What happened

The Justice Department on Tuesday charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with financial crimes, accusing the civil rights organization of secretly paying informants in the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups without telling its donors. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the SPLC paid at least eight unidentified insiders a total of $3 million between 2014 and 2023.

Who said what

Nonprofits like the SPLC are legally required to “have certain transparency and honesty” with donors, Blanche said at a press conference, and by paying KKK, neo-Nazi and Unite the Right leaders for intelligence, the group was “not dismantling extremism, but funding it.” The indictment “offers little to support the notion” the SPLC’s payments were “meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated,” The New York Times said.

The SPLC began working with informants in the 1980s and kept the since-disbanded program secret to ensure their safety, interim CEO Bryan Fair said in a video statement. The group “frequently” shared “what we learned from informants” with law enforcement, including the FBI, and “there is no question” the program “saved lives.”

What next?

Fair said he was “outraged by the false allegations” and his organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff and our work.” No individuals were charged in the indictment, but Blanche said the investigation was ongoing.

The tragedy of the Southport murders, in which three young girls were killed and several more injured in a random attack by knifeman Axel Rudakubana, “defies description”, said The Sun. The report on the first stage of the inquiry, released this week, “laid bare” what its chair called an “inappropriate merry-go-round” of public sector agencies handing off responsibility for the increasingly troubled teenager. “Catastrophe was inevitable”, said the newspaper.

The inquiry report highlighted five key factors that prevented an adequate response to the threat posed by Rudakubana: a lack of risk acceptance, poor information sharing, lack of examination of online activity, a “misunderstanding of autism”, as well as “significant parental failures” at home.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said in a statement that the government has “already taken action to prevent such an awful tragedy from happening again”, but many are calling for concrete legislation to act on some of the 67 recommendations outlined in the inquiry.

What did the commentators say?

The murder of Bebe King, Alice da Silva Aguiar and Elsie Dot Stancombe was “one of the most depraved acts of violence ever seen on these shores”, said The Telegraph in an editorial. “But this did not come out of a clear blue sky.” Rudakubana’s “violent behaviour was known to his parents, his school, the police and to various agencies”. In the years leading up to the killings, he had attacked fellow pupils, been caught with a knife in public, and was referred to the Home Office anti-terror programme Prevent three times. Retired Lord Justice Adrian Fulford, who led the inquiry, said the culture of unaccountability “has to end”. “The trouble is we have heard that before”, said the newspaper, “and it never does”.

The “nightmare” of the July 2024 attacks in Southport “would never have happened if public bodies had done their jobs properly”, said The Guardian. The report did not “single out” any individual police or council officers, but “this does not make them any less culpable”: in fact, the “collective failure” to take responsibility for the events is the “single most disturbing conclusion”. The “grave failures” of those involved, including police, council officers, health professionals and Prevent, revealed the “deadly flaws” of the multi-agency systems linking them, said the paper. “Ministers must not wait for the inquiry’s second phase to explain how they plan to bring this dangerous culture of buck‑passing to an end.”

All those involved with Rudakubana’s case “should hang their heads in shame”, said Jawad Iqbal in The Spectator. The inquiry uncovered a “comprehensive” and “depressing” catalogue of “missed opportunities and systems of protection that were found wanting”. One such failure was officials using Rudakubana’s autism diagnosis to “excuse” his “increasingly erratic and violent behaviour”, rather than considering that, in this instance, his condition “heightened, rather than lessened, the risk he posed”.

“The Southport inquiry is damning in its clarity,” said The Mirror. “This tragedy was preventable.” But this report also “speaks to something far wider”: the roles and duties of parents. Fulford found Rudakubana’s parents bore “considerable blame for what occurred”, and that if they had “done what they morally ought to have done” by reporting his violent behaviour – including collecting knives and concocting poison at home – it is “almost certain” the attack would not have occurred. Parenting has “never been more consequential” in our age of “online radicalisation”, and children “disappearing into the darkness of their bedrooms”. “The duty to know your child, truly know them, and act on what you find has never mattered more.”

What next?

The next stage of the inquiry will consider the “need for a new mechanism” to manage the “growing threat” of Prevent being “overwhelmed” with referrals of teenagers who are “obsessed with violence” but do not display the “coherent ideology of political extremists”, said The Guardian. It will also consider “tighter regulation of social media use” and the “online sale of weapons”.

Any changes to the law will naturally need to be “carefully considered”, weighing up the risks of “making policy off the back of one case, however tragic”, but this case points to the need for “new policies”, “tighter processes and increased resources”. “The failures went beyond missed communications and overstretched staff.”

Questions of those who will take “organisational and individual accountability” and how government agencies will make meaningful change “remain unanswered”, said Iqbal in The Spectator. “Does anyone involved seriously reflect on their conduct and failures rather than simply seek to avoid blame and consequences?” One thing that the report makes “abundantly clear” is that “this culture must change”. “The tragedy of Southport demands nothing less.”

In 2022, Shan Hanes, the chief executive of the Heartland Tri-State Bank in Kansas, met a friendly investment adviser from Australia on WhatsApp. The adviser persuaded Hanes to invest a few thousand dollars in an online cryptocurrency-trading platform, which generated impressive returns. Hanes ended up investing all his own money, $60,000 from his daughter's college fund, $40,000 from his local church and $47 million from the bank he ran.

The “adviser” was, it transpired, not in Australia but most likely in Asia; the “trading platform” was fake; and Hanes had become the highest-profile US victim of a practice known in Chinese as sha zhu pan, a “pig-butchering scam”. Some money was recovered, but investors lost $9 million, the bank collapsed, and Hanes was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

How do the scams work?

“Long cons” have been around for ever, but these – in which the scammers invest a lot of time in building a relationship with the victim, a process they liken to fattening a pig for slaughter – have distinctive features.

Scammers actively seek out victims on social media: pig-butchering originated on regional Chinese dating sites around 10 years ago, but it has since spread to platforms such as Telegram, WhatsApp and LinkedIn. They create trusting relationships with their victims, sometimes of a romantic nature; one former scammer told The Economist she’d been trained to target people who were “rich but not good-looking”.

They rely heavily on crypto, which is easy to launder and difficult to recover. These and other online scams are increasingly run out of Chinese-linked “scam hubs” or “fraud factories” in Southeast Asia.

How did such operations develop?

Gambling – illegal on mainland China – is one of the main revenue streams for domestic and foreign-based Chinese mafias. Casinos and online gambling hubs for Chinese-speakers, based in Cambodia and Myanmar, were one of their main enterprises until 2019, when Cambodia tightened its regulations; Covid lockdowns then emptied the casinos. The criminal syndicates refitted their properties as centres where teams of workers – often trafficked and coerced – run online scams at scale.

Chinese citizens were their original targets, followed by Chinese communities around the world. But they soon expanded to other nationalities, which also meant expanding their trafficking activities. In the four years from January 2020, at least $75 billion was taken in crypto scams; estimates suggest the industry generates over $500 billion a year, comparable to the global drugs trade.

Why do they traffic people?

Many of the gangs’ voluntary workers went home during Covid; not enough locals had the necessary language and computer skills, and recruiting people into cybercrime isn't always easy. The scammers’ solution was to lure people – typically young graduates from developing countries – to cities such as Bangkok with fake offers of legitimate employment, then drive them to compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia or Laos, and put them to work under threats of torture, organ harvesting and sexual slavery.

A UN report this February found that there is a workforce of at least 300,000 people from 66 countries, about 75% of them in the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia. Many live in vast compounds, like self-contained towns – some over 500 acres in size, heavily fortified, with armed guards. It's unlikely that all the workers are coerced, but many of them certainly are; some families have had to pay ransoms in cryptocurrency to get them out.

What are the nations doing about it?

Weak local governance, along with easy access to China, is the reason the gangs set up shop in the Mekong region in the first place. Myanmar's military junta doesn’t control the whole territory; much of it is controlled by insurgent groups and warlords; while Cambodian politics has been dominated by one family since the 1980s. Transparency International ranks both governments among the most corrupt in the world. Analysts calculate that Cambodia’s scam hubs generate earnings worth about 60% of the nation's GDP. According to the US Treasury Department, the Huione Group, a financial conglomerate with ties to Cambodia’s ruling Hun family, has provided the gangs with financial and practical services. Like Latin American “narco-states” before them, these countries are well on the way to becoming “scam states”.

Is there international pressure to close them down?

Influenced partly by stories like the kidnapping of the actor Wang Xing, and even a popular film about scam hubs, “No More Bets”, China has launched an aggressive crackdown. There have been heavily publicised rescues of coerced workers in the Mekong countries; under Chinese pressure, local law enforcement has dismantled notorious scam hubs like the KK Park complex in Myawaddy, Myanmar, thought to have been run by Macau-based triads. Thai forces shelled several other hubs during a border conflict with Cambodia last year. China has arrested hundreds of thousands of people over scams, and in January it executed 11 members of the “Ming family” crime group, who had been extradited from Myanmar.

Is the situation improving?

