Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as euro rallies and DAX and MDAX indices rise in early trading

• German election live: Merz says priority is to make Europe independent from US on defence as coalition talks to begin

Shares in some European weapons makers are rising in early trading too.

German tank maker Rheinmetall jumped 3% at the start of trading, while in London BAE Systems are up 1.7%.

‘’A dose of more certainty has been injected into European politics, with the Germany’s Conservatives winning the elections. It comes at a crucial time for the continent. Three years on from the invasion of Ukraine, high stakes deal making between the US and Russia continues, Ukraine is out in the cold and the outcome will have huge implications for security in Europe.

There is a dawning realisation that European nations will have to pull together and present a more united deterrent force, and Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, is reading from that script. He has pledged to relax fiscal rules, to increase defence spending and inject the economy with much needed investment. But while Merz seems determined to ease off the so-called debt brake, which limits annual borrowing to 0.35% of GDP, it won’t be straightforward, because he will need a two-third majority in parliament.

Conservative opposition wins most votes in Germany election amid dramatic surge by far-right Alternative für Deutschland

• German election 2025: results in full

Guten Morgen aus Berlin,

In November 2019, Freidrich Merz joined a conference of German students at Harvard.

From our point of view it can get going very, very quickly. We should hold the first talks this week already, in the coming days.

My impression is that there are many people in the SPD who also see that we can and should do something together, and then we will find compromises.

Rio de Janeiro reached 44C, its highest temperature for more than a decade, last Monday

While North America grappled with widespread cold and wintry conditions last week, South America – now in its final month of summer – faced the opposite extreme, with record high temperatures being recorded across the continent. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest city, saw temperatures at its Guaratiba weather station soar to 44C last Monday, 14C above the February norm and the highest temperature recorded in the city for over a decade. In addition to the high temperatures, Rio has also experienced what is expected to be one of its driest Februarys on record, with little rain so far this month and minimal precipitation expected in the next week. Authorities activated a level 4 heat protocol early last week as a result of the extreme heat, prompting the setup of hydration stations at outdoor events and public spaces, as well as the designation of air-conditioned buildings as “cooling points”.

Although temperatures in Brazil have since returned closer to average, the focus of the heat has now shifted southwards. North-western Argentina is set to see highs in the upper 30s to low 40s Celsius in the coming days, 10 to 15C above the seasonal average. However, unlike in Rio, these high temperatures are likely to set off thunderstorms, some of which may lead to some high rainfall totals in places.

Israeli tanks in West Bank for first time in more than two decades amid tensions over ceasefire agreement with Hamas

The UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, has been speaking at the UN human rights council in Geneva.

“I am gravely concerned by the rising violence in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers and other violations, as well as calls for annexation,” Guterres said, as he urged for the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel to remain intact.

The ministry of foreign affairs and expatriates warns of the Israeli occupation army’s deployment of heavy tanks around Jenin, viewing it as a prelude to expanding its crimes against the Palestinian people – particularly in the northern West Bank and its refugee camps.

This escalation comes as Israeli ‘defence’ minister Israel Katz boasts that the Israeli occupation army will prevent displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes and has ordered an extended military presence in the area. Israeli occupation forces have already forcibly displaced 40,000 Palestinians from refugee camps in the northern West Bank. The ministry views these developments – including Katz’s statements, the deployment of tanks, and the deliberate intimidation of defenceless civilians- as a grave escalation in the West Bank and a flagrant attempt to entrench genocide and forced displacement against our unarmed people.

After Ademola Lookman’s miss in midweek, Lorenzo Lucca invited further criticism in ignoring his Udinese teammates

This was the week of the undesignated penalty taker in Italian football. On Tuesday, Ademola Lookman missed a spot-kick against Club Brugge and then listened to his manager, Gian Piero Gasperini, tear him to shreds for having the audacity to step up when team-mates encouraged him to. The responsibility was supposed to fall to Charles De Ketelaere, but Lookman claimed the Belgian had told him to go for it.

