At least 59 people have been killed and more than 155 injured in a nightclub fire in North Macedonia, officials say.

The blaze broke out around 02:30 (01:30 GMT) at the Pulse club in Kocani, a town around 100 km (60 miles) east of the capital, Skopje, where 1,500 people were attending a concert by DNK, a popular hip-hop duo in the country.

Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski called it a “difficult and very sad day” for the country, which had lost many “young lives.”

Arrest warrants were issued for four people, interior minister Pance Toskovski said at the scene, without giving further details. He announced the arrest of a man earlier and state news agency Mia said the club owner was detained.

Citing initial reports, Toskovski said the fire had been started by sparks from pyrotechnic devices that had hit the ceiling, which was made of highly flammable material.

Footage shows the band playing on stage when two flares go off, sparks then catch fire on the ceiling before spreading rapidly.

Video verified by the BBC shows people trying to extinguish the flames on the ceiling. The footage shows the club was still full and some people appeared to be watching efforts to put out the fire, rather than leaving.

Marija Taseva, 20, told Channel 5 TV she was caught in a crush at the club as people rushed for the exits. She recalled falling to the ground and being trampled in the chaos before managing to get out.

Her family were still searching for her 25-year-old sister, though, who had not been found in any local hospital – and may have been transferred to Skopje for treatment.

The interior minister had earlier announced a death toll of 51 – with some 100 injured. In his update, he said 35 of the deceased had already been identified.

Local media has reported that the government is set to declare seven days of national mourning and carry out urgent inspections of all nightclubs and restaurants hosting large gatherings.

Kocani’s hospital director said earlier that staff had been struggling to identify patients due to a lack of ID cards.

However, she went on to say that those deceased were aged between of 14 and 24.

Eighteen patients are said to be in critical condition.

In a statement, the prime minister said the government was “fully mobilised and will do everything necessary to deal with the consequences and determine the causes of this tragedy”.

DNK was formed in 2002 and has topped the charts over the past decade.

Local authorities declared seven days of mourning and European leaders have voiced their condolences, with Ursula Von Der Leyen, president of the European Commission, saying the bloc “stands in solidarity with the people of North Macedonia in this difficult time”.

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Donald Trump has signed an order to strip back the federally funded news organisation Voice of America, accusing it of being “anti-Trump” and “radical”.

A White House statement said the order would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”, and included quotes from politicians and right-wing media railing against the “leftist”, “partisan” VOA.

VOA, still primarily a radio service, was set up during World War Two to counter Nazi propaganda. It is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Mike Abramowitz, the VOA’s director, said he and virtually his entire staff of 1,300 people had been put on paid leave.

Abramowitz said that the order left VOA unable to carry out its “vital mission… especially critical today, when America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States”.

The president’s order targets VOA’s parent company US Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, which also funds non-profit entities such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, which were originally set up to counter communism.

It tells managers to “reduce performance… to the minimum presence and function required by law”.

CBS, the news partner of the BBC in the US, said that VOA employees were notified in an email by Crystal Thomas, the USAGM human resources director.

A source told CBS that all freelance workers and international contractors were told there was now no money to pay them.

Emails obtained by CBS notified the bosses of Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that their federal grants had been terminated.

VOA and other stations under USAGM serve more than 400,000,000 listeners and are broadly equivalent to the BBC World Service, which is part-funded by the British government.

Elon Musk, the billionaire and top adviser to Trump who has been overseeing sweeping cuts to the US government, has used his social media platform X to call for VOA to be shut down.

The US president also cut funding to several other federal agencies – including those responsible for preventing homelessness, and funding museums and libraries.

Trump was highly critical of VOA in his first term. He has recently appointed staunch loyalist Kari Lake to be a special adviser for the US Agency for Global Media.

The president regularly states that mainstream media outlets are biased against him. He called CNN and MSNBC “corrupt” and “illegal”, without providing evidence, during a speech at the justice department.

The White House’s statement linked to several commentators and reports from right-wing media organisations about VOA’s alleged bias.

It quoted an article written for the right-wing Washington Times by Dan Robinson, a former White House correspondent for VOA, who said that the organisation had “essentially become a hubris-filled rogue operation often reflecting a leftist bias”.

It included links to other articles that accused VOA managers of telling staff not to describe Hamas as a “terrorist organisation”, and to suppress negative reports of Iran.

Other links were to everyday reporting of the 2020 US election, which it claimed were favourable to Trump’s rival Joe Biden.

Voice of America launched in 1942 which a mandate to combat Nazi and Japanese propaganda. Its first broadcast – made on a transmitter loaned to the US by the BBC – stated a modest purpose.

Gerald Ford, a former president, signed the VOA’s public charter in 1976 to safeguard its editorial independence.

By 1994, the Broadcast Board of Governors, with oversight over non-military broadcasting, was established.

In 2013, a shift in legislation allowed VOA and affiliates to begin broadcasting in the US.

A plane carrying more than 200 Venezuelans deported by the US has landed in El Salvador, hours after a US judge ordered the Trump administration not to do so.

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, wrote on social media that 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had arrived, along with 23 members of the Mexican gang MS-13, on Sunday morning.

Their arrival in the central American nation came after a federal judge blocked US President Donald Trump from invoking a centuries-old wartime law to justify the deportations – something Bukele made fun of in a later post.

“Oopsie… Too late,” he said.

Bukele wrote that the detainees were immediately transferred to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) “for a period of one year”, something that was “renewable” – suggesting they could be held there for longer.

“The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us,” he added.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed the alleged gang members arrival in El Salvador and thanked Bukele, calling him “the strongest security leader in our region”.

Hours before, on Saturday evening, US District Judge James Boasberg ordered a halt to deportations covered by Trump’s proclamation, which invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

The law allows the government to detain and deport people threatening the country’s safety without due process.

After hearing that planes with deportees had taken off, Judge Boasberg ordered them turned back, the Washington Post reported.

Rubio confirmed in a statement on Sunday that the deportations happened under the Alien Enemies Act, and made no mention of the judge’s ruling.

He said: “Hundreds of violent criminals were sent out of our country.”

A video attached to one of Bukele’s social media post shows lines of people with their hands and feet shackled being escorted by armed officials from the plane.

Some of the detainees are placed into the back of armoured vehicles, while others, hunched over as officers push their heads down, are forced onto buses.

The video also shows an aerial view of a long, winding police escort leading the buses into El Salvador’s notorious mega-jail Cecot.

The newly-built maximum-security jail is a proud achievement of Bukele’s, and part of his effort to crack down on the country’s organised crime.

The facility, which can hold up to 40,000 people, has been criticised by human rights groups for maltreatment of inmates.

The arrangement between the US and El Salvador is a sign of strengthening diplomatic ties.

“Thank you for your assistance and friendship,” Rubio told Bukele on Sunday.

El Salvador was the second country Rubio, the US’s top diplomat, visited after he was sworn in.

During that trip, which took place in February, Bukele made an initial offer to take US deportees, saying it would help pay for the massive Cecot facility.

The latest deportations under Trump’s second term are part of the president’s long-running crusade against illegal immigration in the US.

In January, Trump signed an executive order declaring Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organisations.

He won voters on the campaign trail, in part, by promising to enact the largest deportation operation in US history.

The agenda has so far not met expectations, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents not meeting the Trump’s daily quota for arrests.

A recent report suggested ICE agents had deported fewer immigrants in February than they had the same month a year prior during the previous administration under Joe Biden – 11,000 in February 2025, compared to 12,000 in February 2024.

A fashion show held last week in a picturesque, snow-clad town in Indian-administered Kashmir has sparked a major controversy that is still simmering.

The show, by the well-known fashion brand Shivan & Narresh, was held last Friday at a ski resort in Gulmarg to display their skiwear collection. The label is the first big, non-local brand to hold a fashion show in Kashmir, a scenic Himalayan region which has seen decades of violence.

But it soon sparked outrage among locals, politicians and religious leaders in Muslim-majority Kashmir after fashion publisher Elle India posted a video on social media which showed some models wearing underwear or bikinis. Locals were also angry over another video – shared by online magazine Lifestyle Asia – of a party held after the show, which showed people drinking alcohol outdoors.

Many took offence with the show being held in the holy month of Ramadan – a time of fasting and prayer for Muslims – and accused the designers of “mocking their faith” and “disregarding local culture and sentiments”. Some clerics called the show “obscene” and said it was like “soft porn”.

Some others explained that the outrage had arisen not only from religious conservatism, but also from a fear of cultural imposition from “outsiders”. Kashmir has witnessed decades of armed separatist insurgency against Indian rule since the late 1980s.

The backlash prompted Elle India and Lifestyle Asia to delete their videos. Shivan Bhatiya and Narresh Kukreja, the designers behind the label, also apologised, saying that their “sole intention was to celebrate creativity” and that they didn’t intend to offend religious sentiments.

Kashmir – known as the land of saints and Sufism (Islamic mysticism) – has a rich tradition of spirituality which influences many aspects of peoples’ lives. The traditional attire is modest, with locals – both men and women – often wearing the pheran, a long, loose cloak.

The row also moved off social media and a discussion about the show and the after-party caused a ruckus in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly.

The opposition criticised the government, accusing it of giving permission for the event despite being aware of local sensitivities. Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah distanced his government from the event, saying it had been organised by private entities, and asking local authorities to investigate the matter and submit a report.

“If law has been violated, strict action will be taken,” he said in the assembly on Monday. The police have not yet given details about who organised the event and what laws, if any, have been violated.

The fashion brand did not respond to the BBC’s questions about the show, including about permissions it obtained.

It’s not surprising that scenic Gulmarg – one of India’s few skiing destinations and a favourite with tourists – was the choice of venue for a show highlighting a skiwear collection.

Fashion journalist Shefalee Vasudev says it’s not uncommon for designers to want to hold fashion shows in exquisite locations.

In fact, international designers like Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfeld are remembered as much for their creative, theatrical fashion shows as they are for their iconic designs.

But experimentation brings with it the risk of controversy and so, it’s important to be mindful of the political and cultural sensitivities of a place, Ms Vasudev told the BBC.

And this holds especially true in a place like Kashmir, which has witnessed wars and decades of armed conflict.

• Article 370: What happened with Kashmir and why it matters
• ‘Don’t beat us, just shoot us’: Kashmiris allege violent army crackdown

Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir in full but control it only in parts. Since India’s partition and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the nuclear-armed neighbours have fought two wars over the territory.

Thousands of people have been killed since the late 1980s, when a separatist insurgency broke out against Indian rule. Though the separatist movement has lost steam over the years, many locals continue to view the administration in Delhi with distrust.

These sentiments have deepened since 2019 when the federal government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, stripped the region of its autonomy.

So some locals told the BBC that they were not surprised by the reactions to the show.

“Everything in Kashmir is political; people see things through a political prism,” says Mir, a professor at a local university (he asked for his surname to be withheld to protect his identity). He adds that people are sceptical about big corporate events like the fashion show and – even if they are organised by private players – they believe that the government is trying to dilute their culture.

Arshid Ahmad, a researcher, uses stronger words to express public angst. “The government is trying to dilute the spirit of resistance in Kashmiris,” he says.

This isn’t the first time an event held by non-locals has triggered a controversy in Kashmir. In 2013, separatists and human rights activists in the region protested against a show by renowned conductor Zubin Mehta. They said it was an attempt by the government to show the world that all was well in Kashmir when people were “suffering and dying”.

Some of the recent apprehensions around culture and identity can also be tied to the increase in tourists to Kashmir from other states in India. The federal government has often connected this boom in tourism to the abrogation of Article 370, which stripped the region of its autonomy.

Nousheen Fatima, 34, says because of government messaging, people outside Kashmir now see the region as being safer and “more assimilated with India”. But she alleges that many tourists do not respect the region’s culture.

Last year, a video showing tourists drinking alcohol during a boat ride on the famous Dal Lake in Srinagar evoked outrage from political and religious leaders, who called the behaviour “un-Islamic and unethical”.

In February, locals put up posters in Srinagar, asking tourists to “respect local culture and traditions” and “avoid alcohol and use of drugs”, but these were later pulled down by the police.

In an editorial for The Voice of Fashion magazine, Ms Vasudev argues that the outrage needs to be examined from a critical lens. She asks if it would have been all right for the show to have been held in another Indian city instead of Kashmir, where Muslims would also be observing Ramadan. And whether it would have been acceptable to hold the show in Kashmir if it featured only outfits perceived as modest.

She also points out that Kashmir is home to the “world’s finest wool yarn; some of the finest handspun, handwoven pashmina creations and its artisans”.

“What Kashmir creates and stands for cannot be replicated anywhere. Shouldn’t a fashion show at Gulmarg then, with innovative garments made with 100% wool, be seen as regenerating interest in untried ways?” she asks.

At least 34 people have died in the US after violent tornadoes tore through several south-eastern states, flipping cars and flattening homes.

In Kansas, a dust storm on Friday afternoon caused a crash with more than 50 vehicles, killing at least 8 people. Texas saw a similar mass pile-up.

A state of emergency has been declared in several states, including Arkansas, Georgia and Oklahoma, where more than 100 wildfires are raging.

A third day of severe weather is expected on Sunday, with flash flooding and more tornado warnings issued across the region. The National Weather Service (NWS) warned of “intense to violent” tornadoes, describing the situation as “particularly dangerous”.

“Get to the sturdiest structure you have access to and remain in place until the storms pass,” the NWS told residents in Alabama on Saturday night, when multiple tornado warnings were issued.

At least 250,000 properties across the US were without power on Sunday morning, according to tracker PowerOutage.

In Missouri, where at least 12 people died, Governor Mike Kehoe said the state had been “devastated by severe storms… leaving homes destroyed and lives lost”.

Initial reports showed 19 tornadoes had struck 25 counties in the state, its emergency management agency said.

A home belonging to one of the those killed was torn apart.

“It was unrecognisable as a home. Just a debris field,” Coroner Jim Akers of Butler County told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

“The floor was upside down. We were walking on walls.”

Alicia Wilson, who was evacuated from her Missouri home, told local TV station KSDK: “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through – it was so fast, our ears were all about to burst.”

A woman in Mississippi described how terrified her daughter was.

“All I could hear was my six year old screaming that she didn’t want to die – you don’t want to hear that coming out of your baby’s mouth,” Jericho McCoy said.

In Texas, a dust storm caused a pile-up of about 38 cars, which killed at least for people, local officials told AFP.

“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” Sgt Cindy Barkley, of the state’s public safety department, told reporters.

“We couldn’t tell that they were all together until the dust kind of settled.”

