John Healey has been updating MPs with new details on UK operations in the Middle East, including deployments to the region and evacuations of British nationals.
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He said on Monday: "The UK is now conducting defensive air sorties in support of the UAE. Typhoons successfully took out two drones, one over Jordan, the second heading to Bahrain.
"The third Wildcat [helicopter] has now arrived in Cyprus, and we've now deployed additional RAF operations experts in more than five countries in the region, helping coordinate regional military and civilian airspace."
He added that the destroyer HMS Dragon would set sail for the eastern Mediterranean "in the next couple of days", where it will join US air defence vessels.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has posted a short video on X showing a drone being blown up by RAF jets.
The defence secretary also confirmed that 37,000 British nationals have been evacuated since the start of the war in Iran and three chartered flights to the UK have now taken off from Oman's capital, Muscat, "with more to come this week".
Mr Healey said "fragments" of the Iranian drone that hit RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus last week "are being analysed for foreign military hardware by our experts at DSTL [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory]".
The cabinet minister also said that after the UK gave the US permission to use British bases for defensive operations, the first US bomber aircraft landed at RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, on Friday.
Earlier in the Commons, the chancellor admitted the conflict in the Middle East is likely to put "upward pressure on inflation", although the UK is ready to support the release of oil reserves as supply issues continue.
Rachel Reeves said additional funding had been approved for the MoD to deploy "additional capabilities" in the region.
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Meanwhile, Downing Street has steered away from suggestions that the British aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales is preparing to deploy to the Mediterranean.
No decision about deployments had been made, and the Prince of Wales has always been at a high level of readiness, Number 10 said today.
The shadow defence secretary responded to Mr Healey's statement in the Commons by criticising the government for the delay in sending HMS Dragon to the Mediterranean.
James Cartlidge said it had "completely undermined Britain's international standing" while Mr Healey defended the government's response and called Mr Cartlidge an "armchair general".
They were in Australia for the Asian Cup when the Iran war began just over a week ago.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said officials had been preparing "for some time" and the home affairs minister travelled to Queensland to arrange the move.
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"Australians have been moved by the plight of these brave women. They are safe here and they should feel at home here," he said.
"Once it was made clear these women wanted assistance, the Australian federal police moved them to a safe location where they remain," Mr Albanese added.
President Trump said he had spoken to Mr Albanese and that five of the team had "been taken care of" - but indicated the others were returning home.
The Australian government had been under pressure to protect the women after they were knocked out the tournament.
The players were reportedly criticised on Iranian TV, with a commentator saying they had committed the "pinnacle of dishonour" for staying silent during the anthem before their match on 2 March - two days after the US and Israel began attacking Iran.
"Traitors during wartime must be dealt with more severely," presenter Mohammad Reza Shahbazi said, according to Reuters news agency.
Some believed the team's silence was an act of resistance, while others saw it as a show of mourning following the initial US-Israel attacks on their country.
The team has not made any specific comment on their stance.
They sang and saluted ahead of defeats to Australia on Thursday and the Philippines on Sunday, but there were concerns they had been ordered to do so.
The team failed to get past the group stage and players' union FIFPRO said it was "really concerned" about their welfare and had been unable to contact them.
Dozens of people chanted "let them go" and "save our girls" as the team's bus left the stadium on the Gold Coast after Sunday's match.
Supporters said they could see at least three players making the international hand signal for help, according to CNN.
Mr Trump said on Monday he had spoken to Prime Minister Albanese about the matter.
"He's on it!" Mr Trump posted on Truth Social.
"Five have already been taken care of, and the rest are on their way.
"Some, however, feel they must go back because they are worried about the safety of their families, including threats to those family members if they don't return."
'Ongoing threat'
Exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi, who lives in the US, said he had been told that Fatemeh Pasandideh, Zahra Ghanbari, Zahra Sarbali, Atefeh Ramazanzadeh and Mona Hamoudi were now in a "safe location".
He earlier said the team faced an "ongoing threat" after their "brave act" not to sing the anthem.
"As a result of their brave act of civil disobedience in refusing to sing the current regime's national anthem, they face dire consequences should they return to Iran," he posted on social media.
The Australian Iranian Council had also urged the government to protect the players.
It launched an online petition asking authorities to "ensure that no member of Iran's women's national football team is to depart Australia while credible fears for their safety remain".
Ministers say it is a working definition and a "tool for government and organisations to better understand, measure, prevent and address anti-Muslim hostility".
