GREEN MAG

By Andrew MacAskill, William James and Michael Holden

LONDON, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Former British ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson was released from police custody on Tuesday after being arrested in London on suspicion of misconduct in public office, following revelations over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Mandelson, 72, was fired ‌from the most prestigious posting in Britain's diplomatic service in September, when the depth of his friendship with the convicted sex offender started to become ‌clear.

Police earlier this month began a criminal investigation into Mandelson after Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government passed on communications between the former ambassador and Epstein.

"Officers have arrested a 72-year-old man on suspicion of misconduct in public ​office," London's Metropolitan Police said in a statement relating to an investigation into a former government minister.

Mandelson was filmed leaving his central London home on Monday afternoon. He was accompanied by plainclothes officers wearing body cameras, before being driven away in a car.

A separate statement later said he had been released on bail, pending further investigation, and he was seen returning home at around 0200 GMT.

The arrest means police suspect a crime has been committed but does not imply any guilt.

There was no immediate response from Mandelson's lawyers.

EMAILS SHOWED MANDELSON AND EPSTEIN CLOSER ‌THAN THOUGHT

Emails between Mandelson and Epstein, released by the U.S. Department ⁠of Justice in late January, showed the two men had a closer relationship than had been publicly known, and Mandelson had shared information with the financier when he was a minister in former Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government in 2009.

Mandelson, who this month resigned from ⁠Starmer's Labour Party and quit his position in parliament's upper chamber, has previously said he "very deeply" regretted his association with Epstein. But he has not commented publicly or responded to messages seeking comment on the latest revelations.

Mandelson's homes in London and west England were searched by police earlier this month.

"He was arrested at an address in Camden on Monday, 23 February and has been taken ​to ​a London police station for interview," the police statement said.

Advertisement

"This follows search warrants at two addresses in ​the Wiltshire and Camden areas."

Last week, King Charles' younger brother Andrew ‌Mountbatten-Windsor was also arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office over separate allegations he sent confidential government documents to Epstein. He has always denied any wrongdoing.

PRESSURE GROWS ON STARMER OVER VETTING BEFORE APPOINTMENT

A conviction for misconduct in a public office carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, and must be handled in a Crown Court, which only deals with the most serious criminal offences.

Mandelson's relationship with Epstein, who died in prison while awaiting trial in 2019 on sex trafficking charges, is at the centre of a British political scandal that has forced the resignation of two senior government officials.

Starmer, who has faced calls to step down over Mandelson's appointment, faces further scrutiny after parliament ordered the release ‌of documents relating to his vetting. A minister said on Monday that the first documents should be ​published in early March.

MANDELSON HAD A DECADES-LONG CAREER IN UK POLITICS

Mandelson has had a turbulent, decades‑long career ​in British politics.

He came to prominence in the mid-to-late 1990s as one of ​the architects of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's New Labour project.

But Mandelson was forced to resign twice from the cabinet, first in ‌1998 for failing to disclose a home loan he had taken from ​a colleague, and second in 2001 after ​allegations that he had tried to influence a passport application.

But he was reappointed as a minister in Brown's Labour government from 2008 to 2010 and eventually returned to public office when Starmer made him ambassador to the United States in late 2024.

His appointment as ambassador to the United States was initially seen as a ​shrewd move. He scored an early victory by ensuring Britain ‌was the first country to agree a deal with the United States to lower some of President Donald Trump's tariffs.

But he was fired a few ​months later when documents showed his close ties to Epstein.

Starmer has said that Mandelson lied about the extent of his ties to Epstein during ​the vetting process.

(Reporting by William James; editing by Michael Holden, Jon Boyle and Andrew Heavens)

VATICAN CITY, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Since the late 1500s, a small workshop in the Vatican has cared for the hundreds of mosaics that decorate the interior of St. Peter's Basilica in a sea of colour.

Inside the Vatican studio that preserves the mosaics of St. Peter Basilica

The 12 artists on staff ‌at the Vatican Mosaic Studio also produce smaller artworks that Pope Leo uses for a kind of "mosaic diplomacy", gifting them ‌to foreign leaders visiting the Vatican or on his own trips overseas.

It can take months for the studio to create one mosaic in a slow and intensive process ​piecing together tiny coloured tiles into devotional items such as depictions of Jesus and Mary or non-religious scenes like a view of Rome's Colosseum.

"It is very important today to use the mosaic technique because we are saving the ancient tradition," Paolo Di Buono, the studio's director, told Reuters.

Their work is made to last for centuries. "We have the idea that we are working for something that (is) ... almost eternal," said Di Buono.

In the basilica, the ‌studio is responsible for 8,360 square metres (90,000 sq ⁠ft) of mosaics, including in the central dome. Mosaics were used, instead of paintings, because of the smoke produced by candles and incense during liturgies.

VATICAN MOSAICS GIVEN TO US PRESIDENTS

One of the studio's most recent productions ⁠was a portrait of the pope, installed at Rome's Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.

The image, produced by a team of three people over five months, contains around 16,000 individual tiles.

