This year is on course to be the UK's hottest since records began, according to the Met Office, as climate change continues to drive temperatures to new heights.

With just over a week still to go, the average UK air temperature across 2025 is on track to end up at about 10.05C.

A cooler Christmas could affect final figures, but it is likely that 2025 will edge out the current record of 10.03C from 2022, the Met Office says.

Along with a lack of rainfall, the persistent warmth left the country vulnerable to droughts and wildfires through the spring and summer, with temperatures peaking at 35.8C.

While temperatures vary naturally from year to year, scientists could not be clearer that human-caused climate change is driving the UK's rapidly warming trend.

By the end of 2025, the UK's 10 warmest years on record will all have taken place in the last two decades, in measurements going back to the late 1800s.

"Anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change is causing the warming in the UK as it's causing the warming across the world," said Amy Doherty, a climate scientist at the Met Office.

"What we have seen in the past 40 years, and what we're going to continue to see, is more records broken, more extremely hot years [...] so what was normal 10 years ago, 20 years ago, will become [relatively] cool in the future," she told BBC News.

The Met Office's projection uses observed temperatures up to 21 December and assumes that the remaining days of the year follow the long-term December average.

As a result, the Met Office cannot say with certainty that 2025 will be the hottest year, but it is the most likely outcome.

It would be the sixth time this century that the UK has set a new annual temperature record, following 2002, 2003, 2006, 2014 and 2022.

"In terms of our climate, we are living in extraordinary times," said Mike Kendon, also of the Met Office.

"The changes we are seeing are unprecedented in observational records back to the 19th Century," he added.

The expected new record of 2025 has been built on persistent heat through the spring and summer.

Those long, hot, sunny days may feel like a distant memory as we head towards Christmas, but both spring and summer were the UK's warmest ever recorded.

Each month from March to August was more than 2C above the long-term average between 1961 and 1990.

And while temperatures may not have reached the peaks of 40C seen in July 2022, hot spells happened repeatedly.

Four separate - albeit relatively short-lived - heatwaves were declared across much of the country.

The UK Health Security Agency also issued several heat-health alerts through the summer.

Spring and summer were also marked by low rainfall. Spring was particularly dry - the UK's sixth driest since 1836.

Combined with the warm weather helping to dry out the soils, this lack of rainfall pushed large parts of the country towards drought.

Through the summer, official droughts were declared across several regions in England and Wales, by the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales respectively.

Parts of eastern Scotland also entered "significant water scarcity", according to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.

Recent rainfall has eased the situation across much of the country and most areas are no longer in official drought. But water levels are still below average in some places.

"There's a huge deficit to be made up, and there's a huge implication, not just for people who are farming the land [and] growing food, but our rivers, our aquifers, our availability of drinking water," said Jess Neumann, associate professor of hydrology at the University of Reading.

The repeated swings between drought and flooding were making it very hard for communities to adapt to increasing weather extremes, she added.

The prolonged dry, warm weather created ideal conditions for wildfires too.

By late April, the area of the UK burned by wildfires had already reached a new annual record, according to data from the Global Wildfires Information System going back to 2012.

More than 47,100 hectares (471 sq km or 182 sq miles) has now been burned throughout 2025 - smashing the previous high of 28,100 hectares of 2019.

As the UK continues to heat up - driven by humanity's greenhouse gas emissions - scientists expect the UK to experience more weather extremes.

"The conditions that people are going to experience are going to continue to change as they have in the last few years [with] more wildfires, more droughts, more heatwaves," said Dr Doherty.

"But also it's going to get wetter in the winter half-year, so from October to March [...] the rain that does fall will fall more intensely, and in heavier rain showers, causing that kind of flooding that we've been seeing this year as well," she added.

The UK has not been alone in experiencing extreme heat this year. The world is on course for its second or third warmest year ever recorded, according to the European Copernicus climate service.

But the international consensus on tackling climate change is also being tested, with the US and some other leading producers of fossil fuels rowing back on their net zero commitments.

Additional reporting by Justin Rowlatt and Kate Stephens

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Donald Trump has sparked a renewed disagreement with Denmark after appointing a special envoy to Greenland, the Arctic island he has said he would like to annex.

Trump announced on Sunday that Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, would become the US's special envoy to Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

Writing on social media, the US president said Landry understood how "essential Greenland is to our national security" and would advance US interests.

Greenland's prime minister said the island must "decide our own future" and its "territorial integrity must be respected".

