British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to join European leaders at an emergency summit in Paris on Monday, Britain’s PA media reported, after the relationship of the continent with Washington was strained by US President Donald Trump speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin as he pushes for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

“The UK will work to ensure we keep the US and Europe together. We cannot allow any divisions in the alliance to distract from the external enemies we face,” Starmer was quoted as saying in a statement released by Downing Street on Saturday.

“This is a once in a generation moment for our national security where we engage with the reality of the world today and the threat we face from Russia. It’s clear Europe must take on a greater role in NATO as we work with the United States to secure Ukraine’s future and face down the threat we face from Russia,” the prime minister also said.

This comes as Trump’s special envoy for Russia and Ukraine Keith Kellogg said Saturday that European officials will not be at the table when trying to negotiate a solution to the war in Ukraine.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said that French President Emmanuel Macron had called for a summit of European leaders in Paris.

He also said that he expects the European leaders to discuss the matter “in a very serious fashion.”

France is yet to officially confirm the event.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

By the time the girl was admitted to hospital, her hair was brittle, her skin was flaking, and she was so malnourished that doctors said she was at risk of cardiac arrest and death.

She was 17 but looked much younger. Witnesses at the hospital said her parents treated her as if she were a small child. They took her to the bathroom, wiped her bottom, blew her nose and brushed her hair as she watched cartoons more suitable for toddlers.

She weighed just 60 pounds (27.3 kilograms) – about the same size as a 9-year-old.

Last month her parents, an Australian couple in their mid-40s, were sentenced to prison in Perth’s District Court of Western Australia for neglecting their only child, even as they ferried her to and from piano and ballet lessons.

Neither the parents nor their daughter can be identified, according to an Australian law that seeks to protect child victims.

In her ruling, Judge Linda Black said it was clear the girl’s parents loved her, but failed in their parental duties to help her develop, physically and emotionally.

“This is not a case about a malnourished ballerina,” Judge Linda Black said as she sentenced the father to six and a half years in prison, and the mother to five years – a reduced sentence to take into account her “personal circumstances.”

“You isolated your daughter, you prevented her from growing up, you prevented her from developing in the way she was entitled to. You did keep her as a little girl long beyond the age where she should have been,” Black said.

For the purposes of this story, we’ll call the girl Kate. The following details have been sourced from court documents.

A ‘beautiful ballerina princess’

Kate loved to dance. She was homeschooled by her mother, who quit work when she was born, to take care of her. Most of their time was spent at home, but ballet lessons offered Kate a chance to mix with other children.

Photos released by the court show Kate smiling in brightly colored costumes, her hair slicked back, and her feet and arms in the studied pose of a graceful ballerina.

“What a beautiful photo of my ballerina princess!” her father commented on one photo posted to Facebook, of his daughter who looked far younger than her 14 years.

Kate’s father worked full time to provide for the family, who lived in one of the wealthiest suburbs of Perth, the capital of Western Australia.

They were intelligent people, who obviously knew how to feed themselves, the judge said.

Yet, they failed to ensure their daughter ate enough food.

The couple also failed to let Kate grow up as a normal teenager.

Nothing “even remotely age-appropriate” was present in the family’s home, the judge said, pointing to the films and TV shows she watched: Teletubbies, Frozen, and Thomas the Tank Engine.

Unlike most teenagers, who were getting their first jobs and scrolling on social media, Kate was having princess birthday parties and receiving Barbie dolls as gifts. And when other girls were going through puberty, Kate ceased to grow or develop.

During the trial, her father told the court she was a “fussy eater” who had become a vegetarian at age 8 and turned vegan in her early teens. She ate three meals a day and had access to snacks, he said. He didn’t believe she was malnourished.

Vegans avoid eating food that comes from animals, including dairy products and eggs. Their diet is largely made up of fruit, vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds.

“My client didn’t starve his kid … He never withheld food from her. He loved and spoiled his daughter. She was free to eat as much as she wanted. This case was about inadequate nutrition from a vegan diet,” Paxman said.

