Virginia Giuffre would have viewed Prince Andrew giving up his titles "as a victory", the ghostwriter of her posthumous memoir told BBC Newsnight.

The book, Nobody's Girl, co-written by Amy Wallace, details Ms Giuffre's encounters with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell - and more details of her allegations about Prince Andrew, which he has always denied.

In the memoir - released on Tuesday - Ms Giuffre described three occasions where she alleged Prince Andrew had sex with her.

Ms Wallace spent four years writing the book with Ms Giuffre, who took her own life almost six months ago.

In the book, Ms Giuffre said she had sex with Prince Andrew on three separate occasions. She says the third occasion was on Epstein's island as part of what Ms Giuffre called "an orgy" with Epstein and approximately eight other young women.

Prince Andrew, who reached a financial settlement with Ms Giuffre in 2022, announced on Friday that he was voluntarily deciding not to use his titles including the Duke of York, an honour received from his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II.

He is also giving up membership of the Order of the Garter - the oldest and most senior order of chivalry in Britain.

But there are still calls for them to be formally removed.

Ms Wallace said: "I can speak for Virginia; I know that she would view it as a victory that he was forced, by whatever means, to voluntarily give them up."

She called it a "symbolic gesture" which has made "modern history in terms of the royal era", describing it as "a step in the right direction".

"Virginia wanted all the men who she had been trafficked to, against her will, to be held to account, and this is just one of the men.

"Even though he (Andrew) continues to deny it, his life is being eroded because of his past behaviour, as it should be," Ms Wallace said.

Ms Wallace went on to say there was a period when Prince Andrew "indicated he was willing to help investigators in the US" but he was "never available, for some reason".

"That's something he could still do. He could say, as he has repeatedly, 'I still deny that I was involved... however, I was in these houses and I was on that island and I was on the jet and I saw things, and I know how much these women have suffered and I would like to share what I saw," Ms Wallace said.

Ms Wallace said the private jets used by Epstein "had been remodelled in order to afford many bedrooms - they were designed as flying trafficking agents, they were there to use girls in".

She added: "Prince Andrew was on at least one of those jets that I know of, if not more.

"He has to take sort of the measure of his own moral compass - he said in his settlement with Virginia that he now acknowledges the pain that these women and young girls had suffered. If you really feel it, do something about it."

Speaking about Ms Giuffre, Ms Wallace said: "I'm sad and I'm honoured to be able to speak at least a little bit on her behalf to stand up for her.

"She wrote this book to try to help other people, to make the world a better place.

"She deserves all credit for whatever role she played in forcing Prince Andrew to relinquish a few more of his titles but she deserves all credit even more than that for being brave enough to stand up to say 'this isn't right'."

The memoir, which the BBC bought from a book store in central London days before its official release, paints a picture of a web of rich and powerful people abusing young women.

At the centre of the abuse was Epstein and his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking charges.

Ms Giuffre says that even decades later, she remembers how much she feared them both.

Epstein was convicted in Florida in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a person under the age of 18. He died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

The Conservatives say more than 2,000 prisoners serving sentences for rape, stalking and grooming will have their jail time cut because of the government's new sentencing plan.

The opposition party has tabled an amendment to the sentencing bill - which is in the House of Commons for the second reading on Tuesday - to make sure offenders of the most serious crimes stay locked up for longer.

Shadow justice minister Kieran Mullan has called the government's plan "a betrayal of victims", while Labour have accused the Tories of "rank hypocrisy" after they left prisons "at breaking point".

The sentencing review recommends releasing some offenders earlier from prison if they have behaved well.

The review set up to look at alternative punishments to jail after prisons became dangerously overcrowded.

It recommends offenders on a fixed length prison term could be released after serving a third of their sentence, providing they behave well.

Under this "earned progression scheme", prisoners released early will be monitored with enhanced supervision in the community, followed by a period on licence, which is unsupervised.

The Conservatives have said in addition to more than 2,000 serious offenders having their jail terms cut, Labour's changes will also benefit over 62% of jailed rapists.

"Keir Starmer is putting criminals before communities and letting predators out early," Mullan said.

"Under Labour's plans, thousands of the most serious would no longer be treated as such, an insult to thousands of victims across the country."

The amendment tabled by the Tories wants to ensure offenders of the most serious crimes - including rape, sexual offences against children and grievous bodily harm - will not benefit from the government's early release scheme, a press release said.

• Early prisoner release plan worries police chief
• BBC In-Depth: A scheme helped prevent sex offenders committing more crimes - then it closed. Why?

But sentencing minster Jake Richards accused the Conservatives of "feigned outrage" and said the government is "cleaning up the mess" left by the Tories.

"The Conservatives' rank hypocrisy is shameful. They built this crisis, then feigned outrage when the consequences arrived," he said.

"They took our prisons to breaking point, released thousands of serious offenders early and pushed Britain to the brink of a situation where police could no longer make arrests and courts could no longer prosecute."

Labour have said the worst offenders - those on extended fixed sentences or life sentences - will never benefit from early release.

President of the Prison Governors' Association Tom Wheatley said successive governments have failed to deliver the prison spaces needed to deal with dangerous overcrowding.

"The sentencing bill seeks to address this issue by reducing the amount of time offenders will spend in custody," he said.

"The alternatives are either spending more taxpayers money on building and running prisons or to continue to release prisoners earlier than the courts intended, as both this government and previous Conservative governments have done."

Other amendments to the sentencing bill proposed by the Tories include requiring courts to collect and publish detailed data on sentencing, making judges' remarks available to the public within two days, and extending the time victims have to challenge lenient sentences.

Sign up for our morning newsletter and get BBC News in your inbox.

More on this story

• Listen to the latest Football Daily podcast

Defence Secretary John Healey has said European troops are "ready to deploy" to Ukraine in the coming weeks if Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agree on a ceasefire.

After a surprise call last Thursday, the US and Russian presidents are planning to meet in Budapest, Hungary. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has not been invited but said he is ready to join.

Asked if troops could deploy if a deal was reached in the next two weeks, Healey said: "If President Trump can broker a peace, then we will be ready to help secure that peace".

But he added that Ukrainians must be the "people who will decide how and what" is negotiated in any peace talks.

Members of the "coalition of the willing", an alliance of 26 European nations founded in March by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to guarantee Ukraine's security, had been "developing detailed plans, in the event of a ceasefire", Healey said.

Under the plans, UK troops could join a multinational force to secure Ukraine's border.

The work of "over 200 military planners from 38-plus nations over the last six months" had meant forces were ready to deploy when needed, Healey said.

The government were expecting to spend "well over" £100m on sending troops to Ukraine, with some funds already used to prepare the deployment, Healey said.

Speaking at the London Lord Mayor's Annual Defence Lecture, Healey also said Vladimir Putin views Britain as his "number one enemy" because of the country's support for Ukraine.

The defence secretary also warned of a "new era of threat" and said the risk of wider conflict in Europe has not been as great since the end of World War Two.

During the speech, Healey also announced British soldiers will be granted new powers to shoot down drones threatening military bases.

Four British airbases used by US forces reported mystery drone sightings last year, while drones have disrupted airspace across Europe a number of times in recent months.

The new powers will only apply to military sites, but could be extended to civilian locations such as airports.

Healey said the introduction of a "kinetic option" would enable British troops or Ministry of Defence (MoD) police to shoot drones posing a threat to a military site in the UK.

The announcement followed reports that a White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky ended in a "shouting match", as US officials pushed Ukraine to give up land to Russia.

Zelensky had gone to Washington to ask the US to supply sought-after Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory.

But reports suggest Trump had instead insisted Zelensky surrender the entire eastern Donbas region to Putin. Russia controls 70% of Donetsk and nearly all of neighbouring Luhansk.

The Financial Times reported Trump had warned Zelensky that Putin would "destroy" Ukraine if he did not agree to its terms, citing sources familiar with the conversation.

In the more than 1,300 days since Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin has become increasingly reliant on support from North Korea, Iran and China.

According to Healey, Russia has suffered over a million casualties and devoted 40% of its government spending to the military.

But in recent months Moscow has intensified attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, prompting emergency power cuts across the country.

European leaders have expressed concern over Trump's shifting stance, with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warning on social media that "appeasement never was a road to a just and lasting peace".

Finnish President Alexander Stubb said "the only ones who can decide on the land issue are the Ukrainians themselves".

Speaking to the BBC, Stubb said Finland, a member of the coalition of the willing. would never recognise Crimea, or the regions of Donetsk or Luhansk, as Russian.

Sign up for our Politics Essential newsletter to keep up with the inner workings of Westminster and beyond.

How does a group that has governed the Gaza Strip for almost 20 years, ruling two million Palestinians with an iron rod and fighting Israel in repeated wars, suddenly lay down its arms and relinquish control?

Judging by a steady stream of gruesome images emerging from Gaza since the ceasefire came into effect on 10 October, Hamas seems intent on reasserting its authority.

Its masked men, back on the streets, have been seen beating and executing opponents. Impromptu firing squads have dispatched kneeling men they say are members of rival groups, including some of Gaza's powerful clans.

Other victims, cowering in terror, are shot in the legs or beaten with heavy clubs.

Some of those now being attacked by Hamas had been part of groups involved in looting and diverting aid, according to one aid worker I spoke to, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. The UN has also accused criminal gangs of stealing aid.

This is not yet a world in which, as US President Donald Trump's 20-point Gaza peace plan envisages, Hamas fighters turn over their weapons, submit to an amnesty, leave Gaza and hand over to an international stabilisation force.

For his part, President Trump initially seemed ambivalent about the brutality.

On his way to Israel on 13 October, he signalled the US had given Hamas - designated a terrorist group by the US, UK, Israel and others - a green light to restore order.

"We have given them approval for a period of time," he told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Three days later, he hardened his tone. "If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal," he wrote on Truth Social, "we will have no choice but to go in and kill them."

So, where does this situation on the ground in Gaza today leave Hamas?

And ultimately, after two years of war that has resulted in unparalleled suffering for its own people and the violent death of most of its key figures, what, if anything, does the future really hold for the group?

'A complete loss of law and order'

For many Gazans, traumatised and exhausted by two years of perpetual suffering - and a war that has killed 68,000 people in Gaza according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry - this ugly endgame is nerve-wracking, but doesn't come as a surprise.

Of the Gazans I spoke to - among them, aid workers, lawyers, as well as a former adviser to a Hamas leader - each has a different take on the likelihood of Hamas laying down its arms and relinquishing control.

And indeed - given the situation on the ground - whether now is the time for them to do so.

"It's been two years with a complete loss of law and order," aid worker Hanya Aljamal says from her home in Deir al-Balah, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. "We need someone to take over.

"As unqualified as Hamas is to rule the Strip, they are a better option than the gangs."

Dr Ahmad Yousef, a former advisor to Ismail Haniyeh, who was Hamas's political leader, is of the opinion that a firm grip is needed at present.

"As long as there are still people who try to take the law into their hands, we need somebody to scare them and squeeze them to the corner," says Dr Yousef, who now runs a Gaza think tank and remains close to the Hamas leadership.

"This will take time. Not a long time. Within a month we will host those police forces and soldiers from Turkey and Egypt," he continues, referring to the international stabilisation force for Gaza, outlined in the peace plan, that could be composed of troops from Egypt and Turkey, among others.

"This is the moment where they will set their guns aside."

Other Gazans are more sceptical, and fearful. Some aren't convinced that Hamas will give up their power - or weapons at all.

Moumen al-Natour, a Gaza-based lawyer imprisoned several times by Hamas, is one of them.

He has been in hiding since July, when he says masked Hamas gunmen came to his Gaza City apartment and ordered him to report to al-Shifa hospital for interrogation.

