Watch: Skier tells BBC of'panic' as avalanche hit Italian slopes A skier filmed the moment an avalanche struck a mountain valley in northern Italy on Tuesday. The footage, filmed by Siobhan Halford, shows a group of people, including children, in a queue, covered in snow after being hit by the aftermath of an avalanche in Courmayeur. Speaking to the BBC News Channel, Halford, who is from Billericay, Essex, described how the moment unfolded. We couldn't see, it was hard to breathe. There was a lot of panic, she said.

A new wave of theft is rocking the luxury car industry--mixing high-tech with old-school chop-shop techniques to snag vehicles while they're in transport. When Sam Zahr first saw the gray Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible with orange interior and orange roof, he knew he'd found a perfect addition to his fleet. "It was very appealing to our clientele," he told me. As the director of operations at Dream Luxury Rental, he outfits customers in the Detroit area looking to ride in style to a wedding, a graduation, or any other event with high-end vehicles--Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Mercedes G-Wagons, and more. But before he could rent out the Rolls, Zahr needed to get the car to Detroit from Miami, where he bought it from a used-car dealer. His team posted the convertible on Central Dispatch, an online marketplace that's popular among car dealers, manufacturers, and owners who want to arrange vehicle shipments. It's not too complicated, at least in theory: A typical listing includes the type of vehicle, zip codes of the origin and destination, dates for pickup and delivery, and the fee. Anyone with a Central Dispatch account can see the job, and an individual carrier or transport broker who wants it can call the number on the listing. Zahr's team got a call from a transport company that wanted the job. They agreed on the price and scheduled pickup for January 17, 2025.

It has been described as Germany's most spectacular bank heist in years. On a quiet weekend just after Christmas, a group of thieves broke into a High Street bank in the western town of Gelsenkirchen, by boring through a wall with an industrial drill. They looted more than 3,000 safe deposit boxes and made off with millions of euros. Over a month later, police have yet to make an arrest. For the bank's clients, some of whom say they have lost their life savings and precious family jewellery and valuables, this is a time of anger, confusion and shock.

Court system on'brink of collapse', former senior judge warns The court system is on the brink of collapse as the backlogs for trials reach unprecedented levels, the head of a major review has said. Sir Brian Leveson, a senior retired judge, warned ministers, the police and others that there could not be a pick and mix response to solving the crisis. Last year, in the first stage of the review, Sir Brian called for the right to a jury trial to be scaled back and many intermediate crimes to be dealt with by a judge alone. His second and final report has recommended 130 efficiency changes, from technical measures to allowing prison vans to use bus lanes to hit court appearance deadlines. Sir Brian's two reports were commissioned by ministers as part of an attempt to reverse the backlogs that had reached record levels before Labour came into power, but have continued to worsen since then.

Google has agreed to pay $68m (£51m) to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people's private conversations through their phones. Users accused Google Assistant - a virtual assistant present on many Android devices - of recording private conversations after it was inadvertently triggered on their devices. They claimed the recordings were then shared with advertisers in order to send them targeted advertising. The BBC has contacted Google for comment. But in a filing seeking to settle the case, it denied wrongdoing and said it was seeking to avoid litigation.

Three pro-Palestinian demonstrators have been charged with stirring up racial hatred over alleged chants calling for an intifada at a protest in central London last month. The man and two women charged are Abdallah Alanzi, 24, Haya Adam, 21, and Azza Zaki, 60. They were charged on Monday with using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour intended to stir up racial hatred or where it was likely to be stirred up. The trio were arrested on 17 December 2025 at a protest outside the Ministry of Justice. They will appear at Westminster Magistrate's Court on 23 February.

A baby with a rare neurological disorder, airlifted to hospital after collapsing in a supermarket, is not out of the woods yet, said his father. Seven-month-old Rupert Smith, from Broughton, Flintshire, stopped breathing in a Tesco store in Broughton Park, on Monday. His mother Siobhan, 35, immediately called for help and administered CPR before emergency services, including paramedics, police and an air ambulance arrived. Rupert, who has a disorder called alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC), was flown to Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool for treatment. Dad Dave Smith said Rupert had continued to have quite significant seizures [in hospital] so they have been giving him medication and he has undergone various different tests.

Police say at least 25 kids used e-bikes and scooters to evade arrest and intimidate drivers. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Australian police are cracking down on groups of unruly teenagers who they say are using deceptively speedy e-bikes and scooters to engage in "antisocial riding behavior." Their solution: confiscate the popular micromobility devices and crush them. The roundup, dubbed Operation Moorhead, began last week in the suburbs of Perth in southwestern Australia.

When a police force is supposed to seek the truth and uphold the law, what happens when the evidence they present to officials and the public is, as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood put it, exaggerated or untrue? The police inspectorate has concluded the leaders of West Midlands Police fell foul of confirmation bias. In simple terms, that means senior officers had already reached a decision and were looking for intelligence to justify it. The list of errors and inaccuracies set out in an independent review of the decision-making that led to fans of Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv being banned from attending a fixture at Villa Park in November have been described by Mahmood as damning. They include: A report of a football match in an intelligence report produced using AI which never happened; a twice-repeated denial by senior police leaders to MPs that AI had not been relied on to produce the inaccurate report; the claim that local Jewish groups had been consulted on the move when they had not been; inaccurately presenting evidence from Dutch police reports from a previous fixture involving the club.

A husband and wife have died after being trapped in a private sauna room that caught fire in Japan on Monday. Tokyo police are investigating whether a faulty doorknob trapped the couple inside the room at Sauna Tiger, in the city's Akasaka district, local media has reported. Investigators also found that the facility's emergency alarm system was switched off, and allegedly had been for two years. We offer our deepest condolences... and our heartfelt sympathies for the deep grief and pain that cannot be expressed in words, Sauna Tiger said in a statement on its website. The victims have been named by local media as Yoko Matsuda, a 37-year-old nail artist, and her husband Masanari, 36, who ran a beauty salon.