Four children from a Dutch daycare centre were killed on Thursday when a train hit their electric cargo bike at a level crossing, police said on Thursday.

A fifth child and a woman were also critically injured in the accident in Oss, a town near the German border around 110 kilometres (65 miles) southeast of the capital Amsterdam.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte tweeted his condolences from an EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, over a tragedy that has shaken the cycling-mad country.

"Deeply affected by the incredibly sad news from Oss where four young children have died in a horrible accident. I wish everyone involved much strength with this heavy loss," Rutte said.

Cargo bikes – bikes with a large box on the front used for carrying children or shopping – are a common sight in the Netherlands, where cycling is a way of life.

Police confirmed that the train collided with the three-wheeler bike on a crossing as it was taking children from the daycare centre to drop them off at local schools.

"Four children were killed in the accident. Emergency services are still at the scene," police in Brabant province said on Twitter.

"The accident involved an electric cargo bike from a nursery that was headed for a school in Oss," they added.

"The families concerned have been informed by us of the awful news."

The ANP news agency reported that the children were between four and 11 years old, although there was no immediate official confirmation of their ages.

ANP, quoting people who know the woman who drove the bike, said she had just dropped some children at one school and was heading to another.

It was the sixth such accident at the crossing since 1975, it added.

Queen Maxima of the Netherlands said that she and King Willem-Alexander "have no words".

"Our thoughts go out to all families who have lost their children because of a terrible accident in Oss," the queen said during a separate royal visit.

Police said they were speaking to several witnesses, including children, to see "how this accident could happen."

The train was headed from the eastern town of Nijmegen to nearby Den Bosch, said the national railways service NS.

"It is really a terrible accident," said an NS spokesman.

Dutch nurseries and after-school clubs often use larger electric versions of cargo bikes to ferry children around towns.

The Netherlands has more than 22 million bikes in a country of 17 million, and its flat landscape is home to one of the world’s most extensive cycling networks.

In 2017, 206 cyclists were killed on Dutch roads, according to the Dutch Institute for Road Safety Research.

Up to 35 million lives could be saved by 2030 if a fund dedicated to improving the health of women and children is extended to 50 countries.

An independent analysis of the Global Financing Facility (GFF) estimated that if the fund manages to attract an additional $2 billion from donors it could extend from 27 to 50 countries, saving  up to 34.7m lives.

The GFF, set up in 2015 by the United Nations and the World Bank, works with countries, donors and the private sector, to implement a range of live-saving measures, with countries setting their own targets and taking ownership of their investments.

Currently around five million women and children die every year from preventable causes, largely due to low investment in health and nutrition services.

The analysis, published in the BMJ Global Health  journal, projected the impact of the fund for the period 2017 to 2030.

Global Financing Facility | How it works

Researchers worked out two funding scenarios: one “conservative” and one “ambitious”, which would see 34.7 million lives being saved.

Currently, 27 countries are using GFF money to improve the health of women and children by implementing interventions such as ensuring women have antenatal visits, are attended by a trained health worker during childbirth and that children have life-saving vaccinations.

The analysis looked at the impact of the fund being extended to the 50 countries around the world with the highest burden of preventable deaths of women, children and adolescents.

The analysis found that the most ambitious scenario would result in 275m cases of stunting being prevented by 2030 and rates of maternal mortality, under-five mortality and stillbirth all dropping by around a third.

Next month, the governments of Norway and Burkina Faso are hosting a replenishment conference with the aim of raising an additional $2bn for the GFF. If successful the GFF would then be extended to all 50 countries, the majority of which are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The GFF encourages countries to take ownership of their programmes, investing their own resources, rather than simply relying on donor funding.

The new analysis estimates that the extra £2bn raised could mobilise an additional $50 to $75 billion, the majority of which would come from countries’ domestic budgets and other forms of funding dependent on certain criteria such as the allocation of domestic budgets to health.

Increased global funding could save millions of lives

For example, one GFF country, Guatemala, has been freed of some debt payments to the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development on the basis it commits to spending the money saved on social programmes.

A report earlier this year on three "frontrunner" countries found that GFF funding was already making modest gains.

Mariam Claeson, director of the GFF, outlined the importance of the fund for women and children.