Crucially, the definition is non-statutory - meaning it is advisory and has no legal backing.
Discrimination of someone due to their religion or belief is already unlawful under the Equality Act.
Communities Secretary Steve Reed told MPs that ministers had a duty to act against record levels of hate crime against Muslims, but that "you can't tackle a problem if you can't describe it".
He also denied the definition would interfere with freedom of speech or create "blasphemy laws by the back door".
Hate crimes against Muslims reported to police in England and Wales rose by almost a fifth in the year ending March 2025, to 3,199 offences.
The figure does not include incidents reported to Metropolitan Police due to changes in its recording system.
Jewish people faced the highest rate of hate crimes, according to the government figures, with 106 incidents per 10,000 population.
Muslims were second, with 12 per 10,000 population.
In February last year the government set up a working group, led by former Tory minister Dominic Grieve, to come up with a definition of anti-Muslim hatred or Islamophobia.
But Sky News learnt in October that ministers were moving away from the word "Islamophobia" and towards "anti-Muslim hostility".
Alongside the new definition, ministers have set out an accompanying text which says freedom of speech and expression are protected by law, which includes criticising or ridiculing a belief, including Islam.
"Portraying it in a manner that some of its adherents might find disrespectful or scandalous," is also legal, the text says.
Speaking in the Commons, shadow communities minister Paul Holmes said the definition risked "hindering legitimate criticism" - which Mr Reed rejected.
"We will not do what [the Conservatives] did and stand by and simply watch while Muslim communities face targeted abuse in ways that any decent country would consider to be absolutely intolerable," he replied.
Mr Reed announced the new definition as he unveiled a wider strategy on social cohesion.
The British Muslim Trust welcomed the move, with chairman Shabir Randeree saying it would "help guide institutions that have too often been too slow or too weak in their responses to incidents a tolerant and respectful country like ours must never accept".
The government is to also appoint a special representative on anti-Muslim hostility to engage with communities and help facilitate understanding and implementation of the definition.
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Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visited a community centre in London on Monday to speak with residents about how the government was trying to protect people from the impacts of the war in the Middle East.
He said "we mustn't let" the conflict drive apart communities in the UK, and that Muslim and Jewish communities in particular needed reassuring.
Mr Reed also told MPs in the Commons that the government was protecting Jewish communities with "record funding for security at synagogues and schools, millions of pounds to tackle antisemitism in schools and universities, new laws to stop abusive protests outside places of worship".
He added: "Today, we are going even further to tackle antisemitism in schools and colleges and in the healthcare system, and crucially, clamping down hard on the extremism which so often targets Jews first of all."
The group, which includes 22 retired judges and more than 300 senior barristers, alongside solicitors, academics, and other legal professionals, have urged Sir Keir Starmer to halt what they say is an "erosion of a deeply entrenched constitutional principle for negligible gain".
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"Instead of draining valuable time and resources attempting to force through an unpopular, untested and poorly evidenced change to our jury system - and one that will only have effect, if any, in 2028/2029 - we urge the government to focus on the changes we know will make a difference now," the letter reads.
MPs are due to vote for the first time today on the Courts and Tribunals Bill, which will remove the right to a jury trial for Crown Court cases concerning crimes that carry sentences of up to three years.
Under the proposals, only the most serious cases, such as rape, murder and manslaughter, would be heard by a jury.
The plans have proved controversial, with one critical Labour MP - and fellow lawyer - telling Sky News in January he was "ashamed" of Sir Keir over the plans.
The government claims the proposals, alongside other investment they are making in the court system, will reduce the projected backlog by around 84,000 cases, to 49,000 cases by 2035.
But research by the independent Institute for Government thinktank suggests restricting juries would save less than 2% of court time.
The letter says the lawyers "fully support and share the government's aim of bringing down the backlog in the criminal courts," but the proposals "are based on little evidence".
Female Labour MPs urge government to pass reforms
A group of 40 female Labour MPs, including former women and equalities minister Anneliese Dodds, have written to Justice Secretary David Lammy urging him to "remain steadfast" with the reforms.
They highlight "the agonising and rising waiting lists in our courts, which mean that a woman reporting domestic abuse or coercive control today may be told her trial won't come to court until 2030".
"That is intolerable," they say.
The victims' commissioner, Claire Waxman, has also written to MPs asking them to back the plans.