"It is meticulous work because the tiles are very small," said Nicoletta Marino, one of the studio's artists. "It takes ​a ​lot of patience."

Advertisement

Adriano Galise, another artist in the studio, showed photos of mosaics ​he created being given by the late Pope Benedict ‌XVI to U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during official visits to the Vatican.

"The fact that our mosaics are used as a gift by the pope is one of the most important traditions in the Vatican," said Di Buono.

The artists in the studio have different methods for creating their works.

Galise prefers to lay out a black-and-white image with a blueprint of possible places to lay tiles, resembling the plan for a jigsaw puzzle. Others start with a coloured picture or drawing.

ARCHIVE OF 27,000 MOSAIC TILE COLOURS

The studio is an artist workshop ‌but also an historic archive. It houses a catalogue of 27,000 varieties of ​coloured tiles, stored in a 9,000-drawer filing cabinet spanning two floors.

About 23,000 of ​the tiles are artefacts - stockpiles of colours from past centuries ​that can no longer be produced and will one day be exhausted. Some of the artefacts were created ‌with poisonous materials that are no longer used today.

For the ​portrait of Leo, studio artists dipped ​into the archive to better capture the shading on the pope's face.

Inside St. Peter's Basilica, artists from the studio are restoring the mosaics in the dome of the Clementine Chapel, one of the church's oldest and most venerated spaces. It is in ​the grotto, near the tomb of St. Peter, ‌the first pope.

"We preserve the works made by our predecessors," Di Buono said of the studio's care of the ​mosaics. "We are connected in a sort of long chain, of which we are the last part."

(Reporting by Joshua McElwee; ​Additional reporting by Matteo Negri and Gabriele Pileri; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

By Andrea Shalal and David Lawder

Feb 24 - President Donald Trump's temporary 15% tariffs to replace those struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court are meant to resolve a problem that many economists say does not exist: a U.S. balance of payments crisis, making them potentially vulnerable to new legal challenges.

Hours after the high court ‌on Friday struck down a huge swath of tariffs Trump had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president announced the new duties under Section 122 of the Trade Act ‌of 1974 -- a never-used statute that even his own legal team dismissed as irrelevant months ago.

Collections of the new 15% tariffs began at midnight on Tuesday as IEEPA tariff collections of 10% to 50% halted.

The Section 122 law allows the ​president to impose duties of up to 15% for up to 150 days on any and all countries to address "large and serious" balance-of-payments deficits and "fundamental international payments problems."

Trump's tariff order argued that a serious balance of payments deficit existed in the form of a $1.2 trillion annual U.S. goods trade deficit and a current account deficit of 4% of GDP and a reversal of the U.S. primary income surplus.

Some economists, including former International Monetary Fund First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath, disagreed with the Trump administration's alarm.

"We can all agree that the U.S. is not facing a balance of payment crisis, which is when countries ‌experience an exorbitant increase in international borrowing costs and lose access ⁠to financial markets," Gopinath told Reuters.

Gopinath rejected the White House's claim that a negative balance on the U.S. primary income for the first time since 1960 was evidence of a large and serious balance of payment problem.

She attributed the negative balance to a large increase in foreign purchases of U.S. equities ⁠and risky assets over the past decade, which outperformed foreign equities over this period.

Mark Sobel, a former U.S. Treasury and IMF official, said that balance of payments crises are more associated with countries that have fixed exchange rates, and noted that the floating-rate dollar has been steady, the 10-year Treasury yield fairly stable, with U.S. stocks performing well.

Josh Lipsky, chair of international economics at the Atlantic Council think tank, agreed, noting that a balance ​of ​payments crisis occurred when a country could not pay for what it was importing or was unable to service ​foreign debt. That was fundamentally different from a trade deficit, he added.

Advertisement

Brad Setser, a ‌currency and trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as a senior adviser to the U.S. Trade Representative in the Biden administration, took a somewhat contrarian view, arguing in lengthy X posts on Sunday that the Trump administration may have a reasonable case that there is a "large and serious" balance of payments deficit.

He noted that the current account deficit was far higher than when then-president Richard Nixon erected tariffs in 1971 to address a balance of payments crisis, and the U.S. net international investment position is much worse. This "gives the administration a real argument," in favor of its tariffs, Setser wrote.

The White House, U.S. Treasury and U.S. Trade Representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the use of Section 122.

WRONG STATUTE FOR THE JOB

Despite the Trump administration's new focus on balance of payments, the Justice Department ‌had previously argued that Section 122 was the wrong statute to handle a national emergency over the trade ​deficit.

In court filings in its defense of IEEPA tariffs, the Justice Department said Section 122 would not have "any obvious ​application here, where the concerns the president identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade ​deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits."

Neal Katyal, who argued at the Supreme Court on behalf of plaintiffs challenging the IEEPA tariffs, told CNBC that the Trump administration's ‌stance against the use of Section 122 for a trade deficit will make ​those tariffs vulnerable to litigation.

