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At least 12 Palestinians killed and several hurt in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza

At least 12 Palestinians were killed and several more injured across the Gaza Strip on Sunday as the Israeli military said it carried out airstrikes in response to ceasefire violations by Hamas. The Gaza civil defence agency said five people were killed and several others hurt when an airstrike targeted a tent sheltering displaced people in the northern city of Jabaliya. According to the agency, which operates as a rescue force under Hamas authorities, five more people were killed and several injured in a separate early morning strike in the southern city of Khan Younis. It said one more person was killed after Israeli shelling in Gaza City, while one person was killed by Israeli gunfire in Beit Lahia. Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesperson in Gaza, accused Israel of committing a new massacre against displaced Palestinians, calling it a serious breach of the ceasefire days before the first meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. Trump urged Hamas to move forward with disarmament under his plan for postwar Gaza on Sunday and said members of the Board of Peace had pledged $5bn (£3.7bn) towards the Palestinian territory’s reconstruction. Despite a US-brokered truce that entered its second phase last month, violence has continued in Gaza, with Israel and Hamas accusing each other of violating the agreement. Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals confirmed they had received the bodies of at least seven people. “Israel doesn’t understand ceasefires or truces,” Osama Abu Askar, who lost his nephew in the Jabaliya attack, told Agence France-Presse. He said the people killed there were hit as they slept. “We’ve been living under a truce for months and they’ve still targeted us. Israel operates on this principle – saying one thing and doing another,” Askar added. Dozens of relatives and mourners gathered at Nasser hospital where the bodies of some of those killed were laid out in white shrouds. Men and women stood in prayer before the funeral, facing the corpses in the hospital compound. A military official said Israeli forces attacked in response to Hamas violations of the ceasefire agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, which took effect on 10 October, Israeli troops withdrew to positions behind a so-called yellow line, although they remain in control of more than half the territory. “The violation included an identification of several armed terrorists who took cover under debris east of the yellow line and adjacent to IDF troops, likely after exiting underground infrastructure in the area,” the official said. “Crossing the yellow line in the vicinity of IDF troops, while armed is an explicit ceasefire violation and demonstrates how Hamas systematically violates the ceasefire agreement with intent to harm the troops.” Israel has unilaterally moved the yellow line deeper into Gaza even though Israeli withdrawals are part of the ceasefire deal, and Hamas has so far rejected demands to lay down its weapons, also part of the plan. Israel has said it will have to force Hamas to disarm if it does not do so voluntarily. Gaza’s health ministry has said at least 601 people have been killed since the truce began. The Israeli military said at least four of its soldiers had been killed in the same period. Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report

