We've known for some time about the closeness between the Yorks and Jeffrey Epstein but if genuine these emails give us a new level of insight, about their interactions with the convicted paedophile, what they shared with him and just how much they saw him as a friend and close confidante.

From the emails we can see he was apparently welcomed into the fold and the inner sanctum of their palace life. Offered the chance to come into Buckingham Palace in September 2010, invited to Andrew's birthday party at St James's Palace in February 2010, all after his conviction for soliciting prostitution in 2008 and his release in 2009.

From the discussions about him lending them money and the exchanges about Andrew being set up with women, you can see he was clearly trusted with their innermost secrets.

Epstein files latest: More than three million pages being released

It is the obsequious tone with which they write to him which will inevitably anger the victims. It feels like Andrew and Sarah were dependent on him, whether for money or contacts.

It appears Epstein had made it that way, made himself invaluable to them, which chimes with Sarah Ferguson's claim last year that she had to appear loyal because he was blackmailing her.

Date of the emails is key

But away from what's written in the emails, it's when they were written that is also exposing. Just look at the dates and they appear to challenge Andrew and Sarah's recollections of when they apparently tried to cut ties with Epstein.

In June 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to those paedophile charges, he was then released in July 2009. Yet all the email correspondence we see in this latest release of files was sent after they would have known the crimes he'd admitted. Just a month after Epstein was released Sarah Ferguson sent the email describing him as the "brother she always wished for".

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Andrew claimed in that Newsnight interview that they were photographed together in Central Park in December 2010 because he was trying to honourably end their relationship, and yet in February 2011, they were exchanging emails which appear to suggest Epstein was helping the Yorks with money.

It is important to say that the documents don't expose any new accusations of wrongdoing, to this day Andrew has vehemently denied all the allegations against him; the Metropolitan Police also said last year they don't intend to look any further at the suggestions he asked his close protection officer to dig dirt on his accuser Virginia Giuffre.

Difficult reading for Royal Family

But that doesn't stop this again being really difficult reading for the rest of the Royal Family, further ramping up the scrutiny around Andrew. It will also no doubt embolden those who have called for Andrew to tell-all, whether it's Epstein's victims or the US congress committee who invited him to speak to them about what he knew and what he saw.

It has to be pointed out that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson are inevitably at the top of everyone's search list. It means that we are inevitably going to report more on documents related to them, and with other high-profile individuals also linked to Epstein they will no doubt find that unfair.

But as the brother and ex-sister-in-law of the King it is right that we should be able to question and probe how close they were, these documents giving us again that opportunity, and a level of insight we never expected.

Sarah Ferguson has previously said: "I would never have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again. I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children. It was a gigantic error of judgment."

Sky News has approached Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson for comment.

The Canadian-American star won an Emmy award for lead actress for her role in Schitt's Creek in 2020.

She died aged 71 on Friday at her home in Los Angeles "following a brief illness", her agency Creative Artists Agency said in a statement.

She is survived by her husband, Bo Welch, and sons Matthew and Luke - her family will hold a private celebration of her life, the statement said.

In an entertainment career spanning more than 50 years, she gave a memorable turn as Kate McCallister, mother of Kevin, played by Macaulay Culkin, in the first two Home Alone films.

Culkin, who starred as the youngster accidentally left at home when his family leaves for a Christmas holiday in the 1990 classic, posted a heartfelt tribute on Instagram, calling her "Mama" and saying he thought they "had time".

The pair reprised their roles in the 1992 sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost In New York.

Michael Keaton, her co-star in the original Beetlejuice film from 1988, said on Instagram O'Hara had been "my pretend wife, my pretend nemesis and my real life, true friend.

"This one hurts. Man am I gonna miss her."

Meryl Streep, who co-starred with O'Hara in the 1986 comedy drama Heartburn, said in a statement that O'Hara "brought love and light to our world, through whipsmart compassion for the collection of eccentrics she portrayed".

O'Hara frequently collaborated with mockumentary pioneer Christopher Guest, becoming a key player in his ensemble and starring in Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show and A Mighty Wind.