Gasperini used his post-game press conference to roast Lookman, calling him “one of the worst penalty takers I’ve ever seen,” and adding that: “even in training he has a very low conversion rate. He shoots them really badly.” Four days later, Gasperini claimed surprise that his words had caused the striker to feel disrespected.

Marian Keyes’s engaging tale of fresh starts and old flames; a kaleidoscopic family drama spanning six decades; and an absorbing study of ancient rocks from space

Marian Keyes
Penguin, £9.99, pp624 (paperback)

This fly-on-the-wall series about the actor’s family in the lead up to the Rust trial feels in extremely poor taste. It’s entirely unnecessary television that makes the actor and his wife look dreadful

I think there are two options here that will allow ourselves to continue our lives without collapsing into total despair. The first is that a secret cell of revolutionary communists has successfully infiltrated the commissioning corridors of the Discovery channel and created its new reality show The Baldwins as a weapon to bring down western capitalism. It stars Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, their seven children and eight pets as they negotiate their chaotic family life split between their Manhattan apartment and East Hampton summer home, with two nannies and a lot of talk about love and “choosing to grow” through problems. Within 20 minutes or so I expect most of us will be prepared to man the barricades.

The second is that The Baldwins is actually a covert addition to the Tina Fey universe. Perhaps The Baldwins (“I have one overriding concern and that is letting seven children know that I love them”) is beyond parody because it is a parody. Maybe, still not over Alec’s consummate performance as the arrogantly oblivious TV exec Jack Donaghy in her masterwork 30 Rock, Tina Fey has made him a gift of this. Otherwise we are left with a third option; The Baldwins is just a reality show designed and timed to ease the actor’s way back into public life and affection in the wake of his trial (ultimately dismissed on procedural grounds after three days) for the involuntary manslaughter of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer killed in 2021 when a prop gun went off while Baldwin was rehearsing a scene. And that really would be a rare thing – a new low for television.

The Baldwins is on Discovery+

A vivid outback tale, an anguished 80s love triangle and real life are cleverly held in play in the Australian novelist’s inventive memoir-novel-essay hybrid

This book starts as an evocative, shifting novel of time and place: a young man travelling in Switzerland, distracted by thoughts of a beautiful music teacher he met in London, recalls how, in his Australian childhood, he was evacuated to live with his grandparents at a sheep station in New South Wales in the second world war. There follows a brief story of how the boy that he was pocketed an emerald ring owned by his grandmother and chucked it away in the nearby woods. The shame did not end there. A young Aboriginal maid was blamed for the theft, and he did not have the courage to step in to save her from dismissal.

Just as you are losing yourself in this immersive little story, however, its author, Michelle de Kretser, steps in to inform you that “at this point, the novel I was writing stalled”. She goes on to explain how that writer’s block was a product of her difficulties with the “theory and practice” of her novel’s title: the gap between ideas about the novel – particularly those promoted by those French deconstructionists of the 1970s, and earlier by Virginia Woolf – and the impetus for storytelling.

Ivan and Maryna’s story is just one of hundreds of thousands of family tragedies that have afflicted Ukrainians after three years of Russian invasion

Ivan Zabavskyi was looking for his mother when he disappeared.

It was September 2022, and he had grown increasingly nervous as he read reports of intense fighting in the area where Maryna lived. Eventually, he decided to cycle across the frontline to rescue her.