‘People want to help’: Canadians rally round Tumbler Ridge after school shooting

When Jim Caruso heard the news of the school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, he knew immediately he needed to be there. He packed his bags and boarded a plane for the community 700 miles away. “I wanted to be here to bring some level of comfort,” he said. “I wanted to hug people, pray for them and, most importantly, to cry with them.” On Tuesday, a shooter opened fire in the town’s secondary school, killing eight people, most of them young children. It was one of the deadliest attacks in Canada’s history and has left the country reeling. But it has also elicited a wave of support for the British Columbia town from across Canada, in the form of civic resources, grief and trauma counsellors, therapy animals, food and donations. Hotels are fully booked, pushing new arrivals to towns more than a hour’s drive away. Caruso, who retired four years ago, worked as a paramedic, pastor and police chaplain – a career at the nexus of grief, tragedy and compassion that he said made him suited to the moment. “It’s hard but I’m wired for this. I spent my life with first responders. And so I know the police, firefighters, paramedics – they’re just wrecked. They’re destroyed,” he said. “But so are the people here in Tumbler Ridge. And how they’re cared for right now is so important.” On Friday, police said the shooter had been, “for lack of a better term, hunting”. Armed with two guns, “they were prepared and engaging anybody and everybody they could come in contact with”. Investigators have identified the suspect as Jesse Van Rootselaar. Police said Van Rootselaar is a transgender woman. The prime minister, Mark Carney, who travelled to Tumbler Ridge with other federal party leaders in a show of national unity, praised the heroism of first responders and the courage of students and teachers who had been trapped in the school as the shooter stalked the halls.. “Standing here together in your home, we wanted you to hear that Canadians are with you and we will always be with you,” Carney said. “Whatever portion of your sadness that Canadians can bear to help you ease your heavy load, we will gladly do so.” Caruso said the grim details of the attack would add a layer to how counsellors and support workers would help victims and the broader community navigate the unpredictable and turbulent nature of grief. “It’s not like there was a car accident. It’s not like it’s a terminal illness. This was murder. Someone did this in cold blood. And as a result, something innocent was stolen,” he said. “I’ve learned over the years that life will go on. But it will also take a piece of you.” Caruso and his wife intend to spend the next months in town to help residents rebuild emotionally. “It’s hard to not to ask what if I had been here earlier, if we could have been here to bring compassion,” he said. “But there is hope. It might not feel like there is for the parents who lost their kids, or the victims that are gone. But there’s hope for those that remain. That’s what funerals are all about. It’s not for the person that’s gone. It’s for the people around you.” Speaking at a vigil, Carney said Tumbler Ridge was defined by people who cared for each other. “You held each other – as you’re holding each other right now. This is grace. It’s what we do for each other; it’s what we receive from each other,” he said. “Open hearts when the world falls apart.” That the tragedy occurred in a community of less than 2,500 people means first responders knew the victims and not a single person was untouched by loss. In a part of the province known as the Peace region, when the residents of Tumbler Ridge hurt, the pain is felt deeply nearby. “I just wanted to be part of the solution and to do whatever I could to help people,” said Milo MacDonald, the city manager of nearby Fort St John, who had recently arrived in Tumbler Ridge with colleagues. “There’s an awful lot of people right now that want to help. They want to reduce suffering.” Neighbouring communities are sending large-scale resources and small gestures that have an outsized impact. MacDonald said lifeguards and skating technicians had been sent down from his community to ensure places such as the community swimming pool and ice rink could remain open for children. MacDonald, who worked as a police officer for 25 years, including relief stints in Tumbler Ridge, said he was devastated by the horror inflicted on a group of “genuinely good” people. “I experienced tragedies as a police officer, but never anything close to this magnitude,” he said. “And I’ll admit it’s incredibly hard because my sons are a similar age. My hope is that these kinds of things make us focus on our humanity and our common ground. In moments like this you need a confirmation of humanity.” While the droves of people arriving from outside the community have overwhelmed the town’s infrastructure, their presence is nonetheless welcomed by residents. Lynn Way, 82, who has lived in the town for more than three decades, said: “When I lost my son not too long ago, I wanted to just shut the world out. I wanted to just die. He didn’t want a service but I had a get-together and people came from all over. People I didn’t even know. I knew then how much my son was loved. And they wanted to come and let me know. That’s what’s happening in this town right now.” Way said there was a “heaviness” in the air when she stepped outside, but Tumbler Ridge was still a safe town. “You can still leave your door unlocked. That hasn’t changed. This town will get through it, but those poor people that lost their children and their loved ones, it’s going to take longer. That’s a fact of life. All we can do is just say: ‘Hey, if you need something, I’m here for you.’” In recent days, a logo with mountain peaks and a red heart has appeared with the words Tumbler Ridge Strong, a nod to the collective resilience needed in the town and a confidence that it exists within each resident. “What feels so hard right now is that none of this is real,” Way said. “It won’t be real until the first funeral. Then you see the grief you never thought possible. When you lose someone close to you, it takes a year before you can really live with it. And you do. But you don’t ever forget. Ever.”