Experts worry that police raids on compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar are largely for show: the bosses are often tipped off in advance. In any case, they have globalised their operations, popping up as far afield as Peru and the Philippines. Police even closed down an operation targeting Chinese citizens on the Isle of Man in 2024. But developments in AI may mean that the scammers are getting less reliant on human trafficking for language skills. One report on AI-assisted scams found that they rose by 450% in 2024-25 compared with 2023-24. The scammers now often use “deepfakes” of increasingly good quality to groom their victims.

What happened

Rex Heuermann, the Long Island architect long suspected of the so-called Gilgo Beach killings between 1993 and 2010, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to strangling seven women and dismembering some of them. He also confessed to murdering an eighth woman, Karen Vergata, in 1996. Heuermann initially pleaded not guilty following his 2023 arrest. The remains of several of the women were found near Long Island’s Gilgo Beach in 2010 and 2011.

Who said what

Wednesday’s guilty pleas “bring finality to a case that bedeviled investigators, tormented victims’ families and tantalized a true-crime obsessed public for years,” The Associated Press said. The investigation was long “delayed by dysfunction, disarray and corruption,” The New York Times said. It finally ended with Wednesday’s “extraordinary proceeding,” where Heuermann “maintained a normal demeanor, as if having a morning chat,” while confessing to serial murders. He “walked among us play-acting as a normal suburban dad” while “obsessively targeting innocent women for death,” Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said at a post-hearing press conference.

What next?

Heuermann will be sentenced in June to life in prison with no possibility of parole. As part of his plea deal, he also agreed to be interviewed by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Units profilers, potentially helping “investigators hunt down others with similarly violent minds,” the Times said.

High-street retailers are demanding more action to tackle the shoplifting epidemic in Britain, after more than 100 young people stormed a Marks & Spencer store in south London last week.

Shoplifters have become “more brazen, more organised and more aggressive”, said M&S retail director Thinus Keeve in The Telegraph. He called on London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to do more to address the problem, including providing “greater transparency” about its “true scale and impact”.

Shoplifting in England and Wales cost retailers £400 million last year, according to the British Retail Consortium. Iceland’s executive chair, Richard Walker, has likened it to a “daily low-level war”, and has called for supermarket staff to be given extra powers to deal with the most violent offenders – like in Spain, where “all the security guards have truncheons and pepper spray” and “don’t mess about”.

What did the commentators say?

“This is not just any intervention, this is a Marks & Spencer intervention,” said The Times’ editorial board. It is an “alarm bell from one of Britain’s most trusted and storied brands; its concerns are a cri de coeur from middle England”.

M&S has “articulated what small retailers, and what the voiceless and powerless ordinary people of this country” have been seeing in recent years, said Patrick West in The Spectator. Last week’s “scenes of mayhem” in Clapham are “distressingly familiar to the inhabitants of the towns and cities”, who are witnessing the “seemingly inexorable collapse in civic society and the breakdown of our formerly high-trust society”.

“This weakness percolates back to policing,” said former Met Police detective Dominic Adler in UnHerd; if criminals “know they’re unlikely to ever face imprisonment, they see little incentive to stop offending”, and, equally, overworked police officers “see little reason to arrest, either”. This government’s updates to the 2020 Sentencing Act abolished custodial sentences for a variety of petty offences, including most shoplifting, and “punches the bruise of the ‘broken Britain’ narrative”.

This is not “a matter for the retailers to solve on their own, as some have suggested”, said The Telegraph’s editorial board. “If criminals think they can get away with theft or even violence,” it will only get worse. “The police need the resources and the support to crack down.”

What next?

The government has made some “welcome efforts” to help retailers in its recent Crime and Policing Bill, said The Times. Chief among these is abolishing the “misguided” £200 threshold that made “low-value shoplifting” a lesser offence, “a measure that was designed to ease the burden on police, but that gave encouragement to opportunistic raiders”. But “there is clearly a need for more to be done”.

There is a surprising generational divide when it comes to people’s views on shoplifting. While 74% of all Britons consider it a fairly or very serious crime, this drops to 35% among 18- to 24-year-olds, according to a recent YouGov poll. Significant numbers of younger people polled say they think shoplifting is justifiable, given current cost-of-living challenges.

West Texas is not the first place you would expect to find a French aristocrat suspected of murdering his family and going on the run for 15 years.

But last week the Sheriff’s Office of Brewster County posted a request for information about Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès on its Facebook page, following a tip-off from an investigative news team that he had been seen in the south of the county in 2020, accompanied by a black Labrador. Ligonnès “had previously travelled to Brewster County and reportedly claimed it was one of his favourite places”, the sheriff said he’d been told.

The post, which included the most recent known images of Ligonnès, was “enough to stir a frenzy” among French “amateur sleuths and crime fans”, said The Times. Their “favourite mystery, involving multiple supposed sightings over the years, is equivalent to” the enduring controversy around the UK’s “elusive Lord Lucan”.

‘Fantasy life’

Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès was 50 when the bodies of his wife, Agnès, and his children – Arthur, 20, Thomas, 18, Anne, 16, and Benoît, 13 – were discovered under the patio at their home in Nantes in April 2011. They had all been shot, wrapped in sheets, covered in quicklime and buried, along with the two family dogs. The last confirmed sighting of Ligonnès was at a motel near Saint-Tropez two weeks after the bodies were discovered. His car was later found abandoned in the car park.

Initial investigations revealed that, in the days before the killings, Ligonnès had bought cement, digging tools and four bags of lime in various locations in the Nantes area. He also owned a .22 rifle similar to the one used in the killings, had recently bought ammunition and gone to practise at a local shooting club.

Ligonnès, who had an aristocratic lineage, was a “failed businessman”, said The Times. He “lived a fantasy life in which he claimed he was, among other things, a US intelligence agent”. By the time of the murders, he had accrued significant debts and was struggling to maintain his family’s outwardly comfortable lifestyle.

Following his disappearance, reports emerged that Ligonnès had written to friends up to a year before the killings warning that, crippled with debts, he was contemplating “suicide, alone or collective” and “shooting up the house while everyone is sleeping”.

Red herrings and false leads

In the months and years following the murders, hundreds of sightings of Ligonnès were reported to police, “all proving to be false leads”, said France 24.

Then in July 2015, a photo of two of Ligonnès’ sons was sent to an Agence France-Presse journalist, with the words “I am still alive” scrawled on the back, along with his name. Handwriting analysis failed to ascertain if it was genuine.

In 2018, police raided a monastery in Roquebrune-sur-Argens (the Provençal town near Saint-Tropez where his car was abandoned) after a witness reported seeing a man who resembled Ligonnès, but this again proved to be a dead end. A year later, a man was arrested at Glasgow airport and held in custody before tests confirmed it was another case of mistaken identity.

The case then went cold for years, until a new book published earlier this year by Gilles Galloux, a former police investigator on the case. He claimed Ligonnès “boarded a flight from Nice airport using fake ID documents” and has been hiding out in the US, “a place he had long admired”, said The Connexion. It was this lead that drew attention to Brewster County, which Ligonnès visited in the 1990s.

Ligonnès’ sister, Christine, maintains her brother’s innocence, believing the murders “were staged by a foreign intelligence agency, and that the family is living in witness protection in the US”, said The Times. Prosecutors in Nantes remain “sceptical” of such theories. Their somewhat more pedestrian hypothesis is that Ligonnès “probably killed himself in the rocky hinterland of Provence”.

What happened

Minnesota on Tuesday sued the Trump administration for access to evidence related to three federal shootings during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The lawsuit said the federal government’s “arbitrary and capricious” refusal to cooperate or share any evidence with state investigators came from leaders at the Justice Department and Homeland Security Department, and violated Minnesota’s 10th Amendment right to enforce its own laws and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Who said what

“We are prepared to fight for transparency and accountability that the federal government is desperate to avoid,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison stressed “how absolutely extraordinary it is, how rare and unprecedented it is, how completely unnecessary it is, if justice is our goal, for us to have to file this lawsuit.”

DHS said in a statement that the federal government is investigating all three shootings. The FBI is leading the Pretti probe, DHS said, while federal prosecutors are investigating two agents for making false statements about their arrest of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Sosa-Celis — though not for shooting him in the leg. The Good shooting was “still under investigation,” the statement said, though its claims that the unarmed mother “weaponized her vehicle” and the officer shot her “in self-defense” were “contradicted by video evidence,” The New York Times said. Trump officials previously asserted that the Good killing “was not under investigation,” The Minnesota Star Tribune said.

What next?

Minnesota officials “say they are seeking a court order requiring federal agencies to turn over evidence so the state can determine whether any criminal charges are warranted,” Minnesota Public Radio said.

What happened

A California jury Monday awarded Donna Motsinger $59.25 million in civil damages after finding comedian Bill Cosby liable for drugging and sexually assaulting her in 1972. Motsinger, a waitress at the time, accused Cosby of giving her pills that incapacitated her as he escorted her to his stand-up comedy show, then raping her while she was unconscious. The jury awarded her $17.5 million in past damages, $1.75 million for future damages and $40 million in punitive damages. Cosby, 88, did not testify.

Who said what

The jury’s decision “further tarnished” Cosby’s reputation, The New York Times said, after his “standing as one of America’s most beloved entertainers dissolved” in the face of dozens of similar sexual assault allegations. Cosby has “denied all allegations involving sex crimes,” USA Today said, but he was the “first Hollywood figure to be convicted following the #MeToo movement.” He served almost three years in prison for drugging and raping protégé Andrea Constand before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out his conviction on a technicality in 2021.

