US President Trump has announced a deal with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for Delhi to import more US oil and gas to shrink the trade deficit between the two countries.

“They’re going to be purchasing a lot of our oil and gas. They need it. And we have it,” Trump said at a joint news briefing in Washington.

Modi said that “in order to ensure India’s energy security, we will focus on trade in oil and gas”, also pledging to invest more in nuclear energy.

His two-day visit comes as Trump ordered that US trading partners should face reciprocal tariffs – tit-for-tat import taxes to match similar duties already charged by those countries on American exports.

Trump and Modi have developed a personal rapport over the years, despite friction over trade.

“We’ve had a wonderful relationship,” Trump said as he welcomed his visitor in the US capital on Thursday.

He also said the US would increase sales of military hardware to India by millions of dollars, eventually supplying Delhi with F-35 fighter jets.

Immigration was high on the agenda, with Trump expected to ask India to take back thousands of undocumented immigrants. 

Earlier, Modi said he had also discussed space, technology and innovation at a meeting with Trump ally Elon Musk. 

Modi said: “I firmly believe with Trump we will work with twice the speed we did in his first term.”

Shortly before their bilateral, Trump ordered his advisers to calculate broad new tariffs on US trading partners around the globe, warning they could start coming into effect by 1 April.

Trump told reporters that “our allies are worse than our enemies”, when it comes to import taxes.

“We had a very unfair system to us,” the Republican president said before meeting Modi. “Everybody took advantage of the United States.”

The White House also issued a news release that fired a trade shot across the bows of India and other countries.

The document noted that the average US tariff on agricultural goods was 5% for countries to which Washington had granted most favoured nation (MFN) status.

“But India’s average applied MFN tariff is 39%,” the White House fact sheet said.

“India also charges a 100% tariff on US motorcycles, while we only charge a 2.4% tariff on Indian motorcycles.”

On Thursday, Trump acknowledged the risks of his tariff policy, as economists warned such import taxes could drive up consumer prices.

“Prices could go up somewhat, short term, but prices will also go down,” he said in the Oval Office.

But he argued the policy would boost American manufacturing and the country would be “flooded with jobs”.

Trump has already placed an additional 10% tariff on imports from China, citing its production of fentanyl, a deadly opioid that has stoked a US overdose epidemic.

He has also readied tariffs on Canada and Mexico, America’s two largest trading partners, that could take effect in March after being suspended for 30 days.

On Monday, he removed exemptions from his 2018 steel and aluminium tariffs.

Ukraine will not agree to any peace deal proposed by the US and Russia without its involvement, President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned, after Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin pledged to begin talks to end the war.

“We cannot accept it, as an independent country,” Zelensky said.

The US president had talked of a “good possibility” of ending the war after he and Putin spoke by phone. It was not “practical” for Ukraine to join Nato, Trump said, and “unlikely” it could return to its pre-invasion borders.

He has now suggested that Russian respresentatives will meet Americans on Friday in Munich, which is hosting a security conference.

“Russia is going to be there with our people,” Trump said. “Ukraine is also invited, by the way. Not sure exactly who’s going to be there from any country but high-level people from Russia, from Ukraine and from the United States.

“I’d love to have them [the Russians] back. I think it was a mistake to throw them out. Look, it’s not a question of liking Russia or not liking Russia.”

Russia, which is not taking part in the annual forum, did not immediately comment on Trump’s claim.

Zelensky adviser Dmytro Lytvyn told reporters that “talks with Russians in Munich” were “not expected”.

Zelensky is to meet Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, in the German city on Friday.

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The Ukrainian leader, who also had an individual call with Trump on Wednesday, said his country could not accept “any agreements [made] without us”.

“Europeans needed to be at the negotiating table too,” he said, and he told Trump his priority was “security guarantees”, something he did not see without US support.

Elsewhere, he said that Nato membership for Ukraine would be the “most cost-effective” option for its partners, without giving details.

“I also warned world leaders against trusting Putin’s claims of readiness to end the war,” he added.

