Israel’s defence minister has told its military to prepare a plan to “allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so”, in line with President Donald Trump’s proposal for the US to take over the territory and resettle its 2.1 million Palestinians elsewhere.

Israel Katz said Gazans should have “freedom of movement and migration” and countries critical of Israel’s war with Hamas were “obligated” to take them in.

Trump meanwhile said Gaza would be “turned over” to the US by Israel “at the conclusion of fighting”.

But the Palestinian presidency reiterated its rejection of the plan, which it has said would violate international law, and insisted that “Palestine… is not for sale”.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

More than 47,550 people have been killed and 111,600 injured in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Most of Gaza’s population has also been displaced multiple times and almost 70% of its buildings are estimated to be destroyed or damaged.

Healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.

• Bowen: Trump’s Gaza plan won’t happen, but will have consequences
• ‘We won’t go out of Gaza’: Palestinians express shock and defiance
• Why does Trump want to take over Gaza and could he do it?
• How 15 months of war have drastically changed life in the territory
• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained

The Israeli defence minister wrote on X on Thursday that he welcomed the US president’s “bold initiative”, saying it could “support long-term reconstruction efforts in a demilitarized, threat-free Gaza after Hamas”.

Katz announced that he had instructed the Israeli military to “prepare a plan that will allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so, to any country willing to receive them”.

“The plan will include exit options via land crossings, as well as special arrangements for departure by sea and air,” he said.

“Countries such as Spain, Ireland, Norway, and others, which have falsely accused Israel over its actions in Gaza, are legally obligated to allow Gazans to enter their territory. Their hypocrisy will be exposed if they refuse.”

He alleged that Hamas was preventing people leaving Gaza and said that they should have “the right to freedom of movement and migration”.

Hamas official Basem Naim accused Katz of trying to cover up for “a state that has failed to achieve any of its objectives in the war on Gaza” and said Palestinians would refuse to leave.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Palestinian presidency asserted that “Palestine, with its land, history and holy sites, is not for sale”.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh also said the Palestinians would “will not give up an inch of their land”, whether in Gaza or the occupied West Bank.

“The Palestinian people and their leadership will not allow the repetition of the catastrophes of 1948 and 1967, and will thwart any plan aimed at liquidating their just cause through investment projects whose place is neither in Palestine nor on its land.”

The 1948 “Nakba”, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee or driven from their homes before and during the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel.

Many of those refugees ended up in Gaza, where they and their descendants make up three quarters of the population. Another 900,000 registered refugees live in the West Bank, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war along with Gaza, while 3.4 million others live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the UN.

Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though it retained control of its shared border, airspace and shoreline, giving it effective control of the movement of people and goods. The UN still regards Gaza as Israeli-occupied territory because of the level of control Israel has.

On Wednesday, Jordan’s king expressed its “rejection of any attempts to annex land or displace Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank”, while Egypt’s foreign minister stressed the importance of reconstruction “without the Palestinians leaving the Gaza Strip”.

Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the UK and other countries – said Trump’s plan was “absurd” and would “only put oil on the fire” in the region.

The UN human rights office warned that any forcible transfer in, or deportation of, people from occupied territory was strictly prohibited under international law.

The UN’s secretary general also said it was “essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing” and stressed that Gaza would be an integral part of a future Palestinian state.

Antonio Guterres told a meeting in New York that the world had “seen a chilling, systematic dehumanisation and demonization of an entire people”.

Trump unveiled his plan for the US to take “long-term ownership” of Gaza and oversee its reconstruction during a visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.

The president said most of the Palestinians living in Gaza would have to be relocated to achieve his vision of creating “the Riviera of the Middle East”, and that they would be housed in Jordan, Egypt and other countries.

“I hope we can do something where they wouldn’t want to go back,” he said, echoing earlier remarks in the Oval Office where he talked about resettling people “permanently”.

At the White House briefing on Wednesday, spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt was asked to confirm whether all Palestinians who wanted to stay in Gaza would be allowed to do so.

“I can confirm that the president is committed to rebuilding Gaza and to temporarily relocating those who are there because… it is a demolition site,” she replied, appearing to contradict the president.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said the idea was for Gazans to leave the territory for an “interim” period while debris was cleared and reconstruction took place.

On Thursday, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that Gaza would “be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting”.

A ceasefire in effect between Israel and Hamas has halted the war and aims to lead to a permanent end to the fighting.

“The Palestinians… would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free,” he added.

The president also said no US soldiers would be needed to maintain stability.

In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister called Trump’s proposal “remarkable” and something that should be “examined, pursued and done”.

Netanyahu also suggested that Gazans would be able to return, saying: “They can leave, they can then come back, they can relocate and come back, but you have to rebuild Gaza.”

Hate symbols and terror offences will be punishable with mandatory jail terms ranging from one to six years in Australia, after parliament passed a series of amendments to hate crime laws on Thursday.

The new laws were passed following a wave of high-profile antisemitic attacks which have become a major topic of debate in the country.

The amendments have been described by the government as the “toughest laws Australia has ever had against hate crimes”.

But critics say that the governing Labor Party is caving to opposition demands and going against its own policy of opposing mandatory jail sentences.

Under the amendments, displaying hate symbols or performing a Nazi salute is now punishable with at least one year in prison.

Other penalties include a minimum of three years for financing terrorism and six years for committing or planning terrorist acts.

There have been several attacks on Jewish targets in Australia in recent months.

Last week authorities in Sydney found a caravan containing explosives and an antisemitic note.

The discovery came just a week after a childcare centre near a Jewish school and synagogue in Sydney was set on fire and antisemitic graffiti was seen on one of its walls.

In December, a synagogue in Melbourne was set alight with worshippers inside. No-one was seriously hurt in the incident, which sent shockwaves through the country.

Former Labor senator Kim Carr criticised the party for what he said was a “clear breach of the Labor party national platform”.

Labor opposes mandatory sentences on the grounds that such penalties do not reduce crime, undermine the courts’ independence and are often discriminatory in practice.

But opposition parties did not rush to welcome the new amendments either, accusing Labor of dragging its feet.

“The parliament is not acting today because of the decisiveness of the Labor Party,” Liberal senator James Paterson told reporters in Canberra.

“The prime minister has been dragged kicking and screaming to finally introduce tough legislation that will ensure there are real penalties for this behaviour.”

Performing the Nazi salute and displaying Nazi symbols such as the swastika, have been banned since January 2024 and carry up to one year in jail. The amendments on Thursday make the jail term mandatory.

“This is not about politics,” Home Affairs minister Tony Burke said on Wednesday night as the amendments were introduced to parliament.

“This is about whether the Australian Parliament believes it’s acceptable to advocate, threaten or commit violence against another person because of who they are, who they pray to or who they love.”

The use of lethal force by SAS soldiers was unjustified when they opened fire killing four IRA men in an ambush at Clonoe in County Tyrone, an inquest has ruled.

Kevin Barry O’Donnell, 21, Sean O’Farrell, 22, Peter Clancy, 21, and Patrick Vincent, 20, died in February 1992, minutes after they had carried out a gun attack on Coalisland police station.

The soldiers opened fire as the men arrived at St Patrick’s Church car park in a hijacked lorry which had a heavy machine gun welded to its tailgate.

Security forces had intelligence the car park would be used and 12 soldiers were in position behind a hedgerow.

The four armed IRA men were killed about 20 minutes after firing 60 shots at Coalisland police station – no-one was injured in the attack.

SAS soldiers opened fire without warning when the lorry drove in – firing more than 500 rounds.

In statements at the time, the soldiers stated the use of lethal force was justified to protect their lives and those of their colleagues from the danger the IRA unit presented.

However, coroner Mr Justice Michael Humphreys found the use of lethal force cannot have been reasonable.

He said there was no attempt to arrest the four IRA men, even as they lay wounded.

Mr Justice Humphreys said the experienced soldiers lying in wait at the church would have known the men would need to dismount the machine gun and in that scenario the ability to arrest them would have improved.

The coroner said the operation “was not planned and controlled in such a way as to minimise to the greatest extent possible the need for recourse to lethal force”.

However, he said the soldiers chose not to wait but to stand up and begin shooting.

Two of those killed, Mr O’Donnell and Mr O’Farrell, were shot in the back while running away and had bullets fired into their faces as they lay on the ground.

“No attempt was made by the soldiers to arrest any members of the PIRA unit, even as they lay seriously injured and incapacitated either on the ground or in the lorry,” the judge stated.

“The soldiers did not have an honest and genuinely held belief that the use of force was necessary to defend themselves or others.”

Mr Justice Humphreys added that state agencies had “perpetuated falsehoods” about the incident, having claimed at the time there had been a gun battle.

In fact, the IRA men had not fired on the soldiers.

He referred to a Ministry of Defence document which had mentioned the operation as “an excellent security forces success”.

After the ruling, Patrick Vincent’s sister Marian said: “It has been the entirety of my life that this process has been ongoing.

“It’s hard to say you’re delighted at a finding over your family member’s death.

“We’re overwhelmed and we’re delighted with the result, but we’re also very aware at a huge expense to us, as families.”

Solicitor Niall Murphy said: “Anyone who sat through those months of hearings, the inescapable conclusion, the only conclusion is the verdict the judge has found today.

“Whereas truth has been excavated and published today, justice has not.

“We’re going to carefully consider this verdict with regards to any prospect of prosecutions.”

Syrians and a Bosnian were among the 10 victims of a gunman who carried out the worst shooting in Swedish history, at a school in Orebro on Tuesday.

It was the first information about those murdered, and it came from two embassies rather than police, who said only that there were victims of a number of nationalities.

Police said the suspected gunman, named locally as 35-year-old Rickard Andersson, was found dead afterwards, with three guns by his side.

The regional police chief said police faced an “inferno” when they entered the school buildings: “Dead people, screams and smoke.”

Lars Wiren spoke of a scene of chaos at Risbergska school, with people running in and out of a very large complex that stretched over about 17,000 sq m.

Anna Bergqvist, the head of the police investigation, told the BBC police could confirm only that people of multiple nationalities and ages were caught up in the shooting.

One Bosnian national was killed and another wounded, the Bosnian embassy said. Ambassador Bojan Sosic laid flowers outside the school in Orebro on Thursday.

The Syrian embassy gave no details of the number of Syrians affected, but said: “We offer our sincere condolences and sympathies to the families of the victims, including dear Syrian citizens, and to the friendly Swedish people.”

However, it soon emerged that Salim Iskef, a 29-year-old Orthodox Christian who fled the war in Syria in 2015, was one of the 10 victims.

Santa Maria church in Orebro said his life had ended tragically in the shooting.

Jacob Kasselia, the priest at Orebro’s Syrian Orthodox church, told the BBC that Mr Iskef was a kind and thoughtful young man who had arrived from Aleppo in 2015 and was due to get married this summer.

Swedish reports said he had become a Swedish citizen.

The priest said Mr Iskef’s fiancée had been “very badly affected” by the murder.

“She is going through a very difficult, very dark experience,” Mr Kasselia said.

Mr Iskef’s aunt told Arabic-language website Alkompis he had made a video call to his mother to say he had been shot and asked her to look after his fiancée.

The Bosnian embassy said it had chosen to wait for official information from police, although it had relevant information from Orebro’s Bosnian community.

There has been some frustration in Orebro at the slow pace at which police have been releasing information about their inquiry.

“I find it odd, to say the least, that the police choose to withhold information that pertains to foreign citizens, from respective embassies,” Ambassador Sosic told the BBC. He described the Bosnian community as among the best integrated in Sweden.

Police in Orebro say the alarm was raised at 12:33 (11:33 GMT) on Tuesday and after about five minutes the first patrols had reached the school, which sits on a large education campus about 200km (124km) west of Stockholm.

Police chief Lars Wiren said 130 police officers had eventually reached the school and found an “inferno”.

He told the BBC that there was no evidence bombs had been detonated, but said there was thick smoke that could have come from the suspect setting fires or smoke grenades.

He said they believed the suspect had fired at police but that officers did not fire back. The gunman was found dead at the scene over an hour later.

Police investigator Anna Bergqvist said that the suspect had killed himself.

She confirmed that three guns were found at the scene next to the gunman, of a total of four known to be legally registered to the suspect.

However, she refused to comment on the types of guns or ammunition used.

Police remain tight-lipped about both the suspect and the possible motive behind the attack.

Anna Bergqvist explained that the delay in naming the suspect was because of the wait for DNA samples to be matched.

Swedish police are usually cautious about naming suspects and would not normally do so ahead of charges being laid, but Ms Bergqvist said they expected to make an exception in this case and release a name in the coming days.

Risbergska school provides adult education for people aged over 20 who did not finish primary or secondary school, as well as Swedish classes for immigrants.

Young residents in Orebro had already expressed fears of a racial element to the shooting, and the Syrian statement confirmed that immigrants were among the victims.

Sweden’s TV4 channel broadcast a video recorded from a school toilet during the gun attack, in which the words “away from Europe!” can be heard.

It is not clear who shouted the words and police have been careful not to discuss a motive.

However, Ms Bergqvist appeared to row back the initial statement from authorities on Tuesday that the motive for the attack was not ideological.

“Why they said that, I cannot comment,” she said. “We are looking at different motives, we will declare it when we have it.”

Rickard Andersson has been described locally as a recluse and one report by Swedish website Aftonbladet suggested his attack may have targeted local social services.

A source told the site that he had argued with a social worker after he had lost his welfare benefits because he had not done enough to find work.

Police on Tuesday had said that the suspect had no previous convictions, no apparent links to gangs and they did not believe the attack was motivated by terrorism.

Last month was the world’s warmest January on record raising further questions about the pace of climate change, scientists say.

January 2025 had been expected to be slightly cooler than January 2024 because of a shift away from a natural weather pattern in the Pacific known as El Niño.

But instead, last month broke the January 2024 record by nearly 0.1C, according to the European Copernicus climate service.

The world’s warming is due to emissions of planet-heating gases from human activities – mainly the burning of fossil fuels – but scientists say they cannot fully explain why last month was particularly hot.

It continues a series of surprisingly large temperature records since mid-2023, with temperatures around 0.2C above what had been expected.

“The basic reason we’re having records being broken, and we’ve had this decades-long warming trend, is because we’re increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told BBC News.

“The specifics of exactly why 2023, and 2024, and [the start of] 2025, were so warm, there are other elements involved there. We’re trying to pin those down.”

January 2025 ended up 1.75C warmer than January temperatures of the late 19th Century, before humans started significantly warming the climate.

Early last year, global temperatures were being boosted by the natural El Niño weather pattern, where unusually warm surface waters spread across the eastern tropical Pacific. This releases extra heat into the atmosphere, raising global temperatures.

This year, La Niña conditions are developing instead, according to US science group Noaa, which should have the opposite effect.

While La Niña is currently weak – and sometimes takes a couple of months to have its full effect on temperatures – it was expected to lead to a cooler January.

“If you’d asked me a few months ago what January 2025 would look like relative to January 2024, my best shot would have been it would be cooler,” Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal predictions at the UK Met Office, said.

“We now know it isn’t, and we don’t really know why that is.”

A number of theories have been put forward for why the last couple of years have been warmer than anticipated.

One idea involves a prolonged response of the oceans to the 2023-24 El Niño.

While it was not especially strong, it followed an unusually lengthy La Niña phase from 2020-23.

The El Niño event might therefore have “lifted the lid” on warming, allowing ocean heat that had been accumulating to escape into the atmosphere.

But it’s unclear how this would still be directly affecting global temperatures nearly a year after El Niño ended.

“Based on historical data, that effect is likely to have waned by now, so I think if the current record continues, that explanation becomes less and less likely,” says Prof Scaife.

The fact that sea temperatures in other regions of the world remain particularly warm could suggest “that the behaviour of the ocean is changing”, according to Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus.

“We’re really looking to see how the ocean temperatures evolve because they have a direct influence on air temperatures.”

Another prominent theory is a reduction in the number of small particles in the atmosphere, known as aerosols.

These tiny particles have historically masked some of the long-term warming from greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane by helping to form bright clouds and reflecting some of the Sun’s energy back into space.

Aerosol numbers have been falling recently, thanks to reductions in tiny particles from shipping and Chinese industry, for example, aimed at cleaning the air that people breathe.

But it means they haven’t had as large a cooling effect to offset the continued warming caused by greenhouse gases.

And this cooling effect of aerosols has been underestimated by the UN, argues James Hansen, the scientist who made one of the first high-profile warnings on climate change to the US Senate in 1988.

Most scientists aren’t yet convinced that this is the case. But, if true, it could mean there is greater climate change in store than previously assumed.

The “nightmare scenario”, says Prof Scaife, would be an extra cloud feedback, where a warming ocean could cause low-level reflective clouds to dissipate, in turn warming the planet further.

This theory is also very uncertain. But the months ahead should help to shed some light on whether the “extra” warmth over the past couple of years is a blip, or marks an acceleration in warming beyond what scientists had anticipated.

Currently, most researchers still expect 2025 will end up slightly cooler than 2023 and 2024 – but the recent warmth means they can’t be sure.

What they do know, however, is that further records will follow sooner or later as humanity continues to heat up the planet.

“In time, 2025 is likely to be one of the cooler years that we experience,” Dr Burgess said.

“Unless we turn off that tap to [greenhouse gas] emissions, then global temperatures will continue to rise.”

Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to get exclusive insight on the latest climate and environment news from the BBC’s Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, delivered to your inbox every week. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.

“I have so much money now that I could hire someone to kill you, and nobody would know. No-one would miss you. No-one would know anything.”

Former music executive Daniel Evans says he can still remember the threat from his old boss, Sean “Diddy” Combs – then known as Puff Daddy – to a colleague. It was 1997, he says, in the New York office of Combs’s Grammy Award-winning music label Bad Boy Records.

“It was like, this is what money does to you,” he says.

Combs was often “prickly”, but Evans says power was transforming him. Just days before, the hip-hop mogul had received his biggest reward to date – $6m (£4.8m) to mark the label’s success, which boasted platinum-selling artists like The Notorious B.I.G.

That year Combs’s music career reached its peak, with his empire soon expanding into fashion, alcohol and even his own TV network.

Nearly three decades on, his legacy is in ruins as he sits in jail awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering alongside battling dozens of lawsuits accusing him of drugging and assault at lavish parties, high-end hotels and in his label’s recording studio. He denies all the allegations.

Now the BBC has spoken to more than 20 people who worked with Combs at Bad Boy Records – including former executives, assistants and producers – who describe for the first time troubling incidents they say they witnessed during its 1990s rise.

Some executives say they had concerns after seeing Combs having sex with women in the studio, including one incident where the employee says the young woman did not seem to react when he walked in. Another staff member complained Combs asked her to bring him condoms.

The BBC also heard that corporate funds were used to fly in women from across the US for sex at the request of artists and other employees.

“There was a course of conduct that became more egregious over time and that conduct does go back to the 90s,” says Tony Buzbee, a US lawyer representing dozens of alleged victims, including one who says Combs threatened to kill her in similar terms to the incident Evans says he witnessed.

His client alleges Combs raped her on a bathroom floor at a promotional party held for The Notorious B.I.G., the label’s biggest star, in 1995. She says in her lawsuit that afterwards, Combs told her not to tell anyone or “you will disappear”.

In a statement, Combs’s legal team accused Buzbee of being “more interested in media attention than the truth” and said the hip-hop star “never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone”.

The 55-year-old’s lawyers said they had not been provided with sufficient details about the BBC’s claims to present the facts that would “counter these fabricated accusations”.

“As we’ve said before, Mr Combs cannot dignify every publicity stunt or facially absurd claim with a response. He has full confidence in the judicial process, where the truth will prevail: these accusations are pure fiction,” they said.

A brash go-getter, Sean Combs became an overnight millionaire when he launched Bad Boy Records in 1993 with a roster of top artists.

It was Combs’s first venture, having already built a name for himself as a talent director at another music label, Uptown Records, aged 19.

“He said that he wanted to be one of the biggest artists in the world and it didn’t matter if I believed him or not,” remembers Jimmy Maynes, a former Uptown colleague.

Maynes remembers Combs having a short fuse in the office, sometimes banging “his hands up against the desk” like a “bratty kid” and yelling if he did not get his way.

Combs was eventually fired from Uptown and at the age of 23 started Bad Boy Records.

“He’s the hardest working man that I’ve ever met and always wanted people to match his energy,” says Daniel Evans, a senior executive who managed Bad Boy’s recording budgets and artists’ contracts between 1994 and 1997.

