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Trump covers all bases in rambling news conference

The president also used his White House briefing to address Venezuela, whose president Nicolas Maduro was abducted by the US in a raid on Caracas this month.

Mr Trump said his administration had taken 50 million barrels of oil out of the South American country so far, and that it would bring down prices in the US.

And he once again aired his grievances about not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize, saying he'd "lost a lot of respect for Norway" over the matter.

But most of the briefing was concerned with singing his own praises, darting from subject to subject for nearly two hours.

It was an "extraordinary inconsistent ramble... even by his standards" said Sky's US correspondent Mark Stone.

"The right-wing US news networks stuck with it, but others moved on, skipping the monologue, dipping back only for the questions," Stone said.

He continued: "I'd argue that his ramblings - today more than any day - are on a different level from what we saw with Biden.

"The numerous conservative policy achievements - job numbers up, immigration down, crime down - are lost behind the ramble."

'He was bleeding for 40 minutes, gasping for life': The dying moments of an aspiring Iranian rapper

January 21, 2026 at 02:38

"The beat is pounding as he delivers a verse, in a home-made studio built in the closet. I'm not here on a trial run - I'm going to reach the peak - streets, nights, beats, they're my oxygen."

The person at the microphone is a 17-year-old boy, with a dream of something big.

His name is Abolfazl Yaghmouri.

A kid from a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Tehran, he rapped as he reflected on the pain in his life: "The problems don't stop. I was there for everyone, but no one showed up for me."

When the popular protests swept through the streets of his suburb, he added his voice to those calling for change. But the decision proved fatal.

We spoke to his aunt, Gita Yaghmouri, who lives in Toronto.

"He fell on the ground, and he was bleeding for 40 minutes," she said. "They didn't allow the crowd to come and help him… I still can't believe it, they've killed a 17-year-old kid."

The boy's family didn't want him to attend the protests on the evening of 8 January.

The regime had cut off the internet and state officials warned that "no leniency" would be shown to demonstrators.

Gita said the family began to look for the musician in the early hours of the following day.

"They tried to call him," she recalled. "They tried to go to a police station, detention centres. They tried going to hospitals, any clinic around, but they weren't able to find him."

'He was gasping for life'

The moment of discovery came when the boy's brother approached a vehicle that belonged to the local morgue. The crew were picking up bodies in the street.

One of three corpses in the truck was Abolfazl.

"He opened the body bag, and it was the face of his brother. He was shot in his heart with war bullets," Gita said.

Neighbours told the family they had watched the boy die.

"The (security forces) were trying to hit him with anything that they had in their hands, with their boots, with the butt of their guns, with everything, while he was bleeding for 40 minutes, and he was gasping for life. And then, then he passed away," said Gita, fighting back tears.

Read more from Sky News:
What happened to victims of Iran crackdown

His body was transported to a mortuary in a place called Kahrizak, a facility that has become as a mass processing centre for victims of these protests.

In new images uploaded to the internet, we see bodies covering the floor area of a cavernous-looking warehouse as family members search for loved ones amongst the rows of corpses.

The grief on display is compounded by officials of the regime, who are accused of not releasing the bodies unless certain conditions are met.

"The (officials) told (Abolfazl's parents) that 'we cannot release the body to you. You have to agree that this kid was part of our army. He was part of (the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps). Otherwise, we are not going to give the body to you'," Gita said.

'Bullet tax'

In other words, the boy's parents were told to sign a document saying their son was serving in the regime's forces when he was killed by so-called "terrorist protesters".

"They didn't agree to sign that, so (the authorities) asked for money, and then they released the kid," said Gita.

"Is this the so-called bullet tax or bullet money?" I asked, referring to allegations that the regime was demanding compensation for the ammunition used when protesters were shot.

"This is what they are talking about, yes," she replied.

A bright and musical 17-year-old, Abolfazl has left a musical legacy online, although the boy has been denied the opportunity to flourish and grow.

His aunt, who has lived in Canada for nine years, is left with a sense of powerlessness.

"I have everything, but I am not enjoying it. Because my people don't have it. It is very hard."