The destructive storms fuelled many wildfires in several central states, including Oklahoma, where more than 130 fires were reported on Friday, the state’s department of emergency management said.

As of Saturday, it said there had been 112 fire-related injuries reported by hospitals in the state.

Governor Kevin Stitt, who visited his own ranch to find he had “lost everything to the fires”, said the damage in the state was unbelievable.

“Oklahomans, we are in this together and we will build back stronger,” he said.

Tornadoes form when moist, warm air rises, mixing with cold air above to form thunderclouds. Winds blowing from different directions cause the air to rotate, creating a vortex of air that moves upwards.

Several states, including Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Kansas, lie within so-called Tornado Alley – a path frequently hit by the weather phenomenon, as the geography is ideal for their formation.

Peak tornado season in the region is from May to June – but meteorologists caution that they can occur at any time of year.

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We are surrounded by an invisible killer. One so common that we barely notice it shortening our lives.

It’s causing heart attacks, type 2 diabetes and studies now even link it to dementia.

What do you think it could be?

The answer is noise – and its impact on the human body goes far beyond damaging hearing.

“It is a public health crisis, we’ve got huge numbers of people exposed in their everyday life,” says Prof Charlotte Clark, from St George’s, University of London.

It’s just a crisis we don’t talk about.

So I’ve been investigating when noise becomes dangerous, chatting to the people whose health is suffering and seeing if there’s any way of overcoming our noisy world.

I started by meeting Prof Clark in an eerily silent sound laboratory. We’re going to see how my body reacts to noise and I’ve been kitted out with a device that looks like a chunky smartwatch.

It’s going to measure my heart rate and how much my skin sweats.

You can join in too if you have some headphones. Think about how these five sounds make you feel.

The one I find really grating is the traffic noise from Dhaka, Bangladesh, which has the title of the noisiest city in the world. I immediately feel like I’m in a ginormous, stressful traffic jam.

And the sensors are picking up my agitation – my heart rate shoots up and my skin is sweating more.

“There’s really good evidence that traffic noise affects your heart health,” says Prof Clark, as the next sound is prepared.

Only the joyful sounds of the playground have a calming effect on my body. The dogs barking and the neighbour’s party in the early hours lead to a negative response.

• LISTEN: Is noise an invisible killer?

But why is sound changing my body?

“You have an emotional response to sound,” says Prof Clark.

Sound is detected by the ear and passed onto the brain and one region – the amygdala – performs the emotional assessment.

This is part of the body’s fight-or-flight response that has evolved to help us react quickly to the sounds like a predator crashing through the bushes.

“So your heart rate goes up, your nervous system starts to kick in and you release stress hormones,” Prof Clark tells me.

All of this is good in an emergency, but over time it starts to cause damage.

“If you’re exposed for several years, your body’s reacting like that all the time, it increases your risk of developing things like heart attacks, high blood pressure, stroke and type 2 diabetes,” says Prof Clark.

Insidiously, this even happens while we’re fast asleep. You might think you adapt to noise. I thought I did when I lived in a rental near an airport. But the biology tells a different story.

“You never turn your ears off; when you’re asleep, you’re still listening. So those responses, like your heart rate going up, that’s happening whilst you’re asleep,” adds Prof Clark.

Noise is unwanted sound. Transport – traffic, trains and aeroplanes – are a major source, but so too are the sounds of us having a good time. One person’s great party is another’s insufferable noise.

I meet Coco at her fourth-floor flat in the historic Vila de Gràcia area of Barcelona, Spain.

There’s a bag of freshly picked lemons tied to her door gifted by one neighbour, her fridge contains a tortilla cooked by another and she offers me fancy cakes made by a third neighbour who’s training in patisserie.

From the balcony you can see the city’s famous cathedral, the Sagrada Familia. It is easy to see why Coco has fallen in love with living here, but it comes at a huge price and she thinks she’ll be forced to leave.

“It’s extremely noisy… it’s 24-hour noise,” she tells me. There’s a dog park for owners to walk their pooches which “bark at 2, 3, 4, 5am” and the courtyard is a public space that is used for everything from children’s birthday parties to all-day concerts finished off with fireworks.

She gets out her phone and plays the recordings of the music being blasted out so loud it makes the glass in her windows vibrate.

Her home should be a refuge from the stress of work, but the noise “brings frustration, I feel like crying”.

She has been “hospitalised twice with chest pain” and “absolutely” thinks noise is causing the stress, which is damaging her health. “There is a physical change that I feel, it does something to your body, for certain,” she says.

In Barcelona there are an estimated 300 heart attacks and 30 deaths a year just from traffic noise, according to researcher Dr Maria Foraster, who has reviewed evidence on noise for the World Health Organization.

Across Europe noise is linked to 12,000 early deaths a year as well as millions of cases of severely disturbed sleep as well as serious noise annoyance which can impact mental health.

I meet Dr Foraster at a café that is separated from one of Barcelona’s busiest roads by a small park. My sound meter says the noise from the distant traffic is just over 60 decibels here.

We can easily chat over the noise without raising our voices, but this is already an unhealthy volume.

The crucial number for heart health is 53 decibels, she tells me, and the higher you go the greater the health risks.

“This 53 means that we need to be in a rather quiet environment,” says Dr Foraster.

And that’s just in daytime, we need even lower levels for sleep. “At night we need quietness,” she says.

Although it is not just about the volume, how disruptive the sound is and how much control you have over it affect our emotional response to noise.

Dr Foraster argues the health impact of noise is “at the level of air pollution” but is much harder to comprehend.

“We are used to understanding that chemicals can affect health and they are toxic, but it’s not so straightforward to understand that a physical factor, like noise, affects our health beyond our hearing,” she says.

A loud party can be the fun that makes life worth living and someone else’s intolerable noise.

The sound of traffic has the greatest impact on health because so many people are exposed to it. But traffic is also the sound of getting to work, doing the shopping and taking the children to school. Tackling noise means asking people to live their lives differently – which creates problems of its own.

Dr Natalie Mueller, from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, takes me for a walk around the city centre. We start on a busy road – my sound meter clocks in at over 80 decibels – and we head to a quiet tree-lined avenue where the noise is down to the 50s.

But there is something different about this street – it used to be a busy road, but the space was given over to pedestrians, cafes and gardens. I can see the ghost of an old cross roads by the shape of the flowerbeds. Vehicles can still come down here, just slowly.

Remember earlier in the lab, we found that some sounds can soothe the body.

“It is not completely silent, but it’s a different perception of sound and noise,” Dr Mueller says.

The initial plan was to create more than 500 areas like this, termed “superblocks” – pedestrian-friendly areas created by grouping several city blocks together.

Dr Mueller performed the research projecting a 5-10% reduction in noise in the city, which would prevent about “150 premature deaths” from noise alone each year. And that would be “just the tip of the iceberg” of the health benefits.

But in reality only six superblocks were ever built. The city council declined to comment.

The dangers of noise though are continuing to grow. Urbanisation is putting more people into noisy cities.

Dhaka, Bangladesh, is one of the fastest growing megacities in the world. This has brought more traffic and given the city a cacophonous soundtrack of honking horns.

Artist Momina Raman Royal earned the label of the “lone hero” as his silent protests have focused attention on the city’s noise problem.

For about 10 minutes each day, he stands at the intersection of a couple of busy roads with a big yellow placard accusing drivers who honk their horns loudly of causing a massive nuisance.

He took on the mission after his daughter was born. “I want to stop all honking from not only Dhaka, but from Bangladesh,” he says.

“If you see the birds or trees or rivers, no one’s making noise without humans, so humans are responsible.”

But here there are the beginnings of political action too. Syeda Rizwana Hasan, who’s the environment adviser and minister for the government of Bangladesh, told me she was “very worried” about the health impacts of noise.

There is a crackdown on honking horns to get the noise levels down – with an awareness campaign and stricter enforcement of existing laws.

She said: “It’s impossible to get it done in one year or two years, but I think it is possible to ensure that the city becomes less noisy, and when people feel that, they feel better when it’s less noisy, I’m sure their habit will also change.”

The solutions to noise can be difficult, complicated and challenging to solve.

What I’m left with is a new appreciation for finding some space in our lives to just escape the noise because in the words of Dr Masrur Abdul Quader, from the Bangladesh University of Professionals, it is “a silent killer and a slow poison”.

The US has launched a “decisive and powerful” wave of air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, President Donald Trump has said, citing the group’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea as the reason.

“Funded by Iran, the Houthi thugs have fired missiles at US aircraft, and targeted our Troops and Allies,” Trump said on social media, adding that their “piracy, violence, and terrorism” had cost “billions” and put lives at risk.

The Houthi-run health ministry said at least 31 people were killed and 101 others were injured in the strikes.

The group later said it would continue to target Red Sea shipping until Israel lifted its blockade of Gaza, and that its forces would respond to the strikes.

The Houthis reported a series of explosions on Saturday evening in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and in the northern province of Saada – the rebels’ stronghold on the border with Saudi Arabia.

The Iranian-backed rebel group, which considers Israel its enemy, controls Sanaa and the north-west of Yemen, but it is not the country’s internationally-recognised government.

Unverified images show plumes of black smoke over the area of Sanaa’s airport – which includes a military facility.

In a statement, the Houthis blamed the US and the UK for “wicked” aggression targeting residential areas in Sanaa.

The UK did not participate in Saturday’s US strikes against the Houthi targets but it did provide routine refuelling support for the US.

The Houthis have said they are acting in support of the Palestinians in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and have claimed – often falsely – that they are targeting ships only linked to Israel, the US or the UK.

• Who are the Houthis and why are they attacking ships?

Since November 2023, the Houthis have targeted dozens of merchant vessels with missiles, drones and small boat attacks in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. They have sunk two vessels, seized a third, and killed four crew members.

These attacks, Trump said, “will not be tolerated”.

He added: “We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective.”

The Houthis have not been deterred by the deployment of Western warships to protect merchant vessels, or by multiple rounds of US and British air strikes on its military targets.

Israel has also carried out air strikes against the Houthis since July, in retaliation to the 400 missiles and drones that the Israeli military said had been launched at the country from Yemen, most of which were shot down.

Major shipping companies have been forced to stop using the Red Sea – through which almost 15% of global seaborne trade usually passes – and use a much longer route around southern Africa instead.

Trump said that it had been more than a year since a US-flagged ship had sailed safely through the Suez Canal – which the Red Sea leads to – and four months since a US warship had been through the body of water between east Africa and the Arabian peninsula.

The Suez Canal is the quickest sea route between Asia and Europe, and is particularly important in the transportation of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Addressing the Houthis directly, Trump wrote that if they did not stop, “HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE”.

But the Houthis were unwavering in their response, saying the aggression would not diminish their support for Palestinians.

“This aggression will not go without response and our Yemeni armed forces are ready to answer escalation with further escalation,” the group said.

Trump urged Iran to cease its support for the Houthis, warning that Washington would hold Tehran “fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it”.

He also accused the previous White House administration, under Joe Biden, of being “pathetically weak” and allowing the “unrestrained Houthis” to keep going.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the US government had “no authority, or business, dictating Iranian foreign policy”.

“End support for Israeli genocide and terrorism,” he posted on X on Sunday. “Stop killing of Yemeni people.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also discussed military deterrence operations against the Houthis when he spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday.

Rubio emphasised that “continued Houthi attacks on US military and commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea will not be tolerated”, a State Department spokesperson said.

Lavrov, for his part, stressed the need for “an immediate cessation of the use of force” and the “importance for all sides to engage in political dialogue in order to find a solution that would prevent further bloodshed”, said the Russian foreign ministry.

A Peruvian fisherman who survived 95 days lost at sea in the Pacific Ocean by eating turtles, birds and cockroaches has been rescued and reunited with his family.

Maximo Napa Castro, 61, set off for what should have been a two-week fishing trip from the coastal town of Marcona, on the southern Peruvian coast, on 7 December.

Ten days in, a storm blew his boat off course, leaving him adrift with dwindling supplies.

His family launched a search, but Peru’s maritime patrols were unable to locate him.

It was not until Wednesday that the Ecuadorian patrol vessel Don F found him 1,094km (680 miles) from the coast, dehydrated and in a critical condition.

Maximo survived by catching rainwater in his boat and eating whatever he could find.

In an emotional reunion with his brother in Paita, near the Ecuadorian border, on Friday, he described how he had eaten roaches and birds before resorting to sea turtles. His last 15 days were spent without food.

Thinking of his family, including his two-month-old granddaughter, gave him the strength to endure, Mr Castro said.

“I thought about my mother everyday. I’m thankful to God for giving me a second chance.”

His mother, Elena, told local media that, while her relatives remained optimistic during her son’s disappearance, she had begun to lose hope.

After his rescue, Mr Castro was taken to Paita for medical assessment before being flown to the Peruvian capital, Lima.

There, at Jorge Chávez International Airport, he was met by his daughter, Inés Napa, in an emotional reunion surrounded by a media scrum. She welcomed him home with a bottle of pisco, Peru’s national drink.

In his home district of San Andrés in the Ica region, neighbours and relatives told Peruvian media agency RPP they decorated the streets in celebration.

His niece, Leyla Torres Napa, said the family planned to celebrate his birthday, which passed while he was lost at sea.

She told the agency: “The day of his birth was unique because all that he could eat [while at sea] was a small cookie, so it is very important for us that we celebrate because, for us, he has been reborn.”

Last year, Russian Mikhail Pichugin was rescued after spending more than two months adrift in a small inflatable boat in the Sea of Okhotsk, to the east of Russia.

Similarly, José Salvador Alvarenga, a Salvadoran fisherman, endured an extraordinary 14-month ordeal adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

Setting out from Mexico’s coast in late 2012, he was eventually found in the Marshall Islands in early 2014, and also survived on rainwater and turtles.

Hundreds of thousands of people descended on Serbia’s capital on Saturday to protest over the deaths of 15 people in a railway station collapse.

While the government put attendance at 107,000 across Belgrade, an independent monitor said 325,000 – if not more – had gathered, making it Serbia’s largest protest ever.

The Novi Sad collapse last November has galvanised anger towards the government and President Aleksandar Vucic. Demonstrators blame corruption and corner-cutting for the loss of life.

They believe the disaster reflects more than a decade of governing by the Progressive Party of Vucic – who closely associated himself with the station’s recent renovation.

President Vucic addressed the nation on Saturday and praised the police, adding that he was proud that “we managed to preserve the peace”.

He added that he “understood” the protesters’ message, and said “we will have to change ourselves”.