Gunners lose their heads while Mohamed Salah outperforms Kevin De Bruyne in Liverpool’s triumph

• Premier League top scorers | Latest table | Full fixtures

Kevin De Bruyne and Mohamed Salah have mirrored each other as leading men in the Premier League. They even share the status of being discarded by Chelsea, but Sunday’s match may be where their paths finally diverge. Salah delivered a goal and an assist while De Bruyne was a shock selection, unused by Manchester City in Madrid. On Friday Pep Guardiola hinted the Belgian’s time at the club was done. If Sunday was a last hurrah, De Bruyne misfiring passes and chasing shadows was a brutal reminder of how time catches up with even the very best. Where the Belgian exhibits physical decline from sheer miles on the clock, Salah, just a year younger, played to his peak, often buzz-sawing into midfield areas De Bruyne once commanded. The Egyptian king’s contract situation remains at an impasse, the sense being he awaits the right offer from Liverpool. De Bruyne may now be reduced to mere cameos as Guardiola rebuilds, a sad coda. John Brewin

Match report: Manchester City 0-2 Liverpool

Match report: Arsenal 0-1 West Ham

Match report: Everton 2-2 Manchester United

Match report: Aston Villa 2-1 Chelsea

Six weeks after a devastating blaze in Accra ripped through one of the world’s biggest secondhand markets, many stalls remain unfinished and thousands still have no income

It was a blaze that left two people dead and destroyed the fabric of one of the world’s largest secondhand clothes markets. It also wiped out the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people in a matter of hours.

Six weeks on from the 1 January fire in Ghana’s capital, Accra, the aluminium roofing has been replaced and wooden frames have been erected, but many stalls remain unfinished and empty. In the heart of the market, the sound of hammering and building work fills the air. Vendors mill around with little to sell. The narrow passageways – once so rammed with customers there was a stampede two months ago – are easy to pass through.

Scores of people experience complications after change from Tysabri to Tyruko as part of NHS drive to save money

• ‘It was awful for me’: one MS patient shares her experience with Tyruko

Scores of people with multiple sclerosis (MS) have suffered debilitating side-effects after being put on to a cheaper new drug as part of an NHS drive to save money.

About 170 MS patients at Charing Cross hospital in London have had complications, including a relapse of their illness, after being switched from Tysabri to a different drug called Tyruko, made by the pharmaceutical company Sandoz.

Millie had fantastic recall, unlike mine. Now there are parts of my past – and myself – that I’ll never be able to remember

I was midway through Kathryn Mannix’s With the End in Mind when it happened. It’s a comforting book – the author is a palliative care consultant – that describes the basics of a good death: a diminuendo. The mind fades. The breath slows. Inevitably, gently, life stops.

And then I got the call: my sister Millie had died. Her death, at the age of 47, was sudden and unexpected. She was my only sibling – four years younger than me. I put the book down. I’ll probably never finish it.

Jason Hazeley is a comedy writer who is partly responsible for TV untellectual Philomena Cunk

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Three years after Russia’s invasion, UPL teams dream of a seat at Uefa’s top table to avoid an uncertain financial future

Last Friday, Kolos Kovalivka opened the second half of this Ukrainian Premier League season with a home match against a struggling Chornomorets Odesa. The match was kicked off by Dmytro Orel, a soldier who has fought for his country on the frontlines in the war-ravaged east. Orel took in the appreciation of a sparse crowd and saw Kolos score within two minutes. The cheers ended there: a fightback from the visitors brought a 2-1 win and dragged Kolos towards the relegation fight.

The previous day, an infinitely worse piece of news had broken. It was reported that Mykyta Kalin, a former Kolos youth-team player, had been killed during a combat mission in the Kharkiv region. Three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, life must continue where possible and football is back on its feet. But its proximity to unimaginable violence, grief and destruction has not really shifted: the effects continue to be felt severely.

Does the time of day matter? Or is it more about the snack of choice?

It’s a line that’s been rattled off by nutritionists for decades: when food is consumed later in the evening, it’s more likely to cause weight gain … But does that idea actually have legs?

The evidence remains unclear, says Dr Adrian Brown, a dietitian and senior research fellow at University College London specialising in weight management. “We do have data showing that individuals who eat later at night tend to have a higher weight,” he says. “But they are associations and do not show that eating late at night ‘causes’ weight gain.”