Sir Nick White obituary

The idea that a traditional Chinese herbal treatment could be the answer to drug-resistant malaria was tough to swallow for many policymakers in global health. With a combination of dogged persistence, commitment to communities in affected countries and impeccable research design, Nick White changed their minds. He led a campaign to make antimalarial drug combinations containing artemisinin, extracted in China from a common plant, the globally recommended treatment for the most common form of malaria. Millions of lives have been saved as a result. White, who has died aged 74, embodied an approach to research that entailed a deep personal engagement with the health needs of patients in tropical countries, making Thailand his home for most of his adult life and speaking the language fluently. He trained and mentored numerous doctors and researchers in malaria-endemic countries, many of whom have become leaders themselves. Yet he was also indefatigable in his advocacy for those without a voice, sitting on high profile advisory committees and putting pressure on governments and the World Health Organization to eliminate poor practice. Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites, transmitted by mosquito bites. Three-quarters of those it kills are children under the age of five, mostly in Africa. By the mid-1970s, parasites were developing resistance to the available drug treatments. Testing traditional remedies for alternatives, Chinese scientists successfully extracted artemisinin from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) and found evidence that it could inhibit malaria parasites. White first learned about this work soon after he arrived at the newly established Mahidol-Oxford Research Unit (MORU) in Bangkok in 1980. He immediately went to China and came back with a sample to test. Over the next two decades he led studies of artemisinin and its semi-synthetic version artesunate, often in challenging locations such as camps for displaced people on the Thai-Myanmar border. As MORU’s director from 1986, White developed a network of research units in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar, and collaborative research sites across Asia and Africa. His aims were humanitarian as much as scientific. Local partnerships working with the MORU researchers set up free clinics for mothers, and so gained the trust of the community to participate in clinical trials on pregnant women, babies and children. The work of the network encompassed a wide range of other tropical diseases, as well as social and behavioural topics such as the trade in falsified and substandard medicines that promotes drug resistance. Artemisinin was fast acting and effective, but its effects could wear off quickly. “Nick’s insight was then to add a longer-acting drug, which lasts weeks or even months,” said Nick Day, who succeeded White as director of MORU in 2003. Early trials with these artemisinin combination therapies in Asia in the 90s found that they cured 98% of uncomplicated cases, reduced rates of infection and were safer than the alternatives. But White was frustrated by how long it took to gain official endorsement. “He had a can-do attitude, and really hated bureaucracy,” said Day. WHO finally recommended their use in 2006. White and his colleagues subsequently proved that injected artesunate could reduce the death rate of children with severe malaria by between a third and a quarter compared with quinine, and in 2010 WHO updated its guidelines accordingly. After health ministries around the world adopted the new guidelines, aided by international donors such as the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, malaria deaths peaked around the year 2000 and fell by more than a third by 2015. The 2006 WHO guidelines included the optimistic statement that the new therapies “are unlikely to be affected by resistance in the near future”. Sadly that assessment was premature. As early as 2009, MORU’s network of researchers spotted that malaria parasites on the Thai-Cambodian border had already evolved to resist combination therapies. White was instrumental in setting up the Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network that year, serving as its first chair (2009-16). WWARN has since documented the further spread of resistance throughout Asia and into Africa, and death rates are on the rise again. At the time of White’s death he was working on trials of triple combinations, artemisinin plus two other drugs. “He would have really good ideas all the time of how to improve things,” says Day. Riding pillion on Day’s motorbike in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in the early 90s, “the whole journey from the hospital to our house, he would just be spouting ideas for things to do. And he was also really funny.” White acted as MORU’s in-house cartoonist, creating their Christmas cards, and, according to his daughter Rebecca, “he relished opportunities to carry off an April Fools’ prank”. Born in London, Nick was the eldest of three children of John White, an RAF armament officer, and his wife Eileen (nee Millard), who worked in the joint intelligence bureau at the Air Ministry during the second world war. He underwent surgery for pyloric stenosis at four days old and remained in delicate health for a few years. Once he became stronger the family moved with his father’s postings to places including Malta and Anglesey, in north Wales. When Nick was nine they moved to Singapore, and he became fascinated by the tropical plants he encountered on walks in the jungles of Malaya (now Malaysia). To his resentment he was sent back to the UK to board at St John’s college in Southsea, Hampshire, run by the De La Salle Brothers, returning to Singapore only for the summer holidays. Though not a churchgoer in adult life, he continued to see himself as Catholic, while also absorbing Buddhist influences from his Thai environment. White trained in medicine at Guy’s hospital medical school, qualifying in 1974 with the gold medal for the University of London’s top-performing medical student. Influenced by his childhood experiences in the tropics, in 1980 he joined the research team at MORU, a Wellcome Trust-funded partnership between Mahidol University in Bangkok and Oxford University’s Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health. Director of its research programme from 1986 to 2002, he became chairman of Wellcome’s Southeast Asian Tropical Medicine Research Programmes from 2001. Concurrently he held chairs in tropical medicine at Mahidol University (from 1995) and Oxford University (from 1996), where he returned from Thailand for a month each year to serve as a consultant in general medicine. He was in Oxford undergoing treatment for cancer at the time of his death. In his few leisure hours he was a keen sports fan and sportsman, playing squash and cricket at clubs in Bangkok. He loved blues music and played both electric and acoustic guitars. He and his wife Jitda, known as Joom, an artist whom he married in 1997, were passionate about wildlife conservation, and turned the garden of their cottage near Oxford into a nature reserve. Wild birds that they had rescued as fledglings had the run of their houses in both Oxford and Bangkok, and he bought tracts of woodland in Thailand and the UK to preserve them from development. White was appointed OBE in 1999 and knighted in 2017, and won many other honours including the Gairdner global health award in 2010 and Thailand’s Prince Mahidol award in 2011. His modesty was such that you would find no record of any of these on his institutional web pages. White is survived by Joom and their daughter Jitrachote, known as Mod, by his daughters Rebecca and Harriet from his previous marriage to Maren Lonergan, a nurse, which ended in divorce, and by his grandchildren Rose, Jesse, Aaran, Ida and Jinta. • Nicholas John White, consultant physician and infectious disease researcher, born 13 March 1951; died 1 February 2026

