Stronger-than-expected data on the labor market has intensified concerns that the economy continues to run at a solid pace, amplifying fears about stubborn inflation.
Israel and its allies have escalated strikes against the Houthis to try to force them to stop firing on Israel and Red Sea shipping lanes, but it was not clear whether they would deter the Iran-backed militia.
An oil tanker that Finnish authorities said might have been part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” of tankers that Moscow has used to evade existing oil sanctions. The new U.S. sanctions target more than 180 vessels from the fleet.
Eliza and Henrietta Huszti were last seen in the early hours of Tuesday in Aberdeen city centre
Police are searching for two sisters in Aberdeen who were last seen three days ago.
Eliza and Henrietta Huszti, both 32 and who live in Aberdeen city centre, were last seen in Market Street at Victoria Bridge at about 02:12 GMT on Tuesday.
They then crossed the bridge and turned into a footpath next to the River Dee in the direction of Aberdeen Boat Club.
Police Scotland said they are carrying "extensive enquires" and searches to find the sisters, including the use of police dogs and the marine unit.
Family handout
The Huszti sisters were last seen on CCTV in Aberdeen's Market Street at Victoria Bridge
Both Eliza and Henrietta are described as being white, slim build with long, brown hair.
Police said the side of Victoria Bridge in the Torry area, where they were last seen, contained many commercial and industrial units and searches are ongoing there.
It added it was urging businesses in and around the South Esplanade and Menzies Road area to review CCTV footage recorded in the early hours of Tuesday and dashcam footage.
Ch Insp Darren Bruce said: "We are continuing to speak to people who know Eliza and Henrietta and we urge anyone who has seen them or who has any information regarding their whereabouts to please contact 101 quoting incident number 0735 of Tuesday, 7 January, 2025."
A 4x4 makes its way through a snow covered road in Harrogate, North Yorkshire
Commuters are being warned of icy roads and travel disruption, as temperatures plummeted again overnight across the UK.
Fresh weather warnings have been issued, with snow, ice and fog forecast across southern England, Wales, Northern Ireland and northern Scotland on Thursday.
It will be mainly dry elsewhere with winter sunshine, but temperatures could fall again to as low as -16C on Thursday night.
The cold snap has already brought heavy snowfall to some areas, and dozens of flood alerts and warnings are in place due to either heavy rain or melting snow.
On Wednesday the lowest temperature recorded was -8.4C (16F) in Shap, Cumbria, according to the Met Office.
It comes as an amber cold health alert remains in place for all of England until Sunday, meaning the forecast weather is expected to have significant impacts across health - including a rise in deaths.
The Hills/BBC Weather Watcher
A sheep walks in snow in Huddersfield
The Met Office says travel disruption to road and rail services is likely on Thursday in areas covered by warnings, as well potential for accidents in icy places.
There are five warnings in place:
A yellow warning for snow and ice is in place for northern Scotland until midnight on Thursday
A yellow warning for ice has been issued until 10:30 across southern England and south-east Wales
Two yellow warnings for snow and ice are in force until 11:00 GMT - one across western Wales and north-west England, and south-west England; and another for Northern Ireland
A yellow warning for fog until 09:00 in Northern Ireland
Sue B/BBC Weather Watchers
A teenager made a snow sculpture of Venus in her garden in Leeds
On Wednesday snow caused some roads to close and motorists to be stationary for "long periods of time" in Devon and Cornwall, according to authorities there.
Gritters working into Thursday morning have been fitted with ploughs to clear routes in the area.
Car insurer RAC said it has seen the highest levels of demand for rescues in a three-day period since December 2022.
"Cold conditions will last until at least the weekend, so we urge drivers to remain vigilant of the risks posed by ice and, in some locations, snow," said RAC breakdown spokeswoman Alice Simpson.
National Rail have also advised passengers to check before they travel, as ice and snow can mean speed restrictions and line closures.
On Wednesday evening, poor weather was affecting Northern and Great Western Railway.
Buses are also replacing trains between Llandudno Junction and Blaenau Ffestiniog until Monday.
A car covered in snow on a road in Buxton, Derbyshire
The wintry conditions have caused significant disruption across the UK since snow swept many parts of the country at the weekend.
Hundreds of schools were closed in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, including schools in Yorkshire, Merseyside, the Midlands and Aberdeenshire.