Driver killed and 37 injured after train derails near Barcelona

January 21, 2026 at 01:41

A train driver has been killed and 37 people injured after a commuter train derailed near Barcelona.

A retaining wall "collapsed on to the tracks", causing the incident, the region's civil protection agency said on social media.

It came just two days after a train collision killed 42 people in southern Spain and injured dozens.

Following Tuesday's incident, 20 ambulances were dispatched to the site near Gelida, on the outskirts of Barcelona, along with 38 firefighter units, emergency services said.

Five people were seriously injured.

The incident occurred at 10pm local time on the R4 line between Gelida and Sant Sadurní d'Anoia, the train operator said.

The injured have been taken to the Moises Broggu, Bellvitge, and Vilafranca hospitals, according to Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

Catalonia's fire service confirmed "no one remained inside" the train carriages after conducting a review of the site.

"We are reviewing the underside of the train and conducting a sweep of the area to rule out any further victims," it said on X. "We continue securing the area to work safely."

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez acknowledged the Barcelona area crash, posting on X: "All my affection and solidarity with the victims and their families."

Spain's railway operator ADIF said the containment wall likely collapsed due to heavy rainfall across the northeastern Spanish region this week.

Commuter train services were cancelled along the line, it added.

The accident occurred in a region that has struggled for a long time with underfunded rail services and ‌frequent incidents, according to Reuters.

Beth Rigby: Starmer's fate could be decided by a looming crisis much closer to home

January 21, 2026 at 06:33

Sir Keir Starmer was not meant to be doing an emergency news conference on the Greenland crisis in the Downing Street briefing room on Monday.

The prime minister was meant to be about 200 miles away, delivering a speech much closer to voters' concerns around household budgets and what this Labour government is doing to try to help.

2026 was supposed to be the year in which he tried to win back disillusioned voters - and MPs - with a big push to cut the cost of living, be it around rail fares, energy bills, childcare or lifting the two-child benefit cap.

Instead, he has found his agenda blown wildly off course by the whirlwind that is Donald Trump.

But what matters on the global stage affects voters at home: tariffs will hurt the economy and could cost jobs. Conflicts drive up costs, be it in your shopping basket or heating your home.

As the prime minister put it on Monday when he called out Trump on his tariff threat over Greenland: "In today's world geopolitics is not something that happens somewhere else… when instability grows, it's rarely those with the most power who pay the price… we must use every tool of government, domestic and international, to fight for the interests of ordinary people. Tackling the cost of living today also means engagement beyond our borders."

As Starmer does that, deputy Labour leader Lucy Powell is taking on the role of "campaigner in chief" for the party ahead of the May elections.

Because, as global crises keep rolling, Labour could be running into a polling crisis at home.

Later this year, Labour will be contesting 4,000 council seats, representing 20 million voters, plus Scotland's Holyrood and Wales's Senedd. They come with the party trailing Reform and the Conservatives on 17% of the vote.

It is a perilous predicament in what looks set to be a bloody set of elections which could see Labour pushed into third place behind Reform in Scotland and Wales, where Labour could lose control of the Senedd for the first time ever.

The resignation of first minister and Welsh Labour leader Eluned Morgan would surely come shortly after if that becomes Welsh Labour's fate.

But Powell, MP for Manchester Central, who became deputy leader in November, doesn't seem daunted by the task.

The core message

When I meet her in a community centre of her patch run by the Manchester Settlement, she has a clear message for her party: Labour must focus relentlessly on what matters to voters and get behind Starmer.

"The cost of living crisis and cost of living issues are absolutely in the fore of everyone's mind, and I think it's important for us as politicians […] to just constantly remind ourselves that for most people, they're struggling to pay their rent, they're struggling with their housing costs, they're struggling to pay the bills," she said.

"I think people really want to know we are on their side and working every single day as a government to rewire the country and reshape the economy so that life works better for them. I just don't know that we have really pulled it together more strongly as a story."

'Worst of all worlds' if Labour turn on PM

Part of Powell's job is to remedy that - and the deputy leader is proving more loyal to the leadership than many of her colleagues had perhaps expected.

The soft left Labour MP was sacked from the cabinet by Starmer and was not the leadership's choice in the battle to replace Angela Rayner. There were many who thought she would be a constant thorn in Starmer's side, but instead her message to colleagues is to "not undermine Keir, not undermine ourselves".

