It was shortly after 2 a.m. on March 2, the police said, when two members of the British Royal Air Force approached a statue of Paddington Bear, sitting placidly on a park bench in Newbury, England, and holding his favorite snack: a sandwich dripping with marmalade.

The men then kicked, broke apart and stole Paddington, leaving a husk of the bear still affixed to the park bench. But it turns out that they had picked the wrong bear to mess with, in the wrong place.

Newbury has a special reverence for Paddington, as the birthplace of Michael Bond, the author of the beloved children’s book series about the genial Peruvian bear and his adopted family in London, the Browns.

So when the men, Daniel Heath and William Lawrence, both 22, pleaded guilty to criminal damage on Tuesday, the judge had some choice words before he sentenced them.

“Paddington Bear is a beloved cultural icon with children and adults alike,” the judge, Sam Goozée of Reading Magistrates’ Court, told the men, according to a copy of his remarks released by the court. “He represents kindness, tolerance and promotes integration and acceptance in our society. His famous label attached to his duffle coat says, ‘Please look after this bear.’ On the night of 2 March 2025, your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.”

Judge Goozée sentenced the men to 150 hours of community service and ordered them each to pay 2,725 British pounds, or about $3,530, to repair Paddington. “Your actions lacked respect and integrity, two values you should uphold as members of the armed forces,” he said.

Both men expressed remorse for the damage that they had done to the bear.

“Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Heath deeply regret their actions on the day and immediately accepted responsibility when spoken to by the police,” their lawyer, Tom Brymer, said in an email. “No doubt this was behavior which was completely out of character.”

The statue of Paddington, classically attired in a red bucket hat and blue coat, was one of one 23 that were installed last year across the United Kingdom and Ireland to promote the release of the movie “Paddington in Peru.”

On March 2, security-camera footage showed two men — later identified as Mr. Heath and Mr. Lawrence — approaching Paddington on a dark street. Both men were “under the influence of alcohol” at the time, the judge said.

After some prying and pulling, the men succeeded in removing Paddington’s facade. They then carried Paddington to a taxi, which took them and the broken bear back to their Air Force base, Judge Goozée said.

Officers from the Newbury Neighborhood Policing Team tracked Mr. Heath and Mr. Lawrence to their barracks later that day, arrested them and seized the damaged statue, which had been stashed in the trunk of Mr. Lawrence’s car, the police said.

Cracking the case was a point of pride for the local police.

“The Paddington Bear statue is a beloved part of Newbury so we did everything we could to locate it and bring the offenders to justice,” Inspector Alan Hawkett of the Newbury Neighborhood Policing Team said in a statement on Tuesday.

“After a short stay at Newbury police station,” he added, “we handed the statue back to its owners so it can be restored.”

The Newbury Business Improvement District, which owns the Paddington statue, is planning to have the bear repaired and restored to his rightful perch on the park bench.

In the meantime, a spokesman said the district had covered the bench with a gazebo tent, partly to protect passers-by from the rough edges on the damaged statue and “partly so that children wouldn’t see the bear in the broken state.”

The White House said Tuesday that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to cease fighting in the Black Sea and to hash out the details for halting strikes on energy facilities. It would be the first significant step toward the full cease-fire the Trump Administration had been pushing, but it still would fall short of that goal and it remains unclear how and when this limited truce would be implemented.

Both Ukraine and Russia confirmed the agreement, although it appeared to come with some serious caveats on the part of Moscow. In a statement about the talks, the Kremlin said it would honor the agreement only after its state agriculture bank is reconnected to the international payment system and restrictions are lifted on “trade finance operations,” which are some of the penalties imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

In a statement about the U.S.-Russia talks, the White House appeared to agree with at least some of the conditions, saying it “will help restore Russia’s access to the world market for agricultural and fertilizer exports, lower maritime insurance costs, and enhance access to ports and payment systems for such transactions.”