The country has also been hit by widespread flooding in recent days. Currently there are 68 flood warnings - meaning flooding is expected - in England and three in Wales.
The weather is expected to be less cold over the weekend.
Mel Gibson has revealed his home has been destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires while he was away recording Joe Rogan's podcast.
The Oscar-winning film star said his Malibu property was "completely toasted" and criticised California Governor Gavin Newsom over the crisis.
At least 10 people have died in the wildfires, which have burned down thousands of buildings and prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents.
A host of celebrities have told how they have lost their properties, while officials have warned more high winds could further fan the flames of the wildfires.
Gibson said he felt "ill at ease" during his visit to Austin, Texas, to appear as a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, because he knew his neighbourhood was "on fire".
"It's kind of devastating, it's emotional," Gibson said on NewsNation's Elizabeth Vargas Reports.
"I've been relieved from the burden of my stuff because it's all in cinders."
The Braveheart star said he had lived at his property for about 15 years and the homes of some of his neighbours had also "gone", including one belonging to actor Ed Harris.
Gibson said his family had followed an evacuation order and they were safe.
In the podcast with Rogan, Gibson criticised the California governor, saying Newsom claimed he was "going to take care of the forests" but "didn't do anything".
"I think all our tax dollars probably went for Gavin's hair gel," the actor said.
Los Angeles is facing the worst wildfires in its history, which have consumed 31,000 acres (12,500 hectares) of land and led to the evacuation of 180,000 people.
Five wildfires are still burning across the LA areas of Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth, Hurst and Lidia.
California fire chief David Acuna told Radio 4's Today programme that 10,000 structures are likely to have been destroyed. He also warned that winds over the coming days could lead to further destruction in the area.
Republican President-elect Donald Trump has called for Newsom, a Democrat, to resign over his handling of the crisis, saying "one of the best and most beautiful" parts of the US is "burning down to the ground".
Newsom has defended the response and said state authorities were "throwing everything at our disposal" to protect communities.
The governor's spokeswoman accused Trump of politicising the disaster and said Newsom was focused on protecting people and making sure firefighters have the resources they need.
US President Joe Biden said he had pledged extra federal resources to help California after "the most widespread, devastating fire" in the state's history.
Getty Images
A firefighter battles flames at a property in Palisades, Los Angeles
Celebrities who have lost homes
Paris Hilton and Billy Crystal are among the celebrities whose homes have been destroyed in the wildfires.
Hilton, the hotel heiress and reality TV star, shared a video of the remains of her property on social media and said "the heartbreak is truly indescribable".
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Actor Crystal said in a statement that he and his wife Janice were "heartbroken" by the loss of their Pacific Palisades home where they had lived since 1979.
TV host Ricki Lake said she had lost her "dream home", adding: "I grieve along with all of those suffering during this apocalyptic event."
The US Office star Rainn Wilson shared a video of his burnt-out home and said there was a "valuable lesson" to learn from the wildfires.
Actors Sir Anthony Hopkins, John Goodman, Anna Faris and Cary Elwes also reportedly lost their homes.
Meanwhile, actor Steve Guttenberg, a Pacific Palisades resident, helped to move parked cars to make way for fire engines.
"This is not a parking lot," he told KTLA. "I have friends up there and they can't evacuate."
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who live in California, are understood to have invited into their home friends and loved ones who had been forced to evacuate.
In a statement on their website, Harry and Meghan said: "If a friend, loved one, or pet has to evacuate, and you are able to offer them a safe haven in your home, please do."
The accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US will no longer plead guilty on Friday, after the US government moved to block plea deals reached last year from going ahead.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often referred to as KSM, was due to deliver his pleas at a war court on the Guantanamo Bay naval base in south-eastern Cuba, where he has been held in a military prison for almost two decades.
Mohammed is Guantanamo's most notorious detainee and one of the last held at the base.
But a federal appeals court on Thursday evening halted the scheduled proceedings to consider requests from the government to abandon the plea deals for Mohammed and two co-defendants, which it said would cause "irreparable" harm to both it and the public.
A three-judge panel said the delay "should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits", but was aimed at giving the court time to receive a full briefing and hear arguments "on an expedited basis".
The delay means that the matter will now fall into the incoming Trump administration.
What was scheduled to happen this week?
