President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to have come away empty-handed from a White House meeting after US President Donald Trump indicated he was not ready to supply sought-after Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine.
Zelensky said after the cordial bilateral that he and Trump had talked about long-range missiles, but decided not to make statements on that issue "because the United States does not want an escalation".
Following the meeting, Trump took to social media to call for Kyiv and Moscow to "stop where they are" and end the war.
The Trump-Zelensky meeting came a day after Trump spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin and agreed to meet him in Hungary soon.
While Trump did not rule out supplying Tomahawks to Ukraine, his tone at the White House on Friday was non-committal.
"Hopefully they won't need it, hopefully we'll be able to get the war over without thinking about Tomahawks," the US president said, adding that America needed the weapons.
Trump said sending the missiles would be "an escalation, but we'll be talking about it".
Asked by the BBC if the Tomahawks had prompted Putin to meet Trump, the US president said: "The threat of that [the missiles] is good, but the threat of that is always there."
Trump tells BBC Putin 'wants to make a deal', cites threat of Tomahawks
The Ukrainian leader suggested Ukraine could offer drones in exchange for the Tomahawks, prompting smiles and nodding from Trump.
Zelensky also complimented Trump on his role in securing a peace deal in the Middle East, suggesting the US leader could build on that momentum to help end Russia's war in Ukraine.
Outside afterwards, Zelensky was asked by a reporter if he thought Putin wanted a deal or was just buying time with the planned meeting with Trump in Budapest.
"I don't know," he said, adding that the prospect of Ukraine having Tomahawks had caused Russia to be "afraid because it is a strong weapon".
Asked if he was leaving Washington more optimistic that Ukraine would get the Tomahawks, he said: "I am realistic."
Zelensky believes using Tomahawks to strike at Russian oil and energy facilities would severely weaken Putin's war economy.
In recent days, Trump had shown an openness to the idea of selling the Tomahawks, although Putin warned that such a move would further strain the US-Russian relationship.
On Thursday, Trump said "great progress" was made during a phone call with Putin, with the pair agreeing to face-to-face talks soon in Hungary.
Asked whether Zelensky would be involved in those talks, Trump said before his meeting sitting alongside the Ukrainian president that there was "bad blood" between Putin and Zelenksy.
"We want to make it comfortable for everybody," he said. "We'll be involved in threes, but it may be separated." He added that the three leaders "have to get together".
Watch: BBC Ukrainian asks Trump about upcoming meeting with Putin
Trump said his call, the first with Putin since mid-August, was "very productive", adding that teams from Washington and Moscow would meet next week.
Trump had hoped a face-to-face summit in Alaska in August would help convince Putin to enter into comprehensive peace talks to end the war, but that meeting failed to produce a decisive breakthrough.
They spoke again days later when Trump interrupted a meeting with Zelensky and European leaders to call Putin.
Back in Ukraine, the BBC spoke on Friday to a couple repairing the small store they own in a suburb of Kyiv, after it was obliterated by Russian missiles last month.
When the store-owner, Volodymyr, was asked about Trump's forthcoming summit meeting with Putin, he began to say: "We appreciate all support".
But he stepped away as tears welled up in his eyes. After a long pause, he composed himself and started again.
"Truth and democracy will win, and all the terrorism and evil will disappear," he said. "We just want to live, we don't want to give up, we just want them to leave us alone."
Israel's military says the Red Cross has retrieved a coffin of a deceased hostage in the southern Gaza Strip and is now "on the way to IDF [Israel Defence Forces] troops" in the territory.
Posting on X, the IDF urged the public to "act with sensitivity and wait for the official identification, which will first be provided to the families".
It also stressed that Hamas was required to "return all the deceased hostages" in accordance with a Gaza ceasefire agreement.
This follows an earlier statement from Hamas that it would hand over the body of an Israeli hostage to the Red Cross.
Hamas has returned the bodies of nine of the 28 dead hostages in Gaza, and freed all 20 living hostages.
Israel has freed 250 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and 1,718 detainees from Gaza as part of the US-brokered ceasefire deal.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.
You can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on X to get the latest alerts.
Yang Chen Ning is ranked among the most influential physicists of the 20th century
Chen Ning Yang, Nobel laureate and one of the world's most influential physicists, has died at the age of 103, according to Chinese state media.
An obituary released by CCTV cited illness as the cause of death.
Yang and fellow theoretical physicist, Lee Tsung-Dao, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for their work in parity laws, which led to important discoveries regarding elementary particles - the building blocks of matter.
Yang was also a professor at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University and an honorary dean of the Institute for Advanced Study at the institution.
Born in 1922 in China's eastern Anhui province, he was the oldest of five children and raised on the campus of Tsinghua University where his father was a professor of mathematics.
As a teenager, Yang told his parents: "One day, I want to win the Nobel Prize."
He achieved that dream at the age of 35, when his work with Lee studying the law of parity earned them the honour in 1957.
The Nobel committee praised "their penetrating investigation... which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles".
Yang received his science degree in 1942 from National Southwest Associated University in Kunming, and later completed a master's degree at Tsinghua University.
At the end of the Sino-Japanese War, he travelled to the US on a fellowship from Tsinghua and studied at the University of Chicago, where he worked under Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, inventor of the world's first nuclear reactor.
Throughout a prolific career, he worked across all areas of physics, but maintained particular interest in the fields of statistical mechanics and symmetry principles.
Yang received the Albert Einstein Commemorative Award in 1957 and was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton University in 1958.
Yang married his first wife Chih Li Tu in 1950, with whom he had three children.
After Tu's death in 2003, Yang married his second wife Weng Fan, who is more than 50 years his junior.
The pair had first met in 1995 when Weng was a student in a physics seminar, and later reconnected in 2004.
At the time, Yang called her his "final blessing from God".
Ohtani rewrites history to send Dodgers to World Series
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Shohei Ohtani was handed the Most Valuable Player award for his performance
Published
Shohei Ohtani delivered one of the greatest performances in baseball history as defending champions the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Milwaukee Brewers to reach the World Series.
