Category: Trending Now

New CCTV footage exclusively obtained by BBC News reveals how a burglar stole more than £10m worth of jewellery and designer handbags from a London mansion.

The images show a masked man stuffing handfuls of jewellery into a backpack after creeping into the multi-million pound property.

A family spokesperson, who was inside the home when the theft was carried out, said the intruder moved “like a cat” but appears to have almost been thwarted when his apparent escape route was blocked.

The stolen goods belong to Hong Kong socialite Shafira Huang, who was not at the St John’s Wood house at the time, and a reward of up to £1.5m has been offered as the hunt for the thief continues.

Csaba Virag, a spokesman for Ms Huang’s family, said the thief had initially attempted to enter via a second floor window at around 17:00 GMT on 7 December.

Marks that look like they were made with a screwdriver or crowbar were left behind.

When that did not work, the intruder then climbed onto the roof, where he would have seen two housekeepers leaving the grounds, before lowering himself into a large concrete gutter to enter the house via a bathroom window which was also on the second storey.

The bathroom belonged to a live-in governess, Mr Virag said, who he was holding a meeting with in a basement room of the five storey property when the theft occurred.

“She would have been in that room and there would have been a confrontation, which is quite scary,” he said.

Mr Virag said the intruder would have had to climb down onto a sink from the window, but moved “like a cat” to avoid making any marks on it or disturbing the cosmetic products it was littered with. Around £300 in cash on a desk in the room was left untouched.

The family spokesman said he heard a banging during that meeting but put it down to the strong winds outside.

“Retrospectively, I can put two and two together, which at the time you don’t really think,” he said.

Mr Virag said he believes the noise could have been a staff entrance door banging in the draft created when the intruder opened the window, and that the thief closed the window quickly to avoid being given away.

The intruder was then captured on CCTV cameras moving around the house above them, struggling to open cases containing expensive jewellery before putting items into his bag.

Time stamps on one CCTV image released by the family indicate he narrowly avoided bumping into the maid when they walked through the same hallway seconds apart.

Asked if the thief left the house the same way as he came in, Mr Virag said he did, but added “I believe it was not his intention”.

The thief had entered a “high risk” part of the house and appears to have tried to leave via a rarely used guest room at the back of the property, Mr Virag said.

He continued: “[He] tried to open the window from the inside but we have the safety on the sash window.

“The stoppers only allow you to pull it down 8cm and if you don’t have the right tool to unscrew the pins, you can’t. He tried but couldn’t succeed.”

As well as jewellery, Hermes Crocodile Kelly handbags and £15,000 in cash were also taken.

The thief, who police believe may have been armed, is believed to be a white man in his late 20s to 30s.

“We urge anyone who was in the area of Avenue Road, NW8, and saw anything suspicious to please come forward,” the Metropolitan Police’s Det Con Paulo Roberts said.

“Also, if you have seen this jewellery since, someone has offered to sell you it, or you have any further information, then please also contact the police or Crimestoppers anonymously.”

A £500,000 reward has been offered for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the suspect.

A second reward of 10% of the value of any recovered items has been offered by the homeowners for information that leads to the retrieval of the stolen jewellery – which could total as much as £1.5m, the Metropolitan Police confirmed.

The burglary was carried out on Avenue Road, which links the Swiss Cottage and Regent’s Park areas of the capital and is home to some of the city’s most expensive properties.

Ms Huang, who lives in the mansion with her property developer husband, had been a prolific social media user but has since made her profiles private.

A gunman has shot dead 12 people, including two children, in southern Montenegro, police say.

At least some of Wednesday’s deaths happened inside a restaurant in the Cetinje area following a verbal argument between guests, according to the authorities.

It was later confirmed that the attacker had killed himself.

The government has declared three days of national mourning from Thursday, with Prime Minister Milojko Spajic saying the shooting had “shrouded our country in black”.

Police said the attack began at 17:30 (16:30 GMT) when a man – named as Aleksandar Martinović, 45 – opened fire in the restaurant.

