Read the daily news to learn English

The patience and the poker face: Iran’s wily diplomat set to face the US in nuclear talks

If the US and Iran are to avoid a regional war, both sides need to start to make concessions at talks in Geneva on Tuesday, and also to accommodate one another’s very different bargaining styles. The Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, steeped in almost 15 years of Iranian nuclear talks, is a near lifelong diplomat who has written a book on the art of negotiations that reveals the secrets of the Iranian diplomatic trade – the feints, the patience, the poker faces. He has a bachelor’s degree from Iran’s faculty of international relations, a master’s degree in political science from Islamic Azad University and a doctorate in political thought from the University of Kent in the UK. Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff studied law at Hofstra, a university on Long Island near New York, before making his fortune in property development. While Araghchi, much more a consensus figure inside Iranian politics than his famous predecessor Javad Zarif, will have gameplanned the parameters of what Iran can offer in endless consultations across the spectrum of government, including the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, Witkoff works to a shifting brief devised by one man. Trump sees diplomacy as a branch of pro-wrestling. The Iranian foreign ministry regards it as a branch of chess, almost an art form. Indeed, for those in the US who claim Iran loves to play for time and spin a negotiation out, Araghchi’s book, The Power of Negotiation, provides some support. “The main principle of bargaining is practice: repetition, repetition, and repetition – combined with steadfastness and persistence. Insisting on positions and repeating demands is a necessity that must be done each time with different rhetoric and reasoning,” he writes. Born into a family of merchants – his grandfather was a carpet trader – he argues Iranian diplomacy reflects the country’s bazaars. “The Iranian negotiation style is generally known in the world as the ‘market style’, which means continuous and tireless bargaining. It requires a lot of time and energy, and he who gets tired and bored quickly will lose.” More theoretically, he argues in the book – written when out of office in 2014 – that when a negotiator enters the room, their true power rests on the level of national cohesion back home and the country’s military strength. If there is not at least a balance of power with your adversary, he argues it is best to decline talks until there is equilibrium, something Iran did after the bombing of its nuclear sites in June last year. Nevertheless, the Iranian tendency to say “Yes, but” can go far. Famously, Araghchi reduced his US counterpart Wendy Sherman to tears of frustration – something he regrets. Araghchi, who has already had six rounds of direct and indirect talks in two phases with Witkoff also discloses how vital it is to remain opaque. “The face of a skilled diplomat is inscrutable, and it is impossible to catch any emotion from it. The ability to control the expression of emotions on the face is not easy and requires continuous work and practice.” Providing your adversary with a graceful way out, he argues, is integral to diplomacy, describing this as providing “the Golden Bridge”, a term he has picked up from China (Araghchi spent four years as ambassador to Japan). This suggests that if Trump ends up accepting a version of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal from which he walked out in 2018, Araghchi will not be triumphalist. “Diplomacy is not a game that you must necessarily win, but a process where you must necessarily understand the other side,” he writes. Married twice, and with five children, Araghchi is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and maintains close relations with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps IRGC, unlike his predecessor, Zarif, who criticised the elite forces’ power. “Araghchi is much more technocratic and careful in walking the tightrope necessary to survive,” said Ellie Geranmayeh from the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Zarif was more political and outspoken, and willing to test the boundaries of what was digestible for the regime.” Indeed, some thought Araghchi was put in the nuclear talks with Washington by Iranian conservatives to act as a check and balance on Zarif. Geranmayeh expects the US to make clear demands on diluting, or removing Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, but such an irreversible step by Iran would require parallel irreversible steps by the US, such as releasing many of Iran’s large assets frozen abroad. The scope for a compromise on enrichment exists on the basis that the bombing of its nuclear sites makes it impossible to enrich for 3 to 5 years. But this would require the return of the UN nuclear inspectorate, the IAEA, to be able to visit the bombed sites, an issue that was probably at the centre of talks on Monday between Araghchi and Rafael Grossi, the IAEA director general. Outside the nuclear aspects of the deal, Geranmayeh says: “In this Trumpian world, do not expect every agreement to be written down on paper. There could be a series of not verifiable understandings, including a non-aggression pact between Iran and the US and its allies.” Ali Ansari, professor of modern history at the University of St Andrews, said Iran may offer concessions “to keep the discussions going, but Trump is in no rush at present anyway”. Bringing in US oil companies – an economic concession that has been floated – would be a significant change in Iran’s anti-US revolutionary doctrine. Either way, Araghchi knows that whatever the outcome, he faces domestic criticism. Araghchi recalled once meeting with Zarif in the lift of Hassan Rouhani’s residence after the latter’s 2013 presidential election victory. At the time, Zarif had not yet accepted Rouhani’s offer to serve as his foreign minister. Araghchi asked him why. Zarif replied: ‘In the end, we’ll be found wanting, and we will be the victims.”

