Saudi Arabia has strongly denounced US Senate resolutions which called for an end to American support for Saudi forces in Yemen and blamed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.   

The kingdom released an unusually forceful statement after both Democrat and Republican senators defied the White House and voted through the largely symbolic resolutions criticising Saudi Arabia.  

"The Kingdom categorically rejects any interference in its internal affairs, any and all accusations, in any manner, that disrespect its leadership… and any attempts to undermine its sovereignty or diminish its stature,” the Saudi foreign ministry said.

While Donald Trump has said he plans to stand by Saudi Arabia, the US-Saudi relationship is under increasing scrutiny from Congress and the American public after the death of Mr Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist.  

The Senate resolutions have no legal weight but will add to pressure on Mr Trump over his administration’s close ties to the kingdom’s leaders. 

Saudi Arabia insists Crown Prince Mohammed was not aware of the plan to kill Mr Khashoggi, even though one of his closest aides and several members of his security entourage were allegedly involved. 

The kingdom argues that its bombing campaign in Yemen is in self-defence against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who have fired ballistic missiles into Saudi territory. Human rights groups say indiscriminate Saudi bombing and a harsh blockade have killed thousands of civilians. 

A UN-brokered ceasefire deal is due to go into effect Tuesday in the key port city of Hodeidah after peace talks between the Houthis and the Yemeni government in Sweden last week. 

The agreement was looking shaky after intense fighting in Hodeidah over the weekend but UN officials said they were optimistic that the truce would go ahead. Residents reported sporadic fighting around the city on Monday. 

A sustained ceasefire could be a major step towards a larger peace deal to end the three-year war, which is believed to have killed tens of thousands of people and brought millions of Yemenis to the brink of starvation. 

Aid groups have warned that a full-on Saudi offensive in Hodeidah could destroy port facilities and stop badly-needed humanitarian supplies from reaching civilians.

Mr Khashoggi, a Saudi contributor to the Washington Post, was killed on October 2 shortly after entering the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in what Riyadh called a "rogue" operation.

The murder has tarnished Riyadh’s international reputation, and Western countries including the United States, France and Canada have placed sanctions on nearly 20 Saudi nationals.

UN chief Antonio Guterres on Sunday called for a "credible" probe into the murder.

Anger at the human cost of the war in Yemen has also prompted a harder line in Congress about the US military’s role in backing Saudi-led coalition strikes against Huthi rebels.

Since the coalition launched its campaign in 2015, the conflict has killed nearly 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organisation. But some rights groups believe the toll to be far higher.

An American adventurer has won a grueling race against a British Army officer to become the first person to trek unaided across Antarctica.

Colin O’Brady, 33, arrived on the coast of the Ross Sea on Wednesday after trekking nearly 1000 miles across the frozen continent, beating Capt Lou Rudd by hours. 

Crossing onto the Ross Ice Shelf at the point where Antarctica’s land mass ends, Mr O’Brady described feeling "delirious".  

"I accomplished my goal: to become the first person in history to traverse the continent of Antarctica coast to coast solo, unsupported and unaided," he wrote in an Instagram post after covering the final 77.5 miles in 32 hours.

"While the last 32 hours were some of the most challenging hours of my life, they have quite honestly been some of the best moments I have ever experienced," he wrote.

"I was locked in a deep flow state the entire time, equally focused on the end goal, while allowing my mind to recount the profound lessons of this journey. I’m delirious writing this as I haven’t slept yet."

Mr O’Brady and Capt Rudd, 49, both set off from Union Glacier on November 3, setting up a contest that recalled the 1911 race for the pole between Norway’s Roald Amundsen and Britain’s Captain Scott. 

Each man wore cross-country skis and pulled a sled, called a pulk, carrying 180 kilograms of provisions and equipment. 

Mr O’Brady, who called his walk the "impossible first", took 54 days to complete the 921 mile crossing from coast to coast. He reached the South Pole on Dec 12.  

He documented his journey on his Instagram page, writing in detail about the physical and psychological privations of battling 30 mph headwinds that left him wanting to quit.

Capt Rudd, who was descending the Leverett glacier and about 40 miles from completing his journey on Thursday, congratulated Mr O’Brady in an update posted on his expedition’s website. 

"Fantastic, well done to him. He’d pushed really hard all the way across and done extremely well, so congratulations to him. For me, I’ve never felt like I’ve been in a race, I’ve never been in race mode, it’s always been about completing the journey, which I’m looking forward to doing in a couple of days’ time. That’ll be incredible," he wrote. 

"I’ve still got a couple more days in here, on the Glacier. I can comfortably finish in two days," he wrote.

