Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for the creation of an “army of Europe” to guard against Russia as he suggested the US may no longer come to the continent’s aid.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he also said that Ukraine would “never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement” after US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to start peace talks.

In a speech on Friday, in which he attacked European democracies, US Vice President JD Vance warned that Europe needed to “step up in a big way” on defence.

Zelensky said: “I really believe the time has come – the armed forces of Europe must be created.”

• Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia
• What’s happening in Ukraine after three years of conflict with Russia?

He said: “Yesterday here in Munich, the US vice president made it clear [that] decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending.

“From now on things will be different and Europe needs to adjust to that.”

Earlier this week, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a “factory reset” for Nato which signalled the alliance needed to be “robust”, “strong” and “real”.

On Saturday, Zelensky said: “Let’s be honest. Now we can’t rule out the possibility that America might say no to Europe on an issue that threatens it.

“Many, many leaders have talked about Europe that needs its own military.

“An army, an army of Europe.”

The concept of a European army is something that has been proposed by other leaders, including France’s President Emmanuel Macron who has long backed the bloc’s own military to reduce its reliance on the US.

Zelensky said: “A few days ago, President Trump told me about his conversation with Putin. Not once did he mention that America needs Europe at the table – that says a lot.

“The old days are over when America supported Europe just because it always had.”

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nears its three-year anniversary, Trump and Hegseth have both said it is unlikely that Ukraine will join Nato.

The US defence secretary also said a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders was unrealistic.

Zelensky said he would “not take Nato membership for Ukraine off the table”.

Trump had a phone call with Putin last week where they discussed peace talks regarding Ukraine, apparently sidelining key allies.

Zelensky said that, as well as Ukraine, Europe “should have a seat at the table when decisions about Europe are being made”.

The US president later said that he and Putin planned to meet in Saudi Arabia, and wrote on social media that the two had invited each other to their respective capitals.

But Zelensky accused Putin of playing a “game”, by isolating America in “one-on-one” talks.

“Next, Putin will try to get the US president standing on Red Square 9 May this year, not as a respected leader but as a prop in his own performance,” Zelensky said.

No date has been set for Trump’s visit to Moscow.

Russia celebrates “Victory Day” on 9 May, when it marks its triumph over Nazi Germany in 1945.

On Ukraine’s involvement in talks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week that Kyiv “will of course one way or another be taking part in the negotiations”.

Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said his country would never support a dictated peace.

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Europe needs its own plan on Ukraine, or “other global players will decide about our future”.

Hamas has freed three Israeli hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, in the latest swap under the ceasefire agreed by Israel and the armed group last month.

The three hostages handed over on Saturday are American-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, Argentinian-Israeli Yair Horn, 46, and Russian-Israeli Alexander Troufanov, 29.

In return, 369 Palestinians held in Israeli jails were released.

So far 19 hostages held in Gaza and more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners have been freed as part of the Gaza ceasefire that began on 19 January 2025.

By the end of the first six-week stage of the deal, 33 hostages and 1,900 prisoners are expected to have been freed.

On Saturday, in the sixth swap since last month, Israeli hostages were handed over in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

Surrounded by heavily armed Hamas militants, the men briefly addressed a crowd of Palestinians before being transferred into Red Cross vehicles.

They did not look as gaunt as the hostages freed a week earlier – their appearance had aroused anger in Israel and elsewhere.

Yair Horn and his brother Eitan, 37, were both abducted from a kibbutz during the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas. Eitan Horn remains in captivity in Gaza.

The three men were airlifted by military helicopters to a hospital in central Israel where they will undergo medical tests and be reunited with relatives.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, posting on social media, said the hostages had been “forced to endure” a “despicable and cynical ceremony”.

In a social media post, Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel would continue to work with the US to “ensure that all hostages return to Israel soon”.

• Who are the released Israeli hostages?
• Key events that led to the ceasefire
• What we know about the latest Israel-Hamas deal

The majority of the freed Palestinians were taken to Gaza, although some were taken to the West Bank. In both areas, crowds gathered to welcome the former prisoners.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society told the BBC that five of those released in the West Bank city of Ramallah were taken straight to hospital.

“They all have chronic illnesses,” said Mohammad Faqih, an official from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, adding that one man had a broken leg.

Most of the 36 Palestinians serving life sentences will reportedly be deported to Egypt.

Earlier this week, Hamas threatened to delay the hostage release after accusing Israel of violating the terms of the agreement, something Israel denied.

Israel, backed by US President Donald Trump, said “intense” fighting would resume unless the hostages were handed over.

The latest releases mean that under the ceasefire, Hamas is due to free another 14 hostages.

However Israel says eight are of them are dead, meaning six living Israelis are still expected to be returned in the first phase.

A total of 141 hostages have now been freed, including 81 Israelis and 24 foreign nationals released as part of a previous deal between Israel and Hamas.

About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken back to Gaza as hostages when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023.

This triggered a massive Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

An Indian court’s ruling that a man’s forced “unnatural sex” with his wife is not an offence has led to huge outrage and sparked renewed calls for better protections for married women.

The controversial order has also brought back into the spotlight the issue of marital rape in a country which has stubbornly refused to criminalise it.

Earlier this week, a high court judge in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh set free a 40-year-old man who was convicted by a trial court in 2019 of rape and unnatural sex with his wife, who died within hours of the alleged assault.

The lower court had also found the man guilty of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder”. He was sentenced to “rigorous imprisonment for 10 years” on each count, with all the sentences to run concurrently.

But on Monday, the High Court’s Justice Narendra Kumar Vyas acquitted the man of all charges, saying that since India did not recognise marital rape, the husband could not be considered guilty of non-consensual sex or any non-consensual unnatural sexual act.

The judgement has been met with anger, as activists, lawyers and campaigners renew their calls to criminalise marital rape in India.

“To watch this man walk away is unacceptable. This judgement may be correct legally, but it is ethically and morally abhorrent,” said lawyer and gender rights activist Sukriti Chauhan.

“An order that absolves a man of such a crime, to say it’s not a crime, is the darkest hour in our legal system,” she told the BBC.

“It has shaken us to the core. This needs to change and change quickly.”

Priyanka Shukla, a lawyer in Chhattisgarh, said a judgement like this “sends out the message that because you’re the husband, you have rights. And you can do anything, you can even get away with murder”.

She added that this is not the first time a court has given such a judgement, and there is always anger.

“This time, the outrage is more because it is so gruesome and the woman died.”

The court documents make for grim reading.

According to the prosecution, the incident took place on the night of 11 December 2017, when the husband, who worked as a driver, “committed unnatural sex with the victim against her will… causing her a lot of pain”.

After he left for work, she sought help from his sister and another relative, who took her to hospital where she died a few hours later.

In her statement to the police and her dying declaration to a magistrate, the woman said she became ill “due to forceful sexual intercourse by her husband”.

A dying declaration carries weight in court and legal experts say it is generally enough for conviction, unless contradicted by other evidence.

While convicting the man in 2019, the trial court had relied heavily on her dying declaration and the post-mortem report, which stated “the cause of death was peritonitis and rectal perforation” – simply put, severe injuries to her abdomen and rectum.

Justice Vyas, however, saw matters differently – he questioned the “sanctity” of the dying statement, noted that some of the witnesses had retracted their statements and, most importantly, said that marital rape was not an offence in India.

The lower court’s conviction was “a rarest of rare case”, Ms Shukla said, “probably because the woman died”.

“But what is shocking about the high court order is that there’s not even one sympathetic comment from the judge.”

Considering the nature of the assault, the high court’s order has come as a shock for many, who believe the judge should not have dismissed the case so lightly.

India is among more than 30 countries – along with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia – where marital rape is not a criminal offence.

A number of petitions have been filed in recent years seeking to strike down Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which has been in existence since 1860.

The British colonial-era law mentions several “exemptions” – or situations in which sex is not rape – and one of them is “by a man with his own wife” if she is not under 15 years.

Britain outlawed marital rape in 1991 but India, which recently rewrote its criminal code, retained the regressive law in its new statute book.

• India government says criminalising marital rape ‘excessively harsh’
• In India, growing clamour to criminalise rape within marriage

The idea is rooted in the belief that consent for sex is “implied” in marriage and that a wife cannot retract it later. Campaigners say such an argument is untenable in this day and age, and that forced sex is rape, regardless of who does it.

But in a country where marriage and family are considered sacrosanct, the issue has polarised opinions and there’s strong resistance to the idea of criminalising marital rape.

The Indian government, religious leaders and men’s rights activists have strongly opposed the move.

In October last year, the government told the Supreme Court that criminalisation of marital rape would be “excessively harsh”. The federal home ministry said it “may lead to serious disturbances in the institution of marriage”.

Authorities also insist that there are enough laws to protect married women against sexual violence. But campaigners say India cannot hide behind archaic laws to deny women bodily agency.

“A lot of people say the constitution cannot enter your bedroom,” Ms Chauhan said.

“But doesn’t it grant women – like all citizens – fundamental rights to safety and security? What kind of redundant country do we live in that we remain quiet when a woman has to face this level of violence?” she asks.

Violence within marriage is rampant in India.

According to a recent government survey, 32% of married women face physical, sexual or emotional violence by their husbands and 82% have experienced sexual violence by their husbands.

And even that doesn’t give the true scale of the problem, Ms Shukla said, because a majority of women do not report violence, especially sexual violence, out of shame.

“In my experience, women are not trusted when they complain, everyone says it must be fake. The only time such cases are taken seriously is when a woman dies or the assault is particularly gruesome,” the lawyer said.

Ms Chauhan believes nothing will change until the law changes.

“We need to criminalise marital rape. The wife not getting justice after such a gruesome incident deserves a nationwide campaign, which is not born of anger but is serious [and] well thought out.”

She added that the government and men’s activists try to project it as a “man versus woman debate”.

“But the demand for criminalising marital rape is not against men, but for the safety and wellbeing of women. Is it not important to ensure women’s safety?”

Elon Musk’s children have been to places many will never see.

From meetings with foreign leaders to the control room of a SpaceX launch, Musk’s children have debuted as constant sidekicks to their father’s endeavors in tech, business and now, politics.

They have made frequent appearances in the nation’s capital since President Donald Trump tapped the tech billionaire and Tesla co-founder to lead the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk’s four-year-old, “Lil X”, hung on the corner of the Resolute desk in the Oval Office on Wednesday sporting a tan pea coat and a collared shirt.

On Thursday, X and two of his siblings exchanged gifts with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi while their father discussed technology and innovation with the foreign leader.

Musk has frequently been seen with his children even before coming to Washington – at a meeting with the president of Turkey, a memorial service at Auschwitz concentration camp, and a Time magazine ceremony where he was named the 2021 person of the year.

But why do Musk’s children tag along?

“The inclusion of the kids in many public appearances is very much a politician move or a political move to make him seem a bit more personable (and) take a human approach to how the public views him,” says Kurt Braddock, an American University professor of public communication.

Still, Mr Braddock thought the decision to bring Musk’s preschooler to the Oval Office was unusual.

X appeared bored during the 30-minute press briefing as he mimicked his father, sat on the floor and received the occasional side glance and smile from the leader of the free world. At one point, it appeared he told someone in the room to “shush” their mouth.

Mr Braddock said he believes their inclusion is intentional – a distraction that benefits both Musk and Trump.

“I do think that there is a bit of a strategy here trying to draw attention to some things while diverting attention to other things,” he said.

Jon Haber, a strategic communication consultant who has worked with five presidential campaigns and teaches at Harvard, said Musk’s children making frequent appearances – and creating viral moments – is beneficial for Trump.

“For Trump, the more chaos, the more he floods the zone, the less anybody can really focus on. Chaos works for him,” Mr Haber said.

Grimes, Musk’s ex-girlfriend and the mother of X, criticised her son’s appearance in the Oval Office.

“He should not be in public like this,” she wrote in a post on X. “I did not see this… but I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.”

In a 2022 Vanity Fair article, she said that she wasn’t a fan of her son being in the spotlight.

“Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there. I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… X is out there. His situation is like that. But, yeah, I don’t know.”

Long before politics, Musk allowed his children to tag along.

A decade ago, when he was still building his profile and eager to draw attention to his electric-vehicle maker Tesla, it wasn’t unusual to see them at events.

As analysts and reporters waited for one unveiling to begin at a Tesla facility in Silicon Valley in 2015, his five children could be seen running through the hallways chasing after each other and shrieking with laughter.

Despite being forced to wait for hours for attendees, the presence of Musk’s children created an atmosphere that felt relaxed and even joyous.

It was a departure from the stiff, far more formal events held by other companies for which the prospect of seeing an executive’s very young children would have come across as odd.

Musk has had 12 children with three different women.