He killed members of his own family, two of the restaurant owner’s children – aged 10 and 13 – and also the owner, according to Montenegro’s police commander.

The gunman then went on to kill more people at other locations.

Interior Minister Danilo Saranovic called the incident a “consequence of disturbed interpersonal relations”, according to AFP news agency.

According to police, the suspect had been drinking heavily before the attack began.

Four people were taken to hospital after being seriously wounded in the shooting.

The attacker fled but later fatally injured himself after being surrounded by police who asked him to drop his weapon, police said. He died on the way to hospital.

Writing on social media, the prime minister said: “This senseless act has caused immeasurable sadness and bitterness in each of us. There are no words of comfort.”

Milojko Spajic said the country’s security council would “urgently consider all options” to protect the public, including a complete ban on the possession of weapons.

Mass shootings are comparatively rare in the small Balkan nation.

In 2022, a man killed several people, including children, in Cetinje following a family dispute.

“I must say that the situation is changing dramatically,” Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, declared at his end-of-year news conference in December. “There is movement along the entire front line. Every day.”

In eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s war machine is gradually churning mile by mile through the wide open fields of the Donbas, enveloping and overwhelming villages and towns.

Some civilians are fleeing before the war reaches them. Others wait until the shells start exploding all around them before packing what belongings they can carry and boarding trains and buses to safety further west.

Russia is gaining ground more quickly than at any time since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, despite Kyiv’s impressive record of well-publicised asymmetric attacks against its powerful neighbour.

As the invasion reaches the end of its third year, at an estimated cost of a million people, killed or wounded, Ukraine appears to be losing.

In distant Washington, meanwhile, the unpredictable Donald Trump, not famous for his love of Ukraine or its leader, is about to take over in the White House.

It feels like an inflection point. But could 2025 really be the year when this devastating European conflict finally comes to a close – and if so what could the endgame look like?

Trump’s promise to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office is a typically grandiose boast, but it comes from a man who has clearly lost patience with the war and America’s costly involvement.

“The numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering,” he has said. “It’s crazy what’s taking place.”

But the incoming US administration faces twin challenges, according to Michael Kofman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“First, they’re going to inherit a war on a very negative trajectory, without a tremendous amount of time to stabilise the situation,” he said in December. “Second, they’re going to inherit it without a clear theory of success.”

The president-elect offered some clues during recent interviews about how he intends to approach the war.

He told Time Magazine he disagreed “vehemently” with the Biden administration’s decision, in November, to allow Ukraine to fire US-supplied long-range missiles at targets inside Russia.

“We’re just escalating this war and making it worse,” he said.

On 8 December, he was asked by NBC News if Ukraine should prepare for less aid.

“Possibly,” he replied. “Probably, sure.”

But to those who fear, as many do, that America’s new leader is inclined to walk away from Ukraine, he offered hints of reassurance. “You can’t reach an agreement if you abandon, in my opinion,” he has said.

The truth is: Trump’s intentions are far from clear.

And for now, Ukrainian officials reject all talk of pressure, or the suggestion that Trump’s arrival necessarily means peace talks are imminent.

“There’s a lot of talk about negotiations, but it’s an illusion,” says Mykhailo Podolyak, advisor to the head of President Zelensky’s office.

“No negotiation process can take place because Russia has not been made to pay a high enough price for this war.”

For all Kyiv’s misgivings about negotiating while Russian forces continue their inexorable advance in the east, it’s clear that President Zelensky is anxious to position himself as the sort of man Trump can do business with.

The Ukrainian leader was quick to congratulate Trump on his election victory and wasted little time sending senior officials to meet the president-elect’s team.

With the help of France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Zelensky also secured a meeting with Trump when the two men visited Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame cathedral.

“What we’re seeing now is a very smart strategy exercise by President Zelensky,” his former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba told the US Council on Foreign Relations in December.

Zelensky, he said, was “signalling constructiveness and readiness to engage with President Trump.”

