Apple said current UK users of the security feature will eventually need to disable it © REUTERS Apple is withdrawing its most secure cloud storage service from the UK after the British government ordered the iPhone maker to grant secret access to customer data.

“Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature,” the US Big Tech company said on Friday.

Last month, Apple received a “technical capability notice” under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, people familiar with the matter told the FT at the time.

The request for a so-called “backdoor” to user data would have enabled law enforcement and security services to tap iPhone back-ups and other cloud data that is otherwise inaccessible, even to Apple itself.

The law, dubbed a “Snooper’s Charter” by its critics, has extraterritorial powers, meaning UK law enforcement could access the encrypted data of Apple customers anywhere in the world, including in the US.

This is a developing story

Apple said current UK users of the security feature will eventually need to disable it © REUTERS Apple is withdrawing its most secure cloud storage service from the UK after the British government ordered the iPhone maker to grant secret access to customer data.

“Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature,” the US Big Tech company said on Friday.

Last month, Apple received a “technical capability notice” under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, people familiar with the matter told the FT at the time.

The request for a so-called “backdoor” to user data would have enabled law enforcement and security services to tap iPhone back-ups and other cloud data that is otherwise inaccessible, even to Apple itself.

The law, dubbed a “Snooper’s Charter” by its critics, has extraterritorial powers, meaning UK law enforcement could access the encrypted data of Apple customers anywhere in the world, including in the US.

This is a developing story

Apple said current UK users of the security feature will eventually need to disable it © REUTERS Apple is withdrawing its most secure cloud storage service from the UK after the British government ordered the iPhone maker to grant secret access to customer data.

“Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature,” the US Big Tech company said on Friday.

Last month, Apple received a “technical capability notice” under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, people familiar with the matter told the FT at the time.

The request for a so-called “backdoor” to user data would have enabled law enforcement and security services to tap iPhone back-ups and other cloud data that is otherwise inaccessible, even to Apple itself.

The law, dubbed a “Snooper’s Charter” by its critics, has extraterritorial powers, meaning UK law enforcement could access the encrypted data of Apple customers anywhere in the world, including in the US.

This is a developing story

Record-Setting Ocean Liner, a Titan of Its Time, Begins Its Final Voyage

The S.S. United States, the largest passenger ship ever built in America, left Philadelphia under tow on Wednesday, eventually to be sunk off the Gulf Coast.

A rusting steamship passes under a suspension bridge, surrounded by tugboats. The S.S. United States, the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic Ocean, passed under the Walt Whitman Bridge near Philadelphia on Wednesday.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times Joel Wolfram reported from Philadelphia.

The ocean liner that ferried four presidents across the Atlantic Ocean, hosted Duke Ellington and Sylvia Plath, and captured the world’s imagination in the mid-20th century has begun its final voyage. Leaving Philadelphia, where it has been rusting for decades, the ship, the S.S. United States, is bound this time for the bottom of the sea.

Many supporters — including former passengers who traveled on the ship before it docked largely for good in 1969 — had hoped to see the ship restored and opened to visitors. Instead, it is on its way to become the world’s largest artificial reef, off the coast of the Florida Panhandle.

But first, the 990-foot-long ship, nicknamed the Big U, will make a 14-day journey to Mobile, Ala. There, workers will remove hazardous materials, including the fuel still sitting in its tanks, so the ship can be sunk safely. Because it can no longer move under its own power, five tugboats are taking it out of the Delaware River and Bay on Wednesday. Once the ship is in the open waters of the Atlantic, just one of the tugs will be needed to tow it slowly southward.

The United States, built in the early 1950s, is the largest passenger ship ever built in America, more than 100 feet longer than the Titanic. The naval architect William Francis Gibbs designed it to be a luxury ocean liner in peacetime that could switch to quickly transporting 14,000 troops if needed in wartime. The vessel broke the trans-Atlantic speed record on its maiden voyage, crossing eastbound in three days, 10 hours and 40 minutes at an average of more than 35 knots. The S.S. United States went on to cross the Atlantic 800 times, carrying the rich and famous as well as immigrants setting out for new lives and middle-class Americans eager to experience Europe. But over time, travelers increasingly chose the speed of air travel over the comfort and mystique of an ocean crossing. The ship was withdrawn from service in 1969.

The journey downriver began at around 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, with tugboats guiding the ship under the Walt Whitman Bridge about 10 minutes before low tide, when the clearance would be greatest. Traffic on the bridge was temporarily stopped while the tops of the ship’s towering funnels passed less than 10 feet beneath the roadway.