Cosby has “settled some similar lawsuits and has been ordered to pay in others,” The Associated Press said, but Monday’s award is “likely the most he has had to pay in a case.” The money is “icing on the cake,“ Motsinger told reporters after the verdict, but the accountability is more important. “It has been 54 years to get justice, and I know it’s not complete for the rest of the women, but I hope it helps them a little bit.”

What next?

Cosby’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjean said they were “disappointed in the outcome,” but “we believe we have a strong appeal and we’ll pursue that.”

What happened

Labor leaders and state lawmakers on Wednesday scrambled to cancel or rename upcoming events celebrating United Farm Workers founder César Chavez after The New York Times reported it had “uncovered extensive evidence” he sexually abused multiple underage girls and women, including Dolores Huerta, the union’s co-founder and fellow labor icon. Huerta said in a statement that Chavez, who died in 1993, had pressured her into having sex once and raped her another time, with both encounters resulting in children who were raised by other families.

Who said what

“I am nearly 96 years old,” Huerta said, and “I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here.” She said she had “carried this secret” for 60 years “because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” but Chavez’s “deplorable” actions “do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people.”

For many, Chavez and Huerta “were akin to Martin Luther King. Jr. and Rosa Parks because of their work advocating for racial equality and civil rights,” The Associated Press said. Huerta’s “accusation shatters what was a widely celebrated — and seemingly egalitarian — bond between two of the most influential Hispanic activists in U.S. history,” the Times said. Chavez’s “name should be removed from landmarks, institutions and honors,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said on social media. “We cannot celebrate someone who carried out such disturbing harm.”

What next?

The allegations “have prompted swift fallout,” the AP said. The UFW and AFL-CIO unions both said they will not participate in or endorse any activities for César Chavez Day, celebrated on or around his March 31 birthday. Cities, states and Latino advocates are moving to rename schools, streets and holidays bearing his name.

What happened

A man rammed a truck into a Michigan synagogue Thursday, hours after a convicted Islamic State supporter opened fire in a classroom at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, killing one person and wounding two. Both of the attackers were killed. None of the staff or 140 preschoolers at Temple Israel in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield Township were injured. “The back-to-back outbursts of violence added to rising concerns about the possibility ‌of attacks on U.S. soil amid the tension since U.S. and Israeli forces launched airstrikes on Iran,” Reuters said.

Who said what

The gunman at Old Dominion, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, was a former member of the Army National Guard who was arrested in 2016 for plotting an ISIS-inspired attack. He served eight years in prison. ROTC students in the classroom “rendered him no longer alive” after he started shooting, FBI Special Agent Dominique Evans said, crediting their “extreme bravery and courage” for stopping the attack. Jalloh shouted “Allahu Akbar” before the shooting, Evans told reporters.

In the attack at Temple Israel, the nation’s largest Reform synagogue, Lebanon-born U.S. citizen Ayman Mohamad Ghazali drove his truck through the doors and down a hallway before temple security “engaged the individual and neutralized the threat,” West Bloomfield Police Chief Dale Young said. Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said “something ignited in the vehicle” after the crash. Ghazali’s vehicle was carrying “mortar-type explosives,” CBS News said, citing two law enforcement officers. It wasn’t clear whether Ghazali was shot by security guards or killed himself.

Investigators are trying to determine the motives in both shootings, but Ghazali was “devastated” after an Israeli airstrike on his family’s village in Lebanon “roughly 10 days prior” killed two of his brothers and two of their children, CBS News said, citing a source in Michigan’s Lebanese American community. “What happens around the world sometimes affects us, so we have to prepare for it,” Bouchard ​said at a news conference.

What next?

The FBI said it was investigating the synagogue attack as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community,” and the Old Dominion shooting as an act of terrorism.

The government has said its new definition of anti-Muslim hostility does not restrict people’s freedom to criticise Islamism but gives “a clear explanation of unacceptable prejudice, discrimination and hatred targeting Muslims”. Critics say it will shut down debate about immigration and cultural assimilation.

Unveiling the definition this week, as part of a wider social cohesion plan, Communities Secretary Steve Reed said the government has a duty to act against record levels of hate crime against Muslims, and “you can’t tackle a problem if you can’t describe it”.

‘Privileged status’

The new three-paragraph definition, which is not legally binding, describes anti-Muslim hostility as engaging in, assisting or encouraging criminal acts directed at Muslims because of their religion, or directed at those perceived to be Muslim. It also encompasses prejudicial stereotyping to encourage hatred against Muslims, and unlawful discrimination to disadvantage Muslims.

I'm deeply concerned about introducing a definition like this, the government’s former anti-extremism tsar, John Woodcock, told The Times. It could be used by Islamist extremists to “deflect scrutiny from their quest to undermine our values and intimidate fellow Muslims”.

Giving Muslims “privileged status to shield them from ‘hostility’” is a “potentially divisive approach that is unlikely to encourage assimilation”, said The Telegraph’s editorial board. It is also “inimical to free speech”, which is a “cornerstone of the culture within which integration is supposed to happen”. The “great debate of our times” is about the spread of “political Islamism and the terrorism committed in its name”. So why is the government “setting out to shut it down”?

The government insists that the definition is “no threat at all” to freedom of speech, said Andrew Gilligan in The Spectator, “but that’s not the only problem”. It’s “an obvious and open act of two-tier policy”. Hatred and discrimination against Muslims “is already illegal”, so “the only purpose” here “must be to create special protections for one faith which don’t apply to those of other faiths or none”. That will “stoke grievance” and “risks making Muslims less safe, not more”.

‘Right diagnosis’

Hate crimes against Muslims have risen by almost a fifth in the past year and polls show that almost half of Britons “believe Muslim immigrants have had a negative effect on the UK”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. “Never have the effects of Islamophobia been so obvious, or so bleak.” Read the news and “you would think that no grooming gang had ever contained a non-Muslim”.

This is “the right diagnosis for this illness”, said health under-secretary Zubir Ahmed, one of only two Muslims in the government, pointing to an “extraordinary” shift in what people think is acceptable to say about identity and race. We “find ourselves in a space where” I can’t look at my children and confidently say that “their lives, in terms of living in society on an equal footing”, are better than mine was when I was growing up. “That’s a really sad thing to see.” This definition is telling Islamophobes “that there is an issue”, and it’s “validating” our “existence in this country”.

The definition talks of anti-Muslim hostility and “doesn’t use the word Islamophobia”, said James Renton, co-director of the Racial Justice and Migration Research Group, on Al Jazeera. I think that’s a mistake: it gives “carte blanche to those who attack Islam” for creating “potential terrorists, oppressors of women” and “sex predators”. To then “celebrate such attacks as the expression of ‘free speech’ is to glorify hatred”.

What happened

A federal jury in Manhattan on Monday found former star real estate brokers Oren and Tal Alexander and their brother Alon guilty on all 10 counts of sex trafficking and related crimes. During a five-week trial, prosecutors said the Alexander brothers worked together to drug and rape scores of women, including minors, from at least 2008 to 2021. Eleven women testified that one or more of the brothers had sexually assaulted them, and jurors were shown a video Oren Alexander recorded of himself raping an incapacitated 17-year-old girl in 2009.

Who said what

The verdict “caps the downfall” of Tal, 39, and Oren, 38, “the highflying real-estate agents who once brokered some of the country’s priciest transactions in New York, Aspen and Miami,” The Wall Street Journal said. Alon, Oren’s twin, worked at the family’s security business. The victims “testified that they met the brothers at nightclubs, parties and on dating apps,” The Associated Press said, then “were attacked after accepting their invitations to all-expense paid getaways.”

Defense lawyers “argued that the brothers were playboys and womanizers but not criminals,” The New York Times said. They unsuccessfully “cast the victims as a bloc of scorned women, all motivated by shame, regret and greed.” The jurors saw the Alexanders’ conduct “for what it was — calculated, brutal sexual abuse that, unimaginably, the defendants celebrated,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.

What next?

“We believe in our clients’ innocence,” Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Oren Alexander, said after the verdict. “We’re going to keep fighting.” U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni set sentencing for Aug. 6. The brothers, incarcerated since their 2024 arrests, face up to life in prison.

Economic abuse, a form of coercive control, plays a part in 51% of domestic abuse-related deaths in England and Wales. And, every 19 days, a victim of economic abuse loses her life, according to new research.

These findings are a “wake-up call”, said Surviving Economic Abuse, the charity behind the research. “Long overlooked” in standard risk assessments and “misunderstood by agencies that could have intervened”, economic abuse must now be “recognised as a serious and potentially fatal form of domestic abuse”.

What is economic abuse?

It’s a legally recognised form of domestic abuse, where one person – usually a partner or ex-partner – has control over another person’s access to money. This can include taking over the victim’s earnings, spending, bank accounts and credit cards, and often results in the building up of debts in the victim’s name. It can include controlling access to transport, property, food, clothing or technology – restricting the victim’s ability to work and stay connected. In some cases, it can also involve damaging belongings or refusing to contribute to household costs.

