“I have no plans for the future at all,” says Oleksandr Bezhan, standing next to an empty, frozen paddock where he used to work as a fisherman on the bank of the Dnipro river in southern Ukraine. “If I wake up in the morning, that’s already pretty good.”

Malokaterynivka sits just 15km (9 miles) north of the front line in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.

If US President Donald Trump succeeds in halting the war, Malokaterynivka is hoping to end up on the right side of that front line.

I last visited this area in 2023, when Ukraine launched a much-anticipated counter-offensive.

At the time, Ukrainians dared to dream of winning this war. They had, after all, won the battle of Kyiv and liberated swathes of territory elsewhere.

But 18 months on, thunder-like artillery exchanges reflect the failure of that operation, and Russia’s dominance.

The front line here is broadly in the same place – but the broad expanse of river has gone.

When the Russian-occupied Kakhovka dam downstream was destroyed, this became a vast, uninterrupted expanse of scrubland.

The barren surroundings reflect the frozen limbo in which Ukraine finds itself. The White House wants to end the war, but it’s not as simple as blowing a full-time whistle.

“If the front line becomes a border, it would be scary… fighting could break out at any moment,” explains Oleksandr.

The exposed riverbed separates our location from Russian-occupied territory. Distant sunlight bounces off the metallic Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, in Moscow’s grip since 2022.

Ukraine and the US both want peace, but that is where the consensus seems to end.

Washington’s vision of it, along with battlefield realities, means Russia will probably keep hold of the Ukrainian land it’s seized.

Ukraine wants meaningful security guarantees that would prevent invading forces from pushing across the river.

Instead, Trump has denied Kyiv’s dream of joining the Nato alliance as he focuses on Russia.

Having watched and reported on Ukraine’s fight for more than three years, it is an especially tough hand for the country to receive.

There are feelings of betrayal. Commentators criticise either Ukrainian President Zelensky or the new foreign policy of its biggest ally.

“The border wouldn’t depend on us,” says Oleksandr. “It probably won’t work out, but Seoul is 30km from North Korea, and they somehow live and prosper.”

Malokaterynivka’s challenge of finding a new purpose lies at the heart of Ukraine’s future.

And while politicians talk about talks, Ukrainians continue to fight and die.

Villagers gather for the funeral of a local soldier, also named Oleksandr. Half of the graves in the cemetery are freshly dug.

The ceremony cannot last more than 25 minutes because of the threat of artillery. Mourners flinch and duck for cover when his comrades fire off a gun salute.

“I don’t have hope for a ceasefire,” says his widow Natalya, who nevertheless wants to be proved wrong.

“They just keep sending more and more of our boys to the front. If only they could find some way to end it.”

Alongside the river is a disused rail line surrounded by barbed wire.

“It’s to stop Russian agents from sabotaging the track,” explains Lyudmyla Volyk, who has lived in Malokaterynivka her whole life.

Trains used to run all the way to Crimea in the south.

“We hope that one day it will be restored,” says the 65-year-old, optimistically. “And that one day we’ll go to our Crimea.”

The peninsula’s 11 years of Russian occupation makes it hard to imagine.

President Zelensky insists he won’t sign any agreement which doesn’t include Ukraine, so does Lyudmyla trust him to get a deal which protects her?

“We want to believe,” she replies after a deep breath.

If Trump does bring peace to Ukraine, it would be welcomed in many quarters.

The prospect of uninterrupted nights, sirens falling silent and soldiers returning home is yearned for.

But as things stand, any relief would quickly be swamped by the unanswered questions of how a ceasefire would hold and who would enforce it.

Kyiv will see this absence of detail as something still to play for. The problem for Ukraine, is that so will Russia.

South Korean football player Hwang Ui-jo has been handed a suspended one-year jail term for illegally filming his sexual encounters with a woman, Yonhap News Agency reported.

The 32-year-old, a former Norwich City and Nottingham Forest striker, now plays for the Turkish club Alanyaspor. He also plays for the South Korea national team but was suspended in 2023 amid the allegations.

The Seoul court said that “given the seriousness of the socially harmful effects of illegal filming, it is necessary to punish [Hwang] strictly”.

However, it noted Hwang had shown remorse and the videos were posted on social media by a third party.

Hwang had said he was “deeply sorry” for causing “disappointment” during his first court appearance last December.

The videos came to light after Hwang’s sister-in-law shared them on social media last June, in an attempt to blackmail him.

She was sentenced to three years in prison in September for the blackmail after Hwang sued her.

However, the charges against him proceeded as prosecutors said he filmed sexual encounters with two women without their consent on four occasions in 2022.

He had initially claimed innocence, but pleaded guilty to illegal filming charges last October.

He was convicted of the charges related to one woman but acquitted of those related to the other.

Hidden cameras designed to secretly film women and their sexual encounters are a nationwide problem in South Korea.

Over the past decade, thousands have been arrested for filming voyeuristic images and videos, sparking fear and anger among women across the country.

Hamas has released the names of three hostages due to be freed on Saturday in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israel, after days of fears over the future of the ceasefire.

They are Russian-Israeli Alexander Troufanov, Argentine-Israeli Yair Horn, and US-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen.

Israel has said it will resume bombing if the three are not released on time. The warning came after Hamas said it was postponing the releases in response to alleged Israeli violations of the ceasefire.

President Trump said the ceasefire should be scrapped if Hamas did not release all the hostages held in Gaza by midday on Saturday.

• Hamas hostages: Stories of the people taken from Israel

Since the ceasefire began on 19 January, 16 Israeli and five Thai hostages have been released in exchange for 766 prisoners.

During the first six-week phase of the ceasefire, a total of 33 hostages should be freed in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israel.

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

More than 48,230 people have been killed by the Israel offensive in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

There are 73 hostages taken on 7 October who are still being held in Gaza. There are also three other Israeli hostages – one of whom is dead – who have been held in Gaza for a decade or more.

Alexander Troufanov, 29, Yair Horn, 46, and Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, were all seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz on the edge of Gaza.

The ceasefire has been under strain since it began, with each side taking reciprocal action over alleged violations. Intense efforts by mediators US, Egypt and Qatar have managed to stop it from collapsing.

Israel has been especially infuriated by the staged way hostages have been released – publicly displayed on platforms alongside gunmen and in front of crowds of spectators, before being handed over to the Red Cross in chaotic scenes.

For its part, Hamas has accused Israel of preventing what the group says are the amount of tents and aid lorries required to be let into Gaza under the terms of the ceasefire. Israel denies this.

Meanwhile the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) published video of what it said was a rocket fired at Israel from Gaza on Thursday. It said the rocket failed and landed inside Gaza. A source in the Hamas-run police said the rocket was an unexploded Israeli ordinance that had fired into the air while it was being moved away, Reuters news agency reported.

West Bank-based Palestinian news agency Wafa said a 14-year-old boy, Hammoudeh Alaa Saud, was killed the same day by what it said was Israeli ordnance which blew up in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp.

A Russian drone attack has hit the radiation shelter protecting Chernobyl’s damaged nuclear reactor, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

The overnight strike at the nuclear plant, which is the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, caused a fire that has since been extinguished, he added.

As of Friday morning, radiation levels inside and outside Chernobyl remain normal and stable according to the UN’s nuclear watchdog (the IAEA).

Russia has denied any claims it attacked Chernobyl, stating its military does not strike Ukrainian nuclear infrastructure and “any claims that this was the case do not correspond to reality”.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors nuclear safety around the world, said fire safety personnel and vehicles responded within minutes to an overnight explosion. No casualties were reported, the agency added.

The agency remains on “high alert” after the incident, with its director general Rafael Mariano Grossi saying there is “no room for complacency”.

In 1986, a catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl sent a plume of radioactive material into the air, triggering a public health emergency across Europe.

Zelensky posted footage on X appearing to show damage to the giant shield, made of concrete and steel, which covers the remains of the reactor that lost its roof in the explosion.

The shield is designed to prevent further radioactive material leaking out over the next century. It measures 275m (900ft) wide and 108m (354ft) tall and cost $1.6bn (£1.3bn) to construct.

Since 1990, Prof Jim Smith from the UK’s University of Portsmouth has studied the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and, while he admits the strike was a “horrendous attack on a very important structure” he is “not concerned” about the radiation risk.

Prof Smith told the BBC a thick concrete “sarcophagus” below the damaged outer shield covers radioactive particles and dust from the explosion.

Simon Evans from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) was head of the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, which oversaw the construction of the protective dome in the 2010s.

He described the apparent strike as “an incredibly reckless attack on a vulnerable nuclear facility”.

The shield “was never built to withstand external drone attack”, he told the BBC.

Instead, it is a “complex piece of decommissioning kit” built to contain the radioactive materials inside and to help safely deconstruct the broken reactor.

The strike appeared to hit the maintenance system of a crane designed to remotely take the reactor apart, he said.

There appears to be “pretty serious” damage to the outer and inner cladding, he added. But a fuller assessment of the damage will be needed before the bank can determine its costs.

Mr Evans said the mission to build the shelter was the “world’s largest ever collaboration on nuclear safety”, with more than 40 counties coming together to find a long-term solution to deal with the destroyed reactor.

“Ever since the start of the war, it’s been tragic to see that international co-operation undermined by reckless acts,” he added.

Zelensky claimed the attack shows Russian President Vladimir Putin is “definitely not preparing for negotiations”, after US President Donald Trump said Putin had agreed to begin talks to end the war in a surprise announcement this week.

The incident at Chernobyl comes after increased military activity around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine, the IAEA said.

In December, Ukraine and Russia accused each other of launching a drone attack on a convoy of vehicles transporting IAEA experts heading to the Zaporizhzhia plant, which is Europe’s largest nuclear station.

IAEA head Rafael Grossi condemned that attack on his staff as “unacceptable”, stressing that the agency was “working to prevent a nuclear accident during the military conflict”.

The agency last year urged restraint when an attack on Zaporizhzhia raised the risk of a “major nuclear incident”. Russia and Ukraine traded blame over the attack in August.

“I’m more concerned about Zaporizhzhia than Chernobyl,” Prof Smith told the BBC.

“The reactors [at Zaporizhzhia] are currently shut down but there is more live fuel there. Chernobyl is still very radioactive, but it’s not in a ‘hot state’ because of its age.”

The number of people who died in the Chernobyl disaster remains disputed.

According to the official, internationally recognised death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster.

In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure.

Despite the hype, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to Washington under Donald Trump’s second term was a sober, business-first affair – unsurprising for a working visit, which lacks the pomp of a state visit.

Trump announced expanded US military sales to India from 2025, including F-35 jets, along with increased oil and gas exports to narrow the trade deficit. Both sides agreed to negotiate a trade deal and finalise a new defence framework.

He also confirmed the US had approved the extradition of Tahawwur Rana, a Chicago businessman accused of playing a role in the 2008 terror attack in Mumbai.

“That’s a lot of deliverables for an administration less than a month old,” Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute in Washington told the BBC

“Overall, both sides seem comfortable continuing Biden-era collaborations, particularly in tech and defence, though many will be rebranded under Trump.”

Still, major challenges lie ahead. Here are the key takeaways:

Modi’s visit came 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. He ordered advisers to draft broad new tariffs on US trade partners, warning they could take effect by 1 April.

India enjoys a trade surplus with the US, its top trading partner. India cut average tariffs from 13% to 11% in its federal budget in a bid to pre-empt Trump’s tariff moves.

The jury is out on whether India appears to have dodged tariff shocks for now.

Ajay Srivastava, founder of the Delhi-based think tank Global Trade Research Institute (GTRI), says he doesn’t see any “problems with tariffs”.