Japan's Ohtani smashed three huge home runs and struck out 10 Brewers batters in a comprehensive 5-1 victory as the Dodgers swept the series 4-0.
The 31-year-old's trifecta of home runs and 10 strikeouts in the same game is a Major League Baseball post-season record, highlighting a rare talent of excelling with bat and ball.
Ohtani also became the first pitcher since the Boston Braves' Jim Tobin in 1942 to hit three home runs in the same game.
"It was really fun on both sides of the ball today," said Ohtani, who was awarded the Most Valuable Player award for his heroics.
"I'm taking this trophy and let's get four more wins. We won it as a team and this is really a team effort. I hope everybody in LA and Japan and all over the world could enjoy a really good sake [Japanese rice wine]."
Ohtani's entered the game at the Dodger Stadium on the back of an eight-game home run drought, but led from the front as he struck out three batters in the opening frame.
He then starred with the bat in a performance which included a crushing 446 foot home run and a monster 469 foot hit which bounced out of the stadium.
It marked another historic showing from Ohtani, who last year became the first player ever to record 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in the same season.
"That was probably the greatest post-season performance of all time," said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts.
"There's a reason why he's the greatest player on the planet. It's kind of whatever you don't expect, expect him to do it.
"This is just a performance that I've just never seen. No-one's ever seen something like this. I'm still in awe right now of Shohei."
The Dodgers' comfortable victory sets up a World Series showdown against the Toronto Blue Jays or Seattle Mariners, with the latter 3-2 up in the best-of-seven series.
It was 2009, and Antony Easton's father, Peter, had recently died. As Antony started to engage with the messy business of probate, he came across a small brown leather case in his father's old flat in the Hampshire town of Lymington.
Inside were immaculate German bank notes, photo albums, envelopes full of notes recording different chapters of his life - and a birth certificate.
Peter Roderick Easton, who had prided himself on his "Englishness" (and been an Anglican) had, in fact, been born and raised in pre-war Germany as Peter Hans Rudolf Eisner, a member of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Berlin.
Charlie Northcott/BBC
The suitcase that held Antony's father's secrets
Despite hints about his father's origins growing up, the contents of the suitcase shone a light into a past that Antony knew almost nothing about. The revelations would lead him on a decade-long trail, revealing a family devastated by the Holocaust, a vanished fortune worth billions of pounds and a legacy of artwork and property stolen under Nazi rule.
Black-and-white photographs gave a glimpse of Peter's early life, far removed from his son's modest upbringing in London - they showed a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, mansions staffed by servants, staircases ornately carved with angels.
More ominously, one picture showed 12-year-old Peter Eisner smiling with friends, a Nazi flag rippling in the distance.
Antony Easton
Antony's father, Peter (in the middle) aged 12
"I felt it was a hand reaching out from the past," says Antony.
He says his father was a quiet and serious man, if prone to bouts of anger. He avoided talking about his childhood and always shut down questions about his slight German accent.
"There were clues that [he wasn't] really like other people… There was a darkness around his world," says Antony.
An immense fortune
The next big clue about Antony's family history came from a work of art.
Enlisting the help of a friend who spoke fluent German, he asked her to dig into a company called Hahn'sche Werke, references to which were peppered among the documents in the suitcase. After searching online, she sent Antony a photo of a painting, depicting the inside of a large steelworks - seemingly owned by the business
Molten metal glows hot on a conveyor belt, illuminating the faces of busy and attentive workers. It is an image of industrial power and might, from an era when Germany was hurtling towards decades of devastating war.
The 1910 painting, by the artist Hans Baluschek, was called Eisenwalzwerk (Iron Rolling Mill). It had been owned, and was likely commissioned by Heinrich Eisner, who had helped build the Hahn'sche Werke steel business into one of the most high-tech and sprawling companies in central Europe. The documents in the suitcase showed that this was Antony's great-grandfather.
Antony Easton
Eisenwaldzwerk - a painting by the German artist, Hans Baluschek
More research revealed that, at the turn of the 20th Century, Heinrich was one of the wealthiest businessmen in Germany - the equivalent of a modern multi-billionaire.
His company manufactured tubular steel, with factories spread across Germany, Poland and Russia.
Heinrich, and his wife, Olga, owned several properties in and around Berlin, including an impressive six-storey property in the city centre with marble floors and a cream-white facade.
A photograph from the early 1900s shows a man with a softly rounded belly and a straight white moustache. Heinrich wears a black suit, and Olga sits next to him, crowned with a crystal tiara.
Antony Easton
Antony's great-grandparents, Olga and Heinrich Eisner, pictured in the early 1900s
When he died in 1918, Heinrich left shares in his company - and his personal fortune - to his son Rudolf, recently returned from fighting in World War One.
The war had been a human catastrophe, but Hahn'sche Werke had prospered in that period, satisfying the German military's demand for steel. Rudolf and his family also successfully weathered the economic and political chaos which haunted their country after the fighting.
However, in a few years, all would be lost.
Everything changes
In notes found by Antony in the suitcase, Peter recalled overhearing conversations between his parents, and whispers about Nazi threats. Jews were being blamed by Adolf Hitler and his supporters for Germany's defeat in WW1, and for the economic travails that followed.
Rudolf Eisner believed he would be safe if he made his company invaluable to the Nazi regime. For a time, this seemed to work, but as anti-Jewish laws became more and more extreme, and the abuse they witnessed around them worsened, he began to reconsider.
In March 1938, the government came after Hahn'sche Werke. Under immense pressure from the authorities, the Jewish-owned company was sold at a fire-sale price to Mannesmann, an industrial conglomerate whose CEO, Wilhelm Zangen, was a Nazi supporter.
Getty Images
Berlin 1934: Jewish-owned businesses, such as this department store, were targeted by the Nazis soon after they came to power
"It is almost impossible to quantify the wealth stolen and how much those assets are worth today," says David de Jong, author of the book Nazi Billionaires, which retraces the looting of Jewish businesses under the Third Reich.