The move angered Copenhagen, which will call the US ambassador for "an explanation".

Governor Landry said in a post on X it was an honour to serve in a "volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the United States", saying the role would not affect his duties as Louisiana governor.

Denmark's foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, described the appointment as "deeply upsetting" and warned Washington to respect Danish sovereignty.

He told Danish broadcaster TV2: "As long as we have a kingdom consisting of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, we cannot accept actions that undermine our territorial integrity."

Greenland's Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said the territory was willing to cooperate with the United States and other countries, but only on the basis of mutual respect.

He said: "The appointment of a special envoy does not change anything for us. We decide our own future. Greenland belongs to Greenlanders, and territorial integrity must be respected."

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has revived his long-standing interest with Greenland, citing its strategic location and mineral wealth.

He has refused to rule out using force to secure control of the island, a stance that has shocked Denmark, a Nato ally that has traditionally enjoyed close relations with Washington.

Greenland, home to about 57,000 people, has had extensive self-government since 1979, though defence and foreign policy remain in Danish hands. While most Greenlanders favour eventual independence from Denmark, opinion polls show overwhelming opposition to becoming part of the US.

The dispute comes as strategic competition in the Arctic grows, with melting ice opening new shipping routes and increasing access to valuable mineral resources.

Greenland's location between North America and Europe also makes it central to US and Nato security planning and puts it on the shortest route for missiles between Russia and the United States.

Vince Zampella, who co-created the widely-popular video game Call of Duty, has died in a car crash in California, aged 55.

Zampella's death was confirmed by Electronic Arts, which owns Respawn Entertainment, a game studio he co-founded.

The influential video game developer died after his car crashed and caught fire on a highway in Los Angeles on Sunday, US media report.

"This is an unimaginable loss, and our hearts are with Vince's family, his loved ones, and all those touched by his work," a spokesperson for Electronic Arts told the BBC.

Maybe there was a memo sent round the royal households of Europe, but many of this year's Christmas cards seem to have similar images of showing their families holding on to each other tenderly.

Touching, linking arms, holding hands, hugging, they're all sending messages about how close they are to each other.

It's like royal superglue has been applied, connecting them in these Christmas portraits. This is the era of the relatable royals.

The Prince and Princess of Wales have been leading the way, with a Christmas card showing a relaxed, informal family group cosying up to each other in the Norfolk countryside.

As with last year's card, they're continuing in a style that is far away from a stiff, formal portrait, showing a young family having fun together on a spring day, full of affection, dressed in jeans and jumpers.

Prince William has talked about making changes in his approach to the monarchy.

And this is projecting an image that they're like any other family, with eye-lines not looking down on the viewer, literally down to earth, sitting on the grass.

Compare that to this 1969 Christmas card, which shows the royals laughing, smiling and gathered around a boat. Presumably this was meant to feel relaxed and modern.

But they're fairly stiffly dressed, they're all standing apart and it looks like they've just been presented a prize on a game show.

Back to 2025 and King Charles and Queen Camilla are arm in arm in their Christmas card - a show of unity in what's been a busy year.

The picture is a mix of the friendly and the formal, taken on the first day of the state visit to Italy, when the couple were celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary.

The Queen is wearing a lily of the valley brooch, a symbol of enduring love.

That trip was in April, which accounts for the spring backdrop for this Christmas card. The setting is Villa Wolkonsky in Rome, the elegant residence of the UK's ambassador to Italy.

Prince Harry and Meghan are holding hands in their Christmas card - or in fact, a "Happy Holiday Season" card.

Unlike others they've got the season right, with some festive snow captured in a picture from the Invictus Game in Canada in February.

They look like a fashionable couple, smiling optimistically from behind their sunglasses. It's got a sense of movement.

Although the framing of the message isn't so intimate: "On behalf of the Office of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex."

This portrait of the Belgian royal family shows them as though on the way to some grand event. Or at least waiting at a very upmarket bus stop.

They've gone for a more polished look - suits, ties, long dresses - but also with a bit of greenery. The picture was presumably taken when it was warmer, outside their residence at the Palace of Laeken.

It's a multilingual country and the greeting inside - Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year - is in French, German, Flemish and English.

The Spanish royals have combined a range of styles with their Christmas card.

It's projecting a casual, approachable, family image, as if catching them accidentally on a walk in the countryside. No more ties or tiaras for these modern royals.