The main reason, he says, is that 75% of the US exports to India attract import taxes of less than 5%.

“Trump points to extreme outlier tariffs like 150% on select items, but that’s not the norm. India has little reason to fear reciprocal tariffs,” Mr Srivastava told the BBC.

Abhijit Das, former head of the Centre for WTO Studies at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, isn’t convinced.

“The devil lies in the details. Reciprocal tariffs won’t just mirror India’s import taxes -other factors will come into play,” he told the BBC.

Trump’s approach could go beyond import duties, factoring in value added tax (VAT), non-tariff barriers and trade restrictions. While India’s goods and services tax (GST) on imported goods aligns with WTO rules, Trump may still use it to justify higher tariffs.

A US government memo on reciprocal tariffs hints at this strategy, citing costs to American businesses from non-tariff barriers, subsidies and burdensome regulations abroad. It also cites VAT and government procurement restrictions as non-tariff barriers.

Mr Das says the US is expected to push for access to India’s government procurement market, which is currently protected under WTO rules.

“This will hamper India’s ability to prioritise domestic producers, posing a direct challenge to the ‘Make in India’ initiative. This is certainly not good news for us.”

Mr Das suggests that India should counter Trump’s reciprocal tariff logic, particularly in agriculture where the US imposes strict non-tariff barriers that restrict Indian exports such as stiff maximum residue limits on chemicals.

He argues that since the US “heavily subsidises” its farm sector, India should highlight these subsidies to push back against American claims.

Tariffs alone may not help bridge the trade deficit between the two countries. Defence and energy purchases will go some way in addressing the deficit, experts say.

The new $500bn (£400bn) trade goal aims to more than double the $190bn trade between the two countries in 2023.

Modi and Trump committed to negotiating the first phase of a trade agreement by autumn 2025. Talks will focus on market access, tariff reductions and supply chain integration across goods and services.

“The announcement that the two sides will pursue a trade deal gives India an opportunity to negotiate for reduced tariffs on both sides. That would be a boon not only for the US-India relationship, but also for an Indian economy that’s sputtered in recent months,” says Mr Kugelman.

What is not clear is what kind of trade deal the both sides will be aiming at.

“What is this trade agreement? Is it a full blown free trade agreement or is it a reciprocal tariff deal?” wonders Mr Srivastava.

Mr Das believes we’ll have to wait for details on the trade agreement.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean a free trade deal – if that were the case, it would have been stated explicitly. It could simply involve tariff reductions on select products of mutual interest.”

Priyanka Kishore, principal economist at the Singapore-based consultancy firm, Asia Decoded, says $500bn is a “tall target but there are low hanging fruit we can immediately exploit”.

“For instance the US sanctions on Russian shadow fleet are soon going to kick in, so India can easily pivot to the US for more oil. This will not be too difficult.”

Trump said at the joint press conference that the US would hopefully become India’s number one supplier of oil and gas.

India’s defence trade with the US has surged from near zero to $20 billion, making the US its third-largest arms supplier.

While Russia remains India’s top source, its share has dropped from 62% to 34% (2017-2023) as India shifts toward US procurement.

In a major announcement to deepen defence ties, Trump said the US would increase military equipment sales to India “by many billions of dollars starting this year” ultimately paving the way to providing the F-35 stealth warplanes.

But this will be easier said than done, say experts.

“This sounds good, but it may be a case of putting the cart before the horse,” says Mr Kugelman.

Despite rising US arms sales to India, bureaucratic hurdles and export controls limit the transfer of sensitive technologies, he says. The new defence framework announced at the summit may help address these challenges.

Also India isn’t “taking the F-35 offer seriously” due to high maintenance demands, says strategic affairs expert Ajai Shukla.

Shukla notes that US arms deals come with challenges – private firms prioritise profit over long-term partnerships.

Yet with delays and cost overruns affecting some of India’s arms deals with Russia, Delhi’s defence ties with the US look set to deepen.

Modi met Tesla CEO Elon Musk to discuss AI and emerging tech, India’s foreign ministry said.

It’s unclear if they addressed Musk’s stalled plans for Starlink’s India launch or Tesla’s market entry.

Musk has pushed for direct spectrum allocation, clashing with Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, who favours auctions. His licence remains under review.

India is also courting Tesla to set up a car factory, cutting EV import taxes for automakers committing $500m and local production within three years. Tesla has yet to confirm its plans.

In a rare move, Modi joined Trump at a press conference, answering two questions – on illegal immigration and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) bribery charges against the Adani Group.

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, accused of close ties with Modi, was charged with fraud in the US last November over an alleged $250m bribery scheme.

Modi said he hadn’t discussed the issue with Trump. On immigration, he stated India was ready to take back verified illegal Indian migrants.

This was only Modi’s third direct press Q&A in his almost 11-year tenure as India’s prime minister. He has never held a solo press conference. In 2019 he sat beside then party president Amit Shah as Shah answered all the questions and in 2023, he took just two questions alongside former President Joe Biden.

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.

• What does Trump’s executive order mean for TikTok and who might buy it?
• TikTok restores service in US after Trump pledge
• Legal showdown looms as Trump tests limits of presidential power

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 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.

A woman in Japan has been arrested for allegedly squashing a bun at a convenience store and leaving without buying the packet of bread.

Authorities in the southern city of Fukuoka confirmed to the BBC that the 40-year-old had been arrested on Monday for “criminal damage”.

The woman, who said she was unemployed, claimed she “only checked the firmness of [the bun] by pressing lightly with my hand”, according to police.

The woman had allegedly touched a bag of four black sesame and cream cheese buns. While the bag’s wrapper was intact, police said one of the buns was damaged after she pressed it with her right thumb, and the entire bag could not be sold.

Police said the owner of the Lawson convenience store had claimed he had seen the woman squashing buns several times in the past.

As the woman was leaving the shop on Monday, the owner noticed the bun was damaged and he urged her to pay for the bread, according to police. The bag of buns cost about 180 yen (£0.95; $1.20).

She allegedly refused. After following her for 1km (0.6mi), the manager restrained her. The police were called to the scene and they arrested her.

In recent years, police have been also cracking down on pranksters who have committed “sushi terrorism” in sushi conveyor belt restaurants, such as licking communal soy sauce bottles and squashing sushi meant for diners.

Infant mortality rates have increased in US states which have enacted abortion bans following the landmark ruling overturning the nationwide right for women to access the procedure, a new study has found.

Researchers estimate there were an estimated 478 infant deaths across 14 states with bans or heavy restrictions on the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy – which they say would not have occurred had they not been in place.

Alison Gemmill, co-leader of the study, said “restrictive abortion policies” could be “reversing decades of progress” in reducing infant deaths across the US.

In its 2022 ruling, the US Supreme Court reversed its 50-year-old Roe v Wade decision which had protected a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy up until the point of foetal viability, around the 24th week.

The study, published this week by researchers from the John Hopkin’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, found an increase in mortality rates for babies born with congenital issues, as well as among groups where death rates already were higher than average.

This included black infants, as well as for babies whose parents were unmarried, younger, did not attend college, and for those living in southern states.

As of January 2025, 17 states have outlawed nearly all abortions, though some have narrow exceptions for cases of rape, incest or the health of the mother.

States with some form of total abortion ban are Idaho, Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

Florida, Georgia, Iowa and South Carolina ban the procedure beyond six weeks of pregnancy.

Meanwhile, there are bans in place in Nebraska and North Carolina for procedures after 12 weeks, while it is 18 weeks in Utah.

In the states which opted to enact the new laws, infant mortality rates increased to 6.26 per 1,000 live births, compared with an expected rate of 5.93 per 1,000 – a relative increase of 5.6%.

In the UK, the infant mortality rate is estimated at around 3.8 per 1,000 live births. Slovenia, Singapore and Iceland have among the world’s lowest infant mortality rates, at between 1.5-1.6 deaths per 1,000 live births.

Afghanistan currently has the world’s highest rate, with an estimated 101.3 deaths every 1,000 live births.

The study also found an increase in the number of infant deaths in the US from congenital anomalies, rising from an expected 1.24 per 1,000 live births to 1.37 per 1,000 – a relative increase of 10.87%.

Mortality from other causes rose to 4.89 per 1,000 from an expected 4.69, a 4.23% increase.

Among non-Hispanic black infants, there were 11.81 deaths per 1,000 live births after the bans, compared to an expected rate of 10.66 per 1,000, an increase of nearly 11%.

According to the research, the increase in infant mortality due to congenital malformations was consistent with women being denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies – where a pregnancy cannot possibly result in a liveborn baby.

But the increase due to non-congenital causes “is less straightforward”, researchers say.

The study also found the ban may be disproportionately impacting disadvantaged populations who are already at a higher risk of infant mortality as well as delays in receiving medical care.

Separate research from John Hopkin’s Bloomberg School of Public Health found that abortion bans were also linked to increased fertility rates.

Following the overturning of Roe v Wade, which returned control over the procedure back to individual states, researchers found that the number of births per 1,000 reproductive-aged females in affected states rose by 1.7%, or 22,180.

The estimated differences in fertility were largest in states with among the “worst maternal and child health outcomes”, the research suggested.

Hollywood may be known as Tinseltown, a dream factory at the heart of the global entertainment industry. But nowadays crews are more likely to film in Atlanta, London, Toronto or Sydney than in Los Angeles.

Cheaper labour and better tax breaks have lured producers away from the City of Angels for years. The wildfires, which killed at least 29 people and destroyed thousands of homes, have only added to this existential crisis.

Now, many here are calling on the state – and studios and streaming services – to boost local production.

“The best thing the studios could do for fire relief is to bring work back for the rank and file LA film workers,” says Mark Worthington, a production designer whose home burned down in Altadena.

“That’s what we want.”

Mr Worthington had already been struggling to cope with the city’s downturn, noting he hadn’t set foot on an LA set in two years. Covid, labour strikes, and the inevitable end of the streaming boom had led many producers to try and save costs by skipping town – sometimes leaving the country altogether.

• Why Hollywood’s big boom has gone bust

Productions in the US decreased 26% last year compared to pre-strike levels in 2022, according to ProdPro, which tracks global production. In Australia and New Zealand, production was up 14% and in the UK it was up nearly 1%, with Canada up 2.8%.

The loss clearly stings. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are a band synonymous with Los Angeles, with many love songs to the City of Angels. But a biopic about the band is being filmed in Atlanta, Georgia – which has become a major production hub due to its lucrative tax breaks – not LA.

Before the fires, “Survive until ’25” had become a kind of mantra for Mr Worthington and other filmmakers who hoped for a turnaround of fortune. Instead, their city went up in flames.

“It’s crushing in terms of how you see yourself as a creative individual and just as a person, and then on top of that to have these fires,” Mr Worthington says. “This is adding a horrible other thing to pile on top of all the other difficulties and our own work situation over the last couple years.”

Hollywood’s studios and streaming services have donated more than $70m (£56m) to fire relief efforts and have turned the glitzy awards season parties and red carpets typical this time of year into major fundraisers.

Many say these efforts are not enough and that Hollywood’s biggest companies need to commit to filming in LA.

But studios don’t often make business decisions based on the greater good of workers in one city – ultimately, they care about the bottom line. The reality is LA is expensive and the vast majority of industry jobs here are union protected – so they come with high salaries and expensive health care and pensions.

Studios are, however, very responsive to A-list actors.

Megastar Vin Diesel helped ensure Universal Pictures would finish filming the latest Fast and Furious movie in Los Angeles.

“LA really, really, really needs production to help rebuild,” Diesel said in an Instagram post.

