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Police in Mumbai say they have safely rescued 17 children and two adults from a man who claimed to have taken them hostage at an acting school where the children had gathered for an audition, BBC reported.

The official said officers first tried to negotiate with the hostage-taker but as he was "adamant", they "used force" to enter the building in the busy Powai neighbourhood.

Officers entered the studio through the bathroom window and later said they had found an airgun and an unspecified chemical.

The suspect, named by police as Rohit Arya, was shot during the rescue operation and later died in hospital, police said, according to BBC.

A former Australian politician convicted of sexually abusing two young men he met through work has been sentenced to five years and nine months in jail, BBC reported.

Gareth Ward, 44, has been in prison since July after a jury found him guilty of raping one man and indecently assaulting another, in separate incidents in 2013 and 2015.

Ward represented the coastal town of Kiama in the New South Wales (NSW) parliament from 2011. He resigned as a Liberal Party minister when the claims emerged in 2021 but refused to quit parliament and was re-elected in 2023, according to BBC.

Judge Kara Shead SC considered Ward's disability of legal blindness in her sentence and found "no other penalty other than imprisonment is appropriate".

Prince Andrew is to lose his 'prince' title and leave his Windsor mansion, Royal Lodge, following weeks of intense scrutiny over his links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, BBC reported.

In a statement on Thursday night, Buckingham Palace said the King's brother will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

Andrew gave up his other royal titles earlier this month, including the Duke of York, after facing more questions about his private life, according to BBC.

In a posthumous memoir published earlier this month, Virginia Giuffre repeated allegations that, as a teenager, she had sex with Prince Andrew on three separate occasions. Andrew has always denied the claims.

President Donald Trump called on US military leaders to resume testing US nuclear weapons in order to keep pace with other countries such as Russia and China, BBC reported.

"Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis," he wrote on social media just before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea.

The US has more nuclear weapons than any other country, Trump said, with Russia second and China a "distant third". It has not conducted nuclear weapons testing since 1992, according to BBC.