Combs described himself as the “Great Gatsby” and swiftly became known for hosting coveted celebrity bashes at New York nightclubs, on the beaches of Cancun, Mexico, and later infamous “White Parties” – named after the all-white dress code – in the Hamptons.

Even President Donald Trump attended events in the 90s, says Evans, who once saw him sit on a golden throne at Combs’s 30th birthday and exclaim: “I’m the real King of New York!”

“We were all really young. I was 24 years old,” reflects Evans, who was one of the label’s original employees. “People wanted to party, have fun, hook up and build good memories.”

But looking back, Evans says he is troubled by some of the things he witnessed about his boss’s behaviour and the company culture.

In about 1995, he says he walked in on Combs having sex with a young woman at Daddy’s House, Bad Boy’s New York recording studio near Times Square.

“I was getting ready to go home for the night and looking for my jacket. Open the door and he’s having sex with this girl,” says Evans, who thought the studio was empty as it was silent. Combs swore and shouted at him to leave. “I thought I was getting fired,” he says.

Evans remembers the young woman had been brought to the studio, presumably for a tour, by a party-promoter who was a friend of Combs. His boss seemed sober, while she was quiet and did not really talk, he says, wondering if she was high on drugs or just shy.

He says it did not seem unusual at the time. But recalling how the woman did not react when he entered the room, he says: “Knowing what I know now, there’s a lot of speculation about what state she was in… usually both parties are very responsive during the act.”

Felicia Newsome, the manager of Daddy’s House recording studio between 1994 and 2000, says inappropriate conduct in the music industry as a whole was rife at the time.

“It was abnormal if somebody reported it, but it wasn’t abnormal for it to be happening,” she says.

Newsome says an employee once called her to the studio in the middle of the night because Combs was in his underwear, about to have sex with a model and another woman. He was demanding the staff member fetch him condoms, she recalls.

“I said to Puffy, don’t ever ask anyone here to go and get condoms,” says Newsome, who arrived while they were getting dressed again. “He replied: ‘I didn’t need anything like that, ma,’ and never did it again.”

Newsome, then in her 30s, says she found Combs reasonable and that he changed his behaviour when she challenged him. On one occasion, when the studio first opened in 1995, she says Combs was unhappy about the look of the countertops and called her a “bitch” in front of staff.

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She says she demanded a public apology and temporarily shut the studio, asking him: “If I’m bringing women into this space, which is open 24 hours, how do you want to treat people?”

Combs responded that he wanted it to be an inclusive and safe environment, she says.

But while Newsome ran the studio with an “iron fist”, she says other staff were less comfortable calling Combs out.

“Bad Boy Records was a crazy house with a lot of young people who wanted to touch the King’s robes,” she says.

Former staff say the label was run by twenty-something executives and a large number of interns, some of whom were of school age. There were often sexual relationships between employees and the interns, they say.

Evans remembers an uncomfortable moment with a 14-year-old in his own team, who he says propositioned him.

“She says to me, you work really hard. If you ever want to like, get loose, you and I should kick it… but not tonight, I have a curfew.”

Evans says he sent her home and called the next day, telling her not to return to work. He did not report her, but two weeks later she was back working in the mailroom.

Artists and other employees at Combs’s record label would sometimes also request for women to be flown in to have sex at the studio, the former executive says.

“If they had a [sexual] specialty in something, they would be flown in,” says Evans, who told the BBC he knew because he controlled the budgets. Money for the flights would be set aside and logged under travel, he adds.

“It was probably like thousands of dollars,” says Evans. “I don’t think it happened all that often, but it was definitely a recording expense.”

Evans says Combs’s own requests were managed by his personal assistants. One told the BBC that Combs would often ask them to fly in women he was “messing around with” and put them up in hotels, though the assistant said they were not sex workers.

In the 2000s, the Daddy’s House recording studio further changed, two former staff say, into a culture of “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll”. Combs would regularly bring “random women” there to party, turning up with an entourage of dozens of people in “three white jeeps, with white rims and white leather seats”, they say. Other artists would demand suitcases of Ciroc vodka and one even brought a monkey to a session, according to a former executive.

The studio is one of the locations where women have since accused Combs of drugging and raping them. Model Crystal McKinney alleges the mogul plied her with alcohol and marijuana before sexually assaulting her there in 2003. That same year, a woman alleges that Combs and two associates gang raped her at the studio when she was 17.

Combs’s lawyers say he “looks forward to proving his innocence”, adding that McKinney’s claims are “without merit”.

Many ex-staff say they still find it hard to reconcile the allegations with the man they knew. “These accusations are a surprise to me, as I am sure it is to many of our circle,” says Jeffery Walker, a close friend of Combs who was part of Bad Boy’s original production team. “I’ve been to White Parties and of course studio sessions, and none of what he is accused of went down in my sight.”

Evans was also sceptical about some of the claims until he saw the footage of Casandra Ventura, Combs’s ex-partner of 10 years and a former Bad Boy artist, being brutally beaten by the rapper in a hotel in Los Angeles in 2016.

Ventura was the first person to sue Combs back in November 2023, alleging that he had trapped her in a cycle of abuse, violence, and sex trafficking during their relationship. Combs settled the lawsuit the next day for an undisclosed amount.

“It’s not the first time I’ve seen that temper,” recalls Evans, thinking back to the death threat he says he witnessed back in 1997. “It’s hard to see. The guy in the video with Cassie is almost identical to the guy who threatened the employee. So, you wonder, has anything changed?”

Over the years, Sean Combs has repeatedly reinvented himself – from Puff Daddy, to P Diddy and in recent years, “Love”.

“If I’m acting crazy, like ‘ahhh!’ that’s Diddy. If I’m dancing real smooth with a girl, that’s Puff Daddy. And if I’m looking like I’m nervous or scared or shy, that’s Sean,” he said in an interview in 2015.

With more details likely to emerge when he goes on trial in May, many of those who were close to the rapper are questioning whether they knew the real Sean Combs at all.

“One could think that he’s just a disgusting human being, but that’s not my memory of Puff,” says Jimmy Maynes, who grew up with Combs in Mount Vernon, New York.

But after a pause, he adds: “Or maybe money just gives people the freedom to be exactly who they really are, and he was that guy all along.”

If you would like to speak to Rianna or Larissa about this story you can get in touch here.

India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has told parliament the government is working with the US to ensure Indian citizens are not mistreated while being deported.

His statement came a day after a US military flight brought back 104 Indians accused of entering the US illegally.

One of the deportees told the BBC they had been handcuffed throughout the 40-hour flight, sparking criticism.

But Jaishankar said he had been told by the US that women and children were not restrained. Deportation flights to India had been taking place for several years and US procedures allowed for the use of restraints, he added.

Deportation in the US is organised and executed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“We have been informed by ICE that women and children are not restrained,” Jaishankar said.

He added that according to ICE, the needs of deportees during transit, including for food and medical attention, were attended to and deportees could be unrestrained during bathroom breaks.

“There has been no change from past procedure,” he added.

However Jaspal Singh, one of the deportees on the flight that landed in Amritsar city in the state of Punjab on Wednesday, told BBC Punjabi that he was shackled throughout the flight.

“We were tortured in many ways. My hands and feet were tied after we were put on the plane. The plane stopped at several places,” he said, adding that he was unshackled only after the plane landed in Amritsar.

The US has not given further details of how deportees were treated on the flight. Officials have said that enforcing immigration laws is “critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States” and it was US policy to “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens”.

The US border patrol chief posted video showing deportees in shackles, saying the deportation flight to India was the “farthest deportation flight yet using military transport”.

President Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy. The US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered illegally.

Trump has said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured him that the country would “do what’s right” in accepting US deportations.

In his statement on Thursday, Jaishankar said all countries had an obligation to take back their nationals who had entered other countries illegally. They often faced dangerous journeys and inhumane working conditions once they had reached their destinations, he said.

Fraudulent Indian travel agencies are known to take huge sums of money from people desperate to travel abroad for work, and then make them undertake dangerous journeys to avoid being caught by immigration officials.

Jaspal said he had taken a loan of 4m rupees ($46,000; £37,000] to travel to the US, a dangerous journey that took months and during which he saw bodies in the jungle of other migrants who had died on the route.

Opposition leaders have condemned the manner in which migrants were brought back to the country and have asked the government what action it plans to take over the treatment meted out to its citizens.

Congress MP Manickam Tagore called it “shocking and shameful”.

“The way the US is deporting Indians – chained like criminals – is inhumane and unacceptable,” he posted on X.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said the US had the right to deport people who had entered the country illegally but criticised the manner in which they were deported.

“To send them like this abruptly in a military aircraft and in handcuffs is an insult to India, it’s an insult to the dignity of Indians,” he said.

This isn’t the first time that the US has faced the ire of politicians for allegedly mistreating migrants from their countries.

Last month, Brazil’s government expressed outrage after about 88 of its nationals arrived in their homeland handcuffed. The government said that it would demand an explanation from Washington over the “degrading treatment of passengers on the flight”.

Meanwhile, Colombia sent its own planes to collect deportees after Colombian President Gustavo Petro barred US military aircraft from landing, arguing that those on board were being treated like criminals.

Rights groups have urged countries to ensure deportees are treated humanely.

A state of emergency has been declared on the Greek island of Santorini after days of consecutive earthquakes.

It comes after a magnitude 5.2 tremor was recorded at 21:09 local time (19:09 GMT) on Wednesday between the Greek islands of Amorgos and Santorini, making it the strongest in recent days. It is estimated to have occurred at a depth of 5km.

The decree will be in effect until 3 March to “address the emergency needs and manage the consequences”, officials said.

More than 11,000 people have already left Santorini, with around 7,000 departing by ferry and 4,000 by air.

A 4.7 magnitude quake was also recorded south-west of Amorgos at 07:50 local time on Thursday, following 57 tremors between midnight and 06:30.

So far no major damage has been reported on the island, but authorities are taking precautionary measures and bracing in case a larger quake hits.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is expected to visit Santorini on Friday.

Vasilis Karastathis, director of the Geodynamic Institute, told ERTNews that “seismicity continues at the same pace as in previous days, intense.”

“We have a fairly high number of earthquakes with magnitudes above 4,” he said.

“Still, we are not in a position to say that we see any evidence that would lead to the sequence slowly being completed. We are still in the middle of the road. We have not seen any thinning, any sign that it is heading towards retreat.”

Santorini welcomes millions of tourists annually, but it is currently low season, meaning local residents and workers make up the majority of evacuees.

Poor weather means the ferry from Santorini to Piraeus port near Athens is not operating. The adverse conditions are expected to continue over the coming days.

Many travellers remain at Santorini’s port to board emergency ferry routes that have been set up as many families want to leave the island.

Schools on Santorini – and other neighbouring islands including Anafi, Paros, Naxos and Mykonos – will remain closed until Friday, when authorities will make a decision about when they can re-open.

The island has been reinforced with firefighters and medical personnel from Naxos, another island.

All hospital employees are on standby to help those who have remained on the island with all leave and days off cancelled.

Ambulance units have also arrived to reinforce the island’s service and help is also expected from the armed forces.

According to the health ministry’s planning, in the event of an emergency need for personnel, the first thing that will happen is doctors and nurses will come from other islands. In the event of increased need in Santorini, doctors from Athens will also be sent to the island.

A backup telecommunications station is being set up at Santorini City Hall, to be activated in the event of a major earthquake and a telecommunications problem.

Vassilis Kikilias, the climate and civil protection minister, said units of firefighters trained in natural disasters were being despatched to Santorini. Teams with special dogs and a mobile operations centre have also been sent to the island, while helicopters are on standby.

Kikilias also said the coast guard and armed forces would be available to assist vulnerable people who wish to evacuate.

Earlier on Wednesday, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had struck an optimistic tone at a meeting of civil protection experts.

“First and foremost, the state trusts science and scientists. We have done this in other crises,” the prime minister said.

“All plans have been implemented. Forces have been moved to Santorini and the other islands, so that we are ready for any eventuality,” stressed Mitsotakis.

“We will continue like this with the good hope that things will get better, and the phenomenon will subside.”

Mitsotakis concluded his statement with an appeal to the islanders to: “Stay calm and cooperate with the authorities”.

“I understand the fear of being on Santorini, which is constantly shaking,” he added, emphasising the situation was being assessed on a daily basis.

The Thira Chamber of Commerce had earlier requested a state of emergency be announced.

It called for businesses on the island be suspended and emergency support measures be taken in line with those during Covid-19.

“The consequences for the local economy are incalculable, the central markets are being weakened, and businesses are losing customers and revenue,” the letter read.

“The island is being deserted, as 11,000 permanent residents had left by yesterday, which is expected to rise to 14,000 by the end of this week.”

Santorini is on what is known as the Hellenic Volcanic Arc – a chain of islands created by volcanoes – but the last major eruption was in the 1950s.

Greek authorities have said the recent tremors were related to tectonic plate movements, not volcanic activity.

Scientists cannot predict the exact timing, size or location of earthquakes.

But there are areas of the world where they are more likely to occur, which helps governments prepare.

Earthquakes are the result of movement of tectonic plates in the earth’s crust. Sometimes these plates lock together when they meet, which is called a plate boundary or a fault line.

Santorini and the other Greek Islands are near such a line.

Have you been affected by the earthquake? Get in touch.

Indian tax authorities have sent a confidential notice to South Korean car maker Kia Motors accusing it of evading millions of dollars in taxes.

The amount could be as high as $155m (£125m) and the notice was sent in April last year, according to Reuters.

Kia India told the BBC it has already filed a “detailed response supported by comprehensive evidence and documentation” to the tax claim, issued by a customs commissioner in the city of Chennai.

It did not provide further details. The BBC has approached the finance ministry for comment.

Kia has a manufacturing facility in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and has sold more than a million cars in India since its launch in 2019.

Reuters, which first reported the story, said the government’s 432 page notice accused Kia of importing the components for its Carnival car model in separate lots rather than as a single shipment, a move that attracts significantly lower customs duties.

Last year, Indian officials slapped a similar tax notice of $1.4bn on German auto giant Volkswagen’s unit, Skoda Auto Volkswagen India.

Volkswagen has challenged the demand in the Bombay High Court and said it is “availing itself of all legal remedies”.

The pile up of these new tax disputes and lack of quick resolution mechanisms could have significant implications for foreign investment into India, whose economy has slowed in recent months.

Net foreign direct investment (FDI) into the economy has halved over the last year, according to calculations by HSBC Securities, due to a number of reasons.

Such cases also raise concern among foreign investors about policy uncertainty, say experts.

“The issue is being agitated before the courts and so it would not be appropriate to comment on the merits of the revenues’ claim,” says Dinesh Kanabar, tax expert and former Deputy CEO of KPMG India.

“What, however, is concerning is the dispute resolution process in India takes several years and, in the meantime, there is a risk of having to make a part payment of the demand.”

If India is to revive FDI inflows, addressing “ease of business and the tax dispute resolution process” will be critical, he adds.

There has been a spate of high-profile tax disputes between the Indian government and global corporations where litigation has dragged on for years.

The most high-profile was a $2bn tax demand on Vodafone over its purchase of the Indian arm of Hutchison in 2007, where the court ruled in favour of the UK telecoms company.

Similarly, Edinburgh-based oil and gas major Cairn Energy was embroiled in a longstanding $1.4bn dispute with the taxmen over a 2014 retrospective bill that went to an international tribunal. Cairn won the case and the government was forced to settle last year.

“We need a degree of accountability at the tax office, given that the track record of defending demands in appeal is quite poor,” said Mr Kanabar.

All South Korean airports will need to install bird detection cameras and thermal imaging radars, after an air crash in December last year killed 179 people.

The rollout is set to happen in 2026.

Investigators said last week that they had found evidence of a bird strike on the Boeing 737-800 plane – with feathers and blood stains found on both the plane’s engines.

An investigation into the crash – the deadliest on South Korean soil – is still ongoing but will focus on the role of the bird strike as well as a concrete structure at the end of the runway, which the plane slammed into after making an emergency landing.

“Bird detection radars will be installed at all airports to enhance early detection of distant birds and improve response capabilities for aircraft,” said the Ministry of Land in a statement on Thursday.

Bird detection radar detects the size of birds and their movement paths and relays this information to air traffic controllers.

The ministry added that all airports would also need to be equipped with at least one thermal imaging camera.

Currently only four airports in South Korea are equipped with thermal imaging cameras. It is unclear if any of them have bird detection radars in place.

Sites that attract birds, like rubbish dumps, must also be moved away from airports.

Earlier last month, South Korea announced that seven airports would have their runway safety areas adapted following a review of all the country’s airports that was carried out after the crash.

The cause of the crash is still unknown but air safety experts had earlier said the number of casualties could have been much lower if not for the structure that the plane crashed into after making an emergency landing.

On 29 December, the plane, from budget airline Jeju Air, had taken off from Bangkok and was flying to Muan International Airport in the country’s south-west.

At about 08:57 local time, three minutes after pilots made contact with the airport, the control tower advised the crew to be cautious of “bird activity”.

At 08:59, the pilot reported that the plane had struck a bird and declared a mayday signal.

The pilot then requested permission to land from the opposite direction, during which it belly-landed without its landing gear deployed. It overran the runway and exploded after slamming into the concrete structure, a preliminary investigation report concluded.

Flight data and cockpit voice recorders stopped recording four minutes before the disaster, an investigation into the black boxes later found.

The 179 passengers onboard the Boeing B737-800 plane were aged between three and 78 years old, although most were in their 40s, 50s and 60s. Two cabin crew members were the only survivors.

Turkish authorities have reopened their investigation into the death of a British man whose body was found at the bottom of a hotel lift shaft.

Tyler Kerry, 20, was on holiday with his family when he died at the Trendy Lara hotel in Kundu, near Antalya, in November 2024.

At the time, Turkish authorities said Mr Kerry, of Pitsea, Essex, had been drinking and that there was no evidence of “intervention” with his body, but his family believe he was murdered.

Michael Polak from Justice Abroad – who is representing Mr Kerry’s family – believes the Turkish police drew their conclusions “too quickly”.

Mr Kerry was on his first family holiday abroad with his grandparents, girlfriend and other relatives.

Less than 36 hours after arriving, he was found in the lift shaft in the basement level, wearing just a pair of boxer shorts and socks. Medics were unable to save him.

Mr Kerry’s family said they were “disgusted” at the Turkish authorities’ handling of the situation, including the lift reportedly being put back into use for hotel guests just a few hours later.

International lawyer Michael Polak – who set up Justice Abroad to help British citizens navigate legal processes in foreign countries – said evidence in Mr Kerry’s case may have been lost.

“It was little bit worrying that the scene was cleaned up so quickly because that impedes investigations,” he told the BBC.

“If it was in the United Kingdom, you’d hope that they’d set up a cordoned-off area, they’d bring different experts in to gather all the evidence before any of it’s damaged.”

“We hope that we’ll still be able to find evidence and be able to help the family to find those answers they need,” the barrister said.

Mr Polak said Mr Kerry’s family had been contacted by another holidaymaker who stayed at the same hotel earlier in 2024, whose son was allegedly “beaten up” by security guards in the basement, very close to where Mr Kerry’s body was found a few months later.

“It does ring some alarm bells that something similar has happened at the same hotel in relation to the security and it’s something that, at the very least, needs to be investigated,” Mr Polak said.

A judge in Turkey has now instructed investigators to look into both Mr Kerry’s death and the alleged assault on the other holidaymaker, Mr Polak told the BBC.

“We are confident that they will do the right thing and they’ll look into this closely,” he said.

“Tourism is a huge part of the Turkish economy, especially in the Antalya area, so they’ll want to make sure that they are looking at this really properly.”

Mr Polak said he expected the hotel would cooperate with the investigation, and that the holiday operator Tui – who Mr Kerry’s holiday was booked under – “will want to look into the safety of the hotel if they are sending people [there] again and again”.

Mr Kerry’s family – who arranged a private autopsy to be carried out in addition to those which took place in Turkey and at the East London coroner’s service – are said to be “very pleased” that the case is being re-investigated, and are continuing to fundraise to help pay for legal costs.

An inquest was opened and adjourned in December into Mr Kerry’s death. The area coroner, Michelle Brown, said she was “in the hands of the Turkish authorities” who would “not engage with the UK coroner’s service at all”.

A spokesperson for the Presidency of Turkey told the BBC in a statement they “are deeply saddened by the loss of Tyler Kerry…” and that “the safety of millions of UK citizens who visit our country each year is of the highest priority.”

