On a bleak late winter’s day, under leaden skies and occasional driving rain, this was the moment all Israelis had been dreading.

The return of the dead.

It began, as all the handovers so far have begun, with a politically charged display by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups involved in holding Israeli hostages for over 500 days.

Once again, there was a stage, flanked by huge posters highlighting the catastrophic consequences of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the Palestinian determination to stay put.

But instead of haunted, sometimes emaciated, survivors, there were four black coffins, each bearing a photograph and a name – Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir – accompanied by the image of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Missile casings bore the slogan: “They were killed by US bombs”. Hamas has long argued that all four were killed by Israeli air raids on Gaza, something which has not been verified.

As previously, Red Cross officials were on hand to oversee the process. In a rare public statement on the matter, they had urged Hamas to conduct the handover in a private, dignified fashion.

Their efforts had clearly been in vain, but they attempted to screen the coffins from public scrutiny, draping each one in a white sheet before driving them away.

The watching crowd was smaller than usual, perhaps because of the heavy rain.

After Thursday morning’s handover, at a military ceremony on the edge of the Gaza Strip, the coffins carrying the hostages were draped with Israeli flags and prayers offered by the army’s chief rabbi.

A convoy of vehicles then made its way north towards the Abu Kabir forensic institute, in Jaffa, where formal identification of the bodies is taking place.

Along the route, small groups of Israelis stood silently in the rain, carrying Israeli flags and yellow banners – the colour associated with the hostages and their supporters.

In Karmei Gat, where displaced members of kibbutz Nir Oz are living, waiting to go home, the vigil was particularly sombre.

All four of Thursday’s released hostages were seized from Nir Oz on 7 October 2023.

Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square was a study in grief, with people crying or sitting on the ground, heads in hands.

The faces of the red-headed Bibas boys – Ariel and Kfir – are plastered on walls, road signs and in windows up and down the country. Fearing the worst, Israelis have nevertheless clung to the hope that the brothers might have survived, along with their mother, Shiri.

“We were devastated by the news,” Orly Marron said, outside Abu Kabir.

“I have red-headed grandchildren and seeing the photographs is really very heartbreaking.”

Oded Lifschitz’s son, Yizhar, meanwhile told Israel Radio that he had always feared for his father’s health, since his violent abduction in October 2023.

Oded was 84 years old at the time. He and his wife, Yocheved, were both taken to Khan Younis in Gaza, where they were separated, never to see each other again.

Yocheved was released by Hamas two weeks after the attack.

“We need to close this wound and move forward,” Yizhar said, adding that his father, a noted journalist and peace activist, had long had a vision about how to resolve the conflicts of the Middle East.

“It’s sad that we went through this whole cycle and didn’t solve it,” Yizhar said. “We left it as something simmering, and look where we are now.”

Meanwhile, back in Gaza, some Palestinians expressed their anger that Israeli bodies had been handed over, while an unknown number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s military campaign remain buried in the apocalyptic wreckage of the Gaza Strip.

In addition, as many as 665 bodies are being held by Israel in numbered cemeteries, according to a Palestinian protest group, The National Campaign to Recover the Bodies of the Martyrs. It says some have been held for decades.

“I don’t like this agreement at all,” Ikram Abu Salout said in Khan Younis. “They didn’t remove the rubble and we don’t even know where our children and families are.”

As she was speaking, bulldozers flying Egyptian flags were finally arriving in northern Gaza. Israel allowed the equipment to enter, in exchange for Thursday’s handover and the release of six more living hostages this coming Saturday.

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 domestic productions can rival Hollywood blockbusters at the box office.

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.

Insults of this nature are not new, a Chinese social media user who has posted criticisms of Ne Zha 2 and experienced such backlash first-hand, tells the BBC. But the defensiveness surrounding the film is more pronounced because of its meteoric success, which has turned it into a proxy for the Chinese film industry.

In the eyes of these fans, who only see things in black and white, to criticise the movie is to side with Hollywood, they say.

“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.”

“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 has even 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.”

Spain’s former football federation boss Luis Rubiales has been found guilty of sexual assault for kissing player Jenni Hermoso without her consent and ordered to pay a fine of €10,800 (£8,942), Spain’s High Court has ruled.

He was acquitted of coercion, for allegedly trying to pressure Hermoso into saying publicly that the kiss was consensual.

As Spain’s players received their medals after defeating England in Sydney to win the 2023 World Cup, Rubiales grabbed Hermoso by the head and kissed her on the lips.

The incident triggered protests and calls for the resignation of Rubiales, who has said he will appeal against the verdict.

The ruling also banned Rubiales from going within a 200m radius of Hermoso and from communicating with her for one year, the court said in a statement.

Three of Rubiales’s former colleagues who were also on trial, accused of colluding in the alleged coercion – Jorge Vilda, coach of the World Cup-winning side, Rubén Rivera, the Real Federación Española de Fútbol (RFEF)’s former head of marketing, and Albert Luque, former sporting director – were cleared of those charges.

Prosecutors had demanded a prison sentence for Rubiales, who last week told a court he was “absolutely sure” Hermoso had given her consent before he kissed her.

He described the kiss as an “act of affection”, adding that in the moment it was “something completely spontaneous”.

In her testimony earlier this month, Hermoso insisted that she had not given Rubiales permission and that the incident had “stained one of the happiest days of my life”.

She told the court in Madrid: “My boss was kissing me, and this shouldn’t happen in any social or work setting.”

“A kiss on the lips is only given when I decide so,” she said at the time.

Rubiales was accused of sexual assault and of trying to coerce Hermoso into saying the kiss had been consensual.

The incident was witnessed by millions of television viewers and an entire stadium after the Spanish women’s team won the 2023 World Cup.

The ensuing uproar gave momentum to a “Me Too”-style movement in the Spanish women’s game, in which players sought to combat sexism and achieve parity with their male peers.

Rubiales resigned in September 2023 following weeks of resisting pressure to stand down, and after Fifa suspended him and Spanish prosecutors opened an investigation.

Delta Air Lines is offering US$30,000 (£23,792) to each person on board a plane that crash-landed in Toronto on Monday – all of whom survived.

As it landed in the Canadian city, the plane skidded along the runway in flames before flipping over and coming to a halt upside down. Passengers described their amazement as most of them walked away without injuries.

It remains unclear what caused the incident, which is under investigation.

There were 76 passengers and four crew on the flight, which had travelled from the US city of Minneapolis before making its crash-landing in Canada.

A spokesperson for Delta said the money offer had no strings attached and did not affect customers’ rights.

• Why did a plane crash in Toronto, and how did everyone survive?
• Witnesses recount escape from flipped plane

Toronto law firm Rochon Genova says it has been retained by certain passengers and their families over the crash-landing.

Lawyer Vincent Genova said the group expected a “timely and fair resolution”, highlighting that his clients “suffered personal injuries of a serious nature that required hospital attention”.

In an email to the BBC, Mr Genova said the $30,000 compensation is an “advance” payment meant to assist plane crash victims with short-term financial challenges, and the airline will seek to deduct it from any later settled claims.

There is precedent to these types of payments, like in 2013, when Asiana Airlines offered passengers of a San Francisco plane crash $10,000 in initial compensation.

Last year, Alaska Airlines offered a $1,500 cash payment to passengers after mid-air door-plug blowout on a flight from Portland.

Following this week’s incident in Toronto, the plane crew and emergency responders were praised for their quick work in removing people from the wrecked vehicle. The plane’s various safety features have also been credited for ensuring no loss of life.

All of the 21 passengers who were taken to hospital had been released by Thursday morning, the airline said.

Delta’s chief told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that the flight crew were experienced and trained for any condition.

The airline’s head Ed Bastian told CBS the plane crew had “performed heroically, but also as expected”, given that “safety is embedded into our system”. He said Delta was continuing to support those affected.

Several theories about what caused the crash have been suggested to the BBC by experts who reviewed footage, including that harsh winter weather and a rapid rate of descent played a role.

One passenger recalled “a very forceful event”, and the sound of “concrete and metal” at the moment of impact. Another said passengers were left hanging upside down in their seats “like bats”.

The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder have been recovered from the wreckage. The investigation is being led by Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB), supported by US officials.

On Wednesday evening, the wreckage was removed from the airport runway.

The accident was the fourth major air incident in North America in a space of three weeks – and was followed on Wednesday by a crash in Arizona in which two people lost their lives when their small planes collided.

Experts continue to insist that air travel is overwhelmingly safe – more so than other forms of transport, in fact.

That message was emphasised by US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who told CBS on Wednesday there was no pattern behind the incidents, each of which he said was “very unique”.

A passenger train derailed after striking a herd of elephants near a wildlife reserve in central Sri Lanka in the early hours of Thursday.

