An unannounced and unexplained one-day visit to Moscow by CIA director John Ratcliffe has raised concerns over whether Russia is gearing up to test Nato.
Reports that Vladimir Putin cancelled participation in a major event on the same day, and shortly afterwards issued three secret decrees, have added to the speculation.
Neither Russia or the US have made any official comment. However, various theories have been put forward for why Ratcliffe felt he needed not only to have a private conversation with Russia that was both sensitive and important enough for a rare face-to-face meeting, but also to keep it off any official agenda.
Why nicotine vapes are still best chance to quit smoking
Smokers are more likely to quit their habit by using vapes compared to conventional methods such as nicotine gum and patches, according to a new study.
Quit rates are higher
The Cochrane Review examined 80 studies involving almost 30,000 people and found that quit rates were higher with vape use, with it leading to 61 per cent increased odds that a quit attempt would be successful after six months.
- That means that eight to 10 out of 100 people using vaping to quite smoking might succeed compared to six of 100 people using nicotine-replacement therapy.
Providing vapes can help
Researchers looked at behavioural support – offered through advice and counselling – and found that people who were also given nicotine vapes were more likely to quit.
The expert view
We have very strong evidence that regulated nicotine e-cigarettes are substantially less harmful than smoking. Based on the consistency of the findings here, it’s clear that they are a proven and viable option for people wishing to quit cigarettes
Dr Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, senior author of the review from University of Massachusetts Amherst
How shingles jab ‘could slash heart risks’
The shingles vaccine currently used by the NHS may slash the risk of heart failure, heart disease and stroke, according to a new study.
What you need to know
Shingles is a viral infection that causes a painful rash and the jab that protects against it – Shingrix – is available on the NHS for people aged 65-70, people aged 70-79 (as part of a catch-up program) and for those over 18 with a severely weakened immune system.
Experts say that if all over-60s had the jab, it could prevent tens of thousands of deaths.
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The study
The NHS switched to Shingrix from the former vaccine, Zostavax, three years ago. Researchers from the University of Oxford compared the risk of stroke, ischemic heart disease or heart failure between the two vaccines over seven years.
- They analysed data from more than 70,000 people and found that up to seven years after the jab, people who had Shingrix lived 9 per cent longer without developing a cardiovascular disease.
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Children’s eyesight is getting worse. This is what parents can do about it
The rise in short-sightedness is not directly caused by too much screen time, but a related change in children’s behaviour. Fortunately it can be reversed.
Dolly Parton – a life in pictures
Dolly Parton died on Tuesday at the age of 80. Tributes from around the world have honoured the country music superstar, who passed away following a “brief battle with cancer”.
The singer was best known for her genre-defining hits including “9 To 5”, “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene”.
Born into a musical family in 1946
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946, the fourth of 12 children, into a poor farming family who lived in a one-bedroom cabin in Tennessee.
Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was a tobacco farmer. Parton spoke about her mother, Avie Lee, singing folk songs all the time, and her aunt played the guitar.
Country star’s unique style
During her teens, Parton began modelling herself on a local character known as the “town tramp”.
The lady wore bright red nail polish, low-cut tops and high heels – young Dolly thought she was beautiful.
A musical powerhouse
Despite being unable to read sheet music, Parton was proficient on several instruments including the banjo, harp, piano and saxophone. She had her first No 1 hit with the song “Joshua” in 1971.
- It was the theme song that Parton wrote for the 1980 movie 9 to 5 that fully propelled her to stardom.
A nearly 60-year marriage
Parton maintained a deeply committed, nearly 60-year marriage to Carl Dean until his death in 2025. “Carl and I spent many wonderful years together. Words can’t do justice to the love we shared,” Parton said when he died.
Dean remained out of the public eye, choosing to focus on his asphalt-paving business in Nashville. The couple had no children.
Parton’s life in pictures
At least 15 newborn babies die in Islamabad hospital fire
At least 15 infants were killed when a fire broke out at a state-run hospital in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, triggered by a fault in air conditioning systems, local broadcaster Geo TV reported.