In 2000, Mannesmann was taken over by Vodaphone in a deal worth more than £100bn - the largest commercial acquisition on record at the time. At least a portion of the industrial assets included in that sale would have once been part of the Eisner business empire.
The dismantling of Hahn'sche Werke, and the arrest of members of the company, made the Eisners realise they needed to flee. But by 1937, any Jewish family who tried to leave Germany was forced to surrender 92% of its wealth to the state - paying a host of levies known as the Reichsfluchtsteuer or Reich Flight Tax.
The Eisners faced losing what remained of their wealth.
The deal
At the height of this crisis, a man named Martin Hartig, an economist and tax adviser according to records in Berlin's archives, began to loom large in the Eisners' lives.
Throughout the 1930s, his name had featured repeatedly in the guest book at the Eisner country estate, thanking them for their generous hospitality.
Herr Hartig, who wasn't Jewish, appears to have offered the family a solution to the impending confiscation of their assets by the Nazis. They signed over key elements of their personal fortune to him - chiefly the multiple properties they owned and their contents - thereby sheltering them from laws targeting Jews.
Antony Easton
Antony's grandparents, Hildegarde and Rudolf Eisner
Antony believes his grandparents assumed Hartig would one day give the assets back to them.
They were wrong. Instead, he permanently transferred the Eisner assets into his own name.
The BBC found copies of the original sales documents in Germany's federal archives and shared them with three independent experts. All three concluded that this deal was evidence of a "forced sale" - a term widely used to describe the dispossession of Jewish assets under the Nazis.
Despite losing the fortune they had built over generations, Antony's grandparents and father managed to escape Germany in 1938. Train tickets, luggage tags and hotel brochures preserved in Peter's suitcase allowed Antony to retrace their journey.
The family went to Czechoslovakia and then Poland, barely staying one step ahead of the Nazis, before catching one of the last ships bound for England in July 1939.
Charlie Northcott/BBC
Peter's suitcase contained records of the Eisner family's escape from Germany
They had lost the equivalent of billions, but they were among the luckier members of the Eisner family. Most of their relatives were rounded up and killed in concentration camps. Rudolf himself died in 1945 after having spent most of the war - like many other German refugees - interned by the British on the Isle of Man.
Meeting the Hartigs
The next step for Antony was to find out what had happened to the Eisner family fortune, and to Martin Hartig.
He hired an experienced investigator, Yana Slavova, to find out what exactly had been stolen, how it had changed hands, and where it was today.
Within weeks, Yana had uncovered troves of documents about his relatives, including details of their properties and possessions.
She was able to trace the painting Antony had discovered at the beginning of his journey. Eisenwalzwerk was in the collection of the Brohan Museum in Berlin.
Early attempts to reclaim the artwork ran into problems regarding the evidence. Could Antony prove that its sale was tied to Nazi persecution? How did he know it hadn't changed hands multiple times legitimately before ending up in the museum?
A breakthrough came when Yana unearthed correspondence between the museum and an art dealer at the time of the sale.
The art dealer had sold the painting from one of the Eisners' former family homes - a property taken over by Martin Hartig in 1938. Hartig had lived the rest of his life there, meticulously restoring the building after damage during the fall of Berlin, before dying of natural causes in 1965.
After Hartig's death, the property passed to his daughter, who was now in her 80s. She had gifted the house to her own children in 2014, and had moved to a country cottage, where she arranged to meet Antony and Yana.
The elderly lady made them tea and cakes, which they ate in the living room under a portrait of her father - a man with thick-rimmed glasses and oiled hair, gaunt in the face and wearing a black suit. It had been painted in 1945, just after the end of World War Two.
Martin Hartig's daughter had a very different story to the one Antony and Yana were expecting.
She told them her father had always been opposed to the Nazis and had helped save the Eisners, who she described as great friends, from the Holocaust. She said he helped convince them to get away, urging the family: "You can't stay here. Go to Great Britain, to London."
Her father had also told her he helped them smuggle paintings out of Germany by taking them out of their frames and hiding them among clothes.
When asked about the properties her family took over from the Eisners in 1938, she said they were all legitimate purchases.
"My father bought two houses, legally," she said. "It always had to be very correct."
Antony Easton
A memorial outside the former concentration camp at Theresienstadt marks the place where many of the Eisner family died
Other members of the family were more open to the possibility that their ancestor may have exploited the Eisners.
Vincent, Martin Hartig's great-grandson, is in his 20s and training to be a carpenter.
He admitted to feeling that his home, where Antony's grandparents once lived, may have had an uncomfortable past.
"I mean of course I was curious at some point - where does it come from that we as a family live in this nice place," he said. "I've also asked myself the question, how were the circumstances?"
After discovering what happened to Antony's Jewish family, Vincent said he thought the Eisners had little choice when they passed their property to his great-grandfather.
'It's not about the money'
Antony has no recourse for filing a restitution case for his grandparents' property.
His grandmother, Hildegard - Rudolf's widow - tried to reclaim it in the 1950s, but backed down after a legal challenge by Hartig. The statute of limitations for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution to claim properties in former West Germany has also now passed.
For the artworks taken from the Eisner family, however, there is still hope for recovering what was lost.
Earlier this year, the Brohan Museum in Berlin informed Antony that it intended to return the Eisenwalzwerk painting to the descendants of Henrich Eisner. The museum declined an interview with the BBC while the process remains ongoing.
Another painting has been returned to Antony from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and a third claim for an artwork in Austria also remains outstanding.
Among the evidence Antony's investigation has unearthed is a list made by the Gestapo, detailing specific artefacts and paintings which were seized from his relatives. There is a chance his family could find and reclaim more assets in the future.
"I've always said about restitution, it's not about objects and money and property, it's about people," says Antony. In researching his family's past, he has recovered detailed knowledge of who his father and his grandparents once were.
"All of this process has turned them into real people, who had real lives."
Antony Easton
Restitution is "not about objects... it's about people", says Antony
This knowledge has now been passed on to a new generation. The Eisner name may have disappeared when Peter sailed to Britain in 1939, but it now lives again. Antony's great-nephew, Caspian, born in August 2024, was given the middle name of Eisner.
