As the number of the semi-aquatic creatures soars so can tensions. But the Swiss have a tried and tested system to calm the neighbours and restore harmony

“I hate beavers,” a woman tells the beaver hotline. Forty years ago she planted an oak tree in a small town in southern Zurich – now at the frontier of beaver expansion – and it has just been felled: gnawed by the large, semi-aquatic rodents as they enter their seasonal home-improvement mode.

The caller is one of 10 new people getting in touch each week at this time of year. Beavers, nature’s great engineers, can unleash mayhem during winter as they renovate their lodges and build up their dams. For people, this can mean flooding, sinkholes appearing in roads and trees being felled. A single incident can clock up 70,000 Swiss francs (£65,000) in damages.

Two people killed in assault launched on country’s energy infrastructure as temperatures dip towards freezing

Several Ukrainian regions were hit by power cuts in frigid winter weather on Tuesday after Russia launched its latest deadly large-scale attack with drones and missiles, authorities said.

Neighbouring Poland scrambled jets to protect its airspace during the strikes, the country’s military said in a post on X.

Like many of his US counterparts, the Russian science protege turned hugely successful ‘digital populist’ has a deep suspicion of government constraint

Tech visionary, Kremlin dissident, FSB agent, free speech absolutist, health guru. These are just some of the labels admirers and critics have attached to Pavel Durov over the past decade.

The Russian-born tech entrepreneur founded Russia’s version of Facebook before going on to create the messaging app Telegram, launch a cryptocurrency ecosystem and amass a multibillion-dollar fortune, all while clashing repeatedly with authorities in Russia and beyond.

Western intelligence believes Russia is developing a new ‘zone-effect’ weapon to specifically hit Musk’s satellites

Executed with trademark technical flair and empathy, this part-horror, part-fairytale set in a haunted orphanage from 2001 is one of the director’s best

He’s a household name now after The Shape of Water and his new Frankenstein, but 25 years ago Guillermo del Toro was a virtual unknown, still bruised from the Harvey Weinstein-produced Hollywood flop Mimic. But, as this overlooked follow-up attests, he was always a class act. In fact, this is one of his best: a rich, rousing ghost story shrouded in trademark gothic gloom but executed with technical flair and a good deal of empathy.

As with his later breakthrough Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s part-horror, part-fairytale, with children at its centre. The setting is a middle-of-nowhere boys’ orphanage in 1930s Spain, a leftist sanctuary from Franco’s fascists during the civil war. Newcomer Carlos (Fernando Tielve) must find his feet in this semi-surreal realm, with an unexploded bomb in the middle of the courtyard, some kindly adults (one-legged Marisa Paredes and kindly doctor Federico Luppi), some not-so-kindly adults (aggressive caretaker Eduardo Noriega), and junior bullies to win over. There’s also a ghost in the mix: a pale-faced boy named Santi, whose death no one seems to want to discuss, and to whose empty bed Carlos is ominously assigned.

Ireland’s 2015 Gender Recognition Act was born in an era of optimism and consensus, but as gender-critical activism grows so does debate whether it can hold

Soon after Ireland passed its Gender Recognition Act in 2015, Kevin Humphreys, a Labour politician, visited a residential home for senior citizens – where an older woman thanked him for the new law.

It was Humphreys who, as the minister of state for social protection 10 years ago, guided through the legislation that has meant transgender people in Ireland can apply to have their lived gender legally recognised by the state through a simple self-certification process.

Labour urged to accelerate reset with Brussels as many exporters struggling to trade in the EU after Brexit deal

Keir Starmer’s government has been told a closer EU trade deal is a “strategic necessity” for companies in Britain as growing numbers of exporters find it tougher to do business under the UK’s post-Brexit agreement.

Calling on Labour to accelerate its reset with Brussels, the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said the UK’s existing trade and cooperation agreement (TCA) was failing to help them grow their sales in the EU.

