President Trump has spent the day attacking Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling him a “dictator” and deepening the rift between the two leaders.

His attacks came after Zelensky, reacting to US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia from which Kyiv was excluded, said the US president was “living in a disinformation space” governed by Moscow.

Speaking at a Saudi-backed investment meeting in Florida, Trump said the only thing Zelensky “was really good at was playing Joe Biden like a fiddle”.

The “dictator” slur quickly prompted criticism from European leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said “it is simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelensky his democratic legitimacy”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer made it clear he backed Zelensky in a phone call to the Ukrainian president.

A Downing Street spokesperson said Sir Keir “expressed his support for President Zelensky as Ukraine’s democratically elected leader”.

It was “perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during war time as the UK did during World War Two,” the spokesperson added.

Zelensky’s five-year term of office was due to come to an end in May 2024. However, Ukraine has been under martial law since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 and elections are suspended.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson also criticised Trump’s use of the word “dictator” while German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called the comments “absurd”.

“If you look at the real world instead of just firing off a tweet, then you know who in Europe has to live in the conditions of a dictatorship: people in Russia, people in Belarus,” she told broadcaster ZDF.

Speaking in Florida, Trump called Zelensky a “dictator”, just hours after using the same word in a Truth Social post about the Ukrainian president.

“He refuses to have elections. He’s low in the real Ukrainian polls. How can you be high with every city being demolished?” Trump said.

He also referenced his attempt to get rare-earth minerals from Ukraine, accusing Zelensky’s government of “breaking the deal”.

His address echoed his wording of the Truth Social post where Trump said Zelensky “has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died.” In the meantime, the US was “successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia,” he said.

A White House official said Trump’s post was in direct response to Zelensky’s “disinformation” comments.

On Tuesday US and Russian officials held their first high-level, face-to-face talks since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

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The former prime minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, told the BBC that Russia was “popping champagne right now” in response to Trump’s comments.

“Volodymyr Zelensky is a completely legitimate president,” he said. “We cannot hold elections under martial law.”

The war of words began with comments made by Trump on Tuesday at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, when he blamed Ukraine for the war.

Trump was asked by BBC News what his message was to Ukrainians who might feel betrayed, to which he replied: “I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat, well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily.”

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump added.

Trump did not mention that President Vladimir Putin took the decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022.

Then on Wednesday, Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv: “We are seeing a lot of disinformation and it’s coming from Russia. With all due respect to President Donald Trump as a leader… he is living in this disinformation space.”

He added that he believed “the United States helped Putin to break out of years of isolation”.

Later in the day, the Ukrainian leader said the world faced the choice to be “with Putin or with peace” and announced he would be meeting Washington’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, on Thursday.

Earlier, Zelensky also rejected Trump’s attempts to access Ukraine’s rare minerals, saying no security guarantees were offered in exchange.

Trump has attempted to make an issue out of Zelensky’s popularity, claiming the Ukrainian president had only a 4% approval rating. But BBC Verify reports that polling conducted this month found 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted the president.

In Wednesday’s explosive Truth Social post, Trump also took aim at Europe, saying the war in Ukraine is “far more important to Europe than it is to us”.

“We have a big, beautiful ocean as a separation,” he said.

Europe had “failed to bring peace” in the region, he added.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin also spoke to reporters, saying he would meet Trump “with pleasure”.

For its part, the EU said it would place further sanctions on Russia.

The new sanctions target Russian aluminium and dozens of vessels suspected of illegally transporting oil. They would also disconnect more Russian banks from the global Swift payment system and ban more Russian media outlets from broadcasting in Europe.

If there were any lingering doubts about Donald Trump’s view of the Ukraine war and America’s support of Kyiv’s fight against Russia, he put them to rest in stark terms on Wednesday.

Lashing out at Volodymyr Zelensky, who less than three years ago received a standing ovation in Congress for his efforts to resist Russia’s invasion, the US president labelled Ukraine’s leader a “dictator” and accused him of corruption.

He said Zelensky wanted to “keep the gravy train” of foreign aid running, a day after he appeared to blame Ukraine – not Russia – for starting the war.

“Zelensky better move fast, or he is not going to have a country left,” Trump wrote.

It’s been just under a week since Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a lengthy phone conversation. Now Trump is echoing Russia’s talking points about the war and the Ukrainian president.

Russia’s ambassador to the UK Andrei Kelin praised the Trump administration’s approach.

“For the first time we have noticed that they [the US] are not simply saying that this is Russian propaganda and disinformation. They have listened and they hear what we’re saying,” he told BBC Newsnight.

This sudden change in US foreign policy is indeed dramatic, but it should not be surprising. Trump has been charting this course for years.

His latest comments reflect an American president who is wielding total authority over his party and the full power of government to turn a transactional “America First” foreign policy view into reality.

Trump’s latest broadside against Zelensky came after the Ukrainian leader publicly rejected an American bid to gain access to – and profits from – Ukrainian minerals.

“That’s not a serious conversation,” Zelensky said. “I can’t sell our state.”

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The US president seems serious, however, about reducing American military commitments to Europe and pivoting resources instead toward containing China.

And before his decisive election win in November, he frequently criticised the scale of US military aid being sent to Ukraine, describing Zelensky as “the greatest salesman of all time”.

While the voters who elected Trump may not have thought much about the Ukraine war – or foreign policy – in the election, Trump’s position on the issue wasn’t a political liability even as his opponents hammered him on it.

His willingness to now upend international norms and push the limits of US power on the global stage parallel his domestic efforts to slash the federal government and expand presidential authority. And, at least for the moment, there seems to be little interest among Trump’s own party in opposing him.

After his Wednesday social media posts, a few Senate Republicans expressed dismay.

“I certainly would not call President Zelensky a dictator,” Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski said.

Susan Collins of Maine, another regular Republican dissenter, said she disagreed with Trump, as did John Kennedy of Louisiana, who added that Putin was a “gangster”.

Fresh off a trip to Kyiv, Thom Tillis of North Carolina said the Ukraine war was “the responsibility of one human being on the face of the planet: Vladimir Putin”.

If the past is a guide, however, those words within his own party will not translate into any tangible attempt to redirect Trump’s foreign policy. Presidents have broad powers in international relations, and Trump has been clear about his views on Ukraine for years.

He has consistently blamed the Ukraine war on Biden administration weakness, and promised that ending it would be easy.

And while his earlier criticisms of Zelensky were not as sharp as this week, he regularly claimed that the Ukrainian president was adept at convincing Congress to send his country money.

Trump has a long, uneven history with Zelensky, having been impeached in 2019 for withholding arms shipments to Ukraine in an attempt to pressure the Ukrainian leader to open an investigation into his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.

Zelensky’s aggressive pitches for foreign aid, the way the American left has celebrated him as a hero, and his sometimes blunt, confrontational style will all not have helped his case with the US leader.

“The idea that Zelensky is going to change the president’s mind by badmouthing him in public media, everyone who knows the president will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration,” Vice-President JD Vance said in a recent interview.

Trump has also been consistent in his solicitous views toward Putin and the Russian perspective. He said Putin was a “genius” just days after he launched his invasion of Ukraine. At a July 2018 US-Russia summit in Helsinki, Trump said he had no reason to doubt Putin’s insistence, counter to US intelligence findings, that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 US election.

In Trump’s first term, his foreign policy team included some senior officials more sceptical of Russian intentions – like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and John Kelly – who were able to moderate the president’s foreign policy impulses. This time around, Trump is surrounded by many like-minded advisers – and those who might disagree are unwilling or unable to change Trump’s mind.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once viewed as a foreign policy hawk, has been careful to follow Trump’s lead. Keith Kellogg, a Russia critic who Trump picked as his Ukraine envoy, has been sidelined from negotiations with Moscow, while Steve Witkoff – Trump’s Middle East representative and trusted friend – is directly involved.

Trump also has a base of Republican support that agrees with him – further shoring up his political position.

A February Pew survey indicated only 30% of Republicans believed the current level of US support for Ukraine is “not enough” or “just right”. When the war began, 72% felt that way.

Forty percent of Republicans said they believed supporting Ukraine “hurts” US national security, versus only 27% who said it helps.

The Biden White House had argued that standing up to Russia in Ukraine was essential to US national security, but that is a far cry from how Trump and his closest advisers see the world – not in ideological clashes, but in transactions and relations that either benefit or harm American interests.

His Truth Social post, for instance, lamented that the US “will get nothing back” for the support it has given to Ukraine. His focus on the nation’s rare minerals tracks with his Middle East peace plan that involves the US redeveloping Gaza’s waterfront real estate into a resort, or his interest in maintaining control of – and profiting from – Syrian oil fields in his first presidential term.

Trump’s “America First” priorities do not involve committing US resources to spread democracy or getting involved in far-away conflicts across a “big, big beautiful ocean”, as he wrote on Wednesday.

The Ukraine war, he said, is “far more important to Europe than it is to us”.

This is a sharp change from the interventionist conservatism of George W Bush, the most recent Republican president before Trump. But with Trump as the face of the Republican Party since 2016, the changes over the past few weeks have been sudden – but they have also been a long time coming.

Actress Kim Sae-ron‘s death in an apparent suicide has renewed criticism of South Korea’s entertainment industry, which churns out stars but also subjects them to immense pressure and scrutiny.

Kim – who was found dead aged 24 at her home in Seoul on Sunday – had been bombarded with negative press coverage and hate online after a drink-driving conviction in 2022. Police have not provided further details about her death.

Experts found the circumstances leading to it depressingly familiar. Other celebrities also ended up taking their lives after careers upended by cyberbullying.

As Kim was laid to rest on Wednesday, analysts say they are not optimistic her death will lead to meaningful change.

South Korea’s entertainment industry is enjoying massive popularity. Today, there are more than an estimated 220 million fans of Korean entertainment around the world – that’s four times the population of South Korea.

But there is also increasing spotlight on the less glamorous side of the entertainment industry.

South Korea is known for its hyper-competitive culture in most spheres of life – from education to careers. It has one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries. While its overall suicide rate is falling, deaths of those in their 20s are rising.

This pressure is heightened in the case of celebrities. They face immense pressure to be perfect, and are subjected to the demands of obsessive “super fans” who can make or break careers.

That is why even the slightest perceived misstep can be career ending. Kim Sae-ron became so unpopular, scenes featuring her were edited out of shows such as Netflix’s 2023 drama Bloodhounds.

“It is not enough that the celebrities be punished by the law. They become targets of relentless criticism,” Korean culture critic Kim Hern-sik told the BBC.

He referred to K-pop artists Sulli and Goo Hara, who died by suicide in 2019 after long battles with internet trolls, even though they did not have known brushes with the law.

Sulli had offended fans for not conforming to the K-pop mould, while an internet mob had targeted Goo Hara over her relationship with an ex-boyfriend.

Cyberbullying has also become a money-making gig for some, Kim Hern-sik told the BBC.

“YouTubers get the views, forums get the engagement, news outlets get the traffic. I don’t think [Kim’s death] will change the situation.

“There needs to be harsher criminal punishment against leaving nasty comments,” he says.

Kim Sae-ron’s father has blamed a YouTuber for her death, claiming the controversial videos they published caused her deep emotional distress.

Others have pointed fingers at some local media outlets, who reportedly fuelled public animosity against Kim by reporting the unverified claims.

“This cycle of media-driven character assassination must stop,” civic group Citizens’ Coalition for Democratic Media said in a statement on Tuesday.

Na Jong-ho, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, likened the spate of celebrity deaths in South Korea to a real-life version of Squid Game, the South Korean Netflix blockbuster which sees the indebted fighting to the death for a huge cash prize.

“Our society abandons those who stumble and moves on as if nothing happened.. How many more lives must be lost before we stop inflicting this destructive, suffocating shame on people?” he wrote on Facebook.

“Drunk driving is a big mistake. There would be a problem with our legal system if that goes unpunished. However, a society that buries people who make mistakes without giving them a second chance is not a healthy one,” Prof Na added.

Last year, the BBC reported on how “super fans” in the notorious K-pop industry try to dictate their idols’ private lives – from their romantic relationships to their daily activities outside of work – and can be unforgiving when things go off script.

It is no surprise that Kim Sae-ron chose to withdraw from the public eye after her DUI conviction, for which she was fined 20 million won (£11,000) in April 2023.

It is worth noting however, that not all public figures are subject to the same treatment. Politicians, including opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, also have past drink-driving convictions but have been able to bounce back – polls show Lee is now the country’s top presidential contender.

In South Korea, it is “extremely tough” for artistes to recover when they do something that puts a crack in their “idol” image, says K-pop columnist Jeff Benjamin.

He contrasts this to entertainment industries in the West, where controversies and scandals sometimes even “add a rockstar-like edge” to celebrities’ reputations.

“While no one cheers when a Hollywood celebrity is arrested for DUI [driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs] or sent to jail for significant crimes, it’s not necessarily career-ending,” he says.

While the Korean entertainment industry has made moves to address performers’ mental health concerns, it is unclear how effective these have been.

Real change can only happen when there is no more financial or attention incentives to continue with such intrusive reporting, says Mr Benjamin.

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

When Hanaa arrived at work a few months ago, she found “drawers and doors smashed, and the boss surrounded by security personnel”.

Computers, phones, cameras and documents were all confiscated, her boss was arrested and the organisation’s bank account was eventually frozen.

Hanaa works for a US-funded non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Yemen, that supports women’s empowerment and trains people to solve problems through negotiation.

But the country’s civil war, which has lasted more than a decade and created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, has made life for NGO workers increasingly dangerous.

Twenty-four UN employees, along with workers from other local and international NGOs have been detained by Houthi rebels in the past few months.

A wave of arrests in January has intensified the climate of fear – one person from the World Food Programme who was detained died in custody.

The situation has left humanitarian workers feeling their freedom of movement has been greatly restricted. As a result, many organisations, including the UN, are scaling back operations, threatening to make life for people already devastated by war even worse.

Ten years ago, Iranian-backed Houthi militants seized control of much of the west of Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, from the internationally-recognised government. Saudi Arabia, has since carried out intensive air raids on its neighbour – with logistical and intelligence support from the US and UK – to try to prevent the Houthi rebels from taking control of the whole country.

It was Houthi officials who raided Hanaa’s office and detained her boss, and she fears retribution if she speaks out. So, for their safety, we have changed the names of Hanaa and others in Yemen who we interviewed for this article.

By cracking down on humanitarian workers, Hanaa believes the Houthis aim to spread fear among the public. But what hurts her deeply is how the public reacted.

“When I checked social media, it was appalling to find out that people see us as spies,” she says.

A day after her boss was detained, Hanaa was glued to her TV, watching a pro-Houthi channel airing what it described as confessions of espionage, made by nine local people who had once worked at the long-closed US embassy in Sanaa. They were arrested in 2021.

That was the moment she feared things would get worse for her, as she worked for a US-funded NGO. She decided to leave her home in northern Yemen.

By the time she reached the south, she felt traumatised. “For three days I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop crying,” she says.

Now she’s worried that US President Donald Trump’s decision to re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist organisation could lead them to target everyone who works in US-funded projects.

Once someone is arrested, it can be hard for them to get any support, according to Yemeni lawyer Abdulaziz, who represents 14 detainees. They have been behind bars for several months – three are UN staff, while the others are employed by local NGOs. “During the first three months of detention, my clients didn’t communicate with anyone,” he says.

Abdulaziz is getting increasingly worried that their whereabouts is still unknown. More recently, he says that his clients were able to make a few brief phone calls to their families. “Each call was between five to 10 minutes,” he explains.

The BBC approached the Houthis to ask about their treatment of aid workers, but got no reply.

In addition to the detentions, lifesaving assistance from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been paused as a result of President Trump’s freeze on the organisation’s operations around the world, amid allegations of waste and misuse of funds.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) warns that that the impact of President Trump’s policies and the Houthis’ arbitrary arrests is “nothing short of devastating”. It “will have massive and dramatic impact on aid provision in Yemen”, says Niku Jafarnia, a Yemen and Bahrain researcher at the organisation.

According to HRW, the US was funding about one third of humanitarian aid in Yemen, much of it through USAID. Between 2015 and 2021, it provided more than $3.6 billion, making it the largest single donor of humanitarian assistance in the country, according to the UN.

“Cutting aid would be a death sentence to us,” warns Amal, a mother of nine. She lives in a camp for internally displaced people in northern Yemen, alongside thousands of other families.

Even over the phone, it is clear what a heavy burden this woman is carrying. Her slow speech is laden with emotion. It is nearly 10 years since she lost her home.

Amal singlehandedly supports her huge family. Her husband has acute asthma, so he can’t work. The family had to flee their hometown further north after the conflict began.

Since then, life has been increasingly unkind to them. The camp, on barren desert land, hardly resembles a home. Their only shelter is a worn-out plastic tent, with no chairs or beds. It is hard for her children to find joy in a place which lacks almost everything.

“If this supply line provided by NGOs is cut, my children might die. We have no jobs, no income, nothing,” Amal adds.

About half of the population are in bad need of humanitarian assistance, including nearly 10 million children, according to the UN children’s charity Unicef. The UN Human Development Index lists Yemen as one of the 10 least developed countries in the world.

Amal tells us she receives a monthly food basket from the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), but it barely lasts two weeks. When they run out of food, she says her only option is to leave the camp and go out begging in the city’s streets. She passes restaurants and shops, hoping for a few loaves of bread or a packet of rice.

“I am covered in shame, but should I leave my children to starve? I am totally helpless,” Amal explains. Helplessness often takes its toll on her. “I cry a lot when I realise that I don’t have a penny,” she says, her voice both anguished and bitter.

A large number of children suffer from diarrhoea and pneumonia due to the poor hygiene, malnutrition and miserable living conditions, but adequate medication is rarely available.

At a clinic in northern Yemen, the shelves where medicines should be lie empty. Staff told us the medical stock they have is nothing compared to the people’s needs.

The BBC contacted the UN seeking comment on the current aid distribution process and recent arrests but received no reply.

However, addressing the UN Security Council, Hans Grundberg, the UN Special envoy for Yemen, condemned the detention of its staff as “not only a violation of fundamental human rights, but also a direct threat to the UN’s ability to distribute aid to the most needy”. He also called for the immediate release of all detainees, whether from the UN or from other local and international NGOs.

It is for families like Amal’s that Hanaa and her co-workers try to make life better.

She proudly remembers how they sent girls to school in one of the conservative northern areas. When parents complained about neighbours being able to see their daughters during break time, “we held discussions between residents, and eventually agreed to cover the playground, so that girls could go back to class”, she explains.

She fears that the absence of this support, due to fear and lack of funds, could increase rates of illiteracy. “We are the only ones who have survived during the collapse of the state, in order to serve the people,” Hanaa says with a sigh.