Despite multiple resignations – and Vucic’s insistence that he is going nowhere – the protests have only continued to grow.

“We just want a country that works,” law student Jana Vasic told the BBC in the growing crowd in Belgrade.

“We want institutions that do their jobs properly. We don’t care what party is in power. But we need a country that works, not one where you don’t get justice for more than four months.”

Republic Square – just one of the four meeting points around Serbia’s capital for the “15th for 15” protest – was full to overflowing on Saturday.

Some took refuge on the plinth of Prince Mihajlo’s statue – the traditional spot for Belgraders to meet, the equivalent of Eros in London’s Piccadilly.

Others queued up along the road in front of the National Museum, stretching all the way back to Students’ Square.

The other meeting points were every bit as crowded ahead of the planned rendezvous in front of the National Assembly.

The Public Meeting Archive said 275,000-325,000 had attended the protest – “with the possibility that the number was even higher”.

“Due to the extraordinary size, dynamic nature and structure of the assembly, as well as the unclear situation in some parts of the city… a more precise assessment is not possible,” it added.

Serbian media reports 22 people were arrested and 56 others injured.

While the protests over the Novi Sad collapse began with students, they have been joined by taxi drivers, farmers and lawyers.

Ahead of the big protest, motorbike riders pulled up outside the National Assembly, facing off against the tractors surrounding a camp of pro-government counter-protesters.

Then a parade of military veterans received a rousing welcome. They said they would make a citizen’s arrest on anyone who attacked the students.

The students have been calling for full transparency and accountability over the collapse of a concrete and glass canopy at the station in Serbia’s second city, which was renovated and only reopened – by Vucic – in 2022.

They want the government to publish all the documentation relating to the renovation project and say they are not satisfied with the papers the authorities have released so far.

They also want those responsible for the disaster to be charged and convicted. Prosecutors have indicted at least 16 people, including former construction minister Goran Vesic.

But the charges have yet to go to trial. And the students insist they will continue with their protests until the authorities meet all their demands.

“We’re making progress,” a student representing Belgrade University’s philosophy faculty told the BBC. “But at this point none of our demands have been met completely.”

“A couple of politicians have resigned from their offices,” noted another. “But they weren’t fired. We’re yet to see anything but empty promises”.

Prime Minister Milos Vucevic announced his resignation at the end of January. But that has yet to be ratified by the National Assembly and he remains in his post.

But the real power in Serbia lies with Vucic, who insists that he is going nowhere.

“I don’t give in to blackmail,” he told a media conference on the eve of the big protest. “I won’t allow the street to pave a horrible future for this country.”

Vucic described the student protests as “well-intentioned”. But he had less flattering words for opposition parties, labelling them members of a “criminal cartel”. He accused them of attempting to force the formation of a “fraudulent interim government”.

Borko Stefanovic does not deny that the opposition parties are looking for the establishment of a “government of experts”.

The deputy president of the Party of Freedom and Justice describes it as the “only rational way out” of the political crisis, which would establish the conditions for fresh elections.

Like other opposition leaders, Stefanovic says that free elections are not currently possible due to the Progressive Party’s domination of the media and state institutions.

But this is not one of the students’ demands. They are simply calling for the truth behind the Novi Sad disaster to be established.

As law professor Miodrag Jovanovic puts it “they are asking for the things I’ve been lecturing about – the rule of law, respect for the constitution, and the responsibility and accountability of public officials”.

Whatever happens during the “15th for 15” protest, it seems unlikely that the students will relent until they receive some satisfactory answers.

After Kim Visintine put her son to bed every night at a hospital in St Louis, Missouri, she spent her evening in the hospital’s library. She was determined to know how her boy had become seriously ill with a rare brain tumour at just a week old.

“Doctors were shocked,” she says. “We were told that his illness was one in a million. Other parents were learning to change diapers but I was learning how to change chemotherapy ports and IVs.”

Kim’s son Zack was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme. It is a brain tumour that is very rare in children and is usually seen in adults over 45.

Zack had chemotherapy treatments but doctors said there was no hope of him ever recovering. He died at just six years old.

Years later, social media and community chatter made Kim start to think that her son was not an isolated case. Perhaps he was part of a bigger picture growing in their community surrounding Coldwater Creek.

In this part of the US, cancer fears have prompted locals to accuse officials of not doing enough to support those who may have been exposed to radiation due to the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s.

A compensation programme that was designed to pay out to some Americans who contracted diseases after exposure to radiation expired last year – before it could be extended to the St Louis area.

This Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (Reca) provided one-time payouts to people who may have developed cancer or other diseases while living in areas where activities such as atomic weapons testing took place. It paid out $2.6bn (£2bn) to more than 41,000 claimants before coming to an end in 2024.

Among the areas covered were parts of New Mexico, where the world’s first test of a nuclear weapon took place in 1945. Research published in 2020 by the National Cancer Institute suggested that hundreds of cancers in the area would not have occurred without radiation exposure.

St Louis, meanwhile, was where uranium was refined and used to help create the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. After World War Two ended, the chemical was dumped near the creek and left uncovered, allowing waste to seep into the area.

Decades later, federal investigators acknowledged an increased cancer risk for some people who played in the creek as children, but added in their report: “The predicted increases in the number of cancer cases from exposures are small, and no method exists to link a particular cancer with this exposure.”

The clean-up of the creek is still ongoing and is not expected to finish until 2038.

A new bill has been put forward in the House, and Josh Hawley, a US senator representing Missouri, says he has raised the issue with President Donald Trump.

When Kim flicks through her school yearbook, she can identify those who have become sick and those who have since passed away. The numbers are startling.

“My husband didn’t grow up in this area, and he said to me, ‘Kim, this is not normal. It seems like we’re always talking about one of your friends passing away or going to a funeral’,” she says.

Just streets away from the creek, Karen Nickel grew up spending her days near the water picking berries, or in the nearby park playing baseball. Her brother would often try and catch fish in Coldwater Creek.

“I always tell people that we had just the fairytale childhood that you would expect in what you consider suburban America,” says Karen. “Big backyards, big families, children playing out together until the street lights came on at night.”

But years later, her carefree childhood now looks very different.

“Fifteen people from the street I grew up on have died from rare cancers,” she says. “We have neighbourhoods here where every house has been affected by some cancer or some illness. We have streets where you can’t just find a house where a family has not been affected by this.”

When Karen’s sister was just 11 years old, doctors discovered that her ovaries were covered in cysts. The same had happened to their neighbour when she was just nine. Karen’s six-year-old granddaughter was born with a mass on her right ovary.

Karen helped found Just Moms STL, a group that is dedicated to protecting the community from future exposures that could be linked to cancers – and which advocates for a clean-up of the area.

“We get messages every day from people that are suffering from illnesses and are questioning whether this is from exposure,” she says. “These are very aggressive illnesses that the community is getting, from cancers all the way to autoimmune diseases.”

Teresa Rumfelt grew up just a street away from Karen and lived in her family home from 1979 until 2010. She remembers every one of her animals passing away from cancer and her neighbours getting ill from rare diseases.

Years later, her sister Via Von Banks was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of motor neurone disease. Some medical studies have suggested there could be a link between radiation and ALS, but this is not definitive – and more research needs to be done to firm it up.

That does not reassure people like Teresa who are concerned that more needs to be done to understand how locals are being affected.

“ALS took my sister at 50,” Teresa says. “I think it was the worst disease ever of mankind. When she was diagnosed in 2019, she’d just got her career going and her children were growing. She stayed positive through all of it.”

Like Hawley, Just STL Moms and other community members want the government’s compensation act to be expanded to include people within the St Louis area, despite the programme being in limbo after expiring.

Expanding it to the Coldwater Creek community would mean that locals could be offered compensation if they could prove they were harmed as a result of the Manhattan Project, during which the atomic bomb was developed with the help of uranium-processing in St Louis. It would also allow screenings and further study into illnesses other than cancer.

In a statement to the BBC, the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it took concerns very seriously and had actively worked with federal, state and local partners – as well as community members – to understand their health concerns, and to ensure community members were not exposed to the Manhattan Project-era waste.

The BBC has also contacted the US Army Corps of Engineers, which is leading the clean-up – but has not received a response to a request for comment.

“My sister would have loved to be part of the fight. She’d be the first to picket,” says Teresa of her efforts to get greater support from the government.

The trend in people around Coldwater Creek getting unwell has not gone unnoticed among healthcare professionals.

Dr Gautum Agarwal, a cancer surgeon at Mercy Hospital in St Louis, says he has not noticed a “statistical thing”, but notes that he has seen husbands and wives and their neighbours presenting cancers.

Now, he ensures that his patients are asked where they live and how close they are to Coldwater Creek.

“I tell them that there’s a potential that there’s a link. And if your neighbours or family live near there, we should get them screened more often. And maybe you should get your kids screened earlier.”

He hopes that over time more knowledge will be gained about the issue, and for a study into multi-cancer early detection tests to be introduced that could help catch any potential cancers, and help reassure people in the area.

Other experts take a different view of the risks. “There is a narrative that many people are sick from cancers, specifically from exposures while living next to Coldwater Creek for the last few decades”, says Roger Lewis, a professor in the environmental and occupations health department of St Louis University.

“But the data and studies don’t indicate that. They show that there is some risk but it’s small. It doesn’t mean that it’s not significant in some ways, but it’s very limited.”

Prof Lewis acknowledges the fear in the community, saying locals will feel safer if the government is clearer about its efforts to eliminate any hazards.

For many people near Coldwater Creek, conversation with authorities is not easing the angst that comes with living in an area known for the dumping of nuclear waste.

“It’s almost a given in our community that at some point we all expect to have some sort of cancer or illness,” says Kim Visintine. “There’s almost this apathy within our group that, well, it’s just a matter of time.”

Operation Varsity “was the battle that ended” World War Two in Europe, yet it is largely unknown to all but military history buffs.

British, Canadian and American forces took off mostly from Essex airfields on 24 March 1945, to be dropped directly on top of the German lines at the River Rhine.

Paratroopers and gliders packed with men descended into fierce fighting conditions which resulted in rapid success, but huge loss of life. About six weeks later, Victory in Europe was declared.

Chris Bullock has organised an event at one of the departure airfields, RAF Rivenhall, to remember those who died, saying “it’s an untold story”.

“When you see a video of the men at Rivenhall with their final brew, giving the thumbs up and the V for victory sign before they get into their gliders and you know some of them didn’t come home, within three hours they were dead – it’s important to tell that story,” he said.

Peter Davies, 102, took off from RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk towed by a Dakota plane and carrying “a 17-pounder gun, towing vehicle and gun detachment of eight personnel”.

He had volunteered for the Glider Pilot Regiment in 1942 because he thought it would be “more exciting” than his time as an Army private manning a Royal Artillery anti-aircraft unit.

“It’s like flying a brick – there’s only one way, and it’s down,” said Mr Davies, from Bollington, Cheshire, describing what it was like once the the glider was loosed.

“There was a hell of a lot of flak, we lost our controls and having lost a great chunk of one wing, we were pulling deeper and deeper into enemy ground.

“When we hit the ground – and I do mean hit – we were very much in the wrong place amongst a load of very angry Germans, and it was total chaos.”

One American glider came down within 50m (about 160ft) of him, “and not one man got out alive because the Germans were there as well”.

But with co-pilot Bert Bowman, he made it across the battlefield to their intended drop zone and returned to Britain.

“The Allies landed directly on top of the Germans and lots of gliders were shot down and lots of paratroopers were shot in the skies – 80 people from RAF Rivenhall alone lost their lives,” said Mr Bullock, 56, who served in the 3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment for 25 years.

Operation Varsity was the largest single airborne operation in history, with more than 16,000 men were dropped into western Germany on the same day.

Its aim was to establish a bridgehead across the River Rhine for the main Allied advance into Germany and push rapidly towards the Russian forces arriving from the east.

The first part was the ground offensive Operation Plunder, “which was the biggest-ever river crossing and was done by British and Canadian forces”, Mr Bullock said.

The intention was for the amphibious troops on the western side of the Rhine to join up with the airborne troops dropped to its east.

Varsity took place just five months after the disastrous Battle of Arnhem, which resulted in 90% casualties to the Glider Pilot Regiment.

RAF pilots such as Brian Latham, who had been sent to Texas, to learn to fly fighter planes, were among hundreds who “volunteered” for glider service.

“If we didn’t volunteer, we were told we’d never fly again and be made to join the infantry or go down a mine,” said Mr Latham, 101, from Llandudno, Conway, Wales.

However, he soon realised being a gilder pilot was “an elite, like the Commandos”.

“We were not toughies and they made us toughies – I became a trained infantry man,” he said.

Flying from RAF Gosfield, near Braintree, Essex, Mr Latham carried a mortar section, with a Jeep and trailer, and was dropped into ground smoke and heavy anti-aircraft fire.

“We just dived into the smoke and it was all very exciting and we landed just where we should have done at Hamminkeln,” he said.

“We were then by a bridge, held by the Royal Ulster Rifles, which was attacked by German tanks until the British 2nd Army came up [having crossed the Rhine].”

Eventually he was returned to the UK, but was grateful not to go back to his home station of RAF Broadwell in Oxfordshire because “we’d lost too many people”.

Of the 890 Glider Pilot Regiment personnel who took part in Varsity, more than 20% of them were killed or wounded.

“We were dropped right in amongst the Germans, which had never been tried before, and we knew it was a suicide drop,” said Danny Mason, who had qualified to join the Parachute Regiment aged 19 just a week earlier.

“But it didn’t bother us. We were young and keen and thought, ‘We’ll be all right, we’ll be fine’.”

Now 98 and living in Ludlow, Shropshire, Mr Mason added: “We also thought the Germans were losing and weren’t in good fighting condition and this’ll be easy – but it wasn’t. We had a very high casualty rate.”

At least 1,070 members of the US 17th Airborne Division and the British 6th Airborne Division, which included the Canadians, were killed and thousands more were wounded.

“But within four or five hours we had accomplished what we had set out to do,” Mr Mason said.

He advanced 600 miles through Germany within a fortnight until he was injured.

“It was the battle that ended the war, yet nobody was interested in it,” he said.

“I asked my old commanding officer about it and he said it was because everyone was fed up. It was six years of war and it was such a huge relief when VE Day came.”

Mr Bullock provided some additional context.

“Three weeks after Varsity, Belsen concentration camp was liberated. Two weeks after, Hitler killed himself, and a week after that Germany capitulated – it’s probably hardly talked about because events overtook themselves.”

