People are turning their anger toward the security at Brown University following a shooting on the Ivy League campus earlier this month. The incident left two students dead and nine wounded, and questions abound as to whether the school’s response to the shooting violated federal law. As the Education Department pledges to look into the issue, security experts have mixed feelings.

‘May not have been up to appropriate standards’

As the Education Department looks into what role Brown’s security may have played in the matter, the university’s police chief has already been placed on leave. The “surveillance and security system may not have been up to appropriate standards, allowing the suspect to flee while the university seemed unable to provide helpful information about the profile of the alleged assassin,” said the Education Department in a press release.

Most of the debate has surrounded the Clery Act, a federal law that “requires colleges and universities to report campus crime data, support victims of violence and publicly outline the policies and procedures they have put into place to improve campus safety,” said the Clery Center. Universities, as part of the act, must release an annual security report and issue “timely warnings in the event of an immediate, significant danger to the campus community,” said The Providence Journal.

If it’s determined that Brown violated the Clery Act, the school could be fined. This has happened before, as Virginia Tech “ultimately paid $32,500 in fines to the Department of Education” for alleged Clery Act violations following its 2007 shooting, said CNN. Brown and other universities have been targeted by the White House before for ideological reasons, and the “fallout from this month’s shooting on campus threatens to once again put the university at odds with the administration.”

‘Clery Act doesn’t touch it’

The federal law is often seen as a key lifeline because its “required reports can help families decide where to send their children to college,” said The Boston Globe. Universities that violate it can also “lose federal student aid if they do not follow their own published procedures.” But there are safety experts who say that in the case of Brown, the Clery Act does not apply.

Much of the scrutiny has been around the alleged lack of surveillance cameras on Brown’s campus, with President Donald Trump even addressing this issue on social media. While an affidavit claims the building where the shooting occurred lacks sufficient interior cameras, the Clery Act “does not require universities to have any specific protocols such as cameras,” campus safety consultant Daniel Carter said to the Globe. “Absent saying something in the annual security report about having surveillance cameras, the Clery Act doesn’t touch it.”

Many safety experts are “puzzled by the mention of cameras because that’s not really what the Clery Act is designed to do,” said Peter Margulies, a national security and criminal law professor at Roger Williams University, to the Globe. But there’s also an understanding that the government “will want to make sure an institution like Brown was dotting its Is and crossing its Ts in the wake of a horrendous crime like this.”

Australia’s government announced plans to strengthen the country’s gun control laws, following Sunday’s terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, in Sydney.

In the 20-minute rampage, a father and son opened fire on a crowd of about 1,000 people who had gathered to celebrate the first day of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. The father, Sajid Akram, 50, had licences for six firearms, the number recovered at the scene. He was shot dead by police; his son, Naveed Akram, 24, was arrested and taken to hospital. They appear to have been inspired by Islamic State.

The victims of the attack – Australia’s deadliest mass shooting since 1996 – included two rabbis, a Holocaust survivor and a ten-year-old girl. Many more might have died had it not been for the heroism of a bystander, Ahmed al-Ahmed, who crept up behind Sajid Akram and seized his rifle. This week, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announced extra funding for measures to protect the country’s Jewish community.

‘Indelibly stained with tragedy’

This attack on ordinary Jewish people, as they marked the first night of the “Festival of Lights”, was shocking in its malevolence, said The Australian. Bondi is home to many of Australia’s 117,000 Jews; the beach is also a place where people from all creeds and backgrounds congregate. Now, it will be “indelibly stained with tragedy”.

Australia ranks as one of the world’s safest nations, said The Independent. Its gun laws – tightened after the mass shooting in Tasmania 29 years ago – are already among the strictest anywhere. If Jews aren’t safe there, they may now reasonably ask “where in the world they can be safe”.

Australia’s government has suggested that the shooters “weren’t part of a wider cell”, said The Sydney Morning Herald. But the discovery of Islamic State flags in their car, and the revelation that the two men had recently travelled to the Philippines, parts of which are rife with “Islamic extremism”, may be telling.

In 2019, the younger man was actually investigated by Australia’s security services, owing to his links to Islamic State members, said The Times. But he was deemed not to be a threat – an assessment that has “proven to be tragically flawed”.

The global surge in antisemitism

There was a celebratory atmosphere at Bondi on Sunday, said The Economist. “Children wearing face paint crowded a petting zoo. Families held balloons and bubble wands.” Yet as the sun began to dip, two men armed with long-barrelled rifles began firing from a footbridge into the crowd; and the death toll could have been even higher, had they detonated the improvised explosives later found in their car.

It was an appalling tragedy, made worse by its predictability, said Limor Simhony Philpott on UnHerd. Australia’s Jewish community has endured a five-fold surge in antisemitic incidents since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023. Jewish schools, synagogues and homes have been firebombed; protesters have chanted “Fuck the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House. In the summer, Australia’s government kicked out Iran’s ambassador, after accusing Tehran of orchestrating antisemitic attacks on its soil. But it has done little else to curb antisemitism. Instead it has alienated Israel, its former ally, by making the misguided decision to join the UK and others in recognising a Palestinian state.

This attack reflects a broader crisis for the world’s Jewish population, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator. In the past two years, there have been murderous attacks on Jews on five continents. This summer, there were two in cities in the US, and on Yom Kippur in October, two people were killed in the attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester.

When it comes to antisemitic terror, violent words can lead to violent actions, said Dave Rich in The Guardian: hence the anger felt by many Jews when they see banners at pro-Palestine marches demanding an “Intifada revolution” or bearing Hamas symbols.

The frightening reality, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, is that calls to “Globalise the intifada” and the like have made Jews the target of “warped killers” who think that, by unleashing terror, they are “doing the world a favour”. I will carry on lighting candles in the days ahead, and singing the Hanukkah songs. “But I admit that this year, for the first time in my life, I do feel just a little fear as I do it.”

What happened

A 48-year-old man believed to have murdered an MIT professor and two Brown University students earlier this week was found dead Thursday in a New Hampshire storage unit, law enforcement officials said Thursday night. The suspect, Claudio Neves Valente, was a physics grad student at Brown in 2000 and 2001 after attending the same academic program as the slain MIT professor, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, in their native Portugal, officials said. Valente, a permanent U.S. resident since 2017, died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

Who said what

In the timeline outlined last night by police and prosecutors in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, Valente killed Brown students MukhammadAziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook, and shot nine others, during an economics study session on Saturday. He subsequently drove his rental car to Boston and shot Loureiro at his Brookline home on Monday, then drove to the storage unit he rented in Salem, New Hampshire. Loureiro, head of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, died early Tuesday.

“In most mass shootings in the United States, suspects are either killed or captured quickly,” The Washington Post said. In the Brown case, “frustration grew after police briefly detained” the wrong man on Sunday, and daily news conferences grew “more contentious” as police appeared stumped. Ted Docks, the lead FBI agent in Boston, initially said there seemed to be “no connection” between the MIT and Brown shootings.

The alleged killer’s identity was unknown until Wednesday, when a witness in Providence helped “blow the lid” off the case, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said last night. “That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of the person renting the car.” He said authorities are still searching for a motive but “are 100% confident that this is our target and that this case is closed from a perspective of pursuing people involved.”

What next?

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Thursday night that, at President Donald Trump’s request, she had ordered a pause of the DV1 diversity lottery program that Valente used to enter the U.S. “Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery,” The Associated Press said, and this “latest example” of him “using tragedy” to “limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration” is “almost certain to invite legal challenges,” as the lottery was created by Congress.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese for failing to counter the spread of antisemitism that culminated in Sunday’s deadly mass shooting at Bondi Beach.

At least 15 people were killed and more than 40 injured when two gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration in the Sydney suburb.

“Your government did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia,” Netanyahu said, addressing Albanese, as he claimed the Australian government had “let the disease spread”.

What did the commentators say?

It is “highly contestable” to claim the Australian PM could have prevented this attack, said the Australian Financial Review’s political editor Phillip Coorey. But the government has “spent two years falling short” of recommendations to tackle anti-Jewish hate, even those made by “its own handpicked envoy, Jillian Segal”.

That, along with a “palpable lack of moral clarity” when it came to condemning the 7 October attacks on Israel and a “lack of visible leadership” at a time of growing opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza, has left the government “exposed” to claims it has not done enough to counter antisemitism.

“Elements of the Australian media” have also “made their own contribution to this atmosphere”, said Alexander Downer in The Australian. “Much of the reporting coming out of the Middle East was deeply hostile to Israel”, and the national broadcaster, the ABC, has “frequently taken at face value claims made by Hamas, a terrorist organisation”.

These factors have, according to representatives of the Australian Jewish community, created a “permissive environment, where the warning signs were clear and too often left unchecked”, said the ABC. In recent years there have been “hateful symbols displayed at otherwise peaceful demonstrations and a pattern of targeted attacks on Jewish institutions”, in a nation that is home to the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside Israel.

There is also evidence that external agents are exacerbating the hostility. In August, Australia severed diplomatic ties with Iran, whom it accused of paying for arson attacks against a synagogue in Melbourne and a kosher cafe in Sydney.

Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert at Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies in Israel, told The Telegraph it was “too early to jump to conclusions” about Tehran’s potential involvement in Sunday’s shooting. “They are definitely suspects and high on the priority list,” he said, adding that “Al-Qaeda and IS have also been active in Australia”.

What next?

Albanese has repeatedly vowed to eradicate the “scourge” of antisemitism, and has already suggested an imminent tightening of existing firearms legislation. “But it all sounds so hollow,” said Coorey in the Australian Financial Review, especially in the aftermath of one of Australia’s worst-ever terror attacks. “The Jewish community and its supporters aren’t listening. They stopped listening long ago. Now, they’re openly hostile.”

Australia must also grapple more broadly with the implications of the Bondi attack, said Downer in The Australian. They have long viewed their country “as a model of liberalism” where discrimination is “anathema”. “This self-image of Australia has now been shattered.”

There is growing pressure on the government to formally name an MI5 spy who operated at the heart of the IRA for decades.

Freddie Scappaticci, known by his codename “Stakeknife”, was outed in an investigation into the actions of Britain’s security services during the Troubles.

Scappaticci was recruited by the British Army in the 1970s, working until the 1990s as a mole within the IRA’s internal security unit tasked with identifying and killing informers. The West Belfast man, long suspected of being a British agent, was unmasked by the media in 2003, although he denied the allegations and went into hiding. He died in 2023.

Why is this coming out now?

Scappaticci’s alleged activities and the efforts of MI5 to protect his identity have been set out in the damning 160-page Kenova Final Report. It details the findings of a nine-year, £47.5 million investigation into Stakeknife’s alleged crimes.

The investigation revealed evidence of Stakeknife’s involvement in “serious and unjustifiable criminality, including kidnap, interrogation and murder”, said Kenova. He has been implicated in 14 murders and 15 abductions, while working in a notorious IRA unit known as the “nutting squad”, whose aim, ironically, was to flush out spies within its ranks.

An interim report last year found that Stakeknife’s actions probably “resulted in more lives being lost than saved”. Now the full report says he was “improperly protected by the British security services because they believed him to be a more valuable asset than he was”, said Max Jeffery in The Spectator.

It is “one of the Troubles’ most macabre twists that Scappaticci was secretly working for British security services and that his handlers allowed him to act as executioner to preserve his cover”, said The Guardian.

What did MI5 know?

In the past, MI5 has said its involvement with him was “peripheral” but the report clearly states the security services were “closely involved in his handling”.

“Everything done in respect of Stakeknife was done with MI5’s knowledge and consent; and MI5 had an influential role”, a member of the Army’s agent-handling unit told investigators. They concluded that “MI5 had automatic sight of all Stakeknife intelligence and therefore was aware of his involvement in serious criminality”.

Stakeknife submitted 3,517 intelligence reports during his time under cover. He was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for his services and even had a dedicated phone line he could call at any time to contact his handlers. Senior Army figures treated him as the “crown jewel” of British intelligence, and he had a reputation as “the goose that laid the golden eggs”.

Yet the report says protecting his identity became “more important than protecting those who could and should have been saved”.

What have MI5 and the government said?

Despite Scappaticci being outed by the press in 2003 and even telling his family his true identity, the government has “stuck to its routine practice not to identify agents, a principle known as NCND, an acronym for Neither Confirm Nor Deny”, said the BBC.

Iain Livingstone, head of Operation Kenova, has said that Stakeknife should now be named. Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn told the Commons that he would respond to Livingstone’s call at the conclusion of an ongoing case in the Supreme Court, which, Benn said, had implications for NCND. “The government’s first duty is, of course, to protect national security and identifying agents risks jeopardising this.”

This stance was backed by Benn’s Tory counterpart Alex Burghart, who said guarantees would be needed that the naming of Stakeknife would not impact on current security operations.

While Burghart admitted “people within” MI5 and the Army had “absolutely crossed the line in a way that wasn’t acceptable”, ultimately, the murders carried out by Stakeknife would have been signed off by the IRA Army Council. “If one is going to start pointing fingers, the first finger should be pointed in that direction.”

Copper theft may not be the most glamorous crime in the world but it is big business.

It has grown to become a “multi-billion problem worldwide”, said Terry Goldsworthy, associate professor in criminal justice and criminology at Bond University, on The Conversation.

More attractive target

Metal theft is nothing new but it’s “on the rise, largely linked to soaring commodity prices”, said Wired.

This is especially true for copper, “a crucial component in everything from solar panels to electric vehicles and computer chips to plumbing parts”, said The Logic.