Like a judo master, the Russian aggressor wears down his opponents until they break. Then he comes back for more

I have a friend, an American author, who writes about war. Over the past decades, he has been to South Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and other conflict zones. In the case of Ukraine, he said one thing stood out: here it was obvious who was the aggressor and who was the victim. Alongside Bosnia, Ukraine’s resistance to Russia remains, in his opinion, one of two truly just wars.

After three years of fighting a just war against Putin’s aggression, we are now facing, with Donald Trump, an unjust peace. Ukraine will lose lands and will not receive compensation for its losses. War crimes will go unpunished and Ukrainians will not be provided with the security guarantees needed to protect them from future Russian attack.

Yaroslav Hrytsak is a historian and professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv

A mysterious stranger arrives in a small town in western Poland soon after the second world war, and embarks on a string of messy, equally enigmatic affairs

This cult 1960 Polish film is a political absurdist nightmare from director Kazimierz Kutz, written for the screen by Józef Hen and featuring a clamorous, disturbing orchestral score by composer Wojciech Kilar (later to win awards for his music for Coppola’s Dracula and Polanski’s The Pianist). It feels like a European new wave picture by Antonioni or Resnais, but has something of the romantic travails of Franz Kafka, and even appears to anticipate the coming vogue for paranoia thrillers.

Like Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds from 1958, but weirder in tone, this is about a man who is part of the Polish anti-communist underground insurgency, who refuses to carry out an order to kill a communist. It was therefore a subject congenial in 1960 to Polish and Soviet authorities, but also a subject that speaks to a very complex part of the Polish mind. Refusing to kill a leftist is good … but wasn’t it the leftists, in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, who invaded Poland in 1939 at the same time as Hitler and helped start the war in the first place?

For the 41-year-old brothers, returning to their flat is bittersweet. Their apartment was more than just a home. It was once a stage, a space where they performed original theatre plays away from the watchful eye of the Bashar al-Assad regime

Thick layers of dust shimmer in sunlight as Mohamad and Ahmad Malas sift through old belongings in their Damascus apartment, abandoned for 14 years.

The air inside is heavy with a scent of old wood. With every step the brothers make, the floor creaks. Chairs, couches and chandeliers in the living room are cloaked in dust, and on one of the walls portraits of their father and one of their brothers, who have died, hang frozen in time. There’s no electricity so they use their phone torches to light their way as they collect personal artefacts they long forgot about.

Mohamad goes through their belongings in Damascus in January, finding a box containing his love letters and memories collected from when he was young.

The medinas of Fez and Tétouan offer a welcome chance to ditch the GPS – and a return to random encounters

Somewhere between the coppersmiths and the woodcarvers, I achieve my goal. Mustapha, my guide, has stepped aside to buy some sweet pastries from a stall. (“You’ve got to try the kaab el ghazal, the ‘gazelle’s horns’. They’re really special.”) But there are some Gnawa musicians, with long black tassels on their hats rotating in time to their drums, and then I cannot resist looking at large copper pots, and the handmade kettles that lead on to brass antiques. I turn. What’s up here? A doorway and the clacking of a hand loom. As-salamu alaykum! Maybe I should head back? A man with a laden donkey bellows, “Balak!” Gangway! I take another turn. Hang on, I don’t recognise any of this.

At that moment, all the colours, tastes, sounds and sights are sprinkled with a magical leavening of adrenaline and the whole lot rises up like some delicious cake in the oven. I glance at the phone in my hand and make sure that location services have failed. It tells me nothing except that I am in Fez, a city of more than a million. The labyrinth has worked. I am lost.

Parliamentary petition launched due to billionaire’s link to Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to conquer Canada

More than 150,000 people from Canada have signed a parliamentary petition calling for their country to strip Elon Musk’s Canadian citizenship because of the tech billionaire’s alliance with Donald Trump, who has spent his second US presidency repeatedly threatening to conquer its independent neighbor to the north and turn it into its 51st state.