Now working as an international operations security manager for the BBC, he lives near RAF Rivenhall and began researching its story 10 years ago.

Sixty gliders towed by two RAF squadrons left the airfield at 07:00 GMT on 24 March 1945, carrying part of the 6th Airborne Division.

But some of that history is still lost.

“There are no records left of who flew on which glider and what happened to each man – only the anecdotal evidence and individual stories I’ve managed to track down,” he said.

He has commissioned a memorial to “remember all those who flew from Rivenhall and died on that day”.

It will be unveiled at an event on 23 March, with military vehicles, static stands, re-enactors, presentations and a flypast by a Dakota.

A memorial service will be held the next day at 07:00 GMT.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer says a “huge amount” has happened since his “coalition of the willing” idea first surfaced at his Lancaster House summit a fortnight ago.

He is not wrong: US-Ukrainian relations have been on a rollercoaster since then, culminating in the meeting in Riyadh earlier this week, where the two sides agreed on a 30-day ceasefire.

But Sir Keir’s coalition is a big, still somewhat nebulous undertaking, and there is clearly a great deal of work to be done before this ad hoc alliance is ready to take on something as complex – and potentially perilous – as keeping the peace in Ukraine.

Sir Keir says the coalition is now bigger and that “new commitments” are on the table, though he did not spell these out.

• Follow updates on this story
• Trump: US had productive talks with Putin
• Starmer announces ‘coalition of the willing’ to guarantee Ukraine peace

Participants of Saturday morning’s virtual summit, he said, had agreed to keep military aid flowing to Ukraine and tighten restrictions on the Russian economy, to weaken Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine.

Planning, he said, would now move to an “operational phase”, with military chiefs due to meet in the UK next Thursday.

“Overall, we are successfully gathering political and military momentum,” he said.

It is likely that we will see a rolling set of political, diplomatic and military gatherings as the plan slowly takes shape.

It is far from plain sailing.

Asked about vital US military support for any European-led operation – what’s being called a “backstop” – the prime minister was clear: the US position had not changed.

European national security advisors including Jonathan Powell – one of those credited with convincing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept the US ceasefire proposal – were in Washington on Friday.

Unless US President Donald Trump’s position on the backstop changes, Sir Keir’s coalition of the willing could struggle to get off the ground.

For Zelensky, the military clock is ticking, especially in Kursk, where his troops have been occupying a shrinking sliver of Russian territory since August 2024.

Ukraine vehemently denies reports that its forces are surrounded in Kursk – a theory promoted by Trump on Friday – but they are clearly under enormous pressure and are losing ground.

When I was in Kyiv towards the end of last year, Ukrainian troops told us they were holding onto territory in Kursk as a bargaining chip to be played in future negotiations.

But as those negotiations approach, it is a chip that Putin seems determined to remove from the table first.

That may go some way towards explaining his “yes, but” approach to the idea of a 30-day ceasefire.

A fashion show held last week in a picturesque, snow-clad town in Indian-administered Kashmir has sparked a major controversy that is still simmering.

The show, by the well-known fashion brand Shivan & Narresh, was held last Friday at a ski resort in Gulmarg to display their skiwear collection. The label is the first big, non-local brand to hold a fashion show in Kashmir, a scenic Himalayan region which has seen decades of violence.

But it soon sparked outrage among locals, politicians and religious leaders in Muslim-majority Kashmir after fashion publisher Elle India posted a video on social media which showed some models wearing underwear or bikinis. Locals were also angry over another video – shared by online magazine Lifestyle Asia – of a party held after the show, which showed people drinking alcohol outdoors.

Many took offence with the show being held in the holy month of Ramadan – a time of fasting and prayer for Muslims – and accused the designers of “mocking their faith” and “disregarding local culture and sentiments”. Some clerics called the show “obscene” and said it was like “soft porn”.

Some others explained that the outrage had arisen not only from religious conservatism, but also from a fear of cultural imposition from “outsiders”. Kashmir has witnessed decades of armed separatist insurgency against Indian rule since the late 1980s.

The backlash prompted Elle India and Lifestyle Asia to delete their videos. Shivan Bhatiya and Narresh Kukreja, the designers behind the label, also apologised, saying that their “sole intention was to celebrate creativity” and that they didn’t intend to offend religious sentiments.

Kashmir – known as the land of saints and Sufism (Islamic mysticism) – has a rich tradition of spirituality which influences many aspects of peoples’ lives. The traditional attire is modest, with locals – both men and women – often wearing the pheran, a long, loose cloak.

The row also moved off social media and a discussion about the show and the after-party caused a ruckus in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly.

The opposition criticised the government, accusing it of giving permission for the event despite being aware of local sensitivities. Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah distanced his government from the event, saying it had been organised by private entities, and asking local authorities to investigate the matter and submit a report.

“If law has been violated, strict action will be taken,” he said in the assembly on Monday. The police have not yet given details about who organised the event and what laws, if any, have been violated.

The fashion brand did not respond to the BBC’s questions about the show, including about permissions it obtained.

It’s not surprising that scenic Gulmarg – one of India’s few skiing destinations and a favourite with tourists – was the choice of venue for a show highlighting a skiwear collection.

Fashion journalist Shefalee Vasudev says it’s not uncommon for designers to want to hold fashion shows in exquisite locations.

In fact, international designers like Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfeld are remembered as much for their creative, theatrical fashion shows as they are for their iconic designs.

But experimentation brings with it the risk of controversy and so, it’s important to be mindful of the political and cultural sensitivities of a place, Ms Vasudev told the BBC.

And this holds especially true in a place like Kashmir, which has witnessed wars and decades of armed conflict.

• Article 370: What happened with Kashmir and why it matters
• ‘Don’t beat us, just shoot us’: Kashmiris allege violent army crackdown

Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir in full but control it only in parts. Since India’s partition and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the nuclear-armed neighbours have fought two wars over the territory.

Thousands of people have been killed since the late 1980s, when a separatist insurgency broke out against Indian rule. Though the separatist movement has lost steam over the years, many locals continue to view the administration in Delhi with distrust.

These sentiments have deepened since 2019 when the federal government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, stripped the region of its autonomy.

So some locals told the BBC that they were not surprised by the reactions to the show.

“Everything in Kashmir is political; people see things through a political prism,” says Mir, a professor at a local university (he asked for his surname to be withheld to protect his identity). He adds that people are sceptical about big corporate events like the fashion show and – even if they are organised by private players – they believe that the government is trying to dilute their culture.

Arshid Ahmad, a researcher, uses stronger words to express public angst. “The government is trying to dilute the spirit of resistance in Kashmiris,” he says.

This isn’t the first time an event held by non-locals has triggered a controversy in Kashmir. In 2013, separatists and human rights activists in the region protested against a show by renowned conductor Zubin Mehta. They said it was an attempt by the government to show the world that all was well in Kashmir when people were “suffering and dying”.

Some of the recent apprehensions around culture and identity can also be tied to the increase in tourists to Kashmir from other states in India. The federal government has often connected this boom in tourism to the abrogation of Article 370, which stripped the region of its autonomy.

Nousheen Fatima, 34, says because of government messaging, people outside Kashmir now see the region as being safer and “more assimilated with India”. But she alleges that many tourists do not respect the region’s culture.

Last year, a video showing tourists drinking alcohol during a boat ride on the famous Dal Lake in Srinagar evoked outrage from political and religious leaders, who called the behaviour “un-Islamic and unethical”.

In February, locals put up posters in Srinagar, asking tourists to “respect local culture and traditions” and “avoid alcohol and use of drugs”, but these were later pulled down by the police.

In an editorial for The Voice of Fashion magazine, Ms Vasudev argues that the outrage needs to be examined from a critical lens. She asks if it would have been all right for the show to have been held in another Indian city instead of Kashmir, where Muslims would also be observing Ramadan. And whether it would have been acceptable to hold the show in Kashmir if it featured only outfits perceived as modest.

She also points out that Kashmir is home to the “world’s finest wool yarn; some of the finest handspun, handwoven pashmina creations and its artisans”.

“What Kashmir creates and stands for cannot be replicated anywhere. Shouldn’t a fashion show at Gulmarg then, with innovative garments made with 100% wool, be seen as regenerating interest in untried ways?” she asks.

In the world of billionaires and the similarly wealthy teams they own, designing a state-of-the-art stadium goes beyond the visual.

In the offices of architecture firm Arup, there is a soundproof room downstairs with premium grade surround-sound speakers and a large screen. It looks like a small theatre.

“We can put a client in there and say, ‘when your team scores, this is what it will sound like if your stadium roof is shaped this way,'” says Chris Dite, who is responsible for the firm’s sports projects.

“But, if we change the roof shape to this, then this is what it will sound like.”

The way the pitch and intensity of the crowd noise changes in the aftermath of a goal is based on data from stadium projects the firm have completed over the last 25 years.

Dite’s previous work includes the Allianz Arena used by German football giants Bayern Munich and the Gtech Community Stadium where Brentford play.

“If you can sit the client in those front rows and make them feel like they’re in it, that’s where you start to really invoke an emotional response,” Dite tells BBC News.

What a goal might sound like in the new Manchester United stadium was not part of the presentation given by the club earlier this week, but the design of the new £2bn ground certainly invoked emotional responses.

Some questioned how realistic it was to build such tall pillars from which a glass panelled canvas drapes over the new stands and surrounding grounds.

The three pillars in the artist’s impression, unveiled by the firm Foster and Partners, are a nod to the trident on the Red Devil’s crest.

“Gravity still exists, unfortunately for us,” remarks Dite. He says he “can’t comment on other architectural businesses” but that Arup doesn’t issue any public designs that haven’t been approved by structural engineers.

“We don’t want to get into the situation of showing a client or fans an image that everyone falls in love with, that everybody gets behind.

“And then, when it comes to being a finished building, everyone’s like ‘well, that doesn’t look anything like the picture’.”

Prof Kevin Singh, head of the Manchester School of Architecture, explains modern building techniques mean many of an architect’s ideas are possible to construct, though there are limitations.

Housing and infrastructure that surround an existing stadium, particularly in an inner city or residential area, can limit the scope of ambitious redevelopment.

Both Liverpool and Newcastle United have had difficulties expanding their grounds due to their close proximity to houses.

One stand at Luton Town can only be accessed through an entrance sandwiched between a long row of terraced housing. Fans pass through a tight corridor before climbing staircases overlooking gardens of neighbouring properties.

Singh points towards the way Fulham have redeveloped Craven Cottage in a residential part of west London and Everton’s new ground at Bramley-Moore Dock as good examples of stadiums that “fit into its place”.

He said: “Everton’s feels contextual. You know it’s on the dock and it has some nods to Goodison Park,” he told the BBC. “When you saw the images of the stadium, it looked like the sort of thing you would build there.”

In contrast, he thinks Man Utd have chosen to construct something striking that can’t be confused for any other stadium.

“It’s very much an iconic thing in itself,” he says. “They’re justifying that sort of design because of the trident.”

Singh adds: “I think nobody could say that the proposal for Old Trafford is like anything else. I think avoiding anonymity was probably a key consideration.”

Dite agrees, saying how much a stadium stands out in its local area is often something that has to be discussed with planners.

“Some buildings make the statement that ‘I want to be seen’ … I think Tottenham’s stadium does that and certainly the images we’ve seen this week from Manchester show it’s a statement – an iconic piece of architecture.”

He adds: “A lot of that is around the client’s appetite to make a statement.”

For Singh this goes hand in hand with a club’s wider ambitions around branding and what message it is trying to convey about itself.

“We’re in a world now where brand is so important … Anybody can support a team from anywhere – you can watch every single game on TV,” he says.

“It’s a global marketplace now and so clubs are competing, you know, all over the world for fans and their attention. So they have an identity in mind and, of course, their stadium is a huge part of that.”

Club greats and the local mayor hail the project as giving the club the world-leading stadium it deserves.

Some fans are stunned by this exciting look into the future while others feel it looks like a generic entertainment venue devoid of local connection.

Fans of rival clubs have commented it looks like a circus tent, a fitting reflection of the woes suffered by the Premier League’s most valuable team – they are 15th in the table.

For Dite, as much as modern stadium design now includes acoustic considerations and brand messaging, the core tenets have long been the same.

“It is not wildly different from when the Colosseum was built 2,000 years ago”, he says. “That spectators are really participants who want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

“You know what it’s like, when it’s the last five minutes of a close game, everyone gets behind the team.

“It becomes a collective experience. You’re not watching the action, you’re in it.”

When my mother told me at the age of 16 that we were going from the UK to Ghana for the summer holidays, I had no reason to doubt her.

It was just a quick trip, a temporary break – nothing to worry about. Or so I thought.

One month in, she dropped the bombshell – I was not coming back to London until I had reformed and had earned enough GCSEs to continue my education.

I was hoodwinked in a similar way to the British-Ghanaian teenager who recently took his parents to the High Court in London for sending him to school in Ghana.

In their defence, they told the judge they did not want to see their 14-year-old son become “yet another black teenager stabbed to death in the streets of London”.

Back in the mid-1990s, my mother, a primary school teacher, was motivated by similar concerns.

I had been excluded from two high schools in the London Borough of Brent, hanging out with the wrong crowd (becoming the wrong crowd) – and heading down a dangerous path.

My closest friends at the time ended up in prison for armed robbery. Had I stayed in London, I would have almost certainly been convicted with them.

But being sent to Ghana also felt like a prison sentence.

I can empathise to a degree with the teenager, who said in his court statement that he feels like he is “living in hell”.

Yet, speaking for myself, by the time I turned 21 I realised what my mother had done had been a blessing.

Unlike the boy at the centre of the London court case – which he lost – I did not go to boarding school in Ghana.

My mother placed me in the care of her two closest brothers, they wanted to keep an eye on me and it was felt that being around boarders could prove too much of a distraction.

I first stayed with my Uncle Fiifi, a former UN environmentalist, in a town called Dansoman, near the capital, Accra.

The lifestyle change hit hard. In London, I had my own bedroom, access to washing machines and a sense of independence – even if I was using it recklessly.

In Ghana, I was waking up at 05:00 to sweep the courtyard and wash my uncle’s often muddy pick-up truck and my aunt’s car.

It was her vehicle that I would later steal – something of a watershed moment.

I did not even know how to drive properly, treating a manual like an automatic and I crashed it into a high-ranking soldier’s Mercedes.

I tried to flee the scene. But that soldier caught me and threatened to take me to Burma Camp, the notorious military base where people had disappeared in the past.

That was the last truly reckless thing I did.

