A plane carrying the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has left Manila, hours after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity over his deadly “war on drugs”.

The 79-year-old was taken into police custody shortly after his arrival at the capital’s international airport from Hong Kong on Tuesday morning.

Current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr confirmed Duterte had left Philippine airspace, en route to The Hague in the Netherlands, where the ICC sits.

Earlier, his daughter Sara – who said she would accompany him to the Hague – said he was being “forcibly” sent there.

Duterte has offered no apologies for his brutal anti-drugs crackdown, which saw thousands of people killed when he was president of the South East Asian nation from 2016 to 2022, and mayor of Davao city before that.

Upon his arrest on Tuesday, he questioned the basis for the warrant, asking: “What crime [have] I committed?” in a video posted online by his daughter Veronica Duterte.

“If I committed a sin, prosecute me in Philippine courts, with Filipino judges, and I will allow myself to be jailed in my own nation,” he said in a later video.

In response to his arrest, a petition was launched on his behalf in the Supreme Court – urging them not to comply with the request.

In it, Duterte urged the court to refrain from “enforcing or assisting in the enforcement of any ICC-issued warrants… and to suspend all forms of cooperation with the ICC while the case is pending”.

According to a statement from the court’s spokesperson, the former president also called for a declaration that the Philippines withdrawal from the ICC in 2019 “effectively terminated” its jurisdiction over the country and its people.

The ICC says it still has authority in the Philippines over alleged crimes committed before the country withdrew as a member.

Some of Duterte’s supporters rallied at the gates to Villamor Air Base, within the airport compound, where the former president was taken following his arrest. State media said more than 370 police had been deployed there and to other “key locations” to ensure peace was maintained.

While his supporters have criticised the arrest, activists have called it a “historic moment” for those who perished in his drug war and their families, the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) said.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but today, it has bent towards justice. Duterte’s arrest is the beginning of accountability for the mass killings that defined his brutal rule,” said ICHRP chairman Peter Murphy.

Duterte had been in Hong Kong to campaign for the upcoming 12 May mid-term elections, where he had planned to run again for mayor of Davao.

Footage aired on local television showed him walking out of the airport using a cane. Authorities say he is in “good health” and is being cared for by government doctors.

“What is my sin? I did everything in my time for peace and a peaceful life for the Filipino people,” he told a cheering crowd of Filipino expatriates before leaving Hong Kong.

Duterte’s arrest marks the “beginning of a new chapter in Philippine history”, said Filipino political scientist Richard Heydarian.

“This is about rule of law and human rights,” he said.

Heydarian added that authorities had arrested Duterte promptly at the airport instead of letting the matter take its course through the local courts to “avoid political chaos”.

“Duterte’s supporters were hoping they could go berserk in terms of public rallies and [use] all sorts of delaying tactics… [to] drag things on until the warrant of arrest loses momentum,” he said.

The demand for justice in Duterte’s drug war goes “hand in hand” with the political interests of his successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Heydarian said.

The Duterte and Marcos families formed a formidable alliance in the last elections in 2022, where against the elder Duterte’s wishes, his daughter Sara ran as Marcos Jr’s vice-president instead of seeking her father’s post.

The relationship unravelled publicly in recent months as the two families pursued separate political agendas.

Marcos initially refused to co-operate with the ICC investigation, but as his relationship with the Duterte family deteriorated, he changed his stance, and later indicated that the Philippines would co-operate.

Duterte served as mayor of Davao, a sprawling southern metropolis, for 22 years and has made it one of the country’s safest from street crimes.

He used the city’s peace-and-order reputation to cast himself as a tough-talking anti-establishment politician to win the 2016 elections by a landslide.

With fiery rhetoric, he rallied security forces to shoot drug suspects dead. More than 6,000 suspects were gunned down by police or unknown assailants during the campaign, but rights groups say the number could be higher.

A previous UN report found that most victims were young, poor urban males and that police, who do not need search or arrest warrants to conduct house raids, systematically forced suspects to make self-incriminating statements or risk facing lethal force.

Critics said the campaign targeted street-level pushers and failed to catch big-time drug lords. Many families also claimed that the victims – their sons, brothers or husbands – were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Investigations in parliament pointed to a shadowy “death squad” of bounty hunters targeting drug suspects. Duterte has denied the allegations of abuse.

“Do not question my policies because I offer no apologies, no excuses. I did what I had to do, and whether or not you believe it… I did it for my country,” Duterte told a parliament investigation in October.

“I hate drugs, make no mistake about it.”

The ICC first took note of the alleged abuses in 2016 and started its investigation in 2021. It covered cases from November 2011, when Duterte was mayor of Davao, to March 2019, before the Philippines withdrew from the ICC.

Since taking power, Marcos has scaled back Duterte’s anti-narcotics campaign and promised a less violent approach to the drug problem, but hundreds of drug-related killings have been recorded during his administration.

Duterte remains widely popular in the Philippines as he is the country’s first leader from Mindanao, a region south of Manila, where many feel marginalised by the leaders in the capital.

He often speaks in Cebuano, the regional language, not Tagalog, which is more widely-spoken in Manila and northern regions.

When he stepped down in 2022, nearly nine in 10 Filipinos said they were satisfied with his performance as president – a score unseen among his predecessors since the restoration of democracy in 1986, according to the Social Weather Stations research institute.

His populist rhetoric and blunt statements earned him the moniker “Donald Trump of the East”. He has called Russian President Vladimir Putin his “idol” and under his administration, the Philippines’ pivoted their foreign policy to China away from the US, its long-standing ally.

Marcos restored Manila’s ties with Washington and criticised the Duterte government for being “Chinese lackeys” as the Philippines is locked in sea dispute with China.

China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday that it was “closely monitoring the development of the situation” and warned the ICC against “politicisation” and “double standards” in the arrest of Duterte.

Duterte’s daughter and political heir, Sara Duterte, is tipped as a potential presidential candidate in 2028. The incumbent, Marcos, is barred by the constitution from seeking re-election.

Armed militants in Pakistan’s Balochistan region have attacked a train carrying hundreds of passengers and taken a number of hostages, military sources have told the BBC.

The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) fired at the Jaffar Express Train as it travelled from Quetta to Peshawar.

A statement from the separatist group said it had bombed the track before storming the train in remote Sibi district. It claimed the train was under its control.

Pakistani police told local reporters at least three people, including the train driver, had been injured. Security forces have been sent to the scene, as well as helicopters to try to rescue hostages, police told the BBC.

There were reports of “intense firing” at the train, a Balochistan government spokesman told local newspaper Dawn.

A senior police official said it “remains stuck just before a tunnel surrounded by mountains”, AFP news agency reports.

A senior army official confirmed to the BBC that there were more than 100 army personnel travelling from Quetta on the train.

The Baloch Liberation Army has warned of “severe consequences” if an attempt is made to rescue those it is holding.

It has waged a decades-long insurgency to gain independence and has launched numerous deadly attacks, often targeting police stations, railway lines and highways.

The Pakistani authorities – as well as several Western countries, including the UK and US – have designated the BLA as a terrorist organisation.

Quetta’s railway controller Muhammad Kashif told the BBC that 400-450 passengers had been booked on the train.

Officials have not confirmed how many they think have been taken hostage.

A local railway official in Quetta told the BBC that a group of at least 60 passengers had disembarked the train and reached the nearest railway station, Panir.

The official said the group was made up of locals from the province of Balochistan.

Railway officials in Quetta, quoting paramilitary sources, told the BBC that women and children had disembarked from the train and were walking towards the city of Sibi. They did not have an exact number.

Meanwhile, families of passengers were trying to get information from the counter at Quetta railway station.

The son of one passenger, Muhammad Ashraf, who left Quetta for Lahore on Tuesday morning, told BBC Urdu he had not been able to contact his father.

Another relative said he was “frantic with worry” about his cousin and her small child, who were travelling from Quetta to Multan to pick up a family member.

“No one is telling me what’s happening or if they’re safe,” Imran Khan told Reuters news agency.

Officials say they are yet to communicate with anyone on the train.

The area has no internet and mobile network coverage, officials told the BBC.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province and the richest in terms of natural resources, but it is the least developed.

An Indonesian TikToker has been sentenced to almost three years in prison after reportedly ‘talking’ to a picture of Jesus on her phone and telling him to get a haircut.

Ratu Thalisa, a Muslim transgender woman with more than 442,000 TikTok followers, had been on a livestream, and was responding to a comment that told her to cut her hair to look more like a man.

On Monday, a court in Medan, Sumatra found Thalisa guilty of spreading hatred under a controversial online hate-speech law, and sentenced her to two years and 10 months in jail.

The court said her comments could disrupt “public order” and “religious harmony” in society, and charged her with committing blasphemy.

The court ruling came after multiple Christian groups filed police complaints against Ms Thalisa for blasphemy.

The sentence has been condemned by human rights groups, including Amnesty International, who described it as “a shocking attack on Ratu Thalisa’s freedom of expression” and called for it to be quashed.

“The Indonesian authorities should not use the country’s Electronic Information and Transactions (EIT) law to punish people for comments made on social media,” Amnesty International Indonesia’s Executive Director Usman Hamid said in a statement.

“While Indonesia should prohibit the advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, Ratu Thalisa’s speech act does not reach that threshold.”

Mr Hamid called on Indonesian authorities to overturn Ms Thalisa’s conviction and ensure her immediate release from custody.

He also urged them to repeal or make substantial revisions to what he described as “problematic provisions” in the EIT Law – namely, those criminalising alleged immorality, defamation and hate speech.

First introduced in 2008 and amended in 2016 to address online defamation, the EIT Law was designed to safeguard the rights of individuals in online spaces.

It has been roundly criticised, however, by rights groups, press groups and legal experts, who have long raised concerns about the law’s potential threat to freedom of expression.

At least 560 people were charged with alleged violations of the EIT Law while exercising their freedom of expression between 2019 and 2024, and 421 were convicted, according to data from Amnesty International.

Those charged with offenses of defamation and hate speech have included several social media influencers.

In September 2023, a Muslim woman was sentenced to two years’ prison for blaspheming Islam, after she posted a viral TikTok video where she said an Islamic phrase before eating pork.

In 2024, another TikToker was detained for blasphemy after they posted a quiz asking children what kind of animals can read the Quran, according to Amnesty International.

Indonesia is home to many religious minorities, including Buddhists, Christians and Hindus. But a vast majority of Indonesians are Muslim – and most cases of people found in violation of the EIT Law have typically related to religious minorities allegedly insulting Islam.

Ms Thalisa’s case, where a Muslim woman is accused of invoking hate speech against Christianity, is less common.

Prosecutors previously demanded that she receive a sentence of more than four years, and immediately appealed against Monday’s verdict. Ms Thalisa was given seven days to appeal.

South Korean singer Wheesung was found dead on Monday at his home in Seoul.

Emergency services found the 43-year-old unresponsive after being alerted by his mother, local media reported.

The authorities said that an autopsy had been requested, but that there were no signs of foul play.

Wheesung, whose real name is Choi Whee-sung, debuted in 2002 and quickly made a name for himself with his soulful vocals. He was popular in the 2000s and has been credited with popularising R&B in South Korea.

Over the years Wheesung established himself as a mentor and vocal coach to K-pop stars, even writing songs for some of them. He collaborated with many artists and also performed in K-pop concerts across the world, including in Hollywood.

He was scheduled to hold a concert with ballad singer KCM this weekend in the city of Daegu.

His R&B ballads won praise from veteran Korean singers like Shin Seung-hun and Seo Tae-ji.

But Wheesung was also no stranger to controversy.

In 2021, he was handed a two-year suspended sentence for abusing propofol, a powerful anesthetic which also caused the death of Michael Jackson.

Within days in March and April 2020, Wheesung was found unconscious on two occasions, along with syringes and vials containing etomidate, a sleep-inducing drug similar to propofol.

Fellow artists shared tributes to Wheesung after news of his death broke.

“Wheesung, let’s sing and make music freely in that place. I won’t forget your pure and clear heart,” singer Yoon Min-soo wrote in a social media post accompanied by a video of him and Wheesung performing a duet.

“Let’s meet again someday and sing together,” Yoon wrote.

Rapper Verbal Jint shared posted a black square on Instagram, accompanied with the caption: “Every moment we shared was an honor, and I’m grateful. You’ve worked so hard, rest in peace, Wheesung.”

Air India has confirmed that one of its flights from the US was forced to turn around last week after passengers trying to flush away plastic bags, rags and clothes clogged up most of its toilets.

The plane, which was heading from Chicago to India’s capital Delhi, spent several hours in the air before it returned to the US city.

Video clips from inside the aircraft showed scenes of confusion as passengers huddled around crew members who seemed to be explaining the situation.

The incident has stirred a lively debate on social media, with many Indians weighing in on aeroplane bathroom etiquette.

The incident took place on 5 March on Air India Flight 126, according to a statement by the airline released on Monday.

About two hours into the flight, crew members reported that some of the toilets were “unserviceable”.

Subsequently, they found eight of the 12 toilets in business and economy class could not be used, “causing discomfort to all on board”. The plane can carry up to 342 passengers.

At that point the plane was already flying over the Atlantic Ocean, according to Air India’s statement. Due to restrictions on night operations at most European airports at the time, the pilots decided to return to Chicago for “passenger comfort and safety”.

A BBC check on flight tracking website Flightradar24 found the plane was near Greenland when it turned around, and had spent a total of 10 hours in the air.

Air India said an investigation later found “polythene bags, rags and clothes that had been flushed down and stuck in the plumbing” of the plane’s toilets.

It released several pictures showing bags containing waste cleared from the toilets. One photo showed a crew member holding a drainage pipe completely stuffed with what appeared to be rags.

The statement said that all passengers and crew disembarked normally in Chicago and were provided with accommodation and alternative flight options.

Plane toilets store human waste in special tanks and use a vacuum system for flushing. These are normally disposed of once the plane has landed.

While clogged toilets are not uncommon, it is “next to impossible” for all toilets to break down “due to only passengers’ fault, and in a way that it causes an emergency diversion”, Mark Martin, an aviation expert, told the Hindustan Times newspaper.

But Air India said it had previously found objects such as blankets, underwear and diapers flushed down its planes’ toilets.

“We take this opportunity to urge passengers to use lavatories only for the purposes that they are meant for,” it said.

On X, many criticised the airline for poor upkeep and the lack of sanitation facilities on its aeroplanes.

“Only Air India has such frequent mishaps. Honestly what has happened is indefensible,” one user said.

But others pointed out that the airline could not be held responsible for the situation.

“Can we honestly dump all the blame on Air India and the crew, when people can’t follow basic travel etiquette?” another user said.

Head in hands, eight-year-old Timmy muttered to himself as he tried to beat a robot powered by artificial intelligence at a game of chess.

But this was not an AI showroom or laboratory – this robot was living on a coffee table in a Beijing apartment, along with Timmy.

The first night it came home, Timmy hugged his little robot friend before heading to bed. He doesn’t have a name for it – yet.

“It’s like a little teacher or a little friend,” the boy said, as he showed his mum the next move he was considering on the chess board.

Moments later, the robot chimed in: “Congrats! You win.” Round eyes blinking on the screen, it began rearranging the pieces to start a new game as it continued in Mandarin: “I’ve seen your ability, I will do better next time.”

China is embracing AI in its bid to become a tech superpower by 2030.

DeepSeek, the breakthrough Chinese chatbot that caught the world’s attention in January, was just the first hint of that ambition.

Money is pouring into AI businesses seeking more capital, fuelling domestic competition. There are more than 4,500 firms developing and selling AI, schools in the capital Beijing are introducing AI courses for primary and secondary students later this year, and universities have increased the number of places available for students studying AI.

“This is an inevitable trend. We will co-exist with AI,” said Timmy’s mum, Yan Xue. “Children should get to know it as early as possible. We should not reject it.”

She is keen for her son to learn both chess and the strategy board game Go – the robot does both, which persuaded her that its $800 price tag was a good investment. Its creators are already planning to add a language tutoring programme.

Perhaps this was what the Chinese Communist Party hoped for when it declared in 2017 that AI would be “the main driving force” of the country’s progress. President Xi Jinping is now betting big on it, as a slowing Chinese economy grapples with the blow of tariffs from its biggest trading partner, the United States.

Beijing plans to invest 10tn Chinese yuan ($1.4tn; £1tn) in the next 15 years as it competes with Washington to gain the edge in advanced tech. AI funding got yet another boost at the government’s annual political gathering, which is currently under way. This comes on the heels of a 60 billion yuan-AI investment fund created in January, just days after the US further tightened export controls for advanced chips and placed more Chinese firms on a trade blacklist.

But DeepSeek has shown that Chinese companies can overcome these barriers. And that’s what has stunned Silicon Valley and industry experts – they did not expect China to catch up so soon.

It’s a reaction Tommy Tang has become accustomed to after six months of marketing his firm’s chess-playing robot at various competitions.

Timmy’s machine comes from the same company, SenseRobot, which offers a wide range in abilities – Chinese state media hailed an advanced version in 2022 that beat chess Grand Masters at the game.