Sir Keir met with a group of victims on Monday to discuss the reforms, and told them that the government had "got to make good on our commitments" to speed up justice for victims, especially women.
Mr Lammy told Sky News on Friday he expects MPs to pass the bill.
He said that MPs of all parties "recognise that victims of crime are waiting too long for justice".
Sky News chief political correspondent Jon Craig said Mr Lammy emerged from a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on Monday in a "bullish mood".
The Conservatives say they will force a vote to "protect" the right to a jury trial, saying the reforms "risk weakening fundamental safeguards within our system".
The month was marked by "extreme rainfall and widespread flooding in Western Europe and the third-lowest sea ice extent in the Arctic", the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Tuesday.
Experts say climate change was at least partly to blame for the exceptionally wet season across Western Europe.
It saw a run of intense storms including Leonardo, Pedro, and Nils, which was described as having "uncommon strength" by French weather service Meteo-France.
France, Spain, and Portugal in Europe, and Morocco, Mozambique and Botswana elsewhere in the world saw remarkably wet conditions, leading to severe flooding that caused widespread damage and loss of life and livelihoods.
Europe's wet and warm conditions mirrored those in the UK, which saw one of its five wettest Januarys since 1890 in the southern counties of England, and the warmest February day since 2019.
Just 0.1C below landmark target
The globe's 1.49C above the estimated 1850-1900 average used to define the pre-industrial level made it the fifth-warmest February across the planet, the study said.
The target of the 2015 Paris Agreement was to keep global temperatures to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The UN has warned the chance of keeping to that goal is "virtually zero", with the UK braced for a rise of at least 2C within the next 25 years.
Researchers based their latest assessment on Copernicus' own ERA5 dataset, compiled from hourly readings of climate data, which it describes as a climate research standard.
The warmest February on record was in 2024, it said.
In the Arctic, the average sea ice extent in February was 5% below, meaning it was the third-lowest on record for the month. In the Antarctic, the monthly sea ice extent was close to the monthly average.
Read more: Wettest winter on record for parts of the UK
Sharp divide in Europe's weather
Study author Samantha Burgess, the strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMRW), said there was "a really strong divide across Europe", as Scandinavia and Eastern Europe were "much colder than average", whereas the opposite conditions prevailed in most of western and Southern Europe.
Ms Burgess told Sky News the position of the polar jet stream was one of the causes, noting it "has gone further south over the winter, which is why we've had a very dim, very wet winter".
Its unusual position, combined with a series of narrow bands of very moist air, named atmospheric rivers, "led to heavy-to-extreme precipitation over western and Southern Europe. This triggered widespread flooding and landslides, particularly across Iberia and western France," the study said.
Climate change's impact
Ms Burgess said February's extreme events "highlight the growing impacts of climate change and the pressing need for global action".
It's part of our changing winter and changing seasonality, she said, with summers "getting longer, starting earlier and ending later. They're also getting more intense".
Winters, by contrast, are "getting less cold, and sometimes they're also getting shorter".
'Blocked weather pattern'
Met Office climate spokesperson Grahame Madge was less sure, saying the recent wet weather in the UK, particularly in Cornwall, which experienced the wettest winter on record, was a "blocked weather pattern over Scandinavia and an active jet stream driven by cold conditions in North America".
Mr Madge said there is "no strong evidence linking this specific weather pattern to climate change, [but] climate change is expected to lead to warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers in the UK".
'Human-caused' emissions
It's a trend that is "already being observed in rainfall records, with an increased winter rainfall", he said.
Reading University climate science professor Richard Allan said the "serious weather extremes" seen during the month were "a classic winter battleground between warm and wet versus cold and dry conditions over Europe".
"Heavy and persistent rainfall in Western Europe was further intensified by the additional moisture carried by winds from the oceans that are warmer than they would otherwise have been due to the progressive heating from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases," he added.
Dr Michael Byrne, reader in climate science at the University of St Andrews, said the UK "is in a pretty wet part of the world and very much influenced by this warmer air, [creating] more moisture when it rains".
He warned "it's very likely we should expect more flooding events, more rainstorms, both in the winter but also in the summertime, delivering large volumes of rain in a short period of time".
It is, he said, "very much what we expect the UK to be seeing more of in the future".
Ms Burgess agreed, saying "we've got to adapt" by recognising that climate change is "here to stay", and said she remains "optimistically hopeful", pointing to a doubling in the number of cities that have adaptation measures since 2018.