It was not just discipline that I learnt in Ghana – it was perspective.

Life in Ghana showed me how much I had taken for granted.

Washing clothes by hand and preparing meals with my aunt made me appreciate the effort needed.

Food, like everything in Ghana, required patience. There were no microwaves, no fast-food runs.

Making the traditional dough-like dish fufu, for example, is laborious and involves pounding cooked yams or cassava into a paste with a mortar.

At the time, it felt like punishment. Looking back, it was building resilience.

Initially, my uncles considered placing me in high-end schools like the Ghana International School or SOS-Hermann Gmeiner International College.

But they were smart. They knew I might just form a new crew to cause chaos and mischief.

Instead, I received private tuition at Accra Academy, a state secondary school that my late father had attended. It meant I was often taught on my own or in small groups.

Lessons were in English, but out of school those around me were often speaking local languages and I found it easy to pick them up perhaps because it was such an immersive experience.

Back home in London, I used to love to learn swear words in my mother’s Fante language – but was far from fluent.

When I later moved to the city of Tema to stay with my favourite uncle, Uncle Jojo – an agricultural expert, I continued private tuition at Tema Secondary School.

In contrast to the boy making the headlines in the UK, who claimed Ghana’s education system was not up to standard, I found it to be exacting.

I was considered academically gifted in the UK, despite my troublesome ways, but actually found it tough going in Ghana. Students my age were far ahead in subjects like maths and science.

The rigour of the Ghanaian system pushed me to study harder than I ever had in London.

The result? I earned five GCSEs with grades C and above – something that once seemed impossible.

Beyond academic achievements, Ghanaian society instilled values that have stayed with me for life.

Respect for elders was non-negotiable. Throughout the neighbourhoods I lived in, you greeted those older than you, regardless of whether or not you knew them.

Ghana did not just make me more disciplined and respectful – it made me fearless.

Football played a huge part in that transformation. I played in the parks, which were often hard red clay with loose pebbles and stones, with two square goalposts fashioned out of wood and string.

It was a far cry from the neatly maintained pitches in England, but it toughened me up in ways I could not have imagined – and it is no wonder some of the greatest footballers seen in the English Premier League have come from West Africa.

The aggressive style played in Ghana was not just about skill – it was about resilience and endurance. Getting tackled on rough ground meant picking yourself up, dusting yourself off and carrying on.

Every Sunday, I played football on the beach – though I would often be late because there was absolutely no way either of my uncles would allow me to stay home instead of attending church.

Those services felt like they lasted forever. But it was also a testament to Ghana as a God-fearing nation, where faith is deeply embedded in everyday life.

The first 18 months were the hardest. I resented the restrictions, the chores, the discipline.

I even tried stealing my passport to fly back to London, but my mother was ahead of me and had hidden it well. There was no escape.

My only choice was to adapt. Somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing Ghana as a prison and started seeing it as happy home.

I know of a few others like me who were sent back to Ghana by their parents living in London.

Michael Adom was 17 when he arrived in Accra for school in the 1990s, describing his experience as “bittersweet”. He stayed until he was 23 and now lives back in London working as a probation officer.

His main complaint was the loneliness – he missed his family and friends. There were times of anger about his situation and the complications of feeling misunderstood.

This largely stemmed from the fact that his parents had not taught him or his siblings any of the local languages when growing up in London.

“I didn’t understand Ga. I didn’t understand Twi. I didn’t understand Pidgin,” the 49-year-old tells me.

This made him feel vulnerable for his first two-and-a-half years – and, he says, liable to being fleeced, for example, by those increasing prices because he seemed foreign.

“Anywhere I went, I had to make sure I went with somebody else,” he says.

But he ended up becoming fluent in Twi and, overall, he believes the positives outweighed the negatives: “It made me a man.

“My Ghana experience matured me and changed me for the better, by helping me to identify with who I am, as a Ghanaian, and cemented my understanding of my culture, background and family history.”

I can concur with this. By my third year, I had fallen in love with the culture and even stayed on for nearly two more years after passing my GCSEs.

I developed a deep appreciation of the local food. Back in London, I never thought twice about what I was eating. But in Ghana, food was not just sustenance – each dish had its own story.

I became obsessed with “waakye” – a dish made from rice and black-eyed peas, often cooked with millet leaves, giving it a distinctive purple-brown colour. It was usually served with fried plantain, the spicy black pepper sauce “shito”, boiled eggs, and sometimes even spaghetti or fried fish. It was the ultimate comfort food.

I enjoyed the music, the warmth of the people and the sense of community. I was not just “stuck” in Ghana any more – I was thriving.

My mother, Patience Wilberforce, passed away recently, and with her loss I have reflected deeply on the decision she made all those years ago.

She saved me. Had she not tricked me into staying in Ghana, the chances of me having a criminal record or even serving time in prison would have been extremely high.

I went on to enrol at the College of North West London aged 20 to study media production and communications, before joining BBC Radio 1Xtra via a mentoring scheme.

The guys I used to hang out with in north-west London did not get the second chance that I did.

Ghana reshaped my mindset, my values and my future. It turned a misguided menace into a responsible man.

While such an experience might not work for everyone, it gave me the education, discipline and respect I needed to reintegrate into society when I returned to England.

And for that, I am forever indebted to my mother, to my uncles and to the country that saved me.

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Netflix’s latest big-budget film The Electric State, starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, is one of the most expensive movies ever made, and had some of the most scathing reviews in recent memory. But that doesn’t mean it will flop.

Film critics haven’t minced their words when delivering their verdicts on The Electric State.

It is “a turgid eyesore” and “top-dollar tedium”, according to the Times. It’s “slick but dismally soulless”, declared the Hollywood Reporter, while the New York Times called it “obvious, garish and just plain dumb”.

Paste pointed out its eye-watering budget, billing it as “the most banal way you can spend $320m”. Warming to the theme, the magazine summed it up as “one hell of an artistically neutered, sanitized boondoggle”.

There have been some kinder reviews. Empire said it was “breezily watchable” and worth three stars, while the Telegraph awarded four stars to the “Spielbergian treat”.

But overall, its 15% Rotten Tomatoes score is a meagre return for any major film, especially one costing such a lot. The $320m (£247m) figure has been widely reported but neither confirmed nor denied by Netflix. It would make The Electric State the most expensive streaming film ever.

Critics’ opinions, however, have become more irrelevant in the streaming age. The bad reviews didn’t stop The Electric State from going straight to number one on Netflix’s chart after its release on Friday.

It fits into Netflix making star-packed, entertaining and escapist movies that often get panned by reviewers – but are watched by hundreds of millions of subscribers.

“I would love to say that what I’ve written and what other critics have written will matter, but I just don’t think it will,” says Digital Spy movies editor Ian Sandwell.

Sandwell awarded the film two stars out of five, noting that the action and visual effects are “decent”, the robots are “impressive” and the finale is “epic”.

“My main problem was they’d created this really impressive, visually spectacular world and then just told quite a generic seen-it-all-before story inside it,” he says.

Bad reviews might have put people off paying to see the film if it had been released in cinemas, he says. “But on Netflix, I think it will still be absolutely massive. I don’t think bad reviews will matter at all.”

While a critic’s job is to analyse a movie, “audiences probably do just want a big, spectacular blockbuster to watch at home, with two massive stars”, he adds.

The Electric State follows Brown, Pratt and a succession of zany robots in an alternative version of 1990s America, where there has been a war between humans and intelligent bots.

It also stars Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci and the voices of Woody Harrelson and Brian Cox, and is directed by Anthony and Joe Russo – who have made four Marvel movies, including the wildly successful Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame.

The Electric State is based on the graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag, although some critics pointed out that Netflix had missed the book’s point about the perils of a consumerist society addicted to technology.

The film is “absolutely not” value for money in terms of quality, says City AM’s film editor Victoria Luxford.

And it remains to be seen whether the film makes financial sense for Netflix, she says.

The streaming giant’s most popular ever film, 2021’s Red Notice, has had 231 million views, according to Netflix’s measurements.

“The Electric State will be hoping for that kind of performance, just as a $320m theatrically released movie would be aiming to break box office records,” Luxford says.

“The higher the price, the higher the target for success, even with a business model as opaque as Netflix’s.”

Red Notice, an action-packed art crime caper starring Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds, has a lukewarm 39% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes – but a 92% audience rating.

Other recent Netflix hits have been lapped up by viewers more than reviewers.

Brooke Shields’ lightweight multi-generational rom-com Mother of the Bride has a 13% critics’ score, Jennifer Lopez’s AI action thriller Atlas is on 19%, Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx’s family spy escapade Back In Action has 29%, and Kevin Hart’s heist comedy Lift is on 30%.

They are enjoyable but forgettable – and easy to watch in the midst of potential distractions at home. The Hollywood Reporter described Atlas as “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry” – summing up this new genre.

In December, N+1 magazine quoted several screenwriters as saying a common request from Netflix executives is for characters to announce what they’re doing “so that viewers who have this programme on in the background can follow along”.

“Electric State does feel like that,” Sandwell continues, “where there are just random big dumps of the characters explaining exactly what’s happened, sometimes something we’ve seen recently, just in case you’re not following along.

“But it does depend on the movie.”

Netflix does have serious and critically-acclaimed movies, too, of course, but they are often not such crowd-pleasers. Emilia Perez, which led this year’s Oscar nominations, has not troubled the Netflix global top 10 charts.

Another critic, Gav Squires, says many of Netflix’s films are “very average”, but don’t usually have such astronomical budgets as The Electric State.

“Netflix know what they’re doing,” he says. “They know that people are probably watching on a second screen, they’re not paying full attention. So when they’re putting stuff out that costs $30m that people aren’t really watching and is kind of average, I’m not too fussed about it.

“But when they’re spending $320m on a movie, I start getting really angry. $320m would have paid the budgets for the last, I think, 10 best picture Oscar winners.

“And it just feels like really, really bad value for money at that point.”

The will of legendary actor Gene Hackman has been released, but uncertainty lingers over his $80m (£62m) fortune.

The two-time Academy Award winner left his entire estate to his wife of 30 years, Betsy Arakawa. But Arakawa, 65, was found dead alongside her husband in their New Mexico home last month.

Legal experts have now said that, because authorities say Arakawa died seven days before her husband, Hackman’s children could now potentially inherit his fortune, despite not being named in the will.

His three children with his late ex-wife, Faye Maltese – Christopher, 65, Elizabeth, 62, and Leslie, 58 – have not commented publicly on the matter.

Warning: This story contains details some readers may find upsetting

Legal documents obtained by the BBC show Hackman, 95, named Arakawa as his sole beneficiary in 1995, with the last update to the will in 2005.

However, California attorney Tre Lovell told the BBC that the estate could default to them under succession laws, as long as there was no other beneficiary named.

“The estate will actually be probated in accordance with intestate succession laws and the children would be lawfully next in line to inherit,” he said.

They would also need to prove that the will is invalid because Arakawa died before Hackman, he added.

Authorities say Arakawa passed away on 11 February after contracting a rare virus, days before Hackman died of natural causes.

The couple was found dead in separate rooms of their $4m Santa Fe home on 26 February after neighbourhood security conducted a welfare check and saw their bodies on the ground through a window.

Arakawa was found in the bathroom with pills scattered nearby, while Hackman was in the back of the house, wearing sweatpants and slippers, his cane and sunglasses beside him.

Officials determined he died seven days after his wife due to severe heart disease, with advanced Alzheimer’s listed as a contributing factor.

Authorities initially deemed the scene “suspicious” but later ruled out foul play.

• ‘Living in a reel’: How Alzheimer’s left Gene Hackman alone in his final days
• What is hantavirus, disease that killed Gene Hackman’s wife?
• Obituary: One of Hollywood’s greatest ‘tough guys’

Arakawa’s own will left her assets to Hackman, with a provision that if they died within 90 days of each other, her estate would go to a trust and later be donated to charity after covering medical expenses.

Hackman has in the past discussed his relationship with his children.

“You become very selfish as an actor,” he told The New York Times in 1989. “Even though I had a family, I took jobs that would separate us for three or four months at a time. The temptations in that, the money and recognition, it was too much for the poor boy in me.”

Hackman’s children, though rarely in the public eye, occasionally attended red carpet events with him.

In another interview, Hackman talked about the difficulty his children had of growing up with a parent who was constantly in the spotlight.

“It’s tough being the son or daughter of a celebrity,” he told The Irish Independent in 2000. “I couldn’t always be home with them when they were growing up, and then, living in California, they’ve had my success always hanging over their heads.”

His daughters and granddaughter expressed deep affection for him after his passing.

“He was loved and admired by millions around the world for his brilliant acting career, but to us, he was always just Dad and Grandpa,” they said. “We will miss him sorely, and are devastated by the loss.”

Arlington National Cemetery has scrubbed from its website information and educational materials about the history of black and female service members.

Some of the content unpublished from the site was on veterans who had received the nation’s highest military recognition, the Medal of Honor, according to military news site Task & Purpose.

The content removal is part of a larger effort by President Donald Trump to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices in the military and throughout the federal government.

Approximately 400,000 veterans are buried in the Army-run cemetery, which was established after the US Civil War at the home of the South’s general, Robert E. Lee.

On the cemetery’s website, internal links that directed users to webpages with information about the “Notable Graves” of dozens of black, Hispanic and female veterans were missing on Friday.

The pages contained short biographies about veterans such as Gen Colin L Powell, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is the highest rank in the military after the president.

They also told the life stories of members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the country’s first black military airmen.

Earlier this year, the Defense Department had to reinstate training materials on the revered airmen after a national outcry over their removal following Trump’s orders on DEI.

Information on Hector Santa Anna, a World War II bomber pilot and career military leader who has been called a hero of the war, has been taken down, as well.

Visitors to the site may also have trouble finding information, as links to major sections have disappeared. It no longer lists pages for African American History, Hispanic American History and Women’s History.

Content still exists on some notable women buried there, including former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and 14 veterans from the unit recently featured in the Oscar-nominated movie The Six Triple Eight, but it is only found from a direct search.

Since re-entering the White House, President Donald Trump has signed multiple executive orders banning DEI within the federal government.

A spokesperson for the cemetery said in a statement it was working to restore links and content and remained “committed to sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation”, according to the Washington Post.

It added that it wanted to ensure that the content aligned with Trump’s orders and also with instructions from Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth.

Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, condemned the content removal.

“The whole thing is deeply concerning,” Smith said in an interview with the New York Times.

“Even if you have concerns about the way DEI was handled in a number of different places, I’ve never seen a problem within the military.”

