The US has twice sided with Russia in votes at the United Nations to mark the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, highlighting the Trump administration’s change of stance on the war.

First, the US opposed a European-drafted resolution condemning Moscow’s actions and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity – voting the same way as Russia and countries including North Korea and Belarus at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.

Then the US drafted and voted for a resolution at the UN Security Council which called for an end to the conflict, but contained no criticism of Russia.

The Security Council passed the resolution, but two key US allies, the UK and France, abstained after their attempts to amend the wording were vetoed.

The UN resolutions were tabled as French President Emmanuel Macron visited President Donald Trump at the White House in an attempt to address their sharp differences over the war.

On Thursday, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will likewise visit the new American leader.

Trump’s White House has upended the transatlantic alliance, currying favour with Moscow and casting doubt on America’s long-term commitment to European security.

That rift was laid bare on the floor of the 193-member UNGA on Monday as US diplomats pushed their limited resolution mourning the loss of life during the “Russia-Ukraine conflict” and calling for a swift end to it.

European diplomats tabled a more detailed text, blaming Russia for its full-scale invasion, and supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

“We need to reconfirm that the aggression should be condemned and discredited, not rewarded,” said Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Mariana Betsa.

UNGA members backed the European resolution by 93 votes but, extraordinarily, the US did not abstain but actually voted against it, along with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Sudan, Belarus, Hungary and 11 other states, with 65 abstentions.

The UNGA also passed the US resolution but only after it was amended to include language supporting Ukraine, which led to the US abstaining.

Republican Senator John Curtis said he was “deeply troubled” by the vote “which put us on the same side as Russia and North Korea”.

“These are not our friends. This posture is a dramatic shift from American ideals of freedom and democracy,” he wrote on X.

The vote was “contrary to our long-standing support of democracy”, said former US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Ukraine’s former minister of economy, Tymofiy Mylovanov, said the choice to side with Russia was deliberate.

“This is no longer just rhetoric or political theatre,” he said.

At the much more powerful 15-member UN Security Council, the unamended US resolution – which called for an end to the conflict but contained no criticism of Russia – was passed by 10 votes, with the UK, France, Denmark, Greece and Slovenia abstaining.

America’s acting envoy to the UN, Dorothy Camille Shea, described the US resolution as a “simple historic statement… that looks forward, not backwards. A resolution focused on one simple idea: ending the war”.

Rarely has the US been so at odds with its supposed European allies.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, the Security Council has been deadlocked by the power of Russia, one of its five permanent members, to veto any resolution there.

For this reason the UNGA has been the main forum for debating the war. But its resolutions are not legally binding for member states, unlike those of the Security Council.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Authorities in the southern Indian state of Telangana are racing against time to save eight construction workers trapped inside a tunnel for more than 72 hours.

Around 50 workers had been working inside the 43km (26.7-mile)-long tunnel, located in Nagarkurnool district, when a part of its roof caved in early Saturday morning.

Officials say 43 of them managed to come out safely but efforts to reach the remaining eight men have faced repeated setbacks due to loose soil, mud and slush inside the tunnel.

They have also been unable to establish contact with the trapped men, or provide them with oxygen and other essential supplies.

Jupally Krishna Rao, a state minister overseeing the rescue effort, told PTI news agency that “the chances of their survival are very remote.”

On Monday an expert team of “rat-hole miners” – people trained in narrow tunnel navigation – arrived to clear the debris and get to the workers. The same team had sucessfully rescued 41 construction workers trapped in a tunnel after a landslide in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in 2023.

Approximately 33km of excavation has been completed so far and roughly 10km remain, officials said on Tuesday.

Rescuers are using a train to get to a point from where they need to climb on to a conveyor belt to remove the debris. Reports say they are also continuously pumping out water to ensure oxygen supply within the tunnel. But the rough terrain of the region has slowed them down.

As rescue efforts continue, families of the trapped workers – most of whom are daily wage workers – are anxiously waiting for news of their loved ones.

“I just hope that this time my son comes back safe. I will never send him away to earn again,” said Rampratap Sahu, a resident of Jharkhand state.

Others expressed anger at authorities for letting their family members “come in harm’s way”.

“Why did they send the men to work there when they knew of the risks involved in the project?” asked Jaspreet Kaur, whose brother is among those trapped.

A portion of the under-construction Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) collapsed around 13km from its opening at 8:30 local time (03:00 GMT) on Saturday.

The accident took place after a slab of concrete covering seepage on the roof slipped and fell off. At least a dozen workers were injured in the chaos.

The tunnel is part of the longest-running irrigation project of the Telangana government. Located in a hilly forested area, it passes through the Nagarjuna Sagar-Srisailam tiger reserve which is the largest in India.

Officials said construction work had resumed just four days before the accident, after a gap of almost three years.

Various relief teams, including personnel from the National Disaster Response Force, firefighters and soldiers from the Indian army, are at the spot.

Officials told BBC Telugu that a team of firefighters was the first to go inside on Sunday.

“We covered 11km by train, 2km by conveyor belt and the remaining distance on foot,” an official, who wanted to stay anonymous, said. “But then we hit a roadblock.”

“There were tall mounds of mud and soft soil. The boring machine that was being used by the workers lay upside down, blocking all passage beyond.”

The rescuers said they were forced to return from that point as they did not have the necessary tools and machines to clear the slush.

“We shouted and screamed, whistled and pointed torches, hoping for a response but didn’t hear anything.”

Relatives of some of the trapped men are now desperately hoping for a miracle.

“When I left home, my wife held me, wept and said, do not come back empty handed. Bring back my son,” said Rampratap Sahu, father of one of the workers.

“But what can I do? I can only sit here and pray to god to return my son to me. I want nothing else.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he is open to offering the US access to rare minerals, including from Russian-occupied Ukraine.

This comes after US President Donald Trump has repeatedly pushed for Ukraine to give up some of its minerals in exchange for support, in a deal which is currently being finalised, according to a Ukrainian minister.

In a state TV interview on Monday, Putin said he was ready to “offer” resources to American partners in joint projects, including mining in Russia’s “new territories” – a reference to parts of eastern Ukraine that Russia has occupied since launching a full-scale invasion three years ago.

The proposal could also see the two countries collaborating on aluminium extraction and supply to the US to stabilise prices, he added.

In his televised interview, Putin countered Trump’s push to access Ukraine’s mineral deposits, saying they were ready to work with “foreign partners” including companies on mining minerals.

Putin said a potential US-Ukraine deal on rare minerals was not a concern and that Russia “undoubtedly have, I want to emphasise, significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine”.

“As for the new territories, it’s the same. We are ready to attract foreign partners to the so-called new, to our historical territories, which have returned to the Russian Federation,” he added.

He also suggested that Russia and the US could collaborate on aluminium production in Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, where one Russian aluminium maker, Rusal, has its largest smelters.

The televised comments followed a cabinet meeting on Russia’s natural resources.

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists the proposal opened up “quite broad prospects”, adding that the US needed rare earth minerals and Russia had “a lot of them”.

Offering the US access to minerals is an eye-catching move by Putin, given how much pride the Kremlin has taken in keeping Russia’s natural wealth in Russian hands. In 2023 Putin accused the West, particularly the US, of trying to “dismember” Russia to gain access to its natural resources.

• Live coverage of this story
• Why is Ukraine negotiating a minerals deal with the US?

Putin’s intervention comes as Ukraine has been facing growing pressure from the Trump administration to sign a deal for access to its mineral deposits.

Kyiv estimates that about 5% of the world’s critical raw materials are in Ukraine. However, some of the mineral deposits have been seized by Russia in the three years since its invasion of Ukraine.

Trump said earlier this month that the US military and economic aid to Ukraine amounted to about $500bn (£396bn), and he wants the US to have access to Ukrainian minerals of that value.

Zelenzky has disputed that figure and is also said to want any deal to include security guarantees.

On Monday Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, Olga Stefanishyna, said negotiations on such a deal “have been very constructive, with nearly all key details finalised”.

Similarly – albeit in a different approach to the US – the European Union has also proposed a partnership with Ukraine that would give it access to minerals in what the the European Commissioner for industrial strategy, Stéphane Séjourné, called a “win-win”.

One in five Germans put an X in the box for Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Sunday: a record result that has made them the second biggest force in German politics.

Riding on the back of that success, the party is now calling for an end to the consensus in German politics not to work with the far right.

That “firewall” – in German – has worked since the end of World War Two, but AfD joint leader Tino Chrupalla says: “Anyone who erects firewalls will get grilled behind them.”

There is a determination among all of Germany’s main parties to keep that block in place – and the German public backs them up: 69% see the AfD as a threat to democracy, according to voters surveyed on Sunday.

Friedrich Merz, who won the election for the conservatives, believes the only reason the AfD exists is because of problems such as migration and security that need to be addressed: “We need to resolve these problems… then that party, the AfD, will disappear.”

The AfD won 20.8% of the vote nationally, and as the light blue areas of the map show, it was dominant in the five states in the east, securing 34%.

“East Germans have made it very clear they no longer want a firewall,” said Tino Chrupalla.

Friedrich Merz will now go into talks on forming a government with the Social Democrats, who came third.

Even though his party won 28.6% of the vote, it was still their second-worst result since World War Two.

Support for the AfD doubled, and a million of their voters deserted Merz’s conservatives for them, according to a survey by research institute Infratest dimap.

Voters have not been put off by the fact that Germany’s domestic intelligence classifies parts of the AfD as right-wing extremist – or that the party has now embraced a policy called “remigration”.

The AfD argues that remigration means deporting immigrants convicted of crime, but the term has been used by the extreme right to mean mass deportations.

One of the big issues for the Christian Democrats is how to get their voters back and stop losing more.

Merz has already flirted with the AfD in parliament, relying on their votes to push through a motion on migration.

But he was clearly stung by a public outcry and the mass protests that followed in many German cities.

Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting is unlikely to try that again, especially if he forms a government with the centre-left.

But now the AfD has more than 150 seats in parliament, its supporters in particular believe it is time for the firewall to go.

“I just hope that the firewall will fall. But we all know that it won’t be like that,” says pro-AfD TikTok influencer Celina Brychcy, 26.

“I think it will fall at the latest when new elections are held. Then they’ll have to realise at some point they can’t get through with what they’re doing right now.”

“I think the will stay,” says Dominic, 30, who voted for the AfD in Saxony. “I want the government to really think about their own people and their own country.”

Read more on the German election here:

Merz signals seismic shift in transatlantic relations

Five key takeaways from German election

Conservatives celebrate, but AfD doubles vote

Pressure to take down the long-standing firewall is not just coming from the AfD, but from leading figures in the Trump administration too, including US Vice-President JD Vance and Elon Musk, who has repeatedly backed the party.

Most of the voices you hear challenging the firewall come from the east, which may not be surprising considering the deep reach of the AfD, especially in the five eastern states out of a total of 16 across Germany.

They won 38.6% of the vote in Thuringia and 37.% in both Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, far ahead of the CDU. It makes them increasingly difficult to keep at arm’s length.

On one of the big talkshows on German TV on Monday night, Harsh but Fair, one local mayor from Saxony, Mirko Geissler, believed the AfD should be put on the “playing field”, so they could show what they could do. If not, they would end up surging to 40-50% in the polls, he warned.

Liane Bach, an independent mayor from a village in Thuringia said that in her region, “AfD voters aren’t right-wing extremists”.

A CDU politician on the programme, Phillip Amthor, conceded there should be “no firewalls between the democratic parties and people who vote AfD”.

That is the main issue the big national parties will have to address. How to avoid ostracising AfD voters who clearly have no problem with the firewall being breached.

One mayor pointed out that one of her fellow residents who was also an AfD councillor was fixing the local fountain. It made no sense not to work with him.

Prof Conrad Ziller from the University of Duisburg-Essen believes the greatest threat to the firewall could come at state level, rather than nationally.

“If you have trouble building a coalition in a state, then at some point, there could be a minority government that relies on the AfD, or gets votes from the AfD from time to time.”

On a national level, the worst-case scenario would be for a breakdown in a Merz-led coalition: “Merz could make mistakes. If he gets really tough on immigration, it might become problematic with the SPD.”

Germany has already seen one early election because of a coalition collapse, and the AfD’s Alice Weidel has made clear she is looking for early elections.

Her repeated appearances on TV election debates have made her a prominent figure in Germany and helped raise her party’s profile.

But it was the constant focus on migration and security that became the number one issue for AfD voters, partly fuelled by three deadly attacks, all allegedly carried out by immigrants.

Tackling insecurity, and the perception of it, will be an immediate task for the next government, when it eventually takes shape.

Underlying the urgency, Bavaria’s centre-right leader Markus Söder said the need to tackle immigration, along with Germany’s faltering economy, was “in fact, the last bullet of democracy”.

There is no question of breaching the long-standing firewall for the moment.

And the general secretary of Merz’s party, Tom Unger, was adamant that there should be no collaboration with a party that opposed Germany’s ties with the West, its membership of Nato and “the European idea”.

That was incompatible, he said, with the conservatives’ “core DNA”.

Roaring crowds, faces painted blue and green, flags waving like battle standards.

This is the opening of The Greatest Rivalry: India v Pakistan, a new Netflix documentary on one of cricket’s most storied contests.

India’s Virender Sehwag sets the tone: “This is a contest bigger than one between the bat and ball”. Cut to dramatic footage of some of the matches, the Wagah border, partition refugees. A nation split into two, but forever bound by cricket.

Pakistan’s Waqar Younis doesn’t hesitate: “I put this rivalry right at the top. There’s no match like India v Pakistan.” India’s R Ashwin agrees: “I think this is bigger than the Ashes.” Ramiz Raja says it’s “the political garnish that makes this rivalry world-class”.

Despite wars, border standoffs and terror attacks, the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry has endured, driven by history and national pride. Even when politics halts the bilateral series, International Cricket Council (ICC) tournaments keep the fire alive, turning every match into a high-stakes spectacle.

But Pakistan’s crushing defeat by India on Sunday at the Champions Trophy has reignited the question: is this rivalry overhyped, propped up by slogans like “war minus the shooting” – a phrase George Orwell coined in 1945 to criticise excessive nationalism in sports?

Is this still the premier clash in cricket, or just one of its most dramatic? Has it lost its competitive edge, running more on history than intensity?