Last year, the BBC reported cases of economic abuse that included “crashing a car deliberately, taking control of benefit payments and threatening to share explicit images unless money is handed over”. One in six women in the UK has experienced economic abuse by a current or former partner, according to SEA, but many victims do not recognise it as abuse. Even if they do, they have often become so isolated by their abuser that they don’t feel able to talk about it. “It rarely happens in isolation” and is usually accompanied by physical, sexual and psychological abuse.

The reality of economic abuse can make it even more difficult for women to leave an abusive relationship. “They’re very scared to leave because of the financial side that holds them back,” MSP Pam Gosal told Holyrood magazine. Abused women she has tried to help often didn’t know what was in their name financially, what they could lose or what liabilities they could be left with. “You don’t know anything because you never, ever controlled the finances in a relationship.”

How does it contribute to deaths?

Although it is not a physical form of abuse, economic abuse can trap victims in dangerous situations, and “be an indication of escalating risk from a perpetrator”, said the SEA report.

And yet, the report found, agencies often missed opportunities to spot dangers linked to economic abuse. In over half of the domestic abuse-related deaths analysed in the report, economic abuse “was present”, but many of the women experiencing economic abuse were “failed” by those who “should have been there to help them”. Either because they missed the signs of economic abuse or because they did not understand the risk of this abuse, agencies “did not respond as they could have done”.

This is particularly noteworthy in the cases of victims to went on to take their own lives. Women who had experienced economic abuse from an intimate partner were significantly more likely to commit suicide than other abused women whose cases the report analysed. Risk assessments and safety planning should better recognise that “the nature of post-separation economic abuse (where it may start, continue or escalate after a victim has fled) can leave victims feeling hopeless”.

What can be done?

Economic abuse should be integrated into the government’s new guidance on best practice for domestic abuse risk management, recommends SEA. It also recommends specialist training on economic abuse for professionals involved in combating violence against women and girls.

This form of abuse “must be recognised, understood and acted upon across every agency, every review and every response”, said Sam Smethers, chief executive of SEA. “We cannot wait for another woman’s life to be lost.”

Prosecutors in Taiwan indicted 62 people on Wednesday for their alleged links to the Prince Group, a multinational network accused of running a vast system of scam centres from Cambodia.

Scam centres across Southeast Asia have become so powerful and entrenched that they are now building into “scam states”.

Sprawling, industrial-scale criminal economy

Scam states are similar to narco-states, which are countries where the entire government and economy become profoundly corrupted and controlled by the illegal drug trade.

A “scam state” is a country where an “illicit industry has dug its tentacles deep into legitimate institutions, reshaping the economy, corrupting governments and establishing state reliance on an illegal network”, said The Guardian. They’re growing in number because the “multi-billion-dollar global scam industry” has become “so monolithic”.

After beginning as small online fraud rings, scamming has transformed into a sprawling, industrial-scale criminal economy in parts of southeast Asia, an illicit industry has penetrated local economies and institutions to a degree that rivals some of the world’s most entrenched illegal trades.

According to analysts, the growth of scam states has been rapid and systemic, driven by sophisticated technology, weak law enforcement, and political tolerance or complicity.

KK Park in Myanmar’s Myawaddy region was once one of the most notorious scam centres. Ostensibly business complexes, these sites housed tens of thousands of workers – many of them trafficked or coerced – who were forced to defraud victims globally via romance scams, fake investment platforms, and so-called “pig butchering” cons, or investment fraud involving gaining the trust of victims and persuading them to invest in fake opportunities.

When authorities raided and destroyed parts of KK Park, operators had already moved their operations elsewhere, illustrating the adaptability and mobility of the scam networks.

States slow to dismantle networks

The “scale of the compounds” shows “how much the states hosting them have been compromised”, experts told The Guardian. For instance, in Cambodia, it's thought cybercrime operations contribute billions of dollars annually, amounting to a significant portion of the economy. Critics argue that state institutions have been slow to dismantle the networks and that political elites benefit directly or indirectly from their persistence.

The US and UK have launched joint efforts, like the Scam Center Strike Force, to target these networks and the infrastructure supporting them, but dismantling scam states is a complex task.

Analysts warn that without targeting the leadership and financial core of these networks, law enforcement may merely displace the problem rather than eliminate it. The rise of scam states highlights a new frontier of organised crime – one that intertwines digital innovation, exploitation and corruption on a vast scale.

A scenario often featured in popular culture and hypothetical discussions has come true and left investigators baffled.

A double murder trial in France has reached a “bizarre legal quagmire” because two of the suspects are identical twins and so have the same DNA, said The Connexion.

Open question

The 33-year-old brothers are among five defendants on trial in Bobigny, a suburb of Paris, accused of a double murder and several attempted killings in 2020. They deny the charges. Although both twins are suspected of conspiring to plot the double murder, the DNA on an assault rifle used in one of the later gun battles could only be from one of them.

Identical twins develop from the same sperm and a single fertilised egg that splits during pregnancy, so they have exactly the same DNA, making forensic identification difficult. A police officer told the court that forensic experts weren’t able to tell which of the brothers had been conclusively implicated. “Only their mother can tell them apart,” said an investigator.

Although advanced genetic testing techniques can sometimes help distinguish between identical twins, experts concluded that the amount of blood available in this case is insufficient, so the estimated €60,000 cost may not be justified.

Adding to the sense of confusion, police said that the twins frequently share clothes and use the same phone numbers and ID documents. So prosecutors are being forced to try other methods to establish who fired the gun, including phone tracing, interviews and wiretapping.

But for now the “crucial question” of who fired the recovered weapon “remains an open one”, said Sky News.

Onerous costs

In 2013, French police investigating a series of rapes in Marseille were similarly stymied after they traced DNA evidence to twins but couldn’t establish which one was responsible.

“It’s a rather rare case for the alleged perpetrators to be identical twins,” chief investigator Emmanuel Kiehl told France 24, and the cost of sufficient tests to distinguish the DNA, estimated to be up to €1 million, was too “onerous”.

A breakthrough came when investigators eventually determined that some victims reported that the attacker had a speech impediment, which matched a condition caused by partial deafness in one of the twins, who eventually confessed to all the counts.

No such breakthrough has occurred in the current case, though. The trial continues, with the court expected to reach a decision in late February.

When “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother, Nancy, was kidnapped on February 1, 2026, it was the first major kidnapping to spark a media frenzy in many years. Such episodes, prior to the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and advances in forensics, were much more common, including these watershed events.

Charles Lindbergh, Jr. (1932)

The abduction and murder of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son on March 1, 1932, was at the time considered the “crime of the century.” Lindbergh’s 1927 journey from New York to Paris was the first successful solo transatlantic flight and made him a household name.

“Awareness of the case was such that anyone seen with a small blonde child was looked at twice,” said Kase Wickman at Vanity Fair. Despite a frantic search that involved more than 100,000 people, the boy had likely been killed the night of the kidnapping, and his body was discovered 72 days later near the family’s home in Hopewell, New Jersey. A German immigrant named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried, convicted and executed for the crime.

Adolph Coors III (1960)

On February 9, 1960, 44-year-old Adolph Coors III, the grandson of the company’s founder, vanished. His car was found on the Turkey Creek Bridge near Denver, where he had been abducted by an escaped murderer, Joseph Corbett, looking for a quick get-rich scheme.

“The attempt went awry though and ended right there on that bridge” when Corbett shot Coors to death, said Colorado Public Radio. His wife, Mary, received a $500,000 ransom demand the next day, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dispatched an enormous operation to find the beverage heir. Coors’ body was discovered on September 15, 1960, and the FBI later traced a car matching a witness description to Corbett. Corbett was convicted and sentenced to life in prison but released on parole in 1980.

Frank Sinatra, Jr. (1963)

19 year-old Frank Sinatra, Jr., the son of one of the most renowned musicians and actors of his generation, was kidnapped from a hotel in Lake Tahoe, California, on December 8, 1963. Two men, Barry Keenan and Joe Amsler, tied up Sinatra, Jr.’s friend, John Foss, and spirited the singer to Canoga Park, California, where they contacted his father and issued a demand for a $240,000 ransom, which Sinatra delivered early in the morning on December 11.

A third conspirator, John Irwin, spilled the beans to his brother, who contacted the police. The three men were sentenced to life in prison, though none served even five years. At his trial, Keenan “testified that the crime was a hoax, a publicity stunt coordinated with people tied to the family,” an allegation that was later disproven, said Esquire.

Paul Fronczak (1964)

A woman posed as a nurse at Chicago’s Michael Reese hospital and made off with a 1-day-old infant named Paul Fronczak on April 27, 1964, triggering what was then the largest manhunt in the city’s history. Two years later, the FBI found a child that they believed to be Paul in New Jersey and he was returned to his parents, Dora and Chester Fronczak.

But in 2012, Fronczak took a DNA test that proved he was actually Jack Rosenthal, an Atlantic City child who had vanished in 1965 along with his twin sister, Jill (who has still not been found). In 2019, it was revealed that the real Paul Fronczak had been raised as Kevin Baty by a woman named Lorraine Fountain. By then, both Baty and Fountain had passed away, and the original kidnapper remains unknown. Rosenthal still goes by Paul Fronczak and published a memoir in 2022.