“For too long, the world’s poorest have been left behind, persistently underinvested in and deprioritised. We can change that – not only saving millions of lives, but dramatically improving the lives of many more women, children and adolescents, and helping countries to significantly improve their economic prospects.”

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The American artist Jeff Koons was on Monday accused in a Paris court of plagiarising an iconic French clothing advertisement for one of his celebrated sculptures, Fait d’Hiver.

Advertising creative director Franck Davidovici sued Mr Koons, among the world’s most bankable living artists, for €300,000 (£270,000) for copyright infringement, saying he had produced what his lawyer called a “servile copy” of a famous advertising campaign he ran in 1985 for French clothing brand Naf-Naf.

The clothing campaign showed a young girl lying in snow, apparently the victim of an avalanche, being nosed by a pig with a barrel of rum under its neck in reference to the famous Saint Bernard rescue dogs. Naf-Naf is the name of one of the three little pigs that made the most resilient house out of bricks.

Mr Koon’s artwork, which was bought by the Prada Foundation for around $3.7 million (£2.8m) at Christie’s in New York in 2007, depicts a large pig and a tiny penguin with the bust of a woman lying in a fishnet top revealing her breasts.

“It’s the same work in three dimensions, to which Jeff Koons has added flowers and a penguin to evoke cold, with the aim of sticking to the original work. The statement is strictly the same,” said Mr Davidovici’s lawyer, Jean Aittouares.

The work and the campaign even share the same name of Fait d’Hiver – a play on the French term for a short news item "fait divers”.

Mr Davidovici said he had only become aware of Mr Koon’s sculpture when he saw in a catalogue ahead of a planned 2014 exhibition at Paris’ Pompidou Centre, which is also being sued along with Prada and French publisher Flammarion, which reproduced pictures of the sculpture.

The sculpture was pulled from the 2014 exhibition but the president of the Pompidou Centre, Alain Seban, defended the artist, arguing that "similar questions" had already been raised in America about other works from Mr Koons’s Banality sculpture series, "the very principle of which is to draw on objects bought in shops or images seen in the press".

"It is essential that museums be able to continue to give an account of these artistic endeavours," he had said.

This is by no means the first time Mr Koons has been taken to court for copyright infringement.

In the latest case, a Paris court last year ordered the American artist’s limited company, Jeff Koons LLC, to pay the heirs of late French photographer Jean-François Bauret  €40,000, saying Naked, his porcelain sculpture of two naked children produced in 1988, had been copied from a 1975 postcard picture taken by Mr Bauret called Enfants.

The court also found the Pompidou Centre guilty of using an image of the work in the advertising material for their Koons retrospective in 2014.

The artist is no stranger to controversy in Paris. 

Earlier this year, Françoise Nyssen, the French culture minister, announced that a sculpture of a giant bunch of tulips Mr Koons gave the city in remembrance of the 2015 Paris terror attacks victims would not be installed in front of the capital’s Museum of Modern Art and the Palais de Tokyo, after outcry.

Initially welcomed by Paris city hall, the work sparked a row with 23 figures from France’s art and culture world denouncing the choice of a prime, central location for such a massive structure, saying that the museums had no symbolic connection with the Paris attacks.

They also said that while Mr Koons was a "brilliant and inventive" artist in the 1980s, he had since become a symbol of "industrial", assembly-line art.

Ms Nyssen pledged to find a home for the multi-coloured sculpture at a location that was "popular, visible and shared by everyone”.

Hospitality apparently has its limit in Italy’s spectacular South Tyrol region as political leaders are moving to clamp down on property purchases by outsiders “for the defence of the homeland”.  

The province of Bolzano in the country’s north-east has banned both foreigners and Italians from outside the largely German-speaking region from purchasing holiday homes in the area, after concluding they were driving up house prices beyond the reach of the locals.  

Second homes will now be restricted to residents who have spent at least five years in the region or those who work in the area.  

Provincial governor, Arno Kompatscher, reportedly said the move was “for the defence of the Heimat” – or “defence of the homeland” – after the council approved the latest move to protect the popular tourist destination from an excessive number of outsiders.  

The council says the Dolomite mountain range, a World Heritage site which dominates the region, is a big draw for hikers and leisure seekers but that the demand for housing and land purchases was making it too hard for residents, in particular young people, to be able to afford a house.  