“Los Angeles is where Fast and Furious started filming 25 years ago… and now Fast will finally return home.”

Nearly 20,000 people – including actors Keanu Reeves, Zooey Deschanel and Kevin Bacon – have signed a “Stay in LA” petition urging the state’s leaders to temporarily remove caps on production tax incentives for LA County.

It’s part of a grassroots campaign started by director Sarah Adina Smith and other filmmakers who want California to use its emergency powers to boost tax incentives for the next three years to make filming in LA more affordable and help heal Los Angeles. They also want studios to commit to making 10% more productions in Los Angeles.

“We need to bring production back to LA and get LA working again if we want to rebuild,” says Ms Smith.

Before the fires, California Gov Newsom had already proposed to more than double the tax credit the state offers to producers of films and TV shows that shoot in California – changing the annual credit from $330m to $750m, but that must be approved by the state legislature and might not come into effect until the summer.

He says the incentives are good for the economy and that California’s programme has generated more than $26bn in economic activity and supported more than 197,000 cast and crew jobs across the state.

If passed, the subsidy would be the most generous offered by any US state except Georgia, which doesn’t have a cap on the amount it gives to productions per year. Stay in LA wants the cap lifted now.

President Donald Trump has also said he plans to make Hollywood great again with the help of actors Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, who have been tapped to be “special ambassadors” for “troubled Hollywood”.

It’s not yet clear what they have in mind – they did not agree to an interview – but several executives said the instability caused by the Trump administration’s trade wars make risk-averse Hollywood studios nervous. The Canadian dollar recently hit 22-year lows making Canada even more attractive to Hollywood.

On a rainy day more than a month after the fires, Mr Worthington, the production designer, and his partner Mindy Elliott, a film editor, inspected the remains of their home, wishing they’d taken some of their art when they evacuated. They marvelled that a cactus was regrowing next to where their SUV had melted.

“If only we’d had this rain in January,” says Ms Elliott.

Although he is critical that the tax breaks amount to “corporate welfare” for behemoth companies, Mr Worthington says they are a necessary evil if LA wants to compete – both Australia and the UK now have more lucrative tax breaks than California.

Ms Smith, the co-founder of Stay in LA, likens the decline of Hollywood productions to the fall of Detroit, whose once formidable automotive industry collapsed, leaving much of the city desolate and impoverished.

“Once you ruin that infrastructure and that legacy, it’s not so easy to build it back again,” she says. “If we let Hollywood die, it could be for good.”

Others think it’s naïve to think that any incentives will usher in a new Golden Age of Hollywood.

Pointing out the melted remains of what used to be his piano and his drum set in the music studio of his incinerated Topanga Canyon home, composer Matthew Ferraro wipes away tears for what he and his wife have lost.

His once spectacular hilltop home is now rubble and ash and Ferraro says he’s still in shock, consumed with thoughts of where he will sleep on Tuesday, rather than his future in LA.

“I think it’s wishful thinking for people who are still in love with, like yesteryear’s dream of Hollywood, but that’s just not how it works anymore,” says Ferraro, who composed music for The Incredibles and The Minority Report among others.

About a mile away, Jamie Morse’s home also burned. Topanga Canyon has always attracted artists, musicians and dreamers – and Morse had just quit her sensible day job to devote 2025 to making it in Hollywood, working fulltime on her comedic writing and performing.

She laughs when asked about the terrible timing – and says she’s grieving along with everyone else in LA, but remains hopeful.

“Whether they’re performers or studio execs – people love this city,” says Ms Morse, who now sleeps at friends’ homes or in her car with her dog between comedy gigs or classes with her improv troupe, The Groundlings.

Ms Morse wishes she’d taken more sentimental things when she evacuated with her dog, like a Toronto Blue Jays T-shirt which reminded her of her grandfather and her native Canada. But she’s astonished that some of her notebooks and journals survived with some of her comedy writing intact.

“Where an entire stone table is, is in pieces, is like, absolutely decimated, melted,” she said. “But pieces of paper survived… It’s truly unbelievable.”

Does she think it’s fate? A sign that she is meant to make it in Hollywood?

“I’m choosing to believe that this is a sign,” she says, adding that there will be “beautiful, creative things to come out of this very, very crappy time.”

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has hailed a “mega partnership” with the US, as he and US President Donald Trump agreed on a deal for Delhi to import more American oil and gas.

Modi’s two-day visit comes as Trump recently ordered that all the US’ trading partners – including India – should face sweeping reciprocal tariffs.

While both men praised each other’s leadership, Trump criticised India for having some of the highest trade tariffs in the world, calling them a “big problem”.

The Indian leader, seeking to soften impending trade barriers, said he was open to reducing tariffs on US goods, repatriating undocumented Indian nationals and buying military fighter jets from the US.

At a joint news conference, Modi made several references to Trump’s “make America great again” slogan, including his own spin to it: “It’s Make India Great Again – Miga,” Modi said.

“Maga plus Miga…[is a] Mega partnership for prosperity”.

Trump also added that India would be “purchasing a lot of our oil and gas” in an effort to close the trade deficit between both countries.

“They need it. And we have it,” Trump said.

With India already being reliant on imported oil, which it sources from multiple countries, the energy deal with the US “presents a relatively low hanging fruit for both parties”, Radhika Rao, a senior economist at Singapore’s DBS bank told the BBC.

“The US is the largest export market for India’s goods and services, which underscores the administration’s willingness to pre-emptively smoothen trade relations and offer concessions to narrow the bilateral trade deficit that the US runs with India,” she said.

However, “India’s challenge will be to balance its own trade deficit because US oil and gas might be more expensive due to a stronger dollar,” Amitendu Palit, senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies said.

“Reciprocal tariffs are likely to follow on India too at some stage. Hopefully for India, they won’t turn out to be larger than expected,” said Dr Palit.

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

The two also spoke about immigration – another pain point in bilateral relations – with Trump announcing that the US would extradite a man who allegedly plotted 2008 Mumbai terror attack to “face justice in India”.

Modi thanked Trump for allowing the extradition and vowed to accept repatriations of Indian nationals illegally living in the US.

Last week, US deported on a military plane 104 Indians accused of being illegal immigrants, with a video showing deportees in shackles. A second flight is expected to land in India on Saturday.

Indians are one of the largest populations of unauthorised immigrants in the US. They also hold the majority of H-1B visas – a programme that Trump had temporarily banned during his first term and is now coming under fresh scrutiny.

Shortly before his meeting with Modi, Trump had 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.

He acknowledged the risks of his tariff policy but argued the policy would boost American manufacturing and the country would be “flooded with jobs”.

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.”

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.

Earlier this week, he removed exemptions from his 2018 steel and aluminium tariffs.

Tourists in the popular Portuguese city of Albufeira may soon be banned from wandering its streets in swimwear, or face a hefty fine.

The beachside city in the southern Algarve region, a favourite with British holidaymakers, has revised its code of conduct, explicitly prohibiting people from being in a state of partial or complete nudity in public areas.

Under the new plans, anyone wearing a bikini or going without a shirt away from the beach could be fined up to €1,500 (£1,250).

Albufeira joins a relatively long list of European cities with similar laws, including Barcelona, Dubrovnik and Nice.

The city boasts beautiful beaches and a vibrant nightlife, but its reputation as a party destination has damaged Albufeira’s image.

Last year, eight British men were filmed dancing completely naked on a bar in broad daylight on Rua da Oura, Albufeira’s main party strip. The videos went viral and Portuguese police were able to identify the tourists.

It sparked an emergency meeting with the local council, security forces and businesses, and Mayor José Carlos Rolo promised to crack down on “excessive” tourist behaviour.

The proposal document (in Portuguese) states that the “urgent” change is necessary to “preserve Albufeira as a multicultural, family-friendly and safe destination”.

It also bans sex acts in public – another local nuisance.

The rules extend to terraces that can be seen from public spaces, and business operators found to have allowed bad behaviour could also face substantial fines.

The proposal is currently out for public consultation, but could be in place in time for summer.

Pope Francis will be admitted to hospital in Rome to undergo treatment and tests for bronchitis, the Vatican has said.

The 88-year-old will arrive at the Gemelli hospital after his morning audiences on Friday, a short statement said.

The Pope has had bronchitis symptoms for several days and has delegated officials to read his prepared speeches at recent events.

“This morning, after his audiences, Pope Francis will be admitted to the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic for necessary diagnostic tests and to continue hospital treatment for his ongoing bronchitis,” the statement said.

On Wednesday, the Pope asked a priest to read part of his speech because of his difficulties with the illness.

“Let me ask the priest to continue to read, because I cannot yet, with my bronchitis. I hope that next time I can,” the 88-year-old said shortly after starting the speech.

He had also asked aides to read on his behalf at a mass on Sunday and at last Wednesday’s general audience.

He held meetings at his Vatican residence last week in an attempt to rest and recover.

The Pope was treated for bronchitis at the same hospital in March 2023, spending three nights there.

In December the same year, he was forced to cancel his trip to the United Arab Emirates for the COP28 climate summit because of another bout of illness.

The Argentine pontiff has spent nearly 12 years as leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

He has suffered a number of health issues throughout his life, including having part of one of his lungs removed at age 21.

Sir Keir Starmer has reaffirmed the UK will continue to back Ukraine’s “irreversible path” to joining Nato despite leading figures in President Donald Trump’s administration appearing to rule out membership.

The prime minister told Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky he stood by a pledge to support Ukraine’s bid for membership, which was made alongside ex-US president Joe Biden at last year’s Nato summit in Washington.

Sir Keir and Zelensky spoke on the phone ahead of a global leaders’ meeting at the Munich Security Conference.

Sir Keir’s comments are in stark contrast to those of the Trump administration, which has said this week that Nato membership for Ukraine is not a “realistic prospect”.

In a readout of the call, a Downing Street spokeswoman said: “The prime minister began by reiterating the UK’s concrete support for Ukraine, for as long as it’s needed.

“He was unequivocal that there could be no talks about Ukraine, without Ukraine.

“Ukraine needed strong security guarantees, further lethal aid and a sovereign future, and it could count on the UK to step up, he added.

“The prime minister reiterated the UK’s commitment to Ukraine being on an irreversible path to Nato as agreed by allies at the Washington Summit last year.”

The leaders agreed it was an “important moment to demonstrate international unity and support for Ukraine” and “agreed to stay in close contact”, the statement added.

The UK has had to walk a fine line between its support for Kyiv and maintaining good relations with Trump, who this week agreed to open negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin while signalled his willingness to make concessions to Moscow.

Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said restoring Ukraine’s territory to where it was before the first Russian invasion in 2014 is simply “not realistic”.

Speaking at a defence summit in Brussels on Wednesday, Hegseth also downplayed the prospect of Ukraine joining Nato.

His remarks were the clearest indication yet of the Trump administration’s position on the Ukraine war and what a peace plan to end the conflict could involve.

Ukraine has repeatedly called for Nato membership and has rejected ceding territory as part of any peace deal.

Nato’s official position is that Ukraine is on an “irreversible” path to joining the alliance, which was established at a meeting in Washington last year and signed off by Sir Keir and ex-president Biden.

Sir Keir also took a phone call from Trump late on Thursday night, when they discussed “his forthcoming visit to the US”, Number 10 said.

Zelensky has warned Putin is “definitely not preparing for negotiations”, but to “continue deceiving the world” as he appealed for unified pressure from allies on Russia.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy sat down for talks with US Vice President JD Vance on Friday, on the first day of the Munich Security Conference.

Afterwards, Lammy said he was “very encouraged” by their conversations on Ukraine, and he and Vance were in agreement about Kyiv having a seat at the table when it comes to negotiating a peaceful end to the war.

