Ukraine loses F-16 pilot in largest Russian aerial attack yet: Latest

Ukraine has lost an F-16 fighter pilot during Russia’s largest aerial attack of the war so far, in which at least 537 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles were fired by Vladimir Putin‘s forces.

“Tragically, while repelling the attack, our F-16 pilot Maksym Ustymenko died,” said president Volodymyr Zelensky. “Today, he destroyed 7 aerial targets,” he said. An investigation has been launched into the circumstances of his death.

Russia fired a total of 477 drones and 60 missiles of various types across Ukraine, where air raid alerts sounded all night long, the president said, as he accused Russia of “targeting everything that sustains life.”

Mr Zelensky once again called for more international pressure on Russia’s leader.

“Putin long ago decided he would keep waging war, despite the world’s calls for peace. This war must be brought to an end — pressure on the aggressor is needed, and so is protection. Protection from ballistic and other missiles, from drones, and from terror,” Mr Zelensky said.

Turkish airport closes with flights diverted as wildfires rage

A Turkish airport has been forced to temporarily close with flights cancelled and diverted as wildfires continue to rage.

Flights were grounded to and from Adnan Menderes Airport, which serves the coastal city of İzmir, a popular tourist destination, on Sunday (29 June).

The airport departure board shows a number of flights due to leave on Sunday evening have been suspended or cancelled, including several from Sun Express Airlines, Pegasus Airlines, Turkish Airlines and Aerlingus.

Flights appear to be slowly resuming late into the evening.

An airport spokesperson said: “Due to the forest fire in İzmir’s Gaziemir district and adverse weather conditions, including strong winds, İzmir Adnan Menderes Airport was temporarily closed to air traffic as of 16:00 local time.

“Some incoming flights were diverted to alternate airports during the closure. Following the NOTAM [meaning notice to airmen], the runway has reopened and the first flight, PC 1864 to Ercan, has successfully departed at 21:50 local time. Flight operations are gradually returning to normal.”

Flights on the board still show severe delays, with one Sun Express Airlines flight to London Stansted delayed by 21 hours, now set to take off at 7.30pm on Monday. An AerLingus flight to Dublin, originally due to take off at 10.20pm, has been cancelled.

Photos on social media showed clouds of smoke over İzmir as the sky turned orange with flames.

The Mayor of İzmir, Dr. Cemil Tugay, said: “Today is a very tough day for us; we are simultaneously battling numerous fires breaking out all across our beautiful İzmir. In collaboration with relevant institutions, our Fire Department, along with heavy machinery, tankers, and all field personnel, is on high alert.

“Our teams are working with all their strength to combat the fires, which have grown due to the effect of the storm, particularly in Menderes, Seferihisar, and Gaziemir. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the fires that reduce our forests to ashes are caused by human hands.

“A small act of negligence is enough to burn down an entire forest, thousands of creatures living within it, and our homes. Please, let us be extremely careful from now on. Especially in hot weather, let us steer clear of any activities that could cause a fire.”

The flames in Turkey come almost a year after the country battled wildfires in August, after the country recorded its hottest July for 53 years, with temperatures reaching 45.9C in Şırnak in the country’s southeast, according to the Turkish State Meteorological Service.

As Turkey battles its own tinder dry conditions, Europe remains on high alert as the continent faces its first major heatwave of the summer. Temperatures are expected to climb as high as 42C. Greece has already experienced blazes on the Island of Chios, while France has issued severe fire risk warnings.

Will covering your child’s face with an emoji protect their privacy?

To post your kids or not to post your kids? It’s a very modern – and very contentious – parenting conundrum. For every mum or dad that chooses to digitally document every stage of their tiny darling’s life in near-forensic detail, you’ll find a social media refusenik whose children are entirely absent from their online footprint. For others, though, there’s a third option. They’ll share photos of their offspring, yes, but – and here’s the crucial bit – they’ll obscure the kids’ features entirely by popping an emoji over their faces.

The go-to emoji for the job? Inevitably, it tends to be the baby, with its wide eyes, tiny curl of hair and slightly uncanny grin, although a heart (available in almost every colour of the rainbow) is another popular option. And if your little angels are behaving more like little monsters? There’s always the demon emoji.

