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The family of a British aid worker killed by an Israeli drone strike in Gaza have slammed the British government for refusing to release information about the attack gathered by a Royal Air Force (RAF) spy plane.

James Kirby, a 47-year-old former British Army rifleman, was working in Gaza for the World Central Kitchen when he was killed last April in an Israeli targeted attack on a three-car aid convoy. He died alongside several others, including two other British veterans.

The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) told The Times it had footage from a RAF spy plane that was flying over Gaza trying to locate Israeli captives on the day of the strike. The MoD refused to disclose the footage, citing national security and defence exemptions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially claimed the killing of the British aid workers last April was "unintentional". The Israeli military later dismissed two officers and reprimanded two senior commanders, saying a drone operator had mistakenly targeted the convoy.

But in an interview with The Times, the Kirby family slammed the military's investigation as a "whitewash" and called for an independent inquiry.

GENEVA (AP) — Top minds at the world’s largest atom smasher have released a blueprint for a much bigger successor that could vastly improve research into the remaining enigmas of physics.

The plans for the Future Circular Collider — a nearly 91-kilometer (56.5-mile) loop along the French-Swiss border and below Lake Geneva — published late Monday put the finishing details on a project roughly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The FCC would carry out high-precision experiments in the mid-2040s to study “known physics” in greater detail, then enter a second phase — planned for 2070 — that would conduct high-energy collisions of protons and heavy ions that would “open the door to the unknown,” said Giorgio Chiarelli, a research director at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics.

Should you have the world’s tiniest violin to hand, prepare to play it. This week, English councils gain the power to double council tax on second homes, and the holiday-cottage-owning classes are fuming. “Nothing but a racket,” thundered the Daily Telegraph, dismissing a supposedly “vindictive” raid on weekenders that was (gasp) “socialist” to boot.

Its Sunday sister paper further tugged on readers’ heartstrings with tales of homeowners who had inherited a second place somewhere lovely from their parents, and bridled at being asked to pay a few thousand pounds more a year to keep it in the family. In the Times, a retired barrister who felt forced to give up the seaside pad she had bought in her mother’s native St Davids complained of the tax “destroying generations of community-building”, as though houses sitting empty all winter were the one thing really guaranteed to bring a thriving community together. To which one can only say: people, learn to read a room(s). You’ve certainly got enough of them.

A Cyprus court’s acquittal of five men accused of abducting and raping a British woman in the resort of Ayia Napa has been met with outrage as calls mount for the verdict to be challenged.

Dismissing the charges on Monday, the three-member district court in Paralimni ruled the testimony of the 20-year-old had not been credible because it “lacked coherence and contained numerous substantial contradictions”. The defendants, Israelis aged between 19 and 20, claimed sexual contact with the woman had been consensual.

But her lawyer, Michael Polak, described the assertion as absurd. “The young lady in this case is gay, any suggestion that she voluntarily agreed to group sex with men she had never met before, who were speaking in a different language, is ridiculous,” he told the Guardian. “She has been left completely distraught by the court’s verdict today. It was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever had to make.”

In February, another British woman who also claimed she had been gang-raped in Ayia Napa by more than a dozen Israeli men in July 2019 won a “monumental victory” over Cypriot authorities after the Strasbourg-based tribunal ruled they had “failed in their obligation to effectively investigate the applicant’s complaint of rape”.

Berlin’s immigration authorities are moving to deport four young foreign residents on allegations related to participation in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, an unprecedented move that raises serious concerns over civil liberties in Germany.

The deportation orders, issued under German migration law, were made amid political pressure and over internal objections from the head of the state of Berlin’s immigration agency.

The internal strife arose because three of those targeted for deportation are citizens of European Union member states who normally enjoy freedom of movement between E.U. countries. None of the four has been convicted of any crimes.

“What we’re seeing here is straight out of the far right’s playbook,” said Alexander Gorski, a lawyer representing two of the protesters. “You can see it in the U.S. and Germany, too: Political dissent is silenced by targeting the migration status of protesters.”

Berlin’s immigration authorities are moving to deport four young foreign residents on allegations related to participation in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, an unprecedented move that raises serious concerns over civil liberties in Germany.

The deportation orders, issued under German migration law, were made amid political pressure and over internal objections from the head of the state of Berlin’s immigration agency.

The internal strife arose because three of those targeted for deportation are citizens of European Union member states who normally enjoy freedom of movement between E.U. countries. None of the four has been convicted of any crimes.

“What we’re seeing here is straight out of the far right’s playbook,” said Alexander Gorski, a lawyer representing two of the protesters. “You can see it in the U.S. and Germany, too: Political dissent is silenced by targeting the migration status of protesters.”

It was the town hall that wasn’t supposed to happen.

For the better part of two hours Friday night, pissed-off Hoosiers jeered, chanted, and booed at Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., one of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s most fervent supporters in Congress.

It was a case in point for why senior Republican leaders have advised their members against holding such events at all.

Spartz, however, is often at odds with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. She plowed through the taunts as a crowd outside shouted, “Do your job!” Inside, the crowd roared in anger at mentions of Elon Musk and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Brian Jonasen, an Air Force veteran who has helped organize protests at the Indiana Statehouse, said, “The one thing we hope that maybe she takes back with her is that the people are mad. They are angry.”

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — A U.S. armored vehicle that went missing in Lithuania has been retrieved from a swamp after a six-day search but there is still no information about the fate of the four American soldiers who were on board, Lithuanian officials said Monday.

“The armored vehicle was pulled ashore at 4:40 a.m., the towing operation is complete, Lithuanian Military Police and US investigators continue their work,” Defense Minister Dovilė Šakalienė said Monday morning in a post on Facebook.

The soldiers were on a training exercise at the massive General Silvestras Žukauskas training ground in the town of Pabradė when they and their vehicle were reported missing in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the U.S. army said.

In Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day.

I served in Gaza for nine months, and first came across these procedures, called "mosquito protocol" in December 2023. It was only two months into the ground offensive, long before there was a shortage of dogs from the IDF's canine unit, Oketz, who were used for this purpose. This became the insane, unofficial excuse for this insane, unofficial procedure. I didn't realize then how ubiquitous using human shields, whom we referred to as a "shawish," would become.

Today, almost every platoon keeps a "shawish," and no infantry force enters a house before a "shawish" clears it. This means there are four "shawishes" in a company, twelve in a battalion, and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.

I recently saw that the IDF's Military Police Criminal Investigation Division opened six investigations into the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, and my jaw dropped. I've seen cover-ups before, but this is a new low.

If the MPCID wanted to do its job seriously, it would have to open far more than even a thousand investigations. But all the MPCID wants is for us to be able to tell ourselves and the world that we're investigating ourselves, so they've found six scapegoats and are pinning it all on them.

On Wednesday, the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, said in its latest update that Israel’s ban on entry of aid has continued for nearly a month and that no aid entered the enclave throughout this period. All requests by humanitarian agencies to coordinate access with Israeli authorities have been denied.

Helles recalled when the blockade was imposed. The shops were empty within hours, and what was left was too expensive, she said. Even the charity distributions, which once offered a variety of meals, have dwindled, now providing only small servings of rice at the time of Iftar.

After days of eating little more than rice, Huda couldn’t sleep at night, suffering from severe stomach pain and colic. She was diagnosed with a stomach infection two weeks ago.