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CHRISTINE McGuinness has taken a subtle swipe at ex Paddy in a post after taking off her wedding ring following their split.

Model Christine, 37, has unveiled a new gorgeous ring three years after her split from Radio 2 presenter Paddy.

The couple announced their split in 2022 after 11 years of marriage and three children.

Christine has now revealed she commissioned a bespoke ring featuring three huge diamonds to represent each of her kids, twins Leo and Penelope, 12, and 9-year-old Felicity.

The three diamonds are unique in shape and are connected via one silver band, with Christine sharing photos of the extraordinary jewellery on Instagram.

She wrote alongside the snaps: “Three diamonds, three babies, three reasons my heart shines.

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“Different shapes, same sparkle, all beautifully unique just like my children.

“A new chapter, a new ring, one for each of them  a love that never ends.

“It took three years to find the perfect piece but they were worth every moment.”

In a subtle reference to her divorce, Christine added: “Not a wedding ring.

She added: “But a forever ring for the little loves who fill my heart everyday.

“Thank you for creating this beautiful, unique, very special ring @luxury_watches_and_jewellery”

Paddy and Christine were together for 15 years, and she continues to live in the home they shared with the kids.

During their divorce proceedings, it was ruled that Paddy, 52, will be able to keep the £2.5million mansion they both call home.

But in an unexpected twist, it was ruled that Christine and their kids could continue living in the seven-bedroom Cheshire home, which has a gym and swimming pool.

Christine and their kids have autism, and she reportedly didn’t want to uproot their kids from the house they grew up in.

Paddy told The Sun he and Christine still spend Christmas together for the sake of their three children.

Asked if he and Christine spend Christmas Day together, Paddy, 52, replied: “Of course, because both of our families are our children’s relatives. Our children are always happy to see all of our family.

“Luckily for us it’s a nice vibe in our household so there’s never anything where the children feel anything negative whatsoever.

“I think most parents who have separated want what’s best for the children.”

HELEN Flanagan heaped praise on her mother as the row with her ex Scott Sinclair intensifies.

The Coronation Street star has been lashing out at her at the Bristol Rovers footballer after he missed their son Charlie’s nativity play to party at the Formula One in Abu Dhabi.

Helen split from her ex-fiancé in 2022 after 13 years together and they share three children Matilda, 10, Delilah, seven, and Charlie, four.

She is currently starring as The Wicked Queen in a production of Snow White in Liverpool and said her mum, Julia has practically raised her kids while she treads the boards.

Helen posted a photo of Julia to her Instagram stories cuddling up with Charlie.

“So grateful for my incredible mum who has looked after my children for really the past two months while I’ve been working,” she captioned the post.

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“The BEST grandma ever, so lucky to have you mum.”

Helen added: “All the school runs, all the activities, all the school work, all the washing. Love you.”

The star previously opened up to The Sun about the struggles of co-parenting with Scott and relying on her mum for help.

She said: “He lives like Somerset and I live in Lancashire. So we live so far away from each other, which is really difficult when you’ve got three young children.

“I hate calling it co-parenting because I don’t really feel like a co-parent to be honest with you anyway.”

The star is reliant on her mum and dad, who live 15 minutes away, to help with childcare duties, admitting she would “really struggle” without their help.

“I have my children for the rest of the time,” she said. “Which I would never want any other way. I work most days.

“Always back and forth, you know, from London, like a yo-yo as well. My mum’s incredible. She really helps me bring up my children really. I’m very lucky to have that support.”

Fireworks lit the stage and the audience roared as pop star Nicki Minaj walked out hand-in-hand with Erika Kirk Sunday in a surprise appearance at Turning Point USA’s annual convention in Phoenix.

“I love this woman; she is an amazing woman,” said Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, who headed the right-wing student organization until he was killed in September. “Words are words, but I know her heart.”