Antony says he was deeply moved by his niece's decision to honour their long-lost family.
"You know, as long as Caspian's around, that name will still be around with him," he says. "People will say, 'that's an interesting middle name - what's the story there?'"
Edward Serotta created an archive of 1,230 in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors about how they lived, both before and after. “Every one of them comes with a story,” he said.
It was 2009, and Antony Easton's father, Peter, had recently died. As Antony started to engage with the messy business of probate, he came across a small brown leather case in his father's old flat in the Hampshire town of Lymington.
Inside were immaculate German bank notes, photo albums, envelopes full of notes recording different chapters of his life - and a birth certificate.
Peter Roderick Easton, who had prided himself on his "Englishness" (and been an Anglican) had, in fact, been born and raised in pre-war Germany as Peter Hans Rudolf Eisner, a member of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Berlin.
Charlie Northcott/BBC
The suitcase that held Antony's father's secrets
Despite hints about his father's origins growing up, the contents of the suitcase shone a light into a past that Antony knew almost nothing about. The revelations would lead him on a decade-long trail, revealing a family devastated by the Holocaust, a vanished fortune worth billions of pounds and a legacy of artwork and property stolen under Nazi rule.
Black-and-white photographs gave a glimpse of Peter's early life, far removed from his son's modest upbringing in London - they showed a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, mansions staffed by servants, staircases ornately carved with angels.
More ominously, one picture showed 12-year-old Peter Eisner smiling with friends, a Nazi flag rippling in the distance.
Antony Easton
Antony's father, Peter (in the middle) aged 12
"I felt it was a hand reaching out from the past," says Antony.
He says his father was a quiet and serious man, if prone to bouts of anger. He avoided talking about his childhood and always shut down questions about his slight German accent.
"There were clues that [he wasn't] really like other people… There was a darkness around his world," says Antony.
An immense fortune
The next big clue about Antony's family history came from a work of art.
Enlisting the help of a friend who spoke fluent German, he asked her to dig into a company called Hahn'sche Werke, references to which were peppered among the documents in the suitcase. After searching online, she sent Antony a photo of a painting, depicting the inside of a large steelworks - seemingly owned by the business
Molten metal glows hot on a conveyor belt, illuminating the faces of busy and attentive workers. It is an image of industrial power and might, from an era when Germany was hurtling towards decades of devastating war.
The 1910 painting, by the artist Hans Baluschek, was called Eisenwalzwerk (Iron Rolling Mill). It had been owned, and was likely commissioned by Heinrich Eisner, who had helped build the Hahn'sche Werke steel business into one of the most high-tech and sprawling companies in central Europe. The documents in the suitcase showed that this was Antony's great-grandfather.
Antony Easton
Eisenwaldzwerk - a painting by the German artist, Hans Baluschek
More research revealed that, at the turn of the 20th Century, Heinrich was one of the wealthiest businessmen in Germany - the equivalent of a modern multi-billionaire.
His company manufactured tubular steel, with factories spread across Germany, Poland and Russia.
Heinrich, and his wife, Olga, owned several properties in and around Berlin, including an impressive six-storey property in the city centre with marble floors and a cream-white facade.
A photograph from the early 1900s shows a man with a softly rounded belly and a straight white moustache. Heinrich wears a black suit, and Olga sits next to him, crowned with a crystal tiara.
Antony Easton
Antony's great-grandparents, Olga and Heinrich Eisner, pictured in the early 1900s
When he died in 1918, Heinrich left shares in his company - and his personal fortune - to his son Rudolf, recently returned from fighting in World War One.
The war had been a human catastrophe, but Hahn'sche Werke had prospered in that period, satisfying the German military's demand for steel. Rudolf and his family also successfully weathered the economic and political chaos which haunted their country after the fighting.
However, in a few years, all would be lost.
Everything changes
In notes found by Antony in the suitcase, Peter recalled overhearing conversations between his parents, and whispers about Nazi threats. Jews were being blamed by Adolf Hitler and his supporters for Germany's defeat in WW1, and for the economic travails that followed.
Rudolf Eisner believed he would be safe if he made his company invaluable to the Nazi regime. For a time, this seemed to work, but as anti-Jewish laws became more and more extreme, and the abuse they witnessed around them worsened, he began to reconsider.
In March 1938, the government came after Hahn'sche Werke. Under immense pressure from the authorities, the Jewish-owned company was sold at a fire-sale price to Mannesmann, an industrial conglomerate whose CEO, Wilhelm Zangen, was a Nazi supporter.
Getty Images
Berlin 1934: Jewish-owned businesses, such as this department store, were targeted by the Nazis soon after they came to power
"It is almost impossible to quantify the wealth stolen and how much those assets are worth today," says David de Jong, author of the book Nazi Billionaires, which retraces the looting of Jewish businesses under the Third Reich.
In 2000, Mannesmann was taken over by Vodaphone in a deal worth more than £100bn - the largest commercial acquisition on record at the time. At least a portion of the industrial assets included in that sale would have once been part of the Eisner business empire.
The dismantling of Hahn'sche Werke, and the arrest of members of the company, made the Eisners realise they needed to flee. But by 1937, any Jewish family who tried to leave Germany was forced to surrender 92% of its wealth to the state - paying a host of levies known as the Reichsfluchtsteuer or Reich Flight Tax.
The Eisners faced losing what remained of their wealth.
The deal
At the height of this crisis, a man named Martin Hartig, an economist and tax adviser according to records in Berlin's archives, began to loom large in the Eisners' lives.
Throughout the 1930s, his name had featured repeatedly in the guest book at the Eisner country estate, thanking them for their generous hospitality.
Herr Hartig, who wasn't Jewish, appears to have offered the family a solution to the impending confiscation of their assets by the Nazis. They signed over key elements of their personal fortune to him - chiefly the multiple properties they owned and their contents - thereby sheltering them from laws targeting Jews.
Antony Easton
Antony's grandparents, Hildegarde and Rudolf Eisner
Antony believes his grandparents assumed Hartig would one day give the assets back to them.
