What happened
Keir Starmer is facing mounting calls from ministers and MPs to dismiss his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney after No. 10 was accused of orchestrating hostile briefings against Health Secretary Wes Streeting. The row erupted following reports that the operation was intended as a warning to potential leadership rivals. While Starmer reportedly apologised privately to Streeting, he has so far refused to fire McSweeney (pictured above), telling MPs he would not bow to pressure for “consequences”.

Who said what
Downing Street insisted that there had been “no direct briefing against Wes”, saying Starmer “has his full backing”.

The PM’s aides have “tried to flush out Streeting’s leadership ambitions in much the same way as they successfully flushed out those of Andy Burnham in September”, said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. But they have found that the downside has been that “the briefings made the leadership issue public and gave Streeting a national platform to talk about it”.

What next?
Another change of a major role in his top team “would be highly damaging” for Starmer, said The Independent. But when asked by the paper about McSweeney’s Downing Street future, one senior Labour figure replied simply: “Toast.”

What happened
A rough gem has finally been cut into the world’s largest black diamond in a feat of engineering that took seven years. The rare stone, discovered in Guinea in 2008 and weighing nearly 900 carats, baffled experts who feared that it would shatter into smaller gems if cut.

Who said what
“Black diamonds, between 2.6 and 3.2 billion years old, are an enigma,” said The Times. Some scientists believe that they travelled to Earth from space as meteorites “after being born in dying stars”.

Antwerp-based gem expert Peter Herbosch cut the stone with lasers, then built a special diamond-edged grinder to finish it, shaping it into a falcon’s head to suit its natural bird shape.

Previously the largest cut diamond in the world was another black gem, the “Enigma” (pictured above), weighing 555 carats after being cut from a rough stone that weighed 800.

What next?
Weighing more than 600 carats, the Black Falcon is now for sale, but without a price tag due to its rarity. “It’s whatever someone is willing to pay,” said Herbosch.

Milanese prosecutors have launched an investigation into claims that 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.

The case, first reported by Italian newspaper 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 that 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 to Bosnian Serb militias loyal to Radovan Karadzic.

This account corresponds to the 2022 documentary titled “Sarajevo Safari” by Slovenian director Miran Zupanic, who faced a “major backlash and hostile responses from some Bosnian Serb media outlets”, said DW. “I didn’t want to convince anyone of this story,” Zupanic told the broadcaster. “The public will be the ones to judge.”