Council deputy president, Richard Theiner, told local media: “This phenomenon, with a consequent increase in the consumption of land and building areas, makes it very difficult for residents to access a house at an affordable price.”

But real estate agents in the region, which is also known as Alto Adige, are furious at the council move.

Carlo Perseghin, who owns his own agency in Bolzano and is president of the Italian federation of real estate agents (Fiaip) said it would impact interest from abroad and other parts of Italy.

“The new law is madness,” he told The Telegraph. “In Europe there is free circulation of financial resources and people, with the complete deregulation of all sectors.

“Why should someone from Trento, for example, be allowed to buy a house in Berlin but not in South Tyrol?  Whoever buys a second home in Alto Adige sets in motion a positive mechanism that contributes a great deal to residents. The future is not about closure, but openness.”

Michaela Biancofiore, an MP for the centre-Right Forza Italia party, said the new law promoted “ a new kind of apartheid” and she planned to appeal to the European Parliament to change it.

“This initiative will bring the real estate sector to its knees and homeowners will be forced to sell,” she said. “It will cause enormous damage to residents.”

A council statement named the 25 towns and 26 villages would be affected by the new law which was passed by the council in July, and went into effect this week.  

Regular checks will be carried out on second homes to ensure the law is being upheld.  

In towns and villages where the number of second homes exceeds 10 percent, 100 percent of new or converted homes will be reserved for residents, the council said.  

With its Gothic churches, German street signs and restaurants filled with apple strudel and wiener schnitzel, South Tyrol seems the least Italian part of Italy.  

Bolzano is just 70 miles from the Austrian border and two thirds of the population in South Tyrol speak German. Many residents have never accepted the region’s annexation from the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1919.

Federico Guiglia, journalist for the Venetian daily Il Gazzettino, criticised the move as a ploy to gain votes ahead of regional elections in October and questioned why the council had not applied it to all 116 municipalities in the province.  

“It applies to the high tourist density municipalities with the most beautiful places that are visited,” he said.   There were also concerns that the law may be in breach of the Italian Constitution but Mr Theiner said the national government had examined the new provincial law and decided not to challenge it before the constitutional court.  

The provincial district of Gatineau in Qubec, just across the river from Ottawa, has for decades been a stronghold of Justin Trudeau’s sister party.

But on Monday a little-known upstart populist movement seized the riding from the liberals in a shock election win that has thrown a grenade into the Canadian political system.

The Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) swept up the seat as they were elected as the ruling party of Quebec, jolting the liberal established order that has existed in the Canadian province for nearly half a century, and sparking soul searching among their dejected rivals.

The election marked effectively the first time a populist party has come to power in North America, with immigration…

At least 136 people have died after a passenger ferry capsized in Lake Victoria, according to Tanzanian police. 

It is believed the ferry was carrying more than 300 people despite the vessel only having capacity for 100. 

The ferry MV Nyerere capsized close to the pier on Ukara Island on Africa’s largest lake on Thursday when passengers rushed to one side to disembark as it approached the dock.

Tanzania’s top police official Simon Sirro said on Friday that at least 136 bodies have been retrieved and scores more were still feared missing as rescuers searched for survivors on the morning after the disaster.

Thirty-seven people had been rescued from the sea, Jonathan Shana, the regional police commander for the port of Mwanza on the south coast of the lake told Reuters by phone on Friday.

Shana said more rescuers had joined the operation when it resumed at daylight on Friday. He did not give exact numbers.

Mwanza governor John Mongella said: "Operations are continuing." 

Lake Victoria ferry disaster – locator map

The state broadcaster cited witnesses reporting that more than 200 people had boarded the ferry at Bugolora, a town on the larger Ukerewe Island, where it was market day when locals said the vessel was commonly packed with people and goods.

"I have not heard from either my father or my younger brother who were on the ferry. They had gone to the market in Bugolora to buy a school uniform and other supplies for the new school term," said Domina Maua, who was among those seeking information about loved ones.

Davita Ngenda, an elderly woman in Ukara, had already received bad news. "My son is among the bodies recovered," she said, weeping. "He had gone with his wife but she has not been found yet. My God, what did I do to deserve this?"

Sebastian John, a teacher, said such tragedies had become part of life for those living on the lake.