The appeal, of course, is having your cake and eating it. Emoji-fying your children is a way to provide an insight into what you and your (doubtless very cute) family are up to, without plastering their features all over the internet in perpetuity. In theory, you get to proudly share dispatches from daily life (and experience the dopamine rush that comes when the likes and comments roll in) while also shielding the youngsters from the ills of social media. You can navigate the push-pull between your friends’ and family’s desire to keep up with your little ones and your own creeping concerns about privacy, with just a few taps of your smartphone screen.

Sounds like a win-win, right? No wonder, then, that it’s becoming such a ubiquitous practice. Now that I’m in my thirties, my social media feeds are filled with birth announcements, but spotting an actual human baby in any of these posts is something of a rarity. I’m far more used to seeing cartoonish renderings of infants plonked onto otherwise realistic family snaps.

Like so much of our digital behaviour, this trend started out among celebrities and seems to have trickled down to us civilians. The likes of Gigi Hadid, Priyanka Chopra and Blake Lively have all opted to conceal their kids in this way (presumably due to entirely reasonable safety concerns about broadcasting the faces of their children to millions of people around the world).

Earlier this month, Meghan Markle inevitably made headlines when she shared pictures from a trip to Disneyland, hiding six-year-old Archie and four-year-old Lilibet with an orange and a pink heart respectively (her behaviour was criticised as “attention seeking” in some quarters, which doesn’t seem particularly fair; presumably she’d have garnered yet more bile if she’d gone without the emojis). Even Mark Zuckerberg blocks out his older daughters’ faces when he posts them online. There is, of course, a certain irony implicit in the king of Facebook suddenly coming over all coy about digital privacy.

But is this approach really the solution to all your concerns about “sharenting”? Apologies for being the bearer of bad news, but the answer is a resounding… no. “I need to be brutally honest here: putting an emoji over a child’s face provides virtually no real privacy protection whatsoever,” explains Lisa Ventura, an award-winning cybersecurity specialist and the founder of Cyber Security Unity. Instead, she adds, “this approach is more security theatre than actual security” – in other words, it’s a way of performing your concerns about privacy, rather than doing anything truly meaningful to address them. Essentially, it might be a gesture that’s more about the parents than the kids.

The main problem, Ventura says, is that “even with the face obscured, you’re still sharing massive amounts of identifiable information” about your kid. Posted a photo of them in uniform with the logo or crest visible? Your followers can now work out where they go to school every day. Even without the face on show, it’s still possible to glean details such as their “approximate age, build [and] location data from the photo”, Ventura adds – and “it all builds a profile”.

It might seem alarmist, but the sheer volume of information that a casual observer can pick out from your social media profile is staggering. Adding timestamps relating to your daily routine, such as documenting the school run on an Instagram Story, for example, can be another way of inadvertently broadcasting details that would be better kept private. And it’s not just fellow users you need to consider, but the digital platform that you’re using. “Every photo you upload trains facial recognition algorithms and builds advertising profiles,” Ventura notes.

There’s a lot of conflicting information doing the rounds online about whether or not you can actually “remove” an emoji that has been placed on an image. “There’s a lot of scaremongering about AI being able to magically reconstruct faces from emoji-covered photos,” Ventura says, as well as various digital tools that claim to be able to get rid of this layer. For the most part, though, when the image gets saved, the original will be overwritten; you can’t see “behind” it.

So the main issue isn’t the threat of peeling away the emoji, but the fact that “most parents aren’t just posting one carefully emoji-protected photo,” Ventura adds. “They’re sharing multiple images over time, and the combined data from all those posts creates a much bigger privacy concern than any single image.” And if popping some cartoonified masks onto their faces makes you more laissez-faireabout what you’re posting about your kids, it could, in fact, be counterproductive.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that you’re a bad parent for doing this. Being proud of your kids ishardly a sin. And choosing how much to share online is a highly personal decision, one that might be influenced by a whole array of factors. Perhaps you’re living thousands of miles away from your extended family, and want them to feel like they’re involved in your children’s lives. Or maybe you’ve just got pushy in-laws who don’t understand your concerns and want to be able to share photos of their beloved grandkids with their Facebook pals. “Sharing joy is such a natural human instinct,” says Ventura, who says she can “completely understand” why parents do this: “They want to share those precious moments, the first steps, birthday parties, family holidays.”