On a cold January afternoon, a young pharmacy student, Shin Jeong-min, waited restlessly outside South Korea’s Constitutional Court, as the country’s suspended president arrived to fight his impeachment.

While Yoon Suk Yeol testified, she chanted along with hundreds of his incensed and worried supporters, who have rallied around him ever since his failed attempt to impose martial law. “Release him now. Cancel his impeachment,” they shouted.

“If the president is impeached and the opposition leader is elected, our country will become one with North Korea and Kim Jong Un,” Jeong-min said, citing a theory popular among President Yoon’s most fanatical followers: that the left-leaning opposition party wants to unify with the North and turn South Korea into a communist country.

At 22 years old, Jeong-min stands out from the legion of elderly Koreans who have always feared and despised the North, and make up the bulk of those who hold these far-right conspiratorial beliefs.

That generation of Koreans, now in its 60s and 70s, lived through the Cold War and remembers bitterly the devastating aftermath of North Korea’s invasion in the 1950s.

When Yoon declared martial law in early December, he played on these fears to justify his power grab.

Without citing evidence, he claimed that “North Korean communist forces” had infiltrated the opposition party and were trying to overthrow the country. They needed to be “eradicated”, he said, as he moved swiftly to ban political activity and put the army in charge.

Two months on from his failed coup, an anti-communist frenzy is gripping Yoon’s supporters, young and old.

Even some who had never given North Korea or communism much thought are now convinced their dynamic democracy is on the brink of being turned into a leftist dictatorship – and that their leader had no choice but to remove people’s democratic rights in order to protect them from both Pyongyang and Beijing.

“This a war between communism and democracy,” said one office worker in his 40s, who had slipped out of work to join the protest at the court.

Another man, in his 30s, adamantly argued the president had to be returned to office as soon as possible. “He’s going to arrest all the North Korean spies,” he said.

Such threats were once very real. During the 1960s and 70s, spies would regularly attempt to infiltrate the government.

In 1968, a group of North Korean commandos crawled across the border and tried to assassinate then President Park Chung-hee. A tree atop Seoul’s Bugak mountain still bears the bullet marks from the intense gun battles that raged for nearly two weeks.

In the 1980s, during the final years of South Korea’s violent military dictatorship, a radical far-left student movement began to praise Pyongyang for its “superior” political system. They were labelled regime “sympathisers”.

It was also common for authoritarian leaders to accuse their political adversaries of being North Korean conspirators.

“Anti-communism became the dominant ideology of South Korea’s military dictators, who used it to control society and justify restricting people’s freedom,” said Shin Jin-wook, a sociology professor at Chungang University.

Today, these threats have dissipated. Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and advanced cyber-hacking abilities pose the greater risk, and you would struggle to find anyone in South Korea who wants to emulate life in the North. The political left and right are merely divided over how to deal with their troublesome neighbour.

While the approach of Yoon’s conservative People Power Party has been to try to threaten the North into submission with military superiority, the left-leaning Democratic Party prefers to engage with Pyongyang, believing the two countries can peacefully co-exist.

The president has been accused of exploiting people’s historic fears. “Yoon’s rhetoric almost completely matches that of past dictators, and he is the first president to use this anti-communist ideology so blatantly since Korea became a democracy in 1987,” said Mr Shin.

Not only has Yoon accused the parliament, led by the opposition Democratic Party, of being riddled with Pyongyang sympathisers, but he has dangled the idea that North Korea, with help from China, rigged last year’s parliamentary election.

“This is fake news cooked up by Yoon to demonise the opposition and justify his completely undemocratic move,” one Democratic Party lawmaker, Wi Sung-lac, told the BBC.

“We have a long history of fighting for democracy and freedom in Korea. We are the ones who managed to thwart Yoon’s attempt to destroy Korea’s democracy,” he said, referring to the opposition politicians who pushed past troops and climbed over the parliament’s walls during martial law to vote down the motion.

Such ideas were previously pedalled by extreme conservative groups, said Lee Sangsin, a polling expert at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

“These groups were isolated. People didn’t take much notice,” he explained. “But because Yoon is the president, his words carry weight, and many people have accepted what he said.”

This was evident at one of the pro-Yoon weekend rallies we attended last month. Far from being die-hard conspiracy theorists, nearly everyone we spoke to said Yoon had changed their thinking.

“At first I didn’t support Yoon, but martial law opened my eyes,” said Oh Jung-hyuk, a 57-year-old musician, there with his wife. “We can see how deeply embedded leftist forces are in our society.” One woman in her 40s told us she previously had doubts about Chinese vote rigging but had researched the issue after martial law and “realised it was true”.

Yoon’s supporters often point to real events – how the previous Democratic Party President, Moon Jae-in, met Kim Jong Un to try to orchestrate a peace deal; that the current Democratic leader, Lee Jae-myung, is being investigated for helping to send millions of dollars to North Korea – then use these as evidence of a greater plot.

“This far-fetched conspiracy theory that China rigged the election is becoming more and more accepted,” said the sociology professor Mr Shin. “One of the most basic consensuses in a democracy is the premise of fair and free elections, and now we have people distrusting that. This is very extreme.”

As Yoon’s unsubstantiated claims have taken root, his support seems to have grown. Although the majority of people in South Korea still want him permanently removed from office, the number has fallen. Last week it stood at 57%, compared to 75% in the week after the martial law declaration.

Through his anti-communist rhetoric, Yoon has also effectively tapped into a simmering distrust of China. To fear North Korea now means to be wary of China too.

At a recent weekend rally in Seoul, many supporters had swapped their trademark “Stop the Steal” election fraud placards for ones that read “Chinese Communist Party OUT”.

“I believe China is interfering in all South Korea’s political affairs. It’s pulling the strings behind the scenes,” said 66-year-old Jo Yeon-deok, who was holding one of the signs.

According to the polling expert, Mr Lee, “a growing portion of the public now believes China wants to turn South Korea into some kind of vassal state”.

For those in their 20s and 30s who have never experienced real danger from North Korea, China is a more believable threat. Last year the Pew Research Centre found that South Korea and Hungary were the only two countries where the young had a more negative view of China than the old.

But contrary to the information they are being fed, young people’s fears have nothing to do with communism, said Cho Jin-man, a political scientist at Duksung Women’s University.

Until recently South Koreans felt their country was superior to China, Mr Cho explained – but as Beijing has become stronger and more assertive they have started to see it as a threat, especially since the US started treating it as such.

On top of that, young people have a lot of grievances: they’re struggling to find work or afford a home, and feel resentful when they see their universities catering to Chinese students.

Communism, Mr Cho believes, is being used as a convenient catch-all bogeyman to stir up fear and hate. This message is amplified by far-right YouTube channels, particularly popular with young men.

“North Korea and China are my biggest concerns,” said Kim Gyung-joo, a 30-year-old IT developer, who came alone to one of the rallies. He used to be left-wing like his friends, he said, and was initially very critical of the president’s martial law order. But after researching the issue on YouTube he realised martial law was “unavoidable”.

“If I’d been in the president’s position, I’d have declared it too,” he said.

Nonetheless, Wi Sung-lac the opposition politician is not concerned about his party losing support. “Even though these extreme views are spreading, they will be limited,” he said. “Most people understand who we really are, and they are yearning for a return to normality.”

Polling expert Lee Sang-sin is less sanguine, likening Yoon’s supporters to “a fast-growing cult”. The president’s move was “very divisive”, he said.

“It is going to have a lasting effect on Korean society”.

Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago.

King Thutmose II’s tomb was the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty.

A British-Egyptian team has located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near the city of Luxor. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings.

The crew found it in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh.

“Part of the ceiling was still intact: a blue-painted ceiling with yellow stars on it. And blue-painted ceilings with yellow stars are only found in kings’ tombs,” said the field director of the mission Dr Piers Litherland.

He told the BBC’s Newshour programme he felt overwhelmed in the moment.

“The emotion of getting into these things is just one of extraordinary bewilderment because when you come across something you’re not expecting to find, it’s emotionally extremely turbulent really,” he said.

“And when I came out, my wife was waiting outside and the only thing I could do was burst into tears.”

Dr Litherland said the discovery solved the mystery of where the tombs of early 18th dynasty kings are located.

Researchers found Thutmose II’s mummified remains two centuries ago but its original burial site had never been located.

Thutmose II was an ancestor of Tutankhamun, whose reign is believed to have been from about 1493 to 1479 BC. Tutankhamun’s tomb was found by British archaeologists in 1922.

Thutmose II is best known for being the husband of Queen Hatshepsut, regarded as one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and one of the few female pharaohs who ruled in her own right.

Dr Litherland said the “large staircase and a very large descending corridor” of the tomb suggested grandeur.

“It took us a very long time to get through all that,” he said, noting it was blocked by flood debris and the ceilings had collapsed.

“It was only after crawling through a 10m (32ft) passageway that had a small 40cm gap at the top that we got into the burial chamber.”

There they discovered the blue ceiling and decorations of scenes from the Amduat, a religious text which was reserved for kings. That was another key sign they had found a king’s tomb, Dr Litherland said.

They set to work clearing the debris – expecting that they would find the crushed remains of a burial underneath.

But “the tomb turned out to be completely empty”, said Dr Litherland. “Not because it was robbed but because it had been deliberately emptied.”

They then worked out that the tomb had been flooded – “it had been built underneath a waterfall” – just a few years after the king’s burial and the contents moved to another location in ancient times.

It was through sifting through tonnes of limestone in the chamber that they found fragments of alabaster jars, which bore the inscriptions of the names of Thutmose II and Hatshepsut.

These fragments of alabaster “had probably broken when the tomb was being moved,” said Dr Litherland.

“And thank goodness they actually did break one or two things because that’s how we found out whose tomb it was.”

The artefacts are the first objects to be found associated with Thutmose II’s burial.

Dr Litherland’s said his team had a rough idea of where the second tomb was, and it could still be intact with treasures.

The discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb caps off more than 12 years of work by the joint team from Dr Litherland’s New Kingdom Research Foundation and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The team has previously excavated 54 tombs in the western part of the Theban mountain in Luxor, and had also established identities of more than 30 royal wives and court women.

“This is the first royal tomb to be discovered since the ground-breaking find of King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in 1922,” said Egypt’s minister of tourism and antiquities Sherif Fathy.

“It is an extraordinary moment for Egyptology and the broader understanding of our shared human story.”

“Dirty.” “Perverted mind.” “Disgusting.”

These were the words India’s Supreme Court used on Tuesday while granting interim protection from arrest to a popular YouTuber who has been in the eye of a storm in the country over the past week.

The furore began after Ranveer Allahbadia, whose YouTube channel BeerBiceps has eight million followers, asked a contestant the question: “Would you rather watch your parents have sex every day for the rest of your life or join in once and stop it forever?”

The comments, made on the show India’s Got Latent on 9 February, sparked massive outrage, police cases and even death threats. YouTube quickly removed the episode, but that didn’t stall the tide of anger directed at Allahbadia and the show.

In fact, the amount of attention the incident has received is mind-boggling: it has made national headlines, been covered on primetime TV and some of India’s most prominent news sites have even run live pages.

Not surprising, considering the star status of Allahbadia. He has interviewed federal ministers, top Bollywood celebrities, cricketers and Hollywood actors. And last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi handed him a “National Creators Awards” trophy.

Since the controversy erupted, Allahbadia and the show’s creator, Samay Raina, have apologised for the comments and Raina has taken down all previous episodes of the show. The Supreme Court in its recent order banned Allahbadia from posting content on social media.

But the incident continues to make news,

“It feels like the state is trying to make an example out of Allahbadia,” says Apar Gupta, founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation. Saket Gokhale, an opposition lawmaker, also condemned the targeting of Allahbadia and the show.

“Crass content can be criticised if it offends you. However, you cannot have the state persecute and lock up people for offending your ‘moral sentiments’,” he wrote in a post on X.

Popular comedian Vir Das also weighed in on the controversy and criticised news channels for their one-dimensional coverage of the incident and for taking a disparaging view of all digital content.

Allahbadia’s remarks and the subsequent backlash have triggered debates around free speech and India’s obscenity laws; it has also sparked conversations around the thirst for viral content and the consequences its makers face when their content crosses lines upheld by the very people who watch it.

Raina’s show, which debuted in June, has been popular from the start, with each episode being viewed tens of millions of times on YouTube. And it hasn’t shied away from kickstarting controversies either.

The show has platformed some bizarre performances and judges and contestants have been seen making crass and crude comments more than a few times. Critics have accused the show of spewing misogynistic views and for body-shaming guests.

A popular fashion influencer once walked out of the show after a male contestant compared her to a former adult film actress while another asked her about her “body count” (a slang term for the number of sexual partners a person has had).

But that seems to have been the appeal of the show too.

Fans of the show have hailed it for championing “raw talent and unfiltered jokes”. Some have said that they liked the roasts – a form of insult comedy – which was popular on the show.

Experts have underscored how, with the entertainment landscape exploding, digital content creators often feel compelled to push the envelope – even if it means resorting to the risqué and lewd – just to gain views and virality.

It’s safe to say the show pushed the envelope and the buttons of many. But then, it backfired.

“A lot of comedy, especially of a certain masculine kind, is cruel and punches down on people. It has a violent undercurrent. So if you contribute to that culture, it’s not a shock if it comes back to bite you some day,” filmmaker Paromita Vohra says.

She adds that successful comedy calls for a fine-tuned awareness of the audience it is being performed for and what boundaries it can push.

Interestingly, Allahbadia’s question, which sparked the furore, was almost identical to the question asked by the host of an Australian comedy show called OG Crew’s Truth or Drink. While the question didn’t spark outrage in Australia, it has in India.

“The internet has made it possible for content to reach spaces and people it was not organically playing to. Unthinkingly appropriating content can have unexpected consequences,” she says.

But she also says that there’s a need to guard against making such issues a question of morality.

“When such controversies erupt, there is always the risk of morality being weaponised to punish people who have gone against what’s accepted by society,” she says and adds that morality is increasingly being beaten into the legal framework of the country, which can have a divisive effect.

Some critics have also accused the authorities of using the controversy as a smoke screen to divert attention from other pressing problems – like unemployment and pollution. Some fear that it will be used by the federal government as a reason to justify further regulating content creation.

After the controversy, a report by NDTV news channel stated that a parliamentary panel was considering making laws around digital content stricter. The Supreme Court too has pushed for more regulations around online content.

Mr Gupta says the state already has a “tremendous amount of power” to prosecute people accused of flouting various data and content laws and that while the state exercises its powers without restraint, content creators don’t have as many legal safeguards to protect them.

“Instead of tighter laws, we need more reform; existing legal standards need to be more tolerant of free expression,” he says.

“Other systems, like education and digital learning should be strengthened so that young people know to get their education from the classroom, and turn to the internet only for entertainment.”

A chorus of praise is being sung around Ne Zha 2, the Chinese film about a mythical boy who battles demons, which has been newly crowned the world’s highest-grossing animated film.

The box office triumph of the film – which has raked in 12.3bn yuan ($1.7bn; £1.4bn) – triggered a huge swell of national pride across the country.

But as patriotic Ne Zha 2 fans set their sights on further success, they are also keeping a close eye on critics of the movie, accusing them of being clout-chasing, paid “haters”.

Also in the crosshairs of this nationalism is Captain America: Brave New World, the fourth movie of the superhero franchise, now seen as Ne Zha 2’s rival.

“I don’t care if Ne Zha 2 can survive overseas, but Captain America 4 must die in China,” reads a popular slogan that has been repeated on multiple posts on social media.

In Chinese news outlets and social media, people are gloating over the lacklustre performance of the American blockbuster at China’s box office. Of the $92m the film has made outside the US, only $10.6m has come from China, Hollywood’s largest overseas market.

“It’s not Captain America that’s dying, but America that’s dying,” reads the title of an essay on an online forum analysing the movie’s lack of appeal in China.

The author goes on to argue: “In reality, the US does not have superheroes and the US is not a peace-loving, peace-defending beacon for humanity.”

One cinema in Sichuan province reportedly decided to hold off screenings of Captain America 4 in its theatres “in order to support Ne Zha 2”.

Meanwhile, some are critical that Ne Zha 2, which premiered outside China this month, did not get enough screenings in North American cinemas. They have also accused American cinemas of showing other movies rather than the Chinese film.

Ne Zha 2 hit the screens in China on 29 January, among a string of high-profile movies designed to capture an annual surge of cinemagoers during the Lunar New Year holiday.

It quickly towered over the competition, crossing the $1bn milestone in less than two weeks – even more impressive considering China’s sluggish economy.

Ne Zha 2 is being hailed as a symbol of progress in Chinese film and a sign that locally-made productions are becoming competitive globally. Despite China’s massive domestic market, its box office is typically dominated by Hollywood.

Previous domestic box office hits have tended to be patriotic, action films such as The Battle of Lake Changjin, a 2021 propaganda film about the 1950s Korean War, which held the record for China’s highest-grossing film until Ne Zha 2 broke it.

While Hollywood films usually see their revenues spread across different regions, more than 99% of Ne Zha 2’s box office earnings are coming from China – where the animation has become a litmus test for patriotism.

On social media, people say they have bought tickets to watch Ne Zha 2 multiple times. And those who have not watched the movie say they have to deal with snide remarks.

“A friend told me I was not patriotic, just because I did not watch Ne Zha 2,” a social media user posted on Douyin, China’s TikTok.

As cinemagoers took to social media to share their reviews of the movie, criticisms – from the lack of plot continuity to its awkward humour and anti-feminist undertones – were met with a barrage of dismissive comments.

“People like that are either clout-chasing, or are being paid,” read one comment on Xiaohongshu, China’s Instagram-like app.

“Everyone beware, there’s currently a wave of haters swarming Ne Zha 2 with criticism online,” another Xiaohongshu user commented, adding that the “premeditated” criticisms came from jealous individuals in either foreign or domestic film industries.

“With such a great movie, people are using their feet to vote. So they are turning to panic and slander. How despicable!” they wrote.

Ne Zha 2’s huge success is helping introduce characters from Chinese mythology to new audiences around the world, and it’s been praised for its script, special effects and the quality of animation. But the fact it has become a focal point for nationalist sentiment has led to some in China raising concerns about the growing political significance the film has taken on.

“Ne Zha 2 has become a cultural phenomenon, but I don’t think this is entirely a good thing,” reads a Xiaohongshu post reflecting on the sharpening debate over the movie.

“Criticising the plot flaws is equated to being unpatriotic; unreservedly condemning other films released in the same period; replacing deep discussion with a war between fans and haters … This is definitely not a good cultural environment.”