While no injuries were reported among passengers, six elephants died from the accident in Habarana, east of the capital Colombo.

Two injured elephants were being treated, police said, noting that it was the worst such wildlife accident the country had seen, AFP reported.

It is not uncommon for trains to run into herds of elephants in Sri Lanka, where casualties on both sides of human-elephant encounters are among the highest in the world.

Last year, more than 170 people and nearly 500 elephants were killed in human-elephant encounters overall – and around 20 elephants are killed by trains annually, according to local media.

Elephants, whose natural habitats are affected by deforestation and shrinking resources, have increasingly strayed into places of human activity.

Some have urged train drivers to slow down and sound the train horns to warn animals ahead on railway tracks.

In 2018, a pregnant elephant and its two calves similarly died in Habarana after being struck by a train. The three had been part of a larger herd crossing the train tracks at dawn.

Last October, another train ran into a herd in Minneriya, about 25km (15 miles) away from Habarana, killing two elephants and injuring one.

There are an estimated 7,000 wild elephants in Sri Lanka, where the animals, revered by its Buddhist majority, are protected by law. Killing an elephant is a crime punishable by imprisonment or a fine.

Rescuers have ended a 44-day search operation after they found the bodies of five men who were trapped inside a flooded coal mine in India’s north-eastern state of Assam.

DNA tests will be conducted to identify the men as the bodies are in a decomposed state, a state official told the BBC.

On 6 January, nine miners were trapped after water flooded the so-called “rat-hole” mine, which is a narrow hole dug manually to extract coal.

Four bodies were recovered within the first week, and search operations had continued until Wednesday, when the remaining bodies were found.

“The process to identify the remains has been initiated,” Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on the social media platform X.

The families of the miners have also been called to identify the bodies. They will be given compensation by the state government, said Riki Phukan, an official from Assam’s District Disaster Management Authority.

The search operations – at the Umrangso coal mine in Assam’s Dima Hasao district – were jointly conducted by special disaster forces alongside the Indian Army, the Indian Navy, the state police and the district disaster authority.

Divers and helicopters were also deployed but the remote, hilly terrain of the mine had posed severe challenges.

Earlier, one of the men rescued from the mine had shared with the BBC a harrowing account of the moments after the tunnel was suddenly engulfed by water.

Ravi Rai, a worker from Nepal, said that he was working inside the mine when water entered the pit.

“We were holding on to a rope in 50-60ft (15-18m) deep water for at least 50 minutes before being pulled out,” he said.

Despite a ban on “rat-hole” mining in India since 2014, small illegal mines continue to be operational in Assam and other north-eastern states.

Six workers were killed in January 2024 after a fire broke out in a rat-hole coal mine in Nagaland state.

In 2018, at least 15 men were trapped in an illegal mine in Meghalaya after water from a nearby river flooded it.

After the recent accident, police in Assam have said they are investigating illegal mining activities in the state.

The James Bond film franchise will no longer be controlled by the Broccoli dynasty, after long-serving masterminds Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson announced they are stepping down.

The Bond films were launched by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli in 1962, before his daughter and stepson took over.

The pair will now give creative control to Amazon MGM Studios, which was formed when Amazon bought Bond’s parent studio in 2022.

The new deal comes after mounting speculation about the fate of the British spy, four years after his last outing in No Time to Die, which was also Daniel Craig’s final appearance in the role.

Amazon will now decide which actor will take over the famous character, but there is still no timescale for when that that will happen or when the next film will be made.

James Norton, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Theo James are among the bookmakers’ favourites to fill Craig’s shoes.

A statement said Broccoli and Wilson will “remain co-owners of the franchise” as part of a new joint venture but Amazon MGM Studios “will gain creative control”.

Wilson, 83, said: “With my 007 career spanning nearly 60 incredible years, I am stepping back from producing the James Bond films to focus on art and charitable projects.

“Therefore, Barbara and I agree, it is time for our trusted partner, Amazon MGM Studios, to lead James Bond into the future.”

Broccoli, 64, added: “My life has been dedicated to maintaining and building upon the extraordinary legacy that was handed to Michael and me by our father, producer Cubby Broccoli.

“I have had the honour of working closely with four of the tremendously talented actors who have played 007 and thousands of wonderful artists within the industry.

“With the conclusion of No Time to Die and Michael retiring from the films, I feel it is time to focus on my other projects.”

Cubby Broccoli launched the iconic franchise with co-producer Harry Saltzman, and was joined by Wilson as a producing partner for 1985’s A View to a Kill.

Barbara took over from her father to join Wilson as a producer for 1995’s GoldenEye, and the pair have overseen every Bond film since through their Eon production house.

They kept tight control of the character – something that was acknowledged by Craig when he presented them with honorary Oscars in November. “Over the years many people and organisations have tried to put their own footprint on Bond,” he said.

“Barbara, Michael, I can’t tell you how much I admire your integrity in holding on to your singular vision as you brought Bond into the 21st Century with a passionate and a protective determination to honour the heart of this franchise.”

In 2021, when Amazon agreed to take over MGM, which shared the rights to Bond with Eon, Broccoli and Wilson said they would keep creative control.

However, they have finally relinquished the reins, and the deal raises the prospect of a rethink and an expansion of the franchise.

The US giant could commission more streaming spin-offs, for example, such as how the Star Wars universe has been expanded on Disney+.

Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said: “We are honoured to continue this treasured heritage, and look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world.”

Last year, Amazon launched the first spin-off TV series, 007: Road to a Million, hosted by Succession star Brian Cox.

It featured nine teams in a race to win £1m each through a series of spy-themed challenges. However, that series was poorly received by fans and critics and Cox later joked that he signed on to the project thinking it was the next James Bond film.

News of Thursday’s deal helps to explain why there has been a long delay without any announcement about a 26th official Bond film, or its star.

Given how much time it takes to make a blockbuster movie, the gap between No Time To Die and the next film could break the six-year record for the longest period between Bond releases.

Last August, the Telegraph’s chief film critic Robbie Collin wrote that there was “no script, no title, not even a director” for a new instalment.

In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that “the relationship between the family that oversees the franchise and the e-commerce giant has all but collapsed”.

The newspaper also claimed that Broccoli had privately described Amazon as “idiots”.

Manslaughter charges against a friend of Liam Payne and two members of staff at the hotel where the singer died have been dropped.

Rogelio “Roger” Nores and two workers from the hotel in Buenos Aires were charged in December, two months after the One Direction star’s death.

On Wednesday, appeal court judges reversed the earlier decision to charge all three.

However, two other men accused of selling Payne cocaine before his death remain in prison and have been told they still face prosecution and a probable trial.

Payne died last October after falling from a balcony at the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in the Argentine capital.

Following the announcement that charges against Mr Nores had been dropped, the businessman told Rolling Stone: “Glad this is finally over. I’m happy I’m now going to be able to travel to the UK and say goodbye to my friend.”

His lawyer Rafael Cuneo Libarona said he was “happy to have reversed the decision”.

He added: “We have always maintained that Rogelio Nores was not responsible for Liam Payne’s death.

“He was only his friend and had no duty or legal obligation to ensure his safety.”

Mr Cuneo Libarona, the brother of Argentina’s justice minister, had rebutted claims from the prosecution that Mr Nores had failed in his duty of care towards the singer.

The three appeal court judges published their ruling, first obtained by Rolling Stone, eight days after a hearing at Argentina’s National Criminal and Correctional Court.

The two hotel workers who will also no longer face charges are Gilda Martin, its head of security, and Esteban Grassi, the chief receptionist who made an emergency call just before Payne died.

All three would have faced possible prison sentences of between one and five years if convicted, although they were told they could be eligible for suspended sentences.

Prosecutors have the option of appealing against the decision to overturn the charges, but have not yet indicated whether they will do so.

The two men who still face charges are waiter Braian Nahuel Paiz and suspended hotel worker Ezequiel David Pereyra, who are accused of supplying drugs to Payne. They could face prison sentences of between four and 15 years if found guilty.

Mr Nores’s alleged role as a manager and representative of Payne, a position he had denied holding, was said to have been an important element of the decision to prosecute the businessman.

In an indictment ruling in December, Judge Laura Bruniard accused Mr Nores of “failing in his duty of care, assistance and help” towards the singer.

Mr Nores previously said in a statement: “I never abandoned Liam, I went to his hotel three times that day and left 40 minutes before this happened.

“There were over 15 people at the hotel lobby chatting and joking with him when I left. I could have never imagined something like this would happen.”

He added: “I wasn’t Liam’s manager. He was just my very dear friend.”

The US President Donald Trump has said he is not happy with Boeing over a contract to build two new Air Force One planes that is running behind schedule.