Trump has made dramatic changes in the military in his second term, including firing the country’s top general, CQ Brown, a black man who had supported diversity in the armed forces.

Secretary Hegseth – a former Fox News host and military veteran – has pledged to root out all diversity initiatives and had accused Gen Brown of being “woke”.

There are 2.03m people serving in the US military on active duty or in reserves, with 30% identifying as part of a minority group such as black or Native American and 18% as Hispanic or Latino, according to the latest Defense Department report. One-fifth of those in the military are women.

A team of charity workers has been killed in Israeli strikes in northern Gaza, the UK-registered Al Khair Foundation has told the BBC.

The charity said eight people – including its volunteers and independent journalists documenting their activities – were killed when their vehicles were targeted on Saturday in what Hamas described as a “blatant violation” of the ceasefire agreement with Israel.

The Israeli military has said it had struck “two terrorists who were identified operating a drone that posed a threat to Israeli troops”, adding that it then targeted “additional terrorists” who arrived at the scene.

The charity rejects the allegation that members of its team were terrorists.

Qasim Rashid Ahmad, founder and chairman of the charity, told the BBC the team was in the area to set up tents and document it for the charity’s own promotion efforts.

He said that the cameramen came back to the car and were hit, while its team members who rushed to the scene were then struck by an Israeli drone which had followed them when they went to the charity’s second car.

But the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had targeted people operating a drone who posed a threat to Israeli troops in Beit Lahia, adding: “Later, a number of additional terrorists collected the drone operating equipment and entered a vehicle. The IDF struck the terrorists.”

Video editor Bilal Abu Matar and cameramen Mahmoud Al-Sarraj, Bilal Aqila and Mahmoud Asleem were all named as having been killed in the strike, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

The organisation accused Israel of carrying out “systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists, who risk their lives to report the truth and expose Israeli crimes to the world”.

Several others were injured in the strike, and rushed to the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, the Hamas-run health ministry said.

A spokesman for the group, Hazem Qassem, accused Israel of having “committed a horrific massacre in the northern Gaza Strip”.

A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has been in place since January, after 15 months of fighting, but its future is uncertain as the process has reached an impasse.

The first phase of the multi-stage deal saw Hamas return dozens of hostages, both alive and dead, that it had captured during its attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023, in exchange for about 1,800 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Talks to extend the first phase of the ceasefire – which ended on 1 March – ended without an agreement, a Palestinian official told the BBC on Saturday.

Negotiators were working on a US-proposed extension, which would include a further exchange of hostages and prisoners.

Washington accused Hamas of making “entirely impractical” demands. The group has demanded immediate talks on the second phase, including discussions of a permanent ceasefire, as laid out in the agreement brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the US in January.

Hamas’s unprecedented assault on Israel on 7 October 2023 saw about 1,200 people killed and 251 others taken to Gaza as hostages.

Israel responded with a massive military offensive on the Palestinian territory, which has killed more than 48,300 people, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says.

Talks to extend the Gaza ceasefire have failed to reach an agreement, a Palestinian official has told the BBC, as the US accused Hamas of making “entirely impractical” demands at meetings in Qatar.

Negotiators have been trying to find a way forward after the first phase of the temporary truce ended on 1 March.

The US proposed to extend the first phase until mid-April, including a further exchange of hostages held by Hamas and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

But the Palestinian official familiar with the talks, who did not wished to be named, said Israel and Hamas disagreed over key aspects of the deal set out by US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff at the indirect talks.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Israel was prepared to continue negotiations with Hamas on extending the ceasefire in Gaza.

The comments came after Netanyahu met top aides and security officials. His office said the decision was a response to what Israel had heard from mediators on US proposals for 11 living Israeli hostages to be released, and the bodies of half of the deceased hostages.

The White House accused Hamas of making “entirely impractical” demands in its response to Witkoff’s proposal.

It would extend the ceasefire into April but delay the negotiation of a permanent end to the war.

A statement from Witkoff’s office and the US National Security Council on Friday said: “Hamas is making a very bad bet that time is on its side. It is not.”

“Hamas is well aware of the deadline, and should know that we will respond accordingly if that deadline passes.”

A Hamas statement seen by the BBC said negotiations had broken down.

Netanyahu’s office had earlier said Israel accepted the US proposal.

It said Hamas remained “firm in its refusal and has not budged a millimetre,” accusing the group of “manipulation and psychological warfare”.

• What we know about the Gaza ceasefire deal
• US envoy in Qatar for talks on extending fragile Gaza ceasefire
• Gaza ceasefire in peril as Israel and Hamas hit impasse

Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire deal involving three stages in January, after 15 months of war.

In the first stage, Hamas returned 25 living Israeli hostages, the remains of eight others, and five living Thai hostages. Israel released about 1,800 Palestinian prisoners in exchange.

The deal says stage two will include the remaining living hostages in Gaza exchanged for more Palestinian prisoners.

But both sides currently disagree on the number of hostages due to be released next.

They also disagree on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, which the original deal states should be happening by now.

Israel resists this point, while Hamas insists it should happen.

Earlier in March, Israel blocked aid shipments to Gaza and then cut electricity, saying it aimed to put pressure on Hamas.

It is believed that Hamas is still holding up to 24 living hostages in Gaza and the remains of 35 others.

As indirect talks continued on Friday, the group said in a statement it was ready to release the last living Israeli-American hostage it is known to be holding.

Edan Alexander, 21, was serving as an Israeli soldier close to Gaza when he was taken.

Under the terms of the original ceasefire agreement, it was expected that he would have been among the last hostages to be released.

The group also said it would hand over the remains of four other dual nationals captured during the 7 October 2023 attacks.

It did not give further details or make clear what it would demand in return.

Witkoff dismissed the offer, saying Hamas was trying to appear flexible in public while being impractical in private.

The attacks led by Hamas on 7 October 2023 killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel, mostly civilians, with 251 taken hostage.

The assault triggered an Israeli military offensive that has since killed more than 48,520 people, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run health ministry which are used by the UN and others.

Most of Gaza’s 2.1 million population has been displaced multiple times.

An estimated 70% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed, healthcare, water, and sanitation systems have collapsed and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.

A plane carrying more than 200 Venezuelans deported by the US has landed in El Salvador, hours after a US judge ordered the Trump administration not to do so.

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, wrote on social media that 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had arrived, along with 23 members of the Mexican gang MS-13, on Sunday morning.

Their arrival in the central American nation came after a federal judge blocked US President Donald Trump from invoking a centuries-old wartime law to justify the deportations – something Bukele made fun of in a later post.

“Oopsie… Too late,” he said.

Bukele wrote that the detainees were immediately transferred to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) “for a period of one year”, something that was “renewable” – suggesting they could be held there for longer.

“The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us,” he added.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed the alleged gang members arrival in El Salvador and thanked Bukele, calling him “the strongest security leader in our region”.

Hours before, on Saturday evening, US District Judge James Boasberg ordered a halt to deportations covered by Trump’s proclamation, which invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

The law allows the government to detain and deport people threatening the country’s safety without due process.

After hearing that planes with deportees had taken off, Judge Boasberg ordered them turned back, the Washington Post reported.

Rubio confirmed in a statement on Sunday that the deportations happened under the Alien Enemies Act, and made no mention of the judge’s ruling.

He said: “Hundreds of violent criminals were sent out of our country.”

A video attached to one of Bukele’s social media post shows lines of people with their hands and feet shackled being escorted by armed officials from the plane.

Some of the detainees are placed into the back of armoured vehicles, while others, hunched over as officers push their heads down, are forced onto buses.

The video also shows an aerial view of a long, winding police escort leading the buses into El Salvador’s notorious mega-jail Cecot.

The newly-built maximum-security jail is a proud achievement of Bukele’s, and part of his effort to crack down on the country’s organised crime.

The facility, which can hold up to 40,000 people, has been criticised by human rights groups for maltreatment of inmates.

The arrangement between the US and El Salvador is a sign of strengthening diplomatic ties.

“Thank you for your assistance and friendship,” Rubio told Bukele on Sunday.

El Salvador was the second country Rubio, the US’s top diplomat, visited after he was sworn in.

During that trip, which took place in February, Bukele made an initial offer to take US deportees, saying it would help pay for the massive Cecot facility.

The latest deportations under Trump’s second term are part of the president’s long-running crusade against illegal immigration in the US.

In January, Trump signed an executive order declaring Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organisations.

He won voters on the campaign trail, in part, by promising to enact the largest deportation operation in US history.

The agenda has so far not met expectations, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents not meeting the Trump’s daily quota for arrests.

A recent report suggested ICE agents had deported fewer immigrants in February than they had the same month a year prior during the previous administration under Joe Biden – 11,000 in February 2025, compared to 12,000 in February 2024.

Donald Trump has signed an order to strip back the federally funded news organisation Voice of America, accusing it of being “anti-Trump” and “radical”.

A White House statement said the order would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”, and included quotes from politicians and right-wing media railing against the “leftist”, “partisan” VOA.

VOA, still primarily a radio service, was set up during World War Two to counter Nazi propaganda. It is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Mike Abramowitz, the VOA’s director, said he and virtually his entire staff of 1,300 people had been put on paid leave.

Abramowitz said that the order left VOA unable to carry out its “vital mission… especially critical today, when America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States”.

The president’s order targets VOA’s parent company US Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, which also funds non-profit entities such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, which were originally set up to counter communism.

It tells managers to “reduce performance… to the minimum presence and function required by law”.

CBS, the news partner of the BBC in the US, said that VOA employees were notified in an email by Crystal Thomas, the USAGM human resources director.

A source told CBS that all freelance workers and international contractors were told there was now no money to pay them.

Emails obtained by CBS notified the bosses of Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that their federal grants had been terminated.

VOA and other stations under USAGM serve more than 400,000,000 listeners and are broadly equivalent to the BBC World Service, which is part-funded by the British government.

Elon Musk, the billionaire and top adviser to Trump who has been overseeing sweeping cuts to the US government, has used his social media platform X to call for VOA to be shut down.

The US president also cut funding to several other federal agencies – including those responsible for preventing homelessness, and funding museums and libraries.

Trump was highly critical of VOA in his first term. He has recently appointed staunch loyalist Kari Lake to be a special adviser for the US Agency for Global Media.

The president regularly states that mainstream media outlets are biased against him. He called CNN and MSNBC “corrupt” and “illegal”, without providing evidence, during a speech at the justice department.

The White House’s statement linked to several commentators and reports from right-wing media organisations about VOA’s alleged bias.

It quoted an article written for the right-wing Washington Times by Dan Robinson, a former White House correspondent for VOA, who said that the organisation had “essentially become a hubris-filled rogue operation often reflecting a leftist bias”.

It included links to other articles that accused VOA managers of telling staff not to describe Hamas as a “terrorist organisation”, and to suppress negative reports of Iran.

Other links were to everyday reporting of the 2020 US election, which it claimed were favourable to Trump’s rival Joe Biden.

Voice of America launched in 1942 which a mandate to combat Nazi and Japanese propaganda. Its first broadcast – made on a transmitter loaned to the US by the BBC – stated a modest purpose.

Gerald Ford, a former president, signed the VOA’s public charter in 1976 to safeguard its editorial independence.

By 1994, the Broadcast Board of Governors, with oversight over non-military broadcasting, was established.

In 2013, a shift in legislation allowed VOA and affiliates to begin broadcasting in the US.

At least 59 people have been killed and more than 155 injured in a nightclub fire in North Macedonia, officials say.

The blaze broke out around 02:30 (01:30 GMT) at the Pulse club in Kocani, a town around 100 km (60 miles) east of the capital, Skopje, where 1,500 people were attending a concert by DNK, a popular hip-hop duo in the country.

Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski called it a “difficult and very sad day” for the country, which had lost many “young lives.”

Arrest warrants were issued for four people, interior minister Pance Toskovski said at the scene, without giving further details. He announced the arrest of a man earlier and state news agency Mia said the club owner was detained.

Citing initial reports, Toskovski said the fire had been started by sparks from pyrotechnic devices that had hit the ceiling, which was made of highly flammable material.

Footage shows the band playing on stage when two flares go off, sparks then catch fire on the ceiling before spreading rapidly.

Video verified by the BBC shows people trying to extinguish the flames on the ceiling. The footage shows the club was still full and some people appeared to be watching efforts to put out the fire, rather than leaving.

Marija Taseva, 20, told Channel 5 TV she was caught in a crush at the club as people rushed for the exits. She recalled falling to the ground and being trampled in the chaos before managing to get out.

Her family were still searching for her 25-year-old sister, though, who had not been found in any local hospital – and may have been transferred to Skopje for treatment.

The interior minister had earlier announced a death toll of 51 – with some 100 injured. In his update, he said 35 of the deceased had already been identified.

Local media has reported that the government is set to declare seven days of national mourning and carry out urgent inspections of all nightclubs and restaurants hosting large gatherings.

Kocani’s hospital director said earlier that staff had been struggling to identify patients due to a lack of ID cards.

However, she went on to say that those deceased were aged between of 14 and 24.

Eighteen patients are said to be in critical condition.

In a statement, the prime minister said the government was “fully mobilised and will do everything necessary to deal with the consequences and determine the causes of this tragedy”.

DNK was formed in 2002 and has topped the charts over the past decade.

Local authorities declared seven days of mourning and European leaders have voiced their condolences, with Ursula Von Der Leyen, president of the European Commission, saying the bloc “stands in solidarity with the people of North Macedonia in this difficult time”.

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A fashion show held last week in a picturesque, snow-clad town in Indian-administered Kashmir has sparked a major controversy that is still simmering.

The show, by the well-known fashion brand Shivan & Narresh, was held last Friday at a ski resort in Gulmarg to display their skiwear collection. The label is the first big, non-local brand to hold a fashion show in Kashmir, a scenic Himalayan region which has seen decades of violence.

But it soon sparked outrage among locals, politicians and religious leaders in Muslim-majority Kashmir after fashion publisher Elle India posted a video on social media which showed some models wearing underwear or bikinis. Locals were also angry over another video – shared by online magazine Lifestyle Asia – of a party held after the show, which showed people drinking alcohol outdoors.

Many took offence with the show being held in the holy month of Ramadan – a time of fasting and prayer for Muslims – and accused the designers of “mocking their faith” and “disregarding local culture and sentiments”. Some clerics called the show “obscene” and said it was like “soft porn”.

Some others explained that the outrage had arisen not only from religious conservatism, but also from a fear of cultural imposition from “outsiders”. Kashmir has witnessed decades of armed separatist insurgency against Indian rule since the late 1980s.