Kevin Spacey has responded to fellow actor Guy Pearce’s allegation that the Oscar-winner “targeted” him during the making of 1997 movie LA Confidential, telling the Australian to “grow up”, adding: “You are not a victim”.

It comes after Pearce – one of the stars of the recent Bafta-winning film The Brutalist – this week expanded on his alleged experiences with the US actor having previously called him “a handsy guy” in 2018.

Spacey – whose career was brought to a halt by a string of allegations – admitted to “being too handsy” and “pushing the boundaries”, in an interview last year with Piers Morgan, while saying he’d not done anything illegal.

In 2023 the actor was found not guilty of all charges of sexual assault against four men between 2001 and 2013 after a trial in London; and in 2022 a US court dismissed a sexual assault lawsuit against him.

Spacey currently faces a civil trial over another allegation, which he denies, that he sexually assaulted a man in 2008.

A further sexual abuse claim was lodged against him last week at the High Court, according to filings.

Pearce told the Hollywood Reporter that the Oscar-winner “targeted me, no question” during the making of the 1997 crime thriller LA Confidential.

“But I did that thing that you do where you brush it off and go, ‘ah, that’s nothing. Ah, no, that’s nothing’. And I did that for five months,” he said.

“And, really, I was sort of scared of Kevin because he’s quite an aggressive man. He’s extremely charming and brilliant at what he does – really impressive etc.

“He holds a room remarkably. But I was young and susceptible, and he targeted me, no question.”

Pearce revealed he had told his wife at the time that he felt safe on set when his co-star Simon Baker was present, because Spacey allegedly focused his attentions on him instead.

He said the #MeToo movement, which saw allegations made against many men in Hollywood from 2017 onwards, had been “a really incredible wake-up call” for him.

The actor said he “broke down and sobbed” and “couldn’t stop” after he saw the allegations against Spacey in the news headlines. “I think it really dawned on me the impact that had occurred and how I sort of brushed it off and how I had either shelved it or blocked it out or whatever.”

On Tuesday, Spacey responded directly to Pearce in a video posted on X, saying: “If I did something then that upset you, you could have reached out to me.

“We could have had that conversation, but instead, you’ve decided to speak to the press, who are now, of course, coming after me, because they would like to know what my response is to the things that you said.

“You really want to know what my response is? Grow up.”

Spacey claimed Pearce omitted to mention he had flown to Georgia a year after LA Confidential was made “just to spend time with me” while he was filming another movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

“I mean, did you tell the press that too, or does that not fit into the victim narrative you have going?” he added.

“I apologise that I didn’t get the message that you don’t like spending time with me. Maybe there was another reason, I don’t know, but that doesn’t make any sense. That you would have just been leading me on, right? But here you are now on a mission, some 28 years later, after I’ve been through hell and back.”

Spacey concluded his message by saying he was happy to have a “conversation” with Pearce “anytime, anyplace”.

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said. “But Guy – you need to grow up. You are not a victim.”

Pearce earlier told the US publication he had raised Spacey’s alleged behaviour with him years later, and had “had a couple of confrontations with Kevin” that “got ugly”.

His new strategy these days, he noted, was “just try to be more honest about it now and call it for what it is”.

Last spring, when tens of thousands of Georgians were protesting against what they saw as a clear sign of Russian influence on the country’s politics, Georgia’s parliament rushed through amendments to the nation’s tax code.

Transparency International (TI) Georgia, the anti-corruption watchdog, wrote at the time that the change – which allows tax-free transfer of assets from offshore accounts to Georgia – may have been introduced to serve the interests of the country’s richest person and former prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili.

He is the founder and honorary chairman of the country’s ruling party, Georgian Dream.

“Now it is clear, those changes were made for him,” says senior economics analyst at TI Georgia, Beso Namchavadze.

With an estimated wealth of $4.9bn (£3.9bn), Mr Ivanishvili made his money in 1990s Russia, in computing, metals and banking. Most of his wealth is believed to be tucked away in offshore companies.

Georgia was plunged into political crisis and daily street protests last May when the country’s MPs passed the contentious “transparency on foreign influence bill”, often dubbed the “foreign agents law”.

Under this legislation, media and non-governmental organisations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad have to register as “organisations acting in the interest of a foreign power”, submit themselves to stringent audits, or face punitive fines. It was widely seen as a move to prevent US and other Western influence on the country.

Protests then continued when the Georgian Dream-led government won disputed parliamentary elections in October. Protests were spurred again at the start of December when it said it would be putting EU accession talks on hold.

Hundreds of peaceful protests were arrested and severely beaten up by the police.

In response to this crackdown, the US government announced sanctions against Mr Ivanishvili at the end of last year.

There is also the possibility of sanctions from the UK. Last month James MacClearly, a Liberal Democrat MP, introduced an Early Day Motion in the UK parliament calling on the government to impose sanctions on Mr Ivanishvili.

The motion expressed “deep concern at the suspension of Georgia’s EU accession process and the increasing use of excessive force against peaceful protesters”.

TI Georgia estimates that if the UK imposed sanctions on Mr Ivanishvili his entire business empire would be affected, because he has holding companies registered in two British Overseas Territories – British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands.

“All his big business, which he has in Georgia, in the hospitality sector, in the energy sector, all the parent companies of these Georgian companies, the last beneficiaries are registered in these so-called offshore territories,” says Beso Namchavadze.

He adds that TI Georgia believes that Mr Ivanishvili and other family members are continuing to transfer ownership of companies they previously controlled through offshore entities to newly established firms in Georgia.

In January of this year, paintings and other artwork worth nearly $500m were imported into Georgia, according to data published by the Ministry of Finance.

Many believe the artwork was from Mr Ivanishvili’s valuable collection.

“For everybody who knows him it’s pretty clear that this is something that he values the most out of all the assets, and all the wealth, that he has,” says Tina Khidasheli, Georgia’s ex-defence minister and the head of the non-governmental organisation Civic Idea.

“He is going to bring paintings back and he does not want to pay tax on it.”

The head of Georgia’s parliamentary committee on finance and budget, Paata Kvijinadze, recently defended the tax-free transfer of assets from offshore accounts to Georgia.

“If anyone benefited from this law, I am happy about it,” he said in a post on social media. “This is exactly what the law was meant to be: to bring companies from offshore zones and attract more investments into the country”.

In response to the proposed UK sanctions, Georgia’s ruling party issued a statement defending Mr Ivanishvili, saying that a threat of sanctions was “without any foundation” against the party founder who brought “democratic breakthrough to the country”.

Separately, Mr Ivanishvili’s lawyer announced last month that his client is suing Swiss bank Julius Baer for, among other reasons, misinterpreting “the so-called” American sanctions, which the lawyer described as “political blackmail”.

The US sanctions on Mr Ivanishvili call for his assets to be frozen, and place restrictions on US citizens and companies from doing business personally with him, but they do not affect his companies or family members.

For more than a decade Mr Ivanishvili has been involved in legal battles with another Swiss bank, Credit Suisse, over fraud and mismanagement of his money.

Some believe that the billionaire’s mistrust of the West and increased use of conspiracy theories at home, such as accusing adversaries of being part of the “global war party”, or “deep state”, originate in his long-standing financial grievances.

Ever since he became convinced that Credit Suisse was part of a grand conspiracy against him, says Tina Khdasheli. “Bidzina Ivanishvili held Georgia hostage to his personal financial issues.”

Experts say that even though Mr Ivanishvili’s current official position is the honorary chairman of the ruling party, there is a clear understanding that he remains the number one person in Georgian politics. Sanctions against him are therefore seen as sanctions against the entire government.

Nika Gilauri was prime minister of Georgia from 2009 to 2012. He now leads a private company called Reformatics, which advises governments around the world on economic reform.

Mr Gilauri says that Georgia’s continuing political instability and international isolation is negatively impacting the economy. “We are seeing a very negative effect on FDI, foreign direct investment, if you take nine months of 2024 compared to nine months of 2023, we have a 40% drop. So going forward this is going to continue to get worse.”

But the Georgian government paints a different picture.

Last month Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze signed a $6bn inward investment agreement with UAE property group Emaar.

Levan Davitashvili, the Minister of Economy described it as the “largest foreign investment deal” in decades, which was expected to contribute 1.5% growth to the economy.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has even suggested that 10% growth was now “absolutely realistic” for the Georgian economy.

But recently published research by Policy and Management Consulting Group (PMCG), a Georgian research firm, said that the prospect for the next six months was “extremely negative”.

It highlighted the impact of the continuing political turmoil, and said that the suspension of EU membership talks “was negatively viewed by all surveyed economists”.

Mr Gilauri of Reformatics says their own analysis shows that Georgia’s economic growth this year will be zero.

“Going forward, we will have a budgetary problem, a currency exchange problem. We will have an inflation problem. We will have a jobs problem, a job creation problem, and we will have economic decline problem.

“Having new elections is the only way forward for the country as well as for Bidzina Ivanishvili personally.”

Hamas is to transfer to Israel the bodies of four hostages who have been held in Gaza since being taken alive in the group’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

It has said they include a mother and two children from the Bibas family, whose unknown fate has gripped Israel since then. The youngest child, Kfir, was nine months old.

Hamas says the fourth body is that of Oded Lifshitz, 84, a veteran peace activist.

It will mark the first time the group will have handed over dead hostages since the ceasefire began last month.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said “the heart of the entire nation is torn”, adding that Israel was dealing with “monsters”.

Six living hostages are due to be freed on Saturday.

The news – though unconfirmed by the Israeli government – that Shiri Bibas, 33, and her sons (who would now be aged five and two) are dead triggered an outpouring of grief across the country. The government says it will only confirm the names of the dead after forensic examinations.

In a statement, the Bibas family in Israel said it was “in turmoil”, adding that “until we receive definitive confirmation, our journey is not over”.

It is unclear how the four bodies will be handed over, though the Red Cross, which has received the hostages so far released alive by Hamas, has called for a dignified handover.

“We must be clear: any degrading treatment during release operations is unacceptable,” it said in a statement on Wednesday night.

It follows widespread denunciation of the way in which Hamas has released hostages in recent weeks in staged events where they have been put on platforms in front on crowds of spectators before being handed over to the Red Cross representatives.

It is not known how Shiri, Kfir and his brother Ariel – if confirmed – died. Hamas claimed in November 2023 that they had been killed in an Israeli air strike, without providing evidence. At the time, then-member of Israel’s war cabinet Benny Gantz said there was no confirmation of the claim.

The family were taken along with the father, Yarden, from kibbutz Nir Oz when hundreds of Hamas gunmen burst through the border with Israel and attacked communities, security forces sites and a music festival.

About 1,200 people – mostly civilians – were killed in the attack and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Israel launched a massive military campaign against Hamas in response, which has killed at least 48,297 Palestinians – mainly civilians – according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Yarden Bibas, 35, was released on 1 February along with two other hostages as part of an exchange for 183 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Oded Lifshitz, a retired journalist, was also taken from Nir Oz, along with this wife, Yocheved. The eighty-five year-old woman was freed by Hamas two weeks later.

Oded Lifshitz had been held by the armed Palestinian group Islamic Jihad since 7 October 2023.

The release of hostages’ bodies was agreed as part of the ceasefire deal which came into effect on 19 January. Israel has confirmed there will be eight.

The two sides agreed to exchange 33 hostages for about 1,900 prisoners by the end of the first six weeks of the ceasefire.

Talks on progressing to the next phase of the deal – under which the remaining living hostages would be released and the war would end permanently – were due to start earlier this month but have not yet begun.

Twenty-four hostages and over 1,000 prisoners have so far been exchanged.

Seventy hostages taken on 7 October are still being held in Gaza. Three other hostages, taken over a decade ago, are also being held. About half of all the hostages still in Gaza are believed to be alive.

A Missouri man has died weeks before his sentencing for shooting a 16-year-old boy who accidentally went to the wrong address.

Andrew Lester, 86, pleaded guilty last week to second-degree assault after opening fire on Ralph Yarl in Kansas City on 13 April 2023.

Lester was scheduled for sentencing on 7 March and was facing seven years in prison. In a statement, the Yarl family expressed frustration that “justice was never truly served”.

Ralph Yarl rang Lester’s doorbell while going to pick up his younger brothers. Prosecutors said Lester shot the teen without speaking to him. The boy survived and has since graduated from high school.

The Clay County prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Wednesday: “We have learned of the passing of Andrew Lester and extend our sincere condolences to his family during this difficult time.

“While the legal proceedings have now concluded, we acknowledge that Mr Lester did take responsibility for his actions by pleading guilty in this case.

“Our thoughts remain with both families affected by this tragic incident as they continue their healing process.”

But in a statement to the Kansas City Star, the Yarl family expressed dissatisfaction that “the man responsible escaped sentencing”.

They added: “One of the reasons we pushed for a speedy trial was to ensure the public would see that our society does not condone shooting an unarmed, innocent child simply for ringing the wrong doorbell – especially when that child was targeted because of the color of his skin.”

Police initially said there was a “racial component” to the shooting, but authorities ultimately did not charge Lester with a hate crime.

Lester and his lawyers said he was acting in self-defence and thought the teenager was trying to break into his home.

Ralph Yarl told authorities his mother sent him to pick up his siblings from a playdate at around 22:00 local time that night.

He mixed up similar street names – Northeast 115 Street and Northeast 115th Terrace – which put him on Lester’s doorstep and about a block away from the house he was trying to find.

After he rang the doorbell, Lester shot him twice – once in the forehead and once in the arm.

Prosecutors have said the boy “did not cross the threshold” of Lester’s home and survived after fleeing to neighbouring homes for help.

Police initially detained Lester for questioning and released him without charges, sparking protests in Kansas City.

The demonstrations drew support from celebrities including actresses Halle Berry, Kerry Washington and Jennifer Hudson.

Lester turned himself in after an arrest warrant was issued.

The case was one of several in spring 2023 in which Americans were injured after minor mistakes resulted in gun violence.

One of the victims, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, was fatally shot after a car she was in pulled into the wrong driveway in upstate New York.

US President Donald Trump has appeared to accuse Ukraine of being responsible for the war with Russia, in a flurry of claims from his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida.

Speaking to reporters, Trump also made claims about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s popularity and observed that Ukraine had yet to hold scheduled elections due to martial law. He later doubled down on those comments in a fiery Truth Social post on Wednesday.

Trump’s accusations – some of which appeared to mirror common Russian talking points about the war – came just hours after US officials met a Russian delegation in Riyadh to open talks to end the conflict, which has raged for almost three years.

Zelensky later accused Trump of “living in a disinformation space” created by Russia.

BBC Verify has fact-checked Trump’s claims.

Trump initially drew attention to the fact that Ukraine has not held a presidential election since 2019, when Zelensky – previously a comedian with no political base – swept to power.

He repeated the claims in a Truth Social post in which he accused the Ukrainian leader of being a “dictator without elections”.

Zelensky’s first five-year term of office was due to come to an end in May 2024. However, Ukraine has been under martial law since the Russian invasion in February 2022, which means elections are suspended.

Ukraine’s martial laws were drafted in 2015 – shortly after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and years before Zelensky and his Servant of the People party came to power.

Independent observers from the OSCE said the 2019 election had been “competitive and fundamental freedoms were generally respected”.

Zelensky won 73% of the vote in the second-round run-off.

Zelensky has vowed to hold a new election once the conflict ends and has yet to confirm that he intends to stand. Some experts have observed that holding elections in Ukraine before the conflict ends would be practically impossible, as Russian attacks on many cities persist and millions of citizens are displaced abroad or living under Russian occupation.

Trump’s intervention on the subject came just hours after the Kremlin questioned Zelensky’s legitimacy as his term in office has ended, a claim Moscow has repeatedly made in the past months. On 28 January, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin called Zelensky “illegitimate” in an interview with Russian media.

Referring to the electoral situation, Trump appeared aware that it had been a frequent Russian allegation used to undermine Zelensky, saying in his news conference: “That’s not a Russian thing, that’s something coming from me, from other countries.”

For his part, Zelensky has previously said it would be “absolutely irresponsible to throw the topic of elections” in the middle of the conflict.

President Trump also claimed that Zelensky’s approval rating has fallen to 4%.

It’s unclear what source the president was citing as he didn’t provide evidence. We have asked the White House to clarify this.

Official polling is limited and it is extremely difficult to carry out accurate surveys during a time of war. Millions of Ukrainians have fled and Russia has occupied around a fifth of the country.

However, some polling has been possible to carry out by telephone. A survey conducted this month found that 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted the president, according to the Ukraine-based Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

However, that was down from 77% at the end of 2023, and 90% in May 2022 – suggesting that the president has suffered a drop-off in his popularity.

Some other polls suggest Zelensky trailing his nearest rival, former army chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in the first round of any future election, indicating the two would face each other in a run-off.

In the wake of Trump’s comments, some major Russian media outlets seized on the claim and cited a poll carried out by Ukrainian MP and Zelensky critic, Oleksandr Dubinsky, on Telegram which they claimed backed up Trump’s assessment.

Dubinsky has been charged with treason in Ukraine, and accused of “operating at the behest of Russian intelligence” – which he denies.

Ukrainian authorities expressed dissatisfaction over not being part of Tuesday’s talks in Riyadh. But Trump dismissed these concerns, telling reporters that Ukraine had had three years to end the war, before appearing to blame Kyiv for starting the conflict.

“You should have never started it,” he said. The Kremlin has previously accused Ukraine of starting the war against Russia.

“It was they who started the war in 2014. Our goal is to stop this war. And we did not start this war in 2022,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told US talk show host Tucker Carlson in February 2024.

Ukraine didn’t start the war. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, having annexed Crimea in 2014.

The annexation came after Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was ousted by popular demonstrations.

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Russia also backed proxy forces who seized areas of eastern Ukraine, and it accused the new government in Kyiv of discrimination and genocide against Russian speakers. The International Court of Justice has rejected Moscow’s claims.

After the failure of agreements which aimed to end the post-2014 conflict – Russia began a massive build-up of troops on its border with Ukraine in late 2021.

Putin launched the invasion on 24 February 2022, stating that the aim of the operation was to “demilitarise and denazify” the pro-Western government of Volodymyr Zelensky and prevent the country from joining Nato.

In Ukraine’s last parliamentary elections, support for far-right candidates was 2%. It should also be noted that Zelensky is Jewish and that his party has been regarded as centrist.

And while Nato officials said in 2021 that Ukraine was a candidate to join the Western alliance in the future, it was not part of any formal process.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has responded to criticism of Kyiv by Donald Trump, by saying his US counterpart is “living in a disinformation space” created by Russia.