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Ukraine’s European allies also rejected any move towards a forced settlement on Kyiv:

• UK Defence Secretary John Healey said there could be “no negotiation about Ukraine without Ukraine, and Ukraine’s voice must be at the heart of any talks”

• German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rejected a “dictated peace” and his defence minister said it was “regrettable” Washington was already making “concessions” to the Kremlin.

• EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas accused Washington of “appeasement” towards Russia. “We shouldn’t take anything off the table before the negotiations have even started because it plays to Russia’s court and it is what they want,” she said.

Trump, who made the first publicly acknowledged White House call with Putin since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said he would meet Putin in Saudi Arabia. without giving details.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday in the Oval Office, he said Putin wanted the war to end and he expected a ceasefire soon.

When asked if Ukraine was an equal member in the peace process, he said: “They have to make peace.”

His Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told a press conference at a Nato summit on Thursday that peace negotiations would be “had with both” Putin and Zelensky” and he described Trump as the “perfect dealmaker”.

Hegseth, who on Wednesday said it was “unrealistic” to expect Ukraine to return to pre-2014 border and downplayed the prospect of Ukraine joining Nato, appeared to row back on his remarks, saying “everything was on the table” and the conversations were being led by the president.

The defence secretary also suggested financial aid to Ukraine during negotiations could be on the table, as well as US troop numbers in Europe.

Following the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president in 2014, Moscow annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and backed pro-Russian separatists in bloody fighting in eastern Ukraine.

The conflict burst into all-out war nearly three years ago.

Moscow’s attempts to take control of the capital Kyiv were thwarted, but Russian forces have taken around a fifth of Ukraine’s territory in the east and south, and have carried out air strikes across the country.

Ukraine has retaliated with artillery and drone strikes, as well as a ground offensive against Russia’s western Kursk region.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, one of President Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet picks, has been sworn in as the next US Health and Human Services Secretary.

The former presidential candidate will now oversee key health agencies with about 80,000 employees and a trillion-dollar budget. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had questioned his baseless health claims and vaccine scepticism.

On Thursday, Kennedy was confirmed by a 52-48 vote. No Democrats backed him. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was the lone Republican to vote against Kennedy.

Kennedy is the latest cabinet appointee installed as the president seeks to rapidly overhaul almost every level of government.

The Senate is putting in late nights and early mornings as they hurry to round out the president’s cabinet by confirming his remaining nominees. Lawmakers also approved Brooke Rollins as head of the Department of Agriculture by a vote of 72-28.

Kennedy, who had his swearing in ceremony in the Oval Office, is the second controversial cabinet pick to be confirmed this week after Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as director of National Intelligence in a narrow Senate vote on Wednesday.

He will now oversee agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Kennedy will also be charged with overseeing the US health industry which includes food safety, pharmaceuticals, public health and vaccinations. He ran for the White House himself in 2024 as an independent, but dropped out and backed Trump.

The president’s decision to tap Kennedy to lead the federal health agency drew scepticism from several Republicans. Many questioned Kennedy’s past comments on immunisations, his ties to groups making unsubstantiated health claims and his views on abortion.

Kennedy is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which gained prominence in the US for casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccinations and making the discredited claim that the shots are linked to autism.

Kennedy, the nephew of former President John F Kennedy, has denied that he is anti-vaccination, pointing out his own children are immunised. He insisted during his confirmation hearings that he merely supports more stringent studies and safety tests for injections.

Some Republicans have praised Kennedy for his criticism over the use of food additives and push to curb big pharma.

During the hearings, lawmakers also grilled Kennedy on his promotion of health misinformation and knowledge of the US healthcare system.

He was asked to explain his stance on abortion, as he previously indicated that he was in favour of abortion rights. He responded by telling lawmakers he agreed with Trump that access to abortion should be controlled by individual states and that “every abortion is a tragedy”.

The exchange drew scrutiny from Democrats who accused Kennedy of “selling out” his pro-choice values in order to secure President Trump’s nomination.

One of his hearings was interrupted by shouting protesters. But he also received loud applause when promising to make America healthy again, a slogan used by Trump’s administration.

