内容摘要：Starting in summer 2026 and lasting four years, the project will work with the Arts Council, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and others to give a boost to the creative sector.

Starting in summer 2026 and lasting four years, the project will work with the Arts Council, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and others to give a boost to the creative sector.

Author Sir Salman Rushdie has said he is "pleased" the man who tried to kill him in a knife attack in 2022 has received the maximum possible prison sentence.earlier this month for attempted murder after repeatedly stabbing Sir Salman on a New York lecture stage.

"I was pleased that he got the maximum available, and I hope he uses it to reflect upon his deeds," Sir Salman told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.The attack left the award-winning writer blind in one eye, with damage to his liver and a paralysed hand caused by nerve damage to his arm.Last year, Sir Salman published a book titled Knife reflcting on the attack, which he has described as "my way of fighting back".

It includes an imagined conversation with Matar. "I thought if I was to really meet him, to ask him questions, I wouldn't get very much out of him," Sir Salman told Radio 4."I doubt that he would open his heart to me. And so I thought, well, I could open it by myself. I'd probably do it better than a real conversation would."

The fictional conversation was brought to life by BBC film-maker Alan Yentob in an artificial intelligence animation created for a documentary last year.

The results were "very startling", Sir Salman said on Monday. "I have to say it certainly made a point."Russia's view of the Ukraine war was different from the West's, he said, where Moscow sees the war as more of a "continuum" in a larger conflict with Nato and is therefore "trying to find ways into our defence lines and it's testing it".

He cited recent attacks on undersea cables in the Baltic Sea, cyber attacks on European public transport, and unidentified drones spotted over German power stations and other infrastructure.Nato members should therefore build up their militaries again, Gen Breuer argued. "What we have to do now is really to lean in and to tell everybody, hey, ramp up... get more into it because we need it. We need it to be able to defend ourselves and therefore also to build up deterrence."

Asked by the BBC about Nato cohesion, given Hungary and Slovakia's closer relations with Moscow, Gen Breuer insisted the alliance was still healthy.He pointed to Finland and Sweden's decisions to join Nato shortly after the Ukraine war began. "I've never seen such a unity like it is now" among nations and military leaders, he said.