On Tuesday, President Trump appeared to blame Ukraine for the war and suggested the Ukrainian leader’s popularity rating was as low as 4%. Trump was speaking after US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia that left out Ukraine.

In his first comments after the talks, Russia’s Vladimir Putin said he rated the talks in Riyadh “very highly” and that Trump had told him that Ukraine would be part of any future talks process.

Zelensky said it was America’s right to discuss bilateral issues, but that the US had helped Putin “to break out of years of isolation”.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who took part in the talks, praised President Trump for accepting Moscow’s repeated claim that “one of the root causes” of the war was the Biden administration’s “pushy line of dragging Ukraine into Nato”.

Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, arrived in Kyiv on Wednesday on a mission to “sit and listen” to Ukraine’s position. Kellogg was not part of the US team that met Russian officials in Riyadh.

Almost three years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, European nations have been scrambling to respond to this week’s developments.

French President Emmanuel Macron was holding informal talks on Ukraine on Wednesday with leaders from a number of European states as well as Canada.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Zelensky accused Russia of lying during Tuesday’s “notorious meeting” in the Saudi capital, where the US and Russia agreed to start negotiating an end to the war.

“With all due respect to President Donald Trump as a leader… he is living in this disinformation space,” he said.

He added that Ukraine had “evidence” that Russia was spreading disinformation about his approval rating, and “these numbers are being discussed between America and Russia”.

Zelensky won a five-year term in 2019, and has remained in office because elections have been suspended since martial law was declared after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

When asked about the claims made on his popularity, Zelensky said that while he never commented on popularity ratings, one opinion poll put him at 58%.

He said he wanted Trump’s Ukraine envoy to “walk Kyiv’s streets” and “see everything for himself”.

Zelensky also made clear he would not sell his country in return for future security guarantees that gave the US a big stake in Ukraine’s mineral resources.

He said the war has so far cost $320bn (£254bn), around $200bn (£159bn) of which had come from the US and EU.

He said the US had alleged that 90% of Ukraine’s support had come from them, and while he was grateful for American support, “the truth is somewhere else”.

In a later post on X, he wrote: “We must never forget that Russia is ruled by pathological liars – they cannot be trusted and must be pressured.”

On Tuesday, Trump spoke to journalists at his Mar-a-Lago residence. “I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” he said.

“Well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

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European allies have also started weighing in on Trump’s comments.

“No-one but Putin started or wanted this war in the heart of Europe,” said German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. “We are at an existential waypoint for security and peace in Europe.”

French government spokeswoman Sophie Primas, said: “We struggle to understand the American logic”, while reiterating her country’s support for Ukraine.

On Monday, the leaders of several European member states of Nato gathered in Paris to talk about what could be done to help Ukraine.

One idea proposed was sending peacekeepers to Ukraine, although Sergei Lavrov rejected that as unacceptable.

Trump, on the other hand, called it “great”, saying that he was all for it if that was what they wanted to do, but that US troops would not be deployed as the US was “very far away”.

When he penned his eyewitness account of the 1917 Russian Revolution, American journalist John Reed famously titled it Ten Days That Shook The World.

But 10 days is too long for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. They’ve shaken things up in a week.

It began with the Putin-Trump telephone conversation on 12 February and their presidential pledges to kickstart relations.

It continued with the Munich Security Conference and a schism between Europe and America.

Next stop Saudi Arabia for the Russia-US talks: the first high-level in-person contacts between the two countries since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

It is a week that has upended traditional alliances, left Europe and Ukraine scrambling to respond, raised fears for European security and put Russia where it wants to be: at the top table of global politics, without having made any concessions to get there.

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One image dominates Wednesday morning’s Russian newspapers: senior Russian and American officials at the negotiating table in Riyadh.

The Kremlin wants the Russian public and the international community to see that Western efforts to isolate Russia over the war in Ukraine have failed.

Russian media are welcoming the prospect of warmer ties with Washington and pouring scorn on European leaders and Kyiv.

“Trump knows he will have to make concessions [to Russia] because he is negotiating with the side that’s winning in Ukraine,” writes pro-Kremlin tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets. “He will make concessions. Not at America’s expense, but at the expense of Europe and Ukraine.

“For so long Europe had gone around all puffed up, thinking of itself as the civilised world and as a Garden of Eden. It failed to notice it had lost its trousers… now its old comrade across the Atlantic has pointed that out…”

On the streets of Moscow I don’t detect that level of gloating.

Instead, people are watching and waiting to see whether Trump will really turn out to be Russia’s new best friend and whether he can bring an end to the war in Ukraine.

“Trump is a businessman. He’s only interested in making money,” Nadezhda tells me. “I don’t think things will be any different. There’s too much that needs to be done to change the situation.”

“Perhaps those talks [in Saudi Arabia] will help,” says Giorgi. “It’s high time we stopped being enemies.”

“Trump is active. He’s energetic. But will he do anything?” wonders Irina.

“We dream that these negotiations will bring peace. It’s a first step. And maybe this will help our economy. Food and other goods keep going up in price here. That’s partly because of the special military operation [the war in Ukraine] and the general international situation.”

Putin and Trump have spoken on the phone; their two teams have met in Saudi Arabia; a presidential summit is expected soon.

But a few days ago the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets tried to imagine what the two leaders had said to each other during last week’s phone call.

They came up with this rendition:

“Trump called Putin.

‘Vladimir! You’ve got a cool country and I’ve got a cool country. Shall we go and divide up the world?’

‘What have I been saying all along? Let’s do it!….”

Make-believe? We’ll see.

The Russians and Americans are talking again, as European leaders and diplomats contemplate the hard choices forced on them by US President Donald Trump.

Without question, Trump’s diplomatic ultimatum to Ukraine and America’s Western European allies has cracked the transatlantic alliance, perhaps beyond repair.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky looks rattled by the abrupt change of attitude coming from the White House, though some of his many critics at home say he should have seen it coming. Well before he won re-election, Donald Trump made it clear that he was not going to continue Joe Biden’s policies.

As he arrived in Turkey on his latest trip, Zelensky deplored the fact that negotiations to end the war were happening “behind the back of key parties affected by the consequences of Russian aggression”.

But it feels like a long way from the air-conditioned room in Saudi Arabia where the Russian and American delegations faced each other across a broad and highly polished mahogany table, to the bitter cold of north-eastern Ukraine.

In dug-outs and military bases here in the snow-bound villages and forests on the border with Russia, Ukrainian soldiers are getting on with business as usual – fighting the war.

In an underground bunker at a base in the forest somewhere near Sumy, a Ukrainian officer told me he didn’t have much time to follow the news. As far as he was concerned, Donald Trump’s decision to talk to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin was “just noise”.

The commander, who asked to be referred to only by his call sign “White” has more pressing matters to consider.

Ignoring the diplomatic bombshell that has rattled Western leaders, as well as his own president, is probably the right thing to do for a battlefield officer preparing to lead his men back into the fight. Soon they will cross back into Kursk, to rejoin the fight to keep the land Ukraine has seized from Russia.

As a condition of access to Ukrainian soldiers, we agreed not to disclose precise locations or identities, except to say they are in the borderlands around the town of Sumy, and all part of Ukraine’s continuing fight in Kursk.

In a small room in a workshop tucked away in a village there was a formidable display of killing power on shelves made of planks from the sawmill propped up by wooden ammunition boxes.

On the shelves were hundreds of drones, all made in Ukraine. Each one costs around £300 ($380). The soldiers who were checking them before packing them into cardboard boxes to send them into the Kursk battlefields said that when they are armed – and flown by a skilled pilot – they could even destroy a tank.

One of them, called Andrew, was a drone pilot until his leg was blown off. He said he hadn’t thought too hard about what had been said far from here by the Americans – but none of them trusted President Vladimir Putin.

Their drones a few hours earlier had destroyed a Russian armoured unit advancing in broad daylight across a frozen snow-covered field. They showed us the video. Some of the vehicles they hit were flying the red banner of the Soviet Union instead of the Russian flag.

Sumy is busy enough during the day, with shops open and well-stocked. But once it gets dark the streets are almost deserted. Air raid alerts come frequently.

Anti-aircraft guns fire tracer into the sky for hours, aimed at the waves of Russian drones that cross the border near here to attack targets much deeper inside Ukraine – and sometimes in Sumy itself.

A big block of flats has a hole three storeys high ripped out of it. Eleven people were killed here in a Russian drone attack a fortnight or so ago. Since then, the block has been evacuated as engineers fear it is so badly damaged it might collapse.

It is part of a housing estate of identical monumental blocks built during the Soviet era. Residents still living next to the wrecked and unsafe building were going about their business, walking to the shops or their cars, swaddled against the intense cold.

Mykola, a man of 50, stopped to talk as he was walking home with his young son. He lives in the next block to the one the Russians destroyed.

I asked him what he thought of Donald Trump’s idea of peace in Ukraine.

“We need peace,” he said. “It’s necessary because there is no point in war. War doesn’t lead to anything. If you look at how much territory Russia has occupied so far, for the Russians to eventually get to Kyiv, they’ll have to keep fighting for 14 years. It’s only the people who are suffering. It needs to end.”

But no deal worth having, Mykola believed, would emerge from Putin and Trump sitting together without Zelensky and the Europeans.

Yuliia, 33, another neighbour, was out walking her Jack Russell. She was at home when the Russians attacked the block of flats next door.

“It all happened just past midnight, when we were about to go to bed. We heard a loud explosion, and we saw a massive red flash through our window. We saw this horror. It was very scary.

“Many people were outside. And I remember there was a woman hanging out – she was screaming for help – we couldn’t see her immediately but eventually she was saved from the debris.”

Peace is possible, she believes, “but they need to stop bombing us first. There can only be peace when they stop doing that. It needs to come from their side because they started this horror.

“Of course, you can’t trust Putin.”

As the last rays of the sun disappeared, Borys, a spry and upright retired colonel of 70 who served 30 years in the Soviet army stopped on his way to his car. His son and grandson, he said, are both in uniform fighting for Ukraine.

“Peace is possible,” he said. “But I don’t really believe in it. I think that justice will prevail for Ukraine. You have to be cautious.

“While Putin is there, you cannot trust Russians. Because they believe in him as if he is a religion. You won’t change them. It needs time.”

So what’s the answer – keep fighting or a peace deal?

“Ukraine needs to think about peace. But we shouldn’t surrender. I don’t see any point. We will resist until we are stronger. Europe seems like they are ready to help us. There is just no point in surrendering.”

Donald Trump, a man who seems convinced that the principles of a real-estate deal can be applied to ending a war will discover that making peace is much more complicated than just getting a ceasefire and deciding how much land each side keeps.

President Putin has made very clear that he wants to break Ukraine’s sovereignty and destroy its ability to act as an independent nation.

Whether or not Ukraine’s President Zelensky has a seat at President Trump’s conference table, he won’t agree to that. Making a peace that lasts, if it’s possible, will be a long and slow process.

If Donald Trump wants a quick peace dividend, he should look elsewhere.

Asha Roy, 17, was excited to take part in a women’s football tournament, but her hopes were dashed as Islamists forced the organisers to cancel the match in northern Bangladesh.

Shortly before the game began earlier this month, the Islami Andolan Bangladesh group announced a protest rally against the event in Rangpur region, saying it was un-Islamic.

Fearing trouble, local police stepped in and the women’s team members were asked to return to their home for their safety.

“I was frustrated and frightened. We had never faced such a situation before. It was disappointing that we came back without playing,” Ms Roy told the BBC.

Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation, is currently undergoing a political transition after widespread protests ousted its authoritarian government last year.

An interim administration is currently in charge but there are concerns that Islamist groups, which had been pushed to the fringes, have become emboldened again.

The women’s football match was the third to be cancelled in northern Bangladesh in less than two weeks due to the objections of religious hardliners.

In the Dinajpur area, roughly 70km (43 miles) west of Rangpur, Islamists protesting against a game clashed with locals who supported it, leaving four people injured.

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For girls such as Asha Roy, who come from rural areas, football and other sports are a source of female empowerment and a way out of poverty. Those who shine can be selected to play for sponsored teams and some go on to represent Bangladesh internationally.

Many girls have been inspired to take up football thanks to the success of the national women’s team, who are considered heroes after winning two consecutive South Asia Football Championships in recent years.

Ms Roy’s teammate, Musammat Tara Moni, said she would not stop playing despite the threats.

“It’s my dream to represent our national team. My family supports me, so I am not losing hope,” the 16-year-old said.

For their coach Nurul Islam, the objections came as a surprise. “I have taken the team to many tournaments for the past seven years, but it’s the first time we have faced a situation like this,” he said.

The Islamists insist that the match they stopped was against their religious values and say that they are determined to prevent any future football games.

“If women want to play football, they should cover their entire body, and they can play only in front of female spectators. Men cannot watch them play,” Maulana Ashraf Ali, the leader of the Islami Andolan Bangladesh in the Taraganj area of Rangpur, told the BBC.

Mr Ali also insisted that the group “definitely” want hard-line Islamic Sharia law in Bangladesh.

The cancellation of the women’s football matches caused an uproar on social media, leading the authorities to reorganise one of them. They have also launched an investigation into the incidents but say the fear of radicalism is exaggerated.

“There is no truth in the allegations that the government is pandering to Islamists,” Shafiqul Alam, press secretary to interim leader Muhammad Yunus, told the BBC.

Mr Alam pointed out that hundreds of women’s sports matches were held as part of a national youth festival in January, and that they were played across the country without any trouble.

Some people are not reassured. Samina Luthfa, assistant professor of sociology in the University of Dhaka, told the BBC the cancellation of the women’s football matches was “definitely alarming”.

“The women of Bangladesh will not stop playing football and will not stop from going to work or doing their things,” she said, adding that “everyone will fight” efforts to remove women from public spaces.

Other decisions made by the interim government since it assumed power in August in relation to Islamist hardliners have also raised concerns.

They include revoking a ban on the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which was introduced in the last days of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s government.

Jashimuddin Rahmani, the leader of banned Islamist militant group Ansarullah Bangladesh (ABT) – now known as Ansar al Islam – was released in August after a court granted him bail. He was sentenced to five years in prison in connection with the killing of a secular blogger in 2013, but had been kept behind bars because of other pending cases.

According to local media reports, several other people accused of having links with extremist groups have also been given bail in the past few months.

“Though security forces say they will monitor those released, it will be difficult for them to put everybody under surveillance given the limitations,” says Dr Tawohidul Haque, a crime analyst from the University of Dhaka.

While most Bangladeshis practise moderate Islam and secular values dominate society, Islamic extremism is not a new phenomenon in the country. A decade ago, religious zealots targeted secular bloggers, atheists, minorities, foreigners and others in a spate of attacks – killing dozens and sending others fleeing abroad.

In one such incident, a group of Islamist gunmen stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka in 2016, killing 20 people.

It is not just women’s football games that have been targeted recently either. Last week, dozens of Islamist students vandalised a book stall at Dhaka’s famous Ekushey Book Fair.

The protesters were angry over the display a book by the exiled feminist author Taslima Nasrin, who has in the past received death threats from Islamist groups for what they say are her blasphemous writings.

Muhammad Yunus condemned the incident saying the attack “shows contempt for both the rights of Bangladeshi citizens and for the laws of our country.” The police are investigating.

Meanwhile, one of the country’s best-known actors, Pori Moni said she was stopped from inaugurating a department store in the northern town of Tangail after reported objections from religious groups.

“Now I’m really feeling helpless, as well as insecure. It’s part of my job to take part in opening a showroom or a similar event. No one has stopped me all these years,” Ms Moni told the BBC Bengali service.

Similar events involving two other actors, Apu Biswas and Mehazabien Chowdhury, have also been cancelled following threats by Islamists.

Minority groups like the Sufi Muslims say they are also witnessing increasing attacks on their places of worship. Islamist extremists view Sufism as heretical.

“About a hundred of our shrines [mazars] and centres have been attacked in the past six months,” Anisur Rahman Jafri, Secretary General of the Sufism Universal Foundation, told the BBC.

“We have not seen this kind of sudden extremist attack on us since the country’s independence in 1971,” he added, warning that the country was at risk of “Talibanisation” if the situation continued.

Police said only 40 shrines were damaged and that they had stepped up security around religious sites.

The authorities have also been struggling to maintain law and order in the wake of Sheikh Hasina’s departure. Earlier this month, thousands of protesters vandalised homes and buildings connected to Hasina and senior leaders of her Awami League party.

People from other groups and parties, including Islamists, joined in other demonstrations in the capital, Dhaka, and across the country.

The authorities have defended the security forces for not intervening, saying doing so would have cost lives.

Rights groups have expressed concern over the security situation.

“If the government fails to act, then Islamists are going to feel emboldened. There will be more self-censorship for women and girls, they will be more intimidated participating in public events,” Shireen Huq, a prominent women’s rights activist, told the BBC.

“I am still optimistic that this phenomenon will not sustain,” she added.

Grave after grave after grave in this cemetery in the eastern Tanzanian city of Morogoro has been vandalised.

In some, there is a gap where a metal crucifix once stood, in others the religious symbol is bent as thieves, who were hoping sell it to scrap merchants, tried and failed to remove it.

More than 250 have been targeted in one small section of the Kola Municipal Cemetery alone.

The crimes mostly happen at night when there is no security there are no cemetery workers around.

They have left families devastated and the sites desecrated, sparking anger.

For more than two decades Pudensiana Chumbi has been going to the cemetery about once a month to visit the graves of her daughter and mother – and to her distress both have been desecrated over the last few years, multiple times.

The first to be targeted was her grave of her mother who had died in 2000.

A few months after the family had managed to save up to replace the stolen cross in late 2021, her daughter’s grave was then damaged. It was nearby and a little older – her daughter had died in 1997 aged 15.

Before Ms Chumbi could make a decision about fixing her daughter’s cross, to her horror the new cross on her mother’s grave was swiped.

In a quandary about what to do next, she felt metal was not an option when it came to replacing her daughter’s cross.

“This is my child’s grave – my fourth child,” she said pointing towards the concrete cross.

The theft of crosses and markers from graves has become a disturbing trend in this part of Tanzania driven by the rising demand for scrap metal.

“The people doing this are cursed because everyone is sad about what is going on,” Ms Chumbi tells the BBC.

“There are some young men who now demand payment to guard graves overnight, especially those with tiles.”

Tiles can also be sold on for people to use as decorations in their home.

Augustine Remmy, Ms Chumbi’s brother, says it is upsetting for the whole community.

“This is too bad… when these areas that deserve respect are subjected to such bad acts, it truly hurts a lot,” he tells the BBC.

The rash of thefts reflects a desperation among some to make some money that overrides ethical concerns about damaging sacred sites.