"I do think that's probably counter-intuitive for some people to see me saying that, because obviously part of my election was [because] people wanted to see us change a bit and have a course correction and do better than what we've been doing - and that is the mandate I've got," she admitted.

"But I strongly believe we're not going to do that if we all turn in on ourselves and have months and months and months of this constant speculation, that's the worst of all worlds.

"The Tories changed the prime minister three times in three months, and it didn't change the outcome for them at the election one jot. If we don't tell our story ourselves, no one is going to do it and that's what we've got to do."

Who might challenge Starmer?

Powell tells me Starmer will lead the party after the May elections and will be leading Labour into the next election. That she of course cannot know. But what is ringing clear in our conversation is her call for unity.

It comes at a febrile time, with chatter over a possible Wes Streeting leadership bid constant as the briefings and counter-briefings roll on between Starmer supporters and allies of the health secretary.

Streeting is constantly referenced by MPs as a politician with the ambition, network and funding to mount a leadership bid. Some MPs tell me it is in Streeting's interests to go sooner rather than later as the two obvious left candidates - Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham - are not ready for a challenge should it come (the former needs to get her tax situation solved and then rebuild, the latter lacks a seat in parliament).

The upshot is that "will he, won't he" is a constant refrain in Labour circles.

All of this reflects the difficult predicament Starmer is in. The situation got so bad in the run-up to Christmas, the PM's allies felt it necessary to tell MPs he would stay on and fight any rival rather than fold.

That a PM was forced to say that just 18 months into his premiership, on the back of a landslide victory, was both astonishing and a reflection of just how bad things for this government had become.

Foreign affairs to the rescue?

But there is also huge reticence, anxiety even, about trying to turf out a sitting prime minister.

As one cabinet minister put it to me last week: "Changing the leader is a bit Tory for me.

"If we try to change the leader, the party will end up tacking to the left and that is not Labour's problem with the country, so it won't be the solution. It's probably better to try to work on making Keir Starmer better."

The international crisis also helps Starmer, as attentions turn from domestic politics to managing the most serious rift in the transatlantic relationship in decades.

As fellow party leaders fell in behind Starmer on his position on Greenland, it helped him look statesmanlike: this grave chapter in geopolitics is not a moment in which a rival would mount a leadership bid.

In the meantime, Starmer will no doubt soon be back out and about, touring the country rather like he did during the 2024 election. The five pledges, six pillars and three foundations of this government - remember those? - have been buried in favour of a focus on the cost of living.

As part of this, the government is now quickly ditching policies that are unpopular or distract from the core cost of living message. In Westminster parlance, this is known - to quote the former Conservative election chief Lynton Crosby - as "scraping the barnacles off the boat".

The decision to water down the farms tax, business rates on pubs and ditch compulsory digital IDs has seen ministers get a battering in news studios for U-turns (and yes it does roil backbench MPs), but it is a short-term hit senior party figures think is worth taking.

"I think less is more," Powell tells me. "I think people want to see a clearer agenda that they can connect to and that they see. And I think sometimes when you first come into government, there is this attraction of 'let's try to manage everything and do everything'.

"And you know, politics is painted in primary colours, our colour is red. Let's paint in that colour, let's paint in our primary colours and leave the kind of managing of things to other people whose job that is."

On U-turns, Powell concedes it "would be much better to do a lot of that thinking and get things right beforehand" - but the crux of the Labour challenge in 2026 is the government has to deliver.

From Number 10 to new MPs, everyone in Labour agrees that voters - who were promised change in 2024 - need to begin to feel better off.

Starmer is acutely aware that people haven't felt personally better off or seen public services improving since the 2008 financial crash, and saying it will get better isn't cutting much ice.

"People won't believe it until they feel it," is how one cabinet minister put it to me.

To that end, there will be much more activity around cutting costs and improving the NHS, which Labour see as a proxy in voters' minds for better public services.

There will be, I suspect, more barnacles off the boat, as Labour look to lessen the noise in the party and Westminster and campaign into the May elections and beyond. The government might delay reform of jury trails - the legislation is planned for March - in order to avoid a showdown with some of its backbenches.

