The Context

Former gang leader Duane Keffe D Davis was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison for orchestrating the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. The judge told him he did not get to take a man from his family and walk away, and set an aggregate sentence of 40 years to life after 20 years to life for first-degree murder plus a consecutive 20 years to life for a deadly weapon enhancement. Shakur was 25 when he was killed in Los Angeles and sold more than 75 million records worldwide. Davis was arrested in 2023 and had pleaded not guilty; a jury convicted him after a nine-day trial in August. Shakur's sister, Sekyiwa Shakur, described the impact on the family, including depression and trauma, and said she missed her brother, while an entertainment journalist discussed his lasting influence and the long wait for accountability.

In Ukraine, explosions were heard in Kyiv and the city's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said a nine-storey residential building had been hit for the second night in a row. Ukraine said it had received no warning from allies before the attack. President Trump said the US was still sharing military intelligence with Ukraine after threatening to withdraw it if Ukraine continued targeting Russia's infrastructure. General Sir Richard Shirreff told the BBC that Trump was effectively an agent for Putin and criticised a diesel deal. Separately, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said in his annual speech that foreign threats to the UK had quadrupled in the past decade and that Russia was the number one aggressor. He said MI5 was devoting more resource to state threats than during the Cold War, warned about hybrid attacks from Russia, Iran and China, and highlighted AI risks including bioweapons and drone technology. He also said Russian trolls and bot farms had sought to influence the Brexit debate but the referendum result was not in dispute.

The Vatican said Pope Leo came through lung surgery successfully. The operation removed a cancerous nodule from his right lung, along with the affected lobe, and he returned to his room awake and asking for dinner. No information was immediately available on further treatment or whether the cancer had spread. In Tennessee, recordings emerged of confusing telephone calls after death row inmate Christa Pike survived a failed execution. Pike, convicted over the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, received two doses of what was supposed to be a lethal injection and was taken to hospital almost an hour after the first call for an ambulance. A medical expert, Dr Joel Zivot, said warnings had been given that the execution could fail and called for an independent investigation; Pike was back in prison with care ongoing.