Russian president makes threats in first visit since Ukrainian incursion as world waits for Kremlin’s reaction to ceasefire proposal

• Trump hints at financial repercussions if Russia rejects Ukraine ceasefire

French European Affairs minister, Benjamin Haddad, said the European Union could go further in its response to US tariffs, though a trade war was in no-one’s interest, Reuters reported.

“We have the means to go further, if we want,” Haddad told TF1 TV.

Marta Bednarczyk’s family release tribute to loving mother and supportive friend who moved to England 15 years ago

A 13-year-old girl has appeared in court charged with murder and arson after the body of a woman was found in a house in Northamptonshire.

The teenager, who appeared in the dock holding a teddy bear, was remanded in custody at Northampton magistrates court on Wednesday, after being charged with the murder of 43-year-old Marta Bednarczyk.

Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s community in rural Maine is not always welcoming to trans women. She deals with the hostility by capturing the local area’s beauty

The bodies, regularly created and axed by politicians, can help ministers demonstrate priorities and avoid blame

Keir Starmer will this week set out plans to cut some quangos to reduce red tape and a bloated state, helping with economic growth. Politicians have embarked on similar programmes before. This is what quangos are and what they do:

Kerala is providing lessons on how not to be scammed by employment agencies as US and UK step up immigration raids

On a warm February morning, Devika, 24, sits with more than 60 classmates in the city of Kochi, in Kerala, southern India, learning how to tell a bogus overseas recruitment agency from a genuine one. Organised by the local government, the training session on safe and legal migration is among a handful of interventions in a country making headlines around the world as undocumented Indian migrants are rounded up and sent back home.

The training could not have been more timely.

The company’s latest Loud & Clear report – a relatively transparent look into a closed-off industry – shows just how skewed financial success is in music

Since 2021, Spotify has published its Loud & Clear report, corralling data points to show how much money is being earned by artists on the streaming service. There is much talk of “transparency” – perhaps the most duplicitous word in the music industry’s lexicon – but this year’s report feels very different, coming as it does alongside the publication of author Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine, a studs-up assault on streaming economics in general and Spotify in particular.

Then there is the unfortunate timing of the news, as recently unearthed by Music Business Worldwide, that Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has cashed out close to $700m in shares in the company since 2023 while Martin Lorentzon, the company’s other co-founder, cashed out $556.8m in shares in 2024 alone. Meanwhile artists scream of widening financial inequalities and accuse streaming services of doing better from artists than artists are doing from streaming services.