They were wrong. Instead, he permanently transferred the Eisner assets into his own name.
The BBC found copies of the original sales documents in Germany's federal archives and shared them with three independent experts. All three concluded that this deal was evidence of a "forced sale" - a term widely used to describe the dispossession of Jewish assets under the Nazis.
Despite losing the fortune they had built over generations, Antony's grandparents and father managed to escape Germany in 1938. Train tickets, luggage tags and hotel brochures preserved in Peter's suitcase allowed Antony to retrace their journey.
The family went to Czechoslovakia and then Poland, barely staying one step ahead of the Nazis, before catching one of the last ships bound for England in July 1939.
Charlie Northcott/BBC
Peter's suitcase contained records of the Eisner family's escape from Germany
They had lost the equivalent of billions, but they were among the luckier members of the Eisner family. Most of their relatives were rounded up and killed in concentration camps. Rudolf himself died in 1945 after having spent most of the war - like many other German refugees - interned by the British on the Isle of Man.
Meeting the Hartigs
The next step for Antony was to find out what had happened to the Eisner family fortune, and to Martin Hartig.
He hired an experienced investigator, Yana Slavova, to find out what exactly had been stolen, how it had changed hands, and where it was today.
Within weeks, Yana had uncovered troves of documents about his relatives, including details of their properties and possessions.
She was able to trace the painting Antony had discovered at the beginning of his journey. Eisenwalzwerk was in the collection of the Brohan Museum in Berlin.
Early attempts to reclaim the artwork ran into problems regarding the evidence. Could Antony prove that its sale was tied to Nazi persecution? How did he know it hadn't changed hands multiple times legitimately before ending up in the museum?
A breakthrough came when Yana unearthed correspondence between the museum and an art dealer at the time of the sale.
The art dealer had sold the painting from one of the Eisners' former family homes - a property taken over by Martin Hartig in 1938. Hartig had lived the rest of his life there, meticulously restoring the building after damage during the fall of Berlin, before dying of natural causes in 1965.
After Hartig's death, the property passed to his daughter, who was now in her 80s. She had gifted the house to her own children in 2014, and had moved to a country cottage, where she arranged to meet Antony and Yana.
The elderly lady made them tea and cakes, which they ate in the living room under a portrait of her father - a man with thick-rimmed glasses and oiled hair, gaunt in the face and wearing a black suit. It had been painted in 1945, just after the end of World War Two.
Martin Hartig's daughter had a very different story to the one Antony and Yana were expecting.
She told them her father had always been opposed to the Nazis and had helped save the Eisners, who she described as great friends, from the Holocaust. She said he helped convince them to get away, urging the family: "You can't stay here. Go to Great Britain, to London."
Her father had also told her he helped them smuggle paintings out of Germany by taking them out of their frames and hiding them among clothes.
When asked about the properties her family took over from the Eisners in 1938, she said they were all legitimate purchases.
"My father bought two houses, legally," she said. "It always had to be very correct."
Antony Easton
A memorial outside the former concentration camp at Theresienstadt marks the place where many of the Eisner family died
Other members of the family were more open to the possibility that their ancestor may have exploited the Eisners.
Vincent, Martin Hartig's great-grandson, is in his 20s and training to be a carpenter.
He admitted to feeling that his home, where Antony's grandparents once lived, may have had an uncomfortable past.
"I mean of course I was curious at some point - where does it come from that we as a family live in this nice place," he said. "I've also asked myself the question, how were the circumstances?"
After discovering what happened to Antony's Jewish family, Vincent said he thought the Eisners had little choice when they passed their property to his great-grandfather.
'It's not about the money'
Antony has no recourse for filing a restitution case for his grandparents' property.
His grandmother, Hildegard - Rudolf's widow - tried to reclaim it in the 1950s, but backed down after a legal challenge by Hartig. The statute of limitations for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution to claim properties in former West Germany has also now passed.
For the artworks taken from the Eisner family, however, there is still hope for recovering what was lost.
Earlier this year, the Brohan Museum in Berlin informed Antony that it intended to return the Eisenwalzwerk painting to the descendants of Henrich Eisner. The museum declined an interview with the BBC while the process remains ongoing.
Another painting has been returned to Antony from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and a third claim for an artwork in Austria also remains outstanding.
Among the evidence Antony's investigation has unearthed is a list made by the Gestapo, detailing specific artefacts and paintings which were seized from his relatives. There is a chance his family could find and reclaim more assets in the future.
"I've always said about restitution, it's not about objects and money and property, it's about people," says Antony. In researching his family's past, he has recovered detailed knowledge of who his father and his grandparents once were.
"All of this process has turned them into real people, who had real lives."
Antony Easton
Restitution is "not about objects... it's about people", says Antony
This knowledge has now been passed on to a new generation. The Eisner name may have disappeared when Peter sailed to Britain in 1939, but it now lives again. Antony's great-nephew, Caspian, born in August 2024, was given the middle name of Eisner.
Antony says he was deeply moved by his niece's decision to honour their long-lost family.
"You know, as long as Caspian's around, that name will still be around with him," he says. "People will say, 'that's an interesting middle name - what's the story there?'"
Trump and Finnish President Alexander Stubb met at the White House earlier this month
Donald Trump is the "only one who can force" Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table over the war in Ukraine, Finland's president has told the BBC.
Alexander Stubb also said that Finland would never recognise occupied Crimea as part of Russia, and that he wanted to ensure Ukraine became an EU and hopefully Nato member once the war was over.
BBC Radio 4's Today programme spoke to President Stubb ahead of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's meeting with Trump at the White House on Friday, where he told the US president: "I think we can end this war with your help."
Meanwhile, Trump said that Putin has agreed to meet face-to-face with him in Hungary.
The US leader said on Friday that Putin "wants to get it ended. I think that President Zelensky wants to get it ended. Now we have to get it done".
Zelensky said in the White House that Ukraine was ready to talk in any format and wanted peace, but argued that Putin needed to be "pressured" into ending the war.
In August, Trump and Putin met in Alaska for a summit that did not result in a breakthrough, or yield a further meeting involving Zelensky.