The agreements came after three days of intense negotiations in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, during which delegations from Ukraine and Russia met separately with U.S. mediators.

The White House released two different statements saying it had separately struck deals with Ukraine and Russia on the maritime and energy attacks. The statements added that Washington, Kyiv and Moscow welcomed the involvement of third countries in “supporting the implementation of the energy and maritime agreements.”

Although the agreements marked a breakthrough in the White House’s efforts to reach a cease-fire, even limited, in Ukraine after three years of full-scale war, they did not appear the extract major concessions from Russia, the aggressor country.

Kyiv and Moscow have an interest in stopping strikes on their respective energy facilities, which have caused pain for both sides. Russia, in particular, stands to gain from a cease-fire in the Black Sea, where repeated Ukrainian attacks have forced its navy into retreat.

While President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has portrayed himself as being open to demands from President Trump, like halting the strikes on energy facilities or security in the Black Sea, they are goals that the Kremlin has in the past pursued and seen as beneficial to itself.

Mr. Putin rejected an earlier proposal from the United States, which Ukraine agreed to, for a total 30-day cease-fire. He said a broader truce would have to include a halt to Western military aid to Ukraine and to the country’s mobilization efforts — two conditions that are nonstarters for Ukraine.

Ukraine and Russia are now expected to hammer out details for implementing the maritime and energy cease-fire. Mr. Umerov, who led his country’s delegation in Riyadh, said “additional technical consultations” would have to be held as soon as possible for “the implementation, monitoring and control of the arrangements.”

Both countries had already agreed last week to halt strikes on energy facilities, but they had yet to implement the agreement and quickly accused each other of continuing attacks on energy sites.

Strikes on energy facilities have been central to each side’s efforts to weaken the other throughout the war. Russia has pounded Ukraine’s power grid, aiming to make life unbearable for civilians and hinder its war effort. Ukraine has repeatedly struck Russian oil facilities to try to choke off revenues fueling Moscow’s military operations.

Both Russia and Ukraine also rely on the Black Sea for commodity exports. In mid-2022, they brokered a deal allowing Ukraine to ship grain through the sea, but Russia withdrew from the agreement a year later, arguing that Western sanctions were severely limiting its ability to export agricultural products.

Russia then threatened all commercial vessels heading to and from Ukraine, aiming to strangle its seaborne exports. In response, Ukraine’s military started a campaign that pushed the Russian navy out of the western parts of the Black Sea, destroying many of its warships and striking its headquarters in Russian-occupied Crimea. The operation allowed Ukraine to establish a new shipping corridor in the Black Sea and return seaborne grain exports to near-prewar levels.

Mr. Umerov, Ukraine’s defense minister, said that under the deal, “all movement by Russia of its military vessels outside of eastern part of the Black Sea will constitute violation of the spirit of this agreement,” and that Ukraine would have “full right to exercise right to self-defense.”

The White House statements said both Russia and Ukraine had agreed to “eliminate the use of force in the Black Sea.” It was not immediately clear if this would result in a halt on strikes on port infrastructure, which the Ukrainians said was discussed during the talks. Kyiv has also been interested in restarting operations in frontline Ukrainian port cities like Mykolaiv and Kherson, where the nearby fighting has forced them to shut down.

Track and field will introduce mandatory DNA sex testing for athletes entering female competitions, its global leader said Tuesday, making it the first Olympic sport to add the requirement.

The move comes amid an increasingly vexed debate over eligibility rules in female sports and comes less than a year after the issue erupted at the Paris Olympics when questions about the qualifications of two women who went on to secure gold medals in boxing led to tumultuous — and at times disturbing — scenes inside and outside of the ring.

The move is essential to protect female sports, said Sebastian Coe of Britain, the head of track’s governing body, World Athletics, and a former double Olympic gold medalist in the 1500 meters. He said the new policy, which will subject competitors to what is described as a noninvasive cheek swab or dry blood DNA test, was part of his vow to “doggedly protect the female category and do whatever it takes to protect it.”