What is happening to Syria’s IS camps and their former residents?

Humanitarians warned for years that the camps in north-east Syria holding tens of thousands of family members of suspected Islamic State (IS) fighters would have to be dealt with. Calling them a “ticking time bomb”, relief groups said the women and children could not just be left to rot in squalid desert camps indefinitely, because eventually they would come home. Despite the warnings, most states ignored the problem, refusing to repatriate their citizens. At least 8,000 women and children from more than 40 countries have been stranded in the camps of north-east Syria since 2019. This week, they started to come home. Belgian authorities reported a woman charged in absentia for IS membership had made her way from Turkey to Belgium. An Albanian woman, kidnapped as a child by her father and taken to Syria, managed to smuggle herself to Turkey, where she requested travel documents. Thousands more non-Syrian women and children are distributed across the country, their whereabouts mostly unknown. Most of them were residents of al-Hawl camp, once the world’s largest prison camp, which housed about 25,000 family members of suspected IS fighters, 6,000 of whom were foreigners. Security analysts have said the camp became a hotbed for extremist ideology, and that by keeping IS-affiliated women and children in such close quarters, a new generation of IS members was being raised. Humanitarians raised the alarm about what they called life-threatening living conditions, under which residents died of asphyxiation each winter as they tried to escape the cold by burning coal in their tents. Since Damascus took over al-Hawl as part of its wresting of territory from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) last month, the camp has slowly emptied. Smugglers, foreign fighters and family members have come to the camp each night to retrieve residents, most of whom were taken to Idlib, a province in north-west Syria where many former Islamist fighters live. Frustrated by their governments’ lack of action, family members have begun to organise the return of people formerly held in detention facilities. The Belgian and Albanian women smuggled themselves out of Syria into Turkey without the coordination of their governments. On Monday, relatives of 34 Australian women and children organised a convoy of minibuses from al-Roj camp in north-east Syria, where the SDF is holding more than 2,000 families of suspected IS fighters. They set off for Damascus, seemingly without the backing of Canberra, with the aim of boarding flights back to Australia. They were turned back en route, apparently for not coordinating with Damascus in advance, but Syrian officials say their return has only been briefly delayed. Damascus, unlike the SDF, seem unwilling to play prison warden in perpetuity. A humanitarian who met interior ministry officials shortly before Damascus took over al-Hawl last month said they approached the camp as a child protection rather than a security issue. A new camp Damascus has set up to house al-Hawl residents who do not want to leave has wifi and an open door – a far cry from the Humvees with mounted machine guns the SDF maintained outside al-Hawl’s barbed-wire fences for years. Governments seem to have lost their chance to manage the repatriation of their citizens – some of whom are said to be affiliated to IS – and instead now face a disorganised, chaotic process of returns which experts say place citizens and countries in danger. The prospect of thousands of women and children roaming Syria opens the door to renewed recruitment into extremist organisations such as IS, or trafficking and exploitation. A foreign woman from a country who escaped al-Hawl to Idlib last year was promptly kidnapped and had to be freed via ransom. Her family have not heard from her since. Many of the women have no desire to stay in Syria after years of horrific detention, as explained by more than a dozen during a recent Guardian visit to al-Hawl, and will seek to return to their home countries. Dealing with their repatriation will be much more of a challenge for home governments now than it was before, when the families were concentrated in camps. Pressure is growing to release those women and children still held in al-Roj, where mostly European and Russian women are housed. That is where Shamima Begum, the UK-born woman who traveled to Syria at the age of 15 after chatting to a man there, lives. Governments such as the UK’s have refused for years to repatriate their citizens from al-Roj and other camps, preferring to kick the can down the road, and in Begum’s case strip her of her citizenship. Over the last month however, the room for further delay seems to be quickly narrowing.

