HellsBelle

The unthinkable has happened. The US is Europe’s adversary. The stark, profound betrayal contained in the Trump administration’s national security strategy should stop any further denial and dithering in Europe’s capitals. Cultivating “resistance Europe’s current trajectory in European nations” is now Washington’s stated policy.

But contained within this calamity is the gift of clarity. Europe will fight or it will perish. The good news is that Europe holds strong cards.

The US’s bet on AI is now so gigantic that every Maga voter’s pension is bound to the bubble’s precarious survival. AI investment now rivals consumer spending as the primary creator of American economic growth. It accounted for virtually all (92%) GDP growth in the first half of this year. Without it, US GDP grew only 0.1%. Despite Donald Trump’s posturing, he is on shaky economic ground.

Trump’s political coalition is shaky, too. In July and again this month, he has been unable to force Senate Republicans to pass his AI moratorium bill, which would have prevented states from drafting their own AI laws. The Steve Bannon wing of Maga fears that AI will displace workers en masse, and is appalled by what children are exposed to on digital platforms. Maga voters particularly mistrust big tech’s political power. Tech is a dangerous topic for Trump.

Across the world, desperate parents of sick or dying children are being exploited by online scam campaigns, the BBC World Service has discovered. The public have given money to the campaigns, which claim to be fundraising for life-saving treatment. We have identified 15 families who say they got little to nothing of the funds raised and often had no idea the campaigns had even been published, despite undergoing harrowing filming.

Nine families we spoke to - whose campaigns appear to be products of the same scam network - say they never received anything at all of the $4m (£2.9m) apparently raised in their names.

A whistleblower from this network told us they had looked for "beautiful children" who "had to be three to nine years old… without hair".

We have identified a key player in the scam as an Israeli man living in Canada called Erez Hadari.

Almost 90 flights linked to Jeffrey Epstein arrived at and departed from UK airports, some with British women on board who say they were abused by the billionaire, a BBC investigation has found.

We have established that three British women who were allegedly trafficked appear in Epstein's records of flights in and out of the UK and other documents related to the convicted sex offender.

US lawyers representing hundreds of Epstein victims told the BBC it was "shocking" that there has never been a "full-scale UK investigation" into his activities on the other side of the Atlantic.

The UK was one of the "centrepieces" of Epstein's operations, one said.

Alexandra Ching has lived in Bondi her whole life, describing the iconic beach nearby as her back yard. On Sunday evening, like many residents in the area, she heard pops echo through the neighbourhood and thought they were fireworks.

“Everyone did, but I thought it was too light and no one could see them, so what’s the point,” Ching tells the Guardian. She left her apartment to see people “streaming up Bondi Road”. When she saw the looks on their faces, she knew something was wrong.

As Ching stood on the road speaking with a couple who had run up the hill, still dripping wet in their swimmers, she heard someone come up behind her. It was a lifeguard sprinting towards Bondi, barefoot, from neighbouring Tamarama beach – about 1.5km away – carrying a defibrillator.

“I heard someone say ‘excuse me’, and as I turned I just saw this flash of blue,” she recounts. “He was just flying past. It was just him running in the direction that everyone was trying to escape from, carrying that big kit and barefoot … He’s running at something that surely every fibre in your being, you know, would tell you to go in the other direction."

A super-complaint has been filed against police forces in England and Wales over years-long delays in investigating sexual offences.

More than 37,000 sexual offence investigations have taken longer than three years to conclude over the past decade, campaigners said.

Sexual offence cases taking more than three years to investigate have increased more than sevenfold over the past 10 years, from 533 in 2014-15 to 4,008 in 2024-25, according to freedom of information requests submitted by the organisations to the Home Office and police forces across England and Wales. At the end of March 2025, there were almost 14,000 investigations that had been open for more than three years, the organisations said.

Their research found that investigations lasting between three and four years had increased from 137 cases in 2014-15 to 2,261 cases in 2024-25.

Cuts to US aid funding have directly led to the closure of more than 1,000 family planning clinics, new figures shared with the Guardian reveal.

Millions of people have been left without access to contraceptives or care, including those who have suffered sexual assault, as part of a “radical shift towards conservative ideologies that deliberately block human rights”, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

A survey of its member associations found that approximately 1,394 service delivery points, or clinics, have been shut down, including 1,175 in Africa, and that 34 had laid off staff as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts, representing at least 969 job losses.