“Parents will ask about the price, then they will ask where I am from. They expect me to come from the US or Europe. They seem surprised that I am from China,” Mr Tang said, smiling. “There will always be one or two seconds of silence when I say I am from China.”

His firm has sold more than 100,000 of the robots and now has a contract with a major US supermarket chain, Costco.

One of the secrets to China’s engineering success is its young people. In 2020, more than 3.5 million of the country’s students graduated with degrees in science, technology, engineering and maths, better known as STEM.

That’s more than any other country in the world – and Beijing is keen to leverage it. “Building strength in education, science and talent is a shared responsibility,” Xi told party leaders last week.

Ever since China opened its economy to the world in the late 1970s, it has “been through a process of accumulating talent and technology,” says Abbott Lyu, vice-president of Shanghai-based Whalesbot, a firm that makes AI toys. “In this era of AI, we’ve got many, many engineers, and they are hardworking.”

Behind him, a dinosaur made of variously coloured bricks roars to life. It’s being controlled through code assembled on a smartphone by a seven-year-old.

The company is developing toys to help children as young as three learn code. Every package of bricks comes with a booklet of code. Children can then choose what they want to build and learn how to do it. The cheapest toy sells for around $40.

“Other countries have AI education robots as well, but when it comes to competitiveness and smart hardware, China is doing better,” Mr Lyu insists.

The success of DeepSeek turned its CEO Liang Wenfeng into a national hero and “is worth 10 billion yuan of advertising for [China’s] AI industry,” he added.

“It has let the public know that AI is not just a concept, that it can indeed change people’s lives. It has inspired public curiosity.”

Six homegrown AI firms, including DeepSeek, have now been nicknamed China’s six little dragons by the internet – the others are Unitree Robotics, Deep Robotics, BrainCo, Game Science, and Manycore Tech.

Some of them were at a recent AI fair in Shanghai, where the biggest Chinese firms in the business showed off their advances, from search and rescue robots to a backflipping dog-like one, which wandered the halls among visitors.

In one bustling exhibition hall, two teams of humanoid robots battled it out in a game of football, complete in red and blue jerseys. The machines fell when they clashed – and one of them was even taken off the field in a stretcher by their human handler who was keen to keep the joke going.

It was hard to miss the air of excitement among developers in the wake of DeepSeek. “Deepseek means the world knows we are here,” said Yu Jingji, a 26-year-old engineer.

But as the world learns of China’s AI potential, there are also concerns about what AI is allowing the Chinese government to learn about its users.

AI is hungry for data – the more it gets, the smarter it makes itself and, with around a billion mobile phone users compared to just over 400 million in the US, Beijing has a real advantage.

The West, its allies and many experts in these countries believe that data gathered by Chinese apps such as DeepSeek, RedNote or TikTok can be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party. Some point to the country’s National Intelligence Law as evidence of this.

But Chinese firms, including ByteDance, which owns TikTok, says the law allows for the protection of private companies and personal data. Still, suspicion that US user data on TikTok could end up in the hands of the Chinese government drove Washington’s decision to ban the hugely popular app.

That same fear – where privacy concerns meet national security challenges – is hitting Deepseek. South Korea banned new downloads of DeepSeek, while Taiwan and Australia have barred the app from government-issued devices.

Chinese companies are aware of these sensitivities and Mr Tang was quick to tell the BBC that “privacy was a red line” for his company. Beijing also realises that this will be a challenge in its bid to be a global leader in AI.

“DeepSeek’s rapid rise has triggered hostile reactions from some in the West,” a commentary in the state-run Beijing Daily noted, adding that “the development environment for China’s AI models remains highly uncertain”.

But China’s AI firms are not deterred. Rather, they believe thrifty innovation will win them an undeniable advantage – because it was DeepSeek’s claim that it could rival ChatGPT for a fraction of the cost that shocked the AI industry.

So the engineering challenge is how to make more, for less. “This was our Mission Impossible,” Mr Tang said. His company found that the robotic arm used to move chess pieces was hugely expensive to produce and would drive the price up to around $40,000.

So, they tried using AI to help do the work of engineers and enhance the manufacturing process. Mr Tang claims that has driven the cost down to $1,000.

“This is innovation,” he says. “Artificial engineering is now integrated into the manufacturing process.”

This could have enormous implications as China applies AI on a vast scale. State media already show factories full of humanoid robots. In January, the government said that it would promote the development of AI-powered humanoid robots to help look after its rapidly ageing population.

Xi has repeatedly declared “technological self-reliance” a key goal, which means China wants to create its own advanced chips, to make up for US export restrictions that could hinder its plans.

The Chinese leader knows he is in for a long race – the Beijing Daily recently warned that the DeepSeek moment was not a time for “AI triumphalism” because China was still in “catch-up mode”.

President Xi is investing heavily in artificial intelligence, robots and advanced tech in preparation for a marathon that he hopes China will eventually win.

An argument in the White House tore apart the US alliance with Ukraine, shook European leaders and highlighted JD Vance’s key role in forcefully expressing Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The vice-president has come out punching on the global stage – so what is it that drives his worldview?

Vance’s first major foreign speech, at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, caught many by surprise.

Rather than focusing on the war raging in Ukraine, the US vice-president only briefly mentioned the bloodiest European conflict since World War Two.

Instead, he used his debut on the international stage to berate close US allies about immigration and free speech, suggesting the European establishment was anti-democratic. He accused them of ignoring the wills of their people and questioned what shared values they were truly banding together with the US to defend.

“If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people,” he warned.

It was a bold and perhaps unexpected way to introduce himself to the world – by angering European allies. But days later he was back in the news, at the centre of a blistering row with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he accused of being ungrateful.

For those who have been studying the rise of Vance, these two episodes came as no surprise.

The vice-president has come to represent an intellectual wing of the conservative movement that gives expression to Trumpism and in particular how its America First mantra applies beyond its borders. In writings and interviews, Vance has expressed an ideology that seems to join the dots between American workers, global elites and the role of the US in the wider world.

On the campaign trail with Donald Trump last year, Vance spent much of his time sharply criticising Democrats – the usual attack-dog duties that traditionally get dished out to running mates – and sparring with reporters.

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And while Elon Musk’s outsized and unconventional role in the Trump administration initially overshadowed him, that Munich speech and the Oval Office showdown have raised the profile of Trump’s deputy.

It’s also led to questions about the winding ideological journey he’s made during his years in the conservative movement – and what he truly believes now.

“He’s much more of a pragmatist than an ideologue,” said James Orr, associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge and a friend whom Vance has described as his “British sherpa”.

“He’s able to articulate what is and is not in the American interest,” Orr said. “And the American interest is not the interest of some abstract utopia or matrix of propositions and ideas, but the American people.”

Vance has repeatedly returned to this “America First” – or perhaps “Americans First” – theme in speeches, drawing a line between what he castigates as Washington’s economic and foreign policy orthodoxy abroad and the struggles of the left-behind American working class at home.

At the Republican National Convention last summer, for example, he lamented how in small towns across the US “jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war”. And he attacked then-President Joe Biden, saying: “For half a century, he’s been a champion of every single policy initiative to make America weaker and poorer.”

But Vance is also someone who, after a tough upbringing in an Ohio family with Appalachian roots and sudden fame on the back of a bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, has tried out many different views.

Not only is he a former “Never Trumper” who described the US president in 2016 as “reprehensible” and “an idiot”, his book places much of the blame for the plight of the rural poor squarely on the choices made by individuals.

More recently he’s shifted that blame to elites – a group he’s variously defined as Democrats, conventional Republicans, liberals, corporate leaders, globalists and academics.

In speeches, Vance regularly argues that “America is not just an idea… America is a nation.”

He couples this statement with an anecdote about his family’s ancestral graveyard in Kentucky, where he says he, his wife and their children will one day be buried, arguing that family and homeland are more important than some of America’s traditional core ideas.

In Vance’s view, the Trump administration’s priority should be to make life better for Americans who have been in the country for generations, and yet have little of the nation’s vast wealth.

Rod Dreher, a conservative American writer who is also a friend of the vice-president, said Vance’s thinking arises from a belief that “moderate normie Republicans… failed to offer anything to stop the so-called forever wars, and they also failed to offer anything to ordinary Americans like where he comes from, who are suffering economically from globalism and from the effects of mass migration and fentanyl”.

“He got red-pilled, so to speak, by Donald Trump,” Dreher told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme this week.

“Red-pilled” is internet slang for suddenly waking up to a supposedly hidden truth, as featured in The Matrix movies. It’s commonly used by those on the right online who believe they have special access to reality and that people with liberal, centrist or establishment views are uncritical thinkers.

Vance is a vice-president who, more than his boss, seems extremely plugged into internet culture. He’s an enthusiastic user of X, often jumping directly into arguments rather than using it, as many politicians do, as a platform for announcements.

His appearances on fringe right-wing podcasts, while he was trying to drum up support for a Senate run, provided fodder for his opponents, as did provocative trollish comments such as that the US was being run by “childless cat ladies”.

Married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, he has rejected and been rejected by members of the alt-right even if he does echo some of their views. However, he does have friends and allies both at the top of Silicon Valley and in some of its lesser known corners.

After graduating from Yale Law School, he was brought into the world of venture capital by influential Silicon Valley conservative Peter Thiel, who later funded his US Senate campaign.

He has cited people like the blogger Curtis Yarvin, a key guru in the “neo-reactionary” movement which dreams up fantasies of technologically-assisted, hyper-capitalist societies led by powerful monarchs.

His familiarity with the internet’s fringes was further demonstrated when he spread false rumours about immigrants eating pets and an allegation about Ukrainian corruption – which the BBC traced back to Moscow.

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“He sort of stews in this online world,” said Cathy Young, a writer for the conservative, anti-Trump media outlet The Bulwark.

At the same time, Young said, his anecdote about family graveyards and homeland suggests another political tendency – a “disturbing undertone of nativism”.

“That bothers some people and rightly so,” she said. “Part of the American legacy is that we are a nation of immigrants. [Former Republican President] Ronald Reagan talked about that, about one of the distinctive things about this country is that anyone can come here from any part of the world and become an American.”

Vance’s “Americans First” thinking clearly extends to the issue of the war in Ukraine. When he was a senator, he was often critical of America’s involvement in the war and the huge sums spent on it, his former Senate colleague Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, recalled.

“His position then was very much like what it is now… that the conflict must end,” Hawley told the BBC. “It needs to end in a way that’s maximally advantageous to the security of the United States and it needs to end in a way that gets our European allies to take increased responsibility.”

Vance regularly accused the Biden administration of being more interested in Ukraine than in stemming illegal immigration. Writing in 2022, during his Senate campaign and after the Russian invasion, he said: “I will be damned if I am going to prioritise Ukraine’s eastern border right now when our own southern border is engulfed by a human tsunami of illegal migrants.”

His views burst out into the open during that dramatic argument with President Zelensky in the Oval Office. Vance accused Zelensky of lacking respect, of sending politicians on a “propaganda tour” of Ukraine and of being insufficiently thankful for US aid.

“Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country,” he told the Ukrainian president.

The argument left European leaders scrambling to defend Zelensky, while also trying to maintain negotiations over a possible peace deal.

Vance then prompted widespread outrage from allies when he poured scorn on the idea of security guarantees in the form of troops “from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”.

He later denied he was talking about the UK or France, the only two European countries that have publicly stated their willingness to send peacekeepers to Ukraine.

But the vice-president’s willingness to step on the toes of allies reflect a world view which, in his words, has little time for “moralisms about ‘this country is good’, ‘this country is bad'”.

“That doesn’t mean you have to have a complete moral blind spot, but it means that you have to be honest about the countries that you’re dealing with, and there’s a complete failure to do that with most of our foreign policy establishment in this country,” he told a New York Times columnist last year.

His tone has shifted from the two years he spent in the US Senate before being picked by Trump. Democrat Cory Booker remembered Vance as “very pragmatic and thoughtful”.

“That’s why some of this stuff surprises me,” Booker told the BBC.

• Vance’s cousin criticises him for ‘belittling’ Zelensky

Others detect the same disconnect.

David Frum, now a writer for The Atlantic magazine, said that Vance’s views have changed significantly from when he first commissioned the former marine, who was attending Ohio State University at the time, to write for his website on conservative politics more than 15 years ago.

“He was not in any way the culture warrior that he is today,” Frum said.

Frum, a former George W Bush speechwriter and staunch critic of Trump, said that Vance’s view of Russia represented “ideological admiration”.

In Munich, as he spoke about free speech, the vice-president cited cases involving conservatives and Christians in Western countries but avoided any mention of Russia’s harsh clampdowns on expression.

Vance and his allies reject that he is sympathetic to Putin.

“I’ve never once argued that Putin is a kind and friendly person,” Vance, then an Ohio senator, said in a speech at the 2024 Munich Security Conference.

“We don’t have to agree with him. We can contest him and we often will contest him,” he said. “But the fact that he’s a bad guy does not mean we can’t engage in basic diplomacy and prioritising America’s interests.”

The BBC has asked the White House for comment on Vance’s stance in relation to Ukraine and Russia.

A quick end to the conflict in Ukraine is, in Vance’s view, not only about putting a stop to billions of dollars being spent thousands of miles away.

He himself has said that there are bigger issues for the US and its friends to focus on than Ukraine, namely the threat of China, which he has called “our most significant competitor… for the next 20 or 30 years”.

Vance’s views on Ukraine and his willingness to publicly air them provided a dramatic moment in the early days of Trump’s second presidential term.

But it also offered a vivid illustration of the vice-president’s ideology, his prominence in the Trump administration and how he views America’s place in the world.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Residents of Greenland are going to the polls in a vote that in previous years has drawn little outside attention – but which may prove pivotal for the Arctic territory’s future.

US President Donald Trump’s repeated interest in acquiring Greenland has put it firmly in the spotlight and fuelled the longstanding debate on the island’s future ties with Copenhagen.

“There’s never been a spotlight like this on Greenland before,” says Nauja Bianco, a Danish-Greenlandic policy expert on the Arctic.

Greenland has been controlled by Denmark – nearly 3,000km (1,860 miles) away – for about 300 years. It governs its own domestic affairs, but decisions on foreign and defence policy are made in Copenhagen.

Now, five out of six parties on the ballot favour Greenland’s independence from Denmark, differing only on how quickly that should come about.

Voting takes place over 11 hours at 72 polling stations, and ends at 20:00 local time on Tuesday (22:00G).

The debate over independence has been “put on steroids by Trump”, says Masaana Egede, editor of Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq.

The island’s strategic location and untapped mineral resources have caught the US president’s eye. He first floated the idea of buying Greenland during his first term in 2019.

Since taking office again in January, he has reiterated his intention to acquire the territory. Greenland and Denmark’s leaders have repeatedly rebuffed his demands.

Addressing the US Congress last week, however, Trump again doubled down. “We need Greenland for national security. One way or the other we’re gonna get it,” he said, prompting applause and laughter from a number of politicians, including Vice-President JD Vance.

In Nuuk, his words struck a nerve with politicians who were quick to condemn them. “We deserve to be treated with respect and I don’t think the American president has done that lately since he took office,” Prime Minister Mute Egede said.

Still, the US interest has stoked calls for Greenland to break away from Denmark, with much of the debate focused on when – not if – the process of independence should begin.

Greenland’s independence goal is not new, Nauja Bianco points out, and has been decades in the making.

A string of revelations about past mistreatment of Inuit people by the Danes have hurt Greenlandic public opinion about Denmark. Earlier this year, PM Egede said the territory should free itself from “the shackles of colonialism”.

But it is the first time the subject has taken centre stage in an election.

Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA), the party of Prime Minister Mute Egede, favours gradual steps towards autonomy. “Citizens must feel secure,” he told local media.

Arctic expert Martin Breum says Egede’s handling of the challenge from Trump and strong words against Denmark over past colonial wrongdoings “will give him a lot of votes”.

Smaller rivals could also gain ground and potentially shake up alliances.

Opposition party Naleraq wants to immediately kick-off divorce proceedings from Copenhagen and have closer defence dealings with Washington.

Pointing to Greenland’s EU departure and Brexit, party leader Pele Broberg has said that Greenland could be “out of the Danish kingdom in three years”.

Naleraq is fielding the largest number of candidates and has gained momentum by riding the wave of discontent with Denmark.

“Naleraq will also be a larger factor too in parliament,” predicts Mr Breum, who says party candidates have performed well on TV and on social media.

However, the centre-right Demokraatit party believes it is too soon to push for independence.

“The economy will have to be much stronger than it is today,” party candidate Justus Hansen told Reuters.

Greenland’s economy is driven by fishing, and government spending relies on annual subsidies from Denmark.

Talk of Trump and independence has overshadowed other key issues for voters, says newspaper editor Masaana Egede.

“It’s an election where we should be talking about healthcare, care of the elderly and social problems. Almost everything is about independence.”

According to recent polls, almost 80% of Greenlanders back moves towards future statehood.

About 44,000 people are eligible to vote, and given the low numbers and few polls, results are difficult to forecast.

Even though a majority of Greenlanders favour independence, a survey has shown that half would be less enthusiastic about independence if that meant lower living standards.

One poll found that 85% of Greenlanders do not wish to become a part of the United States, and nearly half see Trump’s interest as a threat.