British Columbia author Qualia Reed launched the petition in Canada’s House of Commons, where it was sponsored by New Democrat parliamentary member and avowed Musk critic Charlie Angus, as the Canadian Press first reported over the weekend.

Screen Actors Guild awards go to Shōgun and Conclave ensembles, while Jane Fonda gives a rousing political speech while accepting a life achievement award

Timothée Chalamet has won best actor in a surprise upset at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild awards for his performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, with Demi Moore and the ensembles of Shōgun and Conclave also winning big.

Chalamet won best male actor in a leading role, his first in an awards race that has been led all season by The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody, who has picked up the Golden Globe, Bafta and Critics’ Choice awards and is still widely predicted to win the Oscar next week.

• Extra match against Australia added for November
• Borthwick will lose time he has used for training in Spain

Steve Borthwick will have to forgo a crucial training camp and guide England into this year’s autumn internationals with a week’s less preparation after the Rugby Football Union arranged an extra lucrative November Test against Australia.

England habitually play three autumn internationals in the same year as a British & Irish Lions tour but the RFU arranged a fourth, which could generate up to £10m in revenue, after its latest accounts reported record losses to reserves of £42m.

Arguably the best attacking player in the world this season did three startlingly high-grade things to ensure victory

If you’re going to win it in February, win it in February right. On a rain-sodden day in Manchester, the kind of afternoon when the wind chases you around, lifting up the hem of your coat and firing a draught of ice-cold water up your spine, Liverpool didn’t so much overwhelm Manchester City as stroll politely past, all controlled aggression and strength in reserve.

A 2-0 scoreline seemed fair enough by the end. But then, by half-time this already felt like a victory lap. Albeit, an apposite one. If this really is to be the moment Liverpool took a decisive lead down the back straight, it happened in a way that reflects perfectly the calm, still centre of their season, both goals arriving in a 23-minute spell when Mohamed Salah decided it was time to bend the day to his will.

All-rounder has yet to deliver in five major tournaments and missed out again in Champions Trophy defeat by Australia

The England players who hit the golf course on Sunday morning probably did the right thing, really. Back at the team hotel they were replaying the defeat against Australia the previous night on a jumbo‑sized screen, with the gentle flute muzak in the lobby barely softening the sight of Josh Inglis going gangbusters.

Plenty went back to their own struggle to tee off with the bat. At the 30-over mark, England were 200 with just two down, only to finish 351 for eight. It was their highest score at a global event, the highest by any side at a Champions Trophy. But it was still only par and swiftly bumped down to No 2 as regards the second of those two records.

Ukraine president pays tribute to ‘absolute heroism’ of Ukrainians as EU leaders arrive in Kyiv

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas earlier said that she would be travelling to the US tomorrow to meet with US secretary of state Marco Rubio, adding that what she called the “Russian narrative” is “strongly represented” in comments being made by the second Donald Trump administration.

She told reporters “I think it’s good that we have as many interactions with the new administration in US as possible. I’m also travelling tomorrow to the US to meet Marco Rubio and others there to discuss these issues, because it’s extremely important.”

The sooner the US’s former friends realise the old global order is over, the sooner they can organise to regain power and agency – the only language Trump understands

A resonant phrase during Donald Trump’s first administration was the advice to take him “seriously, but not literally”. It was a singularly detrimental expression, widely quoted by politicians and the media. Its adoption fit with the position many felt most comfortable taking: Trump was bad, but he wasn’t smart. He wasn’t intentional. He wasn’t calculated and deliberate. He sounded off, but rarely followed up with action. He was in essence a misfiring weapon that could do serious damage, but mostly by accident.

The residue of that approach still persists, even in analysis that describes Trump’s first executive orders as a campaign of “shock and awe”, as if it were just a matter of signalling rather than executing. Or that his plan for Gaza is to be taken – you guessed it – seriously, not literally. When that was suggested to Democratic senator Andy Kim, he lost it. “I understand people are bending over backwards to try to mitigate some of the fallout from these statements that are made,” he told Politico. But Trump is “the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world … if I can’t take the words of the president of the United States to actually mean something, rather than needing some type of oracle to be able to explain, I just don’t know what to think about when it comes to our national security.”