Campaigners say the cuts have emboldened anti-rights groups, reporting a rise in rhetoric opposing abortion and access to contraception for teenagers.

A mass shooting in which 15 people were killed during a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney's Bondi Beach was "a terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State," Australia's federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett said Tuesday.

The suspects were a father and son, aged 50 and 24, authorities have said. The older man was shot dead while his son was being treated at a hospital on Tuesday.

A news conference by political and law enforcement leaders on Tuesday was the first time officials confirmed their beliefs about the suspects' ideologies.

North Korea sent troops to clear mines in Russia’s Kursk region earlier this year, leader Kim Jong-un said in a speech carried on Saturday by state media, a rare acknowledgement by Pyongyang of the deadly tasks assigned to its deployed soldiers.

According to South Korean and western intelligence agencies, North Korea has sent thousands of troops to support Russia’s nearly four-year invasion of Ukraine.

Analysts say Russia is giving North Korea financial aid, military technology, food and energy supplies in return, allowing the diplomatically isolated nation to sidestep tough international sanctions on its nuclear and missile programmes.

The British government threatened to defund the international criminal court and leave the Rome statute that set it up if it pressed ahead with plans to issue an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, the ICC’s prosecutor, has claimed.

Karim Khan made the allegation in a submission to the court defending his decision to prosecute Israel’s prime minister.

Khan does not name the individual who made the threats, saying the call on 23 April 2024 was with a British official, but reports have suggested the caller may have been the then British foreign secretary, David Cameron. Khan said the official had argued that issuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defence minister, was disproportionate.

Under a UN treaty, all ships above a certain tonnage must have an onboard tracker called an Automatic Identification System (AIS). These trackers broadcast information about the ships, including their location, and can be followed on websites like MarineTraffic.

But there is an incomplete and misleading public record of the Skipper's movements. According to MarineTraffic, the Skipper's last known port call was at Soroosh in Iran on 9 July, where it arrived after stopping in Iraq and the UAE.

But Kpler suggests that this is part of a pattern of misleading entries by the Skipper. Analysts at the firm said the ship had previously loaded crude oil from Venezuela and Iran, while falsifying its position via its onboard tracker, a process known as spoofing.

Meta has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion access providers, queer groups and reproductive health organisations in the past weeks in what campaigners call one of the “biggest waves of censorship” on its platforms in years.

The takedowns and restrictions began in October and targeted the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts of more than 50 organisations worldwide, some serving tens of thousands of people – in what appears to be a growing push by Meta to limit reproductive health and queer content across its platforms. Many of these were from Europe and the UK, however the bans also affected groups serving women in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Repro Uncensored, an NGO tracking digital censorship against movements focused on gender, health and justice, said that it had tracked 210 incidents of account removals and severe restrictions affecting these groups this year, compared with 81 last year.

Meta denied an escalating trend of censorship. “Every organisation and individual on our platforms is subject to the same set of rules, and any claims of enforcement based on group affiliation or advocacy are baseless,” it said in a statement, adding that its policies on abortion-related content had not changed.

A child bride who was due to be executed this month in Iran over the death of her husband has had her life spared by his parents, who were paid the equivalent of £70,000 in exchange for their forgiveness.

Goli Kouhkan, 25, has been on death row in Gorgan central prison in northern Iran for the past seven years. At the age of 18 she was arrested over allegedly participating in the killing of her abusive husband, Alireza Abil, in May 2018, and sentenced to qisas – retribution-in-kind.

Forced to marry her cousin at 12, Kouhkan became pregnant at 13 and gave birth to a son. She suffered physical and emotional abuse for years. On the day her husband was killed, Kouhkan found him beating their son, then aged five. She called her husband’s cousin, Mohammad Abil, for help. When he arrived a fight broke out which resulted in the death of her husband. According to Iran Human Rights, Abil remains on death row.

Kouhkan’s lawyer confirmed in a post on Instagram on 9 December that the original sum of 10bn tomans had been reduced to 8bn tomans and that amount had been raised through donations. In a video published by Mizan News Agency, Kouhkan’s parents-in-law are seen signing documents.