Ahead of the hearing, Caroline Kennedy – the cousin of Robert F Kennedy Jr – urged US senators to reject him as the next health and human services secretary. She said Kennedy’s views on vaccines disqualify him from the role of being one of America’s leading health policymakers.

It wasn’t enough to dissuade several Republicans who previously withheld their support from Kennedy but wound up approving his nomination during Thursday’s vote.

Many eyes were on Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican, who chairs the Senate Health Committee.

Cassidy, a doctor, previously indicated that he was struggling with Kennedy’s stance on vaccines. He voted to confirm Kennedy.

“We need to make America healthy again, and it is my expectation that Secretary Kennedy will get this done,” Cassidy posted on X after the vote.

Others closely watched McConnell, a Kennedy critic and polio survivor. McConnell had warned Kennedy not to undermine the polio vaccine.

He voted against confirmation.

“Individuals, parents, and families have a right to push for a healthier nation and demand the best possible scientific guidance on preventing and treating illness,” McConnell said in a statement. “But a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions does not entitle Mr. Kennedy to lead these important efforts.”

The Senate continues moving forward with Trump’s nominees. After confirming Kennedy, lawmakers are expected to advance the nomination of Howard Lutnick as the next Secretary of Commerce.

This tees up the final vote for his confirmation to take place next week.

Lawmakers are also expected to take up the nomination of Kash Patel, Trump’s controversial choice to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Kelly Loeffler, Trump’s pick for Small Business Administrator, after the picks received approval from a key committee on Thursday.

Trump’s pick to head the education department, Linda McMahon had her confirmation hearing on Thursday as well.

This puts a handful of cabinet picks through a key hurdle and sets up confirmation votes of Lutnick and Loeffler no sooner than Tuesday, given the President’s Day long weekend.

TikTok is again available on the US app stores of Apple and Google, after President Donald Trump postponed enforcement of a ban of the Chinese-owned social media platform until 5 April.

The popular app, which is used by more than 170 million American users, went dark briefly last month in the US as the ban deadline approached.

Trump then signed an executive order granting TikTok a 75-day extension to comply with a law banning the app if it is not sold.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BBC News.

According to Bloomberg, which first reported TikTok’s return to app stores in the US, the decision to resume its availability came after Apple and Google received assurances from the Trump administration that they would not be held liable for allowing downloads, and the ban wouldn’t be enforced yet.

The ban, which passed with a bipartisan vote in Congress, was signed into law by former President Joe Biden. It ordered TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the US version of the platform to a neutral party to avert an outright ban.

The Biden administration had argued that TikTok could be used by China as a tool for spying and political manipulation.

China and TikTok have repeatedly denied those accusations. Beijing has also previously rejected calls for a sale of TikTok’s US operations.

The law banning the app was supported by US lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and it was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court.

Trump himself had supported banning the app during his first term in office but he appeared to have a change of heart last year during the presidential race.

He professed a “warm spot” for the app, touting the billions of views he says his videos attracted on the platform during last year’s presidential campaign.

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When the app started working again in the US last month, a popup message was sent to its millions of users that thanked Trump by name.

TikTok chief executive Shou Chew met with Trump in Mar-a-Lago after his electoral victory in November and later attended his inauguration ceremony.

Trump has said he wants to find a compromise with the Chinese company that complies with the spirit rather than the letter of law, even floating an idea of TikTok being jointly owned.

“What I’m thinking of saying to someone is buy it and give half to the US, half, and we’ll give you a permit,” he said recently during a news conference about artificial intelligence.

And he also said he would be open to selling the app to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, as well as billionaire Elon Musk, who leads the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Previous names linked with buying TikTok include billionaire Frank McCourt and Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary – a celebrity investor on Shark Tank, the US version of Dragon’s Den.

The biggest YouTuber in the world Jimmy Donaldson – AKA MrBeast – has also claimed he is in the running after a number of investors contacted him after he posted on social media that he was interested.

America is under new management. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is joining a growing list of US allies who are finding that the world according to Donald Trump is a colder, more uncertain and potentially more dangerous place for them.

