Fears over security have been raised after the release on police bail of five men arrested on suspicion of terrorism and explosives offences near an RAF base used by US forces.
Donald Trump said he was surprised to hear the men, all in their 20s and from London, had been released, while his secretary of state Marco Rubio repeated the President’s claims that the US had helped foil an alleged plot involving a foreign state.
Laurence Taylor, head of UK Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP), said police were keeping an open mind, and one possibility could be proxies “either knowingly or unknowingly working on behalf of a foreign state”.
Here is what is known so far about the scenarios that could have unfolded near the air base in Gloucestershire.
Iran-linked terror plot?
Rubio claimed that incident “clearly involves the hand of a foreign actor”.
On Monday, Taylor acknowledged speculation over whether Iran was behind it, and said the force was considering “every possible angle”, including whether individuals might have been working unknowingly on behalf of a foreign state.
What we know about Ranulph Fiennes care home row
Once described as “the world’s greatest living explorer”, Sir Ranulph Fiennes disappeared from public view in 2024.
Members of his family allege they have not been allowed to visit him.
Who is Ranulph Fiennes?
- Ranulph Fiennes, 82, is a famed explorer, known for his Transglobe Expedition.
- He is related to actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes.
- In September this year, his relatives raised the alarm that they had not been allowed to visit him.
- Fiennes disappeared from public in 2024 after opening up about his Parkinson’s diagnosis.
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Allegations of a family rift
In September, published its first story airing concerns from friends who alleged Fiennes’ wife, Louise Millington-Cotes, was not allowing anyone else to see him.
The newspaper reported allegations that Fiennes had been moved around multiple care homes under false names.
Campaign to free him
The explorer’s stepson, Alex Millington-Cotes, has said he is desperate to visit Fiennes again, and told the BBC he wants power of attorney removed from his mother.
“He’s not an isolated type of person, and so to see him isolated now is very painful,” he said.
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King urged to help
- Concerned friends reportedly wrote to King Charles, an old friend of Fiennes’, but the Palace was also unable to get through to him.
- Alex Millington-Cotes has launched a fundraiser to “locate and safeguard” the explorer.
Louise Millington-Cotes has not responded to the allegations
When you could buy gene-edited bananas that don’t go brown
Step aside banana bread, scientists at a start-up in Norwich have created bananas that keep their colour in your fruit bowl for longer before turning brown.
The flashy new fruit can even stay yellow for up to 24 hours after peeling.
Everything you need to know
- Tropic Biosciences has developed gene-edited bananas which can last longer.
The start-up used the CRISPR-Cas9 process to tweak three genes which make bananas turn brown.
It means the fruit does not produce the polyphenol oxidase enzyme responsible for pesky fruit-bowl browning.
The bananas have marketing approval from the environment secretary but must pass the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) checks before they can go on sale.
Why is this significant?
According to Gilad Gershon, the CEO of Tropic, the edited bananas can resist browning by an extra day or two. He said this would “open up a lot of value in reducing waste”.
It is not known how long it could take for the FSA to approve the bananas for safe sale in the UK. If they make it through, they will need to be labelled as “gene edited”.
How long will the warm weather last for?
Tuesday is set to be warm and sunny, with a brief spike in temperatures, but later in the week, the mercury will struggle to get beyond 20°C.
Warmer than average
On Tuesday, temperatures are set to hit 26°C in London and parts of the South East, continuing into a muggy night.
Met Office meteorologist Clare Nasir forecasts:”A breezy day, but also a warm one… temperatures today will be well above average for this time of year, particularly for England and Wales.”
Fresher end to the week
- Nasir warned there is a risk of “some intense bursts of rain” followed by showers on Wednesday.
- The Met Office forecast that the weather will turn “a little fresher from Thursday with showers or longer spells of rain at times, mainly in the west”.
- As the week goes on, temperatures are set to drop, with very few areas expected to reach 20°C or above.
Snooker champion Graeme Dott jailed for child sex abuse
Former snooker world champion Graeme Dott has been found guilty of sexually abusing two primary school-age children.
In August, he was found guilty of two counts of lewd, indecent and libidinous behaviour and on Tuesday he was sentenced to seven years in prison.
What you need to know
The High Court in Edinburgh heard how Dott subjected a girl and a boy to multiple incidents of abuse, with the girl targeted between 1993 and 1996 and the boy between 2006 and 2010.