Having crashed nearly a decade ago due to factors including a Chinese ban on scrap imports, its price has steadily risen since the pandemic and is now roughly 30% more expensive than it was five years ago. This makes copper a “more attractive target for criminals looking for a quick profit”, said Goldsworthy.

A 2022 systematic review revealed a direct correlation between rising copper prices and an increase in copper theft. And, unlike many other scrap metals, copper “can be recycled again and again, without degrading in the process”.

Huge haul for criminal gangs

A key target in recent years has been copper cabling, even if “the disruption caused is often totally disproportionate to the face value of the stolen material”, said Wired. These are the “conduits that keep people connected, the infrastructure that civilisation depends on” and “as the world electrifies”, this form of theft is getting “ever more serious”.

Take the UK, where the theft of electric vehicle charging cables has exploded in the last two years. “Much like Britain’s shoplifting epidemic, the thefts are widely believed to be linked to organised crime, with the copper from the stolen cables later sold to scrap dealers”, said The Telegraph.

It’s a similar story with the recent spate of copper thefts at England’s onshore windfarms. “From a risk versus reward calculation, stealing copper from a windfarm will be a lot more attractive than dealing drugs, for example. Stealing copper does not come with a class-A penalty,” a source close to the affected windfarm owners told The Guardian.

The profit from each copper cable stolen may be relatively minor but taken together it represents a huge haul for criminal gangs. A 2024 report from the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on metal, stone and heritage crime found metal theft was costing the UK economy around £480 million a year.

Like playing Whac-a-Mole

Law enforcement agencies often lack the means and resources to act against this growing market for stolen copper. The APPG report showed sentencing guidelines and prosecution rates were not a sufficient disincentive to criminals, with only 229 prosecutions between 2018 and 2022 for scrap metal dealer offences.

“Problems were compounded by the lack of any single body with ownership and oversight of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013,” said Materials Recycling World.

The problem, said The Logic, is that stopping copper theft “is a little like playing Whac-a-Mole”. That is why some forces have turned to predictive policing, using analytics to try to guess where metal thieves will strike next. Todd Foreman, director of law enforcement outreach at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, uses data analysis to help criminologists anticipate future hot spots of metal-related crime.

Capital punishment has been rarer in recent years, but 2025 has brought a complete reversal. This year has seen the most death row inmates put to death in a decade, a trend that will likely only continue under President Donald Trump, who is a proponent of the death penalty.

How many executions have taken place this year?

There have been 43 prisoners executed across 11 states from January to November, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Identifying a “previous year in which the prevalence of executions in the U.S. rivaled the current one requires looking back at least a decade,” said CBS News. The last time at least 43 people were executed in a single year was 2012.

October was also the “busiest month for the death penalty in nearly 15 years,” said USA Today. Seven people were executed last month, making it the “single busiest month for executions in the U.S. since May 2011.” Florida far and away leads executions by state in 2025, with a Nov. 13 execution of a child killer marking the “record 16th death sentence carried out under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis,” said The Associated Press.

Why are executions on the rise?

There are several reasons, but it is “largely a political effort,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, to CBS. And it is unlikely to change the perception of executions. The number “does represent an increase from where we were in years’ past, but there's absolutely no evidence it represents a change in public support for the death penalty by Americans.”

In fact, the number of people on death row “represents levels of support that are usually decades out of date,” Maher said to PBS NewsHour. Many people currently scheduled for execution “were sentenced to death by juries usually many years, even decades, ago when public support for the death penalty was much higher and there were very different prosecution policies in place.”

The Trump administration has also “talked a lot about the death penalty and has not made any secret about their enthusiasm” over it, Maher said to CBS. Unlike administrations where the president is anti-death penalty, this “environment has made it easier” for states to “schedule executions to curry favor” with Trump. Many states that are “actively executing people are states that have governors who are politically aligned with the president on this,” said John Blume, the director of the Death Penalty Project at Cornell University, to CBS.

The administration has also pushed the death penalty via legislation. Trump in January “signed an executive order reinstating federal executions while encouraging states to expand the use of capital punishment,” said Mother Jones. States have also been forced to look for alternative execution methods during this time, as drug companies have “consistently said that they don’t want their drugs used in these lethal injections,” said Jeff Hood, a death row spiritual adviser, to Mother Jones. What “states have turned to is more novel ways of executing people,” including “firing squads” and a “process called nitrogen hypoxia.” Nobody “really knew what it was going to be like.”

France is marking the 10th anniversary of the attack by Islamist gunmen on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris. They opened fire on 1,500 people on a night of co-ordinated terror attacks that also saw explosives detonated at the Stade de France.

The attacks, which left more than 130 people dead, were the “worst assaults” in France’s post-war history, said The New York Times, and they “inflicted lasting damage on the nation”.

What did the commentators say?

The slaughter “forever changed the country and its politics”, said Politico, “tipping the balance of protecting civil liberties versus ensuring public safety in favour of the latter”. A “slew of laws” were passed, including increasing the state’s “surveillance powers” and its “ability to impose restrictive measures” on its population.

The then president François Hollande called the attacks on 13 November 2015 an “act of war” and declared a nationwide state of emergency. But that “legal framework” gave the government “the power to ban protests and deter other forms of activism”, said France 24. For example, several dozen climate activists were placed under house arrest in 2015 for the duration of the Cop21 conference in December that year.

There will be "grief, poignancy and dignity” across France today, said Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, but there will also be “delusion” among the “political elite” because France "is not united; it is divided”. Since 2015, France’s security service has “thwarted” 80 Islamist terror plots but there have been 50 attacks, 19 of which were “fatal”.

“Arguably,” said Andrew Hussey on UnHerd, “France has yet to fully reckon with the ideology that underpinned” the attacks. It represents a “shockingly direct challenge” to “Western morality and the West’s conception of justice”. France, “for all its secular earnestness”, has “yet to truly level with this fact”.

The nation could have descended into hate, but it has “held firm”, “clinging” to the slogan “you will not have my hatred”, said l’Opinion. A “litany” of subsequent attacks failed to trigger a witch-hunt against Arabs, just as the 13 November jihadists failed to “unite the Muslim community around them”.

What next?

Although Islamist terror remains a threat in the West, “much has changed” since 2015, said the BBC. The “disappearance” of Islamic State as a “major force” in Syria and Iraq means that the “wherewithal to conceive, plan and carry out complex terrorist projects is greatly diminished”.

The intelligence services have “become highly effective in controlling online radicalisation”, said Middle East expert Gilles Kepel, and are able to foil plots that are “often not very sophisticated”.

Milanese prosecutors have launched an investigation into claims Italian citizens paid huge sums of money to the Bosnian Serb army in the mid-1990s to shoot civilians “for fun” during the Siege of Sarajevo.

Snipers killed 225 people, including 60 children, during the four-year siege, Zilha Mastalic Kosuta, of the Institute for Researching Crimes Against Humanity and International Law at Sarajevo University, told DW in 2022. To date, not one sniper has been brought to justice.

‘Weekend snipers’

The case, first reported by Italian newspapers Il Giornale in July, was opened on charges of “voluntary homicide aggravated by cruelty and abject motives” brought against unknown persons, stemming from a complaint filed by journalist and writer Ezio Gavazzeni.

It has proved enough to launch an inquiry, led by prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis, into so-called “weekend snipers”, who allegedly took part in the siege, which lasted from April 1992 to February 1996 and claimed the lives of approximately 11,000 people.

Testimonies gathered from across northern Italy claim far-right sympathisers and gun and hunting enthusiasts met in Trieste before being transported to the hills surrounding Sarajevo, where they allegedly fired on civilians after paying what today would be the equivalent of 100,000 euros to Bosnian Serb militias loyal to Radovan Karadzic.

Gavazzeni’s complaint alleges a “price list” for killings, with children reportedly carrying a higher cost per kill, followed by armed men, women and then elderly civilians, who could allegedly be shot at no cost.

It also cites testimony, reported in Italian English-language news outlet ANSA, from former American firefighter John Jordan, who volunteered in Sarajevo during the siege. Given in 2007 during the trial of Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladic, it includes references to “tourist shooters”.

“On more than one occasion, I witnessed people who didn’t seem like locals to me because of their clothing, the weapons they carried, the way they were treated, managed, and even led by locals”. He later added that “when a boy shows up with a weapon that seems more suited to wild boar hunting in the Black Forest than to urban combat in the Balkans… When you see him handle it and you realise he’s a novice…”

Former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic has reportedly submitted a report on these “rich foreigners engaged in inhumane activities” to the Milan Prosecutor’s Office.

‘Sarajevo Safari’

“While this phenomenon was little spoken of in the past, it was not unheard of,” said New Lines Magazine.

Among the first to speak out publicly was Luca Leone, an Italian journalist and author, whose 2014 book “The Bastards of Sarajevo” mentions foreign tourists from across Europe paying at checkpoints managed by Serbian paramilitaries in both Croatia and Bosnia to spend a weekend shooting civilians in Sarajevo.

This account corresponds to the 2022 documentary titled “Sarajevo Safari” by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic. Based on witness testimony from Slovenian and Bosnian intelligence officers, the film sets out how “tourist shooters” from Russia, Canada and America, as well as Italy, came to take part in the siege.

The story “sent shockwaves through the Balkans” said DW, with Zupanic personally experiencing “major backlash and hostile responses from some Bosnian Serb media outlets”.

Veljko Lazic – the president of an organisation for Srpska families of captured or killed fighters and missing civilians – described the claims made in the documentary as “an absolute and heinous lie” and called the film an “insult to Republika Srpska, its army and the Serb victims of the war”.

“I didn’t want to convince anyone of this story”, Zupanic told DW. “Quite simply, the film offers the testimonies of people who claim something – something so incredible that I, as a creator, felt obliged to make it known to the general public.”

“And the public will be the ones to judge.”

What happened

Federal prosecutors Monday announced charges against two Michigan men for allegedly planning a Halloween terrorist attack on LGBTQ+ bars in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale. The criminal complaint alleged that Momed Ali and Majed Mahmoud, both 20, were inspired to violence by the Islamic State group’s extremism.

Who said what

Ali and Mahmoud, arrested Friday along with an unidentified minor, were charged with receiving and transferring guns and ammunition for terrorism. The FBI reported that a search of their homes and a storage unit “turned up tactical vests and backpacks, AR-15-style rifles, ammunition, loaded handguns and GoPro cameras,” The Associated Press said.

The criminal complaint said Ali and Mahmoud were part of a larger group that shared extremist and ISIS-related material in encrypted group chats secretly monitored during a yearlong investigation. They allegedly spent months planning and training for the thwarted attack. “I don’t think there was a planned attack,” their lawyer Amir Makled told the Detroit Free Press yesterday. “These kids are gamers, gamers are weird in the way they talk to each other,” he told the newspaper on Saturday.

What next?

At a brief court hearing Monday, Ali and Mahoud were ordered detained until a Nov. 10 hearing, when “both sides will argue whether they should be released on bond, or remain locked up pending the outcome of their cases,” the Free Press said.

What happened

French police have arrested the first suspects in last week’s brazen daytime theft of royal jewels from the Louvre, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said Sunday. French media reported that two suspects were arrested, but Beccuau confirmed only that “one of the men arrested was preparing to leave the country” from Charles de Gaulle Airport on Saturday evening. Four people carried out the heist.

Who said what

The theft of more than $100 million worth of historical jewels from the world’s most-visited museum “stunned France,” The New York Times said. The arrests were a “major breakthrough for French investigators, who are racing to find the thieves before the jewelry is dismantled and the rare stones and metals can be sold or melted down.”

The two arrested suspects are in their 30s and “known to police,” and at least one was “identified from DNA traces” recovered from the crime scene, The Associated Press said, citing a police official. Beccuau said she “deeply” regretted the “hasty disclosure” of the arrests, as it “can only harm the investigative efforts of the 100 or so investigators who mobilized in the search for both the stolen jewelry and for all of the criminals.”

What next?

Police can hold the suspects in custody for up to 96 hours before deciding whether to release them or bring preliminary charges. Beccuau said she would “provide additional information at the end of this period.”

What happened

President Donald Trump pardoned billionaire cryptocurrency magnate Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of Binance, the White House said Thursday. Zhao, commonly known as CZ, served four months in prison last year after he and his company pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering by terrorists, drug traffickers, purveyors of child sexual abuse material and other criminals.

Who said what

The pardon followed “months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company,” said The Wall Street Journal. That company, World Liberty Financial, “has generated significantly more income for the Trump family in the past year than their property portfolio ever has annually,” and “Binance has been one of the main drivers of the growth.” A Binance deal earlier this year involving the United Arab Emirates and a World Liberty stablecoin is “poised to generate tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trumps and the family of Steve Witkoff, the president’s top Middle East adviser,” The New York Times said. But Zhao also “hired lawyers and lobbyists with ties to the Trump administration” to push for his pardon.

“I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people,” Trump said Thursday. “A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Zhao was “prosecuted by the Biden administration in their war on cryptocurrency.”

What next?

Trump’s pardon “could pave the way” for Zhao to retake the head of the cryptocurrency exchange he cofounded, Reuters said, and “may offer the chance for Binance to expand in the United States.” It’s “unclear what the pardon means” for the $4.3 billion fine Binance agreed to pay the government, The Washington Post said.

What happened

A gang of thieves broke into the Louvre Sunday morning and stole 19th century royal jewels from the Paris museum’s Galerie d’Apollon. The entire heist took less than seven minutes, officials said, and was carried out in broad daylight, shortly after the world’s most-visited museum opened. The eight objects stolen included an emerald necklace and earring that belonged to Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon’s second wife, plus jewelry from Empress Eugénie and queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense.