“Türkiye and the UK are participants in the European Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters,” the spokesperson said, adding that they “will make their best efforts to assist the relevant authorities in the UK”.

Both the Trendy Lara hotel and Tui said it would be inappropriate to comment while the investigation is ongoing.

Panama has denied making changes to allow US government vessels to transit the Panama Canal for free, following White House claims it had agreed to such a move.

The State Department said in a statement on X that its government vessels “can now transit the Panama Canal without charge fees, saving the US government millions of dollars a year”.

Responding to the comments, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) said it was “empowered to set tolls and other fees for transiting the canal,” adding that it had “not made any adjustments to them”.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced his desire to retake control of the waterway, which is key to global trade.

The 51-mile (82km) Panama Canal cuts across the Central American nation and is the main link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been on a visit to Latin American countries this week, demanded that Panama make “immediate changes” to what he calls the “influence and control” of China over the canal.

America’s top diplomat said Panama had to act or the US would take necessary measures to protect its rights under a treaty between the two countries.

During a visit to the country, Rubio met Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino, as well as the canal’s administrator, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales.

The ACP said after his visit that it had conveyed its intention to work with the US navy to optimise transit priority for its vessels through the canal.

This commitment for dialogue with Washington remained, it said in a separate statement on Wednesday.

US vessels make up a significant proportion of traffic in the canal. In 2024, 52% of transits through the waterway had ports of origin or destination in the United States, according to the canal’s authorities.

Up to 14,000 ships use the canal each year to avoid a lengthy and costly trip around the tip of South America.

In his inaugural speech, President Trump said he planned to “take back” the canal, alleging that China was operating it and Panama had “broken” a promise to remain neutral.

The plan was strongly rejected by Mulino, who said the key trade route “is and will remain” in the country’s hands.

He also rejected Trump’s allegations about China’s influence, saying there is “no presence of any nation in the world that interferes with our administration”.

Trump recently reiterated his claim. Despite saying earlier this week he was “not happy” with the situation, he acknowledged that Panama had “agreed to certain things”. Mulino has said his country will not continue its membership in China’s infrastructure-building programme, the Belt and Road Initiative.

The US built the canal in the early 20th Century but, after years of protest, President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty with Panama in 1977 to gradually hand back control of the waterway, which Trump has branded “a big mistake”.

• Listen to Jeremy read this article on BBC Sounds

Donald Trump’s plan for the US to “take over” and “own” Gaza, resettling its population in the process, is not going to happen. It requires the co-operation of Arab states that have rejected it.

They include Jordan and Egypt – countries that Trump wants to take in Gaza’s Palestinians – and Saudi Arabia, which might be expected to foot the bill.

Western allies of the US and Israel are also against the idea.

Some – perhaps many – Palestinians in Gaza might be tempted to get out if they had the chance.

But even if a million left, as many as 1.2m others would still be there.

Presumably the United States – the new owners of Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East” – would have to use force to remove them.

After America’s catastrophic intervention in Iraq in 2003, that would be deeply unpopular in the US.

It would be the final end of any lingering hope that a two-state solution was possible. That is the aspiration that a conflict more than a century old could be ended with the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside Israel.

The Netanyahu government is adamantly against the idea, and over years of failed peace talks, “two states for two peoples” became an empty slogan.

But it has been a central plank of US foreign policy since the early 1990s.

The Trump plan would also violate international law.

America’s already threadbare assertions that it believes in a rules-based international order would dissolve. Russia’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine and China’s in Taiwan would be turbocharged.

Why worry about all that if it is not about to happen – at least not in the way Trump announced in Washington, watched by a grinning and clearly delighted Benjamin Netanyahu?

The answer is that Trump’s remarks, however outlandish, will have consequences.

He is the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world – no longer a reality TV host and political hopeful trying to grab headlines.

Short-term, the disruption caused by his stunning announcement could weaken the fragile ceasefire in Gaza. One senior Arab source told me it could be its “death knell”.

The absence of a plan for Gaza’s future governance is already a fault line in the agreement.

Now Trump has provided one, and even if it does not come to pass, it presses very big buttons in the minds of Palestinians and Israelis.

It will nourish the plans and dreams of ultra-nationalist Jewish extremists who believe all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, and perhaps beyond, is a God-given Jewish possession.

Their leaders are part of Netanyahu’s government and keep him in power – and they’re delighted. They want the Gaza war to resume with the longer-term objective of removing the Palestinians and replacing them with Jews.

The finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said Trump had provided the answer to Gaza’s future after the 7 October attacks.

His statement said that “whoever committed the most terrible massacre on our land will find himself losing his land forever. Now we will act to finally bury, with God’s help, the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state.”

Centrist opposition leaders in Israel have been less effusive, perhaps fearing trouble ahead, but have offered a polite welcome to the plan.

Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups may feel the need to answer Trump with some kind of show of force against Israel.

For Palestinians, the conflict with Israel is driven by dispossession and the memory of what they call al-Nakba, “the catastrophe”. That was the exodus of Palestinians as Israel won its war for independence in 1948.

• Follow live updates
• Analysis: Trump’s real-estate instincts clash with America First view
• BBC Verify: Can Trump really take ownership of Gaza?

More than 700,000 Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes by Israeli forces. All but a handful were never allowed back and Israel passed laws it still uses to confiscate their property.

Now the fear will be that it is happening again.

Many Palestinians already believed Israel was using the war against Hamas to destroy Gaza and expel the population.

It is part of their accusation that Israel is committing genocide – and now they might believe Donald Trump is adding his weight to Israel’s plans.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained
• What is Hamas and why is it fighting with Israel in Gaza?
• What we know about the Gaza ceasefire deal

Just because Trump says something, that does not make it true or certain.

His statements are often more like opening gambits in a real estate negotiation than expressions of the settled policy of the United States.

Perhaps Trump is spreading some confusion while he works on another plan. He is said to crave the Nobel peace prize.

Middle East peacemakers, even when they do not ultimately succeed, have a strong track record of winning it.

As the world was digesting his Gaza announcement, he posted on his Truth Social platform his desire for a “verified nuclear peace agreement” with Iran.

The Iranian regime denies it wants nuclear weapons but there has been an open debate in Tehran about whether they are now so threatened that they need the ultimate deterrent.

For many years Netanyahu has wanted the US, with Israeli help, to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites. Doing a deal with Iran was never part of his plan.

During Trump’s first term, Netanyahu waged a long and successful campaign to persuade him to pull the US out of the nuclear deal Barack Obama’s administration signed with Iran.

If Trump wanted to throw the Israeli hard-right something to keep them happy as he makes overtures to the Iranians, he has succeeded.

But he has also created uncertainty and injected more instability into the world’s most turbulent region.

For most Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip there is already a painful history of forced displacement that is at the heart of their response to US President Donald Trump’s plan to take over the war-torn territory.

Speaking to the BBC, residents of a tent camp in the central town of Deir al-Balah expressed shock and defiance at the idea of being permanently resettled outside.

“Even if it costs us our souls, we will not leave Gaza,” said Mahmoud Bahjat, who is from the north. “We are against Trump’s decision. He ended the war but displacing us would end our lives.”

On the other hand, many Israelis have been expressing satisfaction at the radical ideas from the White House, particularly those on the far-right who seek to resettle Gaza.

Since a ceasefire took hold in Gaza – on the eve of Trump’s inauguration last month – there have been dramatic scenes of Palestinians returning to what is left of their homes.

Families have piled up possessions into cars and donkey carts or walked long distances along the coastal road, often just to reach piles of rubble.

According to the UN, at least 1.9m people, or about 90% of the population, across Gaza became displaced during 15 months of war.

The scenes of Palestinians on the move have echoed black-and-white footage from 1948 and the mass evacuations that took place during fighting before and after the creation of the state of Israel.

More than 700,000 people were then forced from their homes. The majority of Gazans are descendants of those original refugees.

Standing between rows of plastic sheeting in the Deir al-Balah camp, Jamalat Wadi says that her family has now sacrificed enough and that they are determined to build a new home.

“We endured a year and half of war. When [the Israeli military] finally withdraw from here, we want to remove the rubble and live on the land.”

“After the US made Israel destroy our houses in Gaza, he is telling us that Gaza is destroyed and we have to leave?” Ms Wadi goes on. “If there is only one drop of blood left in our children, we won’t go out of Gaza. We won’t give up on it!”

Many Palestinians we spoke to called on Jordan and Egypt – which Trump is pressing to take displaced Gazans – and for Saudi Arabia – which he wants to normalise relations with Israel – to hold out against US pressure.

• Why does Trump want to take over Gaza and could he do it?
• Trump’s Gaza plan will be seen as flying in face of international law

Since its establishment, Israel has rejected the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their historic homeland, as this would have left the Jewish people as a minority within its borders. Today, there are about 5.9m Palestinians registered by the UN, with most living in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Israel has long argued that those who were dispossessed should be absorbed by Arab countries, pointing out that thousands of Jews left these to come to Israel during the regional turmoil after it became a state.

Israeli officials suggest that by proposing to take over war-torn Gaza, creating a “Riviera of the Middle East” after resettling Palestinians elsewhere, the Trump administration is offering fresh thinking on a long-running conflict.

While Trump notably did not back the re-establishment of settlements in Gaza, settler leaders have reacted enthusiastically to the idea of displacement, calling on the Israeli government to act immediately.

Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war and began constructing settlements in both that are widely seen as illegal under international law. In 2005, Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza, although the UN still regards it as Israeli-occupied territory.

“Assuming Trump’s declarations about transferring Gazans to other countries throughout the world actualise, we need to move quickly and build settlements throughout the Gaza Strip,” stated the Nachala settlement organisation, which claims it has hundreds of activists ready to move there.

“No part of Israel should be left unsettled by Jews. If we leave any area desolate it is liable to be overtaken by our enemies,” Nachala added.

In contrast, the Israeli anti-occupation NGO, Peace Now, dismissed the Trump plan. It backs the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of the long-standing international formula for peace in the region, known as the two-state solution.

Peace Now said there was “no feasible way to transfer two million Gazans” outside.

“It’s time to stop fantasising about ethnic cleansing and forced displacement in Gaza and face reality – there is only one solution that can guarantee security and stability in the Middle East: two states for two peoples and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” it commented.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained
• What is Hamas and why is it fighting with Israel in Gaza?
• What we know about the Gaza ceasefire deal

Many Israelis and Palestinians are concerned about what the latest announcements could mean for the current talks on extending the Gaza ceasefire.

The next stage of the deal is meant to see the return of some 60 remaining Israeli hostages – not all of whom are alive – and a more permanent end to the fighting.

However, the brother of one Israeli hostage held by Hamas told us: “I don’t take what Trump says too seriously. It’s not realistic. He’s shooting for the stars.”

He added that this was “like with Canada” – referring to the US leader’s suggestions that it should become his country’s “51st state”.

Some Gazans did acknowledge that they felt one aspect of President Trump’s declaration was based on reality – his comments that the small coastal strip has become “unliveable”.

Last month, a UN damage assessment showed that clearing over 50m tonnes of rubble left in Gaza as a result of the heavy Israeli bombardment could take 21 years and cost up to $1.2bn.

Bilal al-Rantisi, a former customs worker, is in shock after arriving back in Gaza City with his wife and four children having spent more than a year displaced in the south.

“We have returned to a catastrophe, the worst in history,” he said despondently. “I found neither my home nor my siblings’ homes were standing. Trump doesn’t speak in vain. He knows that Gaza is no longer a place fit for human habitation.”

He said he was hoping to sell his car and his wife’s gold jewellery to raise funds.

“I will leave Gaza at the earliest possible opportunity. Yes, all Gazans oppose displacement but putting emotions aside, if people were given the chance, many would choose to leave.”

Donald Trump has shocked the world by suggesting the US could “take over” and “own” Gaza, resettling its population in the process.

The US president later repeated elements of the proposal on social media, saying Gaza would be “turned over” to the US by Israel under his plan.

The White House moved to clarify that the displacement of Palestinians would be temporary, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio described it as an “interim” arrangement.

But the proposal has continued to draw condemnation, including from across the Middle East, close US allies and the United Nations – and some analysts have raised fears Trump’s comments could destabilise the ongoing ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, said the idea was “worth paying attention to”.

It comes amid ongoing questions about the post-conflict future of Gaza, where the UN estimates around two thirds of buildings have been destroyed or damaged after 15 months of fighting.

Trump’s vague proposal could signal the largest shift in US policy on the Middle East in decades, upending widespread international consensus on the need for a Palestinian state – comprising Gaza and the occupied West Bank – to exist alongside Israel.

If Donald Trump is right about one thing, it is that decades of US diplomacy on Israel and the Palestinians have failed to resolve the conflict.

Peace proposals and presidents have come and gone but the problems have festered. Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the war in Gaza it triggered were the hideous results.

Trump made his millions as a property developer and, with that hat on, made a perfectly valid observation: if Gaza is to be rebuilt, from scratch in some places, it makes little sense for hundreds of thousands of civilians to be sheltering in the rubble.

The task of rebuilding Gaza will be monumental. Unexploded munitions and mountains of debris have to be removed. Water and power lines have to be repaired. Schools, hospitals and shops need to be rebuilt.

Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has said that could take years – and while that goes on, the Palestinians will need to go somewhere.

However, rather than exploring ways of keeping them close to home, almost certainly in camps in the central and southern parts of the Gaza Strip, Trump says they should be encouraged to leave – permanently.

Trump believes that in their absence, an idyllic, American-owned “Riviera of the Middle East” will rise from the ashes, providing thousands of jobs, opportunities for investment and, ultimately, a place for “the world’s people to live”.

• BBC Verify: Can Trump really take ownership of Gaza?
• Analysis: Trump’s real-estate instincts clash with America First view

Where to begin?

Even for a president who spent much of his first term upending US Middle East policy – including moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognising Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights – this was an astonishing proposal.

In their wildest imaginations, no US president ever thought that solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict would involve taking over a chunk of Palestinian territory and evicting its population.

To be clear, to do this by force would be a grave violation of international law.

Some Palestinians would likely choose to leave Gaza and rebuild their lives elsewhere. Since October 2023, as many as 150,000 already have.

But others cannot or will not, either because they lack the financial means to do so or because their attachment to Gaza – part of the land they call Palestine – is simply too strong.

Many Gazans are descendants of people who fled or were driven from their homes in 1948 during the creation of the state of Israel – a period Palestinians call the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe.

The thought of another will be too painful for many and they will cling to their reduced lives in what remains of Gaza with a fierce determination.

For Palestinians who dream of a state of their own, alongside Israel, the loss of part of it will feel like an amputation.

Gaza has been physically separated from the West Bank since 1948. Previous rounds of negotiations, as well as Trump’s 2020 “Vision for Peace”, included plans for tunnels or railways that might link the two.

Now Trump is basically telling the Palestinians to give up on Gaza once and for all.

While he does not appear to be advocating the forced deportation of civilians – which is against international law – Trump is clearly encouraging Palestinians to leave.

Palestinian officials have already accused Israel of blocking the supply of tens of thousands of caravans which could help Gazans to stay put in less damaged parts of the territory while reconstruction takes place elsewhere.

The Arab countries who Trump says should accept as many as 1.8 million Gazan refugees, mainly Egypt and Jordan, have expressed outrage.

Both have enough problems of their own without this added burden.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained
• What is Hamas and why is it fighting with Israel in Gaza?
• What we know about the Gaza ceasefire deal

Gaza was occupied by Egypt for 19 years before it was seized by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

It is still considered occupied by Israel under international law, which Israel disputes. It says the occupation ended in 2005, when it unilaterally dismantled Jewish settlements and pulled out its military.

Around three quarters of UN members recognise Gaza as part of a sovereign state of Palestine, though the US does not.

Cut off from the outside world by fences and an Israeli maritime blockade, it has never felt like a truly independent place.

Nothing and no one moves in or out without Israel’s permission, and an international airport – opened amid much fanfare in 1998 – was destroyed by Israel in 2001 during the second Palestinian uprising.

Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza, citing security reasons, after Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006 and ejected its rivals from the territory after intense fighting the following year.

Long before the latest war, Palestinians had come to regard Gaza as an open prison.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained

It goes without saying that the US has no legal claim to the territory and it is not at all clear how Trump intends to impose American rule.

As with his bullish claims about US control over Greenland or the Panama Canal, it is not yet clear whether Trump really means it or if the comments represent an opening, outlandish bargaining position ahead of a bruising set of negotiations on Gaza’s future.

Various plans have been discussed for the post-war governance of Gaza.

In December, the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, agreed to form a joint committee to oversee its administration – an agreement which has so far come to nothing.

At other times, discussions have focused on the creation of an international peacekeeping force, possibly made up of troops from Arab countries.

Last month, Reuters reported that the UAE, US and Israel had discussed the formation of a temporary administration in Gaza until a reformed Palestinian Authority (PA), which already has control in parts of the West Bank, was ready to take over.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously publicly insisted that the PA will have no role to play in running post-war Gaza.

In a limited sense, American boots are already on the ground. A US security firm has employed around 100 former US special forces to man a vital checkpoint south of Gaza City and screen the vehicles of Palestinians returning to the north for weapons.

Egyptian security personnel have also been seen at the same checkpoint.

These could be the first, tentative signs of an expanded international – and possibly US-led – presence in Gaza.

But that is hardly a US takeover, something that would require a large-scale military intervention in the Middle East – the sort of thing Trump has long told voters he wants to avoid.

Negotiations on phase two of the two-week-old ceasefire between Israel and Hamas have barely begun but it is hard to see how Trump’s bombshell remarks will help to advance them.

If Hamas feels the end product of this whole process is a depopulated Gaza – devoid not just of Hamas, but of all Palestinians – it may conclude there is nothing to talk about and hold on to the remaining hostages it took on 7 October 2023.

Netanyahu’s critics have accused him of looking for excuses to blow up the negotiations and resume the war. They are bound to conclude that, with these comments, Trump is a willing accomplice.

On the other hand, the Israeli prime minister’s right-wing backers have expressed satisfaction with the US takeover plan, potentially reducing the risk of cabinet resignations and making Netanyahu’s immediate political future appear more assured.

In that sense, Trump has given Netanyahu a powerful incentive to keep the ceasefire going.

Asked whether he agreed the US should recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank, Trump said he had yet to take a position but that he would have an announcement to make in four weeks’ time.

That remark has caused alarm among Palestinians, for whom such an announcement would inevitably be seen as another nail in the coffin for a two-state solution.

Recognising the legitimacy of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank would be a hugely consequential move. Most of the rest of the world regards them as illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

During previous rounds of peace talks, negotiators recognised that Israel would get to hold onto large settlement blocs as part of a final agreement, probably in exchange for small chunks of Israeli territory.

In 2020, Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, which secured the historic normalisation of relations between Israel and two Arab nations, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain.

The UAE signed that agreement on the understanding Israel would not annex parts of the West Bank – an understanding which may now be in jeopardy.

When a real-estate developer becomes the US president, don’t be surprised if American foreign policy includes a heavy helping of real-estate development.

That’s probably the biggest conclusion to draw from Donald Trump’s stunning proposal for the US to take over Gaza and turn it into a resort for all the people of the world to enjoy – a “Riviera of the Middle East”, in his words.

It also presents the latest iteration of a question that has persisted as long as Trump has been involved at the highest level of American politics.

Should Trump’s Gaza development plan, which includes the resettlement of more than two million Palestinians and US “ownership” of the contested lands be taken literally or seriously? Both, or neither?

Trump’s proposal flies in the face of the deeply held wishes of the Palestinian people and has been summarily rejected by the Arab nations that would have to play an integral part in resettling those displaced from war-torn Gaza.

It has also triggered howls of protest from the international community, as well as the president’s domestic critics in the Democratic Party.

“Developing war-torn land like a Trump golf resort isn’t a peace plan, it’s an insult,” said Democratic Congressman Troy Carter of Louisiana. “Serious leaders pursue real solutions, not real estate deals.”

• Live Updates:Trump’s Gaza plan

• Why does Trump want to take over Gaza and could he do it?

Even some of Trump’s most steadfast Republican allies have seemed wary of the president’s suggestion that US forces could occupy Gaza, clearing rubble and removing unexploded Israeli ordinance.

“I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza,” Lindsey Graham, who represents South Carolina in the US Senate, said on Wednesday. “I think that might be problematic, but I’ll keep an open mind.”

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was even more blunt.

“I thought we voted for America First,” he wrote on X. “We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers’ blood.”