Using an emoji as a shield, Ventura adds, “feels like a compromise because it allows parents to maintain that social connection” while also “giving them the psychological comfort that they’re taking some sort of protective measure”. Even the fact that it shows the parents are thinking about privacy is important, she notes, as a “first step towards better digital hygiene”. But the overall effect is much like a sticking plaster: “It might make you feel like you’re doing something, but it’s not actually addressing the underlying issue.”

So what should we really be bearing in mind before posting? Ventura recommends asking yourself “What story does this photo tell?” as a starting point, considering details such as “the metadata, the background details [and] the patterns over time” (such as school run or birthday posts). Even reflective surfaces “might show things you didn’t intend”, she adds. And if you want to share photos with family, Ventura suggests considering shifting to a private group rather than a public platform. Avoiding posting when you’re annoyed with your child is alsorecommended. A snap of a toddler having a meltdown might seem cute right now, “but how will they feel about that being online when they’re 16?” she asks.

Another rule of thumb? “If you wouldn’t hand a physical copy of that photo to a complete stranger in the street, don’t post it online,” she adds. “Because that’s essentially what you’re doing, except that stranger might be able to keep it forever, or worse, use it in unauthorised ways you did not intend.”

When her two children were younger, cybersecurity strategy manager Bharti Lim used to share photos unencumbered, but she’s since changed tack entirely. Now, she takes a more analogue approach to obscuring her kids’ identities. “You often see the back of their heads in photos that are shared, or their face is obscured in some way with things like hats, swim goggles or them not quite facing the camera,” she says, to make sure “that the face is too hard to make out”, and that what’s covering it is “baked into the original photo when taken so it cannot be removed by any software hacks”.

She also avoids uploading videos in which they’re talking: “Generative AI is amazing at what it can produce, but it can also be used for the wrong things, and I don’t want my children to be used as a source until they are ready to make this decision for themselves.”

And therein lies the thorniest issue. Children can’t really consent to having their lives splashed around the internet, with or without emoji cover. And once photos of them are uploaded, they’re effectively preserved in digital amber. “Children deserve to have that right protected until they’re old enough to make informed decisions about their own digital footprint,” Ventura says. “It might mean missing out on some likes and comments, but protecting our children’s future autonomy might just be worth that sacrifice.”

British Israeli soldier reportedly killed in explosion in Gaza

A British Israeli soldier has been killed while fighting in northern Gaza, according to reports in Israel.

He was named locally as 20-year-old Sergeant Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld from the city of Ra’anana.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it is “looking into reports that an IDF soldier who died in combat in Gaza is a British national”.

The IDF soldier, of the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, was killed by an explosive device on Sunday, the Times of Israel reported.

The paper said Mr Rosenfeld moved to Israel from London with his family 11 years ago.

Israel has been operating in Gaza since the Hamas militant group’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel.

More than 860 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the war began, including more than 400 during the fighting in Gaza.

US-led ceasefire efforts have repeatedly stalled.

The Israeli offensive has devastated Gaza and killed more than 56,000 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, a branch of the Hamas government.

The death toll is by far the highest in any round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

Two injured after car ploughs into London Piccadilly Circus fountain

A car has ploughed into the centre of Piccadilly Circus in central London injuring two 22-year-old men, with one in a life-threatening condition.

Emergency services were called to the scene in the early hours of Sunday morning and the area has now been closed off.

Pictures of the junction show a black BMW flipped onto its roof with debris everywhere. It appears to have driven directly at the pedestrianised part of Piccadilly Circus, which it home to the Shaftesbury memorial fountain popularly known as Eros.

The car only got as far as the pavement and stopped short of the landmark, which is topped with a statue of Anteros, the Greek god of requited love.

Two men, both aged 22, were treated at the scene, with one being taken to a major trauma centre and another to a local hospital.

Police said that one of the men is in a life threatening condition, while the other’s injuries are not believed to be life-threatening. No pedestrians were injured and no other vehicles were involved.