Consider this. From an eight-wicket thrashing in 2018 to a 228-run demolition in 2023, India has dominated, winning six of the last eight ODIs. Pakistan’s last victory? The 2017 Champions Trophy final – a fading memory in an increasingly one-sided rivalry.

What rivalry, asked Dawn – a leading Pakistani newspaper – pointedly after the latest debacle. A cricket war that’s now just a big yawn, headlined India Today magazine.

The loss would be easier to accept if Pakistan were at least putting up a fight, according to Dawn’s Zohaib Ahmed Majeed.

Majeed believes the troubled politics between the two neighbours is the only thing that has kept the rivalry alive.

“In a way we must thank the politicians of these two nations for keeping this rivalry alive, because the cricketers, especially from our side, are certainly incapable of putting up a show that is worthy of its billing,” he wrote.

“Cut out the war of words and the actual wars and what you’ll be left with is a professional cricketing unit against a haphazardly put together team at the last minute. There is no rivalry as far as pure cricketing merits are concerned.”

India Today was no less acerbic. “With its history of one-sided losses to India in recent years, Pakistan cricket is fast sliding into pity territory. And unless it reverses the trend, Pakistan’s dream of competing with India could soon turn into a butt of jokes for cricket fans,” wrote Sandipan Sharma.

To be true, Pakistan’s cricketing woes keep mounting. They have missed the final four in the last three ODI World Cups, crashed out in the T20 World Cup group stage and now, as hosts of the Champions Trophy, they’ve hit rock-bottom.

Since the 2009 attack on Sri Lanka’s team bus, Pakistan cricket has battled isolation, political turmoil, board instability, frequent coaching changes and selection controversies – all adding to its struggles. Meanwhile, across the border, India has risen as cricket’s powerhouse, backed by a strong domestic system and the IPL, cricket’s richest international league.

Pakistani cricket writer Osman Samiuddin also notes a sense of “marginalisation” among his country’s cricketers, who remain excluded from the IPL and its franchise ecosystem (no Pakistani player has featured in the IPL since 2009, as they were banned after the Mumbai terror attacks). “I think they see Indian cricketers and others as well, like Australian and English cricketers, as partaking in a world of cricket they have been excluded from,” he told a programme.

This has all contributed to the team’s fast-declining fortunes.

“It is a futile exercise to wonder if this is the lowest Pakistan cricket has ever been. However, even when Pakistan have plummeted to spectacular lows in the past, they have done it in a way that justifies the cliché of their mercurial nature,” wrote Sidharth Monga in ESPNcricinfo, after Sunday’s game.

“This slide just feels like a terminal, slow decline. Players are not fighting with each other, there is no backdoor intrigue, there are no cliques in the team plotting to dethrone the captain, there are no comical run-outs or misfields, no defeats snatched from the jaws of victory.”

The “war without guns” narrative once held weight, especially when Imran Khan’s Pakistan, armed with a fearsome pace attack of Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis and batting stars like Javed Miandad and Inzamam-ul-Haq, regularly got the better of India.

“The narrative may have been true till the early 2000s because this is how the actual fans felt. But it was soon hijacked by the multinationals and the media to cash in on the hyper-pathos of it all,” Nadeem Farooq Paracha, Pakistani author and columnist, told me.

“The quality of cricket between the two sides isn’t the same anymore. Indian cricket continues to get better. In fact, I think the narrative in question here has ended up pressuring Pakistani side more. They underplay it, even though they’re more than willing to pocket its financial benefits.”

The cricket boards and broadcasters are doing all they can to keep the rivalry alive, and the ICC won’t dial down the hype – it’s too valuable in an era of overexposure of cricket, limited stars and competition from franchise cricket.

This one game has become a financial juggernaut, fuelling a parallel economy wherever it’s played – Dubai, London, Ahmedabad – drawing fans who spend big just to be there. “Pakistan has talent, but the contest now feels more psychological,” says cricket writer Gautam Bhattacharyya.

Brand consultant Santosh Desai feels the real contest between the arch rivals plays out beyond the cricket ground and the “rivalry thrives more in imagination than in reality”.

“The asymmetry [between the two sides] only fuels the hype. India’s dominance makes it an easy narrative to sell, a battle royale where the outcome feels preordained. If Pakistan were winning consistently, the marketing appeal would fade. The rivalry’s commercial power lies in India’s superiority, feeding a script designed for validation, not uncertainty,” Desai told me.

India’s vice-captain Shubman Gill dismisses talk of overhyping, calling it a contest fans love to watch. “It is an exciting contest when both of these teams play. Everyone enjoys watching it. If so many people are happy to watch the match, then who are we to say that it is underhyped or overhyped,” he told reporters on eve of Sunday’s game.

Gill is possibly right. Tickets for India-Pakistan games still fly off the shelves – the ICC reported sellouts within minutes. An astonishing 600 plus million viewers tuned in to watch Sunday’s match on Indian streaming platform JioHotstar, setting new records.

But for now, as cricket writer Ayaz Memon puts it, “the hype is more thrilling than the cricket itself”.

A 22-member Bangladeshi delegation of political leaders, civil society activists, academics and journalists have begun a 10-day visit to China.

They will be having talks with Chinese government officials and senior members of the ruling Communist Party, a delegation leader confirmed with the BBC.

Analysts say China is making overtures while diplomatic tensions have risen between Bangladesh and India on a range of issues.

This includes ousted Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Hasina living in exile in India. Dhaka has requested her extradition but Delhi has refused.

Abdul Moyeen Khan, a senior official from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) who’s leading the delegation in Beijing, told the BBC: “It’s basically a goodwill visit, initiated by Beijing.”

“It is unique because China this time has invited a team representing various groups in Bangladesh.”

Many of the delegation members are from the BNP and its allies. The BNP, headed by former prime minister Begum Khaleda Zia, is one of the main parties in Bangladesh, besides the Awami League led by Hasina.

The delegation also includes several representatives from the student movement that began the mass uprising against Hasina that eventually ousted the prime minister in August last year.

An interim government led by the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus is currently in charge.

It has been urging India to repatriate Hasina to face charges of crimes against humanity and money laundering, among other allegations. The UN says Hasina’s government’s crackdown on protesters during the uprising killed about 1,400 people.

So far India has showed no sign of extraditing Hasina, who denies the charges.

Delhi and Dhaka had maintained close ties during the 15-year rule of Ms Hasina, who was widely seen by her critics as pro-India, although she also balanced it with her relationship with Beijing.

Following the fall of Hasina, Beijing has stepped up its interaction with Bangladeshi leaders, activists and delegations, including those from Islamist parties.

This week’s visit follows a meeting between the Bangladesh interim government’s foreign policy advisor Touhid Hossain and the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Beijing in January.

It also marks the second time BNP officials have visited China in recent months, after Beijing hosted a BNP delegation late last year.

With the political vacuum and absence of India’s influence, analysts say, Beijing is trying to increase its foothold in Bangladesh, a country of about 170 million people.

China is Bangladesh’s largest trading partner with bilateral trade amounting to around $24bn (£19bn) – the vast majority of that consists of Chinese exports to the South Asian country.

The Bangladeshi military also heavily relies on Chinese equipment and ammunition with more than 70% of supplies coming from China.

Compared to Beijing’s overtures, India has had very limited interactions with the interim government and other Bangladeshi political leaders in the past six months.

The BNP held a protest in December alleging India’s interference in Bangladesh’s internal matters by hosting Hasina. Some advisors of the interim government have also criticised Delhi on the same issue.

This criticism has sparked sharp reaction from Delhi.

The Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said last week that it was up to Bangladesh to decide on “what kind of relationship they want with us”.

He described the criticism of India by Bangladeshi officials and politicians as “absolutely ridiculous”.

Some argue that this increasingly tense rhetoric between Dhaka and Delhi could push Bangladesh towards China.

The latest events indicate that Bangladesh has joined fellow South Asian countries Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Nepal as a target for both Delhi and Beijing, as the superpowers jostle for influence.

“I don’t believe India should consider the whole subcontinent is under Delhi’s sphere of influence. That attitude would make India suffer,” Chinese analyst Zhou Bo, a senior fellow at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, told the BBC.

Skywatchers are in for a treat this week as seven planets – Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Venus, Neptune, Mercury, and Saturn will all be briefly visible in the evening sky.

This phenomenon, known as a ‘planetary parade’ is a rare sight, and it will be the last time seven planets can be seen simultaneously so well until 2040.

The best chance to see as many planets as possible will be just after sunset on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Four of the planets – Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars – will be visible to the naked eye. Saturn will be harder to see because it will be low in the horizon. You will need a telescope to spot the other two planets – Uranus and Neptune.

A good view of the horizon and clear skies will offer the best chance of spotting them all. However, the window to see all seven planets will be very brief.

Dr Edward Bloomer, astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich said: “There’s a rare opportunity to have seven planets in essentially a convenient place for you to look for them.”

As the sun sets, Saturn and Mercury will also be setting, making them particularly difficult to see.

“You really only have a few minutes after sunset to catch them before they drop below the horizon. After that, you’ll still be able to see Venus, Jupiter, and Mars clearly for a much longer time,” Dr Bloomer added.

The planets in our solar system orbit the Sun within roughly the same flat plane as the Earth.

As they orbit at different speeds and distances from the Sun, there are moments when they appear to line up from Earth’s perspective creating a spectacular visual display, although the planets remain separated by vast distances in space.

• Send us your pictures of the planetary parade.

Venus and Jupiter will be the easiest to spot due to their brightness, while Mars will have a distinct reddish hue.

“Uranus is technically visible with the naked eye, but you’d need perfect eyesight and ideal conditions,” Dr Bloomer explains.

To improve your chances of seeing as many planets as possible, Dr Bloomer advises heading to a location with a clear view of the horizon and minimal light pollution.

“If you just pop out of your kitchen into your back garden, you will take time to adjust to the light levels. Give it a bit of time – your eyes take about half an hour to fully adjust,” said Dr Bloomer.

“Avoid looking at your phone, get comfortable, and ensure you have an unobstructed view of the horizon.”

While this is an exciting opportunity, Dr Bloomer encourages people to make a habit of gazing at the night sky.

“See how things change,” he said, adding that observing the heavens is “a chance to witness the ongoing mechanics of the solar system at work.”

Whilst the weather is still rather unsettled currently, clearer and calmer conditions are expected to develop later in the week.

Tuesday evening will start with clear spells, but cloud and rain will move in from the west later.

On Wednesday night, skies will be generally cloudier with showery rain at times.

By Thursday, expect a drier, clearer view of the night sky. Earlier in the evening is best, as mist and fog patches may develop further into the night.

For Friday high pressure is expected to dominate, keeping dry conditions for most with clear spells. Soon after sunset is most favoured as mist and fog patches may develop later.

Syria’s interim president has told a national dialogue conference that the country has a “historic” opportunity to rebuild after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.

Ahmed al-Sharaa also stressed the need for armed groups to integrate into the military and for the state to have a monopoly on weapons, saying Syria’s “strength lies in its unity”.

The 600 delegates have been asked to provide recommendations on transitional justice, the economy, the new constitution and other topics to guide a new transitional government.

But there has been criticism that the process has been rushed, and the Kurdish-led militia alliance and autonomous administration which control north-eastern Syria were not invited.

The Assad family ruled Syria for more than 50 years with an iron fist, with Bashar becoming president in 2000 after the death of his father Hafez.

In 2011, Bashar brutally crushed a peaceful pro-democracy uprising, sparking a devastating civil war in which more than 600,000 people were killed and 12 million others forced to flee their homes.

On 8 December, he fled to Russia after a rebel alliance led by Sharaa’s Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) swept down from north-western Syria and entered Damascus in the space of only 12 days.

Seven weeks later, Sharaa was named president for the “transitional period” by his fellow rebel commanders. They also announced the cancellation of the 2012 constitution, the dissolution of the parliament, army and security agencies, and the integration of all rebel groups into the new state institutions replacing them.

Sharaa promised to hold a national dialogue conference to discuss Syria’s future, which he said would be followed by a “constitutional declaration” to serve during the transition.

“Syria liberated itself on its own, and it suits it to build itself on its own,” Sharaa said in a speech at the national dialogue conference in Damascus on Tuesday.

“What we are living today is an exceptional, historic and rare opportunity. We must take advantage of every moment of it to serve the interests of our people and our country.”

The organising committee said six working groups would be formed to discuss a transitional justice system, the new constitution, reforming and building state institutions, personal freedoms, the role of civil society, and the country’s future economic model.

The groups would agree non-binding recommendations, which would be presented to the new transitional government set to take power on Saturday and help shape the constitutional declaration, according to the committee.

Sharaa said a transitional justice body would soon be formed to “restore people’s rights” and start holding to account those who committed crimes against Syrians during the civil war.

He also reiterated that non-state armed groups had to disarm and hand over their territory.

“The unity of arms and their monopoly by the state is not a luxury but a duty and an obligation,” he said. “Syria is indivisible; it is a complete whole, and its strength lies in its unity.”

The interim government’s forces control Syria’s biggest cities, but large parts of the country are still held by various armed groups.

They include the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a militia alliance supported by the US, which controls most of the north-east and serves as the armed forces of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).

The SDF has so far refused to integrate its forces into the new Syrian army, although negotiations have been taking place in recent weeks.

Organisers of the conference said the SDF and AANES had not been invited because of that refusal, and that Kurds would be represented in Damascus even if they were not.

However, SDF spokesman Farhad Shami told AFP news agency that “the exclusion of the SDF and large sections of Syrian society confirm that the conference serves to please the outside world and not to seek a better future”.

Thirty-five parties in the AANES also criticised what they claimed was the “token representation” of Kurds and other minorities, saying such events were “meaningless, worthless, and will not contribute to finding real solutions to the country’s ongoing crisis”.

Moutasem Sioufi of The Day After, an independent civil society group that is participating in the conference, told the BBC that it was important that all groups were involved.

“We need to have dialogue with all the Syrian groups, with all Syrian powers, especially those who have great influence on the ground. Without that Syria would face a very hard time maintaining itself together,” he said.

The outcomes of the conference will be closely watched by the international community, which has called for an inclusive political process that represents the country’s many ethnic and religious communities.

During the civil war, the US, the UK, and the European Union imposed a wide range of sanctions on Syria targeting Assad’s government and its allies in response to atrocities committed during the civil war.