Capt Rudd set up his expedition in honour of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Worsley, a fellow British Army officer who died while trying to complete an unassisted solo crossing of Antarctica in 2016.

Mr O’Brady’s wife, Jenna Besaw, said her husband planned to remain in Antarctica until Capt Rudd has completed his trek. 

"It’s a small club," she said. "His intention is to wait for Louis and have kind of a celebratory moment with the only other person on the planet to have accomplished this same thing."

Borge Ousland, a Norwegian polar explorer, completed the first solo crossing of Antarctica in 1997, but he was wind-aided by kites.

Post-Soviet Russia’s most notorious serial killer known as the "Angarsk Maniac" was given a second life sentence by a Siberian court on Monday after he was found guilty of killing 56 more victims over a period of 15 years.

Mikhail Popkov worked as a police officer in the Siberian city of Angarsk and was sentenced to life in prison last year when he was found guilty of murdering 22 women. 

After sentencing, he admitted to the murders of an additional 59 women.

Popkov called himself a “cleaner,”  the Interfax news agency reported, and claimed that he only targeted “women who lead loose lifestyles.”

Lead investigator Yevgeny Karchevsky said that Popkov’s motive was misogyny. According to the RIA Novosti news agency, Popkov began killing after finding his wife cheated on him.

Local police began searching for a serial killer as early as 1992, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that patterns began to emerge in a string of violent, sexual murders in the region around Angarsk.

A common theme was track marks from a Lada Niva, a car used by police nationwide.

From the early 90s to 2010, Popkov would don a police uniform and drive his police car on nighttime hunts for women at bus stops and other public places, using his cover to offer them a ride home.

He would instead drive them to the woods, rape them, and then murder them.

“He willingly described all of this,” Mr Karchevsky told RIA Novosti, “with pathos and even with gusto.” 

The investigator added that, setting aside his crimes, Popkov was a sane, well-educated man. 

“These were skills of psychological manipulation,” he said.

Mr Karchevsky said that the investigation into Popkov was the first of its kind in Russia, requiring years of work, DNA testing, and witness testimonies spanning the globe.

As part of Monday’s second life sentence, Popkov was stripped of his retired police title.

Popkov’s lawyer says he intends to appeal that part of the verdict, given his cooperation in the investigation.

The ruling deprives him of a 24,000 ruble (£285) monthly police pension.

North Korea may have been exploiting collaboration with foreign scientists to bypass tough international sanctions and further its nuclear weapons programme, according to a new investigation. 

An analysis released by the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, flags at least 100 journals published jointly by North Korean and foreign scientists that have “identifiable significance for dual-use technology, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or other military purposes.” 

The findings, based on scientific journals spanning more than six decades, shed some light on how North Korea could have advanced so rapidly in building its nuclear and missiles technology despite long-running and harsh international penalties to prevent it from doing so. 

The large majority of the 1,304 research papers dating from 1956 to April 2018 involve natural sciences, engineering or mathematics, but among the identified “areas of concern or potential concern” are Romanian assistance with uranium purification and GPS-related work with Germany and China. 

Most of the research that warrants a closer look involves collaboration with Chinese scientists. 

In an interview with The Telegraph, Joshua Pollack, one of the lead authors on the report, highlighted work on the “isolation of high voltage cables” and on automotive technology as apparently “clear-cut” examples of potential breaches of the ban on the transfer of dual-use equipment. 

Dual-use in this sense would be any legitimate technology that could also be appropriated to assist the creation of WMD or nuclear reactors.

Joint Chinese and North Korean papers on automotive technology had set off alarm bells as they included a computer system that could make the axels on a truck operate independently, said Mr Pollack. 

“That is something that is not associated with an ordinary truck. There are civilian applications for that but in North Korea the obvious use for that is a missile launching vehicle,” he revealed. 

Such an extensive analysis of the risks of scientific collaboration with North Korea is rare, but it is not the first time the issue has been raised. 

Last year, Ken Kato, director of the Tokyo-based Human Rights in Asia, wrote to the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, urging them to close a legal loophole that allegedly allowed pro-North Korean scientists to remain in sensitive research positions. 

“There are six Korean scientists who have been able to remain in sensitive research positions after claiming to have switched their political allegiances to South Korea,” Mr Kato claimed on Thursday. He has not yet received a UN response to his earlier enquiry. 

Mr Pollack and his team conclude that “UN member states must decide what research activities by their nationals or within their territory lie within the scope of sanctions, and which activities are better avoided in order to uphold the integrity of the sanctions regime." 

He added: “We do not want to hand Kim Jong-un a shortcut to advancing his military, advancing his weapons of mass destruction.”