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

New Zealand defence minister Judith Collins says department has ‘never seen a task group of this capability undertaking this sort of work’

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New Zealand’s defence minister has warned that Chinese warships located off the east coast of Australia are armed with “extremely capable” weapons that could reach Australia.

The three vessels, known as Taskgroup 107, undertook two live-fire exercises in the seas between Australia and New Zealand last week, causing commercial flights to be diverted in the skies above.

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For the children of the Nigerian diaspora, displaced by war and split between two worlds, footballers from John Fashanu to Jay-Jay Okocha were a first glimpse of themselves in Britain’s mainstream. Written and read by Aniefiok Ekpoudom

When outrageous clubbers Sue Tilley and Bowery posed for the eminent artist, some of the most spectacular portraits of the century were born. Tilley talks about sex, cash and Bowery’s untimely death

‘Leigh would have been livid that it wasn’t a painting of him that broke the record,” says Sue Tilley with a laugh. She’s talking about the £17.2m paid by Roman Abramovich in 2008 for a Lucian Freud nude of her, called Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. It was then the highest price ever paid for work by a living artist and Tilley thinks Leigh Bowery, the fashion icon and performance artist, would have found a way to claim the credit. After all, it was Bowery, her great friend, who got her the modelling job.

Tilley is now repaying the debt by telling the Australian’s story in a new edition of her book Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, featuring never-before-seen photos and an extra chapter on his legacy. You can’t really understand Bowery – his looks, his performances, his club Taboo, his band Minty – without thinking about Freud. The artist’s naked paintings of Bowery and Tilley are today’s equivalents of the great nudes of the western artistic canon. When he painted these two larger than life people in the 1990s, Freud had finally found subjects who could unlock his full and thrilling mastery of the human form, its flesh and its spirit. Yet, says Tilley, Bowery was not so much muse as collaborator, guiding the older man into preserving him and his friends on canvas.

Many of the nations gathering in Rome for Cop16 have offered no plans to honour their agreement to protect 30% of land and sea for nature

More than half the world’s countries have no plans to protect 30% of land and sea for nature, despite committing to a global agreement to do so less than three years ago, new analysis shows.

In late 2022, nearly every country signed a once-in-a-decade UN deal to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems. It included a headline target to protect nearly a third of the planet for biodiversity by the end of the decade – a goal known as “30 by 30”.

Europe estimated to have bought €22bn of fossil fuels from Russia in 2024 but gave €19bn to support Kyiv

The EU is spending more money on Russian fossil fuels than on financial aid to Ukraine, a report marking the third anniversary of the invasion has found.

The EU bought €21.9bn (£18.1bn) of Russian oil and gas in the third year of the war, according to estimates from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea), despite the efforts under way to kick the continent’s addiction to the fuels that fund Vladimir Putin’s war chest.

She won hearts with True Romance – and an Oscar for Boyhood. The actor reflects on her TV show Severance, political chaos in the US and why human beings are a disaster

If escaping the world by running for the hills looks increasingly attractive to many of us – perhaps living on a commune – Patricia Arquette feels like that too. Head to the mountains, she says. “Plant seeds and farm.” But maybe not the commune part – she lived in one as a child and it wasn’t always utopian. If our conversation is more dystopian than usual, it’s probably because we’re talking about Severance, the hit Apple TV+ show now in its second season. In the first series, we were introduced to Lumon Industries, where some workers, tasked with doing something unknown but probably malevolent with data, were willingly “severed”; their work selves detached from their outside selves, with no memory between the two. If the drama started as an off-kilter take on work-life balance, it soon morphed into something much darker.