One fear among some Greenlanders, says Masaana Egede, is how long the Arctic island could remain independent and whether it would break off from Denmark only to have another country “standing on our coasts and start taking over”.

Experts say it is this worry that could steer votes towards keeping the status quo.

Although Greenland’s right to self-determination is enshrined into law by the 2009 Self-Rule Act, there are several steps to take before the territory could break away from Denmark, including holding a referendum.

This means getting full independence could take “about 10 to 15 years,” says Kaj Kleist, a veteran Greenlandic politician and civil servant who prepared the Self-Rule Act.

“There is lot of preparation and negotiations with the Danish government before you can make that a reality,” he adds.

Whatever the election’s outcome, experts do not believe Greenland could become independent before Trump’s second term is over in 2028.

The results are expected in the early hours of Wednesday.

Patients prescribed drugs for movement disorders – including restless leg syndrome (RLS) – say doctors did not warn them about serious side effects that led them to seek out risky sexual behaviour.

Twenty women have told the BBC that the drugs – given to them for RLS, which causes an irresistible urge to move – ruined their lives.

A report by drugs firm GSK – seen by the BBC – shows it learned in 2003 of a link between the medicines, known as dopamine agonist drugs, and what it described as “deviant” sexual behaviour. It cited a case of a man who had sexually assaulted a child while taking the drug for Parkinson’s.

While there is no explicit reference to this side effect in patient leaflets, the UK medicines regulator told us there was a general warning about increased libido and harmful behaviour. GSK says a risk of “altered” sexual interest is also referred to in the leaflets.

Some of the women who described being drawn to risky sexual behaviour told us they had no idea of what was causing it. Others said they felt compelled to gamble or shop with no history of such activities. One accumulated debts of more than £150,000.

Like many women, Claire first developed RLS during her pregnancies. The relentless need to move was often accompanied by sleeplessness and a crawling sensation under her skin.

The condition persisted after giving birth and she was prescribed the dopamine agonist drug Ropinirole. She says she was not warned by doctors of any side effects. It initially worked wonders for her RLS, she says, but after a year or so she began feeling unprecedented sexual urges.

“The only way I could describe it is it was just deviant,” she tells us – using that word without any knowledge of the GSK research which had established a link with such behaviour.

Claire says she began leaving her house in the early hours of the morning to cruise for sex. Wearing a see-through top and jacket, she would flash her chest at any man she could find. She did this regularly, she says, and in increasingly dangerous locations, despite having a partner.

“There remains an element in your head that knows what you’re doing is wrong, but it affects you to the point that you don’t know you’re doing it.”

Claire says it took years to connect these urges with her medication – and they disappeared almost immediately when she stopped taking it. She feels complete “shame” and is “mortified” at the danger she placed herself in.

• Listen to 5 Minutes On: The prescription drugs that gave me a gambling addiction

Impulsive behaviours, including gambling and increased sex drive, have long been listed as side effects in medicine leaflets for dopamine agonist drugs – and are thought to affect between 6% to 17% of RLS patients taking them, according to health guidance body NICE. A “common” side effect of any medicine is considered to only affect 1% of people who take it, according to the NHS.

The drugs work by mimicking the behaviour of dopamine, a natural chemical in our brains which helps regulate movement. It is known as the “happy hormone” because it is activated when something is pleasurable or we feel rewarded.

But agonist drugs can over-stimulate these feelings and under-stimulate the appreciation of consequences – leading to impulsive behaviour, according to academics.

The cases of what the GSK report from 2003 described as “deviant behaviour” involved two men who were prescribed Ropinirole for Parkinson’s disease. In one, a 63-year-old-man sexually assaulted a seven-year-old girl, leading to a custodial sentence.

The documents said the perpetrator’s libido had increased significantly from the start of his treatment with Ropinirole and his “libido problem subsequently resolved” after his dose was reduced.

In the second case, a 45-year-old man carried out “uncontrolled acts of exhibitionism and indecent behaviour”. His sex drive was reported to have increased prior to being prescribed Ropinirole but his urges “intensified” after the treatment.

Prevalence rates of what GSK calls “deviant” sexual behaviours caused by the drugs are unknown and tend to be under-reported by those who experience them, according to Valerie Voon, a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of Cambridge.

“There’s a lot of stigma and shame attached to it, and people don’t realise that it’s associated with a medication,” she says.

Prof Voon believes risky sexual behaviours – beyond a purely increased libido – should be specifically warned about and screened by the NHS, because their impact can be “devastating”.

RLS is believed to affect about one in 20 adults – and women are about twice as likely to suffer as men.

The 20 sufferers we spoke to say not only had doctors failed to tell them of the potentially serious side effects of the drugs, but also failed to review the impact of the medication on their bodies subsequently.

Sarah was in her 50s when she was prescribed another dopamine agonist drug made by a different manufacturer.

“Previously I’d have had no interest if Brad Pitt walked in the room naked,” she says. “But it turned me into this raging woman who kept taking sexual addiction further.”

Sarah began selling used underwear and videos of sex acts online – and organising telephone sex with strangers. She also began shopping compulsively – ending up with £30,000 of debt.

To combat the effects of the dopamine agonist, she began self-medicating by taking pain-relieving opioids and sleeping pills. She ended up being admitted to rehab – but that meant her driving licence was taken away and she lost her job.

“I turned to things that weren’t healthy – I knew that the behaviour wasn’t me, but I couldn’t control it,” she tells the BBC.

• If you have more information about this story, you can reach Noel directly and securely through encrypted messaging app Signal on: +44 7809 334720, by email at noel.titheradge@bbc.co.uk, external or on SecureDrop

A third woman, Sue, says she was prescribed two different dopamine agonist drugs without being warned of compulsive behaviour side effects on either occasion. She even mentioned recent gambling behaviour when the second drug was prescribed, she says. She went on to rack up debts of £80,000.

“The effect on my family was horrific – it was life-changing money to lose,” she says. “But at the time I didn’t know it was no fault of my own.”

A class action was brought against GSK in 2011 by four sufferers of Parkinson’s disease – the BBC has learned. They said Ropinirole led to gambling debts and broken relationships.

They also complained that despite a link between such behaviours and the drug having been established in medical studies as early as 2000, GSK had failed to include any warnings in its product literature until March 2007. The class action was settled but GSK denied liability.

Cases of serious side effects have also been reported in other countries, particularly in relation to the use of drugs for Parkinson’s disease.

In France, a court awarded damages to a father of two who complained that Ropinirole had given him compulsive homosexual urges, while another man without a criminal record began torturing cats.

In the US, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends the drugs should only be used for short-term treatment, such as end-of-life care.

Many of the women the BBC spoke to also complained that prolonged use of the drugs also worsened their underlying RLS. It meant their dosage had been increased which, in turn, had exacerbated their compulsive behaviour – a process known as augmentation.

Dr Guy Leschziner, a consultant neurologist, says the drugs still play an important role but he believes that drug companies, health authorities and doctors need to better warn patients of these side effects.

“Not everybody knows the kinds of really quite dramatic changes that can occur,” he says.

• If you would like help with any of the issues raised in this story, you can find sources of support from the BBC Action Line here

In a statement, GSK told the BBC Ropinirole had been prescribed for more than 17 million treatments and undergone “extensive clinical trials”. It added the drug had proven to be effective and had a “well-characterised safety profile”.

“As with all medicines, [it] has potential side effects and these are clearly stated in the prescribing information,” it said.

In response to its 2003 research that had found a link with “deviant” sexual behaviour, GSK told us this was shared with health authorities and had informed updates in prescribing information – which now lists “altered or increased sexual interest” and “behaviour of significant concern” as side effects.

The current patient information leaflet for Ropinirole makes specific reference to changes in sexual interest on five occasions – almost exclusively warning about the frequency or strength of such feelings as potentially “abnormally high”, “excessive” or “increase[d]”.

The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), said that while a specific reference to “deviant” sexual behaviour is not included in warnings, such impulses vary and a general warning about activities which may be harmful is included.

It also said that it is important for healthcare professionals to explain the possible risk to patients and not all experience these types of side effects.

The Department of Health and Social Care declined to comment.

Actor Gene Hackman was alone.

The two-time Academy Award winner didn’t make any calls and missed meals.

Medical experts say it’s possible the 95-year-old, who was in declining health and suffering from advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, did not even realise his wife of more than 30 years was dead in the home where he was living.

If he did, experts told the BBC, he likely went through various stages of confusion and grief, trying to wake her up before the disease caused him to become distracted or too overwhelmed to act – a process that likely repeated for days before he, too, died.

Officials in New Mexico say Betsy Arakawa, 65, died of a rare virus about seven days before Hackman perished on 18 February of natural causes.

The pair – and one of their dogs – were found dead in their Santa Fe home after neighbourhood security conducted a welfare check and saw their bodies on the ground through a window.

Authorities, at first, said the grim discovery was “suspicious enough” to launch an investigation.

Their remains were discovered in advanced stages of decomposition. Arakawa was found in a bathroom with scattered pills nearby. Hackman was found near the kitchen with a cane and sunglasses. One of their three dogs was found dead in a crate.

But a police investigation found no foul play.

Instead, the case has shed light on the grim realities of Alzheimer’s disease, which damages and destroys cells in one’s brain over time – taking away memory and other important mental functions.

“It’s like he was living in a reel,” Catherine V Piersol, PhD, an occupational therapist with decades of experience in dementia care, told the BBC of how Hackman may have experienced the repeated loss of his wife.

She noted patients with advanced Alzheimer’s disease like the actor live in the present and are unable to both look back at moments in the past or look forward and act.

“I imagine he would be trying to wake her up and not being successful. But then [he] could have been distracted in another room because of one of the dogs or something,” she described.

Then later, he’d again notice his wife on the ground and would “live through it again”, she said.

Though no one knows how Hackman spent his last days alive, the grim nature of the possibilities were discussed by authorities and the area’s medical examiner.

At a press conference last week, Dr Heather Jarrell, New Mexico’s chief medical examiner, said Arakawa died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), a respiratory illness caused by exposure to infected rodents. Hackman’s death was the result of significant heart disease, with Alzheimer’s disease as a contributing factor.

Given Hackman’s advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, it is “quite possible that he was not aware that she [his wife] was deceased”, Dr Jarrell said.

His autopsy indicated he had not eaten recently, though he showed no signs of dehydration. Officials found no evidence that he had communicated with anyone after his wife’s death and could not determine whether he was able to care for himself.

Ms Piersol said patients with advanced Alzheimer’s aren’t able to pick up on environmental cues like light and darkness, making it harder to determine when he should eat, sleep or bathe.

“Those [cues] are oftentimes just, no longer available to people at this stage of dementia,” she said.

Dr Brendan Kelley, a neurologist who specialises in memory and cognition at UT Southwestern Medical Center, explained why Hackman may also not have been able to call authorities for help. He said Alzheimer’s disease can leave patients caught between emotional discomfort and the inability to act on it.

“A person might feel worried or frightened, but at the same time they might not be capable to take the actions that you or I might normally think to do in order to alleviate that worry or concern, such as calling somebody else, or going to speak to a neighbour.”

Dr Kelley says Alzheimer’s patients experience emotions like pain and sadness, and experience physical needs like hunger and thirst, it’s just harder for them to identify what they are feeling.

He said missing meals could also increase levels of confusion and agitation.

The couple’s deaths and the startling details of Hackman living in the home for a week after his wife’s passing has shocked the Santa Fe area, where the couple had lived for more than 20 years.

“It’s just absolutely devastating,” says Jeffery Gomez, a long-time resident of the city, who remembers seeing Hackman around town in his different cars, always with a smile on his face.

His partner, Linda, said the details were triggering, explaining she cared for her elderly mother with dementia. “Even when you have help, it’s a lot,” she said.

“We know Gene and his wife were very private people and she was probably trying to shield him from the public,” she added, “but the thought of doing that alone? It’s a lot to shoulder.”

Laura N Gitlin, PhD, a behavioural scientist who researches ways to support caregivers told the BBC, this is becoming a common problem among caregivers.

“With the aging of a population, we also simultaneously have a shrinking of the number of people in the family, number of children, or relatives who live nearby,” she explained.

Ms Gitlin noted along with there being fewer caregivers, there is less support for these individuals on making big decisions – such as when it’s time to place a loved one in a home instead of caring for them by yourself.

Jeffery Gomez said he couldn’t understand how no one checked in on the couple for such a long while.

“It breaks my heart he was alone so long.”

Senior Ukrainian and US officials are meeting today in Saudi Arabia to discuss how the war in Ukraine ends.

The US says it’s to agree on a “framework” for a ceasefire and eventual peace deal.

For Kyiv, it is also a chance to patch up its relationship with Washington and muscle in on a process it is yet to be involved in.

It will propose an aerial and naval ceasefire in an initial truce, as well as try to revive a critical mineral deal, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “will sign at any time”.

The Ukrainian hope is that, with a renewed US buy-in, the pressure would be put back on Russia to compromise too.

“Seventy percent of our critical minerals are still underground,” explains Ihor Semko as he gives a tour of the Zavallya quarry – the largest graphite quarry in Europe – of which he is in charge.

In the rural tranquillity of central Ukraine, this man-made canyon is the by-product of 61 years of mining. A lake is flanked by layers of browns: rust, clay and beige, with the gradual excavation of earth.

“We currently have seven million tonnes of graphite ore left, which means 12 more years of work,” says Ihor in a direct style you’d almost expect from the director of a graphite factory.

But the heavy steel of the Soviet-era diggers lies dormant for 11 months of the year.

The reason for this is that the plant is losing money as nervous investors pull out with the ongoing war.

It’s why Zelensky offered up his country’s natural minerals as part of a possible ceasefire deal with the US.

The proposal is thought to be a co-owned cash pot which would receive 50% of the profits from Ukraine’s critical minerals, as well as oil and gas. The money would then be invested in the country’s recovery.

“If the Americans were to invest in a 50-50 partnership, it would be beneficial,” says Ihor. “There would be new jobs, salaries for workers and income for the owners.”

“I think if it wasn’t profitable for Ukraine, there would be no discussions about any agreements at all.”

• What we know about US-Ukraine minerals deal
• What minerals does Ukraine have and what are they used for?

What Ukraine’s leader couldn’t have predicted was how hostile the US’s position would become.

In return for giving the US a slice of its future wealth, Zelensky had wanted security guarantees – military assurances in case Russia breaks a future ceasefire.

But the White House hasn’t offered any, and instead has withdrawn vital military support to force a Ukrainian compromise.

It seems to have worked.

US President Donald Trump believes just the presence of American companies digging for critical minerals would put Russia off from invading Ukraine again.

US businesses didn’t exactly put Russian President Vladimir Putin off last time, but Zelensky has no choice but to agree, for now.

Graphite at the Zavallya quarry is processed at the sprawling refinery site a short distance from the canyon.

At its height, up to 60,000 tonnes passed through here every month, now it’s around 5,000.

It’s sorted into different grades before being sold around the world to make products like batteries, solar panels and the motors found in electric cars.

As it is for most of the year, it’s an industrial ghost town.

It’s why Valerii Kharkovets, a chief engineer, would welcome an investment in any form.

“Security guarantees are unlikely, as this agreement is more economic than military,” he says.

“But if foreign companies are involved, those Ukrainian territories might be left alone.”

For Ukraine and the US to make a profit in critical minerals, it could take decades. But Kyiv needs to secure more than just an investment in Saudi Arabia.

If, as reports suggest, a minerals agreement isn’t enough to win the Trump administration over, a herculean diplomatic effort will be required as well.

Neither Ukraine nor its European friends can afford a repeat of the verbal exchange we saw in the Oval Office.

A shorter winter has literally left Nitin Goel out in the cold.

For 50 years, his family’s clothing business in India’s northwestern textile city of Ludhiana has made jackets, sweaters and sweatshirts. But with the early onset of summer this year, the company is staring at a washout season and having to shift gears.

“We’ve had to start making t-shirts instead of sweaters as the winter is getting shorter with each passing year. Our sales have halved in the last five years and are down a further 10% during this season,” Goel told the BBC. “The only recent exception to this was Covid, when temperatures dropped significantly.”

Across India as cool weather beats a hasty retreat, anxieties are building up at farms and factories, with cropping patterns and business plans getting upended.

Data from the Indian Meteorological Department shows that last month was India’s hottest February in 125 years. The weekly average minimum temperature was also above normal by 1-3C in many parts of the country.

Above-normal maximum temperatures and heatwaves are likely to persist over most parts of the country between March and May, the weather agency has warned.

For small business owners like Goel, such erratic weather has meant much more than just slowing sales. His whole business model, practised and perfected over decades, has had to change.

Goel’s company supplies clothes to multi-brand outlets across India. And they are no longer paying him on delivery, he says, instead adopting a “sale or return” model where consignments not sold are returned to the company, entirely transferring the risk to the manufacturer.

He has also had to offer bigger discounts and incentives to his clients this year.

“Big retailers haven’t picked up goods despite confirmed orders,” says Goel, adding that some small businesses in his town have had to shut shop as a result.

Nearly 1,200 miles away in Devgad town on India’s western coast, the heat has wreaked havoc on India’s much-loved Alphonso mango orchards.