Who said what

The thieves used a truck-mounted basket lift to access the second floor of the Louvre’s riverside facade, then broke in through the windows and smashed targeted display cases, officials said. “It was the most brazen — and possibly the most costly — theft ever staged at the Louvre,” The New York Times said. But “the crime, for all its speed, wasn’t without errors,” The Wall Street Journal said. The thieves “attempted but failed to set fire to their truck” and “dropped the crown of Empress Eugénie, with nearly 1,400 diamonds, before they sped away” on motorcycles. The crown was reportedly damaged.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said the stolen items were of “inestimable value.” The recovered crown alone is “worth several tens of millions of euros,” Drouot auction house president Alexandre Giquello told Reuters. “And it’s not, in my opinion, the most important item.”

What next?

“We will recover the works, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice,” President Emmanuel Macron vowed on social media. Nuñez, who was Paris police chief until earlier this month, said investigators had a “good hope” of catching the thieves by studying surveillance footage and other evidence from the crime.

What happened

A 38-year-old man Tuesday pleaded guilty to charges including terrorism, arson and attempted murder for breaking into the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion in April and trying to burn it down as Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and his family slept upstairs.

Under a plea deal, Cody Balmer was sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison, “far less than he could have faced if the case went to trial,” The Associated Press said.

Who said what

Balmer broke into the official residence carrying a hammer after the Shapiros hosted a Seder on the first night of Passover. Shapiro, who supported the plea deal, told reporters Tuesday that he and his wife “have struggled over the last six months to try and make sense of all of this” and “explain it to our four children” and other family members staying over that night. The attack still “brings with it a real sense of vulnerability our family feels every single day,” he said.

Balmer is “taking full responsibility” for his actions and paying a “hefty price for a man who’s 38 years old,” his attorney Bryan Walk said in court Tuesday. Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo said Balmer had indicated the attack was intended as an “offset” to the deaths in Gaza.

What next?

Prosecutors said Balmer would be eligible for parole when he is 63. Nobody was hurt in the attack but Balmer’s Molotov cocktails “caused millions of dollars in damage” to the governor’s mansion, the AP said, and “work to fix the damage and to bolster its security features continues.”

What happened

Federal officials in Los Angeles Wednesday announced the arrest of a 29-year-old former Uber driver for allegedly sparking the Palisades Fire, which tore through the city’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood and parts of Malibu in January, destroying thousands of homes and killing 12 people. The suspect, Jonathan Rinderknecht, was arrested at his home in Melbourne, Florida, on Tuesday.

Who said what

“A single person’s recklessness caused one of the worst fires Los Angeles has ever seen,” acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said in a statement. According to authorities, Rinderknecht “appeared to be obsessed with fire” and deliberately ignited an open flame on a hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains early Jan. 1, then fled and “called 911 to report it” but returned and “used his phone to take videos of the response,” The New York Times said. Firefighters suppressed that fire after it burned eight acres, but “officials said it continued burning underground until winds ignited what became the Palisades Fire” a week later, Fox News said.

Investigators “went through exhaustive efforts to rule out potential ignition sources,” including “fireworks, cigarettes or downed power lines,” The Wall Street Journal said. California leaders welcomed the arrest as a “significant development in closure and justice for the thousands of people affected by the fire,” which was one of several “unprecedented and disastrous” blazes that ravaged Los Angeles County in January amid “strong and erratic winds.”

What next?

At a brief hearing in Orlando Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Rinderknecht back to court on Oct. 17 to “consider bond and extradition proceedings,” The Associated Press said. If convicted, he faces between five and 20 years in prison.

Police have declared a “terrorist incident” after two people were killed and several others injured in an attack on a synagogue in Manchester on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.

A man drove a car at members of the public outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue this morning, before getting out and stabbing others. Three of the injured remain in a serious condition, while the suspect has been shot dead by police.

What did the commentators say?

Shortly after the incident, Greater Manchester Police declared “Plato”, which is the “national code word” for the emergency response to a “marauding terror attack”, said Sky News. The streets outside the synagogue were closed, with police cars and vans, sirens blaring, racing down neighbouring roads.

A large number of people were worshipping inside the building at the time of the attack, but have since been evacuated safely. A police spokesperson praised the “quick response” of a witness, which enabled officers to prevent the suspect from entering the synagogue.

An image circulating online shows a bald, bearded man with dark clothes and “white objects around his waist” just outside the synagogue’s perimeter fence, said BBC Verify. It “matches that of a man seen apparently being shot by police at the same location”. A bomb disposal unit has been at the scene.

Keir Starmer, who is flying home early from a summit of European leaders in Denmark to chair an emergency Cobra meeting, said he was “appalled” and “absolutely shocked”. King Charles said he and Queen Camilla were also “deeply shocked and saddened” to hear about the attack, “especially on such a significant day for the Jewish community”. Yom Kippur is a day for Jews to fast, pray and reflect on the past year and atone for their sins.

Other countries have experienced “violent incidents against Jewish people and synagogues” since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, said Kaya Burgess, religious affairs correspondent for The Times. In the UK, there has been a sharp rise in vandalism and antisemitic abuse. And, “with the loss of life in Manchester, this wave of hate has crossed a threshold in Britain”.

What next?

Police are stepping up patrols at synagogues around the country as specialist counter-terror teams investigate the incident. Two arrests have already been made.

While there is still little information about the suspect and victims, “we can say with certainty that this is a dark day for our kingdom”, said Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. Britain appears to have been “visited by an apocalyptic form of violence that we normally only read about in the history books”.

What happened

At least four people were killed and eight injured Sunday when a gunman drove a pickup truck into a Mormon church in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, opened fire on the hundreds of congregants and then set the building ablaze, local officials and federal agents said last night. Police killed the suspected gunman minutes after the attack began.

Who said what

Police identified the lone suspect as Thomas Jacob Sanford, a 40-year-old Marine veteran who grew up in the area and lived in nearby Burton. They said they were still trying to uncover a motive. The FBI said it was treating the shooting as an “act of targeted violence.”

“Violence anywhere, especially in a place of worship, is unacceptable,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said in a statement. “We will continue to monitor this situation and hold the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc close.” Sunday's assault was the “latest of many shooting attacks on houses of worship in the U.S. over the past 20 years,” The Associated Press said, and the second mass shooting “in less than 24 hours,” after a gunman shot dead three people and injured five at a bar in Southport, North Carolina, on Saturday night.

What next?

Southport shooting suspect Nigel Edge, also a 40-year-old former Marine, faces three murder and five attempted murder charges. Grand Blanc Township police said Sunday night they had not finished searching through the fire-damaged church and could still find victims buried in the rubble.

What happened

Three police officers were shot dead and two others seriously wounded yesterday in rural southeastern Pennsylvania while serving a warrant in a “domestic-related” investigation, Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Christopher Paris said at a news conference. The two wounded officers were in critical but stable conditions, he said, and the shooter was killed in the gun battle.

Who said what

The shooting attack, near North Codorus Township in York County, marks “one of the deadliest days for Pennsylvania police this century,” The Associated Press said. It “drew the attention of federal and state officials, and a visit by the governor,” Josh Shapiro (D), said The New York Times, but it “left its deepest mark on the residents of this county of farms,” where a 30-year-old officer was shot dead in February while responding to a hostage situation at a local hospital. 

“This is an absolutely tragic and devastating day,” Shapiro said at the evening news conference. “We need to do better as a society” and “help the people who think that picking up a gun, picking up a weapon is the answer to resolving disputes.” It was Shapiro’s third gun-related event in two days, after he attended a gathering outside Philadelphia earlier in the day to mark progress in reducing gun homicides and delivered a speech on political violence at Tuesday’s Eradicate Hate Global Summit in Pittsburgh.

What next?

Paris did not share the identities of the officers or the slain suspect, nor the motive or the focus of the still-active investigation.

What happened

A New York judge yesterday threw out state terrorism and first-degree murder charges against Luigi Mangione, the man charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last year. The dismissal of the two most serious charges means Mangione, if convicted, faces up to life in state prison, but with the possibility of parole. In another high-profile murder case, Utah prosecutors yesterday said they would seek the death penalty for Tyler Robinson for his alleged assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. 

Who said what

Manhattan Judge Gregory Carro said the prosecutors could pursue the other nine charges against Mangione, including second-degree murder, but the terrorism charge was “legally insufficient.” While Mangione “was clearly expressing an animus toward UHC, and the health care industry generally, it does not follow that his goal was to ‘intimidate and coerce a civilian population,’” Carro said. 

The decision was a “blow to the district attorney,” Alvin Bragg, The New York Times said, but legal experts called the terrorism charge an “overreach.” Bragg’s office said it would not appeal the ruling. Meanwhile, Mangione, a “cause célèbre for people upset with the health insurance industry, appeared in good spirits and raised his eyebrows at supporters” gathered outside the brief hearing, The Associated Press said.

What next?

Mangione also faces federal charges, including an “accusation for which prosecutors have said they plan to seek the death penalty,” and state charges in Pennsylvania, where he was caught, the Times said. Carro scheduled a pretrial hearing for Dec. 1, days before Mangione’s next federal court hearing. Robinson’s next court day was set for Sept. 29.

The prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has refused to be interviewed by the Metropolitan Police, just days before he is due to be released from a German prison.

Christian Brückner, 49, who denies any involvement in the case, remains the focus of investigations by British, German and Portuguese police nearly two decades on from the three-year-old’s kidnapping, which attracted global attention.

Who is he?

A “drifter and a petty criminal”, Brückner was just a teenager when, in 1994, he was first convicted of sexual abuse of a child, said The i Paper. A year later he fled to Portugal to escape custody before returning to Germany in 1999 to finish his sentence.

He returned intermittently to Portugal after his release in 2000 and is currently serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American tourist in Praia da Luz in 2005, two years before McCann disappeared from the same Algarve town.

In October last year, Brückner was cleared by a German court of unrelated sexual offences, alleged to have taken place in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

Why is he a suspect?

In 2020, Brückner was named as an official suspect in the McCann case by the German authorities.

The three-year-old disappeared from the Praia da Luz resort in 2007, sparking one of the most high-profile missing persons investigations of recent decades. The Met’s investigation, named Operation Grange, has cost more than £13 million.

Brückner has always denied any involvement in the case and has never been charged, despite evidence he was in the area at the time.

German, Portuguese and British police have carried out a number of searches over the years, most recently in June when officers scoured 120 acres of scrubland east of Praia da Luz where Brückner was known to have spent time. Despite repeated efforts, authorities have found no trace of McCann or evidence directly tying her disappearance to Brückner. But they remain convinced he was involved, a claim backed up by a “former associate”, who told ITV News this week that he was "100% sure" Brückner had a hand in the kidnapping.

He “is not just our number one suspect, he’s the only suspect”, Hans Christian Wolters, the lead German prosecutor investigating the disappearance, told the BBC last month. Wolters claimed there is evidence that indicates Brückner is “responsible” for the toddler’s disappearance and death, but that it is “not strong enough to make a guilty verdict likely” so he hasn’t been arrested or charged.

What happened with the Met?

With Brückner due to be released on Wednesday, the Met Police had requested an interview that “for legal reasons” could only be done via an international letter of request, which he subsequently refused.

DCI Mark Cranwell, the senior investigating officer for Operation Grange, confirmed the German “remains a suspect in the Metropolitan Police’s own investigation” but “in the absence of an interview, we will nevertheless continue to pursue any viable lines of inquiry”.

German law enforcement authorities have already voiced concern that Brückner will soon leave prison and could flee the country, with Wolters saying the expectation was that he would “commit further crimes”.

They are known as the victims of Mexico’s long-running “invisible war”.

Since the then president Felipe Calderón launched his "war on drugs" in 2006, more than 130,000 people have gone missing.

“In many cases, those disappeared have been forcibly recruited into the drug cartels – or murdered for resisting,” said the BBC. But “while drug cartels and organised crime groups are the main perpetrators, security forces are also blamed for deaths and disappearances”.

‘Delirium of necrophilia’

Cases of people reported missing or snatched from the street at gunpoint never to be seen again “were once rare in Mexico”, said The Washington Post. This began to change 15 years ago when huge numbers of disappearances “began to flare into global news, with the discovery of mass graves filled with putrefying bodies”.

By 2023 more than 5,600 mass graves had been recorded in Mexico, said A Dónde van los Desaparecidos. In March this year, a cartel training and extermination camp was discovered on a ranch in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, complete with burned human remains and 200 pairs of shoes.

Strikingly, the discovery – labelled “a human tragedy of enormous proportions” by the UN – was not made by state authorities but by informal search teams of family members known as “buscadores”.

These groups “scour the countryside and the deserts of northern Mexico, following tip-offs, often from the cartels themselves, as to the whereabouts of mass graves”, said the BBC. They carry out searches and campaigning for justice “at great personal risk”, with several themselves disappearing in the aftermath of the Jalisco find.

The “official narrative” is that Mexico’s violence is “entirely the fault of drug cartels, period”, said author Belén Fernández on Al Jazeera. “This rationalisation conveniently excises from the equation the Mexican state’s established track record of killing and disappearing – not to mention the lengthy history of collaboration between Mexican police and military personnel and cartel operatives.”

This is perhaps why the authorities have been hesitant to acknowledge the scope and scale of the crisis, with former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador even going as far as to accuse Mexicans involved in the search for the missing of a “delirium of necrophilia”. According to Mexico’s National Register of Missing and Disappeared Persons, for a year while Obrador was in office, between May 2022 and May 2023, an average of 27.6 people went missing per day, or more than one person per hour.