“Every parent on this planet knows that if you don’t give a child enough food they will starve. But what if your kid chooses to be vegan?”

Judge Black refused to believe the couple didn’t realize their daughter was seriously unwell.

“It seems that everyone in the world who had the opportunity to interact with (Kate) understood she was severely malnourished, except the two people who professed to love her. I simply cannot accept that you didn’t see it. I simply cannot accept that you didn’t notice,” Judge Black said.

In fact, Black found they did notice – so much so that Kate’s father forged her birth certificate to make her seem two years younger, partly to hide what was becoming increasingly apparent to other people – their daughter was chronically malnourished.

Parents at the ballet school were starting to whisper, and her dance teachers implored her parents to see a nutritionist. They refused, and eventually the teachers notified authorities.

By the time Kate was hospitalized at 17, she was 147.5 centimeters (4 feet 10 inches) tall with a body mass index of 12.5 – significantly below the healthy range of 18 to 25.

“She was wasted, according to the doctor, with limited body fat. She was pale. She was exhibiting no signs of puberty. Her hair was brittle and thin. Her skin was dry and flaking. Her heart rate was elevated. The doctor said they needed to do an ECG. And the two of you said no,” Judge Black wrote in her ruling.

As doctors tried to treat her, Kate’s parents openly discussed their suspicions that a conspiracy was forming around them – and that medical staff couldn’t be trusted.

Their daughter was in the Eating Disorder Ward, yet they praised the figure of another patient who was dangerously thin.

They told their daughter her stomach was looking full, and made comments that suggested she might get fat if she followed her doctors’ advice.

“This, in a context of the dire condition your daughter was in, was … outrageous,” Black wrote.

When the couple refused to allow doctors to insert a nasal tube to allow Kate to be fed, and frustrated other attempts to treat her, authorities stepped in and put her into state custody.

Without her parents’ intervention, Kate gained weight, and they were arrested and charged.

When parents can’t let go

Dr Danielle Einstein, a clinical psychologist and author, said cases like Kate’s are “extremely rare.”

She said it’s very common for parents to struggle with the idea that their children will one day leave, but ultimately most want them to grow into responsible adults.

Einstein said one of the problems she has encountered through her work is when parents try to shield their children from problems, or do too much for them.

“Sheltering is a problem; we don’t want to shelter our children. We want them to continue to grow and develop and be capable without us,” she said.

“We’re seeing more anxiety in young adults and in teens because they’re not prepared to face the challenges and overcome the challenges without help.”

Kate’s parents didn’t just prevent her from growing up, the court found – they told “a cascading series of lies” from 2016 about their daughter’s age, to cover up their neglect.

The first came as her mother signed Kate up for a dance class, giving a date of birth that made her daughter seem six months younger than she really was.

Months later, she gave a different birthdate again, to the same dance school, taking off another year, so she appeared 18 months younger.

Then in another application, she knocked a full two years off her age.

“You deliberately lied because you knew that your daughter did not look or behave like a child of her true age,” Black said.

In her sentencing remarks, Black said it was clear that Kate’s parents loved her, but didn’t show it in their actions.

“There is nothing unusual in a parent wanting to cling onto their child and be reluctant to let them go and mature and become an adult. Nothing unusual at all,” she said.

“But what is wrong is when a parent, in fact, prevents the child from embarking upon and completing that natural process.”

“One of your greatest failures was a belief that you could give her what she wanted and failing to give her what she needed,” she continued.

“Every parent knows it’s harder to say no to your child than to say yes. You chose to make the easy decisions rather than the hard ones.”

Kate’s own words provided more evidence to Judge Black that her parents had failed to give her the skills to function without them.

In a letter sent to the judge, appealing to her to drop the prosecution, Kate blamed herself for her parents’ predicament – saying they made her breakfast, lunch and dinner, but she chose how much she ate.

“I’m fully dependent on my parents,” she wrote. “All my living expenses are paid by my parents, including clothes, food, money as I need it. My university fees are being paid by my parents.”