They have lifted some of the sanctions that crippled the Syrian economy since Assad’s fall, but made further steps dependent on Syria’s new leaders keeping promises to respect minority rights and move towards democracy.

On Monday, the EU announced that it was suspending sanctions on its energy, transport and banking sectors to facilitate humanitarian assistance and reconstruction.

Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani welcomed that decision, but he criticised the international sanctions still in place in a speech to the national dialogue conference.

“These sanctions are illegitimate and are not based on any legal or moral foundations,” he said. “They are being used as a means of pressure on the will of the Syrian people.”

HTS, a former al-Qaeda affiliate, is subject to separate sanctions because it continues to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UN, US, EU and UK.

Singapore’s biggest bank, DBS, says it expects to cut about 4,000 roles over the next three years as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on more work currently done by humans.

The move will affect temporary and contract staff, a bank spokesperson said, with the reduction in the workforce coming from “natural attrition” as projects are completed.

Permanent staff are not affected by the cuts. The bank’s outgoing chief executive Piyush Gupta also said it expected to create around 1,000 new AI-related jobs.

It makes DBS one of the first major banks to offer details on how AI will affect its operations.

The company did not say how many jobs would be cut in Singapore.

“Over the next three years, we envisage that AI could reduce the need to renew about 4,000 temporary/contract staff across our 19 markets working on specific projects,” the DBS spokesperson said.

“As such, we expect the reduction in workforce will come from natural attrition as these temporary and contract roles are completed over the next few years.”

DBS currently has between 8,000 and 9,000 temporary and contract workers. The bank employs a total of around 41,000 people.

Last year, Mr Gupta said DBS had been working on AI for over a decade.

“We today deploy over 800 AI models across 350 use cases, and expect the measured economic impact of these to exceed S$1bn ($745m; £592m) in 2025,” he added.

Mr Gupta is set to leave the firm at the end of March. Current deputy chief executive Tan Su Shan will replace him.

The ongoing proliferation of AI technology has put its benefits and risks under the spotlight, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) saying in 2024 that it is set to affect nearly 40% of all jobs worldwide.

The IMF’s managing director Kristalina Georgieva said that “in most scenarios, AI will likely worsen overall inequality”.

The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, told the BBC last year that AI will not be a “mass destroyer of jobs” and human workers will learn to work with new technologies.

Mr Bailey said that while there are risks with AI, “there is great potential with it”.

A Spanish city has honoured two Senegalese migrants for their heroism in trying to save a gay man beaten to death by a homophobic mob.

Ibrahima Diack and Magatte N’Diaye were given “adopted sons of the city” status in A Coruña on Monday in a formal ceremony recognising their actions.

The men were the only ones to intervene in July 2021, when Samuel Luiz was set upon by a group of men and kicked and punched outside a nightclub in the north-western city.

The 24-year-old later died of his injuries in hospital – an event which sparked national outrage and condemnation.

On Monday, at a formal ceremony in the city council’s hall, Mayor Inés Rey described the migrants’ actions as “pure altruism”.

Footage of that night showed other bystanders watching on, some filming on mobiles, and the two being the only ones who intervened.

“That two undocumented migrants were the only ones who physically risked themselves to help the victim of a pack thirsting for horror leaves much food for thought and a series of lessons,” Mayor Rey said.

“Thank you for your example in risking everything despite having a lot to lose,” said another councillor, Rosalía López, on Instagram in a post sharing videos of the ceremony.

Mr Diack and Mr N’Diaye had been living in the city without papers at the time and doing irregular work, putting them at risk of arrest and deportation if they came into contact with authorities.

But both men on Monday said they had just done what they thought was the right thing in trying to stop the violence. In front of friends, civic servants and other guests on Monday, they were handed plaques by the mayor bestowing them with the status of “Adopted Sons of A Coruña”.

“We are not heroes, we did what we had to do,” said Mr N’Diaye, according to an AFP report.

Mr Diack said: “I was born in a family that doesn’t have much… but they gave me many things more valuable than money. They gave me respect, education and above all, values.”

The two were also crucial witnesses in the trial of Mr Luiz’s killers last November, Spanish media reported.

A jury found four men guilty of the murder, with the court ordering sentences between 10 and 24 years. The court found the main accused – given a 24-year sentence – had shouted homophobic insults during the attack.

Tens of thousands of migrants reach Spain illegally every year through boat crossings across the Atlantic – with the most common arrivals from Mali, Senegal and Morocco.

US government workers faced widespread confusion on Monday following conflicting advice over compliance with an Elon Musk-backed order to list their last week’s work in an email or face termination.

Just 48 hours after an email asking “what did you do last week?” was sent, the office behind it clarified responses were voluntary, leaving agencies to decide their approach.

But as this new guidance was shared with federal agencies, President Donald Trump weighed in that workers who did not comply with Mr Musk’s demand would be fired or “sort of semi-fired”.

And later on Monday evening, Mr Musk reinforced the ultimatum, granting workers a final chance to respond.

The mail from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Saturday, instructed recipients to reply with five examples of what they did over the past seven days, without revealing any classified information. The recipients were asked to respond by end of Monday.

Mr Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), said that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation.

The comments fuelled backlash, with federal worker unions and activist groups filing a lawsuit in California to halt the email mandate.

Key agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services (HHS), Justice, and the FBI—now led by Trump appointees—instructed employees to ignore the directive. This led to widespread uncertainty, with some workers receiving contradictory messages over the weekend.

The result was widespread bafflement, as federal workers faced uncertainty over their employment. Many also expressed confusion at the competing guidance they had been given by their respective agencies.

“They’re succeeding in driving us insane,” one employee who works under HHS told the BBC, and asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

On Monday afternoon, OPM held a call with the heads of human resources at federal agencies and said it was up to each entity to determine how they want to handle the directive employees received Saturday, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The same afternoon, President Trump told reporters at the White House that Mr Musk’s demand was a “genius” move.

“There was a lot of genius in sending it,” he said. “We’re trying to find out if people are working and so we’re sending a letter to people, please tell us what you did last week. If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”

“And then if you don’t answer like you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist,” Trump said.

Mr Musk maintained he was acting on instructions from President Donald Trump.

“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance,” he wrote on X, apparently referring to workers who did not respond to his demand by the end of Monday. “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”

“The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!” he said in another post. “Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers. Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?”

Despite pushback from agencies led by Trump appointees, the White House insisted, “Everyone is working together as one unified team at the direction of President Trump”. “Any notion to the contrary is completely false,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

The statement did not explain why different government agencies were giving different recommendations.

Hollywood has had another eventful year: Deadpool faced off with Wolverine, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni sued each other, Inside Out 2 conquered the box office and Joker’s sequel emphatically did not.

The Oscars race, meanwhile, played out against the grim backdrop of wildfires which devastated Los Angeles and left thousands of homes destroyed.

Awards season had its fair share of scandal. While The Brutalist’s use of AI and Anora’s lack of an intimacy co-ordinator were storms in a Twitter teacup, there was one genuine controversy when some historic tweets nearly brought down Emilia Pérez.

Ahead of the Academy Awards on Sunday (2 March), here are 17 of the quirks, trends, patterns, and record breakers from this year’s batch of nominees.

1. This is the first time two musicals have been nominated for best picture in more than five decades.

Wicked and Emilia Pérez are the first tuneful twosome to be up for the top prize since Funny Girl and Oliver! in 1969.

The musical resurgence is partly down to it being twice as easy to score a best picture nomination nowadays, after the top category was expanded to 10 slots.

The last musical to win best picture was Chicago in 2003.

2. Adrien Brody already holds one Oscars record, and he could break another.

The US star is currently the youngest ever winner of best actor – he was 29 when he won for his performance in 2002’s The Pianist.

But Brody wasn’t nominated again until this year, with his nod for The Brutalist. If he wins again, he will become the first person to win the leading actor category with his first two nominations.

Only seven other actors currently have a 100% win rate at the Oscars from two or more nominations – Vivien Leigh, Hilary Swank, Kevin Spacey, Luise Rainer, Christoph Waltz, Helen Hayes and Mahershala Ali.

3. But Timothée Chalamet is a major threat.

The Dune and Wonka star is Brody’s toughest competition in best actor, thanks to his acclaimed portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.

If he won, not only would Chalamet halt Brody’s winning streak, he would also take Brody’s record as the youngest-ever winner. There isn’t much in it – Chalamet would be just 10 months younger than Brody was when he won.

4. Netflix’s Emilia Pérez could follow a dubious pattern for streaming films.

It might have the most nominations, but the Spanish-language musical could share the same fate as other recent streaming films which were heavily nominated, but failed to follow through with many wins.

• The Irishman (Netflix) won zero Oscars, from 10 nominations
• Mank (Netflix) won two out of 10
• The Power of the Dog (Netflix) won one out of 12
• Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple) won zero out of 10

Emilia Pérez is strong in a couple of categories, but it’s similarly unlikely to sweep the board.

Only one streaming film has ever won best picture – Apple’s Coda – which only had three nominations overall.

5. Two Succession stars share a disadvantage.

Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong are both nominated for best supporting actor, for their performances in A Real Pain and The Apprentice respectively.

But the pair are the only two nominees in the category who don’t come from best picture-nominated films.

A Real Pain’s absence in best picture shouldn’t stop frontrunner Culkin from winning. The last person to win the category without a best picture nomination was Christopher Plummer in 2012, for Beginners.

Every actor in the category this year is Oscar-nominated for the first time, except Edward Norton, who has three previous nods.

6. The Substance is the first body horror to be nominated for best picture, and only the seventh horror overall.

The other six were The Exorcist, Get Out, The Silence of the Lambs, Jaws, The Sixth Sense and Black Swan.

The Substance is a strong contender in best make-up and hairstyling, a category where the winner often overlaps with the acting winners. That could work in Demi Moore’s favour in a tight best actress race.

7. Isabella Rossellini is nominated for an eight-minute performance in Conclave, but that isn’t the shortest in Oscars history.

Beatrice Straight won the same category, best supporting actress, for her role in Network, which lasted 5min 02sec.

Dame Judi Dench is only marginally ahead, winning for a performance in Shakespeare in Love which lasted 5min 52sec.

Winners aside, the shortest nominee is thought to be Hermione Baddeley’s performance in 1959’s Room at the Top, lasting 2min 19sec.

On the subject of durations, The Brutalist (3hrs 35mins including an intermission) would be the fourth-longest best picture winner of all time, after Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur.

8. Sing Sing star Colman Domingo is nominated for best actor, just a year after his last nomination in the same category for Rustin.

Quite an achievement, no doubt. But he has some way to go to catch up with Bette Davis and Greer Garson, who both managed five consecutive Oscar nominations in the 1930s and 40s.

Just behind them are Al Pacino, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Thelma Ritter and Jennifer Jones, who each scored four back-to-back nods.

Bradley Cooper, Renée Zellweger, Russell Crowe, Glenn Close, Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, William Hurt, Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr, Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy all managed three in a row.

9. All five best actress nominees come from films which are also nominated for best picture.

That might not sound like much, but it’s the first time it’s happened since 1977.

The historic lack of overlap between the two categories has often been attributed to the Academy being less likely to give female-focused films the top prize.

But that trend has shifted in recent years, with films featuring female leads such as Nomadland, Coda and Everything Everywhere All At Once scoring best picture.

10. Before Sebastian Stan’s nomination for The Apprentice, only seven other actors had been Oscar-nominated for playing a US president.

Frank Langella was recognised for his portrayal of Richard Nixon, while Daniel Day-Lewis and Raymond Massey were both nominated for playing Abraham Lincoln.

Sam Rockwell was nominated for playing George W Bush, Alexander Knox for Woodrow Wilson, and James Whitmore for Harry Truman.

Perhaps most notably, Sir Anthony Hopkins has been nominated twice for portraying two different presidents in separate films – once as Nixon and another as John Quincy Adams.

Stan is slightly different in that he portrays Trump in his younger years as a real estate tycoon, rather than during his tenure as president, but we’re still chalking that up as worthy of induction into this exclusive club.

11. Robbie Williams’ biopic Better Man is nominated for best visual effects, but he also has a connection to two other films in the race.

The British singer’s track Swing Supreme features in a pivotal scene of Emilia Pérez, while his former Take That bandmates feature at the beginning of Anora as a remix of Greatest Day plays in a nightclub.

Its prominence in the film led to the remaining members of Take That performing the song at this year’s Bafta Film Awards.

12. Ralph Fiennes could be a good omen for Conclave.

The last two times the British star was nominated for best actor, for Schindler’s List and The English Patient, his film won best picture.

If Conclave wins, Fiennes would set a record for having appeared in the most best picture winners, becoming the only actor with roles in four (the other being The Hurt Locker).

However, Edward Berger’s absence in the best director category significantly weakens Conclave’s chances. Only six films have ever won best picture without a corresponding director nomination.

On the plus side, three of those have been in the last 12 years (Argo, Coda and Green Book), suggesting this is less of an obstacle than it used to be.

Why wasn’t Berger nominated? One possible factor is that, unlike the five directors who were, he didn’t write or co-write his film’s screenplay. Conclave was adapted from Robert Harris’s novel by British screenwriter Peter Straughan.

13. Diane Warren really wants to win.

The songwriter scored her 16th best original song nomination this year, for writing The Journey, from The Six Triple Eight.

But Warren has never won. With Emilia Pérez’s campaign damaged and potentially splitting votes with two songs in the category, could this finally be her year?

She certainly hopes so. Earlier this month, when a film account on X asked followers: “Which Oscar winner would make you happiest?” Warren brilliantly replied: “Me!”

14. Wicked has a tall hill to climb to win best picture, having missed both a directing and screenplay nomination.

It did score several technical nods as well as acting nominations for Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, but neither are frontrunners in their category.

The last film to win best picture without a corresponding win in a director, screenplay or acting category was Rebecca in 1942.

15. Two nominees are following in their mothers’ footsteps.

I’m Still Here star Fernanda Torres is nominated for best actress – after her mother Fernanda Montenegro became the first Brazilian nominee in the same category in 1999 for Central Station.

Meanwhile, Conclave star Isabella Rossellini’s mother, Ingrid Bergman, was nominated for best actress six times in her career, winning twice, and won best supporting actress.

16. Anora’s director could become the first person to win four Oscars for the same film.

As Sean Baker was involved in so many aspects of the film’s production, he could personally win best picture, editing, director and screenplay.