Rallies held across the world in support of Iran’s anti-government protesters

Hundreds of thousands of people have taken part in rallies around the world to show their solidarity with anti-government demonstrators in Iran whose continued protests have been met with brutal and deadly repression. On Saturday, Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, addressed a crowd of 200,000 people in Munich, telling them he was ready to lead the country to a “secular democratic future”. Pahlavi urged Iranians at home and abroad to continue demonstrating, calling on them to chant slogans from their homes and rooftops at 8pm (4.30pm UK time) on Saturday and Sunday to coincide with the protests in Germany and elsewhere. Thousands more people took part in solidarity demonstrations in cities including Los Angeles, Washington, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Lisbon, Sydney and London. Washington is preparing for a fresh round of talks with Iranian government representatives in Geneva this week despite Trump’s insistence that a change of power in Tehran would be the “best thing”. Pahlavi – who is based in the US and who has not returned to Iran since before the 1979 Islamic revolution that ousted the monarchy – told the crowd in Munich that he could lead a democratic handover. “I am here to guarantee a transition to a secular democratic future,” he said. “I am committed to be the leader of transition for you so we can one day have the final opportunity to decide the fate of our country through a democratic, transparent process to the ballot box.” One protester, a 62-year-old who is originally from Iran and gave his named only as Said, told Agence France-Presse (AFP): “The Iranian regime is a dead regime. It must be game over.” Speaking on Friday as he sent a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East to ratchet up military pressure on Tehran, Trump said a change of government in Iran would be the “best thing that could happen”. Trump had earlier threatened military intervention to support a wave of protests in Iran that peaked in January and were met by a violent crackdown that rights groups say killed thousands. Although Trump had initially said the US was “locked and loaded” to help demonstrators when the government crackdown began, he has since focused his military threats on Tehran’s nuclear programme, which US forces struck last June during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran. Representatives of Iran and the US, which have had no diplomatic relations since shortly after the 1979 revolution, held talks on the nuclear programme last week in Oman. On Sunday, a Swiss foreign ministry spokesperson told AFP that Oman would host talks in Geneva next week. Videos verified by AFP showed people in Iran this week chanting anti-government slogans despite the crackdown, as the clerical leadership celebrated the anniversary of the Islamic revolution. According to the US-based Human Rights Activists’ News Agency, at least 7,010 people, mostly protesters, were killed in the crackdown, though they and other rights groups say the toll is likely far higher. It said more than 53,845 people had been arrested. The Iranian opposition remains divided and Pahlavi has faced criticism for his support for Israel and making a highly publicised visit in 2023 that fractured an attempt to unify opposition camps. He has also never distanced himself from his father’s autocratic rule. Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