Minaj, who has surprised some fans in recent months by embracing the MAGA movement, praised President Trump and mocked California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“I have the utmost respect and admiration for our president,” Minaj said. “I don’t know if he even knows this but he has given so many people hope that there is a chance to beat the bad guys and to win and to do it with your head held high.”

Minaj then read some of her former social media posts mocking Newsom, calling him “Newscum” and “Gavie-poo.”

“Imagine being the guy running on wanting to see trans kids, haha, not even a trans adult would run on that,” she said. “Normal adults wake up and think they want to see healthy, safe, happy kids — not Gav.”

Minaj then urged boys to “be boys.”

“There is nothing wrong with being a boy,” she said. “How about that? How powerful is that? How profound is that? Boys will be boys and there is nothing wrong with that.”

Minaj praised Turning Point USA, saying the organization is encouraging youth to connect with God.

“There has been a lack of that in our media, in our everyday conversations,” she said. “Christians have been being persecuted right here in our country in different ways.”

Minaj drew attention from the Trump administration in November, when she publicly backed the president’s assertions that Christians face persecution in Nigeria, a claim the Nigerian government has disputed.

Ukrainian military successes and Russian narratives clashed this week, as Moscow’s assertion of inevitable victory flew in the face of facts on the ground.

Ukraine steadily took back control of almost all of its northern city of Kupiansk after isolating Russian forces within it, belying Russian claims to have seized it.

Russian forces were also unable to dislodge Ukrainian defenders from the eastern city of Pokrovsk to back up Moscow’s claims of total control.

And Moscow attempted to deny Ukraine’s successful use of an underwater unmanned vehicle to severely damage a Kilo-class submarine, despite visual evidence.

Ukrainian forces operating in the northern Kharkiv region said they had cut Russian logistics to Kupiansk, surrounded a vanguard of 200 Russians inside it, and cleared Russian forces out of forests north of the city on December 12.

Geolocated footage showed Ukrainian forces advancing in the city the following day and taking back the southern suburb of Yuvileynyi, pushing Russian troops to the northern and western suburbs.

The Russian position had become more precarious by Monday. Ukrainian forces said they prevented reinforcements from entering the city through a gas pipeline, a tactic Russia had used in the siege of Chasiv Yar, and the isolated Russian troops were being supplied solely by drone. Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces were still repelling Russian attacks on Friday.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence insisted it had control of the situation. “Units of the Zapad Group of Forces exercise reliable control over all districts of liberated Kupiansk,” it said on Monday, claiming that Ukraine’s efforts to enter the city from the south were being suppressed.

“The only thing that can be said for sure is that the Russian Armed Forces are still holding part of the centre and north of Kupiansk, but most of it is already either in the grey zone or under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” wrote a Russian military reporter on the Telegram messaging app.

On Wednesday this week, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskii, Ukraine’s Army commander-in-chief, told a Ramstein-format of Ukraine’s allies that his forces had taken back 90 percent of Kupiansk. At the same time in Moscow, Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov was telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that “the enemy is unsuccessfully trying to regain” the city.

“The Russian Defense Minister, Belousov, continues to lie that Russia controls Kupiansk,” wrote Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, on Telegram. “In reality, most of the city is controlled by the Ukrainian Defense Forces, which are continuing to clear it of Russians. However, all of Putin’s officials, from [commander-in-chief Valery] Gerasimov, who was the first to lie about controlling the city, to Belousov, continue to lie in the presence of Putin himself.”

Contrary to the available evidence, Belousov also insisted that Russia had seized Pokrovsk, which Russia calls Krasnoarmeysk, and was on the cusp of vanquishing neighbouring Myrnohrad, which Russia calls Dimitrov. Both towns are in the eastern Donetsk region, and are almost surrounded by Russian forces to the north, south and east.

“Russian soldiers continue to inflict fire damage on Ukrainian troops in Dimitrov, the last stronghold of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Krasnoarmeysk agglomeration,” Belousov told Putin.

