US President Donald Trump has announced new import taxes of 25% on cars and car parts coming into the US in a move that threatens to widen the global trade war.

Trump said the latest tariffs would come into effect on 2 April, with charges on businesses importing vehicles starting the next day. Charges on parts are set to start in May or later.

The president claimed the measure would lead to “tremendous growth” for the car industry, promising it would spur jobs and investment in the US.

But analysts have said the move is likely to lead to the temporary shutdown of significant car production in the US, increase prices, and strain relations with allies.

The US imported roughly eight million cars last year, accounting for about $240bn (£186bn) in trade and roughly half of overall sales.

Mexico is the top foreign supplier of cars to the US, followed by South Korea, Japan, Canada and Germany. Trump’s latest move threatens to upend global car trade and supply chains.

Many US car companies have operations in Mexico and Canada as well, set up under the terms of the longstanding free trade agreement between the three countries.

The White House said the order would apply not only to finished cars but also to car parts, which are often shipped in from other countries before getting assembled in the US.

However, the new tariffs on parts from Canada and Mexico are exempt while US customs and border patrol set up a system to assess the duties, the White House said. The neighbouring countries see goods worth billions cross borders each day.

On Wednesday, shares in General Motors slid roughly 3%. The sell-off spread to other companies, including Ford, after the president’s remarks as he confirmed the tariffs.

Asked at a press conference if there was any chance he would reverse course, Trump said no, adding later: “This is permanent.”

“If you build your car in the United States there is no tariff,” he said.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said his government would put “all options on the table” in response to the tariffs.

Japan, which is home to several major motor industry giants, is the world’s second largest exporter of cars.

Shares in Japanese carmakers – including Toyota, Nissan, Honda – fell in early trade in Tokyo.

A tariff is a tax on imports collected by a government and it is paid by the company importing the good.

Trump has embraced the tool, looking to apply it to a host of goods being imported into the US as part of a wider drive to protect American businesses and boost manufacturing.

But while the measures can protect domestic businesses, they also raise costs for businesses reliant on parts from abroad, as is the case for car-makers.

Analysts have estimated that the cost of a car could rise thousands of dollars, with 25% tariffs on parts from Mexico and Canada alone adding $4,000-$10,000 in cost depending on the vehicle, according to the Anderson Economic Group.

The fresh car import taxes on cars are set to come into force on the same day as so-called reciprocal tariffs kick in for individual countries based on their trading relationship with the US.

It is not clear how the car tariffs might affect those plans.

But many countries, including the UK, are concerned about their exporters being hit as a result of the new taxes.

The US was the top sales market for British-based Jaguar Land Rover last year, with the carmaker selling 116,294 vehicles to Americans, exceeding sales to customers in the UK and China.

The UK government is in talks with the US administration and remains hopeful of a trade deal before tariffs come into force, the BBC understands.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called Trump’s announcement a “direct attack” on his country and its car industry.

“This will hurt us, but through this period by being together we will emerge stronger,” he said.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc would consider the measures before any potential response.

“As I have said before, tariffs are taxes – bad for businesses, worse for consumers equally in the US and the European Union,” she said.

“The EU will continue to seek negotiated solutions, while safeguarding its economic interests.”

For the UK, the US is the second largest car export market after the EU, with mainly luxury cars shipped across the Atlantic, according to the industry body, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

Mike Hawes, the chief executive of the SMMT, urged the UK and US governments to “come together immediately and strike a deal that works for all”.

The car industry was already grappling with expanded tariffs on steel and aluminium that Trump put in place earlier this month.

In recent weeks, major car companies such as Ford and General Motors had urged the president to exempt the industry from any further duties.

A 2024 study by the US International Trade Commission predicted that a 25% tariff on imports would reduce imports by almost 75%, while increasing average prices in the US by about 5%.

But Trump has proceeded with the move, which is a revival of an action he first considered during his first term in the White House.

White House officials said it wanted to see US workers make more parts, not simply assemble them, and have maintained their action is pushing firms to relocate.

A day before the latest tariffs, South Korean carmaking giant Hyundai announced it would invest $21bn (£16.3bn) in the US and build a new steel plant in the southern state of Louisiana.

Trump hailed the investment as a “clear demonstration that tariffs very strongly work”.

United Autoworkers union leader Shawn Fain, who had opposed Trump in the election, praised the president’s actions, saying he was “stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working class communities for decades”.

Elsewhere, the head of trade group the American Automotive Policy Council, Matt Blunt, said: “US Automakers are committed to President Trump’s vision of increasing automotive production and jobs in the US.”

China’s efforts to build up huge business interests across Africa have been accompanied by a careful policy of maintaining neutrality – but the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo has caused a shift in its approach.

Rwanda has been widely accused of stoking the fighting in the mineral-rich region and Beijing, which has close relations with both DR Congo and Rwanda, has in recent weeks joined the criticism.

But it is trying to walk a diplomatic tightrope to maintain good relations with both countries, while also continuing to operate its businesses – and buy crucial minerals.

For decades, China has been careful not to take sides in conflicts in Africa, to avoid causing problems that might interfere with its extensive commercial interests.

Up to now it has shied away from criticising African governments for supporting participants in a conflict.

For example, China has said little about the series of coups since 2020 in West Africa’s Sahel region, except to urge leaders to consider the interests of the people.

Beijing has long pursued a policy of non-interference in another state’s internal affairs, says Prof Zhou Yuyuan, who specialises in African development and security at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS).

It therefore avoids proposing solutions to conflicts, apart from calling for diplomatic or political efforts by international organisations such as the UN or the African Union.

The unrest involving Rwandan-back M23 rebels in eastern DR Congo reared its head again in 2021. The fighters are led by ethnic Tutsis who say they took up arms to protect the rights of the minority group – and because the Congolese authorities reneged on an earlier peace deal.

In its early comments on these developments, China restricted itself to criticising unnamed “foreign forces” for providing support to the M23 fighters.

But in the last few weeks it has broken from its usual practice and referred to Rwanda by name.

This follows major gains by the M23, which since January has captured the key cities of Goma and Bukavu.

“China reiterates its hope that Rwanda will… stop its military support for M23 and immediately withdraw all its military forces from the DRC territory,” China’s UN ambassador said in February.

Prof Zhou notes that though significant, the “wording in general is still relatively mild”.

“China ‘hoped’ that Rwanda would stop its support but did not condemn it,” he says.

However, soon afterwards China backed a UN Security Council resolution which bluntly calls on the Rwanda Defence Forces to “cease support to the M23 and immediately withdraw from DRC territory without preconditions”.

According to Prof Zhou, China’s statements are likely to have been prompted by UN expert reports, which have provided strong evidence of Rwanda’s support for the M23.

“This is a basic consensus in the UN Security Council,” he added.

“The problem has been going on long enough, and everyone knows in their hearts the basic situation. There’s no need to be hush-hush any more.”

Neither China’s mission to the UN nor its embassy in London responded when asked why China had criticised Rwanda.

But the critical importance to China of DR Congo’s renowned mineral wealth may have been a factor.

Fighting in eastern DR Congo has been concentrated in the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, home to many Chinese-run gold mines.

How these mines have been affected by the fighting is so far unclear.

The M23 has also seized territory containing mines for coltan ore, which China imports in large volumes.

The metal tantalum, used in cars and everyday electronics from TV sets to mobile phones, is extracted from this ore, and DR Congo is the source of 40% of the world’s supply.

A UN expert group said in December 2024 that the M23 had smuggled coltan to Rwanda from DR Congo. It also noted that Rwanda’s coltan exports rose by 50% between 2022 and 2023.

Although Rwanda has its own coltan mines, analysts say they could account for such a large increase in production.

It is not yet clear whether the volume or the price of coltan imported by China has been affected.

Another mineral that China imports from DR Congo is cobalt, which is crucial for the lithium battery industry.

However, China’s cobalt mining operations are primarily based in southern DR Congo, away from the conflict zones in the east.

Dozens of Chinese companies, many of which are state-owned, are also building roads, telecommunications and hydropower facilities in DR Congo. But it seems that the impact on these activities has so far been minimal.

China’s supplies weapons to both Rwanda and DR Congo.

In the past two decades, the Rwandan military has bought Chinese armoured vehicles, artillery and anti-tank missiles, according to the think-tank Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).

China posted a military attaché to the country for the first time in 2024.

While UN experts say the Rwandan military has armed the M23, it is unclear whether the rebel group is using any Chinese weapons.

The Congolese armed forces have bought Chinese armoured personnel carriers and drones.

They also own Chinese tanks, which were bought in 1976 but were still in use as recently as 2022.

It is reported that the drones, at least, have been used in the fight against the M23.

The Rwandan embassy in Beijing said ties with China remained “excellent and productive”, and it was not for Rwanda to comment on China’s statement about the fighting in eastern DR Congo.

The Chinese ambassador to DR Congo, Zhao Bin, held discussions with Congolese Senate President Sama Lukonde in early February but no details of the meeting were made public.

China’s economic activities in the two countries go very deep. They are both part of China’s Belt and Road initiative, designed to stitch China closer to the world through investments and infrastructure projects.

In Rwanda, China has funded stadiums, schools and highways. Chinese loans are also funding infrastructure projects – a loan to fund a dam and irrigation system, worth an estimated $40m (£31m), was confirmed in January.

For years most goods imported into Rwanda have come from China.

When it comes to China’s economic ties with DR Congo, the UN Comtrade Database shows that for years China has been DR Congo’s top trading partner.

China has gone to great lengths to secure access to DR Congo’s mineral wealth.

It extended $3.2bn (£2.5bn) of loans to the country between 2005 and 2022, according to the Chinese Loans to Africa Database run by Boston University, mostly to fund road and bridge construction, and the country’s electricity grid.

China has financed and built other large-scale infrastructure projects in DR Congo, including hydropower plants and a dry port.

These investments may suggest it is in China’s long-term interests to find a resolution to the conflict quickly.

“It took a huge amount of courage to speak out,” NewJeans have told the BBC in their first interview since a court blocked their attempt to leave their record label, in a case that has rocked the K-pop industry.

“This fight is necessary. Although it will be extremely difficult and arduous, we will keep doing what we have done so far and speak up,” said Haerin, one of the members of the five-piece.

“We thought it was important to tell the world about what we’ve been through. All the choices we’ve made so far have been the best choices we could have made.”

NewJeans looked invincible in the charts when they launched what was an unusual rebellion in the high-pressure, tightly-controlled world of K-pop. Hanni, Hyein, Haerin, Danielle and Minji stunned South Korea and fans everywhere with their decision in November to split from Ador, the label that launched them.

They alleged mistreatment, workplace harassment and an attempt to “undermine their careers”, which Ador denies. It sued to enforce their seven-year contract, which is set to expire in 2029, and sought an injunction against any commercial activities by the group.

On Friday, a South Korean court granted it, ordering NewJeans to stop all “independent” activities, including song releases and advertising deals, while the case was still under way. NewJeans has since challenged the injunction in court.

Friday’s ruling was a “shock”, the group told the BBC.

“Some people think that we’re famous enough to do whatever we want and say whatever we please. But the truth is, it’s not like that at all,” Hyein said. “We held it in for a long time, and only now have we finally spoken up about what we think, what we feel and the unfairness we’ve experienced.”

The K-pop industry has repeatedly come under fire for the pressure it puts on its stars not only to perform and succeed, but to appear perfect. But rarely do conflicts spill into the public, exposing stars’ grievances and rifts with their labels.

NewJeans’ dramatic announcement last year followed a long and public spat with Ador and its parent company, Hybe – South Korea’s biggest music label, whose client list includes K-pop royalty such as BTS and Seventeen.

Ador told the BBC in a statement that the contract with NewJeans still stands, adding that “most of their claims have risen from misunderstandings”. The court said that NewJeans did not “sufficiently prove” that Ador had violated the contract, adding that the label had upheld “most of its duties, including payment”.

The girls were rehearsing for a performance in Hong Kong, when news of the ruling dropped. They found out when Minji got a worried message from her mother: “She asked me, ‘are you okay?’ And I was like ‘what happened?'”

“I was stunned,” Minji says. So were the others when she told them. “At first I thought I didn’t hear her properly,” Danielle says. “We were all kind of in shock.”

This was their second of two interviews with the BBC in as many weeks. In the first interview, which happened before the ruling, the group had been excited to release their new single, Pit Stop – their first since they announced their break from Ador and renamed themselves NJZ.

They spoke about how they coped with a difficult period, including finding comfort in cooking. “I’m not really good at it but it’s kind of healing,” Minji had said, before promising to cook an “amazing dinner” for the group.

In the second interview, which was 24 hours after the ruling, they seemed disheartened and unsettled, less sure of what was to come. “If we knew we were gonna go through this, maybe we would have chosen…” Hanni trailed off as she teared up.

Seconds later, she continued: “Even if we do everything we can and it doesn’t work out the way we hope it does, then we’ll just have to leave it to time. I’m sure time would figure it out for us.”

The following night, they took to the stage in Hong Kong and, despite the court order, performed Pit Stop under their new name. But the evening, which they had pitched to fans as a fresh start, ended in tears as they told the crowd they were going on a hiatus.

“It wasn’t any easy decision to make,” Hyein said on stage, as each of them took turns to address their fans. “But at the moment for us, it’s about protecting ourselves, so that we can come back stronger.”

Just three years into their debut, the future of the young stars – they are aged between 16 and 20 – is now in question.

But they tell the BBC that this is not the end of the road for them as they “find more ways” forward. With the legal battle expected to last for months, if not years, Minji says that gives them time to plan what they want to do next.

Ever since they debuted in July 2022, NewJeans have delivered remarkable success with each new release – OMG, Ditto, Super Shy, Attention. A year on, they were the eighth biggest-selling act in the world.

Critics called them a “game-changer” as their uniquely playful blend of 1990s R&B and sugar-coated pop melodies broke through a K-pop market dominated by electronic beats. And their breezy dance moves stood out among super-synchronised videos.

They were still on the rise when Min Hee-jin – Ador’s former boss and their long-time mentor, who launched them – began trading accusations publicly with Hybe. The music label had created Ador, granting Min a minority shareholding and further stock options, before she was removed from her role last August.

Hybe was now accusing her of plotting Ador’s takeover and Min, in an emotional press conference, accused them of undermining NewJeans by launching another girl group with a similar style. The fight got uglier and Min left the company, alleging she was forced out.

That’s when NewJeans broke their silence – they demanded Min’s return in two weeks in a livestream.

They were not able to contact her for a while, Danielle told the BBC in the first interview: “We didn’t know what was happening and we didn’t have a way to support her. That itself was a hard thing because she was always there for us and… in a way a person to look up to.”

Ador had said Min could not return as CEO, but could continue as an internal director and NewJeans’ producer. When Min didn’t return, NewJeans announced that they were leaving Ador and accused the label of not meeting other demands: an apology for alleged bullying and actions against what they claimed were controversial internal reports.

Ador, which denies all these allegations, appears to blame Min for their dispute with NewJeans. “The core of this issue lies in the label’s ex-management providing distorted explanations to their artists, leading to misunderstandings. They can be fully addressed and resolved upon the members’ return to the label,” Ador told the BBC in a statement.

In the months since, Hanni, a Vietnamese-Australian, testified in tears to South Korean lawmakers in an inquiry into workplace harassment. “I came to the realisation that this wasn’t just a feeling. I was honestly convinced that the company hated us,” she told them, after describing several incidents where she said the group felt undermined and bullied.

NewJeans’ case was dismissed because the labour ministry said K-pop stars did not qualify as workers and were not entitled to the same rights.

Then in December, NewJeans took another rare step by supporting fans who were calling for the impeachment of South Korea’s disgraced president, Yoon Suk Yeol who had briefly imposed martial law – the group provided free food and drinks to fans who showed up at the huge protest rallies.

With each round of publicity, there was also criticism, much of it involving their age. Some said they had “crossed the line”, while others called them “stupid and reckless,” and even “ungrateful” for picking a fight with Ador. Others questioned if they were making their own decisions.