The backlash prompted Elle India and Lifestyle Asia to delete their videos. Shivan Bhatiya and Narresh Kukreja, the designers behind the label, also apologised, saying that their “sole intention was to celebrate creativity” and that they didn’t intend to offend religious sentiments.

Kashmir – known as the land of saints and Sufism (Islamic mysticism) – has a rich tradition of spirituality which influences many aspects of peoples’ lives. The traditional attire is modest, with locals – both men and women – often wearing the pheran, a long, loose cloak.

The row also moved off social media and a discussion about the show and the after-party caused a ruckus in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly.

The opposition criticised the government, accusing it of giving permission for the event despite being aware of local sensitivities. Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah distanced his government from the event, saying it had been organised by private entities, and asking local authorities to investigate the matter and submit a report.

“If law has been violated, strict action will be taken,” he said in the assembly on Monday. The police have not yet given details about who organised the event and what laws, if any, have been violated.

The fashion brand did not respond to the BBC’s questions about the show, including about permissions it obtained.

It’s not surprising that scenic Gulmarg – one of India’s few skiing destinations and a favourite with tourists – was the choice of venue for a show highlighting a skiwear collection.

Fashion journalist Shefalee Vasudev says it’s not uncommon for designers to want to hold fashion shows in exquisite locations.

In fact, international designers like Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfeld are remembered as much for their creative, theatrical fashion shows as they are for their iconic designs.

But experimentation brings with it the risk of controversy and so, it’s important to be mindful of the political and cultural sensitivities of a place, Ms Vasudev told the BBC.

And this holds especially true in a place like Kashmir, which has witnessed wars and decades of armed conflict.

• Article 370: What happened with Kashmir and why it matters
• ‘Don’t beat us, just shoot us’: Kashmiris allege violent army crackdown

Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir in full but control it only in parts. Since India’s partition and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the nuclear-armed neighbours have fought two wars over the territory.

Thousands of people have been killed since the late 1980s, when a separatist insurgency broke out against Indian rule. Though the separatist movement has lost steam over the years, many locals continue to view the administration in Delhi with distrust.

These sentiments have deepened since 2019 when the federal government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, stripped the region of its autonomy.

So some locals told the BBC that they were not surprised by the reactions to the show.

“Everything in Kashmir is political; people see things through a political prism,” says Mir, a professor at a local university (he asked for his surname to be withheld to protect his identity). He adds that people are sceptical about big corporate events like the fashion show and – even if they are organised by private players – they believe that the government is trying to dilute their culture.

Arshid Ahmad, a researcher, uses stronger words to express public angst. “The government is trying to dilute the spirit of resistance in Kashmiris,” he says.

This isn’t the first time an event held by non-locals has triggered a controversy in Kashmir. In 2013, separatists and human rights activists in the region protested against a show by renowned conductor Zubin Mehta. They said it was an attempt by the government to show the world that all was well in Kashmir when people were “suffering and dying”.

Some of the recent apprehensions around culture and identity can also be tied to the increase in tourists to Kashmir from other states in India. The federal government has often connected this boom in tourism to the abrogation of Article 370, which stripped the region of its autonomy.

Nousheen Fatima, 34, says because of government messaging, people outside Kashmir now see the region as being safer and “more assimilated with India”. But she alleges that many tourists do not respect the region’s culture.

Last year, a video showing tourists drinking alcohol during a boat ride on the famous Dal Lake in Srinagar evoked outrage from political and religious leaders, who called the behaviour “un-Islamic and unethical”.

In February, locals put up posters in Srinagar, asking tourists to “respect local culture and traditions” and “avoid alcohol and use of drugs”, but these were later pulled down by the police.

In an editorial for The Voice of Fashion magazine, Ms Vasudev argues that the outrage needs to be examined from a critical lens. She asks if it would have been all right for the show to have been held in another Indian city instead of Kashmir, where Muslims would also be observing Ramadan. And whether it would have been acceptable to hold the show in Kashmir if it featured only outfits perceived as modest.

She also points out that Kashmir is home to the “world’s finest wool yarn; some of the finest handspun, handwoven pashmina creations and its artisans”.

“What Kashmir creates and stands for cannot be replicated anywhere. Shouldn’t a fashion show at Gulmarg then, with innovative garments made with 100% wool, be seen as regenerating interest in untried ways?” she asks.

At least 34 people have died in the US after violent tornadoes tore through several south-eastern states, flipping cars and flattening homes.

In Kansas, a dust storm on Friday afternoon caused a crash with more than 50 vehicles, killing at least 8 people. Texas saw a similar mass pile-up.

A state of emergency has been declared in several states, including Arkansas, Georgia and Oklahoma, where more than 100 wildfires are raging.

A third day of severe weather is expected on Sunday, with flash flooding and more tornado warnings issued across the region. The National Weather Service (NWS) warned of “intense to violent” tornadoes, describing the situation as “particularly dangerous”.

“Get to the sturdiest structure you have access to and remain in place until the storms pass,” the NWS told residents in Alabama on Saturday night, when multiple tornado warnings were issued.

At least 250,000 properties across the US were without power on Sunday morning, according to tracker PowerOutage.

In Missouri, where at least 12 people died, Governor Mike Kehoe said the state had been “devastated by severe storms… leaving homes destroyed and lives lost”.

Initial reports showed 19 tornadoes had struck 25 counties in the state, its emergency management agency said.

A home belonging to one of the those killed was torn apart.

“It was unrecognisable as a home. Just a debris field,” Coroner Jim Akers of Butler County told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

“The floor was upside down. We were walking on walls.”

Alicia Wilson, who was evacuated from her Missouri home, told local TV station KSDK: “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through – it was so fast, our ears were all about to burst.”

A woman in Mississippi described how terrified her daughter was.

“All I could hear was my six year old screaming that she didn’t want to die – you don’t want to hear that coming out of your baby’s mouth,” Jericho McCoy said.

In Texas, a dust storm caused a pile-up of about 38 cars, which killed at least for people, local officials told AFP.

“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” Sgt Cindy Barkley, of the state’s public safety department, told reporters.

“We couldn’t tell that they were all together until the dust kind of settled.”

The destructive storms fuelled many wildfires in several central states, including Oklahoma, where more than 130 fires were reported on Friday, the state’s department of emergency management said.

As of Saturday, it said there had been 112 fire-related injuries reported by hospitals in the state.

Governor Kevin Stitt, who visited his own ranch to find he had “lost everything to the fires”, said the damage in the state was unbelievable.

“Oklahomans, we are in this together and we will build back stronger,” he said.

Tornadoes form when moist, warm air rises, mixing with cold air above to form thunderclouds. Winds blowing from different directions cause the air to rotate, creating a vortex of air that moves upwards.

Several states, including Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Kansas, lie within so-called Tornado Alley – a path frequently hit by the weather phenomenon, as the geography is ideal for their formation.

Peak tornado season in the region is from May to June – but meteorologists caution that they can occur at any time of year.

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The US has launched a “decisive and powerful” wave of air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, President Donald Trump has said, citing the group’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea as the reason.

“Funded by Iran, the Houthi thugs have fired missiles at US aircraft, and targeted our Troops and Allies,” Trump said on social media, adding that their “piracy, violence, and terrorism” had cost “billions” and put lives at risk.

The Houthi-run health ministry said at least 31 people were killed and 101 others were injured in the strikes.

The group later said it would continue to target Red Sea shipping until Israel lifted its blockade of Gaza, and that its forces would respond to the strikes.

The Houthis reported a series of explosions on Saturday evening in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and in the northern province of Saada – the rebels’ stronghold on the border with Saudi Arabia.

The Iranian-backed rebel group, which considers Israel its enemy, controls Sanaa and the north-west of Yemen, but it is not the country’s internationally-recognised government.

Unverified images show plumes of black smoke over the area of Sanaa’s airport – which includes a military facility.

In a statement, the Houthis blamed the US and the UK for “wicked” aggression targeting residential areas in Sanaa.

The UK did not participate in Saturday’s US strikes against the Houthi targets but it did provide routine refuelling support for the US.

The Houthis have said they are acting in support of the Palestinians in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and have claimed – often falsely – that they are targeting ships only linked to Israel, the US or the UK.

• Who are the Houthis and why are they attacking ships?

Since November 2023, the Houthis have targeted dozens of merchant vessels with missiles, drones and small boat attacks in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. They have sunk two vessels, seized a third, and killed four crew members.

These attacks, Trump said, “will not be tolerated”.

He added: “We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective.”

The Houthis have not been deterred by the deployment of Western warships to protect merchant vessels, or by multiple rounds of US and British air strikes on its military targets.

Israel has also carried out air strikes against the Houthis since July, in retaliation to the 400 missiles and drones that the Israeli military said had been launched at the country from Yemen, most of which were shot down.

Major shipping companies have been forced to stop using the Red Sea – through which almost 15% of global seaborne trade usually passes – and use a much longer route around southern Africa instead.

Trump said that it had been more than a year since a US-flagged ship had sailed safely through the Suez Canal – which the Red Sea leads to – and four months since a US warship had been through the body of water between east Africa and the Arabian peninsula.

The Suez Canal is the quickest sea route between Asia and Europe, and is particularly important in the transportation of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Addressing the Houthis directly, Trump wrote that if they did not stop, “HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE”.

But the Houthis were unwavering in their response, saying the aggression would not diminish their support for Palestinians.

“This aggression will not go without response and our Yemeni armed forces are ready to answer escalation with further escalation,” the group said.

Trump urged Iran to cease its support for the Houthis, warning that Washington would hold Tehran “fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it”.

He also accused the previous White House administration, under Joe Biden, of being “pathetically weak” and allowing the “unrestrained Houthis” to keep going.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the US government had “no authority, or business, dictating Iranian foreign policy”.

“End support for Israeli genocide and terrorism,” he posted on X on Sunday. “Stop killing of Yemeni people.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also discussed military deterrence operations against the Houthis when he spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday.

Rubio emphasised that “continued Houthi attacks on US military and commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea will not be tolerated”, a State Department spokesperson said.

Lavrov, for his part, stressed the need for “an immediate cessation of the use of force” and the “importance for all sides to engage in political dialogue in order to find a solution that would prevent further bloodshed”, said the Russian foreign ministry.

The will of legendary actor Gene Hackman has been released, but uncertainty lingers over his $80m (£62m) fortune.

The two-time Academy Award winner left his entire estate to his wife of 30 years, Betsy Arakawa. But Arakawa, 65, was found dead alongside her husband in their New Mexico home last month.

Legal experts have now said that, because authorities say Arakawa died seven days before her husband, Hackman’s children could now potentially inherit his fortune, despite not being named in the will.

His three children with his late ex-wife, Faye Maltese – Christopher, 65, Elizabeth, 62, and Leslie, 58 – have not commented publicly on the matter.

Warning: This story contains details some readers may find upsetting

Legal documents obtained by the BBC show Hackman, 95, named Arakawa as his sole beneficiary in 1995, with the last update to the will in 2005.

However, California attorney Tre Lovell told the BBC that the estate could default to them under succession laws, as long as there was no other beneficiary named.

“The estate will actually be probated in accordance with intestate succession laws and the children would be lawfully next in line to inherit,” he said.

They would also need to prove that the will is invalid because Arakawa died before Hackman, he added.

Authorities say Arakawa passed away on 11 February after contracting a rare virus, days before Hackman died of natural causes.

The couple was found dead in separate rooms of their $4m Santa Fe home on 26 February after neighbourhood security conducted a welfare check and saw their bodies on the ground through a window.

Arakawa was found in the bathroom with pills scattered nearby, while Hackman was in the back of the house, wearing sweatpants and slippers, his cane and sunglasses beside him.

Officials determined he died seven days after his wife due to severe heart disease, with advanced Alzheimer’s listed as a contributing factor.

Authorities initially deemed the scene “suspicious” but later ruled out foul play.

• ‘Living in a reel’: How Alzheimer’s left Gene Hackman alone in his final days
• What is hantavirus, disease that killed Gene Hackman’s wife?
• Obituary: One of Hollywood’s greatest ‘tough guys’

Arakawa’s own will left her assets to Hackman, with a provision that if they died within 90 days of each other, her estate would go to a trust and later be donated to charity after covering medical expenses.

Hackman has in the past discussed his relationship with his children.

“You become very selfish as an actor,” he told The New York Times in 1989. “Even though I had a family, I took jobs that would separate us for three or four months at a time. The temptations in that, the money and recognition, it was too much for the poor boy in me.”

Hackman’s children, though rarely in the public eye, occasionally attended red carpet events with him.

In another interview, Hackman talked about the difficulty his children had of growing up with a parent who was constantly in the spotlight.

“It’s tough being the son or daughter of a celebrity,” he told The Irish Independent in 2000. “I couldn’t always be home with them when they were growing up, and then, living in California, they’ve had my success always hanging over their heads.”

His daughters and granddaughter expressed deep affection for him after his passing.

“He was loved and admired by millions around the world for his brilliant acting career, but to us, he was always just Dad and Grandpa,” they said. “We will miss him sorely, and are devastated by the loss.”

We are surrounded by an invisible killer. One so common that we barely notice it shortening our lives.

It’s causing heart attacks, type 2 diabetes and studies now even link it to dementia.

What do you think it could be?

The answer is noise – and its impact on the human body goes far beyond damaging hearing.

“It is a public health crisis, we’ve got huge numbers of people exposed in their everyday life,” says Prof Charlotte Clark, from St George’s, University of London.

It’s just a crisis we don’t talk about.

So I’ve been investigating when noise becomes dangerous, chatting to the people whose health is suffering and seeing if there’s any way of overcoming our noisy world.

I started by meeting Prof Clark in an eerily silent sound laboratory. We’re going to see how my body reacts to noise and I’ve been kitted out with a device that looks like a chunky smartwatch.

It’s going to measure my heart rate and how much my skin sweats.

You can join in too if you have some headphones. Think about how these five sounds make you feel.

The one I find really grating is the traffic noise from Dhaka, Bangladesh, which has the title of the noisiest city in the world. I immediately feel like I’m in a ginormous, stressful traffic jam.

And the sensors are picking up my agitation – my heart rate shoots up and my skin is sweating more.

“There’s really good evidence that traffic noise affects your heart health,” says Prof Clark, as the next sound is prepared.

Only the joyful sounds of the playground have a calming effect on my body. The dogs barking and the neighbour’s party in the early hours lead to a negative response.

• LISTEN: Is noise an invisible killer?

