Pan Europe found several pesticide residues in 85% of apples, with some showing traces of up to seven chemicals

Environmental groups have raised the alarm after finding toxic “pesticide cocktails” in apples sold across Europe.

Pan Europe, a coalition of NGOs campaigning against pesticide use, had about 60 apples bought in 13 European countries – including France, Spain, Italy and Poland – analysed for chemical residues.

The unnamed official viewed ‘territorial issues like real estate’, a senior Ukrainian official claimed

Paros, US Travel Editor Ted Thornhill discovers, remains under the radar despite its indisputable charms

Xavier Bettel was not happy with the Ukrainian president’s repeated requests to allow Ukraine by 2027

EU enlargement commissioner Marta Kos also strongly criticised Russia for its continuing attacks on Ukraine.

Arriving for the EU foreign affairs council this morning, she said:

“The news we are getting from Ukraine nearly every morning are horrific. What Russia is doing. There is a state terror. It’s far beyond the war [as] they are bombing people while they are at home, freezing to death, [and] bombing passenger trains …”

“I can’t speak about the years; [as] I was saying there is some level of fundamentals which have to be fulfilled. But of course, we also have to consider the very important historical moments. So we will discuss with the member states how to bridge the time we need for the accession process, and of course, to react to this situation.”

“We will work until the end to get the unanimity we need for this process. This is the only way we have to keep going, working also with the Hungary, and this is what we are doing.”

“After more than a decade of hostilities and almost four years of full-scale war, the people of Ukraine continue to endure immense suffering. Daily civilian casualties, widespread infrastructure destruction, and mass displacement are further exacerbating the massive humanitarian needs.

With Russia’s ongoing attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, millions in the country are exposed to freezing temperatures.”

The ‘mother of all deals’ is as much about the tariff-heavy geopolitics of the Trump era as it is about bilateral trade

The year was 2007. Steve Jobs had announced the launch of the first iPhone, the sub-prime mortgage crisis was bubbling up in the US, the EU had enlarged to include Romania and Bulgaria, and India had for the first time become a trillion-dollar economy. This was when trade talks between Delhi and Brussels were initiated for the first time. But it wouldn’t be until this very week, almost 20 years later, that a deal was signed after a few final months of unusually accelerated negotiations.

On Tuesday, the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Council António Costa and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced the “mother of all deals”, which promises to bring together about 2 billion consumers and a quarter of the world’s GDP. The agreement opens parts of India’s famously protectionist domestic market with a focus on exporting manufacturing and services; in return, middle-class Indian consumers will find it cheaper to buy European cars and wine. The overarching EU-India comprehensive strategic agenda is really much larger in scope, taking in defence and security, commitments to multilateralism, mobility and cooperation in a range of areas.

Ravinder Kaur is professor of Asian studies at the University of Copenhagen and is writing a book about the history of the global south

The Kremlin has dismissed the report, claiming figures from the Center for Strategic and International Studies were unreliable

Workers claim they were threatened with 10-year jail terms and beaten

Moscow has largely relied on what it describes as voluntary enlistment

The report said Russia suffered 1.2 million casualties, including up to 325,000 troop deaths, between February 2022 and December 2025

Manners and respect are the norm for kids here. Treating them like a nuisance won’t do anything to help France’s declining birthrate

In French culture, seven is known as “l’âge de raison”, the age at which children know right from wrong and can take some moral responsibility. France’s national rail operator, it seems, puts the age at which a child can be trusted to behave in a non-annoying way onboard a train a bit higher.

In launching its new Optimum plus tariff earlier this month, offering spaces onboard its weekday TGV trains between Paris and Lyon with bigger, more comfortable seats, fancy food and no under-12s, SNCF was trying to appeal to the many business travellers who make that journey. But the move has sparked a backlash and a philosophical debate about the place of children in society, against the backdrop of a worrying decline in French birthrates. “We can’t on one hand say that we are not having enough children and on the other hand try to exclude them from everywhere,” argues Sarah El Haïry, France’s high commissioner for childhood.

Helen Massy-Beresford is a British journalist and editor who lives in Paris

Couple killed near Kyiv and apartment block hit while US says territorial issue of Donetsk ‘very difficult’ to resolve. What we know on day 1,436

Russia has hit cities across Ukraine with drones and a missile, killing a couple near the capital of Kyiv one day after five people died in an attack on a passenger train. The attack came ahead of a fresh round of peace talks due at the weekend. Officials said four people, including two children, sought medical attention after the strikes overnight to Wednesday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack on the apartment block, as well as another strike with short-range rockets on what he described as a residential area without military targets in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia. “We will respond fairly to Russia for this and other similar attacks,” he wrote on social media. Russian strikes on other locations across the country included the southern port city of Odesa as well as the central city of Kryvyi Rih.

The territorial issue of Donetsk is “very difficult” to resolve, the US secretary of state has said, saying there is active work under way to reconcile the issue at US-mediated talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. “It’s still a bridge we have to cross,” Marco Rubio said on Wednesday. “It’s still a gap, but at least we’ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one,” he told a US Senate foreign relations committee hearing, referring to the eastern Ukrainian region where Moscow wants Kyiv to surrender land. Rubio said the US may the join the new Russia-Ukraine talks this week but that said US participation would be more junior than last week when Donald Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner joined negotiations in Abu Dhabi that were Ukrainian and Russian officials’ first face-to-face talks on Trump’s plan to end the war.

Life will be particularly tough for Ukrainians over the next three weeks due to plunging temperatures and intense Russian attacks on the energy system that have already deprived millions of light and heat, a senior lawmaker said on Wednesday. “The bad news is that there will indeed be frosts, and it will be difficult,” Andriy Gerus, the head of the parliament’s energy committee, told the national TV channel, Marathon. “The good news is that we need to hold out for three weeks, and then it will get easier,” he added, citing predicted warmer temperatures and increased solar power from longer days.

Russian strikes against Odesa have escalated sharply in recent months as conflict centred on the Black Sea has heated up again after it had settled into stalemate, Peter Beaumont reports from the southern Ukrainian city. The biggest recent strike – on 13 December, in which 160 drones and missiles targeted energy infrastructure – left large parts of the city without water and electricity for days on end, marking the beginning of a period of almost daily attacks.

Ukraine has urged the European Union not to be afraid of taking “physical” action against Russia’s “shadow fleet”, pointing to the example of Venezuela-linked oil tankers seized by the US. Visiting Berlin, the Ukrainian presidency’s special representative for sanctions, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, also said on Wednesday that work was still needed on western components found in Russian weapons, which he said was proof that Moscow was circumventing sanctions. Calling for “robust actions”, he said that only increased pressure on Russia could help with negotiations to bring the war to an end. The volume of oil transported in 2025 by Russia’s “shadow fleet” – a flotilla of old oil tankers that aim to get around international sanctions – was the same as the previous year, Vlasiuk said.