“We share the view that there has to be an enduring peace,” Lammy told Reuters news agency following the meeting.

“There was an agreement that Zelensky and the Ukrainians have to be part of that negotiated deal.”

Lammy said it was “not surprising” that Trump wanted to speak to Putin and Zelensky about negotiations to end the war, but added: “These are just talks at the moment. We are some way from a negotiated peace.”

Earlier in the day, Vance had said he hoped his discussion with Lammy would focus on what they “spoke about a couple of years ago when we met, which is our shared belief that Europe really should take a bigger role in its own security”.

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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”.

• Follow the latest updates from the Munich Security Conference

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.

The US Vice President, JD Vance, Ukraine’s President Zelensky and up to 60 other world leaders and decision-makers are due to convene in Munich over the next three days for the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC).

For nearly two decades now I have been attending and covering this event for the BBC and I cannot think of a year when there has been so much at stake in terms of global security. A senior and highly experienced Western official said this week “this is the most dangerous and contested time I have ever known in my career”.

Why?

Put simply, the current world security order – the catchily named International Rules-based Order – is in danger of crumbling. Some would argue this is already happening.

• Follow the latest updates from the Munich Security Conference

When President Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago it was widely condemned by much – although not all – of the world. Nato, the EU and the West in general reached an extraordinary level of unity in coming together to help Ukraine defend itself, without getting drawn into direct conflict with Russia.

Barring some demurring from Slovakia and Hungary, there was a general consensus that Putin’s invasion must be seen to fail or Nato itself would be critically weakened while Russia would eventually be tempted to invade another neighbouring country, such as Estonia. It was often said that Ukraine should be given whatever it took and for as long as it took in order to secure a lasting peace from a position of strength.

Not any more.

President Trump has effectively pulled the rug out from Ukraine’s negotiating position by conceding, via his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, that restoring Ukraine’s territory to where it was before the first Russian invasion in 2014 is simply “not realistic”.

The US has also dashed Kyiv’s hopes of joining Nato, a key ambition of President Zelensky, and ruled out sending US troops to help protect its borders from the next time Russia decides to invade.

An even greater shock has come with the news that President Trump held an apparently cordial 90-minute phone call with President Putin, thus abruptly ending the West’s three-year freeze in talking to the Russian leader that has been in place since the time of the invasion.

Over the next 72 hours we will be hearing in Munich from President Trump’s team here in Munich what the details of their plan for Ukraine will be. Some of it is still to be worked out after his envoy, retired US Army General Keith Kellogg, travels to Kyiv next week.

But for now, Nato’s unity is badly dented as clearly there is a wide difference of opinion over Ukraine between Washington and Europe. One wants the war to end as quickly as possible, even if it means conceding to many of Moscow’s demands.

The other still believed, at least until this week, that with Russia losing around a thousand battlefield casualties a day and its economy facing dire long-term problems the best way to win a lasting peace would be to keep up the pressure on Moscow until its army was exhausted and it agreed to peace terms more favourable to Ukraine.

That won’t be happening now.

For the Nato alliance, now in its 76th year, there are other worrying cracks starting to appear which will also come in for discussion here at the Munich Security Conference.

Last month President Trump announced he wanted to “buy” Greenland, an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark. When Denmark’s Prime Minister Frederiksen assured her population that “Greenland is not for sale” there followed what was called a “horrendous” phone call from Donald Trump who has not ruled out the use of force to take Greenland.

The idea of one Nato country threatening to seize part of another Nato country’s territory would have been unthinkable up until now. In Greenland’s case there is no justification for it on security grounds since there are more US troops on Greenland than Danish and Copenhagen is happy to agree ways to boost mutual defence for the island.

But even if nothing ever comes of this idea, and most of Scandinavia is dearly hoping that is the case, in some respects the damage has already been done. The message has gone out from the leader of the free world that it’s OK to threaten your neighbours by force if you want their territory.

“It may be,” says Lord Kim Darroch, the former UK national security adviser and British Ambassador to Washington, “that Trump’s threat of economic measures against Nato ally Denmark, and his refusal to rule out military action against them, are just negotiating tactics. But even if nothing comes from it, it’s done great damage. It’s another signal of Trump’s disdain for Nato. And it will be interpreted in Moscow and Beijing as a message that they have a free hand in Ukraine and Taiwan respectively”.

Washington’s European allies will be looking for some reassurance here in Munich that that is not the case. But President Trump is already well on the way to reshaping America’s role in the world and the indications are he is unlikely to be listening to any complaints coming from Europe.

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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.”

A proposal to amend a decades-old law that governs properties worth millions of dollars donated by Indian Muslims over centuries has triggered protests in the country.

The properties, which include mosques, madrassas, shelter homes and thousands of acres of land, are called waqf and are managed by a board.

The new bill – which introduces more than 40 amendments to the existing law – was introduced in August but was later sent to a joint committee of MPs for discussion.

On 13 February, the committee’s report on the bill was tabled in both houses of parliament amid protests by opposition leaders.

They claimed that their notes of dissent had been deleted, but the federal government denied the allegation.

The new bill is likely to incorporate changes suggested by the committee and put to vote in parliament. If it is passed by both houses of parliament, it will be sent to President Droupadi Murmu for her assent before becoming a law.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government says that the changes they have proposed to the bill are necessary to root out corruption in the management of these properties and address demands for reform from the Muslim community.

But several Muslim groups and opposition parties have called the changes politically motivated and an attempt by Modi’s Hindu nationalist party to weaken the rights of minorities.

In Islamic tradition, a waqf is a charitable or religious donation made by Muslims for the benefit of the community. Such properties cannot be sold or used for any other purpose – which implies that waqf properties belong to God.

A vast number of these properties are used for mosques, madrassas, graveyards and orphanages, and many others are vacant or have been encroached upon.

The tradition of waqf in India can be traced back to the Delhi Sultanate period in the 12th Century when the early Muslim rulers from Central Asia came to India.

The properties are now governed by the Waqf Act, 1995, which mandated the formation of state-level boards. These boards include nominees from the state government, Muslim lawmakers, members of the state bar council, Islamic scholars and managers of waqf properties.

The government says that the waqf boards are among India’s largest landholders. There are at least 872,351 waqf properties across India, spanning more than 940,000 acres, with an estimated value of 1.2 trillion rupees ($14.22bn; £11.26bn).

Muslim groups agree that corruption is a serious issue in waqf boards – its members have been accused several times of colluding with encroachers to sell waqf land.

But critics also say that a significant number of these properties have been encroached by individuals, businesses and government bodies – which too requires immediate attention.

A report submitted in 2006 by the Justice Sachar Committee – formed by the earlier Congress party-led government to assess the socioeconomic conditions of Muslims in India – had recommended waqf reform, as it found that the revenues from the boards were low compared to the vast number of properties they managed.

The committee estimated that efficient use of the land had the potential to generate an annual revenue of about 120bn rupees (1.4bn; £1.1bn). The current annual revenue, according to some estimates, is around 2bn rupees.

The committee also noted that “encroachments by the State, who is the custodian of the Wakf interests, is common”, listing hundreds of instances of such “unauthorised occupation” of waqf land by government authorities.

According to government data, at least 58,889 of waqf properties are currently encroached upon, while more than 13,000 are under litigation. The status of more than 435,000 properties remains unknown.

The amendments, the government says, address these issues and advance the recommendations made by the Sachar Committee.

Parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju told The Times of India newspaper that the reforms were also necessary as only an elite section in the Muslim community managed these properties.

But many Muslims see the proposed changes with scepticism.

One of the most contentious aspects of the bill is the change to ownership rules, which would impact historical mosques, dargahs and graveyards owned by the board.

Many of these properties – in use by Muslims for generations – lack formal documentation as they were donated orally or without legal records decades or centuries ago.

The 1954 Waqf Act recognised such properties under the category of “waqf by user”, but the proposed law omits the provision, leaving the fate of a significant number of these properties uncertain.

Professor Mujibur Rehman, author of Shikwa-e-Hind: The Political Future of Indian Muslims, explains that tracing the ownership of such long-standing community properties is complicated, as their management and deed systems have shifted over the centuries from the Mughal system to the British colonial system, and now to the current system.

“You can trace personal properties up to a few generations, but tracing community properties is more difficult, as their management keeps changing over time,” Prof Rehman says.

Others worry that the new bill may not address the community’s concerns but could instead considerably take away the role of Muslims in controlling waqf properties.

That’s because the proposed changes include tweaks to the composition of waqf boards, making it compulsory to include non-Muslims as its members.

Some agree that a general law mandating people of all religions to be part of boards that run religious institutions is not a bad idea – as it would make processes more secular.

But the current move appears to favour majoritarian politics, Prof Rehman says. “There seems to be an attempt not only to get the state’s control over Muslims’ properties, but also of Hindu community over Muslim community’s lives.”

Among other crucial changes is the mandatory requirement for boards to register their properties with district collectors, who would recommend to the government whether the waqf’s claim to a property is valid.

Critics say this will undermine the powers of the waqf boards.

Asaduddin Owaisi, a prominent Muslim MP, alleges that these changes are intended to strip Muslims of their land.

The current law requires state governments to appoint a survey commissioner who identifies waqf properties, and subsequently prepares a list. The list is then sent to the state government which issues a legally mandated notification. If unchallenged for a year, the final nature of the property becomes waqf.

But some of the changes would mean that the status of several waqf properties will have to be re-established.

“Many have illegally encroached upon waqfs. This means they will get a chance to claim that the property is theirs,” Owaisi recently told reporters.

This process, Muslim groups say, will put many historical dargahs and masjids at risk. They say that reform is needed but it must keep the sensitivity and interests of the community in mind.

“The diagnosis may be correct,” Prof Rehman says, “but the treatment is not.”

What do Baby Shark, the Harlem Shake and Gangnam Style have in common?

Overplayed? Annoying? You’re entitled to your opinion.

But what’s not in doubt is that they all went viral on YouTube, which is now 20 years old.

It’s become the place where 2.5 billion people log on monthly to kill time, be entertained and, sometimes at least, learn something.

But it’s also been life-changing for some of its breakout stars, like Charlie.

You wouldn’t recognise him now but millions around the world have watched him, as a baby, chomping on his big brother’s digits.

That’s because he’s the star of Charlie Bit My Finger.

“It was never not a part of my life, it’s always been there,” Charlie, who’s now 18, tells BBC Newsbeat.

The 55-second clip has had almost 900 million views since it was uploaded in 2007.

Charlie, now 18, says he can’t remember the moment, filmed when he was “about one” and sitting on Harry’s lap.

He says the clip’s success has made life “easier” and helped him get to university where he now studies law.

His dad Howard Davies-Carr previously told Newsbeat the family had made an estimated £1,000,000 off the video over the years.

The video was sold as a non-fungible token, or NFT, for £500,000 in 2021.

But Mr Davies-Carr said he wanted to keep the boys “very grounded” in how they live their lives.

Charlie shares that view and says he doesn’t play the “don’t you know who I am?” card.

“It’s not like I use it as an icebreaker or anything,” he says.

“I was never going to use this as a fun fact.”

Charlie says he doesn’t want to be seen as a show-off, so when asked about himself volunteers “something else a bit more boring”.

“But my friends like to tell people [sometimes], so it’s hard keeping it locked down,” says.

“It slips out every now and then.

“And people are like: ‘Oh that’s cool’, for like five minutes. Or they say: ‘I don’t know what that is.'”

YouTube was founded on 14 February 2005 by three friends – Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim – all former employees of the online payment system PayPal.