Onlookers who had gathered at Freedom Pier in Gloucester City, on the New Jersey side of the river, cheered as the full length of the ship came into view.

For Garfield Harper Jr., of Westampton, N.J., it was a full-circle moment. He happened to be loading his tractor-trailer nearby when the ship arrived in Philadelphia in 1996, and he watched the grand ocean liner that he had seen on TV as child move carefully upriver under the bridge.

Watching it depart again on Wednesday, after decades of decay, put Mr. Harper in a reflective mood.

“My life is just about gone — I’m in my 70s,” he said. “It makes me think back to when I was a kid, when I first saw that ship. It’s kind of sad, but I just wanted to see it leave.”

A crowd of about three dozen people had peered through a chain-link fence in South Philadelphia on Friday afternoon, to watch the first small step of this last journey: moving the ship from the pier where it had been docked since 1996 to another one nearby.

A ship with a black hull and two faded red funnels is seen in the distance, watched by spectators with their backs to the camera. Spectators watched the S.S. United States depart on Wednesday. The ship will be towed on a 14-day journey to Mobile, Ala.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times The ship’s peeling black hull loomed over the industrial riverfront at Pier 82, opposite fast-food restaurants and an IKEA store across South Christopher Columbus Boulevard, as tugboats nudged the ship about 100 feet across the slip, a process that took hours.

Despite its state of disrepair, the ship had been a beloved landmark for some residents over the decades. Ocean liner enthusiasts who watched the move on Friday, including a truck driver from North Carolina, traded trivia about the ship’s history and power, like the unrealized expectation that it might be deployed during the Korean War. And people with a personal connection to the ship came from near and far to pay their last respects.

For Stephen Kosciesza, 70, who traveled from Silver Spring, Md., the S.S. United States gave his parents their start in its namesake country. His father, a “stateless Polish person” after World War II, and his mother sailed aboard the ship in February 1954 as they emigrated to the United States from Britain.

“My father, apparently, was seasick,” Mr. Kosciesza said. “The famous family story is that all the way over, he was saying, ‘Commodore, stop the ship! I’m getting out.’”

Some of the onlookers on Friday lamented that the ship would not be preserved. Devin Harrison, an equipment mechanic and maritime enthusiast from York, Pa., said he was glad the ship was not being scrapped, but that he had imagined a more dignified fate for it.

“I think it should be a national treasure,” Mr. Harrison said.

A man in a winter coat, scarf, knit hat and woolen gloves stands on a brick sidewalk by a waterfront bulkhead. Warren Jones, a member of the S.S. United States Conservancy and a former passenger, watched the ship depart.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times The S.S. United States Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that bought and began caring for the ship in 2011, shares that sentiment. The group planned the ship’s final chapter so that its legacy could continue, albeit in a different setting.

Once it is sunk in about 180 feet of water off the Gulf Coast, the uppermost part of the ship will be about 60 feet below the surface. But there will also be a land-based museum in Okaloosa County, Florida, dedicated to the ship and its history. The design of the museum will incorporate some preserved parts of the ship, including at least one of its funnels.

Alex Fogg, natural resources chief for Destin-Fort Walton Beach, said that as an artificial reef, the ship will be a habitat for sea creatures like snappers, urchins and crabs. He predicted that it would become a major destination for divers from all over the world.

If they had been given more time to find a new home for the ship, leaders of the conservancy said, the outcome might have been different. But a federal court ordered the ship evicted from the Philadelphia pier last summer, following a long legal battle between the conservancy and its landlord.

That began a race against the clock to find a temporary or permanent new location, said Susan Gibbs, the head of the conservancy and granddaughter of the ship’s designer.

Warren Jones, a member of the group’s board and a former passenger, said the group contacted every major port on the East Coast, as well as some on the West and Gulf Coasts, but every potential berthing spot turned out to be too small, too shallow or too hard to reach for such a huge ship.

The head of the Navy’s Inactive Ships Office told Mr. Jones that it wanted to help, but that pier space was in short supply.

As Ms. Gibbs said about the ship, “she’s just so darn big.”

Like many admirers of the S.S. United States, Linda Silva, 80, is sorry to see it go. But she is thankful for the time she had on it.

She sailed aboard the vessel on an improbable trip to Paris before she was 20. No one in her family had ever done anything like that, she said, and the voyage changed her life, exposing her to new experiences and possibilities.