Amnesty International now estimates the rate of disappearances stands at 30 per day.

‘Systematic and widespread’

Last month, thousands of people took to the streets across Mexico in protest at the lack of action on the issue by officials.

“The wide spread of cities, states and municipalities where demonstrations were held illustrated the extent to which the problem of forced disappearances affects communities and families across Mexico,” said the BBC.

For the first time, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances has opened a procedure for the case of Mexico. For the committee’s experts, who have been studying the case for a decade, there are indications of a “systematic and widespread” practice, said openDemocracy.

“As has pretty much been par for the course with all ostensible global anti-narcotic endeavours orchestrated by the US, the Mexican drug war did nothing to curb international drug traffic but much to render the country’s landscape ever more blood-soaked,” said Fernández.

That has not stopped the US government from adopting ever more extreme measures. It has already labelled six Mexican cartels terrorist groups and now the Trump administration is weighing possible military action against them.

“But Mexican cartels aren’t dependent on a handful of high-profile extremists,” said The Washington Post. “They’re among the country’s top employers and often have relationships with local politicians and police. Disappearances are a sign of their hidden control. Killing or capturing a few leaders is unlikely to destroy their structures.”

“As Mexico’s invisible war rages on, disappearance may have already become normalised,” said Fernández.

The four-year manhunt for a fugitive father and his three children living in the New Zealand wilderness came to a tragic end on Monday when Tom Phillips was shot dead by police.

It was the final chapter of a case that has gripped New Zealand and received worldwide attention. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called it a "sombre day" for the country as he paid tribute to a police officer injured in the shoot-out.

'Long-running mystery'

Phillips disappeared with his three children, now aged nine, 10 and 12, in September 2021, prompting a three-week land and sea search that only ended after they emerged from the woods where they had been camping.

Due to appear in court in early 2022 for wasting police resources, Phillips instead fled with his children into the vast Waikato region, south of Auckland, just before Christmas 2021, following an argument with their mother. At the time he did not have legal custody.

Believed to be living "off-grid with the father using his survival skills to feed, shelter and clothe his children", the massive manhunt "gripped the nation", said CNN. The "long-running mystery" over the children's whereabouts "prompted multiple searches, offers of rewards, and pleas for information from family members and the police", said The Guardian. After less than a year, "with the trail cold, the authorities said Phillips and the children might have moved elsewhere in New Zealand and changed their names", said The Independent.

The search resumed in 2023 after several sightings of Phillips. In November that year he was named as the prime suspect in an attempted supermarket robbery. This prompted authorities to issue a reward of NZ$80,000 (£35,000), "large by New Zealand standards", along with an offer of immunity from prosecution for information about the family's whereabouts.

In October last year, the family were seen again, caught on video by pig farmers trekking through a forest, while Phillips was last seen on CCTV in August this year when he robbed a grocery store, accompanied by one of his children.

'A sombre day' for New Zealand

His time on the run finally came to an end on Monday, when he was shot dead by police who had responded to a break-in at a remote farm shop. Pursuing the two suspects – now known to be Phillips and one of his children – on their quad bike, a police officer was wounded after being shot in the head with a rifle. Police returned fire, fatally injuring Phillips.

What followed was described by CNN as a "massive and urgent search operation involving helicopters" to try to find the remaining two children. With the help of their sibling, they were eventually located at a remote campsite in the dense bush near the tiny rural town of Marokopa, on the west coast of Waikato.

In a statement to Radio New Zealand, the children's mother said that while she was "deeply relieved" that the "ordeal" had finally ended, "at the same time, we are saddened by how events unfolded today.

"Our hope has always been that the children could be returned in a peaceful and safe way for everyone involved," she said.

"In a country of close-knit communities," said The Guardian, New Zealanders have "struggled to understand" how Phillips could have survived and evaded detection for so long in such harsh terrain. While there is no suggestion that he was helped by family members, there has long been "speculation others in the community may have aided him".

As students arrive back on college campuses for the fall semester, a nefarious aspect of online anonymity is coming with them: a slew of universities are falling victim to hoaxes involving active shooters. These pranks, in which a fake call is made about a gunman on campus, are becoming increasingly prevalent and often lead to massive police resources being wasted — not to mention the psychological impact they have on students. Researchers also say these types of hoaxes can be difficult to stop.

Victims nationwide

There has been a "rash of hoax calls about active shooters on college campuses — some featuring gunshots sounding in the background — that have sent waves of fear among students," said The Associated Press. These hoaxes, known as swatting calls, prompted universities to initiate active shooter protocols, texting students to "run, hide, fight" while "officers swarmed over campuses, seeking out any threat."

Since universities started resuming classes for the fall semester, more than a dozen campuses have fallen victim to this kind of hoax. Swatting calls at Villanova University in Pennsylvania and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga sent students scrambling for cover, and "campuses across the country have received similar hoax calls, including Texas Tech University, Iowa State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Northern Arizona University," said CNN.

It's unclear where all of these hoaxes are originating from, but at least one online group "said that it was behind a number of recent hoax emergency calls that drew a heavy law enforcement response to college campuses," said The New York Times. The group calls itself Purgatory and "highlighted news media coverage of the recent hoaxes in a public-facing channel on Telegram," a social media app "often used by criminals."

Raising the stakes

Even though one group has taken credit for some of these swatting incidents, tracking down the perpetrators is difficult. This is partially because these swatting calls "frequently originate online, overseas or by using AI software," said Axios. The callers often use technology that allows people to "mask their identities, such as using AI-generated voices, caller ID spoofing and masking a user's IP address."

Threats to universities have had "peaks and valleys, and this one may be coming out of the valley as we're starting back to school," said Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, to Axios. This type of activity is a "little like bomb threats."

As these threats persist, federal officials are working to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice. Someone found swatting a university can be federally charged with "false information and hoaxes; which could lead to up to five years in prison with a 'substantial fine;' interstate transmission of threat; which could lead to up to 20 years in jail if there is an injury involved; and wire fraud, which constitutes a 'substantial penalty, incarceration and fines,'" said Robert Boyce, retired NYPD chief of detectives, to ABC News.

This is the "time to prosecute these individuals and put it out there that these people are going to jail, or possibly could go to jail after prosecution," Boyce told ABC. There must be "serious penalties at stake for those placing these swatting calls."

The closing phase of the trial of Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro – dubbed the "Trump of the tropics" – begins today: the first case of its kind in the country's turbulent history.

The popular far-right figure is accused of plotting to overthrow his left-wing rival, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after losing his bid for re-election in 2022. The full ruling, by five judges in Brasília's Federal Supreme Court, is expected to be delivered by 12 September. A guilty verdict could send Bolsonaro to jail for decades, and further inflame his idol to the north, Donald Trump.

What is Bolsonaro accused of?

Attempting to use military force to overthrow democracy. After narrowly losing the presidential run-off against Lula in October 2022, Bolsonaro "declared the ballot rigged", said The Economist, and "used social media to urge his supporters to rise up". He allegedly tried to persuade military leaders to back a "correction" of the election, but failed to get enough support and left for the US.

On 8 January 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro's supporters attacked key government buildings in an echo of the 6 January attacks on the US Capitol in 2021. A federal investigation into the riots found evidence of a "criminal organisation" that had "acted in a coordinated manner" to keep Bolsonaro in power. The report alleged that Bolsonaro planned the attempted coup, which included a plot to assassinate Lula.

What does Bolsonaro say?

The former president and his alleged co-conspirators deny the charges, calling them "grave and baseless". He claims to be a victim of political persecution, but has admitted considering "alternative" ways of holding on to power after his defeat.

Bolsonaro insists he will challenge Lula for the presidency in next year's election, but the Supreme Court has banned him from seeking office until 2030 for spreading disinformation about Brazil's voting system. He was also placed under house arrest in August after violating a court order banning him from using social media.

How is Donald Trump involved?

Trump is Bolsonaro's "most powerful foreign friend", said The Guardian. The US president has "waded into the courtroom drama", imposing 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports in retaliation for what he calls a "witch hunt" against his ally.

His administration has also imposed Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the judge leading the case against Bolsonaro – measures usually reserved for those accused of "gross" human rights abuses.

Bolsonaro's son, congressman Eduardo, has relocated to the US and "busied himself lobbying Trump officials to target Brazil's top tribunal and Lula allies". But analysts believe the "US coercion campaign will fail to sway the judges".

Last week Brazilian police recommended more charges against Bolsonaro and his son, accusing them of obstruction of justice and interfering with the trial, citing Eduardo's meetings with White House officials. "Brazil will not give in to pressure," Moraes told The Washington Post last month. Brazil is "independent".

Why is the trial so significant?

Bolsonaro and his co-defendants, including a military admiral and three generals, are likely to be found guilty, which could exacerbate Brazil's febrile political landscape.

Brazil has endured 14 coup attempts and a brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 – a living memory for many. However, the country has "traditionally chosen conciliation over prosecution when it comes to alleged crimes against the democratic state".

But when democracy was restored, Brazil "began building a legislative framework to prevent another backslide into authoritarianism". These laws are "the basis for the charges against Bolsonaro".

What happened

A 23-year-old armed with a rifle, shotgun and pistol killed two children and wounded 17 others Wednesday during a morning mass at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. The attacker barricaded at least two doors of the school's church from the outside before firing dozens of bullets through the stained-glass windows, then died by suicide, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara said. "We don't have a motive at this time."

Who said what

"The sheer cruelty and cowardice of firing into a church full of children is absolutely incomprehensible," O'Hara said. The children killed were 8 and 10. The other gunshot victims — 14 children ages 6 to 15 and three octogenarian parishioners — were expected to survive. School and city officials said teachers protected students and older kids shielded their younger classmates. "The pews saved lives and took a lot of bullets," youth minister Ellie Mertens told The New York Times.

The assailant, identified as Robin Westman, is believed to have attended the school, purchased the guns legally and "recently," had no criminal record and acted alone, police said. FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency was investigating the attack as an "act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics." It was also the "146th U.S. school shooting so far this year," Reuters said. "Don't let anybody tell you that it's not about guns, because it is," Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) said at a vigil Wednesday evening.

What next?

President Donald Trump and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) both ordered flags lowered to half-staff as a sign of mourning.

The UK's safeguarding minister has called for an overhaul of the main tool used to decide if a domestic abuse victim needs urgent support.

Jess Phillips told the BBC's File on 4 that the current Dash assessment "doesn't work", amid mounting evidence that it fails to correctly identify those at the highest risk of further harm.

Violence against women and girls accounts for 20% of all recorded crime in England and Wales, according to the National Police Chiefs' Council. A woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK; in the year to March 2024, there were 108 domestic homicides in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics.

How does Dash work?

The Dash (Domestic, Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour-Based Violence) assessment is a checklist, co-developed by domestic-abuse charity SafeLives. It features 27 mainly yes or no questions put to victims – including "Is the abuse getting worse?" and "Has the current incident resulted in injury?"

The victim's answers produce a score that's meant to determine their risk of imminent harm or death. Answering "yes" to at least 14 questions classes a victim as "high risk" and guarantees intensive support and urgent protection. No specialist support is guaranteed to anyone who gets a "medium" or "standard" risk score.

Since 2009, the Dash risk scores have been relied on by many police forces, social services and healthcare workers to determine what action is taken after a reported incident, although practitioners are encouraged to use their "professional judgement" to override low scores or to escalate a case if there are multiple police callouts in a year.

What's wrong with it?

Academics, domestic abuse charities and bereaved families have long raised doubts over the accuracy of the Dash assessment.

As far back as 2016, the College of Policing review found "inconsistencies" in Dash, and recommended a different tool for frontline police responders. And in 2020, a London School of Economics study of Greater Manchester Police data found that, in nearly nine out of ten repeat cases of violence, the victim had been classed as standard or medium risk by Dash.

In 2022, an analysis by researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Seville found that the Dash questions "contributed almost nothing" to its performance as a predictive tool, and, earlier this month, an investigation by The Telegraph identified at least 55 women who had been killed by their partner after being graded only standard or medium risk.

"Too many have died without help, as the Dash system failed to recognise the true threat they faced," said Alicia Kearns MP, the shadow safeguarding minister.

Pauline Jones, the mother of Bethany Fields, who was killed by her partner in 2019, a month after being graded a medium risk by Dash, put it more directly: "When you hear about the Dash, and you know your daughter's death was so easily preventable, it destroys not just your heart, but your very soul.”

Is there a better option?

Dash has "obvious problems", said Phillips. She is reviewing the entire system but "until I can replace it with something" that works better, "we have to make the very best of the system that we have." Any risk assessment tool is "only as good as the person who is using it".

Some police forces have adopted Dara, the tool that the College of Policing has developed, instead of Dash. Other forces and organisations, in the UK and abroad, are calling for a more radical overhaul, using using new technology to assess future risk. "In certain contexts," said Forbes, "AI-enabled tools are making it easier to discreetly gather evidence, assess personal risk and document abuse – actions that were previously unsafe or more difficult to carry out."

President Donald Trump has zeroed in on crime in American cities, including the one where he currently lives: Washington, D.C. But while the Trump administration has criticized crime rates and dispatched federal agents to control the alleged lawlessness, the White House has also been slashing funding for anti-crime programs, particularly gun violence initiatives. Some say cutting these funds puts the Trump administration at odds with its efforts to reduce crime rates, which experts note had already been falling.

What is Trump doing about gun violence?

The Trump administration is rolling back efforts to halt gun violence. The White House has "terminated more than half of all federal funding for gun violence prevention programs in the U.S., cutting $158 million in grants that had been directed to groups in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore," said Reuters. These programs were eliminated because they "no longer effectuate the program's goals or agency's priorities," a Department of Justice spokesperson told the outlet.