John Paul Getty III (1973)

Getty III, the grandson of petroleum magnate John Paul Getty, was abducted by Italian gangsters in Rome on July 10, 1973, when he was 16. The kidnappers demanded $17 million, but the elder Getty initially refused, suspecting his wayward grandson of complicity and saying “If I pay one penny, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.”

He only agreed later to dispatch $2.2 million — after he received his grandson’s ear in the mail — the highest amount that could at the time be considered tax-deductible. Getty III struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and suffered a stroke in 1981 that would leave him disabled for the rest of his life until his death in 2011. The story was made into a 2017 film, “All the Money in the World,” as well as a 2018 FX limited series, “Trust.”

Patricia Hearst (1974)

On February 4, 1974, 19 year-old Patricia Hearst, the heiress to William Randolph Hearst’s media dynasty, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a far-left radical group. Two months later, she participated in a bank robbery, after which she was considered a fugitive until her September 1975 arrest.

Hearst maintained that she was coerced, but she was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. “Hearst’s decision to stay with her kidnappers was a deeply symbolic transgression, one that articulated the anger so many felt against the American establishment,” said Smithsonian Magazine. She was released in 1979 after President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence, and she went on to perform in a number of Hollywood films, including the 1990 film “Cry-Baby.”

Shin Sang-ok (1978)

On January 11, 1978, South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee was abducted in Hong Kong by North Korean agents and taken to the North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang. Six months later, North Korea succeeded in kidnapping her husband, renowned director Shin Sang-ok, in Hong Kong as well.

Held for eight years at the behest of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung’s son and heir apparent, Kim Jong Il, Shin was forced to make seven films for his captors, including “Pulgasari,” a movie known as the “socialist Godzilla.” Kim “sought to create a film industry that would allow him to sway a world audience to the righteousness of the Workers’ Party of Korea,” said The Guardian. In March 1986, Shin and Choi escaped while in Vienna, Austria, where they were ostensibly seeking funding for a new project.

Aldo Moro (1978)

On March 16, 1978, during Italy’s so-called “Years of Lead,” former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the far-left terrorist group The Red Brigades while he was trying to broker the inclusion of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in a coalition government. He was executed by the Brigades on May 9, and his body was discovered in the trunk of a car in Rome.

There are still “unanswered questions” about the episode that remains “arguably the darkest episode of Italy's postwar history,” said The Guardian. Widespread revulsion at the assassination led to a crackdown on the Red Brigades and the beginning of the end of the group’s influence.

Abilio Diniz (1989)

Diniz, the co-founder of the Brazilian grocery chain Pão de Açúcar, Diniz was kidnapped on the morning of December 17, 1989, when the country was holding its first democratic presidential election after decades of autocracy. The 52-year-old Diniz was “dragged out of his Mercedes-Benz as he went to work and taken away in a station wagon disguised as an ambulance,” said The New York Times, and then held in a house in São Paulo before he was freed by authorities a week later.

The kidnappers were part of an ongoing abduction ring that had netted around $65 million. The group was connected to and included several members of the Chilean radical group the Movement for the Revolutionary Left.

Jaycee Dugard (1991)

11-year-old Jaycee Dugard was walking to a school bus stop in Lake Tahoe, California, when she was abducted by a couple, Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Phillip, already a convicted sex offender, and Nancy held Dugard for 18 years in a hidden backyard structure.

She was repeatedly raped and forced to carry two of Phillip’s children. The case attracted even greater attention when she was found in 2009. Authorities “discovered a hidden backyard compound made up of ramshackle tents and sheds, including a small, sparsely furnished two-room building” where she and her children were held, said The New York Times. Dugard founded a non-profit to help people recover from similar horrors and has understandably kept her daughters’ identities a secret. The Garridos remain in prison.

Elizabeth Smart (2002)

On June 5, 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her bedroom in the family’s Salt Lake City home by Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee. Mitchell, who had religious delusions, had previously worked as a roofer on the family’s house.

Though the case drew widespread national scrutiny, Smart remained in captivity for nine months, suffering daily sexual assaults, until she was recognized in Sandy, Utah, on March 12, 2003, and rescued by police. “Smart had to summon tremendous physical stamina to survive her captivity,” said Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker. Smart founded a non-profit to combat sexual exploitation and is now married with three children. Mitchell remains in federal prison; Barzee was granted parole in 2018.

To enter the “Epstein Library”, as it is grandly called, you just have to go to the website of the US Department of Justice, and click Yes on a pop-up that asks if you are 18 or over. That is all it takes to become immersed in a deeply disturbing world, said Helen Rumbelow in The Times.

‘Grand facade’

The more than three million documents and photographs related to the late paedophile are in a “careless jumble”; and the FBI warns that they may contain forgeries and false allegations. But after days poring through the Epstein files, I started to see these papers as a “Rosetta Stone through which women might understand male power”. They take us behind the “grand facade” presented by men who run the world, in government, academia, law and business; and they reveal how these figures speak to one another when “pussy” – in their parlance – is “out of the room where it happens”.

In this world, the men hold the cards, said Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. The women are powerless or peripheral. While Epstein and his male associates joke, network, trade information, swap favours and engage in “light displays of one-upmanship”, women appear mainly only as staff, or providers of sex. Trawling the files, you find yourself eavesdropping on the many female assistants who organise the diaries of these busy men and ensure their lives run seamlessly as they move from Paris to New York, Dubai to Davos.

More often, you hear the men. The word “pussy” comes up hundreds of times. In 2016, a contact promises Epstein “abundant young pussy flesh”; another routinely signs off business emails wishing him “lots of P”. The men speak unguardedly. In 2012, the ex-chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, tells Epstein about the “extraordinary girls” in Albania. An Emirati businessman complains that when the “Moldavian arrived”, she was a “big disappointment” – “not as attractive as the picture”. In 2019, the left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky laments the “horrible” press Epstein is getting, and bemoans the “hysteria” surrounding the abuse of women.

Meanwhile, in the background of all this, Epstein is constantly managing the women he has imported into his life. “Take a selfie of your pussy and send,” he tells one. It’s your “whore moans”, he suggests to another.

Clever conman

All the people who appear in the files insist they knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes, yet his homes were full of young women – “young girls with no last names”, as the Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal refers to them in an email. These girls were groomed and abused on an industrial scale, said Janice Turner in The Times: hundreds passed through his doors. Some were from poor families, offered $300 to give Epstein a massage that turned sexual; others were students or artists, lured to his homes by promises of grants or patronage. Still more were young models, flown in from eastern Europe. The pimp-in-chief was Ghislaine Maxwell, but the files suggest there were others, from the model agency boss Jean-Luc Brunel, who killed himself in jail, to the late socialite Annabelle Neilson.

Epstein’s friends seem to have accepted his taste for girls as though it were a hobby, like collecting fine wine. Take Woody Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn, who messages Epstein about a pal with a jewellery business. “I know you have a lot of... young girls, women friends,” she says. “All women, and girls in your case, like jewellery.”

One of Epstein’s strategies was to pay his victims to recruit their friends, said Memphis Barker in The Daily Telegraph. And he pulled a similar trick in his parallel, sometimes overlapping, world of wealth and power – always leveraging his contacts, and the information they gave him, “to gain another, bigger prize”. There are all sorts of theories about how this working-class college dropout joined the elites, but the reality is simply that he was a clever conman.

In the 1970s, he blagged a lucrative Wall Street job, which he used to make contacts and engage in dodgy deals. Once a millionaire, he used his expertise in tax-avoidance and takeovers to gain access to the super-rich, whose fortunes he raided while acting as their adviser. He reportedly made some $200 million by advising the retail billionaire Les Wexner, and stole up to $100 million. With this sort of money, he could use donations to good causes, lavish hospitality and so on, to cultivate powerful people from all over the world, from senior Kremlin officials to Virgin boss Richard Branson to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli PM.

Although there are hints in the files that some of his contacts were drawn into his crimes – leaving them too exposed to turn on him – there is no clear evidence of a criminal conspiracy, said J. Oliver Conroy in The Guardian. What the files do seem to confirm, though, is the conspiracy theorist’s view of an elite stratosphere, where normal rules don’t apply, everyone knows each other, and ideological differences are subsumed to self-interested motives.

What happened

A Hong Kong court Monday morning sentenced former media tycoon Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison. The 78-year-old British citizen, who founded the now-shuttered pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, was found guilty in December of conspiring to collude with foreign forces and publishing seditious materials.

His punishment is the “heaviest penalty yet meted out under a 2020 Beijing-imposed national security law,” said Bloomberg. Eight co-defendants received shorter prison terms.

Who said what

The judges said Lai was “no doubt the mastermind of all three conspiracies charged,” which “warrants a heavier sentence.” British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said Lai had been jailed “for exercising his right to freedom of expression” and called for his release “on humanitarian grounds.” His heavy sentence “aligns with how the Chinese Communist Party has punished wealthy entrepreneurs and influential academics in the mainland for challenging the state,” said The New York Times.

What next?

President Donald Trump had encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to release Lai, so the sentence could “add another sticking point to negotiations between the world’s two largest economies,” scheduled for April, said The Wall Street Journal.

A new National Police Service dubbed the “British FBI” will be tasked with tackling the most serious crimes, enabling strained local forces to concentrate more resources on everyday offences, the Home Office has announced.