“It’s not that life is a decline,” Ms. Silva said. “It’s just that sometimes your usefulness kind of terminates abruptly, as hers did. But it doesn’t overshadow the magnificent journey you took to get there.”

Trump calls Zelenskyy a ‘dictator’ as US rift with Ukraine deepens

US president warns Ukrainian leader he ‘better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left’

Donald Trump has called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” and warned that he “better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left”, in a deepening rift between the two leaders.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, the US President hit out at his Ukrainian counterpart hours after Zelenskyy accused Trump of living in a “disinformation bubble” and disputed his $500bn bill for aid to Kyiv.

The bitter exchange comes after Trump upended decades of US policy by convening bilateral talks with Moscow on the Ukraine war without inviting Kyiv and blaming Zelenskyy for the 2022 Russian invasion.

In his most overt threat yet to end the war on terms favourable to Moscow, Trump wrote: “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”

He added that Zelenskyy had “talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won”.

Speaking in Kyiv earlier on Wednesday, Zelenskyy, who was sidelined this week from high-profile talks between the US and Russia in Riyadh over the conflict, blasted Trump for pushing “a lot of disinformation coming from Russia”.

“Unfortunately, President Trump, with all due respect for him as the leader of a nation that we respect greatly . . . is living in this disinformation bubble,” ​he said.

He made his comments as Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the US-Russian rapprochement and argued that European leaders had excluded themselves from the talks.

Zelenskyy’s retort was prompted by Trump’s remarks from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday, in which the US president falsely claimed Kyiv had started the conflict, the largest on European soil since the second world war.

Trump added he was “very disappointed” that Ukraine was “upset about not having a seat” at Tuesday’s talks in Saudi Arabia.

“Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’,” the US president said. “Well, you’ve been there for three years . . . you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

Zelenskyy’s comments came a day after the US and Russia agreed to “lay the groundwork for future co-operation” on ending the war, in their first high-profile talks since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.

Amid a dramatic reversal of decades of US policy towards Russia, Trump last week announced that he had spoken to Putin about ending the Ukraine war, without consulting Kyiv or its European allies.

In his first comments since his conversation with Trump, Putin said he “highly appreciates” the US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, which he said “made the first step to resuming our work on all sorts of issues of mutual interest”.

“The US negotiators were totally different — they were open to a negotiating process without any biases or judgments about what was done in the past,” he said. “They intend to work together.”

Putin said Russia would not “speculate” on US-European relations, but claimed EU leaders had “insulted” Trump during his election campaign and said “they are themselves at fault for what is happening”.

Putin said he would meet Trump “with pleasure” but that any summit required substantial preparation.

On Wednesday, Zelenskyy pushed back against Trump’s suggestion that elections should be held in Ukraine, after the US president claimed that his Ukrainian counterpart had an approval rating of just 4 per cent.

Pointing to polling from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which in February found that 57 per cent of Ukrainians trusted their president, Zelenskyy said: “So if anyone wants to replace me right now, that will not work.”

Putin has long sought regime change in Kyiv.

The Ukrainian president also disputed Trump’s claim that Ukraine owed the US $500bn worth of rare minerals and other resources for past military assistance.

Kyiv has spent $320bn on its war efforts against Russia, with $200bn coming from international military assistance, Zelenskyy said. 

“The United States has contributed approximately $60bn so far, with an additional $31.5 billion in financial assistance,” he said. “That’s $67bn in weaponry and $31.5bn in direct budgetary support.”

US state department data broadly supports Zelenskyy’s figure for US military support for Ukraine.

German trains are less punctual than Britain’s ‘broken’ railways

Olaf Scholz mocked UK trains. FT analysis of 1.9bn data points show they are more reliable than Germany’s network

Germany’s rail problems have become so bad that Deutsche Bahn’s intercity service is less punctual than even the worst operator in Britain, a country the German chancellor mocked for its “broken tracks and bad trains”.

Olaf Scholz last week dismissed the idea of privatising Germany’s rail system in a debate for Germany’s snap elections, arguing that it would “end as badly as in England, where nothing works any more”. 

But Financial Times analysis of railway data shows Germany’s state-owned rail group Deutsche Bahn consistently delivering one of the least reliable services in central Europe — and even when compared with the UK network, which is routinely criticised for poor performance at home and abroad. 

About 72 per cent of Deutsche Bahn’s intercity trains arrived within 10 minutes of their scheduled arrival time in the year to January 2025, compared with 78 per cent of British long distance trains, according to the FT analysis.