The criminals can earn somewhere between 700 and 870 Tanzanian shillings ($0.27-$0.34; £0.22-£0.28) per kilogram.

It is not a huge amount of money but it can be enough to pay for a plate of food from a vendor or some locally brewed alcohol.

“Metal dealers often buy without asking questions,” says one man who admitted to the BBC that he had stolen crosses from a cemetery to sell on the scrap metal market.

Agreeing to speak on condition of anonymity, he describes how the thieves would go to welders first who cut the crosses into pieces before taking them to the scrap merchants.

The merchants themselves are faced with the choice of purchasing cheaper stolen goods or following the law.

Izire Ramadhani, a dealer in Morogoro city centre, recalls how in 2023 he, along with some other scrap merchants, caught someone trying to sell a stolen cross and reported him to the authorities.

“In the past, they used to bring us crosses. But then we took one of them to the police, and later he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison – after that, the theft reduced, but now it has returned,” Mr Ramadhani tells the BBC.

He insists that he does not buy stolen goods.

“If a cross is brought here, the person coming to sell to us will be in trouble because we will take him to the police.”

Thieves have also begun targeting other grave markers like tiles and marble decorations, which can easily be sold on to other buyers.

Dr Ndimile Kilatu, Morogoro’s health officer, said the city’s authorities planned to improve cemetery security by introducing fences and guards but warned that “this requires resources and time.

“It is not something that we can do today or tomorrow.”

He also mentioned initiatives to educate scrap metal dealers about the materials that should not be bought, such as grave markers and railway components.

In response to the crimes, Tanzania’s government has also pledged to regulate the scrap metal industry.

Deputy Prime Minister Dotto Biteko has emphasised the need for licensed businesses to adhere to the laws and regulations.

“What is required is just to enforce that and keep the population educated on the same subject. We will keep so educating our people so that we put our infrastructure safe,” he told the BBC.

Religious leaders are also appealing to their communities to do more to prevent those involved in these crimes from carrying them out.

Pastor Steven Msigara from the Jesus Assembles of God in Morogoro has called for a united effort to educate the youth on the need to respect sacred places.

“Together, we must restore their dignity, we know some youth are exposed to bad acts but we can return them to the right track,” he says.

For relatives of those whose graves have been desecrated there is a feeling of frustration.

Ms Chumbi wants more money to be spent on security at the cemeteries as well as a commitment to look after the sites with care befitting a place where loved ones are laid to rest.

She is in the process of replacing her mother’s cross for a second time – and, as in her daughter’s case – is opting for concrete.

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Two years after ChatGPT took the world by storm, China’s DeepSeek has sent ripples through the tech industry by collapsing the cost for developing generative artificial intelligence applications.

But as the global race for AI supremacy heats up, India appears to have fallen behind, especially in creating its own foundational language model that’s used to power things like chatbots.

The government claims a homegrown equivalent to DeepSeek isn’t far away. It is supplying startups, universities and researchers with thousands of high-end chips needed to develop it in under 10 months.

A flurry of global AI leaders have also been talking up India’s capabilities recently.

After being initially dismissive, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this month said India should be playing a leading role in the AI revolution. The country is now OpenAI’s second largest market by users.

Others like Microsoft have put serious money on the table – committing $3bn (£2.4bn) for cloud and AI infrastructure. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also spoke of India’s “unmatched” technical talent as a key to unlocking its future potential.

With 200 startups working on generative AI, there’s enough entrepreneurial activity under way too.

But despite having key ingredients for success in place, India risks lagging behind without basic structural fixes to education, research and state policy, experts say.

China and the US already have a “four to five year head-start”, having invested heavily in research and academia and developed AI for military applications, law enforcement and now large language models, technology analyst Prasanto Roy told the BBC.

Though in the top five globally on Stanford’s AI Vibrancy Index – which ranks countries on metrics such as patents, funding, policy and research – India is still far behind the two superpowers in many key areas.

China and the US were granted 60% and 20% of the world’s total AI patents between 2010 and 2022 respectively. India got less than half a percent.

India’s AI startups also received a fraction of the private investment that US and Chinese companies got in 2023.

India’s state-funded AI mission, meanwhile, is worth a trifling $1bn compared with the staggering $500bn the US has earmarked for Stargate – a plan to build massive AI infrastructure in the US – or China’s reported $137bn initiative to become an AI hub by 2030.

While DeepSeek’s success has demonstrated that AI models can be built on older, less expensive chips – something India can take solace from – lack of “patient” or long-term capital from either industry or government is a major problem, says Jaspreet Bindra, founder of a consultancy that builds AI literacy in organisations.

“Despite what has been heard about DeepSeek developing a model with $5.6m, there was much more capital behind it.”

Lack of high-quality India-specific datasets required for training AI models in regional languages such as Hindi, Marathi or Tamil is another problem, especially given India’s language diversity.

But for all its issues, India punches far above its weight on talent – with 15% of the world’s AI workers coming from the country.

The issue though, as Stanford’s AI talent migration research shows, is that more and more of them are choosing to leave the country.

This is partly because “foundational AI innovations typically come from deep R&D in universities and corporate research labs”, Mr Bindra says.

And India lacks a supporting research environment, with few deep-tech breakthroughs emerging from its academic and corporate sectors.

The enormous success of India’s payments revolution was due to strong government-industry-academia collaboration – a similar model, he says, needs to be replicated for the AI push.

The Unified Payment Interface (UPI), a digital payment system developed by a government organisation, has revolutionised digital payments in India, allowing millions to transact at the click of a button or by scanning a QR code.

Bengaluru’s $200bn outsourcing industry, home to millions of coders, should have ideally been at the forefront of India’s AI ambitions. But the IT companies have never really shifted their focus from cheap service-based work to developing foundational consumer AI technologies.

“It’s a huge gap which they left to the startups to fill,” says Mr Roy.

He’s unsure though whether startups and government missions can do this heavy lifting quickly enough, adding that the 10-month timeline set by the minster was a knee-jerk reaction to DeepSeek’s sudden emergence.

“I don’t think India will be able to produce anything like DeepSeek at least for the next few years,” he adds. It is a view many others share.

India can, however, continue to build and tweak applications upon existing open source platforms like DeepSeek “to leapfrog our own AI progress”, Bhavish Agarwal, founder of one of India’s earliest AI startups Krutrim, recently wrote on X.

In the longer run though, developing a foundational model will be critical to have strategic autonomy in the sector and reduce import dependencies and threats of sanctions, say experts.

India will also need to increase its computational power or hardware infrastructure to run such models, which means manufacturing semiconductors – something that’s not taken off yet.

Much of this will need to fall in place before the gap with the US and China is narrowed meaningfully.

The execution-style killing of an openly gay imam, Muhsin Hendricks, in South Africa has left people in the LGBTQ+ community fearful for their safety – but also determined to forge ahead with the campaign to end their marginalisation in religious circles.

Reverend Toni Kruger-Ayebazibwe, an openly gay Christian cleric, told the BBC that Hendricks was a “gentle spirit” who brought light into any room he occupied.

“The gap Muhsin leaves is massive,” she said, adding that she knew for a fact that there were “a large number of queer Muslims around the world who are grief stricken”.

The 57-year-old was shot dead in what appeared to be a hit on Saturday in the small coastal city of Gqeberha.

Initial reports that Cape Town-based Hendricks had been in Gqeberha to perform the wedding ceremony of a gay couple have been dismissed as untrue by his Al-Gurbaah Foundation.

“He was visiting Gqeberha to officiate the marriages of two interfaith heterosexual couples when he was tragically shot and killed,” it said in a statement.

It is unclear why the couples had asked Hendricks to oversee their ceremonies, but it suggests that he was pushing the boundaries, even in the last seconds of his life.

Traditional imams in South Africa rarely, if ever, perform the marriage of a Muslim to a non-Muslim – something that Hendricks clearly had no issue with.

He had, according to a faith leader that the BBC spoke to, conducted one such marriage ceremony and was on his way to conduct the next one when he was gunned down in his vehicle.

Two leading bodies that represent imams – the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) and the United Ulama Council of South Africa (UUCSA) – condemned Hendricks’ killing.

“As members of a democratic, pluralistic society, the MJC remains steadfast in advocating for peaceful coexistence and mutual respect, even amidst divergent views,” the MJC said, while the UUCSA said it condemned “all forms of extra-judicial killings”.

However, Hendricks – who did his Islamic studies in Pakistan – was a pariah in their circles, as they hold the view that Islam prohibits same-sex relations.

They pointedly referred to him as “Mr Hendricks”, rather than by religious titles like imam or sheikh.

In contrast, Hendricks’ supporters hailed him as the world’s first openly gay imam who made it possible for them to reconcile their sexuality with their Islamic faith.

That he was a trail-blazer is not surprising – South Africa’s constitution, adopted in 1996 after the end of white-minority rule, was the first in the world to protect people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation.

Then in 2006, South Africa became the first country in Africa to legalise same-sex marriage.

Once in a heterosexual marriage with children, Hendricks came out as gay in 1996 – and, according to The Conversation, he later broke another taboo by marrying a Hindu man.

He then spearheaded the formation of The Inner Circle as “an underground social and support group” for queer Muslims.

It started out at his home in Cape Town, and has “proven to be very successful in helping Muslims who are queer to reconcile Islam with their sexuality”, The Inner Circle’s website says.

Despite South Africa having a thriving LGBTQ+ scene, members of the community still face some stigmatisation and violence.

Only a few of the country’s religious groups have adopted policies that are more favourable towards the community, among them the Dutch Reformed Church and the Methodist Church of Southern Africa.

The Dutch Reformed Church was in 2019 forced by the courts to reinstate a policy it had introduced four years earlier, but then scrapped, allowing same-sex marriages and for gay and lesbian pastors to be in romantic relationships.

The following year, the Methodist Church said that while it was “not yet ready to apply for its ministers to officiate at same-sex marriages”, no congregant residing in a member country that recognised civil unions would be “prevented from entering into such a union which can be as same-sex or opposite sex couples”.

Reverend Ecclesia de Lange, the director at Inclusive and Affirming Ministries (IAM), told the BBC that even in instances where faith groups had adopted inclusive policies there were still “pockets of very strong conservatism”.

“The traditional interpretations of sacred texts continue to exclude LGBTQ+ people, so the struggle for acceptance within faith communities remains ongoing,” she said.

Senior lecturer in Islamic Studies at South Africa’s University of the Western Cape, Dr Fatima Essop, reflected on the “distressing” vitriolic content circulating on social media in the wake of Hendricks’ killing.

“I just find that completely shocking and so far removed from our… Islamic tradition, which is all about compassion and mercy and preservation of human life,” she told the BBC.

Dr Essop added that while she understood some of the strong feelings against Hendricks’ work, there was “absolutely no justification, Islamic or otherwise, for this kind of violence”.

And while the motive is unclear, Hendricks’ killing – and the negative comments that followed – was likely to make people fearful to “speak about their sexuality or sexual orientation”, Dr Essop said.

Reverend Kruger-Ayebazibwe said that while Hendricks’ shooting would make LGBTQ+ leaders rethink their security, it would not deter them from campaigning for change “because the work matters too much”.

Hendricks has already been buried at a private ceremony, though his Al-Gurbaah Foundation has pledged to organise a memorial in the near future to “honour his immense contributions”.

For Teboho Klaas, the religion programme officer at The Other Foundation, which champions LGBTQ+ rights in southern Africa, his killers may have cut his life short “but not his legacy because he has multiplied himself”.

• Born free, killed by hate – the price of being gay in South Africa
• Gay rights: Africa, the new frontier
• The long road to legalise same sex marriage in Thailand
• Uganda anti-gay laws: Beaten and forced to flee for being LGBT

At about 03:30 GMT on Wednesday, the sky across northern Europe was illuminated by an object zooming through the air in flames.

“I immediately thought of a sci-fi movie where it looked like a troop formation about to attack,” Simon Eriksson, a workman from Malmo, told the Swedish state broadcaster.

The pyrotechnics were in fact caused by a Space X Falcon 9 rocket re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. There are reports of sightings in Denmark, Sweden and England.

Pieces of the rocket then crashed into Poland and, experts say, may also have landed in Ukraine.

At around 10:00 local time (09:00 GMT), Adam Borucki was astonished to find what appeared to be a charred tank measuring around 1.5m by 1m behind his warehouse in Komorniki, Poland.

The debris appears to have damaged a light fixture in the warehouse’s yard.

Mr Borucki contacted the police who, working alongside the Polish space agency Polsa, determined that the unidentified object was debris from a Falcon 9 rocket, manufactured by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.

“We are investigating how the object ended up in this location, but the important thing is that no-one was harmed,” police spokesperson Andrzej Borowiak said.

A similar piece of debris was discovered in a forest near the Polish village of Wiry, according to Polish police.

Polsa has confirmed that “an uncontrolled re-entry of the Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage occurred between 04:46 and 04:48 on February 19, 2025, over Poland”.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is used to transport people and payloads into the Earth’s atmosphere. It is designed to be reusable.

The rocket which created this debris was launched by SpaceX from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on 1 February.

“It was supposed to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere in a controlled manner and crash into the Pacific Ocean,” Harvard University astrophysicist Dr Jonathan McDowell told the BBC.

“But the engine failed. We’ve seen it orbiting Earth for the past few weeks and we were anticipating an uncontrolled re-entry today, which is what people saw burning in the sky.

“The debris zipped over England at around 17,000 mph, then parts of Scandinavia then parts crashed into eastern Europe at a few hundred miles an hour.”

Space debris from rockets and satellites re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere several times a month. Usually pieces of space debris are entirely burned up by Earth’s atmosphere but larger piece can fall to earth. According to Dr McDowell, an uncontrolled large rocket re-entry is rare and has the potential to be dangerous.

“So far, we’ve been lucky and no-one has been hurt but the more we put into the Earth’s orbit, the more likely it is that our luck will run out,” he said.

“This is the fourth incident recently with a SpaceX Falcon which is causing concern. It looks like glitches like this engine failure are becoming more common.”

So far large pieces of debris have been confirmed in Poland but Dr McDowell suspects that pieces have crashed into western Ukraine where the comet-like streaks of light in the sky “were clearly visible”.

“It’s quite the omen for how our civilisation is changing,” he added.

The BBC has approached Space X for comment.

The world’s glaciers are melting faster than ever recorded under the impact of climate change, according to the most comprehensive scientific analysis to date.

Mountain glaciers – frozen rivers of ice – act as a freshwater resource for millions of people worldwide and lock up enough water to raise global sea-levels by 32cm (13in) if they melted entirely.

But since the turn of the century, they have lost more than 6,500 billion tonnes – or 5% – of their ice.

And the pace of melting is increasing. Over the past decade or so, glacier losses were more than a third higher than during the period 2000-2011.

The study combined more than 230 regional estimates from 35 research teams around the world, making scientists even more confident about exactly how fast glaciers are melting, and how they will evolve in the future.

Glaciers are excellent indicators of climate change.

In a stable climate, they remain roughly the same size, gaining about as much ice through snowfall as they lose through melting.

But glaciers have been shrinking pretty much everywhere over the past 20 years as temperatures have risen due to human activities, principally burning fossil fuels.

Between 2000 and 2023, glaciers outside the major ice-sheets of Greenland and Antarctica lost around 270 billion tonnes of ice a year on average.

These numbers aren’t easy to get your head around. So Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service and lead author of the study, uses an analogy.

The 270 billion tonnes of ice lost in a single year “corresponds to the [water] consumption of the entire global population in 30 years, assuming 3 litres per person and day”, he told BBC News.

The rate of change in some regions has been particularly extreme. Central Europe, for example, has lost 39% of its glacier ice in little over 20 years.

The novelty of this study, published in the journal Nature, is not so much finding that glaciers are melting faster and faster – we already knew that. Instead, its strength lies in drawing together evidence from across the research community.

There are various ways of estimating how glaciers are changing, from field measurements to different types of satellite data. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Direct measurements on glaciers, for example, give very detailed information, but are only available for a tiny fraction of the more than 200,000 glaciers worldwide.

By systematically combining these different approaches, scientists can be much more certain about what’s going on.

These community estimates “are vital as they give people confidence to make use of their findings”, said Andy Shepherd, head of the Department of Geography and Environment at Northumbria University, who was not an author of the recent study.

“That includes other climate scientists, governments, and industry, plus of course anyone who is concerned about the impacts of global warming.”

Glaciers take time to fully respond to a changing climate – depending on their size, anywhere between a few years and many decades.

That means they will continue to melt in the years ahead.

But, crucially, the amount of ice lost by the end of the century will strongly depend on how much humanity continues to warm the planet by releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This could be the difference between losing a quarter of the world’s glacier ice, if global climate targets are met, and nearly half if warming continues uncontrolled, the study warns.

“Every tenth of a degree of warming that we can avoid will save some glaciers, and will save us from a lot of damage,” Prof Zemp explained.

These consequences go beyond local changes to landscapes and ecosystems – or “what happens on the glacier doesn’t stay there”, as Prof Zemp puts it.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide rely to some extent on seasonal meltwater from glaciers, which act like giant reservoirs to help buffer populations from drought. When the glaciers disappear, so does their supply of water.

And there are global consequences too. Even seemingly small increases to global sea-level – from mountain glaciers, the major Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets, and warmer ocean waters taking up more space – can significantly increase the frequency of coastal flooding.

“Every centimetre of sea-level rise exposes another 2 million people to annual flooding somewhere on our planet,” said Prof Shepherd.

Global sea-levels have already risen by more than 20cm (8in) since 1900, with around half of that coming since the early 1990s, and faster increases are expected in the decades ahead.

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

Authorities in one of the Philippines’ most densely-populated urban centres are offering a cash reward for mosquitoes in an attempt to stop the spread of dengue.

Carlito Cernal, village chief of Barangay Addition Hills in central Manila, announced the bounty of one peso (less than two US cents) for every five mosquitoes.

While news of the bounty has provoked scorn on social media, Mr Cernal has defended it as necessary for the community’s health.

The move follows a recent spike in cases of dengue, which is spread by mosquitoes, in the Philippines.

The programme, which will run for at least a month, was started after two students in Mr Cernal’s neighbourhood died from the disease.

The bounty applies to all mosquitoes – dead or alive – and their larvae, Mr Cernal added. Live mosquitoes will be exterminated using ultraviolet light.

A total of 21 people have already claimed their reward, bringing in a total of 700 mosquitoes and larvae so far, he told the BBC.

The bounty drew swift ridicule after it was announced late on Tuesday.

“Mosquito farming is coming,” one social media comment read. “Will a mosquito get rejected if it has only one wing?” read another.

The Philippines’ Department of Health (DOH) told the BBC that it “appreciates the good intentions of local government executives to fight dengue”.