While the first video published on 23 April 2005 was not quite Baby Shark, it did have an animal theme.

It was a 19-second clip called Me at the zoo, posted by co-founder Jawed.

The founders opened the first YouTube headquarters in an office above a California pizza restaurant.

It is now owned by Google and has offices all over the world.

In the UK, 82% of adult internet users in the UK have reported using the platform – more than WhatsApp (80%), Facebook (76%) and Instagram (57%).

Now YouTube is a destination many choose for the latest trailers, reviews and news.

But it is music videos which dominate the most-viewed list, with Baby Shark Dance having more than 15 billion watches.

Despacito by Luis Fonsi has more than eight billion, Shape of You by Ed Sheeran has more than six billion views and PSY’s Gangnam Style has 5.4 billion.

And while Charlie’s family has been helped by income from YouTube, some of its biggest names have made a fortune.

American YouTuber MrBeast, a.k.a Jimmy Donaldson, is the most popular YouTuber with more than 360 million subscribers.

Business magazine Forbes estimates that he earned $85 million (£68 million) in 2024, making him the highest-paid creator.

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing in the platform’s two decades.

Fact-checking organisations around the world have previously said that YouTube is not doing enough to prevent misinformation on the platform.

The site has also been punished for privacy violations, being fined $170m (£139m) by a US regulator for violating children’s privacy laws.

In 2023, it was accused of collecting the viewing data of children aged under 13, in breach of a UK data privacy code.

And there has been criticism that, like other online platforms, violent and extremist videos have been available to view despite government calls for their removal.

Journalist Tamzin Kraftman, who covers technology news, feels while the platform has managed to stay relevant against competition from TikTok and Instagram, there are challenges with combating things like misinformation.

“No team can go through everything with a fine-toothed comb,” she says.

“So the question is how they will ensure everything on there is correct and within regulations.”

Tamzin tells Newsbeat AI could play a big role in helping to deal with those issues, but “might get things wrong and could ban the wrong channel”.

“I think it’s how they use new tools to really stop the spread of misinformation that is going to be their golden ticket [going forward].”

And Charlie doesn’t think the platform is “dying out” any time soon, years on from his flutter with fame.

While he doesn’t remember loads from then, he is grateful for the opportunities it has brought.

He has managed to travel “a decent amount” and been to the United States, filming a flight-safety video.

As for whether he’s tried to recreate the bite?

“I haven’t since I was very young.

“I could start charging now. But I feel like I’ve lost my ability,” he says.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

Given the profile of the man accused in the suspected car-ramming attack in Munich, the incident will undoubtedly have an impact on Germany’s parliamentary election in ten days.

Farhad N, 24, came to Germany in 2016 from Afghanistan to seek asylum, which was rejected but he was given temporary permission to stay in Germany.

For weeks now Germany’s upcoming election, brought by the collapse of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government, has been embroiled in a fevered debate about migration.

A number of violent incidents linked to migrants over the past year have led to increased support for the far-right AfD party.

After a car ploughed into a Christmas market in the city of Magdeburg killing six people and injuring at least 299 in December. The suspect was a 50-year-old Saudi asylum seeker who had been an outspoken critic of Islam.

AfD leaders held political rallies there, blaming the government’s migration policy for the attack.

Initially mainstream politicians called for calm.

But the mood shifted after another attack in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg in January, in which a 28-year-old Afghan asylum seeker stabbed a group of small children in a park. A two-year-old child and a passer-by who tried to help died.

• Dozens injured in suspected car-ramming attack in Munich
• What we know about suspected car attack in Munich
• VIDEO: BBC at the scene of suspected car ramming attack in Munich

The brutality of the attack shocked the country and mainstream politicians, particularly the conservatives, suddenly changed tack.

In the televised duel between Scholz, of the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), and his conservative rival Friedrich Merz leading centre-right party Christian Democrats (CDU), the first 30 minutes was devoted exclusively to the issue of migration.

They were criticized afterwards for solely linking migration to criminality. Both politicians were remarkably hardline in their rhetoric, effectively arguing over who was the toughest to stop irregular migration.

The two have taken harder lines on migration following a string of attacks involving asylum seeker suspects.

Both believe that only by talking tough on borders, can they undermine support for far-right AfD that is polling second and has made immigration its signature issue.

Frontrunner Friedrich Merz wants to close Germany’s borders to all asylum seekers.

Critics say this undermines EU law, contravenes the German constitution and would be logistically impossible to police.

Others worry that anti-migrant rhetoric legitimizes far-right ideas, boosts support for the AfD and stigmatizes people with non-German heritage.

Either way the AfD remains strong, polling at over 20%.

The suffering of those who have been injured – and their families – will of course mainly occupy many people’s thoughts today.

However, it is also the case that migration and public safety is now even more likely to dominate the final week of Germany’s election campaign.

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 “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.”

More than 250 people from 20 nationalities who had been working in telecom fraud centres in Myanmar’s Karen State have been released by an ethnic armed group and brought to Thailand.

The workers, more than half of whom were from African or Asian nations, were received by the Thai army, and are being assessed to find out if they were victims of human trafficking.

Last week Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra met Chinese leader Xi Jinping and promised to shut down the scam centres which have proliferated along the Thai-Myanmar border.

Her government has stopped access to power and fuel from the Thai side of the border, and toughened up banking and visa rules to try to prevent scam operators from using Thailand as a transit country for moving workers and cash.

Some opposition MPs in Thailand have been pushing for this kind of action for the past two years.

Foreign workers are typically lured to these scam centres by offers of good salaries, or in some cases tricked into thinking they will be doing different work in Thailand, not Myanmar.

The scammers look for workers with skills in the languages of those who are targeted for cyber-fraud, usually English and Chinese.

They are pressed into conducting online criminal activity, ranging from love scams known as “pig butchering” and crypto fraud, to money laundering and illegal gambling.

Some are willing to do the work, but others are forced to stay, with release only possible if their families pay large ransoms. Some of those who have escaped have described being tortured.

The released foreign workers were handed over by the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army, DKBA, one of several armed factions which control territory inside Karen State.

These armed groups have been accused of allowing the scam compounds to operate under their protection, and of tolerating the widespread abuse of trafficking victims who are forced to work in the compounds.

The Myanmar government has been unable to extend its control over much of Karen State since independence in 1948.

On Tuesday, Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation, which is similar to the US FBI, requested arrest warrants for three commanders of another armed group known as the Karen National Army.

The warrants included Saw Chit Thu, the Karen warlord who struck a deal in 2017 with a Chinese company to build Shwe Kokko, a new city believed to be largely funded by scams.

The BBC visited Shwe Kokko at the invitation of Yatai, the company which built the city.

Yatai says there are no more scams in Shwe Kokko. It has put up huge billboards all over town proclaiming, in Chinese, Burmese and English, that forced labour is not allowed, and that “online businesses” should leave.

But we were told by local people that the scam business was still running, and interviewed a worker who had been employed in one.

Like the DKBA, Saw Chit Thu broke away from the main Karen insurgent group, the KNU, in 1994, and allied himself to the Myanmar military.

Under pressure from Thailand and China, both Saw Chit Thu and the DKBA have said they are expelling the scam businesses from their territories.

The DKBA commander contacted a Thai member of parliament on Tuesday to arrange the handover of the 260 workers.

They included 221 men and 39 women, from Ethiopia, Kenya, the Philippines, Malaysia, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Taiwan, Nepal, Uganda, Laos, Burundi, Brazil, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Tanzania, Sir Lanka, India, Ghana and Cambodia.

This week saw President Donald Trump face legal opposition for some of his policies, the Philadelphia Eagles win the Super Bowl, and King Charles III and Queen Camilla host celebrities for an evening celebrating Italian cuisine.

But how much attention did you pay to what else has been going on in the world over the past seven days?

Quiz compiled by Grace Dean and George Sandeman.

Fancy some more? Try last week’s quiz or have a go at something from the archives.

South Korean football player Hwang Ui-jo has been handed a suspended one-year jail term for illegally filming his sexual encounters with a woman, Yonhap News Agency reported.

The 32-year-old, a former Norwich City and Nottingham Forest striker, now plays for the Turkish club Alanyaspor. He also plays for the South Korea national team but was suspended in 2023 amid the allegations.

The Seoul court said that “given the seriousness of the socially harmful effects of illegal filming, it is necessary to punish [Hwang] strictly”.

However, it noted Hwang had shown remorse and the videos were posted on social media by a third party.

Hwang had said he was “deeply sorry” for causing “disappointment” during his first court appearance last December.

The videos came to light after Hwang’s sister-in-law shared them on social media last June, in an attempt to blackmail him.

She was sentenced to three years in prison in September for the blackmail after Hwang sued her.

However, the charges against him proceeded as prosecutors said he filmed sexual encounters with two women without their consent on four occasions in 2022.

He had initially claimed innocence, but pleaded guilty to illegal filming charges last October.

He was convicted of the charges related to one woman but acquitted of those related to the other.

Hidden cameras designed to secretly film women and their sexual encounters are a nationwide problem in South Korea.

Over the past decade, thousands have been arrested for filming voyeuristic images and videos, sparking fear and anger among women across the country.

Several prosecutors – including the top US attorney in Manhattan – have resigned after the Justice Department directed the New York office to drop a corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

It was first announced on Thursday that Danielle Sassoon, a conservative lawyer recently promoted by President Donald Trump, had resigned after refusing to dismiss the case, a move she said would set a “breathtaking and dangerous precedent”.

Her departure was followed by the resignations of at least five other top justice department officials.

It marked the latest signs of disquiet over sweeping changes the Trump administration is making in federal law enforcement.

In an indictment last September, Adams is alleged to have accepted gifts totalling more than $100,000 (£75,000) from Turkish citizens in exchange for favours. He denies the charges.

The case was initially brought by officials appointed by former President Joe Biden.

But on Monday, a Trump appointee, acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, ordered Sassoon and New York prosecutors to drop the case, saying it “restricted” the mayor’s ability to address “illegal immigration and violent crime” – a key goal of Trump’s administration.

Bove did not address the merits of the case and noted that the justice department would reserve the right to reinstitute the charges after New York City’s mayoral election in November.

Sassoon refused to drop the case, however, setting out her reasoning in a letter to Bove’s boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, on Thursday and saying she saw no “good faith” reason for dropping the case.

“Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” she wrote.

Sassoon said her office held a meeting with Bove and lawyers for Adams on 31 January in which the mayor’s representatives offered “what amounted to a quid pro quo”, saying Adams would be able to help with administration policies “only if the indictment were dismissed”.

Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Adams, denied that there was any deal tying immigration enforcement with the dropping of the case.

• Foreign bribes, cheap flights: What is Eric Adams accused of?
• US justice department tells prosecutors to drop NYC mayor’s corruption case

He said in a statement: “The idea that there was a quid pro quo [with the Trump administration] is a total lie. We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us.”

In a letter accepting her resignation, Bove accused Sassoon of attempting to “continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case”.

He also said that other prosecutors who worked on the Adams case would be placed on leave and would be subject to an internal investigation – and that Sassoon would be investigated as well.

Five other justice department prosecutors resigned on Thursday: John Keller, acting head of the public corruption unit, and Kevin Driscoll, a senior official in the department’s criminal division.

Later on Thursday, US media outlets reported three additional prosecutors with the justice department’s corruption unit also resigned.

Sassoon, 38, joined the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan in 2016 and was part of the team that prosecuted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Mayor Adams, a Democrat, has expressed a willingness to work with the Trump administration when it comes to the president’s hardline immigration policy. On Thursday, after a meeting with Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, the mayor agreed that immigration officials could re-establish an office at the city’s Rikers Island jail.