But at the same time, it has all the dynastic shape of a traditional court painting. A monarch and his family are looking out at us. It's Velasquez in jeans.

The setting, a place which won an award for the best village in the Asturias region, sends a message about supporting Spain's small communities and their traditional heritage.

King Felipe is 6ft 6in (1.97m) tall, so presumably the family group had to be arranged so that he didn't tower over them. For Spaniards, it's a case of very long to reign over us.

Monaco's royal Christmas card is much grander, with a big fire, oil painting, formal clothes, and a sense of regal order.

There's also a sighting of the Alan Partridge-style smart casual look.

Bonus points though for actually showing a bit of Christmas, with a tree and the log fire, unlike many of the other cards which are basically just people sending out pictures of themselves.

Another extra detail is the tiny dog smuggled into the picture, beside Charlene, Princess of Monaco. She's a former Olympic swimmer and so not shy about making a splash.

The Luxembourg royals, the Grand Duke Guillaume and the Grand Duchess Stephanie, have covered all the angles for a 2025 card.

It's got the touchy-feely, we're-not-uptight family atmosphere, full of playful laughs and children clambering over their parents.

It's also got a proper tree with decorations, there's a Rudolf reindeer toy and they've put some thought into all the splashes of red.

It might look a bit chaotic - but it's Christmassy.

But there was no contest for this year's winner. Juan Carlos, who abdicated as Spanish king in 2014, hit by scandals, now living in Abu Dhabi, sent an irresistible royal Christmas card.

Five small dogs in front of an artificial tree, looking regal in a kind of classic royal portrait line up. But it's more bark than Bach.

What does it mean? The light is glinting on the dogs' baubles. They look up with crumpled, hopeful faces. It's Christmas and that's a time for paws for thought.

Sign up here to get the latest royal stories and analysis every week with our Royal Watch newsletter. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

After making the hard decision to report a celebrity who she said sexually assaulted her, Jenny Evans discovered confidential details printed word for word in a national newspaper.

Then only 19, she racked her brain - could a friend have betrayed her? Was she being spied on?

Without knowing it, Jenny found herself in the middle of a corruption scandal that would eventually bring down some of the most powerful players in the UK press and police.

Instead of hiding away, Jenny funnelled her anger into training to become a journalist to uncover the truth for herself.

Warning: Contains distressing details of sexual violence

Jenny grew up in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, and discovered acting through free community drama classes.

At 18, she was cast in Twin Town and shortly afterwards, in 1997, she was on a night out with the production crew in London.

Jenny, now in her 40s, told Asya Fouks for the Lives Less Ordinary podcast there was a celebrity - not associated with the film - who she found herself with, along with one of his friends, at the end of the night.

She asked to borrow a phone to call a taxi but they refused.

"He put his hand to my chest and just pushed me so that I would lose my footing. And then he and his friend pounced, and then there was a sexual assault," she said.

When the men got bored with her, the famous man's friend called her a taxi.

Jenny was retching and shaking when the taxi pulled up and the driver, named Ken, "kept saying to me 'I think you've been raped. Let me take you to a police station'. And I just couldn't speak."

She was "too shocked and too scared" to go to the police and report it at that point - a feeling that lasted a long time.

Jenny wrote a letter to her friend about it at the time, and told her brother and mum.

She withdrew from life and it was only when her 24-year-old brother died when she was 23 that she decided to try "to live my life again".

She studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama and one night, when she was dancing with friends at a student bar, a friend arrived and dropped the late edition of the Sun on the table.

It reported that the famous man who had sexually assaulted her had been arrested after other women made similar allegations.

She said: "It was the first moment that it occurred to me that I hadn't got myself into a difficult situation and that this man and his friend could be serially violent."

This made her feel a "moral obligation to report" him, but said this was her experience and it was OK that most other survivors "don't want to report or ever talk" about their experience.

She was interviewed by police twice and then, four days later, she was with her boyfriend who was reading a tabloid when he looked at her and said: "I didn't know there was two of them."

He knew something had happened, but she had protected him from the intricate details of the assault.

Jenny was not named, but there in black and white was the confidential report she made just days earlier in the police station.

"It was terrifying," Jenny said.

She tried to figure out who could have sold the story to the newspaper, but no-one knew that level of detail.

Jenny told her case detective and he said he would come back to her, but he never did: "I was so young and naive, I didn't push him on it."