Speaking on board one of the 35-year-old presidential planes that are currently in use, Trump also said he is looking for alternatives because it is taking Boeing too long to build the planes.

The contract for two updated versions of the presidential plane based on the modern Boeing 747-8 were negotiated during Trump’s first term in office.

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

“No, I’m not happy with Boeing. It takes them a long time to do, you know, Air Force One, we gave that contract out a long time ago,” Trump said.

“We may buy a plane or get a plane, or something.”

When asked whether he would consider buying new planes from Boeing’s European rival, Airbus, Trump said “No, I would not consider Airbus over Boeing, but I could buy one that was used and convert it.”

It comes days after Trump visited a 13-year-old Boeing 747-800 that had been owned by the Qatari royal family while it was parked at Palm Beach International Airport.

The new aircraft from Boeing were set for delivery in 2024 but the plane maker has pushed the delivery back to 2027 or 2028.

• Live updates: Zelensky and Trump’s Ukraine envoy to meet as rift between two leaders grows
• Analysis: How Putin and Trump shook up the world in a week

During his first term as president, Trump forced the plane maker to renegotiate its contract, calling the initial deal too expensive.

That contract has already cost Boeing billions of dollars.

Kitting out the planes for presidential use is extremely costly. It requires installing highly-classified and complex communications, safety and accessibility features.

Last year was dreadful for Boeing. The aerospace giant lost $11.8bn (£9.4bn) across the whole of 2024, its worst result since 2020, when the aviation industry was grounded by the Covid pandemic.

In the three months to the end of December, when strikes were affecting the business, it lost $3.8bn.

As well as suffering from well-publicised problems at its commercial aircraft unit, Boeing also faced issues with number of defence programmes.

The Azerbaijani government has ordered the suspension of BBC News’ Azerbaijani operation in the capital city, Baku.

The BBC said in a statement on Thursday that it had made the “reluctant decision” to close its office in the country after receiving a verbal instruction from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The corporation added that it “deeply” regrets “this restrictive move against press freedom”.

State-controlled media has reported that the government wanted to reduce the number of BBC staff working in the country to one.

The BBC says its team of journalists in Baku have suspended their journalistic activities, while it seeks clarification on the instruction, but that it remains committed to continuing to report in the Azerbaijani language.

“We deeply regret this restrictive move against press freedom, which will hinder our ability to report to and from Azerbaijan for our audiences inside and outside the country,” a BBC spokesperson said in a statement.

The BBC has received nothing in writing from the Azerbaijani government and has sought clarification via a number of channels.

Azerbaijan’s ministry of foreign affairs has also not responded to the BBC’s request for comment.

BBC News Azerbaijani reaches on average one million people every week and its audience has been increasing.

It has operated in Azerbaijan since 1994, providing impartial news and information, initially via radio broadcasts and later across a range of digital platforms.

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 is due to meet the American envoy for Russia and Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, on Thursday. He said it was crucial that the discussion – and overall co-operation with the US – remains constructive.

In a social media post, Zelensky said that peace could be more secure with the US and Europe.

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
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• 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.

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.

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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• Rosenberg: How Putin and Trump shook up the world in a week
• Who was at the table at US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia?

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.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

It was a trial that could have dismantled the future for one of hip-hop’s hottest stars.

The felony assault trial of A$AP Rocky – in which he was found not guilty of firing a gun at a former friend – captured global headlines. There were outbursts during the proceedings and surprise visits in court by his longtime partner, singer Rihanna.

Jurors in Los Angeles heard three weeks of testimony chronicling the bitter falling-out of childhood friends and the fight that led to the rapper, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, being charged on accusations he opened fire in the middle of a Hollywood street.

After the rapper was acquitted, he left freely with singer Rihanna, who was seated behind him as the verdict was read.

Here are five big things we learned while inside the courtroom.

As the not guilty verdict was read in court, the rapper immediately jumped from the defence table and leapt over a wooden barrier to hug Rihanna, who was seated behind him in between his mother and sister.

The couple embraced tightly, both breaking into tears as the courtroom erupted in cheers.

Rihanna, a Grammy award-winning artist, was in court multiple days during the trial, including on Valentine’s Day.

On one of the days in court, she brought the couple’s two young children, who were both dressed in suits with pacifiers in their mouths. You could hear them cooing inside the courtroom as they flipped through children’s books.

Joe Tacopina, the rapper’s defence attorney, said Mr Mayers tried to shield Rihanna and their family from the criminal proceedings, but said that “wild horses couldn’t keep her away” from the trial.

Though she was often stoic and staring straight ahead while in court, she never flinched or showed emotion when prosecutors made negative comments about her partner.

Following his acquittal, Rihanna expressed her gratitude on social media, stating, “The glory belongs to God and God alone! Thankful, humbled by his mercy!”

The A$AP Mob is a hip-hop collective founded in 2006 in Harlem by a group of high school friends in New York.

They adopted the “A$AP” title, which means “Always Strive and Prosper”.

The group, which has had more than 20 members over the years, have presented themselves as a family, but they’ve been plagued by jealousy, rivalries and disagreements since the death of its founder, A$AP Yams.

Though there have been fallouts and issues between some members, this trial is the most notable instance of a complete dismantling of a relationship between members.

A$AP Relli, whose legal name is Terell Ephron, was once a close friend and member of the Mob, accused Mr Mayers, known as A$AP Rocky, of shooting him during an altercation in 2021.

During the trial, his defence team argued that Mr Ephron harboured resentment toward his former friend, feeling sidelined as A$AP Rocky’s fame grew and saw mainstream musical success. They argued Mr Ephron was after money.

Several members of the A$AP Mob testified during the trial in favour of Mr Mayers.

A$AP Twelvyy challenged Mr Ephron’s account of the events and suggested that he was the aggressor during the altercation, not Mr Mayers.

A$AP Lou also took the stand, telling jurors that a Glock 43 magazine found during a search of Mr Mayers’s home belonged to him, not the rapper.

None of the A$AP members publicly testified for Relli.

Do you know what AWGE stands for? If you know, I think both me and the jury would love to still know.

During the trial, AWGE came up when A$AP Twelvyy was on the stand. He was asked by prosecutors about its meaning. But before he could answer, A$AP Rocky – who was seated with his attorneys – cut in and shouted, “Don’t say!”

Twelvvy abided and responded, “I just know it’s AWGE”.

It was an astonishing moment. Criminal defendants don’t typically say much during trials – let alone halt a witness from answering a question during their criminal trial.

When asked about this exchange after the trial, A$AP Rocky’s attorney Joe Tacopina explained what happened.

He said it was an “acronym for his company that had to do with his family. I’m gonna leave it at that.” Mr Tacopina went on to explain it was a private thing that the rapper didn’t want revealed publicly to millions, especially in a criminal court case.

But the answer really led to more questions. What does it mean and why is it so secretive?

Here’s what we do know: AWGE is the name of A$AP Rocky’s mysterious creative collective and record label, and it’s long been the subject of intrigue.

Founded in 2014, the group operates across music, fashion and art, collaborating with brands like Mercedes-Benz and PacSun. Members include artists, designers and directors, and everyone remains loyal to one rule: no one publicly reveals what “AWGE” actually stands for.

On the company’s website there are two rules listed: “#1 Never reveal what AWGE means. #2 When in doubt always refer to rule #1.”

A$AP Rocky’s fans do have some guesses though:

• “A$AP Worldwide Global Enterprises” – A possible nod to the A$AP Mob’s broader brand and business ambitions.
• “Ain’t Wanna Go Explicit” – This suggests that AWGE represents an inside joke or personal mantra within Rocky’s circle.
• “All We Got is Everything” – A phrase that aligns with Rocky’s philosophy of creativity and collaboration.
• “A$AP Worldwide Genius Elite” – Another theory that frames AWGE as a highly curated group of artists and visionaries.

Despite the guesses, the rapper and his team have never officially confirmed any meaning.

Instead, they’ve leaned into the secrecy, with members often responding to questions about AWGE with the phrase, “If you know, you know.”

A$AP Rocky’s trial unfolded at a pivotal moment in his career, with the rapper riding a wave of creative and commercial success.

The rapper is set to release his first solo album in nearly a decade and is scheduled to co-headline Los Angeles’ Rolling Loud festival in March 2025.

Additionally, he is starring in a summer blockbuster alongside Denzel Washington. Director Spike Lee’s upcoming film “Highest 2 Lowest” is slated for a summer release.

But his influence extends beyond music—his AWGE collective has been collaborating with brands like Mercedes-Benz and Puma. He’s been celebrated for his fashion sense, too, and is known as being one of music’s best-dressed men.