His most-recognised son, X Æ A-12?, goes by “Lil X”, the same letter Musk used to re-name Twitter when he purchased the social media company.

The four-year-old has been dubbed an “emotional support human” by Musk himself.

Walter Isaacson, the author of Musk’s biography, said on The Diary of a CEO podcast that Musk is “deeply committed” to his children and is “almost obsessed by them”.

“With his own children, his lovers, his wives, there is the same intensity that is baked into everything he does,” Mr Isaacson said.

“He always likes having some of his children around him. He always likes having a companion, but that doesn’t mean that he likes calmness.”

“Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-minor.”

Kendrick Lamar’s most famous lyric was heard around the world at last weekend’s Super Bowl.

An estimated 127 million viewers saw the rapper flash a devious smile to the camera as he delivered the line – a withering takedown of bitter rival Drake.

Taken from Grammy-winning track Not Like Us, it refers to accusations that the Canadian star had relationships with underage women – something he’s denied.

But as 70,000 fans inside Caesars Superdome in New Orleans belted it out with him, it felt like Kendrick’s winning play in the pair’s long-running beef.

It’s been public, personal and petty, but Kendrick has implied that he’s waging a much wider war.

Not just against Drake, but against what he represents.

“Drake is the face of the hip-hop scene as it is,” says Margs, a London rapper who hosts rap battles on his channel Pen Game.

The Canadian is a huge commercial success – the most streamed artist of the 2010s, 143 million Instagram followers and a fixture on party playlists and nightclub set lists.

His style is melodic and accessible. He sings.

In other words, he’s as much a pop star as he is a rapper. And where Drake goes, others follow.

“A lot of people see him as being responsible for the watering down of the product,” says Margs.

“There’s people that like the commercial side of music that just want to dance and enjoy themselves and it have no substance to it.

“And then there’s the other side which is deep-rooted in the hip-hop culture.”

It’s a culture Kendrick wants to defend and celebrate.

Speaking before the Super Bowl show, he said the “grit” had gone from the genre.

“When people talk about rap, the conversations I’m hearing, they think it’s just rapping, it’s not an actual art form,” he said.

Kendrick also took issue with rap being “minimised to a catchy song or verse”, and said his feud with Drake actually came “more from a space of more people putting rap to the back”.

“You didn’t see that grit, you didn’t see that bite any more. So I always took that into consideration with my music,” he said.

Not everyone agrees that a more mainstream-friendly version of rap makes Drake less credible.

His one-time rival Common recently defended him against the “pop star” label – saying that “he’s still an MC” even though his songs are popular.

Kendrick, though, is passionate about rap as an artform, and said the success of Not Like Us and being chosen as the first solo hip-hop artist to front the halftime show “meant everything”.

“To represent it on this type of stage is just everything that I’ve worked for and everything I believe in for the culture, I live and die by it,” he said.

Hip-hop, a genre which has been around for 50 years, has a long history of protest.

Margs says “a lot of that has been lost” when comparing current trends with the genre’s origins.

“They cared about the message and what it stands for because hip-hop was something that was heavily politicised,” he says.

“People used to use their voices in hip-hop to protest and get their messages out.”

The political messaging in Kendrick’s halftime show came from the start when actor Samuel L Jackson, dressed as US government icon Uncle Sam, introduced the rapper.

From there, it included references to the black power movement, imagery of a divided United States and, just before the finale, the line: “This is bigger than the music.”

It’s a time of political change in the US following the re-election of Donald Trump, who was at the Super Bowl.

“There’s no better time for people to stand on business and talk about things that matter,” Margs says.

Kendrick – and his beef with Drake – also hark back to the origins of hip-hop in another way.

He’s said he sees rap as a sport – and battle raps were his inspiration for the back-and-forth with Drake.

These face-offs – as seen in the Eminem film 8Mile – are where artists compete live, swapping disses and trying to spit the best bars to take home the prize.

It’s rap in its purest form – substance over style and a focus on lyricism.

Kendrick said it’s always been that way for him, and it’s a vital part of finding the “grit” and “bite” he feels is missing.

“I still watch battle raps, this has always been the core definition of who I am and it’s been this way since day one,” he said.

Margs thinks Kendrick’s success will shine a light on battle rap, but he acknowledges emerging rappers are now finding new ways to cut their teeth.

Among them is Layyah, who was the first female rapper to win The Rap Game UK.

She’s Team Kendrick, but doesn’t plan on following his example on battle rap.

Layyah says rap artists she looks up to like Central Cee are “definitely not battle rappers” but have found success and respect through other routes.

“We have so many platforms,” she says. “It’s more like who can make a great song and then who can make the best routine to it.

“If that goes viral then it’s a great song, you don’t really have to do the battle raps.”

Margs thinks that’s “taken away from the art form a little bit”.

“You can win a battle on social media just through popularity or being funny… whereas with battle rap it’s all about your lyrics and your skill.”

As for Kendrick’s beef with Drake, it’s stayed quiet since Not Like Us was released last summer.

Some people took the “Game Over” at the end of Kendrick’s Super Bowl set as the end of the battle, and Drake’s just released Gimme a Hug.

In that he suggests he wants to put the beef behind him and “get the party lit”.

But there’s still an ongoing legal case over Not Like Us – with the potential of a bitter courtroom face-off.

Margs says that’s a big contrast to settling scores on the battle rap stage.

“There’s a sportsmanship to it but never spills over into more than that,” says Margs.

“After the fight, they always hug it out and show respect for their competitor.”

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

For the final 15km (9.3 miles) of the journey from Toulouse to the hamlet of Les Pequiès, you travel on narrow winding roads through hilly, dense woodlands. Without a reliable GPS system you can get lost very quickly, especially at night.

I expected the home of Andrew and Dawn Searle, the British couple found dead earlier this month, to be remote. That’s the suggestion from the photos of the crime scene I had seen. But I was surprised when I arrived to find it well within shouting distance of several homes.

It’s an important detail because Dawn’s partly naked body was discovered outside the front of the house on Thursday morning last week. The prosecutor in charge of the case, Nicolas Rigot-Muller, said she had severe head wounds caused by a blunt weapon. Any screams would have been heard very clearly by neighbours.

Her husband’s body was found hanging inside the back of the house. The prosecutor says no weapon has been found, that there’s no obvious sign of a burglary nor evidence that Andrew put up a fight, nor of a sex crime.

A friend discovered Dawn’s body when she came around to the house with her dog. The couple had two big dogs of their own, and they often walked with the friend or several other dog owners I talked to in the quiet hamlet.

One woman, Bénédicte, said the couple were “absolutely adorable, we would often meet like this simply walking our dogs around the village”.

“We are very shocked, of course we are,” she said.

Lydie, a butcher, sells her produce at local markets with her husband. Their property overlooks the Searle’s home, just a fallow field separates them.

“They were a great couple who smiled a lot and since I once lived in England I was able to talk to them in English,” she told me. “They were well integrated and every year invited everyone over for a party.”

But not everyone I approached wanted to talk. Their looks give away that this is a very difficult moment for this rural community in the glare of a criminal investigation.

The railroad crossing next to the village doesn’t have safety barriers, just a stop sign, which tells you how little traffic there is here normally. Now, you can feel the presence of the Gendarmerie, the branch of the French military which is leading the investigation.

While I was providing live coverage for BBC Scotland a large car with tinted windows drove past me slowly, inside four stony-faced officers from the Toulouse homicide and organised crime branch.

There is no question locals are scared. Several officers from the Gendarmerie photographed our car and asked to see our ID cards and urged us to be discreet. They said the residents were frightened and that their presence was partly to reassure them.

There is bright yellow Gendarmerie tape strapped to the front gate of the Searle’s home. The dogs are gone and their swimming pool has a cover over it. Two large candles have been lit in the driveway and a leaflet taped to the gate has a phone number for anyone who feels they need psychological counselling or moral support, provided by local social services. The same leaflet has been taped to a community board in the centre of the hamlet.

The Searle couple retired to this region five years ago, and other mailboxes in the hamlet indicate they are not the only expatriates in the region. This isn’t surprising: there are no official statistics but in the time I have been based in Toulouse, Foreign Office staff have told me at various times they believe around 30,000 Brits live full-time in the south west, making it the biggest British expat population in France outside of Paris.

On top of that tens of thousands more have holiday homes in this region, called Occitanie, which is one of the fastest growing areas of France, attracting people from not just the UK but Belgium, the Netherlands and Paris.

What attracts them here is the quality of life, wide open spaces, relatively cheap property and achingly beautiful countryside and architecture.

The nearby town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue has one of the most beautiful medieval stone arcade-lined central squares in a region teeming with them. In summer, an open-air market in the square is crammed with holiday makers, including many Brits, carrying woven baskets filled with local produce.

Various conspiracy theories circulate about how the couple died – I’ve been asked about them by countless French national TV and radio media outlets. But all we know for sure is that the prosecutor and his team are still trying to determine, as he reiterated to me on Wednesday night, “whether the tragedy resulted from a domestic crime followed by suicide or involved a third party”.

Ever since the deaths I’ve been speaking to the prosecutor leading the case, who revealed to me late this week that he was handing over the investigation to a senior judge in Montpellier with more resources available.

I asked him if that means he was leaning towards the idea that the Searle couple were both murdered.

He replied that he was not ruling anything out. He added that if they were murdered, and it goes to trial, he would lead the prosecution.

Dr Remy Sevigne, the psychologist who answers the counselling hotline from the leaflets, told me that so far around a dozen people had called him for some sort of support. They were all local, he said, and all knew the couple personally.

They were all either frightened or in shock, he said.

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.

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.

The family of a British couple in custody in Iran say they are united in their determination to secure their safe return.

Craig and Lindsay Foreman were arrested in January, but news of their detention emerged on Thursday when state-run Iranian media reported they were being held on unspecified security charges.

The couple, in their early 50s, had been on a motorbike trip across the world, and had only planned on being in Iran for five days.

A statement issued by the Foreign Office on their family’s behalf said: “This unexpected turn of events has caused significant concern for our entire family, and we are deeply focused on ensuring their safety and wellbeing during this trying time.”

The family called it a “distressing situation”, adding: “We are actively engaging with the British government and relevant authorities, working diligently to navigate the complexities of this matter.”

They said the “emotional burden of this situation weighs heavily on us”, and that “the outpouring of support from friends, family, and the community” had “provided us with strength and encouragement as we face this ordeal”.

Mr and Mrs Foreman were heading for Australia on their journey across the globe.

They had crossed into Iran from Armenia on 30 December and had planned to be in Pakistan by 4 January.

After staying in the cities of Tabriz, Tehran and Isfahan, accompanied by a tour guide, they travelled on to Kerman, in east-central Iran, but never checked into their hotel there.

In a series of social media posts before they were detained, the couple described their joy at being in Iran.

Lindsay Foreman, a life coach with a doctorate in psychology, said she was “having an amazing time”.

Her husband, Craig, who is a carpenter, spoke of the “lovely people” of a “lovely country”.

Mrs Foreman posted a picture of herself on 3 January meeting a cleric in the town of Isfahan. Writing on Instagram, she said: “Travel continues to teach me that humanity’s core is shared: kindness, humility, and respect for one another.”

On Facebook that day she wrote: “Despite differences in culture, language, and traditions, we’ve seen something beautifully universal: kindness, humour, hospitality – and a shared love of good food!”

The Iranian authorities have not said what the couple are accused of.

They had moved from East Sussex to start a new life in Andalucia, Spain, in 2019.

The couple appeared on an episode of Channel 4’s A New Life in the Sun in 2022 to showcase their lives as expats.

Mrs Foreman is reported to have been carrying out a research project on their journey to Australia, asking people what it means to be human and what constitutes a good life.

She was due to present her findings at a conference on positive psychology in Brisbane in July.

Posting on Instagram, she acknowledged that travelling to the Iran, against Foreign Office advice, and to Pakistan was risky and “slightly scary”.

“Yes, we’re aware of the risks,” she wrote. “But we also know the rewards of meeting incredible people, hearing their stories, and seeing the breathtaking landscapes of these regions could far outweigh the fear.”

She added: “From the vast deserts of Iran to the towering peaks of Pakistan, we hope to share the beauty, hospitality, and humanity that often go unnoticed.”

The Foreign Office says it is in contact with the local authorities in Iran, and is providing the couple with consular assistance.

A photograph of the couple, with their faces blurred, meeting the British ambassador Hugo Shorter at the public prosecutor’s office in Kerman was published on Wednesday.

The Foreign Office currently advises British nationals to avoid all travel to Iran.

“British and British-Iranian dual nationals are at significant risk of arrest, questioning or detention,” advice says. “Having a British passport or connections to the UK can be reason enough for the Iranian authorities to detain you.”

