What happened
One of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims has accused Buckingham Palace of failing to act on information that could have led to scrutiny of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s conduct while he served as a UK trade envoy.

Jess Michaels, who says she was sexually assaulted by Epstein in 1991, alleges that palace officials received an archive of nearly 30,000 emails in 2020, but did not take any action. Some of the correspondence reportedly suggested that Andrew had shared confidential government information with businessman Jonathan Rowland during his time in the trade role between 2001 and 2011.

Who said what
“Six years ago the palace knew Andrew wasn’t just a problem: he could face a criminal investigation. And they sat on it,” said Michaels.

The claims “increase scrutiny of the palace”, said Natasha Leake in The Telegraph, including “how much was known about Mr Mountbatten-Windsor at the time and what action, if any, was taken over his actions”. 

Buckingham Palace has declined to comment on the allegations, citing an ongoing police investigation.

What next?
Police have said they are aware of allegations circulating publicly and continue to seek information relevant to their inquiry.

What happened
An experimental pancreatic cancer treatment has delivered unprecedented results in a late-stage clinical trial, significantly extending the survival time of patients whose disease had progressed after chemotherapy.

Researchers reported that patients taking the once-daily pill daraxonrasib, developed by Revolution Medicines, had a 60% lower risk of death than those receiving standard chemotherapy. Median survival time increased to 13.2 months, compared with 6.7 months for patients in the chemotherapy group.

The 500-patient study also found that the drug was substantially more effective at stopping tumour growth and shrinking cancers than existing treatments.

Who said what
Dr Rachna Shroff, a pancreatic cancer specialist and expert for the American Society of Clinical Oncology, described the combination of longer survival and reduced mortality as unprecedented.

Pancreatic cancer is among the most deadly forms of the disease “in large part because it’s hard to detect”, said the Associated Press. And unlike other cancers, which have benefitted from a variety of chemotherapy alternatives, “pancreatic cancer has been harder to tackle”.

What next?
Researchers are now investigating whether daraxonrasib can improve outcomes for a broader range of pancreatic cancer patients, including those diagnosed earlier in the course of the disease.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a report from the MapBiomas monitoring network.

The findings are “good news” for Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who made the fight against deforestation a “central tenet” of his reign, said France24. But how good is the news overall?

South America’s biggest country lost 985,000 hectares (2.4 million acres) of native vegetation last year, down 20.6% from 2024, the report found. Deforestation in the Amazon alone fell by 23.5%, while reductions were recorded across Brazil’s six major ecosystems.

Even so, said France 24, the rate of destruction remains “breathtaking”. In the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, five trees are still chopped down every second.

The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest on the planet and it absorbs more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to offset the effects of human-caused emissions. But agriculture, wildfire, logging and mining are stripping it of its powers. Agriculture accounts for 99% of vegetation loss across the country.

If deforestation and global warming “continue unchecked”, the Amazon could begin a gradual transition to a “degraded, grassland-like ecosystem in just a few decades”, said The New York Times.

The consequences of an Amazon “tipping point” are “catastrophic for the entire planet”, Bernardo M. Flores, an ecology researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, told the broadsheet, so “we need to be careful not to get anywhere near those risks”.