“Production this year would be only around 30% of the normal yield,” said Vidyadhar Joshi, a farmer who owns 1,500 trees.

The sweet, fleshy and richly aromatic Alphonso is a prized export from the region, but yields across the districts of Raigad, Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri, where the variety is predominantly grown, are lower, according to Joshi.

“We might make losses this year,” Joshi adds, because he has had to spend more than usual on irrigation and fertilisers in a bid to salvage the crop.

According to him, many other farmers in the area were even sending labourers, who come from Nepal to work in the orchards, back home because there wasn’t enough to do.

Scorching heat is also threatening winter staples such as wheat, chickpea and rapeseed.

While the country’s agriculture minister has dismissed concerns about poor yields and predicted that India will have a bumper wheat harvest this year, independent experts are less hopeful.

Heatwaves in 2022 lowered yields by 15-25% and “similar trends could follow this year”, says Abhishek Jain of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (Ceew) think tank.

India – the world’s second largest wheat producer – will have to rely on expensive imports in the event of such disruptions. And its protracted ban on exports, announced in 2022, may continue for even longer.

Economists are also worried about the impact of rising temperatures on availability of water for agriculture.

Reservoir levels in northern India have already dropped to 28% of capacity, down from 37% last year, according to Ceew. This could affect fruit and vegetable yields and the dairy sector, which has already experienced a decline in milk production of up to 15% in some parts of the country.

“These things have the potential to push inflation up and reverse the 4% target that the central bank has been talking about,” says Madan Sabnavis, Chief Economist with Bank of Baroda.

Food prices in India have recently begun to soften after remaining high for several months, leading to rate cuts after a prolonged pause.

GDP in Asia’s third largest economy has also been supported by accelerating rural consumption recently after hitting a seven-quarter low last year. Any setback to this farm-led recovery could affect overall growth, at a time when urban households have been cutting back and private investment hasn’t picked up.

Think tanks like Ceew say a range of urgent measures to mitigate the impact of recurrent heatwaves needs to be thought through, including better weather forecasting infrastructure, agriculture insurance and evolving cropping calendars with climate models to reduce risks and improve yields.

As a primarily agrarian country, India is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

Ceew estimates three out of every four Indian districts are “extreme event hotspots” and 40% exhibit what is called “a swapping trend” – which means traditionally flood-prone areas are witnessing more frequent and intense droughts and vice-versa.

The country is expected to lose about 5.8% of daily working hours due to heat stress by 2030, according to one estimate. Climate Transparency, the advocacy group, had pegged India’s potential income loss across services, manufacturing, agriculture and construction sectors from labour capacity reduction due to extreme heat at $159bn in 2021- or 5.4% of its GDP.

Without urgent action, India risks a future where heatwaves threaten both lives and economic stability.

For the crew onboard the Stena Immaculate, the cargo ship which was about to plough into them seemed to just “come out of the blue”.

Within seconds, fires began to break out. Soon the flames were tearing through the jet fuel-laden vessel, triggering several explosions.

More than 24 hours later, the other ship involved in the collision – the Solong – is still ablaze and drifting out of control in the North Sea.

BBC News has spoken to eyewitnesses who have recounted how the crash and evacuation unfolded over 30 life-or-death minutes.

The Stena Immaculate – which was carrying fuel on behalf of the US military – was anchored outside the port of Hull and almost entirely stationary when it was hit at 09:48 GMT on Monday.

An experienced American sailor who was on the oil tanker when it was struck gave CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, a first-hand account.

The sailor – who did not give his name as crew are not allowed to speak to the media – was standing close to the point of impact and had seconds to react.

• North Sea tanker collision – what we know so far

He recalled hearing the shouts of his fellow crew members as they warned each other to brace.

It felt as though the Solong was driving into the side of the Stena Immaculate for 10 minutes, the sailor said.

Other crew members described how it appeared nobody was on the bridge of the Solong at the moment of the crash, he added.

An investigation into the cause of the collision has only just begun but the transport minister said it is clear something went “terribly wrong”.

Data from MarineTraffic appears to show the Solong was travelling at 16 knots (18 mph).

Flames immediately began erupting from the vessel, he said, and the crew jumped into action, putting on protective gear to battle the blaze.

“Everybody had only seconds to react”, the sailor said.

It was a “textbook” operation for the crew who had trained for a disaster like this.

Another sailor who was onboard the Stena Immaculate told BBC News he had been blindsided by the impact and described how the severity of the situation dawned on him.

“My eyes were locked on the flames… all I did was still pretty foggy,” he said.

“I looked down, I saw the containers. I looked up, and I briefly saw that it was a ship, and then [I saw] the fire.”

That was when his training kicked in, he recounted, and he joined efforts to fight the flames.

But it did not take long before they realised battling the inferno was hopeless and their ship was a lost cause.

The decision was made to abandon.

The Stena Immaculate’s crew ran to their cabins to get what they needed.

They grabbed emergency equipment and life jackets, before hurrying back to the pre-arranged mustering point.

A headcount was carried out to ensure they had all made it to the lifeboats.

As they climbed in, the fast-spreading flames were lapping at the sailors, creeping so close that they singed the hair of some of them.

All 23 sailors got off the oil tanker safely and made it back to shore.

The captain was the last to disembark.

On Monday evening, some of the Stena Immaculate crew were in a Grimsby supermarket shopping for clothes. One told BBC News he left the vessel with nothing but his wallet and phone.

Less is known about how events unfolded on the Solong, a Portuguese-flagged cargo ship which was sailing from Scotland to the Netherlands when it struck the Stena Immaculate.

There were 14 crew members on board at the time, 13 of whom were brought back to shore.

Coastguard vessels and aircraft were scrambled to search for the missing sailor.

Lifeboats from Bridlington, Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe and Skegness joined response.

But around 12 hours later, with the North Sea in pitch dark, the search was called off and the working assumption is now that the missing sailor was killed in the incident.

His identity has not been publicly confirmed.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Solong cargo ship was drifting southward and continuing to burn.

The lawsuits between actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has shed light on a secretive group of people in Hollywood who operate behind the scenes to keep a lid on fallouts and scandals. But in recent years their role has shifted – and their challenges multiplied

“She’s a phony, but I guess the public likes that…” This is the line that actress Joan Crawford is said to have declared about film star Bette Davis.

The back-and-forth sniping between the pair played out in public in the 1930s and 40s. “Bette is a survivor… She survived herself,” Crawford also apparently remarked.

Their tempestuous relationship was so notorious that in 2017 it was made into an Emmy award-winning TV series, Feud.

Hollywood rivalries are of course nothing new – yet conflicts today rarely play out so publicly. That might be why the dispute between actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, which spilled out into the open in December 2024, is still in the headlines three months on.

The subsequent legal battle brought to light a fallout during production of the film It Ends With Us. After the promotional and cinematic run had ended, the pair – who didn’t appear on the red carpet together at the premiere in New York – filed lawsuits against each other.

Lively has accused Baldoni and others of carrying out a smear campaign against her after she complained about alleged sexual harassment on set. Baldoni, meanwhile, has accused Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds and their publicist of carrying out a smear campaign against him, and claims that she tried to take over control of the film. Both sides deny all allegations.

What emerged as this all played out is that crisis PR managers had been employed. Legal representatives for Lively obtained numerous text messages between Baldoni’s publicist Jennifer Abel and the crisis team he retained, led by Melissa Nathan, whose previous clients include Johnny Depp and Drake. Ms Nathan was alleged to have texted Ms Abel, “You know we can bury anyone.”

Lively has now reportedly taken on the CIA’s former deputy chief of staff Nick Shapiro to advise on her legal communications strategy.

While the outcomes of the lawsuits remain to be seen, the feud has cast the spotlight on an industry that would ordinarily remain largely invisible: that is, the publicity machine at work behind the scenes in Hollywood.

“On every set, there are fights, liaisons… there are all sorts of things that go on,” explains Richard Rushfield, founder and columnist at Hollywood newsletter The Ankler. “Hollywood is a world full of very messy people coming together for these giant projects, where they put together teams quickly to make these things and disband immediately after.

“Between all that a lot of stuff goes on, and they deal with it quietly – they’re very obsessive about controlling the narrative. When this stuff explodes into the public, beyond control, it makes everyone very nervous.”

But the world of the Hollywood PR has shifted in recent years, partly because of the growth of social media, which has changed the relationship between celebrities and fans, bringing them into direct contact and removing some of the mystique.

So, what does that mean for the people whose job it is to keep a lid on the industry’s messy reality?

Few fallouts have spilled out into the open in recent years – and those that did were picked over simply because they’re so rare. Actor Dwayne Johnson revealed “a fundamental difference in philosophies on how we approach moviemaking and collaborating” with his Fast & Furious co-star Vin Diesel, in a 2018 interview.

The stars of another action film, Mad Max: Fury Road, Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy, are reported to have filmed many of their scenes separately.

And then there were the alleged tensions between Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker, who were co-stars of Sex and the City, which ran for six years. In 2018, after Parker offered condolences for Cattrall’s brother’s death, Cattrall responded on social media, calling Parker a “hypocrite” and stating, “You are not my family. You are not my friend.”

But behind the scenes, hundreds of other spats will never see the light of day. “Some of a publicist’s best work may never be seen,” says Daniel Bee, a publicist and brand consultant based in Los Angeles, “because it stopped something that was wrong, or re-crafted something to a different narrative, or pointed the light in a different direction.

“The most interesting stuff I’ve ever done as a publicist is the stuff nobody will ever know about.”

Since Daniel Bee started out as an entertainment publicist in 1997, he has observed a shift in the wider industry. “I started my career in the British media, there were 11 national newspapers competing with each other. It was a bear pit, hard work, and it was getting to know individuals via relationships.

“Now, you’re up against an anonymous algorithm and accounts where you don’t know who you’re up against. It’s harder to control than ever before.”

Certainly, social media has posed challenges for those attempting to control narratives around major films and their stars – while also heralding new forms of “dark arts” through which publicists can attempt to shape opinion.

“There has always been an army of advisors and consultants doing PR voodoo,” says Eriq Gardner, entertainment law expert and founding partner of Puck News. “While I’d love to say the public is media-literate and savvy enough to read between the lines to see the spin, the truth is there are a lot of powerful forces at play and sometimes a large amount of misinformation.”

So-called PR voodoo is different now that a celebrity – or their fans – can access an audience of millions with a click.

While the publicists of previous eras might only have had to worry about print and broadcast platforms, smartphones and social media mean today’s digital landscape is a wild west where anyone can shape their own narrative. A badly judged post or comment can damage an actor’s career.

But the flipside is a whole new medium in which PRs can practise their “voodoo”.

One of the tactics is “astroturfing” – or disguising an orchestrated campaign as a spontaneous up-swelling of public opinion.

This works by manipulating public opinion and creating a false impression of grassroots support (hence the name) or opposition, often coordinated through social media accounts in a way that seems organic.

The practice isn’t new, but has been given new life with the advent of social media algorithms.

“It’s deliberately planting disinformation, or twisted versions of the truth, in certain sections of social media,” says Carla Speight, founder of the PR Mastery app. “The aim is the halfway point of influential where they will get a bit of traction, but so that it’s not too obvious – you wouldn’t hire a Kardashian to do it.

“It’s built up in layers,” she continues. “It’s like playing a very sinister game of chess. You’re putting all the pieces in the right places, just the right amount of mixed-up information, and then you just watch it explode.”

Although the posts might appear to be genuine public opinion, in fact it’s a faked crowd – whether that’s made up of bots or real people, who can be paid to coordinate their posts.

“All it takes is one or two people to create a meme and put it with the right people,” says Ms Speight. “It needs to appear as a trend, and then it’s gone. Something is dripped here, something else over there, and when it’s done well… it causes a bit of mischief.”

But all of this is simply a new platform for an age-old trend that has been going on long before the advent of social media, according to Mr Bee. “Undetected smear campaigns have always been a thing,” he points out.

“Previously it would have been a publicist whispering to a diarist of a national newspaper. The issue with digital media is it’s anonymous and untraceable.”

What has changed, he continues, is that audiences have become savvier. “Whereas before, a quite subservient audience would just take what was given to them in the media, with natural scepticism, curiosity, and a greater level of information, I think people use more critical thinking.”

Eriq Gardner is less convinced: “I’m not sure the public approaches what they read with enough scepticism.”

And yet those in the industry are often alert to it. According to Ms Speight, “Usually, there’s a distinct sort of tell, and it may be the PR thing where we have ‘spidey senses’ and we can sort of see it, but you’re asking, ‘Where has that come from? Who started that?’ And when there’s never a specific place to point it to, that’s usually a tell-tale sign.”

What’s clear, though, is that, with studios providing some publications with significant advertising revenue, as well as supplying talent for special events and front covers, revelations often emerge elsewhere in the media.

“When [scandals] come out, it’s usually from places outside of Hollywood,” argues Mr Rushfield. “The Harvey Weinstein story was broken by The New York Times and the New Yorker.”

It was The New York Times that first reported Lively’s legal complaint in December. “It’s one of the few places that can afford to do that, and then everyone else jumped in so nobody was sticking their neck out.” Baldoni filed a $250 million lawsuit against the New York Times in December, although a federal judge indicated this week that it might be dismissed.

Even when bigger outlets break news about Hollywood disputes, the growing dominance of social media means that stories might not have the same cut-through they had previously.

Doreen St Felix, a writer who was previously an editor on Lena Dunham’s newsletter, recently wrote in The New Yorker that stories of harassment and abuse, for example, now receive a “curdled, cynical, and exhausted reception” – this, less than a decade after the emergence of the MeToo movement.

She went on to claim that: “The late 2010s genre of #MeToo reportage cannot thrive on today’s volatile internet. Information is misinformation and vice versa. Victims are offenders and offenders are victims.”

Sometimes, however, the best way for publicists to prevent stories being amplified is by bypassing social media entirely when reacting to a scandal.

“If you give it to the press first, they don’t quote as many of the comments on social media,” says Ms Speight. “You control the narrative completely, because the comments come afterwards.”

Mr Rushfield points out that very little of the revelations in the entertainment press comes out because someone “uncovered” something. “Almost everything you read is there because somebody placed it there – somebody is dictating a story.”

None of this industry would exist if the appetite weren’t there and if the viewing public didn’t want to unpick details about their lives – and rifts. And yet attitudes towards celebrity have undoubtedly changed since the advent of social media.

“It’s now a two-way communication, which it never was before,” points out Mr Bee. “It was generally celebrities, or lawyer or government or whatever, just saying something that gets reported, and that message is conveyed. Now, you have to be prepared for a two-way conversation.”

But he thinks there are different attitudes to the media today than in the era of celebrity gossip magazines. Nodding to the UK, he continues: “We had the Leveson Inquiry, we’re about to get an ITV drama about phone hacking – it’s as if the curtain has been lifted.”

As for the Lively and Baldoni lawsuits, it’s not clear how these will play out – but the very fact that it has so unusually spilled into the public domain is a reminder of how well-oiled the Hollywood publicity machine is the rest of the time. And that is unlikely to change soon.

Greenland residents head to the polls on Tuesday after Prime Minister Mute Egede called early parliamentary elections.

The vote comes after US President Donald Trump restated his desire to take over the island – currently controlled by Denmark – telling Congress that it was bound to become a US territory “one way or another”.

Almost all the political parties taking part in the election back independence from Denmark, but disagree on how quickly it should happen.

• Greenland heads to the polls as Trump eyes territory

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is located in the Arctic.

It is also the most sparsely populated territory. About 56,000 people live there, mostly indigenous Inuit people.

About 80% of its territory is covered by ice, meaning most people live on the south-western coast around the capital, Nuuk.

An autonomous – or self-governing – territory of Denmark, it is also home to Danish and US military bases.

Greenland’s economy is mainly based on fishing. Large subsidies from the Danish government account for about a fifth of its income, or GDP.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in Greenland’s natural resources, including mining for rare earth minerals, uranium and iron.

These may become more accessible as global warming leads to some of the ice covering Greenland to melt.

• Inside the race for Greenland’s mineral wealth

Located geographically within North America, Greenland has been controlled by Denmark – nearly 3,000km (1,860 miles) away – for about 300 years.

The island was governed as a colony until the mid-20th Century. For much of this time, it remained isolated and poor.

In 1953, it was made part of the Kingdom of Denmark and Greenlanders became Danish citizens.

In 1979, a referendum on home rule gave Greenland control of most policies within the territory, with Denmark retaining control over foreign affairs and defence.

The US has long maintained a security interest in Greenland. After Nazi Germany occupied mainland Denmark during World War Two, the US invaded Greenland, establishing military and radio stations across the territory.

After the war, US forces remained in Greenland. Pituffik Space Base, formerly known as Thule Air Base, has been operated by the US ever since.

In 1951, a defence agreement with Denmark granted the US a significant role in the defence of the territory, including the right to build and maintain military bases.

“If Russia were to send missiles towards the US, the shortest route for nuclear weapons would be via the North Pole and Greenland,” said Marc Jacobsen, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College.

“That’s why the Pituffik Space Base is immensely important in defending the US.”

