearby waters that may involve live fire.

The rare presence of three Chinese naval ships in the Tasman Sea has put both antipodean countries on alert in recent days, with Australia calling it “unusual”.

Australian airline Qantas told the BBC it “temporarily adjusted” the routes of its planes and other carriers have reportedly done the same.

China has said the exercise, which is taking place in international waters, is in accordance with international law.

The ships are now reportedly 340 nautical miles east of the New South Wales coast of Australia, although they were said to have come as close as 150 nautical miles from Sydney at one point.

Australia and New Zealand have been closely monitoring the Chinese fleet – a frigate, a cruiser and a supply tanker – since last week, and have dispatched their own ships to observe them.

Earlier this week, New Zealand’s Defence Minister Judith Collins said China had not informed them they would be sending warships to their region and “have not deigned to advise us on what they are doing in the Tasman Sea”, according to the New Zealand Herald.

Meanwhile, Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles said that the ships’ presence was “not unprecedented, but it is an unusual event”.

China’s foreign ministry confirmed on Friday they were doing naval training and exercises in “distant waters”.

“The exercises were conducted in a safe, standard, and professional manner at all times, in accordance with relevant international laws and practices,” spokesman Guo Jiakun said.

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the Chinese fleet issued an alert on Friday that they would start conducting exercises which may involve live fire.

“This is activity that has occurred in waters consistent with international law… there has been no imminent risk of danger to any Australian assets or New Zealand assets,” he said.

But Marles said the Chinese had not directly notified Australian officials when they put out the alert.

“What China did was put out a notification that it was intending to engage in live fire, and by that I mean a broadcast that was picked up by airlines, literally commercial planes that were flying across the Tasman,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, adding that usually such notices would be given 12 to 24 hours in advance.

On Friday an Emirates plane was reportedly informed about the exercise by Chinese authorities, while it was still in the air as it flew from Sydney to Christchurch. The BBC is seeking confirmation.

In a statement to the BBC, Qantas confirmed that it had changed the routes of its planes flying across the Tasman Sea and said it was continually monitoring airspace.

“We continue to work with the Australian government and broader industry to monitor the situation,” it added.

Virgin Australia and Air New Zealand have reportedly done the same.

The drill comes just days after Australia and China held a defence dialogue in Beijing where they had discussed military transparency and communication, among other things.

The two countries have seen several recent tense maritime encounters.

Earlier this month, Canberra said a Chinese fighter jet had released flares in front of an Australian military aircraft while flying over the South China Sea. Beijing said the aircraft had “intentionally intruded” into its airspace.

In May last year, Australia accused a Chinese fighter plane of dropping flares close to an Australian navy helicopter that was part of a UN Security Council mission on the Yellow Sea.

Canberra accused Beijing’s navy of using sonar pulses in international waters off Japan in November 2023, resulting in Australian divers suffering injuries.

The US President Donald Trump has said he is not happy with Boeing over a contract to build two new Air Force One planes that is running behind schedule.

Speaking on board one of the 35-year-old presidential planes that are currently in use, Trump also said he is looking for alternatives because it is taking Boeing too long to build the planes.

The contract for two updated versions of the presidential plane based on the modern Boeing 747-8 were negotiated during Trump’s first term in office.

Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BBC News.

“No, I’m not happy with Boeing. It takes them a long time to do, you know, Air Force One, we gave that contract out a long time ago,” Trump said.

“We may buy a plane or get a plane, or something.”

When asked whether he would consider buying new planes from Boeing’s European rival, Airbus, Trump said “No, I would not consider Airbus over Boeing, but I could buy one that was used and convert it.”

It comes days after Trump visited a 13-year-old Boeing 747-800 that had been owned by the Qatari royal family while it was parked at Palm Beach International Airport.

The new aircraft from Boeing were set for delivery in 2024 but the plane maker has pushed the delivery back to 2027 or 2028.

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During his first term as president, Trump forced the plane maker to renegotiate its contract, calling the initial deal too expensive.

That contract has already cost Boeing billions of dollars.

Kitting out the planes for presidential use is extremely costly. It requires installing highly-classified and complex communications, safety and accessibility features.

Last year was dreadful for Boeing. The aerospace giant lost $11.8bn (£9.4bn) across the whole of 2024, its worst result since 2020, when the aviation industry was grounded by the Covid pandemic.

In the three months to the end of December, when strikes were affecting the business, it lost $3.8bn.