Over the past few years, dozens of foreign and dual nationals have been arrested in Iran on vague security-related charges.

Human rights groups say they are often used by the Iranian authorities for political leverage.

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.

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.

This year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) was supposed to be primarily about two things: how to end the war in Ukraine without giving in to Russia, and how Europe needed to boost its spending on defence.

But the most senior American present, US Vice President JD Vance, used his time at the podium to talk about neither.

Instead, he shocked delegates on Friday by roundly attacking Washington’s allies, including Britain, in a blistering attack decrying misinformation, disinformation, and the rights of free speech.

It was a very weird 20 minutes – one met largely with silence from delegates in the hall.

• A quick guide to JD Vance
• Ukraine end game: What each side wants from a peace deal

Even a joke, “if American democracy can survive 10 years of [climate campaigner] Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk”, failed to raise a single laugh.

He accused European governments of retreating from their values, and ignoring voter concerns on migration and free speech.

Vance’s speech went down very badly – unequivocally badly. It was extraordinarily poorly judged.

But who was it aimed at?

A US commentator said to me afterwards: “That was all for US domestic consumption.”

The vice president did, however, go on to meet the embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who did his best to sound positive.

The pair had “a good conversation”, according to Zelensky, who said it marked “our first meeting, not last, I’m sure”. The Ukrainian leader emphasised the need for Washington and Kyiv to speak more and work together “to prepare the plan [on] how to stop Putin and finish the war”.

“We want, really, we want peace very much. But we need real security guarantees,” Zelensky added.

According to US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin also wants peace, but that is peace on his terms. Unless those have secretly changed, they involve capitulation to Russia’s demands and the permanent ceding of territory to Moscow.

Vance’s speech came days after President Trump 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 also dashed Kyiv’s hopes of joining Nato, a key ambition of President Zelensky, and ruled out sending US troops to help protect Ukraine’s borders from the next time Russia decides to invade.

Ahead of the Munich conference Europe was stunned by news that Trump had held an apparently cordial 90-minute phone call with 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 2022 invasion.

The delegates in Munich are scheduled to focus on the war in Ukraine in a high-profile debate on Saturday.

The fear in Munich amongst European leaders and their delegations is that in Donald Trump’s rush to secure a peace deal in Ukraine, Putin will emerge victorious, stronger and planning to seize more parcels of land in Europe.

The UK and EU must work together and “do more” to “share the burden” of security across Europe, two senior ministers have said.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Defence Secretary John Healey added that the West had done too little in the past when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014.

In an article for The Telegraph, they said the UK had committed an additional £150m towards military aid for Ukraine as well as new sanctions on people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Their comments come after the US Vice-President, JD Vance, told the Munich Security Conference on Friday that Europe must “step up in a big way to provide for its own defence”.

In his address, Vance said it was his belief that the greatest threat facing Europe was not from Russia or China but “from within”.

He said many European governments, including the UK’s, had retreated from their values and ignored issues like migration and free speech.

Lammy is due to speak as part of a “townhall” meeting on Ukraine at the summit later on Saturday, and will also take part in a panel discussion on European security.

The comments by Lammy and Healey focused on external threats.

The ministers said: “From opposition and in government, we have been clear that Europe and the UK must do more together to share the burden of our continent’s security.”

They added that the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 had been inadequate and that “Putin only responds to strength”.

They said that for two decades the Russian leader had been “seeking to recreate the Russian empire and suffocate the countries around its borders”.

They wrote that the UK, US and Europe were united in achieving a lasting peace in Ukraine, which should be sovereign and prosperous.

Meeting Vance on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he wanted “security guarantees” ahead of planned peace talks between the US and Russia.

US President Donald Trump said he had spoken to Putin on Wednesday and agreed to “work together, very closely” to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. It has been nearly three years since Russia invaded.

Zelensky has proposed what he described as an “army of Europe” to secure the continent.

He told the conference on Saturday: “As we fight this war and lay the groundwork for peace and security, we must build the armed forces of Europe so that Europe’s future depends only on Europeans, and decisions about Europe are made in Europe.”

He added: “Europe needs a single voice, not a dozen different ones.”

Among the other possible security guarantees is the deployment of a peacekeeping mission to Ukraine.

Lord Dannatt, who was head of the British army from 2006 to 2009, said about 100,000 soldiers would be needed for such a mission and that the UK might need to contribute 40,000 of them.

“We just haven’t got that number available,” he told the BBC Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster.

“Our military is so run down at the present moment, numerically and as far as capability and equipment is concerned, it would potentially be quite embarrassing.”

Sir Richard Shirreff, Nato’s former deputy supreme commander, told Radio 4’s Today programme that “100,000 [troops] is probably the minimum”.

Asked about calls to significantly increase defence spending, he said: “This is a defining moment for European militaries [and] European governments”.

The UK military is “so run down” it could not lead any future peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, the former head of the army has said.

Lord Dannatt told the BBC that up to 40,000 UK troops would be needed for such a mission and “we just haven’t got that number available”.

It comes after Sir Keir Starmer said the UK would “play its part” in guaranteeing Ukraine’s security after the prime minister was asked this week if he was open to sending British troops as peacekeepers.

A former Nato chief told the BBC that Britain and France should lead a force of up to 100,000 troops as part of a long-term peacekeeping effort should Russia’s war with Ukraine end.

US President Donald Trump earlier this week announced he had had a lengthy conversation with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and that negotiations to stop the “ridiculous war” in Ukraine would begin “immediately”.

Trump then “informed” Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, of his plan.

Lord Dannatt – who was head of the Army from 2006 to 2009 – agreed that a force to keep the peace would require about 100,000 troops.

However he said the UK would have to supply “quite a proportion of that and we really couldn’t do it”.

“Our military is so run down at the present moment, numerically and as far as capability and equipment is concerned, it would potentially be quite embarrassing,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster.

“I mean, if we were to deploy 10,000 troops, each rotation for six months, that would effectively tie up 30,000 or 40,000 troops and we just haven’t got that number available.

“So there are some big issues here that today’s politicians won’t really have considered.”

It comes as Britain’s foreign and defence secretaries called on the UK and Europe to “do more” to “share the burden” of regional security in a joint article for the Daily Telegraph on Saturday.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he was “very encouraged” by his talks on Ukraine with US Vice-President JD Vance on Friday, on the first day of the Munich Security Conference.

“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.”

The talks came after Vance gave a speech at the conference, in which he was expected to address possible talks to end the war but instead attacked European democracies.

In the address, he said the greatest threat facing the continent was not from Russia and China, but “from within”.

He added that Europe must “step up in a big way to provide for its own defence” and said he hoped a “reasonable settlement” could be reached for the war.

Lammy and his defence colleague John Healey said that Putin had for two decades sought “to recreate the Russian empire and suffocate the countries around its borders”.

“Too often in the past, the West has let him,” they said in the Telegraph.

“We did too little in 2008 when he invaded Georgia, and in 2014 when he first went into Ukraine.”

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was Nato secretary-general from 2009 to 2014, said “a number of European countries need to step up to the plate” for any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, adding that the UK and France should lead that coalition by putting boots on the ground.

“I would let military experts determine [the number] but my guess would be between 50,000 and 100,000 troops,” he told BBC Newsnight.

As of October 2024, there were 74,612 members of the UK’s regular Army forces (excluding Gurkhas and volunteers), according to the latest Ministry of Defence (MoD) figures.

The Army has targets on how many new recruits below the rank of officer it should take on every year, set out by the MoD. These targets have been missed in almost every single financial year since 2010-11, according to a written answer to Parliament last January.

Lord Dannatt said the Labour government would need to “look at their priorities”, adding: “Yes, health, education, roads, infrastructure are important, but actually defence and the security of this nation are more important.”

The crossbench peer said he believes the UK government needs to go further than its commitment of increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP – a pledge that they have yet to put a timeline on when it will be delivered.

Zelensky has previously asked for the UK and other European allies including France to send troops to Ukraine for a peacekeeping operation after the war.

Sir Keir last month signed a “landmark” 100-year pact with Ukraine, building on the £12.8bn the UK hass already sent to the country, with further commitments of £3bn every year for “as long as it takes”.

The UK will also continue to train Ukrainian troops, 50,000 of whom have been trained on British soil so far.

In response to Lord Dannatt’s comments, an MoD spokesperson said Britain’s armed forces were “respected worldwide for their professionalism and excellence”.

“Right now, the Ukrainians are still fighting with huge courage. Our government is stepping up support for Ukraine’s war fighters to put them in the best possible position for any talks.

The spokesperson cited a £150m “firepower package” announced this week “providing more drones, tanks and air defence systems”.

Donald Trump is threatening to introduce big tariffs on EU car imports, unhappy that Europeans don’t buy more American vehicles. But why are US cars, with the notable exception of Tesla, not more popular in Europe?

Italy’s ancient towns and cities, with their narrow, cobbled streets, offer an obvious explanation why, in the words of US President Donald Trump, Europeans “don’t take our cars”.

Or as car industry analyst Hampus Engellau puts it: “Try to go around Italy in a big SUV. I’ve done it, and it’s very difficult”.

Add cost to the question, and it becomes obviously why you don’t see too many American pick-up trucks on European roads, observes Mike Hawes, CEO of The Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders, which represents the industry in the UK.

“We tend to have higher fuel prices than the Americans, so we prefer smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, while they generally prefer larger vehicles.”

Mr Engellau, who works for Swedish investment bank Handelsbanken Capital Markets, also highlights petrol prices being substantially cheaper in the US. “They pay per gallon what we pay per litre,” he says. There are 3.8 litres to one US gallon.

Yet these differences have done little to deter European carmakers from gaining market share in the US. Again, in the words of Mr Trump, the US has “millions of cars coming in – BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and many others”.

In 2022, 692,334 new EU-made cars were exported to the US, worth €36bn ($37bn; £30bn). While only 116,207 new US-made cars went in the opposite direction, for €5.2bn.

This imbalance is caused by unfair trading rules and needs correcting, according to Mr Trump.

“Mr Trump is concerned because the terms of trade are not really equal,” explains Mr Engellau, pointing out that the EU’s 10% tariffs on cars imported from the US far exceeds the 2.5% tariffs the US – currently – charges on cars imported from the EU.

These disparities have prompted Trump to say he wants to raise US tariffs on European automotive imports. He has already announced 25% import tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, two metals crucial for carmakers.

Trump’s move appears to have prompted EU officials to consider reducing their own tariffs in order to protect Europe’s automotive industry from a potential trade war.

Trump’s intervention has not impressed Jim Farley, the boss of US carmaker Ford. “So far what we’ve been seeing is a lot of cost and a lot of chaos,” NBC News recently reported him as saying.

In fact, the very focus on trade is perhaps misplaced, according to automotive industry veteran Andy Palmer, formerly the chief operating officer of Nissan and CEO of Aston Martin, and currently a consultant. “If you can help it, you don’t want to ship cars around the world. They’re big boxes of expensive air,” he says.

The automotive industry is global, adds the SMMT’s Mr Hawes, so carmakers generally want to “manufacture close to where the customer is based”.

As such, several European carmakers, most notably marques such as BMW, Mercedes and Audi, are making some of their largest cars in North America, and some of these vehicles are exported back to Europe.

US carmakers have historically pursued similar strategies in Europe. General Motors owned and manufactured European marques such as Opel/Vauxhall and Saab, but it sold the former in 2017, and shut the latter back in 2009.

Meanwhile, Ford offloaded Aston Martin in 2007, Jaguar and Land Rover in 2008, and Volvo in 2010.

After years of losing money, Ford is currently redirecting its European business towards electric and commercial vehicles and away from small, affordable cars, such as its Focus models.

Ford plans to cut 800 jobs in the UK and 2,900 jobs in Germany by 2027, which represents a 14% reduction in its 28,000-strong European workforce.

Elon Musk’s Tesla has a factory near Berlin in Germany, where it makes its Model Y cars for the European market, but even here there are headwinds as low-cost Chinese imports in particular see their share of Europe’s market for electric cars grow.

Europe is a very tough marketplace for carmakers, according to Jose Asumendi, head of European automotive research at JP Morgan, an investment bank. “You need to have the right products, and you need to run the manufacturing plants well.”

He also points to brands having a competitive advantage in their home countries, be it BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and Audi in Germany, Peugeot, Citroen and Renault in France, or Fiat and Alfa Romeo in Italy.

“There’s a natural inclination for people to buy local champions, especially in Germany, France and Italy,” explains Mr Asumendi.

He adds that while other European countries are more open to different brands, the market is crowded, with a slew of Japanese, South Korea, and, increasingly, Chinese cars.