"Hamas is [sending] a message to the world and to President Donald Trump… that they will neither relinquish power nor hand over their weapons.

"If I fell into Hamas' hands now, they would make a video and kill me in the street with a shot to the head," he says in one of a series of videos sent to us from an undisclosed location in the Gaza Strip.

The wall behind him is riddled with bullet holes.

"It is a gang, not a government," he says of Hamas.

"I don't want them to remain in Gaza… I don't want them in government, and I don't want them in security. I don't want to see their ideas spread in mosques, in the streets, or in schools."

'Still the dominant player in Gaza'

Mr al-Natour has his own take on what Gaza could look like.

The disparate array of militias now under Hamas assault could, in his view, be integrated a new security apparatus. But with their competing agendas, sometimes murky pasts and, in some cases, controversial links to the Israeli military, it's a problematic proposition.

"The fact is – and sometimes it's very hard for Israelis to admit this – that Hamas still exists and is the dominant player in Gaza." says Dr Michael Milshtein, a former head of the department for Palestinian Affairs in Israeli Military Intelligence.

"Relying on suspicious players - clans, militias, gangs, many of them criminals, many of them affiliated with ISIS [the Islamic State group], many of them involved in terror attacks against Israel - and considering them as a kind of alternative to Hamas is an illusion."

Hamas officials have said the group is willing to hand over political control of Gaza. The Trump ceasefire plan, to which it gave its qualified support, envisages "temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee".

But even if the group is willing to step back from a political role – something many Palestinians and Israelis still doubt - persuading its battle-hardened fighters to lay down their weapons is a big step for an organisation whose power, even before October 2023, relied heavily on the force of arms.

Rise of Hamas and its iron grip

To begin to answer the complex question of what may happen to Hamas next requires delving backwards into how exactly it consolidated power in the first place.

From its origins in the 1980s as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and a rival to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hamas morphed into a violent militant group responsible for the deaths of Israeli civilians.

Initially, Israel offered discreet support to Hamas, seeing it as a useful counterweight to the PLO and its dominant faction, Fatah, led at the time by Yasser Arafat.

"The major enemy was Fatah," says Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel's domestic security service, Shin Bet, "because they were the people who demanded a Palestinian state."

But when Hamas launched deadly suicide bomb attacks in the 1990s and 2000s on Israelis, Israel responded with a series of high-profile assassinations.

A violent power struggle with Fatah left Hamas, which won a 2006 election, in sole control of the Gaza Strip.

Eighteen years of Hamas rule have followed, characterised by an Israeli military and economic blockade, and bouts of armed conflict in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021.

Despite Israeli claims since October 2023 that "Hamas is ISIS", the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously convinced itself that Hamas did not pose a strategic threat.

"His was a policy of managing the conflict," says Mr Ayalon. "He said we are not going to solve it and we are totally against the reality of two states, so the only way is to divide and control."

With Hamas in control in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, ruling in part of the occupied West Bank, the Palestinians remained hopelessly divided, enabling Israel to argue that it had no unified leadership to negotiate peace with.

"[Netanyahu] did everything in order to support Hamas in Gaza," Mr Ayalon says. "He let Qatar send them… more than $1.5bn."

The money from Qatar was meant to pay the wages of civil servants and support the poorest families, but security chiefs feared it was being used for other purposes.

Mr Ayalon adds: "It was clear to the director of the Shin Bet and the head of Mossad that this money would go to military infrastructure.

Netanyahu has defended allowing payments to Hamas, saying it was meant to aid the civilian population.

Hamas was always preparing for war

As 7 October brutally revealed, Hamas was always preparing for war. Nowhere was this more obvious than in its elaborate network of tunnels.

Tunnels had already been used to mount attacks on Israeli army positions during the second Palestinian uprising, or "Intifada" that began in 2000.

In 2006, Hamas fighters used a tunnel under the border with Israel to attack a military post near Kerem Shalom, killing two Israel soldiers and kidnapping a third, Gilad Shalit.

He was held for five years until his release, in 2011, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to mastermind the Hamas attacks of October 2023.

Over time, Hamas' tunnel network expanded, to include workshops, weapons-manufacturing sites and command centres.

Regional developments also played a role. In 2012, after the fall of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the brief rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas was able to smuggle increasingly sophisticated weapons into Gaza, including sniper rifles, mobile rocket launchers and equipment for the manufacture of long-range rockets.

Hamas is thought to have benefitted from the help of technicians and fighters with experience of tunnelling in places like Lebanon and Iraq.

Iran was also a key supporter, seeing Hamas as a natural component in its "Axis of Resistance," a loose coalition of militant groups across the Middle East with a shared antipathy towards Israel and the United States.

In 2020, a US State Department report said that Iran was providing around $100m a year to Palestinian militant groups including Hamas.

Some tunnels were reportedly dug as deep as 230ft (70m) below ground, took years to build and cost tens of millions of dollars each. These were designed to protect senior Hamas commanders and house long-range weapons.

A local expert with extensive knowledge of the tunnels told the BBC the cost of the entire project totalled roughly $6bn (£4.5bn).

Precise figures are hard to come by, but it's thought that the scattered network extended for as much as 250 miles (400km), in a strip of land just 26 miles long and, at its widest, seven miles across.

Tunnels: a project shrouded in secrecy

Public discussion of the tunnels - their location or cost - could expose Gazans to accusations of espionage, leading to arrest and worse. But many knew what was happening.

Local residents would see the tell-tale signs: sand and clay being removed, new entrances appearing unexpectedly and machinery being brought in under cover of darkness.

What began as an opportunistic response to Gaza's isolation became, over the span of three decades, a multi-layered subterranean industrial and military complex.

It emerged later that much of it was concealed under Gaza's civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and, in the case of a tunnel containing a Hamas data centre, the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza City.

After 7 October 2023, when Hamas fighters stormed into Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage, it also became a massive underground prison. Not all of those held hostage were concealed in tunnels, but many were, especially as the war ground on.

Eli Sharabi, who became one of the most high profile of those taken, was first moved from a safe house into a tunnel after 52 of his 491 days in captivity.

"They tied us with ropes in our legs and hands," he told the BBC earlier this month. "I fainted from time to time from the pain. One time they broke my ribs."

By the time he was released, in February, he had lost more than 30kg (4st 10lb).

Hamas used the hostages as bargaining chips, to secure ceasefires or the release of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. As negotiations over their fate continued, Hamas drip fed the Israeli public with a cruel series of videos, often showing the hostages in situations of extreme distress.

Eventually it was, says Dr Yousef, internal and external pressure that forced Hamas to abandon the strategy.

"Qatar, Egypt and Turkey and also the people here in displacement camps sent a strong message to Hamas leaders outside that enough is enough."

In the meantime, Israel continues to destroy what it can of the tunnel network, often demolishing civilian neighbourhoods above in the process.

And the job is far from done.

"According to publications from the defence establishment, estimates speak of damage to between 25% and 40% of the tunnels," says Yehuda Kfir, an Israeli civil engineer and underground warfare researcher at Haifa's Technion University.

"No doubt [Hamas] aspires to rehabilitate the infrastructure, including restoring tunnels that were dealt with in various ways by the IDF."

A leadership in tatters

Restoring tunnels is one thing. Reconstituting the organisation is another. After the events of the past two years, Hamas' leadership is in tatters.

Israel has gone to enormous lengths - in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and Qatar - to eliminate the group's key political and military figures.

From its best known, internationally recognisable leaders, travelling the world to promote their cause, to its battalion commanders on the ground in Gaza, Hamas has lost almost everyone of consequence.

Israel assassinated Hamas's powerful leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in July 2024.

Three months later, Haniyeh's successor, the elusive Yahya Sinwar, was killed in the ruins of a house in Rafah.

Despite the loss of these leading figures - and thousands of members of its armed wing - the group battled on, recruiting a fresh generation of radicalised young fighters and splintering into small cells intent on carrying out hit-and-run guerrilla-style operations.

But Hamas in October 2025 is a pale shadow of the organisation that carried out the attacks of 7 October. Today's leaders are less well known and, crucially, have little political experience.

Ezzedine al-Haddad, who is 55, now heads the five-member military council that commands Hamas' armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Outside Gaza, the remnants of the group's political leadership include Khaled Meshaal (the subject of a botched Israeli assassination attempt in Jordan in 1997), Khalil al-Hayya and Muhammad Darwish.

All are believed to have escaped death on 9 September, when Israeli jets attacked a building in Doha, Qatar, where they were meeting to discuss the latest US ceasefire proposals.

Hamas is 'tired of war'

Despite the violence still raging in Gaza, the former Hamas adviser, Ahmed Yousef, says the group is tired of war.

Without mentioning 7 October directly, he describes the cause of the war as a "terrible mistake" and that a "different approach" is needed.

"I'm talking to many of them and they have said that they are not interested in ruling Gaza anymore," he says.

"But Hamas has more than 100,000 members and those people are not going to disappear."

Hamas, he suggests, is looking to rebrand itself in order to continue to play a political role in the future, a process he likens to the ANC's transition from guerrilla warfare to political rule in post-apartheid South Africa.

"If tomorrow there [are] elections," he says, "I'm sure Hamas will come under different names, giving the impression it is more peaceful and more willing to be part of political life.

"Violence is not going to be part of any political party."

Dr Milshtein is doubtful.

"Even if there will be a new local regime in Gaza, of course behind the scenes Hamas will be the dominant player," he argues.

Disarmament, he continues, is even less likely: he predicts another Gaza war within the next five years.

But Ami Ayalon, the former Shin Bet chief, believes Israel should find another way to tackle its enemy.

"Unless we defeat the ideology, they will flourish," he says.

"The only way to defeat the ideology is by creating and presenting to the Palestinian and the Israeli people a new horizon. A horizon of two states."

For now, that horizon does not exist, perhaps making Dr Milshtein's prediction more likely than Ami Ayalon's vision of a shared future.

But Hamas, however diminished, is far from a spent force. One way or another, Israel may have to deal with it for some time to come.

Top picture credit: Getty Images

BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. You can now sign up for notifications that will alert you whenever an InDepth story is published - click here to find out how.

A preliminary report into last month's funicular crash in Lisbon that killed 16 people including three British nationals has detailed a litany of failings.

Portugal's Air and Rail Accident Investigations Bureau said an underground cable - which acted as a counterweight between two carriages and broke, prompting the crash - was defective and had never been certified for passenger transportation.

It said the cable was not technically suitable and was acquired in 2022 by the company that runs Lisbon's public transport, Carris.

The 140-year-old Glória funicular, popular with tourists, derailed and crashed into a building on 3 September.

There were 11 foreigners among those killed, including the three British nationals, while another 20 people were injured.

The preliminary report released on Monday said there had been no oversight by engineers at Carris and the cable was not tested in advance before being installed.

The supervision and maintenance of the funicular by a company outsourced by Carris also did not work properly, apparently giving the Glória funicular the all-clear on the morning of the disaster - though it is not certain if the check actually took place that day.

In addition, the state body that looks after all of Lisbon's funiculars did not cover the Glória one, as it should have done, the report said.

The emergency brake system, which the driver correctly tried to apply when the cable snapped, did not function properly and was never tested in advance, it says.

Lisbon's mayor Carlos Moedas, who was re-elected on 12 October despite opposition accusations he had failed in his duty of oversight over the city's funiculars, told SIC television that the report "reaffirms that the unfortunate tragedy... was due to technical and not political causes".

Carris issued a statement stressing it was "not possible at this time to state whether or not the non-conformities in the use of the cable are relevant to the accident", referring to a passage in the report that notes the same cables had previously been in use in the Glória funicular for 601 days without incident.