Jenny became "very paranoid", searching her home for recording devices, keeping curtains closed and checking friends and family's phones to see if they were speaking to journalists.

Then police told her there was enough evidence to charge the famous man for two counts of sexual assault, but none of the other women's cases had met the charging threshold.

At the time the famous man was saying his accusers were "making it up, they just want money, they just want fame'."

So just before the trial, Jenny's friend gave her the letter she had written after the sexual assault, thinking it was evidence Jenny was not jumping on "a bandwagon".

But because Jenny had detailed multiple instances of sexual violence that had happened to her, the police thought it discredited her.

She said it was hard to win any sexual assault case, but if it has happened multiple times the defence lawyers could make it "look as if you were asking for it" or "you've made them all up".

She did not want to be cross-examined on the letter, so the charges were dropped.

The now defunct News of the World newspaper then published an article with confidential details about the case falling apart and Jenny said her fear turned to anger.

So she took it upon herself to train as a journalist to find out how it happened.

Several years later, investigative reporter Nick Davies published an article on phone hacking, which is the illegal accessing of voicemails.

At this point in 2007 newspaper reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire had been convicted of phone hacking, and although their newspapers said they were just rogue operators, Nick was convinced the problem went deeper.

He tasked Jenny with getting the truth out of past and present reporters about dodgy newsgathering practices and finding people whose phones were hacked by Mulcaire.

She found her own name in his diaries but an incorrect phone number - so she knew this was not how her story was leaked.

The News of the World closed in 2011 after it was found to have been hacking into the phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians.

"I felt very emotional," Jenny said.

"They bullied a nation in a way, and I felt a huge sense of relief."

Jenny's case was never solved due to corruption within the Met Police, but after hiring a lawyer she did receive an apology and "tens of thousands of pounds" as a settlement.

The Met Police has been contacted for comment.

Now, she wants people, "especially young women", to know that when you feel "disenfranchised and powerless, there is real power in learning how to ask questions".

If you've been affected by the issues in this story, help and support is available via BBC Action Line.

They work 24/7 at high speeds and get searingly hot - but data centre computer chips get plenty of pampering. Some of them basically live at the spa.

"We'll have fluid that comes up and [then] shower down, or trickle down, onto a component," says Jonathan Ballon, chief executive at liquid cooling firm Iceotope. "Some things will get sprayed."

In other cases, the industrious gizmos recline in circulating baths of fluid, which ferries away the heat they generate, enabling them to function at very high speeds, known as "overclocking".

"We have customers that are overclocking at all times because there is zero risk of burning out the server," says Mr Ballon. He adds that one client, a hotel chain in the US, is planning to use heat from hotel servers to warm guest rooms, the hotel laundry and swimming pool.

Without cooling, data centres fall over.

In November, a cooling system failure at a data centre in the US sent financial trading tech offline at CME Group, the world's largest exchange operator. The company has since put in place additional cooling capacity to help protect against a repeat of this incident.

Currently, demand for data centres is booming, driven partly by the growth of AI technologies. But the huge amounts of energy and water that many of these facilities consume mean that they are increasingly controversial.

More than 200 environmental groups in the US recently demanded a moratorium on new data centres in the country. But there are some data centre firms that say they want to reduce their impact.

They have another incentive. Data centre computer chips are becoming increasingly powerful. So much so that many in the industry say traditional cooling methods – such as air cooling, where fans constantly blow air over the hottest components – is no longer sufficient for some operations.

Mr Ballon is aware of rising controversy around the construction of energy-devouring data centres. "Communities are pushing back on these projects," he says. "We require significantly less power and water. We don't have any fans whatsoever – we operate silently."

Iceotope says its approach to liquid cooling, which can soothe multiple components in a data centre, not just the processing chips, may reduce cooling-related energy demands by up to 80%.

The company's technology uses water to cool down the oil-based fluid that actually interacts with computer tech. But the water remains in a closed loop, so there is no need to continually draw more of it from local supplies.

I ask whether the oil-based fluids in the firm's cooling system are derived from fossil fuel products and he says some of them are, though he stresses that none contain PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, which are harmful to human health.

Some liquid-based data centre cooling technologies use refrigerants that do contain PFAS. Not only that, many refrigerants produce highly potent greenhouse gases, which threaten to exacerbate climate change.