It must have been bad enough for Zelensky to hear Trump’s abrupt announcement that he had welcomed Russia’s President Vladimir Putin back to international diplomacy with a 90-minute phone call, to be followed by a face-to-face meeting, perhaps in Saudi Arabia.

After Putin, the White House dialled up Zelensky’s number. Speaking to journalists in Ukraine the morning after, Zelensky accepted the fact that Putin received the first call, “although to be honest, it’s not very pleasant”.

What stung Zelensky more was that Trump, who rang him after he spoke to Putin, seemed to regard him, at best, as a junior adjunct to any peace talks. One of Zelensky’s many nightmares must be the prospect of Trump and Putin attempting to settle Ukraine’s future without anyone else in the negotiation.

He told the journalists that Ukraine “will not be able to accept any agreements” made without its involvement.

It was vital, he said, that “everything does not go according to Putin’s plan, in which he wants to do everything to make his negotiations bilateral”.

President Zelensky is heading to the Munich security conference, starting on Friday, where he will attempt to rally Ukraine’s allies. He faces a tough meeting with Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, who was one of the sternest critics of Joe Biden’s aid to Ukraine.

The argument Zelensky will hear from the Americans is that Ukraine is losing and it needs to get real about what happens next. He will argue that Ukraine can win – with the right backing.

The European Union is worried too. After meeting and praising the Ukrainian defence minister Rustem Umerov, the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas posted that Europe must have a central role in any negotiation. “Our priority now must be strengthening Ukraine and providing robust security guarantees,” Kallas said.

Zelensky is painfully aware that while his European allies are sounding much more steadfast than the Americans, the US remains the world’s strongest military power. He told the Guardian last week that “security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees”.

Collectively, European allies have given Ukraine more money than the US. But the Americans have weapons and air defence systems – like the Patriot missile batteries that protect Kyiv – that Europeans simply cannot provide.

Putin will be delighted that he is getting a much easier ride than he had from Biden. The former US president called Putin, among other things, a “pure thug”, a “brutal tyrant” and a “murderous dictator” and cut off contact after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Just to drive home the point that everything had changed, Trump followed up yesterday’s positive assessment of his talk with Putin with an upbeat early morning post on his platform, Truth Social, reflecting on “great talks with Russia and Ukraine yesterday”. There was now a “good possibility of ending that horrible, very bloody war!!!”

Putin is not just back in conversation with the most powerful country in the world. With Trump, he may now see himself as the arbiter of the endgame in the war he started when he broke international law with the all-out invasion of Ukraine almost exactly three years ago.

At the White House, Trump seemed to suggest that the huge numbers of dead and wounded in the Russian military gave some kind of legitimacy to Putin’s demand to keep the land captured and annexed by Russia.

“They took a lot of land and they fought for that land,” Trump said. As for Ukraine, “some of it will come back”.

His defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks at a Nato meeting in Brussels were more direct. He wanted Ukraine to be “sovereign and prosperous”. But “we must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective”.

“Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Trump is still at the easy end of what could become an impossibly tough diplomatic challenge. Boasting that he has the key to ending the Russo-Ukraine war is one thing. Making that happen is something else.

His declaration before any talks with Russia start that Ukraine will not join Nato nor get back all its occupied land has been widely criticised as a poor start by a man who claims to be the world’s best dealmaker.

The veteran Swedish diplomat and politician Carl Bildt posted an ironic rebuke on X.

“It’s certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make very major concessions even before they have started. Not even Chamberlain went that low in 1938. That Munich ended very bad anyhow.”

Bildt posted a photo of Britain’s then prime minister Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich in 1938, waving the notorious and worthless agreement he had made with Adolf Hitler – the price of which was the capitulation and break-up of Czechoslovakia and a faster slide towards a second world war.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin was widely portrayed in the west as the new threat to European peace. Trump’s approach to him is very different.

He will have to try to bridge the gap between Putin and Zelensky’s positions, which are polar opposites.

Zelensky’s declared objective is to regain Ukraine’s lost territory, which amounts to around a fifth of its total land mass. He also wants Ukraine to become a full member of Nato.