As well as suffering from well-publicised problems at its commercial aircraft unit, Boeing also faced issues with a number of defence programmes.

Footballer Jenni Hermoso’s lawyer has said she intends to appeal after Spain’s former football federation boss Luis Rubiales was fined for kissing the player without her consent during the 2023 World Cup, Reuters and AFP reported.

On Thursday, Rubiales was found guilty of sexual assault and ordered by Spain’s High Court to pay a fine of €10,800 (£8,942).

Rubiales was acquitted of coercion, after allegedly trying to pressure Hermoso into publicly saying that the kiss was consensual.

Hermoso’s lawyer, Angel Chavarria, said the player intended to appeal, but did not provide further details on what specifically she might appeal against.

The BBC has contacted Hermoso’s lawyer.

The High Court ruling also banned Rubiales from going within a 200m radius of Hermoso and from communicating with her for one year, the court said in a statement.

Prosecutors had demanded a prison sentence for Rubiales, who has also said he will appeal against the verdict.

During the 2023 World Cup, as Spain’s players received their medals after defeating England in Sydney to win, Rubiales grabbed Hermoso by the head and kissed her on the lips.

He later described the kiss as an “act of affection” and told the court that he was “absolutely sure” Hermoso had given her consent.

In her testimony earlier this month, Hermoso insisted that she had not given consent and that the incident had “stained one of the happiest days of my life”.

The incident sparked nationwide protests and calls for the resignation of Rubiales.

Three of Rubiales’s former colleagues who were also on trial, accused of colluding in the alleged coercion – Jorge Vilda, coach of the World Cup-winning side, Rubén Rivera, the Real Federación Española de Fútbol (RFEF)’s former head of marketing, and Albert Luque, former sporting director – were cleared of those charges.

A cult-like US group known as Zizians has been linked to a string of murders, sparking several arrests – who are the people behind this group and what do they believe?

Jack Lasota, 34, who allegedly leads a group of a few dozen followers known as Zizians, was arrested on Sunday alongside Michelle Zajko, 32, and Daniel Blank, 26, on charges including trespassing and obstruction.

Authorities say they are investigating at least six killings across the US that are allegedly connected to members of the group, including a double homicide in Pennsylvania, a knife attack in California, and the shooting of a US border guard in January.

Three other alleged members of the group have already been charged with murder.

Lasota, a transgender woman, is allegedly the leader of the group.

She earned a degree in computer science from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 2013 and, according to her blog, moved to the San Francisco area three years later.

There, she wrote that she applied for a series of jobs at tech companies and startups – including a brief internship with Nasa – and began to associate with people involved in the rationalist movement, an intellectual trend popular in Silicon Valley that emphasises the power of the human mind to see clear truth, eliminate bias and bad thinking, and improve individuals and society.

Lasota began blogging using the alias “Ziz”, but soon fell out with mainstream rationalists as her writings spun off in bizarre directions.

The blog included posts of thousands of words, blending Lasota’s personal experiences, theories about technology and philosophy, and esoteric comments about pop culture, computer coding and dozens of other subjects.

At one point, during a long diatribe about the TV series The Office, artificial intelligence and other subjects, she wrote: “I realized that I was no longer able to stand people. Not even rationalists anymore. And I would live the rest of my life completely alone, hiding my reaction to anyone it was useful to interact with. I had given up my ability to see beauty so I could see evil.”

Other themes included veganism – total avoidance of any animal food or products – and anarchism.

In 2019 Lasota and three others were arrested while holding a protest outside an event held by a rationalist organisation. The last posts on her blog date from around this time.

Over the next few years, Lasota and others would move around the US, according to reports, at one point living on a boat, and later staying on property owned by others in California and North Carolina.

In 2022, a warrant was issued when Lasota failed to show up for a court hearing, related to the protest outside the rationalist organisation meeting. But her lawyer at the time stated she was “now deceased after a boating accident in the San Francisco Bay area”.

An obituary – noting that Lasota loved “adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals” – even appeared in an Alaska newspaper.

But the story was wrong: Lasota was still alive.

Jessica Taylor, an artificial intelligence researcher who says she knew several of the group members, told the Associated Press that Lasota and the Zizians stretched their rationalist beliefs to justify breaking laws.

“Stuff like thinking it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted,” Taylor said.