With little obvious sign that the Kremlin is making similar gestures, the government in Kyiv is clearly trying to get ahead of the game.

“Because Trump hasn’t fully explained how he’s going to go about it, Ukrainians are trying to give him some ideas that he may present as his own,” says Orysia Lutsevych, head of the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House.

“They know how to work with that ego.”

Even before the US election, there were signs that Zelensky was looking for ways to bolster Ukraine’s appeal as a future partner for a president-elect like Trump who is both instinctively transactional and reluctant to continue underwriting wider European security.

As part of his “Victory Plan”, unveiled in October, Zelensky suggested that battle-hardened Ukrainian troops could replace US forces in Europe after the war with Russia ends. And he offered the prospect of joint investments to exploit Ukraine’s natural resources, including uranium, graphite and lithium.

Such strategic resources, Zelensky warned, “will either strengthen Russia or Ukraine and the democratic world”.

But other elements of the Ukrainian leader’s Victory Plan – Nato membership and its call for a “comprehensive non-nuclear strategic deterrence package” – seem to have met with a lukewarm response among Kyiv’s allies.

Nato membership in particular remains a sticking point, as it has been since well before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

For Kyiv, it’s the only way to guarantee the country’s future survival, against a rapacious Russian enemy bent on subjugating Ukraine.

But despite declaring last July that Ukraine was on an “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including Nato membership” the alliance is divided, with the US and Germany not yet in favour of issuing an invitation.

President Zelensky has indicated that if an offer of membership was extended to the whole country, within Ukraine’s internationally-recognised borders, he would be willing to accept that it would apply, initially, only to territory under Kyiv’s control.

This, he told Sky News in November, could end the “hot stage” of the war, allowing a diplomatic process to address the question of Ukraine’s final borders.

But, he said, no such offer had yet been made.

If not Nato, then what? With the possibility of Trump-led peace talks looming and Ukraine losing ground on the battlefield, the international debate is all about shoring up Kyiv’s shaky position.

“It’s critical to have strong, legal and practical guarantees,” Andriy Yermak, head of President Zelensky’s office, told Ukraine’s public broadcaster on 12 December.

Ukraine’s recent past, he said, had left a bitter legacy. “Unfortunately, from our experience, all the guarantees we had before did not result in security.”

Without concrete mechanisms akin to the sort of collective defence concept embodied by Article 5 of Nato’s founding treaty, observers fear there will be nothing to prevent another Russian attack.

“Zelensky understands that he cannot just have a naked ceasefire,” Orysia Lutsevych says.

“It has to be a ceasefire plus. It would be suicide for Zelensky just to accept a ceasefire and not to have any answer how Ukraine is protected.”

In European policy forums, experts have been looking at ways in which Europe might help to shoulder this heavy responsibility.

Ideas have included the deployment of peacekeepers in Ukraine (a proposal first floated last February by Macron), or the involvement of the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which pulls together forces from eight Nordic and Baltic countries, plus the Netherlands.

But Kofman is sceptical. “Security guarantees that don’t have the United States involved in them as one of the guarantors is like a donut with a giant missing middle in it.”

It’s a view echoed in Kyiv.

“What alternative could there be? There are no alternatives today,” says Mr Podolyak.

Pieces of paper, like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (about Ukraine’s post-Soviet borders) or 2014-15 Minsk agreements (which sought to end the Donbas War) are worthless, he argues, without the added threat of military deterrence.

“Russia must understand that as soon as they start aggression, they will receive a significant number of strikes in response,” he says.

In the absence of agreement on Ukraine’s long term future, its allies are doing what they can to bolster its defences.

In December, Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said “everything” was being looked at, including the supply of additional air defence systems, in part to protect the country’s battered energy infrastructure from a renewed wave of coordinated Russian missile and drone attacks.

With Ukraine continuing to experience severe shortages of manpower, the UK Defence Secretary John Healey said the government might be willing to send British troops to Ukraine to help with training.