"At this point in time, it cannot be said whether the use of this type of non-compliant cable intervened, or what intervention it had, in the rupture... and it is certain for the investigation that there were other factors that had to intervene," the statement added.

The company stressed that although the cables had been brought into use under the current board of directors, who took office in May 2022, the acquisition process took place under the previous board.

The full report will take about 11 months to be completed.

Meanwhile, all Lisbon cable cars have been ordered to be out of service until the necessary safety checks are put in place.

University tuition fees in England will increase every year in line with inflation from 2026 onwards, the government has announced.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson confirmed the increase for the next two years, and promised legislation which would make it happen automatically every year after that.

Maintenance loans will also increase yearly in line with inflation.

Speaking in Parliament, Phillipson said "charging full fees will be conditional on high quality teaching", and that only those universities providing strong outcomes for students would be able to charge the maximum fees.

Universities which fall below the quality threshold set by the regulator in England, the Office for Students, will not be able to charge the new maximum and risk having a cap imposed on the number of students they can recruit.

Tuition fees in England this academic year are £9,535, having increased for the first time in more than a decade last year.

The inflation measure used - the Retail Price Index minus mortgage payments, or RPIx - is likely to be the one used for future increases.

That inflation rate is likely to fluctuate before next year's increase, so it is not yet clear what fees students starting university in 2026 will be charged. If it was done at the current rate, fees would rise by approximately £400 a year, to over £9,900.

Universities UK, which represents 141 universities, said the plans offer "a much-needed reset for our university system".

"It makes clear that universities are a huge national asset, rightly admired around the world. We need them to be in great shape if we want national renewal," chief executive Vivienne Stern said.

Raising fees in line with inflation will "help to halt the long-term erosion of universities' financial sustainability, following a decade of fee freezes", she added.

But University and College Union general secretary Jo Grady said the government had "doubled down on the disastrous tuition-fees funding model, which created the crisis the sector is currently facing".

The union published analysis earlier this month which suggested universities had collectively announced more than 12,000 job cuts in the last year.

Prof Ian Dunn, provost at Coventry University, said the proposed increases were a "good thing" for universities, but added that "under no circumstances will this solve the problem".

"From a university perspective, it adds a little income and will alleviate a little of the pressure," he said.

"But it will not in itself solve the financial situation universities are in right now."

Coventry student Katie, who wants to be a teacher, says she finds her student loan daunting, and that it is likely to "always follow" her.

"I don't even think I'll be able to pay it off ever," she said.

"It's not going to happen, I know it's not."

Overall, there is no limit on the number of university places in England, apart from for a handful of regulated courses like medicine.

To be able to charge maximum fees, universities will be assessed on the additional value they add to a student's academic journey - although there are no details of how that would work in practice, given the majority of students now graduate with either a first class degree or a 2:1.

Those standards are under consultation, and it's not clear when they will be introduced to replace the current teaching and excellence framework.

A similar approach is already in place to measure the performance of schools, based on Year 6 Key Stage 2 tests (Sats) and GCSE results, although it is not easy to understand or use by parents.

Details of the proposed maintenance grants for some students on some courses by the end of this parliament are not expected until the autumn Budget on 26 November.

The government's post-16 skills and higher education white paper also says that, from autumn 2026, a new Lifelong Learning Entitlement will open up tuition fee loans to anyone studying courses at the level equivalent to the first and second year of university.

There is an expectation from government that universities will collaborate with further education colleges to make it easier for students to move from one to another to continue their studies.

The changes announced on Monday only apply to England, as education is devolved across the rest of the UK. Tuition fees in Wales were increased last year to the same level as England, £9,535, a few weeks after the announcement for England was made.

Tuition fees in Northern Ireland were £4,750 in 2024-25, with the economy minister there ruling out any increases above the price of inflation in May.

Scottish students do not pay any tuition fees to go to university in Scotland.

Additional reporting by Hope Rhodes and Hayley Clarke.

Prince Andrew's decision to give up his titles and honours shows no sign of stopping the scrutiny of his links to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, with royal sources expecting "more days of pain ahead" in the scandal.

While the prince will no longer use his titles, including the Duke of York, there are still calls for them to be formally removed.

Rachael Maskell, who is the MP for York and says many of her constituents no longer want the city to be associated with the royal, wants the government to change the law to allow this process.

The Metropolitan Police are looking into claims the prince asked a protection officer for personal information about Virginia Giuffre, who said she had been forced to have sex with the prince, a claim he has consistently denied.

Her memoir, published posthumously this week, adds to pressure on him.

A royal source said the focus of the Royal Family's thoughts were on Epstein's victims and the "whole network of girls and young women who were abused and treated appallingly".

It should not be seen as a reputational or PR battle, they suggested, saying they were treating the ongoing claims with " very great concern".

The posthumous memoir by Ms Giuffre repeats claims she was trafficked for sex by Epstein to his powerful circle of friends, including Prince Andrew - an allegation that the prince has strongly denied.

On Friday the prince announced he would no longer use his titles and honours, which include the Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killyleagh. He also gave up his membership of the prestigious Order of the Garter.

He remains a prince, a title assigned from birth as the son of a monarch. But constitutional expert Craig Prescott says Andrew's title of "prince" could also be theoretically removed by a legal document issued by monarchs, called Letters Patent. If he ceased to be a prince and as he is no longer Duke of York, he would become Andrew Windsor.

But at present, taking away his other titles would require legislation in Parliament.

Although Palace pressure might have been exerted, the handing back of his titles was a voluntary move. They were not taken away, but Andrew's offer to stop using them can be enacted immediately and avoids using parliamentary time that would be necessary to remove those titles.

But Maskell does wants the government to amend current laws to make it possible for the King to directly take away his other titles and honours - and she says a poll in her York Central constituency showed overwhelming support for forcing Andrew to lose his titles.

"There are opportunities here to address the wrongs of history and ensure the voices of victims and survivors are heard and acted upon," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Maskell, who lost the Labour whip in a rebellion over welfare reforms, said she "didn't come into Parliament to discuss princes and princesses" but that such a change could be quickly passed allowing the monarch to remove titles and honours.

"It's a simple single clause, it could be added to constitutional bill or a private member's bill," she said.

Flynn, the SNP's Westminster leader, has also called for a better mechanism to remove titles.

He said the public was "angry and aghast and they deserve to know that some MPs share their outrage".

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, speaking on BBC Breakfast, said that with regards the debate about taking away the prince's titles: "Any further decisions are not something we as a government would be involved in."

Prince Andrew also faces pressure from inquiries in the US into Epstein's contacts with influential people, with more documents being trawled.

At the weekend, there were reports of emails showing Epstein's connections with Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, who has also lost her title and is no longer the Duchess of York.

The emails suggested that Prince Andrew in 2011 had sought personal information about his accuser Virginia Giuffre from his police protection officers and that he had already had her social security number.

This was in contrast to his claims in his BBC Newsnight interview - when he said: "I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever."

The Metropolitan Police has said it is actively looking into the claims about Andrew seeking information about her.

The documents emerging from the US, published by the Mail on Sunday, also showed Epstein claiming to have financially supported Sarah Ferguson for 15 years.

Sources close to Sarah Ferguson denied that this was correct.

The announcement that Prince Andrew would lose his remaining titles had been intended to draw a line under what a royal source had called the "constant parade of headlines" about him, which had taken attention away from other royals.

Royal sources highlighted that also included the work by Queen Camilla and the Duchess of Edinburgh to challenge violence against women.

The Palace will not want the scandal surrounding Andrew to overshadow a historic state visit to the Vatican this week, during which King Charles will meet Pope Leo.

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.

The US and Australia have signed a deal intended to boost supplies of rare earths and other critical minerals, as the Trump administration looks for ways to counter China's dominance of the market.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the deal would support a pipeline of $8.5bn (£6.3bn) "ready-to-go" projects that would expand his country's mining and processing abilities.

It includes $1bn to be invested by the two countries in projects in the US and Australia over the next six months, a framework text says.

The US and Australia have been working on these issues since Trump's first term, but Albanese said the latest agreement would take the partnership to the "next level".

China currently controls about 70% of rare earths mining and 90% of the processing of the materials, which are found in everything from defence equipment to computer chips and cars.

US companies rely heavily on the materials, making them vulnerable this year as China has taken steps to restrict access to supplies in response to new US tariffs and other tensions.

Albanese said the agreement was aimed at speeding investment in three types of projects, including US investments in processing facilities in Australia.

The two countries also agreed to work together on issues such as pricing, permitting, and rules for government review of the sales of companies and projects in the sector.

The US separately said it would invest in the construction of a 100 tonnes-per-year advanced gallium refinery in Western Australia and was preparing to offer some $2.2bn in financing to advance critical minerals projects via its Export-Import Bank.

The Trump administration in recent months has already announced a series of investments in companies such as US rare earths miner MP Materials and Canada's Trilogy Metals and Lithium America's, which have projects in the US.

In exchange for the support, it has received ownership stakes in the firms.

Ahead of the meeting, shares in Australian companies such as Lynas Rare Earths had jumped on the prospect of increased support. Lynas was awarded a contract by the US Defense Department a few years ago and is working on a project in Texas.

The framework published by the White House was light on details, reflecting the delicate issues at play.

Australia is a major source of critical minerals but like the US, it relies on China for the processing required to turn the materials into something companies can use.

China is also Australia's biggest trade partner.

Resources will not determine whether Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans can attend a match in Birmingham next month, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said.

The city's Safety Advisory Group (SAG), made up of police, council and safety experts, decided last week that away fans would be barred from the Uefa Europa League fixture against Aston Villa, on 6 November, on safety grounds.

Calling the decision "wrong", Nandy said it was "not for the government to assess the risk surrounding this football match" but that ministers were working together to fund the necessary policing operation.

Her Conservative shadow, Nigel Huddlestone, said the ban was "embarrassing and a disgrace".

The SAG, which advises the council on whether to issue safety certificates, will review the decision if West Midlands Police changes its risk assessment for the match, Birmingham City Council said.

On Thursday, West Midlands Police said it had classified the fixture as "high risk" based on current intelligence and previous incidents, including "violent clashes and hate crime offences" between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv fans before a match in Amsterdam, in November 2024.

On Sunday, the Israeli Premier League derby between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv was cancelled before kick-off, after what police described as "public disorder and violent riots".

'Rising antisemitism'

But Nandy said the question concerning the Villa game was wider than matchday security, adding it came "against the backdrop of rising antisemitism here and across the world, and an attack on a synagogue in Manchester in which two innocent men were killed".

She added: "Following the decision last week, the government has been working with West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council to support them to consider all the options available, and to tell us what resources are needed to manage the risks, to ensure fans from both teams can attend safely.

"If the assessment is revised, the Safety Advisory Group will meet again to discuss options."

Conservative MP Danny Kruger said the government should overrule the ban using powers in the Police Act, rather than asking local authorities "politely if they'll change their decision".

The minister replied that there was a long-standing principle that police were operationally independent, and said she was "surprised" the MP would seek to question that.

Downing Street later said that the powers did not apply, and could only be used on "rare occasions" when a force could not function effectively.

Unprecedented move

Liverpool MP Paula Barker warned of a "slippery slope when safety concerns are ignored" at football stadiums, referencing the Hillsborough disaster.

"Ninety-seven innocent men, women and children lost their lives. We have safety advisory groups for a reason, and it's a slippery slope when safety concerns are ignored, and I believe unprecedented for a government to try to overturn such advice."

Nandy said what was "completely different" about the Aston Villa case was that "the risk assessment is based in no small part on the risk posed to those fans that are attending to support Maccabi Tel Aviv because they are Israeli and because they are Jewish".

"Now, we should be appalled by that and never allow it to stand," she added.