Being young doesn’t mean they should be taken less seriously, the group says. “That’s an easy way to devalue the fact that we are actually trying to do something,” Hanni says. “The decisions we’ve made in the past year have been decided through a very, very large amount of discussion between us.”

As the dispute has dragged on, the critics have got louder, dubbing the girls as troublemakers rather than game-changers. Following the ruling, which their critics welcomed, NewJeans say they have been “very aware of the intense scrutiny and judgment” ever since they held that press conference last year.

“There hasn’t been a single moment when we’ve expressed our opinions without worry or tension,” Minji says. “We’ve thought more than anyone else about how much responsibility each of our actions carries, and we’re currently bearing that responsibility ourselves.”

It’s not clear how long their hiatus will last. Ador says it hopes to meet the group soon to discuss the future, but NewJeans insist they don’t feel protected enough to go back.

Their lawsuit with Ador will return to the headlines next week when the hearings begin – and so will all five of them.

The one thing that seems constant is their determination to get through this together.

Two weeks ago, Hanni had said: “We’ve always said to each other, if one person doesn’t want to do it, then we’re not going to do it. It has to be all all five of us that agrees to do it. That’s how we’ve gotten here and that’s how we are going to get to the end.”

On Saturday, she repeated: “We’re gonna get through it.”

On a hot, humid Thursday night in Saitama, China’s national football team hit its lowest ebb.

With a minute left on the clock and trailing Japan 6-0, Chinese defenders were likely wishing for the sweet relief of the final whistle.

But Japan’s Takefusa Kubo was not feeling charitable. After watching his team-mates toy with their opponents for a while, he received a pass on the edge of the Chinese box and rammed home Japan’s seventh goal.

The ball rocketed into the roof of the net, and the man known as “Japanese Messi” condemned China to their worst-ever defeat in a World Cup qualifier.

The 7-0 spanking in September – described as “rock-bottom” by a Shanghai-based newspaper – followed a year-long line of humiliating defeats which included losses to Oman, Uzbekistan and Hong Kong.

But worse was to come.

A week later dozens of players, coaches and administrators were arrested for gambling, match-fixing and bribery as part of a two-year probe into corruption in the domestic game.

And the defeats have continued. On Tuesday, Australia beat China 2-0 in Hangzhou – cementing them at the bottom of their World Cup qualifying group.

It wasn’t long ago that China had dreamed of becoming a footballing superpower.

The world’s largest population, a thriving economy and a determined Communist Party led by an avid football fan, President Xi Jinping. What could go wrong?

Apparently, quite a lot.

When Xi came to power in 2012, his love for the sport spurred a drive to reform and improve Chinese football. His dream, he once said, was for China to qualify for the World Cup, host it and, ultimately, win it. These were his “three wishes”.

But a decade later, even Xi seemed to have lost the faith. While making small talk with Thailand’s prime minister on the sidelines of an international summit in 2023, the Chinese president was heard saying that China had “got lucky” in a recent victory against Thailand.

“When China’s government puts its mind to something, it very rarely fails,” says Mark Dreyer, a Beijing-based sports writer. “Look at electric vehicles, look at the Olympics. Practically any sector you can think of, China is right up there.”

But football, it seems, could not thrive in the grip of the Communist Party.

A key government report in 2015 noted that The Chinese Football Association (CFA) must have “legal autonomy,” and should be “independent” of the General Administration of Sport (GAS).

Even Xi admitted that if China wanted to succeed, then the Party would have to do what it seldom does: let go.

And yet, Beijing didn’t let go.

“China’s failure in football has become a national embarrassment and figuring out the reasons has become a national obsession,” Rowan Simons, author of Bamboo Goalposts: One Man’s Quest to Teach the People’s Republic of China to Love Football, told the BBC.

“But to me, the reasons are pretty clear and they tell you a lot about how the country is run.”

The problem, he and others argue, is that China’s one-party state imposes decisions from the top. While this is effective for economic growth, it yields poor results in competitive team sports.

Although Fifa prohibits state interference, Chinese football is rife with political appointments. This is common in China, where the Party controls most aspects of public life.

The current president of the CFA, Song Cai, is also a Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party. His work, in turn, is overseen by a senior government official at the GAS.

“Everything has to report upwards to Communist Party bosses. It basically means that non-football people are making football decisions,” Mr Dreyer says. “Football has to be grassroots-led. You start at the bottom of the pyramid and the talent starts to funnel up to the top.”

All major footballing nations have a “pyramid” of leagues. The elite professional clubs sit at the top, supported by a deep pool of semi-professional and amateur teams, all of whose players are vying to work their way up.

Such a pyramid thrives on a culture of playing football, en masse, for fun. The larger the pool to draw from, the better the players at the top will be.

“If you look at every country where football is really successful, the sport has grown organically as a grassroots activity over the past 100 years,” Mr Simons says. “Professional football in China has continually failed because it’s supported by nothing – their pyramid is upside down.”

The statistics bear this out: England’s 1.3 million registered players dwarf China’s fewer-than-100,000 footballers. This is inspite of China’s population being 20 times larger than England’s.

“Kids here don’t grow up with a ball at their feet. Without that, you’re not going to produce elite talent,” Mr Dreyer says.

Top-level football in Europe and South America traces its origins to streets and parks in every town and village. In China, however, the push began in Beijing.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the government set up the country’s first professional league. It created a handful of top clubs in major cities – but neglected the grassroots.

Keen to impress their bosses, officials in this top-down system inevitably opt for a “short-termist” approach that sacrifices genuine improvement over time for quick fixes, Mr Dreyer explains.

Some foreigners who have played in China say such a heavily controlled system also leaves little room forl young players to develop a natural understanding of the game.

A European currently playing in China, who did not wish to reveal his name, told the BBC that while many Chinese players are “technically good”, they lack “football IQ” at crucial moments on the pitch.

“Creativity and basic decision-making, which we learn instinctively as a kid, you don’t see so much here,” the player says.

This does not mean that there is not a deep love for football in China.

While the men’s team, currently ranked 90th in the world, is seen as a constant disappointment, the women’s team, ranked 17th, has been a source of pride for years.

Many in China have referred to them as the “real” guozu or national team – and in 2023, a record 53 million people tuned in to watch them play – and lose 6-1 – to England at the World Cup.

The men’s Super League boasts the highest average attendance of any league in Asia. At its peak in the 2010s, it was attracting big-name foreign players as it rode a wave of investment from state-owned enterprises, buoyed by a thriving economy.

But it was short-lived.

Since the pandemic and the subsequent economic slowdown in China, more than 40 professional clubs have folded as state-backed companies started to pull their investments. Private companies, too, have proved fickle in their commitment.

In 2015, the Suning Appliance Group, which also used to own the top Italian club Inter Milan, bought Jiangsu FC. The club went on to win the Super League in 2020. But months later, Suning said they were closing the club to focus on their retail business.

The demise of Guangzhou Evergrande, China’s most successful team ever, is yet another example.

Bankrolled by property giant Evergrande Group, they won trophy after trophy under the management of Italian greats such as Marcello Lippi and Fabio Cannavaro. But as they found glory at home and in Asia, their parent company was overstretching itself in an inflated property market.

Evergrande is now the world’s most indebted property company and the poster-child for China’s real estate crisis, with arrears of more than $300bn (£225bn).

Its former club – now in the hands of new owners – was expelled from the league in January. After years of splurging, the eight-time champions are still struggling to pay off their debt.

But that is not the only crisis engulfing Chinese football. Its rapid rise created another problem: corruption.

“I should have followed the right path. I was just doing what was customary at the time,” says Li Tie, the former manager of China’s national men’s team, in a 2024 documentary.

In that documentary, Li makes a shocking admission: for years he fixed matches and paid bribes to get certain jobs, including 3m yuan (£331,000, $418,500) to become the national team coach in 2019.

Dressed in all-black, he marks a written confession with an inky fingerprint: “I’m very sorry.”

China’s national team was made to watch the documentary by state broadcaster CCTV while preparing for last year’s Asian Cup in Qatar.

The primetime expose, co-produced by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), was the first episode of a four-part series on corruption in China called Continued Efforts, Deepening Progress.

In it, dozens of Chinese officials confess – always to camera – to staggering levels of corruption across a variety of industries.

By airing the football episode first, the authorities signalled their serious concern about graft within the sport.

Li, who appeared in a World Cup and once played for Premier League side Everton, is the most high-profile figure to have been apprehended last year in an unprecedented slew of anti-corruption arrests in Chinese football.

In December, he was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Also publicly shamed in the documentary are former CFA chairman Chen Xuyuan and ex-deputy director of the GAS, Du Zhaocai.

“The corruption of these officials has broken our hearts,” one fan told CCTV. “I’m not surprised,” said another.

The documentary echoed what one ex-national team player told a BBC radio documentary in 2015 in an anonymous interview: that there was a system of “open bidding” among players for their spot in the squad.

“I could have won many more caps, but I didn’t have the cash,” he said.

It would take another 10 years before corruption in football exploded into the spotlight. Some suggest this was prompted by China’s intolerably bad performances on the pitch.

The struggles of China’s men’s football team are all the more stark given how other sports are flourishing in the country.

Decades of investment in infrastructure and training have taken China from a sporting backwater to a medal-winning machine that recently equalled the United States with 40 golds at the Paris Olympics.

But many of these are individual sports – weightlifting, swimming, diving – which require fewer resources and, crucially, less emphasis on community-led grassroots efforts, compared to a game like football.

They are also less lucrative and, therefore, less vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement.

As China’s economy reels from a sustained downturn, its officials have bigger challenges than football woes.

But that is little consolation to fans.

The loss to Japan particularly stung. While Japan have gone from strength to strength over the past two decades, China have failed to qualify for a single World Cup.

The day after the loss, the Oriental Sports Daily did not mince its words: “When the taste of bitterness reaches its extreme, all that is left is numbness.”

According to Mr Dreyer, Japan’s approach is antithetical to China’s: a long-term vision, a lack of political interference and a commercially savvy club structure.

“Even so, the fan culture here [in China] is still remarkably good,” he adds. “They deserve so much more.”

Their disappointment showed following Tuesday’s defeat against Australia – but so did their humour.

“It seems like the national team’s performance is as consistent as ever,” wrote one fan on social media. Another joked that if China wants to continue thriving economically, then its football team must suffer so there is a balance in “national fortune”.

Perhaps they had resigned themselves to what a popular Chinese journalist had written in his blog after Japan beat China.

Football “cannot be boosted by singing odes or telling stories”, he noted. “It needs skill, and physical and tactical training. It cannot be accomplished through politics.”

US President Donald Trump says he may cut tariffs on China to help seal a deal for short video app TikTok to be sold by its owner ByteDance.

Trump also said he is willing to extend a 5 April deadline for a non-Chinese buyer of the platform to be found.

In January, he delayed the implementation of a law passed under the Biden administration to ban TikTok.

The legislation, which was signed into law in 2024, cited national security grounds for the sell or be banned order.

“With respect to TikTok, and China is going to have to play a role in that, possibly in the form of an approval, maybe, and I think they’ll do that,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

“Maybe I’ll give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done,” he added.

Trump also said he expected at least the outline of a deal to be reached by the 5 April deadline.

He made the comments after announcing new import taxes of 25% on all cars and car parts coming into the US in a move that threatens to widen the global trade war.

The BBC has contacted TikTok and the Chinese embassy in Washington for comment.

The biggest sticking point to finalising a deal to sell the TikTok business, which is worth tens of billions of dollars, has always been securing Beijing’s agreement.

Trump has previously tried to use tariffs as leverage in the negotiations.

On his first day back in the White House, on 20 January, the president threatened more import duties on China if it did not approve a TikTok deal.

The hugely popular app is used by around 170 million Americans.

Trump, who called for TikTok to be banned in his first term as president, now has an account on the platform.

He has more than 15 million followers and has said he received billions of views on the app during his presidential election campaign.

Separately, the US increased levies on all imports from China to 20% this month.

That doubled the tariffs Trump imposed on the world’s second largest economy on 4 February.

On 10 February, China responded with its own tariffs, including a 10-15% tax on some US agricultural goods.

Beijing has also targeted various US aviation, defence and tech firms by adding them to an “unreliable entity list” and imposing export controls.

The 10% levy doubled to 20% on 4 March.

China has urged the US to return to dialogue with Beijing as soon as possible.

When Jeffrey Goldberg published a bombshell story outlining how some of the most senior US officials had mistakenly shared sensitive information with him, he obtained the biggest scoop of the year. The Atlantic editor also became the prime target for every senior Trump administration official in Washington.

In the last couple of days, he’s been called a “loser” and a “sleazebag” by President Trump, as well as a liar and “scum” by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, who appeared to have mistakenly added Goldberg to a group chat earlier this month.

Before he became a political lightning rod, however, Goldberg watched on his phone as cabinet officials – including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, CIA director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – discussed the sensitive details, timings and targets of an upcoming military operation in Yemen. They did not seem to notice his presence.

In an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, he told me it all began when he got a message on his phone, via the publicly available Signal messaging app, which allows users to send each other encrypted messages. It’s popular among journalists and government officials. An account under Waltz’s name had messaged him, which he assumed was a hoax.

“I wish there was a Le Carré quality here, you know,” he said, referring to the late British spy novelist. “But he asked me to talk. I said yes. And next thing I know, I’m in this very strange chat group with the national security leadership of the United States.”

As the fall-out of the episode has engulfed Washington, Waltz has taken responsibility for mistakenly adding Goldberg to the group chat, suggesting that he meant to invite somebody else.

He has insisted that he has never met the editor, saying: “I wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, if I saw him in a police lineup”.

By Goldberg’s account, the two have actually met several times, though he declined to go into detail about their relationship.

“He can say obviously whatever he wants, but I’m not commenting on my relationship or non-relationship,” Goldberg told me. “As a reporter, I’m just not comfortable talking publicly about relationships that I may or may not have with people who are news makers.”

• Read the messages Trump officials exchanged on leaked Signal thread
• Three sensitive messages from Yemen strike Signal chat unpacked and explained
• WATCH: Is the Signal chat leak involving Trump officials a big deal?

Still, one thing is clear: you must already have someone’s contact information to reach them on Signal, and so Waltz had Goldberg’s phone number. The top security adviser has said he has asked Elon Musk, tech billionaire and the White House’s government efficiency czar, to investigate how the mistake happened – a move that was ridiculed by Goldberg.

“Really, you’re going to put Elon Musk onto the question of how somebody’s phone number ends up in someone’s phone? I mean you know, most 8-year-olds could figure it out,” he said.

The bigger question? “Should you, as national security officials, be doing this on Signal on your phone?” Goldberg said.

In his Monday Atlantic story – the first to report his access to the chat – Goldberg withheld the precise details that were shared around the bombing mission that attacked Houthi rebel targets in Yemen on 14 March. But Trump administration officials downplayed the report, calling him a liar and challenging his claims that classified information was shared.

And so two days later, the magazine printed the full text messages, including several from Hegseth that included operational specifics. I asked him if that was a tough decision to make.

“Once Donald Trump said there was nothing to see here, essentially, and once Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe said there was no sensitive information, no classified information, et cetera – we felt like, hm, we disagree,” he said. “They’re saying that, and we’re the ones who have the texts, so maybe people should see them.”

There are text messages in the group chat – sent before the first wave of strikes – detailing exactly when F-18 fighter jets would take off, when the first bombs would drop on Houthi targets and when Tomahawk missiles were going be fired. Hegseth has pushed back, saying they were clearly not “war plans” and none of it was classified information.

President Trump expressed his support for Hegseth on Wednesday, saying he was “doing a great job” and describing Goldberg as a “sleazebag”. The White House has also attempted to argue that the information shared was not technically war planning.

Goldberg did not appear swayed by their insults and claims.