But Syrskii told allies that Ukrainian forces had regained about 16 square kilometres (6 square miles) in the northern part of Pokrovsk and 56sq km (22sq miles) west of the city. “Logistics in Myrnograd are complex, but the operations continue,” he wrote.

Russia had claimed complete control over Pokrovsk on December 2 and was sticking to its story.

Submarine and oil refinery explosions

A third point of contention was Ukraine’s successful use of an underwater unmanned vehicle (UUV) to strike a Russian Kilo-class submarine on Monday (December 15), in what is considered the first such attack in military history.

Video of the Russian fleet at anchor in the port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea shows a huge explosion in the stern section of the submarine.

Ukraine’s State Security Service later claimed credit for the attack.

However, Russia’s Defence Ministry said: “Not a single ship or submarine as well as the crews of the Black Sea Fleet stationed in the bay of the Novorossiysk naval base were damaged as a result of the sabotage.”

The ministry published footage of what it said was the attacked submarine, in which it appeared undamaged above the surface, but the video did not show the stern section.

Ukraine’s long-range strikes against Russia scored other successes, on which Russia did not comment.

Ukraine struck the oil refinery in Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow, on December 12. On Sunday, Ukrainian drones struck the Afipsky refinery in Krasnodar Krai and the Uryupinsk oil depot in Volgograd, causing explosions in both locations. They also struck the Dorogobuzhskaya power plant in Smolensk.

United States and Ukrainian negotiating teams met for two days in Berlin on Sunday and Monday. Russian officials said they would be briefed next week on the results of those talks.

But even as it claimed to be interested in ongoing peace negotiations, Russia clearly signalled that it plans to continue aggressive operations next year.

“The key task for the next year is to maintain and increase the pace of the offensive,” said Belousov in Putin’s presence on Wednesday, at an expanded meeting of the Defence Ministry Board.

“It wasn’t us who started the war in 2022; it was the destructive forces in Ukraine, with the support of the West – essentially, the West itself that unleashed this war,” Putin said. “We are only trying to finish it, to put an end to it.”

Putin said “the goals of the special military operation will certainly be achieved,” and “Russia will achieve the liberation of its historical lands by military means,” suggesting there was little room for compromise on Moscow’s side.

Putin’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov signalled the same thing in an interview with ABC on Tuesday. He said Europe and Ukraine expected a “deep and very wrong” revision of Russian peace proposals, and ruled out conceding seized Ukrainian land.

“We are not able in any form to compromise on this, because it would be, in our view, a revision of a very fundamental element of our statehood, set forth through our constitution,” Naryshkin said.

Russian losses outpace recruitments

Russia has attempted to give the impression that it has inexhaustible manpower with which to prosecute the war it started in Ukraine.

Belousov said almost 410,000 Russians volunteered for military service, exceeding expectations for 2025.

That translates to 32,800 per month. “Data from the Ukrainian General Staff on Russian losses indicate that Russian forces suffered an average of 34,600 casualties per month between January and November 2025 – suggesting that Belousov’s recruitment numbers are not quite replacing Russian losses,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested most of these casualties were deaths. “[Putin] spends around 30,000 soldiers’ lives on the front every month. Not wounded – 30,000 killed each month… We have drone footage confirming these deaths,” he told Dutch parliamentarians.

Syrski also doubted Russian recruitment quotas were sufficient.

“The number of Russian troops has long been around 710,000,” he wrote on Telegram. “However, the enemy has not been able to increase this figure, despite active recruitment in Russia, because our soldiers are ‘reducing’ the number of occupiers by a thousand every day through deaths and injuries.”

Russian leader underscores Kremlin’s hardline stance on peace talks as Trump pushes for deal to end war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at his highly choreographed annual question-and-answer session in Moscow, has said his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy refuses to discuss territorial concessions.

The comments were made on Friday during the “Results of the Year” event, where Putin fielded questions from millions of Russians on topics ranging from domestic policy to the war.

