It is 2pm and Ana, 47, has just started the afternoon shift at the Suez recycling plant near Birmingham city centre, standing beneath a sign reading “Non-ferrous sorting station” with a bucket of vapes in front of her. Sorting and dismantling them is part of her job as a site operative.

Recycling them is not simple. Each bucket holds between 40 and 50 devices, and over the course of a shift, she gets through about half a bucket. Using a hammer, she has to smash each vape open, pry out the batteries and separate each component into a different container.

Single-use vapes were banned in June last year, but more than 6m vapes and vape pods are still being discarded every week in the UK. Waste management companies say the sheer volume is straining recycling systems, while hidden lithium-ion batteries inside the devices are causing fires.

As Ana works, a burst of sugary scent fills the air; she doesn’t worry about the vapes exploding, she says, it’s never happened to her yet. But while vapes may not be hazardous at this stage of the sorting, they can become dangerous when crushed or damaged, such as during waste collection and storage.

In 2025, there were 670 fires at Suez’s UK sites. Of those, 368 were confirmed to be caused by batteries or vapes, with a further 176 suspected to be linked. Those working at the sites say people simply do not understand that vapes cannot be thrown away, or think – wrongly – that they can be recycled alongside household products. Instead, they need to be taken to dedicated electrical recycling points.

“Vapes were suspected as the cause of over 80% of the reported fires across our sites last year, with the numbers and trend continuing so far in 2026,” says Dr Adam Read, the chief sustainability and external affairs officer at Suez.

“This is despite the ban on disposable vapes coming into effect halfway through 2025. With more than 6m vapes still thrown away every week, it is clear that the perception on these items remains that they are a throwaway item. The problem is that people often don’t realise the danger that batteries cause when not disposed of correctly, and think they are doing the right thing by putting them in with their recycling.”

Read adds: “Across the sector, we estimate around £1bn a year is being spent, or needs to be spent, dealing with this issue … Waste sites are now seen by insurers as some of the highest-risk facilities because fire is so prevalent.”

He recalls a major blaze at a site in Aberdeen four years ago that destroyed the facility. “It was £20m of investment gone … These are serious risks,” he says.

The root cause, Read says, is simple: frequency. “Other battery-powered items, like electric toothbrushes, don’t appear as often in the waste stream because people keep them for years. But vapes are used and thrown away constantly. It’s the sheer volume.”

Every fire investigation now starts the same way. “We’re almost always looking for lithium-ion batteries as the starting point, and then asking: was it a vape?”

While the disposable vape ban aimed to tackle the problem, industry figures say it has simply shifted it.

On the floor of the Birmingham recycling site, since operations began at 6am, about 150 vapes have already been found in just six hours. Staff say the devices have changed: instead of the once-ubiquitous disposable brands such as Elfbar, larger rechargeable vapes, such as Hayati, are now more common in the waste stream.

An Elfbar spokesperson said: “Depleted devices and refills should always be disposed of responsibly. Vapers are encouraged to use takeback services provided by retailers selling vapes, which have a statutory duty to accept them. Thousands of recycling points can also be found across the UK on Material Focus’s Recycle Your Electricals website.”

Hayati did not respond to attempts to contact it for a comment.

As these devices are often not much more expensive that disposables, critics argue there is little incentive for users to change their behaviour.

Steve Daniels, the operations manager at Suez, says: “We are seeing a change in the size of the vapes being thrown away, because they’re the ones that require charging. We used to see smaller vapes, like the 600-puff ones, but now, as you’ll see on the production floor, it’s the larger, rechargeable types – and they have bigger batteries.”

When recycling material enters the plant, it is first sorted by size. Larger non-conforming items (such as nitrous oxide canisters) are often removed. However, larger vape devices, which are becoming more common, are increasingly slipping through this stage and are instead identified later during aluminium separation, where they often appear among crushed cans.

Read says producers should bear more responsibility for the products they make. “We’ve argued that if a vape costs £10, there should be a £5 handling cost built in. That reflects the real cost of dealing with it safely,” he says. “That financial driver could change behaviour.”

Another proposed solution is a deposit return scheme for vapes, similar to those planned for drinks containers.

“If people could return vapes and get £1 or £2 back, you’d dramatically reduce the number ending up in general waste,” he says. “That could cut the fire risk by 70-90%.”

For now, the burden remains on workers such as Ana, carefully dismantling devices by hand, one bucket at a time.

A government spokesperson said: “We are determined for more vapes to be recycled correctly and safely, and have made it compulsory for all vape retailers to provide recycling bins. We will continue to work with Trading Standards and local authorities to build on the 10,500 takeback bins already on our high streets.”

A North Korean women’s football club has arrived in South Korea for an AFC Women’s Champions League semi-final, marking the first visit by athletes from the isolated state to the South in eight years.

The delegation of 27 players and 12 staff entered the country on Sunday before Wednesday’s match between Naegohyang FC and South Korea’s Suwon FC Women in Suwon.