“If Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, is texting me, telling me the attack was about to be launched on Yemen – telling me what kind of aircraft are going to be used, what kind of weapons are going to be used, and when the bombs are going to fall two hours after the text is received – that seems sensitive information, war-planning information to me,” he said.

This isn’t the first time that the veteran editor has been on the receiving end of Trump’s ire: in 2020 he published a piece in The Atlantic where senior military officials quoted Trump as having referred to fallen American soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”, something the president and his administration have vigorously denied.

I asked him how he felt about the vitriolic personal attacks against him, coming from the very highest levels of the government.

“This is their move. You never defend, just attack,” Goldberg said. “So I’m sitting there, minding my own business. They invite me into this Signal chat and now they’re attacking me as a sleaze bag, I don’t even get it.”

Trump has, so far, been defending his national security team and doesn’t seem inclined to sack anyone over what he is calling a press “witch-hunt”. But Goldberg says there’s a widespread feeling in the White House that Waltz made a serious error, as well as deeper concern about how the incident is being handled.

“If you’re a Air Force captain, currently working with the CIA and the State Department, and you mishandled sensitive information the way that they’ve obviously mishandled sensitive information? You’d be fired, you’d be prosecuted,” Goldberg said.

He said there is now some “buzz” among the ranks around the apparently differing accountability standards for leaders in the Trump administration.

Goldberg didn’t stick around in the chat for the fallout. He decided the responsible thing to do was to leave the group. Some journalists have expressed incredulity that he would voluntarily exit.

But what happens next will play out in the White House and Congress, where Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans have demanded an investigation.

“There’s a part of me that would love to see what else is happening in there. But there’s a lot of different issues here related to law and ethics and all kinds of other issues that I really can’t go into, ” Goldberg said. “Believe me when I say that I made that decision with good advice from various parties.”

The White House reacted furiously on Wednesday after The Atlantic magazine published messages between national security officials in a Signal group chat in their entirety.

President Donald Trump called the reporting “all a witch hunt” and declared the publication a “failed magazine”.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist who was inadvertently included in the chat among senior cabinet leaders, shared texts in which US defence secretary Pete Hegseth provided sensitive information such as detailed timetables and unit information ahead of a US strike in Yemen.

Goldberg said he decided to publish the information after the Trump administration accused him of lying that classified information was shared.

Officials continued to maintain that position after the new messages were published.

But some senior officials began to acknowledge the episode was a mistake, including Trump himself.

When asked by reporters who was to blame for allowing a journalist to view the Signal communications, Trump suggested his national security adviser.

“Mike Waltz, I guess he claimed responsibly,” Trump said during an Oval Office press conference. “I was told it was Mike.”

He added that Waltz “took responsibility”.

Trump backed his Defence secretary, who posted a detailed run-down of the impending military operation to the group chat.

“Hegseth is doing a great job,” Trump said. “He had nothing to do with this.”

Trump also said that the Signal leak “doesn’t bother me”, but added the app “isn’t very good”.

He also referred to Mr Goldberg as a “total sleazebag”.

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Goldberg said the Trump administration had sought to place the blame on a reporter rather than “actually acknowledging that they have a massive national security breach, and that they should just go fix it”.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who participated in the group chat, acknowledged during a visit to Jamaica on Wednesday that, “Obviously, someone made a mistake….a big mistake, and added a journalist.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, also a chat participant, told the House Intelligence Committee that an “in-depth review” would be conducted by the National Security Council to determine how the reporter was added.

She also acknowledged it was a mistake, even as she insisted the no classified information was shared.

President Trump described the episode as “not a big deal”, while National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who set up the group, said on Tuesday night that he took “full responsibility” for it.

Democrats meanwhile called for Hegseth to resign, saying that the information he shared inadvertently with a journalist could have risked American servicemembers’ lives if they had been obtained by a US adversary.

Goldberg shocked Washington earlier this week when he published an initial article recounting how he had found himself added to the chat group on Signal, an encrypted messaging app.

At the time he said he was holding back some details of messages he had seen because they contained classified information about US intelligence agents and military strikes targeting Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

While the White House quickly acknowledged the exchanges were real, senior officials including Hegseth sought to discredit the magazine editor.

In his new article published on Wednesday, Goldberg said he had decided to publish the messages discussing Yemen attack plans so that Americans could “reach their own conclusions”.

“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in non-secure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” Goldberg and co-author Shane Harris wrote on Wednesday.

At the White House news briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt attacked Goldberg directly, accusing him of being an “anti-Trump hater” and “propagandists in the media” of pushing a “Signal hoax”.

“The real story here is the overwhelming success of decisive military action against Houthi terrorists,” Leavitt continued

The messages released in full by the Atlantic include details of the US military’s strike “package” for the Yemen strikes – a military term which refers to a set of aircraft or weapons systems that will participate in an operation.

• Three sensitive messages from full Signal chat explained
• Read messages Trump officials exchanged on leaked Signal thread

Other messages refer to damage assessments taken after the strike, as well as CIA operations in Yemen and anticipated Israeli strikes on the Houthis.

Hegseth continued to defend himself on Wednesday.

“They know it’s not war plans,” he told reporters in Hawaii. “There’s no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information.”

Hegseth added that his job is to “provide updates in real time”.

“That’s what I did,” he added.

But several military experts and veterans of the intelligence community said that the information was highly sensitive and should never have been shared in a commercial messaging app.

“War plans are generally the plan to conduct an entire conflict,” Mick Mulroy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence (DASD) for the Middle East and a retired CIA paramilitary officer, told the BBC. “Attack plans stem from that and go down to the individual unit level”.

“Both are classified and highly sensitive,” he added. “One could actually make the argument that attack plans are more sensitive because they are more detailed and specific on time, place and manner”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he hopes the US will “stand strong” in the face of Russian demands to lift sanctions as a condition for a ceasefire in the Black Sea.

Moscow said a maritime truce announced on Tuesday to allow safe passage for commercial vessels would only begin once Western restrictions on Russia’s food and fertiliser trade had been lifted.

Zelensky was speaking during a panel interview in Paris with journalists from across Europe.

Asked by the BBC if the US would resist Russian pressure, he said: “I hope so. God bless, they will. But we’ll see.”

The White House said on Tuesday that Russian and Ukrainian delegations had agreed to a ceasefire in the Black Sea after three days of separate talks with American officials in Saudi Arabia.

But hours later, the Kremlin released its own statement including a list of conditions.

Its demands include revoking Western sanctions on financial institutions involved in the agricultural trade and restoring their access to the Swift international payment system – a network that facilitates secure financial messaging.

Trump said the US government was “looking at” Moscow’s request for the restrictions to be lifted, but the EU said on Wednesday it would not consider removing sanctions before the “unconditional” withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine’s internationally-recognised territory.

Speaking to the panel in Paris, Zelensky said he was “very grateful” for bipartisan support from the US, but said he feared some were “under the influence of Russian narratives”.

“We can’t agree to those narratives,” he said.

When asked whether US President Donald Trump had a closer relationship with him or Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zelensky said he did not know.

“I don’t know – it’s difficult for me to say,” he said. “I don’t know what relationships he’s got, I don’t know how many conversations he’s had.”

The Ukrainian leader was also asked about comments from Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, who dismissed Europe’s efforts to create a “coalition of the willing” to support Ukraine in an interview last week.

In response, Zelensky said he would not be “hastily driving to conclusions”.

He said Witkoff, who has a background in property development, did not “have that experience”.

“As far as I know, he knows very well how to buy and sell real estate, but that’s somewhat different,” he said.

He also said that Europe had “strengthened itself significantly” during the course of the war.

The BBC also asked Zelensky how he would be remembered in the history books: the man who saved Ukraine, or the man who let it fall?

“I don’t know what history books will write about me,” he said. “It’s not my purpose or goal.”

He said his goal was instead to defend Ukraine and to see his children “walk along their streets without hiding”.

“I will do everything I can until end of my days to defend Ukraine as much as I can,” he added.

On whether Ukraine should be allowed to join Nato, Zelensky said his “battle-hardened” nation would make the alliance stronger, though he noted that the Trump administration had ruled out membership for Kyiv.

The interview took place shortly after Zelensky met French President Emmaunuel Macron in Paris, where the Eiffel Tower has been lit in the colours of the Ukrainian flag in his honour.

Ukraine’s president has returned to Europe to rally his allies and convince them to take the threat of Putin seriously.

They are now doing so – some might even say scrambling to do so – but have previously relied on the Americans to do the heavy lifting in terms of military capacity.

After everything Trump has said in the last two months, Europeans realise the Americans may not be there in the future, which has concentrated their minds.

President Zelensky’s challenge is to get them to deliver hard cash commitments rather than just sentiments.

His meeting with Macron has already proven fruitful, with the French president announcing a new €2bn ($2.2bn; £1.6bn) package of military aid for the war-torn nation.

Referring to the Kremlin’s request to lift sanctions, Macron said Moscow cannot “dictate the conditions” for peace, adding that it was too early to considering lifting European sanctions on Russia.

It comes ahead of a gathering of European leaders in Paris on Thursday to discuss the war in Ukraine.

The “coalition of the willing” – which does not include the US – is attempting to form an agreement on what support European and other nations could offer to maintain a future ceasefire, if one was to be agreed.

The head of Turkey’s main opposition party has told the BBC that protests will continue “in every city” until either early presidential elections are called, or the jailed mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, is released from prison.

Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the mayor’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), said the nationwide protests would include a very large demonstration this Saturday in Istanbul. That will open the party’s campaign to make Imamoglu the country’s next president in elections that are due in 2028, he said.

“In every city we go to, we will have the biggest rallies in their history,” Ozel declared.

“The belief in Ekrem Imamoglu and in democracy will make the protests bigger and stronger,” he told us at his party headquarters in Istanbul, as visitors, staff and advisors bustled in and out.

The opposition has brought huge crowds onto the streets – the biggest seen here in over a decade – since Imamoglu was arrested seven days ago.

Alongside the mass demonstrations, there have also been mass arrests – more than 1,400 people and counting, including seven Turkish journalists who were reporting on the protests.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has plenty of strong supporters, has condemned the demonstrations as “street terrorism” and accused protesters of attacking the police and damaging public property.

He said the opposition’s “show” would eventually fade.

Ozel spoke to the BBC fresh from a visit to Silivri Prison, a high-security campus on the outskirts of Istanbul where Imamoglu is being held.

“He is in solitary confinement, but he’s in good condition and has not been mistreated so far,” he told us.

Ozel said the corruption case against Istanbul’s mayor was “a scam designed to discredit him”.

As an example, he cited allegations that Imamoglu bought land cheaply years ago, and the low purchase price may have been a bribe. “The truth was that small payment was just the deposit for the land,” he said.

• Why are thousands of people protesting in Turkey?
• Protests are about far more than fate of Istanbul’s mayor
• Ekrem Imamoglu – Turkey’s presidential hopeful who is under arrest

Imamoglu denies all the charges against him, including “establishing a criminal organisation, taking bribes, extortion, and rigging a public tender”.

He says his arrest was a coup. Turkish officials say the courts here are independent. Human rights organisations strongly dispute that.

Ozel said Imamoglu was arrested for one simple reason – to prevent him becoming Turkey’s next president. Opinion polls suggest the mayor might be able to do that – if he’s not behind bars.

“Erdogan has thrown a three-time election winner in jail… in front of the whole world,” Ozel said.

“Suddenly he is jailing someone who is fighting against him in a normal political way. It’s like your rival coming and slicing the ball in a football game, because you are winning.”

The opposition party believes the response of Turkish society and the international community will be key in deciding if Imamoglu remains behind bars.

But Ozel said the CHP felt “abandoned” by the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his party.

“While all of Europe is reacting, the English Labour Party, and Starmer have said nothing. The cradle of democracy – England – and our brother party, the Labour party, how can they stay silent? We are really hurt.”

A few hours before that comment on Tuesday, Starmer’s spokesman said that there was “an ongoing domestic Turkish legal process” and the UK “expects Turkey to uphold the rule of law”.

If the mayor is not released, the CHP plans to keep fighting for the presidency.

“If they keep Ekrem Imamoglu locked up and hinder his candidacy,” Ozel said, “any member of CHP can be a candidate and would be elected with 65% to 70%”.

Victims have been conned out of millions of pounds in a whisky barrel investment scam, a BBC investigation has found.

Hundreds of people were duped into ploughing their life savings and pensions into casks that were overpriced or did not exist, while some individual casks were sold multiple times to different investors.

The victims include one woman with terminal cancer who invested £76,000 and another woman who spent more than £100,000 on casks which experts say were only ever worth a fraction of the price they paid.

The BBC can reveal that police are investigating three Scotch whisky companies over fraud allegations, with investments running into the millions.

The market’s popularity has grown rapidly in recent years because of the reports of huge returns being made from rare whiskies.

Investors buy a cask of whisky when it is first produced and then hope that it rises in value as the spirit ages in the barrel.

It takes three years for spirit to become Scotch whisky in a cask, and investors are encouraged to keep barrels for up to 10 years or more to maximise returns.

There are many legitimate traders – but a lack of regulation has enabled fraudsters to exploit the market. They use misleading claims and even outright fabrications to lure in unsuspecting investors.

There is no central authority regulating or tracking the ownership of casks, making it difficult to verify claims.

As a result, many investors find themselves entangled in complex legal disputes or left with assets worth far less than they were led to believe.

Alison Cocks, from Montrose, invested £103,000 in a company called Cask Whisky Ltd, run by a man calling himself Craig Arch.

She initially bought a single whisky cask for £3,000, and at first everything appeared legitimate.

Mrs Cocks was given certificates, and the company provided an online portal where she could track her investment. Her portfolio appeared to grow, on paper at least.

Comforted by the projected returns she was being promised, which started at 12% and were forecast to increase to as much as 50% over time, she was convinced to invest more.

She bought another three casks for a total of £100,000.

However, she said that the problems started when she told the company she wanted to sell.

“Suddenly they didn’t want to talk to me anymore. They were avoiding my calls. I was really panicking,” she said.

“I decided I would start investigating my own casks.

“On my certificates, it showed where my casks were, allegedly. When I actually contacted those warehouses, they weren’t there.”

Mrs Cocks was told by independent whisky valuers that she paid five times what her barrels were actually worth.

She has since been able to track down three of the four casks in warehouses, but none is in her name. One has also been bought by someone else.

The most expensive cask she bought – which cost her £49,500 – does not exist.

Alison Cocks is one of 200 people who invested with Cask Whisky Ltd and are trying to work out if they actually own their casks.

The BBC has discovered that Craig Arch – the company’s CEO – is actually Craig Brooks, a disqualified director and convicted fraudster.

In 2019, Brooks and his brother were jailed for a £6.2m fraud, where 350 victims were cold called and convinced to invest in carbon credits and “rare earth metals”.

The City of London Police Serious and Organised Crime team is now investigating Brooks’ whisky company.

But the BBC can also reveal that Brooks is running another cask whisky company, Cask Spirits Global Ltd, under another false name, Craig Hutchins.

As a disqualified director, it is illegal to run or control a company.

Yet, using the name Hutchins, Brooks told an undercover BBC reporter that he was in charge of “decision making” and that he dealt with finances.

When confronted, Brooks admitted his name wasn’t Hutchins, but maintained all of the whisky casks he sold existed. He said he never told the reporter he made the company decisions.

Another company, called Whisky Scotland, has also left a trail of dissatisfied investors.

They include NHS worker Jay Evans, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2021. She put her home in Brighton on the market so she could make investments to provide long-term security for her loved ones.

She invested almost £76,000 in Whisky Scotland after being promised lucrative returns from a company director.

Mrs Evans, 54, sold her home and moved to Peacehaven in East Sussex, then used the money from the sale to invest in seven casks.

The company’s director sent her voicemails from across the world, telling her she was his “favourite ever client” and that he would “always look after her”.

But two of the casks did not exist, and the other five had been sold at a much higher cost than their true worth.

Mrs Evans has been told it would take 25 years to recoup what she has paid.