Two-phase cooling systems use such refrigerants says Yulin Wang, a former senior technology analyst at IDTechEx, a market research firm. The refrigerant starts out as a liquid but heat from server components causes it to evaporate into a gas and this phase change soaks up a lot of energy, meaning it is an effective way of cooling things down.

In some designs, data centre tech is fully immersed in large quantities of PFAS-containing refrigerant. "Vapours can get out of the tank," adds Mr Wang. "There could be some safety issues." In other cases, the refrigerant is piped directly to the hottest components, computer chips, only.

Some companies that offer two-phase cooling are currently switching to PFAS-free refrigerants.

Over the years, firms have experimented with wildly different approaches to cooling, in a race to find the best means of keeping data centre gadgets happy.

Microsoft famously sank a tube-like container full of servers into the sea off Orkney, for example. The idea was that cold Scottish seawater would improve the efficiency of air-based cooling systems inside the device.

Last year, Microsoft confirmed that it had shuttered the project. But the company had learned much from it, says Alistair Speirs, general manager of global infrastructure in the Microsoft Azure business group. "Without [human] operators, less things went wrong – that informed some of our operational procedures," he says. Data centres that are more hands-off appear more reliable.

Initial findings showed the subsea data centre had a power usage effectiveness, or PUE, rating of 1.07 – suggesting it was far more efficient than the vast majority of land-based data centres. And it required zero water.

But in the end, Microsoft concluded that the economics of building and maintaining subsea data centres weren't very favourable.

The company is still working on liquid-based cooling ideas, including microfluidics, where tiny channels of liquid flow through the many layers of a silicon chip. "You can think of a liquid cooling maze through the silicon at nanometre scale," says Mr Speirs.

Researchers are coming up with other ideas, too.

In July, Renkun Chen, at the University of California San Diego, and colleagues, published a paper detailing their idea for a pore-filled membrane-based cooling technology that could help to cool chips passively – without the need to actively pump fluids or blow air around.

"Essentially, you are using heat to provide the pumping power," says Prof Chen. He compares it to the process by which water evaporates from a trees' leaves, inducing a pumping effect that draws more water up through the plant's trunk and along its branches to replenish the leaves. Prof Chen says he hopes to commercialise the technology.

New ways of cooling down data centre tech are increasingly sought-after, says Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at Hugging Face, a machine learning company.

This is partly due to demand for AI – including generative AI, or large language models (LLMs), which are the systems that power chat bots. In previous research, Dr Luccioni has shown that such technologies eat up lots of energy.

"If you have models that are very energy-intensive, then the cooling has to be stepped up a notch," she says.

Reasoning models, which explain their output in multiple steps, are even more demanding, she adds.

They use "hundreds or thousands of times more energy" than standard chat bots that just answer questions. Dr Luccioni calls for greater transparency from AI companies regarding how much energy their various products consume.

For Mr Ballon, LLMs are just one form of AI – and he argues they have already "reached their limit" in terms of productivity.

Spain's Christmas lottery has been welcomed as an "injection of hope" in the northwest of the country, where the jackpot handed out hundreds of millions of euros just months after wildfires had caused devastation.

Most of the first-prize-winning tickets in the lottery, known as El Gordo, had been bought by people in small towns in the province of León.

A single ticket, or décimo, costing 20 euros, is worth 400,000 euros if it bears the winning number, in this case 79432. Décimos come in strips of 10 and when many strips of the same number are sold to a group of neighbours or workmates, there is potential for a massive jackpot.

People in the town of La Bañeza shared out 468 million euros.

Among the recipients were members of a local football club in the town, which has a population of around 11,000.

The jackpot came four months after forest fires had torn through León, burning 8,000 hectares of land surrounding La Bañeza and killing a local man, 35-year-old Abel Ramos.

The sparsely populated, heavily forested north-west of Spain is used to wildfires, although during this record-breaking year, the area was particularly severely affected. Firefighters battled enormous blazes in León and the neighbouring Galicia region throughout much of August and during the summer 0.8 percent of the country's total surface area was burned.

According to the mayor of the town, Javier Carrera, the lottery win "means for La Bañeza an injection of excitement and hope," he told Spanish media. Carrera also mentioned the closure this year of a local sugar-beet factory which caused the loss of dozens of jobs.

Another town in the León province that was heavily affected by the summer's fires, Villablino, also took a massive share of the jackpot, receiving 200 million euros.

"We needed some good news," said the mayor, Mario Rivas.

On top of the blazes, five local men were killed in two separate mining accidents in nearby Asturias this year.