Putin insists that any peace deal would require Ukraine to give up the land Russia has captured, as well as areas it has not occupied, including the city of Zaporizhzhia which has a population of more than half a million. Ukraine would also become neutral, demilitarised and would never join Nato.

Ukraine’s demands will not be acceptable to Moscow, and Trump has indicated he doesn’t like them either.

But Russia’s amount to an ultimatum, not a serious peace proposal. Trump, once a developer, likes deals that involve tangible real estate. But Putin wants more than land. He wants Ukraine to go back to the relationship it had with the Kremlin during the days when it was part of the Soviet Union. For that to happen, Ukraine would have to lose its independence and sovereignty.

Biden offered Ukraine enough not to lose, because he took Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons if Nato intervened seriously. Trump must be aware of nuclear danger, but he also believes backing Ukraine indefinitely is a bad deal for the US, and he can do better.

As for the Europeans, he might force them to face up to the gross disparity between their military promises to Ukraine and their military capabilities. Only Poland and the Baltic states are backing their public statements about the threat from Russia with qualitatively increased defence spending.

With Russia grinding forward on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, this is the toughest moment Zelensky will have faced since the dark and desperate first months of the war, when Ukraine fought off Russia’s attack on Kyiv.

It is also a moment of decision for his western allies. They face tough choices that cannot be put off much longer.

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A year into their relationship, Jess and Nate got engaged next to the sea. “It was a golden, sandy beach – empty and secluded,” says Jess, 26. “It was just us two there, so it was really intimate.”

Except that the couple were actually hundreds of miles apart – and they were role-playing their engagement in the video game World of Warcraft.

Nate, 27, was living just outside London – and Jess was in Wales. After meeting briefly at an esports event in Germany in March 2023, the pair developed a long-distance relationship, playing the game together “from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to bed”, says Nate.

The couple still play the game daily, even though they’ve been living together in Manchester since March 2024. And they know other couples who have found their partners through video games: “It’s a different way of meeting someone,” says Jess. “You both have such a strong mutual love for something already, it’s easier to fall in love.”

Nate agrees. “I was able to build a lot more of a connection with people I meet in gaming than I ever was able to in a dating app.”

Nate and Jess are not alone. According to some experts, people of their generation are moving away from dating apps and finding love on platforms that were not specifically designed for romance.

And hanging out somewhere online that’s instead focused on a shared interest or hobby could allow people to find a partner in a lower-stakes, less pressurised setting than marketing themselves to a gallery of strangers. For some digital-native Gen Zs, it seems, simply doing the things they enjoy can be an alternative to the tyranny of the swipe.

Since it first appeared with the launch of match.com 30 years ago, online dating has fundamentally altered our relationships. Around 10% of heterosexual people and 24% of LGBT people have met their long-term partner online, according to Pew Research Center.

But evidence suggests that young people are switching off dating apps, with the UK’s top 10 seeing a fall of nearly 16%, according to a report published by Ofcom in November 2024. Tinder lost 594,000 users, while Hinge dropped by 131,000, Bumble by 368,000 and Grindr by 11,000, the report said (a Grindr spokesperson said they were “not familiar with this study’s source data” and that their UK users “continue to rise year over year”).

According to a 2023 Axios study of US college students and other Gen Zers, 79% said they were forgoing regular dating app usage. And in its 2024 Online Nation report, Ofcom said: “Some analysts speculate that for younger people, particularly Gen Z, the novelty of dating apps is wearing off.” In a January 2024 letter to shareholders, Match Group Inc – which owns Tinder and Hinge – acknowledged younger people were seeking “a lower pressure, more authentic way to find connections”.

“The idea of using a shared interest to meet someone isn’t new, but it’s been reinvented in this particular moment in time – it signals a desire of Gen Z,” says Carolina Bandinelli, an associate professor at Warwick University whose research focuses on the digital technologies of romance.

According to Danait Tesfay, 26, a marketing assistant from London, younger people are looking for alternatives to dating apps, “whether that be gaming or running clubs or extra-curricular clubs, where people are able to meet other like-minded people and eventually foster a romantic connection”.