In May, he is set to co-chair the 2025 Met Gala – one of fashion’s biggest nights – alongside big names like Anna Wintour, British race car driver Lewis Hamilton, singer Pharrell Williams and basketball superstar LeBron James.

His relationship with Rihanna, one of the most famous singers, has further cemented his cultural relevance.

The couple welcomed their second child, Riot Rose, in August 2023, and their growing family had become a symbol of hip-hop royalty.

The trial wasn’t just a battleground for the rapper’s freedom—it also saw intense clashes between legal teams.

Celebrity defence attorney Joe Tacopina, known for his aggressive courtroom style, relentlessly challenged the credibility of the prosecution’s key witness, A$AP Relli, whose legal name is Terell Ephron.

He painted Mr Ephron as an opportunist seeking financial gain and called the prosecution’s case flimsy due to a lack of physical evidence. Mr Ephron got so fed up with the rapper’s attorney during questioning that he called Mr Tacopina “annoying”.

Meanwhile, prosecutors pushed back, accusing Mr Tacopina of attempting to intimidate witnesses and dismiss key testimonies.

Both sides were very liberal with their use of objections in court, and it sometimes felt as though both sides were trying to throw the other off their game, rather than being based on legal guidelines.

It also got personal between the two sides.

At one point during closing arguments, Mr Tacopina and prosecutor John Lewin traded misconduct allegations, with Mr Lewin accusing Mr Tacopina of using steroids and Mr Tacopina firing back by calling Lewin a “hunchback”.

After a short break, the judge attempted to lighten the mood by theatrically introducing the attorneys like boxers before resuming the trial.

US President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky have entered a war of words after the US leader initiated talks with Russia about ending the conflict, but did not include Ukraine.

After Zelensky said Trump was in a “disinformation space”, Trump called Zelensky a “dictator” – a remark condemned by Kyiv’s allies.

The two have traded barbs in the past, but Zelensky has usually tried to toe a diplomatic line with Trump.

Here is a look back at what the two have said to, and about, one another over the years.

• 21 April 2019: On the day Zelensky is elected president of Ukraine, Trump, still in his first term, calls Zelensky to congratulate him. Trump says it was an “incredible election” and adds “you will do a great job”.
• 2019: Allies of Trump begin stoking allegations that Joe Biden, then Democratic frontrunner for the 2020 election, lobbied Ukraine to dismiss its top prosecutor to stymie an investigation into energy firm Burisma. Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of the firm. The allegations were later found to be fabricated by an FBI informant, and the prosecutor was removed from office for corruption.
• 25 July 2019: In a phone conversation that would become the basis for Trump’s first impeachment, Trump asks Zelensky to “do me a favour” and “get to the bottom” of the allegations concerning the Bidens and Burisma. Zelensky says a review of the evidence would be held later that year.
• 29 September 2020: In the first of the presidential debates between Trump and Biden, Trump alludes to the allegations, saying: “Once you became vice-president, [Hunter] made a fortune in Ukraine and China and Moscow and various other places. And he didn’t have a job.”
• 24 February 2022: Russia begins its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Trump says: “The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling. We are praying for the proud people of Ukraine.” He adds that Zelensky is “brave” for remaining in Kyiv, and claims the invasion “would never have happened” if he had been elected in 2020.
• 5 March 2023: “Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” Trump tells a conservative conference. “And it will take me no longer than one day.”
• May 2024: Zelensky’s term expires but he remains in office, as scheduled elections in Ukraine do not go ahead because the nation remains under martial law. Zelensky had expressed hope to hold elections, but previously said “now is not the time for elections”.
• 25 September 2024: On the campaign trail, Trump accuses Zelensky of “making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me”, adding: “Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.”
• 27 September 2024: Zelensky and Trump meet at Trump Tower in New York ahead of the US election. Zelensky says they have a “common view that the war has to be stopped and (Vladimir) Putin can’t win”, while Trump says he will resolve the war “very quickly”.
• 6 November 2024: Trump is re-elected US president. In his victory speech, he vows to “stop wars”, without referencing Ukraine explicitly. Zelensky is among the first world leaders to call to congratulate him, writing shortly after that he looked forward to a “strong” US under Trump’s “decisive leadership”.

• 22 January 2025: “It’s time to MAKE A DEAL,” Trump writes on Truth Social. “We can do it the easy way or the hard way.” He adds that without a deal, he will be forced to place further economic restrictions on Russia.
• 23 January 2025: Trump tells the World Economic Forum that Zelensky “wants to make a deal” but Putin “might not”.
• 15 February 2025: Zelensky writes that he has begun working with Trump’s team, adding: “Right now, the world is looking up to America as the power that has the ability to not only stop the war but also help ensure the reliability of peace afterward.”
• 18 February 2025: US-Russia talks about ending the war begin in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Zelensky tells reporters that the talks took place “behind Ukraine’s back”, adding: “Once again, decisions about Ukraine are being made without Ukraine. I wonder why they believe Ukraine would accept all these ultimatums now if we refused them at the most difficult moment?”
• 18 February 2025: After the talks, Trump says he was “disappointed” by Ukraine’s reaction and appeared to blame Ukraine for starting the war, saying the country “could have made a deal” earlier.
• 19 February 2025: Zelensky says the US president is caught in a Russian “disinformation space”. He adds: “We are standing strong on our own two feet. I am counting on Ukrainian unity, our courage…on the unity of Europe and the pragmatism of America.”
• 19 February 2025: Trump accuses Zelensky of talking the US “into spending $350bn (£277bn) to go into a war that he, without the US and ‘TRUMP’, will never be able to settle” and of claiming that half of that money was now missing. Trump calls Zelensky a “dictator” who has “done a terrible job”.

In a room at the luxury Decápolis Hotel in Panama City, two girls hold a piece of paper to the window with a written message. “Please help us,” it reads.

The hotel offers its clients rooms with sea views, has two exclusive restaurants, a swimming pool, a spa and private transportation. But it has now become a “temporary custody” centre housing 299 undocumented migrants deported from the US, the Panamanian government said on Tuesday.

Some migrants raise their arms and cross them at the wrists to indicate that they are deprived of their freedom. Others hang small signs with other messages such as: “We are not safe in our country.”

The Trump administration has pledged to deport millions of people who crossed illegally into the US. Those in the Panama City hotel arrived on three flights last week, after President José Raúl Mulino agreed that Panama would become a “bridge” country for deportees.

However, of the 299 undocumented migrants – from India, China, Uzbekistan, Iran, Vietnam, Turkey, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka – only 171 have agreed to return to their countries of origin.

The remainder now face an uncertain future, and it is the Panamanian authorities who are in control of what happens next.

According to the government, this group will be transferred to a camp in the province of Darién, which has temporarily housed migrants crossing the jungle en route to the US.

On a normal day, tourists can enter and leave the Decápolis Hotel with ease, but now heavily armed members of the Panamanian National Aeronaval Service enforce strict security measures inside and outside of the building.

From the street, laundry can be seen hanging in a window. One of the items is a yellow Los Angeles Lakers basketball jersey with the number 24, worn by the legendary player Kobe Bryant.

In another window, a group of adults and three children raise their arms with their thumbs in their palms – the international symbol for those needing assistance. “Help us,” is written in red letters on the glass.

And two children with their faces covered hold up sheets of paper against the glass with the message: “Please save the Afghan girls.”

An Iranian woman who has lived in Panama for a number of years told the BBC she was in contact with one of the migrants inside the hotel. She said they were “terrified” of the possibility of being returned to Iran.

The woman, who asked not to be named, said she went to the hotel to offer her help as a Farsi translator but was told they already had one.

She added, however, that people inside the hotel said that was not true.

Using a hidden mobile phone, since contact with those outside of the Decápolis Hotel is reportedly not allowed, the Iranian woman said the migrant told her there were several children in the hotel, that they have been denied a lawyer and that they are not allowed to leave their rooms even to eat.

After the story of the deportees being held at the hotel was first reported on Tuesday, the security measures put in place were tightened and migrants’ access to the internet was cut off, the woman said.

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The BBC contacted both the Decápolis Hotel and the Panamanian government to ask about the conditions inside the building, but did not receive a response.

However, Panama’s Minister of Public Security Frank Ábrego said migrants are not allowed to leave the hotel because his government must guarantee the safety and peace of Panamanians.

A video posted on social media on the weekend showed one of the migrants describing in Farsi how they had been detained after crossing the border to the US and told that they would be taken to Texas, but ended up in Panama.

The woman in the video said her life would be in danger if she returned to Iran because of possible reprisals of the government.

Her intention, she said, is to ask for political asylum.

Analysts say this is difficult to obtain without access to a lawyer – even more so when the Panamanian government announced that this access would not be offered to deportees.

Minister Ábrego said on Tuesday that the migrants would remain temporarily in Panama under the protection of the country’s authorities.