Paul highlights what has been an apparent contradiction in the early weeks of Trump’s presidency. While Trump has culled US foreign aid and pledged to focus on American domestic concerns, he has also leavened his remarks with talk of American expansionism.

His interest in acquiring Greenland is persistent and, according to administration officials, deadly serious. His talk of making Canada the “51st state” and retaking the Panama Canal is no longer being treated like a joke.

And now Trump, one of the most vocal right-wing critics of the US invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, is suggesting a new Middle East nation-building project.

As for the specific ideas behind Trump’s latest proposal, they may be shocking for some but they shouldn’t be too much of a shock.

The president spoke of “cleaning out” Gaza and resettling Palestinians in remarks to reporters on Air Force One just days after his inauguration.

During the presidential campaign, he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that Gaza could be “better than Monaco”, but that the Palestinians “never took advantage” of their “best location in the Middle East”.

This also isn’t the first time Trump has viewed a seemingly intractable foreign policy situation as an exciting business opportunity.

During meetings with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in 2018, President Trump marvelled at the hermit nation’s “great beaches”, which could someday have the “best hotels”.

Those ambitious dreams have been shelved – and Trump’s Gaza vision, which would require a significant commitment of American blood and fortune at a time when it’s paring back its foreign involvements, will almost certainly meet the same fate.

But Trump’s Gaza proposal does represent a marked shift in America’s commitment to a two-state solution to the Palestinian situation.

A generous interpretation of the American strategy is that it is designed to shake up the Middle East powers and force them to commit more of their own resources, and political will, to finding a long-term solution to the situation in Gaza.

But such a strategy would come with risks.

The multi-step Israeli-Hamas ceasefire hangs in the balance. The Palestinians could view Trump’s comments as a sign that the US is not interested in a lasting peace, while Israeli hard-liners who are a key part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition may celebrate it as Trump’s green light for further expanding Israeli settlements.

Arab nations – some of whom worked with the first Trump administration to produce normalised relations with Israel in the Abraham Accords – may doubt whether Trump in his second term can be a reliable negotiating partner.

There are now years of evidence that Trump’s focus can shift on a moment’s notice. In the end, he could abandon all attempts at brokering a durable Middle East peace, blaming the Palestinians and their Arab allies for what he might view as their decision to reject the prospect of a better life removed from past conflicts.

Then it’s back to trade wars with Canada, condominiums in North Korea, mining sites in Greenland or some other challenge that does not divide his own party or require solving centuries of animosity with seemingly intractable ancestral concerns.

Four-year-old Emir was at home with his family when two devastating earthquakes hit southern Turkey on 6 February 2023, claiming the lives of more than 53,500 people.

The bodies of his mother, father and 10-year-old brother were found in the wreckage of their apartment block in Antakya, a city on the Syrian border.

But there was no trace of him.

Two years on, Emir is still missing. Dozens of families continue to search for their loved ones and at least 30 of the missing are children.

Emir’s aunt Nursen Kisa arrived at the collapsed building in Antakya an hour after the earthquake and waited beside the debris for over two weeks while search and rescue operations continued.

“We thought we could find him, or at least a piece of his clothing, some remains, some sort of a trace. But there were none. Neither in the debris nor among the bodies,” she said.

Since then, she has been on a mission to find her missing nephew.

She filed a missing person’s claim at the police station, only for the authorities to call three months later to say they had no paperwork showing Emir was missing.

Her initial inquiry most likely got lost so the whole process had to start from scratch.

In the meantime Nursen posted pictures of her nephew all over social media in the hope that someone would recognise him. She visited dozens of orphanages across Turkey.

Her sister’s remains were exhumed so that DNA samples could be compared with remains that had yet to be identified.

None of her efforts were successful.

She said she had even had occasional calls from local authorities asking how Emir was coping. For her it meant that her nephew had not yet been officially recorded as missing.

Two years on from the earthquakes, the number of missing is still unclear.

In April 2023, the internal affairs minister at the time said “a missing person claim was filed for 297 people, 86 of whom were children”.

By November 2024, current Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced that 75 people were still missing and that 30 of them were children.

That contrasted with the main opposition party, who said they had a list of 140 missing people, 38 of whom were children. They shared their list with the minister but received no response, they told BBC News Turkish.

Sema Gulec, spokesperson of a foundation to locate the missing, believes the discrepancy may be because the interior ministry has not counted those whose families have officially accepted them as deceased.

After the earthquake, various allegations were made about children being rescued from under the rubble but then going missing.

The implication was that they had then been abducted, although these claims were denied by authorities.

In January 2024, the governing party and its right-wing ally voted down a parliamentary motion calling for an investigation into the missing children.

Then a commission to investigate the cases of the missing people was formed within Turkey’s Disaster Management Authority (Afad) – a government agency that operates under the interior ministry.

Afad has been using several techniques to search for the missing, says Sema Gulec, whose 24-year-old son is among the disappeared.

These techniques range from comparing DNA taken from the relatives of the missing with samples from the bodies buried without identification, to using a facial recognition system and comparing pictures of the missing with records filed with the police, she explains.

However, opposition figures have accused authorities of irregularities or incompetence. They cite the example of a young woman who was buried under a different identity, only to be exhumed and identified a year later.

“There could be dozens of others buried under false identities,” said Nermin Yildirim Kara, an MP from the main opposition party.

She also argued that some of the rubble was cleared before all necessary scanning was made, citing as an example a famous residency building in Antakya where 48 people remain unaccounted for.

“That debris was cleared in such haste that maybe some of the remains also got destroyed in the process,” she said.

BBC News Turkish approached both Afad and the interior ministry for comment, but they declined to respond.

In the meantime, families of the missing continue their search for answers.

“A proper scan was not carried out. They removed the debris immediately, and we could not stop them,” said Ayse Ambarcioglu, whose sister and six-month-old niece went missing.

“Two years have gone by already. What are [the authorities] supposed to do now – bring a piece of bone and say this belongs to your sister?”

“We would settle just for a single bone, but nothing was found,” said Caner Yurdakul, whose sister, brother-in-law and their six-year-old twin daughters disappeared after the earthquake.

The cities scarred by the devastating tremors in southern Turkey are rife with such accounts. But many relatives of the missing are determined to carry on with their search for answers.

“There is nothing yet to prove that my nephew Emir is either dead or alive,” said Nursen Kisa. “I am never going to succumb to pressure and report him as deceased.”

Don’t mess with Canada – that’s the private message to the US from the very top of Ottawa’s political system. Just like nearly a century ago with the infamous American Smoot-Hawley tariffs, Canada got its retaliation in to Donald Trump’s import taxes very quickly.

While the White House is claiming Canada’s pledge to spend $1.3bn (£1bn) on a border protection plan has given it diplomatic victory in its battle over fentanyl traffic, there was very little conceded that was not already planned by America’s northern neighbour.

Crucially, both Mexico and Canada were undeterred by a clear threat in Trump’s executive orders that any retaliation would lead to higher tariffs on imports into the US.

After consulting each other, Canada and Mexico instead both negotiated a month’s pause with Trump.

The returning US president likes making threats of tariffs on most days, and in many directions.

Since his inauguration, these have also been directed at Denmark, Colombia, China, Taiwan, the European Union as well as all of the Brics countries which include Brazil, Russia and India.

The rationale for his tariffs keeps changing and much about this situation defies logical explanation.

So, Mexico, Canada and every other country facing tariffs or the threat of them have to decipher what Trump is really playing at.

And when they’ve done that, the question for the whole world is whether what we are seeing is an attempt by the US president to rewrite the entire global monetary system – and at what risk to America?

Trump has claimed that fentanyl trafficking was the legal pretext for tariffs, allowing him to bypass Congress and use emergency powers to impose border taxes on Canada, Mexico and China, by declaring an “unusual or extraordinary threat”.

But while talking about the fentanyl trade, he also referred to Canada’s goods trade surplus with the US (which means Canada sells more to the US than it imports), and introduced the idea that Canada should become the “51st state” of America.

While any country might demand talks about both illicit and legal trade flows, it is difficult to see how to handle these conversations when there is a parallel threat of continental annexation of a free trade ally which is also part of Nato and one of the Group of Seven (G7) most advanced economies in the world.

Europe, meanwhile, seems unwilling to stir the pot as it attempts to work out the president’s precise motivations and how this feeds itself into what he decides over Transatlantic tariffs.

Trump’s long-standing animus with the EU comes from the bloc’s substantial goods trade surplus with the US, arising from areas such as high-end German car exports.

Underlying all of this is a perceived unfairness that other markets are more restrictive against America such as when it comes to the prices paid for US drugs or fines placed on US tech companies.

But if this really is about trade deficits, it is something of a mystery as to why Trump has not yet announced tariffs against the likes of Vietnam, Japan and South Korea – who have far bigger surpluses with the US.

In any case, for Trump to focus solely on goods means that he is willingly ignoring the US’s great export – services.

I put this precise point to the EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic last month.

He told me: “Sure, we have a trade surplus in goods, but the US has a trade surplus in services.

“And on top of it, every year, €300bn (£249bn) is flowing across the Atlantic into the American companies from our pension funds, from the saving accounts of the European citizens because they’re investing in the US. So I think that it’s a pretty balanced relationship.”

As it happens, the UK trade position with the US is more balanced, a point made to me by the Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds. In fact, on some measures, the US has a surplus with Britain.

Amid the fog of Trump’s true intentions, European negotiators have resorted to stressing co-operation, partnership and deals with the US and studiously avoided directly criticising even the extraordinary suggestion of using tariffs against Nato-ally Denmark over the fate of Greenland.

In November 2024, Stephen Miran, before becoming President Trump’s White House chief economics advisor, authored a paper laying out further questions that could determine how much more the US should tariff specific countries.

These ranged from an assessment of whether a country applies similar tariffs to the US, suppresses its currency, respects US intellectual property, pays its Nato obligations, votes against the US at the United Nations or its “leaders grandstand against the US in the international theatre”.

It also talked of forcing other nations “to choose between facing a tariff on their exports to the American consumer or applying tariffs to their imports from China”, asking: “Which will they choose?”

The president himself was pretty clear in his video address to a stunned World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January.

“Your choice,” he said to the assembled international executives. Build your goods in American factories with tax incentives, or import into the US from foreign factories and pay tariffs that would raise “hundreds of billions of dollars and even trillions of dollars” for the US Treasury.

“Most of the world has come to understand that Trump does use tariffs as a negotiating tool,” Stephen Moore, a former Trump economic advisor who recently visited the president, told me.

It may be that a part of Trump’s logic is very simple: remodel the US tax system so that everything coming into the country attracts a levy but, in return, the public sees income tax rates slashed.

“By the way, I do think at the end of the day, there will be an across-the-board tariff imposed by Trump,” says Mr Moore.

“He’s talked about this, that if you’re bringing something into the United States whether it’s from Britain, whether it’s Mexico, Canada, China, Europe, you’re going to pay a little bit more but if something is made in the United States, he’s going to lower the tax. And to a lot of Americans, that’s a very attractive proposition.”

Mr Moore has suggested a 15% universal tariff on all imports from everywhere in order to fund a cut in income tax rates down to 15%.

Mr Miran’s paper also contains a proposal that led to jaws dropping in global central banks and finance ministries: bring down the value of the dollar in order to boost US industry and exports.

Arranging this would mean a fundamental change to the way the global monetary system operates. But Mr Miran suggests that punitive tariffs could be used as leverage to make reluctant trading partners like Europe and China “become more receptive” to the idea.

He suggests that in time there could be a summit of the world’s economic powers, where allies and rivals thrash out the revaluation of the dollar, perhaps at the president’s Florida residence. It could be known as the Mar-a-Lago Accord.

Early discussions of the idea in international forums have been highly sceptical, recalling the history of similar attempts to manage global currency values.

But it is the recently published concept of the top White House economic advisor. Tariff now, tariff hard and tariff everywhere in order to, in the future, get the world to help bring down the value of the dollar.

Such a radical idea comes with risk and already simply with the tariffs, there is a danger for the White House that the US overplays its hand.

Mark Carney, who is frontrunner to replace Justin Trudeau as Canadian Liberal Party leader, and as Prime Minister, at least until an election, has a rather unique approach.

The former governor of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada decided to come out punching, ridiculing the fentanyl rationale and telling the BBC that Canada would retaliate “dollar for dollar” and that Canadians would “stand up to a bully”.

He said that the tariff move would rebound on the US economy itself by fuelling inflation, forcing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and crippling the ability of the US to sign trade deals, given they would have effectively ripped up their biggest – the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) – just a few years after the president had personally renegotiated it.

Mr Carney then publicly suggested that Canada removes a subsidy from exports to the US of its oil, and stressed that Canada’s green investments might need to be protected from US carbon emissions.

For those countries like the UK trying to avoid tariffs, he had a simple message: “Good luck”.

The clear sense was that from his own experience of having dealt with Trump at the G20, the way to deal with him was to show strength.

This is partly a calculation that the muted opposition to these policies within the US will not be sustained. Again, the harder, more strategic and more coordinated the retaliation, the more pause for thought it will give big US corporates and some in the competing courts around the President.

Elon Musk, the normally prolific social media poster on his X platform and chief executive of electric vehicle-maker Tesla, was curiously largely quiet about the single biggest move from the president.

He eventually reposted the news from the Mexican president that their tariffs had been delayed.

A leading US tech chief executive told me that his company was already making plans, assuming they would be on the receiving end of retaliatory tariffs.

His hope was that Trump’s focus on the rising value of the US stock market would create a natural restraint against excessive tariffs. Some saw the modest fall on the Dow Jones index on Monday as contributing to this week’s pauses.

Retaliation is standard procedure in trade wars.

Indeed in the most famous of them all, when US Republicans passed the calamitous 1930s Smoot-Hawley tariffs, Canada was the first to hit back, doing so before the US had even finished legislating. History points to Henry Ford being one of those begging Herbert Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in 1930.

And, in 2025, the car industry is one obvious potential tariff loser.

“It’s true to say that there is no such thing as a Canadian auto industry, an American auto industry and a Mexican auto industry,” says Peter Frise, a professor of mechanical and automotive engineering at the University of Windsor.

“There are Canadian, American, and Mexican components of a North American auto industry and the integration among the three countries is absolutely foundational to how the industry works.”

Not only are models like the Honda Civic, which is hugely popular in the US, manufactured in Canada – Prof Frise says “very few” cars assembled in the US will not contain some parts that come from across the border. And so, says he adds, tariffs “would drive up costs for everyone” – US consumers included.

Another risk for Trump is that as Mr Carney and Mr Sefcovic said, they are all now responding to the direction of US trade policy by diversifying with one another. The EU is busy doing trade deals with Latin America. “There is huge demand in the outside world for free and fair trade relationships,” says Mr Sefcovic.

The UK has also restarted trade negotiations with India and the Gulf countries.

Reynolds says that the “challenging international position” means the UK has to push its “genuine competitive advantage” as the “most connected market in the world” with the US, the EU and China.

The other issue here is that if the direction of travel is a universal tariff, as Trump and his advisors keep suggesting, is there much incentive to try to avoid it?

There is some startling thinking circulating in Trumponomics circles. It is talk of that revenue grab of trillions of dollars that is spooking even allies who think they might escape the tariffs.

It sounds like a wild economic gamble. But such talk is relative, at a time when the US president is putting tariffs on his closest economic G7 and Nato partner over fentanyl, while simultaneously claiming it should become part of the US.

It could be an extensive and surprising tariff war. This week’s trade dramas are just early skirmishes.

“I saw my son fighting for his last breath,” says Anna Nikolin-Caisley. “He went in agony.”

Anna believes her youngest child, Vlad, 17, was “encouraged” to swallow poison by users of an online “pro-suicide” group which is still active in the UK, despite numerous calls to ban it.

Vlad’s family have decided to reveal the harrowing details of his death, in Hampshire in May 2024, as a warning to others.

The government said platforms must remove illegal suicide and self-harm content when new rules come into effect this year as part of the Online Safety Act.

But the Samaritans charity says it does not believe the new law goes far enough.

It was 02:40 on 7 May when Anna was jolted from her sleep by her teenage son Vlad screaming, “Mum! Call doctors!”

He then shouted the name of a poison and the time he drank it.

“I don’t know what the substance is,” Anna remembers, “but he’s changed his mind, and he came to me for help, to save him.”

Vlad’s father, Graham Caisley, describes how their son must have staggered upstairs, before collapsing on his bedroom floor.

“His hands were all clenched up and he was shaking,” Graham says. “It was just a state of panic.”

“It was violent, it was sudden,” his mother adds, as she describes her son suffering multiple seizures. “Fitting and fighting for life – I can’t even start imagining the terror he went through.”

Minutes later, Graham was on his knees carrying out CPR on his son, guided by paramedics on speakerphone.

“I was just doing what I could to try and save my son’s life,” Graham says, with tears in his eyes. “It was just horrible.”

Police body-worn camera footage reveals the chaos and emotional fallout as emergency responders tried and failed to save Vlad’s life.

After Vlad’s death his family were shocked to discover he had been sharing his “dark moments” with people online. His mother says it was a “very secretive” community and describes it as a “pro-suicide” cult.

Detectives found a “suicide kit” in the family’s Southampton home, containing various poisons, pills and other things Vlad had bought after joining the chat group.

“He’s researched and understood, and been told where to buy these things and what to buy,” says DS Chris Barrow from Hampshire Police. “So, without the website, Vlad wouldn’t have been able to put together this set of items and ingredients with which to take his own life.”

After a happy childhood, Vlad had begun to withdraw in his early teens and was later diagnosed with autism, depression and anxiety. At the time of his death he was being treated by mental health professionals and had also developed a painful neurological condition.

His family say they had seen his mental health improve as he had started seeing friends and travelling. But Vlad’s older sisters, Masha and Mia, say even though he was much better, he was still vulnerable when he took his own life.

“Even if people using this forum struggle,” says Masha, “no-one knew my brother well enough to make any decisions about his life.”

Mia, who has exchanged messages with moderators on the website, describes the site as an “echo chamber” which can “push people over the edge”.

“There is almost definite grooming taking place,” she says.

The BBC has spent years investigating the online forum that Vlad was a member of. It now has more than 50,000 members globally and Vlad’s family want it taken down or blocked.

By coincidence, Vlad had ordered poison from a Ukrainian seller called Leonid Zakutenko, just before the BBC exposed him.

But Vlad did not swallow that poison. The chemical he eventually ingested was ordered from Poland and had been mis-labelled, possibly to get through customs.

Following his death, the family read all Vlad’s posts and exchanges on the forum and describe how things appear to have “slowly escalated”.

Vlad’s mother, Anna, says: “Then you have private chats and you are led down the path of death. Anyone can come across it. A child can come across it. There’s no checks.

“The people who sold the poison, the people who encouraged it, how is that legal?”

“They’re alive,” Vlad’s father, Graham, says, “our son is dead.”

The police investigation into Vlad’s death, to establish if any criminal offences have been committed, is ongoing.

The website is based in South America and hosted by a server in the United States. With different laws in different countries, online harm is notoriously difficult to police.

Data from the Office of National Statistics shows suicides in England and Wales have risen by 10% over the last six years. Although it is still rare for under 25s to kill themselves by poisoning, the numbers of young people choosing to end their lives in this way are rising more quickly than in older people.

A government spokesperson said, “Suicide devastates families. Intentionally encouraging suicide or the serious self-harm of another person is illegal.

“Once the Online Safety Act is fully implemented, platforms will have to remove this illegal suicide and self-harm content as well as stop children from seeing harmful suicide related material – even when it falls below the criminal threshold.

“Companies should not wait for laws to come into force – they must take effective action to protect all users now.”

Julie Bentley, CEO of Samaritans, says the charity’s calls for smaller sites to be treated as severely as larger platforms have been “completely ignored”.

“Legal-but-harmful content needs to be strictly regulated for both adults and children,” she says, urging both the government and Ofcom to act “before it’s too late”.

Ofcom told the BBC that from July sites would have “duties to protect children from harmful self-harm and suicide content, even where it’s not illegal”.

“As these duties come into force, we’ll be able to use the full extent of our enforcement powers against any services that fail to comply with their duties,” it added.

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this story you can find information and support on the BBC Actionline website here.

Additional reporting by Jonathan Fagg, Senior Data Journalist

The view is spectacular from the top of Ponte Tower, one of the most famous buildings in the South African city of Johannesburg.

Built in 1975, standing almost 200m (656 ft) tall, it’s a long-established feature of the city skyline, once the tallest residential building in Africa.