“I love my parents very much. They are the most important people in my life. If my parents go to prison, I don’t think I’ll be able to cope.”

Kate’s father admitted forging her birth certificate, but both parents denied all other charges, while their lawyers pointed to an anxiety disorder to partly explain their behavior.

Judge Black said the couple had taken no responsibility for their actions, and she saw no reason not to jail them.

“You have shown no remorse. You have shown no acceptance of responsibility. You have shown no insight,” she said. Both will be eligible for parole.

Iryna Danilovich disappeared while returning from work in April 2022. It would be two weeks before Russian authorities admitted she was in their custody. The human rights activist and nurse was detained in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, accused of illegal possession of explosives and sentenced to seven years in prison. In her trial, Danilovich testified that she was tortured during her detention.

She has since been deported to a notoriously cruel women’s penal colony in Zelenokumsk, southern Russia. She suffers from constant headaches and her health continues to deteriorate – yet she is not allowed to sit or lie down during the day, according to human rights monitoring group Zmina.

Ukraine has always called its areas under Russian control “temporarily occupied territories,” insisting it will eventually regain control over them. But that hope is being crushed now. This week, US President Donald Trump suggested it was “unlikely” Ukraine would get back much of its occupied land in the peace negotiations he intends to hold with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Danilovich’s case – and she is just one of thousands Kyiv says are detained in Russia – shows what is at stake for Ukraine.

Trump’s comment came after he held a 90-minute phone call with Putin on Wednesday, and it sparked panic across the country, where few believe Putin would negotiate in good faith.

Yuliya Kazdobina, a foreign policy expert at Ukrainian Prism, a think tank, said she doesn’t believe the Russian leader wants peace.

“We already had so many years of negotiations with the Russian side,” she said. Russia has a history of striking and violating agreements with Ukraine going back decades. In 1994, Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees from the United States, United Kingdom and Russia that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. In 2015, after illegally annexing Crimea and sparking the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Moscow signed a ceasefire agreement only to then repeatedly violate it and then launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine seven years later.

The view from Kyiv

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to the Trump-Putin call by saying his country would not accept a peace deal struck between the US and Russia without Kyiv’s involvement.

“As an independent country we simply cannot accept any agreements without us. And I articulate this very clearly to our partners. We will not accept any bilateral negotiations on Ukraine without us,” Zelensky said, adding that the fact that Trump spoke to Putin first was “not pleasant.”

“We may be left without the currently temporarily occupied territories, without parts of the Kherson region, Zaporizhzhia region and the long-suffering Crimea,” he said. “We must take back what is rightfully ours.”

Russian forces currently occupy nearly 20% of Ukraine’s territory, up from the roughly 7% it controlled before launching its unprovoked full-scale invasion nearly three years ago.

According to Ukrainian officials, some 6 million people, including 1 million children, live under Russian occupation, in what the United Nations has described as a “bleak human rights situation.”

Fears of history repeating itself

Crimea has been under Russian control since Moscow illegally annexed it in 2014. Since then, Russia has imposed a brutal and repressive regime, stomping out any sign of opposition.

Maksym Vishchyk, a lawyer at Global Rights Compliance, a non-profit that advises the Ukrainian authorities on investigating and prosecuting international crimes, said Moscow has repeated the same pattern across other occupied territories.

“And Crimea has been kind of their playbook. Policies and patterns and tactics (Russia) applied in Crimea were then applied as well in other occupied territories. So, we see essentially the same patterns in all occupied territories, both since 2014 and since 2022.”

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has repeatedly reported the myriad human rights violations committed by Russia in occupied Ukraine – from unlawful detentions to sexual abuse to forcing people to accept Russian citizenship and sending their children to Russian schools and training programs.

Russia has repeatedly denied accusations of human rights abuses.

A dangerous precedent

“Given how many victims this war has already had, and to end it on someone else’s conditions… then why did these (Ukrainian soldiers) die and why did they defend these territories?” he said.