Nobody has ever done this before.

Walt Disney did win four Oscars in the same night in 1953, but for four different films.

And Parasite’s Bong Joon-Ho came incredibly close in 2020, but as the best international film prize technically goes to the country that submitted it rather than the director, he only took home three for his own trophy cabinet.

If Anora does win the top prize, it will be the second consecutive year the director of best picture co-wins with his wife. Baker and wife Samantha Quan would follow Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas.

Anora would also be the first 18-rated film to win best picture since The Departed in 2007.

17. It’s official: The cat in Flow is named Flow.

The delightful movie about a cat who survives a flood is a dark horse in the animated film category, having beaten box office juggernauts Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot to the prize at the Golden Globes.

“While we worked on Flow the cat didn’t have a name,” the film’s director Gints Zilbalodis said earlier this month. “We just called it the cat.

“I’ve heard from multiple people that they think that its name is Flow. People have even named their cats Flow now! So I think we can call the cat Flow.”

In 2020, Duarte Dias, a Portuguese software engineer, accepted a job offer to work in Microsoft’s Dublin subsidiary.

A little over a year later, he joined a team at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle, where he still works.

Even though he misses the Portuguese laid-back approach to life, and the family-like team spirit of the work environments there, he does not regret, not for one second, his choice of pursuing an international career.

Mr Dias’s decision was made easier by all the financial impact of moving.

The verdict of the spreadsheet was clear: staying in Portugal would be financially ruinous.

“I did simulations of how much money I would save a year in Portugal, and I quickly realised that I wouldn’t be able to have a comfortable life financially, even if I got one of the most well-paying jobs available in engineering for my experience level,” says.

A two-year job experience in Portugal while Mr Dias was concluding his masters at Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico cemented his conviction: his yearly income amounted to €35,000 ($36,000; £29,000).

But his take home salary was much, much less.

His income placed him in a tax bracket which meant up to 40% of this gross salary went to the state.

“Financially it was bad. It would be very hard to save money if I didn’t live with my parents,” he recalls.

Moving to Ireland meant an immediate hike in his salary prospects, almost doubling to €60,000.

The money is even better in the US, where he now earns upwards of $160,000 before a 20% income tax rate, much lower than at home.

Mr Dias intends to return to Lisbon in two years’ time with “with many more savings”.

Keeping skilled workers like Mr Dias in Portugal has been a concern for recent governments.

In 2020, the administration led by the Socialist Party’s Antonio Costa launched IRS Jovem, a programme of tax reductions for workers less than 30 years old and tiered by level of education.

In 2022, 73,684 taxpayers benefitted from this incentive, according to official data.

After a snap election in March, the new centre-right Portuguese government led by Luis Montenegro doubled down on the idea and expanded it from five to 10 years, and to all workers under 35 independently of their educational levels.

The proposal, passed by the Portuguese parliament in late November, is due to benefit up to 400,000 workers, according to the Portuguese Ministry of Finance.

But specialists say it likely won’t be enough to keep the young from going abroad.

“It is unlikely that, on its own, the tax regime will make young workers remain in the country, whether because professional opportunities are more abundant in foreign countries, or due to the fact this tax benefit applies only to yearly incomes under €28,000,” says Sérgio Vasques, professor of tax law at the Católica Lisbon School of Law.

He points out that the Portuguese government still takes more of the average worker’s salary than most richer nations.

Known as the tax wedge, the ratio between the amount of taxes paid by an average single worker without children and the corresponding total labour cost for the employer, stands at 42.3% in Portugal.

That’s the 8th highest among the 38 member countries of the OECD.

“This is a tax regime that is an enemy of qualified work and professional success. This regime will not solve this problem,” adds Mr Vasques.

Mr Vasques, also a former secretary of state for tax affairs in the early 2010s, adds: “I also cannot imagine a young professional deciding to move to Portugal just because of an extra couple hundred euros at the end of the year.

“Not even a low-skilled worker will make a decision based on that. Portuguese food works probably better as an incentive to move here than that tax regime”.

Rita de La Feria, chair of tax law at the University of Leeds, reminds that the exodus of young people isn’t just a Portuguese problem, and that Europe is grappling with the challenges of young emigration.

According to a study requested by the Portuguese Parliament, as of July, in the European Union Portugal, Poland and Croatia had special tax regimes based on the taxpayers’ ages.

“The challenges are very obvious: worker mobility is higher. The problem is that the country spends very large amounts on training for them to leave for other countries as soon as they enter the workforce,” she said.

Ms de La Feria, who moved to the UK at a young age, told the BBC that when she left Portugal she did not intend to “leave for good: many leave their countries of origin thinking they will come back at some point. But once they form a family, it’s almost impossible to return.”

Antonio Almeida, a software engineer like Mr Dias, left Portugal during the pandemic in late 2020 for a job in Berlin, right after finishing his degree. He would change the German capital for Brussels two years later. All his work experience was done abroad.

“Back in 2020, we were offered monthly salaries of €1,300, gross, in Lisbon. Berlin offered me €4,200 for a junior role.”

Even with a 40% income tax rate in Germany, there was a considerable net gain. “It wasn’t a difficult decision,” says Mr Almeida.

Now in Belgium – where taxes are higher, he stresses – returning to his homeland isn’t a priority. “I think of returning eventually, mainly for family reasons.

“But at the moment my life standards are very high and I like the way of life of central Europe. And the main problem in Portugal is low salaries, not taxes.”

Mr Almeida does not consider the Portuguese tax changes as a major factor when thinking of the pros and cons of coming back home.

“Up until today I never thought about it.”

Mr Dias agrees: “Salaries outside Portugal will always be higher, and all those who don’t have any personal or familial connections to the country won’t have any kind of financial or career incentive to stay there”.

Relations between Europe and the US are unquestionably in crisis, so merely keeping things together as French President Emmanuel Macron did at the White House on Monday stands as an achievement.

He did that by praising, flattering and gently cajoling the US president as they took questions in the Oval Office and held a joint news conference. This is a playbook that many leaders around the world now see as more productive than outright plain speaking or criticism of Trump.

Macron managed to navigate what could have been a tricky day in Washington without conceding or revealing too much.

He spoke of both countries wanting peace, and while he gently corrected one of Trump’s claims on Europe’s support for Ukraine, he also agreed that Europe needed to take more responsibility for its own security.

But Macron did make one important concession – that Trump was right to re-establish some kind of relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

That is in sharp contrast to the view up until now in London, Paris and Berlin, which have all pursued a policy of isolating Putin and slapping sanctions on Russian industries and individuals.

“There is good reason for President Trump to re-engage with President Putin,” Macron said, adding that the new administration represented “a big change”.

• Peace must not mean surrendering Ukraine, Macron says
• Zelensky says he hopes to end Ukraine war ‘this year’
• Three years on, Ukraine’s extinction nightmare has returned

Macron held out the prospect of European countries such as France and the UK being willing to play a leading role in ensuring the security of a post-truce Ukraine, possibly in the form of air power and troops stationed away from the frontline.

But at the same time, he stressed the importance of having an American backstop.

Macron, however, did not get a commitment of US back-up from his meeting in the Oval Office. And if he was looking for a scintilla of criticism of the Russian president from Trump, then he did not get that either.

What he did get was, at least to some extent, Europe’s voice back at the table and he, along with other European leaders, will take some heart from that.

It is clear however, that the ambitions for re-establishing the kind of close relationship that Europe and the US have had since the end of World War Two are not on anyone’s roadmap.

That is why Macron himself has been working on the idea of a more strategically autonomous Europe for some time, toying with ideas of combined European defence forces.

His sense that Europe needs to adapt given the dramatic shift in the US position is shared by Friedrich Merz, who will be Germany’s next chancellor.

Merz has already said that he believes the US under Donald Trump is indifferent to Europe’s fate, and that the continent needs to be independent of the US in terms of security.

“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” Merz said.

But France, the UK and Germany have also got to be cognisant of the fact that not all European powers are so hostile to the US view on Ukraine.

The rise of far-right nationalist parties in Europe, most notably in places like Germany where the AfD came second in Sunday’s elections, suggests some European citizens are also sceptical about the continent’s continued support for Kyiv.

Later this week, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who has been closely co-ordinating with his French counterpart, will come to Washington to reinforce their case on Ukraine.

He, like Macron, believes his country has a special relationship with the US which can open doors and get a fair hearing.

The problem is that Washington in the shape of Donald Trump is on transmit mode at the moment – pushing an agenda that leaves little room for the opinion of others.

And while America has always had the ability to flex its muscles and get its way, Europe for the most part has not been on the receiving end. The fact that has changed is a sign of just how serious this rupture in established alliances has become.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

For months, Japan’s entertainment industry has been rocked by a scandal that unseated one of its most popular celebrities and put one of its biggest broadcasters at risk.

But some believe it has also marked a turning point in how cases of sexual assault are perceived in Japan – where traditionally victims have been shamed into silence.

At its heart was Masahiro Nakai, a household name and leading presenter for Fuji TV, one of the country’s biggest broadcasters.

Nakai, who is also a former member of J-pop boy band SMAP, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a dinner party in 2023.

The revelations, which appeared last December in the weekly tabloid magazine Josei Seven and were then picked up by the Shukan Bunshun, marked the latest of a series of scandals involving celebrities in Japan, including that of late entertainment mogul Johnny Kitagawa, who was found by investigators to have abused hundreds of boys and young men over six decades.

Nakai didn’t admit guilt and denied using force against the woman. But he apologised for “causing trouble” in a statement and said that he had “resolved” the matter in a settlement, reportedly worth more than half a million dollars.

But as public anger mounted, he was forced to announce his retirement from the entertainment industry in January. Another channel, the Tokyo Broadcasting System, has also stopped airing a program that Nakai regularly appeared on as an MC.

The impact on Fuji TV has been devastating.

The broadcaster’s reputation is now in ruins. Its revenue is under threat and some of its top executives have also been forced to step down.

High-profile companies like Nissan and Toyota were among those who pulled advertising from the broadcaster as outrage grew. Fuji TV has since admitted it allowed Nakai to continue presenting shows even after finding out about the allegations.

“If this had happened 10 years ago, there would not have been this outcry,” Keiko Kojima, who worked in Japan’s media industry for 15 years as a TV presenter, told the BBC.

Sexual violence against women is one of Japan’s worst-kept secrets. A 2020 survey claimed that more than 70% of sexual assaults in the country go unreported. And according to a 2024 study published in the International Journal of Asian Studies, for every 1,000 rapes in Japan, only 10–20 result in a criminal conviction – and fewer than half of convicted rapists are incarcerated.

“There’s still a prevalent attitude of ‘Shoganai ‘ or ‘there’s nothing you can do’ that is being projected on women – so they’re encouraged to keep silent,” Machiko Osawa, professor emeritus at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo, told the BBC.

She added that women were seldom believed and did not have proper mechanisms to even report such incidents, which contributed to this culture of silence.

Ms Kojima said that the media industry, in particular, has long had a culture of impunity and lack of accountability where many young women felt they must keep silent to keep their jobs.

“It was common for men to make rude comments about women’s bodies or appearance or age. I remember my colleagues and I being asked how many people we’ve had sex with,” she said.

“We were expected to reply with a sense of humour without getting angry or offended. I saw sexual harassment and other forms of derogatory treatment of women on a daily basis. For a woman, adapting to these situations was the only way to become a full-fledged TV or media professional.”

The Fuji TV case has also raised questions about dinners and drinking parties involving celebrities and young women – and how common they were.

Although Shukan Bunshun retracted an earlier report that claimed the alleged assault took place at a party organised by Fuji TV, Ms Kojima told the BBC that it was indeed common to use women as “tools for entertaining”.

“In Japanese working culture, it’s an everyday practice to half-forcibly take young female employees to events to entertain clients,” she said.

“Men are happy when young women join them. The idea that women are like a gift and that taking a young woman with you is a way of offering hospitality to the other person is very common.”

That is why the fallout from this scandal has encouraged women’s rights activists.

Minori Kitahara, one of the founders of the Flower Demo movement – where groups of sexual violence survivors and their supporters gather in public spaces on the 11th of every month – admitted she was surprised at how swiftly and severely the sponsors reacted.

“Even if it’s more of self-preservation than human rights for sponsors, this is a turning point for the MeToo movement in Japan,” she told the BBC.

“It’s up to us how big we make it.”

Nearly 50 companies have walked away from the now-tarnished Fuji TV.

The Japanese government has also withdrawn all its recent and planned advertisements with the network. And it has called on the broadcaster to regain the trust of viewers and sponsors. So far Fuji TV seems to have done neither.

The scandal and Fuji TV’s role in hiding it have sent the company on a crisis-management frenzy that seems to have led to deeper disgrace, fuelling even more public anger.

Fuji TV president Koichi Minato admitted that the company had known about the allegation shortly after the alleged incident.

But he said they chose not to disclose it at the time because they “prioritised the woman’s physical and mental recovery as well as the protection of her privacy.”

After a press conference held in the hope of defusing the outrage turned into a PR disaster, the company held a second one that lasted 10 hours.

It was intended to show remorse.

Both Fuji TV’s chairman Shuji Kano and its President Koichi Minato stepped down, bowing humbly as they announced their resignations. The firm said its executive vice-president Kenji Shimizu would replace Mr Minato as president.

But this was seen as a mere face-saving exercise to appease advertisers rather than a sign of substantial change – especially because the president’s replacement belonged to the same leadership cadre.

Professor Osawa told the BBC, however, that high-profile cases like Fuji TV become important precedents for real change.

And this is the latest saga in a series of prominent sexual misconduct cases that have generated conversation about women’s rights in Japan.

These include the case of journalist Shiori Ito, who became a symbol of the country’s MeToo movement in 2017. She took the rare step of going public with allegations that Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a well-known TV journalist, had raped her after she met him for drinks. While he denied the allegations, she won a civil lawsuit against him in 2019

“People have now started to realise that it was OK to speak out and say that this [sexual harassment] is a problem. We are changing what we take as the norm,” Ms Kojima said.

But Ms Kojima and Ms Kitahara both say that Japan is not moving fast enough.

“I think it’s time for that generation [of media leadership] to step down. The industry needs to create a new corporate culture. The change is slow,” Ms Kojima said.

“The TV industry has long neglected the issue of exploitation and violence and has not dealt with the victims properly. If the root of the problem doesn’t change, the same will happen again.”

