In a statement, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) said Russia's National Paralympic Committee had been awarded six slots in the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games.
The country will have one woman and one man competing in para alpine skiing, one woman and one man in para cross-country skiing, and two men in the snowboarding event in Italy.
The latest move by the IPC comes after Russia was twice banned from the games, first in 2016 over a state-sponsored doping scheme, and then in 2022 due to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The last time Russian athletes were able to compete under their own flag was in 2014, when the country hosted both the Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi.
While Russian athletes have featured at the Paralympics since, they have competed under a neutral banner.
The IPC voted to lift the ban on Russia in September but some sports maintained their own suspensions.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the recent move was "completely the wrong decision" - and she urged the IPC to reconsider.
She posted to social media: "Resuming the right of athletes from Russia and Belarus to compete under their own flags while the brutal invasion of Ukraine continues sends a terrible message.
"The International Paralympic Committee should reconsider this decision urgently."
Last year, IPC president Andrew Parsons told Sky's sports correspondent Rob Harris that Russian participation in the games was "not linked to participation in wars".
"Russia and Belarus, they used Paralympic sport to promote what they called the "special operation" at the time," he said in an interview.
"And this is what led to the first suspension, the suspension in 2023. Between 2023 and now... there is less evidence of that being used again for the promotion of the war."
The UK and 32 mainly European countries signed a joint statement expressing "serious concern" after IPC members voted to lift the partial suspensions of Russia and Belarus in September.
It comes after Ukrainian sports minister Matvii Bidnyi told Sky News that the Paralympics should not have lifted its ban on Russia.
He disputed the IPC president's claim that sport is no longer being used to promote the war, adding: "It's unjust, and we think it's not appropriate to give the opportunity to terrorist states."
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Former prime minister Gordon Brown last week called for UK police to "urgently" re-examine claims women or girls were trafficked to the country aboard flights.
In an article for the New Statesman, Mr Brown said the recently published files relating to Jeffrey Epstein showed the paedophile financier's jet making 90 flights to or from UK airports, including 15 after his 2008 sex offence conviction.
A spokesperson for Essex Police said: "We are assessing the information that has emerged in relation to private flights into and out of Stansted Airport following the publication of the US DoJ Epstein files."
Stansted Airport said: "All private aircraft at London Stansted operate through independent Fixed Base Operators, which handle all aspects of private and corporate aviation in line with regulatory requirements. All immigration and customs checks for passengers arriving on private aircraft are carried out directly by Border Force.
"They use entirely independent terminals not operated by London Stansted and no private jet passengers enter the main airport terminal. The airport does not manage or have any visibility of passenger arrangements on privately operated aircraft."
Former prime minister Gordon Brown said that information in the Epstein files suggested "a number of British girls were on 90 Epstein flights organised from UK airports on what was called his [Epstein's] 'Lolita Express'".
In an article for the New Statesman, he added that 15 of those flights occurred after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a child.
Mr Brown demanded a full inquiry and wrote: "I have asked the Met urgently to re-examine their decision-making in their investigation and the subsequent reviews."
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Police are hunting for Daniel Boakye after he escaped from police custody in a hospital in Lewisham, south London.
Boakye, 21, had been serving time at HMP Feltham for robbery charges. He is understood to be violent, has gang connections, and is due for deportation to Ghana.
He had already gone missing after freeing himself from prison custody at West Middlesex University Hospital in the early hours of 10 February.
The prison service said at the time they were "urgently" working with the Metropolitan Police, and were investigating how he was able to escape from hospital.
Officers located him at an address in Thamesmead, southeast London, on Wednesday afternoon.
On Sunday, Boakye again absconded from policy custody, this time at Lewisham Hospital, where he had been receiving medical treatment.
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Police are now appealing for information to help them find him.
"Officers gave chase, but could not detail Boakye before he left the building," a Metropolitan Police spokesperson told Sky News.
"He is 21 years old, black, of medium height and slim build. He was wearing grey tracksuit bottoms, and a dark Nike jacket, when he absconded."
Jackson was an impassioned orator, offering a voice for the voiceless. Raised in the segregated South, he rose to prominence in the civil rights era and became a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr.
He used that 1988 speech to call on Americans, left and right, black and white, to find common ground.
"The only time that we win is when we come together," he told the audience. "Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don't you surrender. Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end, faith will not disappoint."