Putin’s remarks are the latest in a drumbeat of often-repeated maximalist Russian positions nearly four years after he ordered troops into the neighbouring country, as United States President Donald Trump intensifies diplomatic efforts to broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv.

The issue of territory gained, lost, to be ceded or not, delves into the heart of the matter on one of the most contentious issues in the talks to end the war so far.

“We know from statements from Zelenskyy that he’s not prepared to discuss territory issues,” Putin told attendees at the event in the capital’s Gostiny Dvor exhibition hall. Zelenskyy has indeed stated that clearly, but Ukraine’s constitution also forbids the ceding of land.

Putin has demanded Ukraine cede all territory in four key regions his forces have captured and occupied, along with Crimea, which Moscow seized and annexed in 2014.

He also wants Ukrainian troops to withdraw from parts of eastern Ukraine that Russian forces have not yet taken in the eastern Donetsk region, where fighting remains attritional – conditions Kyiv has rejected outright.

Putin projected confidence about battlefield progress, saying Russian forces had “fully seized strategic initiative” and would make further gains before the year ends.

Moscow’s larger army has made steady advances in recent months, seizing between 12 and 17 square kilometres (4.5 and 6.6 square miles) daily in 2025, according to Western assessments.

The Russian president also attacked Western handling of frozen Russian assets, labelling plans to use them for Ukraine as “robbery” rather than theft because it was being done openly.

“Whatever they stole, they’ll have to give it back someday,” he said, pledging to pursue legal action in courts he described as “independent of political decisions”.

European Union leaders agreed to provide a hefty $105bn interest-free loan to Ukraine to meet its military and economic needs in its war with Russia for the next two years, EU Council President Antonio Costa said.

The leaders decided early on Friday ‍to borrow cash on capital markets to fund Ukraine’s defence against Russia rather than use frozen Russian assets, diplomats said.

The annual event, which Putin has held in different formats since 2001, drew about three million questions from Russians via phone, text and online platforms. An artificial intelligence system processed the queries to identify common themes.

Putin’s comments come at a pivotal moment, and are watched closely by Western officials who will want to get a read on how he intends to present the situation on the ground to the Russian public.

Trump has launched a major diplomatic push to end nearly four years of fighting, but negotiations have stalled over sharply conflicting demands from Moscow and Kyiv.

US officials estimate that Russia and Ukraine have suffered more than two million casualties since Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022. Neither side discloses reliable loss figures.

England’s Jofra Archer gets two wickets in three balls, removing Marnus Labuschagne and Cameron Green, in the first over after lunch as Australia fall to 94-4 on day one of the third Ashes Test in Adelaide.

FOLLOW LIVE: The Ashes third Test – day one

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Singapore Airlines’ ultra-long-haul route covers 9,537 miles – but it doesn’t come cheap.

The world’s longest flight links America to Asia, with travellers buckled in for nearly 19 hours. Singapore Airlines currently holds the record for the lengthiest long-haul journey, operating from New York’s JFK Airport to Singapore Changi.

The epic 9,537-mile trek boasts a scheduled flight time of 18 hours and 50 minutes and first took to the skies back in 2018.

Singapore Airlines deploys their cutting-edge A350-900ULRs on this route, aircraft capable of remaining airborne for over 20 hours non-stop.

These planes achieve such endurance thanks to a specially adapted fuel system. This enhancement boosts the aircraft’s total fuel capacity to an enormous 24,000 litres.

Yet this mammoth journey isn’t available to all, as Singapore Airlines doesn’t provide economy seating on this route. The carrier instead provides 67 Business Class seats and 94 Premium Economy Class seats.

Premium Economy travellers can relish additional legroom, a footrest, and an adjustable headrest. Passengers also benefit from noise-cancelling headphones and WiFi throughout their journey, reports the Express.