At the same time that membership of some dating apps appears to be in decline, platforms based around common interests are attracting more users. For instance, the fitness app Strava now has 135m users – and its monthly active users grew by 20% last year, according to the company. Other so-called “affinity-based” sites have seen similar growth: Letterboxd, where film fans can share reviews, says its community grew by 50% last year.

And just as in the pre-internet age, when couples might have met at a sports club or the cinema, now singletons are able to find each other in their online equivalents.

“People have always bonded over shared interests, but it’s been given a digital spin with these online communities,” says Luke Brunning, co-director of the Centre for Love, Sex, and Relationships (CLSR) at the University of Leeds.

“It’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between behaviour that’s on a dating app and dating behaviour on another platform.”

Hobby apps are taking on some features of social media, too: in 2023, Strava introduced a messaging feature letting users chat directly. One twenty-something from London explains that her friends use it as a way to flirt with people they fancy, initially by liking a running route they’ve posted on the platform. Strava says its data shows that one in five of its active Gen Z members has been on a date with someone they met through fitness clubs.

“[Online] fitness communities are becoming big places to find partners,” says Nichi Hodgson, the author of The Curious History of Dating. She says a friend of hers met his partner that way, and they’re now living together.

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The same appears to apply to Letterboxd, too. With users including Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, it’s a popular platform for younger people – two-thirds of members in a survey of 5,000 were under 34.

The company says it’s aware of several couples meeting through the app, including one who bonded over a shared love of David Fincher’s opinion-dividing 2020 drama Mank. “It could be that seeing other people’s film tastes reveals an interesting aspect of themselves,” says Letterboxd co-founder Matthew Buchanan.

So what might be driving this? While dating apps initially appeared to offer “the illusion of choice”, and a transparent, efficient way to meet partners, the reality for many has often proven to be different. The Pew Research Center found that 46% of dating-app users said their experiences were overall very or somewhat negative.

The recent decline in user numbers might also be a response to the way some apps are structured – in particular, the swipe feature for selecting potential partners, launched by Tinder in 2013 and widely copied.

Its creator, Jonathan Badeen, was partly inspired by studying the 1940s experiments of psychologist BF Skinner, who conditioned hungry pigeons to believe that food delivered randomly into a tray was prompted by their movements.

Eventually, the swipe mechanism faced a backlash. “Ten years ago, people were enthusiastic and would talk quite openly about what apps they were on,” says Ms Hodgson. “Now the Tinder model is dead with many young people – they don’t want to swipe any more.”

According to Mr Brunning, the gameifying interface of many dating apps is a turn-off. “Intimacy is made simple for you, it’s made fun in the short term, but the more you play, the more you feel kind of icky.”

The pandemic may have had an impact, too, says Prof Brian Heaphy at the University of Manchester, who has studied dating-app use in and after the lockdowns: “During Covid, dating apps themselves became more like social media – because people couldn’t meet up, they were looking for different things.”

Although that didn’t last after the pandemic, it “gave people a sense that it could be different from just swiping and getting no responses – all the negatives of dating-app culture,” says Prof Heaphy.

And in that context, the fact that video games or online communities like Strava or Letterboxd aren’t designed for dating can be appealing. By attracting users for a broader range of reasons, there’s less pressure on each interaction.

“Those apps aren’t offering a commercialised form of romance, so they can seem more authentic,” says Prof Heaphy.

It’s a type of connection free from the burden of expectation. A different couple who met on World of Warcraft – and go by the names Wochi and PurplePixel – weren’t looking for love. “I definitely didn’t go into an online game trying to find a partner,” says Wochi.

But although initially in opposing teams, or guilds, their characters started a conversation. “We spent all night talking until the early hours of the morning, and by the end of the night, I’d actually left my guild and joined his guild,” says PurplePixel. Within three years, Wochi had quit his job and moved to the UK from Italy to be with her.

According to Ms Hodgson, “While some dating apps can bring out the worst behaviours, these other online spaces can do the opposite, because people are sharing something they enjoy.”

Because of these structural elements, she doesn’t think the recent decline in numbers is temporary. “It’s going to keep happening until dating apps figure out how to put the human aspect back.”