China and Russia have begun building up their Arctic military capabilities in recent years, according to an Arctic Institute paper. The paper called for the US to further develop its presence in the Arctic to counter its rivals.

In January, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said Denmark was open to discussions with the US, adding that Washington had “legitimate” interests in the region.

“We see a Russia that is arming itself. We see a China that is also starting to take an interest,” Rasmussen said.

Trump is also likely interested in the mining potential across Greenland’s vast landmass, Mr Jacobsen added, especially the rare earth minerals in the south.

• Danes struggle with response to Trump Greenland threat

During his speech to Congress, Trump said that control of Greenland was essential “for national security and international security.”

He said he strongly supported the people of Greenland’s right to determine their own future.

“If you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America,” he added.

Though the president’s rhetoric may seem unusual, a succession of US presidents have tried to gain control of Greenland for more than a century.

“The US has tried a few times to push the Danes out of Greenland and take it over as part of the US, or at least to have full security tutelage of Greenland,” said Lukas Wahden, the author of 66° North, a newsletter on Arctic security.

In 1867, after buying Alaska from Russia, US Secretary of State William H Seward led negotiations to buy Greenland from Denmark, but failed to reach any agreement.

In 1946, the US offered to pay $100m (equivalent to $1.2bn; £970m today) for the territory, judging that it was vital for national security, but the Danish government refused.

Trump also tried to buy Greenland during his first presidential term.

Both Denmark and the Greenlandic government rejected the 2019 proposal, saying: “Greenland is not for sale.”

The debate over the territory’s independence has been “put on steroids by Trump”, according to Masaana Egede, editor of the newspaper Sermitsiaq.

According to recent polls, almost 80% of Greenlanders back independence from Denmark.

But an opinion survey in January found that 85% of Greenlanders rejected the idea of becoming part of the US, versus 6% who wanted it. The rest were undecided.

When BBC correspondent Fergal Keane visited the island in January, he said he heard one phrase again and again: “Greenland belongs to Greenlanders. So, Trump can visit but that’s it.”

The issue has taken centre stage in the election.

“We deserve to be treated with respect and I don’t think the American president has done that lately since he took office,” said Prime Minister Egede.

He previously said the territory should free itself from “the shackles of colonialism”, but wanted to take gradual steps towards autonomy.

In contrast, the opposition party Naleraq wants to immediately start divorce proceedings from Denmark and have closer defence dealings with Washington.

When Trump first raised the idea of buying Greenland in 2019, many locals told the BBC they were opposed to the proposal.

“This is a very dangerous idea,” said Dines Mikaelsen, a tour operator who was born and raised in Tasiilaq, east Greenland.

“He’s treating us like a good he can purchase,” said Aleqa Hammond, Greenland’s first female prime minister.

A Kurdish-led militia alliance which controls north-eastern Syria has signed a deal to integrate all military and civilian institutions into the Syrian state, the country’s presidency says.

The agreement, which includes a complete cessation of hostilities, says the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) will hand over control of the region’s border posts, airport, and vital oil and gas fields.

It also recognises the Kurdish minority as “an integral part of the Syrian state” and guarantees “the rights of all Syrians to representation and participation in the political process”.

SDF commander Mazloum Abdi called the deal a “real opportunity to build a new Syria”.

“We are committed to building a better future that guarantees the rights of all Syrians and fulfils their aspirations for peace and dignity,” he wrote on X after signing the deal in Damascus on Monday alongside interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

The deal represents a major step towards Sharaa’s goal to unify the fractured country after his Sunni Islamist group led the rebel offensive that overthrew president Bashar al-Assad in December and ended 13 years of devastating civil war.

It could also de-escalate the SDF’s conflict with neighbouring Turkey and Turkish-backed Syrian former rebel factions allied to the government, which are trying to push the alliance out of areas near the border.

There were celebrations welcoming the announcement of the deal on the streets of several cities on Monday night, with many people expressing relief at a time when Syria is facing several other threats to its stability.

The recent mass killings of Alawite civilians in the western coastal region during clashes between security forces and Assad loyalists have sparked calls for international protection for Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities and amplified voices promoting division.

There is also concern about the south, where some Druze militias in Suweida province have been reluctant to lay down their arms. However, Suweida residents said representatives met Sharaa in Damascus on Monday and a deal like the SDF’s was expected soon.

Israel has also threatened to intervene to protect the Druze from the government, which it considers a threat. It has also carried out an air campaign to destroy much of Syria’s military capabilities and seized a demilitarised buffer zone next to the occupied Golan Heights.

The SDF, which has tens of thousands of well-armed and well-trained fighters, was not aligned with either Assad’s regime or the opposition during the civil war.

It currently controls more than 46,000 sq km (18,000 sq miles) of territory in the north-east, where it defeated the Islamic State (IS) group in 2019 with the help of a US-led coalition.

The SDF plays a major role in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), which governs the region also known to Kurds as Rojava.

About 10,000 IS fighters are being detained in SDF-run prisons spread across the region and about 45,000 other people linked to IS, mostly women and children, are held in several camps.

Since the fall of Assad, the SDF has warned that attacks from Turkish-backed factions are forcing it to divert fighters away from guarding the prisons and paving the way for an IS resurgence.

The Turkish government views the biggest militia in the SDF, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), as a terrorist organisation. It says it the YPG is an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) group that waged an insurgency in Turkey for decades but whose imprisoned leader recently declared a ceasefire.

There was no immediate comment from Turkey in response to Monday’s agreement. However, Turkish officials have previously called for all Kurdish-led groups in north-eastern Syria to dissolve and integrate with the new government.

Several Arab countries welcomed the deal, with Saudi Arabia and Qatar both describing it as an important step towards maintaining “civil peace”.

Between 25 and 35 million Kurds inhabit a mountainous region straddling the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Armenia. They make up the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, but they have never obtained a permanent nation state.

Syria’s Kurds, which make up about make up about 10% of the population, were suppressed and denied basic rights during the Assad family’s rule.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to deport Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested over the weekend by immigration agents.

Mr Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and permanent US resident, played a key role in last year’s Gaza war protests at the Ivy League campus in New York City.

The arrest is part of President Donald Trump’s pledge to crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses, in what he called “the first arrest of many to come”.

Protesters gathered in New York City on Monday afternoon pushing for Mr Khalil’s release and condemning the Trump administration’s actions.

A crowd waving Palestinian flags gathered in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square soon after it was reported that the US had attempted to deport Khalil. The protesters later marched further south toward city hall. At least one person was detained.

“We’re facing a horrifying reality that our own student, a member of the Columbia community, has become a political prisoner here in the United States,” Columbia University Professor Michael Thaddeus said in a statement.

The judge set a hearing for Wednesday where Mr Khalil is expected to make an appearance, according to court documents.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents informed Mr Khalil they were revoking his student visa and green card upon taking him into custody on Saturday, his lawyer said.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused the former student of “leading activities aligned to Hamas” but provided no details. The BBC has asked the agency for further information on the allegations.

Trump has previously stated that foreign students found to be “terrorist sympathisers” would face deportation. Mr Khalil is the first known detainee under this policy.

His lawyer, Amy Greer, condemned his detention as “terrible and inexcusable”, calling it part of “the US government’s open repression of student activism and political speech”.

Mr Khalil, a Palestinian refugee who was born in Syria, has not been charged with any crime.

ICE agents detained him at his university-owned Manhattan apartment and initially placed him in a New Jersey immigration facility before transferring him to a detention centre in Jena, Louisiana, according to ICE records.

His attorney claims ICE also threatened to arrest his wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant. When she attempted to visit him in New Jersey, officials told her he was not there.

Columbia University stated that law enforcement can enter campus property with a warrant but denied that university leadership had invited ICE agents.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reaffirmed the administration’s stance, posting on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

The Trump administration announced last week it was rescinding $400m (£310m) in federal grants to Columbia, accusing it of failing to fight antisemitism on campus.

Columbia was the epicentre last year of pro-Palestinian student protests nationwide against the war in Gaza and US support for Israel.

Mr Khalil was lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest when its protesters set up a huge tent encampment on the university lawn in protest against the Gaza war.

He later told the BBC he had been temporarily suspended by the university, where he was a graduate student at the School of International and Public Affairs.

New York Civil Liberties Union President Donna Lieberman called his deportation “targeted retaliation and an extreme attack on the First Amendment.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James said she was “extremely concerned” and monitoring the case.

Some Jewish students at Columbia said that the protest rhetoric had at times crossed the line into antisemitism last year. School officials raised this and other safety concerns when they announced that classes would be fully remote until the end of the 2024 spring semester.

But many contested the accusations of antisemitism, and Jewish students also joined the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Carly, a Jewish-American graduate student at Columbia and a friend of Mr Khalil, rejected the characterisation. She told the BBC that the detainee was a “very, very caring soul”.

“He has been very targeted online and just seeing how he has been so misrepresented, it’s very painful, as someone who knows him on a personal level,” said Carly, who declined to share her surname for privacy reasons.

Speaking on Fox News, Trump’s border tsar Tom Homan alleged that Mr Khalil had violated the terms of his visa by “locking down buildings and destroying property”.

The Israeli military launched its campaign against Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack into Israel on 7 October 2023, which left about 1,200 people dead and 251 taken hostage.

More than 48,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in Israel’s military action, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Air India has confirmed that one of its flights from the US was forced to turn around last week after passengers trying to flush away plastic bags, rags and clothes clogged up most of its toilets.

The plane, which was heading from Chicago to India’s capital Delhi, spent several hours in the air before it returned to the US city.

Video clips from inside the aircraft showed scenes of confusion as passengers huddled around crew members who seemed to be explaining the situation.

The incident has stirred a lively debate on social media, with many Indians weighing in on aeroplane bathroom etiquette.

The incident took place on 5 March on Air India Flight 126, according to a statement by the airline released on Monday.

About two hours into the flight, crew members reported that some of the toilets were “unserviceable”.

Subsequently, they found eight of the 12 toilets in business and economy class could not be used, “causing discomfort to all on board”. The plane can carry up to 342 passengers.

At that point the plane was already flying over the Atlantic Ocean, according to Air India’s statement. Due to restrictions on night operations at most European airports at the time, the pilots decided to return to Chicago for “passenger comfort and safety”.

A BBC check on flight tracking website Flightradar24 found the plane was near Greenland when it turned around, and had spent a total of 10 hours in the air.

Air India said an investigation later found “polythene bags, rags and clothes that had been flushed down and stuck in the plumbing” of the plane’s toilets.

It released several pictures showing bags containing waste cleared from the toilets. One photo showed a crew member holding a drainage pipe completely stuffed with what appeared to be rags.

The statement said that all passengers and crew disembarked normally in Chicago and were provided with accommodation and alternative flight options.

Plane toilets store human waste in special tanks and use a vacuum system for flushing. These are normally disposed of once the plane has landed.

While clogged toilets are not uncommon, it is “next to impossible” for all toilets to break down “due to only passengers’ fault, and in a way that it causes an emergency diversion”, Mark Martin, an aviation expert, told the Hindustan Times newspaper.

But Air India said it had previously found objects such as blankets, underwear and diapers flushed down its planes’ toilets.

“We take this opportunity to urge passengers to use lavatories only for the purposes that they are meant for,” it said.

On X, many criticised the airline for poor upkeep and the lack of sanitation facilities on its aeroplanes.

“Only Air India has such frequent mishaps. Honestly what has happened is indefensible,” one user said.

But others pointed out that the airline could not be held responsible for the situation.

“Can we honestly dump all the blame on Air India and the crew, when people can’t follow basic travel etiquette?” another user said.

An Indonesian TikToker has been sentenced to almost three years in prison after reportedly ‘talking’ to a picture of Jesus on her phone and telling him to get a haircut.

Ratu Thalisa, a Muslim transgender woman with more than 442,000 TikTok followers, had been on a livestream, and was responding to a comment that told her to cut her hair to look more like a man.

On Monday, a court in Medan, Sumatra found Thalisa guilty of spreading hatred under a controversial online hate-speech law, and sentenced her to two years and 10 months in jail.

The court said her comments could disrupt “public order” and “religious harmony” in society, and charged her with committing blasphemy.

The court ruling came after multiple Christian groups filed police complaints against Ms Thalisa for blasphemy.

The sentence has been condemned by human rights groups, including Amnesty International, who described it as “a shocking attack on Ratu Thalisa’s freedom of expression” and called for it to be quashed.

“The Indonesian authorities should not use the country’s Electronic Information and Transactions (EIT) law to punish people for comments made on social media,” Amnesty International Indonesia’s Executive Director Usman Hamid said in a statement.

“While Indonesia should prohibit the advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, Ratu Thalisa’s speech act does not reach that threshold.”

Mr Hamid called on Indonesian authorities to overturn Ms Thalisa’s conviction and ensure her immediate release from custody.

He also urged them to repeal or make substantial revisions to what he described as “problematic provisions” in the EIT Law – namely, those criminalising alleged immorality, defamation and hate speech.

First introduced in 2008 and amended in 2016 to address online defamation, the EIT Law was designed to safeguard the rights of individuals in online spaces.

It has been roundly criticised, however, by rights groups, press groups and legal experts, who have long raised concerns about the law’s potential threat to freedom of expression.

At least 560 people were charged with alleged violations of the EIT Law while exercising their freedom of expression between 2019 and 2024, and 421 were convicted, according to data from Amnesty International.

Those charged with offenses of defamation and hate speech have included several social media influencers.

In September 2023, a Muslim woman was sentenced to two years’ prison for blaspheming Islam, after she posted a viral TikTok video where she said an Islamic phrase before eating pork.

In 2024, another TikToker was detained for blasphemy after they posted a quiz asking children what kind of animals can read the Quran, according to Amnesty International.

Indonesia is home to many religious minorities, including Buddhists, Christians and Hindus. But a vast majority of Indonesians are Muslim – and most cases of people found in violation of the EIT Law have typically related to religious minorities allegedly insulting Islam.

Ms Thalisa’s case, where a Muslim woman is accused of invoking hate speech against Christianity, is less common.

Prosecutors previously demanded that she receive a sentence of more than four years, and immediately appealed against Monday’s verdict. Ms Thalisa was given seven days to appeal.

A former senior Facebook executive has told the BBC how the social media giant worked “hand in glove” with the Chinese government on potential ways of allowing Beijing to censor and control content in China.

Sarah Wynn-Williams – a former global public policy director – says in return for gaining access to the Chinese market of hundreds of millions of users, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, considered agreeing to hiding posts that were going viral, until they could be checked by the Chinese authorities.

Ms Williams – who makes the claims in a new book – has also filed a whistleblower complaint with the US markets regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), alleging Meta misled investors. The BBC has reviewed the complaint.

Facebook’s parent company Meta, says Ms Wynn-Williams had her employment terminated in 2017 “for poor performance”.

It is “no secret we were once interested” in operating services in China, it adds. “We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored.”

Meta referred us to Mark Zuckerberg’s comments from 2019, when he said: “We could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there, and they [China] never let us in.”

Facebook also used algorithms to spot when young teenagers were feeling vulnerable as part of research aimed at advertisers, Ms Wynn-Williams alleges.

A former New Zealand diplomat, she joined Facebook in 2011, and says she watched the company grow from “a front row seat”.

Now she wants to show some of the “decision-making and moral compromises” that she says went on when she was there. It is a critical moment, she adds, as “many of the people I worked with… are going to be central” to the introduction of AI.

In her memoir, Careless People, Ms Wynn-Williams paints a picture of what she alleges working on Facebook’s senior team was like.

Mr Zuckerberg, she says, did not get up before midday, loved karaoke and did not like to be beaten at board games, such as Risk. “I didn’t realise that you were supposed to let him win. I was a little naive,” she told us.

However, Ms Wynn-Williams says her allegations about the company’s close relationship with China provide an insight into Facebook’s decision-making at the time.

“China is Mark Zuckerberg’s white whale,” meaning a goal that he obsessively pursued, says Ms Wynn-Williams.

The country is the world’s biggest social media market, but access to Facebook remains blocked there, alongside the likes of X and YouTube.

“It’s the one piece on the board game that he hasn’t conquered,” she says.

Ms Wynn-Williams claims that in the mid-2010s, as part of its negotiations with the Chinese government, Facebook considered allowing it future access to Chinese citizens’ user data.

“He was working hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party, building a censorship tool… basically working to develop sort of the antithesis of many of the principles that underpin Facebook,” she told the BBC.

Ms Wynn-Williams says governments frequently asked for explanations of how aspects of Facebook’s software worked, but were told it was proprietary information.

“But when it came to the Chinese, the curtain was pulled back,” she says.

“Engineers were brought out. They were walked through every aspect, and Facebook was making sure these Chinese officials were upskilled enough that they could not only learn about these products, but then test Facebook on the censorship version of these products that they were building.”

Meta told the BBC that such claims about China had been “widely reported” at the time.

In her SEC complaint, Ms Wynn-Williams also alleges Mr Zuckerberg and other Meta executives had made “misleading statements… in response to Congressional inquiries” about China.