Poulomi Saha, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies cults, says that while there is no strict legal definition of such a group, several of the Zizians’ attributes align with the popular cultural conception of the term.

“This is a group of individuals that seem to share some unorthodox viewpoints,” she said. “That in and of itself wouldn’t open up them up to the cult label… but then there is this leadership figure ‘Ziz.'”

Saha noted, however, that there is still significant uncertainty about the relationships between group members and about what may have motivated alleged acts of violence in recent years.

Not long after the obituary was published, Lasota resurfaced along with other members of the group in Vallejo, California, which is north of San Francisco. Several members were living in vans and trucks on land owned by a man named Curtis Lind.

At some point the Zizians allegedly stopped paying rent, and Lind sued to evict them.

But the dispute escalated and in November 2022, Lind was attacked, stabbed 50 times and blinded in one eye. In an act of what police would later say is self-defence, he fired a gun, which killed Emma Borhanian, a former Google employee who was one of the Zizians and who had previously been arrested at the rationalist protest.

Two other members, Suri Dao and Somni Logencia, were arrested and charged with attempting to murder Lind. They remain in prison awaiting trial. Lasota was also at the scene of the attack, but was not charged with a crime.

The following month, two parents of a Zizian member were killed in a small Pennsylvania town.

Richard Zajko, 71, and his wife, Rita, 69, were found shot in the head in their home.

The Zajkos were the parents of Zizian member Michelle Zajko, who was briefly held by police but not charged with a crime.

Lasota was arrested and charged with obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct in connection with the incident.

Despite the links to those two attacks, the group mostly flew under the radar without receiving much wider public attention until earlier this year.

On 17 January, Lind, the California landlord who had allegedly been attacked by members of the group, was killed.

Vallejo Police Department say he was stabbed to death by an assailant wearing a mask and black beanie.

Police later charged Maximilian Snyder with murder, and alleged that Snyder killed Lind in order to stop him from testifying during the attempted murder trial.

That was followed just a few days later by the killing of a US border patrol agent on the other side of the country.

Two Zizians, Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt, were pulled over by US Border Patrol Agent David Maland near the Canadian border in Vermont.

A firefight ensued. Bauckholt, a German citizen who also went by the name Ophelia, was killed in the shootout along with Maland.

Youngblut – who was previously known as Milo – was wounded and later arrested on firearms charges.

The shooting led to a wider hunt for members of the group after police said the gun used to kill Maland was bought by Michelle Zajko.

After the Vermont shootout, police in Pennsylvania said they had uncovered new evidence about the shooting of Zajko’s parents, and Lasota was wanted for failing to appear at several court hearings.

The whereabouts of the pair were unknown until Sunday, when they were arrested with fellow group member Daniel Blank in Maryland.

A police report said a resident of Frostburg, about 160 miles (260km) north-west of Washington DC, had called police saying he wanted three “suspicious” people off his property after they asked to camp on his land for a month.

Maryland State Police said that the trio were charged with trespassing and obstruction, and that Lasota and Zajko were additionally charged with weapons violations. All three were denied bail.

A lawyer for Lasota, Daniel McGarrigle, declined to comment on the arrest but instead sent the BBC a statement he had previously issued about his client, saying: “I urge members of the press and the public to refrain from speculation and premature conclusions.”

Plans to allow English whisky makers to use the term “single malt” have led to a backlash by Scottish distilleries and politicians.

Under proposals being considered by the UK government, “single malt English whisky” could be used for the spirit made by a single distillery in England.

However, the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) said it “devalues” single malts because, it claims, the English method would be simpler than the process used in Scotland.

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) said no decisions had been made and the application process was “ongoing”.

“What Scotch whisky does is it takes the malted barley and it creates the mash, it ferments it and then it distils it at one site,” Graham Littlejohn, SWA director of strategy and communications told BBC Good Morning Scotland.

“What the English proposal would do is to strip away the first two of those three elements and really remove the fundamental connection to place that single malt Scotch whisky has.”

Under the proposal for English single malt whisky, the drink would only be required to be distilled at one site, while mashing and fermentation could take place elsewhere.

The English Whisky Guild said that its distilleries partner with local breweries not on the same site to use “their brewing expertise to create innovative and distinct whiskies”.

The guild said it agreed with the SWA that “provenance and a sense of place is a critical element of whisky” and English whisky distillers’ grain had to be sourced from the UK.