World Athletics said the new tests could be in place in time for its next world championships, in Tokyo in September.

“We’re not just talking about the integrity of female women’s sport, but actually guaranteeing it,” Mr. Coe told reporters in Nanjing, China. “And this, we feel, is a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition.”

Mr. Coe, an unsuccessful candidate in the recent election to lead the International Olympic Committee, has been a polarizing force in his zeal on this issue. The debate over women’s eligibility criteria has led to pitched battles — mostly played out in the bear pit of social media — over who has the right to compete. Track since 2023 has banned transgender athletes from women’s competition.

The new rules eliminate from women’s competition a minority of athletes who do not have the typical female XX sex chromosomes, and have one of several conditions that together are known as differences in sex development, or DSD. Such people can be female to outward appearances, and in some do not know they have DSD. But their unusual genetics can result in high levels of testosterone, and possibly greater muscular development, giving them some of the athletic advantage that men have.

Track and field has been at the forefront of the debate since the South African runner Caster Semenya exploded into the public consciousness by winning gold in the 800 meters at a world championships in 2009. Her victory prompted a backlash from rivals who complained about Ms. Semenya’s appearance, leading to the governing body at the time ordering sex tests. At issue was a rare trait giving her naturally elevated levels of testosterone.

She won gold at the London Olympics in 2012, and again at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, when all three medalists in the women’s 800 meters were all athletes with DSD.

In 2018, track officials began requiring all DSD athletes to take medication to reduce the amount of testosterone in their bodies in order to compete. Now even that allowance — which some athletes challenged — will disappear.

World Athletics said it updated its policy after concluding that the most recent research showed that male advantages exist even before puberty. The performance benefits, it said, between men and women were up to five percent in running events and even higher in the throwing and jumping categories.

Human rights groups previously criticized track and field’s rules, describing the gender eligibility tests and the requirement to restrict athletes’ natural testosterone levels as abusive and harmful.

Mr. Coe tried to play down the effect of latest tests, which all female athletes will have to undergo once.

“The process is very straightforward, frankly,” he said. “Neither of these are invasive. They are necessary and they will be done to absolute medical standards.”

Ms. Semenya challenged the governing body’s previous rules, and the case went to international sports’ top court in 2019, where she lost. Mr. Coe said he was prepared to defend the new rules to the court, as well, should a similar challenge arise.

The issue about who is or isn’t eligible to participate in the female category was prominent at the recent I.O.C. election in which Mr. Coe and five other candidates lost to Kirsty Coventry, a former gold medal-winning swimmer from Zimbabwe, who will take control in June.

Ms. Coventry has said she intends to set up task force, as well as a meeting with different sports, to discuss ideas about protecting women’s sports but was vague about specific policy, calling only for “a little more sensitivity” toward athletes with a difference in sex development. The I.O.C. has previously rejected the idea of sex testing, but Ms. Coventry did not rule out the possibility.

Addressing the topic has also become more treacherous for sports officials since the return of President Trump to the White House. Ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Mr. Trump has been outspoken on the issue, saying there are only two genders — male and female — and ordering visa bans last month to prevent transgender athletes from entering the United States.

Britain’s National Crime Agency has warned of an “unprecedented risk” to young people from online groups that encourage teenagers to share sadistic and misogynistic material and to coerce others into sexual abuse, self-harm or violence.

The agency, which is responsible for combating serious and organized crime in Britain, said Tuesday in an annual assessment of crime trends that reports of incidents related to the threat from online groups increased sixfold between 2022 and 2024 in Britain and warned of significant numbers of victims being groomed or blackmailed.

“Young people are being drawn into these sadistic and violent online gangs, where they are collaborating at scale to inflict, or incite others to commit, serious harm,” said Graeme Biggar, director general of the agency, in a statement.