But this is only a portion of the anti-gun violence programs that the administration has slashed. In all, Trump has "eliminated about $500 million in grants to organizations that buttress public safety, including many working to prevent gun violence," said CNN. In addition to gun safety, these programs ranged from "conflict mediation and de-escalation to hospital-based initiatives that seek to prevent retaliation from people who experience violent injuries."

And while violent crimes are down overall, "every year tens of thousands of Americans — one every few minutes — are killed by gun violence on the scale of a public health epidemic," said NPR. Most "headlines focus on America's urban centers, but the numbers also reflect the growth of gun violence" in rural areas. In 2020, the death rate from guns in rural areas was 20% higher than in cities, according to Johns Hopkins University.

What is the White House's message on crime?

The White House's reduction of gun violence prevention programs has "left dozens of similar programs scrambling," said PBS News. This seems to be a contrast to the anti-crime messaging from the president. While crime rates have fallen steadily, "some worry that progress is in jeopardy" by eliminating these programs.

Many have also pointed to the White House's lax gun control policies in Washington, D.C., where Trump has dispatched the National Guard to police the streets in a move that has "left parts of the U.S. capital looking like occupied territory," said The Associated Press. But while Trump criticizes crime rates in Washington (the city has indeed seen high crime rates in certain areas), his administration is taking actions to lessen gun-related penalties. Federal prosecutors in D.C. have been "instructed not to seek felony charges against people who are carrying rifles or shotguns in the nation's capital, regardless of the strength of the evidence," said The Washington Post.

This new policy "marks a break from past practice," said the Post. It also "complicates the White House's boasts of seizing dozens of guns" as part of Trump's crime crackdown. And it comes as people nationwide continue to criticize the removal of gun control funds. "If you partially extend a helping hand to somebody, and then you rip it away right when they start to trust you, you assure they will never trust you again," said LJ Punch, a former trauma surgeon who founded the Bullet Related Injury Clinic in St. Louis, to CNN. "If your intention is to prevent violence, you don't do that."

An American woman who disguised herself in a niqab to shoot her British lover's feud rival has been found guilty of conspiracy to murder.

Aimee Betro, from Wisconsin, flew to the UK as part of a revenge plot orchestrated by Mohammed Nabil Nazir and his father, Mohammed Aslam. Betro, 45, tried to assassinate Sikander Ali at point-blank range outside his family home in Birmingham – but her gun jammed, allowing him to escape.

Following the "botched" attack, in 2019, Betro spent five years on the run, said CNN. After a hunt that "spanned continents and involved multiple crime agencies", including the FBI, she was arrested last summer in Armenia, extradited for trial in the UK and convicted on Tuesday at Birmingham Crown Court.

Feud between families

The prosecution said the attack was "the culmination of a feud between two families" in the Midlands, said The New York Times. It began in 2018, with a "fistfight" in the clothing boutique owned by Ali's father, Aslat Mahumad. The court heard that both Nazir and Aslam were left injured, and with a desire to "exact revenge" on Mahumad and his family. But "the assassin they chose was far from local".

Betro said she and Nazir, 31, had met on a dating app and begun a relationship online. She said she had travelled to the UK twice before to spend time with him but, this time, she was only in Britain to celebrate her birthday and attend a boat party.

When Sikander Ali arrived at his family home, in "a quiet cul-de-sac" in the suburbs of Birmingham, on the evening of 7 September 2019, he did not notice a woman with her face covered, parked in a Mercedes. "As he began to open his car door, the veiled woman walked toward him, raised a handgun and pulled the trigger." After the gun jammed, Ali "scrambled back into his vehicle, threw it into reverse and sped off".

"It is sheer luck that he managed to get away unscathed," said Hannah Sidaway from Crown Prosecution Service West Midlands.

Betro abandoned her car nearby but returned a few hours later in a taxi, and fired three shots into the now-empty home. The court heard that Betro had sent Ali's father text messages, saying: "Stop playing hide and seek; you are lucky it jammed."

She then fled the UK, and was joined in the US by Nazir. From there, the pair "orchestrated another plot" that, according to West Midlands Police, involved sending illegal ammunition "to a man in Derby, England, in the hopes he would be arrested", said CNN.

'Implausible' story

Betro claimed someone else carried out the shooting, that she had "no reason or motive" to do so, and that she did not know the intended victim's family, said ITV News. It was "all just a terrible coincidence", she told the court, and another "small and fat" American woman, who wore the same trainers, was responsible.

But the jury saw through "her implausible account", said The Times. Betro had flown to Britain with "a clear brief: kill Mahumad and his family".

Detective Chief Inspector Alastair Orencas, from West Midlands Police, described it as "a carefully planned murderous plot".

Aslam and Nazir were both convicted last November for their part in the murder plot. Aslam, 56, was sentenced to 10 years and Nazir to 32 years, both for conspiracy to murder.

After 21 hours of deliberation, jurors at Birmingham Crown Court found Betro guilty on charges of conspiracy to murder, possessing a gun with intent to cause fear of violence, and illegally importing ammunition. When the near-unanimous verdicts were read out, Betro "did not react and merely stared towards the jury bench", said The Guardian. "She remained emotionless when escorted back to her cell."

Betro is due to be sentenced on 21 August.

The government will equip seven police forces in England with new live facial recognition (LFR) vans in a bid to trace suspects of serious crimes, including murder and sexual assaults, more effectively.

The Home Office announced that it would give the forces shared access to 10 new vans, which can scan the faces of people passing by and match them against a database of suspects. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the technology will be used in a "targeted way" and has so far been responsible for hundreds of arrests in London, where it has already been deployed.

However, LFR has been strongly criticised by civil liberties groups for the potential to invade privacy. The Big Brother Watch campaign group said the "significant expansion of the surveillance state" was "alarming".

How does LFR work?

Specially trained officers staff the vans, which are usually posted at busy public spaces. Cameras then scan the faces of people nearby in real-time, taking measurements of facial features such as the distance between the eyes, and the length of the jawline to establish a set of unique biometric data.

The data is automatically compared to a watchlist of suspects by the technology, which then flags to officers any potential matches and enables them to approach the possible suspect.

Changes to the Investigatory Powers Act last year also now allow the use of artificial intelligence to scan data "when there is no expectation of privacy", said The Economist.

Does it work?

Government and police figures suggest that LFR has been extremely effective in identifying criminals. According to data released in July, the Metropolitan Police said it had "made 1,000 arrests using live facial recognition to date, of which 773 had led to a charge or caution", said The Guardian. However, that number accounts for "just 0.15% of the total arrests in London since 2020", said The Register.

The government cited figures from the past year, suggesting police in London had made "580 arrests in 12 months, including 52 registered sex offenders who breached their conditions", said the BBC.

Critics, though, say this comes at a cost, with a deep invasion of the privacy of innocent people who have their faces scanned.

Where will it be used?

Up until now, only London and South Wales police have had access to permanent LFR technology, but almost all police forces use retrospective facial recognition, in which officers use CCTV or social media images of suspects to compare against the database. Likewise, some police use operator-initiated facial recognition, which is used to scan the faces of people of specific interest.

The Home Office announcement means seven more forces across England, comprising Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire, will now share access to the 10 new vans and be able to obtain the live technology.

There is little official guidance on where and when LFR can be used, leaving it down to police discretion to deploy the technology in public spaces.

What are the ethical concerns?

The biggest ethical concerns over LFR include invasion of privacy, a lack of regulation, and accuracy.

The majority of people scanned by LFR will be innocent, but will be tracked by the technology whether they choose to or not. A poll by the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security and the Alan Turing Institute this year found that "60% of Britons are comfortable" with the police using LFR in a crowd, said The Economist.

Its accuracy has also been called into question. The Met says there have been just seven false alerts so far in 2025, but there have been notable cases in which innocent people have been questioned after being falsely identified by the system. One man, Shaun Thompson, is taking the Met to the High Court, having been wrongly identified and stopped last year.

Campaigners also say there is a lack of regulation and oversight around the surveillance powers as use increases. For instance, police are "free to employ any AI tools they like" while using LFR, which means it is "impossible to know where and how they are being used", said The Economist. Critics say that could lead to systems recognising some types of faces better than others, and lead to greater discrimination against certain groups.

One of the deadliest chemicals on Earth is being smuggled across Latin America – and is poisoning the environment along the way.

Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin and its use is banned or heavily restricted throughout the world. But it's "essential" to illegal gold mining, one of the Amazon's "most destructive criminal economies", said The Associated Press,

Once extracted from the Earth's crust, mercury "persists in the environment indefinitely", said The Guardian. Those who drink water and consume food contaminated by it are gradually poisoned. But, with the current record-high gold prices, the mercury trade has become "so lucrative that one of Mexico's deadliest cartels has entered the business".

The 'gold-mercury-drug trifecta'

Last month, Peruvian authorities seized about four tonnes of mercury hidden inside gravel sacks in a Mexican container on a cargo ship bound for Bolivia. It was the largest mercury seizure made in South America. Mercury mining in Mexico is "spinning out of control", according to a recent report by the non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). More than 180 tonnes were trafficked from Mexico to Colombia, Bolivia and Peru between April 2019 and June 2025, as part of what the Washington-based organisation calls a "gold-mercury-drug trifecta".

Miners mix mercury with sediment and heat it until it vaporises, leaving the pure gold ore – and releasing toxic vapour into the air, water and soil. Leftover mercury washes into rivers, where it transforms into methylmercury: its most dangerous form. Artisanal and small-scale gold mining releases 800 tonnes of mercury into the rainforest every year.

In 2013, 128 countries signed up to the Minamata Convention and committed to restrict the production and export of mercury, before phasing it out by 2032. But "legal loopholes" in the UN-based treaty "benefit traffickers and illegal gold miners", said the EIA, warning that the trade is "fuelling violence, forest destruction", human rights abuses and "environmental devastation".

In Latin America, governments and law enforcement agencies have struggled to stem the flow. Peru and Brazil banned mercury imports in 2016 but, "in Bolivia, it is easier to import mercury than to import books or medicines", said Oscar Campanini, director of the non-profit Centro de Documentación e Información Bolivia.

'Profound impact'

The surge in mercury trafficking has been driven by soaring gold prices. According to World Gold Council estimates, 30% of gold mined around the world comes from "untraceable" sources – a $12 billion (£9 million) black market that has "created a toxic web of environmental degradation and public health risks", said AI Invest.

It's having a "particularly profound impact" on the health of Indigenous people, said Mongabay, a non-profit environmental media organisation. Communities that live near mining sites in the Amazon have been exposed to high concentrations of mercury. In Peru's Madre de Dios region, an "epicentre of illegal mining", mercury contamination has been detected in drinking water and even breast milk, said AP. Long-term exposure can cause "irreversible damage to the brain and nervous system, particularly in children and pregnant women".

There are equipment and methods that can replace mercury in the gold mining process, and reduce the risk of contamination – but there is currently little market incentive to adopt them.

The issue is "expected to take centre stage" at the Conference of the Parties to the Minamata Convention in November, where advocates "hope to eliminate legal loopholes" and enforce phase-out timelines. Authorities say last month's bust "marks a turning point in efforts to dismantle the supply chains".

Tommy Robinson is no stranger to legal trouble. Over the past two decades the founder of the now largely defunct English Defence League (EDL), whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has been convicted of assault, using a fake passport, mortgage fraud and contempt of court.

Robinson has largely relied on donations to fund his legal battles and his lifestyle. These consist mainly of relatively small amounts from individual supporters, but Elon Musk, the world's richest person, "agreed to help fund" Robinson's "mounting legal bills" in January, said The i Paper.

Here is a history of Robinson's turbulent legal troubles.

2005 – Assault

Robinson was first convicted back in 2005 for assaulting an off-duty police officer who had "intervened in a bid to protect the EDL founder's girlfriend" as they argued in the street, said The Mirror. Robinson was sentenced to 12 months in prison.

2011 – Assault

Robinson was convicted of assault again in 2011, receiving a suspended sentence for butting a man at an EDL rally in Blackburn.

2011 – Community order

In July 2011, Robinson was given a 12-month community rehabilitation order for leading a brawl that involved more than 100 football fans in Luton in August 2010.

Robinson had denied the charges and claimed outside the court that he had been "persecuted for his right-wing beliefs", said the BBC at the time. He was found guilty and was also ordered to complete 150 hours of unpaid work and pay £650 in costs.

2013 – False passport

Robinson was then jailed in 2013 for using a false passport, having attempted to use someone else's to enter the US. He had "previously been refused entry to the US", said The Independent, and borrowed the passport of his friend, Andrew McMaster, in addition to carrying his own.

On arrival in New York, "he was caught when customs officials at JFK airport took his fingerprints and realised he was not Mr McMaster". Before they could follow up, Robinson "left the airport, entering the US illegally".

After returning to the UK, using his own passport, he was arrested and admitted to the charges in court, receiving a 10-month prison sentence.

2014 – Mortgage fraud

In January 2014, Robinson was given an 18 -month prison sentence for "conspiring with others to obtain a mortgage by misrepresentation from the Abbey and Halifax banks", said The Guardian.

By that point he had left the EDL, "claiming he had concerns over far-right extremism". However, he posted on social media that his criminal conviction was "a complete stitch-up".

2019 – Contempt of court

Robinson was again jailed in 2019 for contempt of court after interfering with a grooming gang trial by livestreaming on Facebook outside Leeds Crown Court in 2018.