Her popularity surged after the success of Schitt's Creek, which dominated the 2021 Emmys following its sixth and final season, bringing O'Hara a new generation of fans.

The show's creators, father and son duo, Dan and Eugene Levy, who co-starred in the series alongside O'Hara, both released statements in tribute.

Dan Levy wrote: "What a gift to have gotten to dance in the warm glow of Catherine O'Hara's brilliance for all those years.

"Having spent over fifty years collaborating with my Dad, Catherine was extended family before she ever played my family. It's hard to imagine a world without her in it. I will cherish every funny memory I was fortunate enough to make with her."

And Eugene Levy wrote: "Words seem inadequate to express the loss I feel today.

"I had the honor of knowing and working with the great Catherine O'Hara for over fifty years. From our beginnings on the Second City stage, to SCTV, to the movies we did with Chris Guest, to our six glorious years on 'Schitt's Creek,' I cherished our working relationship, but most of all our friendship. And I will miss her."

O'Hara enjoyed a late-career renaissance that led to a serious role in HBO's post-apocalypse drama, The Last Of Us, for which she was nominated for an Emmy.

Pedro Pascal, her costar, said on Instagram: "There is less light in my world, this lucky world that had you."

Starring in The Studio as Patty Leigh, O'Hara received both Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.

O'Hara's career was launched at the Second City theatre in Toronto, where she was born, in the 1970s.

It was there that she first worked with Eugene Levy, who would become a lifelong collaborator - and her Schitt's Creek co-star.

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While at Second City, she helped create the sketch comedy show SCTV - in which both she and Levy appeared - and which helped launch the careers of other top Canadian comedians, including Andrea Martin and Martin Short.

I cannot hold a note or even reliably maintain a beat, yet in 30 seconds I can now make an entire pop song, lyrics and all.

Or a soul song. Or a metal track. Whatever comes to mind - you just tell the AI engine what you want and it does the rest. The output might be a little generic, but as far as listeners are concerned it's indistinguishable from the real thing.

Even people far more musically aware than me cannot tell the difference between human and artificial songs. The musical Turing Test has been well and truly passed.

AI music is a perfect example of the power of artificial intelligence to take complicated tasks and automate them to a standard that was unimaginable only a few years ago.

Yet, as ever with technology, removing friction comes with a cost.

I have spent the last few months investigating AI music. What has emerged is a picture of a vast attempted fraud, as technologically-equipped criminals use AI tools to try and take billions of pounds away from real-life musicians.

The fraud takes place in two stages which sound like something from a science-fiction novel, but are now part of everyday life in the hidden world of the internet economy.

First, the fraudsters make huge amounts of AI music. Then, they build bots to stream that music over and over again and thereby make some royalties.

Yes, this is a case of robots listening to robot music. The defence? More robots. Let me explain.

Thanks to the ease with which AI music can be made, production of it is already reaching an industrial scale.

The best figures we have on the number of AI tracks being released come from Deezer, a streaming site which is the French equivalent of Spotify or Apple Music. It estimates that 60,000 fully AI tracks are being uploaded to its site every day, over a third of all production.

To put that into context: in 2015 the entire US music industry made around 57,000 songs.

A decade later, Deezer is set to receive 21 million AI tracks a year - and this is a conservative estimate, because the scale of AI music production is growing by the month.

"It's a way to totally flood the music streaming services," says Romain Hennequin, head of research at Deezer, who has developed an algorithm to detect AI music being uploaded to the platform, picking up tiny features of the music which are inaudible to the human ear.

The tracks themselves are not actually fraudulent, but the behaviour around them is.

Someone will upload an AI track then use an automated system - a bot - to listen to a song again and again in order to make royalties from it.

This isn't a minor aspect of AI music perpetrated by a few bad apples.

According to Thibault Roucou, Deezer's head of royalties, "the vast majority of the listeners of this content is in fact what we call stream manipulation or fraud".

His algorithms, which pick up unnatural activity on the platform in the same way that a bank looks for unusual activity around payments, suggest that as much as 85% of all listens on fully AI music are fraudulent.

This is not just an issue for Deezer, but also for artists, because of the way that payments work on streaming services.