At a hearing beginning on Friday morning, Mohammed was scheduled to plead guilty to his role in the 11 September 2001 attacks, when hijackers seized passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside of Washington. Another plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.
Mohammed has been charged with offences including conspiracy and murder, with 2,976 victims listed on the charge sheet.
He has previously said that he planned the "9/11 operation from A-to-Z" - conceiving the idea of training pilots to fly commercial planes into buildings and taking those plans to Osama bin Laden, leader of the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda, in the mid 1990s.
Friday's hearing was set to happen in a courtroom on the base, where family members of those killed and the press would have been seated in a viewing gallery behind thick glass.
Photo courtesy of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s legal team
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Why is this all happening 23 years after 9/11?
Pre-trial hearings, held at a military court on the naval base, have been going on for more than a decade, complicated by questions over whether torture Mohammed and other defendants faced while in US custody taints the evidence.
Following his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, Mohammed spent three years at secret CIA prisons known as "black sites" where he was subjected to simulated drowning, or "waterboarding", 183 times, among other so-called "advanced interrogation techniques" that included sleep deprivation and forced nudity.
Karen Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place: How Guantanamo Became the World's Most Notorious Prison, says the use of torture has made it "virtually impossible to bring these cases to trial in a way that honors the rule of law and American jurisprudence".
"It's apparently impossible to present evidence in these cases without the use of evidence derived from torture. Moreover, the fact that these individuals were tortured adds another level of complexity to the prosecutions," she says.
The case also falls under the military commissions, which operate under different rules than the traditional US criminal justice system and slow the process down.
The plea deal was struck last summer, following some two years of negotiations.
What does the plea deal include?
The full details of the deals reached with Mohammed and two of his co-defendants have not been released.
We do know that a deal means he would not face a death penalty trial.
In a court hearing on Wednesday, his legal team confirmed that he had agreed to plead guilty to all charges. Mohammed did not address the court personally, but engaged with his team as they went over the agreement, making small corrections and changes to wording with the prosecution and the judge.
If the deals are upheld and the pleas are accepted by the court, the next steps would be appointing a military jury, known as a panel, to hear evidence at a sentencing hearing.
In court on Wednesday, this was described by lawyers as a form of public trial, where survivors and family members of those killed would be given the opportunity to give statements.
Under the agreement, the families would also be able to pose questions to Mohammed, who would be required to "answer their questions fully and truthfully", lawyers say.
Central to the prosecution agreeing to the deals was a guarantee "that we could present all of the evidence that we thought was necessary to establish a historical record of the accused's involvement in what happened on September 11th," prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., said in court on Wednesday.
Even if the pleas go ahead, it would be many months before these proceedings would begin and a sentence ultimately delivered.
Reuters
The case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, shown here during a 2012 pre-trial hearing, has been ongoing for two decades at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay.
Why is the US government trying to block the pleas?
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appointed the senior official who signed the deal. But he was travelling at the time it was signed and was reportedly caught by surprise, according to the New York Times.
Days later, he attempted to revoke it, saying in a memo: "Responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior authority."
However, both a military judge and a military appeals panel ruled that the deal was valid, and that Mr Austin had acted too late.
In another bid to block the deal, the government this week asked a federal appeals court to intervene.
In a legal filing, it said Mohammed and the two other men were charged with "perpetrating the most egregious criminal act on American soil in modern history" and that enforcing the agreements would "deprive the government and the American people of a public trial as to the respondents' guilt and the possibility of capital punishment, despite the fact that the Secretary of Defense has lawfully withdrawn those agreements".
Following the announcement of the deal last summer, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, then the party's leader in the chamber, released a statement describing it as "a revolting abdication of the government's responsibility to defend America and provide justice".
What have the victims' families said?
Some families of those killed in the attacks have also criticised the deal, saying it is too lenient or lacks transparency.
Speaking to the BBC's Today Programme last summer, Terry Strada, whose husband Tom was killed in the attacks, described the deal as "giving the detainees in Guantanamo Bay what they want".
Ms Strada, the national chair of the campaign group 9/11 Families United, said: "This is a victory for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other two, it's a victory for them."
Other families see the agreements as a path towards convictions in the complex and long-running proceedings and were disappointed by the government's latest intervention.
Stephan Gerhardt, whose younger brother Ralph was killed in the attacks, had flown to Guantanamo Bay to watch Mohammed plead guilty.