It declined further comment, however, when asked if catching mosquitoes in exchange for cash is an effective way of stopping dengue.

“We urge all concerned to please consult and coordinate with their local health officers or the DOH regional office in their area for evidence-based practices that are known to work,” it said.

Mr Cernal said he was aware that the bounty had been bashed on social media, but added: “This is one of the biggest and most dense areas. We have to do something to help the local government.”

He pointed out that local health authorities recorded 44 cases of dengue in the community during the most recent surge of infections.

Barangay Addition Hills is home to nearly 70,000 people, crammed into a 162-hectare patch at the heart of the capital, Metro Manila.

Mr Cernal said the bounty was meant to supplement existing measures such as cleaning the streets and preventing the build-up of water where dengue-carrying mosquitoes lay their eggs.

Dengue is endemic in tropical countries, and outbreaks often occur in urban areas with poor sanitation which allows virus-carrying mosquitoes to multiply.

In severe cases, dengue causes internal bleeding which can lead to death. Its symptoms include headaches, nausea, joint and muscle pain.

Philippine authorities have recently flagged a rise in dengue cases nationwide due to seasonal rains. The DOH said it recorded 28,234 cases on 1 February, a 40% jump from the previous year.

The department has advised the public to maintain the cleanliness of their surroundings, destroy potential mosquito breeding sites such as tyres, wear long-sleeved shirts and trousers and apply mosquito repellent.

Aside from dengue, the DOH said the rains have also fuelled a spike in influenza-like diseases and cases of leptospirosis, a rat-borne disease that people get when wading in flood waters.

President Trump has spent the day attacking Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling him a “dictator” and deepening the rift between the two leaders.

His attacks came after Zelensky, reacting to US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia from which Kyiv was excluded, said the US president was “living in a disinformation space” governed by Moscow.

Speaking at a Saudi-backed investment meeting in Florida, Trump said the only thing Zelensky “was really good at was playing Joe Biden like a fiddle”.

The “dictator” slur quickly prompted criticism from European leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said “it is simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelensky his democratic legitimacy”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer made it clear he backed Zelensky in a phone call to the Ukrainian president.

A Downing Street spokesperson said Sir Keir “expressed his support for President Zelensky as Ukraine’s democratically elected leader”.

It was “perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during war time as the UK did during World War Two,” the spokesperson added.

Zelensky’s five-year term of office was due to come to an end in May 2024. However, Ukraine has been under martial law since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 and elections are suspended.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson also criticised Trump’s use of the word “dictator” while German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called the comments “absurd”.

“If you look at the real world instead of just firing off a tweet, then you know who in Europe has to live in the conditions of a dictatorship: people in Russia, people in Belarus,” she told broadcaster ZDF.

Speaking in Florida, Trump called Zelensky a “dictator”, just hours after using the same word in a Truth Social post about the Ukrainian president.

“He refuses to have elections. He’s low in the real Ukrainian polls. How can you be high with every city being demolished?” Trump said.

He also referenced his attempt to get rare-earth minerals from Ukraine, accusing Zelensky’s government of “breaking the deal”.

His address echoed his wording of the Truth Social post where Trump said Zelensky “has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died.” In the meantime, the US was “successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia,” he said.

A White House official said Trump’s post was in direct response to Zelensky’s “disinformation” comments.

On Tuesday US and Russian officials held their first high-level, face-to-face talks since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

• Trump echoes Russia as he upends US position on Ukraine
• Fact-checking Trump claims about war in Ukraine
• Rosenberg: How Putin and Trump shook up the world in a week
• Europe’s leaders divided over their tactics with Trump

The former prime minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, told the BBC that Russia was “popping champagne right now” in response to Trump’s comments.

“Volodymyr Zelensky is a completely legitimate president,” he said. “We cannot hold elections under martial law.”

The war of words began with comments made by Trump on Tuesday at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, when he blamed Ukraine for the war.

Trump was asked by BBC News what his message was to Ukrainians who might feel betrayed, to which he replied: “I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat, well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily.”

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump added.

Trump did not mention that President Vladimir Putin took the decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022.

Then on Wednesday, Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv: “We are seeing a lot of disinformation and it’s coming from Russia. With all due respect to President Donald Trump as a leader… he is living in this disinformation space.”

He added that he believed “the United States helped Putin to break out of years of isolation”.

Later in the day, the Ukrainian leader said the world faced the choice to be “with Putin or with peace” and announced he would be meeting Washington’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, on Thursday.

Earlier, Zelensky also rejected Trump’s attempts to access Ukraine’s rare minerals, saying no security guarantees were offered in exchange.

Trump has attempted to make an issue out of Zelensky’s popularity, claiming the Ukrainian president had only a 4% approval rating. But BBC Verify reports that polling conducted this month found 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted the president.

In Wednesday’s explosive Truth Social post, Trump also took aim at Europe, saying the war in Ukraine is “far more important to Europe than it is to us”.

“We have a big, beautiful ocean as a separation,” he said.

Europe had “failed to bring peace” in the region, he added.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin also spoke to reporters, saying he would meet Trump “with pleasure”.

For its part, the EU said it would place further sanctions on Russia.

The new sanctions target Russian aluminium and dozens of vessels suspected of illegally transporting oil. They would also disconnect more Russian banks from the global Swift payment system and ban more Russian media outlets from broadcasting in Europe.

Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago.

King Thutmose II’s tomb was the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty.

A British-Egyptian team has located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near the city of Luxor. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings.

The crew found it in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh.

“Part of the ceiling was still intact: a blue-painted ceiling with yellow stars on it. And blue-painted ceilings with yellow stars are only found in kings’ tombs,” said the field director of the mission Dr Piers Litherland.

He told the BBC’s Newshour programme he felt overwhelmed in the moment.

“The emotion of getting into these things is just one of extraordinary bewilderment because when you come across something you’re not expecting to find, it’s emotionally extremely turbulent really,” he said.

“And when I came out, my wife was waiting outside and the only thing I could do was burst into tears.”

Dr Litherland said the discovery solved the mystery of where the tombs of early 18th dynasty kings are located.

Researchers found Thutmose II’s mummified remains two centuries ago but its original burial site had never been located.

Thutmose II was an ancestor of Tutankhamun, whose reign is believed to have been from about 1493 to 1479 BC. Tutankhamun’s tomb was found by British archaeologists in 1922.

Thutmose II is best known for being the husband of Queen Hatshepsut, regarded as one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and one of the few female pharaohs who ruled in her own right.

Dr Litherland said the “large staircase and a very large descending corridor” of the tomb suggested grandeur.

“It took us a very long time to get through all that,” he said, noting it was blocked by flood debris and the ceilings had collapsed.

“It was only after crawling through a 10m (32ft) passageway that had a small 40cm gap at the top that we got into the burial chamber.”

There they discovered the blue ceiling and decorations of scenes from the Amduat, a religious text which was reserved for kings. That was another key sign they had found a king’s tomb, Dr Litherland said.

They set to work clearing the debris – expecting that they would find the crushed remains of a burial underneath.

But “the tomb turned out to be completely empty”, said Dr Litherland. “Not because it was robbed but because it had been deliberately emptied.”

They then worked out that the tomb had been flooded – “it had been built underneath a waterfall” – just a few years after the king’s burial and the contents moved to another location in ancient times.

It was through sifting through tonnes of limestone in the chamber that they found fragments of alabaster jars, which bore the inscriptions of the names of Thutmose II and Hatshepsut.

These fragments of alabaster “had probably broken when the tomb was being moved,” said Dr Litherland.

“And thank goodness they actually did break one or two things because that’s how we found out whose tomb it was.”

The artefacts are the first objects to be found associated with Thutmose II’s burial.

Dr Litherland’s said his team had a rough idea of where the second tomb was, and it could still be intact with treasures.

The discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb caps off more than 12 years of work by the joint team from Dr Litherland’s New Kingdom Research Foundation and Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The team has previously excavated 54 tombs in the western part of the Theban mountain in Luxor, and had also established identities of more than 30 royal wives and court women.

“This is the first royal tomb to be discovered since the ground-breaking find of King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in 1922,” said Egypt’s minister of tourism and antiquities Sherif Fathy.

“It is an extraordinary moment for Egyptology and the broader understanding of our shared human story.”

If there were any lingering doubts about Donald Trump’s view of the Ukraine war and America’s support of Kyiv’s fight against Russia, he put them to rest in stark terms on Wednesday.

Lashing out at Volodymyr Zelensky, who less than three years ago received a standing ovation in Congress for his efforts to resist Russia’s invasion, the US president labelled Ukraine’s leader a “dictator” and accused him of corruption.

He said Zelensky wanted to “keep the gravy train” of foreign aid running, a day after he appeared to blame Ukraine – not Russia – for starting the war.

“Zelensky better move fast, or he is not going to have a country left,” Trump wrote.

It’s been just under a week since Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a lengthy phone conversation. Now Trump is echoing Russia’s talking points about the war and the Ukrainian president.

Russia’s ambassador to the UK Andrei Kelin praised the Trump administration’s approach.

“For the first time we have noticed that they [the US] are not simply saying that this is Russian propaganda and disinformation. They have listened and they hear what we’re saying,” he told BBC Newsnight.

This sudden change in US foreign policy is indeed dramatic, but it should not be surprising. Trump has been charting this course for years.

His latest comments reflect an American president who is wielding total authority over his party and the full power of government to turn a transactional “America First” foreign policy view into reality.

Trump’s latest broadside against Zelensky came after the Ukrainian leader publicly rejected an American bid to gain access to – and profits from – Ukrainian minerals.

“That’s not a serious conversation,” Zelensky said. “I can’t sell our state.”

• Trump calls Zelensky a ‘dictator’ as rift deepens
• Fact-checking Trump claims about war in Ukraine
• Zelensky says Trump living in Russian ‘disinformation space’
• Who was at the table at US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia?

The US president seems serious, however, about reducing American military commitments to Europe and pivoting resources instead toward containing China.

And before his decisive election win in November, he frequently criticised the scale of US military aid being sent to Ukraine, describing Zelensky as “the greatest salesman of all time”.

While the voters who elected Trump may not have thought much about the Ukraine war – or foreign policy – in the election, Trump’s position on the issue wasn’t a political liability even as his opponents hammered him on it.

His willingness to now upend international norms and push the limits of US power on the global stage parallel his domestic efforts to slash the federal government and expand presidential authority. And, at least for the moment, there seems to be little interest among Trump’s own party in opposing him.

After his Wednesday social media posts, a few Senate Republicans expressed dismay.

“I certainly would not call President Zelensky a dictator,” Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski said.

Susan Collins of Maine, another regular Republican dissenter, said she disagreed with Trump, as did John Kennedy of Louisiana, who added that Putin was a “gangster”.

Fresh off a trip to Kyiv, Thom Tillis of North Carolina said the Ukraine war was “the responsibility of one human being on the face of the planet: Vladimir Putin”.

If the past is a guide, however, those words within his own party will not translate into any tangible attempt to redirect Trump’s foreign policy. Presidents have broad powers in international relations, and Trump has been clear about his views on Ukraine for years.

He has consistently blamed the Ukraine war on Biden administration weakness, and promised that ending it would be easy.

And while his earlier criticisms of Zelensky were not as sharp as this week, he regularly claimed that the Ukrainian president was adept at convincing Congress to send his country money.

Trump has a long, uneven history with Zelensky, having been impeached in 2019 for withholding arms shipments to Ukraine in an attempt to pressure the Ukrainian leader to open an investigation into his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.

Zelensky’s aggressive pitches for foreign aid, the way the American left has celebrated him as a hero, and his sometimes blunt, confrontational style will all not have helped his case with the US leader.

“The idea that Zelensky is going to change the president’s mind by badmouthing him in public media, everyone who knows the president will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration,” Vice-President JD Vance said in a recent interview.

Trump has also been consistent in his solicitous views toward Putin and the Russian perspective. He said Putin was a “genius” just days after he launched his invasion of Ukraine. At a July 2018 US-Russia summit in Helsinki, Trump said he had no reason to doubt Putin’s insistence, counter to US intelligence findings, that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 US election.

In Trump’s first term, his foreign policy team included some senior officials more sceptical of Russian intentions – like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and John Kelly – who were able to moderate the president’s foreign policy impulses. This time around, Trump is surrounded by many like-minded advisers – and those who might disagree are unwilling or unable to change Trump’s mind.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once viewed as a foreign policy hawk, has been careful to follow Trump’s lead. Keith Kellogg, a Russia critic who Trump picked as his Ukraine envoy, has been sidelined from negotiations with Moscow, while Steve Witkoff – Trump’s Middle East representative and trusted friend – is directly involved.

Trump also has a base of Republican support that agrees with him – further shoring up his political position.

A February Pew survey indicated only 30% of Republicans believed the current level of US support for Ukraine is “not enough” or “just right”. When the war began, 72% felt that way.

Forty percent of Republicans said they believed supporting Ukraine “hurts” US national security, versus only 27% who said it helps.

The Biden White House had argued that standing up to Russia in Ukraine was essential to US national security, but that is a far cry from how Trump and his closest advisers see the world – not in ideological clashes, but in transactions and relations that either benefit or harm American interests.

His Truth Social post, for instance, lamented that the US “will get nothing back” for the support it has given to Ukraine. His focus on the nation’s rare minerals tracks with his Middle East peace plan that involves the US redeveloping Gaza’s waterfront real estate into a resort, or his interest in maintaining control of – and profiting from – Syrian oil fields in his first presidential term.

Trump’s “America First” priorities do not involve committing US resources to spread democracy or getting involved in far-away conflicts across a “big, big beautiful ocean”, as he wrote on Wednesday.

The Ukraine war, he said, is “far more important to Europe than it is to us”.

This is a sharp change from the interventionist conservatism of George W Bush, the most recent Republican president before Trump. But with Trump as the face of the Republican Party since 2016, the changes over the past few weeks have been sudden – but they have also been a long time coming.

“Dirty.” “Perverted mind.” “Disgusting.”

These were the words India’s Supreme Court used on Tuesday while granting interim protection from arrest to a popular YouTuber who has been in the eye of a storm in the country over the past week.

The furore began after Ranveer Allahbadia, whose YouTube channel BeerBiceps has eight million followers, asked a contestant the question: “Would you rather watch your parents have sex every day for the rest of your life or join in once and stop it forever?”

The comments, made on the show India’s Got Latent on 9 February, sparked massive outrage, police cases and even death threats. YouTube quickly removed the episode, but that didn’t stall the tide of anger directed at Allahbadia and the show.

In fact, the amount of attention the incident has received is mind-boggling: it has made national headlines, been covered on primetime TV and some of India’s most prominent news sites have even run live pages.

Not surprising, considering the star status of Allahbadia. He has interviewed federal ministers, top Bollywood celebrities, cricketers and Hollywood actors. And last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi handed him a “National Creators Awards” trophy.

Since the controversy erupted, Allahbadia and the show’s creator, Samay Raina, have apologised for the comments and Raina has taken down all previous episodes of the show. The Supreme Court in its recent order banned Allahbadia from posting content on social media.

But the incident continues to make news,

“It feels like the state is trying to make an example out of Allahbadia,” says Apar Gupta, founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation. Saket Gokhale, an opposition lawmaker, also condemned the targeting of Allahbadia and the show.

“Crass content can be criticised if it offends you. However, you cannot have the state persecute and lock up people for offending your ‘moral sentiments’,” he wrote in a post on X.

Popular comedian Vir Das also weighed in on the controversy and criticised news channels for their one-dimensional coverage of the incident and for taking a disparaging view of all digital content.

Allahbadia’s remarks and the subsequent backlash have triggered debates around free speech and India’s obscenity laws; it has also sparked conversations around the thirst for viral content and the consequences its makers face when their content crosses lines upheld by the very people who watch it.

Raina’s show, which debuted in June, has been popular from the start, with each episode being viewed tens of millions of times on YouTube. And it hasn’t shied away from kickstarting controversies either.

The show has platformed some bizarre performances and judges and contestants have been seen making crass and crude comments more than a few times. Critics have accused the show of spewing misogynistic views and for body-shaming guests.

A popular fashion influencer once walked out of the show after a male contestant compared her to a former adult film actress while another asked her about her “body count” (a slang term for the number of sexual partners a person has had).

But that seems to have been the appeal of the show too.

Fans of the show have hailed it for championing “raw talent and unfiltered jokes”. Some have said that they liked the roasts – a form of insult comedy – which was popular on the show.

Experts have underscored how, with the entertainment landscape exploding, digital content creators often feel compelled to push the envelope – even if it means resorting to the risqué and lewd – just to gain views and virality.

It’s safe to say the show pushed the envelope and the buttons of many. But then, it backfired.

“A lot of comedy, especially of a certain masculine kind, is cruel and punches down on people. It has a violent undercurrent. So if you contribute to that culture, it’s not a shock if it comes back to bite you some day,” filmmaker Paromita Vohra says.

She adds that successful comedy calls for a fine-tuned awareness of the audience it is being performed for and what boundaries it can push.

Interestingly, Allahbadia’s question, which sparked the furore, was almost identical to the question asked by the host of an Australian comedy show called OG Crew’s Truth or Drink. While the question didn’t spark outrage in Australia, it has in India.

“The internet has made it possible for content to reach spaces and people it was not organically playing to. Unthinkingly appropriating content can have unexpected consequences,” she says.

But she also says that there’s a need to guard against making such issues a question of morality.

“When such controversies erupt, there is always the risk of morality being weaponised to punish people who have gone against what’s accepted by society,” she says and adds that morality is increasingly being beaten into the legal framework of the country, which can have a divisive effect.

Some critics have also accused the authorities of using the controversy as a smoke screen to divert attention from other pressing problems – like unemployment and pollution. Some fear that it will be used by the federal government as a reason to justify further regulating content creation.

After the controversy, a report by NDTV news channel stated that a parliamentary panel was considering making laws around digital content stricter. The Supreme Court too has pushed for more regulations around online content.

Mr Gupta says the state already has a “tremendous amount of power” to prosecute people accused of flouting various data and content laws and that while the state exercises its powers without restraint, content creators don’t have as many legal safeguards to protect them.

“Instead of tighter laws, we need more reform; existing legal standards need to be more tolerant of free expression,” he says.

“Other systems, like education and digital learning should be strengthened so that young people know to get their education from the classroom, and turn to the internet only for entertainment.”

Actress Kim Sae-ron‘s death in an apparent suicide has renewed criticism of South Korea’s entertainment industry, which churns out stars but also subjects them to immense pressure and scrutiny.