The visit has been approved under the inter-Korean exchange law and covers the players’ stay until next weekend, though the team could leave earlier if eliminated, according to Seoul’s unification ministry.

Public interest has been strong, with all 7,087 tickets made available to the general public selling out within a day, according to Yonhap news agency, citing South Korea’s football federation.

North Korea has in recent years labelled South Korea its “most hostile state”, and ruled out reuniting the nation split by the 1950-1953 Korean war. By contrast, the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, has called for improved ties.

“It may be difficult to hope for a complete thaw in strained relations by this one-time visit,” said a spokesperson for South Korea’s ruling Democratic party, vowing to make efforts to open the door for exchanges and dialogue.

“We hope it will serve as an opportunity to tear down high barriers between the South and the North,” the spokesperson said.

South Korea’s government has said it will keep its role limited, given the fixture is an international club competition, but will provide logistical support for the visiting team.

The unification ministry said it has set aside 300m won ($200,000) from an inter-Korean cooperation fund to support a cheering squad for both sides, citing the event’s potential to promote mutual understanding between the two Koreas.

As the match is between clubs and not national teams, it will not feature national anthems or political symbols, including the Korean Unification flag, in line with Asian Football Confederation rules.

The white flag bearing a blue silhouette of the peninsula has often been used in international sports fixtures involving both sides to represent unity.

Seoul’s unification minister, Chung Dong-young, is considering attending the match, according to South Korean media.

The semi-final is scheduled to kick off at 7pm local time (10am GMT) on Wednesday in Suwon. The winner will face either Melbourne City or Tokyo Verdy in the final on Saturday.

If Naegohyang lost, the North Korean team was expected to return home the following day, the ministry said.

The hantavirus outbreak, while unlikely to spark the next big pandemic, is shining a spotlight on the ways public health has deteriorated in the US: its ability to test for rare diseases, its expertise on outbreak prevention and response, its ability to battle misinformation and restore trust.

“Assuming everything goes well in containing this outbreak, which I hope it does, the takeaway from that should not be ‘we’re fine,’” said Stephanie Psaki, former White House global health security coordinator. “We’re not ready for this type of threat.”

Many of the people at health agencies who plan for a quick response to outbreaks, and the systems supporting them, are gone now, Psaki noted. Yet “this is just one of many, many pathogens. These types of things will continue happening.” And, she pointed out, there’s a 50/50 chance of another pandemic at least as bad as Covid in the next 25 years, according to scientific models.

Examining the mistakes – and the progress – made during the Covid pandemic can help us prepare for the next big one, Psaki and other former top US officials said at a recent event in Washington DC.

Misinformation is one of the greatest challenges facing public health. Conspiracy theories and rumors aren’t new; even the Milan plague around 1630 had its share.

But “the only difference between hundreds of years ago is social media”, said Anthony Fauci, former chief medical adviser to the president and former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “We’re just being overwhelmed” with misinformation online, he said, calling it “a real problem which I don’t see any easy solution to”.

People don’t often relate to rigorous studies with methods sections, statistical analyses, and 17 supplementary figures in the New England Journal of Medicine, but they frequently relate to social media influencers pushing fake cures, Fauci said.

“It’s stunning. It’s painful, but it’s true that somebody on social media who’s a trusted influencer will outflank any scientist who’s trying to show you data, so you can’t fight misinformation with data,” Fauci said. “You have to fight misinformation with figuring out a better way to communicate to people on a level that they understand.”

That means releasing accurate information quickly – and it should involve pre-bunking myths before they have a chance to spread, Fauci said. “Otherwise you’re always playing catch-up. And when you’re playing catch-up, you’re losing.”

Officials also need to get better at communicating uncertainty, said Nina Schwalbe, a senior scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Policy and Politics and former director of Covid-19 Vaccine Access and Delivery Initiative at the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

“We say things too simply, and then people lose their trust.” But people can handle uncertainty “because the world is an uncertain place”, she said.

The very advances to come out of the pandemic – such as mRNA vaccines, widely viewed as one of the greatest technological advances of this generation – are now at risk, with slashed funding and growing misinformation.

The science conducted during the pandemic was “extraordinary”, but it frequently “gets lost in the somewhat muddled public health response”, said Fauci. Vaccine development began six days after publication of the Sars-CoV-2 genome, and a vaccine that was about 95% effective was going into arms 11 months later.

“That didn’t happen by accident – that happened because of the years of investment in basic and clinical research,” Fauci said. That work itself built on the response to a different epidemic, HIV. The Covid vaccine is “one of the best vaccines that was ever developed”, Fauci said, particularly because of its ability to be changed overnight as the virus evolves – and it can be produced quickly in enormous quantities.

“It saved us,” he said. “Could you imagine how many more people would have died?”

‘We have to invest in public health’

Yet now that work is being pulled back.