"It doesn't make up for the loss of the lives of our friends, but this shows us that there can also be good news," said Rivas.

Most of the winning tickets in Villablino were sold by a local Alzheimer's association.

In addition, the town of La Pola de Gordón, also in León and with a population of 3,000, shared out 60 million euros. Sixty-four million euros of jackpot money also went to a working-class district in Madrid.

In Villablino, Maribel Martín had one of the winning décimos, worth 400,000 euros. She was out doing grocery shopping when her son called her to give her the good news.

"We were really down and 200 million euros is a wonderful thing," she said

She is clear what she wants to do with the prize money. "Spread it around a bit and enjoy life," she said.

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Spain's Christmas lottery has been welcomed as an "injection of hope" in the northwest of the country, where the jackpot handed out hundreds of millions of euros just months after wildfires had caused devastation.

Most of the first-prize-winning tickets in the lottery, known as El Gordo, had been bought by people in small towns in the province of León.

A single ticket, or décimo, costing 20 euros, is worth 400,000 euros if it bears the winning number, in this case 79432. Décimos come in strips of 10 and when many strips of the same number are sold to a group of neighbours or workmates, there is potential for a massive jackpot.

People in the town of La Bañeza shared out 468 million euros.

Among the recipients were members of a local football club in the town, which has a population of around 11,000.

The jackpot came four months after forest fires had torn through León, burning 8,000 hectares of land surrounding La Bañeza and killing a local man, 35-year-old Abel Ramos.

The sparsely populated, heavily forested north-west of Spain is used to wildfires, although during this record-breaking year, the area was particularly severely affected. Firefighters battled enormous blazes in León and the neighbouring Galicia region throughout much of August and during the summer 0.8 percent of the country's total surface area was burned.

According to the mayor of the town, Javier Carrera, the lottery win "means for La Bañeza an injection of excitement and hope," he told Spanish media. Carrera also mentioned the closure this year of a local sugar-beet factory which caused the loss of dozens of jobs.

Another town in the León province that was heavily affected by the summer's fires, Villablino, also took a massive share of the jackpot, receiving 200 million euros.

"We needed some good news," said the mayor, Mario Rivas.

On top of the blazes, five local men were killed in two separate mining accidents in nearby Asturias this year.

"It doesn't make up for the loss of the lives of our friends, but this shows us that there can also be good news," said Rivas.

Most of the winning tickets in Villablino were sold by a local Alzheimer's association.

In addition, the town of La Pola de Gordón, also in León and with a population of 3,000, shared out 60 million euros. Sixty-four million euros of jackpot money also went to a working-class district in Madrid.

In Villablino, Maribel Martín had one of the winning décimos, worth 400,000 euros. She was out doing grocery shopping when her son called her to give her the good news.

"We were really down and 200 million euros is a wonderful thing," she said

She is clear what she wants to do with the prize money. "Spread it around a bit and enjoy life," she said.

The UN and other aid agencies fear new Israeli registration rules for dozens of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) risk the collapse of the humanitarian response in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

INGOs not registered by 31 December face closure of their operations in Israel within 60 days, which the agencies say could severely disrupt healthcare and other life-saving services in Gaza.

Save the Children said its application had not been approved and it was "pursuing all available avenues to have this decision reconsidered".

Israel's ministry of diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism said the departure of "rogue organisations" would not affect the delivery of aid.

Fourteen out of the approximately 100 applications have so far been rejected, 21 have been approved, and those remaining are still undergoing review, according to the ministry.

The registration system introduced in March includes several grounds for rejection, including:

• Denying the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state
• Denying the Holocaust or the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023
• Supporting an armed struggle against Israel by an enemy state or terrorist organisation
• Promoting "delegitimisation campaigns" against Israel
• Calling for a boycott of Israel or committing to participate in one
• Supporting the prosecution of Israeli security forces in foreign or international courts

The Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory - a forum that brings together UN agencies and more than 200 local and international organisations - warned in a statement last Wednesday that the system "fundamentally jeopardises" the operations of INGOs in Gaza and the West Bank.

"The system relies on vague, arbitrary, and highly politicised criteria and imposes requirements that humanitarian organisations cannot meet without violating international legal obligations or compromising core humanitarian principles," it said.

It added: "While some INGOs have been registered under the new system, these INGOs represent only a fraction of the response in Gaza and are nowhere near the number required just to meet immediate and basic needs."