The company and directors have now vanished. Its Glasgow office is just a rented space and a BBC reporter was told they were never there.

“They’ve made somebody who’s facing end of life at an early age, they’ve made it infinitely more difficult. None of it will matter to people like this,” she said.

Her wife Susie Walker said it was “heart-breaking” that the money Jay had worked for had gone overnight, and that she would now need to carry on working.

Self-employed locksmith Geoff Owens, from Wrexham, invested his life savings – more than £100,000 – with Whisky Scotland.

He and other investors are now trying to track down their casks and their investments.

Mr Owens says he will not stop until he finds out what has happened to his money.

“No-one is going to rip me off and walk away from this, without me facing you,” he said.

“I will get an army together who you’ve ripped off, and we will try and do something about it.”

The BBC asked the directors of Whisky Scotland for a comment. It did not respond.

Martin Armstrong runs Whisky Broker, a bonded warehouse in Creetown, near Dumfries, which stores 48,000 casks.

He says he’s being contacted “almost every day” by investors looking for casks sold by unscrupulous companies.

Asked if he thought that fraud could ever be so rife in the sector, he said: “No. But I knew it was possible.

“When there’s money involved, then everything follows.”

Kenny Macdonald – a legitimate whisky cask broker who runs his own company, Dram Mor – said there were other “good guys” operating in the industry.

He said there were “a huge amount of people” who were “profiteering” – but that in those cases, investors were at least getting a product.

“And then you get the ones who are downright nasty. And they’re selling somebody a piece of paper, for a cask that just never existed.

“The sharks are circling. They know there’s blood. They can smell it.

“And unfortunately, in this particular case, the blood is whisky.”

US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has released a social media video filmed inside a controversial mega-prison in El Salvador, thanking the country and its president for “bringing our terrorists here and incarcerating them”.

Secretary Noem was in the country to tour the facility, where US officials recently sent 238 Venezuelans.

In a cell behind her as she spoke were dozens of bare-chested and tattooed Salvadoran members from the MS13 and the 18th Street gang.

The trip suggests President Trump does not intend to back down from his immigration policy in the face of an injunction, upheld by an appeals court, on removing the Venezuelans from US soil under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

Secretary Noem described the prison as “one of the tools in our toolbox”. and warned people that “if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face”.

As part of her visit, she is due to meet Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, an ally of US President Donald Trump, who had the Terrorism Confinement Centre (Cecot) facility as part of his own crackdown on gang crime in El Salvador.

President Bukele made the offer to incarcerate deportees and prisoners from the US at the Cecot during a recent visit to the Central American nation by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The move has prompted an outcry in the US and Venezuela, with several family members of the deportees insisting their relatives do not belong to any gang.

As Secretary Noem was being shown around the notorious facility on Wednesday, the Trump Administration received another setback in its effort to send foreign nationals there.

An appeals court in Washington DC upheld a decision by a lower court to put a temporary injunction on the deportation of Venezuelan immigrants under the 1798 act, which allows for the expulsion of foreign citizens with little due process.

The use of the act has drawn an outcry from immigration lawyers and activists who argue that some men accused of being gang members have been sent to El Salvador and locked up in the mega-prison on the basis of little evidence, including simply having tattoos.

Human rights groups have warned that the jail, in which inmates are held in windowless cells and sleep on bare metal bunks, is a “concrete and steel pit”.

The White House continues to insist that all those they rounded up are dangerous gang members and were carefully vetted.

However, several of their family members in Venezuela say their loved ones had no prior convictions.

The deportation of 238 Venezuelans to the Cecot earlier this month has also put the Trump Administration into open conflict with a federal judge, James Boasberg, over the use of the centuries-old law to justify their quick deportation.

Judge Boasberg has since imposed an injunction on further deportations under the law, which was last invoked during World War Two.

The fate of the Venezuelans has also come under severe criticism by a Washington Court of Appeals judge who said that even “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act”.

The comparison prompted a furious reaction from senior officials in the Trump Administration.

Meanwhile, lawyers in El Salvador, apparently acting in coordination with the Venezuelan government, have lodged a petition with the Salvadorean Supreme Court to try to secure the immediate release of the men.

The deportations to El Salvador under Trump’s second term are part of the president’s long-running campaign against illegal immigration in the US.

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

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

While irregular border crossings have plummeted to the lowest number in decades since Trump took office, the Republican president has reportedly been frustrated by the relatively slow pace of deportations so far.

For the past 48 hours, top White House officials have faced questions from lawmakers and the press about how a journalist came to join a sensitive group chat for an upcoming military operation – and why President Donald Trump’s national security team was sharing sensitive information in an unsecure manner.

The Atlantic first reported details of the group chat on the platform Signal after its editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added to it. He followed the thread as top Trump administration officials discussed upcoming military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen.

A National Security Council spokesman later confirmed that the portions of the chat that Mr Goldberg initially shared “appears to be authentic”.

The Atlantic then on Wednesday published the entire text thread that showed the detailed and potentially classified rundown for a March strike on Yemen after Mr Goldberg and the publication faced pushback from the Trump administration.

While the thread appears to have contained sensitive information, there is still much that remains unknown. Here are six lingering questions regarding so-called “Signal-gate”.

• Read the messages Trump officials exchanged on leaked Signal thread
• Three sensitive messages from Yemen strike Signal chat unpacked and explained
• WATCH: Is the Signal chat leak involving Trump officials a big deal?

The Trump administration maintains the information shared in the chat was not classified.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers during a congressional hearing that the Signal chat was “candid and sensitive” but “no classified information was shared”.

But under questioning, she and CIA Director John Ratcliffe appeared uncertain about the classification of the attack plan. They later emphasised that Hegseth had the power to classify and declassify the type of details that were shared.

Hegseth has denied sharing classified material, but experts are sceptical that this type of sensitive information would not carry that kind of designation.

“The idea this wasn’t classified information at the time is inconceivable,” Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel of the National Security Agency, told the BBC. “I don’t know if they declassified it afterwards but any imminent military action involving American troops would have been classified at the time.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that “no war plans” were discussed on the chat. Instead, she characterised the information shared as “sensitive policy discussions”.

Jamil Jaffer, executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University, said that Hegseth did not send “an operational plan for World War Three, or for the Pacific region”.

“But at the same time,” Mr Jaffer said, “these are operational details that could, if released publicly, put American lives at risk or jeopardise the success of the operation.”

In his original article, Mr Goldberg reports that on 11 March he initially “received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz”, Trump’s national security adviser.

Two days later, he writes that he received a notice that he was to be included in a Signal group titled the “Houthi PC small group.”

Mr Goldberg reports that the group received a message from Waltz, which also noted one of his deputies was “pulling together” a team of top staffers relevant to the discussion.

On Tuesday, Trump suggested that a “lower level” staffer for Waltz added Mr Goldberg to the chat.

However, Waltz himself told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham: “I take full responsibility. I built the – I built the group.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was also in the group, said on Wednesday that someone had made a “mistake” in adding Mr Goldberg.

It remains to be seen whether Congress will launch oversight investigations, which it has the power to pursue.

Trump is a Republican, and both chambers of Congress – the House of Representatives and the Senate – are controlled by his party.

That means committees who have oversight of the executive branch, military, and intelligence community are run by Republicans.

Republican lawmakers have emphatically supported the Trump administration’s agenda to this point, so it seems improbable that they would support investigations into the Signal chat.

Democrats in the House are reportedly trying to force a vote on a “Resolution of Inquiry” that would require the Trump administration to hand over records related to the incident, according to Reuters, but they do not have a majority.

While some Republicans have raised concerns over the leak, few have appeared eager to cross the president.

Democratic lawmakers are calling for resignations, but at the moment, none of the officials involved in the Signal chat have stepped down.

Hegseth and Waltz have faced the most calls to resign, and some cabinet officials have said that their process will go under review.

“I think there’ll be reforms and changes made,” Rubio told reporters on Wednesday.

Still, it is unclear if the president will ask any members of his team to step down. So far, the White House has launched a full-court defence of the Signal chat and the officials who participated.

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that Waltz “took responsibility”, but has previously maintained that he has not lost confidence in his national security adviser.

Hegseth also appears safe from Trump’s ire for now.

“Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this,” the president said.

The use of Signal to discuss the Houthi strikes posed broader questions about how Trump’s top staffers are sharing and discussing sensitive information.

Gabbard testified on Wednesday that Signal came “pre-installed on government devices”.

She cited guidance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which mentioned Signal as an example of a messaging service with end-to-end encryption.

Ratcliffe earlier testified to Congress that Signal had been installed on his devices when he took over the CIA.

But it remains uncertain if security officials had provided guidance about using Signal for discussing military operations like the strikes against the Houthis.

“Whether these circumstances were approved or not is still not clear,” Mr Jaffer said.

CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, has reported, however, that the US National Security Agency had warned employees against using Signal due to “a vulnerability” that they had identified.

“The use of Signal by common targets of surveillance and espionage activity has made the application a high value target to intercept sensitive information,” warned the NSA bulletin that was shared a month before the Houthi Strike chat.

The group chat appears to suggest that the officials’ discussion was one that had continued from the White House Situation Room, one of the most secure venues in the US government.

This is unusual. Oftentimes further discussion or the inclusion of team members who cannot attend in person is done via secure rooms called sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIFs.

Top-ranking national security officials have these SCIFs installed in their offices and homes to ensure the protection of sensitive information and discussions.

That can add a layer of complexity to planning and coordination, however, which may have led to lax security system standards.

“Whatever they have might not be effective enough,” Mr Jaffer said. “Or there’s so many restrictions on it, that it forces senior officials into workarounds that themselves might create vulnerabilities.”

South Korean governments committed numerous human rights violations over decades in a controversial programme that sent at least 170,000 children and babies abroad for adoption, a landmark inquiry has found.

It said the government’s lack of oversight enabled the “mass exportation of children” by private agencies that were driven by profit, and found examples of fraud, falsified records and coercion.

Since the 1950s, South Korea has sent more children abroad for adoption than any other country, with most sent to Western countries.

South Korea has sinced moved to tighten its adoption processes, but some adoptees and their biological parents say they are still haunted by what they went through. The BBC spoke to one woman who claimed her adoptive parents “took better care of the dog than they ever did of me”.

“This is a shameful part of our history,” said Park Sun-young, the chairperson of the commission, at a press briefing.

“While many adoptees were fortunate to grow up in loving families, others suffered great hardship and trauma due to flawed adoption processes. Even today, many continue to face challenges.”

The report was released on Wednesday by the independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission following an investigation that began in 2022.

Since then, 367 adoptees – all of which were sent overseas between 1964 and 1999 – had filed petitions alleging fradulent practices in their adoption process.

Some 100 petitions have been analysed so far, of whom 56 adoptees were recognised as victims of human rights violations. The commission is still investigating other cases, with the inquiry set to end in May.

In the aftermath of the Korean war, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world and few families were keen on adopting children.

South Korea’s government then began a transnational adoption programme handled by private agencies, which were given significant powers through special adoption laws.

But there was a “systemic failure in oversight and management”, which led to numerous lapses committed by these agencies, according to the report.

The report noted that foreign agencies had demanded a set number of children every month and Korean agencies complied, “facilitating large-scale intercountry adoptions with minimal procedural oversight”.

With no government regulation on fees, the Korean agencies charged large amounts and demanded “donations”, which turned adoptions into “a profit-driven industry”, according to the report.

Other lapses include adoptions conducted without proper consent from birth mothers and inadequate screening of adoptive parents.

The agencies also fabricated reports that made children appear as if they were abandoned and put up for adoption; and intentionally gave children wrong identities.

Because many adoptees had false identities listed in their paperwork, they now struggle to obtain information about their birth families and are left with inadequate legal protection, the report noted.

The commission has recommended the government deliver an official apology, and to comply with international standards on transnational adoptions.

South Korea has moved to tighten its adoption processes in recent years. In 2023, it passed a law ensuring that all overseas adoptions would be handled by a government ministry instead of private agencies, which is due to come into effect by July.

The South Korean government has yet to respond to Wednesday’s report.

Inger-Tone Ueland Shin, 60, was one of the petitioners whose cases were investigated by the commission. She was adopted by a Norwegian couple when she was 13 – and discovered later on that her adoption was illegal.

The couple, who were in their 50s at the time, had initially applied to adopt but were rejected by Norwegian authorities as they were too old.

They then travelled to South Korea and visited an orphanage, where they selected Inger-Tone and took her with them to Norway.

The couple only submitted an adoption application to Norwegian authorities years later. The authorities approved it, despite acknowledging the illegality of Inger-Tone’s situation, because they determined that by then she had “no connection to Korea anymore”.

Inger-Tone told the BBC she had great difficulty adjusting to life in Norway, and also alleged her adoptive father sexually abused her.

“They took better care of the dog than they ever did of me,” she said. “It was so painful. I wasn’t able to talk or express myself, other than crying at night”.

In 2022, she successfully sued her local government in Norway and was awarded damages. She also received her local government’s acknowledgment that it was liable for “failing to supervise” her adoptive home.

Her adoptive parents have since died.

“They have never spent time in prison for what they’ve done to me. They criminally picked up a child outside of the country… nobody has taken responsibility for what they did to me,” she said.

While she is satisfied with the results of the commission’s investigation, she said: “I have been living in the wrong country and I have had a painful and miserable life.”

“I don’t wish this for anyone and I sincerely hope they do not adopt any more children out of Korea.”

This is the gravest crisis for Western security since the end of World War Two, and a lasting one. As one expert puts it, “Trumpism will outlast his presidency”. But which nations are equipped to step to the fore as the US stands back?

At 09.00 one morning in February 1947, the UK ambassador in Washington, Lord Inverchapel, walked into the State Department to hand the US Secretary of State, George Marshall, two diplomatic messages printed on blue paper to emphasise their importance: one on Greece, the other on Turkey.

Exhausted, broke and heavily in debt to the United States, Britain told the US that it could no longer continue its support for the Greek government forces that were fighting an armed Communist insurgency. Britain had already announced plans to pull out of Palestine and India and to wind down its presence in Egypt.

The United States saw immediately that there was now a real danger that Greece would fall to the Communists and, by extension, to Soviet control. And if Greece went, the United States feared that Turkey could be next, giving Moscow control of the Eastern Mediterranean including, potentially, the Suez Canal, a vital global trade route.

Almost overnight, the United States stepped into the vacuum left by the departing British.

“It must be a policy of the United States,” President Harry Truman announced, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.”

It was the start of what became known as the Truman Doctrine. At its heart was the idea that helping to defend democracy abroad was vital to the United States’ national interests.

There followed two major US initiatives: the Marshall Plan, a massive package of assistance to rebuild the shattered economies of Europe, and the creation of Nato in 1949, which was designed to defend democracies from a Soviet Union that had now extended its control over the eastern part of Europe.

It is easy to see this as the moment that leadership of the western world passed from Britain to the United States. More accurately it is the moment that revealed that it already had.

The United States, traditionally isolationist and safely sheltered by two vast oceans, had emerged from World War Two as the leader of the free world. As America projected its power around the globe, it spent the post-war decades remaking much of the world in its own image.

The baby boomer generation grew up in a world that looked, sounded and behaved more like the United States than ever before. And it became the western world’s cultural, economic and military hegemon.

Yet the fundamental assumptions on which the United States has based its geostrategic ambitions now look set to change.

Donald Trump is the first US President since World War Two to challenge the role that his country set for itself many decades ago. And he is doing this in such a way that, to many, the old world order appears to be over – and the new world order has yet to take shape.

The question is, which nations will step forward? And, with the security of Europe under greater strain than at any time almost in living memory, can its leaders, who are currently scrabbling around, find an adequate response?

President Trump’s critique of the post-1945 international order dates back decades. Nearly 40 years ago he took out full-page advertisements in three US newspapers to criticise the United States’ commitment to the defence of the world’s democracies.

“For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” he wrote in 1987. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?