Any interaction with the German rail network is also one of the biggest factors affecting the punctuality of long-distance rail travel in central Europe. 

Services from Germany to Amsterdam, for instance, are delayed by an average of almost 13 minutes, while trains coming to the city from elsewhere are typically within two minutes of their scheduled arrival time. 

The poor state of German trains has become a symbol for the country’s vast investment backlog and a top theme in the federal elections on February 23. Politicians have debated how to fix crumbling roads, neglected railways, housing shortages and depleted armed forces. 

Germany and the UK use different definitions for punctuality. To allow for a direct comparison, the FT used detailed German rail network statistics collected by the websites Bahn-Vorhersage and Zugfinder. 

The analysis is based on more than 1.9bn train arrivals at stations that were tracked by the websites from February 2024 until the end of January 2025, amounting to over 5mn per day. 

The data paints a picture of Deutsche Bahn, which runs about 95 per cent of all long-distance trains in Germany, struggling to meet even basic service targets.

While just 37 per cent of German long-distance trains arrived with a delay of less than 60 seconds, even Britain’s worst performing train operator — Avanti West Coast — met this service level in 41 per cent of all cases. The UK average is 69 per cent. 

About a fifth of intercity trains in Germany were delayed by more than 15 minutes, almost twice the share at Avanti West Coast and 10 times as much as in the UK overall. 

The performances of the rail networks in both the UK and Germany lag far behind some of their European peers. In Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, punctuality consistently exceeds 90 per cent. 

Germany’s neighbours also suffer from Deutsche Bahn’s patchy performance, as its delayed trains have knock-on effects for timetables across central Europe.

In Basel’s central station, trains originating in Germany arrive with an average delay of more than 12 minutes — 12 times higher than those coming from elsewhere.

The Swiss network, renowned for its punctuality, has resorted to stopping some late-arriving German services at the border to prevent them disrupting local operations.

Deutsche Bahn told the FT that infrastructure was “the key to more punctual railways”, adding that 80 per cent of all delays were caused by the poor state of its network. The company described its infrastructure as “too crowded, too old, and too prone to disruptions”. 

As a positive example, Deutsche Bahn pointed to the new high-speed track between Berlin and Munich, where 82.5 per cent of all trains in 2024 arrived within 10 minutes of their schedule. 

For decades, Germany skimped on maintenance and infrastructure upgrades as successive governments put a higher priority on fixing roads and balancing budgets. 

According to data by Pro-Rail Alliance, a German railways lobby group, the German government in 2023 spent just €115 per citizen on railway infrastructure, compared with three times that amount in Austria and four times in Switzerland. 

Andreas Geissler, a transport policy expert at Pro-Rail Alliance, told the FT that investment surged to €190-€210 per citizen in 2024. Over the past 15 years on average the investment stood at just €73 per citizen.

Since 1995, when the government started to prepare for a privatisation that was later shelved, 12 per cent of the track network has been axed while passenger traffic is up by 50 per cent and cargo traffic has risen by 90 per cent. 

Poorly designed funding laws made matters worse. Deutsche Bahn was long required to fund maintenance work with its annual budgets, while renewal and extension was paid for by the federal government. 

“This created incentives not to properly maintain kit, but to run it down and then replace it at the governments’ expense,” said one person familiar with the matter, adding that this issue was only recently addressed. 

More than half of all the interlockings — a type of signalling apparatus — need to be improved, with some that date back a century to the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II. 

In Frankfurt, one of Germany’s main railway hubs, a critical bridge across the river Main close to the European Central Bank has been labelled beyond repair. Built in 1913 and quickly repaired after it was damaged in the final days of second world war, it has now been declared unsafe for pedestrians. It will take years to build a replacement. 

Deutsche Bahn has labelled 16 per cent of all German railways infrastructure as “poor”, “deficient” or worse. The investment backlog that needs to be dealt with grew by €2bn in 2023 to €92bn, according to Deutsche Bahn estimates.  

Even a 74 per cent surge in federal investment in the railways infrastructure in 2024 to €16.9bn was unlikely to turn the tide, according to an insider who added that this push was only expected to stop further decay. 

Friedrich Merz, the centre-right leader likely to be Germany’s next chancellor, has said he wants to split the operation of the network from the operation of the trains — a move reminiscent to UK rail privatisation in the 1990s.

But Merz has not committed to provide the billions that Deutsche Bahn says it needs by 2027. A person with deep knowledge of the investment backlog in the German railways network told the FT reforming the structure “would not improve the punctuality of a single train”.