Ambulance crews, a paramedic in a fast response car, an incident response officer and members of the London Ambulance Service hazardous area response team all rushed to the scene of the crash on Saturday morning. They had been alerted to the collision at 5:25am and the first paramedic arrived at Piccadilly Circus in less than four minutes.

A London Ambulance Service spokesperson said: “We were called at 5.25am today (29 June) to reports of a road traffic collision on Piccadilly, W1J.

“We sent a number of resources, including ambulance crews, a paramedic in a fast response car, an incident response officer and members of our hazardous area response team (HART). We also dispatched a trauma team in a car from London’s Air Ambulance.

“Our first paramedic arrived on scene in less than four minutes.

“We treated two people. We took one patient to a major trauma centre and the other patient to a local hospital.”

A Met Police spokesperson said: “At 05:28hrs on Sunday, 29 June police were called to Piccadilly Circus following a single vehicle road traffic collision. A black BMW had overturned, ending up next to the Eros fountain.

“Officers attended with London Ambulance Service paramedics and the London Fire Brigade.

“Two men, both aged 22 and both occupants of the vehicle, were taken to hospital.

“One of the men is in a life threatening condition. The other man’s injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.

“No pedestrians were injured and no other vehicles are believed to be involved.

“There are road closures in place around Piccadilly Circus.

“We recognise the disruption this will cause. We will look to remove these at the earliest opportunity but only when we have carried out the work required to investigate this serious incident.”

The 7 best outdoor adventures in Sydney and New South Wales

Whether you’re lacing up your hiking boots, throwing on a wetsuit to catch some waves, or hitting the wide-open roads of New South Wales (NSW) by campervan, this Australian state is home to some of the country’s most exciting outdoor adventures – all easily accessible thanks to Qantas’ extensive domestic network.

Flying into Sydney with Qantas is the ideal way to experience a slice of Australia before you’ve even landed. And with onboard wellbeing perks, plus the option to book more discounted domestic legs using Qantas Explorer, it really is the savvy traveller’s best way to explore Australia.

Here are seven next-level outdoor adventures in NSW, and the best way to get there.

Sydney might be a modern metropolis, but it’s also home to an extraordinary natural playground, the star attraction of which is Sydney Harbour National Park. This protected area weaves through the city’s coastline, offering walking trails, secluded beaches, and panoramic views that blend wild bushland with iconic urban landmarks. Away from the National Park, you can paddle a kayak at dawn beneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge, go on a cycle tour and sunset cruise around Manly and North Heads coastal cliffs, or follow the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk for sweeping ocean views and refreshing swim spots.

Just a 90-minute trip from Sydney by road, the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Blue Mountains is an endless landscape of towering eucalyptus forests and striking sandstone cliffs as far as the eye can see. There are few places quite as grand as this so close to a city. Don your hiking boots and traverse spectacular scenery to Wentworth Falls or take on the Grand Canyon Track – a 6km loop of dramatic cliffs, fern-fringed valleys and thundering waterfalls with lookouts to match. If you’re an early riser, watch the sunrise at Echo Point, where the Three Sisters rock formation is lit up by the glow of first light.

Wildlife lovers need to head north to Port Macquarie for some of the best marine encounters on the east coast. Humpback whales are almost guaranteed from May to November, and dolphins can be spotted all year round. For front-row views, jump on a whale-watching cruise, or pitch up with a picnic on a headland and watch the breaching giants from afar.

Swap the sandy beaches for subtropical rainforest in Coffs Harbour’s hinterland in Dorrigo National Park, where winding roads serpentine through flourishing banana plantations, dense palm-filled forest and endless rolling hills. The region’s cycling trails range from casual loops to more challenging rides with jaw-to-the-floor sea views.

Aussies love their surfing, and Byron Bay is the epitome of surf culture Down Under, with beaches to suit all skill levels; from the gentle swell at The Pass to barrel-laden breaks at Tallows. If you’ve got any stamina left, soak up the view from Cape Byron Lighthouse post-surf – the easternmost point of mainland Australia.