Producer of Israeli spy thriller found dead in Athens hotel room

The co-creator of an Israeli hit TV series has been found dead in a hotel room in Athens where the fourth season of the spy thriller is being filmed. Dana Eden, 52, was discovered by her brother late on Sunday, Greek police said, attributing her death to suicide. Her death was described as “a moment of great sorrow for the family, friends, and colleagues” by Donna and Shula Productions, the international production company set up by Eden. After Israeli media reports of Greek police investigating a possible link to Iran, the company also took the unusual step of ruling out “a criminal or nationalistic-related death”, saying rumours that were circulating “are not true and are unfounded”. In such circumstances a postmortem is automatically carried out, with the results of that backed up by an official investigation. Within hours, police had launched an official inquiry, taking testimony from hotel staff and ordering security camera footage to be handed over. A police spokesperson, Constantina Dimoglidou, appeared to rule out foul play, telling outlets that the producer’s brother had spoken of his sister being on medication for a condition that had hospitalised her in the past. The award-winning TV executive, who won an Emmy for producing the Apple TV series Tehran, was a prominent figure in Israel’s flourishing TV industry. She had been in Athens since 4 February working on the latest season of the spy thriller. The country’s public broadcaster, KAN, said: “We are saddened by the passing of our friend and partner in a long line of productions, series, and programmes. “Dana was among the senior figures in the Israeli television industry and played a central role in creating and leading some of the corporation’s most prominent and influential productions.” Tehran, starring Niv Sultan as the Mossad agent Tamar Rabinyan, tells the story of an Iranian-born spy brought up in Israel and recruited to infiltrate Iran to dismantle the country’s burgeoning nuclear programme. The series, which featured Glenn Close in a starring role in the second season, has been described by the New York Times as so persuasively plausible in its portrayal of Israel’s famed intelligence agency that “even the FBI director endorsed it”. The Iranian regime has repeatedly criticised the show as Zionist propaganda. From its inception, Tehran had been filmed in Athens, the location production teams believed came closest to resembling the Iranian capital with its web of “narrow residential streets and alleys and wide boulevards and squares”. Both cities are surrounded by mountains and have a shared chaos suffused with a similar Mediterranean light. The thriller series has attracted such audiences that Apple TV decided to finance a fourth season in December. KAN said Eden’s contribution to the industry would not be forgotten easily. “Her professional and personal legacy will continue to shape Israeli television for many years to come,” it said. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

French police launch murder inquiry after far-right activist’s death in Lyon

French police have launched a murder inquiry after a far-right activist died in hospital having been beaten up in an attack that has fuelled political tensions in France. Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old mathematics student, died from a severe brain injury at the weekend. The Lyon prosecutor, Thierry Dran, said Deranque was assaulted by at least six masked individuals. Police were working to identify suspects and no arrests had been made, Dran said. Deranque was attacked on Thursday on the sidelines of a protest against a university conference attended by Rima Hassan, a European member of parliament for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftwing party, La France Insoumise (LFI). The anti-immigration Nemesis collective, which is close to the far right, was protesting against the conference. Nemesis said at the weekend that Deranque had been present to protect its members as security and was assaulted by anti-fascist activists. Deranque’s family lawyer said in a statement to French media that the student appeared to have been ambushed by “organised and trained individuals, vastly superior in number and armed, some with their faces masked”. The lawyer told Le Monde that Deranque was not part of security for any organisation, had no criminal record and defended his political convictions “in a non-violent way”. The death has inflamed political divisions in France ahead of municipal elections and next year’s presidential race. The LFI party, described by Mélenchon as “radical left”, was officially labelled as “far left” by the French interior ministry this month before the local elections in March. The LFI, as well as the Socialist party leader, Olivier Faure, protested against this label. On Monday, the government spokesperson Maud Bregeon accused the LFI of having “encouraged a climate of violence for years”. She told the broadcaster BFMTV that there was “therefore – in light of the political climate and the climate of violence – a moral responsibility on the part of LFI” for the attack on Thursday. A video broadcast by TF1 of the alleged attack on Thursday showed a group of people hitting three others lying on the ground, two of whom managed to escape while one lay motionless. A witness told Agence France-Presse: “People were hitting each other with iron bars.” Demonstrations called by the far right in memory of Deranque have taken place in the southern city of Montpellier and in Paris, where protesters unfurled a banner reading “antifa murderers, justice for Quentin”. The LFI lawmaker Éric Coquerel, speaking to the public broadcaster Franceinfo, condemned “all political violence” and said the activists responsible for Hassan’s security “were in no way involved in what happened”. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, wrote on social media over the weekend: “It is essential that the perpetrators of this ignominy be prosecuted, brought to justice and convicted. Hatred that kills has no place among us. I call for calm, restraint and respect.”