Kim – who was found dead aged 24 at her home in Seoul on Sunday – had been bombarded with negative press coverage and hate online after a drink-driving conviction in 2022. Police have not provided further details about her death.

Experts found the circumstances leading to it depressingly familiar. Other celebrities also ended up taking their lives after careers upended by cyberbullying.

As Kim was laid to rest on Wednesday, analysts say they are not optimistic her death will lead to meaningful change.

South Korea’s entertainment industry is enjoying massive popularity. Today, there are more than an estimated 220 million fans of Korean entertainment around the world – that’s four times the population of South Korea.

But there is also increasing spotlight on the less glamorous side of the entertainment industry.

South Korea is known for its hyper-competitive culture in most spheres of life – from education to careers. It has one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries. While its overall suicide rate is falling, deaths of those in their 20s are rising.

This pressure is heightened in the case of celebrities. They face immense pressure to be perfect, and are subjected to the demands of obsessive “super fans” who can make or break careers.

That is why even the slightest perceived misstep can be career ending. Kim Sae-ron became so unpopular, scenes featuring her were edited out of shows such as Netflix’s 2023 drama Bloodhounds.

“It is not enough that the celebrities be punished by the law. They become targets of relentless criticism,” Korean culture critic Kim Hern-sik told the BBC.

He referred to K-pop artists Sulli and Goo Hara, who died by suicide in 2019 after long battles with internet trolls, even though they did not have known brushes with the law.

Sulli had offended fans for not conforming to the K-pop mould, while an internet mob had targeted Goo Hara over her relationship with an ex-boyfriend.

Cyberbullying has also become a money-making gig for some, Kim Hern-sik told the BBC.

“YouTubers get the views, forums get the engagement, news outlets get the traffic. I don’t think [Kim’s death] will change the situation.

“There needs to be harsher criminal punishment against leaving nasty comments,” he says.

Kim Sae-ron’s father has blamed a YouTuber for her death, claiming the controversial videos they published caused her deep emotional distress.

Others have pointed fingers at some local media outlets, who reportedly fuelled public animosity against Kim by reporting the unverified claims.

“This cycle of media-driven character assassination must stop,” civic group Citizens’ Coalition for Democratic Media said in a statement on Tuesday.

Na Jong-ho, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, likened the spate of celebrity deaths in South Korea to a real-life version of Squid Game, the South Korean Netflix blockbuster which sees the indebted fighting to the death for a huge cash prize.

“Our society abandons those who stumble and moves on as if nothing happened.. How many more lives must be lost before we stop inflicting this destructive, suffocating shame on people?” he wrote on Facebook.

“Drunk driving is a big mistake. There would be a problem with our legal system if that goes unpunished. However, a society that buries people who make mistakes without giving them a second chance is not a healthy one,” Prof Na added.

Last year, the BBC reported on how “super fans” in the notorious K-pop industry try to dictate their idols’ private lives – from their romantic relationships to their daily activities outside of work – and can be unforgiving when things go off script.

It is no surprise that Kim Sae-ron chose to withdraw from the public eye after her DUI conviction, for which she was fined 20 million won (£11,000) in April 2023.

It is worth noting however, that not all public figures are subject to the same treatment. Politicians, including opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, also have past drink-driving convictions but have been able to bounce back – polls show Lee is now the country’s top presidential contender.

In South Korea, it is “extremely tough” for artistes to recover when they do something that puts a crack in their “idol” image, says K-pop columnist Jeff Benjamin.

He contrasts this to entertainment industries in the West, where controversies and scandals sometimes even “add a rockstar-like edge” to celebrities’ reputations.

“While no one cheers when a Hollywood celebrity is arrested for DUI [driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs] or sent to jail for significant crimes, it’s not necessarily career-ending,” he says.

While the Korean entertainment industry has made moves to address performers’ mental health concerns, it is unclear how effective these have been.

Real change can only happen when there is no more financial or attention incentives to continue with such intrusive reporting, says Mr Benjamin.

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

The Trump administration is moving to end New York City’s congestion pricing plan, which charges vehicles entering the city in certain areas, then uses tolls to upgrade its aging transit systems.

The Trump administration said the federal government has jurisdiction over highways leading into the city and is revoking its approval of the controversial program over concerns it unfairly burdens working-class residents in the region.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,” President Trump said on social media. “Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”

New York, which launched the program just last month, is vowing to fight Trump, arguing the program is helping minimise traffic and travel times. “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” New York Gov Kathy Hochul said. “We’ll see you in court.”

The program poses a $9 (£7.15) toll on vehicles entering Manhattan between 60th Street and the southern tip of the island in the Financial District. The toll is in place on weekdays from 5 am to 9 pm and on weekends from 9 am to 9 pm.

New US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy notified Gov Hochul that he was rescinding approval of the program and would work with officials to halt the tolls.

He called the program a “slap in the face to working class Americans”.

“Commuters using the highway system to enter New York City have already financed the construction and improvement of these highways through the payment of gas taxes and other taxes,” he argued. “The toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative, and instead, takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways. It’s backwards and unfair.”

New York officials vowed immediately to fight the Trump administration. Its transit agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), on Wednesday asked a judge to make a declaratory judgement to prevent the administration from moving forward with plans to end the program.

Hochul said the tolls will continue, and in a fiery speech at a subway station on Wednesday, said Trump was trying to take away the state’s rights as part of his “revenge tour.”

“New York hasn’t laboured under a king in over 250 years and we sure as hell are not going to start now,” Hochul said. “This is an attack on our sovereign identity, our independence from Washington. We are a nation of states. This is what we fought for.”

Hochul held up a photo posted earlier Wednesday by the official White House account on X, which showed Trump in a faux magazine cover wearing a crown, with the words, “long live the king”.

“We are not subservient to a king or anyone else out of Washington,” Hochul said. “So this is the fight we’re in. It’s all about our sovereignty.”

She and others at the news conference argued the new program lowered traffic by 9% during the month since it started. It’s also cut traffic accidents in half and increased the use of other transportation, such as the city’s subway system, she said.

Transportation officials have argued the program would help relieve traffic in the city and help first responders trying to reach emergencies quickly. Money raised from the tolls would help bolster funds for its aging subways, which have garnered headlines over the years for massive underground floods during heavy rains.

New Jersey’s governor Phil Murphy sent a letter to Trump last month – the same day the president took office – asking him to access the program and its impacts to his state.

On Wednesday, he applauded the Trump administration for halting the program, saying in a statement that the program placed an unfair “burden” on commuters who work in the city.

“The current program lines the MTA’s pockets at the expense of New Jerseyans,” he said.

A chorus of praise is being sung around Ne Zha 2, the Chinese film about a mythical boy who battles demons, which has been newly crowned the world’s highest-grossing animated film.

The box office triumph of the film – which has raked in 12.3bn yuan ($1.7bn; £1.4bn) – triggered a huge swell of national pride across the country.

But as patriotic Ne Zha 2 fans set their sights on further success, they are also keeping a close eye on critics of the movie, accusing them of being clout-chasing, paid “haters”.

Also in the crosshairs of this nationalism is Captain America: Brave New World, the fourth movie of the superhero franchise, now seen as Ne Zha 2’s rival.

“I don’t care if Ne Zha 2 can survive overseas, but Captain America 4 must die in China,” reads a popular slogan that has been repeated on multiple posts on social media.

In Chinese news outlets and social media, people are gloating over the lacklustre performance of the American blockbuster at China’s box office. Of the $92m the film has made outside the US, only $10.6m has come from China, Hollywood’s largest overseas market.

“It’s not Captain America that’s dying, but America that’s dying,” reads the title of an essay on an online forum analysing the movie’s lack of appeal in China.

The author goes on to argue: “In reality, the US does not have superheroes and the US is not a peace-loving, peace-defending beacon for humanity.”

One cinema in Sichuan province reportedly decided to hold off screenings of Captain America 4 in its theatres “in order to support Ne Zha 2”.

Meanwhile, some are critical that Ne Zha 2, which premiered outside China this month, did not get enough screenings in North American cinemas. They have also accused American cinemas of showing other movies rather than the Chinese film.

Ne Zha 2 hit the screens in China on 29 January, among a string of high-profile movies designed to capture an annual surge of cinemagoers during the Lunar New Year holiday.

It quickly towered over the competition, crossing the $1bn milestone in less than two weeks – even more impressive considering China’s sluggish economy.

Ne Zha 2 is being hailed as a symbol of progress in Chinese film and a sign that locally-made productions are becoming competitive globally. Despite China’s massive domestic market, its box office is typically dominated by Hollywood.

Previous domestic box office hits have tended to be patriotic, action films such as The Battle of Lake Changjin, a 2021 propaganda film about the 1950s Korean War, which held the record for China’s highest-grossing film until Ne Zha 2 broke it.

While Hollywood films usually see their revenues spread across different regions, more than 99% of Ne Zha 2’s box office earnings are coming from China – where the animation has become a litmus test for patriotism.

On social media, people say they have bought tickets to watch Ne Zha 2 multiple times. And those who have not watched the movie say they have to deal with snide remarks.

“A friend told me I was not patriotic, just because I did not watch Ne Zha 2,” a social media user posted on Douyin, China’s TikTok.

As cinemagoers took to social media to share their reviews of the movie, criticisms – from the lack of plot continuity to its awkward humour and anti-feminist undertones – were met with a barrage of dismissive comments.

“People like that are either clout-chasing, or are being paid,” read one comment on Xiaohongshu, China’s Instagram-like app.

“Everyone beware, there’s currently a wave of haters swarming Ne Zha 2 with criticism online,” another Xiaohongshu user commented, adding that the “premeditated” criticisms came from jealous individuals in either foreign or domestic film industries.

“With such a great movie, people are using their feet to vote. So they are turning to panic and slander. How despicable!” they wrote.

Ne Zha 2’s huge success is helping introduce characters from Chinese mythology to new audiences around the world, and it’s been praised for its script, special effects and the quality of animation. But the fact it has become a focal point for nationalist sentiment has led to some in China raising concerns about the growing political significance the film has taken on.

“Ne Zha 2 has become a cultural phenomenon, but I don’t think this is entirely a good thing,” reads a Xiaohongshu post reflecting on the sharpening debate over the movie.

“Criticising the plot flaws is equated to being unpatriotic; unreservedly condemning other films released in the same period; replacing deep discussion with a war between fans and haters … This is definitely not a good cultural environment.”

On a cold January afternoon, a young pharmacy student, Shin Jeong-min, waited restlessly outside South Korea’s Constitutional Court, as the country’s suspended president arrived to fight his impeachment.

While Yoon Suk Yeol testified, she chanted along with hundreds of his incensed and worried supporters, who have rallied around him ever since his failed attempt to impose martial law. “Release him now. Cancel his impeachment,” they shouted.

“If the president is impeached and the opposition leader is elected, our country will become one with North Korea and Kim Jong Un,” Jeong-min said, citing a theory popular among President Yoon’s most fanatical followers: that the left-leaning opposition party wants to unify with the North and turn South Korea into a communist country.

At 22 years old, Jeong-min stands out from the legion of elderly Koreans who have always feared and despised the North, and make up the bulk of those who hold these far-right conspiratorial beliefs.

That generation of Koreans, now in its 60s and 70s, lived through the Cold War and remembers bitterly the devastating aftermath of North Korea’s invasion in the 1950s.

When Yoon declared martial law in early December, he played on these fears to justify his power grab.

Without citing evidence, he claimed that “North Korean communist forces” had infiltrated the opposition party and were trying to overthrow the country. They needed to be “eradicated”, he said, as he moved swiftly to ban political activity and put the army in charge.

Two months on from his failed coup, an anti-communist frenzy is gripping Yoon’s supporters, young and old.

Even some who had never given North Korea or communism much thought are now convinced their dynamic democracy is on the brink of being turned into a leftist dictatorship – and that their leader had no choice but to remove people’s democratic rights in order to protect them from both Pyongyang and Beijing.

“This a war between communism and democracy,” said one office worker in his 40s, who had slipped out of work to join the protest at the court.

Another man, in his 30s, adamantly argued the president had to be returned to office as soon as possible. “He’s going to arrest all the North Korean spies,” he said.

Such threats were once very real. During the 1960s and 70s, spies would regularly attempt to infiltrate the government.

In 1968, a group of North Korean commandos crawled across the border and tried to assassinate then President Park Chung-hee. A tree atop Seoul’s Bugak mountain still bears the bullet marks from the intense gun battles that raged for nearly two weeks.

In the 1980s, during the final years of South Korea’s violent military dictatorship, a radical far-left student movement began to praise Pyongyang for its “superior” political system. They were labelled regime “sympathisers”.

It was also common for authoritarian leaders to accuse their political adversaries of being North Korean conspirators.

“Anti-communism became the dominant ideology of South Korea’s military dictators, who used it to control society and justify restricting people’s freedom,” said Shin Jin-wook, a sociology professor at Chungang University.

Today, these threats have dissipated. Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and advanced cyber-hacking abilities pose the greater risk, and you would struggle to find anyone in South Korea who wants to emulate life in the North. The political left and right are merely divided over how to deal with their troublesome neighbour.

While the approach of Yoon’s conservative People Power Party has been to try to threaten the North into submission with military superiority, the left-leaning Democratic Party prefers to engage with Pyongyang, believing the two countries can peacefully co-exist.

The president has been accused of exploiting people’s historic fears. “Yoon’s rhetoric almost completely matches that of past dictators, and he is the first president to use this anti-communist ideology so blatantly since Korea became a democracy in 1987,” said Mr Shin.

Not only has Yoon accused the parliament, led by the opposition Democratic Party, of being riddled with Pyongyang sympathisers, but he has dangled the idea that North Korea, with help from China, rigged last year’s parliamentary election.

“This is fake news cooked up by Yoon to demonise the opposition and justify his completely undemocratic move,” one Democratic Party lawmaker, Wi Sung-lac, told the BBC.

“We have a long history of fighting for democracy and freedom in Korea. We are the ones who managed to thwart Yoon’s attempt to destroy Korea’s democracy,” he said, referring to the opposition politicians who pushed past troops and climbed over the parliament’s walls during martial law to vote down the motion.

Such ideas were previously pedalled by extreme conservative groups, said Lee Sangsin, a polling expert at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

“These groups were isolated. People didn’t take much notice,” he explained. “But because Yoon is the president, his words carry weight, and many people have accepted what he said.”

This was evident at one of the pro-Yoon weekend rallies we attended last month. Far from being die-hard conspiracy theorists, nearly everyone we spoke to said Yoon had changed their thinking.

“At first I didn’t support Yoon, but martial law opened my eyes,” said Oh Jung-hyuk, a 57-year-old musician, there with his wife. “We can see how deeply embedded leftist forces are in our society.” One woman in her 40s told us she previously had doubts about Chinese vote rigging but had researched the issue after martial law and “realised it was true”.

Yoon’s supporters often point to real events – how the previous Democratic Party President, Moon Jae-in, met Kim Jong Un to try to orchestrate a peace deal; that the current Democratic leader, Lee Jae-myung, is being investigated for helping to send millions of dollars to North Korea – then use these as evidence of a greater plot.

“This far-fetched conspiracy theory that China rigged the election is becoming more and more accepted,” said the sociology professor Mr Shin. “One of the most basic consensuses in a democracy is the premise of fair and free elections, and now we have people distrusting that. This is very extreme.”

As Yoon’s unsubstantiated claims have taken root, his support seems to have grown. Although the majority of people in South Korea still want him permanently removed from office, the number has fallen. Last week it stood at 57%, compared to 75% in the week after the martial law declaration.

Through his anti-communist rhetoric, Yoon has also effectively tapped into a simmering distrust of China. To fear North Korea now means to be wary of China too.

At a recent weekend rally in Seoul, many supporters had swapped their trademark “Stop the Steal” election fraud placards for ones that read “Chinese Communist Party OUT”.

“I believe China is interfering in all South Korea’s political affairs. It’s pulling the strings behind the scenes,” said 66-year-old Jo Yeon-deok, who was holding one of the signs.

According to the polling expert, Mr Lee, “a growing portion of the public now believes China wants to turn South Korea into some kind of vassal state”.

For those in their 20s and 30s who have never experienced real danger from North Korea, China is a more believable threat. Last year the Pew Research Centre found that South Korea and Hungary were the only two countries where the young had a more negative view of China than the old.

But contrary to the information they are being fed, young people’s fears have nothing to do with communism, said Cho Jin-man, a political scientist at Duksung Women’s University.

Until recently South Koreans felt their country was superior to China, Mr Cho explained – but as Beijing has become stronger and more assertive they have started to see it as a threat, especially since the US started treating it as such.

On top of that, young people have a lot of grievances: they’re struggling to find work or afford a home, and feel resentful when they see their universities catering to Chinese students.

Communism, Mr Cho believes, is being used as a convenient catch-all bogeyman to stir up fear and hate. This message is amplified by far-right YouTube channels, particularly popular with young men.

“North Korea and China are my biggest concerns,” said Kim Gyung-joo, a 30-year-old IT developer, who came alone to one of the rallies. He used to be left-wing like his friends, he said, and was initially very critical of the president’s martial law order. But after researching the issue on YouTube he realised martial law was “unavoidable”.

“If I’d been in the president’s position, I’d have declared it too,” he said.

Nonetheless, Wi Sung-lac the opposition politician is not concerned about his party losing support. “Even though these extreme views are spreading, they will be limited,” he said. “Most people understand who we really are, and they are yearning for a return to normality.”

Polling expert Lee Sang-sin is less sanguine, likening Yoon’s supporters to “a fast-growing cult”. The president’s move was “very divisive”, he said.

“It is going to have a lasting effect on Korean society”.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has backed Volodymyr Zelensky as a “democratically elected leader” after Donald Trump described the Ukrainian president as a “dictator”.

Sir Keir called Zelensky on Wednesday evening and told him it was “perfectly reasonable” for Ukraine to “suspend elections during wartime as the UK did during World War Two”, Downing Street said.

Trump had earlier criticised Zelensky, saying he had done a “terrible job” and claiming “he refuses to have elections” in Ukraine.

Russia’s Ambassador to the UK, Andrei Kelin, has told the BBC he believes Zelensky should hold elections and again rejected the idea of foreign peacekeeping troops being allowed in Ukraine in the event of any peace deal.

Zelensky’s five-year term was due to end in May 2024, but elections have been suspended since martial law was declared after Russia’s invasion.

In the phone call with the Ukrainian president, Sir Keir “stressed the need for everyone to work together”, a Downing Street spokesperson said.

“The prime minister reiterated his support for the US-led efforts to get a lasting peace in Ukraine that deterred Russia from any future aggression,” they added.