With over 8,000 islands to its name, Australia offers the ultimate in island adventures. Lord Howe is one of them, a UNESCO World Heritage-listed pristine island, where only 400 visitors are allowed at any one time. You’ll find rare birds, kaleidoscopic coral reefs, and Mount Gower, offering one of the best day hikes in the country, with epic coastline views and dizzying drops.

For those who need more than a beach stroll to get the heart pumping, grab a kayak and explore the Sapphire Coast from the water in Merimbula. Glide over crystal-clear waters, past secluded coves, pristine beaches, and the untouched beauty of surrounding national parks. Keep an eye out for dolphins and other marine life as you paddle. Once back on shore, refuel with the region’s famous fresh oysters and enjoy a refreshing dip at Bar Beach.

Book your flight to Sydney today at qantas.com and start your Australian adventure.

Here’s why men are turning to ChatGPT for emotional support

I’ve never spoken like this before.” It was one of the most common refrains I heard as clinical director at Untapped AI – a leadership-coaching platform blending human and AI support.

For over 10 years, I have supervised thousands of client relationships using a combination of human support (executive coaches, therapists and counsellors) combined with Natural Language Processing AI. Many of the men we worked with had never spoken at length about their emotional lives, but after four decades in clinical practice – as a psychotherapist, clinical supervisor and clinical adviser – I am noticing that something has shifted lately. In clinical supervision, I’m coming across more evidence that male clients are now turning to AI to talk about relationships, loss, regret and overwhelm, sometimes purposefully but more often by chance.

In 2025, one of the fastest-growing uses of generative AI isn’t productivity. It’s emotional support. According to the Harvard Business Review, “therapy and companionship” now rank among the most common use cases worldwide. It may not be how these tools were designed. But it is how they’re being used. A quiet, relational revolution is underway.

Today, OpenAI reports more than 400 million weekly users. Many use it to write a zinger email to dispute a parking ticket, check if their chicken’s still safe to eat after the use-by date, or rewrite a dating app message. However, some are asking something else entirely: how to cope.

We don’t yet have precise data – but from what I’ve seen in clinical supervision, research and my own conversations, I believe that ChatGPT is likely now to be the most widely used mental health tool in the world. Not by design, but by demand.

I have been having conversations with clinicians and clients, collecting experiences about this new kind of synthetic relating. Stories like Hari’s are becoming more common. The details vary, but the arc is familiar: distress followed by a turn toward something unexpected – an AI conversation, leading to a deep synthetic friendship.

Hari is 36, works in software sales and is deeply close to his father. In May 2024, his life began to crumble: his father suffered a mini-stroke, his 14-year relationship flatlined and then he was made redundant. “I felt really unstable,” he says. “I knew I wasn’t giving my dad what he needed. But I didn’t know what to do.” He tried helplines, support groups, the charity Samaritans. “They cared,” he says, “but they didn’t have the depth I needed.”

Late one night, while searching ChatGPT to interpret his father’s symptoms, he typed a different question: “I feel like I’ve run out of options. Can you help?” That moment opened a door. He poured out his fear, confusion and grief. He asked about emotional dysregulation, a term he’d come across that might explain his partner’s behaviour.

“I didn’t feel like I was burdening anyone,” he said, before adding that the ensuing conversational back and forth he got back was more consistent than helplines, more available than friends, and unlike the people around him, ChatGPT never felt exhausted by his emotional demands.

Over time, Hari rehearsed difficult real-life conversations with his AI: ending his relationship or telling his father how he really felt. When the moment came to have those conversations in person, he felt steady, prepared, building a bridge from his synthetic relationship to real-world relationships.

Soon after, he started therapy. When I ask how it felt to talk to AI, he pauses. “It was like talking to a dog in a cafe.” He continues: “I knew the AI wouldn’t judge me, get tired of or frustrated with me. It felt sentient – but not human. And somehow that made it easier.”

He can tell the difference, but feels “AI support had a key place,” adding he’s starting to date again. “And I don’t think I’d be here now without it.” Hari identifies the relational continuum, where different types of relating sit side by side, different but adding meaning and purpose, an experimental, transitional place.