Mr Littlejohn said that allowing the English industry to use the term for its alcohol “would really damage the integrity of the single malt category and with it, the reputation of the Scotch whisky industry.”

The proposal to allow English single malt whisky is part of a wider application to Defra by the guild for geographical indication for English whisky.

This would give it protected geographical status, meaning it could only be used to describe whisky made in England.

Mairi Gougeon, Scotland’s cabinet secretary for rural affairs, said any proposal “to undermine the reputation or definition of the term single malt could have devastating effects on our iconic whisky industry and would be wholly unacceptable”.

She said the industry was “of huge economic importance to Scotland”, and exported £5.4bn worth of goods last year.

Scottish First Minister John Swinney said the Scottish government would “make all necessary representations on this issue to protect the identity and the character of Scotch whisky”.

Opponents of the plans have three months to respond.

The SWA said it would respond formally to the Defra consultation “to robustly defend against any devaluation of the single malt category”.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could not resist a dig at President Donald Trump moments after Canada’s ice hockey team beat the USA in a close final.

“You can’t take our country – and you can’t take our game,” Trudeau wrote on X.

Canada’s thrilling 3-2 overtime win in the 4 Nations Face Off final in Boston took place amid rising tensions between the two neighbours.

Not only is there the looming threat of an economically damaging trade war, there are Trump’s persistent musings on making Canada the 51st US state.

The American national anthem has been regularly booed by Canadian sports fans in recent weeks but this time it was the US home fans doing most of the booing.

As their jeers rang out, the Canadian national anthem was sung with different lyrics in protest over Trump’s statements.

A representative for singer Chantal Kreviazuk told CBC News she intentionally sang “that only us command” instead of “in all of us command”.

In a post on Instagram with a photo of the adjusted lyrics, Kreviazuk said: “We should express our outrage in the face of any abuses of power.”

On any ordinary day, this fixture would have been a significant one for the two neighbouring countries who have long been friendly rivals on the ice. But recent events gave it added spice.

And the sudden-death goal from Connor McDavid which sealed the win prompted delirium among the travelling fans.

The US president was unable to make the game but he called the team to wish them good luck.

He also repeated his desire to absorb Canada, writing in a Truth Social post ahead of the game that he hoped the country “will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished and very important, Fifty First State”.

For fans across North America, the final was a “dream match-up,” ice hockey writer Daniel Nugent-Bowman told the BBC. Not since the 2014 Winter Olympics had the top men’s ice hockey players from Canada and the US faced off in such a consequential game.

Both countries boast some of the biggest stars in the National Hockey League (NHL), like Canadians Mitch Marner and McDavid, and Americans Auston Matthews and Jack Eichel. The game was a chance for this new generation of players to prove themselves.

But in Canada, the game was also a personal one, giving both die-hard and casual fans an opportunity to bask in national pride at a time when the country’s sovereignty looks to be threatened by its closest neighbour.

Few Canadians would dispute how integral ice hockey is to the country’s national identity.

The sport has served as a backdrop to some of the most patriotic moments in Canada’s history, like Sidney Crosby’s overtime gold medal goal at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Historically, Canada has had the upper hand against the US. The two countries have met 20 times in best-on-best tournaments since the 1976 Canada Cup, with Canada winning 14 of those games.

Sinn Féin’s first minister at Stormont, Michelle O’Neill, has said she is “taking a stand against injustice” as she defended her decision to boycott St Patrick’s Day events at the White House.

On Friday, the party announced it will not travel to Washington DC for the annual festivities next month over US President Donald Trump’s stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

There had been growing calls for the party to make its position clear, after the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) clarified it will not take part in celebrations if invited.

However, no invites have been officially issued yet.

DUP leader Gavin Robinson criticised the decision as “short-sighted and counterproductive”, and confirmed his party would attend the St Patrick’s Day events.

When power-sharing is functioning, it is custom for the first and deputy first ministers to make the trip.

O’Neill said she could not attend St Patrick’s Day events “in good conscience” following President Trump’s remarks on Gaza earlier this month.

The US president previously suggested the US could “take over” and “own” Gaza while resettling its population in the process.

“I’m taking a stand against an injustice which I see unravelling every day from the dangerous rhetoric from this new US president,” she told BBC News NI.

“At moments like this, whenever our grandchildren ask us what do we do, whenever the Palestinian people were suffering in the way in which they are, I want to be able to say that I stood on the side of humanity so this decision for me is very much the position of principle and I think it’s the right thing to do.”