Adding to Europe’s complexities for overseas carmakers are different taxation regulations, and the need to communicate in many different languages.

Mr Palmer does not think “European customers have any particular objections to American cars”, and Mr Asumendi agrees. “I think Europeans do like American brands, but there are many other brands available in Europe, so competition is fierce,” he says.

Mr Trump’s ambition is to make the US car industry stronger, by bringing more production and innovation home. But Mr Palmer insists that a car trade war with Europe will not deliver this.

Not least, he says, since tariffs tend to “insulate the beneficiaries from the free market, and this merely makes them lazy, so they stop innovating and fail to remain competitive”.

“It’s not about trade,” adds Mr Palmer. “It’s about investment and collaboration.”

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.”

Peter Kay made the news last weekend when he kicked two hecklers out of his show at the Manchester Arena.

Kay defended the move afterwards, saying he’d done his “best to address the situation and made light of it, as any comedian would, but unfortunately their interruptions continued”.

One heckler was removed for loudly ordering the Bolton comic’s favourite “garlic bread” one too many times. He went on to tell the Daily Mail he felt he’d been “treated like a terrorist”.

Another had announced “we love you, Peter” in the aftermath, resulting in Kay calling her Lisa Riley as she was ejected, because of her resemblance to the actress.

The woman later said on TikTok that she felt “humiliated” and thought his reaction was a bit “over the top”.

BBC News journalist Ellen Kirwin told the BBC the “vibe was good” in the place before the red cards, which “seemed unjustified”.

The incidents prompted a week-long discussion about when piping up can be fun, and how it can quickly get out of hand.

With this in mind, we asked an English, a Welsh and Scottish comedian for their thoughts on the subtle art of dealing with hecklers.

Larry Dean, who starts his UK tour on Wednesday 19 February in Cardiff, tells the BBC he “felt sorry for the audience, not just Peter Kay”.

“It’s a really hard thing to do because no one wants to see a comic go serious, you feel like a teacher sometimes,” he says.

“It changes the atmosphere when a heckler goes too far, but it really is about gauging do the people around me want me to keep going?”

Last year, Dean found himself the victim of what he has described as “the most brutal heckle ever”.

When discussing the topic of ghosts, he overheard a woman loudly talking to someone else in the audience and decided to ask if she was okay.

“My dad bought me these tickets because he’s dying and he wanted me to have a laugh,” came the reply.

“We’re not laughing”, she added, “so I’ve said to my pal we’re going to leave.”

Dean recalls his shocked response.

“Obviously I’m not gonna make fun of that,” Dean tells the BBC.

The Glaswegian looked so discombobulated by the heckle that another audience member asked him if he was okay.

“Looking at it, perspective-wise, Chris Rock [who was slapped on stage at the Oscars by Will Smith] and Peter Kay – who have the two most famous show interruptions from the past few years – they’ve had it easy!

“They need to get this woman from Dundee to know what a heckle really is.”

His second-worst heckle involved a man on the front row repeating the same whispered swear word at him, so low that only he could hear it. “I just had to ignore it,” he says.

Arenas, like the ones Kay performs in, bring in more people but they can also bring problems for stand-ups, he says.

“They’re harder to play than a theatre or comedy club because the laughter goes up, it doesn’t come towards the stage,” says Dean, who has played support slots in arenas.

He says it’s difficult for comedians in Kay’s situation to hear what audience members are actually saying, and that their interjections are also distracting for others watching in different parts of the arena.

“People say, ‘he should have said this…’, but usually people who say that have never been on stage before and they don’t know how hard it can be thinking that quickly in the moment about what the best thing for the show is; because you just want everybody to have a good time.”

Another British comic James Acaster last year released a special entitled Hecklers Welcome, not because he particularly enjoys the experience, but to face his biggest fear and, as he told GQ, “run towards the thing I was scared of”.

Dean feels that “nothing will ever catch people’s attention more” than watching a comedian get heckled.

But, he warns, if you’re going to take a pop at a professional then you have to expect something to come back your way.

Abi Clarke, who has almost a million followers on TikTok, thinks most comedians will be on Kay’s side of the argument.

Crucially though, the Bristolian notes: “There’s a difference betwen heckling and crowd work.

“With crowd work a comedian is inviting it, you’re asking a question, you’re wanting a chat and that’s very different from somebody shouting out a random thing.

“Once is fine, or twice but if the comedian stops engaging with you or says that’s enough, then at that point you’re ruining it.”

New comic superstar Paul Smith made his name roasting crowds as an MC/compere in Liverpool, while Jimmy Carr is also famed for inviting and actively engaging with interruptions.

For Clarke, heckling comes into its own when comics are workshopping new material. If someone joins in, it can create new “source material” that can be used as a fresh joke at the next gig.

“I’ve had hecklers who have interrupted multiple times but if they’re engaging, joining in with what you’re saying and being positive, I don’t mind that, it’s quite fun.

“If they’re just derailing the gig because they like the sound of their own voice, then I think you should just chuck them out!

“‘Garlic bread’ – there’s not much you can do with that.”

Clarke thinks if you’re going to someone’s headline show that they’ve honed and crafted – “they’ve perfected the rhythm, set-up and punchline” – then the time to interject has passed.

“I promise you, It will be a better show if they get to perform it how it’s meant to be performed.”

The other time that heckling comes in handy, she says, is for promotional purposes online, as comics don’t want to give away their best written material for free, when a great bit of crowd banter will show off their skills just as well.

“The ones we will post are the wonderful one-off spontaneous moments because they’ll never happen again, so they won’t ruin the show.”

She’s “quite lucky so far”, she says, having had only “two or three horrible instances” of bad heckling, and in those cases the audience had her back.

“It’s easy to win an argument against a person that no one in the room likes.”

Her new tour, Role Model, which kicks off on Thursday 17 April in Southampton, finds her keeping a humorous tally of bad behaviour, while questioning if she herself is a bad person for doing certain things.

During these moments she finds other girls will supportively offer, “no, it’s fine”, which she really appreciates on a human level, but “that’s not what the joke is for!”.

Welsh comic Paul Hilleard, who won the BBC New Comedy Award last year, believes dealing with hecklers is “part of the job” and that Kay – a finalist in the same award in 1997 – may have “thrown his toys out of the pram” a bit, especially given he was playing to a room of “people who love you”, he says.

It’s a bit different from some of the venues – or “bear pits” – that he plays as an up-and-coming comedian in Bristol, while also working as a teaching assistant.

He sometimes performs in back rooms of pubs, where people don’t always know that comedy is about to take place around them.

“Heckling is just part of the game, it’s not fun… but it can be,” he adds, mischievously.

“I’ve always been taught you’ve got to play the room. If it’s chaotic, it doesn’t matter if you’ve written the best 20 minutes ever, you’ve got to control that room of people who are intoxicated, and show them that you’re funnier.”

Stag and hen dos, which tend to gravitate to comedy nights, can bring such chaos.

Hilleard says he has spoken with other comics who agree that audiences “are a little more feral” since returning from the Covid lockdown, “heightened” by social media.

“One guy was on magic mushrooms, we found out, and it became part of the show, you lean into it,” he says. “That’s the best thing you can do, until they become very abusive.”

“There’s a line,” he continues. “If you’re ruining the show, that becomes the venue’s problem.

“But it’s our job as a comic to make that heckle part of the show, as that’s where the magic is.”

He will perform at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival in May, and said there are “tricks of the trade” including certian “jokes and comebacks” that experienced comedians can lean on to deal with such situations.

But it’s all worth it, he says, “if you can turn something on the fly that wasn’t planned into something hilarous”.

“That’s when people are like, ‘oh my God, how did you do do that?’.”

Nine out of 10 hecklers, he believes, are not trying to ruin the show, they just think it’s “part of the fun” or “want to be acknowledged”.

And the one that does, “might have had a bad day, drank too much or they might just be an [idiot]!

“I think it’s something within people, we like a bit of drama.”

A selection of news photographs from around the world.

Life for Mike Elvis Tusubira, a motorcycle taxi rider with HIV in Uganda, has been turned upside down since US President Donald Trump halted foreign aid last month.

Not only does the 35-year-old fear for his own survival as he takes life-saving anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs – but he says he will have to split up from his wife as they can no longer have safe sex.

His partner is HIV-negative and relies on PrEP, a medicine that reduces the risk of contracting HIV.

“It means that even my marriage will end, because actually without the preventive measures, she’s not going to stay,” he told the BBC.

“No condoms, no [anti-HIV] lubricants, no PrEP, nothing. We can’t stay in marriage without meeting. It means that I have to stay single.”

All the couple’s medicines and contraceptives were supplied thanks to funding from the US government’s main overseas aid agency USAID.

Since the sudden shutdown, which he heard about on social media, they have not been able to replenish their supplies. His wife has completely run out of PrEP now and they are both afraid that relying just on condoms – they have some left – is too risky.

Trump ordered the 90-day pause on foreign aid on his first day back in office, after which stop-work orders began to be issued to organisations funded by USAID.

Waivers were subsequently issued for humanitarian projects, but by that time the HIV programme Mr Tusubira was part of – run out of Marpi Clinic in the north of the capital, Kampala – had closed.

He phoned his counsellor at the Kiswa Health Centre III in the city to find out what was going on.

“My counsellor was in the village. He told me that he is no longer at the clinic.”

The father of one, who tested positive for HIV in 2022, has since missed a test to determine how much virus is in his blood and the strength of his immune system.

“I’m moving in the dark, in the darkness. I don’t know whether my viral load is suppressed. I’m traumatised.”

He does not think his job driving a motorbike taxi – known locally as a “boda-boda” – will be able to help his family get over the hurdles they now face.

“Some other people say that the drugs will be in private pharmacies… as a boda-boda rider I don’t know whether I can raise the money to sustain my treatment.”

They have also been impacted by the loss of services provided by non-government organisations (NGOs) that received funding from USAID, he says.

His wife was getting her PrEP via an NGO at Marpi and his five-year-old son was benefitting from one that provided school and food for vulnerable children.

“My child is no longer at school now,” he said.

Uganda’s health sector is heavily reliant on donor funding, which supports 70% of its Aids initiatives.

The East African nation is among the top 10 recipients of USAID funds in Africa. According to US government data, the country received $295m (£234m) in health funding from the agency in 2023 – ranking third after Nigeria which received $368m and Tanzania with $337m.

USAID also supports its malaria, tuberculosis and leprosy programmes – as well as funding maternal and child health services and emergency health assistance.

Thousands of healthcare workers have been impacted by the US funding freeze.

Dr Shamirah Nakitto, a clinician with Reach Out Mbuya (Rom) – a faith-based community organisation providing medical and psychosocial support to people living with HIV in Uganda – was based at Kisenyi Health Centre IV, which serves a densely populated slum in Kampala.

On average, she attended to 200 patients with HIV/Aids and tuberculosis daily. But after the stop-work order, all Rom-supported health workers were laid off.

Its tuberculosis unit now stands silent and its orphans and vulnerable children section has also been shut at Kisenyi.

“We are waiting for the 90 days. So, this compulsory leave, I hadn’t prepared for it,” she told the BBC.

“It was so abrupt. We didn’t have a proper handover at the facility. We just stopped working.”

Uganda’s health ministry says it is exploring ways to minimise disruptions.

Dr Diana Atwine, the top civil servant at the ministry, urged staff “willing to continue working in the spirit of patriotism as volunteers” to get in contact.

Further south in Malawi, USAID-funded activities have also ground to a halt.

The country received $154m from USAID’s health budget in 2023, making it the 10th largest recipient in Africa.

In the northern city of Mzuzu, the gates are shut at a clinic that has been a key provider of HIV services in the region. Vehicles sit idle; there is no sign of activity at the Macro Mzuzu Clinic. Workers locked the doors, turned off the lights and went home 18 days ago.

Despite the US State Department’s waiver on 28 January allowing the delivery of medicine such as ARVs, many clinics have closed as without the critical staff who co-ordinate USAID’s activities, distributing medicines is a challenge.

Even where services are technically permitted to resume, many contracts remain in limbo. Health workers are unsure of what they can and cannot do.

The Trump administration plans to reduce USAID staff by more than 90%.

Atul Gawande, USAID’s former global health assistant administrator, posted on X that the agency’s workforce would be slashed from 14,000 to 294 – with only 12 staff assigned to Africa.

More than 30 NGOs in Malawi have also been severely impacted by the funding freeze.

Eddah Simfukwe Banda, a 32-year-old subsistence farmer, has been getting ARVs since 2017 from the Macro clinic, where various NGOs were providing HIV programmes.

She is worried about her own fate – and that of her sister-in-law, who also relies on donor-funded medication – and says they little option but to pray.