“What we agreed with the US government is that they are here and will remain in our temporary custody for their protection,” he said.

He also warned that those migrants who did not wish to return to their country of origin would have to choose a third country.

In that case, he said, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) would be responsible for their repatriation.

An IOM spokesperson told the BBC that the organisation is in charge of “providing essential support” to people deported from the US.

“We are working with local officials to help those affected, supporting the voluntary return of those who request it and identifying safe alternatives for others,” he said.

“While we have no direct involvement in the detention or restriction of movement of persons, we are committed to ensuring that all migrants are treated with dignity and in accordance with international standards,” he said.

Ábrego also said the migrants were being housed in the Decápolis Hotel because of its capacity to receive them.

Another senior official said “the arrival of more migrants is not expected” because no more flights of this type have been agreed with the US.

Panama agreed to be a “bridge” country for deportations after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited the country as tensions simmered over Trump’s threats to “recover” sovereignty of the Panama Canal.

Muzaffar Chishti, a senior researcher at the Migration Policy Institute – a think tank in the US – said many of the deportees come from nations not open to accepting the return of nationals deported from the US.

“That implies constant diplomatic negotiations with those governments,” he told the BBC.

“By sending them to Panama, the US is out of the picture,” he added. “It is a headache for Panama to take charge of those negotiations and see how to get those countries to agree to receive them again.”

This week, a flight carrying deportees from the US is expected to arrive in Costa Rica, another Central American country that has agreed with Washington to become a “bridge” nation for deportees.

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.

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 and 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 the grave of her mother who 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 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 stolen.

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 between 700 and 870 Tanzanian shillings ($0.27-$0.34; £0.22-£0.28) per kilogramme.

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 first go to welders who cut the crosses into pieces before taking them to the scrap merchants.

The merchants are faced with the choice of buying cheaper stolen goods or abiding by 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,” Mr Ramadhani tells the BBC.

He says this led to a reduction in the theft of crosses, although there has been a recent increase.

Mr Ramadhani 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.

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 young people 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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Capturing water from fog – on a large scale – could provide some of the driest cities in the world with drinking water.

This is what researchers in Chile have concluded after studying the potential of fog harvesting in the desert city of Alto Hospicio in the north of the country.

Average rainfall in the region is less than 0.19in (5mm) per year.

“Like a lot of cities, Alto Hospicio has its social problems,” said lead researcher Dr Virginia Carter Gamberini, from Universidad Mayor. “There is a lot of poverty”, she explained, and many people there have no direct access to the networks that supply clean water.

Many who live in the city’s poorest communities rely on drinking water that is delivered by truck.

However, clouds of fog that regularly gather over the mountain city are an untapped source, researchers say.

Capturing fog water is remarkably simple – a mesh is hung between poles, and when the moisture-laden clouds pass through that fine mesh, droplets form. The water is then channelled into pipes and storage tanks.

It has been used at a small scale for several decades, mainly in rural South and Central America – in places with the right foggy conditions. One of the biggest fog water harvesting systems is in Morocco, on the edge of the Sahara Desert.

However, Dr Carter says a “new era” of much larger-scale fog harvesting could provide a more secure and sustainable supply of water in urban environments where it is most needed.

She and her colleagues carried out assessments of how much water can be produced by fog harvesting, and combined that information with studies of cloud formation in satellite images and with weather forecasts.

From this, they concluded that the clouds that regularly form over the Pacific – and are blown across the coastal mountain city – could provide the people of Alto Hospicio’s slums with a sustainable source of drinking water. They published their findings in a paper in the journal Frontiers of Environmental Science.

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Alto Hospicio’s fog forms over the Pacific Ocean – when warm, moist air flows over cold water – and is then blown over the mountains. The reliably foggy conditions here allowed Dr Carter and her colleagues to pinpoint areas where the largest volumes of water could be harvested regularly from the clouds.

Based on an annual average water collection rate of 2.5 litres per square metre of mesh per day, the researchers worked out:

• 17,000 sq m of mesh could produce enough water to meet the weekly water demand of 300,000 litres that is currently delivered by truck to urban slums
• 110 sq m could meet the annual demand for the irrigation of the city’s green spaces
• Fog water could be used for soil-free (hydroponic) agriculture, with yields of 33 to 44lb (15 to 20kg) of green vegetables in a month

Alto Hospicio is on the edge of the Atacama Desert – one of the driest places on Earth. With little to no precipitation, the main water source of cities in the region are underground aquifers – rock layers that contain water-filled spaces – that were last refilled thousands of years ago.

With urban populations growing, and demand on those water supplies from mining and industry, the scientists say there is an urgent need for other sustainable sources of clean water.

Dr Gamberini explained that Chile is “very special” for its sea fog, “because we have the ocean along the whole country and we have the mountains”.

Her team is currently working on a “fog harvesting map” of the whole country.

“Water from the clouds”, as Dr Carter describes it, could, she said, “enhance our cities’ resilience to climate change, while improving access to clean water”.

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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 domestic productions can rival Hollywood blockbusters at the box office.

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.

Insults of this nature are not new, a Chinese social media user who has posted criticisms of Ne Zha 2 and experienced such backlash first-hand, tells the BBC. But the defensiveness surrounding the film is more pronounced because of its meteoric success, which has turned it into a proxy for the Chinese film industry.

In the eyes of these fans, who only see things in black and white, to criticise the movie is to side with Hollywood, they say.

“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.”

The James Bond film franchise will no longer be controlled by the Broccoli dynasty, after long-serving masterminds Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson announced they are stepping down.

The Bond films were launched by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli in 1962, before his daughter and stepson took over.

The pair will now give creative control to Amazon MGM Studios, which was formed when Amazon bought Bond’s parent studio in 2022.

The new deal comes after mounting speculation about the fate of the British spy, four years after his last outing in No Time to Die, which was also Daniel Craig’s final appearance in the role.

Amazon will now decide which actor will take over the famous character, but there is still no timescale for when that that will happen or when the next film will be made.

James Norton, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Theo James are among the bookmakers’ favourites to fill Craig’s shoes.

A statement said Broccoli and Wilson will “remain co-owners of the franchise” as part of a new joint venture but Amazon MGM Studios “will gain creative control”.

Wilson, 83, said: “With my 007 career spanning nearly 60 incredible years, I am stepping back from producing the James Bond films to focus on art and charitable projects.

“Therefore, Barbara and I agree, it is time for our trusted partner, Amazon MGM Studios, to lead James Bond into the future.”

Broccoli, 64, added: “My life has been dedicated to maintaining and building upon the extraordinary legacy that was handed to Michael and me by our father, producer Cubby Broccoli.

“I have had the honour of working closely with four of the tremendously talented actors who have played 007 and thousands of wonderful artists within the industry.

“With the conclusion of No Time to Die and Michael retiring from the films, I feel it is time to focus on my other projects.”

Cubby Broccoli launched the iconic franchise with co-producer Harry Saltzman, and was joined by Wilson as a producing partner for 1985’s A View to a Kill.

Barbara took over from her father to join Wilson as a producer for 1995’s GoldenEye, and the pair have overseen every Bond film since through their Eon production house.

They kept tight control of the character – something that was acknowledged by Craig when he presented them with honorary Oscars in November. “Over the years many people and organisations have tried to put their own footprint on Bond,” he said.

“Barbara, Michael, I can’t tell you how much I admire your integrity in holding on to your singular vision as you brought Bond into the 21st Century with a passionate and a protective determination to honour the heart of this franchise.”

In 2021, when Amazon agreed to take over MGM, which shared the rights to Bond with Eon, Broccoli and Wilson said they would keep creative control.

However, they have finally relinquished the reins, and the deal raises the prospect of a rethink and an expansion of the franchise.

The US giant could commission more streaming spin-offs, for example, such as how the Star Wars universe has been expanded on Disney+.

Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said: “We are honoured to continue this treasured heritage, and look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world.”

Last year, Amazon launched the first spin-off TV series, 007: Road to a Million, hosted by Succession star Brian Cox.

It featured nine teams in a race to win £1m each through a series of spy-themed challenges. However, that series was poorly received by fans and critics and Cox later joked that he signed on to the project thinking it was the next James Bond film.

News of Thursday’s deal helps to explain why there has been a long delay without any announcement about a 26th official Bond film, or its star.

Given how much time it takes to make a blockbuster movie, the gap between No Time To Die and the next film could break the six-year record for the longest period between Bond releases.

Last August, the Telegraph’s chief film critic Robbie Collin wrote that there was “no script, no title, not even a director” for a new instalment.

In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that “the relationship between the family that oversees the franchise and the e-commerce giant has all but collapsed”.