Professor Osawa agrees that Japan still has a long way to go because of the ubiquitous power imbalance in the country.

She adds that while women have been part of the workforce for decades they’re still seen as the “caretakers” and men as the “breadwinners” by a society that is heavily shaped by patriarchal values.

“This is an important time… But it’s unclear how far attitudes will change,” she said.

While Ms Kitahara is hopeful, she says she’s also angry: “The sexual violence never stops.”

“I still meet new survivors at Flower Demo [protests] every month and learn what happened to them. We had a high school girl other day. When we started the movement [in 2019] she was probably in junior high, ” she said.

“I hope for the day when I will never have to go to a Flower Demo protest again.”

Friedrich Merz’s conservatives have won, but Germany’s 2025 election has thrown up some important and fascinating stories that reveal a country in flux.

Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has doubled its support in just four years to 20.8%, and has spread out from its support base in the east to become the second biggest political force in parliament.

Meanwhile, outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD had its worst performance in decades, only securing 16.4% of the vote.

Here are five key takeaways.

Look at an election results map of Germany, and you could almost have travelled back in time to the Cold War, when an iron curtain divided communist East Germany from the west.

In the east it’s a swathe of AfD light blue, apart from pockets like Berlin and half of Leipzig. In the west the vast majority has turned conservative black, especially in Bavaria where Merz’s conservative sister party, the CSU, dominates the landscape.

But the AfD is spreading in the west too, and political loyalty to the old mainstream parties has gone.

For one in five Germans it has become normalised. “They’re just normal people,” said one young man of immigrant origin in Duisburg, a city in western Germany’s old industrial heartland.

Even though it came second, the AfD is blocked from being part of the next government because of a “firewall” – or– operated by Germany’s main parties, who do not co-operate with any party seen as extremist since the end of World War Two.

The AfD’s leader Alice Weidel insists it is a libertarian, conservative movement, not racist. Its big increase in public support has coincided with a series of deadly attacks in the past nine months, all allegedly by immigrants.

The AfD has embraced a highly controversial policy called “remigration”, which it defines as deporting migrants who have committed crimes. But the term can also refer to the mass deportation of migrants and their descendants.

In May 2024 a German court rejected an AfD appeal against a ruling classifying it as a suspected far-right extremist organisation. Judges found that the AfD had “positions that disparage the democratic order and are incompatible with the principle of democracy”.

In three German states in the east – Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony – domestic intelligence has designated the AfD as right-wing extremist.

A leading AfD figure in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has twice been convicted of using a banned Nazi slogan “Alles für Deutschland” – everything for Germany. Alice Weidel supporters have chanted her name during the election campaign, using the phrase “Alice für Deutschland”.

Not since 1987 has turnout been as high as 82.5% in a German election, and that was three years before reunification of east and west.

Four years ago it was 76.6%.

Put simply, more than four in every five of Germany’s 59.2 million voters turned out.

It reflects just how energised Germans have been by this election, which comes at a pivotal moment for their country. There were nine TV debates in the final stretch of the campaign, but that reflected the broad interest of the audience.

The three-party government of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz fell apart at the end of last year, and within 24 hours of Sunday’s election, all three leaders have said they’re leaving the front line of politics.

The leader of the economic liberals, the FDP, was first. Christian Lindner has led his party for 11 years. But it failed to get any MPs elected and Lindner has said he’s leaving politics after 25 years.

It was Lindner’s refusal to compromise on debt rules that first brought the government down, and then sent his party into the wilderness.

Although Scholz will remain as chancellor until the next government is formed, he won’t be taking part in coalition talks and will be leaving frontline politics.

Greens Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck is also leaving frontline politics after his party fell below 12% in the election.

Until a few weeks ago, the Left party looked doomed when one of its leading lights, Sahra Wagenknecht, went off and founded her own, more populist, party with eight other MPs.

Wagenknecht’s popularity soared for a while as head of her BSW party, but ultimately fell just below the 5% threshold for getting into parliament.

The story was very different for the Left (), which came back from the dead with an inspired social medial campaign.

Heidi Reichinnek, Die Linke’s co-chair, went viral after she gave a speech enthusiastically defending the firewall against the AfD.

She now has 580,000 followers on TikTok and her post has attracted seven million views.

Her party secured just under 9% of the vote.

Die Linke’s viral videos helped secure a quarter of the 18-24 vote, and the AfD were not far behind with 21%, according to surveys by ARD TV.

Alice Weidel was the biggest hit on social media during the election, even bigger than Heidi Reichinnek. She has attracted more than 935,000 followers on TikTok.

For the over-35s, it was the Christian Democrats who won out, and more men than women.

Kyiv and Washington are close to signing a deal over US access to Ukraine’s mineral deposits, a Ukrainian minister says.

Olga Stefanishyna, deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, said on X that “negotiations have been very constructive, with nearly all key details finalised”.

She added that “we are committed to completing this swiftly to proceed with its signature”.

Ukraine has been facing growing pressure from the US administration to sign the deal, which has ended up in the centre of the growing rift between the US and Ukrainian presidents.

Zelensky first included the offer of an agreement on minerals in the so-called “victory plan” that he presented to Trump last September.

• Follow live updates

The idea was to offer the then presidential candidate a tangible reason for the US to continue supporting Ukraine.

On Monday former UK prime minister Boris Johnson told the BBC in Kyiv that such a deal was “the great prize” because it would secure “a United States commitment under Donald Trump to a free, sovereign and secure Ukraine”.

Kyiv estimates that about 5% of the world’s “critical raw materials” are in Ukraine. This includes some 19 million tonnes of proven reserves of graphite, which the Ukrainian Geological Survey state agency says makes the nation “one of the top five leading countries” for the supply of the mineral.

Graphite is used to make batteries for electric vehicles.

Ukraine also has a third of all European lithium deposits, the key component in current batteries. And prior to the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s global share of titanium production, a lightweight metal used in the construction of everything from aeroplanes to power stations, was 7%.

Further, Ukraine has significant deposits of rare earth metals. These are a group of 17 elements that are used to produce weapons, wind turbines, electronics and other products vital in the modern world.

Some of the mineral deposits, however, have been seized by Russia. According to Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s economy minister, resources worth $350bn (£277bn) remain in occupied territories today.

In 2022, SecDev, a geopolitical risk consultancy based in Canada, conducted an evaluation, which established that Russia had occupied 63% of Ukrainian coal mines, and half of its manganese, caesium, tantalum and rare earth deposits.

Dr Robert Muggah, principal of SecDev, says that such minerals add a “strategic and economic dimension” in Russia’s continued aggression. By seizing them, he says, Moscow denies access revenue for Ukraine, expands its own resource base and influences global supply chains.

Critical minerals “are the foundation of the 21st Century economy”, Dr Muggah explained. They are key to renewable energy, military applications and industrial infrastructure and play “a growing strategic role in geopolitics and geoeconomics”, he said.

Additionally, the US is keen on a deal for Ukraine’s mineral resources because it wants to reduce dependency on China, which controls 75% of rare earth deposits in the world, according to the Geological Investment Group.

In December China banned the export of some rare earth minerals to the US, having previously limited mineral exports to the US the previous year.

On Monday, ahead of a visit with French President Emmanuel Macron, White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz told US news outlet NewsNation that the deal was “about growing the pie economically and binding the US and Ukraine together for the future”.

Prior to Stefanishyna’s assertion that a deal was close, there appeared to be several sticking points.

Last Wednesday, Zelensky rejected US demands for a reported 50% share of its rare earth minerals – which Trump said would reflect the amount of aid the US had provided to Ukraine during its war with Russia.

“I can’t sell our state,” he said.

The provisions of a second draft of the deal on Sunday appeared to be even tougher than in the first document.

Instead of 50/50 revenue split, the revised draft suggested the US wanted full control, Zelensky told journalists at the press conference on Sunday.

Trump said earlier this month that the US military and economic aid to Ukraine amounts to about $500bn (£396bn), and he wants the US to have access to Ukrainian minerals of that value.

However, Zelensky has said that the American assistance so far totals around $100bn (£79bn). Kyiv has also insisted that the aid they have received until now was a grant and not a credit, and so Ukraine has no obligation to return anything.

Zelenzky is also said to want any deal to include security guarantees.

On Monday former UK prime minister Boris Johnson called an agreement for US access to Ukraine’s minerals “the great prize”.

He rejected suggestions the deal was a “rip-off” and said “what the Ukrainians get from this is a United States commitment under Donald Trump to a free, sovereign and secure Ukraine”.

Some commentators have described the US offer as “colonial” but Kyiv is interested in joint exploration of its resources.

Developing these mineral resources is extremely difficult and expensive, according to Iryna Suprun, chief executive of the Geological Investment Group, a mining advisory firm based in Ukraine.

She argued that if they can attract American investors to develop their natural resources, it will be highly beneficial for the country’s economy.

“We will get technologies that our mining industry lacks so much,” Ms Suprun explained. “We will get capital. That means more jobs, tax payments. We’ll receive revenue from the development of mineral deposits.”

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was open to offering the US access to Russia’s rare minerals, in order to counter a potential deal between the US and Ukraine.

In a televised interview on Russian state-owned broadcaster Rossiya 1, he said it would include access to Russia’s “new territories” – those it has seized and occupied in Ukraine since their invasion three years ago.

“We undoubtedly have, I want to emphasise, significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine,” Putin said, adding Russia was ready to “attract foreign partners”.

Roaring crowds, faces painted blue and green, flags waving like battle standards.

This is the opening of The Greatest Rivalry: India v Pakistan, a new Netflix documentary on one of cricket’s most storied contests.

India’s Virender Sehwag sets the tone: “This is a contest bigger than one between the bat and ball”. Cut to dramatic footage of some of the matches, the Wagah border, partition refugees. A nation split into two, but forever bound by cricket.

Pakistan’s Waqar Younis doesn’t hesitate: “I put this rivalry right at the top. There’s no match like India v Pakistan.” India’s R Ashwin agrees: “I think this is bigger than the Ashes.” Ramiz Raja says it’s “the political garnish that makes this rivalry world-class”.

Despite wars, border standoffs and terror attacks, the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry has endured, driven by history and national pride. Even when politics halts the bilateral series, International Cricket Council (ICC) tournaments keep the fire alive, turning every match into a high-stakes spectacle.

But Pakistan’s crushing defeat by India on Sunday at the Champions Trophy has reignited the question: is this rivalry overhyped, propped up by slogans like “war minus the shooting” – a phrase George Orwell coined in 1945 to criticise excessive nationalism in sports?

Is this still the premier clash in cricket, or just one of its most dramatic? Has it lost its competitive edge, running more on history than intensity?

Consider this. From an eight-wicket thrashing in 2018 to a 228-run demolition in 2023, India has dominated, winning six of the last eight ODIs. Pakistan’s last victory? The 2017 Champions Trophy final – a fading memory in an increasingly one-sided rivalry.

What rivalry, asked Dawn – a leading Pakistani newspaper – pointedly after the latest debacle. A cricket war that’s now just a big yawn, headlined India Today magazine.

The loss would be easier to accept if Pakistan were at least putting up a fight, according to Dawn’s Zohaib Ahmed Majeed.

Majeed believes the troubled politics between the two neighbours is the only thing that has kept the rivalry alive.

“In a way we must thank the politicians of these two nations for keeping this rivalry alive, because the cricketers, especially from our side, are certainly incapable of putting up a show that is worthy of its billing,” he wrote.

“Cut out the war of words and the actual wars and what you’ll be left with is a professional cricketing unit against a haphazardly put together team at the last minute. There is no rivalry as far as pure cricketing merits are concerned.”

India Today was no less acerbic. “With its history of one-sided losses to India in recent years, Pakistan cricket is fast sliding into pity territory. And unless it reverses the trend, Pakistan’s dream of competing with India could soon turn into a butt of jokes for cricket fans,” wrote Sandipan Sharma.

To be true, Pakistan’s cricketing woes keep mounting. They have missed the final four in the last three ODI World Cups, crashed out in the T20 World Cup group stage and now, as hosts of the Champions Trophy, they’ve hit rock-bottom.

Since the 2009 attack on Sri Lanka’s team bus, Pakistan cricket has battled isolation, political turmoil, board instability, frequent coaching changes and selection controversies – all adding to its struggles. Meanwhile, across the border, India has risen as cricket’s powerhouse, backed by a strong domestic system and the IPL, cricket’s richest international league.

Pakistani cricket writer Osman Samiuddin also notes a sense of “marginalisation” among his country’s cricketers, who remain excluded from the IPL and its franchise ecosystem (no Pakistani player has featured in the IPL since 2009, as they were banned after the Mumbai terror attacks). “I think they see Indian cricketers and others as well, like Australian and English cricketers, as partaking in a world of cricket they have been excluded from,” he told a programme.

This has all contributed to the team’s fast-declining fortunes.

“It is a futile exercise to wonder if this is the lowest Pakistan cricket has ever been. However, even when Pakistan have plummeted to spectacular lows in the past, they have done it in a way that justifies the cliché of their mercurial nature,” wrote Sidharth Monga in ESPNcricinfo, after Sunday’s game.

“This slide just feels like a terminal, slow decline. Players are not fighting with each other, there is no backdoor intrigue, there are no cliques in the team plotting to dethrone the captain, there are no comical run-outs or misfields, no defeats snatched from the jaws of victory.”

The “war without guns” narrative once held weight, especially when Imran Khan’s Pakistan, armed with a fearsome pace attack of Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis and batting stars like Javed Miandad and Inzamam-ul-Haq, regularly got the better of India.

“The narrative may have been true till the early 2000s because this is how the actual fans felt. But it was soon hijacked by the multinationals and the media to cash in on the hyper-pathos of it all,” Nadeem Farooq Paracha, Pakistani author and columnist, told me.

“The quality of cricket between the two sides isn’t the same anymore. Indian cricket continues to get better. In fact, I think the narrative in question here has ended up pressuring Pakistani side more. They underplay it, even though they’re more than willing to pocket its financial benefits.”

The cricket boards and broadcasters are doing all they can to keep the rivalry alive, and the ICC won’t dial down the hype – it’s too valuable in an era of overexposure of cricket, limited stars and competition from franchise cricket.