The first minister said she was “comfortable” with her decision, and added that she values US relations.

She said she had informed Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly of her decision this morning, and will not “stand in her way” if she wishes to go.

“I respect her different views and equally would ask that she would respect me,” she said.

“I’ve taken my decision on a point of principle, I know I’m doing what I’m doing, but Emma will also have her voice and she’ll make her views know I have no doubt.”

O’Neill said it was “the right thing” for Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Micheál Martin to still attend the US celebrations.

“He has a unique experience in that he gets one-on-one time with the United States President,” she added.

“He will have an opportunity to make the depth of feeling felt by the people here, at home in Ireland and I think he should never miss that opportunity.”

The taoiseach said Sinn Féin were “engaging in politics” over its decision, and said he has a “responsibility to the country” to attend the celebrations.

“Many Irish companies create thousands of jobs in the US – and many US companies create jobs in Ireland – it’s a two-way street, but a very significant relationship and we have a relationship to protect the livelihoods of people in this country and to engage and discuss and profile the level of Irish investment in the US,” Irish broadcaster RTÉ reports.

Tánaiste (deputy Irish prime minister) Simon Harris said Sinn Fein’s stance “does not help anybody in Palestine”.

“It’s always easier to just not show up, isn’t it? What’s actually much more productive is to show up, work hard, and actually engage with people on complex and important issues,” he told reporters at the G20 summit.

Earlier, Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald said she had followed the president’s comments on Gaza with “growing concern” and had listened in “horror” to calls for “mass expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homes and the permanent seizure of Palestinian lands”.

At a press conference following the announcement, McDonald added that the US is a “valued friend” of Ireland, with strong peace ties and role in the Irish economy.

However, the Sinn Féin president said the current US administration is “catastrophically wrong” on Palestine.

“I have made a decision not to attend events in the White House this year as a principled stance against the call for the mass expulsion of the Palestinian people from Gaza,” she said.

At a press conference following the announcement, McDonald added that the US is a “valued friend” of Ireland, with strong peace ties and role in the Irish economy.

However, the Sinn Féin president said the current US administration is “catastrophically wrong” on Palestine.

“The only route to peace and security is a permanent ceasefire followed by a negotiation settlement which guarantees peace and security for both Palestinians and Israelis through a just and sustainable two state solution and that should be the solution of the US.”

Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Gavin Robinson criticised the first minister’s decision to boycott the celebrations and confirmed that his party would be in Washington for the St Patrick’s day events.

“We always use the opportunity to strengthen Northern Ireland’s economic and political ties with the United States, regardless of who occupies the White House,” he said.

“We will continue to engage with our partners in Washington, promoting Northern Ireland as a place to invest, work, and do business.”

SDLP leader Claire Hanna said she was glad there was a “growing realisation things cannot be business as usual” with the current US administration.

Last week, she announced that her party would decline an invite to the White House over the president’s comments on Gaza.

It is the second year in a row the party has said it would turn down an invitation to St Patrick’s Day celebrations.

“There are those who have championed Donald Trump and tried to ride on his coattails,” she told BBC News NI.

“They have a decision to make as to whether they go along with his autocracy, his means of disinformation and potentially international chaos or whether they choose to stand against it and speak truth to power.”

Traditionally politicians from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland take part in engagements in the US around St Patrick’s Day.

This usually culminates in the taoiseach (Irish prime minister) presenting a bowl of shamrock to the US president in the Oval Office.

Last year, O’Neill and Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly made the first joint St Patrick’s Day visit by Executive Office ministers since 2016.

An experimental trial of gene therapy has helped four toddlers – born with one of the most severe forms of childhood blindness – gain “life-changing improvements” to their sight, according to doctors at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.

The rare genetic condition means the babies’ vision deteriorated very rapidly from birth.

Before the therapy, they were registered legally blind and only just able to distinguish between dark and light. After the infusion, all parents reported improvements – with some of their young children now able to begin to draw and write.

Further work is being done to confirm the early study, which appears in the Lancet medical journal.

Gene therapy for another form of genetic blindness has been available on the NHS since 2020.

The new work builds on that success by injecting healthy copies of a defective gene into the back of a child’s eye, very early in life, to treat a severe form of the condition.

Jace, from Connecticut in the United States, had the gene therapy in London when he was just two years old.