In a statement, Adams said: “I want to work with the new federal administration, not war with them, to find common ground and make better the lives of New Yorkers.”

The New York mayor met with Trump in Florida days before his inauguration, and then attended his swearing-in ceremony on 20 January. Adams denied at the time that he discussed his legal issues with the incoming president.

On Thursday, Trump told reporters that he had not asked for the case against Adams to be dropped.

However, Bove’s letter described his instructions to drop the case as “direct orders implementing the policy of a duly elected President”.

Adams was indicted last autumn on charges of wire fraud, bribery, and receiving campaign contributions from foreigners.

According to a 57-page indictment, the mayor allegedly accepted hotel stays, lavish meals and airline upgrades from Turkish nationals beginning in 2016, when he was president of the New York City borough of Brooklyn.

In one instance, Adams is alleged to have paid $600 for a two-night stay at a luxury hotel in Istanbul, a visit that was valued at approximately $7,000.

He has pleaded not guilty and denies any wrongdoing.

A Russian drone attack has hit the radiation shelter protecting Chernobyl’s damaged nuclear reactor, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

The overnight strike at the nuclear plant, which is the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, caused a fire that has since been extinguished, he added.

As of Friday morning, radiation levels inside and outside Chernobyl remain normal and stable according to the UN’s nuclear watchdog (the IAEA).

Russia has denied any claims it attacked Chernobyl, stating its military does not strike Ukrainian nuclear infrastructure and “any claims that this was the case do not correspond to reality”.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors nuclear safety around the world, said fire safety personnel and vehicles responded within minutes to an overnight explosion. No casualties were reported, the agency added.

The agency remains on “high alert” after the incident, with its director general Rafael Mariano Grossi saying there is “no room for complacency”.

In 1986, a catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl sent a plume of radioactive material into the air, triggering a public health emergency across Europe.

Zelensky posted footage on X appearing to show damage to the giant shield, made of concrete and steel, which covers the remains of the reactor that lost its roof in the explosion.

The shield is designed to prevent further radioactive material leaking out over the next century. It measures 275m (900ft) wide and 108m (354ft) tall and cost $1.6bn (£1.3bn) to construct.

Since 1990, Prof Jim Smith from the UK’s University of Portsmouth has studied the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and, while he admits the strike was a “horrendous attack on a very important structure” he is “not concerned” about the radiation risk.

Prof Smith told the BBC a thick concrete “sarcophagus” below the damaged outer shield covers radioactive particles and dust from the explosion.

Simon Evans from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) was head of the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, which oversaw the construction of the protective dome in the 2010s.

He described the apparent strike as “an incredibly reckless attack on a vulnerable nuclear facility”.

The shield “was never built to withstand external drone attack”, he told the BBC.

Instead, it is a “complex piece of decommissioning kit” built to contain the radioactive materials inside and to help safely deconstruct the broken reactor.

The strike appeared to hit the maintenance system of a crane designed to remotely take the reactor apart, he said.

There appears to be “pretty serious” damage to the outer and inner cladding, he added. But a fuller assessment of the damage will be needed before the bank can determine its costs.

Mr Evans said the mission to build the shelter was the “world’s largest ever collaboration on nuclear safety”, with more than 40 counties coming together to find a long-term solution to deal with the destroyed reactor.

“Ever since the start of the war, it’s been tragic to see that international co-operation undermined by reckless acts,” he added.

Zelensky claimed the attack shows Russian President Vladimir Putin is “definitely not preparing for negotiations”, after US President Donald Trump said Putin had agreed to begin talks to end the war in a surprise announcement this week.

The incident at Chernobyl comes after increased military activity around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine, the IAEA said.

In December, Ukraine and Russia accused each other of launching a drone attack on a convoy of vehicles transporting IAEA experts heading to the Zaporizhzhia plant, which is Europe’s largest nuclear station.

IAEA head Rafael Grossi condemned that attack on his staff as “unacceptable”, stressing that the agency was “working to prevent a nuclear accident during the military conflict”.

The agency last year urged restraint when an attack on Zaporizhzhia raised the risk of a “major nuclear incident”. Russia and Ukraine traded blame over the attack in August.

“I’m more concerned about Zaporizhzhia than Chernobyl,” Prof Smith told the BBC.

“The reactors [at Zaporizhzhia] are currently shut down but there is more live fuel there. Chernobyl is still very radioactive, but it’s not in a ‘hot state’ because of its age.”

The number of people who died in the Chernobyl disaster remains disputed.

According to the official, internationally recognised death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster.

In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure.

A woman in Japan has been arrested for allegedly squashing a bun at a convenience store and leaving without buying the packet of bread.

Authorities in the southern city of Fukuoka confirmed to the BBC that the 40-year-old had been arrested on Monday for “criminal damage”.

The woman, who said she was unemployed, claimed she “only checked the firmness of [the bun] by pressing lightly with my hand”, according to police.

The woman had allegedly touched a bag of four black sesame and cream cheese buns. While the bag’s wrapper was intact, police said one of the buns was damaged after she pressed it with her right thumb, and the entire bag could not be sold.

Police said the owner of the Lawson convenience store had claimed he had seen the woman squashing buns several times in the past.

As the woman was leaving the shop on Monday, the owner noticed the bun was damaged and he urged her to pay for the bread, according to police. The bag of buns cost about 180 yen (£0.95; $1.20).

She allegedly refused. After following her for 1km (0.6mi), the manager restrained her. The police were called to the scene and they arrested her.

In recent years, police have been also cracking down on pranksters who have committed “sushi terrorism” in sushi conveyor belt restaurants, such as licking communal soy sauce bottles and squashing sushi meant for diners.

Despite the hype, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to Washington under Donald Trump’s second term was a sober, business-first affair – unsurprising for a working visit, which lacks the pomp of a state visit.

Trump announced expanded US military sales to India from 2025, including F-35 jets, along with increased oil and gas exports to narrow the trade deficit. Both sides agreed to negotiate a trade deal and finalise a new defence framework.

He also confirmed the US had approved the extradition of Tahawwur Rana, a Chicago businessman accused of playing a role in the 2008 terror attack in Mumbai.

“That’s a lot of deliverables for an administration less than a month old,” Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute in Washington told the BBC

“Overall, both sides seem comfortable continuing Biden-era collaborations, particularly in tech and defence, though many will be rebranded under Trump.”

Still, major challenges lie ahead. Here are the key takeaways:

Modi’s visit came 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. He ordered advisers to draft broad new tariffs on US trade partners, warning they could take effect by 1 April.

India enjoys a trade surplus with the US, its top trading partner. India cut average tariffs from 13% to 11% in its federal budget in a bid to pre-empt Trump’s tariff moves.

The jury is out on whether India appears to have dodged tariff shocks for now.

Ajay Srivastava, founder of the Delhi-based think tank Global Trade Research Institute (GTRI), says he doesn’t see any “problems with tariffs”.

The main reason, he says, is that 75% of the US exports to India attract import taxes of less than 5%.

“Trump points to extreme outlier tariffs like 150% on select items, but that’s not the norm. India has little reason to fear reciprocal tariffs,” Mr Srivastava told the BBC.

Abhijit Das, former head of the Centre for WTO Studies at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, isn’t convinced.

“The devil lies in the details. Reciprocal tariffs won’t just mirror India’s import taxes -other factors will come into play,” he told the BBC.

Trump’s approach could go beyond import duties, factoring in value added tax (VAT), non-tariff barriers and trade restrictions. While India’s goods and services tax (GST) on imported goods aligns with WTO rules, Trump may still use it to justify higher tariffs.

A US government memo on reciprocal tariffs hints at this strategy, citing costs to American businesses from non-tariff barriers, subsidies and burdensome regulations abroad. It also cites VAT and government procurement restrictions as non-tariff barriers.

Mr Das says the US is expected to push for access to India’s government procurement market, which is currently protected under WTO rules.

“This will hamper India’s ability to prioritise domestic producers, posing a direct challenge to the ‘Make in India’ initiative. This is certainly not good news for us.”

Mr Das suggests that India should counter Trump’s reciprocal tariff logic, particularly in agriculture where the US imposes strict non-tariff barriers that restrict Indian exports such as stiff maximum residue limits on chemicals.

He argues that since the US “heavily subsidises” its farm sector, India should highlight these subsidies to push back against American claims.

Tariffs alone may not help bridge the trade deficit between the two countries. Defence and energy purchases will go some way in addressing the deficit, experts say.

The new $500bn (£400bn) trade goal aims to more than double the $190bn trade between the two countries in 2023.

Modi and Trump committed to negotiating the first phase of a trade agreement by autumn 2025. Talks will focus on market access, tariff reductions and supply chain integration across goods and services.

“The announcement that the two sides will pursue a trade deal gives India an opportunity to negotiate for reduced tariffs on both sides. That would be a boon not only for the US-India relationship, but also for an Indian economy that’s sputtered in recent months,” says Mr Kugelman.

What is not clear is what kind of trade deal the both sides will be aiming at.

“What is this trade agreement? Is it a full blown free trade agreement or is it a reciprocal tariff deal?” wonders Mr Srivastava.

Mr Das believes we’ll have to wait for details on the trade agreement.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean a free trade deal – if that were the case, it would have been stated explicitly. It could simply involve tariff reductions on select products of mutual interest.”

Priyanka Kishore, principal economist at the Singapore-based consultancy firm, Asia Decoded, says $500bn is a “tall target but there are low hanging fruit we can immediately exploit”.

“For instance the US sanctions on Russian shadow fleet are soon going to kick in, so India can easily pivot to the US for more oil. This will not be too difficult.”

Trump said at the joint press conference that the US would hopefully become India’s number one supplier of oil and gas.

India’s defence trade with the US has surged from near zero to $20 billion, making the US its third-largest arms supplier.

While Russia remains India’s top source, its share has dropped from 62% to 34% (2017-2023) as India shifts toward US procurement.

In a major announcement to deepen defence ties, Trump said the US would increase military equipment sales to India “by many billions of dollars starting this year” ultimately paving the way to providing the F-35 stealth warplanes.

But this will be easier said than done, say experts.

“This sounds good, but it may be a case of putting the cart before the horse,” says Mr Kugelman.

Despite rising US arms sales to India, bureaucratic hurdles and export controls limit the transfer of sensitive technologies, he says. The new defence framework announced at the summit may help address these challenges.

Also India isn’t “taking the F-35 offer seriously” due to high maintenance demands, says strategic affairs expert Ajai Shukla.

Shukla notes that US arms deals come with challenges – private firms prioritise profit over long-term partnerships.

Yet with delays and cost overruns affecting some of India’s arms deals with Russia, Delhi’s defence ties with the US look set to deepen.

Modi met Tesla CEO Elon Musk to discuss AI and emerging tech, India’s foreign ministry said.

It’s unclear if they addressed Musk’s stalled plans for Starlink’s India launch or Tesla’s market entry.

Musk has pushed for direct spectrum allocation, clashing with Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, who favours auctions. His licence remains under review.

India is also courting Tesla to set up a car factory, cutting EV import taxes for automakers committing $500m and local production within three years. Tesla has yet to confirm its plans.

In a rare move, Modi joined Trump at a press conference, answering two questions – on illegal immigration and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) bribery charges against the Adani Group.

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, accused of close ties with Modi, was charged with fraud in the US last November over an alleged $250m bribery scheme.

Modi said he hadn’t discussed the issue with Trump. On immigration, he stated India was ready to take back verified illegal Indian migrants.