He added, “These groups are not lurking on the dark web, they exist in the same online world and platforms young people use on a daily basis,” and noted that young girls were being “groomed into hurting themselves and in some cases, even encouraged to attempt suicide.”

The groups have reached young people using gaming platforms like Roblox as well as messaging apps such as Discord and Telegram.

The agency’s National Strategic Assessment for 2024 said that while adults were involved in these communities or networks, it was especially concerned about teenage boys often sharing sadistic and misogynistic material and targeting girls as young as 11.

Described as “Com” networks, the forums have become vehicles for sharing images of extreme violence, gore and child sexual abuse. They are also used to apply “extreme coercion” to manipulate young people into harming or abusing themselves, their siblings or pets, the agency said.

“Members of ‘Com’ networks are usually young men who are motivated by status, power, control, misogyny, sexual gratification, or an obsession with extreme or violent material,” said the report, which added that the emergence of these types of online groups “are almost certainly causing some individuals, especially younger people, to develop a dangerous propensity for extreme violence.”

It added that the networks typically attract young males promoting nihilistic views, who “attempt to gain status with other users by committing or encouraging harmful acts across a broad spectrum of offending.”

Users in Britain and other western countries “had exchanged millions of messages online relating to sexual and physical abuse,” it noted.

The crime agency gave the example of Cameron Finnigan, a British teenager who was sentenced to jail in January after being part of an online Satanist group that blackmails other children into filming or livestreaming self-harm, violence and sexual abuse. Mr. Finnigan, 19, used the Telegram app to encourage contacts to commit murder and suicide.

In his statement, Mr. Biggar said that police were collaborating with technology companies and psychologists to better understand the behavior of young people but added that he encouraged parents “to have regular conversations with their child about what they do online.”

Jess Phillips, a government minister who has responsibility for tackling violence against women and girls, described the scale of abuse outlined in the report as “absolutely horrific,” and also urged open conversations within families.

“My message to tech companies is simple: This is your responsibility, too,” she added. “You must ensure your platforms are safe for children, so that we can protect the most vulnerable and put predators behind bars.”

The agency’s latest survey focused heavily on the use of technology and online platforms in crimes including fraud, extremism and sexual abuse.

Citing statistics from the Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit organization, it said that 291,273 web pages had contained indecent images of children in 2024, a 6 percent increase since 2023. Of these, 91 percent were classified as self-generated indecent imagery, either shared consensually, or elicited through manipulation.

Eric Schmieman worked for 15 years on the modern engineering equivalent of the Great Pyramid — building a giant protective shield for a damaged reactor at Chernobyl that would protect the world from further fallout from the worst ever nuclear disaster.

The steel shell, slid into place over Reactor No. 4 on railroad tracks in 2016, is the world’s largest movable structure. It is as tall as a football field and weighs almost 40,000 tons. More than 45 countries and organizations spent almost $1.7 billion building it.

“We did a lot of safety analysis, considering a lot of bad things that could happen,” said Mr. Schmieman, 78, a retired civil engineer from Washington state who was a senior technical adviser on the project. “We considered earthquakes, tornadoes, heavy winds, 100-year snowfalls, all kinds of things. We didn’t consider acts of war.”

On Feb. 14, a drone with a high-explosive warhead that likely cost as little as $20,000 to produce punched a hole in the steel shell. Ukrainian officials said the Russians deliberately targeted the structure with a Shahed 136 drone. The Kremlin has denied responsibility.

While the initial fire was quickly put out, a waterproof membrane inside the insulation of the arch burned and smoldered for almost three weeks, said Artem Siryi, the head of the operations department for the structure, called the New Safe Confinement. Emergency workers in mountain-climbing equipment had to knock holes into the shield’s outer layer, hunting for the fire, and spray water inside a structure designed to stay dry to prevent corrosion, Ukrainian officials and international experts said.