Here is everything we know about the incident so far.
What happened?
The blaze started at around 7am local time on Wednesday at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences on the third floor of the mother and child health ward.
The incident is among the deadliest hospital fires in recent years in the country, where government healthcare is subsidised but facilities are overburdened.
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The story in pictures
A closer look at the detail
- There were 16 newborns in the ward when the fire broke out, one of whom was rescued, Geo reported.
- Prime minister Shehbaz Sharif has directed authorities to conduct an immediate investigation, his office said.
- “Those responsible should be identified, and the strictest action should be taken,” Sharif’s office said.
One suggestion is that he might have delivered a warning over Russia’s continued escalation of hostile acts against Nato countries, including sabotage, electronic warfare and drone attacks. The last visit of this kind came in November 2021, when then CIA director Bill Burns travelled to Moscow to try to persuade Putin not to proceed with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But it is hard to be optimistic on this front. Burns failed in part because the US administration of the time, under Joe Biden, was unwilling to confront Russia for fear of nuclear escalation. The current administration, for different reasons, is even less willing. The likelihood of the US doing anything to confront Russia is even more remote now than it was then.
The talks may have been focused on Ukraine, including a possible halt to strikes on the energy infrastructure of both countries – another explanation that could perhaps lead to a positive outcome.
At the pessimistic end of the scale, there is he possibility that this could have been a private conversation clarifying the rules of the new relationship between the United States and Russia under Trump, over the heads of the European states that will be affected by it. As I detail in my forthcoming book, that relationship is highly dangerous for allies and partners of the US, given the sympathy the Trump administration has shown for Moscow’s aspirations in Ukraine and beyond.
Other suggested explanations include talks over prisoner exchanges. The CIA and Ratcliffe personally have been directly involved in negotiating the release of American citizens held in Russia. But that hasn’t previously required his personal attendance in Moscow, and if his aircraft brought back any additional passengers, we have not yet been told about it.
Iran is another possible topic of the conversation: whether trying to persuade Russia to join the US campaign to isolate Tehran economically, or perhaps to ask it to stop providing information to Iran to assist in the targeting of US assets and personnel in the Gulf region. In either of those cases, it’s hard to see how the US might hope to cajole Putin into doing something against Russia’s interests.
While we don’t yet know what the visit was about, there is plenty to be learned from the way it was conducted.
The shifting power balance between the US, Ukraine and Russia was highlighted by an American request to Ukraine to suspend strikes on Moscow for the duration of the visit. Ukraine agreed.
On the one hand, that’s a demonstration that the US has no confidence in Russia’s air defences. It also shows how, in effect, the visit proceeded with Ukraine’s permission. But it’s also the opposite of what happened just a few days previously, when US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner cancelled a planned visit to Kyiv because of Russia’s continuing drone and missile strikes.
That reveals that, in contrast with the request to Ukraine, the US felt unable to ask Russia to suspend its campaign for long enough for the pair to visit – or alternatively, the US ask, and was rebuffed by Russian officials who felt no need to offer Washington any favours.
The apparent attempts to keep the visit confidential only add to suspicion around its purpose. Rather than an official announcement, it was flight movements and an unexpected American motorcade being filmed in Moscow that alerted the world – while Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov continued to deny that anything was happening or that any meetings with American officials had been planned.
It seems unlikely that either the US or Russia genuinely believed that the visit could be kept secret. But that leaves open the question of what all the secrecy was for. It’s not felt to be necessary, for instance, around the forthcoming long-planned visit of FBI director Kash Patel to Russia in October.
It’s hard not to see the official silence as an indication that of all the possible reasons for Ratcliffe’s visit, the real one is toward the pessimistic end of the scale: that the US is discussing something with its Russian partners that would be bad news if Europe found out about it. Unless and until a plausible alternative explanation emerges, European countries have every reason to be alarmed.