The dating apps aren’t giving up without a fight, however. Hinge is still “setting up a date every two seconds”, according to a spokesperson; Tinder says a relationship starts every three seconds on its platform and that almost 60% of its users are aged 18-30. In fact, the apps appear to be embracing the shift to shared-interest platforms, launching niche alternatives including ones based around fitness, veganism, dog-ownership or even facial hair.

They’re also evolving to encourage different kinds of interaction. On Breeze, users who agree to be set up on a date aren’t allowed to message each other before they meet; and Jigsaw hides people’s faces, only removing pieces to reveal the full photo after a certain amount of interaction.

It means that it’s premature to proclaim the death of the dating app, believes Prof Heaphy. “There’s now such a diversity of dating apps that the numbers for the biggest ones aren’t the key indicator,” he says. “It might actually be a similar number to before, in terms of overall membership.”

And there’s a downside to people going to more general-interest apps looking for love – people might not want to be hit on when they just want to talk about books. Dating apps, at least, are clear about what their purpose is.

In an increasingly online world, the solution to improving relationships might not simply be to go offline. Instead, apps that can offer an experience which more closely mirrors the best of IRL interactions, while tapping into the possibilities of digital ones, might also show a way forward.

With the imminent integration of AI into dating apps, we are “right on the cusp of something new”, says Mr Brunning. “It’s interesting to see if we’ll end up with specific apps just for dating, or will we end up with something a bit more fluid?”

He points to platforms in China that are more multi-purpose. “People use them for chat, for community, and conduct business on them – they can also be dating platforms, but they’re often not exclusively for that.”

In the meantime, the interactions possible in less mediated communities like World of Warcraft could offer more of a chance to connect than conversations initiated by a swipe.

Jess and Nate’s in-game engagement on the beach might not have been real, but the couple are hoping to change that soon. “It’s a matter of when, really. There are a few things we need to tick off the checklist, and then she’ll be getting her ring,” says Nate. And there’ll still be a gaming element.

“You can role-play getting married,” says Jess. “So it could be funny to get all our friends together at some point in the World of Warcraft cathedral, and we could have a marriage ceremony.”

Parents of four young female Israeli hostages freed from Hamas captivity in Gaza have told the BBC about how their daughters were abused, including being starved, intimidated and threatened by armed men, and forced to cook and clean.

They recounted how the hostages were held in underground tunnels and buildings, witnessed physical abuse and were made to participate in Hamas propaganda videos, including, in one case, by faking her own death.

They said the women found strength through sharing stories, drawing and keeping a diary.

None of the women have given interviews to the media since their release, and their parents say the full details of what they endured are still emerging. There are also things they can’t speak about due to fears it could put the hostages still in Gaza at risk.

Three of the four women whose parents spoke to the BBC were female soldiers kidnapped by Hamas from the Nahal Oz army base near Gaza on 7 October 2023.

The hostages’ access to food and their treatment by male guards varied over the 15 months they were held, their parents said. They were moved between locations, rarely seeing sunlight.

“It was very different between the places that she went – it could be a good tunnel, it could be a very bad tunnel. It could be a good house or a bad house,” said the father of Agam Berger, 20, a soldier who had been at Nahal Oz.

Some of the places had good food, some had “very bad food… they just tried to survive,” Shlomi Berger said.

“They [and their captors] had to run away from one place to another because they are in a war zone there. It was very dangerous to be there,” said Orly Gilboa, whose daughter Daniella was also kidnapped from the base.

When Daniella watched the release of three male hostages last week – who came out thin and emaciated – she told her mother: “If I had been released two months ago I would have probably looked like them.”

“She got thinner, she lost a lot of her weight through the captivity. But in the last two months they were given a lot of food to gain weight,” Ms Gilboa says.

Other parents have also reported significant weight loss. Meirav Leshem Gonen’s daughter was taken by Hamas from the Nova music festival.

Romi, 24, was released in the first week of the ceasefire in January – she had lost “20% of her body weight”, says her mother.