Stubb said Trump had once asked him - over a game of golf - whether he could trust Putin; and Stubb's answer was no.
"What we need is not so much the power of the carrot to convince Russia to the negotiating table, it's more of the stick that will bring them.
"So you have to force Russia to come to the negotiating table for peace and that's the deal President Trump is trying to make."
He said Trump "has been giving the carrot to President Putin, and the carrot was in Alaska, and of course now if you look at the language that he has put forward lately, there has been more stick".
Stubb was optimistic about Trump's ability, saying he believed peace negotiations had probably advanced more in the past eight months during Trump's second term than in the previous three years.
Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Stubb said Finland would never recognise Crimea, or the regions of Donetsk or Luhansk, as Russian. Russia controls 70% of Donetsk and nearly all of neighbouring Luhansk.
He said "the only ones who can decide on the land issue are the Ukrainians themselves".
"I want to make sure that Ukraine, when this war is over, retains its independence, retains its sovereignty - in other words becomes an EU member state and hopefully a Nato member - and also maintains its territorial integrity. That is what we are all fighting for right now," Stubb said.
Trump said in August that there would be "no going into Nato by Ukraine" as part of a peace deal.
The US president previously floated the idea that there may be some "land swaps" in a future peace deal, but then, in September, said Kyiv could "win all of Ukraine back in its original form".
When asked why Trump had apparently changed his tune, Stubb said it was because Russia was not advancing - seizing only 1% of Ukrainian territory in the past 1,000 days. Ukraine had also been able to push back, he said.
Trump is 'the only one who can force' Putin to negotiating table, Finland's president tells BBC
Stubb said Russia's economy - smaller than Italy's - was suffering, with the country's reserves depleted, growth "pretty much around zero", and inflation raised to between 10% and 20%.
Stubb said economic threats should be used to bring Russia to the table, most importantly giving €200bn (£173bn) worth of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine as a loan that would stay there if Russia did not pay compensation after peace negotiations.
He also wanted to see exports of Russian oil and gas to Europe - which have dropped by 80% - cut off. Sanctions could be put on countries that buy Russian oil and gas, he said, in addition to the 19th European sanctions package targeting Russia.
Stubb said "all the strategic games of Putin have been an utter failure". Russia had been unsuccessful in trying to take over Ukraine, to divide Europe and to split Nato, with two new members - Finland and Sweden - added instead.
He said Europe's "coalition of the willing" was ready to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, with the key help in the air, on the seas and with intelligence.
But they needed a backstop from the US, specifically in air defences, intelligence and operations, he said.
Stubb said he hoped to see some results from a two-phase peace process - the first a ceasefire to stop the killing and the second an extended peace process - "in coming days and weeks".
"We'll keep on working at it. The key is to engage and try to find solutions and be pragmatic. In foreign policy you always have to deal with the world as it is, not what you would wish it to be, but let's do peace."
The Marines plan to fire 155-millimeter artillery shells over a major freeway in Southern California on Saturday as part of a demonstration at Camp Pendleton.
A blood test for more than 50 types of cancer could help speed up diagnosis according to a new study.
Results of a trial in north America show that the test was able to identify a wide range of cancers, of which three quarters don't have any form of screening programme.
More than half the cancers were detected at an early stage, where they are easier to treat and potentially curable.
The Galleri test, made by American pharmaceutical firm Grail, can detect fragments of cancerous DNA that have broken off a tumour and are circulating in the blood.
Impressive results
The trial followed 25,000 adults from the US and Canada over a year.
Nearly one in a 100 of those tested had a positive result and in 62% of these cancer was later confirmed.
The test correctly ruled out cancer in over 99% of those who tested negative.
When combined with breast, bowel and cervical screening it increased the number of cancers detected overall seven-fold.
Crucially, three quarters of cancers detected were for those which have no screening programme such as ovarian, liver, stomach bladder and pancreas.
The blood test correctly identified the origin of the cancer in 9 out of 10 cases.
These impressive results suggest the blood test could eventually have a major role to play in diagnosing cancer earlier.
Scientists not involved in the research say more evidence is needed to show whether the blood test reduces deaths from cancer.
The topline results are to be released at the European Society for Medical Oncology congress in Berlin, but the full details have yet to be published in a peer reviewed journal.
Much will depend on the results of a three-year trial involving 140,000 NHS patients in England, which will be published next year.
The NHS has previously said that if the results are successful, it would extend the tests to a further one million people.
The lead researcher, Dr Nima Nabavizadeh, Associate Professor of Radiation Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University said the latest data show that the test could "fundamentally change our approach to cancer screening, helping to detect many types of cancer earlier, when the chance of successful treatment or even cure are the greatest".
But Clare Turnbull, Professor of Translational Cancer Genetics at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: "Data from randomised studies, with mortality as an endpoint, will be absolutely essential to establish whether seemingly earlier-stage detection by Galleri translates into benefits in mortality."
Sir Harpal Kumar, President of Biopharma at Grail, told the BBC: "We think these results are very compelling. The opportunity in front of us is that we can find many more cancers - and many of the more aggressive cancers - at a much earlier stage when we have more effective and potentially curative treatments."
Naser Turabi of Cancer Research UK said: "Further research is needed to avoid overdiagnosing cancers that may not have caused harm. The UK National Screening Committee will play a critical role in reviewing the evidence and determining whether these tests should be adopted by the NHS."
The ring sits in the centre of the hall, with a temple roof suspended above it, and a round LED screen above that
There are not many sports that can keep an audience enraptured through 45 minutes of ceremony before the first point is even contested.
And yet, the intricate traditions unfolding in a small clay ring - virtually unchanged in hundreds of years - managed to do just that.
Welcome, then, to the Grand Sumo Tournament - a five-day event at the Royal Albert Hall featuring 40 of the very best sumo wrestlers showcasing a sport which can date its first mention back to 23BC.
London's Victorian concert venue has been utterly transformed, complete with six-tonne Japanese temple roof suspended above the ring.
It is here the wrestlers, known as rikishi, will perform their leg stomps to drive away evil spirits, and where they will clap to get the attention of the gods.