EU foreign policy chief criticises ‘fashionable euro-bashing’ by US

The EU’s foreign policy chief has denied claims levelled by the US that Europe is facing civilisational erasure, rejecting what she condemned as “fashionable euro-bashing” by Washington. Kaja Kallas also said the US was discovering that it could not settle the war in Ukraine without Europe’s involvement and consent. Her remarks capped a difficult three-day Munich Security Conference attended by world leaders and security officials in which the health of the transatlantic alliance, a stronger European pillar inside Nato, and the Ukraine peace talks dominated discussions. In his speech on Saturday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, laced a more diplomatic tone with a firm message that Washington would only work alongside Europe if it changed to accommodate US leadership on mass migration, free trade and greater European defence spending. Kallas, speaking on the last day of the conference, suggested some of Rubio’s remarks were directed at a domestic audience. “Euro-bashing” was now “very fashionable” despite all “the good things that Europe actually has to offer,” Kallas said. “When I travel around the world, I see countries that look up to us because we represent values that are still highly regarded. “Contrary to what some may say, woke, decadent Europe is not facing civilisational erasure. In fact, people still want to join our club, and not just fellow Europeans. In Canada, I was told over 40% of Canadians have an interest in joining the EU.” She challenged the US criticism of media freedom in Europe, pointing out that her own country, Estonia, ranked second in the world press freedom index and the US 58th. Given the EU’s record on human rights, she said, she found some of the criticisms very hard to take. “We are, you know, pushing humanity forward, trying to defend human rights and all this, which is actually bringing also prosperity for people. So that’s why it’s very hard for me to believe these accusations.” Kallas, a fierce opponent of Russia, has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration. She said she did not think the EU was ready to give Ukraine a date for membership, suggesting accession as early as 2027 is unrealistic. The previous day, Rubio made an emotional but highly conditional offer of a new partnership, insisting the two continents belonged together and describing America as “a child of Europe”. In a much-anticipated speech, he said the US was intent on building a new world order, adding: “While we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.” Admitting the Americans may come across as a little direct and urgent, he said this was only because the US was profoundly concerned by the fate of Europe and knew their destinies were intertwined. Rubio travelled to Bratislava in Slovakia after the conference where he skirted around why the US intelligence agencies had not been involved in the report prepared by five European intelligence agencies, including the UK’s, that found the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had been poisoned. The agencies concluded he was poisoned with a toxin derived from dart frogs found in South America, and accused the Russian state of being responsible. When asked why the US had not joined the statement, Rubio said this had been an endeavour by the agencies. “Those countries came to that conclusion. They coordinated that. We chose – doesn’t mean we disagree with the outcome. We just, it wasn’t our endeavour. Sometimes, countries go out and do their thing based on the intelligence they’ve gathered,” Rubio said. Keir Starmer said on Saturday that cooperation between the UK and the US on intelligence was closer than ever.