Liberal democracies view Putin’s Russia as a bully – and Trump’s US as an angry drunk with a bazooka. The response is pure venom

There are people who argue that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is not motivated by fears or imperial ambitions, but by other countries’ disrespect. Russia once commanded authority as one of the world’s two superpowers, but it has since forfeited that status. It knows it has lost the respect of other countries (Barack Obama famously dismissed Russia as just a “regional power”), and the Ukraine war is its way of winning it back.

What is perhaps surprising is that Donald Trump’s turn against Europe has similar motivations. Putin knows his aggressive revanchism won’t win Russia any love among countries whose respect he craves. But if he can’t be loved, he hopes at least to be feared. If you are in a social order that regards you as inferior, you have every incentive to turn spoiler.

Henry Farrell is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Sergey Radchenko is Wilson E Schmidt distinguished professor at the Henry A Kissinger Center, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Emergency crews at work after port facilities and ship damaged, governor says, while Donald Trump says peace talks going ‘OK’. What we know on day 1,399

Russian forces struck Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa late on Monday and damaged port facilities and a ship, the regional governor said, in the second attack on the region in less than 24 hours. Oleh Kiper said on Telegram that emergency crews were tackling the aftermath of the latest attack and that no casualties had been reported but provided no further details. An earlier overnight attack hit port and energy infrastructure in the Odesa region, causing a fire at a major port and disrupting electricity supplies to tens of thousands of people. “Russia is attempting to disrupt maritime logistics by launching systematic attacks on port and energy infrastructure,” deputy prime minister Oleksiy Kuleba said on Telegram.

Ukraine’s energy ministry said on Tuesday that Russia was again attacking the country’s energy sector, prompting emergency power outages in a number of regions, including the capital, Kyiv, and its surrounding region.

A Russian general was killed after an explosive device detonated beneath his car in what Moscow described as a likely assassination carried out by Ukrainian intelligence services, reports Pjotr Sauer. Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov, head of the operational training directorate of the Russian armed forces’ general staff, died of his injuries, a spokesperson for Russia’s investigative committee said. “Investigators are pursuing numerous lines of inquiry regarding the murder.” Russian Telegram channels with links to the security services reported that Sarvarov’s car exploded while driving along a Moscow street about 7am on Monday. Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack.

Donald Trump has said talks to end the Ukraine war are going “OK”, a day after his envoy Steve Witkoff characterised US discussions with Ukrainian and European representatives in Florida as “productive and constructive”. “The talks are going along,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday. “We are talking. It’s going OK.” Asked if he planned to speak to Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Vladimir Putin, Trump didn’t say, offering only of the fighting: “I’d like to see it stopped.”

Zelenskyy said initial drafts of US proposals for a peace deal met many of Kyiv’s demands but suggested neither side in the war was likely to get everything it wanted in talks on a settlement. “Overall, it looks quite solid at this stage,” the Ukrainian president said on Monday of the latest talks with US officials. “There are some things we are probably not ready for, and I’m sure there are things the Russians are not ready for either.” Trump has been pushing for a peace deal for months but has run into sharply conflicting demands from Moscow and Kyiv.

Moscow said parallel talks between Russia and the US in Miami at the weekend should not be seen as a breakthrough. “This is a working process,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said when asked whether the talks could be seen as a turning point. The Izvestia news outlet cited him as saying in remarks published on Tuesday that discussions were expected to continue in a “meticulous” format and that Russia’s priority was to obtain from the US details of Washington’s work with Europeans and Ukrainians on a possible settlement. He said Moscow would then judge how far those ideas matched what he called the “spirit of Anchorage”, after the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska in August.

Zelenskyy has said residents of a border village taken into Russia by Moscow’s troops had interacted with their neighbours for years without incident. The Ukrainian president on Monday confirmed media reports that residents of Hrabovske village – on the Sumy region’s border and home to 52 people – were taken away by Russian troops. “I think they simply didn’t expect Russian troops to simply walk in and take them away as prisoners,” Zelenskyy said. “But that’s what happened.” The Kremlin has not commented on the situation. The Ukrainian army has said it is battling an attempted Russian breakthrough in the north-eastern Ukrainian region, where Russian forces have recently seized several villages near the border.