Soldiers fighting on the frontlines were likewise skeptical that negotiations between Trump and Putin could yield a result that would be palatable to many Ukrainians.

Volodymyr Sablyn, a battalion commander in the 66th mechanized brigade, who is fighting near Lyman in the east of the country, said that having Russia take over some of Ukraine’s territory could have dangerous consequences.

“It will set a precedent and show Russia that they can attack any country, take its territory and make it theirs with impunity in the future,” he said, adding that Russia could soon turn their focus on other smaller countries in its vicinity.

Putin has repeatedly made his goals clear: He wants to gain control over the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. But many in Ukraine are worried that even if he initially agrees to a ceasefire, he will ultimately instigate further fighting to achieve his endgame.

“No one and nothing will stop Putin from attacking us again and occupying another region or several more. If Europe and America don’t help us, then making peace now will most likely lead to war in a few years,” Sablyn said.

Dariya Tarasova-Markina contributed to this report.

Friedrich Merz, the 69-year-old veteran German politician with a hardline stance on migration and a love of aviation, is the favorite to become the country’s next chancellor in the federal election on February 23.

But who is the old-school conservative who wants to rid his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), of former leader Angela Merkel’s centrist legacy?

His long-time rival’s decision to leave the top job in 2021 prompted Merz to come out of political hibernation and run for the party leadership. After two failed bids, he was eventually selected to lead the CDU in 2022.

Now, he appears to have the chancellery within his grasp after the November collapse of Germany’s governing coalition – made up of the Social Democrats (SPD), Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Greens – which paved the way for the snap election.

If his party comes out on top, Merz stands to take the helm of a country mired in crises – although it may take weeks to form a governing coalition. He has pledged to reboot Germany’s large economy after years of uncharacteristic stagnation, crack down on migration, and lower taxes, all while attempting to wrestle back votes from the far right.

Despite his party comfortably topping polls, his campaign has not been all smooth sailing. A dalliance with the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) three weeks before the election drew criticism – and accusations he had breached the mainstream parties’ “firewall” against the AfD.

Beer-coaster economics

Merz was born in 1955 into a conservative, Catholic family in the North Rhine-Westphalia town of Brilon, in central Germany, and joined the CDU’s youth wing while still in school. He entered politics full-time in 1989, when he was elected to the European Parliament at the age of 33.

After serving one term as an MEP, Merz, a married father-of-three, was elected to the Bundestag – Germany’s parliament – and established himself as a leader in financial policy. In 2003, he famously argued that German tax rules should be simple enough to calculate on the back of a beer coaster.

A growing feud with Merkel eventually pushed him to leave politics, however.

Merz, who appealed to the CDU’s more traditionalist, right-wing faction, lost out to Merkel in a party leadership contest in 2000.

Merkel’s leadership signaled a break from the CDU’s norm; she was its first female leader, with a Protestant – rather than Catholic – background and centrist leanings.

The pair’s rivalry became more apparent in 2002, when Merz was pushed aside as leader of the opposition in the Bundestag in favor of Merkel.

By late 2009, Merz had fully joined the private sector.

He worked as a lawyer and senior counsel at the international law firm Mayer Brown, among other positions. These ventures made him a multi-millionaire, according to German business newspaper Handelsblatt.

This background may have persuaded voters that Merz is a man who can do business; a desirable skill for anyone hoping to fix Europe’s largest economy, which contracted for a second year running in 2024.

Merkel’s ‘carpet of fog’

Nine years after he left politics, the announcement of Merkel’s resignation from Germany’s top job paved the way for Merz to re-enter. After two failed bids for CDU party leadership, in 2018 and 2021, he was selected to lead in 2022, cementing his political comeback.

Merz’s desire to distance himself from Merkel’s legacy is clear. He has sought to bring the CDU further to the right than it was under Merkel, partly to try to stop voters turning to the far right, while advocating for a more pro-market economy.

In an interview with German broadcaster ZDF in 2019, he described his predecessor’s “idle” leadership as like a “carpet of fog” over the country, and has said he sees her “open door” refugee policy during the 2015 migrant crisis as a grave error.