Ayoub Khan, whose Birmingham Perry Barr constituency is home to the Villa Park Stadium, has claimed there was a "deliberate disingenuous move by many to make this a matter of banning Jews".

He later added: "Those who are not welcome in Aston are hooligans that have a long history of violence and vile racism," citing anti-Palestinian chants made by some Maccabi Tel Aviv fans at previous matches.

Aston Villa previously told their matchday stewards that they did not have to work at the Maccabi Tel Aviv fixture, saying they understood that some "may have concerns".

Following Thursday's announcement by the club about the impending fixture, Prime Minster Keir Starmer called the move "wrong" and said: "We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets."

Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.

Hamas has handed over a body that it says is a hostage, the Israeli military has said.

The body was transported by the Red Cross to Israeli forces in Gaza, and will now be returned to Israel for formal identification.

Before Monday, Hamas had handed over all 20 living hostages and 12 out of 28 deceased hostages under the first phase of a US-brokered ceasefire deal that began on 10 October.

There has been anger in Israel that Hamas has not yet returned all the deceased hostages, with the Israeli military saying the Palestinian armed group "is required to uphold the agreement and take the necessary steps to return all the hostages".

Hamas has said it faces difficulty finding bodies under rubble in Gaza.

Under the agreement, Israel has also freed 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,718 detainees from Gaza, and returned 15 bodies of Palestinians in return for every Israeli hostage's remains.

The first phase has also seen an increase of aid into the Gaza Strip, a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces, and a halt in fighting - though deadly violence flared up on Sunday as both sides accused one another of breaching the deal.

Israel said it struck dozens of Hamas targets across the Strip after accusing Hamas of an attack that killed two of its soldiers in Rafah. Hamas had said it was "unaware" of any clashes in the area, which is under Israeli control.

At least 45 Palestinians were killed in the strikes, local hospitals said.

On Sunday evening, Israel said it was resuming enforcement of the ceasefire, adding that it would "respond firmly to any violation of it". Hamas had earlier said it remained committed to the agreement.

US President Donald Trump said the truce remained in place, as his envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner travelled to Israel.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) currently holds about half of Gaza, demarcated by a so-called Yellow Line.

With Palestinians expressing confusion about the exact location of the line, the IDF has put out a video showing bulldozers towing yellow blocks into place to mark it out.

On Monday, Palestinian health officials said Israeli fire killed three people east of Gaza City. The IDF said its troops fired towards "several terrorists" who crossed the Yellow Line in the Shejaiya area.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 251 others hostage.

At least 68,216 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen by the UN as reliable.

The ex-husband of pop star Britney Spears gives new details on the pair's tense relationship in his new memoir You Thought You Knew.

Kevin Federline, her one-time backing dancer, presents a picture of Spears's allegedly erratic behaviour as a wife and mother, and says he continues to have concerns for her wellbeing.

Spears has spoken out against the book, which will be published on Tuesday, and accuses Federline of trying to profit from his association with her.

What does the book say about Spears?

Federline makes a number of allegations against Spears, in the memoir shared with the BBC ahead of the book's release by publisher Listenin.

He accuses Spears of unhealthy behaviour as a mother, including drinking when she was pregnant and taking cocaine while her two sons were still breastfeeding. Spears has previously denied having substance abuse issues.

When they were teenagers, the couple's sons were fearful of Spears, Federline also alleges. "They would awaken sometimes at night to find her standing silently in the doorway, watching them sleep - 'Oh, you're awake?' - with a knife in her hand," he writes. "Then she'd turn around and pad off without explanation."

Federline also expresses his concern for his estranged ex-wife, writing: "The truth is, this situation with Britney feels like it's racing toward something irreversible. From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we're getting close to the 11th hour."

He writes that he was supportive of a conservatorship, under which many aspects of Spears's life were controlled by others for years. Of the Free Britney movement, Federline writes that he could "never fully get behind it".

What's the history of their relationship?

The pair got together in the summer of 2004, after Spears's commercial peak.

They married a few months later and quickly welcomed their two sons: Preston, now 20, and Jayden, now 19.

Spears filed for divorce in 2006 and the divorce was finalised in 2007.

The couple fought publicly over custody of their sons and ultimately Federline was given sole custody of the boys.

In the wake of Federline getting full custody, Spears was seen behaving in a way that Federline characterises in his book as erratic.

She made headlines with incidents like shaving her head and hitting a photographer's car with an umbrella.

Those public incidents raised concern about her mental welfare, and after she was taken to hospital twice, a temporary conservatorship was established in 2008 and made permanent later that year.

Spears remained under that controversial arrangement until 2021, under which her father and others controlled her finances and aspects of her personal life. She did not regain custody of her children until after it was lifted.

What has Spears said?

Spears has accused Federline of attacking her during his recent press appearances to promote the book. She described the contents of the memoir as "extremely hurtful and exhausting", but suggested the work would sell better than her own memoir had done.

In that book, The Woman in Me, Spears accused her ex-husband of trying to "convince everyone I was completely out of control".

Spears has also defended her relationship with her sons. "I have always pleaded and screamed to have a life with my boys," she wrote on social media on 15 October, adding that "relationships with teenage boys is complex".

In a statement to US media, a Spears spokesperson added: "With news from Kevin's book breaking, once again he and others are profiting off her and sadly it comes after child support has ended with Kevin. All she cares about are her kids, Sean Preston and Jayden James, and their well-being during this sensationalism. She detailed her journey in her memoir."

The BBC has contacted Federline's lawyer for comment on Spears's counter-accusations.

Why is this happening now?

While the pair dominated headlines during their relationship and subsequent divorce, Federline in particular has largely remained out of the limelight in recent years. And recently, the spotlight on Spears has largely been over her social media postings.

Federline has said he considered writing a book for many years but wanted to wait until his children were older to complete it.

"I picked it up and put it down quite a lot over probably a five-year period," he told the Associated Press. "I think that it's a very good description of me, who I am, the father I've become, the husband I am, the ex-husband I am."

He also told AP: "I want my children to be able to move forward in their lives and know that the actual truth of everything is out there."

A massive monument of General Robert E Lee that once sparked riots in the Virginia city of Charlottesville is now a pile of melted-down bronze, artfully displayed in a Los Angeles museum.

Next to the sculpture are barrels of toxic "slag" leftover from the melting process.

Around the corner, there is a massive, graffitied equestrian statue of Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson – the two most famous Confederate generals in the US Civil War, which the Confederacy lost in 1865 and ultimately led to the end of slavery in the United States.

"They fought for slavery," says curator Hamza Walker, who has been working for eight years to acquire and borrow the massive monuments amid lawsuits and the logistical challenges of moving tens of thousands of pounds of bronze and granite to Los Angeles.

"The idea of lionising those figures. What did they believe? They believed in white supremacy. Period."

Coming at a time when President Donald Trump is ordering statues and paintings of Confederate generals to be reinstalled, the warring narratives of American history are at the heart of "Monuments," which opens 23 October at The Brick and at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The 18 decommissioned Confederate monuments are displayed alongside pieces of contemporary art. The massive, graffitied statue of Lee and Jackson, for example, stands next to a giant replica sculpture of the "General Lee" car from the iconic TV show, The Dukes of Hazzard.

President Trump has often spoken of General Lee's bravery and he and others have criticized the removal and toppling of Confederate monuments, saying it's revisionist history.

White nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, triggering deadly clashes, to keep the statue from being removed. In the aftermath, similar statues sparked clashes in cities across the US.

"Under this historical revision, our Nation's unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed," President Trump wrote in a March executive order calling for paintings and monuments to be reinstalled.

But Mr Walker says putting Lee and Jackson on pedestals – even though they lost the war – is racist and promotes the Lost Cause ideology that argues the Civil War was a noble cause for states' rights and not about slavery.

"States rights to do what? The reason for the Civil War was slavery," he said, adding that it perpetuates the idea that the South was a "noble victim", and that slavery wasn't so terrible.

"If you could distance them from slavery, right, then you could portray them as heroes, even though they lost the war and were on the wrong side of history, fighting for something that was morally repugnant," he says.

The centrepiece of the show is "Unmanned Drone" – a completely reconstructed sculpture of Stonewall Jackson by artist Kara Walker, who transformed the horse and its rider heading into battle into a headless, zombie-like creature.

"The southern vernacular would be a 'haint', which would be a ghostly form," Kara Walker, who is not related to Hamza Walker, told the BBC when asked how she describes the work. "It's an attempt to rethink the legacies of Stonewall Jackson as a mythology, as mythological holder for white supremacy."

Most of the monuments on display will be returned to the cities and towns they've been borrowed from when the show closes in May. But Kara Walker's sculpture will need to find a new home. And the bronze ingots from the melted down Lee sculpture will be transformed again into a new work of art.

The statue was removed in 2021 and melted in 2023 after the Charlottesville City Council voted to donate the statue to the Jefferson School - African American Heritage Center.

"It's a toxic representation of history, this lost cause narrative, and we're purifying it," says Jalane Schmidt, an activist and professor who was there when the statue came down in Charlottesville, and when it was melted at a secret foundry. She came to see it in its new form in Los Angeles.

Living in Charlottesville, she said, the statue was always in the background until a teenage girl in 2016 started a petition to rename Lee Park and remove the statue because she found it offensive that the city would celebrate someone who fought for slavery.

The statue was the focal point for the Unite the Right rally in 2017, which turned deadly when a 21-year-old white nationalist plowed his car into counter protesters killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal and civil rights activist.

Schmidt says the petition and the rally changed public opinion about the monuments in Charlottesville and elsewhere.

"Especially after Unite the Right, after we were attacked, well, clearly this was evidence that, you know, people are willing to die for symbols, but they're also willing to kill for them," she said. "We had to remove them just for our own health."

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had a bad day.

That's how the boss of another big US tech firm Cloudflare put it – probably feeling very relieved that today's outage, hitting over 1,000 companies and affecting millions of internet users, had nothing to do with him.

The places hit by the outage vary significantly. It took out major social media platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, banks like Lloyds and Halifax, and games like Roblox and Fortnite.

AWS is a US giant with a large global footprint, having positioned itself as the backbone of the internet.

It provides tools and computers which enable around a third of the internet to work, it offers storage space and database management, it saves firms from having to maintain their own costly set-ups, and it also connects traffic to those platforms.

That's how it sells its services: let us look after your business's computing needs for you.

But today something very mundane went very wrong: a common kind of outage known as a Domain Name System (DNS) error.

People who work in the tech industry will be rolling their eyes right now.

This common error can cause a lot of havoc.

"It's always DNS!" is something I hear a lot.

When someone taps an app or clicks a link, their device is essentially sending a request to be connected to that service.

DNS is supposed to act like a map, and today AWS lost its bearings – platforms like Snapchat, Canva and HMRC were all still there but it couldn't see where they were to direct traffic to them.

Why did it have such an impact?

These errors happen for a number of reasons.

Usually it's a maintenance issue or a server failure. Sometimes that's human error, someone misconfiguring something somewhere, or in extreme cases a cyber attack - although there's no evidence of this so far.

AWS said it occurred at its vast data centre plant in North Virginia, its oldest and biggest site.

A chorus of experts have said today is a textbook illustration of the risks of putting all of your eggs in one basket in terms of a service provider - AWS is a giant and millions of businesses rely on it.

And they are right, but the issue is there aren't many alternatives at the sheer scale provided by AWS.

There are only two main contenders in fact, and they're both other US giants: Microsoft's Azure and Google's Cloud Platform.

Smaller rivals include IBM and the Chinese firm Alibaba. The parent company of the supermarket Lidl launched a European rival called Stackit last year, in direct competition with Amazon.

But AWS remains the dominant player by some margin.