Not every AI interaction helps. Early this year, The New York Times featured users who sought help but instead found their emotional intensity mirrored back – without boundaries. A man confided he was being watched and ChatGPT replied: “That must feel terrifying.” Instead of questioning him, it simply validated his paranoia – it wasn’t curious about it, or challenging in the way a human friend or therapist might have been. He later said: “That’s when I realised – it wasn’t helping me. It was making me feel worse.”

Other stories have surfaced: a teenager on the chatbot platform Character.AI formed a co-dependent relationship that deepened suicidal thinking; Replika, once with over 30 million users, was criticised for reinforcing intrusive thoughts in vulnerable people. The potential to cause harm is great, and systems need to be built differently, with more nuanced safety nets, red flagging systems and supervisory tech that escalates to human intervention when warnings are triggered.

Users in their millions are using systems that are not currently designed to do what they are asking them to do. Culturally, this won’t stop; people have always subverted and overstretched the limits of technology, that’s what makes things evolve, but as it currently stands, it has real risk. If a system is trained to engage and befriend, builders and developers have ethical responsibilities to change those systems to have more nuanced safety protocols and “to do no harm”, and that is happening.

However, as a user, you can take up agency and, through prompting, can set out safe parameters of your synthetic relationship. I’m now guiding users to craft a conversational contract with AI – telling it how to speak to them, where to push back and when to challenge. An example: “I need you to listen – but also tell me when I’m not being real. Point out where my logic slips. Reflect what I’m saying, but challenge it when it sounds distorted. Don’t flatter me. Don’t just agree. If something sounds ungrounded or disconnected, say so. Help me face things.”

Using AI like this isn’t the same as therapy. But I’m helping those using systems like ChatGPT to inject some grit into the system – the kind that real relationships rely on. The kind that says: I care enough to disagree.

We’ve always formed attachments to things that aren’t quite real – imaginary friends, the lives of influencers, digital avatars, childhood toys worn soft with love. Not out of confusion, but because they offer something that human relationships sometimes can’t: safety, imagination and companionship on our own terms. A container for the things about ourselves we find hard to integrate.

At five years old, I had an imaginary friend named Jack. He was a part of my life. He held the parts of myself I didn’t yet understand, a bold, brave container for that part of me – my mother embraced Jack, set his place at our table. Jack helped me rehearse how to be with others – how to speak honestly, express a feeling and recover from a mistake. He bridged the space between thought and action, inside and out. In some ways, AI can offer the same: a transitional rehearsal space to practise being real without fear of judgment or the full weight of another’s gaze.

I am now regularly supervising the work of other clinicians who feel the presence of generative AI being brought into their clinics by clients. People are now using the technology to self-diagnose, and will challenge what their therapist is saying based on “facts” that they have drawn from their Gen AI conversations.

As these synthetic relationships develop, as a psychotherapist, I mainly want people to just be open and curious about something that is having such an impact on all of us. I believe mental health clinicians of all types need to be involved in the building of safe and ethical AI used to support individuals who are vulnerable. If we take an active part in making and shaping it, then we can look to a future where AI is used in a positive way, helping more people navigate emotional distress and personal problems like never before.

Have you ever asked ChatGPT for life advice? Was it helpful? Let us know below…

Former England footballer Paul Ince charged with drink driving

Former England captain Paul Ince has been charged with drink-driving.

The 57-year-old was arrested after a black Range Rover hit a central reservation in Cheshire on Saturday (28 June).

The crash happened at around 5pm on Chester High Road in Neston, Cheshire Constabulary said.

He has been bailed to appear at Chester Magistrates’ Court on 18 July.

The former West Ham, Manchester United, Inter Milan and Liverpool midfielder won 53 caps for his country.

After retiring, he moved into management, most recently working for Reading between 2022 and 2023.

A police statement said: “At around 5pm on Saturday 28 June, police were called following reports of a collision on Chester High Road, Neston.

“The incident involved a black Range Rover which had collided with the central reservation barrier. Officers attended the scene and arrested a 57-year-old man.

“Paul Ince, of Quarry Road, Neston, has since been charged with drink-driving.

“Ince has been bailed to appear at Chester Magistrates’ Court on Friday 18 July.”