The announcement comes ahead of a series of reforms that will be “the biggest shake-up to the crime-fighting structure” in more than half a century, according to The Telegraph.

How will the new unit work?

The National Police Service will target terrorism, fraud and organised crime. Despite the “British FBI” nickname, the NPS will only operate in England and Wales, as policing is devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The new organisation, set out in a government White Paper, will bring together the responsibilities of existing agencies such as the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Policing, Regional Organised Crime Units and National Road Policing. The NPS will also be in charge of setting professional standards and training requirements and purchasing new equipment for all forces. This includes overseeing the nationwide roll-out of controversial facial recognition software.

The NPS will have its own uniform and a new national police commissioner will be appointed to lead the force, serving as the most senior police officer in the country.

The establishment of the new body will be accompanied by a reduction in the number of police forces in England and Wales, “with some merged to create bigger regional constabularies tackling complex crimes, such as murder, drugs and county lines gangs”.

What is the goal?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has insisted the radical overhaul is urgently needed because the “outdated” and “fragmented” current model is “buckling under the strain” of tackling complex modern crime, leaving “serious offending unpunished”.

“The current policing model was built for a different century,” she said. The “British FBI” will deploy “world-class talent and state-of-the-art technology to track down and catch dangerous criminals”. Ministers claim the NPS will be better placed to tackle criminals whose activities increasingly cross local constabulary and national borders.

Another of the “main aims” of the new service is to “boost the 43 local forces’ ability to spend more time fighting crime in their communities, such as shoplifting, drug dealing, phone theft and anti-social behaviour”, said Sky News.

How have the plans been received?

The establishment of the NPS “reflects a widespread consensus” among law enforcement experts that “more specialised officers are needed to combat threats such as online fraud and international organised crime, and that only larger forces can support the level of expertise required”, said the Financial Times.

The heads of Counter Terrorism Policing, the Metropolitan Police, the College of Policing, the National Crime Agency and the National Police Chiefs’ Council have all welcomed the move, writing jointly in The Telegraph that the current system is “messy and complex, and neither as efficient nor as coherent as it should be. That is why reform is needed – not as an ideological exercise, but as common sense. National crime demands a national response.”

While the policing world is “almost giddy” about the plans, “amending police structures, processes and institutions won’t affect people’s lives in the short, or even the medium, term”, said crime expert and former BBC journalist Danny Shaw. The White Paper “is not intended as an urgent plan of action to address our immediate concerns about safety on the streets, crime and anti-social behaviour”, but rather “a roadmap towards a more efficient and effective police service in the decades to come”.

What happened

A growing number of Republicans on Sunday joined unified Democratic calls for a thorough, transparent investigation of an immigration agent’s killing Saturday of Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at Minnesota’s Veterans Affairs hospital, was pushed to the ground by a Border Patrol agent after stepping in to shield a woman being hit with pepper spray, then surrounded, beaten and shot in the back several times, multiple bystander videos show. Trump administration officials quickly blamed Pretti, baselessly calling him a “terrorist” intent on shooting federal agents with a legally concealed handgun. Videos show Pretti had a phone in his hand but never touched his gun, which was removed from his waistband by an agent before he was shot.

The Department of Homeland Security is investigating the shooting by its own agent, officials said, and it barred Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators from the scene of the shooting on Saturday, despite a signed search warrant. A federal judge late Saturday agreed to Minnesota’s request for a temporary restraining order barring DHS “from destroying or altering evidence related to” Pretti’s shooting.

Who said what

Minnesota’s “extraordinary legal maneuvers” are “meant to counter what state officials and legal experts framed as unprecedented obstruction by federal authorities” into Pretti’s shooting, Axios said. They also “appear geared toward avoiding a repeat of the aftermath of an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of Renee Good.” The FBI blocked state investigators and “briefly opened a civil rights investigation” into Good’s shooting, The Washington Post said, “but closed it and instead focused on investigating Good’s partner and protesters.”

Having DHS investigate Pretti’s killing is “not normal,” a former senior ICE official told CBS News. The Trump administration is “lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes,” urging us to “reject the evidence” of our own “eyes and ears,” The New York Times said in an editorial, so it “will be impossible to trust any federal investigation that it conducts.” Pretti’s killing is the “worst incident to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump presidency,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. The president “would be wise to pause ICE enforcement in the Twin Cities” and “consider a less provocative strategy.”

What next?

The “gentle and equivocal” public pushback from a “small but growing number of Republicans” is “increasingly conspicuous” as the political costs rise, Politico said. The “growing fury” among Democrats, “even among moderates,” said The Associated Press, pushed Senate Democrats on Sunday to say they would block a government spending bill unless the DHS funding was removed, raising the odds of a partial government shutdown starting next weekend.

How America has changed, said Molly Olmstead on Slate. When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, the country was united in horror. Republican commentators expressed their shock at the killing; President Trump called it “sickening” and “revolting”. Compare that with the response to the killing last week of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officer just a mile from where Floyd died.

Shocking lies

Within hours, the administration was slandering her. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson claimed that she’d “weaponised her vehicle” in an attempt to kill Ice officers, in “an act of domestic terrorism”. A Fox News pundit accused Democrat leaders of emboldening “thugs” to attack law enforcers. Vice President J.D. Vance called Good a “deranged Leftist”. All this despite an abundance of video evidence suggesting that Good’s killing was unjustified.

The lies were shocking, said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. Officials could have pleaded patience while the full facts were established, yet they chose instead to spout falsehoods, such as that there were riots at the scene. “The federal government now speaks with the voice of the right-wing smear machine: partisan, dishonest and devoted to vilifying Trump’s perceived enemies rather than informing the public.”

Trump was the worst offender, said Eric Levitz on Vox. He condemned Good on social media as a “professional agitator” who had “violently, wilfully, and viciously” run over the Ice officer who shot her. “Based on the attached clip,” he said, “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in hospital.” Anyone who has seen footage of the event knows that’s nonsense. While the officer might have been clipped by the bumper of Good’s SUV as she turned to drive off, he clearly wasn’t run over. After firing through the windshield and open driver window, he calmly reholstered his gun and walked away. It’s frightening. “If Ice agents know that they can kill US citizens on video – and still count on the president to lie in support of their freedom – Americans’ most basic liberties will be imperilled.”

Useful distraction

Let’s keep things in perspective, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. To listen to some people, you’d think Ice agents were wandering around randomly executing people. While Good certainly didn’t deserve to die, she did appear to disobey police orders. The agent who fired at her, Jonathan Ross, may well have feared for his life, said The Wall Street Journal. He reportedly received dozens of stitches last year after a fleeing car dragged him about 300 feet.

Both sides need to lower the temperature. It’s not helpful for Mayor Jacob Frey to demand that federal immigration officials “get the f**k out of Minneapolis”. Trump should also tone down his rhetoric and reconsider his aggressive deployment of Ice agents. “His mass deportation policy is already unpopular and will become more so if there are more such violent incidents.”

On the contrary, the row over Ice may serve as a useful distraction for Trump, said Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine. At a time when his ratings have slumped and the Democrats are making headway by relentlessly highlighting cost-of-living issues, shifting the battleground towards immigration, crime and policing puts the Republicans in “more familiar and comfortable” territory. Hence why they were so eager to misrepresent the circumstances of Good’s death. Beyond the desire to show deference to Trump, they recognised that, facts aside, “support for the shooter is good politics for the GOP”.

What happened

Minnesota officials on Thursday said the FBI was barring state and local investigators from participating in the inquiry into an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good on Wednesday. Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) Superintendent Drew Evans said in a statement the FBI “had reversed course” on an initial agreement to conduct a joint investigation, and since the BCA will “no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews,” his agency “reluctantly” stepped back.

Who said what

“Minnesota must be part of this investigation,” Gov. Tim Walz (D) told reporters, or “it feels very, very difficult that we will get a fair outcome.” State Attorney General Keith Ellison said he hoped the FBI would “reverse” its “very concerning” decision. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Minnesota officials “have not been out. They don’t have any jurisdiction in this investigation.”

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that the ICE agent who killed Good, identified in court papers as Jonathan Ross, “is protected by absolute immunity.” Vance’s claim was “quickly met with skepticism by experts,” CNN said. But keeping the investigation in federal hands means the BCA has “few tools available to fully scrutinize the shooting and provide its findings to county prosecutors, who would then determine whether the agent should face state charges.”

What next?

In Oregon, Portland Police Chief Bob Day said Thursday night the FBI was leading the investigation into a Border Patrol agent’s non-fatal shooting of two people in a car yesterday afternoon. DHS said the agent fired a “defensive shot” at an alleged Venezuelan gang member after he fled a “targeted vehicle stop.” In previous cases, including Good’s killing, “video evidence cast doubt on the administration’s descriptions of what prompted the shootings,” The Associated Press said. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said his state’s Department of Justice would conduct its own investigation.

What happened

An unidentified ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, 37, on Wednesday during what federal officials said was an immigration enforcement action on a residential street in Minneapolis. Multiple bystander videos of the shooting show three ICE agents approaching Good’s SUV, which backs up and is turning to drive away when an agent near the front of the car fires three shots into the vehicle. Good’s killing was “at least the fifth death to result from the aggressive U.S. immigration crackdown the Trump administration launched last year,” The Associated Press said, and it “quickly drew hundreds of angry protesters.”