One answer given by Mr Zuckerberg to Congress in 2018 said Facebook was “not in a position to know exactly how the [Chinese] government would seek to apply its laws and regulations on content”

Meta told the BBC that Mr Zuckerberg gave accurate testimony, adding it did not operate services in China.

Most Facebook executives didn’t allow their own children on Facebook – according to Ms Wynn-Williams. “They had screen bans. They certainly wouldn’t allow them to use the product.”

And yet she says reports from 2017 – that the company had been using algorithms to target and categorise vulnerable teens – were true.

“The algorithm could infer that they were feeling worthless or unhappy,” she alleges.

The company – which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp – could, she claims, identify when a teenage girl had deleted a selfie on its platforms, and then notify a beauty company that it would be a good moment to target the child with an advert.

Ms Wynn-Williams says she “felt sick” at the thought and tried to push back, “although I knew it was futile”.

“They said: ‘The business side thinks this is exactly what we should be doing. We’ve got this amazing product, we can get young people, which is a really important advertising segment.'”

Meta told the BBC this was false – it has never offered tools to target people based on their emotional state – and that the research it previously did was to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook, not to target ads.

Overall, Ms Wynn-Williams says the company has not done enough to address the issue of young people’s safety on social media.

“This is one of the most valuable companies in the world. They could invest in this and make it a real priority and do more to fix it.”

Facebook said it was transparent about advert-targeting and had shared updates regarding its approach to creating age-appropriate advert experiences for teens.

It also said it had introduced “Teen Accounts” for tens of millions of young people with built-in protections. It also said it was giving parents more oversight over their teens’ use of the app.

As well as poor performance, Meta says the 45-year-old was also fired for “toxic behaviour” after she had made “misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment”.

But Ms Wynn-Williams told the BBC she was let go after she had complained about inappropriate comments by one of her bosses – Joel Kaplan, who is now Meta’s chief global affairs officer.

Meta told us she had been paid by “anti-Facebook activists” and she was not a whistleblower.

“Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books,” it said.

In regard to Ms Wynn-Williams’ book, Meta has confirmed to the BBC that it has launched legal action in the US to “halt the further distribution of defamatory and untrue information”.

To counter this, a legal representative for Ms Wynn-Williams said: “Meta has made a number of false and inconsistent statements about Sarah since the news of her memoir broke… while Meta’s statements are trying to mislead the public, the book speaks for itself”.

We asked her why she was speaking out now. She said she wanted Meta to change as it “influences so much of our day-to-day life” and we need to ensure “we get the future we deserve”.

“We’re in this moment where tech and political leaders are coming together and as they combine forces, that has a lot of consequences for all of us.

“I think it’s really important to understand that and to understand you look at all these engineers who are influencing the highest level of government.”

US President Donald Trump has said he will “buy a brand new Tesla” after shares in the electric car firm fell more than 15%.

Trump blamed “radical left lunatics” boycotting the firm to “attack and do harm” to Tesla owner Elon Musk.

However, stock analysts said the main reason for the poor performance of the shares was fear about Tesla meeting production targets and a drop in sales over the past year.

Trump’s own economic policies on tariffs are also making investors nervous, analysts said.

US markets slumped on Monday as investors concerned about the economic effects of Trump tariffs sold shares.

This came after the US president hinted at a potential US recession, telling a TV interviewer that the world’s biggest economy was in a “period of transition”.

Investors fear Trump’s tariffs could push up the pace of price rises and hit economic growth as firms pass on the costs of bringing goods into the country onto customers.

As part of the sell-off, shares in technology firms dropped, with Tesla stock sinking by 15.4%, while artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia, Facebook owner Meta, Amazon, and Google-parent Alphabet also fell sharply.

Tesla’s shares recovered somewhat – rising 3.6% – when US markets opened on Tuesday. Other US tech stocks also regained some lost ground.

Tesla’s initial drop came after a UBS analyst warned on Monday that new Tesla deliveries could be much lower than expected this year.

On Tuesday, Trump took to his Truth Social platform trying to drum up Tesla sales, asking “Republicans, Conservatives, and all great Americans” to support Musk, who has been putting his energies into trying to slash federal government jobs.

Despite his comments, Trump policies so far have been designed to limit electric car sales, including his revoking a 2021 order by former president Joe Biden that half of all car sales should be electric by 2030, and halting unspent government funds for charging stations.

Trump’s tariffs could also hurt the manufacturer. Tesla chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja said in January Tesla parts sourced from Canada and Mexico would be subject to the levies and that this could hit profitability.

Trump said on Tuesday Musk is doing a “fantastic job”, but “radical left lunatics” are “trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla” in an effort “to attack and do harm to Elon”.

“I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American,” Trump added.

Tesla shares are back to around the level they were before the US election.

They spiked after Trump’s win as investors bet on Musk’s business benefitting from his backing the president.

Mr Musk has been heading up the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which is not an official US government agency.

Doge has been trying to make huge cuts to federal funding, and Musk himself has has been voicing support for far-right politics.

His stance has been drawing criticism in the US. About 350 demonstrators protested outside a Tesla dealership in Portland, Oregon, last week, and nine demonstrators were arrested outside a New York City Tesla dealership earlier in March.

Linsay James, an investment strategist at Quilter Investors, said that although there is “an element” of Elon Musk’s politics “having a brand impact”, there were other reasons for the share price fall.

Ultimately the drop “comes down to hard numbers”, she said.

“When we look at new orders, for example in Europe and China, you can see that they’ve effectively halved over the last year,” she said.

Sales in Europe have fallen sharply this year. Across the continent, they were down 45% in January compared to the same month in 2024, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA).

There has also been a steep decline in China – a key market – and Australia.

Other experts have said Tesla is over-valued, so the fall is seen as a correction, while others have pointed to rising competition from some of Chinese electric vehicle companies.

Investors are “certainly getting more worried about an economic slowdown too, so the richest-valued companies like Tesla have been hit hardest in recent days”, she added.

They have also been concerns that Musk has not been focusing on his firms.

In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, he said he was combining the Doge role with running his businesses “with great difficulty”.

Alongside Tesla, his businesses include Space X, which has experienced serious failures in the last two launches of its giant Starship rocket, and the social media network X, which suffered an outage on Monday.

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An Albanian national who travelled to the UK illegally has told the BBC how his life became “unbearable” after he ended up working on a cannabis farm.

Gzim, who wished to remain anonymous, was one of more than 12,600 Albanians who made the trip to the UK by small boat in 2022 – the peak year for English Channel migrant crossings.

Last year the number of Albanians that made the dangerous journey dropped to just 616 people, following a campaign by the UK and Albanian governments.

Gzim says he is speaking out to warn others, as the UK government relaunches a social media campaign aimed at warning Albanians who enter illegally of possible hardships in the UK.

He says he found a smuggler on TikTok who agreed to help him make the journey to England, and after travelling to France via buses, he arrived in Dunkirk, where a boat was launched to Dover.

He says his cousins, who were already in the UK, paid the smuggler £3,500 for him to cross the channel.

After being placed in a hotel, he says he was able to leave unnoticed to work on a cannabis farm.

He said: “I wanted a better life, to help my family, like all the other people who have done this journey.

“I knew the risks involved with this kind of business, but I hoped that I wouldn’t be unlucky.”

He says the cannabis farm was broken into and because of this he didn’t get paid.

Gzim moved into a construction role where he says he felt forced to take a lower wage – not enough to cover his own expenses and support his family back home.

Five months after arriving in the UK he said it got so “unbearable” he decided to return to Albania.

He added: “I dreamed of other things. I hoped I would make it.

“Nobody wants to leave his homeland. Nobody wants to leave his people and his friends. But in Albania it is a war of survival and I didn’t have any other choice.”

• How many people cross the Channel in small boats

New social media adverts are highlighting stories of migrants who entered the UK illegally “only to face debt and exploitation”.

This approach originally started in 2023 under the Conservative government.

It followed a cooperation agreement signed by the UK and Albania under the previous government to try and reduce illegal migration.

The numbers on small boats had already started to fall before the agreement was struck.

The National Crime Agency said the reduction in crossings is due to a number of different factors, including law enforcement activity, deportations, diminished demand for travel to the UK and potential displacement to other methods.

Last year more than 2,600 people were returned to Albania, more than any other nationality.

Balkans expert Andi Hoxhaj told a committee of MPs in 2022 that he estimated about 40% of people leave Albania for “economic opportunities”.

Lavdrim Krashi, an MP in the ruling Socialist Party, said some people had been lured on social media by promises of a better life in Britain.

He told the BBC: “The promotion was made to especially young people to come to the UK and if you make it there, don’t worry about any finances because money really grows on trees, and we know that’s not the case.

“The numbers travelling illegally has drastically reduced in the last few years, but always more can be done,” he said.

“It’s not in our interest to lose our young people, we want to make them thrive in the Albanian economy.”

But there are also ongoing concerns about Albanians being trafficked into the UK.

They are still among the most common nationalities referred to the National Referral Mechanism as potential modern day slaves.

Jorida Tabaku, an opposition MP from the Democratic Party said: “When people go there they face a different reality.

“A lot of them are paying very much to go to the UK, a lot of them are leaving families behind because they are unemployed men.”

Albanian TV journalist Eraldo Harlicaj says depopulation of the country has been an issue for years.

“We have lots of problems here again.

“Nothing has changed about Albania from 2022 when we had the peak of illegal migration,” he said.

“Most of the young Albanians who wanted to go to England are in England, so we don’t have any more to send.”

Since 2022 the British Embassy has invested £6m in a project aimed at stemming the flow of people leaving northern Albania for a life of illegal working in the UK.

The New Perspectives programme is designed to create job and business opportunities.

Vasyl Chornyi, the team leader, said: “There are organised criminal groups using their social media, trying to lure people into trafficking scheme.

“Trying to change the narrative with a positive image that people can make their life here is extremely important,” he added.

The project provides business mentoring and coaches people in employment and entrepreneurship skills.

Albert Halilaj, the Mayor of Kukës said: “The number of immigrants going abroad is falling down. The young people of Kukës are not looking to migrate anymore.

“Tourism is the sole focus of the future of Kukës, and i’d like to make a public call to all the immigrants abroad that they can return here and they will find support for their investments in every field.”

The migration agreement with Britain has also resulted in closer co-operation to tackle people smuggling.

Head of the Albanian Border and Migration Police, Saimir Boshnjaku, said: “Albanian law enforcement officers have been deployed in the UK, especially in Dover, to support the British authorities”.

A network of UK-funded cameras has also been installed on the Albania-Kosovo border to tackle illegal migration and criminal gangs.

The equipment includes a fleet of drones and number plate recognition cameras to recognise British vehicles which criminals use to avoid detection by the local police.

Minister for Europe, Stephen Doughty said: “By working directly with Albanian communities, we are discouraging the dangerous journeys to the UK.

“Together with tougher border controls and cracking down on people-smuggling gangs, the government is focused on the international challenge and delivering on its Plan for Change.”

A plane carrying the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has left Manila, hours after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity over his deadly “war on drugs”.

The 79-year-old was taken into police custody shortly after his arrival at the capital’s international airport from Hong Kong on Tuesday morning.

Current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr confirmed Duterte had left Philippine airspace, en route to The Hague in the Netherlands, where the ICC sits.

Earlier, his daughter Sara – who said she would accompany him to the Hague – said he was being “forcibly” sent there.

Duterte has offered no apologies for his brutal anti-drugs crackdown, which saw thousands of people killed when he was president of the South East Asian nation from 2016 to 2022, and mayor of Davao city before that.

Upon his arrest on Tuesday, he questioned the basis for the warrant, asking: “What crime [have] I committed?” in a video posted online by his daughter Veronica Duterte.

“If I committed a sin, prosecute me in Philippine courts, with Filipino judges, and I will allow myself to be jailed in my own nation,” he said in a later video.

In response to his arrest, a petition was launched on his behalf in the Supreme Court – urging them not to comply with the request.

In it, Duterte urged the court to refrain from “enforcing or assisting in the enforcement of any ICC-issued warrants… and to suspend all forms of cooperation with the ICC while the case is pending”.

According to a statement from the court’s spokesperson, the former president also called for a declaration that the Philippines withdrawal from the ICC in 2019 “effectively terminated” its jurisdiction over the country and its people.

The ICC says it still has authority in the Philippines over alleged crimes committed before the country withdrew as a member.

Some of Duterte’s supporters rallied at the gates to Villamor Air Base, within the airport compound, where the former president was taken following his arrest. State media said more than 370 police had been deployed there and to other “key locations” to ensure peace was maintained.

While his supporters have criticised the arrest, activists have called it a “historic moment” for those who perished in his drug war and their families, the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) said.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but today, it has bent towards justice. Duterte’s arrest is the beginning of accountability for the mass killings that defined his brutal rule,” said ICHRP chairman Peter Murphy.

Duterte had been in Hong Kong to campaign for the upcoming 12 May mid-term elections, where he had planned to run again for mayor of Davao.

Footage aired on local television showed him walking out of the airport using a cane. Authorities say he is in “good health” and is being cared for by government doctors.

“What is my sin? I did everything in my time for peace and a peaceful life for the Filipino people,” he told a cheering crowd of Filipino expatriates before leaving Hong Kong.

Duterte’s arrest marks the “beginning of a new chapter in Philippine history”, said Filipino political scientist Richard Heydarian.

“This is about rule of law and human rights,” he said.

Heydarian added that authorities had arrested Duterte promptly at the airport instead of letting the matter take its course through the local courts to “avoid political chaos”.

“Duterte’s supporters were hoping they could go berserk in terms of public rallies and [use] all sorts of delaying tactics… [to] drag things on until the warrant of arrest loses momentum,” he said.

The demand for justice in Duterte’s drug war goes “hand in hand” with the political interests of his successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Heydarian said.

The Duterte and Marcos families formed a formidable alliance in the last elections in 2022, where against the elder Duterte’s wishes, his daughter Sara ran as Marcos Jr’s vice-president instead of seeking her father’s post.

The relationship unravelled publicly in recent months as the two families pursued separate political agendas.

Marcos initially refused to co-operate with the ICC investigation, but as his relationship with the Duterte family deteriorated, he changed his stance, and later indicated that the Philippines would co-operate.

Duterte served as mayor of Davao, a sprawling southern metropolis, for 22 years and has made it one of the country’s safest from street crimes.

He used the city’s peace-and-order reputation to cast himself as a tough-talking anti-establishment politician to win the 2016 elections by a landslide.

With fiery rhetoric, he rallied security forces to shoot drug suspects dead. More than 6,000 suspects were gunned down by police or unknown assailants during the campaign, but rights groups say the number could be higher.

A previous UN report found that most victims were young, poor urban males and that police, who do not need search or arrest warrants to conduct house raids, systematically forced suspects to make self-incriminating statements or risk facing lethal force.

Critics said the campaign targeted street-level pushers and failed to catch big-time drug lords. Many families also claimed that the victims – their sons, brothers or husbands – were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Investigations in parliament pointed to a shadowy “death squad” of bounty hunters targeting drug suspects. Duterte has denied the allegations of abuse.

“Do not question my policies because I offer no apologies, no excuses. I did what I had to do, and whether or not you believe it… I did it for my country,” Duterte told a parliament investigation in October.

“I hate drugs, make no mistake about it.”

The ICC first took note of the alleged abuses in 2016 and started its investigation in 2021. It covered cases from November 2011, when Duterte was mayor of Davao, to March 2019, before the Philippines withdrew from the ICC.

Since taking power, Marcos has scaled back Duterte’s anti-narcotics campaign and promised a less violent approach to the drug problem, but hundreds of drug-related killings have been recorded during his administration.

Duterte remains widely popular in the Philippines as he is the country’s first leader from Mindanao, a region south of Manila, where many feel marginalised by the leaders in the capital.

He often speaks in Cebuano, the regional language, not Tagalog, which is more widely-spoken in Manila and northern regions.

When he stepped down in 2022, nearly nine in 10 Filipinos said they were satisfied with his performance as president – a score unseen among his predecessors since the restoration of democracy in 1986, according to the Social Weather Stations research institute.

His populist rhetoric and blunt statements earned him the moniker “Donald Trump of the East”. He has called Russian President Vladimir Putin his “idol” and under his administration, the Philippines’ pivoted their foreign policy to China away from the US, its long-standing ally.

Marcos restored Manila’s ties with Washington and criticised the Duterte government for being “Chinese lackeys” as the Philippines is locked in sea dispute with China.

China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday that it was “closely monitoring the development of the situation” and warned the ICC against “politicisation” and “double standards” in the arrest of Duterte.

Duterte’s daughter and political heir, Sara Duterte, is tipped as a potential presidential candidate in 2028. The incumbent, Marcos, is barred by the constitution from seeking re-election.

Patients prescribed drugs for movement disorders – including restless leg syndrome (RLS) – say doctors did not warn them about serious side effects that led them to seek out risky sexual behaviour.

Twenty women have told the BBC that the drugs – given to them for RLS, which causes an irresistible urge to move – ruined their lives.

A report by drugs firm GSK – seen by the BBC – shows it learned in 2003 of a link between the medicines, known as dopamine agonist drugs, and what it described as “deviant” sexual behaviour. It cited a case of a man who had sexually assaulted a child while taking the drug for Parkinson’s.