But like the city, it’s had its ups and downs. In the 1980s it was taken over by criminal gangs, and its hollow core filled with rubbish up to 50m deep.

“The building got hijacked. There were no utilities, so most of the people were actually throwing their trash right inside the building, until it reached the 14th floor,” said Delight Sithole, who runs tours of the building.

He added: “There were some dead bodies here, illegal firearms, drugs. The smell, I’m sure it was just horrible, just really like, hell on earth.

“If you asked anybody what happens in that round building, somebody would have something interesting or scary to say about it,” said Sifiso Zikhali, who works with Mr Sithole in an organisation called Dlala Nje, which means “just play” in Zulu.

“People were scared of the neighbourhood,” he said.

Johannesburg was seen as being one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

But the building turned itself around 15 years ago in the wake of the Fifa World Cup hosted in South Africa, and people started moving back in.

After Covid, people returned and the building is now around three-quarters full.

There is no escaping the issues that Johannesburg, and South Africa, face.

Despite signs of improvement in the most recent statistics, crime is still a major issue.

Crippling power cuts that plagued the city for years, known as load-shedding, came to an end almost a year ago, but now a water crisis is looming, leaving many without.

A building fire in the Central Business District (CBD) killed almost 80 people in the winter of 2023, and exposed the issue of hijacked buildings, disused housing and apartments blocks that have been taken over by criminal gangs who charge people to live there.

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This is an area that’s been regenerated by a property company called Ithemba, which is Zulu for “hope”. And it’s a company that is seeing business booming in Johannesburg.

A few days later, on a tour of one of Ithemba’s flagship residential developments called Jewel City, senior manager Alan Tait explains the turnaround.

“The demand is just phenomenal, and that demand is specifically to live in the CBD,” he said.

He said that the company currently leases 7,200 properties and is expected to double that over the next two years.

Named after its origins as a diamond dealing district, like the Ponte building the area fell into disrepair, only to see a resurgence.

“We launched Jewel City about five years ago, just as Covid was hitting. So the timing was a little bit out. But as soon as Covid lifted, the buildings filled up quite quickly,” he said.

As we near the edge of the development, he points out a long strip of lights under a flyover. They were put up to provide light in an area that had been dark for some time, largely due to the loadshedding affected the city.

It was part of an initiative by a group called JoziMyJozi which started in 2023. One of its first projects was to light up the Nelson Mandela bridge, a centrepiece of the city, that meant people once again found it safe to use.

“So the whole aim of JoziMyJozi is to bring hope back to the residents of the city,” said Bea Swanepoel, CEO of the organisation, in the courtyard behind her office in Rosebank, north of the city centre.

“And by bringing hope back, we need to show some visible improvements and impactful projects so that they can see there’s a way out of where we are currently, and to live in the city of the future, where people can be safe and where they can thrive and where there are jobs.”

The group also launched the gateway project, an effort to clean up the ten main entrances to the city, and they’ve begun to tackle everything from potholes, to homelessness to education.

Could Johannesburg one day be spoken about like London, Paris or New York?

“Well, that is the intention,” said Ms Swanepoel. “Much of what’s happening in Joburg is due to perceptions. We have a long way to go. I mean, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s not impossible. We need to get up there and be the gold standard for cities in Africa.”

The city is due to host the G20 later this year, which will bring new investment and attention to the city.

Back on 51st floor of the Ponte tower, Sifiso Zikhali gazes out of the window.

Does he think Dlala Nje is succeeding in its mission?

“Yes we are, because one of our biggest challenges was to get people coming here. We are now one of the city’s top attractions. This is our city, and whatever we face, we need at the end to find a solution for it,” he said.

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India’s biggest news organisations are seeking to join a lawsuit against OpenAI, the US startup behind ChatGPT, for alleged unauthorised use of their content.

The news organisations include some of India’s oldest publications like The Indian Express, The Hindu, The India Today group, billionaire Gautam Adani-owned NDTV, and over a dozen others.

OpenAI denies the allegations and told the BBC that it uses “publicly available data” that are in line with “widely accepted legal precedents”.

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in Delhi to discuss India’s plan for a low-cost AI ecosystem with IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

He said India “should be one of the leaders of the AI revolution” and said earlier comments from 2023, when he said Indian firms would struggle to compete, had been taken out of context.

“India is an incredibly important market for AI in general and for OpenAI in particular,” local media quoted him as saying at the event.

The legal case filed against OpenAI in November by Asian News International (ANI), India’s largest news agency, is the first of its kind in India.

ANI accuses ChatGPT of using its copyrighted material illegally – which OpenAI denies – and is seeking damages of 20m rupees ($230,000; £185,000).

The case holds significance for ChatGPT given its plans to expand in the country. According to a survey, India already has the largest user base of ChatGPT.

Chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on massive datasets collected by crawling through the internet. The content produced by nearly 450 news channels and 17,000 newspapers in India holds huge potential for this.

There is, however, no clarity on what material ChatGPT can legally collect and use for this purpose.

OpenAI is facing at least a dozen lawsuits across the world filed by publishers, artists and news organisations, who have all accused ChatGPT of using their content without permission.

The most prominent of them was filed by The New York Times in December 2023, in which the newspaper demanded “billions of dollars” in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, its backer.

“A decision by any court would also hold some persuasive value for other similar cases around the world,” says Vibhav Mithal, a lawyer specialising in artificial intelligence at the Indian law firm Anand and Anand.

Mr Mithal said the verdict in the lawsuit filed by ANI could “define how these AI models will operate in the future” and “what copyrighted news content can be used to train AI generative models [like ChatGPT]”.

A court ruling in ANI’s favour could spark further legal cases as well as opening the possibility of AI companies entering into license sharing agreements with content creators, which some companies have already started doing.

“But a ruling in OpenAI’s favour will lead to more freedom to use copyrighted protected data to train AI models,” he said.

ANI provides news to its paying subscribers and owns exclusive copyright over a large archive of text, images and videos.

In its suit filed in the Delhi High Court, ANI says that OpenAI used its content to train ChatGPT without permission. ANI has argued that this led to the chatbot getting better and has profited OpenAI.

The news agency said that before filing the suit, it had told OpenAI its content was being used unlawfully and offered to grant the company a license to use its data.

ANI says OpenAI declined the offer and put the news agency on an internal blocklist so that its data is no longer collected. It also asked ANI to disable certain web crawlers to ensure that its content was not picked up by ChatGPT.

The news agency says that despite these measures, ChatGPT picks up its content from websites of its subscribers. This has enriched OpenAI “unjustly”, it says.

ANI also says in its suit that the chatbot produces its content verbatim for certain prompts. In some instances, ANI says, ChatGPT has falsely attributed statements to the news agency, hampering its credibility and misleading the public.

Apart from seeking compensation for damages, ANI has asked the court to direct OpenAI to stop storing and using its work.

In its response, OpenAI says it opposes the case being filed in India since the company and its servers are not located in the country and the chatbot has also not been trained there.

In December, the Federation of Indian Publishers, which claims to represent 80% of Indian publishers including the Indian offices of Penguin Random House and Oxford University Press, filed an application in court saying that they were “directly affected” by this case and should be allowed to present their arguments as well.

A month later, Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), which represents leading Indian news outlets, and three other media outlets filed a similar application. They argued that while OpenAI had entered into licensing agreements with international news publishers such as the Associated Press and Financial Times, a similar model had not been followed in India.

DNPA told the court the case would affect the livelihood of journalists and the country’s entire news industry. OpenAI has, however, argued that chatbots are not a “substitute” for news subscriptions and are not used for such purposes.

The court has not admitted these applications by the publishers yet and OpenAI has argued that the court should not hear them.

But the judge clarified that even if these associations are allowed to argue, the court will restrict itself to ANI’s claims since the other parties had not filed their own lawsuits.

Meanwhile, OpenAI told the BBC it is engaging in “constructive partnerships and conversations” with news organisations around the world, including India, to “work collaboratively”.

Analysts say the lawsuits filed against ChatGPT across the world could bring into focus aspects of chatbots that have escaped scrutiny so far.

Dr Sivaramakrishnan R Guruvayur, whose research focuses on responsible use of artificial intelligence, says that the data used to train chatbots is one such aspect.

The ANI-OpenAI case will lead the court “to evaluate the data sources” of chatbots, he said.

Governments across the world have been grappling with how to regulate AI. In 2023, Italy blocked ChatGPT saying that the chatbot’s mass collection and storage of personal data raised privacy concerns.

The European Union approved a law to regulate AI last year.

The Indian government too has indicated plans to regulate AI. Before the 2024 election, the government issued an advisory that AI tools that were “under-testing” or “unreliable” should get government permission before launching.

It also asked AI tools to not generate responses that are illegal in India or “threaten the integrity of the electoral process”.

“I’m alive thanks to USAID,” says Dmytro Sherembey.

He’s been living with HIV for 24 years in Ukraine, and says the agency, which distributes billions of dollars of aid around the world, has helped prevent the virus from spreading there.

“Every second HIV-positive person in Ukraine was identified thanks to this programme,” Mr Sherembey adds.

But the future of USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) is now very uncertain.

One of US President Donald Trump’s first actions after returning to office was signing an executive order pausing almost all foreign assistance for 90 days while a review could be carried out. He has said USAID is run by “radical left lunatics” and is getting away with “tremendous fraud” – without giving evidence.

Mr Sherembey, who heads 100% Life, the largest patient-led organisation in Ukraine, recalls that when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, warehouses storing HIV medication were bombed.

It was USAID assistance that made it possible to quickly procure replacement medication and distribute it across the country, he explains.

“USAID’s slogan is that this is assistance from the American people. But it turns out that this aid could be stopped by the decision of one person,” he says.

USAID was established in 1961 by President John F Kennedy. It has around 10,000 employees and a budget of nearly $40bn (£32.25bn), out of a total of $68bn in US government foreign aid spending.

It has bases in more than 60 countries, and works in dozens of others. However, most of the work on the ground is carried out by other organisations that it contracts and funds.

The range of activities it undertakes is vast. Its work includes providing food in countries where people are starving, to operating the world’s gold-standard famine detection system, which uses data analysis to try to predict where food shortages are emerging.

• USAID staff will be put on leave starting on Friday
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• Inside an Islamic State camp shaken by US aid cuts
• How a US freeze upended global aid in a matter of days

Elon Musk – the world’s richest man, who has been tasked by Trump with shrinking the US federal government – has called the agency “a criminal organisation”, without providing evidence, and has said it is “time for it to die”.

But in countries such as Afghanistan, the end of USAID could cause huge problems. The agency is one of the biggest donors to the country’s health sector, funding projects that provide life-saving services to mothers and children.

A doctor responsible for USAID-funded projects there says more than 60 of his team, including midwives, nurses and doctors, were told to stay at home after funding was paused.

“The future appears bleak and the impact on patients is massive,” he says.

“If the funding halt continues, mothers will be forced to give birth at home as the facilities are closed and it will increase mortality rates,” one midwife says.

USAID’s work also branches out into areas like cybersecurity. One Iranian activist, focusing on anti-censorship, says their organisation operates with USAID funding.

“If an opposition figure, a university student, or a women’s rights activist is arrested in Iran, it is NGOs like the one I work for that immediately act so the person’s email and social media accounts are locked and removed,” says the activist, who requested anonymity due to fear of reprisals.

This has meant that if Iranian intelligence agents force detainees to reveal their passwords, they cannot access that person’s communications, the activist says.

“If an internet company works with the regime to restrict Iranians’ access to the internet, we expose them publicly and get them… sanctioned by the EU and the US,” the activist adds.

“All of this work is now about to be stopped because of the funding freeze.”

Among its other activities, USAID also grants scholarships – with 1,077 undergraduate students in Egypt alone receiving money. Trump’s pause on international spending and his comments on USAID have thrown the futures of these students into doubt.

“I feel like I don’t know my fate. I was once a top student with a bright future, but now my future looks dark, and I fear heading in the wrong direction,” said Mohamed Ashraf, one of the affected students.

Trump is a long-term critic of overseas spending, and has said it does not represent value for money for American taxpayers – singling out USAID, which he has described as wasteful. But whether he can actually shut down the agency is not yet clear.

Closing USAID altogether, as Musk wants, would likely require an act of Congress – in which Trump’s Republican Party holds slim majorities in both chambers.

The administration reportedly intends to merge the US government’s main overseas aid agency with the Department of State. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he is now the acting head of the agency – which says thousands of its staff around the world will be put on leave at the end of the week.

For Mr Sherembey in Ukraine, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

“My life is now at risk. If my hospital runs out of this medication, I will have to search for it elsewhere,” he says.

“But the tragedy for an HIV-positive person in Ukraine is that you cannot simply go to a pharmacy and buy these drugs. You cannot buy them on the black market. HIV-positive people here have no alternatives,” he adds.

“It is barbaric that we have returned to the Stone Age.”

After days of speculation over the precise role the world’s richest man would play in Donald Trump’s White House – how much power he would hold, whether he is a government employee at all – he took to the social media platform he owns to clarify.

“My preferred title is just ‘Tech Support,'” Elon Musk wrote on X on Tuesday. It was a knowing understatement.

As the head of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), Musk has emerged as a dominant force in the dizzying start to Trump’s second administration.

In just two weeks he has led efforts to seize access to the federal payment system, dismantled an entire agency and offered millions of civil servants an ultimatum – quit or face being fired.

But Musk’s increasingly bold attempt to remake the federal government with the same blunt force he used to take control of companies like Twitter have put him on a collision course with the Washington establishment.

And while he has secured a place in Trump’s inner circle, observers wonder if a showdown between these two powerful personalities could be looming.

Musk’s journey from billionaire entrepreneur to White House power player was not straightforward. By his own accounting, Musk had – for decades – been a reliable vote for the Democrats.

But unhappy with Biden’s position on issues from labour laws to transgender rights, Musk began to look to the other side of the aisle in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.

Initially, Musk called for Trump to “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset” and had backed his rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for the Republican nomination. But he soon became the president’s biggest booster, contributing $288m to Trump and other Republican candidates and becoming a key adviser on the campaign.

By the time of Trump’s inauguration, Musk was his right-hand man, seated just behind the president’s left shoulder on the dais – an unmistakable symbol of his influence.

“You know I always say we have to be protective of our geniuses because we don’t have too many. But that one is a good one,” Trump said of Musk, after welcoming him on stage at a rally the day before.

Musk has been a near constant presence in the nation’s capital ever since.

Almost immediately after his election Trump tapped Musk to run Doge, and this new role has seemingly empowered him in a far-reaching mission to slash and transform the federal government, pushing for massive reforms with stunning speed.

Although Trump had said Musk would not be given an office in the West Wing, the tech leader and his team have moved beds into the federal personnel office next door to the White House, according to the New York Times.

He has top secret security clearance, a Trump administration official confirmed, potentially giving him access to a broad swathe of highly classified information.

His tactics – relentless, sometimes ruthless – are reminiscent of how he ran his previous companies, former employees say.

A former programme manager at Tesla, who spoke to the BBC on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said Musk “did not care” about the human cost of his decisions.

“He’s only concerned with the objective at hand. I think he views interpersonal issues and conflicts as ancillary things that are not worth his time,” he said.

Occasionally, Musk tended toward the impulsive. The manager recalled seeing Musk fire a fellow Tesla employee on the spot over an overflowing rubbish can.

“He interpreted that as a sign that this person didn’t take as much pride in his work as he should,” he said. “That was the nuance to it… but at the end of the day someone got fired because they admitted that their trash can was overflowing.”

The approach yielded a committed workforce, the employee said. If you were on board with Musk’s mission, that single-minded focus was motivating, he said, and helped fuel regular 13 plus-hour days on the job.

“He can get more out of people than anyone else I have ever seen,” he recalled, although he added that the intensity at Tesla was par for the course in Silicon Valley.

But for those in the federal government, the employee added, “it’s gotta be a culture shock.”

Nowhere has Musk’s purported work on behalf of Trump been felt as intensely as USAID.

The government agency responsible for international development went from dispensing billions in aid to programmes around the world to an effective dead stop in just over two weeks.

Trump already curtailed USAID’s work significantly when he ordered a 90-day pause in US foreign spending, while the administration reviewed the funds in order to make sure they were in line with the president’s policy goals.

But in recent days, employees have watched with increasing alarm as Musk set his sights directly on USAID, labelling their agency a “criminal organisation” on X.

Musk’s increasingly harsh rhetoric has coincided with equally drastic changes at USAID.

On 1 February, the USAID website stopped working; its X account appeared to vanish not long after. That same weekend, two top security officials were placed on administrative leave after a confrontation with Doge representatives over access to a secure facility used for reviewing classified information, the Washington Post and other US outlets reported.

On Monday, USAID employees were told to stay at home while hundreds of employees were locked out of their email. CBS, the BBC’s US news partner, reports USAID employees are being pulled out of their respective countries worldwide by Friday.

“It’s beyond repair,” Musk said of the agency during his 50-minute conversation on X Spaces early Monday morning.

“I went over it with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said of his conversation with Trump. “And I actually checked with him a few times [and] said ‘are you sure?'”

“The comments from Elon Musk have been particularly cutting, calling us a ‘criminal organisation’ that needs to ‘die,”” said a USAID staffer, who asked not to be named because they feared retaliation from Musk and the administration.

“Coming from the wealthiest man on the planet, that feels pretty grotesque,” said the staffer, who has since been put on administrative leave along with many other colleagues.

“I see foreign service officers that have spent their entire lives serving – a large part of it overseas – and the sacrifices they made,” they said. “To be dragged through the mud like this is disrespectful.”

The upheaval at USAID has raised concerns from Democrats and experts about whether Trump and Musk’s actions are legal.

On its face, efforts by Trump and Musk to shut down USAID are “not legal because it runs afoul of what Congress has explicitly done previously,” said Jon Rogowski, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies the separation of powers in the US government.

Congress has established USAID as an independent agency, and the legislative branch appropriates funding.

As head of the federal agencies, however, Trump does have broad authority to bring certain USAID functions under the state department’s control, according to George Ingram, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former USAID deputy assistant administrator.

One such move included appointing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the acting head of USAID, when in the past the agency had functioned independently of the state department, while following its guidance on foreign policy.

And influential Republicans in Congress appear ready to work with the administration to allow some degree of change.

“I’m supportive of the Trump administration’s efforts to reform and restructure the agency in a way that better serves US national security interests,” said Senator James Risch, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Though Musk does not have the authority to shut down or restructure USAID, the agency likely could not have been dismantled as swiftly and thoroughly without his influence.

“I cannot think of any precedent where a presidential administration has essentially handed over the reins to a private citizen, to remake and take control of the executive branch as they see fit,” Mr Rogowski said.

In a statement to the BBC, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Musk “is selflessly serving President Trump’s Administration as a special government employee, and he has abided by all applicable federal laws”.

Prior to Trump’s inauguration, some of Musk’s peers expressed optimism at the prospect of an injection of start-up culture in Washington.

“I think we’ve just had a very exciting moment,” Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce who has been vocal in his support of Trump, told the BBC in December. “It’s a new chapter for America.”

“There’s a lot of incredible people like Elon Musk in the tech industry and in the business community. And if you can tap the power of expertise to make the best of America, that’s a great vision,” he said at the time.

But two weeks into the Trump administration, some observers say not everyone in Silicon Valley is enthusiastic.

Niki Christoff, a former Salesforce executive who now runs a communication firm in DC, told the BBC that many “people in the [tech] industry seem dumbstruck by the events of the past two weeks”.

“Most CEOs of publicly traded multinational tech companies want predictability. They want stability. They want a strong dollar,” she added. “They want predictable supply chains, and a lot of the policies and the headlines coming out of Washington are creating anxiety and uncertainty.”

Dr Philip Low, a neuroscientist and CEO of neurotechnology company Neurovigil, said Musk’s playbook could wreak havoc on governmental institutions. The two were close for nearly 15 years before their relationship soured, he said.

“His pattern is to take companies, invest in them, destabilise them, and then take them over,” said Dr Low, citing Twitter as an example.

“In that context, the White House is his biggest investment to date. And he is destabilising the American government now.”

According to Dr Low, Musk will not be satisfied being a trusted deputy, which may set him on a collision course with the president, his boss.

“Knowing Elon as I do, he doesn’t want to be number two or number three. He will want to take over,” he said.

“Whatever he decides, goes,” the former Tesla employee said, echoing Dr Low. “He never takes no for an answer.”

After the shake-up at USAID, Trump made it clear that final authority would always rest with him.

When asked if he was happy with Musk after the upending of the agency, he said yes – “for the most part”.

“Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job,” he said on Monday.

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval, and we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate we won’t,” the president said.

“He reports in.”

India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has told parliament the government is working with the US to ensure Indian citizens are not mistreated while being deported.

His statement came a day after a US military flight brought back 104 Indians accused of entering the US illegally.

One of the deportees told the BBC they had been handcuffed throughout the 40-hour flight, sparking criticism.

But Jaishankar said he had been told by the US that women and children were not restrained. Deportation flights to India had been taking place for several years and US procedures allowed for the use of restraints, he added.

Deportation in the US is organised and executed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“We have been informed by ICE that women and children are not restrained,” Jaishankar said.

He added that according to ICE, the needs of deportees during transit, including for food and medical attention, were attended to and deportees could be unrestrained during bathroom breaks.

“There has been no change from past procedure,” he added.

However Jaspal Singh, one of the deportees on the flight that landed in Amritsar city in the state of Punjab on Wednesday, told BBC Punjabi that he was shackled throughout the flight.

“We were tortured in many ways. My hands and feet were tied after we were put on the plane. The plane stopped at several places,” he said, adding that he was unshackled only after the plane landed in Amritsar.

The US has not given further details of how deportees were treated on the flight. Officials have said that enforcing immigration laws is “critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States” and it was US policy to “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens”.

The US border patrol chief posted video showing deportees in shackles, saying the deportation flight to India was the “farthest deportation flight yet using military transport”.

President Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy. The US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered illegally.

Trump has said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured him that the country would “do what’s right” in accepting US deportations.

In his statement on Thursday, Jaishankar said all countries had an obligation to take back their nationals who had entered other countries illegally. They often faced dangerous journeys and inhumane working conditions once they had reached their destinations, he said.

Fraudulent Indian travel agencies are known to take huge sums of money from people desperate to travel abroad for work, and then make them undertake dangerous journeys to avoid being caught by immigration officials.

Jaspal said he had taken a loan of 4m rupees ($46,000; £37,000] to travel to the US, a dangerous journey that took months and during which he saw bodies in the jungle of other migrants who had died on the route.

Opposition leaders have condemned the manner in which migrants were brought back to the country and have asked the government what action it plans to take over the treatment meted out to its citizens.

Congress MP Manickam Tagore called it “shocking and shameful”.

“The way the US is deporting Indians – chained like criminals – is inhumane and unacceptable,” he posted on X.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said the US had the right to deport people who had entered the country illegally but criticised the manner in which they were deported.

“To send them like this abruptly in a military aircraft and in handcuffs is an insult to India, it’s an insult to the dignity of Indians,” he said.

This isn’t the first time that the US has faced the ire of politicians for allegedly mistreating migrants from their countries.

Last month, Brazil’s government expressed outrage after about 88 of its nationals arrived in their homeland handcuffed. The government said that it would demand an explanation from Washington over the “degrading treatment of passengers on the flight”.

Meanwhile, Colombia sent its own planes to collect deportees after Colombian President Gustavo Petro barred US military aircraft from landing, arguing that those on board were being treated like criminals.

Rights groups have urged countries to ensure deportees are treated humanely.

A state of emergency has been declared on the Greek island of Santorini after days of consecutive earthquakes.

It comes after a magnitude 5.2 tremor was recorded at 21:09 local time (19:09 GMT) on Wednesday between the Greek islands of Amorgos and Santorini, making it the strongest in recent days. It is estimated to have occurred at a depth of 5km.

The decree will be in effect until 3 March to “address the emergency needs and manage the consequences”, officials said.

More than 11,000 people have already left Santorini, with around 7,000 departing by ferry and 4,000 by air.

A 4.7 magnitude quake was also recorded south-west of Amorgos at 07:50 local time on Thursday, following 57 tremors between midnight and 06:30.

So far no major damage has been reported on the island, but authorities are taking precautionary measures and bracing in case a larger quake hits.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is expected to visit Santorini on Friday.

Vasilis Karastathis, director of the Geodynamic Institute, told ERTNews that “seismicity continues at the same pace as in previous days, intense.”

“We have a fairly high number of earthquakes with magnitudes above 4,” he said.

“Still, we are not in a position to say that we see any evidence that would lead to the sequence slowly being completed. We are still in the middle of the road. We have not seen any thinning, any sign that it is heading towards retreat.”

Santorini welcomes millions of tourists annually, but it is currently low season, meaning local residents and workers make up the majority of evacuees.

Poor weather means the ferry from Santorini to Piraeus port near Athens is not operating. The adverse conditions are expected to continue over the coming days.

Many travellers remain at Santorini’s port to board emergency ferry routes that have been set up as many families want to leave the island.

Schools on Santorini – and other neighbouring islands including Anafi, Paros, Naxos and Mykonos – will remain closed until Friday, when authorities will make a decision about when they can re-open.

The island has been reinforced with firefighters and medical personnel from Naxos, another island.

All hospital employees are on standby to help those who have remained on the island with all leave and days off cancelled.

Ambulance units have also arrived to reinforce the island’s service and help is also expected from the armed forces.

According to the health ministry’s planning, in the event of an emergency need for personnel, the first thing that will happen is doctors and nurses will come from other islands. In the event of increased need in Santorini, doctors from Athens will also be sent to the island.

A backup telecommunications station is being set up at Santorini City Hall, to be activated in the event of a major earthquake and a telecommunications problem.

Vassilis Kikilias, the climate and civil protection minister, said units of firefighters trained in natural disasters were being despatched to Santorini. Teams with special dogs and a mobile operations centre have also been sent to the island, while helicopters are on standby.

Kikilias also said the coast guard and armed forces would be available to assist vulnerable people who wish to evacuate.

Earlier on Wednesday, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had struck an optimistic tone at a meeting of civil protection experts.

“First and foremost, the state trusts science and scientists. We have done this in other crises,” the prime minister said.

“All plans have been implemented. Forces have been moved to Santorini and the other islands, so that we are ready for any eventuality,” stressed Mitsotakis.

“We will continue like this with the good hope that things will get better, and the phenomenon will subside.”

Mitsotakis concluded his statement with an appeal to the islanders to: “Stay calm and cooperate with the authorities”.

“I understand the fear of being on Santorini, which is constantly shaking,” he added, emphasising the situation was being assessed on a daily basis.

The Thira Chamber of Commerce had earlier requested a state of emergency be announced.

It called for businesses on the island be suspended and emergency support measures be taken in line with those during Covid-19.

“The consequences for the local economy are incalculable, the central markets are being weakened, and businesses are losing customers and revenue,” the letter read.

“The island is being deserted, as 11,000 permanent residents had left by yesterday, which is expected to rise to 14,000 by the end of this week.”

Santorini is on what is known as the Hellenic Volcanic Arc – a chain of islands created by volcanoes – but the last major eruption was in the 1950s.

Greek authorities have said the recent tremors were related to tectonic plate movements, not volcanic activity.

Scientists cannot predict the exact timing, size or location of earthquakes.

But there are areas of the world where they are more likely to occur, which helps governments prepare.

Earthquakes are the result of movement of tectonic plates in the earth’s crust. Sometimes these plates lock together when they meet, which is called a plate boundary or a fault line.

Santorini and the other Greek Islands are near such a line.

Have you been affected by the earthquake? Get in touch.

US President Donald Trump has restated a vision in which the US would take over Gaza, after officials in his administration appeared to contradict his earlier comments.

“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” Trump said on Thursday. He reiterated that the idea would mean resettling Palestinians, and that no US soldiers would be needed.

Trump’s resettlement idea has prompted accusations that he is planning ethnic cleansing, and has drawn condemnation from the UN, human rights groups and Arab leaders. Analysts doubt it will ever happen.

After Trump’s first comments on the issue, his officials suggested any relocation would be only temporary.

Under his plan, Trump wrote, Gazans “would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region”. The US would then be part of an effort to redevelop the enclave, he said.

His post, written on Truth Social, did not make clear whether the two million residents of the Palestinian territory would be invited to return.

Under international law, attempts to forcibly transfer populations from occupied territory are strictly prohibited.

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday that any displacement would be temporary. In his own comments, made on the same day, Secretary of State Rubio said the idea was for Gazans to leave the territory for an “interim” period while debris was cleared and reconstruction took place.

These views contradicted Trump’s initial comments on the matter. Speaking on Tuesday, when he proposed the development of Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, Trump suggested that the displacement of Palestinians would be permanent.

“The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too,” he said on Tuesday during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called the idea “worth paying attention to”.

The announcement took even senior Trump aides by surprise due to a lack of planning around the idea, the New York Times reported, citing four anonymous sources with knowledge of the discussions.

Trump’s fresh comment on Thursday that no American soldiers would be needed was more clearly in agreement with Leavitt, who said the US had not committed to putting “boots on the ground”.

• Follow live updates from Trump’s second presidency
• Why does Trump want to take over Gaza and could he do it?
• Israel minister tells army to plan for Palestinians leaving Gaza

Fifteen months of fighting have left the Gaza Strip, a territory 41km (25 miles) long and 10km (6 miles) wide, largely uninhabitable.

Entire districts have been razed to the ground. Agricultural land where greenhouses once stood has been reduced to sand and rubble.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned that it could take 21 years to remove and dispose of all debris.

It described the water and sanitation systems as “almost entirely defunct”, warned of mounting rubbish around camps and shelters, and highlighted the risk that chemicals from destroyed solar panels and the munitions being used could contaminate soil and water supplies.

More than 50 million tonnes of debris have accumulated as a result of the destruction, according to the UN body.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

More than 47,550 people have been killed and 111,600 injured in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

“I have so much money now that I could hire someone to kill you, and nobody would know. No-one would miss you. No-one would know anything.”

Former music executive Daniel Evans says he can still remember the threat from his old boss, Sean “Diddy” Combs – then known as Puff Daddy – to a colleague. It was 1997, he says, in the New York office of Combs’s Grammy Award-winning music label Bad Boy Records.

“It was like, this is what money does to you,” he says.

Combs was often “prickly”, but Evans says power was transforming him. Just days before, the hip-hop mogul had received his biggest reward to date – $6m (£4.8m) to mark the label’s success, which boasted platinum-selling artists like The Notorious B.I.G.

That year Combs’s music career reached its peak, with his empire soon expanding into fashion, alcohol and even his own TV network.

Nearly three decades on, his legacy is in ruins as he sits in jail awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering alongside battling dozens of lawsuits accusing him of drugging and assault at lavish parties, high-end hotels and in his label’s recording studio. He denies all the allegations.

Now the BBC has spoken to more than 20 people who worked with Combs at Bad Boy Records – including former executives, assistants and producers – who describe for the first time troubling incidents they say they witnessed during its 1990s rise.

Some executives say they had concerns after seeing Combs having sex with women in the studio, including one incident where the employee says the young woman did not seem to react when he walked in. Another staff member complained Combs asked her to bring him condoms.

The BBC also heard that corporate funds were used to fly in women from across the US for sex at the request of artists and other employees.

“There was a course of conduct that became more egregious over time and that conduct does go back to the 90s,” says Tony Buzbee, a US lawyer representing dozens of alleged victims, including one who says Combs threatened to kill her in similar terms to the incident Evans says he witnessed.

His client alleges Combs raped her on a bathroom floor at a promotional party held for The Notorious B.I.G., the label’s biggest star, in 1995. She says in her lawsuit that afterwards, Combs told her not to tell anyone or “you will disappear”.

In a statement, Combs’s legal team accused Buzbee of being “more interested in media attention than the truth” and said the hip-hop star “never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone”.

The 55-year-old’s lawyers said they had not been provided with sufficient details about the BBC’s claims to present the facts that would “counter these fabricated accusations”.

“As we’ve said before, Mr Combs cannot dignify every publicity stunt or facially absurd claim with a response. He has full confidence in the judicial process, where the truth will prevail: these accusations are pure fiction,” they said.

A brash go-getter, Sean Combs became an overnight millionaire when he launched Bad Boy Records in 1993 with a roster of top artists.

It was Combs’s first venture, having already built a name for himself as a talent director at another music label, Uptown Records, aged 19.

“He said that he wanted to be one of the biggest artists in the world and it didn’t matter if I believed him or not,” remembers Jimmy Maynes, a former Uptown colleague.

Maynes remembers Combs having a short fuse in the office, sometimes banging “his hands up against the desk” like a “bratty kid” and yelling if he did not get his way.

Combs was eventually fired from Uptown and at the age of 23 started Bad Boy Records.

“He’s the hardest working man that I’ve ever met and always wanted people to match his energy,” says Daniel Evans, a senior executive who managed Bad Boy’s recording budgets and artists’ contracts between 1994 and 1997.

Combs described himself as the “Great Gatsby” and swiftly became known for hosting coveted celebrity bashes at New York nightclubs, on the beaches of Cancun, Mexico, and later infamous “White Parties” – named after the all-white dress code – in the Hamptons.

Even President Donald Trump attended events in the 90s, says Evans, who once saw him sit on a golden throne at Combs’s 30th birthday and exclaim: “I’m the real King of New York!”

“We were all really young. I was 24 years old,” reflects Evans, who was one of the label’s original employees. “People wanted to party, have fun, hook up and build good memories.”

But looking back, Evans says he is troubled by some of the things he witnessed about his boss’s behaviour and the company culture.

In about 1995, he says he walked in on Combs having sex with a young woman at Daddy’s House, Bad Boy’s New York recording studio near Times Square.

“I was getting ready to go home for the night and looking for my jacket. Open the door and he’s having sex with this girl,” says Evans, who thought the studio was empty as it was silent. Combs swore and shouted at him to leave. “I thought I was getting fired,” he says.

Evans remembers the young woman had been brought to the studio, presumably for a tour, by a party-promoter who was a friend of Combs. His boss seemed sober, while she was quiet and did not really talk, he says, wondering if she was high on drugs or just shy.

He says it did not seem unusual at the time. But recalling how the woman did not react when he entered the room, he says: “Knowing what I know now, there’s a lot of speculation about what state she was in… usually both parties are very responsive during the act.”

Felicia Newsome, the manager of Daddy’s House recording studio between 1994 and 2000, says inappropriate conduct in the music industry as a whole was rife at the time.

“It was abnormal if somebody reported it, but it wasn’t abnormal for it to be happening,” she says.

Newsome says an employee once called her to the studio in the middle of the night because Combs was in his underwear, about to have sex with a model and another woman. He was demanding the staff member fetch him condoms, she recalls.

“I said to Puffy, don’t ever ask anyone here to go and get condoms,” says Newsome, who arrived while they were getting dressed again. “He replied: ‘I didn’t need anything like that, ma,’ and never did it again.”

Newsome, then in her 30s, says she found Combs reasonable and that he changed his behaviour when she challenged him. On one occasion, when the studio first opened in 1995, she says Combs was unhappy about the look of the countertops and called her a “bitch” in front of staff.

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She says she demanded a public apology and temporarily shut the studio, asking him: “If I’m bringing women into this space, which is open 24 hours, how do you want to treat people?”

Combs responded that he wanted it to be an inclusive and safe environment, she says.

But while Newsome ran the studio with an “iron fist”, she says other staff were less comfortable calling Combs out.

“Bad Boy Records was a crazy house with a lot of young people who wanted to touch the King’s robes,” she says.

Former staff say the label was run by twenty-something executives and a large number of interns, some of whom were of school age. There were often sexual relationships between employees and the interns, they say.

Evans remembers an uncomfortable moment with a 14-year-old in his own team, who he says propositioned him.

“She says to me, you work really hard. If you ever want to like, get loose, you and I should kick it… but not tonight, I have a curfew.”

Evans says he sent her home and called the next day, telling her not to return to work. He did not report her, but two weeks later she was back working in the mailroom.

Artists and other employees at Combs’s record label would sometimes also request for women to be flown in to have sex at the studio, the former executive says.

“If they had a [sexual] specialty in something, they would be flown in,” says Evans, who told the BBC he knew because he controlled the budgets. Money for the flights would be set aside and logged under travel, he adds.

“It was probably like thousands of dollars,” says Evans. “I don’t think it happened all that often, but it was definitely a recording expense.”

Evans says Combs’s own requests were managed by his personal assistants. One told the BBC that Combs would often ask them to fly in women he was “messing around with” and put them up in hotels, though the assistant said they were not sex workers.

In the 2000s, the Daddy’s House recording studio further changed, two former staff say, into a culture of “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll”. Combs would regularly bring “random women” there to party, turning up with an entourage of dozens of people in “three white jeeps, with white rims and white leather seats”, they say. Other artists would demand suitcases of Ciroc vodka and one even brought a monkey to a session, according to a former executive.

The studio is one of the locations where women have since accused Combs of drugging and raping them. Model Crystal McKinney alleges the mogul plied her with alcohol and marijuana before sexually assaulting her there in 2003. That same year, a woman alleges that Combs and two associates gang raped her at the studio when she was 17.

Combs’s lawyers say he “looks forward to proving his innocence”, adding that McKinney’s claims are “without merit”.

Many ex-staff say they still find it hard to reconcile the allegations with the man they knew. “These accusations are a surprise to me, as I am sure it is to many of our circle,” says Jeffery Walker, a close friend of Combs who was part of Bad Boy’s original production team. “I’ve been to White Parties and of course studio sessions, and none of what he is accused of went down in my sight.”

Evans was also sceptical about some of the claims until he saw the footage of Casandra Ventura, Combs’s ex-partner of 10 years and a former Bad Boy artist, being brutally beaten by the rapper in a hotel in Los Angeles in 2016.

Ventura was the first person to sue Combs back in November 2023, alleging that he had trapped her in a cycle of abuse, violence, and sex trafficking during their relationship. Combs settled the lawsuit the next day for an undisclosed amount.

“It’s not the first time I’ve seen that temper,” recalls Evans, thinking back to the death threat he says he witnessed back in 1997. “It’s hard to see. The guy in the video with Cassie is almost identical to the guy who threatened the employee. So, you wonder, has anything changed?”

Over the years, Sean Combs has repeatedly reinvented himself – from Puff Daddy, to P Diddy and in recent years, “Love”.

“If I’m acting crazy, like ‘ahhh!’ that’s Diddy. If I’m dancing real smooth with a girl, that’s Puff Daddy. And if I’m looking like I’m nervous or scared or shy, that’s Sean,” he said in an interview in 2015.

With more details likely to emerge when he goes on trial in May, many of those who were close to the rapper are questioning whether they knew the real Sean Combs at all.

“One could think that he’s just a disgusting human being, but that’s not my memory of Puff,” says Jimmy Maynes, who grew up with Combs in Mount Vernon, New York.

But after a pause, he adds: “Or maybe money just gives people the freedom to be exactly who they really are, and he was that guy all along.”

If you would like to speak to Rianna or Larissa about this story you can get in touch here.

Israel’s defence minister has told its military to prepare a plan to “allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so”, in line with President Donald Trump’s proposal for the US to take over the territory and resettle its 2.1 million Palestinians elsewhere.

Israel Katz said Gazans should have “freedom of movement and migration” and countries critical of Israel’s war with Hamas were “obligated” to take them in.

Trump meanwhile said Gaza would be “turned over” to the US by Israel “at the conclusion of fighting”.

But the Palestinian presidency reiterated its rejection of the plan, which it has said would violate international law, and insisted that “Palestine… is not for sale”.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

More than 47,550 people have been killed and 111,600 injured in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Most of Gaza’s population has also been displaced multiple times and almost 70% of its buildings are estimated to be destroyed or damaged.

Healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.

• Bowen: Trump’s Gaza plan won’t happen, but will have consequences
• ‘We won’t go out of Gaza’: Palestinians express shock and defiance
• Why does Trump want to take over Gaza and could he do it?
• How 15 months of war have drastically changed life in the territory
• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained

The Israeli defence minister wrote on X on Thursday that he welcomed the US president’s “bold initiative”, saying it could “support long-term reconstruction efforts in a demilitarized, threat-free Gaza after Hamas”.

Katz announced that he had instructed the Israeli military to “prepare a plan that will allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so, to any country willing to receive them”.

“The plan will include exit options via land crossings, as well as special arrangements for departure by sea and air,” he said.

“Countries such as Spain, Ireland, Norway, and others, which have falsely accused Israel over its actions in Gaza, are legally obligated to allow Gazans to enter their territory. Their hypocrisy will be exposed if they refuse.”

He alleged that Hamas was preventing people leaving Gaza and said that they should have “the right to freedom of movement and migration”.