Judges said Robinson had called for "vigilante action" during the hour-and-a-half broadcast while the jury considered its verdict. The livestream was viewed more than 250,000 times, and called on supporters to "harass a defendant by finding him, knocking on his door, following him, and watching him", judges said.

He was given six months for his offence in Leeds, and a further three for a similar offence committed in 2017 outside Canterbury Crown Court, for which he had received a suspended sentence.

2021 – Stalking

The next brush with the law came after The Independent journalist Lizzie Dearden and her boyfriend Samuel Partridge reported Robinson to the police for stalking, in January 2021.

Robinson "stood outside Dearden’s house and shouted unsubstantiated allegations about Partridge" and "threatened to repeatedly return to her address", said The Guardian. He had found her address through a private investigator after she had enquired through his legal team about an alleged misuse of money donated by his supporters.

Robinson was given a five-year stalking protection order in October 2021 and prohibited from contacting them, going to their place of work or home, or publishing anything about them.

2024 – Contempt of court

Robinson was jailed again for contempt of court for being in breach of an injunction by repeating false allegations about a Syrian refugee.

In 2021, Robinson lost a libel case brought against him by Jamal Hijazi, whom he had falsely accused of being "not innocent" and violent towards girls at his school after a video of Hijazi being attacked by fellow pupils went viral.

The false allegations were repeated numerous times in a film that Robinson had made, called "Silenced", resulting in 10 breaches of a High Court order. He was given an 18-month sentence, but was released after seven months in May this year.

Fifty years ago this week, one of Ireland's most popular music groups became the target of a terror attack in which three of its members were killed by loyalist paramilitaries posing as British Army soldiers.

A "controversial" parade due to take place in Northern Ireland this weekend "risks stepping over the line into the glorification of terrorism", said the BBC. Fifteen bands and hundreds of people are expected to take part in the Harris Boyle 50th Anniversary Memorial parade in County Armagh, in memory of one of the perpetrators of the Miami Showband Massacre.

Who were the Miami Showband?

The Miami Showband were a touring cabaret band formed in 1962, who became one of the biggest stars of Ireland's showband scene. An evolution from the travelling big bands of the 1940s and 1950s, showbands offered a more contemporary pop and easy listening sound, playing to packed houses across the length and breadth of the island of Ireland.

The Miami Showband's name was inspired by the first venue they played, the Palm Beach Ballroom in Portmarnock, north of Dublin. They had seven number-one hits in Ireland and performed Ireland's entry in the 1966 Eurovision Song Contest, finishing joint fourth. They also played in Northern Ireland, and had also appeared on UK television programmes.

What happened?

On 31 July 1975, the band were travelling home to Dublin after a concert in Banbridge, Northern Ireland, when they were stopped by a group of around 10 men in uniform at what appeared to be a British Army checkpoint. In fact, the "soldiers" were all members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group. Four of them were also serving in the British Army's Ulster Defence Regiment.

The attackers ordered the band members to line up at the side of the road while they attempted to place a bomb on the tour bus. It's believed that the plan was for the bomb to detonate once the van passed into the Republic of Ireland, framing the band members as IRA bomb smugglers, attracting bad publicity for the Republican cause and prompting stricter security measures at the border.

However, the explosive detonated prematurely, killing two of the paramilitaries, including Harris Boyle. The surviving gunmen then opened fire on the band, murdering lead singer Fran O’Toole, guitarist Tony Geraghty and trumpet player Brian McCoy. Two other members of the band, Des McAlea and Stephen Travers, were injured but survived.

Were the killers brought to justice?

In 1976, two men were jailed for 35 years in connection with the murders. Imposing the longest life sentences in Northern Ireland history, the judge said "killings like the Miami Showband must be stopped" and hinted that the death penalty would have been imposed had it not been recently abolished.

A third attacker, former British Army soldier John James Somerville, was convicted in 1981 for his involvement in the killings, as well as a separate sectarian murder. All three declined to name their accomplices and their identities remain unknown. They were released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

In 2019, Netflix documentary "ReMastered: The Miami Showband Massacre" brought the killings back into the public eye, following survivor Stephen Travers' fight to bring the killers to justice and keep the memory of his bandmates alive.

When Thailand became the first country in Asia to decriminalise cannabis in 2022, it sparked a major tourism boom – and a domestic industry now worth $1 billion.

But now, the government is "harshing that buzz", said Time magazine.

Last month, it imposed rules "designed to rein in the country's 'green rush'" and reclassify cannabis as a controlled herb, said CNN. Citizens now need a doctor's prescription to buy the drug, restricting consumption to medical purposes. The public health minister also said he would "recriminalise cannabis as a narcotic", according to the broadcaster, which would be a "major reversal from Thailand's liberal approach".

The government says the move is designed to protect children and combat international smuggling, but critics argue that the rushed move could endanger the thousands of small cannabis stores.

The 'weed wild west'

After cannabis was decriminalised in Thailand, there was a "frenzy of investment", said the BBC's Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head. There are about 11,000 registered cannabis dispensaries in the country. In parts of Bangkok, it is "impossible to escape the lurid green glare of their neon signs and the constant smell of people smoking". This has "flooded the market and driven the price down".

But some describe the "free-wheeling" market as "out of control". A promised regulatory framework was never implemented, perhaps because of "obstruction by vested interests with links to the marijuana industry", said one MP involved in the process. The result: a "weed wild west", and an "influx of foreign drug syndicates hiding behind Thai nominees".

There have been growing calls to restrict the industry, but "the final straw appears to have been pressure from the UK". A "flood" of Thai cannabis has been smuggled into the country, often by young people "lured by drug syndicates" into carrying suitcases of it home, because "very few regulations" exist in Thailand to control it. Last month, two British women were arrested in Georgia and Sri Lanka "with large amounts of marijuana from Thailand".

"It's massively increased over the last couple of years," said Beki Wright, spokesperson for the National Crime Agency in London. The NCA intercepted 800 couriers carrying 26 tonnes in 2024, up from 142 couriers carrying five tonnes in 2023.

The Thai government is "probably getting yelled at during international meetings", Kitty Chopaka, an advocate for smaller cannabis producers, told the broadcaster. "Countries saying 'all your weed is getting smuggled into our country', that is quite embarrassing."

'Bracing for real pain'

The government's "major policy reversal" has plunged the industry into "a state of confusion", said The Guardian. Shops are "scrambling" with the new restrictions, and many owners fear the changes will "unfairly push out smaller businesses" that can't afford to comply with rules or register as medical clinics. "Most of the registered shops will shut down", or go underground, said store owner Natthakan Punyathanaworakit.

There are also fears that new regulations will scare off tourists and hurt profits. Other owners say the issue has been "politicised"; the policy reversal comes after the Bhumjaithai Party, which "championed" legalisation, withdrew from the ruling coalition over Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra's "perceived poor handling of a border row with Cambodia".

That allowed the ruling Pheu Thai party to "pursue its promises of restricting the use of marijuana to medical purposes only", said Time. It's a popular one: a 2024 poll found that more than 60% of the public were in favour of reclassifying cannabis as a narcotic.

Legalisation was "widely criticised" – it allowed "thousands of people convicted of cannabis-related offences to be released from jail", said The Guardian. "Piecemeal" rules also had to be implemented after the fact, such as banning cannabis from schools and children.

But now, with "stricter controls on sales and distribution" on the horizon, said Bloomberg, communities in the "lush northern countryside" where the plants grow are "bracing for real pain".

People were divided politically when reports first emerged of the Trump administration's immigration detention facility in the Florida Everglades, dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz," with Democrats lambasting it as cruel and Republicans upholding it as a necessary space. But now that detainees have lived in the facility for several weeks, details have circulated of alleged poor conditions, prompting some to raise the alarm.

Interviews with several news outlets have documented everything from insect infestations to widespread problems with plumbing. And new evidence has emerged that many of the detainees at Alligator Alcatraz may not even have a criminal record.

What are the alleged conditions at Alligator Alcatraz?

Detainees inside the facility, which gets its name from the alligator and snake-infested swamp surrounding it, say that "worms turn up in the food. Toilets don't flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere," said The Associated Press. The open floor plan means that "rows of bunkbeds are surrounded by chain-link cages." Detainees allegedly go "days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and they are only able to speak by phone to lawyers and loved ones." Problems with the air conditioning are reportedly also common.

Alligator Alcatraz does not have permanent running water, meaning "drinking and bathing water has to be brought in several times a day, but is still in short supply," said The Washington Post. Combined with the swampy nature of the facility, this means that insects are a pervasive problem. Facility staffers are "issued a can of mosquito repellent their first day of work, but detainees are sprayed only when they arrive," which reportedly has minimal effect. Most detainees have "skin irritations from mosquitoes; they don't give us spray. All of us worry that we'll get a disease because of the mosquitoes," detainee Anderson Miranda told the Post. The mosquitoes "don't let you sleep," said detainee Juan Javier Gonzalez.

Some of the detainees facing these conditions may not even be accused of wrongdoing. "Hundreds of immigrants with no criminal charges in the United States are being held at Alligator Alcatraz," according to an investigation by the Miami Herald. At least 250 people being held at the facility have "only immigration violations but no criminal or pending charges." This tracks with national figures, which showed "nearly half of detainees in ICE custody" nationwide did not have a "criminal conviction or charge."

What has the response been?

Local officials have denied these accounts of Alligator Alcatraz's conditions. The "reporting on the conditions in the facility is completely false. The facility meets all required standards and is in good working order," said spokesperson Stephanie Hartman of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which built the facility, to the AP. Alligator Alcatraz is a "very professionally run facility," said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to WPTV-TV West Palm Beach. It's "South Florida. This is not the Four Seasons."

The beds at the facility are "better than my bed at home," Florida's Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia (R) said to The New York Times following a tour of Alligator Alcatraz. But congressional Democrats, several of whom also toured the facility, have said the reports of horrific conditions are accurate. When "those doors opened, what I saw made my heart sink," Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) said to reporters. There were "32 people per cage, about six cages in the one tent." The administration "should not put humans in the middle of swampland in the Everglades: It's outrageous," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). "It's inhumane. It's unlawful."

During a two-month trial in Manhattan, federal prosecutors successfully exposed Sean "Diddy" Combs as "a vile pervert," said Dana Bazelon in Slate. Yet the hip-hop mogul "(mostly) beat the rap." Jurors last week acquitted Combs of racketeering and sex trafficking, charges that carried a potential life sentence, and instead found him guilty of two lesser counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. Prosecutors had sought to portray Combs, 55, as the kingpin of a criminal enterprise. The evidence against him included graphic testimony from two former girlfriends, who detailed a pattern of brutal coercion dating back to 2008. He pressured the women to have sex with male prostitutes during drug-fueled "freak-off" parties, "extorted them with the videos he made of them doing it, and beat them when they tried to leave." Yet the jury didn't buy the prosecution's claim that Diddy was a mob boss. Instead, they saw him as something "far more pedestrian": a domestic abuser.

"The prosecution massively overcharged Diddy," said Haley Strack in National Review. Because the statute of limitations had expired on more direct charges of sexual assault or battery, they reached for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—typically used against organized crime. But as the shirt of one Diddy supporter outside the courthouse declared, "A freako is not a RICO." The rapper will likely be sentenced to several years in prison on the prostitution charges. Still, after weeks of testimony by women who "were beaten, choked, drugged, emotionally abused, and assaulted by Diddy, it feels as though the music mogul escaped justice." This is another "gruesome marker of a post-#MeToo era," said Moira Donegan in The Guardian. After a fleeting moment when powerful men like Harvey Weinstein were held accountable, there's been a "triumphant restoration of the status quo ante."

Many people still can't grasp how "a powerful man can coerce and control a woman," said Rachel Louise Snyder in The New York Times. Jurors were shown 2016 surveillance footage of Combs kicking and dragging his girlfriend Casandra Ventura down the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel, and heard testimony from a former Diddy employee who watched his boss beat her. Yet the jury seemingly accepted the defense's argument that Ventura voluntarily took part in Diddy's freak-offs. If such searing evidence of violent coercion can't secure a conviction in our justice system, "then perhaps we ought to rethink that system."

Three men have been convicted of aggravated arson at the Old Bailey this week, after causing serious damage to warehouses in east London in an attack orchestrated by Russia's Wagner Group.

The ringleader of the arsonists, Dylan Earl, admitted to working for Russia to commit the attack on the warehouses, which contained equipment destined for Ukraine, and had been in contact with Wagner Group operatives in the days leading up to the fire.

Earl was the only one of those convicted who had been in touch with the Wagner Group, a "powerful group of mercenaries" now effectively controlled by the Kremlin since its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was assassinated in 2023, said Trevor Barnes in London's The Standard.

Designated a terrorist organisation by the UK, the Wagner Group is using its own "playbook" to try to "recruit young British men to carry out sabotage and arson attacks against targets in the UK to help Putin".

What did the commentators say?

The trial revealed the "four stages" of Wagner recruitment: "spot, groom, test and task".

Earl, an "active drug dealer", already used the likes of Telegram to "organise his activities". He was spotted by the group having "accessed numerous pro-Russian Telegram channels" and his "sympathy for Russia was recorded in Moscow". It was then simpler to groom him and begin "probing how useful the potential candidate might be".

"Thousands of messages" were discovered by the police during investigations, providing "extraordinary insight" into how Russia is "paying criminal gangs to conduct espionage and sabotage operations in Europe", said Lizzie Dearden in The New York Times.

"Within 24 hours" the Wagner operatives, working under the Telegram account "Privet Bot", had "issued its first order" and instructed Earl to carry out the arson attack on the "unassuming industrial estate" containing Starlink satellite equipment, after which Earl was quickly able to recruit local criminals to help him for cash rather than ideology.