For its part, the departing Biden administration seems determined to deliver as much congressionally approved military assistance as it can to Ukraine before leaving office, although reports suggest it may run out of time to send everything.

On 21 December it was reported that Trump would continue to supply military aid to Ukraine, but would demand that NATO members dramatically increase their defence spending.

Kyiv’s allies have also continued to ratchet up sanctions on Moscow, in the hope that Russia’s war-time economy, which has proved stubbornly resilient, may finally break.

“There’s been deep frustration that sanctions haven’t just shattered the Russian economy beyond repair,” a US congressional source said, on condition of anonymity.

After multiple rounds of sanctions (fifteen from the EU alone), government officials have grown wary of predicting their successful impact.

But recent indicators are increasingly alarming for the Kremlin. With interest rates at 23%, inflation running above 9%, a falling rouble and growth expected to slow dramatically in 2025, the strains on Russia’s economy have rarely seemed more acute.

Putin is putting on a brave face. “The sanctions are having an effect,” he said during his end of year news conference, “but they are not of key importance.”

Along with Russia’s staggering losses on the battlefield – western officials estimate that Moscow is losing an average of 1,500 men, killed and wounded, every day – the cost of this war could yet drive Putin to the negotiating table.

But how much more territory will Ukraine have lost – and how many more people will have been killed – by the time that point is reached?

Top picture credit: Getty Images

BBC InDepth is the new home on the website and app for the best analysis and expertise from our top journalists. Under a distinctive new brand, we’ll bring you fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions, and deep reporting on the biggest issues to help you make sense of a complex world. And we’ll be showcasing thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. We’re starting small but thinking big, and we want to know what you think – you can send us your feedback by clicking on the button below.

A well-known American college football player, a young aspiring nurse and a mother of a four-year-old are among the victims of the New Year’s day attack in New Orleans in which at least 15 people were killed.

Their names are being released by families and relatives before authorities complete post-mortem examinations.

Here’s what we know so far.

Martin “Tiger” Bech is a former football player at Princeton University.

His death was confirmed in a statement by the university.

“There was no more appropriate nickname of a Princeton player I coached,” Princeton football coach Bob Surace said in a statement.

“He was a ‘Tiger’ in every way – a ferocious competitor with endless energy, a beloved teammate and a caring friend.”

Martin Bech’s brother, Jack Bech, posted a tribute on X alongside a news article reporting his death.

“Love you always brother!” he wrote. “You inspired me everyday now you get to be with me in every moment. I got this family T, don’t worry. This is for us.”

Mr Bech was a member of the 2016 and 2018 Ivy League Championship teams.

The 18-year-old was an aspiring nurse.

Her death was confirmed by her mother, Melissa Dedeaux, on social media.

“I lost my baby just pray for me and my family pleaseeeeee!!! God I need you now!!,” the mother pleaded, along with a photograph of her daughter wearing a red graduation cap and gown from this year.

Ms Dedeaux – who is also a nurse – told local media outlet Nola that her daughter had been due to start her nurse training later this month.

She added that Nikyra had snuck out with a cousin and friend, who both survived.

The death of the store manager and father of two was confirmed to CBS News, the BBC News’ US partner, by his cousin Shirell Robinson Jackson.

Ms Jackson described him as “full of life”, and said the 37-year-old had messaged the family minutes after midnight to wish them a Happy New Near.

He was with another cousin who was injured in the attack.

Kimberly Usher Fall, Ms Perez’s friend and boss at the deli store she worked at, called her a dedicated, smart and a “good-hearted person”, according to CBS.

The 27-year-old was also a mother to a four-year-old boy.

The 25-year-old audio-visual technician had a “laid-back spirit and infectious laughter” that brought joy to those around him, according to a fundraiser his family set up in his name.

His mother Cathy Tenedorio, told US broadcaster NBC News, she last saw her son alive at 21:00 local time on New Year’s Eve, adding she remembered hugging and kissing him.