Ukraine is probably leveraging a recent block on Russian troops’ access to Starlink, says Institute for the Study of War; Trump says he wants Kyiv deal with Moscow ‘fast’. What we know on day 1,455 Ukraine recaptured 201 sq km from Russia between Wednesday and Sunday last week, taking advantage of a Starlink shutdown for Russian forces, according to an Agence France-Presse analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). The recaptured area (78 sq miles) is almost equivalent to the Russian gains for the entire month of December and is the most land retaken by Kyiv’s forces in such a short period since a June 2023 counteroffensive. The recaptured land is concentrated mainly to the east of the city of Zaporizhzhia, in an area where Russian troops have made significant progress since mid-2025. “These Ukrainian counterattacks are likely leveraging the recent block on Russian forces’ access to Starlink, which Russian milbloggers (military bloggers) have claimed is causing communications and command and control issues on the battlefield,” said the ISW thinktank. On 5 February, military observers noted disruption of the Starlink antennas used by Moscow on the front lines, following announcements by Elon Musk of “measures” to end the Kremlin’s use of this technology, the AFP report said. Kyiv claimed that Russian drones were using them in particular to circumvent electronic jamming systems and strike their targets with precision. Ukraine’s anti-corruption police accused an ex-energy minister on Monday of helping launder kickbacks and stashing millions offshore, a day after he was detained trying to leave the country in a case that has shaken Kyiv’s wartime government. The arrest of German Galushchenko was the first major development for months in the “Midas” bribery case, which has loomed over Ukraine’s domestic politics since last year by reaching into President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s inner circle. In unveiling the accusations against Galushchenko, Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency Nabu said it was working with 15 foreign jurisdictions to expand its investigation. Galushchenko has denied any wrongdoing. Donald Trump said he hoped Ukraine reached a deal with Russia “fast” ahead of Tuesday’s trilateral talks in Geneva. “Ukraine better come to the table fast,” the US president said late on Monday. Senior Ukrainian and Russian officials are to meet for the second round of talks brokered by the Trump administration days before the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The two-day meeting in Switzerland starting on Tuesday is expected to mirror negotiations held earlier this month in Abu Dhabi, with representatives from Washington, Kyiv and Moscow in attendance, reported Luke Harding and Pjotr Sauer. Despite renewed US efforts to revive diplomacy, hopes for any sudden breakthrough remain low, with Russia continuing to press maximalist demands on Ukraine. Zelenskyy said Ukrainian intelligence showed more Russian attacks on energy targets lay ahead and that such strikes made it more difficult to reach an agreement on ending the war. “Intelligence reports show that Russia is preparing further massive strikes against energy infrastructure so it is necessary to ensure that all air defence systems are properly configured,” he said in his nightly video address on Monday. Zelenskyy also said Russian attacks were “constantly evolving” and resorting to a combination of weapons, including drones and missiles, requiring “special defence and support from our partners”. Civilian casualties in Ukraine caused by bombing soared by 26% during 2025, reflecting increased Russian targeting of cities and infrastructure in the country, according a global conflict monitoring group. Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) said 2,248 civilians were reported killed and 12,493 injured by explosive violence in Ukraine according to English-language reports – with the number of casualties an incident rising significantly, reports Dan Sabbagh. An average of 4.8 civilians were reported killed or injured in each strike, 33% more than in 2024, with the worst attack taking place in Dnipro on 24 June. Continue reading...

Recognised with an honorary Academy Award in 2016, Wiseman directed and produced almost 50 films with a lifelong commitment to curiosity and naturalism Frederick Wiseman, the prolific film-maker whose documentaries primarily explored US public institutions and communities, has died aged 96. His death on Monday was announced in a joint statement from the Wiseman family and his production company, Zipporah Films. Continue reading...

Unnamed suspect accused of planning to bomb one of singer’s Eras tour shows in Vienna Austrian prosecutors have filed terrorism-related charges against a 21-year-old who they say planned toattack one of Taylor Swift’s concerts in Vienna in August 2024. Three dates in Swift’s record-breaking Eras tour were cancelled after authorities warned of the plot. Continue reading...