The US also failed to slow the pandemic in its flawed efforts to vaccinate the world, Fauci said, adding: “We got in our own way. We didn’t make equity our driving force.”

When the US later offered vaccines to other countries, a lack of planning – including basic supplies like having enough syringes – stymied the effort. “Tens of millions of doses of vaccine is meaningless if there’s no way of distributing them in the country that needs it,” Fauci said.

This delay in global access to Covid vaccines did “deep” and “long-lasting” damage to the alliances between the United States and other countries, Psaki said. “It’s being reinforced by the positions of this administration, but the damage was deep, and it’s very, very difficult to rebuild trust after that kind of betrayal.” The mpox outbreak response in 2024 was better, in part because there were already vaccines on hand – but “we were still not able to get those vaccines in arms”, Psaki said.

It’s also important to develop and distribute tests quickly, Fauci said. “The South Koreans were putting out 20,000 tests per day, and we were playing around with five tests that didn’t work.” But the “catastrophe” extended beyond bad tests to a “refusal to believe that there are other ways of doing it”, he said.

Pandemic preparedness is not just a domestic issue, Fauci said; it must involve working closely with international partners, and “that’s something that, unfortunately, we seem to be steering away from right now, which is very troublesome to me”.

Donald Trump has moved to leave the World Health Organization (WHO), which Psaki calls “an absolutely essential institution.” The US contribution to WHO is $130m – roughly equivalent to the Pentagon’s recent spending on lobster and steak, she noted.

In the absence of federal guidance, states are taking the lead by forming health alliances and working with WHO directly.

“From where I sit, the federal government is not going to play the role that is needed in the next pandemic, and so we are watching states step up,” said Matthew Kavanaugh, director of the Georgetown global health policy center.

The basics of outbreak response and pandemic preparation haven’t changed, Psaki said: “Stop a threat from emerging, identify the threat quickly, contain the threat, have a way to respond to the threat and keep people alive and keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed.”

Experts worry that the public, divided by politics and overwhelmed by misinformation, won’t have an appetite for public health measures. But it’s important to have “a little more space for hope and trust”, Psaki said. “Most families want to keep their family members safe” – which is different from the motivations of political leaders and others who may benefit from misinformation, she noted.

Schwalbe’s father was one of the first victims of Covid in New York. He got sick in March 2020 as the entire system was falling apart, Schwalbe said. “It was just me and my dad in his apartment on Lexington Avenue as he died.”

They didn’t have any oxygen or palliative care, but they did have refrigerator trucks for bodies and sirens wailing constantly in the street. She knew six people who died of Covid. The experience made her more determined to strengthen public health before the next crisis hits.

“We can’t just leave public health as the unseen thing that people complain about when it’s not working,” Schwalbe said. “We have to invest in it.”

The launch of limited-edition Swatch watches descended into chaos in several European cities and New York, with French police firing teargas to restore order at a store near Paris.

Hundreds of people waited through the night from Friday into Saturday – and in some cases for several days – hoping to buy the Royal Pop timepieces, made in collaboration with the luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet.

In France, queues of hundreds of people formed overnight in several cities and a police source said officers had fired teargas to control a 300-strong crowd outside a Swatch shop in the Paris region.

A metal shutter and two security gates were damaged in the incident. The police added the stores had underestimated the need for security.

A fight also broke out in front of a Swatch store in Milan at opening time on Saturday, according to footage broadcast by local media.

In the Netherlands, police had to intervene at a shopping centre near The Hague after hundreds flocked to the store.

The police said there had been a tense atmosphere and some quarrelling. When the store decided not to open, people had been sent home. Swatch stores in Amsterdam and Utrecht also remained closed. It is not clear when they will reopen.

On its website, the Westfield Mall of the Netherlands announced: “The introduction of Swatch in collaboration with Audemars Piguet will NOT go ahead. The store will remain closed this weekend.”

In New York, the opening of the Swatch store in Times Square saw pushing and shoving in the waiting crowd according to John McIntosh, who had been in the queue since Wednesday. “It was like a mosh pit,” he added.

Like many others, McIntosh said he had hoped to get his hands on the brightly coloured watch – sold in store for about $400 (£300) – to resell immediately at a huge mark-up.

Another buyer, who gave his name as Mac, said he had managed to get one after five days of queueing.

“It was pretty hectic … it’s nasty, but I was able to get in,” he said. “Retail for them is about $400 – I sold one just now for $4,000.”

Benny, 30, said he had decided to pay rather than to wait, and had spent $2,400 for one of the watches.

“It’s basically $2,000 over retail, but you can’t get an AP (Audemars Piguet) for less than $2,000, so I think it was a steal,” he said. “I’d rather pay a premium than come out and get it.”

Swatch was also forced to close its stores in London and six other UK cities for “safety considerations” after huge crowds gathered outside.

Swatch has declined to comment.