There will be many that see it as weakness from Starmer, but this is a PM who wants to dial the noise down in order to try to push Labour's dismal polling ratings up.

It is a perhaps insurmountable task for a PM being tested to his limits at home and abroad.

May will be a huge ballot box test for the Starmer administration - and could well determine his fate with his party.

Inside the new breed of 'zero bills' homes where you pay nothing for your energy

January 21, 2026 at 02:30

Elliott Wood has something you're probably going to want.

Like most of us, every month he gets a bill for his monthly energy use.

Only his bill… is free.

He's living in a new breed of "zero bills" homes, which comes with solar panels, heat pumps and batteries.

Together, that technology generates more electricity than Elliot uses.

When combined with the right tariff - in his case a zero bills tariff with Octopus Energy - the excess electricity is sold back to the grid, and his bill comes in at a princely sum of £0 a month.

"It's amazing… you just don't have to worry," says 26-year-old Elliott, who lives in a one-bedroom rental house with his partner in Milton Keynes.

"There is no stress at the end of each month, [wondering] 'have we had too many showers, has the heating been on too much, have we used the microwave too many times?'"

The zero bills scheme does come with a few caveats: the tariff is only guaranteed for five to 10 years, and it doesn't include electric vehicle charging.

But Octopus estimates it will save an average household of two to three beds approximately £1,758 a year on bills, based on current Ofgem price cap rates.

Now for the bad news…

But only a few hundred of these homes are up and running, meaning for most of us, the zero bill home remains a pipe dream.

In fact Britain has some of the most leaky, drafty and gas reliant homes in Western Europe - and that's a major vulnerability.

Approximately 85% of homes rely on gas for heating, more than half of which we import, only for some of that hard work to go to waste as the heat drifts out through uninsulated Victorian brickwork.

That means cold, damp homes that are expensive to run, leaving a staggering 2.7m UK households living in fuel poverty.

Housing and buildings are also the second biggest polluting sector in the UK, after transport, something that must fall if the country is to hit its climate targets.

Quest to upgrade Britain's homes

The government aims to tackle all these problems in one fell swoop.

Its long-awaited Warm Homes plan published on Wednesday is designed to upgrade homes to make them cheaper, better and warmer.

The £14.7bn strategy will pay for measures like insulation, solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps that can lower bills and cut gas use.

These won't see bills falls to zero, like Elliott's, but ministers say it could slash some bills by several hundred pounds.

Ministers says the plan will upgrade five million homes and lift "up to" one million families out of fuel poverty by 2030.

If done well, upgrading homes is an effective way to slash bills and reduce damp, and campaigners and industry have broadly welcomed the idea.

But previous attempts to upgrade homes have tried and failed. It's not clear how officials can enforce landlords to upgrade properties, or who to trust to insulate homes, or whether electricity costs will come down enough to truly reap the benefits of a heat pump.

Energy UK's CEO Dhara Vyas said: "Supporting better access to clean heat systems, solar panels, batteries, and insulation will help millions of households across the UK bring down their energy bills.

But she said to "ensure the plan realises its full potential, it will be important to tackle the factors that currently make electricity artificially expensive."

The key to the cost of living crisis?

As more people get off gas heating and on to electric heat pumps, it should also reduce the UK's imports of gas.

The government sees a geopolitical value in weaning the country off gas it has to buy from abroad, as opposed to clean power it can harness at home - albeit using Chinese components.

First it wanted to reduce reliance on Russia, but now even buying gas from the US has taken on a new risk with a less predictable president in the White House. No one in government would say that out loud, yet, but who knows what levers Donald Trump might pull on Europe to get his way on Greenland.

And while reducing energy imports is good for security, there's a risk that with fewer people paying gas bills, those left will shoulder higher costs to keep the system running.

On top of that, the Warm Homes plan is still just a plan - and previous attempts to deliver have failed.

But the government has staked its reputation on easing the cost of living and slashing household bills.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: "This is a government bearing down on the cost-of-living crisis… giving people the security and the fair shot they need to get on in life."

That claim will be judged largely on whether this new plan to upgrade homes sinks or swims.

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