Cooper is leaving the fabled news show after nearly 20 years amid a shake-up under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss Anderson Cooper will leave the CBS News program 60 Minutes after nearly two decades, he said on Monday, in the latest staffing shake-up to hit the storied news magazine amid broader newsroom changes under the new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. “Being a correspondent at 60 Minutes has been one of the great honors of my career. I got to tell amazing stories, and work with some of the best producers, editors and camera crews in the business,” Cooper said in a statement. “For nearly twenty years, I’ve been able to balance my jobs at CNN and CBS, but I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they still want to spend time with me.” Continue reading...

Yoon Suk Yeol could face the death penalty when judges rule on the martial law crisis that many in South Korea see as a dark moment they would rather forget South Korea awaits one of the most consequential court rulings in decades this week, when judges are due to deliver their verdict on insurrection charges against former president Yoon Suk Yeol, with prosecutors demanding the death penalty. When Yoon stands in courtroom 417 of Seoul central district court on Thursday to hear his fate, which will be broadcast live, he will do so in the same room where the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan was sentenced to death three decades ago. The charge is formally the same. Last time, it took almost 17 years and a democratic transition to deliver a verdict. This time, it has taken 14 months. Chun’s death sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment on appeal, and he was eventually pardoned. Continue reading...

In ruling, judge cited quote from Orwell’s novel 1984 describing process by which authoritarians rewrite history A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Monday ordered the National Park Service to reinstall a slavery exhibit at a Philadelphia historic site, pending the outcome of ongoing litigation after the city sued the federal government over its removal. The National Park Service last month dismantled and removed a long-established slavery-related exhibit at the Independence National Historical park, which holds the former residence of George Washington, in response to Donald Trump’s claims, which have been rejected by civil rights groups, of “anti-American ideology” at historical and cultural institutions. Continue reading...

Pelicot’s riveting account of her ordeal refuses to conform to any agenda but her own It is a mark of the power and honesty of Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir, A Hymn to Life – a seemingly impossible writing project in which the author must reconcile herself with horrors of which she has no recollection – that in the first 40 pages, the person I felt most angry towards was Pelicot herself. Her ex-husband, Dominique, who will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life for drugging and raping his wife and recruiting 50 men over the internet to do likewise, takes his place among the monsters of our age. In his absence, the reader may experience a version of what happened in Gisèle Pelicot’s own family – namely, the misdirection of anger towards her. I have read enough books by female survivors of male sexual violence to say with confidence that Hymn to Life is unique. Pelicot – she decided to keep her married name in the interests of giving those of her grandchildren who share it a way to be proud rather than ashamed – was 67 when her husband of almost 50 years was arrested in 2020 for upskirting women in a supermarket in Carpentras, a small town in the south-east of France near the couple’s retirement home in the village of Mazan. When the police investigation uncovered a cache of videos and photos in which an unconscious Pelicot was shown being sexually assaulted by scores of men, she entered a nightmare. Continue reading...

London police say criminal gangs are using Snapchat to offer cash rewards of up to £380 for stolen iPhones Gangs are recruiting children to go out to steal smartphones before they head to school, using Snapchat to offer rewards of up to £380 for the latest Apple iPhones, police have revealed. The Metropolitan police said they were deploying new resources including drones and Surron ebikes to chase suspects as they step up their fight against phone snatching. Continue reading...

Messages from ex-wife of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to sex offender, sent after his conviction, came to light last month Six companies linked to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, are being wound down in the wake of revelations about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. According to Companies House, an application to strike off each company was filed after new details about Ferguson’s contact with Epstein came to light in the millions of documents released by US authorities as part of the Epstein files. Continue reading...

Stuart Leslie, 46, and Shaun Overy, 51, died while skiing off-piste in Val d’Isère amid red avalanche alert Two British skiers who died in an avalanche in the French Alps have been named as Stuart Leslie and Shaun Overy. The pair were part of a group of five people, accompanied by an instructor, skiing off-piste in Val d’Isère in south-east France on Friday when they were swept away by falling snow. Continue reading...

Advisory board member says Europe already paying price for lack of preparation but adapting is ‘not rocket science’ Keeping Europe safe from extreme weather “is not rocket science”, a top researcher has said, as the EU’s climate advisory board urges countries to prepare for a catastrophic 3C of global heating. Maarten van Aalst, a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC), said the continent was already “paying a price” for its lack of preparation but that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit”. Continue reading...