While there is no explicit reference to this side effect in patient leaflets, the UK medicines regulator told us there was a general warning about increased libido and harmful behaviour. GSK says a risk of “altered” sexual interest is also referred to in the leaflets.

Some of the women who described being drawn to risky sexual behaviour told us they had no idea of what was causing it. Others said they felt compelled to gamble or shop with no history of such activities. One accumulated debts of more than £150,000.

Like many women, Claire first developed RLS during her pregnancies. The relentless need to move was often accompanied by sleeplessness and a crawling sensation under her skin.

The condition persisted after giving birth and she was prescribed the dopamine agonist drug Ropinirole. She says she was not warned by doctors of any side effects. It initially worked wonders for her RLS, she says, but after a year or so she began feeling unprecedented sexual urges.

“The only way I could describe it is it was just deviant,” she tells us – using that word without any knowledge of the GSK research which had established a link with such behaviour.

Claire says she began leaving her house in the early hours of the morning to cruise for sex. Wearing a see-through top and jacket, she would flash her chest at any man she could find. She did this regularly, she says, and in increasingly dangerous locations, despite having a partner.

“There remains an element in your head that knows what you’re doing is wrong, but it affects you to the point that you don’t know you’re doing it.”

Claire says it took years to connect these urges with her medication – and they disappeared almost immediately when she stopped taking it. She feels complete “shame” and is “mortified” at the danger she placed herself in.

• Listen to 5 Minutes On: The prescription drugs that gave me a gambling addiction

Impulsive behaviours, including gambling and increased sex drive, have long been listed as side effects in medicine leaflets for dopamine agonist drugs – and are thought to affect between 6% to 17% of RLS patients taking them, according to health guidance body NICE. A “common” side effect of any medicine is considered to only affect 1% of people who take it, according to the NHS.

The drugs work by mimicking the behaviour of dopamine, a natural chemical in our brains which helps regulate movement. It is known as the “happy hormone” because it is activated when something is pleasurable or we feel rewarded.

But agonist drugs can over-stimulate these feelings and under-stimulate the appreciation of consequences – leading to impulsive behaviour, according to academics.

The cases of what the GSK report from 2003 described as “deviant behaviour” involved two men who were prescribed Ropinirole for Parkinson’s disease. In one, a 63-year-old-man sexually assaulted a seven-year-old girl, leading to a custodial sentence.

The documents said the perpetrator’s libido had increased significantly from the start of his treatment with Ropinirole and his “libido problem subsequently resolved” after his dose was reduced.

In the second case, a 45-year-old man carried out “uncontrolled acts of exhibitionism and indecent behaviour”. His sex drive was reported to have increased prior to being prescribed Ropinirole but his urges “intensified” after the treatment.

Prevalence rates of what GSK calls “deviant” sexual behaviours caused by the drugs are unknown and tend to be under-reported by those who experience them, according to Valerie Voon, a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of Cambridge.

“There’s a lot of stigma and shame attached to it, and people don’t realise that it’s associated with a medication,” she says.

Prof Voon believes risky sexual behaviours – beyond a purely increased libido – should be specifically warned about and screened by the NHS, because their impact can be “devastating”.

RLS is believed to affect about one in 20 adults – and women are about twice as likely to suffer as men.

The 20 sufferers we spoke to say not only had doctors failed to tell them of the potentially serious side effects of the drugs, but also failed to review the impact of the medication on their bodies subsequently.

Sarah was in her 50s when she was prescribed another dopamine agonist drug made by a different manufacturer.

“Previously I’d have had no interest if Brad Pitt walked in the room naked,” she says. “But it turned me into this raging woman who kept taking sexual addiction further.”

Sarah began selling used underwear and videos of sex acts online – and organising telephone sex with strangers. She also began shopping compulsively – ending up with £30,000 of debt.

To combat the effects of the dopamine agonist, she began self-medicating by taking pain-relieving opioids and sleeping pills. She ended up being admitted to rehab – but that meant her driving licence was taken away and she lost her job.

“I turned to things that weren’t healthy – I knew that the behaviour wasn’t me, but I couldn’t control it,” she tells the BBC.

• If you have more information about this story, you can reach Noel directly and securely through encrypted messaging app Signal on: +44 7809 334720, by email at noel.titheradge@bbc.co.uk, external or on SecureDrop

A third woman, Sue, says she was prescribed two different dopamine agonist drugs without being warned of compulsive behaviour side effects on either occasion. She even mentioned recent gambling behaviour when the second drug was prescribed, she says. She went on to rack up debts of £80,000.

“The effect on my family was horrific – it was life-changing money to lose,” she says. “But at the time I didn’t know it was no fault of my own.”

A class action was brought against GSK in 2011 by four sufferers of Parkinson’s disease – the BBC has learned. They said Ropinirole led to gambling debts and broken relationships.

They also complained that despite a link between such behaviours and the drug having been established in medical studies as early as 2000, GSK had failed to include any warnings in its product literature until March 2007. The class action was settled but GSK denied liability.

Cases of serious side effects have also been reported in other countries, particularly in relation to the use of drugs for Parkinson’s disease.

In France, a court awarded damages to a father of two who complained that Ropinirole had given him compulsive homosexual urges, while another man without a criminal record began torturing cats.

In the US, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends the drugs should only be used for short-term treatment, such as end-of-life care.

Many of the women the BBC spoke to also complained that prolonged use of the drugs also worsened their underlying RLS. It meant their dosage had been increased which, in turn, had exacerbated their compulsive behaviour – a process known as augmentation.

Dr Guy Leschziner, a consultant neurologist, says the drugs still play an important role but he believes that drug companies, health authorities and doctors need to better warn patients of these side effects.

“Not everybody knows the kinds of really quite dramatic changes that can occur,” he says.

• If you would like help with any of the issues raised in this story, you can find sources of support from the BBC Action Line here

In a statement, GSK told the BBC Ropinirole had been prescribed for more than 17 million treatments and undergone “extensive clinical trials”. It added the drug had proven to be effective and had a “well-characterised safety profile”.

“As with all medicines, [it] has potential side effects and these are clearly stated in the prescribing information,” it said.

In response to its 2003 research that had found a link with “deviant” sexual behaviour, GSK told us this was shared with health authorities and had informed updates in prescribing information – which now lists “altered or increased sexual interest” and “behaviour of significant concern” as side effects.

The current patient information leaflet for Ropinirole makes specific reference to changes in sexual interest on five occasions – almost exclusively warning about the frequency or strength of such feelings as potentially “abnormally high”, “excessive” or “increase[d]”.

The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), said that while a specific reference to “deviant” sexual behaviour is not included in warnings, such impulses vary and a general warning about activities which may be harmful is included.

It also said that it is important for healthcare professionals to explain the possible risk to patients and not all experience these types of side effects.

The Department of Health and Social Care declined to comment.

An argument in the White House tore apart the US alliance with Ukraine, shook European leaders and highlighted JD Vance’s key role in forcefully expressing Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The vice-president has come out punching on the global stage – so what is it that drives his worldview?

Vance’s first major foreign speech, at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, caught many by surprise.

Rather than focusing on the war raging in Ukraine, the US vice-president only briefly mentioned the bloodiest European conflict since World War Two.

Instead, he used his debut on the international stage to berate close US allies about immigration and free speech, suggesting the European establishment was anti-democratic. He accused them of ignoring the wills of their people and questioned what shared values they were truly banding together with the US to defend.

“If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people,” he warned.

It was a bold and perhaps unexpected way to introduce himself to the world – by angering European allies. But days later he was back in the news, at the centre of a blistering row with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he accused of being ungrateful.

For those who have been studying the rise of Vance, these two episodes came as no surprise.

The vice-president has come to represent an intellectual wing of the conservative movement that gives expression to Trumpism and in particular how its America First mantra applies beyond its borders. In writings and interviews, Vance has expressed an ideology that seems to join the dots between American workers, global elites and the role of the US in the wider world.

On the campaign trail with Donald Trump last year, Vance spent much of his time sharply criticising Democrats – the usual attack-dog duties that traditionally get dished out to running mates – and sparring with reporters.

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• Vance took the lead attacking Zelensky. Why?

And while Elon Musk’s outsized and unconventional role in the Trump administration initially overshadowed him, that Munich speech and the Oval Office showdown have raised the profile of Trump’s deputy.

It’s also led to questions about the winding ideological journey he’s made during his years in the conservative movement – and what he truly believes now.

“He’s much more of a pragmatist than an ideologue,” said James Orr, associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge and a friend whom Vance has described as his “British sherpa”.

“He’s able to articulate what is and is not in the American interest,” Orr said. “And the American interest is not the interest of some abstract utopia or matrix of propositions and ideas, but the American people.”

Vance has repeatedly returned to this “America First” – or perhaps “Americans First” – theme in speeches, drawing a line between what he castigates as Washington’s economic and foreign policy orthodoxy abroad and the struggles of the left-behind American working class at home.

At the Republican National Convention last summer, for example, he lamented how in small towns across the US “jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war”. And he attacked then-President Joe Biden, saying: “For half a century, he’s been a champion of every single policy initiative to make America weaker and poorer.”

But Vance is also someone who, after a tough upbringing in an Ohio family with Appalachian roots and sudden fame on the back of a bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, has tried out many different views.

Not only is he a former “Never Trumper” who described the US president in 2016 as “reprehensible” and “an idiot”, his book places much of the blame for the plight of the rural poor squarely on the choices made by individuals.

More recently he’s shifted that blame to elites – a group he’s variously defined as Democrats, conventional Republicans, liberals, corporate leaders, globalists and academics.

In speeches, Vance regularly argues that “America is not just an idea… America is a nation.”

He couples this statement with an anecdote about his family’s ancestral graveyard in Kentucky, where he says he, his wife and their children will one day be buried, arguing that family and homeland are more important than some of America’s traditional core ideas.

In Vance’s view, the Trump administration’s priority should be to make life better for Americans who have been in the country for generations, and yet have little of the nation’s vast wealth.

Rod Dreher, a conservative American writer who is also a friend of the vice-president, said Vance’s thinking arises from a belief that “moderate normie Republicans… failed to offer anything to stop the so-called forever wars, and they also failed to offer anything to ordinary Americans like where he comes from, who are suffering economically from globalism and from the effects of mass migration and fentanyl”.

“He got red-pilled, so to speak, by Donald Trump,” Dreher told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme this week.

“Red-pilled” is internet slang for suddenly waking up to a supposedly hidden truth, as featured in The Matrix movies. It’s commonly used by those on the right online who believe they have special access to reality and that people with liberal, centrist or establishment views are uncritical thinkers.

Vance is a vice-president who, more than his boss, seems extremely plugged into internet culture. He’s an enthusiastic user of X, often jumping directly into arguments rather than using it, as many politicians do, as a platform for announcements.

His appearances on fringe right-wing podcasts, while he was trying to drum up support for a Senate run, provided fodder for his opponents, as did provocative trollish comments such as that the US was being run by “childless cat ladies”.

Married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, he has rejected and been rejected by members of the alt-right even if he does echo some of their views. However, he does have friends and allies both at the top of Silicon Valley and in some of its lesser known corners.

After graduating from Yale Law School, he was brought into the world of venture capital by influential Silicon Valley conservative Peter Thiel, who later funded his US Senate campaign.

He has cited people like the blogger Curtis Yarvin, a key guru in the “neo-reactionary” movement which dreams up fantasies of technologically-assisted, hyper-capitalist societies led by powerful monarchs.

His familiarity with the internet’s fringes was further demonstrated when he spread false rumours about immigrants eating pets and an allegation about Ukrainian corruption – which the BBC traced back to Moscow.

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“He sort of stews in this online world,” said Cathy Young, a writer for the conservative, anti-Trump media outlet The Bulwark.

At the same time, Young said, his anecdote about family graveyards and homeland suggests another political tendency – a “disturbing undertone of nativism”.

“That bothers some people and rightly so,” she said. “Part of the American legacy is that we are a nation of immigrants. [Former Republican President] Ronald Reagan talked about that, about one of the distinctive things about this country is that anyone can come here from any part of the world and become an American.”

Vance’s “Americans First” thinking clearly extends to the issue of the war in Ukraine. When he was a senator, he was often critical of America’s involvement in the war and the huge sums spent on it, his former Senate colleague Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, recalled.

“His position then was very much like what it is now… that the conflict must end,” Hawley told the BBC. “It needs to end in a way that’s maximally advantageous to the security of the United States and it needs to end in a way that gets our European allies to take increased responsibility.”

Vance regularly accused the Biden administration of being more interested in Ukraine than in stemming illegal immigration. Writing in 2022, during his Senate campaign and after the Russian invasion, he said: “I will be damned if I am going to prioritise Ukraine’s eastern border right now when our own southern border is engulfed by a human tsunami of illegal migrants.”

His views burst out into the open during that dramatic argument with President Zelensky in the Oval Office. Vance accused Zelensky of lacking respect, of sending politicians on a “propaganda tour” of Ukraine and of being insufficiently thankful for US aid.

“Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country,” he told the Ukrainian president.

The argument left European leaders scrambling to defend Zelensky, while also trying to maintain negotiations over a possible peace deal.

Vance then prompted widespread outrage from allies when he poured scorn on the idea of security guarantees in the form of troops “from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”.

He later denied he was talking about the UK or France, the only two European countries that have publicly stated their willingness to send peacekeepers to Ukraine.

But the vice-president’s willingness to step on the toes of allies reflect a world view which, in his words, has little time for “moralisms about ‘this country is good’, ‘this country is bad'”.

“That doesn’t mean you have to have a complete moral blind spot, but it means that you have to be honest about the countries that you’re dealing with, and there’s a complete failure to do that with most of our foreign policy establishment in this country,” he told a New York Times columnist last year.

His tone has shifted from the two years he spent in the US Senate before being picked by Trump. Democrat Cory Booker remembered Vance as “very pragmatic and thoughtful”.

“That’s why some of this stuff surprises me,” Booker told the BBC.

• Vance’s cousin criticises him for ‘belittling’ Zelensky

Others detect the same disconnect.

David Frum, now a writer for The Atlantic magazine, said that Vance’s views have changed significantly from when he first commissioned the former marine, who was attending Ohio State University at the time, to write for his website on conservative politics more than 15 years ago.

“He was not in any way the culture warrior that he is today,” Frum said.

Frum, a former George W Bush speechwriter and staunch critic of Trump, said that Vance’s view of Russia represented “ideological admiration”.

In Munich, as he spoke about free speech, the vice-president cited cases involving conservatives and Christians in Western countries but avoided any mention of Russia’s harsh clampdowns on expression.

Vance and his allies reject that he is sympathetic to Putin.

“I’ve never once argued that Putin is a kind and friendly person,” Vance, then an Ohio senator, said in a speech at the 2024 Munich Security Conference.

“We don’t have to agree with him. We can contest him and we often will contest him,” he said. “But the fact that he’s a bad guy does not mean we can’t engage in basic diplomacy and prioritising America’s interests.”

The BBC has asked the White House for comment on Vance’s stance in relation to Ukraine and Russia.

A quick end to the conflict in Ukraine is, in Vance’s view, not only about putting a stop to billions of dollars being spent thousands of miles away.

He himself has said that there are bigger issues for the US and its friends to focus on than Ukraine, namely the threat of China, which he has called “our most significant competitor… for the next 20 or 30 years”.

Vance’s views on Ukraine and his willingness to publicly air them provided a dramatic moment in the early days of Trump’s second presidential term.

But it also offered a vivid illustration of the vice-president’s ideology, his prominence in the Trump administration and how he views America’s place in the world.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Armed militants in Pakistan’s Balochistan region have attacked a train carrying hundreds of passengers and taken a number of hostages, military sources have told the BBC.

The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) fired at the Jaffar Express Train as it travelled from Quetta to Peshawar.

A statement from the separatist group said it had bombed the track before storming the train in remote Sibi district. It claimed the train was under its control.

Pakistani police told local reporters at least three people, including the train driver, had been injured. Security forces have been sent to the scene, as well as helicopters to try to rescue hostages, police told the BBC.

There were reports of “intense firing” at the train, a Balochistan government spokesman told local newspaper Dawn.

A senior police official said it “remains stuck just before a tunnel surrounded by mountains”, AFP news agency reports.

A senior army official confirmed to the BBC that there were more than 100 army personnel travelling from Quetta on the train.

The Baloch Liberation Army has warned of “severe consequences” if an attempt is made to rescue those it is holding.

It has waged a decades-long insurgency to gain independence and has launched numerous deadly attacks, often targeting police stations, railway lines and highways.

The Pakistani authorities – as well as several Western countries, including the UK and US – have designated the BLA as a terrorist organisation.

Quetta’s railway controller Muhammad Kashif told the BBC that 400-450 passengers had been booked on the train.

Officials have not confirmed how many they think have been taken hostage.

A local railway official in Quetta told the BBC that a group of at least 60 passengers had disembarked the train and reached the nearest railway station, Panir.

The official said the group was made up of locals from the province of Balochistan.

Railway officials in Quetta, quoting paramilitary sources, told the BBC that women and children had disembarked from the train and were walking towards the city of Sibi. They did not have an exact number.