Before the arson had even been carried out, Privet Bot was already "significantly upping the ante", asking Earl to kidnap Russian exile Evgeny Chichvarkin and burn down his restaurant and wine shop in Mayfair, said Martin Evans in The Telegraph.

While the "plot never came to fruition", Earl's recruitment was an example of how an "increasing number of young men were being drawn to Moscow".

The motivation is largely the "accumulation of wealth and status and the associated lifestyle it would bring", Russia expert Professor Mark Galeotti told the paper. There is a "perverse mystique" to Putin's ideology, one that holds "traditional values" but is also "ruthless and brutal". It can be "very appealing" to "disaffected lads and thugs", he said, with Wagner able to "leverage this perverse appeal to the fullest".

Using Telegram to recruit amateur saboteurs has been "central to Russia's attempts to wreak havoc on the Continent" since its "spy network suffered significant blows" when agents and diplomats were expelled after the start of the war with Ukraine, said Ali Mitib and Fiona Hamilton in The Times. The arson attack in Leyton is the latest in a "string of incidents" including "sabotage, influence, vandalism and assassination attempts" that have "surged" in recent years.

What next?

While Russia goes to "great lengths to reward and retrieve its spies", the "gig economy" recruits it finds via Telegram "can't expect the same", with the Kremlin viewing them as "disposable", said Christian Edwards at CNN.

European authorities have seen greater success in "thwarting" this type of attack and "bringing the perpetrators to justice", after having initially "struggled to combat the new ways" of committing sabotage, and offering a "disjointed response" that "meant Russia could act with impunity".

Incidences may have slowed, but "experts agree" that Moscow will keep "trying for the foreseeable future to enlist saboteurs online" and cause "considerable trouble" to the UK and Europe, said The Standard. Britain should consider that it "has been warned".

What happened

A jury in Australia Monday found Erin Patterson guilty of murdering three of her estranged husband's relatives by serving them Beef Wellingtons laced with toxic death cap mushrooms. Her husband's parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and aunt, Heather Wilkinson, died in the days following the family lunch in July 2023. Wilkinson's husband was also severely ill after eating the meal but survived.

Who said what

The so-called mushroom murders case has gripped Australia, and "drew comparisons to an Agatha Christie novel or TV murder mystery," said The Washington Post. The prosecution said that Patterson, 50, lured her guests to dine at her home in Leongatha, a few hours outside Melbourne, by lying about having cancer. Her estranged husband declined, but she deliberately poisoned his family and embarked on a "sustained cover-up," the jury heard in Victoria state's Supreme Court.

Patterson pleaded not guilty to the charges and insisted the deaths were accidental. Her defense team said the prosecution's case was "ridiculous" and "convoluted." But the jury agreed with the prosecution that she "deliberately picked the mushrooms used in the meal," CNN said.

What next?

Patterson will be sentenced at a later date and faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The "mystery" of "what happened at Erin Patterson's dining table" in rural Australia on 29 July 2023 has "gripped the world" for two years, said the BBC.

Of the four relatives who were served beef wellington in her home on that "fateful Saturday", three subsequently died and one was left "fighting for his life".

Today, Patterson has been found guilty of murdering her in-laws Don and Gail Patterson and her husband's aunt Heather Wilkinson (Gail Patterson's sister), and attempting to murder her husband's uncle, Ian Wilkinson, by lacing their meal with powdered death cap mushrooms.

'Lies caught up with her'

The lunch was reportedly planned to "reconcile an increasingly fractured relationship" between Patterson and her estranged husband, Simon, said The Times, but he pulled out the day before. Patterson denied purposefully putting the deadly mushrooms in the food but "exposed herself to cross-examination" by choosing to take the witness stand.

The prosecution accused her of a succession of deceptions, including lying to her guests about having cancer, pretending to suffer the effects of poisoning and concealing the truth that "lethal doses of poison" were hidden in the home-cooked meal. After denying she even owned a food dehydrator to prepare the mushrooms, she was caught on CCTV dumping it at a local rubbish tip in the town of Leongatha, 85 miles southeast of Melbourne, days after the lunch. "In the end the lies caught up with her."

Patterson has been remanded in custody while awaiting a date for sentencing. She will "likely spend most – if not all – of the rest of her life behind bars", said The Australian, although she still has 28 days to appeal.

The 'final word'

So why has this tragedy seized the public consciousness? Perhaps because the "mushroom murder trial" had "the feel of a Shakespearean drama: multiple deaths within one family, death by poison, and a female protagonist", said criminologist Xanthe Mallett on The Conversation. The case has "prompted worldwide headlines, multiple daily podcasts, and even YouTube videos of self-proclaimed 'body language experts'" assessing the defendant's "every move".

But now that the verdict is in, the "final word" should really be saved for the families, who have lost their loved ones and must come to terms with what Patterson has done. "Amid the spectacle," said Mallett, "it's easy to lose sight of the humanity at the centre."

Twenty years ago today four terrorists killed 52 people and injured more than 700 in suicide bomb attacks on London's public transport.

Two weeks after the horrors of 7/7, there were four more attempted attacks. This time the devices failed to detonate properly but once again London was "unnerved", said historian Dominic Sandbrook on the BBC, but the police investigation led to the tragic death of one innocent man.

What happened?

In an attempted repeat of the 7/7 attacks, four Islamist extremists targeted three London Underground trains and a bus, but their devices failed to explode and only the detonators of the bombs went off.

These minor explosions caused nothing more than the popping sounds mentioned by witnesses, and the only reported injury was one person having a minor asthma attack.

Although no one died on 21/7, it was "nevertheless a terrible reminder" of the capital's "vulnerability to domestic terrorism" and the "apparently ubiquitous threat of Islamist extremism", said Sandbrook.

The offenders apparently "intended to kill themselves in acts of martyrdom", said The Jamestown Foundation, but they fled the scenes after their bombs failed to explode, sparking an "international manhunt", said Cosmopolitan.

The Metropolitan Police commissioner at the time, Sir Ian Blair, said the investigation became "the greatest operational challenge ever faced" by the force.

How were they caught?

The failure of the bombs to go off meant police were able to recover forensic material from the scenes, while CCTV images of the bombers were also widely shared.

With public transport passengers in the capital on edge, the investigation took a tragic turn when, the day after the failed attacks, police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician who was mistaken for one of the bombers.

Within eight days, police had arrested all four of the main suspects. One was apprehended in Birmingham, two were arrested in London and a fourth was caught in Rome and extradited to the UK.

At their trial, the judge described their plot as a "viable attempt at mass murder". Ramzi Mohammed, Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yassin Omar were found guilty of conspiracy to murder and sentenced to minimum terms of 40 years' imprisonment.

A fourth man, Ismail Abdurahman, was convicted of assisting one of the failed bombers and failing to disclose information about the planned attacks. He was sentenced to 10 years, reduced to eight on appeal.

What happened next?

In 2008, the men lost a court appeal to challenge their convictions. Judges rejected their claim that the devices were made to look realistic "but included flaws" that were meant to "ensure that the main charge of each of those devices would not detonate".

The judges also dismissed applications from two of the men to challenge their sentences, ruling that "as they were rightly meant to be", the sentences were "severe and extreme".

In 2014, they lost an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights. Three of the men had claimed their human rights had been breached because statements they made to police without lawyers present had been used as evidence, and a fourth man argued he had been treated unfairly when he was interviewed as a witness.

The court ruled that it had been "convincingly established" that at the time of the interviews there was an "exceptionally serious and imminent threat to public safety", which provided "compelling reasons" to "delay" all four applicants' access to lawyers.

The following year, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights agreed to look again at the case. It ruled that there was no violation of rights for Ibrahim, Ramzi Mohammed and Omar, but there was a violation in the access to legal counsel for Abdurahman.

What happened

A federal jury in Manhattan Wednesday convicted Sean "Diddy" Combs of two counts of transportation for prostitution, a felony violation of the Mann Act, for bringing sex workers across state lines for drug-fueled sex marathons. But he was acquitted of the more serious charges of racketeering and sex trafficking.

Judge Arun Subramanian denied Combs' request for release on bail as he awaits sentencing, saying the trial demonstrated the rap mogul's "yearslong pattern of violence."

Who said what

Combs' lawyer Marc Agnifilo called the jury's decision "a victory of all victories." It was "certainly a defeat for the prosecution and the victims who told their often terrifying stories in open court," USA Today said. "And the nation could be forgiven for wanting to take a collective shower" after hearing a "seemingly incessant stream of sordid details" of how Combs "used his fame and fortune to reduce his female victims to chattel."

Combs "dropped to his knees and prayed" after being acquitted of the charges that could have put him "behind bars for life," The Associated Press said. But the "mixed verdict capped a sordid legal odyssey that shattered Combs' affable 'Puff Daddy' image and derailed his career as a Grammy-winning artist and music executive, fashion entrepreneur, brand ambassador and reality TV star."

What next?

Subramanian scheduled a hearing next Tuesday on sentencing scheduling. Combs' lawyers suggested he should face about two years in prison while the prosecutors said federal guidelines called for at least four or five years.

What happened

A man started a wildfire at a popular wilderness area near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Sunday afternoon then fired a rifle at first responders when they arrived to put out the flames, killing two firefighters, officials said. A third firefighter was "fighting for his life" after undergoing surgery, Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris said during a news conference Sunday night. The suspected lone gunman was found dead in the Canfield Mountain recreation area with a firearm nearby, Norris said.

Who said what

"We do believe that the suspect started the fire, and we do believe that it was an ambush and it was intentional," Norris said. "These firefighters did not have a chance." The unidentified suspect's body was found hours after the attack started when investigators followed the signal from a cellphone that had remained stationary. Norris said it was unclear if he died by suicide. At an earlier press conference, the sheriff had said he hoped "somebody has a clear shot and is able to neutralize" the threat because the "sniper" was showing no "evidence of wanting to surrender."

The "bodies of the slain firefighters arrived in the nearby city of Spokane, Washington," Sunday evening, "escorted by a procession of fire and law enforcement vehicles," The Associated Press said. The "line-of-duty slayings rocked a region marked by a history of law enforcement deaths," said Spokane's The Spokesman-Review.

What next?

Law enforcement lifted a shelter-in-place order Sunday night, but the still-burning fire was an "unnerving sight" for locals, The New York Times said, "because recent dry conditions have increased the wildfire danger in northern Idaho."

"Someone tapped my left forearm. I started to feel numb in the muscle, like you do when you get a vaccine. After about 30 minutes, the injection mark appeared," 22-year-old Manon told CNN.

She is one of 145 young women who reported being pricked with syringes and becoming unwell while attending Fête de la Musique, an annual open-air music festival that took place in towns and cities across France last weekend.

Instilling fear

Manon and other victims are now waiting for the results of toxicology tests to determine what they were jabbed with. The French interior ministry says it is unclear whether anyone has been injected with rape drugs such as Rohypnol or GHB.

"Toxicology tests are being done and the investigation is ongoing," a spokesperson said, adding that the authorities are "taking this very seriously". French police have detained 12 suspects, but so far no one has been charged.

The objective of the unidentified assailants "isn't only to drug women. It's to instil fear in them," Abrège Soeur, a feminist influencer, told CNN. "When people start saying that there will be needle attacks, it spreads in the form of rumour – people mention it in group chats, others pick it up, it just gets amplified," she said. Before the festival, Soeur had warned her followers that men on social media were planning syringe attacks.

There were similar spates of reported attacks in France at the 2022 Fête de la Musique and in the UK in October 2021, when nightclubs reopened and students returned to university after Covid pandemic lockdowns. By February 2022, UK police had received more than 1,300 reports of needle spiking over the previous six months, without a single confirmed case or conviction.

'Social panic'

"The reports are always the same," said Le Monde in 2022: "an invisible attacker; traces of a needle in the arm, buttocks or back; symptoms of varying intensity (headaches, vomiting)... and toxicological analyses that turn out to be negative".

According to Psychology Today, there could be an element of "social panic" in reports of "needle-spiking". Young people in 2022 were experiencing fear of vaccinations, worry about passing Covid to someone vulnerable, and guilt about having fun.

Previous needle-spiking panics have been connected to other topical fears, such as HIV transmission. In 1998, an "urban legend" in Canada involved young women on nights out being pricked with contaminated needles and then finding a note in their pocket saying, "Welcome to the world of Aids".

In the recent incidents in France, "some jabs were found to have been caused by tooth picks and some were mosquito bites", said The Times. "Police have shifted their focus" to the theory that social media posts about jabbing women as a "game" "may have both promoted 'prank' spiking and prompted imaginary attacks".

What happened

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles on Tuesday unsealed an indictment charging seven men for the July 2022 heist of an estimated $100 million worth of gold, diamonds, rubies, emeralds and luxury watches from the back of a Brinks armored big rig, calling it "the largest jewelry heist in U.S. history." Two of the suspects were arrested Monday, one is in jail in Arizona for an unrelated burglary and the other four are at large.

Who said what

The "heist has been a mystery" for three years, the BBC said. The indictment "was a long time coming, and there were times when the victims and members of the team wondered whether we'd see this success,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Butler said Tuesday. According to the indictment, the thieves followed the Brinks truck from a jewelry show outside San Francisco to a Flying J truck stop 300 miles to the south. When the driver went in to eat at about 2 a.m., the burglars cut the lock and stole 24 of 73 bags of jewelry, the indictment alleged.

When they got back to L.A., the thieves "may not have grasped how large their score was," the Los Angeles Times said. For the victims, "the fallout from the heist has been ugly," with Brinks suing to cap payouts to the 14 robbed jewelers at the declared value of $8.7 million and the jewelers countersuing.