Some argue the UK and Europe urgently needs to build up its own infrastructure and be less reliant on the US for cloud services – while others say it's too late.

Someone working in government once told me an MP informally proposed creating a UK version of AWS.

"But what's the point?" came the reply. "We already have AWS, over there."

Perhaps incidents like today's highlight why it's not quite that simple.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the world's top tech stories and trends. Outside the UK? Sign up here.

The Metropolitan Police says it will no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents to allow officers to "focus on matters that meet the threshold for criminal investigations".

The announcement came as the Met confirmed it was dropping a probe into Father Ted creator Graham Linehan after he was arrested at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of inciting violence in relation to his posts on X.

"This decision means that no charges will be brought against Graham Linehan in relation to this allegation," a detective wrote in an email to the comic on Monday.

Mr Linehan was arrested by five officers on 1 September after arriving on a flight from the US, sparking a backlash from some public figures and politicians.

In the email to his lawyers, a Metropolitan Police detective wrote: "I am writing to inform you that following a review of the evidence by the Crown Prosecution Service, it has been determined that no further action will be taken in this matter.

"Please note that this decision may be reconsidered if further evidence or information comes to light."

Mr Linehan and the Free Speech Union (FSU), an advocacy group, vowed to sue the Metropolitan Police for wrongful arrest and interference with his free speech rights.

The writer added that Westminster Magistrates Court ordered that all of his bail conditions be dropped after an application by FSU lawyers. District Judge Snow ruled that the conditions were too vague and ordered that they were immediately lifted.

In a statement on Monday addressing non-crime hate incidents, a Metropolitan Police spokesperson said it "understands the concern" around Mr Linehan's case.

"The Commissioner has been clear he doesn't believe officers should be policing toxic culture war debates, with current laws and rules on inciting violence online leaving them in an impossible position," the spokesperson said.

The policy change would "provide clearer direction for officers, reduce ambiguity and enable them to focus on matters that meet the threshold for criminal investigations," the spokesperson added.

Non-crime hate incidents are alleged acts perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards people with certain characteristics, such as race or transgender identity.

The arrest

In an online Substack article published in September, Mr Linehan said that, following his arrest at the airport, officials became concerned for his health after taking his blood pressure. He said he was then taken to hospital.

The Metropolitan Police said that a man in his 50s was arrested on 1 September at Heathrow Airport and taken to hospital, adding his condition "is neither life-threatening nor life-changing" , and he was bailed "pending further investigation".

Linehan said in the Substack post that his arrest related to three posts on X from April, on his views about challenging "a trans-identified male" in "a female-only space".

He shared screen shots of the posts he said he was arrested for on Substack, the subscription-based online platform.

The first post, from his X feed, said: "If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls."

He then wrote on Substack that during his police interview following the arrest, "I explained that the 'punch' tweet was a serious point made with a joke", and that it was about "the height difference between men and women... and certainly not a call to violence".

His second post from X appeared to be an aerial shot of a group of protesters in a town centre, and he called it "a photo you can smell".

The third expressed his views, in which he said "I hate them", referring to "misogynists and homophobes", adding an expletive.

On 3 September the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, defended the officers involved in the Heathrow arrests, but said he recognised "concern caused by such incidents given differing perspectives on the balance between free speech and the risks of inciting violence in the real world".

He called on the government to "change or clarify" the law following Linehan's arrest, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said police must "focus on the most serious issues", when asked about the arrest.

At the time, Green Party leader Zack Polanski called the posts "totally unacceptable", saying the arrest seemed "proportionate", while Shami Chakrabarti, a Labour peer and ex-director of Liberty, a civil liberties group, said "the public order statute book and speech offences in particular do need an overarching review".

"But inciting violence must always be a criminal offence," she added.

Mr Linehan has pleaded not guilty to charges of harassment and criminal damage in a separate case, which has been adjourned until 29 October, with the comedian released on bail.

Japan has for the first time approved over-the-counter sales of an emergency contraceptive pill, its manufacturer says, allowing women in the country to take the medication without prescription.

ASKA Pharmaceutical said wider access to the pill would "empower Japanese women in the area of reproductive health". A date for it to go on sale has yet to be announced.

The pill will be labelled as "medicine requiring guidance", meaning women must take it in the presence of a pharmacist.

The "morning-after" pill is already available without prescription in more than 90 countries. Japan's conservative views on abortion are rooted in patriarchy and deeply traditional views on the role of women.

ASKA Pharmaceutical said in a statement on Monday that it "has obtained the marketing authorisation as a switch to OTC [over-the-counter] use of the emergency contraceptive pill commercialised under the trademark Norlevo".

There will be no age restrictions on buyers and no requirement for parental consent, the saily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported.

The company said it had filed for regulatory approval in 2024, following prescription-free trial sales of the pill the year before.

During the trial, Norlevo was made available at 145 pharmacies in Japan. Until then, the pill had only been supplied at clinics or pharmacies with a doctor's examination and prescription.

At the time, rights groups criticised the trial, saying it was too small, and called for restrictions to be lifted. Campaigners have long argued that requiring a prescription deterred younger women and rape victims from accessing emergency contraception.

Selling the drug without prescription was first discussed by a health ministry panel in 2017 - the public consultation found overwhelming support across the country.

But officials stopped short of giving it the green light then, saying that making it more easily available would encourage irresponsible use of the "morning-after" pill.

Norlevo - and the generic version levonorgestrel - works best within 72 hours after unprotected sex and has an efficacy rate of 80%.

McVitie's Penguin and Club bars are no longer classed as chocolate after rising cocoa prices led the makers to switch to using other ingredients.

Club bars had previously been marketed under the slogan: "If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club".

But both treats are now described as "chocolate flavour" because the amount of cocoa they contain has been reduced after owner Pladis had to find cheaper alternatives to the main ingredient in chocolate.

The UK sources cocoa beans from West Africa and poor harvests as a result of severe drought conditions in cocoa-producing countries, such as Ivory Coast and Ghana, have led to restricted supplies and higher prices.

The change to the bars' ingredients was first reported by trade journal The Grocer.

A spokesperson for Pladis said: "We made some changes to McVitie's Penguin and Club earlier this year, where we are using a chocolate flavour coating with cocoa mass, rather than a chocolate coating."

"Sensory testing with consumers shows the new coatings deliver the same great taste as the originals," the spokesperson added.

The company said it was committed to delivering "great-tasting snacks" while managing rising costs, and it only adjusted its recipes when "necessary".

Confectionery historian Alex Hutchinson said many confectioners were lowering the amount of cocoa ingredients in their chocolate in favour of cheaper alternatives.

When processed, a cocoa bean becomes cocoa liquor, which contains 50% each of cocoa solids and cocoa butter.

But manufacturers looking to save costs can reduce the amount of ingredients they use which are directly from the bean, and instead use alternatives such as palm oil or shea butter.

For milk chocolate to be classified as such, UK regulations say it should be made up of about 20% cocoa solids, slightly lower than EU regulations which stipulate a minimum of 25%.

The move from Pladis, which owns well-known household favourites such as McVities, Godiva, Go Ahead and Jacobs, means the firm is now using less than 20% cocoa-bean derived ingredients in its "chocolate" coating for Club and Penguin.

Although cocoa commodity prices have eased slightly recently, a surge in costs over the past three years led to pricier Easter eggs and squeezed profit margins at some chocolate-sellers.

"During my lifetime the cost of cocoa has stayed around $3,500 (£2,607) dollars a tonne and last year it soared to $11,500 (£8,567) a tonne," said Ms Hutchinson.

"Chocolate costs more than ever before," she added.

The ex-husband of pop star Britney Spears gives new details on the pair's tense relationship in his new memoir You Thought You Knew.

Kevin Federline, her one-time backing dancer, presents a picture of Spears's allegedly erratic behaviour as a wife and mother, and says he continues to have concerns for her wellbeing.

Spears has spoken out against the book, which will be published on Tuesday, and accuses Federline of trying to profit from his association with her.

What does the book say about Spears?

Federline makes a number of allegations against Spears, in the memoir shared with the BBC ahead of the book's release by publisher Listenin.

He accuses Spears of unhealthy behaviour as a mother, including drinking when she was pregnant and taking cocaine while her two sons were still breastfeeding. Spears has previously denied having substance abuse issues.

When they were teenagers, the couple's sons were fearful of Spears, Federline also alleges. "They would awaken sometimes at night to find her standing silently in the doorway, watching them sleep - 'Oh, you're awake?' - with a knife in her hand," he writes. "Then she'd turn around and pad off without explanation."

Federline also expresses his concern for his estranged ex-wife, writing: "The truth is, this situation with Britney feels like it's racing toward something irreversible. From where I sit, the clock is ticking, and we're getting close to the 11th hour."

He writes that he was supportive of a conservatorship, under which many aspects of Spears's life were controlled by others for years. Of the Free Britney movement, Federline writes that he could "never fully get behind it".

What's the history of their relationship?

The pair got together in the summer of 2004, after Spears's commercial peak.

They married a few months later and quickly welcomed their two sons: Preston, now 20, and Jayden, now 19.

Spears filed for divorce in 2006 and the divorce was finalised in 2007.

The couple fought publicly over custody of their sons and ultimately Federline was given sole custody of the boys.

In the wake of Federline getting full custody, Spears was seen behaving in a way that Federline characterises in his book as erratic.

She made headlines with incidents like shaving her head and hitting a photographer's car with an umbrella.

Those public incidents raised concern about her mental welfare, and after she was taken to hospital twice, a temporary conservatorship was established in 2008 and made permanent later that year.

Spears remained under that controversial arrangement until 2021, under which her father and others controlled her finances and aspects of her personal life. She did not regain custody of her children until after it was lifted.

What has Spears said?

Spears has accused Federline of attacking her during his recent press appearances to promote the book. She described the contents of the memoir as "extremely hurtful and exhausting", but suggested the work would sell better than her own memoir had done.

In that book, The Woman in Me, Spears accused her ex-husband of trying to "convince everyone I was completely out of control".

Spears has also defended her relationship with her sons. "I have always pleaded and screamed to have a life with my boys," she wrote on social media on 15 October, adding that "relationships with teenage boys is complex".

In a statement to US media, a Spears spokesperson added: "With news from Kevin's book breaking, once again he and others are profiting off her and sadly it comes after child support has ended with Kevin. All she cares about are her kids, Sean Preston and Jayden James, and their well-being during this sensationalism. She detailed her journey in her memoir."

The BBC has contacted Federline's lawyer for comment on Spears's counter-accusations.

Why is this happening now?

While the pair dominated headlines during their relationship and subsequent divorce, Federline in particular has largely remained out of the limelight in recent years. And recently, the spotlight on Spears has largely been over her social media postings.

Federline has said he considered writing a book for many years but wanted to wait until his children were older to complete it.

"I picked it up and put it down quite a lot over probably a five-year period," he told the Associated Press. "I think that it's a very good description of me, who I am, the father I've become, the husband I am, the ex-husband I am."

He also told AP: "I want my children to be able to move forward in their lives and know that the actual truth of everything is out there."

Much of Virginia Giuffre's story has been heard before but in her memoir, published posthumously, the abuse is described in appalling detail.

Two days ahead of the book's official publication, the BBC got hold of a copy.

There are revelations about Ms Giuffre's encounters with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell - as well as more details of her allegations about Prince Andrew, which he has always denied.

Here's what we learned from the 367-page-long book.

Prince Andrew allegations - and an 'orgy'

In the memoir, Ms Giuffre says she had sex with Prince Andrew on three separate occasions.

The third time, she says, was on Epstein's island as part of what Ms Giuffre called "an orgy".

"Epstein, Andy, and approximately eight other young girls and I had sex together," she says.