Jackson never did become president but blazed the trail for a new era, for a night 20 years after his speech when Barack Obama realised that dream.
His activism and political career was not without controversy, and he weathered several storms throughout his years in the spotlight. However, he remained America's pre-eminent civil rights figure for decades.
Born Jesse Louis Burns in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, Jackson's mother was a 16-year-old high school student and his father a 33-year-old married man who lived next door. His mother later married another man who adopted him.
He grew up in the Jim Crow era, the often brutally enforced set of racist laws to subjugate black Americans in the South, and was segregated from white neighbours. He earned a football scholarship at the University of Illinois, but transferred to a historically black college because he said he experienced discrimination.
Civil rights activism began when he was a student, and he was once arrested after seeking to enter a "whites-only" public library.
Jackson was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and his activism was noticed by Martin Luther King Jr. He became his protege.
He was there at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on the day King was assassinated, and claimed to have worn a shirt said to be soaked with the murdered civil rights leader's blood the following day.
He set up his own civil rights organisation in Chicago, Operation PUSH, in the early 1970s, and in 1984 founded the National Rainbow Coalition, advocating also for women and gay rights. PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition merged in 1996 and are now the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
'Our time has come'
Jackson ran for president for the first time in 1984. Some Democrats did not agree with his campaign, saying said his ideas were too left-leaning and could be detrimental to the party.
He dismissed criticism, saying the party's mission should be to feed the hungry and house the homeless.
"My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised," he said in his 1984 Democratic Convention speech. The mantra then: "Our time has come."
During both his presidential runs, Jackson attracted black voters and many ​white liberals but fell short of becoming the first black major party White House nominee.
He later served as Democratic president Bill Clinton's special envoy to Africa in the 1990s, and was instrumental in securing the release of a number of Americans and others held overseas in places such as Syria, Cuba, Iraq and Serbia.
Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s to identify black people in the United States as African Americans.
In 2000, he received the highest US civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from Clinton.
Despite health challenges in his final years he continued protesting against racial injustice into the era of Black Lives Matter, condemning the police killing of George Floyd.
"This season of ugliness brought about by the lynching of George Floyd has brought the best and worst out of us," he told Sky News at the time. "The worst is lynching but the best is fighting back."
In 2024, he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a city council meeting to show support for a resolution backing a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
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Jackson's career was also marked by some controversies. In 1984 he faced allegations of using a slur in reference to Jewish people, comments he initially denied. However, he later offered an apology while speaking at a synagogue, according to a New York Times article.
Jackson married his wife, Jacqueline Brown, in 1962, and they had five children. In 1999, he also had a daughter with a woman who worked at his civil rights groups; he later said he understood what it meant to be born out of wedlock and committed to supporting her emotionally and financially.
In 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was "talking down to black people" in comments captured by a microphone. However, when he joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago to greet the new president on election night, he had tears streaming down his face.
"I wish for a moment that Dr King... could've just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labour," he told the Associated Press news agency in a later interview. "I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey."
In 2017, he announced he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease after experiencing symptoms for three years. Doctors later confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder, and he was admitted to hospital in November.
Following his death, tributes have been paid to a trailblazer who spoke up for minorities, for the poor and underrepresented.
"I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of colour," he told the Associated Press. "Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities."
US Southern Command posted a video on X of Monday's operation, along with a statement that "intelligence confirmed the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and were engaged in narco-trafficking operations".
The strikes are the latest in a series of controversial military operations which have brought the number of so-called "narcoterrorists" killed to at least 145 people since early September 2025.
Like most of the military's statements on the 42 known strikes, US Southern Command said it targeted alleged drug traffickers along known smuggling routes.
It alleged the three boats were "operated by designated terrorist organisations".
Two vessels carrying four people each were struck in the eastern Pacific Ocean, while a third boat with three people was hit in the Caribbean Sea.
The military posted videos showing the boats being destroyed.
Donald Trump said the US is in "armed conflict" with cartels in Latin America and has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs.
In a post on X, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth praised the strikes: "Turns out President's Day - under President Trump - is not a good day to run drugs."
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The military has not provided evidence that the boats or people killed on Monday were involved in drug trafficking.
In January, the US launched a direct military attack on Venezuela, extraditing Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, transporting them both to New York to face narcoterrorism and other charges, which both deny.