The jury heard Dott exposed himself in front of both children, touched them inappropriately and kissed them.
What did the victims say?
- One of Dott’s victims, now in her 40s, told the court Dott had sexually abused her on multiple occasions.
- The second victim, now in his late 20s, also said he was sexually abused on multiple occasions.
- Lord Harrower, the judge, told Dott he had “robbed the complainers of a significant part of their childhood”.
- He added the behaviour bore “the hallmarks of grooming”.
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Men feel happier than women about how they look, study finds
Researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School also found men overestimated their IQ, while British people generally rated themselves less attractive than other nationalities.
What did the study find?
- Men consistently gave themselves higher ratings for physical attractiveness than women.
- Participants scored themselves between 0 and 100.
- On average, men scored 6-8 per cent higher than women.
- How attractive the participants were considered by other people was not part of the study.
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A closer look at the study
The study also found that men and women with higher IQs tended to rate themselves as less attractive.
Britons generally rated themselves less attractive than their American, Australian, Canadian and South African counterparts. Researchers suggested this could be a symptom of British manners, with more emphasis on “modesty or understatement”.
What does this mean?
Professor Adrian Furnham, who led the study, noted men often overestimate their IQ, while women typically underestimate it.
He said the similar gap in attractiveness self-ratings could be another indication of “male hubris versus female humility”. He added that more intelligent people could be “more honest”.
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How the UK could rejoin the EU, step by step
Labour grandees have urged Andy Burnham to start preparing to reverse Brexit – but high hurdles would have to be overcome.
Why is it coming up now?
Sadiq Khan said he wants Britain to return to the customs union “almost straight away” and provision in the next Labour manifesto to reverse Brexit without a referendum.
However, experts are sceptical. Polls indicate a narrow majority of Britons support the idea of rejoining, but it may require more support before we could rejoin.
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What the process could look like
Experts warned it could also take five to 10 years to get back in.
Here’s how rejoining might look:
- A second vote is not technically necessary but leading experts think a referendum would likely be needed to provide a stable mandate to start negotiations with the EU.
- If the UK applied to rejoin, the EU would need to ensure the applicant met the 1993 Copenhagen Criteria.
- If talks then began, there would be a series of big issues to resolve.
- The EU could demand that Britain use the Euro and become part of the Schengen Area.
The expert analysis
Experts disagree on the likelihood the UK could be allowed to opt-out of either the Schengen Area or the Euro. Dr Thomas Sampson, economist and Brexit expert at LSE, suggested it is possible the EU would be willing to let Britain rejoin under the same deal.
But others suggested the EU would want to lock the UK into the Euro to “make it harder for [us] to ever leave”.
- The European Commission would need to approve any deal for the UK to rejoin. A majority of MEPs in the European Parliament would also have to vote in favour and all the bloc’s member states.
- Professor Catherine Barnard, an expert in EU law at the University of Cambridge, thinks negotiations and ratification could take as long as a decade.
- If talks did not start until after a Labour general election victory in 2029, it could be 2040 before Britain was back in the bloc.
Watch more from The i Paper
New treatment for ultra-rare ‘second skeleton’ disorder
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) is a “devastating, irreversible” genetic condition.
What is FOP?
- According to the charity FOP Friends, there are around 70 known people with FOP in the UK.
It is one of the rarest diseases in the world, affecting around one in a million people.
FOP is a genetic condition which leads to the body creating extra bones in locations where they should not form, including inside muscles, tendons and ligaments.
What is the treatment?
A new “disease modifying” treatment has been shown to reduce new bone growth by more than 90 per cent, reduce flare-ups and potentially offer hope for new surgical options in the future.
The drug garetosmab is an antibody that blocks a protein called activin A, which has been found to be critical in the development of new abnormal growth development in people with FOP.
63 adults were involved in the trial, which saw a massive reduction in flare-ups in the groups which received the treatment.
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Writing in , the authors said they expect the drug to enable “long term preservation of mobility and function”.
Chris Bedford-Gay, FOP Friends founder, said the community “has desperately waited for a way to stop FOP in its tracks”. He added this “is the moment a life-changing treatment comes that bit closer”.
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Tehran has denied any link with the incident, but Iran, and Russia, have been known to use proxies to carry out crimes on their behalf on UK soil.