“We have to pray as Malawians. Those of us that believe depend on a God who opens doors when one is closed,” she told the BBC.

The mother of three, who has a three-week supply of ARVs left, also said systemic failures were to blame: “As Malawians, we depend too much on receiving aid. At times we are lazy and squander and rely on other countries to help us.

“Let this be a lesson that we have to be independent,” she said.

But this is difficult for one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world. According to the World Bank, Malawi is vulnerable to external shocks – including prolonged droughts, cyclones and erratic rainfall.

A disruption of this magnitude in its healthcare system presents an enormous challenge.

For decades, the US has been Africa’s most significant public health partner.

In particular through its ground-breaking programme to counter the global spread of HIV, which was launched in 2003. Called the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), it has saved more than 25 million lives.

According to head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), USAID gave $8bn of aid assistance to Africa over the past year.

“Seventy-three per cent went to healthcare,” Jean Kaseya told BBC Newsday last month.

Health experts warn that replacing this funding will be extremely difficult.

African governments have made strides in reducing aid dependency. Kenya now funds nearly 60% of its HIV response. South Africa covers almost 80%.

But for many low-income nations, debt burdens, climate disasters and economic shocks make self-sufficiency nearly impossible.

Amref Health Africa, one of the leading health NGOs on the continent, warns that without urgent action, global health security is at risk.

“This would require African governments and Africa CDC to increase their own funding, which is almost impossible under the current debt distress conditions,” its CEO Dr Githinji Gitahi told the BBC.

“With accelerating outbreaks from climate change and human-environmental conflict, this would leave the world fragile and unsafe – not only for Africa but for everyone.”

Worldwide in 2023, there were 630,000 Aids-related deaths and 1.5 million new infections.

While infection rates have been declining in the worst-affected countries, the impact of the USAID shutdown could reverse these gains.

“If you take away this major contribution by the United States government, we expect that in the next five years, there’ll be an additional 6.3 million Aids-related deaths,” Winnie Byanyima, the head of UNAids, told the BBC’s Africa Daily podcast this week.

“There will be 8.7 million new infections, 3.4 million additional Aids orphans. I don’t want to sound like a prophet of doom, but I have a duty to give the facts as we see them.”

The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has also warned of the dangers of interrupting HIV treatments.

“HIV medicines must be taken daily or people run the risk of developing resistance or deadly health complications,” Tom Ellman, from MSF Southern Africa, has said in a statement.

Back in Uganda, Mr Tusubira feels bleak about the future.

He has about 30 days left of his ARV medication – and may opt to leave Kampala and go home to his village after that.

“At least it will be a bit simpler. If I die, they just bury me there, instead of disturbing my people here in Kampala.

“Because I have no way I can live here without ARV services.”

• What is USAid and why is Trump poised to ‘close it down’?
• Ugandan teenage cancer patient: How a bed saved my life
• ‘I found out I had cervical cancer while I was pregnant’
• Why trainee Kenyan doctors are taking their own lives
• Why South Africa’s health insurance is causing ructions
• How Trump locked out contraception in Africa in his first term

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.

Zakaria is 11 years old and lives in Gaza. He reckons he has seen thousands of bodies since the war started.

But at an age when children are typically found in a classroom, Zakaria is volunteering at one of Gaza’s few functioning hospitals – al-Aqsa.

As a succession of ambulances ferrying victims of the war between Israel and Hamas pull up outside the facility in the central town of Deir al-Balah, Zakaria clears a way through the crowds to retrieve newly arrived patients and rush them inside for treatment.

Moments later he is running through the corridors of the hospital with a stretcher and later carries a young child inside to the emergency room.

Several of his schoolfriends have been killed since the conflict started and hanging around the hospital means Zakaria witnesses shocking scenes. He says that once, after an Israeli strike, he saw a boy in front of him burn to death in a fire.

“I must have seen at least 5,000 bodies. I saw them with my own eyes,” he tells our cameraman.

Zakaria is one of the children and young people we spent nine months following for our BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone.

It’s a film that my colleague Yousef Hammash and I co-directed from London, because international journalists have not been allowed by Israel to enter the Gaza Strip and report independently since the start of the war 16 months ago.

To gather the footage and the interviews, we employed two cameramen who live in Gaza – Amjad Al Fayoumi and Ibrahim Abu Ishaiba – communicating with them regularly using messaging apps, internet calls and mobile phone networks.

Yousef and I wanted to make this documentary to show what everyday life is like for Gazan people trying to survive the horrors of this conflict as it unfolded. We finished filming a few weeks ago, on the day the current ceasefire started.

We focused on three children and a young woman with a newborn because they are the innocents in this war, which came to a shaky pause on 19 January when a hostage release deal between Hamas and Israel took effect.

More than 48,200 people have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s offensive, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The military action followed the attacks on southern Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023 in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

By and large we filmed in an area of southern and central Gaza earmarked by Israel’s army as a “humanitarian zone”, where Palestinians were told to go for their own safety. Despite its designation, the zone itself was struck almost 100 times between May 2024 and January this year, according to analysis by BBC Verify. The Israel Defense Forces said it was targeting Hamas fighters operating there.

We wanted to know how children found food, decided where to sleep and how they occupied themselves while trying to survive.

Abdullah, 13, narrates the film. He speaks excellent English having attended the British school in Gaza before the war and does all he can to keep going with his education.

Renad, 10, does a cooking show on TikTok with the help of her older sister. They make many kinds of dishes, even though the war means they can’t get the proper ingredients, and have more than one million followers.

We also followed Rana, 24, who has given birth to a baby girl prematurely. She has been displaced three times and lives near the hospital with her two sons and her parents.

Some of the film also looks at how medics fought to keep people alive in al-Aqsa hospital, which was described in January 2024 by British doctors as the only functioning hospital in central Gaza.

That’s where we found Zakaria.

Everyone working at the hospital knows the boy. He is, of course, still a child and not a qualified medic but he is always hanging around, waiting for an opportunity to help someone, in the hope he might receive some food or money in return.

Sometimes he helps carry equipment for local journalists, other times stretchers with people injured or dying.

When there is a quiet moment he helps clean the blood and dirt from the ambulances.

There is no school for him to go to and he is the only person in his family making any money. He doesn’t stay with them as they have little food or water, he says, and instead lives on his own at the hospital and sleeps where he can. One night it’s in the CT scan room, another in the journalists’ tent or the back of an ambulance.

There were plenty of nights he fell asleep hungry.

As much as they try, hospital staff can’t keep him away from the chaos of caring for casualties.

Zakaria idolises the paramedics and wants to be considered part of the team. One of them, Said, takes him under his wing. Whenever he treats Zakaria as a child, he says, the boy gets upset.

Other staff see the care and attention Zakaria pays to them and the patients in the hospital and teach him to give someone an IV drip.

In recognition of his efforts, they even make him a miniature set of blue scrubs – which he takes great pride in.

Said tries to ensure the boy still gets a semblance of childhood and in the film we follow them on a trip to the beach.

Sitting under the fronds of a tree branch, Zakaria tucks into the lunch Said has bought. The shawarma, he says, is perfect. Said jokes it’s the only time the boy ever “shuts up”.

But Said worries Zakaria has seen so much death and destruction that he may never fit in with children his age again.

Zakaria is himself looking beyond childhood.

“I want to be a paramedic,” he says. “But first I need to get out of here.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for the creation of an “army of Europe” to guard against Russia as he suggested the US may no longer come to the continent’s aid.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he also said that Ukraine would “never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement” after US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to start peace talks.

In a speech on Friday, in which he attacked European democracies, US Vice President JD Vance warned that Europe needed to “step up in a big way” on defence.

Zelensky said: “I really believe the time has come – the armed forces of Europe must be created.”

• Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia
• What’s happening in Ukraine after three years of conflict with Russia?

He said: “Yesterday here in Munich, the US vice president made it clear [that] decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending.

“From now on things will be different and Europe needs to adjust to that.”

Earlier this week, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a “factory reset” for Nato which signalled the alliance needed to be “robust”, “strong” and “real”.

On Saturday, Zelensky said: “Let’s be honest. Now we can’t rule out the possibility that America might say no to Europe on an issue that threatens it.

“Many, many leaders have talked about Europe that needs its own military.

“An army, an army of Europe.”

The concept of a European army is something that has been proposed by other leaders, including France’s President Emmanuel Macron who has long backed the bloc’s own military to reduce its reliance on the US.

Zelensky said: “A few days ago, President Trump told me about his conversation with Putin. Not once did he mention that America needs Europe at the table – that says a lot.

“The old days are over when America supported Europe just because it always had.”

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nears its three-year anniversary, Trump and Hegseth have both said it is unlikely that Ukraine will join Nato.

The US defence secretary also said a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders was unrealistic.

Zelensky said he would “not take Nato membership for Ukraine off the table”.

Trump had a phone call with Putin last week where they discussed peace talks regarding Ukraine, apparently sidelining key allies.

Zelensky said that, as well as Ukraine, Europe “should have a seat at the table when decisions about Europe are being made”.

The US president later said that he and Putin planned to meet in Saudi Arabia, and wrote on social media that the two had invited each other to their respective capitals.

But Zelensky accused Putin of playing a “game”, by isolating America in “one-on-one” talks.

“Next, Putin will try to get the US president standing on Red Square 9 May this year, not as a respected leader but as a prop in his own performance,” Zelensky said.

No date has been set for Trump’s visit to Moscow.

Russia celebrates “Victory Day” on 9 May, when it marks its triumph over Nazi Germany in 1945.

On Ukraine’s involvement in talks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week that Kyiv “will of course one way or another be taking part in the negotiations”.

Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said his country would never support a dictated peace.

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Europe needs its own plan on Ukraine, or “other global players will decide about our future”.

Elon Musk’s children have been to places many will never see.

From meetings with foreign leaders to the control room of a SpaceX launch, Musk’s children have debuted as constant sidekicks to their father’s endeavors in tech, business and now, politics.

They have made frequent appearances in the nation’s capital since President Donald Trump tapped the tech billionaire and Tesla co-founder to lead the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk’s four-year-old, “Lil X”, hung on the corner of the Resolute desk in the Oval Office on Wednesday sporting a tan pea coat and a collared shirt.

On Thursday, X and two of his siblings exchanged gifts with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi while their father discussed technology and innovation with the foreign leader.

Musk has frequently been seen with his children even before coming to Washington – at a meeting with the president of Turkey, a memorial service at Auschwitz concentration camp, and a Time magazine ceremony where he was named the 2021 person of the year.

But why do Musk’s children tag along?

“The inclusion of the kids in many public appearances is very much a politician move or a political move to make him seem a bit more personable (and) take a human approach to how the public views him,” says Kurt Braddock, an American University professor of public communication.

Still, Mr Braddock thought the decision to bring Musk’s preschooler to the Oval Office was unusual.

X appeared bored during the 30-minute press briefing as he mimicked his father, sat on the floor and received the occasional side glance and smile from the leader of the free world. At one point, it appeared he told someone in the room to “shush” their mouth.

Mr Braddock said he believes their inclusion is intentional – a distraction that benefits both Musk and Trump.

“I do think that there is a bit of a strategy here trying to draw attention to some things while diverting attention to other things,” he said.

Jon Haber, a strategic communication consultant who has worked with five presidential campaigns and teaches at Harvard, said Musk’s children making frequent appearances – and creating viral moments – is beneficial for Trump.

“For Trump, the more chaos, the more he floods the zone, the less anybody can really focus on. Chaos works for him,” Mr Haber said.

Grimes, Musk’s ex-girlfriend and the mother of X, criticised her son’s appearance in the Oval Office.

“He should not be in public like this,” she wrote in a post on X. “I did not see this… but I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.”

In a 2022 Vanity Fair article, she said that she wasn’t a fan of her son being in the spotlight.

“Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there. I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… X is out there. His situation is like that. But, yeah, I don’t know.”

Long before politics, Musk allowed his children to tag along.

A decade ago, when he was still building his profile and eager to draw attention to his electric-vehicle maker Tesla, it wasn’t unusual to see them at events.

As analysts and reporters waited for one unveiling to begin at a Tesla facility in Silicon Valley in 2015, his five children could be seen running through the hallways chasing after each other and shrieking with laughter.

Despite being forced to wait for hours for attendees, the presence of Musk’s children created an atmosphere that felt relaxed and even joyous.

It was a departure from the stiff, far more formal events held by other companies for which the prospect of seeing an executive’s very young children would have come across as odd.

Musk has had 12 children with three different women.

His most-recognised son, X Æ A-12?, goes by “Lil X”, the same letter Musk used to re-name Twitter when he purchased the social media company.

The four-year-old has been dubbed an “emotional support human” by Musk himself.