And above all this ancient ceremony, a giant, revolving LED screen which wouldn't look out of place at an American basketball game, offering the audience all the stats and replays they could want.
Sumo may be ancient, and may have strict rules governing every aspect of a rikishi's conduct, but it still exists in a modern world.
And that modern world is helping spread sumo far beyond Japan's borders.
Getty Images
Throwing salt, like Hoshoryu here, helps purify the ring ahead of the bout
It was a "random video" which first caught Sian Spencer's attention a couple of years ago.
This was quickly followed by the discovery of dedicated YouTube channels for a couple of the sumo stables, where rikishi live and train, waking up early to practice, followed by a high protein stew called a chankonabe, and then an afternoon nap - all in the service of bulking up.
Then she discovered the bi-monthly, 15 day championships, known as basho, and from there, she was hooked.
The London tournament was simply a "once-in-a-lifetime", not-to-be-missed, opportunity to see it all in real life, the 35-year-old says.
Flora Drury/BBC
Sian Spencer and Luke May travelled to London for the event
Julia and her partner Cezar, who live in Edinburgh, discovered sumo through a more traditional route: a trip to Japan six years ago.
"We saw it as a very touristy activity, but we actually ended up loving the sport," says Julia, 34.
"From there on, we tried to find communities, information, just to learn more and more about it," Cezar, 36, adds.
Colleagues, friends and family, they found, could be quite taken aback by their new passion.
"It's the only sport we watch," explains Julia - so they found like-minded people on messaging apps like Telegram.
"We found Italian groups, English groups," says Julia.
"Outside of Japan, online is the only way to interact with the sport," adds Cezar.
Going to Japan is almost the only way to see a top-flight sumo tournament.
This week's event in London is only the second time the tournament has visited the city - the first time was in 1991 - while the last overseas trip was to Jakarta in 2013.
But even going to Japan isn't a guarantee of getting a seat. Last year was the first time in 24 years that all six of the bi-monthly, 15-day events had sold out in 28 years, Kyodo News reported - fueled by interest at home, and by the tourist boom which saw more than 36m foreigners visit in 2024.
So for many, the London tournament is the first time they have watched sumo in person - and it doesn't disapoint.
"Seeing it up close, you get a sense of the speed and the power which you don't get on TV. It was incredible," says Caspar Eliot, a 36-year-old fan from London. "They are so big."
To win, one man needs to push another out of the ring or to the ground using brute strength. The majority use one of two styles to achieve this, often in split seconds - pushing, or grappling.
Either way, the sound of the two rikishi colliding in the first moment of the match reverberates around the hall.
Getty Images
Yokozuna Onosato performs rituals before the bout
Getty Images
For many fans, this was the first time witnessing the speed and power of the rikishi
PA
The rikishi all wear elaborate aprons known as kesho-mawashi during the entering ceremony
AFP via Getty Images
The fights are not sorted by weight, which means a rikishi can come up against someone 40kg (7.8 stone) or more heavier than him
Caspar and his wife Megha Okhai had been among those lucky enough to get tickets when they visited Japan last year - only for them not to arrive in the post in time.
It didn't stop them falling head over heels, however, and they have watched every basho this year. So when it came to the London Grand Sumo Tournament, they weren't taking chances.
"I think we had four devices trying to book tickets," Caspar tells the BBC ahead of the event, displaying his sumo towels proudly - a must for diehard fans. "We got front row seats, on the cushions."
The cushions right next to the ring are of course highly prized - but also, a bit risky.
On Thursday, it was all 181kg and 191cm of Shonannoumi which went plummeting into the crowd - perhaps making those in the slightly cheaper seats breathe a sigh of relief.
PA Media
Thursday's bout between Tokihayate and Shonannoumi resulted in both men falling into the audience below
PA Media
The two weigh a combined 320kg
AFP via Getty Images
A six-tonne Japanese temple roof hangs over the ring
Of course, the size of the rikishi is one of the first things most people think of when they think of sumo. The Albert Hall's director of programming revealed to The Guardian earlier this week that they "had to source and buy new chairs which can take up to 200kg in weight".
But sumo - for all its sell-out events - is not without its troubles behind the scenes. A series of scandals over the last couple of decades around bullying, match fixing and sexism have dented its image.
And then there is the fact that last year - while being a bumper one for ticket sales - saw the lowest number of new recruits joining the stables.
Perhaps the strict life of a rikishi doesn't look as appealing as it once might have. Its popularity among young Japanese is also being threatened by other sports, like baseball. As Thomas Fabbri, the BBC's resident sumo fan, said: "My Japanese friends think I'm mad, as they see it as a sport for old people."
Japan's falling birthrate will also not help - nor is the Japanese Sumo Association's rule which restricts each stable to just one foreign rikishi. Despite this, Mongolians have dominated for the past few years - and one of the most exciting rising stars hails from Ukraine.
Dan Milne-Morey, Megha Okhai and Caspar Eliot with a few of their sumo towels - which represent their favourite rikishi
Not that any of this has worried fans in London.
"Seeing all this ritual and ceremony that goes with sumo is quite special," fan Sian says. "Now, seeing it in person, you feel like you are more part of it."
Julia and Cesar agree in a message the next day.
"It's a Japanese sport but we didn't feel out of place, so many people from all around the world around us."
For Megha, the drama "made it so incredible" - as did meeting the other fans.
"Getting out of a very niche Reddit community and being able to see all these sumo fans in person and being able to chat with other people who are just as into this as we are - it was worth every penny of sumo gold."
Additonal reporting by Thomas Fabbri
Want to watch? Audiences can tune in via BBC iPlayer, the BBC Red Button, the BBC Sport website and app.
The ring sits in the centre of the hall, with a temple roof suspended above it, and a round LED screen above that
There are not many sports that can keep an audience enraptured through 45 minutes of ceremony before the first point is even contested.
And yet, the intricate traditions unfolding in a small clay ring - virtually unchanged in hundreds of years - managed to do just that.