Meanwhile, families of passengers were trying to get information from the counter at Quetta railway station.

The son of one passenger, Muhammad Ashraf, who left Quetta for Lahore on Tuesday morning, told BBC Urdu he had not been able to contact his father.

Another relative said he was “frantic with worry” about his cousin and her small child, who were travelling from Quetta to Multan to pick up a family member.

“No one is telling me what’s happening or if they’re safe,” Imran Khan told Reuters news agency.

Officials say they are yet to communicate with anyone on the train.

The area has no internet and mobile network coverage, officials told the BBC.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province and the richest in terms of natural resources, but it is the least developed.

Air India has confirmed that one of its flights from the US was forced to turn around last week after passengers trying to flush away plastic bags, rags and clothes clogged up most of its toilets.

The plane, which was heading from Chicago to India’s capital Delhi, spent several hours in the air before it returned to the US city.

Video clips from inside the aircraft showed scenes of confusion as passengers huddled around crew members who seemed to be explaining the situation.

The incident has stirred a lively debate on social media, with many Indians weighing in on aeroplane bathroom etiquette.

The incident took place on 5 March on Air India Flight 126, according to a statement by the airline released on Monday.

About two hours into the flight, crew members reported that some of the toilets were “unserviceable”.

Subsequently, they found eight of the 12 toilets in business and economy class could not be used, “causing discomfort to all on board”. The plane can carry up to 342 passengers.

At that point the plane was already flying over the Atlantic Ocean, according to Air India’s statement. Due to restrictions on night operations at most European airports at the time, the pilots decided to return to Chicago for “passenger comfort and safety”.

A BBC check on flight tracking website Flightradar24 found the plane was near Greenland when it turned around, and had spent a total of 10 hours in the air.

Air India said an investigation later found “polythene bags, rags and clothes that had been flushed down and stuck in the plumbing” of the plane’s toilets.

It released several pictures showing bags containing waste cleared from the toilets. One photo showed a crew member holding a drainage pipe completely stuffed with what appeared to be rags.

The statement said that all passengers and crew disembarked normally in Chicago and were provided with accommodation and alternative flight options.

Plane toilets store human waste in special tanks and use a vacuum system for flushing. These are normally disposed of once the plane has landed.

While clogged toilets are not uncommon, it is “next to impossible” for all toilets to break down “due to only passengers’ fault, and in a way that it causes an emergency diversion”, Mark Martin, an aviation expert, told the Hindustan Times newspaper.

But Air India said it had previously found objects such as blankets, underwear and diapers flushed down its planes’ toilets.

“We take this opportunity to urge passengers to use lavatories only for the purposes that they are meant for,” it said.

On X, many criticised the airline for poor upkeep and the lack of sanitation facilities on its aeroplanes.

“Only Air India has such frequent mishaps. Honestly what has happened is indefensible,” one user said.

But others pointed out that the airline could not be held responsible for the situation.

“Can we honestly dump all the blame on Air India and the crew, when people can’t follow basic travel etiquette?” another user said.

US President Donald Trump has said he will double the tariffs he previously announced on Canadian steel and aluminium imports into the US, taking the levies to 50% in total.

In the latest twist in a deepening trade war, Trump said it was in retaliation for a 25% surcharge Ontario announced on electricity it sends to northern US states on Monday.

Trump said if tariffs, including those on agricultural products were not dropped, he would hike taxes on the car industry, “which will, essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada”.

Ontario premier Doug Ford said: “Until the threat of tariffs is gone for good, we won’t back down.”

Ford added in a post on X that Trump had “launched an unprovoked trade and tariff war with America’s closest friend and ally”.

He has previously said he will “not hesitate to shut off electricity completely” if the US “escalates”.

Tariffs are taxes charged on goods imported from other countries.

The companies that bring the foreign goods into the country pay the tax to the government.

But firms may pass then on some or all of the cost of levies to customers.

Writing on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said his tariffs would go into effect on Wednesday morning, and that he would declare “a national emergency on electricity” in those states.

He also said Canada relied on the US for “military protection”, and reiterated that he wanted the country to become the 51st US state.

He add that it “would make all tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear,” if Canada were to join the US as a state.

Canadian Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney has previously said “Canada will never be part of America in any way, shape or form”.

The announcement comes during a turbulent time for markets.

The S&P 500 index of the largest firms listed in the US fell a further 0.5% on Tuesday after dropping 2.7% on Monday, which was its biggest one-day drop since December.

The UK’s FTSE 100 share index, which had edged lower earlier on Tuesday, fell further following Trump’s latest comments and was down more than 1%. The French Cac 40 index and German Dax followed a similar pattern.

Monday’s stock market sell-off had begun after Trump said the economy was in a “transition” when asked about whether the US was heading for a recession.

Investors have been concerned about the economic effects of Trump’s trade policies, which it is feared could push up inflation in the US and beyond.

AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould said that although some investors see the US as an attractive option, Trump’s trade policy is already having adverse effects on the US economy and consumer confidence.

“It would be interesting to see whether investors start buying US stocks which they may see as bargains on the hope that they will bounce back, or whether they opt to invest instead in European stocks, which are cheaper,” he said.

US President Donald Trump has said he will “buy a brand new Tesla” after shares in the electric car firm fell more than 15%.

Trump blamed “radical left lunatics” boycotting the firm to “attack and do harm” to Tesla owner Elon Musk.

However, stock analysts said the main reason for the poor performance of the shares was fear about Tesla meeting production targets and a drop in sales over the past year.

Trump’s own economic policies on tariffs are also making investors nervous, analysts said.

US markets slumped on Monday as investors concerned about the economic effects of Trump tariffs sold shares.

This came after the US president hinted at a potential US recession, telling a TV interviewer that the world’s biggest economy was in a “period of transition”.

Investors fear Trump’s tariffs could push up the pace of price rises and hit economic growth as firms pass on the costs of bringing goods into the country onto customers.

As part of the sell-off, shares in technology firms dropped, with Tesla stock sinking by 15.4%, while artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia, Facebook owner Meta, Amazon, and Google-parent Alphabet also fell sharply.

Tesla’s shares recovered somewhat – rising 3.6% – when US markets opened on Tuesday. Other US tech stocks also regained some lost ground.

Tesla’s initial drop came after a UBS analyst warned on Monday that new Tesla deliveries could be much lower than expected this year.

On Tuesday, Trump took to his Truth Social platform trying to drum up Tesla sales, asking “Republicans, Conservatives, and all great Americans” to support Musk, who has been putting his energies into trying to slash federal government jobs.

Despite his comments, Trump policies so far have been designed to limit electric car sales, including his revoking a 2021 order by former president Joe Biden that half of all car sales should be electric by 2030, and halting unspent government funds for charging stations.

Trump’s tariffs could also hurt the manufacturer. Tesla chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja said in January Tesla parts sourced from Canada and Mexico would be subject to the levies and that this could hit profitability.

Trump said on Tuesday Musk is doing a “fantastic job”, but “radical left lunatics” are “trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla” in an effort “to attack and do harm to Elon”.

“I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American,” Trump added.

Tesla shares are back to around the level they were before the US election.

They spiked after Trump’s win as investors bet on Musk’s business benefitting from his backing the president.

Mr Musk has been heading up the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which is not an official US government agency.

Doge has been trying to make huge cuts to federal funding, and Musk himself has has been voicing support for far-right politics.

His stance has been drawing criticism in the US. About 350 demonstrators protested outside a Tesla dealership in Portland, Oregon, last week, and nine demonstrators were arrested outside a New York City Tesla dealership earlier in March.

Linsay James, an investment strategist at Quilter Investors, said that although there is “an element” of Elon Musk’s politics “having a brand impact”, there were other reasons for the share price fall.

Ultimately the drop “comes down to hard numbers”, she said.

“When we look at new orders, for example in Europe and China, you can see that they’ve effectively halved over the last year,” she said.

Sales in Europe have fallen sharply this year. Across the continent, they were down 45% in January compared to the same month in 2024, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA).

There has also been a steep decline in China – a key market – and Australia.

Other experts have said Tesla is over-valued, so the fall is seen as a correction, while others have pointed to rising competition from some of Chinese electric vehicle companies.

Investors are “certainly getting more worried about an economic slowdown too, so the richest-valued companies like Tesla have been hit hardest in recent days”, she added.

They have also been concerns that Musk has not been focusing on his firms.

In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, he said he was combining the Doge role with running his businesses “with great difficulty”.

Alongside Tesla, his businesses include Space X, which has experienced serious failures in the last two launches of its giant Starship rocket, and the social media network X, which suffered an outage on Monday.

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Actor Gene Hackman was alone.

The two-time Academy Award winner didn’t make any calls and missed meals.

Medical experts say it’s possible the 95-year-old, who was in declining health and suffering from advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, did not even realise his wife of more than 30 years was dead in the home where he was living.

If he did, experts told the BBC, he likely went through various stages of confusion and grief, trying to wake her up before the disease caused him to become distracted or too overwhelmed to act – a process that likely repeated for days before he, too, died.

Officials in New Mexico say Betsy Arakawa, 65, died of a rare virus about seven days before Hackman perished on 18 February of natural causes.

The pair – and one of their dogs – were found dead in their Santa Fe home after neighbourhood security conducted a welfare check and saw their bodies on the ground through a window.

Authorities, at first, said the grim discovery was “suspicious enough” to launch an investigation.

Their remains were discovered in advanced stages of decomposition. Arakawa was found in a bathroom with scattered pills nearby. Hackman was found near the kitchen with a cane and sunglasses. One of their three dogs was found dead in a crate.

But a police investigation found no foul play.

Instead, the case has shed light on the grim realities of Alzheimer’s disease, which damages and destroys cells in one’s brain over time – taking away memory and other important mental functions.

“It’s like he was living in a reel,” Catherine V Piersol, PhD, an occupational therapist with decades of experience in dementia care, told the BBC of how Hackman may have experienced the repeated loss of his wife.

She noted patients with advanced Alzheimer’s disease like the actor live in the present and are unable to both look back at moments in the past or look forward and act.

“I imagine he would be trying to wake her up and not being successful. But then [he] could have been distracted in another room because of one of the dogs or something,” she described.

Then later, he’d again notice his wife on the ground and would “live through it again”, she said.

Though no one knows how Hackman spent his last days alive, the grim nature of the possibilities were discussed by authorities and the area’s medical examiner.

At a press conference last week, Dr Heather Jarrell, New Mexico’s chief medical examiner, said Arakawa died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), a respiratory illness caused by exposure to infected rodents. Hackman’s death was the result of significant heart disease, with Alzheimer’s disease as a contributing factor.

Given Hackman’s advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, it is “quite possible that he was not aware that she [his wife] was deceased”, Dr Jarrell said.

His autopsy indicated he had not eaten recently, though he showed no signs of dehydration. Officials found no evidence that he had communicated with anyone after his wife’s death and could not determine whether he was able to care for himself.

Ms Piersol said patients with advanced Alzheimer’s aren’t able to pick up on environmental cues like light and darkness, making it harder to determine when he should eat, sleep or bathe.

“Those [cues] are oftentimes just, no longer available to people at this stage of dementia,” she said.

Dr Brendan Kelley, a neurologist who specialises in memory and cognition at UT Southwestern Medical Center, explained why Hackman may also not have been able to call authorities for help. He said Alzheimer’s disease can leave patients caught between emotional discomfort and the inability to act on it.

“A person might feel worried or frightened, but at the same time they might not be capable to take the actions that you or I might normally think to do in order to alleviate that worry or concern, such as calling somebody else, or going to speak to a neighbour.”

Dr Kelley says Alzheimer’s patients experience emotions like pain and sadness, and experience physical needs like hunger and thirst, it’s just harder for them to identify what they are feeling.

He said missing meals could also increase levels of confusion and agitation.

The couple’s deaths and the startling details of Hackman living in the home for a week after his wife’s passing has shocked the Santa Fe area, where the couple had lived for more than 20 years.

“It’s just absolutely devastating,” says Jeffery Gomez, a long-time resident of the city, who remembers seeing Hackman around town in his different cars, always with a smile on his face.

His partner, Linda, said the details were triggering, explaining she cared for her elderly mother with dementia. “Even when you have help, it’s a lot,” she said.

“We know Gene and his wife were very private people and she was probably trying to shield him from the public,” she added, “but the thought of doing that alone? It’s a lot to shoulder.”

Laura N Gitlin, PhD, a behavioural scientist who researches ways to support caregivers told the BBC, this is becoming a common problem among caregivers.

“With the aging of a population, we also simultaneously have a shrinking of the number of people in the family, number of children, or relatives who live nearby,” she explained.

Ms Gitlin noted along with there being fewer caregivers, there is less support for these individuals on making big decisions – such as when it’s time to place a loved one in a home instead of caring for them by yourself.

Jeffery Gomez said he couldn’t understand how no one checked in on the couple for such a long while.

“It breaks my heart he was alone so long.”

An Indonesian TikToker has been sentenced to almost three years in prison after reportedly ‘talking’ to a picture of Jesus on her phone and telling him to get a haircut.

Ratu Thalisa, a Muslim transgender woman with more than 442,000 TikTok followers, had been on a livestream, and was responding to a comment that told her to cut her hair to look more like a man.

On Monday, a court in Medan, Sumatra found Thalisa guilty of spreading hatred under a controversial online hate-speech law, and sentenced her to two years and 10 months in jail.

The court said her comments could disrupt “public order” and “religious harmony” in society, and charged her with committing blasphemy.

The court ruling came after multiple Christian groups filed police complaints against Ms Thalisa for blasphemy.

The sentence has been condemned by human rights groups, including Amnesty International, who described it as “a shocking attack on Ratu Thalisa’s freedom of expression” and called for it to be quashed.

“The Indonesian authorities should not use the country’s Electronic Information and Transactions (EIT) law to punish people for comments made on social media,” Amnesty International Indonesia’s Executive Director Usman Hamid said in a statement.

“While Indonesia should prohibit the advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, Ratu Thalisa’s speech act does not reach that threshold.”

Mr Hamid called on Indonesian authorities to overturn Ms Thalisa’s conviction and ensure her immediate release from custody.

He also urged them to repeal or make substantial revisions to what he described as “problematic provisions” in the EIT Law – namely, those criminalising alleged immorality, defamation and hate speech.

First introduced in 2008 and amended in 2016 to address online defamation, the EIT Law was designed to safeguard the rights of individuals in online spaces.

It has been roundly criticised, however, by rights groups, press groups and legal experts, who have long raised concerns about the law’s potential threat to freedom of expression.

At least 560 people were charged with alleged violations of the EIT Law while exercising their freedom of expression between 2019 and 2024, and 421 were convicted, according to data from Amnesty International.

Those charged with offenses of defamation and hate speech have included several social media influencers.

In September 2023, a Muslim woman was sentenced to two years’ prison for blaspheming Islam, after she posted a viral TikTok video where she said an Islamic phrase before eating pork.

In 2024, another TikToker was detained for blasphemy after they posted a quiz asking children what kind of animals can read the Quran, according to Amnesty International.

Indonesia is home to many religious minorities, including Buddhists, Christians and Hindus. But a vast majority of Indonesians are Muslim – and most cases of people found in violation of the EIT Law have typically related to religious minorities allegedly insulting Islam.

Ms Thalisa’s case, where a Muslim woman is accused of invoking hate speech against Christianity, is less common.

Prosecutors previously demanded that she receive a sentence of more than four years, and immediately appealed against Monday’s verdict. Ms Thalisa was given seven days to appeal.

South Korean singer Wheesung was found dead on Monday at his home in Seoul.

Emergency services found the 43-year-old unresponsive after being alerted by his mother, local media reported.

The authorities said that an autopsy had been requested, but that there were no signs of foul play.

Wheesung, whose real name is Choi Whee-sung, debuted in 2002 and quickly made a name for himself with his soulful vocals. He was popular in the 2000s and has been credited with popularising R&B in South Korea.

Over the years Wheesung established himself as a mentor and vocal coach to K-pop stars, even writing songs for some of them. He collaborated with many artists and also performed in K-pop concerts across the world, including in Hollywood.

He was scheduled to hold a concert with ballad singer KCM this weekend in the city of Daegu.

His R&B ballads won praise from veteran Korean singers like Shin Seung-hun and Seo Tae-ji.

But Wheesung was also no stranger to controversy.

In 2021, he was handed a two-year suspended sentence for abusing propofol, a powerful anesthetic which also caused the death of Michael Jackson.

Within days in March and April 2020, Wheesung was found unconscious on two occasions, along with syringes and vials containing etomidate, a sleep-inducing drug similar to propofol.

Fellow artists shared tributes to Wheesung after news of his death broke.

“Wheesung, let’s sing and make music freely in that place. I won’t forget your pure and clear heart,” singer Yoon Min-soo wrote in a social media post accompanied by a video of him and Wheesung performing a duet.

“Let’s meet again someday and sing together,” Yoon wrote.

Rapper Verbal Jint shared posted a black square on Instagram, accompanied with the caption: “Every moment we shared was an honor, and I’m grateful. You’ve worked so hard, rest in peace, Wheesung.”