There is no set price for a single stream; instead, artists get paid from a common royalty pool depending on the proportion of streams they get.

This means that if someone generates a huge number of streams, they will take money away from everyone else, by reducing the amount in the common pool.

The sums involved are extremely large. "We detect 8 to 9% of the stream as being fraudulent," says Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer.

"If you implement this 8% to the world of music, it's roughly a few billion dollars, two to three."

'An ongoing battle'

Deezer says it is identifying the bots using their own automated systems in order to prevent the tracks they stream from generating royalties, but the fraudsters are always looking for new ways to get past the defences.

"It's an ongoing battle," says head of royalties Roucou.

"I think we will not lose, but we will not win anyway because they will continue to improve, and we will also. And we hope we will be able… to prevent them from taking too much money from other artists."

When I spoke to human artists about the situation, they were shocked.

"As artists, we get such a small fraction of the money that we actually deserve to get because of the streaming system. And for that to just be getting cut shorter and shorter and shorter through robots… it makes my blood boil," says folk musician Lila Tristram.

"The music industry needs to get their hands around this a little bit, otherwise it could rapidly get quite out of control," says Aidan Grant, founder of music production agency Different Sauce.

But what can be done? The genie of AI music is out of the bottle now, so currently the debate is on the best way to alert consumers and musicians.

Deezer have decided to label fully AI tracks as AI, but right now they are the only streaming site to take this approach.

Spotify, the world's biggest streaming service, has opted against it, for fear it might stigmatise musicians who used AI, a potential problem for a future in which every track is made using some kind of artificial assistance.

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Neither YouTube nor Apple Music label AI tracks. YouTube said it asks creators to mark AI as AI if it looked realistic. Apple didn't respond to a request for comment.

Where Spotify has joined Deezer is in trying to block the flood of AI music and fraudulent streams.

Last year, it removed 75 million spam tracks, many of which will have been AI. For context, Spotify's whole catalogue stands at 100 million.

The one silver lining for musicians? Although some AI tracks have gathered a lot of hype and generated millions of streams, so far there is no great appetite for it outside the occasional one-off viral hit - and of course the fraudsters.

It seems that music still needs to be played and promoted by someone with genuine personal appeal for it to find a meaningful audience. The human connection matters… for the moment anyway.

Sky News has learnt that a group of creditors holding £13bn of Thames Water's total debt mountain of £20bn is aiming to sign an in-principle agreement with Ofwat and the company by the middle of next month.

Under the agreement being discussed, lenders would take a haircut on the Class A debt they are owed of up to 30%, an increase from the 25% disclosed in an announcement in October, according to one industry source.

In total, more than £13bn of existing value - up from £12.5bn - is expected to be written off when a final deal is put to the participating investors, which include Assured Guaranty, Invesco, Elliott Management, Silver Point Capital and Farallon Capital Management.

In exchange, they would receive a minimum of 10% of the recapitalised company's equity.

A planned new equity injection of £3.15bn is also likely to be increased if an agreement is reached, the industry insider said.

Last year, Thames Water's creditors said they would commit £3bn of emergency funding to keep Thames Water afloat.

Half of that sum has already been drawn by the company, with the in-principle agreement needing to be confirmed in order for Thames Water to access the second £1.5bn tranche, which would fund the company to the end of the restructuring process.

Thames Water's would-be owners have also committed not to sell the company before 2030 - with a stock market listing expected to be arranged at some point after that - while they have pledged not to take any dividends during the period of its Turnaround Oversight Regime or until it goes public.

The consortium has also said that customer bills will not rise beyond increases already agreed with Ofwat.

An announcement about an outline deal, which one source said could come as soon as the week after next, would represent the clearest sign yet that Britain's biggest water utility can be solvently recapitalised and remain out of a government-orchestrated special administration regime (SAR).

That would be a relief to the Treasury, which is determined to keep Thames Water's mountain of debt off the government's books.

This weekend, however, regulatory sources cautioned that "gaps" remained between the creditors and watchdogs over both the financial and other terms of the prospective agreement, meaning that an agreement could yet be delayed beyond the middle of February.

"There's still no guarantee that this gets done," said one.