Far-right character’s monologue prompts violent scenes at German theatre

An actor at a theatre in Germany was at the weekend shouted down, pelted with fruit and subjected to an attempted stage invasion as he delivered a final monologue in character as a far-right activist. The violent scenes came on Saturday during the German premiere of the Portuguese playwright Tiago Rodrigues’s work Catarina, or the Beauty of Killing Fascists in Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia. The provocative, prize-winning play from 2020 tells the story of a family with a macabre annual tradition: to avenge the murder of farm worker Catarina Eufémia, a real-life resistance martyr shot and killed in 1954 during the Salazar dictatorship, they kidnap a “fascist” each year in order to execute him during a family feast. Over the course of the play a generational conflict breaks out between bloodthirsty parents and their more squeamish adult daughter about what means are justified to defend democracy. At the end of the last act, the year’s chosen victim, a far-right party functionary, delivers a 15-minute monologue laying out a nightmarish extremist agenda. As the actor Ole Lagerpusch launched into the incendiary speech, the audience became increasingly agitated, the theatre spokesperson Alexander Kruse said. At first, people began whistling and heckling, insulting Lagerpusch and urging him to stop. An orange was thrown at the actor, narrowly missing him. Kruse said some of the audience then got out of their seats. “Furthermore, two spectators mounted the stage, apparently with the intention of dragging [the] actor off the stage, which was prevented,” he said, calling the assault “completely unacceptable”. Martin Krumbholz of the culture website Nachtkritik.de, who was at the Bochum Schauspielhaus to review the play, said Lagerpusch persevered despite the hostile reaction and managed to deliver his chilling last line: “The future belongs to us.” The play’s acclaimed Slovenian director, Mateja Koležnik, said by telephone from Ljubljana that she was “incredibly proud” of Lagerpusch and denounced the “stupidity” and brutality of the spectators’ attack. “For me it was quite a shock – we did expect people talking back, even shouting back, because, of course, the last monologue is a provocation,” she said. She said Lagerpusch, who she described as “traumatised”, was so effective in the role because he was softly spoken, even affable, in conveying his hateful, divisive message. “[But] I was astonished by the stupidity, really. I never ever thought – nobody did – that somebody from the audience would jump on stage and try to hit the actor … I would expect this from the people we are voting against, but not from the people who should be on our side.” Koležnik said her intention with the production had not been to make “liberal, petit bourgeois society in Europe feel good” around a consensus of condemning intolerance, but to leave them scared. “The next wave of fascism, there will not be monsters. There will be normal, nice people,” she said. The critic Christoph Ohrem of the regional public broadcaster WDR attended the premiere and released a brief audio recording of the tumult, which he said recalled something from the age of Shakespeare. He noted Rodrigues’s piece had often triggered intense responses from audiences and concluded it was a “good play” for taking spectators out of their comfort zone. “It’s truly astonishing that a play can still elicit such reactions in 2026,” he said. Rodrigues has said he intended to cause a stir with the play. In his review, Krumbholz placed the blame for the uproar on spectators. “Parts of the Bochum audience, which one would have thought to be among the most theatre-savvy in the country, are apparently too stupid, to put it bluntly, to distinguish between fiction and reality,” he said. People expressed support for the theatre in Bochum on its Instagram page, with one commenter noting that a subsequent performance with stepped-up security measures, and after an appeal for calm by the deputy director Angela Obst, had gone off without incident. Another spectator said of Saturday’s debacle that she had been “shocked how disrespectful some people can be in the theatre” when “the actor was just doing his job”. A third called it “scary” when “supposedly anti-fascist theatregoers storm the stage and attack the actors. This is basically a fascist attitude towards art and theatre and, in my opinion, should never happen.” Rodrigues’s play has won several awards including best foreign performance at Italy’s Ubu awards and the equivalent prize from the French Critics’ Union.

Was Navalny poisoning by frog toxin meant to send a message?