This was only Modi’s third direct press Q&A in his almost 11-year tenure as India’s prime minister. He has never held a solo press conference. In 2019 he sat beside then party president Amit Shah as Shah answered all the questions and in 2023, he took just two questions alongside former President Joe Biden.

Donald Trump has ordered his team to devise plans to impose reciprocal tariffs, or import taxes, on goods coming into the US from other countries.

It is not yet clear what precise form these tariffs would take.

But it is likely to mean an attempt to set levies on imports to the US at a similar rate to which other countries impose levies on goods they import from the US.

Trump has justified this by arguing that other countries often have higher tariffs on imports from the US than the other way round, a situation he says is unfair to US exporting firms.

The president argues his reciprocal tariffs would level the playing field.

BBC Verify has explored whether Trump has a valid case.

First, it is important to understand the rules of global trade.

Under the terms of membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), countries are permitted to impose tariffs on imports.

Those tariffs can differ depending on the item being imported.

So, for instance, a nation can impose a 10% levy on rice imports and a 25% tariff on car imports.

But under WTO rules, they are not supposed to discriminate between nations when setting the tariff they charge on a particular imported good.

So Egypt, for example, would not be allowed to impose a 2% tariff on wheat coming from Russia, but a 50% tariff on wheat coming from Ukraine.

This is known as the “Most Favoured Nation” (MFN) principle in international trade: everyone has to be subject to the same tariff by the country imposing the tariff.

There is an exception when two nations sign a free trade agreement between themselves that covers most of their trade. Under these circumstances they can charge no tariffs on goods passing between them but maintain tariffs on goods coming from everywhere else in the world.

While most countries have a range of tariff rates covering different goods imports, they also report an average external tariff to the WTO, which reflects the overall average tariff rate applied to all imports.

The US had an average external tariff of 3.3% in 2023.

That was slightly lower than the UK’s average tariff of 3.8%.

It was also below the European Union’s average tariff of 5% and China’s average tariff of 7.5%.

America’s average tariff was considerably lower than the average tariff of some of its other trading partners.

For instance, India’s average tariff was 17%, while South Korea’s was 13.4%.

America’s average tariff was lower than Mexico’s (6.8%) and Canada’s (3.8%), though trade agreements between the US and these countries mean that American exports to them are not subject to tariffs. The same is true for South Korea, with which the US has a free trade agreement

But, broadly speaking, it is legitimate for Trump to point out that some countries have a higher average tariff on imports than America’s.

And those tariffs push up the cost of many American exports to those countries, which might be said to disadvantage US exporters relative to exporters in those countries selling into the US.

However, whether this amounts to unfair trade that serves to harm the US is not clear cut.

Most economists judge that the costs of import tariffs are, ultimately, borne by households in the country that imposes them because they can mean that imported goods become more expensive.

This could mean nations with higher average external tariffs than the US would be penalising their own consumers rather than Americans.

• Will Trump tariffs hurt US consumers?
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On 10 February, Trump suggested it could mean the US imposing the same average external tariff on imports from each individual nation as those countries impose.

He told reporters: “If they charge us, we charge them. If they’re at 25, we’re at 25. If they’re at 10, we’re at 10.”

This would likely break the MFN rules of the WTO, which require a nation to impose the same tariff on particular goods, regardless of where they came from.

If the US imposed, say, a tariff of 9.4% on all goods coming from Vietnam but 3.8% on all goods coming from the UK (the same as their own average external tariffs) that would be a breach of the rules.

If the US could show the targeted country was already itself breaching the organisation’s rules in some way it might be able to claim that specific retaliatory tariffs against that country are justified under WTO rules.

But simply imposing reciprocal tariffs as a general principle would likely constitute a breach.

Another possibility is that Trump could attempt to match not average national tariff rates, but tariff rates on individual items imposed by different countries.

For example, the EU imposes a 10% tariff on all imported cars from outside the bloc, including from America.

But the US imposes only a 2.5% tariff on imported cars, including those from the EU.

The US might decide to impose a 10% tariff on cars from the EU in order to level the playing field.

However, if it tried to match tariffs on every type of import with every different country this would be an extremely lengthy and complex exercise, given the vast range of goods involved in global trade and the distinct tariff regimes operated by the 166 members of the WTO.

Trump’s official memorandum outlining the policy said the administration’s reciprocal tariffs might also be designed to offset so called “non-tariff barriers” to trade such as other countries’ regulations, domestic subsidies, currency values and Value Added Taxes (VAT).

America does not charge VAT on goods, but most other nations do, including the UK.

This could make the exercise of designing the tariffs even more complex.

While economists agree that domestic regulations and subsidies can constitute important non-tariff barriers to trade, they insist that VAT does not fall into this category because it is levied on all goods sold domestically, and therefore does not lead to any relative cost disadvantage for imports from the US.

The WTO does not list VAT as a trade barrier.

If Trump were serious about exactly matching individual tariffs from other nations it could also, in theory, require the US to lower some tariffs, not to raise them.

The US has higher tariffs on certain agricultural products than some of its trading partners.

For instance, the US currently imposes effective tariffs on many milk imports of more than 10%. But New Zealand, a major global milk producer, has 0% tariffs on its dairy imports.

The US milk tariffs are designed to protect US dairy farmers, including many in the swing state of Wisconsin, and lowering the tariff for milk exporters from New Zealand would likely face political resistance from politicians from that state.

Similarly, a genuinely reciprocal US tariff regime based on individual goods would pose challenges for the US automotive industry.

The US imposes a 25% tariff on imported trucks, including from the EU.

But the EU’s own tariff on imported trucks, including from the US, is only 10%.

So a US reciprocal tariff with the EU on imported trucks would, in theory, mean the US lowering its tariff here.

While a reciprocal tariff on EU cars might be welcomed by American automakers, a reciprocal tariff on EU trucks might not be.

However, Trump on Thursday made clear that some of his planned tariffs such as on steel and aluminium would be “over and above” his reciprocal tariffs, suggesting that true reciprocity on trade is not, in fact, his principal objective.

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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.”

Hamas has released the names of three hostages due to be freed on Saturday in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israel, after days of fears over the future of the ceasefire.

They are Russian-Israeli Alexander Troufanov, Argentine-Israeli Yair Horn, and US-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen.

Israel has said it will resume bombing if the three are not released on time. The warning came after Hamas said it was postponing the releases in response to alleged Israeli violations of the ceasefire.

President Trump said the ceasefire should be scrapped if Hamas did not release all the hostages held in Gaza by midday on Saturday.

• Hamas hostages: Stories of the people taken from Israel

Since the ceasefire began on 19 January, 16 Israeli and five Thai hostages have been released in exchange for 766 prisoners.

During the first six-week phase of the ceasefire, a total of 33 hostages should be freed in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israel.

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

More than 48,230 people have been killed by the Israel offensive in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

There are 73 hostages taken on 7 October who are still being held in Gaza. There are also three other Israeli hostages – one of whom is dead – who have been held in Gaza for a decade or more.

Alexander Troufanov, 29, Yair Horn, 46, and Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, were all seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz on the edge of Gaza.

The ceasefire has been under strain since it began, with each side taking reciprocal action over alleged violations. Intense efforts by mediators US, Egypt and Qatar have managed to stop it from collapsing.

Israel has been especially infuriated by the staged way hostages have been released – publicly displayed on platforms alongside gunmen and in front of crowds of spectators, before being handed over to the Red Cross in chaotic scenes.

For its part, Hamas has accused Israel of preventing what the group says are the amount of tents and aid lorries required to be let into Gaza under the terms of the ceasefire. Israel denies this.

Meanwhile the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) published video of what it said was a rocket fired at Israel from Gaza on Thursday. It said the rocket failed and landed inside Gaza. A source in the Hamas-run police said the rocket was an unexploded Israeli ordinance that had fired into the air while it was being moved away, Reuters news agency reported.

West Bank-based Palestinian news agency Wafa said a 14-year-old boy, Hammoudeh Alaa Saud, was killed the same day by what it said was Israeli ordnance which blew up in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp.

Concerns are growing the UK could be more exposed to US trade taxes after President Donald Trump announced he would target VAT in his latest move.

Trump has instructed his staff to develop custom so-called “reciprocal tariffs” for individual countries based in part on trading agreements, including imports and exports, with the US.

The UK’s trading relationship with US had suggested it would be less exposed to tariffs than others, but the surprise inclusion of VAT to calculate potential tariffs has prompted questions over the impact on British businesses.

Analysts have suggested tariffs of 20% or more could be placed on the UK as well as the European Union, but the outcome remains uncertain.

The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) business group warned that cars, pharmaceuticals, and food and drink were specific goods which could be “significantly hit” by the measures, which were announced by the White House on Thursday.

The latest announcement by Trump administration was wide-ranging and threatened retaliation by the US for not just trade tariffs, but for other “unfair or harmful acts, policies or practices”.

One of the justifications Trump has given to date for imposing tariffs on countries is whether they have a trade surplus with the US – i.e. they sell more to the US than they import from the country.

The use of tariffs is part of Trump’s efforts to protect American businesses and boost manufacturing.

Both the UK and US claim to have trade surpluses with each other due to discrepancies in how the countries collect data. It remains uncertain whether Trump would exempt the UK from tariffs, but the introduction of Value Added Tax (VAT) into the equation complicates matters.

The president’s latest announcement cited VAT as an “unfair, discriminatory or extraterritorial tax”.

VAT tax is the tax people have to pay when people buy most goods or services, apart from food and children’s clothes. The standard rate in the UK is 20% and it is levied regardless of whether a product has been imported from overseas or not.

George Saravelos, global head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, said if the US imposed taxes based on existing tariffs and VAT combined, British businesses exporting to the US could face charges of 21%.

“If reciprocal tariffs are applied on a VAT basis, European countries would be much higher on the list of impacted countries,” he said.

William Bain, head of trade policy at the BCC, said the UK had a “level of insulation” due to it not exporting as many goods to the US in comparison to other countries.

But he warned Trump’s proposals would “create more cost and uncertainty” and “upend established trade norms”.

Fiona Conor, managing director of Trust Electric Heating, a Leeds-based radiator manufacturer which has plans to expand into the US, said if tariffs applied to her products, she would not want to pass on the costs through higher prices to customers.

But she told the BBC’s World At One that she was looking at starting production in the US “because there is real, huge tax breaks for innovative companies like us to set up manufacturing in the US”.

She said the government should “be strong negotiators”, adding that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer needed to “strengthen our partnership” with the US.

Paul Ashworth, chief UK economist for Capital Economics, said that most people would regard VAT as a non-discriminatory tax as it is applied to all goods whether they were produced domestically or imported.

But he noted one of Trump’s advisers had argued that given the US applied a much lower average sales tax at state level, VAT was a “form of discriminatory tariff”.

Mr Ashworth said it appeared the US president now favoured tariffs to be imposed on a “country-by-country basis” as opposed to his original idea of introducing universal tax on all imports to the US.

A tariff is a tax on imports collected by a government and it is paid by the company importing the good. Countries typically erect tariffs in a bid to protect certain sectors from foreign competition.

But in protecting domestic businesses, prices for consumers can go up if a company importing goods from abroad passes higher costs on, rather than absorbing them or reducing imports.

Caroline Ramsay, partner and head of international trade at law firm TLT, said it was “difficult to predict” what the latest announcement would mean for the UK.

She suggested the word “reciprocal” did not mean what people might have first assumed, adding an assessment by the US would be made on what it considers to be fair.

“It does not mean that the USA is going to check what the UK tariff is on paper imports and match that tariff percentage for paper exports to the US from the UK,” she added.