"I'm not sure it ​will necessarily even need to get to the Supreme Court, but if the president adheres to this plan of using a statute that his own Justice Department has said he can't use, yeah, I think that's a pretty easy thing to litigate," Katyal said.

It is unclear who might take the lead in challenging the Section 122 tariffs.

Sara Albrecht, chair of ​the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm representing several small businesses that ‌challenged the IEEPA tariffs, said the group would closely monitor any new statutes being invoked.

Albrecht did not reveal any future litigation strategy, adding: "Our immediate focus is simple: making ​sure the refund process begins and that checks start flowing to the American businesses that paid those unconstitutional duties."

In its ruling, the Supreme Court did not give ​instructions regarding refunds, instead remanding the case to a lower trade court to determine next steps.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Russsell Westbrook scored 25 points and Precious Achiuwa had 22 points and 12 rebounds as the Sacramento Kings snapped a 16-game losing streak — the longest in franchise history — with a 123-114 victory over the Memphis Grizzlies on Monday night.

DeMar DeRozan and Daeqwon Plowden finished with 19 points each, with Plowden scoring 10 in the fourth quarter. Sacramento has the NBA's worst record and hadn't won since beating Washington on Jan. 16.

Javon Smalls led Memphis with 21 points and nine assists. Olivier-Maxence Prosper had 17 points and GG Jackson added 16 points.

SPURS 114, PISTONS 103

DETROIT (AP) —Victor Wembanyamahad 21 points, 17 rebounds and six blocks, Devin Vassell scored 28 andSan Antoniobeat the Detroit in a potentialNBAFinals preview.

The Spurs have won a season-high nine games in a row and trail only the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference.

The Eastern Conference-leading Pistons, who had won five straight, host Oklahoma City on Wednesday night in another test.

Advertisement

Detroit star Cade Cunningham struggled, missing 21 of 26 shots and finishing with 16 points and 10 assists.

ROCKETS 125, JAZZ 105

HOUSTON (AP) — Jabari Smith Jr. had 31 points and nine rebounds and Amen Thompson scored 20 points as Houston beat Utah.

Smith hit his first five shots and matched a career-high with 14 points in the first quarter. He converted 12 of 17 shots overall and made six 3-pointers.

Thompson shot 8 for 9 from the field and finished with seven rebounds, three assists and two steals.

Kevin Durant scored 18 points and added a season-high 12 assists. Reed Sheppard scored 15 points off the bench.

With the win, the Rockets (35-21) into third place in the Western Conference, behind Oklahoma City and San Antonio.

MILAN (AP) — Days ahead of theWinter Paralympics, when disabled athletes will take center stage at the Milan Cortina Games, a choir from northernItalyperformed a pop music concert inside Milan's Sant'Antoniochurch, calling for harmony and inclusion — particularly of those with disabilities.

Paralympics Milan Church Inclusion

Around 70 teenagers and adults in the Terzo Tempo choir traveled from the neighboring city Abbiategrasso for their Feb. 18 performance, titled "Like Yeast in the Dough." It drew on a Gospel image that reflects the project's spirit: a discreet presence that helps anyone rise from within.

The choir's concert in Milan formed part of the archdiocese's strategy to seize the Olympic and Paralympic moment to impartChristian values.

"The Olympics and theParalympicsare not something that simply passes over our heads, but something that also touches our lives," said the Rev. Stefano Guidi, who heads the Archdiocese of Milan's Service for Oratories and Sport.

Milan's Catholic Church created in 2021 a special branch that focuses on raising awareness of inclusion. Its work stretches through local parishes and communities, encouraging welcoming environments for everyone, disabled and non-disabled alike.

"If we focus on organizing things only for people with disabilities, we risk segregation," said the Rev. Mauro Santoro, who leads the office alongside 13 volunteers. "Instead, we try to bring everyone together — children's catechism, sports, the simplest activities — because this is true inclusion."

Inclusion rooted in parish life

The Catholic Church's work with young people in Italy largely relies on oratories, parish spaces where children and teenagers gather after school for sports and recreational activities. In these spaces, Santoro said, training to involve people with disabilities and discussions regarding values connected to the Paralympics take place, as well.

"There are testimonies from athletes, including Paralympians," he said. "The real challenge is to change the game so everyone can play well and participate."

Advertisement

This goal was reflected in the choir's concert at Sant'Antonio. The repertoire was in Italian, English and included a Congolese samba — a choice aimed at diversifying and conveying values associated with the Olympic spirit.

"We tried to choose songs that speak about the desire to achieve something and about constant commitment because that is what really matters beyond the result," said the choir's director, Silvia Gatti. "These are values that athletes believe in, but they should concern everyone."

The choir, whose motto is "Where singing is unity, passion, freedom and joy," welcomes participants from all backgrounds and encourages children to sing with people in their 70s.

In previous performances, the choir has addressed themes such as peace and opposition to violence against women, underscoring its community-focused mission.

AP Olympics:https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP'scollaborationwith The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.