“The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

It’s a position he has repeated since his second inauguration.

And the fury felt by some in his administration for what they perceive as European reliance on the United States was apparently shown in the leaked messages about air strikes on Houthis in Yemen that emerged this week.

In the messages, an account named Vice-President JD Vance wrote that European countries might benefit from the strikes. It said: “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

Another account, identified as Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

Trump’s own position appears to go beyond criticising those he says are taking advantage of the United State’s generosity. At the start of his second presidency, he seemed to embrace Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling Russia that Ukraine would not be granted Nato membership and that it should not expect to get back the territory it has lost to Russia.

Many saw this as giving away two major bargaining chips before talks had even started. He apparently asked Russia for nothing in return.

On the flipside, certain Trump supporters see in Putin a strong leader who embodies many of the conservative values they themselves share.

To some, Putin is an ally in a “war on woke”.

The United States’ foreign policy is now driven, in part at least, by the imperatives of its culture wars. The security of Europe has become entangled in the battle between two polarised and mutually antagonistic visions of what the United States stands for.

Some think the division is about more than Trump’s particular views and that Europe can not just sit tight waiting for his term in office to end.

“The US is becoming divorced from European values,” argues Ed Arnold, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. “That’s difficult [for Europeans] to swallow because it means that it’s structural, cultural and potentially long-term. “

“I think the current trajectory of the US will outlast Trump, as a person. I think Trumpism will outlast his presidency.”

The Trump White House has said it will no longer be the primary guarantor of European security, and that European nations should be responsible for their own defence and pay for it.

“If [Nato countries] don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them. No, I’m not going to defend them,” the president said earlier this month.

For almost 80 years, the cornerstone of European security has been embedded in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack on one member state of the alliance is an attack on all.

In Downing Street last month, just before his visit to the White House, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told me during an interview that he was satisfied that the United States remained the leading member of Nato and that Trump personally remained committed to Article 5.

Others are less sure.

Ben Wallace, who was defence secretary in the last Conservative government, told me earlier this month: “I think Article 5 is on life support.

“If Europe, including the United Kingdom, doesn’t step up to the plate, invest a lot on defence and take it seriously, it’s potentially the end of the Nato that we know and it’ll be the end of Article 5.

“Right now, I wouldn’t bet my house that Article 5 would be able to be triggered in the event of a Russian attack… I certainly wouldn’t take for granted that the United States would ride to the rescue.”

According to polling by the French company Institut Elabe, nearly three quarters of French people now think that the United States is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavourable views of the United States as well.

“The damage Trump has done to Nato is probably irreparable,” argues Robert Kagan, a conservative commentator, author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC who has been a long time critic of Trump.

“The alliance relied on an American guarantee that is no longer reliable, to say the least”.

And yet Trump is by no means the first US president to tell Europe to get its defence spending in order. In 2016 Barack Obama urged Nato allies to increase theirs, saying: “Europe has sometimes been complacent about its own defence.”

All of this is great news for Putin. “The entire system of Euro-Atlantic security is crumbling before our eyes,” he said last year. “Europe is being marginalised in global economic development, plunged into the chaos of challenges such as migration, and losing international agency and cultural identity.”

In early March, three days after Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous meeting with Trump and Vance in the White House, a Kremlin spokesman declared “the fragmentation of the West has begun”.

“Look at Russia’s objectives in Europe,” says Armida van Rij, head of the Europe programme at Chatham House. “Its objectives are to destabilise Europe. It is to weaken Nato, and get the Americans to withdraw their troops from here.

“And at the moment you could go ‘tick, tick and almost tick’. Because it is destabilising Europe. It is weakening Nato. It hasn’t gone as far as to get the US to withdraw troops from Europe, but in a few months time, who knows where we’ll be?”

One of the great challenges Europe, in particular, faces from here is the question of how to arm itself adequately. Eighty years of reliance on the might of the United States has left many European democracies exposed.

Britain, for example, has cut military spending by nearly 70% since the height of the Cold War. (At the end of the Cold War, in the early 1990s, Europe allowed itself a peace dividend and began a decades-long process of reducing defence spending.)

“We had a big budget [during the Cold War] and we took a peace dividend,” says Wallace. “Now, you could argue that that was warranted.

“The problem is we went from a peace dividend to corporate raiding. [Defence] just became the go-to department to take money from. And that is where we just forgot the lessons of our history.”

The prime minister told parliament last month that Britain would increase defence spending from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5% by 2027. But is that enough?

“It isn’t enough just to stand still,” argues Wallace. “It wouldn’t be enough to fix the things we need to make ourselves more deployable, and to plug the gaps if the Americans left.”

Then there is the wider question of military recruitment. “The West is in freefall in its military recruiting, it’s not just Britain,” argues Wallace.

“At the moment, young people aren’t joining the military. And that’s a problem.”

But Germany’s new Chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, has said Europe must make itself independent of the United States. And “Europeanising” NATO will require the build up of an indigenous European military-industrial complex capable of delivering capabilities that currently only the United States has.

Others share the view that Europe must become more self reliant militarily – but some are concerned that not all of Europe is on board with this.

“Where we are at the moment is that the East Europeans by and large, don’t need to get the memo,” says Ian Bond, deputy director, Centre for European Reform. “The further west you go, the more problematic it becomes until you get to Spain and Italy.”

Mr Arnold agrees: “The view in Europe now is this isn’t really a debate anymore, it’s a debate of how we do it and maybe how quickly we do it, but we need to do this now.”

There is a short list of “very important things” that only the United States currently provides, according to historian Timothy Garton Ash.

“These are the so-called strategic enablers,” he says. “The satellites, the intelligence, the Patriot air defence batteries, which are the only ones that can take down Russian ballistic missiles. And within three to five years we [countries other than the US] should aim to have our own version of these.

“And in this process of transition, from the American-led Nato [the idea is] you will have a Nato that is so Europeanised that its forces, together with national forces and EU capacities, are capable of defending Europe – even if an American president says ‘leave us out of this’.”

The question is how to achieve this.

Ms van Rij stresses that, in her view, Europe does need to build a Europe-owned European defence industrial base – but she foresees difficulties.

“What’s really difficult are the divisions within Europe on how to actually do this and whether to actually do this.”

The European Commission and experts have been trying to figure out how this defence may work for several decades. “It has traditionally been very difficult because of vested national interests… So this is not going to be easy.”

In the meantime, Trump appears ready to turn the page on the post-Cold War rules-based international order of sovereign states that are free to choose their own destinies and alliances.

What he seems to share with Vladimir Putin is a desire for a world in which the major powers, unconstrained by internationally agreed laws, are free to impose their will on smaller, weaker nations, as Russia has traditionally done in both its Tsarist and Soviet Empires. That would mean a return to the “spheres of interest” system that prevailed for 40 years after the Second World War.

We don’t know exactly what Donald Trump would do were a Nato country to be attacked. But the point is that the guarantee of US help can no longer be taken for granted. That means Europe has to react. Its challenge appears to be to stay united, finally make good on funding its own defence, and avoid being drawn into the “sphere of influence” of any of the big powers.

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

India’s Supreme Court has put on hold a recent high court court which said that “grabbing [the] breasts” of a girl and breaking off the drawstrings of her lower garment could not be considered an attempt to rape.

The Allahabad high court had ruled last week that the offence could only be described as “aggravated sexual assault”, which involves a lesser punishment.

The top court judges said some of the comments in the high court order depicted “a total lack of sensitivity” on the part of the judge who wrote it.

The high court ruling led to outrage in India.

On Wednesday, the two-judge Supreme Court bench of Justice BR Gavai and Justice Augustine described the 17 March order as “shocking”, especially since it was not delivered “on the spur of the moment” but had been well thought through after being reserved for four months.

The top court has now sent notices to India’s federal authorities and state government in Uttar Pradesh, where the court in Allahabad (now called Prayagraj) is located.

According to the prosecution, the case involves an 11-year-old girl whose mother has alleged that the two accused offered a lift to her daughter on their motorbike, promising to drop her home.

She sent the child with the men who were from the same village and known to them.

“The accused persons stopped their motorcycle on the way to the village and started grabbing her breasts,” the high court order said, adding that one of the men dragged her beneath a culvert and “broke her pyjama [lower garment] string”.

She was rescued by some villagers who were passing by and were alerted by her cries for help, forcing her attackers to flee.

The accused have denied the allegations against them.

The high court ruling was based on the argument that “attempt to rape” was different from “preparation”, legal website Live Law reported, quoting from the high court order.

“The prosecution must establish that it had gone beyond the stage of preparation. The difference between preparation and actual attempt to commit an offence consists chiefly in the greater degree of determination,” the order said.

The controversial ruling led to outrage in the country with many describing the judgement as “atrocious”.

Senior lawyer Indira Jaising told a TV channel that what happened with the child “goes beyond preparation” and in legal terms “it is attempt to commit rape”.

“How do you prove intent? It is proved by actions that precede the actual act of rape,” she said, adding that the fact that the girl was dragged to a secluded place meant it had gone beyond preparation.

India’s Women and Child Welfare Minister Annapurna Devi told news agency Press Trust of India that “the high court ruling has no place in a civilised society and that it will have an adverse impact on society”.

Fukushima. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Places that will forever be remembered as the sites of nuclear disasters.

Most people will have heard of them. But fewer are aware of the Windscale fire.

It was one of the world’s first – and remains the UK’s worst – nuclear accident.

A nuclear reactor at the site in Cumbria caught fire and burned for three days, releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere.

Many details of the event were kept quiet for decades, and it is far less famous than some of the more recent examples.

But a new video game has brought the disaster, and the area where it happened, back into the spotlight.

Atomfall is the latest release from Oxford-based Rebellion, best known for its long-running Sniper Elite series.

CEO Jason Kingsley tells BBC Newsbeat he was walking in the Lake District when the idea of using the real-life Windscale story “as a trigger point for a fictionalised version of the disaster” began to take shape.

Atomfall is set in the rolling green landscapes of the beauty spot, but on an alternative sci-fi inspired timeline where the area surrounding the plant has become a quarantine zone.

“It went pretty wrong in real life, but it was controlled,” says Jason.

“It was a proper disaster, but it didn’t cause strange glowing plants or mutants or dangerous cults to emerge.”

Although the Windscale fire was “very serious”, Jason says it’s not something that is especially well-remembered, even among locals.

It is estimated about 240 cases of thyroid cancer were caused by the radioactive leak and all milk produced within 310 square miles (800 square km) of the site was destroyed for a month after the fire.

Windscale was eventually renamed Sellafield and produced nuclear power until 2003. It still employs about 10,000 people in the local area.

When Newsbeat visits Cumbria, most young people we speak to say they haven’t heard of the disaster.

And indie game developers Hannah Roberts and Harry Hawson say that they became more aware of it once the game was announced.

For two people like them, who hope to break into the games industry, they’re excited to see a game set in the place where they live.

Hannah, 26, says it’s evident Atomfall’s makers have done their research.

“The actual environments are spot on, they’ve got fantastic Morris dancing stuff going on – it really tickled me when I saw that,” she says.

Hannah says other small details – like black and white Cumbrian signposts – were also pleasing to see.

Atomfall’s setting and its inspiration have made it an anticipated title since it was first revealed last year, and Harry, 23, says that’s been encouraging for him.

“Seeing that such a small space like Cumbria can be taken by the games industry and built upon and people are receptive to that, it’s exciting for the future and I look forward to seeing what’s next for me,” he says.

It’s fairly unusual for high-profile games set in the UK to be set outside London.

While indie games – such as the Shropshire-set Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and last year’s Barnsley-based laughfest Thank Goodness You’re Here! – have ventured further north, bigger games haven’t tended to stray beyond the M25.

Jason says the US is about 40% of the video games market, so it’s important to appeal to players there, and there’s a “natural tendency” to follow the norms.

Being an independent company, he feels, allows Rebellion to do things differently, and Britain offers lots of inspiration for new settings – if you’re prepared to look for them.

“The UK, I think, to understand certain aspects of our culture, you’ve got to dig into it a little bit because we tend to understate things quite a lot.”

Head designer Ben Fisher says the goal was to create a “slightly theme parkish” version of the Lake District with accurate details.

“There are things that, as locals, it’s easy for us to forget are unique to Britain, that are unusual,” he says.

The team that worked on the game has members from various countries, Ben says, which helped to highlight things the UK natives might have missed.

“The lead artist on the project is from Seattle and was mystified by dry stone walls,” says Ben.

He adds the team spent time recreating the structures – which are constructed without the use of mortar – to “capture those local details”.

Featuring a local area in a film or TV show can expose a new audience to that place.

“Ultimately, what’s incredibly rewarding about this industry is you can put your ideas down and they can be played by people across the globe,” Jason says.

“And you know, how wonderful is it to sort of talk about the Lake District to people that live in Africa or Southeast Asia or Canada or wherever it might be.

“That’s a kind of form of soft power that very few types of media have.”

Oliver Hodgson, 21, can see Sellafield from his bedroom window.

He hopes that the local area will benefit from some of the soft power Jason describes.

“I think it’s just an incredibly powerful thing for young people in west Cumbria,” he says.

“I think it’s really positive to see such a big gaming developer set a story in Cumbria, which is normally just known for its lakes and mountains,” he says.

Oliver who runs his own PR firm, is working with the creators of a project to create a £4m gaming hub in Whitehaven aimed at boosting digital skills in the area.

Oliver says he’s glad the game has taken its inspiration from Windscale and is drawing attention to the area, as well as switching locals on to their history.

“I think we should own it,” he says.

“The story of the Windscale disaster obviously isn’t a positive one but we can’t rewrite history.

“So acknowledging what happened and teaching and letting young people learn about that history, if this is what brings it into the classroom or on to young people’s phones or their social media, then so be it.”

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

What will it take for India’s private companies to begin investing in building new factories and firms?

It’s a question that’s confounded policymakers for years. As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), private investment in India has been on the decline since the global financial crisis of 2007, even while the overall economy clocked world-beating growth rates.

After a long hiatus, the investment rate picked up slightly in 2022 and 2023, but latest data from a leading ratings agency shows private sector expenditure as part of the overall investments in India’s economy dipped again to a decadal low of 33% this financial year.

Analysis from Icra of 4,500 listed companies and 8,000 unlisted companies reveals that while the pace of investments made by listed players moderated, those by unlisted entities actually contracted.

Over the years, several economists have raised similar concerns about a slowdown in private investments.

Banking tycoon Uday Kotak is among many who’ve raised concerns recently about India’s fading “animal spirits”, urging young business owners who had inherited companies to build new businesses rather than sitting tight and managing their existing wealth.

Data from investment advisory firm Value Research shows Indian non-financial businesses were sitting on cash worth 11% of their total assets, corroborating the view that companies are not spending money in making fresh investments.

So why are Indian corporate houses choosing to do that?

Weak domestic consumption in urban areas, muted export demand and an influx of cheap Chinese imports in some sectors were among the factors that “restricted the capacity expansion plans of Indian corporate houses”, Icra’s Chief Rating Officer K Ravichandran said in a note.

But beyond the more immediate reasons, private investment impulse has been low because of “global uncertainties and overcapacity”, India’s economic survey pointed out earlier this year.

Slowing private investments have a direct bearing on India’s growth prospects.

Investments by companies in assets such as factories, machinery or construction – also called gross fixed capital formation – make up around 30% of GDP and are its second largest contributor following private consumption.

India’s full-year GDP is expected to close at 6.5%, sharply lower compared to last year’s 9.2%. Growth has flagged on account of slower consumption.

With all the key levers of growth, including exports, slowing down and US President Donald Trump’s tariffs exacerbating global uncertainties, kick-starting private investment will be fundamental for India to hit its long-term growth targets, experts say.

According to the World Bank’s latest estimates, India will need to grow by 7.8% on average over the next 22 years to achieve its high-income status ambition by 2047.

Key to this would be to increase private and public investment to at least 40% of GDP from 33% currently, the bank estimates.