Welcome, then, to the Grand Sumo Tournament - a five-day event at the Royal Albert Hall featuring 40 of the very best sumo wrestlers showcasing a sport which can date its first mention back to 23BC.
London's Victorian concert venue has been utterly transformed, complete with six-tonne Japanese temple roof suspended above the ring.
It is here the wrestlers, known as rikishi, will perform their leg stomps to drive away evil spirits, and where they will clap to get the attention of the gods.
And above all this ancient ceremony, a giant, revolving LED screen which wouldn't look out of place at an American basketball game, offering the audience all the stats and replays they could want.
Sumo may be ancient, and may have strict rules governing every aspect of a rikishi's conduct, but it still exists in a modern world.
And that modern world is helping spread sumo far beyond Japan's borders.
Getty Images
Throwing salt, like Hoshoryu here, helps purify the ring ahead of the bout
It was a "random video" which first caught Sian Spencer's attention a couple of years ago.
This was quickly followed by the discovery of dedicated YouTube channels for a couple of the sumo stables, where rikishi live and train, waking up early to practice, followed by a high protein stew called a chankonabe, and then an afternoon nap - all in the service of bulking up.
Then she discovered the bi-monthly, 15 day championships, known as basho, and from there, she was hooked.
The London tournament was simply a "once-in-a-lifetime", not-to-be-missed, opportunity to see it all in real life, the 35-year-old says.
Flora Drury/BBC
Sian Spencer and Luke May travelled to London for the event
Julia and her partner Cezar, who live in Edinburgh, discovered sumo through a more traditional route: a trip to Japan six years ago.
"We saw it as a very touristy activity, but we actually ended up loving the sport," says Julia, 34.
"From there on, we tried to find communities, information, just to learn more and more about it," Cezar, 36, adds.
Colleagues, friends and family, they found, could be quite taken aback by their new passion.
"It's the only sport we watch," explains Julia - so they found like-minded people on messaging apps like Telegram.
"We found Italian groups, English groups," says Julia.
"Outside of Japan, online is the only way to interact with the sport," adds Cezar.
Going to Japan is almost the only way to see a top-flight sumo tournament.
This week's event in London is only the second time the tournament has visited the city - the first time was in 1991 - while the last overseas trip was to Jakarta in 2013.
But even going to Japan isn't a guarantee of getting a seat. Last year was the first time in 24 years that all six of the bi-monthly, 15-day events had sold out in 28 years, Kyodo News reported - fueled by interest at home, and by the tourist boom which saw more than 36m foreigners visit in 2024.
So for many, the London tournament is the first time they have watched sumo in person - and it doesn't disapoint.
"Seeing it up close, you get a sense of the speed and the power which you don't get on TV. It was incredible," says Caspar Eliot, a 36-year-old fan from London. "They are so big."
To win, one man needs to push another out of the ring or to the ground using brute strength. The majority use one of two styles to achieve this, often in split seconds - pushing, or grappling.
Either way, the sound of the two rikishi colliding in the first moment of the match reverberates around the hall.
Getty Images
Yokozuna Onosato performs rituals before the bout
Getty Images
For many fans, this was the first time witnessing the speed and power of the rikishi
PA
The rikishi all wear elaborate aprons known as kesho-mawashi during the entering ceremony
AFP via Getty Images
The fights are not sorted by weight, which means a rikishi can come up against someone 40kg (7.8 stone) or more heavier than him
Caspar and his wife Megha Okhai had been among those lucky enough to get tickets when they visited Japan last year - only for them not to arrive in the post in time.
It didn't stop them falling head over heels, however, and they have watched every basho this year. So when it came to the London Grand Sumo Tournament, they weren't taking chances.
"I think we had four devices trying to book tickets," Caspar tells the BBC ahead of the event, displaying his sumo towels proudly - a must for diehard fans. "We got front row seats, on the cushions."
The cushions right next to the ring are of course highly prized - but also, a bit risky.
On Thursday, it was all 181kg and 191cm of Shonannoumi which went plummeting into the crowd - perhaps making those in the slightly cheaper seats breathe a sigh of relief.
PA Media
Thursday's bout between Tokihayate and Shonannoumi resulted in both men falling into the audience below
PA Media
The two weigh a combined 320kg
AFP via Getty Images
A six-tonne Japanese temple roof hangs over the ring
Of course, the size of the rikishi is one of the first things most people think of when they think of sumo. The Albert Hall's director of programming revealed to The Guardian earlier this week that they "had to source and buy new chairs which can take up to 200kg in weight".
But sumo - for all its sell-out events - is not without its troubles behind the scenes. A series of scandals over the last couple of decades around bullying, match fixing and sexism have dented its image.
And then there is the fact that last year - while being a bumper one for ticket sales - saw the lowest number of new recruits joining the stables.
Perhaps the strict life of a rikishi doesn't look as appealing as it once might have. Its popularity among young Japanese is also being threatened by other sports, like baseball. As Thomas Fabbri, the BBC's resident sumo fan, said: "My Japanese friends think I'm mad, as they see it as a sport for old people."
Japan's falling birthrate will also not help - nor is the Japanese Sumo Association's rule which restricts each stable to just one foreign rikishi. Despite this, Mongolians have dominated for the past few years - and one of the most exciting rising stars hails from Ukraine.
Dan Milne-Morey, Megha Okhai and Caspar Eliot with a few of their sumo towels - which represent their favourite rikishi
Not that any of this has worried fans in London.
"Seeing all this ritual and ceremony that goes with sumo is quite special," fan Sian says. "Now, seeing it in person, you feel like you are more part of it."
Julia and Cesar agree in a message the next day.
"It's a Japanese sport but we didn't feel out of place, so many people from all around the world around us."
For Megha, the drama "made it so incredible" - as did meeting the other fans.
"Getting out of a very niche Reddit community and being able to see all these sumo fans in person and being able to chat with other people who are just as into this as we are - it was worth every penny of sumo gold."
Additonal reporting by Thomas Fabbri
Want to watch? Audiences can tune in via BBC iPlayer, the BBC Red Button, the BBC Sport website and app.