Arquette plays Harmony Cobel, an icy and (mostly) controlled senior manager at Lumon before she was fired, then rehired. In the outside world, she is Mrs Selvig, neighbour of Mark, another Lumon employee (he is severed, she isn’t, and he doesn’t know she is his boss). Arquette wouldn’t say she likes Cobel as a character. “I feel sorry for her, in a way,” she says. “To be so indoctrinated by a thought system or organisation, whether it’s a religion, or a corporation or a military. Obviously, she’s done some things that are reprehensible, but like all people who do bad things, they always have reasons, excuses, for why they needed to do that thing.”

A forthcoming episode, which Arquette can’t talk about, explains a lot about why Cobel is as she is. It’s intense – the flashes of almost violent emotion we’ve already seen come out in a deluge – and Arquette is typically brilliant. It reinforced her sympathy for the characters. “I kind of feel sorry for everyone. There’s a lot of self-deception, a lot of wanting to belong, of wilful ignorance – and then just a lot of trickery and deception. That is never good.”

Selection of former Secret Service agent and author means two staunch Trump allies lead the principal federal law enforcement agency

Dan Bongino, a former US Secret Service agent who has written bestselling books, run unsuccessfully for office and gained fame as a conservative pundit with TV shows and a popular podcast, has been chosen to serve as the FBI’s deputy director.

President Donald Trump announced the appointment on Sunday night in a post on his Truth Social platform, praising Bongino as “a man of incredible love and passion for our country”. He called the announcement “great news for law enforcement and American justice”.

On a fairly subdued red carpet at the Screen Actors Guild awards, the cast of Wicked stood out in full fantasy regalia. Here’s a look at what the stars wore – including Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Timothée Chalamet, Monica Barbaro, Jeremy Allen White and Demi Moore

• Sag awards 2025: Timothée Chalamet, Demi Moore, Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña win major categories

How did Imam Muhsin change the lives of queer Muslims? Jamie Fullerton reports

“As a Muslim, you always question: ‘Have I pleased God, or have I angered him or her?’”

Imam Muhsin Hendricks of Cape Town, South Africa, was the world’s first openly gay imam. In early February, he was shot and killed and the identities and motives of those responsible are still unknown.

Results show CDU/CSU will be largest party but success of Alternative für Deutschland likely to complicate formation of a government

The conservative opposition has won the most votes in Germany’s general election, but a dramatic surge by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is likely to complicate the formation of a government to help spearhead a European response to growing global threats.

The CDU/CSU candidate, Friedrich Merz, was preparing on Sunday night to try to form a ruling coalition after clinching almost 29% of the vote from a high turnout.

From a fight over a $500bn minerals deal to Trump ‘surrendering to the Russians’ – here are the key US politics stories from Sunday at a glance

As Ukraine prepared to mark the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of the country, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he would be willing to step down if it meant peace or membership of Nato, something the US and some other Nato member states oppose. Zelenskyy insisted he wanted good, “friendly” relations with America – a “strategic partner” – and shrugged off Trump’s bruising description of him as a “dictator” for not holding elections during wartime.

But he also said that he would not sign a $500bn minerals deal proposed by the US. He said the figure was far higher than the US’s actual military contribution of $100bn.

All but handful of agency’s personnel around world to be placed on paid leave, according to notice sent to workers

The Trump administration on Sunday said it was placing all but a handful of USAid personnel around the world on paid administrative leave and eliminating about 2,000 of those positions in the US, according to a notice sent to agency workers and posted online.

“As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAid direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally,” the notice said.

Try a hybrid Mary-Jane-meets-ballerina flat for a shortcut to style this spring

Business secretary says negotiations – now in their 15th round – are a ‘top priority’ for Labour government

Ministers are relaunching negotiations with India this week in an attempt to clinch a multibillion-pound free trade agreement that they hope will boost the UK’s flatlining economy.

Jonathan Reynolds, the business and trade secretary, flew to Delhi on Sunday to meet his Indian counterpart, Piyush Goyal, for the first time since Labour won the election.