This one game has become a financial juggernaut, fuelling a parallel economy wherever it’s played – Dubai, London, Ahmedabad – drawing fans who spend big just to be there. “Pakistan has talent, but the contest now feels more psychological,” says cricket writer Gautam Bhattacharyya.

Brand consultant Santosh Desai feels the real contest between the arch rivals plays out beyond the cricket ground and the “rivalry thrives more in imagination than in reality”.

“The asymmetry [between the two sides] only fuels the hype. India’s dominance makes it an easy narrative to sell, a battle royale where the outcome feels preordained. If Pakistan were winning consistently, the marketing appeal would fade. The rivalry’s commercial power lies in India’s superiority, feeding a script designed for validation, not uncertainty,” Desai told me.

India’s vice-captain Shubman Gill dismisses talk of overhyping, calling it a contest fans love to watch. “It is an exciting contest when both of these teams play. Everyone enjoys watching it. If so many people are happy to watch the match, then who are we to say that it is underhyped or overhyped,” he told reporters on eve of Sunday’s game.

Gill is possibly right. Tickets for India-Pakistan games still fly off the shelves – the ICC reported sellouts within minutes. An astonishing 600 plus million viewers tuned in to watch Sunday’s match on Indian streaming platform JioHotstar, setting new records.

But for now, as cricket writer Ayaz Memon puts it, “the hype is more thrilling than the cricket itself”.

The US has twice sided with Russia in votes at the United Nations to mark the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, highlighting the Trump administration’s change of stance on the war.

First, the US opposed a European-drafted resolution condemning Moscow’s actions and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity – voting the same way as Russia and countries including North Korea and Belarus at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.

Then the US drafted and voted for a resolution at the UN Security Council which called for an end to the conflict, but contained no criticism of Russia.

The Security Council passed the resolution, but two key US allies, the UK and France, abstained after their attempts to amend the wording were vetoed.

The UN resolutions were tabled as French President Emmanuel Macron visited President Donald Trump at the White House in an attempt to address their sharp differences over the war.

On Thursday, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will likewise visit the new American leader.

Trump’s White House has upended the transatlantic alliance, currying favour with Moscow and casting doubt on America’s long-term commitment to European security.

That rift was laid bare on the floor of the 193-member UNGA on Monday as US diplomats pushed their limited resolution mourning the loss of life during the “Russia-Ukraine conflict” and calling for a swift end to it.

European diplomats tabled a more detailed text, blaming Russia for its full-scale invasion, and supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

“We need to reconfirm that the aggression should be condemned and discredited, not rewarded,” said Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Mariana Betsa.

UNGA members backed the European resolution by 93 votes but, extraordinarily, the US did not abstain but actually voted against it, along with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Sudan, Belarus, Hungary and 11 other states, with 65 abstentions.

The UNGA also passed the US resolution but only after it was amended to include language supporting Ukraine, which led to the US abstaining.

Republican Senator John Curtis said he was “deeply troubled” by the vote “which put us on the same side as Russia and North Korea”.

“These are not our friends. This posture is a dramatic shift from American ideals of freedom and democracy,” he wrote on X.

The vote was “contrary to our long-standing support of democracy”, said former US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Ukraine’s former minister of economy, Tymofiy Mylovanov, said the choice to side with Russia was deliberate.

“This is no longer just rhetoric or political theatre,” he said.

At the much more powerful 15-member UN Security Council, the unamended US resolution – which called for an end to the conflict but contained no criticism of Russia – was passed by 10 votes, with the UK, France, Denmark, Greece and Slovenia abstaining.

America’s acting envoy to the UN, Dorothy Camille Shea, described the US resolution as a “simple historic statement… that looks forward, not backwards. A resolution focused on one simple idea: ending the war”.

Rarely has the US been so at odds with its supposed European allies.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, the Security Council has been deadlocked by the power of Russia, one of its five permanent members, to veto any resolution there.

For this reason the UNGA has been the main forum for debating the war. But its resolutions are not legally binding for member states, unlike those of the Security Council.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he is open to offering the US access to rare minerals, including from Russian-occupied Ukraine.

This comes after US President Donald Trump has repeatedly pushed for Ukraine to give up some of its minerals in exchange for support, in a deal which is currently being finalised, according to a Ukrainian minister.

In a state TV interview on Monday, Putin said he was ready to “offer” resources to American partners in joint projects, including mining in Russia’s “new territories” – a reference to parts of eastern Ukraine that Russia has occupied since launching a full-scale invasion three years ago.

The proposal could also see the two countries collaborating on aluminium extraction and supply to the US to stabilise prices, he added.

In his televised interview, Putin countered Trump’s push to access Ukraine’s mineral deposits, saying they were ready to work with “foreign partners” including companies on mining minerals.

Putin said a potential US-Ukraine deal on rare minerals was not a concern and that Russia “undoubtedly have, I want to emphasise, significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine”.

“As for the new territories, it’s the same. We are ready to attract foreign partners to the so-called new, to our historical territories, which have returned to the Russian Federation,” he added.

He also suggested that Russia and the US could collaborate on aluminium production in Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, where one Russian aluminium maker, Rusal, has its largest smelters.

The televised comments followed a cabinet meeting on Russia’s natural resources.

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists the proposal opened up “quite broad prospects”, adding that the US needed rare earth minerals and Russia had “a lot of them”.

Offering the US access to minerals is an eye-catching move by Putin, given how much pride the Kremlin has taken in keeping Russia’s natural wealth in Russian hands. In 2023 Putin accused the West, particularly the US, of trying to “dismember” Russia to gain access to its natural resources.

• Live coverage of this story
• Why is Ukraine negotiating a minerals deal with the US?

Putin’s intervention comes as Ukraine has been facing growing pressure from the Trump administration to sign a deal for access to its mineral deposits.

Kyiv estimates that about 5% of the world’s critical raw materials are in Ukraine. However, some of the mineral deposits have been seized by Russia in the three years since its invasion of Ukraine.

Trump said earlier this month that the US military and economic aid to Ukraine amounted to about $500bn (£396bn), and he wants the US to have access to Ukrainian minerals of that value.

Zelenzky has disputed that figure and is also said to want any deal to include security guarantees.

On Monday Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, Olga Stefanishyna, said negotiations on such a deal “have been very constructive, with nearly all key details finalised”.

Similarly – albeit in a different approach to the US – the European Union has also proposed a partnership with Ukraine that would give it access to minerals in what the the European Commissioner for industrial strategy, Stéphane Séjourné, called a “win-win”.

Skywatchers are in for a treat this week as seven planets – Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Venus, Neptune, Mercury, and Saturn will all be briefly visible in the evening sky.

This phenomenon, known as a ‘planetary parade’ is a rare sight, and it will be the last time seven planets can be seen simultaneously so well until 2040.

The best chance to see as many planets as possible will be just after sunset on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Four of the planets – Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars – will be visible to the naked eye. Saturn will be harder to see because it will be low in the horizon. You will need a telescope to spot the other two planets – Uranus and Neptune.

A good view of the horizon and clear skies will offer the best chance of spotting them all. However, the window to see all seven planets will be very brief.

Dr Edward Bloomer, astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich said: “There’s a rare opportunity to have seven planets in essentially a convenient place for you to look for them.”

As the sun sets, Saturn and Mercury will also be setting, making them particularly difficult to see.

“You really only have a few minutes after sunset to catch them before they drop below the horizon. After that, you’ll still be able to see Venus, Jupiter, and Mars clearly for a much longer time,” Dr Bloomer added.

The planets in our solar system orbit the Sun within roughly the same flat plane as the Earth.

As they orbit at different speeds and distances from the Sun, there are moments when they appear to line up from Earth’s perspective creating a spectacular visual display, although the planets remain separated by vast distances in space.

• Send us your pictures of the planetary parade.

Venus and Jupiter will be the easiest to spot due to their brightness, while Mars will have a distinct reddish hue.

“Uranus is technically visible with the naked eye, but you’d need perfect eyesight and ideal conditions,” Dr Bloomer explains.

To improve your chances of seeing as many planets as possible, Dr Bloomer advises heading to a location with a clear view of the horizon and minimal light pollution.

“If you just pop out of your kitchen into your back garden, you will take time to adjust to the light levels. Give it a bit of time – your eyes take about half an hour to fully adjust,” said Dr Bloomer.

“Avoid looking at your phone, get comfortable, and ensure you have an unobstructed view of the horizon.”

While this is an exciting opportunity, Dr Bloomer encourages people to make a habit of gazing at the night sky.

“See how things change,” he said, adding that observing the heavens is “a chance to witness the ongoing mechanics of the solar system at work.”

Whilst the weather is still rather unsettled currently, clearer and calmer conditions are expected to develop later in the week.

Tuesday evening will start with clear spells, but cloud and rain will move in from the west later.

On Wednesday night, skies will be generally cloudier with showery rain at times.

By Thursday, expect a drier, clearer view of the night sky. Earlier in the evening is best, as mist and fog patches may develop further into the night.

For Friday high pressure is expected to dominate, keeping dry conditions for most with clear spells. Soon after sunset is most favoured as mist and fog patches may develop later.

US government workers faced widespread confusion on Monday following conflicting advice over compliance with an Elon Musk-backed order to list their last week’s work in an email or face termination.

Just 48 hours after an email asking “what did you do last week?” was sent, the office behind it clarified responses were voluntary, leaving agencies to decide their approach.

But as this new guidance was shared with federal agencies, President Donald Trump weighed in that workers who did not comply with Mr Musk’s demand would be fired or “sort of semi-fired”.

And later on Monday evening, Mr Musk reinforced the ultimatum, granting workers a final chance to respond.

The mail from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Saturday, instructed recipients to reply with five examples of what they did over the past seven days, without revealing any classified information. The recipients were asked to respond by end of Monday.

Mr Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), said that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation.

The comments fuelled backlash, with federal worker unions and activist groups filing a lawsuit in California to halt the email mandate.

Key agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services (HHS), Justice, and the FBI—now led by Trump appointees—instructed employees to ignore the directive. This led to widespread uncertainty, with some workers receiving contradictory messages over the weekend.

The result was widespread bafflement, as federal workers faced uncertainty over their employment. Many also expressed confusion at the competing guidance they had been given by their respective agencies.

“They’re succeeding in driving us insane,” one employee who works under HHS told the BBC, and asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

On Monday afternoon, OPM held a call with the heads of human resources at federal agencies and said it was up to each entity to determine how they want to handle the directive employees received Saturday, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The same afternoon, President Trump told reporters at the White House that Mr Musk’s demand was a “genius” move.

“There was a lot of genius in sending it,” he said. “We’re trying to find out if people are working and so we’re sending a letter to people, please tell us what you did last week. If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”

“And then if you don’t answer like you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist,” Trump said.

Mr Musk maintained he was acting on instructions from President Donald Trump.

“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance,” he wrote on X, apparently referring to workers who did not respond to his demand by the end of Monday. “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”

“The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!” he said in another post. “Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers. Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?”

Despite pushback from agencies led by Trump appointees, the White House insisted, “Everyone is working together as one unified team at the direction of President Trump”. “Any notion to the contrary is completely false,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

The statement did not explain why different government agencies were giving different recommendations.

Singapore’s biggest bank, DBS, says it expects to cut about 4,000 roles over the next three years as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on more work currently done by humans.

The move will affect temporary and contract staff, a bank spokesperson said, with the reduction in the workforce coming from “natural attrition” as projects are completed.

Permanent staff are not affected by the cuts. The bank’s outgoing chief executive Piyush Gupta also said it expected to create around 1,000 new AI-related jobs.

It makes DBS one of the first major banks to offer details on how AI will affect its operations.

The company did not say how many jobs would be cut in Singapore.

“Over the next three years, we envisage that AI could reduce the need to renew about 4,000 temporary/contract staff across our 19 markets working on specific projects,” the DBS spokesperson said.

“As such, we expect the reduction in workforce will come from natural attrition as these temporary and contract roles are completed over the next few years.”

DBS currently has between 8,000 and 9,000 temporary and contract workers. The bank employs a total of around 41,000 people.

Last year, Mr Gupta said DBS had been working on AI for over a decade.

“We today deploy over 800 AI models across 350 use cases, and expect the measured economic impact of these to exceed S$1bn ($745m; £592m) in 2025,” he added.

Mr Gupta is set to leave the firm at the end of March. Current deputy chief executive Tan Su Shan will replace him.

The ongoing proliferation of AI technology has put its benefits and risks under the spotlight, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) saying in 2024 that it is set to affect nearly 40% of all jobs worldwide.

The IMF’s managing director Kristalina Georgieva said that “in most scenarios, AI will likely worsen overall inequality”.

The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, told the BBC last year that AI will not be a “mass destroyer of jobs” and human workers will learn to work with new technologies.

Mr Bailey said that while there are risks with AI, “there is great potential with it”.

Roaring crowds, faces painted blue and green, flags waving like battle standards.

This is the opening of The Greatest Rivalry: India v Pakistan, a new Netflix documentary on one of cricket’s most storied contests.

India’s Virender Sehwag sets the tone: “This is a contest bigger than one between the bat and ball”. Cut to dramatic footage of some of the matches, the Wagah border, partition refugees. A nation split into two, but forever bound by cricket.

Pakistan’s Waqar Younis doesn’t hesitate: “I put this rivalry right at the top. There’s no match like India v Pakistan.” India’s R Ashwin agrees: “I think this is bigger than the Ashes.” Ramiz Raja says it’s “the political garnish that makes this rivalry world-class”.

Despite wars, border standoffs and terror attacks, the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry has endured, driven by history and national pride. Even when politics halts the bilateral series, International Cricket Council (ICC) tournaments keep the fire alive, turning every match into a high-stakes spectacle.

But Pakistan’s crushing defeat by India on Sunday at the Champions Trophy has reignited the question: is this rivalry overhyped, propped up by slogans like “war minus the shooting” – a phrase George Orwell coined in 1945 to criticise excessive nationalism in sports?

Is this still the premier clash in cricket, or just one of its most dramatic? Has it lost its competitive edge, running more on history than intensity?

Consider this. From an eight-wicket thrashing in 2018 to a 228-run demolition in 2023, India has dominated, winning six of the last eight ODIs. Pakistan’s last victory? The 2017 Champions Trophy final – a fading memory in an increasingly one-sided rivalry.

What rivalry, asked Dawn – a leading Pakistani newspaper – pointedly after the latest debacle. A cricket war that’s now just a big yawn, headlined India Today magazine.