As a young baby, his parents noticed something wasn’t right about his eyesight.

“Around eight weeks old when babies should start looking at you and smiling, Jace wasn’t doing that yet,” says his mum DJ.

She knew instinctively there was an issue and began to search for the reason, which took 10 months.

After several visits to doctors and many tests, the family were told Jace had the ultra rare condition. It’s caused by a mutation to a gene called AIPL1 and there is no established treatment.

“It was a shock,” Jace’s dad Brendan says of his first child.

“You never think it’s going to happen to you, of course, but there was a lot of comfort and relief to finally find out… because it gave us a way to move forward.”

The family was lucky to hear about an experimental trial being carried out in London – just by chance – when they were at a conference about the eye condition.

Jace’s surgery was quick and “pretty easy”, his mum says. He had four tiny scars in his eye where healthy copies of the gene were injected into the retina at the back of the eye through keyhole surgery.

These copies are contained inside a harmless virus, which goes through the retinal cells and replaces the defective gene. The healthy, working genes then kick start a process which helps the cells at the back of the eye work better and survive longer.

In the first month following treatment, Brendan noticed Jace squint for the first time on seeing bright sunshine streaming through the windows of their house.

His son’s progress has been “pretty amazing”, he says.

“Pre-surgery, we could have held up an object near his face and he wouldn’t be able to track it at all.

“Now he’s picking things off the floor, he’s hauling out toys, doing things driven by his sight that he wouldn’t have done before.”

This may not be the last treatment he needs in his life, his parents say, but the improvements so far are helping him to know the world better.

“It’s really hard to undersell the impact of having a little bit of vision,” Brendan says.

Prof James Bainbridge, a retinal surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital, who helped lead the trial, said giving children the chance of sight improvement this early on could make a big difference to their development and ability to interact with people.

“Sight impairment in young children has a devastating effect on their development.

“Treatment in infancy with this new genetic medicine can transform the lives of those most severely affected,” he said.

The four children, from the United States, Turkey and Tunisia, were all born with an aggressive form of Leber Congenital Amaurosis, where a genetic fault means the cells at the back of their eyes – that normally help distinguish light and colour- malfunction and rapidly die out.

Scientists at University College London developed the innovative procedure, which involves infusing healthy copies of the gene into the back of the eye, and Great Ormond Street Hospital specialists led on giving the procedure in the trial.

Unlike traditional scientific trials, families were offered this experimental therapy under a special licence designed for compassionate use, when there are no other options readily available.

Children had one eye treated each – a measure taken in case the treatment had any adverse effects.

They were aged between one and three when they had the procedure and their vision was then checked at intervals over the next four years, in a variety of ways – including moving down corridors and identifying doors.

Given their age, some children found the more formal eye tests challenging.

According to Moorfields’ doctors, the results of the tests they completed, alongside the parent’s reports of their improvements, give “compelling evidence” that all four benefited from the treatment and were seeing more than would be expected with the normal course of the disease.

Vision in their untreated eyes, meanwhile, deteriorated, as expected.

Consultant eye surgeon, Prof Michel Michaelides, at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, added: “The outcomes for these children are hugely impressive and show the power of gene therapy to change lives.”

The team plans to monitor the children to see how long-lasting the results are.

The results so far give them hope that intervening early in other childhood genetic eye conditions could offer the “greatest benefit” and ultimately transform children’s lives.

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A notorious gang leader has died after he was shot inside a courthouse in Sri Lanka by a gunman disguised as a lawyer, say police.

Police say the gunman used a revolver which was smuggled in a hollowed-out book by a female suspect, who remains at large.

Gang leader Sanjeewa Kumara Samararathne had been escorted to court to face proceedings when he was shot. Police say he was a suspect in multiple murder cases.

The shooting in the capital Colombo is among a series of killings by rivalling gangs, which has persisted as authorities vow to crack down on gang violence in the country.

The gang leader, popularly known as Ganemulle Sanjeewa, had been in custody since he was arrested in September 2023.

Police said he had been escorted to the courthouse on Wednesday by a dozen police officers. He was taken to hospital after he was shot but was pronounced dead on arrival.

The gunman managed to flee the scene but was later captured by police. He has been identified differently by authorities and local media, but police say that he used several names.

Police have identified the female suspect as 25-year-old Pinpura Dewage Ishara Sewwandi.