But the complicated nature of scientific research also creates a dilemma about where to draw the line. 

Mr Pollack stressed that concerns over the misuse of some research should not lead to a “blanket ban” on scientific collaboration with the secretive regime, which prizes scientists so highly that it awards them with the best housing in the capital, Pyongyang. 

“You would have to have very strong reasons to shut the North Koreans out, bearing in mind that science contributes to human welfare and progress. It’s not all about weapons,” he said. 

Many Western researchers are heavily vetted by their governments before they can proceed.  

British cooperation with Pyongyang over the years has included “frontiers on mathematics”, engineering principles and, more recently, studies of Mount Paektu, a volcano on North Korea’s border with China. 

James Hammond, a geophysicist at the Birkbeck University of London, who has been working on the project alongside American, Chinese and North Korean colleagues, told NPR that it took almost two years to get US and UK government approval to carry in sensitive seismic equipment. 

Research on the volcano could prove vital to saving many lives if there was a future eruption, Mr Pollack pointed out. 

“I think it may be the case that we don’t do enough when there are humanitarian issues. In particular, epidemiology comes to mind. In both China and North Korea there is a lot of drug-resistant tuberculosis, for example… And disease doesn’t care that much about borders,” he said.  

Finally, he argued, scientific collaboration made sense from a strategic point of view. Towards the end of the Cold War, cooperation between Soviet and American scientific establishments helped to build bridges between the two enemies. 

“Having these bridges between scientists is not a bad thing from a perspective of enlightened self-interest,” he said.   

The family of British backpacker Grace Millane have said they hope that what happened to her "will not deter even one  person from venturing out into the world" after the disappearance of the 22-year-old.

The body of Ms Millane was formally identified on Wednesday after she went missing from a hostel in Auckland, New Zealand, on December 1.

Officers said Ms Millane’s family were "in the process of organising to take her home" as their investigation into the circumstances of her death continue.

Her family said: "Grace went off to travel the world in mid-October and arrived in New Zealand on the 20th November.

"By the amount of pictures and messages we received, she clearly loved this country, its people and the lifestyle.

"We all hope that what has happened to Grace will not deter even one person from venturing out into the world and discovering their own OE (overseas experience)."

Calling the crime "heinous", the family also paid tribute to investigating officers for completing a "concise, stringent and thorough investigation".

They added: "We would like to thank the people of New Zealand for their outpouring of love, numerous messages, tributes and compassion.

"Grace was not born here and only managed to stay a few weeks, but you have taken her to your hearts and in some small way she will forever be a Kiwi."

Jesse Kempson, 26, has been charged with murder and appeared in an Auckland court on Monday.

Ms Millane, from Essex, was last seen at about 9.40pm on December 1 in the company of a man at the CityLife hotel in Auckland, not far from the hostel she was staying at, which is located on the road Mr Kempson lived on.

Detective Inspector Scott Beard said: "Work continues to piece together exactly what happened to Grace, as we build a timeline of the circumstances."

Officers said they have received "hundreds" of calls about the case and investigators are trying to establish a timeline of events.

Police initially launched a missing person inquiry for the University of Lincoln graduate after her parents became concerned that she did not reply to birthday wishes sent on December 2.

Since arriving in New Zealand from Peru on November 20, she had been in near-daily contact with her family, officers said.

A week after she was last seen alive, police said they were treating the case as a homicide investigation and a day later a body was found in the Waitakere Ranges 10 metres away from the road

On Monday, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern gave an emotional apology to Ms Millane’s family, saying: "Your daughter should have been safe here, and she wasn’t, and I’m sorry for that."

"I cannot imagine the grief of her family and what they would be experiencing and feeling right now."

Candlelit vigils were held throughout New Zealand to honour Grace Millane on Wednesday night, and several more were planned for Saturday with peace walks in Auckland and Christchurch.

The vigil held outside Auckland’s SkyCity Casino – one of the places Grace was last seen alive – was a tribute all 15 women killed on New Zealand soil during 2018.

On a warm summer night, amidst the fake snow and bauble-strewn pines of Christmas, hundreds of people gathered beside the casino. Many clasped candles, some were in tears.

Broadcaster Ali Mau organised the event and said Millane’s death had "become a flashpoint for anger and grief over New Zealand’s appalling record on violence against women".

"Sadly, Grace is not alone. Just today, police have given details of another Auckland woman murdered in the past 24 hours."

Abby Munckhof, 23, said she that while she was aware violence towards women was a problem the world over, following Millane’s story had “brought it home” for her.

“I can identify with Grace. I’m also a young women, I also go travelling overseas, head off with strangers … you think you’re going to be safe and she deserved to be safe.”