Who said what

President Donald Trump claimed on social media shortly after the shooting that Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good had weaponized her car in an “act of domestic terrorism.” Witnesses and state and local officials disputed those characterizations.

“Don’t believe this propaganda machine,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said, calling the shooting the “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable” result of Trump’s surge of ICE officers to the city. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) called the self-defense “spin” a “garbage narrative” and “bullshit” and told ICE to leave town. The “narrative they’re pushing clearly doesn’t match up with the videos we’re all seeing,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) said on social media.

According to eyewitnesses, ICE agents “gave mixed orders” to Good in the moments before opening fire, said Minnesota Public Radio, with one agent “ordering her to drive away from the scene” as another “yelled for her to get out of her car as he reached for the door handle.” The ICE agent who fired into the car “was filmed immediately after the shooting walking without apparent injury,” The Washington Post said.

What next?

Walz said he had issued a “warning order” to prepare the Minnesota National Guard for deployment if violence broke out, but he urged Minnesotans not to “take the bait.” Trump and his team “want a show,” he said. “We can’t give it to them.” The FBI and Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are investigating the shooting, but Minneapolis prosecutors are “pushing hard for a local investigation,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told Fox 9, “which is the only way to ensure full transparency.”

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.”

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.

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’

In July 2025, the Italian media reported that journalist and writer Ezio Gavazzeni had filed evidence with the Milan prosecutor’s office regarding 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…”

Prosecutor Alessandro Gobbis is investigating potentcial charges of “voluntary homicide aggravated by cruelty and abject motives”, based on Gavazzeni’s complaint and a report by former Sarajevo mayor Benjamina Karic.

‘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.”

The drugs crisis in English and Welsh prisons has reached “endemic” levels, “fostering a dangerous culture of acceptance that must be broken”, said the House of Commons Justice Committee.

The prison service’s ability to maintain control, keep prisoners safe and offer them “effective rehabilitation”, is being “critically undermined” by the sheer scale of the “trade and use of illicit drugs”, the cross-party parliamentary committee said in a report. Without “urgent reform”, there could be “unacceptable human cost”.

How much of a problem is it? 

Almost four out of 10 inmates surveyed by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons said it is easy to access drugs. Some prisons have an “embedded” subculture of drug use, with a “menu of drugs” on offer, and inmates saying it’s “almost impossible to get away from them”. In 2023-24, 30% of women and 23% of men in the prison estate reported having a drug issue.

There were 136 drug-related deaths in English and Welsh prisons between December 2022 and 2024 – 16% of the 833 deaths during that period across the prison estate. The number of drug-related medical emergencies are so high, it can cause “regime restrictions” and more time spent in cells. Over half of prison staff say they have been exposed to psychoactive substances, reporting subsequent nausea, confusion and paranoia.

How are drugs getting into prisons?

“Beyond the razor wire and towering walls” of Britain’s jails, a “hidden criminal underworld is thriving”, said The Sun, as “ruthless gangs” are “running multimillion-pound drug empires” from their cells.

Illicit substances, ordered by prisoners with “encrypted phones”, are smuggled in by visitors or corrupt staff, thrown over prison walls or, increasingly, delivered by drone. A man living near a prison in Worcestershire told Sky News that drones are dropping so many packages into the jail, there’s “an intense buzzing, like a pack of wasps”. In the 12 months to March 2025, there were 1,712 drone incidents in prisons, a 43% increase on the previous year, and a new peak.

How is the crisis affecting inmates?

Each morning, staff open the cell doors and I’m waiting “for the check to be completed successfully, as that means everybody’s alive”, the governor of HMP Shotts in Scotland told The Times. Shotts is at “the front line of the synthetic drug crisis in the UK”, said the paper, which means overdoses are a significant risk. It is also difficult to know how many prisoners are using these synthetic drugs, as current drug testing systems fail to detect them.

A recent inspection of HMP Leeds found it has highest rate of prisoner suicides of all UK jails, with “illicit drug use and availability” identified as a major factor. Leeds had the highest number of “drug equipment finds” in the prison estate, and 18% of inmates said they had developed a drug or alcohol problem while at the jail.

What can be done about it?

The Justice Committee has called on the Ministry of Justice to update drug testing methods, address the growing use of synthetic drugs in prisons, and speed up plans for waste-water surveillance systems that can help monitor drug usage trends.

The committee has also recommended that the government invests in electronic drone countermeasures, such as the “Sky Fence” system that can disrupt drone signals.

In July, the MOJ announced a new £900,000 investment to tackle the drones bringing drugs and weapons into prisons, in addition to the £40 million already allocated for improving security measures, including reinforcing windows and putting up anti-drone netting.

Broadcaster Kirsty Gallacher said she was “really sad” about “what’s going on on the streets of London” after she was attacked by a masked assailant in the capital last week.

Politicians have also raised the alarm about safety in the city in recent months. But London Mayor Sadiq Khan accused them of “spreading misinformation”, as latest statistics show violent crimes resulting in injury have fallen in every borough over the past year.

What are the murder rates in London?

When “rolling” monthly data began to be recorded in 2003, there were 216 killings in London over the previous 12 months; now that rolling total is 89 – less than half the number in 2003, even as London’s population soared by nearly two million.

London may be experiencing the lowest number of murders in decades, Fraser Nelson said on his Substack. Comparing today’s figures to archived records pre-dating 2003 suggests London is “likely back to – or below – the murder counts of the 1970s”.

In the 12 months to August 2025, there were nearly 9,000 fewer violent crimes resulting in injury across the capital, a fall of nearly 12% from the previous 12 months, according to latest figures from City Hall.

Knife crime fell by 19% between April and June this year compared with the same period in 2024, but some offences, such as possession of weapons, and rape, went up.

Overall recorded crime in London has increased by 31.5% in the last 10 years, according to the Office for National Statistics.

What about other crimes?

Theft from a person was down 13% over 12 months, from 25,272 to 21,937, and robbery of personal property fell by the same percentage, from 7,106 to 6,209. Meanwhile, residential burglaries were down 10% from 7,974 to 7,144. But over 10 years, theft from the person has risen by 207%, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Who said what?

In September, Donald Trump said Khan was doing a “terrible job”, and that “crime in London is through the roof”, but the mayor said “the evidence was clear” that his policies are working. Violent crime with injury is “down in every single London borough” he said, and that’s “testament to the incredible work of our brave police officers”.

If Khan thinks London is “getting more safe, he needs to get out more”, Reform UK London Assembly Member Alex Wilson told the Local Democracy Reporting Service. For the mayor to point to “incremental changes” in “just a few categories is ridiculous”, added Wilson.

During the summer, the mayor, who admitted there’s a “long way to go”, promised a “policing blitz” on London's 20 most blighted town centres for shoplifting, robbery, knife crime and antisocial behaviour, said the BBC.

A lucrative illegal trade in cars and their parts has driven a 74% increase in the number of vehicles stolen in England and Wales over the past 10 years.

The cars will often be “soaked”, left in a location for two or three days, and end up in a “chop shop” but some will follow stolen mobile phones and be shipped abroad.

What happens to stolen cars?

Car thieves in the “intricate £1.8 billion-a-year web of crime normally take several steps to maximise profits and avoid arrest”, and the first is usually “soaking”, said the Daily Mail. After leaving the crime scene, the thieves will generally abandon the car for two or three days at a predetermined location, to check whether it’s been fitted with a tracker.

After that, they attach cloned number plates, which correspond to another car of the same make, model and colour, to avoid detection from automatic numberplate recognition system cameras.

Sometimes the car will be sold to drug dealers, armed robbers or gangsters. Or it might go to a so-called “chop shop”, where mechanics can “rapidly strip” the stolen car of lucrative parts, which “get sold on to unsuspecting consumers” who want to repair their own car.

The vehicles could also be shipped abroad. Stolen cars from the UK have been “found across the globe”, including in Russia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eastern Europe, Dubai, Thailand and Cyprus.

What happens to stolen phones?

Headlines and social media posts about mobile phones being snatched on Oxford Street have worried Londoners and visitors alike. Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Police busted an international gang suspected of smuggling up to 40,000 stolen mobile phones from the UK to China over the past 12 months, said the BBC.

After the number of phones stolen in London almost tripled in the last four years, from 28,609 in 2020 to 80,588 in 2024, the Met discovered that street thieves were being paid up to £300 per handset. Stolen devices are being sold in China for up to £4,000 each, because they are “internet-enabled and more attractive for those trying to bypass censorship”.

What is being done about it?

The Met said personal robbery has decreased by 13% and theft is down 14% in London this year. Up to 80 more officers are joining the West End team to focus on offences such as phone robbery. But London Mayor Sadiq Khan said “coordinated global action” is needed to “shut down” the trade in stolen phones.

As for cars, the “days of hard-bitten detectives getting tip-offs from snouts over a pint” and then “raiding a seedy back-street garage” are “long gone”, said The Telegraph. Instead, police are turning to private companies staffed by former officers.

“We’re almost trying to alleviate the pressure on the police,” said Ahron Tolley from W4G. “I’m ex-police. We know the stresses and strains on the police in the UK to investigate crime.”

