Oil prices tumbled and stock markets rallied yesterday on reports that the United States had sent a peace plan to Iran.

Tehran is seeking to choke the vital Strait of Hormuz to oil traffic following US and Israeli strikes against Iran, with fears it could be using sea mines to do so. Any Iranian mining of the key shipping lane, as its forces did in the 1980s, would be a nightmare for Western demining teams. Here’s an explainer:

UK Defence Minister John Healey suggested on Thursday that Russia was influencing Iran’s use of drone attacks in its war with the United States and Israel.

It all started off as a joke, a French researcher told AFP. But what the team found was a piece of history -- a long-lost page from a legendary manuscript by ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes which had been languishing, forgotten, in the archives of a French museum.

A Russian court yesterday handed life sentences to four gunmen from Tajikistan, and 11 others it said were their accomplices, for the 2024 Crocus concert hall attack that left 150 people dead.

Antarctic sea ice coverage has likely rebounded this year, coming closer to its annual summer average after four years of extreme lows, US scientists said Monday.

Asylum applications to the EU dropped by almost 20 percent in 2025, the bloc’s asylum agency said yesterday -- warning however that a crisis in Iran could result in refugee movements of “unprecedented magnitude”.

Here is a run-down of some of the main faces in the new cabinet

Mountbatten-Windsor, who turned 66 on Thursday, had been questioned all day by detectives from Thames Valley Police

King Charles’ younger brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested yesterday on suspicion of misconduct in public office over allegations he sent confidential government documents to Jeffrey Epstein.

Thousands of years from now, what will remain of our digital era? The ever-growing vastness of human knowledge is no longer stored in libraries, but on hard drives that struggle to last decades, let alone millennia.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul criticised French defence spending yesterday, calling for Paris to do more to turn calls for European security sovereignty into concrete capabilities.

Twelve members of Italy’s fringe group CasaPound have been jailed for seeking to revive the Fascist Party, which ruled from 1922 to 1943 under dictator Benito Mussolini.

Scientists have unearthed in Canada’s province of Nova Scotia the skull of a creature dating to about 307 million years ago that is one of the oldest-known plant-eating land vertebrates, representing a pivotal juncture in animal evolution.

The son of a British couple held in Iran said Wednesday his parents were “caught in the middle” of geopolitical tensions as he urged the British government to act on their case.

Tankers from Russia’s “shadow fleet” circumventing European sanctions navigated through Denmark’s waters at a rate of almost one a day in 2025, data compiled by the Danish Maritime Authority showed yesterday.

A top Russian military intelligence general was shot in a Moscow apartment building yesterday and hospitalised, Moscow said, in what it said was an assassination attempt orchestrated by Ukraine.

US President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer have agreed to work “closely” to maintain the key Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean following recent criticism by Trump of UK action, the prime minister’s office said Tuesday.

France plans to impose stricter limits on the acceptable level of a toxin called cereulide in infant formula after potentially contaminated products were recalled over 60 countries.

Moscow said yesterday two Russian crew members of a tanker seized earlier this month by the United States in the North Atlantic had been released and were on their way home.