Merkel, for her part, criticized Merz in a rare political intervention in January, after he pushed through an immigration bill with help from the AfD – now the CDU’s main rival. The bill was ultimately defeated by the German parliament.

His campaign for the chancellery has largely focused on bread-and-butter issues like tax cuts, deregulation and incentives to work.

Merz drives a hard line on immigration and sees curbing irregular migration to Germany as the most pressing task if he is elected, according to German news magazine Der Spiegel. He has called for asylum seekers arriving from other European Union member states to be rejected at Germany’s land borders.

Merz has criticized liberal welfare benefits and accused Ukrainian refugees of “social tourism” – a phrase he later apologized for using. Overall, he promises to slash welfare spending, telling The Economist in a rare sit-down interview in the lead-up to the election that he wants to avoid “paying people who are not willing to work.”

Merz and the CDU support Germany’s continued military aid to Israel amid its war in Gaza, while also advocating for a two-state solution as the long-term goal. In a televised debate with Chancellor Olaf Scholz earlier this month, Merz expressed unease over US President Donald Trump’s proposal to “take over” Gaza, while also suggesting it remains to be seen “what is really meant seriously.”

On the topic of sending aid to Ukraine, Merz has advocated a more hands-on approach than the outgoing SPD-led coalition. He supports the delivery of long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Kyiv – something Scholz’s government has refused for fear of drawing Germany into the conflict.

Merz was vague when questioned by The Economist on the issue of Germany’s defense spending, although he acknowledged that it would have to increase in the long run. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week reiterated his administration’s demand for NATO members to spend 5% of GDP on defense at a meeting with US allies in Brussels.

Germany’s government last month said it had met NATO’s target to spend 2% of its GDP on defense after establishing a special fund in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – yet this falls significantly short of the Trump administration’s demand.

In his spare time, Merz is an amateur pilot, sometimes flying his own private plane – an expensive hobby for a man who once described himself to German tabloid Bild as “upper middle class.”

A shipment of heavy bombs from the United States has arrived in Israel, as Marco Rubio visits the country on his first official trip to the region since becoming US Secretary of State.

The munitions were sent after President Donald Trump’s administration last month lifted a hold on the deliveries, Israel’s Ministry of Defense said Sunday.

Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz said the shipment of MK-84 munitions “represents a significant asset for the Air Force and the IDF and serves as further evidence of the strong alliance between Israel and the United States,” in a statement from his ministry. Katz thanked Trump and the US administration for their “unwavering support.”

The new administration’s release of the heavy bomb shipments rolled back one of the few Biden-era policies meant to exert leverage on Israel during its war in Gaza. Former President Joe Biden had restricted the delivery of the 2,000-pound bombs out of concern they could be used indiscriminately by Israel’s military in densely populated areas of Gaza.

Despite causing tensions between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the move did not portend any major changes in the war. Nor did it significantly improve Biden’s standing among critics of the war, who argued for significantly tighter restrictions on American arms sales to Israel.

The head of Gaza’s Government Media Office Salama Maroof criticized the US decision to send the heavy bombs. “Instead of sending food, medicine, water, or shelter and building materials to the victims in the Gaza Strip, even with a humanitarian motive, the United States of America, the first democracy in the world and a pioneer of human rights, as it describes itself, supports the criminal occupation army with 1,800 heavy MK bombs,” Maroof said.

Rubio landed in Tel Aviv on Saturday night, where he was greeted by Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on the first leg of his trip to the region. He is meeting with Netanyahu at his office in Jerusalem Sunday morning, where US President Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to “take over” the Gaza Strip is likely to come under discussion.

It also comes a day after three Israeli hostages were released by Hamas as part of a US-mediated ceasefire agreement.

Before his meeting with Netanyahu, Secretary Rubio attended mass at the historic Church of the Holy Sepulchre, according to a State Department official. A news conference is expected later today.

Rubio is also scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as part of his travels.