The government on its part has significantly increased spending, especially on infrastructure. It also cut corporate tax rates from 30% to 22% and doled out billions of dollars in production-linked subsidies to manufacturers over the years. Availability of bank credit isn’t a constraint any longer, and regulation has eased with regulatory restrictions halving between 2003 and 2020.

But none of this has prodded corporate India to boost spending.

According to Sajjid Chinoy, JP Morgan India’s Chief Economist, the big problem is the lack of demand in the economy to justify putting up additional capacities.

India’s post-pandemic recovery has been uneven, with the consumer class not expanding quickly enough. Demand for goods and services has thus been hit, with spending capacity further curtailed by a fall in wages, even though corporate profitability has soared to a 15-year high this year.

“Just because companies are financially strong doesn’t mean they will automatically invest. Companies will only invest if they expect good returns,” Chinoy said at an event in Mumbai earlier this year.

Rathin Roy, a former member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC), points to other deeper structural issues arresting investment appetite.

“Entrepreneurs have been lacking the energy to produce goods that might generate new demand. A classic example of this is construction – where there’s unsold inventory in the urban areas, but an incapacity among builders to go into tier two and tier three towns and tap newer markets,” Roy told the BBC.

He said he also agreed with Mr Kotak’s views on the growing trend of business heirs turning wealth managers rather than building businesses ground up.

“Business houses discovered during Covid-19 that they don’t need to do business to make money. They can just invest and multiply it without building anything new,” said Roy. And these investments aren’t just happening in the domestic stock market. “A lot of money is just flowing out of India and chasing returns elsewhere,” he added.

But things could be turning a corner, according to Icra.

Interest rate cuts as well as a $12bn income tax relief provided to individuals in the federal budget “augurs well for supporting domestic consumption demand”, according to the report.

India’s central bank also says more private companies have shown an intention to invest this year compared to last year, although how much of that intent results into actual money deployed remains to be seen.

The uncertainties related to global trade tariffs could delay any anticipated investment pick-up, according to Icra.

Yoh! I’m so gatvol of this tjoekie and need a zol to handle these moggy people.

No, these are not grammatical errors – this is a sentence comprising South African words included in the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) latest update.

It means: Wow, I’m so annoyed by this prison and need to smoke some marijuana to handle these irrational people.

These popular words are among a slew of “untranslatable words”, defined by the OED as “words and phrases in one language that cannot be translated into another”, featured in the latest lexicon.

Other “loan words” included in the update come from the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Ireland.

The list of South African words come from several of the country’s 12 official languages and they are:

• Yoh: A popular South African interjection, which the OED traced to 1855. It comes from two South African languages: Afrikaans and isiXhosa and is defined as “a cry or exclamation used to express various emotions or reactions, such as surprise, wonder, admiration, shock, or distress”.

• Gatvol: Another popular slang term originating from Afrikaans and used to express “feelings of frustration and anger”. The OED traced this word to 1980 and says the adjective describes “a person who has had enough” or is “extremely annoyed, unhappy or bored” with the persistent state of affairs.

• The hell-in: A colloquial phrase which comes from an Afrikaans saying that literally translates to “in the hell”.

• Tjoekie: Another colloquial term, traced back to 1977, which refers to jail or prison. The word was first introduced into South Africa by English-speaking immigrants from India, according to the OED, “but it made its way into South African English via Afrikaans”. It is related to another slang term for jail – the English term chokey.

• Seshweshwe or shweshwe: This comes from Southern SeSotho and refers to a “type of printed cotton fabric, originally dyed with indigo but now available in various colours”, according to the OED. Seshweshwe patterns are used in traditional southern African clothes or accessories, it added.

• Makarapa: This word can be traced to 1999, and referred to a hard hat worn by construction workers or miners. According to the OED, “it is now more known for its use by sports fans, especially football fans, who paint and elaborately decorate these hats with flags, horns, and badges and wear them at games to show support for their favourite teams”.

• Zol: This term, of unknown origin, is popular in South African slang and refers to marijuana, the drug itself, or “hand-rolled cigarette containing marijuana”, according to the OED.

• Moggy: This adjective, whose origin is also uncertain, can be traced to 1984. According to the OED, it refers to someone “who is extremely irrational or out of touch with reality”.

• Sharp-sharp: The last, and arguably most well-known, phrase featured in the OED’s latest quarterly update can be traced back to 1991. The term is a “casual way to say hello or goodbye in South African English” but can also be used to “compliment someone’s style or just to comment on how generally excellent or fantastic they are”.

A list of all words added from across the world can be found on the OED website.

It was Sunday, 19 January 2020.

All attempts to negotiate a new role for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex within the royal family had failed, and Harry and Meghan were about to head off to a new life in the United States.

Prince Harry made one final speech about how he was feeling.

He delivered it at a dinner for his beloved Sentebale charity.

This was a safe space for him. Amongst charity workers, donors and friends, he spoke of the love and happiness he had found with Meghan, of honouring his mother’s legacy, and described his “sadness” at leaving the UK.

“Together, you have given me an education about living, and this role has taught me more about what is right and just than I could ever have imagined,” he told dinner guests.

“We are taking a leap of faith, so thank you for giving me the courage to take this next step.”

Sentebale had been part of Prince Harry’s world for his entire adult life. It had ridden the storm of family fallout and leaving royal life behind.

He first visited Lesotho, the landlocked mountain kingdom in southern Africa, when he was 19, in 2004. He’d just left Eton and was on a gap year before his military training at Sandhurst.

It was a formative time for Harry.

What he saw during his gap year prompted him to set up the charity two years later.

It would support children who had lost parents to HIV and Aids.

And then there is the Diana factor. Sentebale means “forget-me-not” in Sesotho, the language of Lesotho.

Back at that Sentebale dinner in 2020, he told guests: “When I lost my mum… you took me under your wing. You looked out for me for so long.”

The connection to Diana, Princess of Wales, is an important personal part of the Sentebale story.

His joint founder, Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, had also lost his mother. They were both motivated by a sense of loss. Remembering their mothers drove much of what they did over the past two decades.

Prince Seeiso became a personal friend of Harry. Seeiso was a guest at his wedding in Windsor in 2018. He’d also been at the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey seven years earlier.

This makes their joint decision to walk away from Sentebale all the more powerful.

Prince Harry’s move to the US has impacted his ability to be hands-on with some of his charity work. But his team in California say he remains a strong supporter of them all and plays an active part in what they do.

He last visited Lesotho in 2024 and, with Prince Seeiso, saw the latest work the charity was doing. His commitment to the charity would “never falter”, he said.

But, for now, Prince Harry has walked away in what has clearly been a catastrophic breakdown in the trustees’ relationship with the chair of the board.

There has been a personal fallout, a wrangle over the charity’s future direction, and broken relationships with damaging accusations being made.

Prince Harry has been here before.

Popular Indian comedian Kunal Kamra has refused to apologise after jokes he made during a stand-up show angered supporters of a top politician in Maharashtra state.

Clips of the jokes – some of them were directed at the state’s Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde – had gone viral.

Members of the Shiv Sena party, which is led by Shinde, vandalised the hotel in Mumbai – the capital of Maharashtra – where the show was held.

A police case was also registered against Kamra and politicians from the state’s ruling coalition have asked him to apologise.

In a statement released on Monday night, Kamra said he would “co-operate with the police and courts for any lawful action” taken against him.

“But will the law be fairly and equally deployed against those who have decided that vandalism is the appropriate response to being offended by a joke?” he added.

Police arrested 12 people for the vandalism at the hotel, which housed a comedy club where the show was filmed. They were later released on bail.

As the controversy raged, Shinde said he did not support the vandalism, but added that “the other person should also maintain a certain standard”.

“There is freedom of expression. We understand satire. But there should be a limit,” he told BBC Marathi.

Kamra is a well-known name in the Indian comedy scene, with his political satire and stand-up shows getting millions of views on social media.

In his latest show – called Naya Bharat (New India) – Kamra refers to Shinde’s 2022 defection from the Shiv Sena party which triggered a major political crisis in the state.

The move led to a split in the Shiv Sena – India’s Election Commission later recognised Shinde’s group as the “real” Shiv Sena. The party is now part of the governing coalition in Maharashtra along with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Nationalist Congress Party.

In the show, Kamra sang a parody of a Bollywood song where he indirectly referred to Shinde as a traitor, outraging his supporters.

It’s not clear when the show was filmed at the hotel but the reactions this week were swift.

After Shiv Sena workers ransacked the venue, the studio Habitat – which often hosted stand-up comedy shows – said it was shutting down until it figured out “the best way to provide a platform for free expression without putting ourselves and our property in jeopardy”.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, Mumbai’s civic authorities, also demolished some structures at the hotel, citing alleged building violations.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who is from the BJP, criticised Kamra, asking him to apologise. “None of us are against freedom of speech. We support satire or even political satire and we do not paint it differently,” he said.

Both he and Shinde accused Kamra of speaking on behalf of the opposition.

A lawmaker from Shinde’s party also said in a video that Shiv Sena workers would pursue Kamra across the country and he would be forced to leave India.

In his statement, Kamra said he would not “hide under [his] bed”, waiting for the outrage to die down.

“As far as I know, it is not against the law to poke fun at our leaders and the circus that is our political system,” he said.

Opposition leaders have supported Kamra.

Uddhav Thackeray, chief of Shinde’s former party – the Shiv Sena (UBT) – said Kamra had not done anything wrong.

“He stated the facts and voiced the public opinion,” he added.

Indian comedians have often faced legal action over comments and jokes. In 2021, Munawar Faruqui spent days in jail after being accused of hurting Hindu religious sentiments in jokes that – it turned out – he didn’t actually crack.

Actor and comedian Vir Das also faced outrage and police complaints after a show in the US where he described India as a country of two sides where people “worship women during the day but gang rape them at night”.

The University of Sussex has been fined £585,000 by the higher education regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), for failing to uphold freedom of speech.

The OfS investigation started with the case of Prof Kathleen Stock, who left the university in 2021 after being accused of transphobia for her views on sex and gender issues.

The OfS said the university’s policy statement on trans and non-binary equality, including a requirement to “positively represent trans people”, could lead to staff and students preventing themselves from voicing opposing views.

The University of Sussex plans to legally challenge the OfS findings, vice-chancellor Prof Sasha Roseneil said.

Describing the judgement as an “unreasonably absolutist definition of free speech”, the university said the ruling would leave institutions “powerless to prevent abusive, bullying and harassing speech”.

The OfS, it added, had pursued a “vindictive and unreasonable campaign” against it.

Universities UK, which represents 141 institutions, said it would be writing to the OfS to clarify what would represent a breach of freedom of speech rules.

Chief executive Vivienne Stern said the University of Sussex ruling raised concerns about how universities can balance freedom of speech with other legal duties, like preventing harassment and hate speech.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said free speech and academic freedom were “non-negotiables” in universities.

“I have been clear that where those principles are not upheld, robust action will be taken,” she said.

“If you go to university, you must be prepared to have your views challenged, hear contrary opinions and be exposed to uncomfortable truths.

“We are giving the OfS stronger powers on freedom of speech so students and academics are not muzzled by the chilling effect demonstrated in this case.”

The OfS was given the power to issue fines where freedom of speech was not upheld at a university in January.

Arif Ahmed, the OfS director for freedom of speech and academic freedom, said the decision to fine the university had followed a thorough investigation.

It found, he said, that the policy had meant staff feared disciplinary action and that Prof Stock had changed the way she taught her course as a result.

Dr Ahmed added that the OfS was “concerned that a chilling effect may have caused many more students and academics at the university to self-censor”.

The regulator said the Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement issued by the University of Sussex was looked at in the context of existing legal duties on freedom of speech, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights.

In its report, the OfS found four elements of the policy to be “concerning”.

These included a requirement for course materials to “positively represent trans people and trans lives” and an assertion that “transphobic propaganda… [would] not be tolerated”.

Another part of the policy highlighted by the regulator said “transphobic abuse” would be a serious disciplinary offence for staff and students.

It also looked at the management and governance of the university around freedom of speech.

Prof Stock faced protests on the university campus after she published a book questioning whether gender identity was more “socially significant” than biological sex.

Posters were put up on the campus calling for her to be sacked, and students turned up with placards at an open day.

Prof Stock rejected accusations that she was transphobic and described the experience to the BBC as a “surreal anxiety dream”.

She resigned from her university post in 2021 and was awarded an OBE for services to education.

The fine is the largest issued to a university and is likely to be seen as an intention to hold the line over the expression of legal views.

In a strongly worded statement, the University of Sussex said the regulator had been determined to make an example of its case and “entrench an extreme libertarian free speech position”.

It added there had been no “substantive engagement” other than via written correspondence, and it accused the regulator of pursuing a “vindictive and unreasonable campaign”.

The policy at the heart of the investigation had been adapted from a template, according to the university, and had since been changed.

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US President Donald Trump has announced new import taxes of 25% on cars and car parts coming into the US in a move that threatens to widen the global trade war.

Trump said the latest tariffs would come into effect on 2 April, with charges on businesses importing vehicles starting the next day. Charges on parts are set to start in May or later.

The president claimed the measure would lead to “tremendous growth” for the car industry, promising it would spur jobs and investment in the US.

But analysts have said the move is likely to lead to the temporary shutdown of significant car production in the US, increase prices, and strain relations with allies.

The US imported roughly eight million cars last year, accounting for about $240bn (£186bn) in trade and roughly half of overall sales.

Mexico is the top foreign supplier of cars to the US, followed by South Korea, Japan, Canada and Germany. Trump’s latest move threatens to upend global car trade and supply chains.

Many US car companies have operations in Mexico and Canada as well, set up under the terms of the longstanding free trade agreement between the three countries.

The White House said the order would apply not only to finished cars but also to car parts, which are often shipped in from other countries before getting assembled in the US.

However, the new tariffs on parts from Canada and Mexico are exempt while US customs and border patrol set up a system to assess the duties, the White House said. The neighbouring countries see goods worth billions cross borders each day.

On Wednesday, shares in General Motors slid roughly 3%. The sell-off spread to other companies, including Ford, after the president’s remarks as he confirmed the tariffs.

Asked at a press conference if there was any chance he would reverse course, Trump said no, adding later: “This is permanent.”

“If you build your car in the United States there is no tariff,” he said.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said his government would put “all options on the table” in response to the tariffs.

Japan, which is home to several major motor industry giants, is the world’s second largest exporter of cars.

Shares in Japanese carmakers – including Toyota, Nissan, Honda – fell in early trade in Tokyo.

A tariff is a tax on imports collected by a government and it is paid by the company importing the good.

Trump has embraced the tool, looking to apply it to a host of goods being imported into the US as part of a wider drive to protect American businesses and boost manufacturing.

But while the measures can protect domestic businesses, they also raise costs for businesses reliant on parts from abroad, as is the case for car-makers.

Analysts have estimated that the cost of a car could rise thousands of dollars, with 25% tariffs on parts from Mexico and Canada alone adding $4,000-$10,000 in cost depending on the vehicle, according to the Anderson Economic Group.

The fresh car import taxes on cars are set to come into force on the same day as so-called reciprocal tariffs kick in for individual countries based on their trading relationship with the US.

It is not clear how the car tariffs might affect those plans.

But many countries, including the UK, are concerned about their exporters being hit as a result of the new taxes.

The US was the top sales market for British-based Jaguar Land Rover last year, with the carmaker selling 116,294 vehicles to Americans, exceeding sales to customers in the UK and China.

The UK government is in talks with the US administration and remains hopeful of a trade deal before tariffs come into force, the BBC understands.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called Trump’s announcement a “direct attack” on his country and its car industry.

“This will hurt us, but through this period by being together we will emerge stronger,” he said.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc would consider the measures before any potential response.

“As I have said before, tariffs are taxes – bad for businesses, worse for consumers equally in the US and the European Union,” she said.

“The EU will continue to seek negotiated solutions, while safeguarding its economic interests.”