The government has launched an independent investigation after the accidental release of a “high profile” prisoner “left jaws on the floor”, said Chris Mason, the BBC’s political editor.

Ethiopian national Hadush Kebatu, who was jailed for 12 months in September for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman, was due to be deported at the end of his sentence but was mistakenly released on Friday, before being recaptured in London on Sunday.

How many prisoners are wrongly released?

In the 12 months to March this year, 262 prisoners were released in error, a 128% increase from 115 the previous year, according to government data. The total prison population in England and Wales is approximately 86,000.

The vast majority of the “blunders” – 233 – occurred in prisons, while the remaining 29 happened in courts, said The Telegraph.

How do prisoners get released in error?

There are a variety of reasons. During the government’s emergency prison release scheme in September 2024 to tackle overcrowding, 37 inmates were freed in error because their offences were wrongly logged under repealed legislation.

The prison where Kebatu was mistakenly released was “conned into freeing a fraudster two years ago”, said The Times. In June 2023, HMP Chelmsford received an email purporting to be from the Royal Courts of Justice instructing the prison to release Junead Ahmed, who was awaiting trial on suspicion of fraud. After prison staff released Ahmed they received further emails from the same sender with apparent orders for the release of other inmates. They then “realised the emails were fake”.

Elsewhere, a computer system “designed to automate the calculation of release dates has ‘failed to function as planned’”, forcing prison staff to “work out complex release calculations by hand using calculators”, said The i Paper.

It shouldn’t be “difficult or complicated to correctly calculate release dates”, or to “issue accurate instructions for transferring prisoners and ensure they are followed”, said former prisoner David Shipley in The Spectator. But accidental releases are “all too common” – “time and again, our prisons demonstrate they can’t do the basics”.

Why are numbers rising?

It’s “quite possible” that overcrowding is “one of the reasons for the increase in these mistakes”, Ian Acheson, a former prison governor, told The Telegraph. There are “literally thousands of movements a year of people going to and from courts” and “people going to and from” different jails, said another former governor, John Podmore.

In addition to general overcrowding in the penal system, there’s been a “doubling” in the number of prisoners held on remand awaiting trial. Numbers have reached a 50-year high of more than 17,500 – around a fifth of the entire prison population. These inmates have to be “regularly transferred to and from court for hearings”, which increases the pressure on the “often inexperienced officers” who are “receiving and discharging prisoners”.

What can be done?

Speaking in the House of Commons, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said that “any release in error is one too many”. He has “taken immediate action to introduce the strongest release checks ever”.

From now on a prison duty governor must be physically present when any foreign criminal is being released early to be deported. There will be a “clear checklist with governors required to confirm every step has been followed before any release takes place”.

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.”

The four abuse survivors who have stepped down from the oversight panel of the national grooming gangs inquiry said last night that they will not re-engage with the process unless safeguarding minister Jess Phillips resigns.

Fiona Goddard and Ellie-Ann Reynolds announced they were quitting earlier this week, with fellow survivors “Elizabeth” and “Jess” following suit just days later. In an open letter to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, the four women said they joined the panel “in good faith”, hoping that, “after decades of being dismissed, silenced, and called liars by the very institutions meant to protect us, things might finally be different. Instead, we have watched history repeat itself.”

What did the commentators say?

Other survivors remain on the panel but the exit of these four has “plunged” the inquiry “into disarray” before it has even started, said Adele Robinson and Jake Levison on Sky News. Ever since Keir Starmer announced the inquiry in June, “frustrations have grown over the pace of progress towards launching it”. Specifically, some survivors are concerned that the Home Office may broaden the inquiry’s scope “beyond group-based sexual abuse” and adopt a “regional focus”, rather than a “truly national” one.

“This inquiry is not, and will never be, watered down on my watch,” said Mahmood on X, insisting that “its scope will not change” and it will be “robust and rigorous”.

Britain’s grooming gangs acted “with impunity” to exploit vulnerable girls whose word was not taken seriously, said Joanna Williams in The Spectator. “Both Goddard and Reynolds joined the victims’ liaison panel to ensure” those “who had endured abuse”, like they both had, for years, “were heard”. But it seems clear they are “still struggling” to be “taken seriously”. The grooming gangs “thrived” because “the abused girls were the wrong kind of victims and their Pakistani-heritage rapists were the wrong kind of perpetrators. Now, as adults, these women continue to be the wrong kind of victims.”

What next?

The inquiry still needs to find a chair. Both potential candidates approached so far have pulled out after some survivors objected to their previous career backgrounds in police or social work. The government wants “to get this right”, said Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing Josh MacAlister, urging other political parties to “turn the heat down”.

Jim Gamble, one of those who withdrew as a potential chair, said there was now a “toxic environment” around the inquiry. “There needs to be a pause,” the former head of the Child Sexual Exploitation and Online Protection centre told GB News. Those in positions of power need to “think about the victims and survivors, rather than their own political point-scoring”.

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.

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”.

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".

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".

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."

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".

Questions have been asked about how far-right activist Tommy Robinson was able to travel to the US and visit the State Department despite being banned from the country after a 2012 attempt to enter the US on a false passport.

Posts on social media show Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, meeting senior State Department officials, Republican congressmen and Donald Trump’s former national security adviser General Michael Flynn during the visit last month. Robinson had been banned from flying to the US due to his criminal past, and was previously denied a US visa in 2018. “It is not known who lifted Robinson’s ban and granted his visa, which he reportedly received hours before his flight departed,” said The i Paper.

Sara Khan, the UK’s former counter-extremism commissioner, told NBC News she was “disappointed” to see Robinson welcomed to the US given he has a “history of criminal convictions as long as my arm”.

The founder of the now largely defunct English Defence League (EDL), Robinson is no stranger to controversy and has served multiple jail sentences over the past two decades. He has convictions for offences including 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, is believed to have covered Robinson’s legal fees in a terror offence trial last November, which Robinson claimed amounted to “nearly £100,000”, The London Economic reported.

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 last year.

2025 – Cleared of terrorism charges

In October last year, Robinson went on trial for refusing to comply with a request made by counter-terrorism police as he tried to leave the UK. After being stopped by police at the Channel Tunnel on his way to Spain, he refused to hand over the PIN for his phone because it had “journalistic material on it”. Police had requested access to his iPhone under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act after Robinson gave what they described as “vague replies” to questions.

He was found not guilty following a two-day trial, after his defence team successfully argued police had engaged in a “fishing expedition” and that there was no evidence from the UK’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, to suggest he was a terrorist. Leaving court Robinson said he was “forever grateful” to Elon Musk for funding his latest legal fight and keeping him out of jail.

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.

Muckamore Abbey Hospital, Northern Ireland, which provides treatment for adults with severe learning disabilities, became "one of the nation's biggest ever crime scenes" in 2017 when hundreds of thousands of hours of CCTV footage revealed that patients had been seriously abused, said the BBC.

Yet, eight years after the footage was discovered, no cases have come to trial, the hospital hasn't been closed and a public inquiry has yet to report its findings.

'Staggering' abuse

There were already concerns about the hospital's treatment of patients before the CCTV footage was discovered. Glynn Brown, for instance, believed that his severely disabled adult son may have been assaulted by staff but he was told there was no video evidence because the CCTV cameras, installed six months earlier, had never been switched on.

But, in fact, the cameras had been running the entire time and had captured a "staggering" 300,000 hours of footage that revealed widespread abuse and neglect of patients by hospital staff.

Vulnerable young adults were "punched, kicked, dragged across floors, tipped off furniture" and had "balls kicked at them", said the BBC. Their possessions were "taken away" and there was "emotional abuse", including patients with severe learning disabilities being "provoked into a reaction" and then restrained and placed in isolation.

As hospital trust officials took on the mammoth task of combing through the footage, families of the patients were told they would not be allowed to see it, to prevent any prejudice of criminal investigations. But relatives were contacted with descriptions of the incidents involving their loved ones.

This is the "largest systemic abuse case uncovered in the UK", Andrew McDonnell, a clinical psychologist with experience of such investigations, told the broadcaster. The "sheer volume and scale" of it "dwarfs anything I've ever seen before".

Inquiry yet to deliver verdict

Yet the families are still waiting to see anyone be held to account. In March, the hospital trust rejected calls for senior staff members to be sacked, reported Nursing Times. Belfast Health and Social Care Trust apologised for the failings of individual staff members at Muckamore Abbey Hospital but said that accountability "doesn't necessarily mean losing your job". In a statement to the BBC this week, the trust apologised to families and said some staff have now been dismissed.

In May, seven former members of staff appeared in court charged with ill-treatment of patients. They were released on bail pending an arraignment hearing, said the Belfast Telegraph. There have been 38 arrests to date, said the BBC, but no trials or convictions.

A public inquiry, which sat from 2022 until earlier this year, is yet to deliver its final report and recommendations. Families have criticised the inquiry, saying that hospital managers were not "rigorously cross-examined" and that lawyers representing patients and their families weren't allowed to directly ask questions of the witnesses. The Muckamore Abbey Inquiry said, in a statement, that lawyers for families of patients were permitted to make an application to the chair to ask witnesses questions directly but no such applications had been received.

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".

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".