It was a very particular choice of weapon, but experts say it remains unclear whether the dart frog toxin used to kill the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was intended to convey a message. Known as epibatidine, the poison is produced by wild dart frogs native to parts of South America – meaning Navalny could not have accidentally taken the poison. “Only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin to target Navalny during his imprisonment in a Russian penal colony in Siberia, and we hold it responsible for his death,” the UK government has stated. Epibatidine was certainly an efficient choice: it is a powerful painkiller thought to be hundreds of times more potent than morphine and can cause muscle paralysis. “Your chest wall doesn’t expand and contract, so essentially you can’t breathe and you’re [suffocated],” said Alastair Hay, emeritus professor of environmental toxicology, University of Leeds. And there is another chilling twist. “There isn’t an antidote to this [poison] that I know of,” said Hay. But while epibatidine may seem exotic and its use ostentatious, it is not as obscure as it might first seem. As Hay notes, the chemical has long been studied as a painkiller for lung conditions ranging from pulmonary fibrosis to sarcoidosis, but its high toxicity precludes its therapeutic use. As a result researchers in countries including Russia have been making chemicals with a similar structure, apparently in the hope of harnessing epibatidine’s analgesic properties without its toxicity. “Because its structure is known, it can be synthesised in the lab,” said Hay. “It’s a more complicated chemical structure, but competent chemists are not going to have a problem making it.” In fact epibatidine and its analogues can even be bought online for research purposes. Russia certainly has form for poisoning those who pose a threat. Among other cases, in 2006 the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko died after radioactive polonium-210 was slipped into his green tea, while in 2018 the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia survived being poisoned by the nerve agent novichok – the substance later killed 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess. Indeed Russia is known to have a poison factory in Moscow and, as Hay points out, “very, very competent chemists”. The UK foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, has suggested the use of epibatidine in the killing of Navalny conveyed a message. “Russia saw Navalny as a threat. By using this form of poison the Russian state demonstrated the despicable tools it has at its disposal and the overwhelming fear it has of political opposition,” she said. But while the poison might appear to be a macabre calling-card from the state, signalling an ability to dispose of its enemies in a nasty and painful way, some say the situation is rather less clear. “I think it would be very difficult to detect it, and that would probably be one of the reasons why it was used,” said Hay, adding the potency of the poison meant only a small quantity would be present in the body, making the chances of finding it remote. That the toxin has been identified is, Hay suggests, down to state of the art instruments. It also – crucially – required samples from Navalny’s body. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, has previously stated such samples were smuggled out of Russia. But Dr Brett Edwards, an expert in biological and chemical weapons at the University of Bath, said that if the goal was to avoid detection, or create a more deniable situation, there were many other poisons – or other methods – that could have been used. That, he said, meant it was a deliberate choice to deploy the unusual toxin – as was the case for the novichok poisonings. “[Navalny] was in a high-security prison. So, first of all, nothing gets in there unless they wanted [it] to get in there, particularly for a political prisoner, for obvious reasons,” he said. “If they wanted to do it quietly, they wouldn’t have used a toxin.” Edwards noted the Russian state did delay the release of Navalny’s body – possibly to make it harder for others to acquire and analyse samples. But, he added, the use of poisons has a long tradition as a tool of Russian statecraft – potentially explaining why it was the chosen method for killing Navalny. To Dr Luca Trenta, an associate professor of international relations at Swansea University, the case did not appear to involve overt signalling, unlike the attack on Litvinenko or the Skripals, where the message was one of reach and capability. “It was not like with the Skripals or with Litvinenko in which it was clearly impossible to hide,” he said. “This one, if it had not been for a fairly long effort at getting some samples and some testing out, it might not have been discovered.” Instead Trenta said Russia might have been testing the use of epibatidine, showcasing such capabilities if the exotic toxin was discovered, or simply using a particularly hideous weapon in revenge. “If there is a signal to be sent here [it] is Russia’s ability to use these weapons, to produce these weapons. And in a sense, its disregard for international norms and international law,” he said. “But again, it’s a tricky case when it comes to signalling, because if it was a signalling matter perhaps it would have been more overt.” Edwards noted that while the use of epibatidine raised the question of what other capabilities Russia might have, the bottom line remained the same. “It’s intriguing, but in essence, it’s just murder. It’s just standard political murder. They’ve always done it. They’ll keep doing it,” he said.