Hamas official Basem Naim accused Katz of trying to cover up for “a state that has failed to achieve any of its objectives in the war on Gaza” and said Palestinians would refuse to leave.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Palestinian presidency asserted that “Palestine, with its land, history and holy sites, is not for sale”.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh also said the Palestinians would “will not give up an inch of their land”, whether in Gaza or the occupied West Bank.

“The Palestinian people and their leadership will not allow the repetition of the catastrophes of 1948 and 1967, and will thwart any plan aimed at liquidating their just cause through investment projects whose place is neither in Palestine nor on its land.”

The 1948 “Nakba”, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee or driven from their homes before and during the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel.

Many of those refugees ended up in Gaza, where they and their descendants make up three quarters of the population. Another 900,000 registered refugees live in the West Bank, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war along with Gaza, while 3.4 million others live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the UN.

Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though it retained control of its shared border, airspace and shoreline, giving it effective control of the movement of people and goods. The UN still regards Gaza as Israeli-occupied territory because of the level of control Israel has.

On Wednesday, Jordan’s king expressed its “rejection of any attempts to annex land or displace Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank”, while Egypt’s foreign minister stressed the importance of reconstruction “without the Palestinians leaving the Gaza Strip”.

Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the UK and other countries – said Trump’s plan was “absurd” and would “only put oil on the fire” in the region.

The UN human rights office warned that any forcible transfer in, or deportation of, people from occupied territory was strictly prohibited under international law.

The UN’s secretary general also said it was “essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing” and stressed that Gaza would be an integral part of a future Palestinian state.

Antonio Guterres told a meeting in New York that the world had “seen a chilling, systematic dehumanisation and demonization of an entire people”.

Trump unveiled his plan for the US to take “long-term ownership” of Gaza and oversee its reconstruction during a visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.

The president said most of the Palestinians living in Gaza would have to be relocated to achieve his vision of creating “the Riviera of the Middle East”, and that they would be housed in Jordan, Egypt and other countries.

“I hope we can do something where they wouldn’t want to go back,” he said, echoing earlier remarks in the Oval Office where he talked about resettling people “permanently”.

At the White House briefing on Wednesday, spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt was asked to confirm whether all Palestinians who wanted to stay in Gaza would be allowed to do so.

“I can confirm that the president is committed to rebuilding Gaza and to temporarily relocating those who are there because… it is a demolition site,” she replied, appearing to contradict the president.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said the idea was for Gazans to leave the territory for an “interim” period while debris was cleared and reconstruction took place.

On Thursday, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that Gaza would “be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting”.

A ceasefire in effect between Israel and Hamas has halted the war and aims to lead to a permanent end to the fighting.

“The Palestinians… would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free,” he added.

The president also said no US soldiers would be needed to maintain stability.

In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister called Trump’s proposal “remarkable” and something that should be “examined, pursued and done”.

Netanyahu also suggested that Gazans would be able to return, saying: “They can leave, they can then come back, they can relocate and come back, but you have to rebuild Gaza.”

After days of speculation over the precise role the world’s richest man would play in Donald Trump’s White House – how much power he would hold, whether he is a government employee at all – he took to the social media platform he owns to clarify.

“My preferred title is just ‘Tech Support,'” Elon Musk wrote on X on Tuesday. It was a knowing understatement.

As the head of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), Musk has emerged as a dominant force in the dizzying start to Trump’s second administration.

In just two weeks he has led efforts to seize access to the federal payment system, dismantled an entire agency and offered millions of civil servants an ultimatum – quit or face being fired.

But Musk’s increasingly bold attempt to remake the federal government with the same blunt force he used to take control of companies like Twitter have put him on a collision course with the Washington establishment.

And while he has secured a place in Trump’s inner circle, observers wonder if a showdown between these two powerful personalities could be looming.

Musk’s journey from billionaire entrepreneur to White House power player was not straightforward. By his own accounting, Musk had – for decades – been a reliable vote for the Democrats.

But unhappy with Biden’s position on issues from labour laws to transgender rights, Musk began to look to the other side of the aisle in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.

Initially, Musk called for Trump to “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset” and had backed his rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for the Republican nomination. But he soon became the president’s biggest booster, contributing $288m to Trump and other Republican candidates and becoming a key adviser on the campaign.

By the time of Trump’s inauguration, Musk was his right-hand man, seated just behind the president’s left shoulder on the dais – an unmistakable symbol of his influence.

“You know I always say we have to be protective of our geniuses because we don’t have too many. But that one is a good one,” Trump said of Musk, after welcoming him on stage at a rally the day before.

Musk has been a near constant presence in the nation’s capital ever since.

Almost immediately after his election Trump tapped Musk to run Doge, and this new role has seemingly empowered him in a far-reaching mission to slash and transform the federal government, pushing for massive reforms with stunning speed.

Although Trump had said Musk would not be given an office in the West Wing, the tech leader and his team have moved beds into the federal personnel office next door to the White House, according to the New York Times.

He has top secret security clearance, a Trump administration official confirmed, potentially giving him access to a broad swathe of highly classified information.

His tactics – relentless, sometimes ruthless – are reminiscent of how he ran his previous companies, former employees say.

A former programme manager at Tesla, who spoke to the BBC on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said Musk “did not care” about the human cost of his decisions.

“He’s only concerned with the objective at hand. I think he views interpersonal issues and conflicts as ancillary things that are not worth his time,” he said.

Occasionally, Musk tended toward the impulsive. The manager recalled seeing Musk fire a fellow Tesla employee on the spot over an overflowing rubbish can.

“He interpreted that as a sign that this person didn’t take as much pride in his work as he should,” he said. “That was the nuance to it… but at the end of the day someone got fired because they admitted that their trash can was overflowing.”

The approach yielded a committed workforce, the employee said. If you were on board with Musk’s mission, that single-minded focus was motivating, he said, and helped fuel regular 13 plus-hour days on the job.

“He can get more out of people than anyone else I have ever seen,” he recalled, although he added that the intensity at Tesla was par for the course in Silicon Valley.

But for those in the federal government, the employee added, “it’s gotta be a culture shock.”

Nowhere has Musk’s purported work on behalf of Trump been felt as intensely as USAID.

The government agency responsible for international development went from dispensing billions in aid to programmes around the world to an effective dead stop in just over two weeks.

Trump already curtailed USAID’s work significantly when he ordered a 90-day pause in US foreign spending, while the administration reviewed the funds in order to make sure they were in line with the president’s policy goals.

But in recent days, employees have watched with increasing alarm as Musk set his sights directly on USAID, labelling their agency a “criminal organisation” on X.

Musk’s increasingly harsh rhetoric has coincided with equally drastic changes at USAID.

On 1 February, the USAID website stopped working; its X account appeared to vanish not long after. That same weekend, two top security officials were placed on administrative leave after a confrontation with Doge representatives over access to a secure facility used for reviewing classified information, the Washington Post and other US outlets reported.

On Monday, USAID employees were told to stay at home while hundreds of employees were locked out of their email. CBS, the BBC’s US news partner, reports USAID employees are being pulled out of their respective countries worldwide by Friday.

“It’s beyond repair,” Musk said of the agency during his 50-minute conversation on X Spaces early Monday morning.

“I went over it with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said of his conversation with Trump. “And I actually checked with him a few times [and] said ‘are you sure?'”

“The comments from Elon Musk have been particularly cutting, calling us a ‘criminal organisation’ that needs to ‘die,”” said a USAID staffer, who asked not to be named because they feared retaliation from Musk and the administration.

“Coming from the wealthiest man on the planet, that feels pretty grotesque,” said the staffer, who has since been put on administrative leave along with many other colleagues.

“I see foreign service officers that have spent their entire lives serving – a large part of it overseas – and the sacrifices they made,” they said. “To be dragged through the mud like this is disrespectful.”

The upheaval at USAID has raised concerns from Democrats and experts about whether Trump and Musk’s actions are legal.

On its face, efforts by Trump and Musk to shut down USAID are “not legal because it runs afoul of what Congress has explicitly done previously,” said Jon Rogowski, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies the separation of powers in the US government.

Congress has established USAID as an independent agency, and the legislative branch appropriates funding.

As head of the federal agencies, however, Trump does have broad authority to bring certain USAID functions under the state department’s control, according to George Ingram, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former USAID deputy assistant administrator.

One such move included appointing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the acting head of USAID, when in the past the agency had functioned independently of the state department, while following its guidance on foreign policy.

And influential Republicans in Congress appear ready to work with the administration to allow some degree of change.

“I’m supportive of the Trump administration’s efforts to reform and restructure the agency in a way that better serves US national security interests,” said Senator James Risch, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Though Musk does not have the authority to shut down or restructure USAID, the agency likely could not have been dismantled as swiftly and thoroughly without his influence.

“I cannot think of any precedent where a presidential administration has essentially handed over the reins to a private citizen, to remake and take control of the executive branch as they see fit,” Mr Rogowski said.

In a statement to the BBC, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Musk “is selflessly serving President Trump’s Administration as a special government employee, and he has abided by all applicable federal laws”.

Prior to Trump’s inauguration, some of Musk’s peers expressed optimism at the prospect of an injection of start-up culture in Washington.

“I think we’ve just had a very exciting moment,” Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce who has been vocal in his support of Trump, told the BBC in December. “It’s a new chapter for America.”

“There’s a lot of incredible people like Elon Musk in the tech industry and in the business community. And if you can tap the power of expertise to make the best of America, that’s a great vision,” he said at the time.

But two weeks into the Trump administration, some observers say not everyone in Silicon Valley is enthusiastic.

Niki Christoff, a former Salesforce executive who now runs a communication firm in DC, told the BBC that many “people in the [tech] industry seem dumbstruck by the events of the past two weeks”.

“Most CEOs of publicly traded multinational tech companies want predictability. They want stability. They want a strong dollar,” she added. “They want predictable supply chains, and a lot of the policies and the headlines coming out of Washington are creating anxiety and uncertainty.”

Dr Philip Low, a neuroscientist and CEO of neurotechnology company Neurovigil, said Musk’s playbook could wreak havoc on governmental institutions. The two were close for nearly 15 years before their relationship soured, he said.

“His pattern is to take companies, invest in them, destabilise them, and then take them over,” said Dr Low, citing Twitter as an example.

“In that context, the White House is his biggest investment to date. And he is destabilising the American government now.”

According to Dr Low, Musk will not be satisfied being a trusted deputy, which may set him on a collision course with the president, his boss.

“Knowing Elon as I do, he doesn’t want to be number two or number three. He will want to take over,” he said.

“Whatever he decides, goes,” the former Tesla employee said, echoing Dr Low. “He never takes no for an answer.”

After the shake-up at USAID, Trump made it clear that final authority would always rest with him.

When asked if he was happy with Musk after the upending of the agency, he said yes – “for the most part”.

“Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job,” he said on Monday.

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval, and we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate we won’t,” the president said.

“He reports in.”

Panama has denied making changes to allow US government vessels to transit the Panama Canal for free, following White House claims it had agreed to such a move.

The State Department said in a statement on X that its government vessels “can now transit the Panama Canal without charge fees, saving the US government millions of dollars a year”.

Responding to the comments, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) said it was “empowered to set tolls and other fees for transiting the canal,” adding that it had “not made any adjustments to them”.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced his desire to retake control of the waterway, which is key to global trade.

The 51-mile (82km) Panama Canal cuts across the Central American nation and is the main link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been on a visit to Latin American countries this week, demanded that Panama make “immediate changes” to what he calls the “influence and control” of China over the canal.

America’s top diplomat said Panama had to act or the US would take necessary measures to protect its rights under a treaty between the two countries.

During a visit to the country, Rubio met Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino, as well as the canal’s administrator, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales.

The ACP said after his visit that it had conveyed its intention to work with the US navy to optimise transit priority for its vessels through the canal.

This commitment for dialogue with Washington remained, it said in a separate statement on Wednesday.

US vessels make up a significant proportion of traffic in the canal. In 2024, 52% of transits through the waterway had ports of origin or destination in the United States, according to the canal’s authorities.

Up to 14,000 ships use the canal each year to avoid a lengthy and costly trip around the tip of South America.

In his inaugural speech, President Trump said he planned to “take back” the canal, alleging that China was operating it and Panama had “broken” a promise to remain neutral.

The plan was strongly rejected by Mulino, who said the key trade route “is and will remain” in the country’s hands.

He also rejected Trump’s allegations about China’s influence, saying there is “no presence of any nation in the world that interferes with our administration”.

Trump recently reiterated his claim. Despite saying earlier this week he was “not happy” with the situation, he acknowledged that Panama had “agreed to certain things”. Mulino has said his country will not continue its membership in China’s infrastructure-building programme, the Belt and Road Initiative.

The US built the canal in the early 20th Century but, after years of protest, President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty with Panama in 1977 to gradually hand back control of the waterway, which Trump has branded “a big mistake”.

• Listen to Jeremy read this article on BBC Sounds

Donald Trump’s plan for the US to “take over” and “own” Gaza, resettling its population in the process, is not going to happen. It requires the co-operation of Arab states that have rejected it.

They include Jordan and Egypt – countries that Trump wants to take in Gaza’s Palestinians – and Saudi Arabia, which might be expected to foot the bill.

Western allies of the US and Israel are also against the idea.

Some – perhaps many – Palestinians in Gaza might be tempted to get out if they had the chance.

But even if a million left, as many as 1.2m others would still be there.

Presumably the United States – the new owners of Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East” – would have to use force to remove them.

After America’s catastrophic intervention in Iraq in 2003, that would be deeply unpopular in the US.

It would be the final end of any lingering hope that a two-state solution was possible. That is the aspiration that a conflict more than a century old could be ended with the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside Israel.

The Netanyahu government is adamantly against the idea, and over years of failed peace talks, “two states for two peoples” became an empty slogan.

But it has been a central plank of US foreign policy since the early 1990s.

The Trump plan would also violate international law.

America’s already threadbare assertions that it believes in a rules-based international order would dissolve. Russia’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine and China’s in Taiwan would be turbocharged.

Why worry about all that if it is not about to happen – at least not in the way Trump announced in Washington, watched by a grinning and clearly delighted Benjamin Netanyahu?

The answer is that Trump’s remarks, however outlandish, will have consequences.

He is the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world – no longer a reality TV host and political hopeful trying to grab headlines.

Short-term, the disruption caused by his stunning announcement could weaken the fragile ceasefire in Gaza. One senior Arab source told me it could be its “death knell”.

The absence of a plan for Gaza’s future governance is already a fault line in the agreement.

Now Trump has provided one, and even if it does not come to pass, it presses very big buttons in the minds of Palestinians and Israelis.

It will nourish the plans and dreams of ultra-nationalist Jewish extremists who believe all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, and perhaps beyond, is a God-given Jewish possession.

Their leaders are part of Netanyahu’s government and keep him in power – and they’re delighted. They want the Gaza war to resume with the longer-term objective of removing the Palestinians and replacing them with Jews.

The finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said Trump had provided the answer to Gaza’s future after the 7 October attacks.

His statement said that “whoever committed the most terrible massacre on our land will find himself losing his land forever. Now we will act to finally bury, with God’s help, the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state.”

Centrist opposition leaders in Israel have been less effusive, perhaps fearing trouble ahead, but have offered a polite welcome to the plan.

Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups may feel the need to answer Trump with some kind of show of force against Israel.

For Palestinians, the conflict with Israel is driven by dispossession and the memory of what they call al-Nakba, “the catastrophe”. That was the exodus of Palestinians as Israel won its war for independence in 1948.

• Follow live updates
• Analysis: Trump’s real-estate instincts clash with America First view
• BBC Verify: Can Trump really take ownership of Gaza?

More than 700,000 Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes by Israeli forces. All but a handful were never allowed back and Israel passed laws it still uses to confiscate their property.

Now the fear will be that it is happening again.

Many Palestinians already believed Israel was using the war against Hamas to destroy Gaza and expel the population.

It is part of their accusation that Israel is committing genocide – and now they might believe Donald Trump is adding his weight to Israel’s plans.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained
• What is Hamas and why is it fighting with Israel in Gaza?
• What we know about the Gaza ceasefire deal

Just because Trump says something, that does not make it true or certain.

His statements are often more like opening gambits in a real estate negotiation than expressions of the settled policy of the United States.

Perhaps Trump is spreading some confusion while he works on another plan. He is said to crave the Nobel peace prize.

Middle East peacemakers, even when they do not ultimately succeed, have a strong track record of winning it.

As the world was digesting his Gaza announcement, he posted on his Truth Social platform his desire for a “verified nuclear peace agreement” with Iran.

The Iranian regime denies it wants nuclear weapons but there has been an open debate in Tehran about whether they are now so threatened that they need the ultimate deterrent.

For many years Netanyahu has wanted the US, with Israeli help, to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites. Doing a deal with Iran was never part of his plan.

During Trump’s first term, Netanyahu waged a long and successful campaign to persuade him to pull the US out of the nuclear deal Barack Obama’s administration signed with Iran.

If Trump wanted to throw the Israeli hard-right something to keep them happy as he makes overtures to the Iranians, he has succeeded.

But he has also created uncertainty and injected more instability into the world’s most turbulent region.

Indian tax authorities have sent a confidential notice to South Korean car maker Kia Motors accusing it of evading millions of dollars in taxes.

The amount could be as high as $155m (£125m) and the notice was sent in April last year, according to Reuters.

Kia India told the BBC it has already filed a “detailed response supported by comprehensive evidence and documentation” to the tax claim, issued by a customs commissioner in the city of Chennai.

It did not provide further details. The BBC has approached the finance ministry for comment.

Kia has a manufacturing facility in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and has sold more than a million cars in India since its launch in 2019.

Reuters, which first reported the story, said the government’s 432 page notice accused Kia of importing the components for its Carnival car model in separate lots rather than as a single shipment, a move that attracts significantly lower customs duties.

Last year, Indian officials slapped a similar tax notice of $1.4bn on German auto giant Volkswagen’s unit, Skoda Auto Volkswagen India.

Volkswagen has challenged the demand in the Bombay High Court and said it is “availing itself of all legal remedies”.

The pile up of these new tax disputes and lack of quick resolution mechanisms could have significant implications for foreign investment into India, whose economy has slowed in recent months.

Net foreign direct investment (FDI) into the economy has halved over the last year, according to calculations by HSBC Securities, due to a number of reasons.

Such cases also raise concern among foreign investors about policy uncertainty, say experts.

“The issue is being agitated before the courts and so it would not be appropriate to comment on the merits of the revenues’ claim,” says Dinesh Kanabar, tax expert and former Deputy CEO of KPMG India.

“What, however, is concerning is the dispute resolution process in India takes several years and, in the meantime, there is a risk of having to make a part payment of the demand.”

If India is to revive FDI inflows, addressing “ease of business and the tax dispute resolution process” will be critical, he adds.

There has been a spate of high-profile tax disputes between the Indian government and global corporations where litigation has dragged on for years.

The most high-profile was a $2bn tax demand on Vodafone over its purchase of the Indian arm of Hutchison in 2007, where the court ruled in favour of the UK telecoms company.

Similarly, Edinburgh-based oil and gas major Cairn Energy was embroiled in a longstanding $1.4bn dispute with the taxmen over a 2014 retrospective bill that went to an international tribunal. Cairn won the case and the government was forced to settle last year.

“We need a degree of accountability at the tax office, given that the track record of defending demands in appeal is quite poor,” said Mr Kanabar.

Google has become the latest big US firm to scrap its goals to recruit more workers from underrepresented groups, BBC News understands.

The decision to abandon the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) recruitment targets comes after the company carried out an annual review of its corporate policies.

The technology giant is also reviewing some of its other DEI programmes.

US President Donald Trump and his allies have regularly attacked DEI policies. Since his return to the White House just over two weeks ago, Trump has ordered government agencies to eliminate such initiatives.

“We’re committed to creating a workplace where all our employees can succeed and have equal opportunities,” a Google spokesperson said.

“We’ve updated our [annual investor report] language to reflect this, and as a federal contractor our teams are also evaluating changes required following recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic.”

The story was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Between 2021 and 2024, Google’s investor reports stated its commitment to make “diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do”. That line is not in its latest report, which was published on Wednesday.

In recent years, Google had been an outspoken supporter of DEI targets, particularly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the protests that followed his death.

At the time, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, set a five-year goal to increase the number of its leaders who came from underrepresented groups by 30%.

According to the company, the proportion of black people among its leadership almost doubled between 2020 and last year. It also said representation of women and Latino people had increased in those roles.

Google is the latest major company to make a U-turn on its diversity policies.