Walter Isaacson, the author of Musk’s biography, said on The Diary of a CEO podcast that Musk is “deeply committed” to his children and is “almost obsessed by them”.

“With his own children, his lovers, his wives, there is the same intensity that is baked into everything he does,” Mr Isaacson said.

“He always likes having some of his children around him. He always likes having a companion, but that doesn’t mean that he likes calmness.”

For the final 15km (9.3 miles) of the journey from Toulouse to the hamlet of Les Pequiès, you travel on narrow winding roads through hilly, dense woodlands. Without a reliable GPS system you can get lost very quickly, especially at night.

I expected the home of Andrew and Dawn Searle, the British couple found dead earlier this month, to be remote. That’s the suggestion from the photos of the crime scene I had seen. But I was surprised when I arrived to find it well within shouting distance of several homes.

It’s an important detail because Dawn’s partly naked body was discovered outside the front of the house on Thursday morning last week. The prosecutor in charge of the case, Nicolas Rigot-Muller, said she had severe head wounds caused by a blunt weapon. Any screams would have been heard very clearly by neighbours.

Her husband’s body was found hanging inside the back of the house. The prosecutor says no weapon has been found, that there’s no obvious sign of a burglary nor evidence that Andrew put up a fight, nor of a sex crime.

A friend discovered Dawn’s body when she came around to the house with her dog. The couple had two big dogs of their own, and they often walked with the friend or several other dog owners I talked to in the quiet hamlet.

One woman, Bénédicte, said the couple were “absolutely adorable, we would often meet like this simply walking our dogs around the village”.

“We are very shocked, of course we are,” she said.

Lydie, a butcher, sells her produce at local markets with her husband. Their property overlooks the Searle’s home, just a fallow field separates them.

“They were a great couple who smiled a lot and since I once lived in England I was able to talk to them in English,” she told me. “They were well integrated and every year invited everyone over for a party.”

But not everyone I approached wanted to talk. Their looks give away that this is a very difficult moment for this rural community in the glare of a criminal investigation.

The railroad crossing next to the village doesn’t have safety barriers, just a stop sign, which tells you how little traffic there is here normally. Now, you can feel the presence of the Gendarmerie, the branch of the French military which is leading the investigation.

While I was providing live coverage for BBC Scotland a large car with tinted windows drove past me slowly, inside four stony-faced officers from the Toulouse homicide and organised crime branch.

There is no question locals are scared. Several officers from the Gendarmerie photographed our car and asked to see our ID cards and urged us to be discreet. They said the residents were frightened and that their presence was partly to reassure them.

There is bright yellow Gendarmerie tape strapped to the front gate of the Searle’s home. The dogs are gone and their swimming pool has a cover over it. Two large candles have been lit in the driveway and a leaflet taped to the gate has a phone number for anyone who feels they need psychological counselling or moral support, provided by local social services. The same leaflet has been taped to a community board in the centre of the hamlet.

The Searle couple retired to this region five years ago, and other mailboxes in the hamlet indicate they are not the only expatriates in the region. This isn’t surprising: there are no official statistics but in the time I have been based in Toulouse, Foreign Office staff have told me at various times they believe around 30,000 Brits live full-time in the south west, making it the biggest British expat population in France outside of Paris.

On top of that tens of thousands more have holiday homes in this region, called Occitanie, which is one of the fastest growing areas of France, attracting people from not just the UK but Belgium, the Netherlands and Paris.

What attracts them here is the quality of life, wide open spaces, relatively cheap property and achingly beautiful countryside and architecture.

The nearby town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue has one of the most beautiful medieval stone arcade-lined central squares in a region teeming with them. In summer, an open-air market in the square is crammed with holiday makers, including many Brits, carrying woven baskets filled with local produce.

Various conspiracy theories circulate about how the couple died – I’ve been asked about them by countless French national TV and radio media outlets. But all we know for sure is that the prosecutor and his team are still trying to determine, as he reiterated to me on Wednesday night, “whether the tragedy resulted from a domestic crime followed by suicide or involved a third party”.

Ever since the deaths I’ve been speaking to the prosecutor leading the case, who revealed to me late this week that he was handing over the investigation to a senior judge in Montpellier with more resources available.

I asked him if that means he was leaning towards the idea that the Searle couple were both murdered.

He replied that he was not ruling anything out. He added that if they were murdered, and it goes to trial, he would lead the prosecution.

Dr Remy Sevigne, the psychologist who answers the counselling hotline from the leaflets, told me that so far around a dozen people had called him for some sort of support. They were all local, he said, and all knew the couple personally.

They were all either frightened or in shock, he said.

The family of a British couple in custody in Iran say they are united in their determination to secure their safe return.

Craig and Lindsay Foreman were arrested in January, but news of their detention emerged on Thursday when state-run Iranian media reported they were being held on unspecified security charges.

The couple, in their early 50s, had been on a motorbike trip across the world, and had only planned on being in Iran for five days.

A statement issued by the Foreign Office on their family’s behalf said: “This unexpected turn of events has caused significant concern for our entire family, and we are deeply focused on ensuring their safety and wellbeing during this trying time.”

The family called it a “distressing situation”, adding: “We are actively engaging with the British government and relevant authorities, working diligently to navigate the complexities of this matter.”

They said the “emotional burden of this situation weighs heavily on us”, and that “the outpouring of support from friends, family, and the community” had “provided us with strength and encouragement as we face this ordeal”.

Mr and Mrs Foreman were heading for Australia on their journey across the globe.

They had crossed into Iran from Armenia on 30 December and had planned to be in Pakistan by 4 January.

After staying in the cities of Tabriz, Tehran and Isfahan, accompanied by a tour guide, they travelled on to Kerman, in east-central Iran, but never checked into their hotel there.

In a series of social media posts before they were detained, the couple described their joy at being in Iran.

Lindsay Foreman, a life coach with a doctorate in psychology, said she was “having an amazing time”.

Her husband, Craig, who is a carpenter, spoke of the “lovely people” of a “lovely country”.

Mrs Foreman posted a picture of herself on 3 January meeting a cleric in the town of Isfahan. Writing on Instagram, she said: “Travel continues to teach me that humanity’s core is shared: kindness, humility, and respect for one another.”

On Facebook that day she wrote: “Despite differences in culture, language, and traditions, we’ve seen something beautifully universal: kindness, humour, hospitality – and a shared love of good food!”

The Iranian authorities have not said what the couple are accused of.

They had moved from East Sussex to start a new life in Andalucia, Spain, in 2019.

The couple appeared on an episode of Channel 4’s A New Life in the Sun in 2022 to showcase their lives as expats.

Mrs Foreman is reported to have been carrying out a research project on their journey to Australia, asking people what it means to be human and what constitutes a good life.

She was due to present her findings at a conference on positive psychology in Brisbane in July.

Posting on Instagram, she acknowledged that travelling to the Iran, against Foreign Office advice, and to Pakistan was risky and “slightly scary”.

“Yes, we’re aware of the risks,” she wrote. “But we also know the rewards of meeting incredible people, hearing their stories, and seeing the breathtaking landscapes of these regions could far outweigh the fear.”

She added: “From the vast deserts of Iran to the towering peaks of Pakistan, we hope to share the beauty, hospitality, and humanity that often go unnoticed.”

The Foreign Office says it is in contact with the local authorities in Iran, and is providing the couple with consular assistance.

A photograph of the couple, with their faces blurred, meeting the British ambassador Hugo Shorter at the public prosecutor’s office in Kerman was published on Wednesday.

The Foreign Office currently advises British nationals to avoid all travel to Iran.

“British and British-Iranian dual nationals are at significant risk of arrest, questioning or detention,” advice says. “Having a British passport or connections to the UK can be reason enough for the Iranian authorities to detain you.”

Over the past few years, dozens of foreign and dual nationals have been arrested in Iran on vague security-related charges.

Human rights groups say they are often used by the Iranian authorities for political leverage.

Hamas has freed three Israeli hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, in the latest swap under the ceasefire agreed by Israel and the armed group last month.

The three hostages handed over on Saturday are American-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, Argentinian-Israeli Yair Horn, 46, and Russian-Israeli Alexander Troufanov, 29.

In return, 369 Palestinians held in Israeli jails were released.

So far 19 hostages held in Gaza and more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners have been freed as part of the Gaza ceasefire that began on 19 January 2025.

By the end of the first six-week stage of the deal, 33 hostages and 1,900 prisoners are expected to have been freed.

On Saturday, in the sixth swap since last month, Israeli hostages were handed over in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

Surrounded by heavily armed Hamas militants, the men briefly addressed a crowd of Palestinians before being transferred into Red Cross vehicles.

They did not look as gaunt as the hostages freed a week earlier – their appearance had aroused anger in Israel and elsewhere.

Yair Horn and his brother Eitan, 37, were both abducted from a kibbutz during the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas. Eitan Horn remains in captivity in Gaza.

The three men were airlifted by military helicopters to a hospital in central Israel where they will undergo medical tests and be reunited with relatives.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, posting on social media, said the hostages had been “forced to endure” a “despicable and cynical ceremony”.

In a social media post, Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel would continue to work with the US to “ensure that all hostages return to Israel soon”.

• Who are the released Israeli hostages?
• Key events that led to the ceasefire
• What we know about the latest Israel-Hamas deal

The majority of the freed Palestinians were taken to Gaza, although some were taken to the West Bank. In both areas, crowds gathered to welcome the former prisoners.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society told the BBC that five of those released in the West Bank city of Ramallah were taken straight to hospital.

“They all have chronic illnesses,” said Mohammad Faqih, an official from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, adding that one man had a broken leg.

Most of the 36 Palestinians serving life sentences will reportedly be deported to Egypt.

Earlier this week, Hamas threatened to delay the hostage release after accusing Israel of violating the terms of the agreement, something Israel denied.

Israel, backed by US President Donald Trump, said “intense” fighting would resume unless the hostages were handed over.

The latest releases mean that under the ceasefire, Hamas is due to free another 14 hostages.

However Israel says eight are of them are dead, meaning six living Israelis are still expected to be returned in the first phase.

A total of 141 hostages have now been freed, including 81 Israelis and 24 foreign nationals released as part of a previous deal between Israel and Hamas.

About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken back to Gaza as hostages when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023.

This triggered a massive Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

Donald Trump is threatening to introduce big tariffs on EU car imports, unhappy that Europeans don’t buy more American vehicles. But why are US cars, with the notable exception of Tesla, not more popular in Europe?

Italy’s ancient towns and cities, with their narrow, cobbled streets, offer an obvious explanation why, in the words of US President Donald Trump, Europeans “don’t take our cars”.

Or as car industry analyst Hampus Engellau puts it: “Try to go around Italy in a big SUV. I’ve done it, and it’s very difficult”.

Add cost to the question, and it becomes obviously why you don’t see too many American pick-up trucks on European roads, observes Mike Hawes, CEO of The Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders, which represents the industry in the UK.

“We tend to have higher fuel prices than the Americans, so we prefer smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, while they generally prefer larger vehicles.”

Mr Engellau, who works for Swedish investment bank Handelsbanken Capital Markets, also highlights petrol prices being substantially cheaper in the US. “They pay per gallon what we pay per litre,” he says. There are 3.8 litres to one US gallon.

Yet these differences have done little to deter European carmakers from gaining market share in the US. Again, in the words of Mr Trump, the US has “millions of cars coming in – BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and many others”.

In 2022, 692,334 new EU-made cars were exported to the US, worth €36bn ($37bn; £30bn). While only 116,207 new US-made cars went in the opposite direction, for €5.2bn.

This imbalance is caused by unfair trading rules and needs correcting, according to Mr Trump.

“Mr Trump is concerned because the terms of trade are not really equal,” explains Mr Engellau, pointing out that the EU’s 10% tariffs on cars imported from the US far exceeds the 2.5% tariffs the US – currently – charges on cars imported from the EU.

These disparities have prompted Trump to say he wants to raise US tariffs on European automotive imports. He has already announced 25% import tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, two metals crucial for carmakers.

Trump’s move appears to have prompted EU officials to consider reducing their own tariffs in order to protect Europe’s automotive industry from a potential trade war.

Trump’s intervention has not impressed Jim Farley, the boss of US carmaker Ford. “So far what we’ve been seeing is a lot of cost and a lot of chaos,” NBC News recently reported him as saying.

In fact, the very focus on trade is perhaps misplaced, according to automotive industry veteran Andy Palmer, formerly the chief operating officer of Nissan and CEO of Aston Martin, and currently a consultant. “If you can help it, you don’t want to ship cars around the world. They’re big boxes of expensive air,” he says.

The automotive industry is global, adds the SMMT’s Mr Hawes, so carmakers generally want to “manufacture close to where the customer is based”.