Authorities have put out a notice promising a reward for anyone providing information on the woman. Police say they have also arrested a policeman and van driver suspected of helping the two suspects in the shooting.

Lawmakers discussed reining in gang violence in parliament on Wednesday, with an opposition MP calling it a “major security issue”.

Health and mass media minister Nalinda Jayatissa, who in December had pledged to crack down on such criminal activity, said on Wednesday that the government would “take the actions of organised underworld gangs seriously.”

The incident has also raised questions about security in the courthouse, with authorities currently reviewing security measures.

New security protocols are being implemented in the wake of the shooting, including deploying armed guards when certain people are brought to court. Armed security personnel are not typically allowed in court, justice minister Harshana Nanayakkara said on Thursday.

At least nine people have died this year in a spate of shootings blamed on gang rivalry, according to AFP citing police data.

New direct train routes from London to Germany, Switzerland and France could open as part of plans to boost passenger numbers at St Pancras station.

London St Pancras Highspeed, which owns the station and operates the track to the Channel Tunnel in Folkestone, has already set out proposals to increase capacity for international train travel from 1,800 passengers per hour to almost 5,000.

It now wants to attract different train operators to offer a range of services in Europe.

Eurostar currently holds a monopoly on the trains through the Channel Tunnel with routes to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam.

London St Pancras Highspeed and Getlink have signed an agreement that will help them to commit to expanding rail connectivity between the UK and Europe.

“Many European cities could be reached directly by train in under six hours which we believe is really competitive with short-haul air travel,” said a spokesperson for London St Pancras Highspeed.

Yann Leriche, chief executive of Getlink, which owns Eurotunnel, said: “We are keen to drive forward attractive opportunities for low-carbon mobility with a range of new destinations in Germany, Switzerland and France.”

Getlink believes it is possible for train services to Bordeaux, Cologne, Frankfurt, Geneva, Marseille and Zurich to be created.

No set timeline has been revealed as yet.

Eurostar dropped services between London and Disneyland Paris in June 2023, and no longer has routes between London and the south of France.

Virgin Group and Evolyn are two companies developing plans for rival services to Eurostar that could take passengers to the newly proposed destinations.

Virgin acknowledged that it would be a “huge undertaking” to establish a new cross-Channel operator but said the route was “ripe for change with plenty of room and potential for new competition at St Pancras and through the Tunnel”.

Competition between different companies on the route would benefit all customers, a spokesperson added.

London St Pancras Highspeed and Getlink have signed an agreement that will help them to commit to expanding rail connectivity between the UK and Europe.

Robert Sinclair, chief executive of London St Pancras Highspeed, said demand for international train travel was growing.

He said his company would work with Getlink “to encourage new and existing train operators to expand capacity and launch new destinations unlocking the potential of a fully connected Europe”.

Footballer Jenni Hermoso’s lawyer has said she intends to appeal after Spain’s former football federation boss Luis Rubiales was fined for kissing the player without her consent during the 2023 World Cup, Reuters and AFP reported.

On Thursday, Rubiales was found guilty of sexual assault and ordered by Spain’s High Court to pay a fine of €10,800 (£8,942).

Rubiales was acquitted of coercion, after allegedly trying to pressure Hermoso into publicly saying that the kiss was consensual.

Hermoso’s lawyer, Angel Chavarria, said the player intended to appeal, but did not provide further details on what specifically she might appeal against.

The BBC has contacted Hermoso’s lawyer.

The High Court ruling also banned Rubiales from going within a 200m radius of Hermoso and from communicating with her for one year, the court said in a statement.

Prosecutors had demanded a prison sentence for Rubiales, who has also said he will appeal against the verdict.

During the 2023 World Cup, as Spain’s players received their medals after defeating England in Sydney to win, Rubiales grabbed Hermoso by the head and kissed her on the lips.

He later described the kiss as an “act of affection” and told the court that he was “absolutely sure” Hermoso had given her consent.

In her testimony earlier this month, Hermoso insisted that she had not given consent and that the incident had “stained one of the happiest days of my life”.

The incident sparked nationwide protests and calls for the resignation of Rubiales.

Three of Rubiales’s former colleagues who were also on trial, accused of colluding in the alleged coercion – Jorge Vilda, coach of the World Cup-winning side, Rubén Rivera, the Real Federación Española de Fútbol (RFEF)’s former head of marketing, and Albert Luque, former sporting director – were cleared of those charges.