On March 7, Ukraine declared the fire officially extinguished. But by that point, roughly half of the northern section of the shield had been damaged, Ukrainian officials said. The International Atomic Energy Agency said on March 13 that the fires and smoldering had caused “extensive damage, including to the northern side and to a lesser extent to the southern side of its roof,” according to an evaluation that Ukraine shared with the agency.

Radiation levels outside Chernobyl are still normal, the I.A.E.A. and Ukrainian nuclear regulators say. But it is unclear how the shield will be fixed, how much it will cost and how long it will take.

Repairs could take years, nuclear experts warn. That could delay a plan to dismantle the damaged reactor and safely dispose of the radioactive waste that was supposed to begin over the next five years. And there are risks that the steel shell starts corroding — or that the temporary “sarcophagus” Soviet engineers built around the reactor almost 40 years ago, which still sits within the shell, deteriorates further.

“The reason the international community spent so much money and time building this structure is because they know the scale of the threat radiologically inside,” said Shaun Burnie, a nuclear specialist at Greenpeace who visited the damaged reactor at Chernobyl after the drone attack.

“It’s an enormous intellectual achievement to build something that could protect Europe, Ukraine and the world from what’s inside,” he said. “And now the Russians have basically blown a hole in it, both physically and metaphorically.”

On Thursday, Greenpeace released a report saying the drone attack severely compromised plans for the damaged reactor and that the shell was no longer functioning as designed. Jan Vande Putte, a nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Ukraine, said the entire shell might have to be removed, dismantled and replaced — a view echoed by Mr. Schmieman and Mr. Siryi. The I.A.E.A. said the shell’s confinement function had been compromised and that the structure needed “extensive repair efforts.”

Both Russia and Ukraine have targeted one another’s energy infrastructure since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, but both have also stopped short of launching major strikes at nuclear power plants.

On Wednesday, as part of negotiations on a potential cease-fire, President Trump suggested that the United States take over Ukraine’s electrical and nuclear power sites, arguing that this would help protect them.

Drones continue to fly over Chernobyl almost every night, Mr. Siryi said in an interview. “Their motor noise has become a familiar sound,” he added. Many were likely heading toward Kyiv, the country’s capital.

For people of a certain age, the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, after years of heightened fears of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, was the stuff of nightmares. It sent a plume of radioactive material into the air, caused a public health emergency across Europe and led many to question nuclear energy. The Soviets, who initially hid the extent of the disaster, hastily built the concrete-and-steel emergency “sarcophagus” to encase the damaged reactor. Authorities also set up a 1,000-square-mile “exclusion zone” where no one was allowed to live.

The explosion’s official death toll was 31. But many other people got sick or eventually died. Cancer rates, especially for thyroid cancer, increased in areas heavily exposed to radiation.

The sarcophagus, which has become increasingly unstable, was never meant to last. Figuring out how to replace it took decades.

The confinement structure at Chernobyl that Mr. Schmieman worked on was an engineering and construction feat, designed to protect the damaged reactor for 100 years. To minimize radiation exposure, the structure was built about one-third of a mile away from the damaged reactor, then moved into place. It is about 40 feet thick, with an outer and an inner shell that are both made of steel. The humidity level between the shells is kept below 40 percent to prevent corrosion.

The outer shell is the key to keeping out precipitation, Mr. Schmieman said. The inner shell is designed to keep the radioactive dust inside the structure, especially when the cranes already set up start taking apart the sarcophagus and the damaged reactor before safely disposing of the waste in smaller containers.

By the end of this year, specialists had aimed to finish the initial plan outlining the first dismantling stage. “Unfortunately, that’s no longer possible” because of the drone attack, Mr. Siryi said.

He said experts were evaluating how the shell could be fixed — and even if it could be. Workers would have to close the initial 540-square-foot hole from the drone. But they would also have to seal up the small holes created by workers trying to extinguish the fire. They would have to somehow repair the damaged membrane and insulation and any damaged internal structures. And they would have to reduce the humidity that resulted from hundreds of workers spraying high-powered hoses inside the structure.