What next?

Some of the jewelry and watches were recovered Monday, along with a large amount of cash. Butler said investigators were still searching for the remaining jewelry.

"One thing is abundantly clear; we as a society owe these women a debt."

That was Louise Casey's assessment in her audit of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse, published yesterday. Keir Starmer commissioned the audit in January after Labour "came under extreme pressure to hold an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal", said The New Statesman.

The government had "repeatedly refused to hold a national inquiry", arguing that councils should investigate "at a local level instead". But yesterday, Starmer "quietly let slip that the government had changed its mind".

There will be a full statutory inquiry into the way the grooming scandal was mishandled by authorities – as Casey's report "directly recommends". But critics have argued that another inquiry does not necessarily mean society's debt to the victims, to use Casey's language, will be repaid.

What did the commentators say?

"The report is damning," said Megan Kenyon in The New Statesman. The strength of its findings has "forced Starmer's hand".

Casey described a "collective failure to address questions about the ethnicity of grooming gangs". Institutions like the police, social services and councils "shied away from" these questions for fear of appearing racist; "two-thirds" of perpetrators did not have their ethnicity data recorded. But such data as there was identified "clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men", Casey wrote. "It is not racist to want to examine the ethnicity of offenders."

Among the audit's many recommendations, said The Guardian, is a time-limited national, independent inquiry, co-ordinating "a series of targeted local investigations".

But there has already been a "comprehensive, seven-year" Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, chaired by child protection expert Alexis Jay, said Emma Norris and Cassia Rowland at the Institute for Government.

The "more serious charge on institutional failure to tackle child sexual abuse" is that even now, three years on from Jay's final report, none of her 20 core recommendations have been implemented in full. A "better alternative to a new inquiry", and the best way to help the victims of child sexual abuse, would be to "listen to and act on" the inquiry that has already taken place.

But this new inquiry isn't quite the same, said Isabel Hardman, assistant editor of The Spectator. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told MPs yesterday that it would not be "another overarching inquiry" like Jay's, but one with a purpose "to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies". This, said Hardman, allows ministers to "claim they are taking grooming gangs as seriously as the row at the start of the year demanded".

But whether or not it counts as a U-turn is "beside the point", said The Independent. It has "been long apparent" that what has been achieved on this issue hasn't been enough. The country needs an "accurate and balanced accounting" for how these unspeakable crimes were committed just a few years ago, "almost in plain sight, with something like collusion in parts of local government and the police".

Perhaps "even more heartening" than the announcement of a new inquiry is Casey's recommendation for "a nationwide policing operation", led by the National Crime Agency rather than "sometimes discredited" local forces. This new model of investigating these gangs "will help prevent future shortcomings". The victims "deserve nothing less than this".

What next?

Cooper said the inquiry would take about three years, and that further action would be taken to implement the recommendations of Jay's previous inquiry.

Many victims will "welcome" Starmer's quick acceptance of Casey's audit, said Sky News. They will want the inquiry to "probe" into who the perpetrators were and how they were connected, as well as "clear accountability of the people and organisations who failed to act" when vulnerable girls reported their abuse.

But, said Hardman in The Spectator, "there will need to be quite a sustained storm to ensure there is real change in policy".

It remains to be seen if Starmer, Cooper and colleagues will ever be "given political credit", said The Independent. But they are "delivering a measure of justice and restitution". Britain is at last "doing the right thing by the victims".

You may not know it from all the crime-filled tabloid headlines, but murder rates are in free fall across the U.S., said Sophie Clark in Newsweek. So far this year, homicides in big cities are down 20% over the same period in 2024, with murders dropping by a whopping 55% in Denver, 24% in St. Louis and Baltimore, and 25% in New Orleans, according to data from independent analyst Jeff Asher. "If rates continue to fall this year, then 2025 could see the lowest murder rate ever recorded in the U.S." It's a remarkable turnaround from the bloodiest days of the pandemic: Murders spiked 30% in cities in 2020—the biggest single-year jump since 1960—and stayed high for the next two years. The Trump administration is claiming its tough-on-crime policies are responsible for the recent drop. But urban murder rates actually began their steady decline under President Biden, falling 13% year over year in 2023 and then 20% in 2024. The big question is why.

Thank big-city leaders for "using the criminal justice system again," said Charles Fain Lehman in The Free Press. The anti-cop backlash that followed George Floyd's murder in 2020 led to a fall in law enforcement activity, morale, and staffing in big cities. "Unsurprisingly, murder soared." That led to another backlash, with voters booting "soft-on-crime prosecutors" and electing mayors who campaigned on public safety. Meanwhile, diminished police departments focused their resources "on the small number of criminals—mostly young, gang-involved men—who drive most of the offending." Such tactics won't "win plaudits among" the "Defund the Police" crowd, but they work. Other factors likely contributed to the drop in murders, said Jeff Asher in his Substack newsletter, including the massive post-Covid surge in public and private investment in jobs, infrastructure, and social services. Murders may have fallen simply because "we spent a lot of money everywhere on stuff."

Our cities may be getting safer, said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times, but "most of us haven't clocked the improvements." A Gallup poll last year found that 64% of voters, including 90% of Republicans, thought crime was getting worse. Perhaps that's because "the stories we tell ourselves have changed," away from "the concrete risks of direct violence and toward more ambient impressions of decay and decline" spread on Fox News and social media. "For me, it's a distressing possibility that law-and-order vibes could be more important to my neighbors than actual rates of murder or rape."

Listed alongside the more familiar knackered sofas and unwanted books are ancient, stolen treasures: Facebook Marketplace has become a profitable hub for the sale of looted and trafficked Syrian antiquities.

Since the fall of the Assad regime, "widespread poverty" and the "collapse" of the nation's "once-feared security apparatus" have sparked a "gold rush" of looters, robbing 2000-year-old graves for artefacts to sell online, said The Guardian.

'Awash' with artefacts

Syria's location in the "heart of the fertile crescent where settled civilisation first emerged", means it is "awash" with "mosaics, statues and artefacts" that "fetch top dollar" from Western collectors.

Nearly a third of the 1,500 Syrian cases that the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research project has documented since 2012 have occurred since December alone.

When Assad fell, there was a "huge spike on the ground", said Amr al-Azm, a co-director of the ATHAR project. There was a "complete breakdown" of any of the constraints that used to control looting. "The last three to four months has seen the biggest flood of antiquities trafficking I have ever seen, from any country, ever," said ATHAR's other co-director Katie Paul.

This has upset many Syrians and some have protested outside the National Museum in Damascus, demanding the protection of the nation's antiquities from illicit excavations. The "destruction" of our cultural heritage is a "blatant attack on our history", one of them told Syrian news agency Sana, and it must be confronted "by all possible means".

'Shovels and jackhammers'

The looters, "armed with pickaxes, shovels and jackhammers", come by night to "disturb the dead", said The Guardian. Under "cover of darkness", they dig up ancient graves in Syria's ancient city of Palmyra, searching for historic booty.

Once the treasures are "out of the ground", they "make their way online", and Facebook has "emerged as a key hub" for their sale, with public and private groups offering "ancient coins, entire mosaics and heavy stone busts" to the "highest bidder".

In one post on Facebook, "a user offered a pile of ancient coins for sale", writing, "I have been holding them for 15 years, Free Syria." In a video "shared in a Facebook group in March", a man with a Syrian accent displays "a mosaic depicting Zeus on a throne, using his mobile phone for scale".

"This is the fastest we've ever seen artefacts being sold," said ATHAR's Paul. It used to take a year to sell a mosaic but now they can go in just two weeks. In response, ATHAR is tracking the route of trafficked Middle Eastern antiquities online and building a database of more than 26,000 screenshots, videos, and pictures.

But the team wants more help from Facebook. In 2020, the social media behemoth banned the sale of historical antiquities on its platform but Paul says the policy is rarely enforced.

So it continues to be used as a "gateway for traffickers", linking "low-level looters" in Syria to "criminal networks" that smuggle the artefacts out of the country and ship them "around the world to create fake bills of sale and provenance". After 10 to 15 years, the treasures make their way into legal auction houses, where collectors and museums, mostly in the US and Europe, "snap them up".

What happened

A New York jury Wednesday found Harvey Weinstein guilty of one criminal sexual act, acquitted him of a second such charge and was still deliberating on a third-degree rape count. The mixed and partial verdict came at the end of a retrial of similar charges from 2020. New York's highest court last year overturned Weinstein's 23-year prison sentence from that trial, ruling 4-3 that the judge improperly allowed women not directly involved in the case to testify about their alleged sexual assaults by Weinstein.

Who said what

The retrial jury found Weinstein guilty of sexually assaulting production assistant Miriam Haley and acquitted him of assaulting model Kaja Sokola. Sokola's lawyer, Lindsay Goldbrum, said that while it wasn't the "verdict she deserved," it "helped bring down a man who believed he was untouchable." Sokola said she was "relieved" Weinstein would remain in prison.

Weinstein's 2020 conviction was a "watershed moment for the #MeToo movement," The New York Times said. "This trial was fair until we got to the jury deliberations," his publicist, Juda Engelmayer, said Wednesday. Weinstein, 73, did not testify but he asked for a mistrial in court after the jury foreman told the judge he was being bullied during deliberations. "Jurors fight," Justice Curtis Farber said, denying the request. "They act childish at times."

What next?

The jury will deliberate again today on the third charge. Weinstein faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison for Wednesday's conviction. He is also appealing a 16-year sentence he received at a sex crimes trial in Los Angeles in 2022.

What happened

Jonathan Joss, the actor best known for voicing "King of the Hill" character John Redcorn, was fatally shot Sunday night outside his fire-gutted San Antonio home, police said Monday. He was 59. A neighbor, Sigfredo Ceja Alvarez, was arrested and charged with murder. Joss' husband, Tristan Kern de Gonzales, said the shooter "started yelling violent homophobic slurs at us" before firing.

Who said what

Joss "lost his three dogs and South Side childhood home to a house fire" in January, saying at the time that "when he emerged from his burned home carrying a deceased dog, at least one neighbor laughed at him," the San Antonio News-Express said. Gonzales said on social media that he and Joss had faced "years of threats" and "openly homophobic" harassment before the fire, and Joss "was murdered by someone who could not stand the sight of two men loving each other."

"Our investigation has found no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Mr. Joss' murder was related to his sexual orientation," the San Antonio police said in a statement. "Should any new evidence come to light, we will charge the suspect accordingly."

What next?

Joss, who was of Apache and Comanche descent, "often played Native American roles during his roughly three-decade acting career," including in a recurring role in "Parks and Recreation," The New York Times said. He was set to return to "King of the Hill" in a revival launching in August. In an Instagram post on Saturday, Joss said he had already done voice work for four episodes.

What happened

The Justice Department and police in Boulder, Colorado, said Monday that the man arrested for Sunday's attack on a local Jewish group had admitted to throwing Molotov cocktails at the "Zionists" in a plot to kill them. The suspect, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, faces state attempted murder charges and a federal hate crime charge. Two of the 12 people burned by his incendiary devices are still hospitalized, police said.

Who said what

Soliman, 45, said he brought 18 incendiary devices to kill Jewish participants in a weekly "Run for Their Lives" hostage-awareness walk, according to a police affidavit. "He said he had to do it, he should do it and he would not forgive himself if he did not do it," but only threw two of the Molotov cocktails "because he got scared and had never hurt anyone before." Soliman intended to use his gas-filled backpack sprayer on himself "because he had planned on dying," police said.

Soliman admitted he planned the attack for a year and "wanted them all to die, he had no regrets and he would go back and do it again," acting U.S. Attorney J. Bishop Grewell said at a news conference. He wanted to use guns but "could not purchase them because he was not a legal citizen." U.S. officials said Soliman, an Egyptian citizen, entered the U.S in 2022 on a since-expired tourist visa and later applied for asylum. His still-pending asylum claim put his immigration status in a legal "gray area," The New York Times said.

What next?

Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty said the state charges carried a maximum sentence of 384 years. Grewell said the federal case could mean life in prison, "and these charges are the first step." Soliman's next court appearance is Thursday.

What happened

Eight people were hospitalized with burns Sunday after a man threw Molotov cocktails at a Jewish group in Boulder, Colorado, at the end of their weekly walk to raise awareness of the Israeli hostages being held by Hamas, authorities said. The alleged attacker, who was arrested at the scene, also used a "makeshift flamethrower" and was heard yelling "Free Palestine," said Mark Michalek, the FBI agent in charge of the Denver office. The FBI is investigating this clear "targeted act of violence" as "an act of terrorism," he said.

Who said what

The victims ranged in age from 52 to 88 and at least one was in critical condition, officials said. Boulder Police Chief Stephen Redfearn said the 45-year-old suspect, Mohamed Sabry Soliman of Colorado Springs, was believed to have acted alone. He was also briefly hospitalized, police said. Witnesses told The Associated Press the attacker had removed his shirt and what looked like a bulletproof vest after accidentally setting himself on fire.

Israel's war in Gaza has "spurred both an increase in antisemitic hate crime" and an effort "led by President Donald Trump to brand pro-Palestinian protests as antisemitic," Reuters said. Sunday's attack came less than two weeks after a gunman yelling "Free Palestine" killed two Israeli embassy workers outside a Jewish event in Washington D.C. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) said it was "unfathomable that the Jewish community is facing another terror attack here in Boulder."

What next?

Soliman was booked in the Boulder County jail. County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said authorities would decide in coming days which charges to file in what courts to "hold the attacker fully accountable."