Progress on family planning in Afghanistan is still possible | Letter

The suffering described in your article (Taliban birth control ban: women ‘broken’ by lethal pregnancies and untreated miscarriages, 29 January) is real and deeply concerning. Afghan women face severe constraints on mobility, decision-making and access to healthcare, particularly in rural and remote areas where services and trained providers are scarce. But it is also important to recognise that the picture is not uniformly bleak. Despite the restrictions, DKT Afghanistan, a locally registered private-sector pharmaceutical organisation, has been able to sustain and even expand access to family planning and maternal health services by working within cultural and religious norms. In Afghanistan, family planning is often delivered as “birth spacing”, an approach that aligns with community expectations and Islamic principles. DKT Afghanistan works through more than 3,800 private outlets across 13 provinces, alongside clinics and community midwife networks in Kabul and Balkh. In 2024 alone, these services reached nearly 70,000 patients, including more than 40,000 family planning clients. That access helped avert an estimated 298,000 unintended pregnancies and more than 340 maternal deaths in 2024. These gains do not negate the serious rights violations that Afghan women endure, but they do show that progress, however fragile, is still possible. Recognising what works matters, especially when international engagement is wavering. Sustaining and scaling these pragmatic, culturally grounded approaches could save lives now, while longer-term rights and freedoms remain under threat. George Papachristou Regional director, DKT Afghanistan and Pakistan Gigih Yudhistira Country manager, DKT Afghanistan

Trump is ‘deeply committed to your success’, Rubio tells Orbán during Hungary visit – as it happened

Donald Trump is committed to the success of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán because his leadership is crucial for US national interests, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said. “President Trump is deeply committed to your success, because your success is our success,” Rubio said, standing next to Orbán at a joint press conference in Budapest. At a news conference in Budapest, Rubio said US-Hungary relations - which both he and Orbán described as experiencing a “golden age” under Trump - go beyond mere diplomatic cooperation. “I’m going to be very blunt with you,” Rubio said. “The prime minister and the president have a very, very close personal relationship and working relationship, and I think it has been beneficial to our two countries.” German finance minister Lars Klingbeil said on Monday the European Union was at a turning point in which countries should not hide behind national interests but accelerate progress to strengthen EU influence and sovereignty. “We want to cut through knots, we want to find solutions always with the goal of strengthening Europe’s sovereignty and making Europe strong,” Klingbeil said in Brussels. “This is a very European moment.” Germany’s foreign minister Johann Wadephul suggested that France needs to boost its defence spending. “He repeatedly and correctly refers to our pursuit of European sovereignty,” Wadephul said of French president Emmanuel Macron. “Anyone who talks about it needs to act accordingly in their own country.” The Kremlin has dismissed assessments from five European countries that concluded that the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed using a poison developed from a dart frog toxin administered by the Russian state two years ago. The assessment was made from the foreign ministries of the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands after analysis of material samples found on Navalny’s body. Senior Ukrainian and Russian officials are to meet this week in Switzerland for a second round of talks brokered by the Trump administration, days before the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The two-day meeting, kicking off on Tuesday, is expected to mirror negotiations held earlier this month in Abu Dhabi, with representatives from Washington, Kyiv and Moscow in attendance. Avalanches from heavy snowfall in the European Alps claimed more lives over the weekend, as a train was derailed by a snow slide in Switzerland on Monday and roads and villages around Mont Blanc were closed or placed under evacuation orders. As large areas of the western Alps remained under a high risk of avalanche – following a week in which alerts reached category 5, the highest level – Swiss police said a train derailment caused by an avalanche injured five people near the town of Goppenstein. Authorities in Cyprus have urged residents to reduce their water intake by 10% – the equivalent of two minutes’ use of running water each day – as Europe’s most south-easterly nation grapples with a once-in-a century drought. The appeal, announced alongside a €31m (£27m) package of emergency measures, comes as reservoirs hit record lows with little prospect of replenishment before the tourist season starts. Spain announced earlier this month that it would seek to ban under-16s from using social media platforms, following Australia’s ban for under-16s in December and French lawmakers passing a bill that would ban social media use by under-15s. To enforce the ban, the Spanish government will reportedly seek to order platforms to put stringent age verification methods in place.