China’s Eileen Gu second, Italy’s Flora Tabanelli third ‘I really did have to go for it,’ says Briton This time, surely, Kirsty Muir must have believed that a Winter Olympic medal was in her grasp. But as a thrilling big air competition reached its denouement, an Italian with no anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee came down a 180‑feet ramp and drove a stake through the Briton’s heart. It all looked so promising when the 21-year-old from Aberdeen landed a stunning left double 1620, with four and a half rotations, to move into the medal positions. Continue reading...

“We are top of the league,” sang the Coventry City supporters of returning to the summit of the Championship. Ironically, it was a result that quelled the nagging noise surrounding Frank Lampard and his team. Coventry, pace-setters for the majority of the season, had won just four league games since the end of November. But Haji Wright hit a timely hat-trick as Coventry again traded places with Middlesbrough, whose six-game winning run came to an abrupt halt. Riley McGree pulled a goal back midway through the second half but from the restart Boro conceded a penalty that allowed Wright to claim the match ball. Coventry’s lead may be a single point but this felt a significant victory – psychologically as much as anything – their having taken just 16 points from the previous available 39. Continue reading...

For 160 minutes this season, Macclesfield had been more than a match for illustrious Premier League opponents in the FA Cup. Ultimately it took an unfortunate own goal from Sam Heathcote, a PE teacher when not playing as a part-timer in the sixth tier, to put Brentford into the fifth round. As cruel as it felt on Heathcote and Macclesfield, they can once again be proud of their performance. Crystal Palace could not break down the Cheshire team in the previous round and for 70 minutes Brentford had also struggled for a route to goal. The non-league side were even able to rouse themselves to push for a late equaliser, rather than cave in to Keith Andrews’s men. Continue reading...

American was competing in her fifth Olympics Ties Bonnie Blair for US women’s medal record Medal table | Live scores and schedule | Results It took her five Olympics but she finally got there: USA’s Elana Meyers Taylor won gold in the monobob on Monday, capping a long and brilliant career. The 41-year-old’s first Olympics came in Vancouver in 2010, and since then she has won three silver medals and two bronze across two events, the monobob and the two-woman bobsleigh. Her victory on Monday came down to the final run of the competition with Laura Nolte competing to best Meyers Taylor’s time of three minutes and 57.93 seconds. But the German could not respond and Meyers Taylor became America’s oldest-ever female Winter Olympic champion. Continue reading...

Northampton coaches eased wing’s post-Lions burden 34 games last season ‘a lot of rugby … I was tired’ England’s Tommy Freeman has revealed the extent of his mental struggles after the victorious British & Irish Lions tour of Australia at the end of a season in which he exceeded the player welfare limits for the number of appearances made. Freeman made 34 appearances last season – 19 for Northampton, nine for England and six for the Lions – and has spoken of a “built-up anxiety” as a result of the workload. The mandated limit is 30 but players were given dispensation for the Lions tour on the proviso they were given five weeks off upon returning from Australia and missed the first two rounds of the 2025-26 season. Continue reading...

Rayo had to prepare at Getafe’s place and play at Leganés’s stadium. But they still managed to upset Atlético Madrid One day in November, the coach of Rayo Vallecano decided that was it: he was out. The captain in whom he finds strength had reached a similar conclusion long ago, handing in his armband as an act of protest and dignity. Two Fridays ago, the squad signed a statement saying they couldn’t carry on like this. And last Friday, the fans who’ve been through it all before decided they too would walk away. Yet 48 hours later, after another week that proved them right, resisting everything, there they were still, celebrating another implausible success, another day when they had stuck it to The Man. If not, admittedly, the man they’d like to stick it to. Actually, ‘there’? Not all of them were in the same place, even if that was a way of showing they were in this together. Because Rayo fans were out on the streets of the self-styled independent republic of Vallecas with their banners and scarves and songs on Sunday, while their team and coach were 10km south, playing in a different city. With their training ground unusable and their home home ground declared to be so too, they had to prepare at Getafe’s place and play at Leganés’s stadium. Where, in front of 9,000 empty seats, and kicking off in the relegation zone, they only went and beat Atlético Madrid 3-0, three days after Diego’s Simeone’s side had battered Barcelona 4-0. Continue reading...