"The other girls all appeared to be under the age of 18 and didn't really speak English. Epstein laughed about how they couldn't really communicate, saying they are the easiest girls to get along with."

She later recalls seeing the photo of Epstein walking in New York's central park with Prince Andrew, published in newspapers around the world in 2011.

"I was of course revolted to see two of my abusers together, out for a stroll," she writes.

"But mostly I was amazed that a member of the Royal Family would be stupid enough to appear in public with Epstein".

Prince Andrew, who reached a financial settlement with Ms Giuffre in 2022, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. In 2019, he told BBC Newsnight he did not remember meeting Ms Giuffre "at all", and that they "never had any sort of sexual contact."

'Epstein told me I'd had a miscarriage'

Shortly after the alleged "orgy" Ms Giuffre says she "wasn't in great shape", and had irregular bleeding and a tenderness in her abdomen.

She says Epstein took her to a hospital, where she remembers being taken to an examination room. However, she says she is unclear what happened next due to pain medication affecting her memory.

Soon after, she writes, one of the other girls in Epstein's house suggested to her that an incision mark near her belly button could mean she had surgery for an ectopic pregnancy.

"But Epstein told me I'd suffered a miscarriage, which is altogether something different," Ms Giuffre says.

"Epstein never wore a condom. Neither did the men he and Maxwell trafficked me to."

Memories of Epstein 'torture' Giuffre

At the centre of the abuse was the late Epstein and his former girlfriend Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking charges.

Ms Giuffre says that even after many years, the memories of what Epstein put her through "torture" her - and says she she feared she might "die a sex slave" at the hands of Epstein and his circle.

The memoir includes shocking descriptions of sadomasochistic sex.

She says Epstein developed an interest in it over time, and began to "experiment with whips and restraints and other instruments of torture".

"In session after session, he would play out various fantasies, with me as the victim," she writes.

She says the chains and contraptions he used on her "caused so much pain that I prayed I would black out". But she adds: "When I did, I'd awaken to more abuse".

Ms Giuffre also details the physical effects such abuse had on her body, with dark circles under her eyes and her ribs visible beneath her skin.

Rather than offering any care, Epstein was "disgusted" at her appearance, she says.

"'You're not the same girl you were,' Epstein said coldly. 'You need to clean yourself up'," she writes in the book.

Maxwell's part in the abuse

Ms Giuffre goes into detail about how she first met Maxwell, and how she introduced her to Epstein.

She says Maxwell turned up at the Mar-a-Lago spa, where a teenage Ms Giuffre was working.

"She looks to be in her late thirties, and her British accent reminds me of Mary Poppins," Ms Giuffre recalls.

She says Maxwell asked her to come for a job interview as a masseuse.

When she arrived at the house, Ms Giuffre says she was taken to a room where Epstein was completely naked on a massage table. "Just do what I do," she says Maxwell told her.

Ms Giuffre says she started giving Epstein a massage. She says Maxwell then took her clothes off, and undressed Ms Giuffre, and they sexually abused her.

"The disappointment was excruciating. I blamed myself. 'Is sex all anyone will ever want from me'," she writes.

She later describes how Maxwell facilitated the introduction to Prince Andrew in March 2001.

She writes that Maxwell woke her up and told her it was going to be a "special day" - that "just like Cinderella" she was going to meet a "handsome prince".

Ms Giuffre later writes that even decades later, she remembers how much she feared both Epstein and Maxwell.

Disappointment at Epstein's death

One of the other themes running through the book is Ms Giuffre's desire for accountability.

Epstein was convicted in Florida in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a person under the age of 18. He died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Ms Giuffre describes feeling disappointed at his death. "This wasn't how justice was supposed to work out," she says.

On Prince Andrew, she recalls standing outside a courtroom and telling journalists: "He knows exactly what he's done… and I hope he comes clean about it."

She later writes that she hopes the royal - who has always denied wrongdoing - will be "held to account".

The most powerful words are perhaps saved for the ending of the book.

"In my mind, I hold a picture of a girl reaching out for help and easily finding it," Ms Giuffre writes.

"I picture a woman, too, who - having come to terms with her childhood pain - feels that it's within her power to take action against those who hurt her.

"If this book moves us even an inch closer to a reality like that - if it helps just one person - I will have achieved my goal."

Pizza Hut UK is to close 68 restaurants with the loss of 1,210 jobs after falling into administration.

DC London Pie Limited, which operates Pizza Hut's UK restaurants, appointed FTI Consulting as administrators on Monday.

However, Pizza Hut's global owner Yum! Brands has agreed to save 64 restaurants in the UK, preserving 1,276 jobs.

Pizza Hut is well known for its family-friendly dining and salad bar, but has been struggling in recent months and had previously gone into administration in January.

King Charles has met survivors of the car and knife attack on a Manchester synagogue in which two people were killed.

Jihad Al-Shamie, 35, carried out the attack at the city's Heaton Park synagogue on 2 October.

His monarch expressed his "sadness" following the "terrible" incident as he met senior leaders as well as three people who were injured in the attack.

The King also met members of the emergency services who responded to the incident in a gathering at Greater Manchester Police's headquarters, including ambulance workers.

About 150 well-wishers lined a nearby street outside the synagogue, despite the rain, hoping for a glimpse of the monarch.

• Synagogue reopens two weeks after Manchester attack

The King, who wore a traditional kippah, displayed by Jews as a sign of Jewish identity, met all three people who survived the attack, in which Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed.

Andrew Franks, the volunteer security guard who was recently discharged from hospital, returned to the synagogue for the first time since the attack.

Yoni Finlay, who was mistakenly shot by police, was also in attendance, and told the BBC he is "physically doing very well".

Speaking outside the synagogue, he said: "I'm doing very well. Physically, I'm doing very well."

On meeting the King, Mr Finlay said: "It was quite an honour. Quite surreal but quite an honour.

"I think it really sends out a message. It shows a lot of support from the very top of the country. It was very special that he came. It was an honour to meet him.

"Three weeks ago I saw the worst of humanity, but since then you do absolutely see the best, and there's a lot of good people out there."

Bernard Agyemang, the professional security guard who was seriously injured when the attacker drove his car into him, was brought in and out of the synagogue in a wheelchair.

Charles was introduced to the "heroes" by Rabbi Daniel Walker - a group of senior figures from the synagogue who helped stop the attack on the on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

"I can't tell you how sad I am," the King told the group, which included the synagogue's chairman Alan Levy, who helped to barricade the door, and its president Hilary Foxler.

And later when he met other members of the congregation, the King commented on what he described as a "terrible thing to come out of the blue".

The synagogue reopened last week for the first time since the targeted attack to celebrate the festivals of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah earlier this week.

Alan Rubins, from Whitefield, said he "dropped everything" when he heard about the King's visit to join the crowd.

"I wanted to pay my respects the way the King is paying his respects to the Manchester Jewish community," he said.

He said he thought it was "fantastic" when the King crossed the road to engage in a "big huddle with the community".

Gloria Levene, who also went along to see the King, said his visit was "a very big boost" for the Jewish community.

Supt Kirsten Buggy said it was "such a privilege" to meet the King during his visit to see emergency responders.

"It has been a tough few weeks and meeting the King and listening to him take a real interest in the role we all performed, it was hugely uplifting from a morale point of view," she said.

Listen to the best of BBC Radio Manchester on Sounds and follow BBC Manchester on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230.

One week ago, US President Donald Trump was given a hero's welcome in Israel after securing the Gaza ceasefire and exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

But the days since have shown just how precarious the ceasefire is, and Sunday brought its biggest test so far.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a series of deadly strikes across Gaza, after two soldiers were killed in an attack it blamed on Hamas. An Israeli security official announced the suspension of aid deliveries.

It appears US pressure ensured the truce was not derailed and that Israel's crossings with Gaza reopened on Monday. Now it is clear mediators must stay closely involved to shore up the deal and settle key issues on the future of Gaza and Hamas.

Already, the president's special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are back in the region while Hamas negotiators are meeting Egyptian mediators and Palestinian factions in Cairo.

All are expected to discuss the second phase of Trump's 20-point peace plan, which involves deploying an international stabilisation force in Gaza, the eventual withdrawal of the IDF and critically, the disarmament of Hamas.

Palestinians and Israelis have been shaken by the latest breakdown.

"From the start of the war I was with him 24 hours a day, I never left him," bereaved father, Shadi Abu Obeid told the BBC in Khan Younis as he fought back tears at the funeral of his 14-year-old son Mohammed early on Monday.

"Because of the ceasefire I was a bit more relaxed, and I let him go out with his friends," Shadi added. "It was quiet and there were meant to be international guarantees."

Mohammed was killed with two others in an Israeli strike on a tent in al-Mawasi. The IDF would not comment on who or what was specifically being targeted.

At least 45 Palestinians were killed, local hospitals say, after the IDF said it struck "dozens of Hamas terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip".

The BBC understands that several members of Hamas's armed wing, including a commander, were killed in a strike on a makeshift café in central Gaza. However, footage from other locations showed civilians, including children, among the dead.

Trump's envoys – who played a key role in negotiations with Hamas – had been expected in Israel to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, prior to the latest events.

Before they left the US, the two men gave an interview to 60 Minutes on CBS, in which they described how they had broken with diplomatic protocols to hold direct talks with Hamas leaders during ceasefire talks in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.

They said this was intended to give guarantees that fighting would not resume after Israeli hostages were returned. Kushner - Trump's son-in-law – said the president had been "very, very comfortable" with such an approach.

He also said the signs were that Hamas was acting "in good faith" to return the bodies of deceased hostages – a main point of contention with Israel, prior to Sunday's events, threatening the ceasefire. Sixteen bodies have yet to be handed back. Hamas has said it has recovered another corpse which will be handed back when "conditions allow."

Speaking to journalists on Air Force One on Sunday, President Trump stressed the truce remained in place and that "we want to make sure it's going to be very peaceful".

When it came to the threat of internal violence and score-settling by Hamas in Gaza, he said that Hamas had been "quite rambunctious" and "they've been doing some shooting". But he added that "maybe the leadership isn't involved", and that it could be "some rebels within".

The IDF denied reports that its actions on Sunday were triggered by a clash between Hamas and a militia allied to Israel in the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza. It said Hamas had launched several direct attacks on its troops in an area still under its control with an anti-tank missile and gunfire.

An Israeli government spokeswoman said forces had been working near Rafah "to dismantle terrorist infrastructure all in accordance with the ceasefire agreement."

Hamas, which has accused Israel of multiple ceasefire violations, said communication with its remaining cells in Rafah had been cut off for months and that it was "not responsible for any incidents occurring in those areas".

The latest events have Israeli commentators focusing once again on the weaknesses of the deal agreed by Israel and Hamas.

In Israel's Haaretz newspaper, journalist and author Amir Tibon notes that it was "full of vague wording that left significant loopholes."

One problem that he says it left unresolved "was the fate of Hamas fighters stranded in the areas of Gaza held by Israel when the ceasefire went into effect". Israel's military currently holds about half of the territory, demarcated by a so-called Yellow Line.

In Israel Hayom, military columnist Yoav Limor describes the firefight near Rafah as "a warning", adding: "If Israel fails to establish tough and clear rules vis-à-vis Hamas it could find itself on a slippery slope."

Israel's Defence Minister, Israel Katz, has since appeared to do that, putting out a message that any Hamas fighters beyond the Yellow Line, in Israeli-controlled parts of Gaza must leave immediately and that Hamas leaders will be held responsible for their actions.

With Palestinians expressing confusion about the exact location of the line, the IDF has put out a video showing bulldozers towing yellow blocks into place to mark it out.

On Monday, Palestinian health officials said Israeli fire killed three people east of Gaza City. The IDF said its troops fired towards "several terrorists" who crossed the Yellow Line in the Shejaiya area.