Under its business plan, the London & Valley Water consortium wants to spend £20.5bn on infrastructure and service improvements over the next five years to tackle the company's appalling record on waste and sewage pollution.

Ofwat had rejected a previous blueprint proposed by the company which would have allowed it to spend £24.5bn during the next five-year regulatory period.

If successfully completed, the deal would be one of the most complex corporate restructurings ever seen in Britain.

It requires the approval of Ofwat, the Environment Agency and the Drinking Water Inspectorate.

If an agreement is approved by regulators and Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, it would be subject to a public consultation because of modifications Ofwat would be making to the company's operating licence.

The deal will also require sanctioning by the courts.

An insider said the terms of the deal, which are still to be finalised, were also expected to be submitted to Downing Street for review in the coming weeks.

One area of potential scrutiny is likely to relate to an agreement on Thames Water's future regulatory penalties, although London & Valley Water has pledged that the company's outstanding fines would be paid in full.

Negotiations over Thames Water's future come at a critical time for the UK water industry.

A white paper was published this month by ministers confirming plans to abolish Ofwat and establish a new regulator, with an 'MOT-style' approach to supervising water infrastructure.

The document also set out plans to introduce a new regime to enable struggling water companies to be turned around.

The privatised sector's travails have been further highlighted this month by the scandal at Thames Water's neighbour, South East Water, which is facing calls to sack its chief executive over outages which have left thousands of Kent households without a reliable water supply.

Thames Water's most recent consortium of shareholders, which included the Universities Superannuation Scheme and an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, have written off the value of their investments in the company.

Last August, Sky News revealed that Steve Reed, Ms Reynolds' successor as environment secretary, had signed off the appointment of FTI Consulting to undertake contingency planning for a SAR - a regime which has only been tested once before, with the collapse of energy supplier Bulb.

Since then, FTI Consulting is understood to have had little engagement on the project amid the ongoing talks between creditors and Ofwat.

KKR, the private equity behemoth, pulled out of talks to buy Thames Water last summer, while Hong Kong-based CK Infrastructure has attempted to gatecrash the process with little success.

Mike McTighe, the veteran corporate troubleshooter who chairs BT Group's Openreach division, has been parachuted in to work with the creditor group as the company's potential chairman.

In October, he said: "There is a huge amount of work to be done to turn around Thames Water and deliver the improved service and environmental outcomes that customers and local communities deserve.

"From day one, we will inject billions in new investment, strengthen Thames Water's balance sheet, transform the company for thousands of hard-working frontline staff and begin the delivery of an operational turnaround that puts 16 million customers and the environment first."

This weekend, an Ofwat spokesperson said: "We continue to engage with London & Valley Water and are reviewing their plans carefully to assess whether they deliver a turnaround in the company's operational performance and strengthen its financial resilience to the benefit of customers and the environment."

DEFRA has been contacted for comment, while Thames Water and London & Valley Water both declined to comment.

Many bodies are still buried under the mud following the tragedy near Rubaya, in the east of the country, earlier this week.

More than 15% of the world's supply of tantalum, a rare metal extracted from coltan, comes from the region and is a key component in smartphones, as well as computers and aircraft engines.

The mines are under the control of rebel group M23. Lumumba Kambere Muyisa, a spokesperson of the rebel-appointed governor of North-Kivu province, said the landslide was caused by heavy rain.

"More than 200 people were victims of this landslide, including miners, ​children and market women," he said. "Some people were rescued just in time and have serious injuries," he said.

Survivors were taken to nearby health facilities or the nearest city of Goma - around 30 miles away.

A former miner at the site spoke of the dangers of repeated landslides because tunnels had been dug by hand, poorly constructed, and left without maintenance.

"People dig everywhere, without control or safety measures," Clovis Mafare said. "In a single pit, there can be as many as 500 miners, and because the tunnels run parallel, one collapse can affect many pits at once."

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Sky News found children as young as four working in the unregulated mines in the DRC.

The country has been hit by violence between government forces and different armed groups, including the Rwanda-backed M23, for decades.

In May 2024, M23 seized Rubaya and took control of its mines.