The newspaper also claimed that Broccoli had privately described Amazon as “idiots”.

Delta Air Lines is offering US$30,000 (£23,792) to each person on board a plane that crash-landed in Toronto on Monday – all of whom survived.

As it landed in the Canadian city, the plane skidded along the runway in flames before flipping over and coming to a halt upside down. Passengers described their amazement as most of them walked away without injuries.

It remains unclear what caused the incident, which is under investigation.

There were 76 passengers and four crew on the flight, which had travelled from the US city of Minneapolis before making its crash-landing in Canada.

A spokesperson for Delta said the money offer had no strings attached and did not affect customers’ rights.

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Toronto law firm Rochon Genova says it has been retained by certain passengers and their families over the crash-landing.

Lawyer Vincent Genova said the group expected a “timely and fair resolution”, highlighting that his clients “suffered personal injuries of a serious nature that required hospital attention”.

In an email to the BBC, Mr Genova said the $30,000 compensation is an “advance” payment meant to assist plane crash victims with short-term financial challenges, and the airline will seek to deduct it from any later settled claims.

There is precedent to these types of payments, like in 2013, when Asiana Airlines offered passengers of a San Francisco plane crash $10,000 in initial compensation.

Last year, Alaska Airlines offered a $1,500 cash payment to passengers after mid-air door-plug blowout on a flight from Portland.

Following this week’s incident in Toronto, the plane crew and emergency responders were praised for their quick work in removing people from the wrecked vehicle. The plane’s various safety features have also been credited for ensuring no loss of life.

All of the 21 passengers who were taken to hospital had been released by Thursday morning, the airline said.

Delta’s chief told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that the flight crew were experienced and trained for any condition.

The airline’s head Ed Bastian told CBS the plane crew had “performed heroically, but also as expected”, given that “safety is embedded into our system”. He said Delta was continuing to support those affected.

Several theories about what caused the crash have been suggested to the BBC by experts who reviewed footage, including that harsh winter weather and a rapid rate of descent played a role.

One passenger recalled “a very forceful event”, and the sound of “concrete and metal” at the moment of impact. Another said passengers were left hanging upside down in their seats “like bats”.

The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder have been recovered from the wreckage. The investigation is being led by Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB), supported by US officials.

On Wednesday evening, the wreckage was removed from the airport runway.

The accident was the fourth major air incident in North America in a space of three weeks – and was followed on Wednesday by a crash in Arizona in which two people lost their lives when their small planes collided.

Experts continue to insist that air travel is overwhelmingly safe – more so than other forms of transport, in fact.

That message was emphasised by US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who told CBS on Wednesday there was no pattern behind the incidents, each of which he said was “very unique”.

“The hearts of an entire nation lie in tatters,” Israel’s President Isaac Herzog has said, as the bodies of four hostages taken alive by Hamas in its attack on 7 October 2023 were returned to Tel Aviv.

Hamas says the bodies are those of a mother and two children from the Bibas family, whose unknown fate has gripped Israel, and Oded Lifschitz, 84, a veteran peace activist. Israel says it will confirm their identities after forensic examinations.

President Herzog wrote “there are no words” in a post on social media platform X, asking the four for forgiveness “for not bringing you home safely”.

It is the first time Hamas has returned captives dead since the ceasefire began last month.

Six living hostages are due to be freed on Saturday.

The news that Shiri Bibas, 33, and her sons, who would now be aged five and two, were dead triggered an outpouring of grief across the country.

Hamas claimed in November 2023 they had been killed in an Israeli air strike, without providing evidence. The Israeli government never confirmed the claim.

Addressing Israelis in a video statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country was “united in unbearable grief. Every home in Israel bows its head today.

“We all rage over the monsters of Hamas,” he said.

A lawyer for Dr Sharone Lifschitz, the British-based daughter of Oded Lifschitz, said the day was “one of immense sadness, and of failure.”

Early on Thursday morning, in choreographed scenes reminiscent of recent handovers of living hostages, four black coffins were laid out on a stage decked with propaganda in Khan Younis in southern Gaza in front of crowds of spectators.

One of the backdrops depicted a ghoulish image of Benjamin Netanyahu with fangs looming over a picture of the four hostages when they were alive. Another read: “The Return of the War = The Return of your Prisoners in Coffins”.

One of those present, Ikram Abu Salout, told the BBC she was against handing over the bodies. “They didn’t remove the rubble and we don’t even know where our children and families are.”

A Red Cross official appeared to sign documents at a table alongside armed Hamas fighters before the four coffins transferred to vehicles belonging to the humanitarian organisation.

United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said the handover was “abhorrent and cruel, and flies in the face of international law”.

“We urge that all returns are conducted in privacy, and with respect and care,” he added.

After the handover, the bodies were transferred to Israeli forces in Gaza and brought to Israel. People – many with Israeli flags and yellow ones representing the hostages – lined the streets as a police convoy with the coffins passed by. The bodies have been taken to the Abu Kabir forensic institute in Jaffa, Israel, for post-mortems.

The Bibas family, and Oded Lifschtiz and his wife, were among residents taken 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.

Six living hostages are due to be freed on Saturday.

The news that Shiri Bibas, 33, and her sons, who would now be aged five and two, were dead triggered an outpouring of grief across the country.

Hamas claimed in November 2023 they had been killed in an Israeli air strike, without providing evidence. The Israeli government never confirmed the claim.

Addressing Israelis in a video statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country was “united in unbearable grief. Every home in Israel bows its head today.

“We all rage over the monsters of Hamas,” he said.

A lawyer for Dr Sharone Lifschitz, the British-based daughter of Oded Lifschitz, said the day was “one of immense sadness, and of failure.”

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 Lifschitz, a retired journalist, had been held by the armed Palestinian group Islamic Jihad. His wife Yocheved was freed by Hamas on 23 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-eight hostages and more than 1,000 prisoners have so far been exchanged.

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

Spain’s former football federation boss Luis Rubiales has been found guilty of sexual assault for kissing player Jenni Hermoso without her consent and ordered to pay a fine of €10,800 (£8,942), Spain’s High Court has ruled.

He was acquitted of coercion, for allegedly trying to pressure Hermoso into saying publicly that the kiss was consensual.

As Spain’s players received their medals after defeating England in Sydney to win the 2023 World Cup, Rubiales grabbed Hermoso by the head and kissed her on the lips.

The incident triggered protests and calls for the resignation of Rubiales, who has said he will appeal against the verdict.

The ruling also banned Rubiales from going within a 200m radius of Hermoso and from communicating with her for one year, the court said in a statement.

Three of Rubiales’s former colleagues who were also on trial, accused of colluding in the alleged coercion – Jorge Vilda, coach of the World Cup-winning side, Rubén Rivera, the Real Federación Española de Fútbol (RFEF)’s former head of marketing, and Albert Luque, former sporting director – were cleared of those charges.

Prosecutors had demanded a prison sentence for Rubiales, who last week told a court he was “absolutely sure” Hermoso had given her consent before he kissed her.

He described the kiss as an “act of affection”, adding that in the moment it was “something completely spontaneous”.

In her testimony earlier this month, Hermoso insisted that she had not given Rubiales permission and that the incident had “stained one of the happiest days of my life”.

She told the court in Madrid: “My boss was kissing me, and this shouldn’t happen in any social or work setting.”

“A kiss on the lips is only given when I decide so,” she said at the time.

Rubiales was accused of sexual assault and of trying to coerce Hermoso into saying the kiss had been consensual.

The incident was witnessed by millions of television viewers and an entire stadium after the Spanish women’s team won the 2023 World Cup.

The ensuing uproar gave momentum to a “Me Too”-style movement in the Spanish women’s game, in which players sought to combat sexism and achieve parity with their male peers.

Rubiales resigned in September 2023 following weeks of resisting pressure to stand down, and after Fifa suspended him and Spanish prosecutors opened an investigation.

The US President Donald Trump has said he is not happy with Boeing over a contract to build two new Air Force One planes that is running behind schedule.

Speaking on board one of the 35-year-old presidential planes that are currently in use, Trump also said he is looking for alternatives because it is taking Boeing too long to build the planes.

The contract for two updated versions of the presidential plane based on the modern Boeing 747-8 were negotiated during Trump’s first term in office.

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

“No, I’m not happy with Boeing. It takes them a long time to do, you know, Air Force One, we gave that contract out a long time ago,” Trump said.

“We may buy a plane or get a plane, or something.”

When asked whether he would consider buying new planes from Boeing’s European rival, Airbus, Trump said “No, I would not consider Airbus over Boeing, but I could buy one that was used and convert it.”

It comes days after Trump visited a 13-year-old Boeing 747-800 that had been owned by the Qatari royal family while it was parked at Palm Beach International Airport.