In 2024, the Director General of MI5 said Iranian state actors were making “extensive use of criminals”, such as drug-traffickers and “crooks”, to conduct activity in Britain, including reconnaissance.
Chris Phillips, former head of the UK National Counter Terrorism Security Office, said that while it was a “possibility” that the arrested men had been used as unwitting proxies, or were carrying out hostile reconnaissance, “it doesn’t sound likely”.
He said that following the arrest of suspected terrorists “you almost always keep them for a few days while you’re doing your background” – suggesting the release of the men on police bail, after little more than 24 hours, pointed to an alternative scenario.
Sir Peter Fahy, former chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, said that if the suspects had been unwittingly involved in a plot with foreign agents, “they’d [the police] have kept them in, and they’d arrest some other people”.
A dry run?
The i Paper understands the men had been under surveillance for some time, but the arrests were opportunistic rather than a planned operation.
Some experts have suggested, given the apparent lack of explosives at the scene, that at the time of their arrest the suspects may have been engaging in a dry run ahead of a planned attack.
One former counter-terrorism officer told : “One possibility is that this was a hostile reconnaissance operation and they were carrying out a dry run before the actual operation. That might explain why the police do not appear to have found anything such as explosives in the vehicles.”
There was also the possibility that a local farmer who raised the alarm, after spotting masked men near the base, had inadvertently stumbled onto a surveillance operation, Fahy added.
He said it was possible that “they were under surveillance, and the security services were carrying out some sort of operation, probably in its earliest stages, and this farmer rang up, and the local bobbies then reacted to that, not knowing that there was a surveillance operation, and then basically compromised it.”
However, he is doubtful of claims that the men would have been released so that further surveillance could be conducted, adding: “You wouldn’t have thought they would take that risk”.
Fuel theft?
If a bomb plot is ruled out, the question remains as to what the five men were doing, allegedly wearing balaclavas in three vans so close to an RAF base in the middle of the night.
The vans contained barrels and bore a logo and name for a fake fuel transit company, “Fuel 2You”, and a phone number, sparking speculation they could be thieves stealing diesel.
Phillips said the men could have been in the “wrong place at the wrong time” next to a military site where there is a credible threat of a terror attack.
“There’s lots of reasons they could have been in the woods down there driving around in dodgy vans that don’t involve terrorism,” said Phillips.
“They wouldn’t have been released if they’d if there’d been anything on them, [and] certainly wouldn’t have been released if there were explosives in the van.”
If explosives were involved, the men’s London addresses would have been raided and local homes evacuated, said Fahy.
Why have the men been released on bail?
Fahy said this indicated that as soon as counter-terror officers became involved “they don’t seem to have found a great deal. They clearly can’t have gathered enough to in any way justify keeping them in”.
Taylor said the men were released on bail under “stringent conditions” but “absolutely remain under investigation” while multiple lines of inquiry are explored.
The decision has been questioned in some quarters, with Nigel Farage asking whether it was an example of “two-tier Britain”
But Dennis Kavanagh, a criminal barrister, said the decision showed that, rather than doing something wrong, the police were “acting properly and lawfully now and avoiding a judicial review later”.
In a post on social media, he said the CTP briefing outlined that “even persons allegedly involved in active serious matters may have little or no knowledge of an overarching conspiracy and that the challenge the police face is hybrid in that respect”.
He added: “We saw precisely this with Telegram-messenger-recruited defendants committing arson at the former PM’s [Keir Starmer] address, and it is not unreasonable to take the officer’s comments as connoting similar circumstances here.”
In June, Roman Lavrynovych, 22, was convicted of conspiring with others to commit arson attacks on two homes and a car linked to Starmer.
Lavrynovych told the Old Bailey he carried out the attacks after being recruited online by a Russian-speaking Telegram user called “El Money”, and claimed he had never heard of Starmer
Bail in criminal proceedings does not indicate innocence or guilt, Kavanagh added.
“A person may be arrested, yet entitled to bail under the Bail Act 1976, which provides the general framework for police decisions pre charge,” he wrote. “The police may properly conclude a person has engaged in an enterprise knowingly or unknowingly and reach a bail decision.
“None of that various proves ‘two tier justice’, ‘something doesn’t add up’, ‘the police are corrupt’ or “we should know everything now’.”