Tough rhetoric and domestic pressure on Netanyahu are now anticipated as Israel's parliament begins its winter session, and with an internal election due within the prime minister's Likud party.

Netanyahu directed the military to take "strong action" against breaches of the deal, but he refrained from threatening a return to war.

On the Palestinian side, Hamas spokesman Mohammed Nazzal has called for the speedy approval of a committee of politically independent Palestinian technocrats to govern Gaza, telling Al Jazeera that Hamas had submitted a list of more than 40 proposed names to mediators.

However, in a separate interview with Reuters, he indicated that Hamas intended to maintain security control in Gaza for an interim period, illustrating another major obstacle to cementing the full end of the war in Gaza.

In the US, Vice President JD Vance has downplayed the shakiness of the ceasefire, saying: "There's going to be fits and starts." It was, he said, "the best chance for a sustainable peace".

Meanwhile, Witkoff and Kushner are expected to go on to further meetings in Cairo. There are significant obstacles to overcome before there can be more celebrations over the Gaza ceasefire.

The son of ex-England footballer Stuart Pearce has died in a tractor crash.

Harley Pearce, 21, from Marlborough in Wiltshire, died in the crash in Gloucestershire last week, police said.

Harley's family have issued a tribute to him saying: "Our family is truly shocked and utterly heartbroken at the loss of our cherished son and devoted brother, Harley."

The crash happened on Old Birdlip Hill, A417, in Witcombe, near Gloucester at 14:30 BST on Thursday.

Harley's family described him as "a golden boy with an infectious smile".

"A soul who left an unforgettable imprint on all who knew him," continued the tribute.

"This shocking tragedy will leave a huge hole in the hearts of those who were fortunate enough to have known him.

"With a quiet, understated strength and deep kindness, we are so proud of the young man he had become, exhibiting a wonderful work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit in the farming industry.

"He will always be our shining star. Rest in peace, our beautiful son and brother. You will never ever be forgotten."

Harley ran his own farming company, Harley Pearce Agricultural Services.

His father, Stuart Pearce, played more than 400 games for Nottingham Forest. He also played for Coventry, Newcastle, West Ham and Manchester City.

The former electrician won 78 international caps and later managed Forest, Manchester City and the Great Britain team at the London 2012 Olympics.

He also had a stint as England's caretaker manager.

The 62-year-old, who currently works as a pundit for Talksport, recently suffered a medical emergency on a flight from Las Vegas to London.

The flight had to be diverted to St John's International Airport in Canada for him to have treatment.

Follow BBC Gloucestershire on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.

A group of blind patients can now read again after being fitted with a life-changing implant at the back of the eye.

A surgeon who inserted the microchips in five patients at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London says the results of the international trial are "astounding".

Sheila Irvine, 70, who is registered blind, told the BBC it was "out of this world" to be able to read and do crosswords again. "It's beautiful, wonderful. It gives me such pleasure."

The technology offers hope to people with an advanced form of dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), called geographic atrophy (GA), which affects more than 250,000 people in the UK and five million worldwide.

In those with the condition, cells in a tiny area of the retina at the back of the eye gradually become damaged and die, resulting in blurred or distorted central vision. Colour and fine detail are often lost.

The new procedure involves inserting a tiny 2mm-square photovoltaic microchip, with the thickness of a human hair, under the retina.

Patients then put on glasses with a built-in video camera. The camera sends an infrared beam of video images to the implant at the back of the eye, which sends them on to a small pocket processor to be enhanced and made clearer.

The images are then sent back to the patient's brain, via the implant and optic nerve, giving them some vision again.

The patients spent months learning how to interpret the images.

Mahi Muqit, consultant ophthalmic surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, who led the UK arm of the trial, told the BBC it was "pioneering and life-changing technology".

"This is the first implant that's been demonstrated to give patients meaningful vision that they can use in their daily life, such as reading, writing.

"I think this is a major advance," he said.

How the implant technology works

For the research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 38 patients with geographic atrophy in five European countries took part in the trial of the Prima implant, which is made by California biotech Science Corporation.

Of 32 patients given the implant, 27 were able to read again using their central vision. After a year, this equated to an improvement of 25 letters, or five lines, on an eye chart.

For Sheila, from Wiltshire, the improvement is even more dramatic. Without the implant, she is completely unable to read.

But when we filmed Sheila reading an eye chart at Moorfields Hospital, she did not make a single error. After completing it, she punched the air and cheered.

'I am one happy bunny'

The task took huge concentration. Sheila had to put a pillow under her chin in order to steady the feed from the camera, which can focus on just one or two letters at a time. At some points she needed the device switched to magnification mode, especially to distinguish between the letters C and O.

Sheila began losing her central vision more than 30 years ago, due to loss of cells in the retina. She describes her vision as like having two black discs in each eye.

Sheila gets around using a white cane because her very limited peripheral vision is completely blurred. She is unable to read even the largest street signs when outdoors.

When she had to give up her driving licence, she says she cried.

But after having an implant fitted around three years ago, she is delighted by her progress, as is the medical team at Moorfields.

"I am able to read my post, books, and do crosswords and Sudoku," she says.

When asked if she ever thought she'd read again, Sheila replied: "Not on your nelly!"

"It is amazing. I am one happy bunny," she adds.

"Technology is moving so fast, it's amazing that I am part of it."

Sheila doesn't wear the device when outdoors. In part, this is because it requires great concentration - her head has to be held very still in order to read. She also does not want to become over-reliant on the device.

Instead, she says she "rushes her chores" at home each day before sitting down and putting on the special glasses.

The Prima implant is not yet licensed so is not available outside of clinical trials, and it's unclear how much it may eventually cost.

Nonetheless, Mahi Muqit said he hoped it would be available to some NHS patients "within a few years."

Dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of sight loss in older age. It's hoped the technology could be used to help people with other eye conditions in the future.

However the implant would not help restore sight in people born blind, because they don't have a functioning optic nerve to pass signals to the brain.

Prince Andrew's decision to give up his titles and honours shows no sign of stopping the scrutiny of his links to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, with royal sources expecting "more days of pain ahead" in the scandal.

While the prince will no longer use his titles, including the Duke of York, there are still calls for them to be formally removed.

Rachael Maskell, who is the MP for York and says many of her constituents no longer want the city to be associated with the royal, wants the government to change the law to allow this process.

The Metropolitan Police are looking into claims the prince asked a protection officer for personal information about Virginia Giuffre, who said she had been forced to have sex with the prince, a claim he has consistently denied.

Her memoir, published posthumously this week, adds to pressure on him.

A royal source said the focus of the Royal Family's thoughts were on Epstein's victims and the "whole network of girls and young women who were abused and treated appallingly".

It should not be seen as a reputational or PR battle, they suggested, saying they were treating the ongoing claims with " very great concern".

The posthumous memoir by Ms Giuffre repeats claims she was trafficked for sex by Epstein to his powerful circle of friends, including Prince Andrew - an allegation that the prince has strongly denied.

On Friday the prince announced he would no longer use his titles and honours, which include the Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killyleagh. He also gave up his membership of the prestigious Order of the Garter.

He remains a prince, a title assigned from birth as the son of a monarch. But constitutional expert Craig Prescott says Andrew's title of "prince" could also be theoretically removed by a legal document issued by monarchs, called Letters Patent. If he ceased to be a prince and as he is no longer Duke of York, he would become Andrew Windsor.

But at present, taking away his other titles would require legislation in Parliament.

Although Palace pressure might have been exerted, the handing back of his titles was a voluntary move. They were not taken away, but Andrew's offer to stop using them can be enacted immediately and avoids using parliamentary time that would be necessary to remove those titles.

But Maskell does wants the government to amend current laws to make it possible for the King to directly take away his other titles and honours - and she says a poll in her York Central constituency showed overwhelming support for forcing Andrew to lose his titles.

"There are opportunities here to address the wrongs of history and ensure the voices of victims and survivors are heard and acted upon," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Maskell, who lost the Labour whip in a rebellion over welfare reforms, said she "didn't come into Parliament to discuss princes and princesses" but that such a change could be quickly passed allowing the monarch to remove titles and honours.

"It's a simple single clause, it could be added to constitutional bill or a private member's bill," she said.

Flynn, the SNP's Westminster leader, has also called for a better mechanism to remove titles.

He said the public was "angry and aghast and they deserve to know that some MPs share their outrage".

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, speaking on BBC Breakfast, said that with regards the debate about taking away the prince's titles: "Any further decisions are not something we as a government would be involved in."

Prince Andrew also faces pressure from inquiries in the US into Epstein's contacts with influential people, with more documents being trawled.

At the weekend, there were reports of emails showing Epstein's connections with Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, who has also lost her title and is no longer the Duchess of York.

The emails suggested that Prince Andrew in 2011 had sought personal information about his accuser Virginia Giuffre from his police protection officers and that he had already had her social security number.

This was in contrast to his claims in his BBC Newsnight interview - when he said: "I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever."

The Metropolitan Police has said it is actively looking into the claims about Andrew seeking information about her.

The documents emerging from the US, published by the Mail on Sunday, also showed Epstein claiming to have financially supported Sarah Ferguson for 15 years.

Sources close to Sarah Ferguson denied that this was correct.

The announcement that Prince Andrew would lose his remaining titles had been intended to draw a line under what a royal source had called the "constant parade of headlines" about him, which had taken attention away from other royals.

Royal sources highlighted that also included the work by Queen Camilla and the Duchess of Edinburgh to challenge violence against women.

The Palace will not want the scandal surrounding Andrew to overshadow a historic state visit to the Vatican this week, during which King Charles will meet Pope Leo.

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.

Security measures "failed" in preventing a major jewellery heist in the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, creating a very negative image of the country, the French justice minister has said.

"People were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of Paris, get people up it in several minutes to grab priceless jewels and give France a terrible image," Gérald Darmanin said.

Thieves wielding power tools broke into the world's most-visited museum in broad daylight, stealing eight items described as being of inestimable value, before escaping on scooters.

There are fears that unless the thieves are caught quickly, the priceless items - including a diamond and emerald necklace Emperor Napoleon gave to his wife - will be broken up and smuggled out of the country.

Darmanin told France Inter radio he was certain police would eventually arrest the thieves.

But the head of an organisation specialising in the location and recovery of stolen and looted artworks warned that if the thieves are not caught in the next 24 to 48 hours, the stolen jewellery will likely be "long gone".

"There is a race going on right now," Chris Marinello, the chief executive of Art Recovery International, told BBC World Service's Newshour programme.

Crowns and diadems - which were stolen in the heist - can easily be broken apart and sold in small parts.

The thieves "are not going to keep them intact, they are going to break them up, melt down the valuable metal, recut the valuable stones and hide evidence of their crime," Mr Marinello said, adding it would be difficult to sell these jewels intact.

The French police "know that in the next 24 or 48 hours, if these thieves are not caught, those pieces are probably long gone," he said.

"They may catch the criminals but they won't recover the jewels."

The theft took place between 09:30 and 09:40 local time on Sunday morning, shortly after the museum opened to visitors.

Four masked thieves used a truck equipped with a mechanical lift to gain access to the Galerie d'Apollon (Gallery of Apollo) via a balcony close to the River Seine.

Pictures from the scene showed a vehicle-mounted ladder leading up to a first-floor window.

Two of the thieves cut through glass panes with a battery-powered disc cutter and entered the museum.

They then threatened the guards, who evacuated the building.

The thieves smashed the glass display cases and stole the jewels, which collectively contained thousands of diamonds and precious gemstones.

The robbery took just seven minutes.

As the museum's alarms started blaring, staff followed protocol by contacting security forces, the culture ministry said in a statement.