But why is sound changing my body?

“You have an emotional response to sound,” says Prof Clark.

Sound is detected by the ear and passed onto the brain and one region – the amygdala – performs the emotional assessment.

This is part of the body’s fight-or-flight response that has evolved to help us react quickly to the sounds like a predator crashing through the bushes.

“So your heart rate goes up, your nervous system starts to kick in and you release stress hormones,” Prof Clark tells me.

All of this is good in an emergency, but over time it starts to cause damage.

“If you’re exposed for several years, your body’s reacting like that all the time, it increases your risk of developing things like heart attacks, high blood pressure, stroke and type 2 diabetes,” says Prof Clark.

Insidiously, this even happens while we’re fast asleep. You might think you adapt to noise. I thought I did when I lived in a rental near an airport. But the biology tells a different story.

“You never turn your ears off; when you’re asleep, you’re still listening. So those responses, like your heart rate going up, that’s happening whilst you’re asleep,” adds Prof Clark.

Noise is unwanted sound. Transport – traffic, trains and aeroplanes – are a major source, but so too are the sounds of us having a good time. One person’s great party is another’s insufferable noise.

I meet Coco at her fourth-floor flat in the historic Vila de Gràcia area of Barcelona, Spain.

There’s a bag of freshly picked lemons tied to her door gifted by one neighbour, her fridge contains a tortilla cooked by another and she offers me fancy cakes made by a third neighbour who’s training in patisserie.

From the balcony you can see the city’s famous cathedral, the Sagrada Familia. It is easy to see why Coco has fallen in love with living here, but it comes at a huge price and she thinks she’ll be forced to leave.

“It’s extremely noisy… it’s 24-hour noise,” she tells me. There’s a dog park for owners to walk their pooches which “bark at 2, 3, 4, 5am” and the courtyard is a public space that is used for everything from children’s birthday parties to all-day concerts finished off with fireworks.

She gets out her phone and plays the recordings of the music being blasted out so loud it makes the glass in her windows vibrate.

Her home should be a refuge from the stress of work, but the noise “brings frustration, I feel like crying”.

She has been “hospitalised twice with chest pain” and “absolutely” thinks noise is causing the stress, which is damaging her health. “There is a physical change that I feel, it does something to your body, for certain,” she says.

In Barcelona there are an estimated 300 heart attacks and 30 deaths a year just from traffic noise, according to researcher Dr Maria Foraster, who has reviewed evidence on noise for the World Health Organization.

Across Europe noise is linked to 12,000 early deaths a year as well as millions of cases of severely disturbed sleep as well as serious noise annoyance which can impact mental health.

I meet Dr Foraster at a café that is separated from one of Barcelona’s busiest roads by a small park. My sound meter says the noise from the distant traffic is just over 60 decibels here.

We can easily chat over the noise without raising our voices, but this is already an unhealthy volume.

The crucial number for heart health is 53 decibels, she tells me, and the higher you go the greater the health risks.

“This 53 means that we need to be in a rather quiet environment,” says Dr Foraster.

And that’s just in daytime, we need even lower levels for sleep. “At night we need quietness,” she says.

Although it is not just about the volume, how disruptive the sound is and how much control you have over it affect our emotional response to noise.

Dr Foraster argues the health impact of noise is “at the level of air pollution” but is much harder to comprehend.

“We are used to understanding that chemicals can affect health and they are toxic, but it’s not so straightforward to understand that a physical factor, like noise, affects our health beyond our hearing,” she says.

A loud party can be the fun that makes life worth living and someone else’s intolerable noise.

The sound of traffic has the greatest impact on health because so many people are exposed to it. But traffic is also the sound of getting to work, doing the shopping and taking the children to school. Tackling noise means asking people to live their lives differently – which creates problems of its own.

Dr Natalie Mueller, from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, takes me for a walk around the city centre. We start on a busy road – my sound meter clocks in at over 80 decibels – and we head to a quiet tree-lined avenue where the noise is down to the 50s.

But there is something different about this street – it used to be a busy road, but the space was given over to pedestrians, cafes and gardens. I can see the ghost of an old cross roads by the shape of the flowerbeds. Vehicles can still come down here, just slowly.

Remember earlier in the lab, we found that some sounds can soothe the body.

“It is not completely silent, but it’s a different perception of sound and noise,” Dr Mueller says.

The initial plan was to create more than 500 areas like this, termed “superblocks” – pedestrian-friendly areas created by grouping several city blocks together.

Dr Mueller performed the research projecting a 5-10% reduction in noise in the city, which would prevent about “150 premature deaths” from noise alone each year. And that would be “just the tip of the iceberg” of the health benefits.

But in reality only six superblocks were ever built. The city council declined to comment.

The dangers of noise though are continuing to grow. Urbanisation is putting more people into noisy cities.

Dhaka, Bangladesh, is one of the fastest growing megacities in the world. This has brought more traffic and given the city a cacophonous soundtrack of honking horns.

Artist Momina Raman Royal earned the label of the “lone hero” as his silent protests have focused attention on the city’s noise problem.

For about 10 minutes each day, he stands at the intersection of a couple of busy roads with a big yellow placard accusing drivers who honk their horns loudly of causing a massive nuisance.

He took on the mission after his daughter was born. “I want to stop all honking from not only Dhaka, but from Bangladesh,” he says.

“If you see the birds or trees or rivers, no one’s making noise without humans, so humans are responsible.”

But here there are the beginnings of political action too. Syeda Rizwana Hasan, who’s the environment adviser and minister for the government of Bangladesh, told me she was “very worried” about the health impacts of noise.

There is a crackdown on honking horns to get the noise levels down – with an awareness campaign and stricter enforcement of existing laws.

She said: “It’s impossible to get it done in one year or two years, but I think it is possible to ensure that the city becomes less noisy, and when people feel that, they feel better when it’s less noisy, I’m sure their habit will also change.”

The solutions to noise can be difficult, complicated and challenging to solve.

What I’m left with is a new appreciation for finding some space in our lives to just escape the noise because in the words of Dr Masrur Abdul Quader, from the Bangladesh University of Professionals, it is “a silent killer and a slow poison”.

A Peruvian fisherman who survived 95 days lost at sea in the Pacific Ocean by eating turtles, birds and cockroaches has been rescued and reunited with his family.

Maximo Napa Castro, 61, set off for what should have been a two-week fishing trip from the coastal town of Marcona, on the southern Peruvian coast, on 7 December.

Ten days in, a storm blew his boat off course, leaving him adrift with dwindling supplies.

His family launched a search, but Peru’s maritime patrols were unable to locate him.

It was not until Wednesday that the Ecuadorian patrol vessel Don F found him 1,094km (680 miles) from the coast, dehydrated and in a critical condition.

Maximo survived by catching rainwater in his boat and eating whatever he could find.

In an emotional reunion with his brother in Paita, near the Ecuadorian border, on Friday, he described how he had eaten roaches and birds before resorting to sea turtles. His last 15 days were spent without food.

Thinking of his family, including his two-month-old granddaughter, gave him the strength to endure, Mr Castro said.

“I thought about my mother everyday. I’m thankful to God for giving me a second chance.”

His mother, Elena, told local media that, while her relatives remained optimistic during her son’s disappearance, she had begun to lose hope.

After his rescue, Mr Castro was taken to Paita for medical assessment before being flown to the Peruvian capital, Lima.

There, at Jorge Chávez International Airport, he was met by his daughter, Inés Napa, in an emotional reunion surrounded by a media scrum. She welcomed him home with a bottle of pisco, Peru’s national drink.

In his home district of San Andrés in the Ica region, neighbours and relatives told Peruvian media agency RPP they decorated the streets in celebration.

His niece, Leyla Torres Napa, said the family planned to celebrate his birthday, which passed while he was lost at sea.

She told the agency: “The day of his birth was unique because all that he could eat [while at sea] was a small cookie, so it is very important for us that we celebrate because, for us, he has been reborn.”

Last year, Russian Mikhail Pichugin was rescued after spending more than two months adrift in a small inflatable boat in the Sea of Okhotsk, to the east of Russia.

Similarly, José Salvador Alvarenga, a Salvadoran fisherman, endured an extraordinary 14-month ordeal adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

Setting out from Mexico’s coast in late 2012, he was eventually found in the Marshall Islands in early 2014, and also survived on rainwater and turtles.

After Kim Visintine put her son to bed every night at a hospital in St Louis, Missouri, she spent her evening in the hospital’s library. She was determined to know how her boy had become seriously ill with a rare brain tumour at just a week old.

“Doctors were shocked,” she says. “We were told that his illness was one in a million. Other parents were learning to change diapers but I was learning how to change chemotherapy ports and IVs.”

Kim’s son Zack was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme. It is a brain tumour that is very rare in children and is usually seen in adults over 45.

Zack had chemotherapy treatments but doctors said there was no hope of him ever recovering. He died at just six years old.

Years later, social media and community chatter made Kim start to think that her son was not an isolated case. Perhaps he was part of a bigger picture growing in their community surrounding Coldwater Creek.

In this part of the US, cancer fears have prompted locals to accuse officials of not doing enough to support those who may have been exposed to radiation due to the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s.

A compensation programme that was designed to pay out to some Americans who contracted diseases after exposure to radiation expired last year – before it could be extended to the St Louis area.

This Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (Reca) provided one-time payouts to people who may have developed cancer or other diseases while living in areas where activities such as atomic weapons testing took place. It paid out $2.6bn (£2bn) to more than 41,000 claimants before coming to an end in 2024.

Among the areas covered were parts of New Mexico, where the world’s first test of a nuclear weapon took place in 1945. Research published in 2020 by the National Cancer Institute suggested that hundreds of cancers in the area would not have occurred without radiation exposure.

St Louis, meanwhile, was where uranium was refined and used to help create the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. After World War Two ended, the chemical was dumped near the creek and left uncovered, allowing waste to seep into the area.

Decades later, federal investigators acknowledged an increased cancer risk for some people who played in the creek as children, but added in their report: “The predicted increases in the number of cancer cases from exposures are small, and no method exists to link a particular cancer with this exposure.”

The clean-up of the creek is still ongoing and is not expected to finish until 2038.

A new bill has been put forward in the House, and Josh Hawley, a US senator representing Missouri, says he has raised the issue with President Donald Trump.

When Kim flicks through her school yearbook, she can identify those who have become sick and those who have since passed away. The numbers are startling.

“My husband didn’t grow up in this area, and he said to me, ‘Kim, this is not normal. It seems like we’re always talking about one of your friends passing away or going to a funeral’,” she says.

Just streets away from the creek, Karen Nickel grew up spending her days near the water picking berries, or in the nearby park playing baseball. Her brother would often try and catch fish in Coldwater Creek.

“I always tell people that we had just the fairytale childhood that you would expect in what you consider suburban America,” says Karen. “Big backyards, big families, children playing out together until the street lights came on at night.”

But years later, her carefree childhood now looks very different.

“Fifteen people from the street I grew up on have died from rare cancers,” she says. “We have neighbourhoods here where every house has been affected by some cancer or some illness. We have streets where you can’t just find a house where a family has not been affected by this.”

When Karen’s sister was just 11 years old, doctors discovered that her ovaries were covered in cysts. The same had happened to their neighbour when she was just nine. Karen’s six-year-old granddaughter was born with a mass on her right ovary.

Karen helped found Just Moms STL, a group that is dedicated to protecting the community from future exposures that could be linked to cancers – and which advocates for a clean-up of the area.

“We get messages every day from people that are suffering from illnesses and are questioning whether this is from exposure,” she says. “These are very aggressive illnesses that the community is getting, from cancers all the way to autoimmune diseases.”

Teresa Rumfelt grew up just a street away from Karen and lived in her family home from 1979 until 2010. She remembers every one of her animals passing away from cancer and her neighbours getting ill from rare diseases.

Years later, her sister Via Von Banks was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of motor neurone disease. Some medical studies have suggested there could be a link between radiation and ALS, but this is not definitive – and more research needs to be done to firm it up.

That does not reassure people like Teresa who are concerned that more needs to be done to understand how locals are being affected.

“ALS took my sister at 50,” Teresa says. “I think it was the worst disease ever of mankind. When she was diagnosed in 2019, she’d just got her career going and her children were growing. She stayed positive through all of it.”

Like Hawley, Just STL Moms and other community members want the government’s compensation act to be expanded to include people within the St Louis area, despite the programme being in limbo after expiring.

Expanding it to the Coldwater Creek community would mean that locals could be offered compensation if they could prove they were harmed as a result of the Manhattan Project, during which the atomic bomb was developed with the help of uranium-processing in St Louis. It would also allow screenings and further study into illnesses other than cancer.

In a statement to the BBC, the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it took concerns very seriously and had actively worked with federal, state and local partners – as well as community members – to understand their health concerns, and to ensure community members were not exposed to the Manhattan Project-era waste.

The BBC has also contacted the US Army Corps of Engineers, which is leading the clean-up – but has not received a response to a request for comment.

“My sister would have loved to be part of the fight. She’d be the first to picket,” says Teresa of her efforts to get greater support from the government.

The trend in people around Coldwater Creek getting unwell has not gone unnoticed among healthcare professionals.

Dr Gautum Agarwal, a cancer surgeon at Mercy Hospital in St Louis, says he has not noticed a “statistical thing”, but notes that he has seen husbands and wives and their neighbours presenting cancers.

Now, he ensures that his patients are asked where they live and how close they are to Coldwater Creek.

“I tell them that there’s a potential that there’s a link. And if your neighbours or family live near there, we should get them screened more often. And maybe you should get your kids screened earlier.”

He hopes that over time more knowledge will be gained about the issue, and for a study into multi-cancer early detection tests to be introduced that could help catch any potential cancers, and help reassure people in the area.

Other experts take a different view of the risks. “There is a narrative that many people are sick from cancers, specifically from exposures while living next to Coldwater Creek for the last few decades”, says Roger Lewis, a professor in the environmental and occupations health department of St Louis University.

“But the data and studies don’t indicate that. They show that there is some risk but it’s small. It doesn’t mean that it’s not significant in some ways, but it’s very limited.”

Prof Lewis acknowledges the fear in the community, saying locals will feel safer if the government is clearer about its efforts to eliminate any hazards.

For many people near Coldwater Creek, conversation with authorities is not easing the angst that comes with living in an area known for the dumping of nuclear waste.

“It’s almost a given in our community that at some point we all expect to have some sort of cancer or illness,” says Kim Visintine. “There’s almost this apathy within our group that, well, it’s just a matter of time.”