As such, several European carmakers, most notably marques such as BMW, Mercedes and Audi, are making some of their largest cars in North America, and some of these vehicles are exported back to Europe.

US carmakers have historically pursued similar strategies in Europe. General Motors owned and manufactured European marques such as Opel/Vauxhall and Saab, but it sold the former in 2017, and shut the latter back in 2009.

Meanwhile, Ford offloaded Aston Martin in 2007, Jaguar and Land Rover in 2008, and Volvo in 2010.

After years of losing money, Ford is currently redirecting its European business towards electric and commercial vehicles and away from small, affordable cars, such as its Focus models.

Ford plans to cut 800 jobs in the UK and 2,900 jobs in Germany by 2027, which represents a 14% reduction in its 28,000-strong European workforce.

Elon Musk’s Tesla has a factory near Berlin in Germany, where it makes its Model Y cars for the European market, but even here there are headwinds as low-cost Chinese imports in particular see their share of Europe’s market for electric cars grow.

Europe is a very tough marketplace for carmakers, according to Jose Asumendi, head of European automotive research at JP Morgan, an investment bank. “You need to have the right products, and you need to run the manufacturing plants well.”

He also points to brands having a competitive advantage in their home countries, be it BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and Audi in Germany, Peugeot, Citroen and Renault in France, or Fiat and Alfa Romeo in Italy.

“There’s a natural inclination for people to buy local champions, especially in Germany, France and Italy,” explains Mr Asumendi.

He adds that while other European countries are more open to different brands, the market is crowded, with a slew of Japanese, South Korea, and, increasingly, Chinese cars.

Adding to Europe’s complexities for overseas carmakers are different taxation regulations, and the need to communicate in many different languages.

Mr Palmer does not think “European customers have any particular objections to American cars”, and Mr Asumendi agrees. “I think Europeans do like American brands, but there are many other brands available in Europe, so competition is fierce,” he says.

Mr Trump’s ambition is to make the US car industry stronger, by bringing more production and innovation home. But Mr Palmer insists that a car trade war with Europe will not deliver this.

Not least, he says, since tariffs tend to “insulate the beneficiaries from the free market, and this merely makes them lazy, so they stop innovating and fail to remain competitive”.

“It’s not about trade,” adds Mr Palmer. “It’s about investment and collaboration.”

A London borough is making moves to ban smartphones from its schools.

From September, 103 primary schools in Barnet will not allow smartphones to be brought in and 23 secondary schools will commit to working towards removing smartphones entirely from the school day.

This is according to the Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC) charity, which says the “groundbreaking” policy was made possible by school leaders, Barnet Public Health, Dan Tomlinson MP and the SFC community.

The charity is also encouraging parents to delay smartphone purchases until their children are at least 14 and to prevent their access to social media until they are 16.

The charity has said from this year, all new Year 7 students in the north London borough will be prohibited from bringing smartphones to school up to Year 11.

According to the SFC, this is the first policy of its kind in the UK.

The SFC says that more than 63,000 state-educated children in Barnet will benefit from a seven-hour window in the day when they can “learn, socialise and grow, free from addictive algorithms”.

The charity’s regional leader for north London, Nova Eden, said: “There is a lot of evidence to show there is a direct correlation and causative link between the use of smartphones and social media in young children and the rise in cases of depression, anxiety and self-harm.

“We really want children to be free from the dangers of smartphones and social media and to enjoy a play-based childhood, which is full of healthy development – away from devices and screens.

“When parents, schools and educational leaders come together, we can create meaningful change for the next generation,” the mother of three added.

BBC London asked members of the public about the policy.

“I think it will really help students with their engagement in their learning,” a student said.

One man told us: “I do think it is important to prioritise reframing from using phones at school and I think it’s important to have the conversation at home with them first.”

A mother said: “We use smartphones to watch our son travel here, there and everywhere, to know that he’s safe.”

The SFC also signposts parents to other types of phones such as “brick” phones, which only allow calls and texts, or other models that can access podcasts and music, but offer no internet access.

Ms Eden said: “We are not saying no phones, just one without the dangers of the internet in the child’s pocket.

“Until these platforms are safe for children, the risks far outweigh the benefits of having a smartphone.”

It follows a similar announcement by Ealing Council last month, in which more than 70 primary schools in the borough pledged to go smartphone-free.

The running total of schools in north London that are now implementing or working towards becoming smartphone-free is 250, said the SFC.

“This is about the tragedy of modern childhood – children don’t need smartphones, childreen need a childhood and we urgently need the government to act now,” Ms Eden added.

The BBC has approached Barnet Council and Dan Tomlinson MP for comment.

A woman in her 40s has died in a Valentine’s Day shooting outside a village pub in Kent as a manhunt continues.

Kent Police said it was treating the shooting at the Three Horseshoes on Main Road, Knockholt, just after 19:00 GMT on Friday, as a murder inquiry.

The woman, who had gunshot wounds, died at the scene, officers said.

A vehicle recovered at the Dartford Crossing along with a firearm is being linked to the death, police have said.

The suspect, a man who is believed to be known to the victim, left the area and is currently outstanding.

Kent Police said it was working to identify and locate “all persons potentially involved”.

Local resident Chris Warner told the BBC: “It’s a really quiet area. Everybody knows everyone.

“It’s just so shocking that something like this could happen here.”

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the Three Horseshoes pub expressed its “sincere condolences to the victim’s family and friends”.

It added: “We also want to send our support to anyone else in the local and surrounding community who have been impacted by this.

“Please be respectful of everyone involved at this difficult time.”

Steve Maines, a parish councillor in Knockholt, told the BBC he heard a “commotion” outside the venue and was told someone had been shot.

He said: “We were sitting having our Valentine’s Day meal when all of a sudden we heard this huge commotion outside in the car park.

“We were told someone had been shot so we had to leave.”

Villager Dorothy Wong said: “I heard around three to four bangs outside and loud shouting from a woman’s voice.”

Ray Picot has lived in the village for 30 years.

He said: “We looked out and saw the whole area cordoned off with ambulances, police and flashing lights.

A separate notice on the pub’s Facebook page said it would be closed on Saturday “following a tragic incident outside the pub last night”.

The Three Horseshoes is located about five miles (8km) north-west of Sevenoaks.

BBC reporter Daniel MacLaren said on Saturday morning the area immediately around the pub was cordoned off with police tape.

Police officers were standing by at the scene to prevent access.

An Indian court’s ruling that a man’s forced “unnatural sex” with his wife is not an offence has led to huge outrage and sparked renewed calls for better protections for married women.

The controversial order has also brought back into the spotlight the issue of marital rape in a country which has stubbornly refused to criminalise it.

Earlier this week, a high court judge in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh set free a 40-year-old man who was convicted by a trial court in 2019 of rape and unnatural sex with his wife, who died within hours of the alleged assault.

The lower court had also found the man guilty of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder”. He was sentenced to “rigorous imprisonment for 10 years” on each count, with all the sentences to run concurrently.

But on Monday, the High Court’s Justice Narendra Kumar Vyas acquitted the man of all charges, saying that since India did not recognise marital rape, the husband could not be considered guilty of non-consensual sex or any non-consensual unnatural sexual act.

The judgement has been met with anger, as activists, lawyers and campaigners renew their calls to criminalise marital rape in India.

“To watch this man walk away is unacceptable. This judgement may be correct legally, but it is ethically and morally abhorrent,” said lawyer and gender rights activist Sukriti Chauhan.

“An order that absolves a man of such a crime, to say it’s not a crime, is the darkest hour in our legal system,” she told the BBC.

“It has shaken us to the core. This needs to change and change quickly.”

Priyanka Shukla, a lawyer in Chhattisgarh, said a judgement like this “sends out the message that because you’re the husband, you have rights. And you can do anything, you can even get away with murder”.

She added that this is not the first time a court has given such a judgement, and there is always anger.

“This time, the outrage is more because it is so gruesome and the woman died.”

The court documents make for grim reading.

According to the prosecution, the incident took place on the night of 11 December 2017, when the husband, who worked as a driver, “committed unnatural sex with the victim against her will… causing her a lot of pain”.

After he left for work, she sought help from his sister and another relative, who took her to hospital where she died a few hours later.

In her statement to the police and her dying declaration to a magistrate, the woman said she became ill “due to forceful sexual intercourse by her husband”.

A dying declaration carries weight in court and legal experts say it is generally enough for conviction, unless contradicted by other evidence.

While convicting the man in 2019, the trial court had relied heavily on her dying declaration and the post-mortem report, which stated “the cause of death was peritonitis and rectal perforation” – simply put, severe injuries to her abdomen and rectum.

Justice Vyas, however, saw matters differently – he questioned the “sanctity” of the dying statement, noted that some of the witnesses had retracted their statements and, most importantly, said that marital rape was not an offence in India.

The lower court’s conviction was “a rarest of rare case”, Ms Shukla said, “probably because the woman died”.

“But what is shocking about the high court order is that there’s not even one sympathetic comment from the judge.”

Considering the nature of the assault, the high court’s order has come as a shock for many, who believe the judge should not have dismissed the case so lightly.

India is among more than 30 countries – along with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia – where marital rape is not a criminal offence.

A number of petitions have been filed in recent years seeking to strike down Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which has been in existence since 1860.

The British colonial-era law mentions several “exemptions” – or situations in which sex is not rape – and one of them is “by a man with his own wife” if she is not under 15 years.

Britain outlawed marital rape in 1991 but India, which recently rewrote its criminal code, retained the regressive law in its new statute book.

• India government says criminalising marital rape ‘excessively harsh’
• In India, growing clamour to criminalise rape within marriage

The idea is rooted in the belief that consent for sex is “implied” in marriage and that a wife cannot retract it later. Campaigners say such an argument is untenable in this day and age, and that forced sex is rape, regardless of who does it.

But in a country where marriage and family are considered sacrosanct, the issue has polarised opinions and there’s strong resistance to the idea of criminalising marital rape.

The Indian government, religious leaders and men’s rights activists have strongly opposed the move.

In October last year, the government told the Supreme Court that criminalisation of marital rape would be “excessively harsh”. The federal home ministry said it “may lead to serious disturbances in the institution of marriage”.

Authorities also insist that there are enough laws to protect married women against sexual violence. But campaigners say India cannot hide behind archaic laws to deny women bodily agency.

“A lot of people say the constitution cannot enter your bedroom,” Ms Chauhan said.

“But doesn’t it grant women – like all citizens – fundamental rights to safety and security? What kind of redundant country do we live in that we remain quiet when a woman has to face this level of violence?” she asks.

Violence within marriage is rampant in India.

According to a recent government survey, 32% of married women face physical, sexual or emotional violence by their husbands and 82% have experienced sexual violence by their husbands.

And even that doesn’t give the true scale of the problem, Ms Shukla said, because a majority of women do not report violence, especially sexual violence, out of shame.

“In my experience, women are not trusted when they complain, everyone says it must be fake. The only time such cases are taken seriously is when a woman dies or the assault is particularly gruesome,” the lawyer said.

Ms Chauhan believes nothing will change until the law changes.

“We need to criminalise marital rape. The wife not getting justice after such a gruesome incident deserves a nationwide campaign, which is not born of anger but is serious [and] well thought out.”

She added that the government and men’s activists try to project it as a “man versus woman debate”.

“But the demand for criminalising marital rape is not against men, but for the safety and wellbeing of women. Is it not important to ensure women’s safety?”

This year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) was supposed to be primarily about two things: how to end the war in Ukraine without giving in to Russia, and how Europe needed to boost its spending on defence.

But the most senior American present, US Vice President JD Vance, used his time at the podium to talk about neither.

Instead, he shocked delegates on Friday by roundly attacking Washington’s allies, including Britain, in a blistering attack decrying misinformation, disinformation, and the rights of free speech.

It was a very weird 20 minutes – one met largely with silence from delegates in the hall.

• A quick guide to JD Vance
• Ukraine end game: What each side wants from a peace deal

Even a joke, “if American democracy can survive 10 years of [climate campaigner] Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk”, failed to raise a single laugh.

He accused European governments of retreating from their values, and ignoring voter concerns on migration and free speech.

Vance’s speech went down very badly – unequivocally badly. It was extraordinarily poorly judged.

But who was it aimed at?

A US commentator said to me afterwards: “That was all for US domestic consumption.”

The vice president did, however, go on to meet the embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who did his best to sound positive.

The pair had “a good conversation”, according to Zelensky, who said it marked “our first meeting, not last, I’m sure”. The Ukrainian leader emphasised the need for Washington and Kyiv to speak more and work together “to prepare the plan [on] how to stop Putin and finish the war”.

“We want, really, we want peace very much. But we need real security guarantees,” Zelensky added.