"What is the end goal for the Biden administration? So they get the stay and this drags into the next administration. To what end? Think about the families. Why are you prolonging this saga?" he said.
Mr Gerhardt told the BBC the deals were "not a victory" for the families, but that it was "time to find a way to close this, to convict these men".
Families on the base were meeting with the press when news of the delay was made public.
"It was supposed to be a time of healing. We'll board that plane still with that deep sense of pain – there's just no end to it," one said.
Why are the proceedings happening in Guantanamo?
Mohammed has been held in a military prison in Guantanamo Bay since 2006.
The prison was opened 23 years ago - on 11 January 2002 - during the "war on terror" that followed the 9/11 attacks, as a place to hold terror suspects and "illegal enemy combatants".
Most of those held here were never charged and the military prison has faced criticism from rights groups and the United Nations over its treatment of detainees. The majority have now been repatriated or resettled in other countries.
The prison currently holds 15 - the smallest number at any point in its history. All but six of them have been charged with or convicted of war crimes.
As wildfires roar into residential neighborhoods, firefighters in California and elsewhere are finding that water systems can’t keep up with the demand.
A judge annulled the marriage after accepting the woman was tricked
A woman in Australia has annulled her marriage after realising that a fake wedding ceremony she took part in for a social media stunt was in fact real.
The unknowing bride said her partner was a social media influencer who convinced her to take part in the ceremony as a "prank" for his Instagram account.
She only discovered the marriage was genuine when he tried to use it to gain permanent residency in Australia.
A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after accepting the woman was tricked into getting married, in a judgment published on Thursday.
The bizarre case began in September 2023 when the woman met her partner on an online dating platform. They began seeing each other regularly in Melbourne, where they lived at the time.
In December that year, the man proposed to the woman and she accepted.
Two days later, the woman attended an event with the man in Sydney. She was told it would be a "white party" - where attendees would wear white-coloured clothing - and was told to pack a white dress.
But when they arrived she was "shocked" and "furious" to find no other guests present except for her partner, a photographer, the photographer's friend and a celebrant, according to her deposition quoted in court documents.
"So when I got there, and I didn't see anybody in white, I asked him, 'What's happening?'. And he pulled me aside, and he told me that he's organising a prank wedding for his social media, to be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content, and wants to start monetising his Instagram page," she said.
She said she accepted his explanation as "he was a social media person" who had more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believed that a civil marriage would only be valid if it was held in a court.
Still, she remained concerned. The woman rang a friend and voiced her worries, but the friend "laughed it off" and said it would be fine because, if it were real, they would have had to file a notice of intended marriage first, which they had not.
Reassured, the woman went through the ceremony where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed in front of a camera. She said she was happy at that time to "play along" to "make it look real".
Two months later, her partner asked her to add him as a dependent in her application for permanent residency in Australia. Both of them are foreigners.
When she told him she could not as they were technically not married, he then revealed that their Sydney wedding ceremony had been genuine, according to the woman's testimony.
The woman later found their marriage certificate, and discovered a notice of intended marriage which had been filed the month before their Sydney trip - before they even got engaged - which she said she did not sign. According to the court documents, the signature on the notice bears little resemblance to the woman's.
"I'm furious with the fact that I didn't know that that was a real marriage, and the fact that he also lied from the beginning, and the fact that he also wanted me to add him in my application," she said.
In his deposition, the man claimed they had "both agreed to these circumstances" and that following his proposal the woman had agreed to marry him at an "intimate ceremony" in Sydney.
The judge ruled that the woman was "mistaken about the nature of the ceremony performed" and "did not provide real consent to her participation" in the marriage.
"She believed she was acting. She called the event 'a prank'. It made perfect sense for her to adopt the persona of a bride in all things at the impugned ceremony so as to enhance the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage," he stated in the judgement.
Constellation Energy’s deal to buy Calpine is being driven by fast-rising demand for electricity in part by the technology industry’s investments in artificial intelligence.
Calpine’s natural gas power plants, like this one in Richmond, Texas, are increasingly valuable because of the rising demand for electricity from data centers.
The president-elect had said Russia’s leader wanted to meet him to discuss the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin said it welcomed such dialogue, but a meeting could occur only after Mr. Trump took office.
President-elect Donald J. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club, on Thursday. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that he could resolve the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours, without saying how.
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