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Some do it to explore their ancestral heritage or an unknown part of their identity. Others are hoping to find parents, siblings and new relatives.

More than 40 million people worldwide are thought to have tested their DNA ancestry via companies such as Ancestry, 23andMe and MyHeritage since the first genetic genealogy test was offered to the public in 2000.

Now, people are using their test results in a new way – to apply for citizenship in other countries, DNA experts say.

Prof Turi King, director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at Bath University, said: “The more people take tests and the more people find out their ancestry and who their biological parents are, the more they can use that evidence to get citizenship of a particular country.”

King, who also presents the BBC show DNA Family Secrets, thinks ancestry DNA testing will become an easy and more widespread way for some Britons to gain dual citizenship in the future. “This will only grow,” she said.

Holes mysteriously found cut in army base fences.

An alleged plot to assassinate Germany’s top weapons manufacturer.

Phone taps on a high-level Luftwaffe call. These aren’t storylines lifted from a 1960s spy novel but real-life events in Germany, this year.

Not all of these events can definitively be blamed on Moscow, but Germany is on heightened alert for possible acts of Russian sabotage, because of Berlin’s continued military support for Kyiv.

As a hot war rages between Russia and Ukraine, there are fears that Europe has slipped into a new Cold War.

A 7.2-magnitude earthquake has struck off the east coast of Russia's Kamchatka peninsula - with a tsunami warning issued.

The quake was recorded at a depth of around 51km (32 miles), the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre said.

It struck at 8.10pm UK time, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), around 50 miles from the coastal city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which is said to have a population of more than 150,000 people.

The US National Tsunami Warning Centre said there was a tsunami threat from the quake.

Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of people including two families in both Gaza and Lebanon, while Hezbollah fired a volley of 55 rockets into northern Israel in response.

World leaders urged restraint and tried to frame the ceasefire negotiations as heading in a positive direction.

But in an interview with Sky News, the leader of Hamas in Lebanon told us no progress had been made so far at the talks and the two sides appear to be just as far apart as ever.

Hamas is not at the negotiations but messages and updates have been passed on to them on the sidelines.

The Ukrainian air force says it has attacked a second bridge in Russia's Kursk region.

Footage posted on a commander's Telegram channel shows an attack on a bridge in Zvannoe, Kursk over the Seym river.

This is the same river over which another bridge was destroyed earlier this week.

Ukraine's destruction of infrastructure in the area is believed to be an attempt to hamper Russian supply lines or reinforcements.

A solar well went into operation a few days ago in Dêrik in Northern and Eastern Syria. The well in the Şehid Xebat district is a central component of the district's water supply after the infrastructure in large parts of the region was destroyed by air strikes by the Turkish military. The project, funded by the Berlin State Office for Development Cooperation (LEZ), was implemented by the Berlin twin town partnership Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg – Dêrik together with the city administration in Dêrik and the "Make Rojava Green Again" initiative.

The UN’s nuclear watchdog warned on Saturday that the safety situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was “deteriorating” after a nearby drone strike.

Earlier on Saturday, Russia accused Ukraine of dropping an explosive charge on a road near the occupied plant in southern Ukraine.

The plant, which was seized by Russia’s forces early in the war, has come under repeated attacks that both sides have accused each other of carrying out.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts on site were informed of the detonation near essential plant facilities on Saturday and immediately visited the area, the agency said in a statement.

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As the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has stretched into its 11th month, Israel has increased its military activity against what it terms suspected terrorism in the occupied West Bank, and violent settler attacks have surged at the same time.

Far-right ministers in Mr. Netanyahu’s government — particularly Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, who are both West Bank settlers — have espoused divisive rhetoric and advanced policies to expand Israel’s hold on the territory.

The West Bank is home to about 2.7 million Palestinians and more than 500,000 settlers. Israel seized control of the territory from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states, and Israelis have since settled there with both tacit and explicit government approval. The international community largely considers settlements illegal, and many outposts also violate Israeli laws.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which tracks violent incidents in the West Bank, said in its latest update on Wednesday that Israeli settlers had carried out 25 attacks against Palestinians in the previous week. Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that set off the war in Gaza, the agency has recorded around 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property.

“There has been an uptick in vigilante attacks by a minority of settlers,” David Makovsky, director of the Koret Project on Arab-Israel relations at the Washington Institute, said in an interview. “The West Bank is a tinderbox.”

Few attacks, however, have generated the kind of immediate reprobation from Israeli officials that followed the storming of Jit.

Despite the intensifying political crisis in the country, both Maduro’s ruling party and the opposition have dismissed the solutions put forward to date

The X service remains available to the people of Brazil, the platform said on Saturday.

for now

Up to 400 activists from the radical right gathered in opposition to the much larger LGBTQ+ parade held in the eastern German city. Police described "partly aggressive or militant behavior" and the protest was broken up.

Neo-Nazi activists staged a short demonstration in the vicinity of a Pride event in Germany's eastern city of Leipzig on Saturday, the second such counterprotest in a week.

The march was organized to pass within earshot of the 19,000-strong Pride parade, in support of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) community.

Researchers wildly underestimated how many people don’t have safe drinking water.

In 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean water.

Roughly a quarter of the world’s population might seem bad enough. But on Thursday, a new study published in Science reported that 2 billion was a huge underestimate. New analyses reveal that 4.4 billion people across low- and middle-income countries — over half of the world’s population — don’t have safe household drinking water. It’s not that billions more people lost access to water. Rather, how researchers measure access became much more accurate, and those new measurements showed the problem is much worse than previously thought.

If you’ve always had clean running water at home, it’s easy to forget that drinkable tap water isn’t a given for much of the planet.

Performers working in the games industry have spoken of their distress at being asked to work on explicit content without notice, including a scene featuring a sexual assault.

Sex scenes are common in modern games - and are often made by filming human actors who are then digitised into game characters.

But performers have told the BBC a culture of secrecy around projects - where scripts are often not shared until the last moment - means they frequently do not know in advance that scenes may involve intimate acts.

They describe feeling "shaken" and "upset" after acting them out.

Performing arts union Equity is demanding action from the industry - it has published guides on minimum pay, and working conditions in games, including on intimate or explicit scenes.

Doctors in India have begun a national strike, escalating the protest against the rape and murder of a female colleague in the West Bengal city of Kolkata.

The Indian Medical Association (IMA), the country's largest grouping of doctors, said all non-essential hospital services would be shut down across the country on Saturday.

The IMA described last week's killing as a "crime of barbaric scale due to the lack of safe spaces for women" and asked for the country's support in its "struggle for justice".

Protests against the attack and calling for the better protection of women have intensified in recent days after a mob vandalised the hospital where it happened.