Vienna turns into a playground of camp, cruelty and aristocratic disdain in a blackly comic take on the Báthory legend – with Huppert gloriously suited to the title role From the dark heart of central Europe comes a midnight-movie romp through the moonlit urban glades of Euro-goth and camp from German director Ulrike Ottinger. As for the star … well, it’s the part she was born to play. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, legendary for having the blood of hundreds of young girls on her hands and indeed her body, in an attempt to attain eternal youth. The “blood countess” has been variously played in the past by Ingrid Pitt, Delphine Seyrig, Paloma Picasso, Julie Delpy and many more, but surely none were as qualified as Huppert who importantly does not modify her habitual hauteur one iota for the role. Her natural aristocratic mien and cool hint of elegant contempt were never so well matched with a part. She gives us the classic Huppert opaque gaze – part dreamy, part coldly assessing – and the politely bemused half-smile of concealed distaste, merging into a pout, at the absurdity or ill manners of someone to whom she cannot avoid being introduced. Unlike the other mere mortals in this film, Huppert’s face is lit like that of a Golden Age Hollywood star, giving her impeccable maquillage a ghostly sheen of profane sainthood. Continue reading...

Police confirm suspect is one of dead in incident at boys’ hockey game that injured four in Pawtucket At least two people are dead in an apparent mass shooting at an indoor ice rink in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on Monday afternoon, officials told the WPRI local news outlet. Police confirmed to the outlet that the suspect is dead. A local sports reporter, Branden Mello, said that one of the shooting victims also died. Continue reading...

State’s governor had demanded impartial inquiry into the shooting of the VA nurse by federal immigration agents Minnesota law enforcement authorities have said the FBI is refusing to share any evidence on its investigation into the death of Alex Pretti, the man killed by federal immigration authorities in late January. Pretti was shot on 24 January by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials in Minneapolis during the Trump administration’s surge of immigration enforcement operations in the city. His killing came just two weeks after an immigration official shot and killed Renee Good and 10 days after the shooting of Julio C Sosa-Celis. Continue reading...

Abbas Araghchi is steeped in more than a decade of nuclear dealmaking with a book on the art of negotiations If the US and Iran are to avoid a regional war, both sides need to start to make concessions at talks in Geneva on Tuesday, and also to accommodate one another’s very different bargaining styles. The Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, steeped in almost 15 years of Iranian nuclear talks, is a near lifelong diplomat who has written a book on the art of negotiations that reveals the secrets of the Iranian diplomatic trade – the feints, the patience, the poker faces. He has a bachelor’s degree from Iran’s faculty of international relations, a master’s degree in political science from Islamic Azad University and a doctorate in political thought from the University of Kent in the UK. Continue reading...

Calls grow for reform of England’s vaccination system including delivery of jabs in pharmacies as take-up falls Children are at risk of measles because the NHS is “clearly failing” to ensure they get the MMR vaccine and its system needs an urgent overhaul, MPs and health experts have warned. Calls for major reform of how MMR jabs are delivered are growing as it emerged that vaccination rates in some parts of England are now on a par with those in Afghanistan and Malawi. Continue reading...

Judge says people should not lose chance of parenthood ‘by the ticking of a clock’ after 10-year deadline missed More than a dozen fertility patients have won a high court battle to save their embryos, eggs and sperm from destruction after errors meant they did not renew consent to store them within the 10-year window required by law. Ruling that the material could be kept, the judge said they should not “have the possibility of parenthood … removed by the ticking of a clock”. Continue reading...

Ruthless Americans reel off 5-0 victory Switzerland or Canada await in Thursday’s final A United States women’s hockey team already being hailed as one of the best ever assembled is right where they expected to be: playing for Olympic gold. The Americans brushed aside Sweden 5-0 in the first of Monday’s semi-finals, setting the stage for a potential seventh gold-medal showdown with Canada. Twenty years ago, almost to the day, the USA women absorbed one of the great Olympic shocks when Sweden stunned them in a shootout just down the A4 autostrada in Torino, ending a streak of 25 straight losses to the Americans during which they’d been outscored 187-29. There would be no such ambush this time, even if Sweden coach Ulf Lundberg had suggested the US team were “just human beings” and might not have been overly keen on facing his team in the semi-finals. Continue reading...

Gavin Newsom angers president over ‘inappropriate’ agreement on scaling up technologies and ties with UK Donald Trump has vented his fury against a green energy deal between the British government and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a likely future Democratic presidential candidate. “The UK’s got enough trouble without getting involved with Gavin Newscum,” Trump said in an interview with Politico, using the derogatory nickname he reserves for Newsom. “Gavin is a loser. Everything he’s touched turns to garbage. His state has gone to hell, and his environmental work is a disaster.” Continue reading...