The new aircraft from Boeing were set for delivery in 2024 but the plane maker has pushed the delivery back to 2027 or 2028.

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During his first term as president, Trump forced the plane maker to renegotiate its contract, calling the initial deal too expensive.

That contract has already cost Boeing billions of dollars.

Kitting out the planes for presidential use is extremely costly. It requires installing highly-classified and complex communications, safety and accessibility features.

Last year was dreadful for Boeing. The aerospace giant lost $11.8bn (£9.4bn) across the whole of 2024, its worst result since 2020, when the aviation industry was grounded by the Covid pandemic.

In the three months to the end of December, when strikes were affecting the business, it lost $3.8bn.

As well as suffering from well-publicised problems at its commercial aircraft unit, Boeing also faced issues with number of defence programmes.

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.”

A complex problem that took microbiologists a decade to get to the bottom of has been solved in just two days by a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool.

Professor José R Penadés and his team at Imperial College London had spent years working out and proving why some superbugs are immune to antibiotics.

He gave “co-scientist” – a tool made by Google – a short prompt asking it about the core problem he had been investigating and it reached the same conclusion in 48 hours.

He told the BBC of his shock when he found what it had done, given his research was not published so could not have been found by the AI system in the public domain.

“I was shopping with somebody, I said, ‘please leave me alone for an hour, I need to digest this thing,'” he told the Today programme, on BBC Radio Four.

“I wrote an email to Google to say, ‘you have access to my computer, is that right?'”, he added.

The tech giant confirmed it had not.

The full decade spent by the scientists also includes the time it took to prove the research, which itself was multiple years.

But they say, had they had the hypothesis at the start of the project, it would have saved years of work.

Prof Penadés’ said the tool had in fact done more than successfully replicating his research.

“It’s not just that the top hypothesis they provide was the right one,” he said.

“It’s that they provide another four, and all of them made sense.

“And for one of them, we never thought about it, and we’re now working on that.”

The researchers have been trying to find out how some superbugs – dangerous germs that are resistant to antibiotics – get created.

Their hypothesis is that the superbugs can form a tail from different viruses which allows them to spread between species.

Prof Penadés likened it to the superbugs having “keys” which enabled them to move from home to home, or host species to host species.

Critically, this hypothesis was unique to the research team and had not been published anywhere else. Nobody in the team had shared their findings.

So Mr Penadés was happy to use this to test Google’s new AI tool.

Just two days later, the AI returned a few hypotheses – and its first thought, the top answer provided, suggested superbugs may take tails in exactly the way his research described.

The impact of AI is hotly contested.

Its advocates say it will enable scientific advances – while others worry it will eliminate jobs.

Prof Penadés said he understood why fears about the impact on jobs such as his was the “first reaction” people had but added “when you think about it it’s more that you have an extremely powerful tool.”

He said the researchers on the project were convinced that it would prove very useful in the future.

“I feel this will change science, definitely,” Mr Penadés said.

“I’m in front of something that is spectacular, and I’m very happy to be part of that.

“It’s like you have the opportunity to be playing a big match – I feel like I’m finally playing a Champions League match with this thing.”

“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 has even 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.”

On a bleak late winter’s day, under leaden skies and occasional driving rain, this was the moment all Israelis had been dreading.

The return of the dead.

It began, as all the handovers so far have begun, with a politically charged display by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups involved in holding Israeli hostages for over 500 days.

Once again, there was a stage, flanked by huge posters highlighting the catastrophic consequences of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the Palestinian determination to stay put.

But instead of haunted, sometimes emaciated, survivors, there were four black coffins, each bearing a photograph and a name – Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir – accompanied by the image of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Missile casings bore the slogan: “They were killed by US bombs”. Hamas has long argued that all four were killed by Israeli air raids on Gaza, something which has not been verified.

As previously, Red Cross officials were on hand to oversee the process. In a rare public statement on the matter, they had urged Hamas to conduct the handover in a private, dignified fashion.

Their efforts had clearly been in vain, but they attempted to screen the coffins from public scrutiny, draping each one in a white sheet before driving them away.

The watching crowd was smaller than usual, perhaps because of the heavy rain.

After Thursday morning’s handover, at a military ceremony on the edge of the Gaza Strip, the coffins carrying the hostages were draped with Israeli flags and prayers offered by the army’s chief rabbi.

A convoy of vehicles then made its way north towards the Abu Kabir forensic institute, in Jaffa, where formal identification of the bodies is taking place.

Along the route, small groups of Israelis stood silently in the rain, carrying Israeli flags and yellow banners – the colour associated with the hostages and their supporters.

In Karmei Gat, where displaced members of kibbutz Nir Oz are living, waiting to go home, the vigil was particularly sombre.

All four of Thursday’s released hostages were seized from Nir Oz on 7 October 2023.

Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square was a study in grief, with people crying or sitting on the ground, heads in hands.

The faces of the red-headed Bibas boys – Ariel and Kfir – are plastered on walls, road signs and in windows up and down the country. Fearing the worst, Israelis have nevertheless clung to the hope that the brothers might have survived, along with their mother, Shiri.

“We were devastated by the news,” Orly Marron said, outside Abu Kabir.

“I have red-headed grandchildren and seeing the photographs is really very heartbreaking.”

Oded Lifschitz’s son, Yizhar, meanwhile told Israel Radio that he had always feared for his father’s health, since his violent abduction in October 2023.

Oded was 84 years old at the time. He and his wife, Yocheved, were both taken to Khan Younis in Gaza, where they were separated, never to see each other again.

Yocheved was released by Hamas two weeks after the attack.

“We need to close this wound and move forward,” Yizhar said, adding that his father, a noted journalist and peace activist, had long had a vision about how to resolve the conflicts of the Middle East.

“It’s sad that we went through this whole cycle and didn’t solve it,” Yizhar said. “We left it as something simmering, and look where we are now.”

Meanwhile, back in Gaza, some Palestinians expressed their anger that Israeli bodies had been handed over, while an unknown number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s military campaign remain buried in the apocalyptic wreckage of the Gaza Strip.

In addition, as many as 665 bodies are being held by Israel in numbered cemeteries, according to a Palestinian protest group, The National Campaign to Recover the Bodies of the Martyrs. It says some have been held for decades.

“I don’t like this agreement at all,” Ikram Abu Salout said in Khan Younis. “They didn’t remove the rubble and we don’t even know where our children and families are.”

As she was speaking, bulldozers flying Egyptian flags were finally arriving in northern Gaza. Israel allowed the equipment to enter, in exchange for Thursday’s handover and the release of six more living hostages this coming Saturday.

A passenger train derailed after striking a herd of elephants near a wildlife reserve in central Sri Lanka in the early hours of Thursday.

While no injuries were reported among passengers, six elephants died from the accident in Habarana, east of the capital Colombo.

Two injured elephants were being treated, police said, noting that it was the worst such wildlife accident the country had seen, AFP reported.

It is not uncommon for trains to run into herds of elephants in Sri Lanka, where casualties on both sides of human-elephant encounters are among the highest in the world.

Last year, more than 170 people and nearly 500 elephants were killed in human-elephant encounters overall – and around 20 elephants are killed by trains annually, according to local media.

Elephants, whose natural habitats are affected by deforestation and shrinking resources, have increasingly strayed into places of human activity.

Some have urged train drivers to slow down and sound the train horns to warn animals ahead on railway tracks.

In 2018, a pregnant elephant and its two calves similarly died in Habarana after being struck by a train. The three had been part of a larger herd crossing the train tracks at dawn.

Last October, another train ran into a herd in Minneriya, about 25km (15 miles) away from Habarana, killing two elephants and injuring one.

There are an estimated 7,000 wild elephants in Sri Lanka, where the animals, revered by its Buddhist majority, are protected by law. Killing an elephant is a crime punishable by imprisonment or a fine.

More than 80% of Australian children aged eight to 12 use social media or messaging services that are only meant to be for over-13s, according to new research.

It comes as Australia plans to implement a total social media ban for under-16s that is expected by the end of this year.

The country’s internet regulator, eSafety, found YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat were the most popular platforms used by young children.

The regulator accused the apps of “a lack of robust interventions” for checking the ages of their users.

The companies in question – Discord, Google (YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Reddit, Snap, TikTok and Twitch – did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Users of all of these platforms must be 13 and over to have an account, though there are some exceptions.

For example, YouTube has Family Link – when an account is accessible for children under the age of 13 under the supervision of a guardian – and the separate app YouTube Kids, which is specifically made for children.

In the report, usage of YouTube Kids was not included for this reason.

“The findings of this report will be a helpful input to guide next steps,” said eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant.

Australia’s robust stance on social media for young people is being keenly watched by the rest of the world – including the UK which has not ruled out copying its ban for young users.