Mr Bain argued it was “vital” that the UK government negotiated with Trump and did not get “sucked into a trade war of tit-for-tat tariffs”.

Senior UK government minister Pat McFadden said the government would wait before reacting.

“The most sensible thing to do with all of these announcements is to digest them, see if they actually come to pass, and then decide what you do.”

Tourists in the popular Portuguese city of Albufeira may soon be banned from wandering its streets in swimwear, or face a hefty fine.

The beachside city in the southern Algarve region, a favourite with British holidaymakers, has revised its code of conduct, explicitly prohibiting people from being in a state of partial or complete nudity in public areas.

Under the new plans, anyone wearing a bikini or going without a shirt away from the beach could be fined up to €1,500 (£1,250).

Albufeira joins a relatively long list of European cities with similar laws, including Barcelona, Dubrovnik and Nice.

The city boasts beautiful beaches and a vibrant nightlife, but its reputation as a party destination has damaged Albufeira’s image.

Last year, eight British men were filmed dancing completely naked on a bar in broad daylight on Rua da Oura, Albufeira’s main party strip. The videos went viral and Portuguese police were able to identify the tourists.

It sparked an emergency meeting with the local council, security forces and businesses, and Mayor José Carlos Rolo promised to crack down on “excessive” tourist behaviour.

The proposal document (in Portuguese) states that the “urgent” change is necessary to “preserve Albufeira as a multicultural, family-friendly and safe destination”.

It also bans sex acts in public – another local nuisance.

The rules extend to terraces that can be seen from public spaces, and business operators found to have allowed bad behaviour could also face substantial fines.

The proposal is currently out for public consultation, but could be in place in time for summer.

A Chinese fighter jet released flares in front of an Australian military aircraft while flying over the South China Sea early this week, authorities in Canberra have said.

Australia’s defence ministry said it “expressed concerns” to its Chinese counterparts over the “unsafe and unprofessional interaction”.

No one was injured and there was no damage to Australia’s P-8A surveillance jet after Tuesday’s incident, the ministry said.

But China said the Australian aircraft “intentionally intruded” into its airspace and that the Chinese fighter jet responded in a “legitimate, lawful, professional, and restrained” manner.

This is the latest in a string of encounters between the two countries’ militaries in the region, where China’s vast claims over islands and outcrops overlap with those of its neighbours.

While it has no claims to the South China Sea, Australia has aligned itself close to the US and its allies in saying that China’s assertions have no legal basis.

“Australia expects all countries, including China, to operate their militaries in a safe and professional manner,” the department said in a statement on Thursday.

Chinese foreign ministry’s spokesperson Guo Jiakun said in response that Australia violated China’s sovereignty and that Canberra must “stop undermining peace and stability in the South China Sea”.

In May last year, Australia accused a Chinese fighter plane of dropping flares close to an Australian navy helicopter that was part of a UN Security Council mission on the Yellow Sea.

In November 2023, Canberra accused Beijing’s navy of using sonar pulses in international waters off Japan, resulting in Australian divers suffering injuries.

In a separate statement on Thursday, Canberra said it was monitoring three Chinese navy vessels operating to the north-east of Australia.

These vessels had travelled through South East Asia before entering Australia’s maritime approaches, with one of the vessels transiting into waters in the country’s north, the defence department said.

“Australia respects the rights of all states to exercise freedom of navigation and overflight in accordance with international law, just as we expect others to respect Australia’s right to do the same,” it said.

A couple who won £115m on the lottery have invested in a football club with the aim of reaching the Women’s Super League.

Patrick and Frances Connolly, from Hartlepool, have acquired a 25% stake in Championship side Durham Women FC following a change in ownership.

The couple, who won the EuroMillions in 2019, are long-term supporters of the club and are keen to “inspire the next generation of female athletes”.

Club directors Lee Sanders and Dawn Hepple have taken possession of the club from Durham University, with a new board of directors in place.

Mr Sanders said the investment from Mr and Mrs Connolly will be “transformative” and allow Durham Women FC to work towards building a “bespoke stadium” and ultimately promotion to the Women’s Super League.

“It takes us to the next level,” he said.

Durham Women FC is one of the only independent clubs in the women’s game and is not affiliated with a men’s team.

Mr and Mrs Connolly moved from Moira, County Down, to Hartlepool more than 30 years ago.

They have been sponsors of Durham Women for a number of years and said they have “always” been involved in women’s football because their daughters used to play for Hartlepool St Francis.

“We are now excited to have a bigger role in helping Durham Women FC reach new heights, with a target to deliver a sustainable future and inspire the next generation of female athletes,” they said.

Mr Sanders, who is the club’s founder and former first team manager, said the players were “excited” by the change.

“Obviously, some of them say they wish they were a bit younger now,” he added.

Durham currently sit in fourth place in the Women’s Championship and only one team will be promoted to the top flight at the end of the season.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has hailed a “mega partnership” with the US, as he and US President Donald Trump agreed on a deal for Delhi to import more American oil and gas.

Modi’s two-day visit comes as Trump recently ordered that all the US’ trading partners – including India – should face sweeping reciprocal tariffs.

While both men praised each other’s leadership, Trump criticised India for having some of the highest trade tariffs in the world, calling them a “big problem”.

The Indian leader, seeking to soften impending trade barriers, said he was open to reducing tariffs on US goods, repatriating undocumented Indian nationals and buying military fighter jets from the US.

At a joint news conference, Modi made several references to Trump’s “make America great again” slogan, including his own spin to it: “It’s Make India Great Again – Miga,” Modi said.

“Maga plus Miga…[is a] Mega partnership for prosperity”.

Trump also added that India would be “purchasing a lot of our oil and gas” in an effort to close the trade deficit between both countries.

“They need it. And we have it,” Trump said.

With India already being reliant on imported oil, which it sources from multiple countries, the energy deal with the US “presents a relatively low hanging fruit for both parties”, Radhika Rao, a senior economist at Singapore’s DBS bank told the BBC.

“The US is the largest export market for India’s goods and services, which underscores the administration’s willingness to pre-emptively smoothen trade relations and offer concessions to narrow the bilateral trade deficit that the US runs with India,” she said.

However, “India’s challenge will be to balance its own trade deficit because US oil and gas might be more expensive due to a stronger dollar,” Amitendu Palit, senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies said.

“Reciprocal tariffs are likely to follow on India too at some stage. Hopefully for India, they won’t turn out to be larger than expected,” said Dr Palit.

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

The two also spoke about immigration – another pain point in bilateral relations – with Trump announcing that the US would extradite a man who allegedly plotted 2008 Mumbai terror attack to “face justice in India”.

Modi thanked Trump for allowing the extradition and vowed to accept repatriations of Indian nationals illegally living in the US.

Last week, US deported on a military plane 104 Indians accused of being illegal immigrants, with a video showing deportees in shackles. A second flight is expected to land in India on Saturday.

Indians are one of the largest populations of unauthorised immigrants in the US. They also hold the majority of H-1B visas – a programme that Trump had temporarily banned during his first term and is now coming under fresh scrutiny.

Shortly before his meeting with Modi, Trump had 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.

He acknowledged the risks of his tariff policy but argued the policy would boost American manufacturing and the country would be “flooded with jobs”.

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.”

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.

Earlier this week, he removed exemptions from his 2018 steel and aluminium tariffs.

The Nigerian government has condemned Canada for denying visas to its senior military officers, including the head of the military.

Chief of Defence Staff Gen Christopher Musa said half of his delegation, who were supposed to be in Canada for an official assignment on Wednesday, were left in Nigeria after not getting the correct paperwork.

Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo condemned the action by Canadian officials, terming it “disrespectful” to the West African country.

The Canadian High Commission in Nigeria said it was aware of the matter but declined to give further details for “privacy reasons” on the specific individuals involved.

It comes two weeks after Canada introduced new regulations that grant immigration officers explicit authority to cancel temporary resident documents under specific circumstances.

The changes were aimed at bolstering border security, maintaining the integrity of visa programmes and protecting public safety, according to the Canadian authorities.

Speaking on Thursday, Gen Musa said how he and his colleagues were blocked from attending an event in Canada meant to honour war veterans.

“We were invited along with our team, but while half of us got visas, the other half was denied. It’s very disappointing,” he added.

He termed the incident a “wake-up call” for Nigeria to strengthen its sovereignty and “refuse to be taken for granted”.

Nuhu Ribadu, a national security adviser, who spoke at the same event on Thursday, expressed disappointment at the move, calling it “disrespectful” saying Canada “can go to hell”.

“This is yet another reason we must work hard to make Nigeria work,” Mr Ribadu added.

During an interview on Nigerian TV on Friday, Tunji-Ojo said Canada’s action was unjustifiable, noting that diplomatic channels could have been used to address any concerns.

“If that can happen to the chief of defence staff, then I am worried for an average Nigerian,” the interior minister said.

He was however hopeful that the matter would be resolved diplomatically to ensure mutual respect between both nations.

• Oil clean-up ‘scam’ warnings ignored by Shell, whistleblower tells BBC
• Unconventional Trump brings openings and perils for Africa
• Nigerian extradited to US for alleged sextortion

South Korean football player Hwang Ui-jo has been handed a suspended one-year jail term for illegally filming his sexual encounters with a woman, Yonhap News Agency reported.

The 32-year-old, a former Norwich City and Nottingham Forest striker, now plays for the Turkish club Alanyaspor. He also plays for the South Korea national team but was suspended in 2023 amid the allegations.

The Seoul court said that “given the seriousness of the socially harmful effects of illegal filming, it is necessary to punish [Hwang] strictly”.

However, it noted Hwang had shown remorse and the videos were posted on social media by a third party.

Hwang had said he was “deeply sorry” for causing “disappointment” during his first court appearance last December.

The videos came to light after Hwang’s sister-in-law shared them on social media last June, in an attempt to blackmail him.

She was sentenced to three years in prison in September for the blackmail after Hwang sued her.

However, the charges against him proceeded as prosecutors said he filmed sexual encounters with two women without their consent on four occasions in 2022.

He had initially claimed innocence, but pleaded guilty to illegal filming charges last October.

He was convicted of the charges related to one woman but acquitted of those related to the other.

Hidden cameras designed to secretly film women and their sexual encounters are a nationwide problem in South Korea.

Over the past decade, thousands have been arrested for filming voyeuristic images and videos, sparking fear and anger among women across the country.

South Korean football player Hwang Ui-jo has been handed a suspended one-year jail term for illegally filming his sexual encounters with a woman, Yonhap News Agency reported.

The 32-year-old, a former Norwich City and Nottingham Forest striker, now plays for the Turkish club Alanyaspor. He also plays for the South Korea national team but was suspended in 2023 amid the allegations.

The Seoul court said that “given the seriousness of the socially harmful effects of illegal filming, it is necessary to punish [Hwang] strictly”.

However, it noted Hwang had shown remorse and the videos were posted on social media by a third party.

Hwang had said he was “deeply sorry” for causing “disappointment” during his first court appearance last December.

The videos came to light after Hwang’s sister-in-law shared them on social media last June, in an attempt to blackmail him.

She was sentenced to three years in prison in September for the blackmail after Hwang sued her.

However, the charges against him proceeded as prosecutors said he filmed sexual encounters with two women without their consent on four occasions in 2022.

He had initially claimed innocence, but pleaded guilty to illegal filming charges last October.

He was convicted of the charges related to one woman but acquitted of those related to the other.

Hidden cameras designed to secretly film women and their sexual encounters are a nationwide problem in South Korea.

Over the past decade, thousands have been arrested for filming voyeuristic images and videos, sparking fear and anger among women across the country.