Ms Gilboa says the hardest thing she endured was seeing a video that suggested her daughter had been killed. Her captors poured powder on her so she looked like she was covered in plaster, as if she was killed in an Israeli military strike.

“I think everyone who saw it believed it, but I just kept telling myself that it can’t be,” she told the BBC.

The war was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, when gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage.

More than 48,230 people have been killed in Gaza since, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. About two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged, estimates the UN.

So far, 16 Israeli and five Thai hostages have been exchanged for more than 600 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel under the ceasefire deal that began on 19 January.

Mr Berger says his daughter, Agam, was threatened by her captors and witnessed physical abuse while in captivity.

“Sometimes they tortured other female hostages in front of her eyes,” he says, referring specifically to an assault on Amit Soussana, a former hostage who was released in November 2023.

Mr Berger says his daughter told him how they were constantly watched over by armed men, “playing all the time with their guns and their hand grenades”.

He says the male captors treated the women with “big disrespect”, including forcing them to clean and prepare food.

“That was really bothering her. She’s a girl that if she has something to say, she’ll say it. She’s not shy. And sometimes she told them what she was thinking about them and their behaviour,” he says.

He adds that in a small act of resistance, Agam had refused to perform any jobs on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest. The men detaining her accepted this.

They were also not allowed to speak loudly.

“When Agam came [back to Israel] she wanted to speak all the time… After a day, she had no voice because she’d spoken so much,” Mr Berger says.

Yoni Levy, whose daughter Naama, 20, was also taken from the army base, says she was sometimes held in locations where there was a TV or radio playing.

Once, Naama saw her father talking on TV. “It gave her a lot of hope and optimism… that nobody would forget her, and we’ll do whatever is needed to take her out of this hell.”

He says for Naama, the Hamas attack on the army base was “was much more traumatic than the captivity itself”.

“It may change but at this stage we think that this is the most tragic day that she’s talked about,” Mr Levy says.

Footage of Naama that day shows her and other female soldiers in bloodstained clothing surrounded by armed men in a room at the base before being forced into a vehicle and taken to Gaza.

The three female soldiers whose parents spoke to the BBC are among five from an all-women unarmed military unit at Nahal Oz freed in the first round of the ceasefire.

Members of the unit, known in Hebrew as Tatzpitaniyot, are tasked with observing the Gaza border and looking for signs of anything suspicious. Survivors and relatives of some of those killed that day say that they had been warning for months that Hamas had been preparing for an attack.

A few days before the 7 October attack, Daniella had been at home on a break from service. She had told her mother then: “Mummy, when I go back to the army, there’s going to be a war.”

“I didn’t think it was going to be such a war and of course that my daughter would be taken hostage,” Ms Gilboa says.

Ms Gilboa and the families of the two other observers who spoke to the BBC say they are joining calls for an inquiry into what happened.

They say their daughters remain concerned about the conditions of those still in Gaza and have called for the ceasefire to continue.

Meanwhile, Ms Leshem Gonen says she is still learning what happened to her daughter Romi.

She was shot at the Nova music festival and her mother says she was not properly treated, leaving her with “an open wound where she could see the bone”.

“This is something we can know and that she speaks about. The other things, I think it will take time.”

Ms Leshem Gonen says Romi described her release in the first week of the truce as “intimidating” and “frightening”. She was surrounded by gunmen and crowds. But the moment of their reunion was “so powerful”.

The parents also described how their daughters had found ways to get through each day in captivity – through drawing, making notes or sharing stories with each other.

“They wrote as much as they could, every day – what was happening, where were they moving, who were the guards and things like that,” says Mr Berger.

While in captivity, the young women had dreamt about the things they wanted to do when they got home: getting a haircut and eating sushi.

Daniella had drawn a butterfly with the word “freedom” while in captivity – she now has that tattooed on her arm.

They are adapting to life back in Israel, and their families say they are taking the recovery step by step.

The moment of reunion with his daughter Naama is still a blur, says Mr Levy, but he remembers the emotion.

“The feeling was that… I will take care of you now, and everything’s going to be OK. Daddy’s here. That’s all. And then everything was quiet.”