The loss would be easier to accept if Pakistan were at least putting up a fight, according to Dawn’s Zohaib Ahmed Majeed.

Majeed believes the troubled politics between the two neighbours is the only thing that has kept the rivalry alive.

“In a way we must thank the politicians of these two nations for keeping this rivalry alive, because the cricketers, especially from our side, are certainly incapable of putting up a show that is worthy of its billing,” he wrote.

“Cut out the war of words and the actual wars and what you’ll be left with is a professional cricketing unit against a haphazardly put together team at the last minute. There is no rivalry as far as pure cricketing merits are concerned.”

India Today was no less acerbic. “With its history of one-sided losses to India in recent years, Pakistan cricket is fast sliding into pity territory. And unless it reverses the trend, Pakistan’s dream of competing with India could soon turn into a butt of jokes for cricket fans,” wrote Sandipan Sharma.

To be true, Pakistan’s cricketing woes keep mounting. They have missed the final four in the last three ODI World Cups, crashed out in the T20 World Cup group stage and now, as hosts of the Champions Trophy, they’ve hit rock-bottom.

Since the 2009 attack on Sri Lanka’s team bus, Pakistan cricket has battled isolation, political turmoil, board instability, frequent coaching changes and selection controversies – all adding to its struggles. Meanwhile, across the border, India has risen as cricket’s powerhouse, backed by a strong domestic system and the IPL, cricket’s richest international league.

Pakistani cricket writer Osman Samiuddin also notes a sense of “marginalisation” among his country’s cricketers, who remain excluded from the IPL and its franchise ecosystem (no Pakistani player has featured in the IPL since 2009, as they were banned after the Mumbai terror attacks). “I think they see Indian cricketers and others as well, like Australian and English cricketers, as partaking in a world of cricket they have been excluded from,” he told a programme.

This has all contributed to the team’s fast-declining fortunes.

“It is a futile exercise to wonder if this is the lowest Pakistan cricket has ever been. However, even when Pakistan have plummeted to spectacular lows in the past, they have done it in a way that justifies the cliché of their mercurial nature,” wrote Sidharth Monga in ESPNcricinfo, after Sunday’s game.

“This slide just feels like a terminal, slow decline. Players are not fighting with each other, there is no backdoor intrigue, there are no cliques in the team plotting to dethrone the captain, there are no comical run-outs or misfields, no defeats snatched from the jaws of victory.”

The “war without guns” narrative once held weight, especially when Imran Khan’s Pakistan, armed with a fearsome pace attack of Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis and batting stars like Javed Miandad and Inzamam-ul-Haq, regularly got the better of India.

“The narrative may have been true till the early 2000s because this is how the actual fans felt. But it was soon hijacked by the multinationals and the media to cash in on the hyper-pathos of it all,” Nadeem Farooq Paracha, Pakistani author and columnist, told me.

“The quality of cricket between the two sides isn’t the same anymore. Indian cricket continues to get better. In fact, I think the narrative in question here has ended up pressuring Pakistani side more. They underplay it, even though they’re more than willing to pocket its financial benefits.”

The cricket boards and broadcasters are doing all they can to keep the rivalry alive, and the ICC won’t dial down the hype – it’s too valuable in an era of overexposure of cricket, limited stars and competition from franchise cricket.

This one game has become a financial juggernaut, fuelling a parallel economy wherever it’s played – Dubai, London, Ahmedabad – drawing fans who spend big just to be there. “Pakistan has talent, but the contest now feels more psychological,” says cricket writer Gautam Bhattacharyya.

Brand consultant Santosh Desai feels the real contest between the arch rivals plays out beyond the cricket ground and the “rivalry thrives more in imagination than in reality”.

“The asymmetry [between the two sides] only fuels the hype. India’s dominance makes it an easy narrative to sell, a battle royale where the outcome feels preordained. If Pakistan were winning consistently, the marketing appeal would fade. The rivalry’s commercial power lies in India’s superiority, feeding a script designed for validation, not uncertainty,” Desai told me.

India’s vice-captain Shubman Gill dismisses talk of overhyping, calling it a contest fans love to watch. “It is an exciting contest when both of these teams play. Everyone enjoys watching it. If so many people are happy to watch the match, then who are we to say that it is underhyped or overhyped,” he told reporters on eve of Sunday’s game.

Gill is possibly right. Tickets for India-Pakistan games still fly off the shelves – the ICC reported sellouts within minutes. An astonishing 600 plus million viewers tuned in to watch Sunday’s match on Indian streaming platform JioHotstar, setting new records.

But for now, as cricket writer Ayaz Memon puts it, “the hype is more thrilling than the cricket itself”.

Energy costs are one of a number of bill rises which will come into force at the start of what some commentators have described as “awful April”.

The exact amount you pay will depend on your individual circumstances, and where you live.

Although minimum wages will increase from April, and wages on average have been outpacing inflation, household finances could still come under extra pressure.

Here are seven ways in which you could be affected.

Water bills for households are due to go up in England and Wales by £10 more per month on average, but there’s a lot of variation depending on the company.

For example, the annual Southern Water bill will jump 47% to £703, while Anglian Water customers will pay 19% more, or £626.

Factors including whether households have a meter and how much water used will also impact bills, which are being front-loaded for the next five years, meaning the big increase is coming in April.

Water companies in England and Wales have said the increases are needed to invest in creaking infrastructure, including sewage, and to build more reservoirs.

In Scotland, water bills are set to rise by almost 10%. Scottish Water, which is a public body, said spending was needed to cope with periods of “drought and intense rainfall” brought on by climate change.

Domestic customers in Northern Ireland are not billed for water, with the system funded by the devolved government.

The annual energy bill for a household using a typical amount of gas and electricity will go up £111 a year to £1,849 from April.

Regulator Ofgem increased the energy price cap because of higher wholesale costs and inflation.

The cap is set every three months and limits the amount suppliers can charge for each unit of gas and electricity, but not the total bill, so if you use more, you will pay more.

It affects 22 million homes in England, Wales and Scotland.

Standing charges – fixed fees to connect to a gas and electricity supply and vary by region – are rising again for gas but dropping for electricity, but it depends on where you live.

Ofgem is suggesting households consider a fixed tariff for a bit of stability, even though there’s speculation of prices dropping in July.

It is likely the tax you pay to your local authority will go up from April.

In England, local authorities with responsibility for delivering social care can increase council tax every year by up to 4.99% without triggering a referendum or local vote.

Smaller councils without social care duties can increase bills by up to 2.99%.

For 2025-26, the government is allowing Bradford, Newham, Birmingham, Somerset, and Windsor and Maidenhead to bypass the 4.99% cap, meaning they could raise council tax by more.

Council tax rates in Scotland have been frozen or had limited increases since 2007, but they are expected to go up in April, in some cases by as much as 10%.

The Scottish government says it is offering local authorities an extra £1bn in 2025-26 to help reduce the scale of any rise.

In Wales, council tax rates could jump by as much 15% in some areas. Local authorities were given £253m by the Welsh government in its draft budget, but council leaders say more money needed.

Northern Ireland uses a domestic rates system instead of council tax. All of Northern Ireland’s councils have reported district rate increases for the next year.

From April, the standard rate of tax for cars registered after April 2017 rises £5 to £195 a year. According to the RAC, you may pay less or more if your car was first used before 2017.

The exact amount for your road tax will depend on the year your car was registered and the type of fuel it uses.

One big change is that electric vehicles (EVs) will no longer be tax exempt. EVs registered from April 2025 will pay the lowest rate of £10 in the first year, then move to the standard rate. The standard rate will also apply to EVs first registered after April 2017.

Rule changes introduced by the telecoms regulator this year mean that mobile and broadband providers must now tell customers “in pounds and pence” about any price rises, as well as when they occur.

The new rules typically only apply to new customers, so any price rise will depend on when you took your contract out.

For instance, under the new rules, someone with a mobile Sim only contract with EE will see their bill go up by £1.50 a month, or £18 a year.

But for the majority of customers who took their contract out before 10 April 2024, they will face an increase of 6.4%, based on the inflation rate last December, plus an additional charge.

Similarly, most Virgin Media broadband customers will face a 7.5% rise in bills, but for anyone who took out a contract after 9 January this year, their monthly bill will go up by £3.50.

The cost of a TV licence will also go up by £5 to £174.50, and for a black and white TV it will go up by £1.50 to £58.50.

House buyers in England and Northern Ireland will start paying stamp duty on properties over £125,000 in April, instead of over £250,000 at the moment.

First-time buyers currently pay no stamp duty on homes up to £425,000, but this will drop to £300,000.

Anyone starting a search for a property now would likely struggle to move before the stamp duty changes.

The government has kept in place the freeze on tax thresholds on income tax and National Insurance until 2028, a policy brought in by the previous government.

This is often dubbed a stealth tax – as governments don’t explicitly label it as a tax.

But the policy amounts to a tax rise because of a process called “fiscal drag”, which sees more people “dragged” into paying higher rates of tax as wages rises.

According to figures from the government’s financial watchdog by 2028-29, nearly four million additional people will be expected to pay income tax – and three million more will have moved to the higher rate – due to the threshold being frozen.

Theranos founder and former chief executive Elizabeth Holmes has lost an appeal against her conviction for defrauding investors in her blood-testing company.

Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.

In her appeal, she challenged trial evidence and testimony and argued that statements by her ex-business and romantic partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani about his level of responsibility for Theranos’ financial model should have been included. He was jailed for more than 12 years.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the arguments.

Judge Jacqueline H Nguyen wrote that Theranos’s claim of being able to run blood tests with a drop from a finger prick instead of a needle in a vein was “nothing more than a mirage”.

“The grandiose achievements touted by Holmes and Balwani were half-truths and outright lies,” Nguyen wrote in the opinion on behalf of a three-judge panel published on Monday.

Holmes was convicted in 2022 of conspiracy and multiple charges of wire fraud for misleading investors over the company’s financial health and the effectiveness of its technology.

Balwani, who was tried separately and additionally convicted of defrauding patients in 2022, also lost his appeal.

In the appeal, both challenged a court order to pay $452m (£358m) in restitution to victims, which the court upheld.

In Holmes’s appeal, she argued that statements from Balwani where he said he “owned” the company’s financial model should have been included in the trial.

The appeal also argued that former Theranos employees offered improper expert testimony and a government inspection report should not have been included as evidence – all arguments the court dismissed.

Silicon Valley start-up Theranos was once valued at $9bn (£7bn).

But in late 2015, news reporting revealed internal struggles at the company and exposed the limitations of its technology. After a two-and-a-half-year investigation, a grand jury indicted Holmes and Balwani, leading to their convictions and sentencings.

Holmes entered prison in Texas in 2023.

A 15-year-old boy kicked and punched an 80-year-old man to death in a park to “let his anger out” before falsely claiming he had threatened a girl with a knife, a court has heard.

Leicester Crown Court was told the boy racially abused Bhim Kohli and slapped him in the face with a shoe while he was on his knees during the “intense attack”, while a 13-year-old girl encouraged the violence and filmed it on her phone while laughing.

Mr Kohli died in hospital a day after the attack, which occurred yards from his home, in Franklin Park, Braunstone Town, Leicestershire, on 1 September last year.

The boy denies murder and manslaughter, while the girl denies manslaughter.

The pair, who were 14 and 12 at the time, cannot be named due to their ages.

Prosecutor Harpreet Sandhu KC said: “[Bhim Kohli] left his home on Bramble Way in Leicester. Having left his home, he walked a few yards to the entrance of Franklin Park, where he was going to take his dog for a walk.

“However, Mr Kohli would not get the opportunity to walk his dog for long and never would he return home. That is because in Franklin Park, Mr Kohli had the misfortune to encounter these two defendants.”

Mr Kohli’s cause of death was given as a neck injury causing spinal cord damage, and he had a number of other injuries including fractured ribs.

Mr Sandhu said: “The prosecution say that as a result of causing those injuries, [the boy] is guilty of murdering Bhim Kohli and [the girl] who encouraged the causing of those injuries is guilty of manslaughter.”

Mr Sandhu told the court the boy and girl had spent the afternoon together at Braunstone Park before going to the boy’s home, where he changed his clothes and wore black sliders – a loose-fitting type of shoe similar in appearance to flip-flops – which the barrister said were used in the attack.

He said CCTV footage showed Mr Kohli walked with his dog Rocky to Franklin Park at about 18:18 BST, followed by the two defendants and three other children a few minutes later.

The 15-year-old boy could be seen carrying a balaclava, the prosecutor said, but it “would not be long” before he put it on.

Mr Kohli was spotted by the 13-year-old defendant, the court heard, who told the group that he had tried to hit one of the 15-year-old defendant’s friends with a stick.

The prosecution said the defendants approached the victim but the other three children did not and two of them left the park.

Jurors were told that one of the friends who ran away told police they did so because they thought the 15-year-old boy was “either going to start on him or be mean”.

Mr Sandhu said: “[The girl] remained with [the boy]. She remained with him in order to support him in what was about to happen.

“Within four minutes and 40 seconds, he had put his balaclava on. He had put his balaclava on in preparation for the violence he was going to use against Mr Kohli.”

Mr Sandhu told the court Mr Kohli was “on his knees” when the boy slapped him round the face with the slider shoe, which the girl filmed as she laughed.

The footage of the assault was shown to the jury.

In a message recovered from the boy’s phone, the court heard he wrote: “I watched him pull a knife out on a girl and hit her. I did not mean to batter him. My anger turned in.”

A friend of the boy told police the defendant said that he only meant to punch Mr Kohli once to his face “to teach him not to do it again”, but instead he “let his anger out”.

Mr Sandhu added: “They had to think of a way to justify the violence which had been used.

“It was not Mr Kohli’s habit to carry a knife, no knife was recovered from the clothing that Mr Kohli was wearing at the time, and no knife was recovered from Franklin Park.”

Mr Sandhu told the court the boy knew the police would be looking for him, and messaged his mother and said he would not be home that night.

The next day, the boy searched for “Franklin Park” on Google the day after the attack and read a BBC News article about Mr Kohli, jurors heard.

The prosecution said he also created a Snapchat group with three other children who were at the park and asked which of them had been arrested.

Two of Mr Kohli’s children arrived at the scene shortly after, the court was told.

His son found Mr Kohli “on the ground and in obvious pain”, Mr Sandhu said.