Following the phone call, Zelensky said they had discussed “upcoming plans and opportunities”, adding: “UK’s support matters indeed, and we will never forget the respect the British people have shown for Ukraine and our citizens.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch also defended the Ukrainian leader, writing on X that Zelensky was “the democratically elected leader of Ukraine who bravely stood up to Putin’s illegal invasion”.

But Badenoch said Trump was “right that Europe needs to pull its weight” and called on Sir Keir to “get on a plane to Washington and show some leadership”.

Sir Keir will travel to Washington DC next week for his first in-person meeting with Trump. But the deepening rift between Trump and Zelensky has now increased the political jeopardy for him.

The PM has said he wants to use his meeting with Trump next week to discuss a “US backstop” that he says is necessary to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again.

There has been widespread criticism of Trump’s comments in the UK.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said calling Zelensky a dictator “must be where the line is drawn” and he hoped “the whole political spectrum… will speak with one voice in opposition to Trump’s lies”.

Former Conservative PM Boris Johnson posted on X to say “of course Ukraine didn’t start the war”.

“Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action,” he added.

Conservative MP and former security minister Tom Tugendhat said Zelensky was “no more a dictator than [former British PM Sir Winston Churchill]”.

“Putin is determined on destroying the US built alliances to advance his power.”

The former head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service MI6 has said Trump’s comments are “unfortunate” and will “embolden” Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Sir Alex Younger told BBC Newsnight: “I don’t know whether Donald Trump buys the Russian line but I think the Russians probably think he does and I think that significantly diminishes his leverage.”

Sir Keir has said he would be prepared to deploy British troops to Ukraine to help guarantee its security as part of a peace deal provided there was a US “backstop”.

Speaking to BBC Newsnight, the Russian ambassador to the UK said Moscow would not accept troops from the UK or other European nations in Ukraine, even if Trump approved the idea.

Mr Kelin also questioned whether there could be a potential peace agreement without fresh elections in Ukraine.

Asked if his country would give back some of the territory it had seized from Ukraine, the Russian ambassador said: “Why should we? We have liberated these territories, upon which Russian people are living for centuries.”

Kevin Spacey has responded to fellow actor Guy Pearce’s allegation that the Oscar-winner “targeted” him during the making of 1997 movie LA Confidential, telling the Australian to “grow up”, adding: “You are not a victim”.

It comes after Pearce – one of the stars of the recent Bafta-winning film The Brutalist – this week expanded on his alleged experiences with the US actor having previously called him “a handsy guy” in 2018.

Spacey – whose career was brought to a halt by a string of allegations – admitted to “being too handsy” and “pushing the boundaries”, in an interview last year with Piers Morgan, while saying he’d not done anything illegal.

In 2023 the actor was found not guilty of all charges of sexual assault against four men between 2001 and 2013 after a trial in London; and in 2022 a US court dismissed a sexual assault lawsuit against him.

Spacey currently faces a civil trial over another allegation, which he denies, that he sexually assaulted a man in 2008.

A further sexual abuse claim was lodged against him last week at the High Court, according to filings.

Pearce told the Hollywood Reporter that the Oscar-winner “targeted me, no question” during the making of the 1997 crime thriller LA Confidential.

“But I did that thing that you do where you brush it off and go, ‘ah, that’s nothing. Ah, no, that’s nothing’. And I did that for five months,” he said.

“And, really, I was sort of scared of Kevin because he’s quite an aggressive man. He’s extremely charming and brilliant at what he does – really impressive etc.

“He holds a room remarkably. But I was young and susceptible, and he targeted me, no question.”

Pearce revealed he had told his wife at the time that he felt safe on set when his co-star Simon Baker was present, because Spacey allegedly focused his attentions on him instead.

He said the #MeToo movement, which saw allegations made against many men in Hollywood from 2017 onwards, had been “a really incredible wake-up call” for him.

The actor said he “broke down and sobbed” and “couldn’t stop” after he saw the allegations against Spacey in the news headlines. “I think it really dawned on me the impact that had occurred and how I sort of brushed it off and how I had either shelved it or blocked it out or whatever.”

On Tuesday, Spacey responded directly to Pearce in a video posted on X, saying: “If I did something then that upset you, you could have reached out to me.

“We could have had that conversation, but instead, you’ve decided to speak to the press, who are now, of course, coming after me, because they would like to know what my response is to the things that you said.

“You really want to know what my response is? Grow up.”

Spacey claimed Pearce omitted to mention he had flown to Georgia a year after LA Confidential was made “just to spend time with me” while he was filming another movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

“I mean, did you tell the press that too, or does that not fit into the victim narrative you have going?” he added.

“I apologise that I didn’t get the message that you don’t like spending time with me. Maybe there was another reason, I don’t know, but that doesn’t make any sense. That you would have just been leading me on, right? But here you are now on a mission, some 28 years later, after I’ve been through hell and back.”

Spacey concluded his message by saying he was happy to have a “conversation” with Pearce “anytime, anyplace”.

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” he said. “But Guy – you need to grow up. You are not a victim.”

Pearce earlier told the US publication he had raised Spacey’s alleged behaviour with him years later, and had “had a couple of confrontations with Kevin” that “got ugly”.

His new strategy these days, he noted, was “just try to be more honest about it now and call it for what it is”.

A huge sinkhole in a street in Surrey is continuing to grow and swallow up more road, with the county council declaring a major incident.

The original hole first appeared in Godstone High Street late on Monday night, growing to at least 65ft (20m) long by Tuesday lunchtime.

A second opening has now appeared, with a car teetering on the brink and the owner unable to move it.

Families have been evacuated from their homes over fears of an explosion caused by exposed cables, with one resident saying the street now “sounded like a waterfall”.

The evacuated properties were built about three years ago, on the site of a former sand quarry.

Local residents also believe there are caves underneath the area.

Noosh Miri and her family were among those evacuated from the area by police.

“We got a violent knocking on the door. As I opened the door, it sounded like I was in a waterfall because the sinkhole was right in front of my doorstep,” she said.

“The policewoman told us we needed to get out straight away, and in the space of 10 minutes, we got the kids dressed, we grabbed the nearest things that we could find.”

The family have now been found temporary accommodation by their insurers, but she said she was prepared “for a good couple of months” before being able to move back in.

Speaking to Radio 5 Live, Ms Miri added: “Our house is not secure at all. At the moment we don’t know the extent of the damage but we do know we won’t be going home for some time.”

She later suggested the sink hole could be linked to mining caves as well as heavy-loaded vehicles which sometimes made their home “rattle” when they came past.

Around seven miles of tunnels sit beneath Godstone, according to the charity Surrey Hills Society.

Ms Miri added: “We think it’s a combination of different things that have led to here – it’s not a simple burst pipe or the caves or lorries.”

Pete Burgess, of the Wealden Cave and Mines Society, said a quarry marked “sand pit” can be seen on 19th century maps of land directly under the sinkhole.

He added that sand from the pit was dug out and used for building and gardening purposes.

Other residents said the sinkhole had opened adjacent to “brand new flats” which had been built in the area.

Another added that they had been forced to sleep in their car in a nearby car park after being evacuated in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Businesses in the area, including Godstone Pharmacy, said many shops had closed and that staff had been making deliveries on foot to ensure vulnerable customers received their medication.

Staff member Mrulal Gudadhe said the business had seen nearly no customers walk through the door since Monday.

He added: “The pharmacy is completely dead. There are no people. Streets are empty and everything is closed. But we are open, we are still working.”

• What is a sinkhole and how does it form?

As a result of the major incident, the operation is now being managed by Surrey Local Resilience Forum, with Surrey County Council (SCC) as the lead agency.

Investigations were continuing to make the area safe and to repair utilities, SCC said.

Carl Bussey, the council’s assistant director for safer communities, said: “Residents from within the cordon – around 30 properties – are being supported by Tandridge District Council with advice around accommodation.”

In an updated statement, Mr Bussey added that properties in the wider area “have access to water and power as normal” and affected properties had been confined to within the cordon.

More permanent repairs will be carried out “once the site is deemed safe to work in”, he added.

The Environment Agency said there was no evidence of pollution caused by the hole.

Godstone MP Claire Coutinho thanked engineers for their work and said her team would be in “regular contact” with Tandridge Council and Surrey County Council to ensure those evacuated “receive the necessary support in the coming days and weeks”.

On Wednesday morning, SES Water said it had restored supplies to properties, but warned water may appear discoloured.

The company said there was no risk to health and customers would receive compensation in their bills.

Repairs are expected to take several months.

The cause of the sinkhole remains unclear, but experts at the British Geological Survey (BGS) say it could be caused by a burst water main.

Andrew Farrant, BGS regional geologist in south east England, says that weak sandstone lies beneath the village and this would normally be stable, but if there was a sudden influx of water it could “flush out weak sandstone bedrock”.

This would create a void and then the overlying ground would collapse into it.

Mr Farrant suspects the water could come from a burst water main in the local area.

Locals have raised concerns about a local sand quarry and historic mining activities, which had created caves near the village.

The old sand mine has now been filled in so BGS think it’s unlikely to be the reason, but they say they cannot rule out that there are other sand mines not mapped or that the roof of a historic cave has collapsed somewhere else which cause the initial failure of the water pipe.

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Anti-Muslim hate in the UK surged to record levels last year, an organisation tracking Islamophobia has found.

Almost 6,000 reports to Tell Mama were confirmed by it as anti-Muslim incidents, more than double the number two years ago, with men targeted more than women for the first time since the body was founded in 2012.

In its report the organisation said there had been a “surge in rhetoric that falsely portrays Muslims as terrorists or terrorist sympathisers” following the Israel-Gaza conflict and Southport murders.

A government spokesperson called the findings “extremely concerning” and said it would “seek to stamp out anti-Muslim hatred and racism wherever it occurs”.

A total of 6,313 cases of anti-Muslim hate were recorded by Tell Mama in 2024, a 43% increase on the previous year – with 5,837 of the reports verified by the group.

The organisation, which describes itself as the leading agency on monitoring anti-Muslim hate crime, said it had documented a steep rise in offline incidents, with 3,680 cases reported – a 72% increase on the number two years ago.

The majority of the in-person cases were abusive behaviour, with Tell Mama also recording incidents of physical assault, discrimination and vandalism. Most of the attacks took place in public areas such as streets and parks, with a minority occurring in the workplace.

For the first time since Tell Mama’s inception in 2012, more men than women were targeted by anti-Muslim hate and Islamophobia, the organisation said.

Tell Mama said that shift reflected “the deepening impact of harmful stereotypes that fuel societal divisions and reinforces false notions about Muslim identities”.

Anti-Muslim attacks surged in the UK following both the Southport murders last July and the start of the Israel-Gaza conflict in October 2023.

According to the report, more than half of the online incidents of Islamophobia last year took place after three girls were murdered at a dance class in Southport. The majority of these occurred on the social media platform X – formerly known as Twitter.

Following the murders, misinformation about the assailant’s identity proliferated online, fuelling civil unrest that spread across the UK.

Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents who had settled in Britain, is serving a minimum 52-year sentence for the murders.

Tell Mama said that there had been a “surge in rhetoric that falsely portrays Muslims as terrorists or terrorist sympathisers” since both the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and the 2024 riots sparked by the Southport murders.

Iman Atta, the group’s director, called for coordinated action by the government and said: “As anti-Muslim hate continues to be felt by a greater number of British Muslims, both at a street and online level, our work and support for victims of anti-Muslim hate is needed now more than ever.”

The public must “stand together against hatred and extremism”, she said, and urged those in positions of influence to “consider how their language risks stereotyping communities and how it unduly influences discussions online and offline”.

In response to the findings, the government said that “attacks on and hatred against Muslim communities are completely unacceptable and have no place in our society”.

A spokesperson added: “We are absolutely determined to bridge divisions between communities and are working closely with community groups, charities, and public sector partners to tackle hatred in all its forms.”

Seven men have been charged in connection with a spree of burglaries targeting professional athletes across the US.

Goods worth more than $2m (£1.58m) were stolen from the homes of NBA and NFL players in a series of break-ins which began in October 2024.

Kansas City Chiefs stars Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes were among those targeted as they were competing in games late last year, as were players from the Milwaukee Bucks and Cincinnati Bengals.

According to a federal complaint unsealed on Tuesday, all seven men charged over the burglaries are Chilean nationals. It alleges they are members of a South American theft group that targeted high-profile athletes.

The complaint names the men as Pablo Zuniga Cartes, Ignacio Zuniga Cartes, Bastian Jimenez Freraut, Jordan Quiroga Sanchez, Bastian Orellano Morales, Alexander Huiaguil Chavez, and Sergio Ortega Cabello.

The group, who are aged between 23 and 38, all face a maximum of 10 years in jail if convicted over the burglaries.

It is not yet clear if they have legal representation. Four of the defendants – Mr Cabello, Mr Chavez, Mr Morales, and Mr Sanchez – pleaded not guilty to initial charges in Ohio last month.

While the federal complaint does not name the victims, it said the Kansas City homes of two Chiefs players were burgled in October.

Kelce’s home was robbed on 7 October as he was starting a game against the New Orleans Saints. Officials said $20,000 (£15,900) in cash was stolen from his $6m home.

And Mahomes’s residence was burgled on 5 October, police said at the time.

The complaint also alleges the seven men were involved in the November burglary of a home belonging to a Milwaukee Bucks basketball player. The date of this incident is when forward Bobby Portis reported a burglary.

A safe containing watches, chains, jewellery, and cash was stolen along with a designer suitcase and designer bags. In total, the items stolen were worth more than $1.5m.

The athletes make for easy targets in part because they have valuable belongings and public schedules, security experts told the BBC last year.

“In any professional football event, for instance, there’s 106 players, 53 on each team, that are not going to be home, not including coaches. And some of those players may have very lucrative contracts and live in nice places,” said former FBI agent Jeff Lanza.

The NFL has been warning players about the crimes, sending a memo last year which said “organised and skilled groups” appeared to be targeting them. The memo said the groups were tracking the players’ whereabouts on social media and through public records.

The issue is an international one. In the UK, a number of top Premier League footballers have also been targeted with burglaries in recent years.

Brazil’s chief prosecutor has accused former President Jair Bolsonaro of leading an attempted coup after the ex-leader was defeated by his left-wing rival in the 2022 presidential election.

According to the prosecutor, the alleged plot aimed to prevent Bolsonaro’s successor in office, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office and included a plan to poison Lula.

Bolsonaro, 69, denies any wrongdoing and says he is the victim of a political witch hunt.

It is now up to Brazil’s Supreme Court to decide whether to accept the prosecutor’s charges and put Bolsonaro and 33 others accused on trial.

In a sign of how divided Brazil remains two-and-a-half years after the bitterly fought presidential election, critics of Bolsonaro celebrated news of the charges, saying that the former president belonged in jail, while his supporters insisted he was innocent.

The focus is now on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who will have to weigh up the merits of the accusations made by the chief prosecutor and decide whether the case should proceed to the trial stage.

There is no deadline for Mr Moraes to make his decision, but legal experts quoted in Brazilian media said they expected him to rule in favour of a trial, which could get under way later this year.

Political analysts say a potential trial could have an impact on the 2026 presidential election.

While Bolsonaro is barred from running for office until 2030 for falsely claiming that Brazil’s voting system was vulnerable to fraud, he remains a strong political force.

Many think he could use a potential trial as a platform for his agenda.

In his 272-page report, Attorney-General Paulo Gonet said that he had concluded that Bolsonaro and the 33 other accused had formed a criminal group which had tried to instigate a coup against Lula’s newly elected government – an allegation those named have denied.

The document alleges that Bolsonaro and his vice-presidential candidate Walter Braga Netto led the group.

“Allied with other individuals, including civilians and military personnel, they attempted to prevent, in a co-ordinated manner, the result of the 2022 presidential elections from being fulfilled,” it reads.

According to the report, the alleged plot included a plan to poison Lula and shoot dead Alexandre de Moraes – the same Supreme Court justice now tasked with deciding whether the case should proceed to trial.

The prosecutor’s charges are based on a police investigation into the events leading up to 8 January 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in the capital, Brasilia.

Parts of the buildings were ransacked and police arrested 1,500 people.

Bolsonaro was in the United States at the time and has always denied any links to the rioters. But the prosecutor’s report alleges that he started sowing doubts about Brazil’s voting system as early as July 2021, which are thought to have encouraged those storming Congress.

Lawyers representing the former president said they were “astonished” by the accusations levelled against their client and insisted that he had never supported any movement aimed at dismantling Brazil’s democratic rule of law or the institutions that uphold it.

The said the prosecutor had come up with a “fanciful narrative” that would not stand up to legal scrutiny.

Police in western France are investigating how a campervan ended up in an unusual position by the side of a road.

Officers were shocked to find the abandoned vehicle with the bonnet in a ditch and the back against overhead power lines near the city of Saint-Malo on Saturday.

In Facebook post later that day, they said they “sincerely hope [the driver and any passengers] are OK”. Ouest-France newspaper quoted eyewitnesses as saying the driver and two other people left the scene after the accident.

On Sunday, the driver reported to police and was unhurt, the report adds. Officers told the BBC that prosecutors had launched an inquiry.

On the day of the accident, the driver of the tow truck that was called in to remove the campervan told the Ici news website: “I’ve never seen anything like it in my 22-year career.”

The BBC has approached Saint-Malo prosecutor’s office for comment.

South Africa’s Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has been forced to postpone the unveiling of the national budget following sharp disagreements within the coalition government.

Coalition partners derailed his budget after opposing his plan to raise value-added-tax (VAT), which would have seen the prices of goods go up at a time when South Africans are hard-hit by the cost-of-living crisis.

Godongwana is a member of the African National Congress (ANC), which was forced to enter into a coalition after losing its parliamentary majority in elections last year.

His failure to table the budget sent shockwaves in South Africa, as it has never happened since the end of white-minority rule in 1994.

The currency plummeted against the US dollar, as markets reacted negatively to the news.

The Democratic Alliance (DA), which is the second-biggest party in the coalition, was one of the most vocal critics of the proposed budget.

Its leader John Stenhuisen said the party could not in “good conscience” agree to a VAT increase from 15% to 17% as it would have “broken back the back of our economy”.

VAT was last increased in 2018 from 14% to 15%.

The ANC’s other coalition partners, like the Freedom Front Plus, said they were only told of the proposed hike before Godongwana was due to table the budget.

Godongwana told journalists that the planned increase was mentioned in the cabinet last week.

The budget will now be tabled on 12 March, following further discussions to iron out differences, he said.

The opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) expressed dismay over the postponement, saying it was a “symptom of weak, indecisive, and opportunistic governance”.

But the DA hailed the postponement as a “victory”, and said it would push for a budget that is “better for growth and employment”.

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