For the UK, the US is the second largest car export market after the EU, with mainly luxury cars shipped across the Atlantic, according to the industry body, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

Mike Hawes, the chief executive of the SMMT, urged the UK and US governments to “come together immediately and strike a deal that works for all”.

The car industry was already grappling with expanded tariffs on steel and aluminium that Trump put in place earlier this month.

In recent weeks, major car companies such as Ford and General Motors had urged the president to exempt the industry from any further duties.

A 2024 study by the US International Trade Commission predicted that a 25% tariff on imports would reduce imports by almost 75%, while increasing average prices in the US by about 5%.

But Trump has proceeded with the move, which is a revival of an action he first considered during his first term in the White House.

White House officials said it wanted to see US workers make more parts, not simply assemble them, and have maintained their action is pushing firms to relocate.

A day before the latest tariffs, South Korean carmaking giant Hyundai announced it would invest $21bn (£16.3bn) in the US and build a new steel plant in the southern state of Louisiana.

Trump hailed the investment as a “clear demonstration that tariffs very strongly work”.

United Autoworkers union leader Shawn Fain, who had opposed Trump in the election, praised the president’s actions, saying he was “stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working class communities for decades”.

Elsewhere, the head of trade group the American Automotive Policy Council, Matt Blunt, said: “US Automakers are committed to President Trump’s vision of increasing automotive production and jobs in the US.”

When Jeffrey Goldberg published a bombshell story outlining how some of the most senior US officials had mistakenly shared sensitive information with him, he obtained the biggest scoop of the year. The Atlantic editor also became the prime target for every senior Trump administration official in Washington.

In the last couple of days, he’s been called a “loser” and a “sleazebag” by President Trump, as well as a liar and “scum” by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, who appeared to have mistakenly added Goldberg to a group chat earlier this month.

Before he became a political lightning rod, however, Goldberg watched on his phone as cabinet officials – including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, CIA director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – discussed the sensitive details, timings and targets of an upcoming military operation in Yemen. They did not seem to notice his presence.

In an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, he told me it all began when he got a message on his phone, via the publicly available Signal messaging app, which allows users to send each other encrypted messages. It’s popular among journalists and government officials. An account under Waltz’s name had messaged him, which he assumed was a hoax.

“I wish there was a Le Carré quality here, you know,” he said, referring to the late British spy novelist. “But he asked me to talk. I said yes. And next thing I know, I’m in this very strange chat group with the national security leadership of the United States.”

As the fall-out of the episode has engulfed Washington, Waltz has taken responsibility for mistakenly adding Goldberg to the group chat, suggesting that he meant to invite somebody else.

He has insisted that he has never met the editor, saying: “I wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, if I saw him in a police lineup”.

By Goldberg’s account, the two have actually met several times, though he declined to go into detail about their relationship.

“He can say obviously whatever he wants, but I’m not commenting on my relationship or non-relationship,” Goldberg told me. “As a reporter, I’m just not comfortable talking publicly about relationships that I may or may not have with people who are news makers.”

• Read the messages Trump officials exchanged on leaked Signal thread
• Three sensitive messages from Yemen strike Signal chat unpacked and explained
• WATCH: Is the Signal chat leak involving Trump officials a big deal?

Still, one thing is clear: you must already have someone’s contact information to reach them on Signal, and so Waltz had Goldberg’s phone number. The top security adviser has said he has asked Elon Musk, tech billionaire and the White House’s government efficiency czar, to investigate how the mistake happened – a move that was ridiculed by Goldberg.

“Really, you’re going to put Elon Musk onto the question of how somebody’s phone number ends up in someone’s phone? I mean you know, most 8-year-olds could figure it out,” he said.

The bigger question? “Should you, as national security officials, be doing this on Signal on your phone?” Goldberg said.

In his Monday Atlantic story – the first to report his access to the chat – Goldberg withheld the precise details that were shared around the bombing mission that attacked Houthi rebel targets in Yemen on 14 March. But Trump administration officials downplayed the report, calling him a liar and challenging his claims that classified information was shared.

And so two days later, the magazine printed the full text messages, including several from Hegseth that included operational specifics. I asked him if that was a tough decision to make.

“Once Donald Trump said there was nothing to see here, essentially, and once Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe said there was no sensitive information, no classified information, et cetera – we felt like, hm, we disagree,” he said. “They’re saying that, and we’re the ones who have the texts, so maybe people should see them.”

There are text messages in the group chat – sent before the first wave of strikes – detailing exactly when F-18 fighter jets would take off, when the first bombs would drop on Houthi targets and when Tomahawk missiles were going be fired. Hegseth has pushed back, saying they were clearly not “war plans” and none of it was classified information.

President Trump expressed his support for Hegseth on Wednesday, saying he was “doing a great job” and describing Goldberg as a “sleazebag”. The White House has also attempted to argue that the information shared was not technically war planning.

Goldberg did not appear swayed by their insults and claims.

“If Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, is texting me, telling me the attack was about to be launched on Yemen – telling me what kind of aircraft are going to be used, what kind of weapons are going to be used, and when the bombs are going to fall two hours after the text is received – that seems sensitive information, war-planning information to me,” he said.

This isn’t the first time that the veteran editor has been on the receiving end of Trump’s ire: in 2020 he published a piece in The Atlantic where senior military officials quoted Trump as having referred to fallen American soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”, something the president and his administration have vigorously denied.

I asked him how he felt about the vitriolic personal attacks against him, coming from the very highest levels of the government.

“This is their move. You never defend, just attack,” Goldberg said. “So I’m sitting there, minding my own business. They invite me into this Signal chat and now they’re attacking me as a sleaze bag, I don’t even get it.”

Trump has, so far, been defending his national security team and doesn’t seem inclined to sack anyone over what he is calling a press “witch-hunt”. But Goldberg says there’s a widespread feeling in the White House that Waltz made a serious error, as well as deeper concern about how the incident is being handled.

“If you’re a Air Force captain, currently working with the CIA and the State Department, and you mishandled sensitive information the way that they’ve obviously mishandled sensitive information? You’d be fired, you’d be prosecuted,” Goldberg said.

He said there is now some “buzz” among the ranks around the apparently differing accountability standards for leaders in the Trump administration.

Goldberg didn’t stick around in the chat for the fallout. He decided the responsible thing to do was to leave the group. Some journalists have expressed incredulity that he would voluntarily exit.

But what happens next will play out in the White House and Congress, where Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans have demanded an investigation.

“There’s a part of me that would love to see what else is happening in there. But there’s a lot of different issues here related to law and ethics and all kinds of other issues that I really can’t go into, ” Goldberg said. “Believe me when I say that I made that decision with good advice from various parties.”

US President Donald Trump says he may cut tariffs on China to help seal a deal for short video app TikTok to be sold by its owner ByteDance.

Trump also said he is willing to extend a 5 April deadline for a non-Chinese buyer of the platform to be found.

In January, he delayed the implementation of a law passed under the Biden administration to ban TikTok.

The legislation, which was signed into law in 2024, cited national security grounds for the sell or be banned order.

“With respect to TikTok, and China is going to have to play a role in that, possibly in the form of an approval, maybe, and I think they’ll do that,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

“Maybe I’ll give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done,” he added.

Trump also said he expected at least the outline of a deal to be reached by the 5 April deadline.

He made the comments after announcing new import taxes of 25% on all cars and car parts coming into the US in a move that threatens to widen the global trade war.

The BBC has contacted TikTok and the Chinese embassy in Washington for comment.

The biggest sticking point to finalising a deal to sell the TikTok business, which is worth tens of billions of dollars, has always been securing Beijing’s agreement.

Trump has previously tried to use tariffs as leverage in the negotiations.

On his first day back in the White House, on 20 January, the president threatened more import duties on China if it did not approve a TikTok deal.

The hugely popular app is used by around 170 million Americans.

Trump, who called for TikTok to be banned in his first term as president, now has an account on the platform.

He has more than 15 million followers and has said he received billions of views on the app during his presidential election campaign.

Separately, the US increased levies on all imports from China to 20% this month.

That doubled the tariffs Trump imposed on the world’s second largest economy on 4 February.

On 10 February, China responded with its own tariffs, including a 10-15% tax on some US agricultural goods.

Beijing has also targeted various US aviation, defence and tech firms by adding them to an “unreliable entity list” and imposing export controls.

The 10% levy doubled to 20% on 4 March.

China has urged the US to return to dialogue with Beijing as soon as possible.

On a hot, humid Thursday night in Saitama, China’s national football team hit its lowest ebb.

With a minute left on the clock and trailing Japan 6-0, Chinese defenders were likely wishing for the sweet relief of the final whistle.

But Japan’s Takefusa Kubo was not feeling charitable. After watching his team-mates toy with their opponents for a while, he received a pass on the edge of the Chinese box and rammed home Japan’s seventh goal.

The ball rocketed into the roof of the net, and the man known as “Japanese Messi” condemned China to their worst-ever defeat in a World Cup qualifier.

The 7-0 spanking in September – described as “rock-bottom” by a Shanghai-based newspaper – followed a year-long line of humiliating defeats which included losses to Oman, Uzbekistan and Hong Kong.

But worse was to come.

A week later dozens of players, coaches and administrators were arrested for gambling, match-fixing and bribery as part of a two-year probe into corruption in the domestic game.

And the defeats have continued. On Tuesday, Australia beat China 2-0 in Hangzhou – cementing them at the bottom of their World Cup qualifying group.

It wasn’t long ago that China had dreamed of becoming a footballing superpower.

The world’s largest population, a thriving economy and a determined Communist Party led by an avid football fan, President Xi Jinping. What could go wrong?

Apparently, quite a lot.

When Xi came to power in 2012, his love for the sport spurred a drive to reform and improve Chinese football. His dream, he once said, was for China to qualify for the World Cup, host it and, ultimately, win it. These were his “three wishes”.

But a decade later, even Xi seemed to have lost the faith. While making small talk with Thailand’s prime minister on the sidelines of an international summit in 2023, the Chinese president was heard saying that China had “got lucky” in a recent victory against Thailand.

“When China’s government puts its mind to something, it very rarely fails,” says Mark Dreyer, a Beijing-based sports writer. “Look at electric vehicles, look at the Olympics. Practically any sector you can think of, China is right up there.”

But football, it seems, could not thrive in the grip of the Communist Party.

A key government report in 2015 noted that The Chinese Football Association (CFA) must have “legal autonomy,” and should be “independent” of the General Administration of Sport (GAS).

Even Xi admitted that if China wanted to succeed, then the Party would have to do what it seldom does: let go.

And yet, Beijing didn’t let go.

“China’s failure in football has become a national embarrassment and figuring out the reasons has become a national obsession,” Rowan Simons, author of Bamboo Goalposts: One Man’s Quest to Teach the People’s Republic of China to Love Football, told the BBC.

“But to me, the reasons are pretty clear and they tell you a lot about how the country is run.”

The problem, he and others argue, is that China’s one-party state imposes decisions from the top. While this is effective for economic growth, it yields poor results in competitive team sports.

Although Fifa prohibits state interference, Chinese football is rife with political appointments. This is common in China, where the Party controls most aspects of public life.

The current president of the CFA, Song Cai, is also a Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party. His work, in turn, is overseen by a senior government official at the GAS.

“Everything has to report upwards to Communist Party bosses. It basically means that non-football people are making football decisions,” Mr Dreyer says. “Football has to be grassroots-led. You start at the bottom of the pyramid and the talent starts to funnel up to the top.”

All major footballing nations have a “pyramid” of leagues. The elite professional clubs sit at the top, supported by a deep pool of semi-professional and amateur teams, all of whose players are vying to work their way up.

Such a pyramid thrives on a culture of playing football, en masse, for fun. The larger the pool to draw from, the better the players at the top will be.

“If you look at every country where football is really successful, the sport has grown organically as a grassroots activity over the past 100 years,” Mr Simons says. “Professional football in China has continually failed because it’s supported by nothing – their pyramid is upside down.”

The statistics bear this out: England’s 1.3 million registered players dwarf China’s fewer-than-100,000 footballers. This is inspite of China’s population being 20 times larger than England’s.

“Kids here don’t grow up with a ball at their feet. Without that, you’re not going to produce elite talent,” Mr Dreyer says.

Top-level football in Europe and South America traces its origins to streets and parks in every town and village. In China, however, the push began in Beijing.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the government set up the country’s first professional league. It created a handful of top clubs in major cities – but neglected the grassroots.

Keen to impress their bosses, officials in this top-down system inevitably opt for a “short-termist” approach that sacrifices genuine improvement over time for quick fixes, Mr Dreyer explains.

Some foreigners who have played in China say such a heavily controlled system also leaves little room forl young players to develop a natural understanding of the game.

A European currently playing in China, who did not wish to reveal his name, told the BBC that while many Chinese players are “technically good”, they lack “football IQ” at crucial moments on the pitch.

“Creativity and basic decision-making, which we learn instinctively as a kid, you don’t see so much here,” the player says.

This does not mean that there is not a deep love for football in China.

While the men’s team, currently ranked 90th in the world, is seen as a constant disappointment, the women’s team, ranked 17th, has been a source of pride for years.

Many in China have referred to them as the “real” guozu or national team – and in 2023, a record 53 million people tuned in to watch them play – and lose 6-1 – to England at the World Cup.

The men’s Super League boasts the highest average attendance of any league in Asia. At its peak in the 2010s, it was attracting big-name foreign players as it rode a wave of investment from state-owned enterprises, buoyed by a thriving economy.

But it was short-lived.

Since the pandemic and the subsequent economic slowdown in China, more than 40 professional clubs have folded as state-backed companies started to pull their investments. Private companies, too, have proved fickle in their commitment.

In 2015, the Suning Appliance Group, which also used to own the top Italian club Inter Milan, bought Jiangsu FC. The club went on to win the Super League in 2020. But months later, Suning said they were closing the club to focus on their retail business.

The demise of Guangzhou Evergrande, China’s most successful team ever, is yet another example.

Bankrolled by property giant Evergrande Group, they won trophy after trophy under the management of Italian greats such as Marcello Lippi and Fabio Cannavaro. But as they found glory at home and in Asia, their parent company was overstretching itself in an inflated property market.

Evergrande is now the world’s most indebted property company and the poster-child for China’s real estate crisis, with arrears of more than $300bn (£225bn).

Its former club – now in the hands of new owners – was expelled from the league in January. After years of splurging, the eight-time champions are still struggling to pay off their debt.

But that is not the only crisis engulfing Chinese football. Its rapid rise created another problem: corruption.

“I should have followed the right path. I was just doing what was customary at the time,” says Li Tie, the former manager of China’s national men’s team, in a 2024 documentary.

In that documentary, Li makes a shocking admission: for years he fixed matches and paid bribes to get certain jobs, including 3m yuan (£331,000, $418,500) to become the national team coach in 2019.

Dressed in all-black, he marks a written confession with an inky fingerprint: “I’m very sorry.”

China’s national team was made to watch the documentary by state broadcaster CCTV while preparing for last year’s Asian Cup in Qatar.

The primetime expose, co-produced by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), was the first episode of a four-part series on corruption in China called Continued Efforts, Deepening Progress.

In it, dozens of Chinese officials confess – always to camera – to staggering levels of corruption across a variety of industries.

By airing the football episode first, the authorities signalled their serious concern about graft within the sport.

Li, who appeared in a World Cup and once played for Premier League side Everton, is the most high-profile figure to have been apprehended last year in an unprecedented slew of anti-corruption arrests in Chinese football.

In December, he was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Also publicly shamed in the documentary are former CFA chairman Chen Xuyuan and ex-deputy director of the GAS, Du Zhaocai.

“The corruption of these officials has broken our hearts,” one fan told CCTV. “I’m not surprised,” said another.

The documentary echoed what one ex-national team player told a BBC radio documentary in 2015 in an anonymous interview: that there was a system of “open bidding” among players for their spot in the squad.

“I could have won many more caps, but I didn’t have the cash,” he said.