According to the Humanitarian Country Team, INGOs currently run or support the majority of Gaza's field hospitals and primary healthcare centres, emergency shelter responses, water and sanitation services, nutrition stabilisation centres for children with acute malnutrition, and critical mine action activities.

If they were forced to stop operations, it said, one in three health facilities in Gaza would close.

"Pressing ahead with this policy will have far-reaching consequences on the future of the OPT, in addition to threatening a fragile ceasefire and putting Palestinian lives at imminent risk, particularly during winter," the Humanitarian Country Team warned.

"The UN will not be able to compensate for the collapse of INGOs' operations if they are de-registered, and the humanitarian response cannot be replaced by alternative actors operating outside established humanitarian principles."

It also stressed that Israel had an obligation under international humanitarian law to ensure that Gaza's population was adequately supplied.

Save the Children - which has supported families in Gaza with clean water and cash assistance, as well as healthcare clinics and mother and baby areas - confirmed on Monday that it was informed several weeks ago that its registration application had not been approved.

"We are pursuing all available avenues to have this decision reconsidered, including filing a petition with the Israeli courts," a spokesperson told the BBC.

"While we call for this decision to be reconsidered, we remain committed to delivering vital and life-saving support to children and families in the Occupied Palestinian Territory through our team of over 300 dedicated Palestinian staff together with trusted partners."

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) - which supports six public hospitals and runs two field hospitals in Gaza, and has treated hundreds of thousands of patients over the past year - meanwhile said it was among the INGOs still waiting to obtain registration.

"With Gaza's health system already destroyed, independent and experienced humanitarian organisations losing access to respond would be a disaster for Palestinians," a statement said.

"MSF calls on the Israeli authorities to ensure that INGOs can maintain and continue their impartial and independent response in Gaza. The already restricted humanitarian response cannot be further dismantled."

A spokesman for the Israeli diaspora affairs ministry told the BBC that it had already extended the registration deadline from 9 September to 31 December "as an extraordinary measure and well beyond what was required".

"There has been more than sufficient time to act, and any organisation that has failed to do so by now has demonstrated a clear lack of good faith," he said.

He also stressed that the process had been carried out by a team that included all relevant Israeli security and government bodies, and that "claims of a sweeping or mass rejection are false and misleading".

He added: "Humanitarian aid will continue uninterrupted. The departure of rogue organisations whose real objective is to undermine the State of Israel under a humanitarian guise will not affect the ongoing delivery of aid."

Eleven Ecuadorean soldiers have been sentenced to 34 years in prison each after being found guilty of the forced disappearance of four boys last year.

The discovery of the beaten and burned remains of the four boys, aged between 11 and 15, shocked the violence-wracked nation.

The court found a military patrol had picked up the boys as they returned from playing football in the city of Guayaquil, forced them to strip off their clothes, beat them and left them naked in a desolate, dangerous and abandoned location.

One of the boys called his father but, by the time he arrived, they were no longer there. Their burned bodies were found days later close to a military base near Guayaquil.

In total, 17 soldiers were on trial over the disappearance of 15-year-old Nehemías Arboleda, 11-year-old Steven Medina, and brothers Ismael, 15, and Josué Arroyo, 14.

Eleven of the soldiers were sentenced to 34 years and eight months in prison and five were given reduced sentences of two and a half years for co-operating with the prosecution.

A lieutenant-colonel who had not been on patrol with the rest of the group was declared not guilty.

The soldiers had been sent on patrol as part of the government's crackdown on criminal gangs in the country, which has seen its crime rate skyrocket as the gangs' power has expanded.

Defence officials had originally said that the four children, who became known as The Malvinas Four after the neighbourhood the were from, had been stopped by the patrol because they were suspects in a robbery.

But the judge ruled that they had been "innocent victims of a state crime" and ordered that their families be issued with an official apology and that the four victims be commemorated with a plaque.

He also ordered that military personnel undergo human rights training.

The judge said that evidence provided by the five soldiers who had co-operated with the prosecution had revealed the cruelty with which the 16 soldiers on patrol had acted.

He said that they had deliberately taken the four boys to a desolate area, where they subjected them to racist insults, beatings and even a simulated execution.

Defence lawyers had argued that because the boys were alive when the soldiers left, the accused were not responsible for their death.

But the judge concluded that leaving them in such a dangerous and desolate location "was the cause of the victims' death". It is not known who burned the bodies.