"Since my birth, people have gone to their deaths on this lake, but what are we to do? We did not choose to be born here, we have nowhere to go," he said.

It remains unclear how many people are still missing. Tanzania’s Electrical, Mechanical and Services Agency, which is responsible for ferry services, said it was unknown how many passengers were aboard the MV Nyerere.

The ageing ferry, whose hull and propellers were all that remained visible after it overturned, was also carrying cargo, including sacks of maize, bananas and cement, when it capsized around 50 metres (55 yards) from Ukara dock.

The cause of the accident was not immediately clear, but overloading is frequently to blame for such incidents.

President John Magufuli was "deeply saddened" by the disaster and called on Tanzanians to "stay calm during these difficult times," according to spokesman Gerson Msigwa.

The country’s opposition, however, accused the government of "negligence".

"We have often raised concerns about the poor condition of this ferry, but the government turned a deaf ear. We have repeatedly denounced this negligence," said John Mnyika, deputy secretary general of Chadema, the main opposition party.

Mnyika said overloading was "another failure of the authorities" and criticised "inadequate relief efforts as well as delays" in the rescue operation.

With a surface area of 70,000 square kilometres (27,000 square miles), oval-shaped Lake Victoria is roughly the size of Ireland and is shared by Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.

Capsizes are not uncommon in the massive lake, and the number of fatalities is often high due to a shortage of life jackets and the fact that many people in the region cannot swim.

The deadliest such accident in recent decades was in May 1996, when around 800 people died after their ferry sank on the way to Mwanza in Tanzania.

Waters in the lake can be rough and boats are frequently poorly maintained, while ferry operators often fail to record the number of passengers on board.

Around 20 people were killed in December 2016 when their boat overturned in Lake Victoria as it was carrying passengers to Uganda’s mainland for Christmas holidays.

And in March 2012, only two survivors were found after a boat believed to be carrying around 60 people capsized on the lake in Uganda.

An Italian scientist has been suspended by one of the world’s leading leading nuclear research centres after he gave a presentation saying "physics was invented and built by men".

CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, said on Monday it was shocked by the "highly offensive" comments made by Professor Alessandro Strumia from Pisa University at a conference.

The centre also wiped slides from his talk from its website “in line with a code of conduct that does not tolerate personal attacks and insults” and said it was reassessing its relationship with the researcher after an outcry from physicists and scientists around the world.

In his presentation Professor Strumia said male scientists rather than female scientists were suffering from discrimination that was based on ideology rather than merit.

“CERN considers the presentation delivered by an invited scientist during a workshop as highly offensive and supports the many members of the community that have expressed their indignation,” said Arnaud Marsollier, media spokesman for CERN. 

Prof Strumia could not be reached on Monday but has reportedly defended his comments despite the outcry.

CERN, the organisation which discovered the Higgs Boson particle in 2012, hosted the conference on high energy physics and gender in Genoa on Friday. 

“The (scientific) community is in shock,” Mr Marsollier told The Telegraph. “We know physics is dominated by males. This workshop was organised to make progress and that’s why we find it so shocking. We feel it should not happen in future."

In a statement CERN, which appointed its first female director-general, Fabiola Gianotti, in 2016, said it was a “culturally diverse organisation” that brought people together from dozens of nationalities. Mr Marsollier said CERN’s management was meeting on Monday to assess its future relationship with Professor Strumia.

“It is a place where everyone is welcome, and all have the same opportunities, regardless of ethnicity, beliefs, gender or sexual orientation,” the statement said.

“Diversity is a strong reality at CERN, and is also one of the core values underpinning our code of conduct.  The organisation is fully committed to promoting diversity and equality at all levels.”

Dr Jessica Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London who also spoke at the conference, tweeted her disgust over Prof Strumia’s analysis.

“Short summary of Strumia’s talk: women aren’t as good at physics as men and they’ve been allocated too much funding/ been promoted into positions of power unfairly. He said this to an audience of early career #womeninSTEM,” she said.

However, Nico Macdonald, a visiting fellow at London’s South Bank University, said that Prof Strumia’s paper may “well be wrong” but that did not warrant removal.

“It should be responded to scientifically, and politically, not removed as ‘highly offensive’,” he tweeted.