“He told his son he had been hit, he pointed to his left side, and in particular the area of his ribs. He also pointed to the left side of his neck,” he added.

Mr Kohli, the court heard, had told his daughter he had been punched in the face, kicked, and racially abused.

In a letter written by the boy, after he had been charged, to a professional who was working with him, he said: “I am so nervous, well scared and worried. I accept I did it and I’m doing time, I’m just scared about how long I have to do.”

He also said in the letter that his girlfriend had broken up with him and he had been “struggling with that”, so he “needed anger etc releasing”.

When the professional told the boy that the contents of his letter would need to be disclosed, the boy said “that’s my manslaughter plea gone”, Mr Sandhu told the jury.

The trial, which is expected to last six to eight weeks, continues.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded the complete demilitarisation of much of southern Syria.

It is an announcement that could make conflict between Israel and the new leadership in Syria, after the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad, more likely.

In a speech to Israeli military cadets on Sunday, Netanyahu said that Israel would not allow the forces of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – the Islamist group that led the overthrow of Assad – nor the new Syrian army that is being formed to “enter the area south of Damascus”.

“We demand the complete demilitarisation of southern Syria in the provinces of Quneitra, Deraa and Suweida from the forces of the new regime,” he added. “Likewise, we will not tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria.”

He also said that Israeli forces would remain indefinitely inside the Syrian territory that they have seized since Assad’s fall last December – which would be a shift in Israeli strategy.

Until now, Israel had described its move into a UN-monitored demilitarised buffer zone in the Golan Heights as a temporary measure to ensure the security of Israelis on the other side.

The rationale appeared to be to prevent extremist groups from moving down to the Golan in the power vacuum.

But with his latest comments, Netanyahu has made it clear that he believes that the new authorities in Syria – with their background in jihadism – could represent a similar danger.

Israel seized most of the Golan from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so in 2019.

Syria’s new interim President, HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has tried to reassure Israel that he does not want conflict and that he is ready to uphold the long-standing disengagement agreement between the two countries concluded after another war in 1973.

He has also stressed that he will not allow Syria to be used as a base for attacks against Israel.

But Sharaa has also called on Israel to withdraw from the buffer zone it has taken, as he tries to assert sovereignty across the whole of Syria’s fractured landscape.

Clearly, Netanyahu does not trust these assurances.

Like much of the international community, the Israeli prime minister is waiting to see if Sharaa makes good on his moderate, emollient stance in action as well as words.

From the perspective of the new Syrian leadership, freeing the country from the influence of all the foreign powers that jockeyed for position during the long years of civil war is seen as vital to ensuring a more positive future for the country and a definitive break with the past.

Some foreign players, such as Iran and Russia, have seen for now at least the curtailment of the overweening influence they once had.

Under President Donald Trump, the US might also further disengage from Syria – a role which has helped underpin Kurdish-led forces in the north-east of the country.

There has, though, been growing influence from Turkey – which provided essential support for HTS in its lightning campaign against Assad.

How big a part it chooses to play could be a determining factor in how Syria develops in the post-Assad era.

But Israel may present a more immediate challenge to the independence of Syria’s new leadership.

To have Israeli troops increasingly infringing on the country’s territory – as well as carrying out numerous strikes on targets associated with what’s left of Assad’s military arsenal – does not fit with the vision of a re-unified, sovereign state that Sharaa is trying to convince Syrians both inside and outside the country that his leadership can provide.

Netanyahu’s move to forbid Syrian forces from operating freely within the country’s borders may be a step too far for the new order in Damascus to stomach, however non-confrontational an image it is trying to maintain.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded the complete demilitarisation of much of southern Syria.

It is an announcement that could make conflict between Israel and the new leadership in Syria, after the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad, more likely.

In a speech to Israeli military cadets on Sunday, Netanyahu said that Israel would not allow the forces of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – the Islamist group that led the overthrow of Assad – nor the new Syrian army that is being formed to “enter the area south of Damascus”.

“We demand the complete demilitarisation of southern Syria in the provinces of Quneitra, Deraa and Suweida from the forces of the new regime,” he added. “Likewise, we will not tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria.”

He also said that Israeli forces would remain indefinitely inside the Syrian territory that they have seized since Assad’s fall last December – which would be a shift in Israeli strategy.

Until now, Israel had described its move into a UN-monitored demilitarised buffer zone in the Golan Heights as a temporary measure to ensure the security of Israelis on the other side.

The rationale appeared to be to prevent extremist groups from moving down to the Golan in the power vacuum.

But with his latest comments, Netanyahu has made it clear that he believes that the new authorities in Syria – with their background in jihadism – could represent a similar danger.

Israel seized most of the Golan from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so in 2019.

Syria’s new interim President, HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has tried to reassure Israel that he does not want conflict and that he is ready to uphold the long-standing disengagement agreement between the two countries concluded after another war in 1973.

He has also stressed that he will not allow Syria to be used as a base for attacks against Israel.

But Sharaa has also called on Israel to withdraw from the buffer zone it has taken, as he tries to assert sovereignty across the whole of Syria’s fractured landscape.

Clearly, Netanyahu does not trust these assurances.

Like much of the international community, the Israeli prime minister is waiting to see if Sharaa makes good on his moderate, emollient stance in action as well as words.

From the perspective of the new Syrian leadership, freeing the country from the influence of all the foreign powers that jockeyed for position during the long years of civil war is seen as vital to ensuring a more positive future for the country and a definitive break with the past.

Some foreign players, such as Iran and Russia, have seen for now at least the curtailment of the overweening influence they once had.

Under President Donald Trump, the US might also further disengage from Syria – a role which has helped underpin Kurdish-led forces in the north-east of the country.

There has, though, been growing influence from Turkey – which provided essential support for HTS in its lightning campaign against Assad.

How big a part it chooses to play could be a determining factor in how Syria develops in the post-Assad era.

But Israel may present a more immediate challenge to the independence of Syria’s new leadership.

To have Israeli troops increasingly infringing on the country’s territory – as well as carrying out numerous strikes on targets associated with what’s left of Assad’s military arsenal – does not fit with the vision of a re-unified, sovereign state that Sharaa is trying to convince Syrians both inside and outside the country that his leadership can provide.

Netanyahu’s move to forbid Syrian forces from operating freely within the country’s borders may be a step too far for the new order in Damascus to stomach, however non-confrontational an image it is trying to maintain.

Candidates vying to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada faced each other for the first time on Monday in a French-language debate.

The stage was shared by four hopefuls: former governor of the banks of Canada and England Mark Carney, former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, Liberal government House leader Karina Gould, and businessman and former MP Frank Baylis.

The question of how to deal with Donald Trump dominated the first half, as the US president has repeatedly threatened to tariff Canada and make it the “51st state.”

Candidates also answered questions about domestic matters like immigration, healthcare and the high cost of living.

Early in the debate, Freeland – whose resignation as finance minister in December triggered the collapse of Trudeau’s leadership – stated that Trump represented “the greatest threat to Canada since World War Two”.

She frequently drew on her experience in government, saying that she had successfully faced Trump during his first term when she helped renegotiate North America’s longstanding free-trade agreement.

But Freeland warned that Trump’s second term might be worse for Canada.

“He wants to turn Canada into the 51st state, and it’s no joke,” she said. “That is why he is supporting [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s criminal attempt to redraw Ukraine’s borders.”

“Trump wants to redraw our borders too,” Freeland said.

To counter these threats, Freeland and the other candidates suggested strengthening trade ties with the EU and the UK.

Baylis proposed a “new economic bloc” consisting of Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia, noting that all four countries shared the same values, cultures and governing systems.

Carney, who is frontrunner in the polls, focused his message on helping Canada achieve economic prosperity. He proposed doing so by leveraging its resources, including critical minerals and metals, as well as making Canada a “superpower of clean energy” and removing trade barriers between provinces.

He, too, agreed with Freeland that Trump’s second term was different from the first.

“He is more isolationist. He is more aggressive,” Carney said. “In the past he wanted our markets. Now he wants our country.”

He added that he would be in favour of imposing dollar-for-dollar tariffs on the US should Trump move ahead with his threat to levy a 25% tax on all Canadian goods starting on 4 March.

Gould, the youngest candidate on the stage, positioned herself as the candidate “for today and the future”, with a message that homed in on how a Liberal Party under her leadership would work to make life more affordable for Canadians.

The candidates also addressed shifting US policy on Ukraine. As the four debated, Trudeau was in Kyiv marking three years since the Russia-Ukraine war began.

All four candidates agreed that Canada should continue supporting Ukraine. Freeland suggested that money seized from Russia through sanctions be redistributed to help Ukraine’s war effort, while Carney stated that any discussion on Ukraine’s future could not happen without the Ukrainians at the table.

Freeland also suggested that Canada should foster closer ties with Denmark which, she noted. was also facing threats from Trump who has signalled his desire to take over Greenland – a Danish territory.

For the second half of the debate, candidates offered up their ideas for how to help Canada reduce its federal budget deficit, tackle crime and increase its military spending.

They were also asked about climate change, with both Freeland and Carney saying they no longer supported a carbon tax on consumers – a key climate policy of the Trudeau government that has become unpopular with Canadians.

At certain points, candidates also took aim at Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, saying he would be unfit to defend Canada against Trump.

Poilievre is currently leading in the national polls, though the gap between him and the Liberal Party has narrowed since Trudeau’s resignation. The Conservative leader has since focused his attacks on Carney, arguing that a Liberal Party under his leadership would not be different from that under Trudeau.

Monday’s debate is the first of two, with a second, English-language debate slated for Tuesday. Liberal Party members will vote for their next leader on 9 March, after which Trudeau is expected to step down.

The French-language debate is especially important for Francophone Canadians in Quebec, whose votes are influential in helping decide which party will form Canada’s next government.

Whoever is elected as leader would become Canada’s next prime minister until the next general election, which must be held on or before 20 October.

The BBC board has apologised over “missed opportunities” to tackle “bullying and misogynistic behaviour” by former BBC Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood.

An independent report into what the BBC knew about Mr Westwood’s conduct was published on Tuesday, highlighting a series of incidents and allegations it said amount to a “considerable body of evidence” which it failed to investigate properly.

The report added the BBC had “inadequate record keeping and communication with people who raised complaints or concerns”, and “an insufficiently rigorous attempt to address the substance of concerns raised”.

The BBC had previously acknowledged six complaints about bullying and sexual misconduct. In a video that appeared on social media last year, the DJ said: “It’s all false allegations.”

The BBC board admitted it did not “take adequate action”, saying: “It is clear that in the past, the BBC has not only been too siloed but too deferential to high-profile individuals.”

Gemma White KC led the report commissioned by the BBC board in 2022.

More than 120 individuals contributed to the review and thousands of records from the time were examined.

The DJ’s solicitors told Ms White:

• He denies the allegations of criminal and other misconduct and “confirms he has never had any sexual interest in children under the age of 16”.
• He has never acted in a “predatory and/or sexual manner” and “did not (and does not) present any risk to young women, at the BBC nor elsewhere”.
• He has been “denied the opportunity of presenting a defence to allegations set out in [the report] as a result of the vague nature of the allegations and the ongoing police investigation”.

Mr Westwood, who has not responded to the BBC’s requests for comment, had a gig in Oyo state in Nigeria on Monday.

The report highlighted some staff felt uncomfortable raising grievances with management about the DJ.

Those to spoke to Ms White referenced:

• “A feeling that they could not raise issues with the controller or other people in senior management because of the importance of the ‘talent’ to Radio 1/1Xtra.
• “A feeling that presenters were valued over production staff and that senior management were likely to side with presenters.”

She noted evidence of senior management “reacting firmly” to public complaints about the DJ, along with “evidence of their intention to create an environment in which employees would feel able to raise concerns”.

But the “lack of formality adopted” towards concerns raised about workplace misconduct, and the “type of material broadcast on air” were likely to have resulted employees not feeling confident that workplace conduct concerns about the DJ “would be properly addressed.”

The BBC board said: “Beyond assessing any alleged criminality, which is a matter for the police, it is clear there were times where the BBC, on learning about concerns regarding Mr Westwood’s behaviour, did not take adequate action.”

It cited “evidence of bullying and misogynistic behaviour on the part of Mr Westwood and the plain fact is that his general conduct was entirely incompatible with BBC values – not just now, but then”.

“The organisation fell short and failed people – including our own staff – who had a right to expect better from us,” it added.

The report has cost approximately £3.3m.

It found “there was no widespread or significant or BBC knowledge of allegations or concerns about predatory sexual behaviour by Mr Westwood”.

But it said there were “instances where the organisation missed opportunities that might have led to action.”

The BBC says it has since improved its processes.

A Metropolitan Police spokesperson told the BBC: “A full file of evidence remains with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for their consideration. Detectives from the Met continue to make enquiries, with support from prosecutors.”

The report follows a joint investigation by BBC News and The Guardian in 2022 which heard from women who made allegations of predatory and unwanted sexual behaviour and touching.

The allegations revealed by BBC News spanned the period from 1992 to 2017, when the 67-year-old was at the height of his career as a leading hip hop DJ.

In December, the Met and the Crime Prosecution Service asked the BBC to pause the report’s publication “to allow for further time to consider any potential impact on the investigation”.

The report has been published with redactions on police request.

In 2022, BBC News broadcast accusations by 18 women of predatory and unwanted sexual behaviour and touching by Mr Westwood, in alleged incidents from 1992 to 2017.

Following the joint investigation, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie said the claims against the DJ were “appalling”.

He added he had “seen no evidence of complaints” being made to BBC managers about Westwood’s behaviour in the past.

Mr Davie was director of audio and music, including BBC Radio 1, at the corporation at the time, between 2008 and 2012.

Westwood, 67, was a presenter on BBC Radio 1 and Radio 1Xtra between 1994 and 2013, where he hosted the UK’s first nationally broadcast hip-hop show.

In July 2022, the BBC revealed it had received six complaints about alleged bullying or sexual misconduct by Mr Westwood, one of which had previously been referred to police.

Then in August, the Metropolitan Police confirmed it was investigating a man over allegations of of non-recent sexual offences in London in 1982, 1985, 2010 and 2016.

A Met spokesperson said on Monday: “A full file of evidence remains with the CPS for their consideration. Detectives from the Met continue to make enquiries, with support from prosecutors.”