Business class flyers experience ultimate privacy, with their seats transforming into completely flat beds for proper rest during travel. Singapore Airlines maintains that the A350-900ULR delivers passengers a “more comfortable travelling experience”.

The aircraft boasts a host of additional amenities including elevated ceilings, expansive windows and specially engineered lighting systems to combat jet lag.

The carrier maintains that the aircraft’s cutting-edge carbon composite construction also enables superior air quality throughout the cabin.

Prospective passengers will need deep pockets, as tickets routinely command prices well into five-figure territory.

Singapore Airlines’ chief executive, Mr Goh Choon Phong, has previously stated that the new service will provide the “fastest way” to journey between these two metropolitan hubs.

He said: “Singapore Airlines has always taken pride in pushing the boundaries to provide the best possible travel convenience for our customers, and we are pleased to be leading the way with these new non-stop flights using the latest technology, ultra-long-range Airbus A350-900ULR.

“The flights will offer our customers the fastest way to travel between the two cities – in great comfort, together with Singapore Airlines’ legendary service – and will help boost connectivity to and through the Singapore hub.”

In the winter, you can enjoy the seafront paths without the crowds, and enjoy views of snow-capped mountains on the coldest days.

A coastal path in Wales has been hailed as the UK’s top Christmas walk, thanks to its breathtaking mountain vistas and close proximity to snug pubs. The ranking, compiled by GO Outdoors, utilised TripAdvisor reviews and data on average December snowfall, along with festive factors such as nearby watering holes.

Using this information, the outdoor retailer curated a list of the top ten spots for a brisk December amble or a post-Christmas dinner saunter. Barmouth Beach, nestled on the fringes of Eyri National Park (Snowdonia), clinched the number one position. The area is enveloped by natural splendour, offering panoramic views across Cardigan Bay and the Mawddach Estuary.

During the summer months, this sandy expanse has a classic seaside atmosphere. A land train chugs along the promenade, children enjoy donkey rides on the sand, and the shallow waters are perfect for a paddle.

However, winter also presents an ideal opportunity for exploration, allowing visitors to savour the seafront paths without the throngs of people and admire views of snow-dusted mountains on the chilliest days, reports the Express.

While a tranquil stroll along the promenade is always an option, there’s also a more demanding route for those wishing to soak up some of the surrounding landscape.

The four-mile-long Panorama Walk commences at the beach and meanders through dense woodland and winding country lanes along the Mawddach Estuary.

However, it’s recommended for seasoned walkers, as it can be hilly and tricky to navigate, particularly in cold, damp conditions.

After exploring the coast, venture inland to find a cosy pub for some warmth. Just 500 metres from the beach, The Royal is a traditional stone-clad pub that’s a welcome sight after a chilly walk.

Settle into a leather chair and soak up the old-world charm while sipping on a pint and savouring classic pub grub, from roasts to a Welsh cheeseboard.

If you’d rather warm up with a hot brew, Davy Jones Locker is worth a visit. This harbourside café serves everything from hearty breakfasts to fish and chips.

Enjoy the sunshine at an outdoor table or head inside to appreciate the quirky, nautical-themed décor.

Although it only operates seasonally, usually from April to October, consider booking a ticket on the ferry departing from Barmouth Harbour. At just £4 per adult, it offers breathtaking views of the Afon Mawddach estuary.

The ferry also links with Fairbourne Railway, a vintage train service running along the mid-Wales coast.

Passengers can take in the coastal scenery as they journey along, with day passes available for those who wish to hop on and off at their leisure.

Stroll into town to discover a handful of independent shops, alongside numerous hotels and restaurants in the centre.

If you’re planning a festive getaway, The Sandbanks Hotel is a great choice, boasting direct beach access, rooms with sea views, and Christmas-themed entertainment.

An Al Jazeera crew at the Thai border with Cambodia was forced to take shelter in a bunker as Cambodia shelled the village of Ban Nong Mek, in Thailand’s Sisaket province.