Offer to join Trump’s new era is met with growing sense of European steeliness

If JD Vance’s thuggish speech to last year’s Munich Security Conference, directed at the solar plexus of Europe, marked the moment when a transatlantic breakup started, this weekend’s conference, in a rainy and cold Bavaria, was where the debate about the terms of the divorce settlement got under way. Marco Rubio, the chosen Washington representative this year, is a diplomat, so he softened the Trumpian tone with references to German beer, the Beatles, Dante and the Mayflower. But his speech was a stern warning that if Europe wanted to continue on its path of civilisational decline, as this US administration sees it, America would not be interested and has different hemispheres on which to focus. “Yesterday is over,” he said, and then he spelled out what yesterday meant. Mass migration threatening civilisational erasure and the continuity of Christian culture, unfettered trade, massive welfare states, weak defences, climate cults, the outsourcing of sovereignty to international institutions, the rationalisation of a broken status quo by people “shackled with guilt and shame”. Unlike Vance, he did not laud rightwing European populist parties, but he nonetheless wrapped himself in their ideology. His next stop after Munich was Budapest, where Viktor Orbán faces a battle in April to remain in power. And yet there were some, such as the organiser of the conference, the distinguished German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, who claimed to be reassured by the conditional offer to join this journey into a new era with Donald Trump. If Europeans were reassured by Rubio, it was, as Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, observed, “a classic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations”. One reference by the US secretary of state to his country being “a child of Europe” and the older romantics of transatlanticism melted. But that was not the dominant European mood at this sprawling conference. An iron has entered the European soul about Trump, egged on by the many Democrats attending, and there is a willingness if not to confront him then at least to end the dependence and learn the lessons of the standoff over Greenland. Talk of a stronger independent European pillar of Nato was heard repeatedly, and even adopted by Keir Starmer in his speech pledging greater integration on defence with Europe. His Valentine’s Day speech to Europe was remarkable for two other reasons. He declared the Brexit era was over and, unlike Rubio, he praised societal diversity and a Britain where “people who look different to each other can live peacefully together”. So much for Rubio’s risk of civilisational erasure. But the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who is due to go to China in April, said the era of US hegemony was coming to an end, and more quickly than many thought if the US believed it could act alone. “We don’t believe in tariffs and protectionism but in free trade. And we stand by climate agreements and the World Health Organization because we are convinced that we can only solve global challenges together,” he said. Merz signalled Berlin was already preparing for a smaller American footprint in Europe, and that Germany may at times diverge from the US. “We Europeans are taking precautions. In doing so, we arrive at different conclusions than the administration in Washington,” he said. The dispute over Ukraine and Trump’s leniency towards Vladimir Putin still appals much of Europe and is at the centre of what is driving Trump and leaders on the continent apart. It was an American, Hillary Clinton, who expressed the anger best: “The effort that Putin and Trump are making to profit off the misery and death of the Ukrainian people is a historic error and corrupt to the nth degree … He’s betrayed the west. He’s betrayed human values.” The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, now a leading contributor to European defence technology, said “war reveals forms of evil we did not expect” and asked why it was, he felt, Ukraine and not Russia being asked by Trump to make the concessions. He admitted he felt keenly the mistake of Europe’s absence at the negotiating table. Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, further made the point. He said it was natural for the US to take the lead in the negotiations when it was providing the bulk of the military assistance. “But we are now paying for this war. The US outlay for the war last year was close to zero. We are buying the weapons to be delivered to Ukraine. There is no prospect of a package in Congress. If we are paying, and it is affecting our security and not just Ukraine’s, we deserve a seat at the table.” Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, rebuked Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, for telling Europe to dream on if it thought it could defend itself without the US. At one level, the US and Europe vehemently agree that Europe should take greater responsibility for its own conventional defence. Elbridge Colby, the deputy secretary for war and the nearest thing the Trump administration has to a theoretician, said: “People get it, 2025 was the year to reframe and reorient, and now we have a lot of buy-in. Look at what Germany has been doing with a massive increase in spending.” But what the US and Europe have only started to debate is what this more independent Europe will be permitted to do by the US. For the moment an interregnum exists. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, in a speech that lost some impact owing to its late scheduling, was the one who spelled out the wider consequences of Europe becoming its own protector. With new responsibilities came new rights, some of which Trump may dislike. Not only did Europe deserve a place at the Ukraine negotiating table, since it was Europe’s existential challenge, it had a right to speak to Putin directly apart from the US, Macron said. Ideally, the US should be weaned off its belief that a just deal is acceptable in the short term. In any negotiations about what may replace the collapsed arms control agreements with Russia, Europe could not again be a bystander while the US unilaterally withdrew from agreements such as the INF treaty. He had learned of the US withdrawal from the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty in the newspapers, as did all allies, Macron complained. Macron argued that to be credible at such a negotiation, Europe needed better deep strike capacities to match those of Russia. European defence firms should not be browbeaten into buying US military hardware. “We will be credible only if we are able to procure and produce what we need, without foreign strings attached.” Europe could strengthen its own rules on tech and AI. It would be “crazy” if free speech meant giving “the mind, the brain, the heart of my teenagers to the algorithm of big guys with whom I’m not totally sure I share their values”, he said. Above all, Macron, Merz and Starmer referenced the deeply sensitive discussions on which they are to embark as to how France and the UK could make their nuclear deterrents available to Europe, thus reducing the need for the US nuclear umbrella. It is a hugely expensive and politically fraught undertaking. Merz made a brief but deliberate reference to the initial talks he had held with Macron, and in an article for Foreign Affairs he said he hoped to agree the first concrete steps this year. Macron was also an enthusiast, pointing to the cooperation with Britain. If European sovereignty ever extends this far it will make the US uncomfortable. But it is a sign of the times that it is on the agenda. Yesterday is truly over.