The thieves had tried to set fire to their vehicle outside but were prevented by the intervention of a museum staff-member, it added.

Eight items of jewellery were stolen in total, including an emerald and diamond necklace that Napoleon gave his wife, Empress Marie Louise.

Also taken was a diadem (jewelled headband) that once belonged to the Empress Eugénie - wife of Napoleon III - which has nearly 2,000 diamonds.

They also took a necklace that once belonged to Marie-Amelie, the last queen of France, and which contains eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, according to the Louvre's website.

There is an eerie emptiness at the seat of US economic power.

The US Treasury is in shutdown like much of the federal government.

Most staff are furloughed as the world's finance ministers and bankers jet in for the International Monetary Fund annual meetings a few blocks away, their delayed flights handled by a small number of unpaid air traffic controllers.

There is, however, one clear message the Trump administration is notably keen to get out, not so much for its domestic audience but for the bewildered world outside.

And they delivered it in the middle of last week to a small number of people ushered into the Treasury and what is said to be the finest room in Washington DC, the ornate and marbled Cash Room, which hosted the inaugural reception for post-civil war president, Ulysses Grant.

"Make no mistake," said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent alongside Trade Ambassador Jamieson Greer, as they fired the latest salvo in the ongoing 2025 global trade war. "This is China versus the world."

This simple message connects several extraordinary economic currents swirling around the world right now.

They include China's new export controls on critical minerals, fears of an AI bubble bursting, the tariff chaos and even the development of an erotic chatbot by OpenAI.

The world always seems to tilt a little on its axis in the two weeks a year that top bankers and finance ministers mass in Washington DC for their meetings at the IMF.

It is rare that the host itself is the main source of upheaval. Normally it would be a developing country, or perhaps the eurozone in the 2010s and infamously the UK in 2022.

The decisions and uncertainty arising from US trade policy, dizzying markets and decisions over its interest rates, loom large.

The inescapable signal being sent by the two most powerful US trade negotiators as they spoke to a small group of media in the Treasury's Cash Room was that China last week fired perhaps its most potent weapon yet by dramatically increasing restrictions on the trade of rare earth components.

These are critical to the production of high-tech goods ranging from electric cars to military hardware.

Bessent called the move a "Chinese chokehold" on the world.

• China has found Trump's pain point - rare earths
• Europe strives for rare earth independence from China

China's "sweeping expansion" of export controls on rare earth elements and equipment, as well as electric vehicle battery tech, industrial diamonds and super hard materials is "an exercise in economic coercion on every country in the world", said Greer.

This accusation is being made as his own boss, President Donald Trump, attempts to redraw global trade relations by using tariffs to eliminate US trade deficits.

He may have produced what is the toughest tariffs system the world has seen since 1933 but the disruption it has caused has been surprisingly muted so far.

The biggest economy on the planet is now behind a significant tariff wall but it's yet to feel the impact, partly thanks to a wealth boom built on some rather frothy tech valuations.

The conclusion to take from that is either the world economy is more shock absorbent than thought or it is just a matter of timing, with the real pain ahead.

Companies exporting to the US have swallowed the cost of tariffs, which are effectively import taxes, in their profit margins. But is that only for the time being?

The wall of tariffs that the US has built around its economy has led to more trade, for example, from China to Europe and Africa.

The US itself has been protected, for now, from the profound uncertainties, higher prices and domestic living standards impacts of the tariffs and the 10% fall in the value of the dollar.

Some insulation has come from booming AI tech sector share valuations, creating a profound wealth effect in certain households across the US, calculated by JP Morgan economists as worth $180bn per year.

• Landmark deal to cut global shipping emissions in tatters
• China's electric cars are becoming slicker and cheaper

The thin line between boom and bubble is impossible to calculate. Sometimes, it can be felt.

I was standing outside the Nasdaq in New York's Times Square, where the high tech market which symbolises US private sector tech ascendancy publicises its latest IPOs (stock launches) to the world.

One of the dozens of funds which raises real cash to plough into crypto, joyously "rang the opening bell", despite their share price already having slumped.

The executives then filed out into the Square to watch a giant video of themselves ringing the bell, among confused tourists. In fact, inside the Nasdaq, there is no bell, or trading floor either, just a bank of futuristic screens. Is it just hubris?

Another screen reminds us it is the 20th anniversary of the Nasdaq flotation of another tech company which went public here, now worth $3tn, Google.

This week, OpenAI's Sam Altman revealed that ChatGPT was developing chatbot erotica options.

This comes at a time when analysts are taking a hard look at firms like Altman's which have emerged at the front of the pack in the AI race.

A raft of convoluted deals where major US firms including chipmakers are investing in their own suppliers and vice versa has raised eyebrows further about the potential that the billions being poured into data centres, AI start-ups and cutting-edge manufacturing plants could be fuelling an ever-growing bubble.

So are the Chinese trying to weaponise these fears that it's all about to burst?

This is what Jamieson Greer seemed to suggest when he said the Chinese export controls on minerals critical to many important semiconductors gives Beijing control over the entire global economy and the technology supply chain which powers the very firms that could be keeping the US economy afloat.

"This will impact artificial intelligence systems and high tech products," he said.

Bessent also joined in, saying US media reports that China was playing hardball and was prepared to use financial markets to hurt the US was like "taking dictation" from the Chinese communist party. He went on, unusually, to accuse a named Chinese negotiator of going rogue.

None of this seems like a game of chess.

This is not carefully considered maestros thinking out their strategies, six moves ahead of time. This is more like playing pool by smashing the balls indiscriminately around the table, and then attempting to break the cue, or the table, or both.

Tariffs, counter-tariffs and export controls amount to mutually assured destruction manoeuvres which are cloaked behind the general assumption that President Trump will always pull back from the brink. The more that is baked in, the higher the risk of a shock.

In this situation, it is sensible game theory to look for allies.

The China moves would affect the whole world, including Europe. UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves and other leading European finance ministers told me they would work with global partners to ensure the supply of these rare earth materials.

Reeves pointed to work with Canada especially on developing alternative supply chains. The US is now reopening mines, and refining facilities. Chinese dominance here is decades in the making, however.

At times like this, it is also fair to say there is some divergence between the public words of diplomacy and what is being said in private.

There was frustration and bafflement behind the scenes directed at the US for having liberally sprayed tariffs in all directions while asking the world to focus on China's trade distortions.

"It's hard to tell friend from foe," said one G20 finance minister.

"The Americans are basically trying to corral the rest of the world against China, using everything as leverage against China," one senior G7 official told me.

• What tariffs has Trump announced and why?
• India's exports to US plunge as tariffs bite

This climate of suspicion breeds uncertainty and the world's smaller central banks are ploughing their money into the so-called safe haven of gold for a reason, sending it to new records.

Back at the US Treasury Cash Room, where there is a lot of gold detail in the seven types of marble, there is another telling statement from US Treasury Secretary Bessent.

He sees the US going through a 1990s-style high-tech productivity boom. "That's the most analogous period to what we're seeing now."

In the coming weeks he will help choose the new chair of the US Federal Reserve in the mould of 1990s Alan Greenspan, who famously accommodated the run-up of the dotcom boom with low interest rates, considered by some to have contributed to the financial crash. Bessent has been rereading Greenspan's biography Maestro.

But in the 1990s the world's second biggest economy was not taking steps to interrupt the new tech supply chain and there was not a constantly rolling threat of more tariffs from China and the US.

These are centrifugal forces shaping the uneasy calm in the world economy.

The Road Runner moment has happened. Like the cartoon character, having headed off the edge of a cliff, global trade is defying gravity momentarily but the running has kept going, and even sped up.

The world's finance ministers on their field trip to Washington have had to assume the world economy will muddle through this.

It doesn't mean it will.

An independent inquiry into "repeated failures" at an NHS trust's maternity units has been announced by Health Secretary Wes Streeting, following potentially avoidable harm to babies and mothers.

Earlier this year a BBC investigation revealed that the deaths of at least 56 babies and two mothers at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTH) over the past five years may have been prevented.

Streeting said a thorough investigation was required to understand what had "gone so catastrophically wrong" at the trust's maternity units at Leeds General Infirmary and St James's University Hospital.

In a statement, the trust told the BBC it was already "taking significant steps to address improvements".

The BBC has now spoken to more than 70 families who have described traumatic care, with some cases going back more than 15 years.

They include Fiona Winser-Ramm and Dan Ramm whose daughter, Aliona, died in January 2020 at Leeds General Infirmary. An inquest found "a number of gross failures" that "directly contributed" to her death.

Four years later, Amarjit Kaur and Mandip Singh Matharoo's daughter Asees was stillborn at the same hospital.

Both couples were among a group of bereaved Leeds families who wrote to Streeting requesting an independent inquiry following the BBC's initial coverage.

They later shared their experiences with him in person before the inquiry was announced.

"We know we are not alone, and that there's other families that have experienced what we have," said Amarjit.

Fiona added that "we can't quite believe it yet".

"I think the scale of this inquiry will be enormous. There are so many people who don't even know they are victims yet and it is going to snowball at an alarming pace," she added.

Streeting said he was "shocked" by the bereaved families' stories and the "repeated maternity failures" that were "made worse by the unacceptable response of the trust".

"I do think there is an exceptional case in Leeds to have a Nottingham-style independent inquiry into the failures," he said.

Nottingham University Hospitals Trust is at the centre of a public inquiry that will examine 2,500 cases of maternity failings on a national level.

Streeting said he hoped the Leeds inquiry would help the families to learn the truth about what went wrong in their care.

The Department of Health has not yet revealed the inquiry's terms of reference or details of who will lead it.

Bereaved families want Donna Ockenden - the senior midwife who led the review into maternity failings at Shrewsbury and Telford and is currently leading the Nottingham review – to also chair the Leeds inquiry.

They said Ms Ockenden had the trust of families and proven experience in uncovering systemic failings in maternity care.

The BBC has previously spoken to whistleblowers who said the previous rating of "good" for LTH maternity services did not reflect the reality.

The body responsible for inspecting NHS hospitals, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) downgraded both of the trust's maternity units to "inadequate" in June, after unannounced inspections raised concerns that women and babies were "at risk of avoidable harm".

Inspectors also highlighted a "blame culture" at the trust, which resulted in staff being reluctant to raise concerns and incidents.

The Leeds units are also currently part of a rapid national review into maternity and neonatal services across England, which was launched in June and is being led by Baroness Valerie Amos.

Brendan Brown, chief executive of LTH NHS Trust, apologised to bereaved families and said he hoped the inquiry would provide them with "answers".

He said: "We are determined to do better. We want to work with the families who have used our services to understand their experiences so that we can make real and lasting improvements.

"I would also like to reassure families in Leeds who will be using our services currently, that we are already taking significant steps to address improvements to our maternity and neonatal services, following reviews by the Care Quality Commission and NHS England."

Families say serious questions now need answering about what Sir Julian Hartley, the man in charge of the trust for ten years until 2023, knew about poor maternity care.

He's now in charge of the health care regulator in England, the Care Quality Commission.

In a statement, Sir Julian told the BBC that while he was Chief Executive of Leeds Trust, he was "absolutely committed to ensuring good patient care across all services, including maternity, but clearly this commitment wasn't enough to prevent some families suffering pain and loss".

He said he was "truly sorry" for this.

Lauren Caufield whose daughter, Grace Kilburn, died in 2022, and also met Streeting said:

"It is completely unacceptable that nothing has been done to date to look into the situations with Sir Julian Hartley. We hope the inquiry will do that."

Do you have more information about this story?

You can reach Divya directly and securely through encrypted messaging app Signal on: +44 7961 390 324, by email at divya.talwar@bbc.co.uk or her Instagram account.