Meta, Amazon, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Walmart and others have rolled back their DEI programmes.

Apple has stood out by pushing back against this trend. Last month, the tech giant’s board asked investors to vote against a proposal to end its diversity policies.

The proposal by conservative group, the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), called on the iPhone maker to abolish its DEI policies, saying they expose firms to “litigation, reputational and financial risks”.

Last week, the retail chain Target was sued by a group of shareholders, led by the City of Riviera Beach Police Pension Fund in Florida, who said the firm had defrauded them by allegedly concealing the risks associated with its DEI policies.

The lawsuit referred to a 2023 backlash over LGBTQ+ merchandise at its stores, which caused both its sales and its stock price to drop.

Target has also recently announced that it was ending its DEI targets.

In the latest example of the Trump administration’s disapproval of such policies, the US President last week speculated, without giving evidence, that DEI had led to an air crash in Washington DC.

The remarks, which came less than 24 hours after the crash, were in line with the White House’s efforts to undo such programmes.

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Britons are being warned “to book through reputable vendors only” when planning trips on Egyptian liveaboard dive boats in the Red Sea, due to safety concerns.

Sixteen incidents involving liveaboard vessels operating in the area have occurred in the last five years, UK investigators said, with a number resulting in deaths.

A Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) report published on Thursday found boats were “poorly constructed” and essential lifesaving equipment was “defective, out-of-date for service and, in some cases, missing”.

It comes after a BBC investigation heard accusations of safety failings on the Sea Story, an Egyptian dive boat that sank in the Red Sea last November.

Up to 11 people died or are still missing, including two Britons, Jenny Cawson and Tarig Sinada from Devon.

At the time, Egyptian authorities attributed the disaster to a huge wave of up to 4m (13ft). However, survivors and family members have since raised concerns over alleged safety failings on board.

These claims have been supported by a leading oceanographer, who told the BBC weather data from the time suggests a wave could not have been responsible, and that a combination of crew error and failings in the boat were the likely cause.

One survivor said there had been a lack of functioning emergency equipment, making evacuation difficult when the vessel started taking on water.

Witnesses also claimed that the Sea Story boat had undergone structural modifications that may have compromised its seaworthiness.

Egyptian authorities launched an investigation into the disaster but the findings are yet to be publicly released. The BBC previously contacted the company that ran the boat trip for comment but received no response.

As well as the Sea Story incident, the MAIB report also referenced the dive boat Carlton Queen, which capsized and foundered in April 2023 with 33 people on board – all were rescued but many were injured, including UK nationals.

The report also looked at a fire on the dive boat Hurricane in June 2023. Three British passengers died in the incident.

Chief Inspector of Marine Accidents, Andrew Moll, said the MAIB was aware of 16 incidents in the area in the last five years and it was “deeply regrettable that a number of these accidents have resulted in the loss of life”.

That number included three liveaboard dive boats lost in the last 20 months that resulted in numerous deaths, including some UK nationals, investigators added.

Mr Moll said: “While MAIB does not have the jurisdiction to investigate accidents involving non-UK flagged vessels operating within the territorial waters of another coastal state, we have made the appropriate authorities aware of our national interest and offered every assistance with any safety investigation they conduct.

“It is important to remember that such vessels are unlikely to be built, maintained, equipped, and operated to the standard of similar vessels in the UK and we urge the exercise of extreme caution when choosing a boat.”

Other safety issues identified by the MAIB included emergency escape routes being unmarked, via lockable doors and with no emergency lighting.

Investigators also found that safety briefings to passengers “were of a poor standard or not conducted at all and crews appeared poorly trained and were unfamiliar with their vessels”.

As part of safety recommendations, the MAIB told potential passengers to ensure they request a thorough safety briefing from the crew when arriving on liveaboard vessels, before departure.

Australian scientists have produced the world’s first kangaroo embryo through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a breakthrough they say could help save other species from extinction.

Using specimens from eastern grey kangaroos, the researchers successfully injected a single sperm cell into an egg, but said achieving a live birth would require more work and “technical advancements”.

The feat provides important insights into marsupial breeding and could aid efforts to improve the genetic diversity of endangered species such as the koala, Tasmanian devil, northern hairy-nosed wombat and Leadbeater’s possum, lead researcher Andres Gambini said.

Australia houses the largest variety of marsupial mammals, but it also has the highest rate of mammal extinctions.

The University of Queensland experiment looked at the growth of kangaroo eggs and sperm in a laboratory setting before creating embryos using a method known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).

The technique, which is already used on humans and some domestic animals, was tried on eastern grey kangaroos that had died. The species was selected because it is not endangered and has existing high populations.

Despite how iconic marsupial species are in Australia and the crucial role they play in its biodiversity, studies into their tissues have been limited, scientists say.

“We are now refining techniques to collect, culture and preserve marsupial eggs and sperm,” said Dr Gambini, adding that such methods would play a crucial role in safeguarding “the genetic material of these unique and precious animals”.

IVF is being used as a tool to try and preserve endangered species the world over.

Last year, scientists achieved the world’s first IVF rhino pregnancy, successfully transferring a lab-created rhino embryo into a surrogate mother in Kenya.

In 2018, IVF was also used to create the world’s first donkey embryo.

Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera has ordered the military to begin preparing to withdraw from their peacekeeping mission in the volatile eastern Democratic of Congo.

The Malawian troops are part of the southern African regional bloc’s military mission (SAMIDRC) deployed to DR Congo to help tackle armed groups.

At least 20 peacekeepers, including 14 South Africans and three Malawians, were killed as the M23 rebels captured the key city of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, last week.

President Chakwera said on Wednesday that his decision was meant to “honour the declaration of a ceasefire by the parties”, even though the fighting is continuing.

In a statement read on state TV on Wednesday evening, he said the withdrawal of troops would “pave the way for their planned negotiations towards a lasting peace”.

Malawi Information Minister Moses Kunkuyu told the BBC Newsday programme that the planned withdrawal was being “made in good faith”.

He said a meeting by southern African leaders last week in Tanzania, on the sidelines of the Africa Energy Summit, had passed a resolution “to call for a ceasefire from all parties in the conflict, just to pave way for peaceful negotiations”.

“It is pursuant to that agreement that the president of Malawi has seen it fit to contribute to the peace-building effort by withdrawing troops from the region so that there is that peaceful negotiation”.

• What’s the fighting in DR Congo all about?
• More than 100 women raped and burned alive in DR Congo jailbreak, UN says
• South Africa and Rwanda go head-to-head over DR Congo war

He did not indicate exactly when the troops would leave, but said what remained were the “operational aspects” and that they had communicated the decision to the DR Congo president and the southern Africa bloc.

On Monday, the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group declared a unilateral ceasefire “for humanitarian reasons”, which was due to start the following day.

However, fighting has since resumed, and the rebels have reportedly taken the mining town of Nyabibwe in the South Kivu province.

The Malawian president has been under pressure to withdraw his country’s forces from DR Congo in the wake of the deaths of peacekeepers.

South Africa has faced similar pressure, but President Cyril Ramaphosa has vowed to keep his troops in DR Congo, saying they are subject to the SAMIDRC mission “which has operational timeframes and an end date”. The mission was initially deployed in 2023 and was last year extended until December this year.

The SAMIDRC mission was authorised by the southern African bloc (Sadc) to have 5,000 troops from South Africa, Malawi and Tanzania.

South Africa, which leads the mission, was to deploy 2,900 troops and the rest shared between Malawi and Tanzania – although it is not clear how many troops are currently there.

Malawi also has some soldiers in DR Congo serving under the UN peacekeeping force Monusco.

Sadc leaders are due to meet in Tanzania this Saturday in a special joint summit with East African heads of states to address the DR Congo crisis.

Bitter rivals DR Congo President Félix Tshisekedi and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame are both expected to attend.

Meanwhile, the Ugandan military has denied reports it has sent troops to eastern DR Congo because of the fighting in and around Goma.

Since their capture of Goma, the rebels have been seeking to seize territories in South Kivu, especially the capital Bukavu. Congolese authorities have enlisted hundreds of civilian volunteers to help defend the city.

The rebel group has appointed top officials including a governor of North Kivu, to administer the territory.

For the first time since they seized Goma, the M23 on Thursday held a rally in the city that saw rebel leader Corneille Nangaa address large crowds at the Unity Stadium.

A warrant for Nangaa’s arrest has been issued by a military court in Kinshasa, accusing him of war crimes and treason.

The UN says nearly 3,000 people were killed during the M23’s violent campaign to seize Goma.

There are fears that diseases such as Mpox and cholera could spread beyond the city.

The International Criminal Court has said its prosecutors are closely following events in DR Congo “including the grave escalation of violence over the past week”.

• Your phone, a rare metal and the war in DR Congo
• ‘People are afraid’: BBC visits DR Congo city under rebel control
• The evidence that shows Rwanda is backing rebels in DR Congo

The decision to deconstruct Grenfell Tower has been met with anger by some bereaved relatives and survivors of the fire that killed 72 people there in 2017.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told a meeting on Wednesday that the west London tower block would be dismantled to ground level.

But a spokesperson for Grenfell United, which represents some of the bereaved families and survivors, said no-one at the meeting supported the decision, and that ignoring their wishes was “disgraceful and unforgivable”.

There has been years of debate over the future of the 24-storey tower, with some hoping it would remain as a lasting reminder of the tragedy and others wanting it replaced with a new memorial.

Some local residents have called for it to be removed completely.

One former Grenfell resident said the section of the block that is structurally unsafe should be taken down, but retained to become a memorial as “if it’s out of sight, it will be definitely be out of mind”.

A formal government announcement on the matter is expected to be made on Friday.

The spokesperson for Grenfell United said Rayner had refused to confirm how many bereaved people and survivors had been spoken to in the “recent, short four week consultation”.

“Today’s meeting showed just how upset bereaved and survivors are about not having their views heard or considered in this decision,” they said in a statement.

“Ignoring the voices of bereaved on the future of our loved ones’ gravesite is disgraceful and unforgivable.”

Kimia Zabihyan, from Grenfell Next of Kin, which also acts for some of the bereaved families, told the BBC she had attended the meeting with Rayner.

She described the meeting as “charged”, but said Rayner appeared to have come along with the “best of intentions”.

“The deputy prime minister was very clear that she has taken this decision very seriously, that it is a serious responsibility and that it is a very sensitive decision to make, but it is one that she felt she had to make,” said Ms Zabihyan, adding that Rayner said she had made the decision based on what engineers had recommended.

The government has previously been warned the structure may be unsafe due to the extent of the fire damage.

A report in 2020 recommended the tower be propped up in various places because the concrete that reinforces it had been damaged by the weather, and that the heating and drying of summers and winters had created some instability.

The engineers recommended that the tower was brought down – and in 2019 the government was told the tower should be taken down above the 10th floor.

A spokesperson for the prime minister said Rayner had engaged with the Grenfell community since her appointment last July, and had “considered expert information about health and safety”.

Ms Zabihyan said she understood the government’s rationale for the decision, but said many people were very unhappy.

She said that at the meeting one person had told Rayner: “No-one cares about this more than me, because I had just bits of bone to bury of my mother so that building means a lot to me. That is where her soul is, where her ashes are. It’s in that building.”

Following the meeting, a government spokesperson said: “This is a deeply personal matter for all those affected, and the deputy prime minister is committed to keeping their voice at the heart of this.”

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said a decision on the tower’s future “has got to be made”, but “we do need to always have in our mind’s eye the victims in this terrible, terrible tragedy”.

The head of a local residents’ association told Radio 4’s The World Tonight he and “the overwhelming majority” of local residents supported the decision to take down the tower.

Mushtaq Lasharie, a local resident and chairman of Lancaster West Estate Residents Association, told Radio 4: “We were waiting over seven-and-a-half years for a closure and I hope this decision will bring a closure.

“When we surveyed a few years back the overwhelming majority wanted to take it out and the reason is, number one, it is dangerous, number two, it reminds us every day.”

Emma O’Connor, who lived on 20th floor of tower and escaped the fire that night, told Radio 4’s Today programme she thought the tower should be “taken down from the top to the 10th floor, which they say is the most unstable, so it then can be erected into a standing memorial”.

“We understand it’s unsafe but if it’s out of sight, it will be definitely be out of mind for those responsible for the tragic deaths,” she said.

Ms O’Connor was at the meeting with Rayner and said survivors and relatives were told ‘I’ve made this decision, I’ll take questions now’, but said officials “didn’t answer how they came to the decision” to dismantle the tower.

Emma Dent Coad, who was Labour MP for Kensington at the time of the Grenfell fire and is now an independent councillor on Kensington and Chelsea Council, said a lot of the bereaved and families were “absolutely distraught”.

She said: “We’ve been told the work will start after the 8th anniversary, which is this coming June, and will be gone by the 10th – so that may take two years to deconstruct, as they’re calling it.”

She said while there were concerns from the local community about public health issues, some of the bereaved wanted the tower to stay – “a lot of people regarded it as a sacred site”.

Joe Powell, MP for Kensington and Bayswater where Grenfell Tower stands, told Radio 4’s World at One said the decision to take down the tower was “always going to be an incredibly painful moment”.

He said that “so much that was promised after the fire has not been delivered”, most notably criminal justice, changes to the estate the tower is based on, council culture and improvements to local health services.

“The fear is that without the tower the push on those issues will diminish.”

But he added: “We cannot allow the decision on the tower to slow what has already been incredibly painfully slow progress.”

Kate Lamble, a journalist, producer and presenter of The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast and Grenfell: Building a Disaster, told Radio 4’s Today programme that some people still believe the tower is the resting place of their loved ones and should remain.

There are others, she said, “who see it while they’re taking their kids to school or going to work see it as this reminder of a very traumatic event and welcome the idea of it being take down.”

The fire on 14 June 2017 was originally caused by a faulty fridge in a fourth-floor flat and quickly spread around the block because it was covered in highly flammable cladding.

A public inquiry concluded in September that the disaster had been the result of numerous government failures, and failure of the construction industry to act on the dangers of flammable materials on high-rise buildings.

The west London tower block was covered in combustible cladding because of the “systematic dishonesty” of firms who made and sold it, inquiry chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick said.

Many bereaved families have called for criminal action to be brought against some of those implicated in the inquiry but police and prosecutors have said that no decision will be made on potential charges until the end of 2026.

In a 2023 report, the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission set out a series of recommendations for a “sacred space”, designed to be a “peaceful place for remembering and reflecting”.

It said the space should include a garden, monument and dedicated space for the private expression of grief and mourning for the families who lost loved ones.

A shortlist of five potential design teams was announced last month, and a winning design team is set to be selected this summer.

India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has told parliament the government is working with the US to ensure Indian citizens are not mistreated while being deported.

His statement came a day after a US military flight brought back 104 Indians accused of entering the US illegally.

One of the deportees told the BBC they had been handcuffed throughout the 40-hour flight, sparking criticism.

But Jaishankar said he had been told by the US that women and children were not restrained. Deportation flights to India had been taking place for several years and US procedures allowed for the use of restraints, he added.

Deportation in the US is organised and executed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“We have been informed by ICE that women and children are not restrained,” Jaishankar said.

He added that according to ICE, the needs of deportees during transit, including for food and medical attention, were attended to and deportees could be unrestrained during bathroom breaks.

“There has been no change from past procedure,” he added.

However Jaspal Singh, one of the deportees on the flight that landed in Amritsar city in the state of Punjab on Wednesday, told BBC Punjabi that he was shackled throughout the flight.

“We were tortured in many ways. My hands and feet were tied after we were put on the plane. The plane stopped at several places,” he said, adding that he was unshackled only after the plane landed in Amritsar.

The US has not given further details of how deportees were treated on the flight. Officials have said that enforcing immigration laws is “critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States” and it was US policy to “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens”.

The US border patrol chief posted video showing deportees in shackles, saying the deportation flight to India was the “farthest deportation flight yet using military transport”.

President Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy. The US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered illegally.

Trump has said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured him that the country would “do what’s right” in accepting US deportations.

In his statement on Thursday, Jaishankar said all countries had an obligation to take back their nationals who had entered other countries illegally. They often faced dangerous journeys and inhumane working conditions once they had reached their destinations, he said.

Fraudulent Indian travel agencies are known to take huge sums of money from people desperate to travel abroad for work, and then make them undertake dangerous journeys to avoid being caught by immigration officials.

Jaspal said he had taken a loan of 4m rupees ($46,000; £37,000] to travel to the US, a dangerous journey that took months and during which he saw bodies in the jungle of other migrants who had died on the route.

Opposition leaders have condemned the manner in which migrants were brought back to the country and have asked the government what action it plans to take over the treatment meted out to its citizens.

Congress MP Manickam Tagore called it “shocking and shameful”.

“The way the US is deporting Indians – chained like criminals – is inhumane and unacceptable,” he posted on X.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said the US had the right to deport people who had entered the country illegally but criticised the manner in which they were deported.

“To send them like this abruptly in a military aircraft and in handcuffs is an insult to India, it’s an insult to the dignity of Indians,” he said.

This isn’t the first time that the US has faced the ire of politicians for allegedly mistreating migrants from their countries.

Last month, Brazil’s government expressed outrage after about 88 of its nationals arrived in their homeland handcuffed. The government said that it would demand an explanation from Washington over the “degrading treatment of passengers on the flight”.

Meanwhile, Colombia sent its own planes to collect deportees after Colombian President Gustavo Petro barred US military aircraft from landing, arguing that those on board were being treated like criminals.

Rights groups have urged countries to ensure deportees are treated humanely.

One of the world’s most pre-eminent conductors, Daniel Barenboim, has announced he has Parkinson’s Disease.

The 82-year-old has served as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin State Opera and La Scala in Milan, but is equally well known for his efforts to promote peace through music in the Middle East.

In 2022, he cut back his performance schedule after developing a “serious neurological condition”. In a statement on Thursday, he confirmed the long-suspected diagnosis of Parkinson’s.

“I know that many people have been concerned about my health,” he wrote, adding: “I have been very touched by the support I have received over the last three years.”

The musician said he was not retiring altogether, and planned to “maintain as many of my professional commitments as my health permits”.

He added that his priority was to ensure the future of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra , which he co-founded in 1999.

The ensemble is intended to promote co-operation among young musicians from Israel and Arab nations.

“It has very flatteringly been described as a project for peace,” Barenboim once noted. “It isn’t. It’s not going to bring peace, whether you play well or not so well.

“The Divan was conceived as a project against ignorance. A project against the fact that it is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it.”

The orchestra’s performances have been a regular highlight of the BBC Proms since their first visit in 2003.

Born in Argentina to Jewish parents, Barenboim rose to prominence as a prodigious young pianist, before moving to Israel as a teenager and going on to become a leading conductor, first in Israel and then in Australia with the Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras.

He married the British cellist Jacqueline du Pré in Jerusalem in 1967, converting to Judaism. Following her death, he married the Russian pianist Elena Bashkirova.

He became general musical director at Berlin’s State Opera in 1992 and is credited is credited with reviving its fortunes after it fell into obscurity under communism.

In Jerusalem in 2001, he provoked controversy by conducting the Prelude to the opera Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner at the Israel Festival.

Wagner’s music had been unofficially banned in Israel because of his anti-Semitic beliefs and the fact that he was Adolf Hitler’s favourite composer.

Barenboim initially ceded to protests from Holocaust survivors and pressure from politicians – but at the end of the concert, he asked the audience if they wanted him to play Wagner after all.

Although some protested, calling it “the music of the concentration camps”, the majority of concertgoers asked him to proceed. The performance ended with a standing ovation.

The conductor argued that, while Wagner was undoubtedly anti-semitic, he had died long before the rise of Naziism, and his music was “too important” to be ignored.

“I didn’t want anybody who felt unable to hear this music because of the association [with Nazism] to be confronted with it,” he told Israeli radio.

“But people who don’t have the association should be able to hear it.”

In 2011, he received an honorary knighthood – the highest honour for foreign citizens – in recognition of his work towards reconciliation in the Middle East through music.

As well as having Israeli citizenship, he accepted honorary Palestinian citizenship in 2008 – making him the first person to hold both Israeli and Palestinian passports.

In his statement, the conductor vowed to continue conducting the West-Eastern Divan “whenever my health allows me to”.

“At the same time,” he continued, “I will take an active role in ensuring that the Divan has the opportunity of working with excellent conductors going forward.

“I have been navigating this new reality of mine and my focus is on receiving the best available care. I thank everyone for their kindness and well-wishes.”