‘Woke Europe not facing civilisational erasure,’ says EU’s Kallas after Rubio’s Munich speech – as it happened

in Munich … and on that note, it’s a wrap for today and for our coverage from the 2026 Munich Security Conference! “Contrary to what some may say, woke decadent Europe is not facing civilizational erasure,” the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, insisted as she appeared on stage on the final day of the conference (9:48). But Kallas welcomed US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s speech from Saturday, saying that “we don’t see eye to eye in all the issues and that this will remain the case as well, but I think we can work from there” (9:51). But other European leaders urged Europe to not “cling to love words” from the US, but focus on reforming itself, ramping up its defence production and strenghtening its strategic independence (9:52, 9:53, 9:58). The European Central Bank president, Christine Lagarde, struck an upbeat tone that Europe always “gets better in crisis,” as she called for a reaction to “kick in butt by Trump” (10:40). Meanwhile, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of “betraying the west” with his “disgraceful” policy of pressurising Ukraine to strike a peace deal with Russia (11:18). Separately, Both Kallas and Latvian president Edgars Rinkēvičs said that while the EU was broadly agreed on prioritising Ukraines’ accession to the bloc, they currently appeared “not ready” to commit to a specific date (10:06), as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps pushing for a 2027 target. Looking forward to the upcoming peace talks in Geneva, Kallas said the EU should focus on identifying its key asks of Russia (10:26). The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has landed in Slovakia as he continues his European charm offensive tour, with a visit to Hungary expected on Monday (11:04). And that’s all from me, Jakub Krupa. Thank you for following our reporting from Munich. If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

UK’s gender pay gap ‘won’t close for 30 years’ at current rates

Women in the UK will not be paid the same as men until 2056 at the current rate of progress, according to a Trades Union Congress report. The gender pay gap, which stands at £2,548 a year, means that women have in effect worked for nothing so far this year, the TUC said. The report by the umbrella body says the pace at which women’s earnings are increasing relative to men’s is so slow that the gap is not scheduled to close for 30 years. “Women have effectively been working for free for the first month and a half of the year compared to men,” said the TUC’s general secretary, Paul Nowak. “Imagine turning up to work every single day and not getting paid. That’s the reality of the gender pay gap. In 2026 that should be unthinkable. With the cost of living still biting hard, women simply can’t afford to keep losing out. They deserve their fair share.” Inequality widens as women age, the report found, because they are more likely than men to take on unpaid caring responsibilities throughout their lives and are not sufficiently supported by childcare, social care provision and flexible working. The pay gap, which stands at 12.8% overall, was found to be larger in some sectors than others. In the water industry, women earn 3% more than men on average, while in the accommodation and food sectors, as well as in agriculture, they only fall 3% short of men. But women in education earn 17% less than their male peers; in finance and insurance the discrepancy rises to 27.2%. Nowak said the Employment Rights Act, introduced by Labour last year, could help to tackle the gender pay gap and other employment rights problems. He said the legislation was “an important step forward for pay parity for women. “It will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts, which disproportionately hit women and their pay packets. It will make employers publish action plans for tackling their gender gaps, but these plans must be tough, ambitious and built to deliver real change, otherwise they won’t work.” The gender pay gap may have been underestimated for more than 20 years, according to research released by the British Journal of Industrial Relations in August last year. Researchers found that the Office for National Statistics had failed to properly account for the fact that it received more data from larger employers, when it reported its annual survey of hours and earnings.