Researchers questioned over 1,500 children across Australia aged between eight and 15 about their usage of social media and messaging platforms.

They found 84% of the children aged between eight and 12 who were surveyed had used at least one social media or messaging service since the beginning of last year. Over half of them used it via the account of a parent or carer.

Staying with that age bracket, a third of the children who had used social media or messaging services had their own account, and 80% of them had help setting up their account/accounts from a parent or carer.

The study also found only 13% of children who had an account had them shut down by the social media companies or messaging services for being under the age of 13.

“These findings indicate there is inconsistency across industry regarding the steps taken to assess the age of end-users at various points in the user experience,” the report’s authors said.

“However, there is one thing they have in common: a lack of robust interventions at the point of account sign-up to a service to prevent someone under 13 from providing a false age or birthdate to set up an account.”

The regulator’s report also surveyed the platforms themselves, which were asked how they verify the ages of younger users.

Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch and YouTube told the authors they deployed tools and technology to detect whether a user may be under the age of 13 once they were using the service.

“Proactive tools and technologies may rely on a user actively engaging with a service (such as connecting with others, communicating with others, sharing and creating content) to detect relevant signals,” the report said.

“This may require time and engagement to detect a child under 13, and in that time the child may be exposed to risks and harms.”

Apple has announced a new iPhone which brings artificial intelligence (AI) features at a lower cost than its flagship handsets.

The iPhone 16e has the same processor as the more expensive iPhone 16, Apple said, with similar storage options, though a lower spec elsewhere, including fewer cameras.

Apple has been struggling to find a new product that excites consumers – sales of iPhones dropped at the end of last year.

It will be hoping that bringing enhanced AI functionality to a less expensive phone will address that – however analysts have been cautious about the sales boost such tools bring.

Its name is clearly a nod to its iPhone SE series, which were released from 2016 to 2022, and were also lower priced.

Apple said the iPhone 16e would be available for pre-order from 21 February in 59 countries.

It will launch in the UK for £599, which is £200 less than the iPhone 16 – but more than double the price of the original iPhone SE went for when it launched in 2016.

“This now becomes one of the most affordable powerful iPhones now on the market,” industry analyst Paolo Pescatore told BBC News.

“The move should help accelerate adoption and especially its foray into AI with Apple Intelligence.”

However other experts have questioned how much value consumers put on AI – an area Apple has spent $189bn (£150bn) on in the last decade.

“All we have to show for that is the HomePod and $3,500 ski goggles,” said Cory Johnson, Epistrophy Capital Research chief market strategist, referring to Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which has not sold many units.

“AI should be right in Apple’s wheelhouse. But Apple fanboys, fangirls, and investors are right to be disappointed so far,” Mr Johnson added.

Meanwhile, tech influencer Marques Brownlee said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that the “most lowkey interesting thing” about the iPhone 16e was its new C1 modem.

It is the first time Apple has used its own modem design for the iPhone, having previously relied on Qualcomm and Intel’s chips to provide cellular connectivity.

This also meant paying costly licensing fees to those chip giants – something Apple has previously wrangled over with Qualcomm in court.

Adopting its own modems would also help the tech giant realise a vision laid out by chief executive Tim Cook in 2009 of owning and controlling the tech powering its products.

Much of the conversation around the new handset will probably centre around its power, with Apple electing to use the same A18 chip behind its more expensive devices.

This means the 16e will be capable of playing the same games and running the same apps as other iPhones – though AI is almost certainly at the heart of this decision.

Mr Cook said in the announcement the new model featured “the performance, intelligence and privacy” Apple fans “expect” from the firm.

And he said the Apple Intelligence features on the device would “help you save time, quickly get more things done, and express yourself in new ways”.

The firm introduced its spin on the tech – Apple Intelligence – with this series of devices, which includes new tools for writing and incorporating OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT into Siri.

It hasn’t always gone well, with the firm at one point suspending its AI-generated news alerts after they created false headlines attributed to news organisations including the BBC.

It now presents the summaries in italics.

Apple said its new phone is “built for Apple Intelligence”, and pointed to certain features of the tech, like an easy way to clean up photos or search your image library.

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Other phone manufacturers have similar features on their devices – though the iPhone 16e will be by far the cheapest way to access AI on an Apple handset.

“The iPhone 16e generates a new revenue stream for Apple, and this will be particularly noticeable in key markets like India, where iPhones are out of reach for most people,” said Forrester principal analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee.

“There is also a second-order effect of cheaper devices like the iPhone 16e, bringing new customers into the Apple ecosystem,” he added.

The tech giant also appears to aiming its new handset at owners of older models, in the hope of boosting upgrades.

A graphic on its website says “there’s never been a better time to upgrade” and allows users to compare the iPhone 16e’s specs to models dating back to 2019.

“We’ve seen a limited appetite among many of the installed base to upgrade from previous versions, but the new phone reduces the cost hurdle of joining the Apple Intelligence bandwagon,” said Mr Chatterjee.

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.

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 protesters 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.”

A British tourist has died while trekking with a friend in the Himalaya mountains in northern India.

The two British men were hiking in “extremely difficult terrain” near the village of Thathri in Dharamshala when one of them was critically injured, local emergency services said.

The man was rescued and taken down the mountain on a stretcher, but by the time he reached hospital nearly 24 hours later he was declared dead, rescuers said.

The Foreign Office said they were “supporting the family of a British man who has died in India and are in contact with the local authorities”.

According to the Times of India, the pair were hiking the Triund trek, a popular route of about 7km (4.3 miles) in the foothills of the Dhauladhar mountain range.

They were on their descent when one of the men fell and his friend sought help from the nearby village, the newspaper reports.

Local rescuers, the Himachal Pradesh State Disaster Response Force, said on X that the call for their help had come in at 18:00 on Sunday, and a team of 10 people had been sent up the mountain to search for the men.

“After four hours of trekking, the team located the victims at 10:30pm with one trekker in a critical condition. They secured the critical trekker onto a stretcher and began the challenging descent along with his co trekker.

“The rough terrain and repeated crossings of a rivulet made progress extremely slow, requiring nearly two hours to cover just 100m.”

Overnight the team requested backup, and more rescuers arrived in the morning.

“They continued transporting the victims but faced extreme difficulty due to the steep landscape, requiring multiple anchorings of the stretcher.”

The man was finally taken to hospital at 17:08 on Monday but was declared dead on arrival, rescuers added. His friend was unharmed.

The local authorities in Kangra district had brought in a temporary ban on trekking in high-altitude areas, but the Times of India says the two tourists were unaware of it.

It said they had reached the snowline – the part of the mountain where snow is on the ground all year round.

The victim has yet to be formally identified.

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.”

Spain’s former football federation boss Luis Rubiales has been found guilty of sexual assault for kissing player Jenni Hermoso without her consent and ordered to pay a fine of €10,800 (£8,942), Spain’s High Court has ruled.

He was acquitted of coercion, for allegedly trying to pressure Hermoso into saying publicly that the kiss was consensual.

As Spain’s players received their medals after defeating England in Sydney to win the 2023 World Cup, Rubiales grabbed Hermoso by the head and kissed her on the lips.

The incident triggered protests and calls for the resignation of Rubiales, who has said he will appeal against the verdict.

The ruling also banned Rubiales from going within a 200m radius of Hermoso and from communicating with her for one year, the court said in a statement.

Three of Rubiales’s former colleagues who were also on trial, accused of colluding in the alleged coercion – Jorge Vilda, coach of the World Cup-winning side, Rubén Rivera, the Real Federación Española de Fútbol (RFEF)’s former head of marketing, and Albert Luque, former sporting director – were cleared of those charges.

Prosecutors had demanded a prison sentence for Rubiales, who last week told a court he was “absolutely sure” Hermoso had given her consent before he kissed her.

He described the kiss as an “act of affection”, adding that in the moment it was “something completely spontaneous”.

In her testimony earlier this month, Hermoso insisted that she had not given Rubiales permission and that the incident had “stained one of the happiest days of my life”.

She told the court in Madrid: “My boss was kissing me, and this shouldn’t happen in any social or work setting.”

“A kiss on the lips is only given when I decide so,” she said at the time.

Rubiales was accused of sexual assault and of trying to coerce Hermoso into saying the kiss had been consensual.

The incident was witnessed by millions of television viewers and an entire stadium after the Spanish women’s team won the 2023 World Cup.

The ensuing uproar gave momentum to a “Me Too”-style movement in the Spanish women’s game, in which players sought to combat sexism and achieve parity with their male peers.

Rubiales resigned in September 2023 following weeks of resisting pressure to stand down, and after Fifa suspended him and Spanish prosecutors opened an investigation.