According to US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin also wants peace, but that is peace on his terms. Unless those have secretly changed, they involve capitulation to Russia’s demands and the permanent ceding of territory to Moscow.

Vance’s speech came days after President Trump 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 also dashed Kyiv’s hopes of joining Nato, a key ambition of President Zelensky, and ruled out sending US troops to help protect Ukraine’s borders from the next time Russia decides to invade.

Ahead of the Munich conference Europe was stunned by news that Trump had held an apparently cordial 90-minute phone call with 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 2022 invasion.

The delegates in Munich are scheduled to focus on the war in Ukraine in a high-profile debate on Saturday.

The fear in Munich amongst European leaders and their delegations is that in Donald Trump’s rush to secure a peace deal in Ukraine, Putin will emerge victorious, stronger and planning to seize more parcels of land in Europe.

The first thing kayaker Adrián Simancas noticed after he was eaten by a whale was the slime.

“I spent a second realising I was inside the mouth of something, that maybe it had eaten me, that it could have been an orca or a sea monster,” the 23-year-old told BBC Mundo.

Adrián had started to think how he might survive inside the humpback whale “like Pinocchio” – then the creature spat him back out.

The Venezuelan kayaker had been paddling through the Strait of Magellan, off Chile’s Patagonian coast, with his father when he felt something “hit me from behind, closing in on me and sinking me”.

His father, Dall, was able to capture the short-lived ordeal on video just metres away.

“I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I realised I was inside the whale’s mouth,” Adrián told the BBC.

“I felt a slimy texture brush my face,” he recalled, adding that all he could see was dark blue and white.

“I wondered what I could do if it had swallowed me since I could no longer fight to stop it,” he said.

“I had to think about what to do next.”

But within seconds, Adrián started to feel as though he was rising toward the surface.

“I was a little afraid of whether I would be able to hold my breath because I didn’t know how deep I was, and I felt like it took me a long time to come up.

“I went up for two seconds, and finally I got to the surface and realised that it hadn’t eaten me.”

In a nearby kayak, Adrián’s father Dall Simancas watched on in disbelief.

The pair had just crossed Eagle Bay – down the coast from Punta Arenas, Chile’s southernmost city – when he heard a crash behind him. “When I turned around, I didn’t see Adrián.”

“I was worried for a second, until I saw him coming up out of the sea,” the 49-year-old said.

“Then I saw something, a body, which I immediately interpreted as most likely being a whale because of its size.”

Dall had fixed a camera to the back of his kayak to record the rising waves – which captured his son’s remarkable experience.

Watching the footage back, Adrián – who moved with his father to Chile from Venezuela seven years ago in search of a better quality of life – was shocked to see just how enormous the whale had been.

“I hadn’t seen the moment when the back appears, and the fin is visible. I didn’t see it, I heard it. That made me nervous,” he said.

“But later, with the video, I realised that it actually appeared before me in such a huge size that perhaps if I had seen it, it would have scared me even more.”

For Adrián, the experience was not just about survival – but he said felt he had received a “second chance” when the whale spat him out.

The “unique” experience in one of the most extreme places on Earth had “invited me to reflect on what I could have done better up until that point, and on the ways I can take advantage of the experience and appreciate it as well”, he added.

But there is a simple reason he was able to escape the whale so quickly, according to a wildlife expert.

Humpback whales have narrow throats “about the size of a household pipe” designed for swallowing small fish and shrimp, Brazilian conservationist Roched Jacobson Seba told the BBC.

“They physically cannot swallow large objects like kayaks, tires, or even big fish like tuna,” he said.

“Ultimately, the whale spit out the kayak because it was physically impossible to swallow.”

The humpback whale likely engulfed Adrián by accident, Mr Seba suggested.

“The whale was likely feeding on a school of fish when it unintentionally scooped up the kayak along with its meal.

“When whales surface too quickly while feeding, they can accidentally hit or engulf objects in their path.”

He warned that the encounter served as “an important reminder” to avoid using paddleboards, surfboards or other silent vessels in areas where whales usually swim.

Boats used for whale watching and research must always keep their engines on, he added, as the noise helps whales detect their presence.

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.

“My love, I will eat burgers & fries and fish & chips with you forever. Thank you for you,” wrote Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, in a Valentine’s Day message to Prince Harry.

Apart from being an insight into what everyone really wants, even among Californian health fadsters, it was a chance to send a message to her husband, who is attending the Invictus Games in Canada.

“Back home taking care of our babies, and missing my Valentine,” Meghan wrote on social media, saying she was “beyond proud” of his sports event for disabled and wounded veterans.

The Prince and Princess of Wales also put out their own social media message, with a single heart emoji and a picture of the couple holding hands and kissing.

The picture of Prince William and Catherine was particularly poignant, as a still from the video that she had issued last September alongside an announcement that she had completed her cancer treatment.

It’s a slightly retro-image, with autumn colours and Enid Blyton shorts, taken in woodland in Norfolk and showing Prince William kissing Catherine.

Prince Harry and Meghan are also kissing in their picture on social media, in a black and white photo of the couple behind what could be the two dishes linking the US and the UK, with a burger and fries and fish and chips a culinary marker of their own transatlantic “special relationship”.

Meghan added the tag #lovewins to her Valentine’s message and signed off “As ever, M.”

There’s also another important part of the romantic mood, with what looks like a big glass of red wine.

Although as far as can be seen, neither of the couples had bought a bunch of garage flowers on the way home and laboured over a witty message.

Why say it with flowers when you can say it on social media, with 4.6 million followers to offer their hearts?

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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 lawsuit against Sean “Diddy” Combs and Jay-Z, which alleged the rape of a 13-year-old girl in 2000, has been dismissed, according to a legal filing submitted on Friday in New York.

The attorney representing the anonymous plaintiff, referred to as Jane Doe, voluntarily withdrew the case, court records show.

The filing was submitted by lawyer Tony Buzbee, who is representing dozens of plaintiffs in lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct against Mr Combs.

The filings states that the plaintiff “hereby gives notice that the… action is voluntarily dismissed, with prejudice”.

Because the dismissal is with prejudice, the lawsuit cannot again be refiled in its current form.

Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded by Jay-Z, whose legal name is Shawn Carter, issued a statement signed by him, referring to the dismissal as a “victory”.

“The frivolous, fictitious and appalling allegations have been dismissed,” he wrote.

“This civil suit was without merit and never going anywhere. The fictional tale they created was laughable, if not for the seriousness of the claims.”

“The trauma that my wife, my children, loved ones and I have endured can never be dismissed,” said the rapper, who is married to singer Beyoncé.

He continued: “The courts must protect the innocent from being accused without a shred of evidence. May the truth prevail for all victims and those falsely accused equally.”

Jay-Z’s attorney, Alex Spiro, emphasised in a separate statement that the case “never should have been brought”.

“By standing up in the face of heinous and false allegations, Jay has done what few can – he pushed back, he never settled, he never paid 1 red penny, he triumphed and cleared his name,” he said in a statement to the BBC.

Jane Doe initially filed the lawsuit against Mr Combs in October before adding Jay-Z’s name in December. She alleged that both men assaulted her in 2000 after an MTV Video Music Awards afterparty.

• Diddy: When is the trial and what are the charges?

Jay-Z strongly denied the allegations, claiming that his attorney had been sent “blackmail” in an attempt to force a settlement. He said the attempt had the “opposite effect” and instead motivated him to publicly challenge the accusations.

In December, Jane Doe gave an interview that raised questions about her credibility. She admitted that “not all the facts are clear” and stated, “I have made some mistakes. I may have made a mistake in identifying.”

Last month, Jay-Z formally requested the court to dismiss the lawsuit, citing inconsistencies in the accuser’s account. The request was approved by United States District Judge Analisa Torres, leading to the lawsuit’s dismissal.

While Jay-Z is no longer facing legal action in this case, Mr Combs continues to battle over three dozen civil suits.

In response to Friday’s dismissal, Mr Combs’ legal team issued a statement declaring his innocence.

“For months, we have seen case after case filed by individuals hiding behind anonymity, pushed forward by an attorney more focused on media headlines than legal merit. Just like this claim, the others will fall apart because there is no truth to them,” the statement says.

It added: “This is just the first of many that will not hold up in a court of law.”

Mr Combs has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, since September 2024 on federal criminal charges related to racketeering and sex trafficking.

He’s been denied bail three times, and will remain in custody until his trial on 5 May 2025.

The world’s frozen oceans, which help to keep the planet cool, currently have less ice than ever previously recorded, satellite data shows.

Sea-ice around the north and south poles acts like a giant mirror by reflecting much of the Sun’s energy back into space.

But as rising temperatures cause this bright layer to shrink, the dark ocean below can absorb more heat, warming the planet further.

This latest sea-ice low appears to have been driven by a combination of warm air, warm seas and winds breaking apart the ice.

Over the 5 days to 13 February, the combined extent of Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice was 15.76 million sq km (6.08 million sq miles), according to BBC analysis of data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

This breaks the previous 5-day record low of 15.93 million sq km (6.15 million sq miles) from January-February 2023.

Arctic sea-ice is currently at its smallest recorded extent for the time of year, while Antarctic sea-ice is close to a new low in satellite records going back to the late 1970s.

The decline of Arctic sea-ice in response to a warming planet is well-established. Its end-of-summer extent fell from an average of 7 million sq km in the 1980s to 4.5 million sq km in the 2010s.

But until the mid-2010s, Antarctic sea-ice had been remarkably resilient, defying predictions that it would shrink.

Since then, Antarctica has shown a series of very low sea-ice extents, although there is still lots of natural variability.

“Every year, every data point that we get suggests that this isn’t a temporary shift, but something more permanent, like what we’ve seen in the Arctic,” Walter Meier, senior research scientist at NSIDC, told BBC News.

“It is indicating that the Antarctic has moved into a new regime of lower ice extents.”

Antarctic sea-ice is relatively thin and mobile – being surrounded by ocean rather than continents like the Arctic – so it can be particularly sensitive to winds breaking up the ice.

But warmer air and warmer waters look to have played a key role in this latest 2025 low, towards the end of the southern hemisphere summer.

The Antarctic ice-shelves – ice flowing off the Antarctic continent, rather than sea-ice – appear to have had a particularly extreme season of surface melting, driven by high air temperatures.

“Atmospheric conditions in December and January looked like they were strongly promoting surface melting on the ice-shelves,” said Tom Bracegirdle, research scientist at the British Antarctic Survey.

“That could also have contributed to what we’ve seen in Antarctic sea-ice, and ongoing ocean warming is setting the backdrop to all of this as well.”

Antarctica’s record sea-ice low of 2023 would have been a one-in-2,000 year event without climate change, according to a recent study. Yet 2025 is not far from eclipsing it.

At the other end of the planet, the Arctic should be reaching its annual maximum, with cold winter temperatures helping the oceans to freeze over.

But current sea-ice extent is nearly 0.2 million sq km below anything previously recorded for the time of year, and has been tracking very low since late 2024.

This is partly as a result of a late freeze-up of ice around Hudson Bay, with unusually warm ocean waters taking a long time to cool down.

As well as warmer seas, some storms also disrupted ice around the Barents and Bering Seas, with the consequences likely amplified by long-term reductions in sea-ice thickness.

“A thinner ice cover is more responsive to weather [… so] weather events can have a stronger impact than they used to,” said Julienne Stroeve, professor of polar observation and modelling at University College London.

In recent weeks, Arctic sea-ice has moved even further below average. Temperatures around the north pole were about 20C above normal in early February, leading to melting conditions in places like Svalbard.

This “is quite astonishing” for the time of year, according to Dr Bracegirdle.

This very low winter extent doesn’t necessarily mean the Arctic will end up with record conditions throughout 2025, as conditions can change quickly at the poles.

But, with the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the global average, declines over the coming decades are almost inevitable.

The Arctic is expected to be essentially free of sea-ice at the end of its summer at least once before 2050, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Some recent studies suggest it could happen sooner.

Declining sea-ice at both poles not only has implications for local wildlife like polar bears and penguins, but also the Earth’s climate.

Polar sea-ice has already lost around 14% of its natural cooling effect since the early-to-mid 1980s, as the area of bright, reflective ice has declined, according to a study published last year.

“If you significantly change the sea ice distribution in and around Antarctica, you modify that part of the planet which is actually helping us fight against climate change,” said Simon Josey, a professor at the National Oceanography Centre.

Sea-ice also plays an important role in the great ocean conveyor, the mass movement of water that helps distribute heat around the planet and keeps places like the UK and north-west Europe relatively mild.

“If we see another strong winter loss [of Antarctic sea-ice], people are going to start to worry about what it’s doing to the ocean circulation,” said Prof Josey.

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