Doing that where the confinement shell now sits is probably not possible, experts said, because workers would be exposed to high radiation levels from within. Moving the structure and then fixing it would also be challenging. What would protect the already unstable sarcophagus while that work was carried out?

“Full restoration of the facility is practically impossible,” Mr. Siryi said. “To bring it as close as possible to its original state — well, that would likely require hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Mr. Schmieman said repairing the structure, or building a new one, would be extremely costly. He suggested temporarily covering the holes — with something akin to duct tape — so the ventilation system inside could start reducing humidity. “Don’t immediately look for a quick, permanent solution for the large number of holes in the building, but look for a quick way to reduce corrosion,” he said.

One thing that might help, he said: drones. Largely because of the war, Ukraine has developed drone technology faster than almost any other country. Small drones — much smaller than the Shahed 136 that pierced the structure — could perhaps evaluate the damage inside the shell, and even help with fixing it.

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting.

Britain’s National Crime Agency has warned of an “unprecedented risk” to young people from online groups that encourage teenagers to share sadistic and misogynistic material and to coerce others into sexual abuse, self-harm or violence.

The agency, which is responsible for combating serious and organized crime in Britain, said Tuesday in an annual assessment of crime trends that reports of incidents related to the threat from online groups increased sixfold between 2022 and 2024 in Britain and warned of significant numbers of victims being groomed or blackmailed.

“Young people are being drawn into these sadistic and violent online gangs, where they are collaborating at scale to inflict, or incite others to commit, serious harm,” said Graeme Biggar, director general of the agency, in a statement.

He added, “These groups are not lurking on the dark web, they exist in the same online world and platforms young people use on a daily basis,” and noted that young girls were being “groomed into hurting themselves and in some cases, even encouraged to attempt suicide.”

The agency’s National Strategic Assessment for 2024 said that while adults were involved in these communities or networks, it was especially concerned about teenage boys often sharing sadistic and misogynistic material and targeting girls as young as 11.

Described as “Com” networks, the forums have become vehicles for sharing images of extreme violence, gore and child sexual abuse. They are also used to apply “extreme coercion” to manipulate young people into harming or abusing themselves, their siblings or pets, the agency said.

“Members of ‘Com’ networks are usually young men who are motivated by status, power, control, misogyny, sexual gratification, or an obsession with extreme or violent material,” said the report, which added that the emergence of these types of online groups “are almost certainly causing some individuals, especially younger people, to develop a dangerous propensity for extreme violence.”

It added that the networks typically attract young males promoting nihilistic views, who “attempt to gain status with other users by committing or encouraging harmful acts across a broad spectrum of offending.”

Users in Britain and other western countries “had exchanged millions of messages online relating to sexual and physical abuse,” it noted.

The crime agency gave the example of Cameron Finnigan, a British teenager who was sentenced to jail in January after being part of an online Satanist group that blackmails other children into filming or livestreaming self-harm, violence and sexual abuse. Mr. Finnigan, 19, used the Telegram app to encourage contacts to commit murder and suicide.

In his statement, Mr. Biggar said that police were collaborating with technology companies and psychologists to better understand the behavior of young people but added that he encouraged parents “to have regular conversations with their child about what they do online.”

Jess Phillips, a government minister who has responsibility for tackling violence against women and girls, described the scale of abuse outlined in the report as “absolutely horrific,” and also urged open conversations within families.

“My message to tech companies is simple: This is your responsibility, too,” she added. “You must ensure your platforms are safe for children, so that we can protect the most vulnerable and put predators behind bars.”

The agency’s latest survey focused heavily on the use of technology and online platforms in crimes including fraud, extremism and sexual abuse.

Citing statistics from the Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit organization, it said that 291,273 web pages had contained indecent images of children in 2024, a 6 percent increase since 2023. Of these, 91 percent were classified as self-generated indecent imagery, either shared consensually, or elicited through manipulation.