It would take another 10 years before corruption in football exploded into the spotlight. Some suggest this was prompted by China’s intolerably bad performances on the pitch.

The struggles of China’s men’s football team are all the more stark given how other sports are flourishing in the country.

Decades of investment in infrastructure and training have taken China from a sporting backwater to a medal-winning machine that recently equalled the United States with 40 golds at the Paris Olympics.

But many of these are individual sports – weightlifting, swimming, diving – which require fewer resources and, crucially, less emphasis on community-led grassroots efforts, compared to a game like football.

They are also less lucrative and, therefore, less vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement.

As China’s economy reels from a sustained downturn, its officials have bigger challenges than football woes.

But that is little consolation to fans.

The loss to Japan particularly stung. While Japan have gone from strength to strength over the past two decades, China have failed to qualify for a single World Cup.

The day after the loss, the Oriental Sports Daily did not mince its words: “When the taste of bitterness reaches its extreme, all that is left is numbness.”

According to Mr Dreyer, Japan’s approach is antithetical to China’s: a long-term vision, a lack of political interference and a commercially savvy club structure.

“Even so, the fan culture here [in China] is still remarkably good,” he adds. “They deserve so much more.”

Their disappointment showed following Tuesday’s defeat against Australia – but so did their humour.

“It seems like the national team’s performance is as consistent as ever,” wrote one fan on social media. Another joked that if China wants to continue thriving economically, then its football team must suffer so there is a balance in “national fortune”.

Perhaps they had resigned themselves to what a popular Chinese journalist had written in his blog after Japan beat China.

Football “cannot be boosted by singing odes or telling stories”, he noted. “It needs skill, and physical and tactical training. It cannot be accomplished through politics.”

The White House reacted furiously on Wednesday after The Atlantic magazine published messages between national security officials in a Signal group chat in their entirety.

President Donald Trump called the reporting “all a witch hunt” and declared the publication a “failed magazine”.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist who was inadvertently included in the chat among senior cabinet leaders, shared texts in which US defence secretary Pete Hegseth provided sensitive information such as detailed timetables and unit information ahead of a US strike in Yemen.

Goldberg said he decided to publish the information after the Trump administration accused him of lying that classified information was shared.

Officials continued to maintain that position after the new messages were published.

But some senior officials began to acknowledge the episode was a mistake, including Trump himself.

When asked by reporters who was to blame for allowing a journalist to view the Signal communications, Trump suggested his national security adviser.

“Mike Waltz, I guess he claimed responsibly,” Trump said during an Oval Office press conference. “I was told it was Mike.”

He added that Waltz “took responsibility”.

Trump backed his Defence secretary, who posted a detailed run-down of the impending military operation to the group chat.

“Hegseth is doing a great job,” Trump said. “He had nothing to do with this.”

Trump also said that the Signal leak “doesn’t bother me”, but added the app “isn’t very good”.

He also referred to Mr Goldberg as a “total sleazebag”.

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Goldberg said the Trump administration had sought to place the blame on a reporter rather than “actually acknowledging that they have a massive national security breach, and that they should just go fix it”.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who participated in the group chat, acknowledged during a visit to Jamaica on Wednesday that, “Obviously, someone made a mistake….a big mistake, and added a journalist.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, also a chat participant, told the House Intelligence Committee that an “in-depth review” would be conducted by the National Security Council to determine how the reporter was added.

She also acknowledged it was a mistake, even as she insisted the no classified information was shared.

President Trump described the episode as “not a big deal”, while National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who set up the group, said on Tuesday night that he took “full responsibility” for it.

Democrats meanwhile called for Hegseth to resign, saying that the information he shared inadvertently with a journalist could have risked American servicemembers’ lives if they had been obtained by a US adversary.

Goldberg shocked Washington earlier this week when he published an initial article recounting how he had found himself added to the chat group on Signal, an encrypted messaging app.

At the time he said he was holding back some details of messages he had seen because they contained classified information about US intelligence agents and military strikes targeting Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

While the White House quickly acknowledged the exchanges were real, senior officials including Hegseth sought to discredit the magazine editor.

In his new article published on Wednesday, Goldberg said he had decided to publish the messages discussing Yemen attack plans so that Americans could “reach their own conclusions”.

“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in non-secure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” Goldberg and co-author Shane Harris wrote on Wednesday.

At the White House news briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt attacked Goldberg directly, accusing him of being an “anti-Trump hater” and “propagandists in the media” of pushing a “Signal hoax”.

“The real story here is the overwhelming success of decisive military action against Houthi terrorists,” Leavitt continued

The messages released in full by the Atlantic include details of the US military’s strike “package” for the Yemen strikes – a military term which refers to a set of aircraft or weapons systems that will participate in an operation.

• Three sensitive messages from full Signal chat explained
• Read messages Trump officials exchanged on leaked Signal thread

Other messages refer to damage assessments taken after the strike, as well as CIA operations in Yemen and anticipated Israeli strikes on the Houthis.

Hegseth continued to defend himself on Wednesday.

“They know it’s not war plans,” he told reporters in Hawaii. “There’s no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information.”

Hegseth added that his job is to “provide updates in real time”.

“That’s what I did,” he added.

But several military experts and veterans of the intelligence community said that the information was highly sensitive and should never have been shared in a commercial messaging app.

“War plans are generally the plan to conduct an entire conflict,” Mick Mulroy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence (DASD) for the Middle East and a retired CIA paramilitary officer, told the BBC. “Attack plans stem from that and go down to the individual unit level”.

“Both are classified and highly sensitive,” he added. “One could actually make the argument that attack plans are more sensitive because they are more detailed and specific on time, place and manner”.

Victims have been conned out of millions of pounds in a whisky barrel investment scam, a BBC investigation has found.

Hundreds of people were duped into ploughing their life savings and pensions into casks that were overpriced or did not exist, while some individual casks were sold multiple times to different investors.

The victims include one woman with terminal cancer who invested £76,000 and another woman who spent more than £100,000 on casks which experts say were only ever worth a fraction of the price they paid.

The BBC can reveal that police are investigating three Scotch whisky companies over fraud allegations, with investments running into the millions.

The market’s popularity has grown rapidly in recent years because of the reports of huge returns being made from rare whiskies.

Investors buy a cask of whisky when it is first produced and then hope that it rises in value as the spirit ages in the barrel.

It takes three years for spirit to become Scotch whisky in a cask, and investors are encouraged to keep barrels for up to 10 years or more to maximise returns.

There are many legitimate traders – but a lack of regulation has enabled fraudsters to exploit the market. They use misleading claims and even outright fabrications to lure in unsuspecting investors.

There is no central authority regulating or tracking the ownership of casks, making it difficult to verify claims.

As a result, many investors find themselves entangled in complex legal disputes or left with assets worth far less than they were led to believe.

Alison Cocks, from Montrose, invested £103,000 in a company called Cask Whisky Ltd, run by a man calling himself Craig Arch.

She initially bought a single whisky cask for £3,000, and at first everything appeared legitimate.

Mrs Cocks was given certificates, and the company provided an online portal where she could track her investment. Her portfolio appeared to grow, on paper at least.

Comforted by the projected returns she was being promised, which started at 12% and were forecast to increase to as much as 50% over time, she was convinced to invest more.

She bought another three casks for a total of £100,000.

However, she said that the problems started when she told the company she wanted to sell.

“Suddenly they didn’t want to talk to me anymore. They were avoiding my calls. I was really panicking,” she said.

“I decided I would start investigating my own casks.

“On my certificates, it showed where my casks were, allegedly. When I actually contacted those warehouses, they weren’t there.”

Mrs Cocks was told by independent whisky valuers that she paid five times what her barrels were actually worth.

She has since been able to track down three of the four casks in warehouses, but none is in her name. One has also been bought by someone else.

The most expensive cask she bought – which cost her £49,500 – does not exist.

Alison Cocks is one of 200 people who invested with Cask Whisky Ltd and are trying to work out if they actually own their casks.

The BBC has discovered that Craig Arch – the company’s CEO – is actually Craig Brooks, a disqualified director and convicted fraudster.

In 2019, Brooks and his brother were jailed for a £6.2m fraud, where 350 victims were cold called and convinced to invest in carbon credits and “rare earth metals”.

The City of London Police Serious and Organised Crime team is now investigating Brooks’ whisky company.

But the BBC can also reveal that Brooks is running another cask whisky company, Cask Spirits Global Ltd, under another false name, Craig Hutchins.

As a disqualified director, it is illegal to run or control a company.

Yet, using the name Hutchins, Brooks told an undercover BBC reporter that he was in charge of “decision making” and that he dealt with finances.

When confronted, Brooks admitted his name wasn’t Hutchins, but maintained all of the whisky casks he sold existed. He said he never told the reporter he made the company decisions.

Another company, called Whisky Scotland, has also left a trail of dissatisfied investors.

They include NHS worker Jay Evans, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2021. She put her home in Brighton on the market so she could make investments to provide long-term security for her loved ones.

She invested almost £76,000 in Whisky Scotland after being promised lucrative returns from a company director.

Mrs Evans, 54, sold her home and moved to Peacehaven in East Sussex, then used the money from the sale to invest in seven casks.

The company’s director sent her voicemails from across the world, telling her she was his “favourite ever client” and that he would “always look after her”.

But two of the casks did not exist, and the other five had been sold at a much higher cost than their true worth.

Mrs Evans has been told it would take 25 years to recoup what she has paid.

The company and directors have now vanished. Its Glasgow office is just a rented space and a BBC reporter was told they were never there.

“They’ve made somebody who’s facing end of life at an early age, they’ve made it infinitely more difficult. None of it will matter to people like this,” she said.

Her wife Susie Walker said it was “heart-breaking” that the money Jay had worked for had gone overnight, and that she would now need to carry on working.

Self-employed locksmith Geoff Owens, from Wrexham, invested his life savings – more than £100,000 – with Whisky Scotland.

He and other investors are now trying to track down their casks and their investments.

Mr Owens says he will not stop until he finds out what has happened to his money.

“No-one is going to rip me off and walk away from this, without me facing you,” he said.

“I will get an army together who you’ve ripped off, and we will try and do something about it.”

The BBC asked the directors of Whisky Scotland for a comment. It did not respond.

Martin Armstrong runs Whisky Broker, a bonded warehouse in Creetown, near Dumfries, which stores 48,000 casks.

He says he’s being contacted “almost every day” by investors looking for casks sold by unscrupulous companies.

Asked if he thought that fraud could ever be so rife in the sector, he said: “No. But I knew it was possible.

“When there’s money involved, then everything follows.”

Kenny Macdonald – a legitimate whisky cask broker who runs his own company, Dram Mor – said there were other “good guys” operating in the industry.

He said there were “a huge amount of people” who were “profiteering” – but that in those cases, investors were at least getting a product.

“And then you get the ones who are downright nasty. And they’re selling somebody a piece of paper, for a cask that just never existed.

“The sharks are circling. They know there’s blood. They can smell it.

“And unfortunately, in this particular case, the blood is whisky.”

Hundreds of people have taken part in the largest anti-Hamas protest in Gaza since the war with Israel began, taking to the streets to demand the group step down from power.

Masked Hamas militants, some armed with guns and others carrying batons, intervened and forcibly dispersed the protesters, assaulting several of them.

Videos shared widely on social media by activists typically critical of Hamas showed young men marching in the streets of Beit Lahia, northern Gaza on Tuesday, chanting “out, out, out, Hamas out”.

Hamas said it condemned those who it accused of pushing “suspicious political agendas” and shifting the blame from Israel.

Pro-Hamas supporters downplayed the significance of the protests and accused the participants of being traitors.

The protests in northern Gaza came a day after Islamic Jihad gunmen launched rockets at Israel, prompting an Israeli decision to evacuate large parts of Beit Lahia, which sparked public anger in the area.

Israel has resumed its military campaign in Gaza following nearly two months of ceasefire, blaming Hamas for rejecting a new US proposal to extend the truce. Hamas, in turn, has accused Israel of abandoning the original deal agreed in January.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and thousands displaced since Israeli military operations resumed with air strikes on 18 March.

One of the protesters, Beit Lahia resident Mohammed Diab, had his home destroyed in the war and lost his brother in an Israeli airstrike a year ago.

“We refuse to die for anyone, for any party’s agenda or the interests of foreign states,” he said.

“Hamas must step down and listen to the voice of the grieving, the voice that rises from beneath the rubble – it is the most truthful voice.”

Footage from the town also showed protesters shouting “down with Hamas rule, down with the Muslim Brotherhood rule”.

Hamas has been the sole ruler in Gaza since 2007, after winning Palestinian elections a year prior and then violently ousting rivals.

Open criticism of Hamas has grown in Gaza since war began, both on the streets and online, though there are still those that are fiercely loyal and it is hard to accurately gauge how far support for the group has shifted.

There was opposition to Hamas long before the war, though much of it remained hidden for fear of reprisals.

Mohammed Al-Najjar, from Gaza, posted on his Facebook: “Excuse me, but what exactly is Hamas betting on? They’re betting on our blood, blood that the whole world sees as just numbers.

“Even Hamas counts us as numbers. Step down and let us tend to our wounds.”

Hamas official Dr Basem Naim told the BBC people have the right “to cry out in pain”, but he accused protesters of having “suspicious agendas” and asked why demonstrations were not happening in the West Bank.

He said it was unacceptable to exploit the humanitarian conditions in Gaza to “shift the blame away” from Israel.

The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, during which around 1,200 people, mainly civilians, were killed and 251 others taken hostage.

Israel responded to the attack with a military offensive in Gaza to destroy Hamas, which has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, the Hamas-run health ministry said.

Most of Gaza’s 2.1 million population has also been displaced, many of them several times.

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

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he hopes the US will “stand strong” in the face of Russian demands to lift sanctions as a condition for a ceasefire in the Black Sea.

Moscow said a maritime truce announced on Tuesday to allow safe passage for commercial vessels would only begin once Western restrictions on Russia’s food and fertiliser trade had been lifted.

Zelensky was speaking during a panel interview in Paris with journalists from across Europe.

Asked by the BBC if the US would resist Russian pressure, he said: “I hope so. God bless, they will. But we’ll see.”

The White House said on Tuesday that Russian and Ukrainian delegations had agreed to a ceasefire in the Black Sea after three days of separate talks with American officials in Saudi Arabia.

But hours later, the Kremlin released its own statement including a list of conditions.

Its demands include revoking Western sanctions on financial institutions involved in the agricultural trade and restoring their access to the Swift international payment system – a network that facilitates secure financial messaging.

Trump said the US government was “looking at” Moscow’s request for the restrictions to be lifted, but the EU said on Wednesday it would not consider removing sanctions before the “unconditional” withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine’s internationally-recognised territory.

Speaking to the panel in Paris, Zelensky said he was “very grateful” for bipartisan support from the US, but said he feared some were “under the influence of Russian narratives”.

“We can’t agree to those narratives,” he said.

When asked whether US President Donald Trump had a closer relationship with him or Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zelensky said he did not know.

“I don’t know – it’s difficult for me to say,” he said. “I don’t know what relationships he’s got, I don’t know how many conversations he’s had.”

The Ukrainian leader was also asked about comments from Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, who dismissed Europe’s efforts to create a “coalition of the willing” to support Ukraine in an interview last week.

In response, Zelensky said he would not be “hastily driving to conclusions”.

He said Witkoff, who has a background in property development, did not “have that experience”.

“As far as I know, he knows very well how to buy and sell real estate, but that’s somewhat different,” he said.

He also said that Europe had “strengthened itself significantly” during the course of the war.

The BBC also asked Zelensky how he would be remembered in the history books: the man who saved Ukraine, or the man who let it fall?

“I don’t know what history books will write about me,” he said. “It’s not my purpose or goal.”

He said his goal was instead to defend Ukraine and to see his children “walk along their streets without hiding”.

“I will do everything I can until end of my days to defend Ukraine as much as I can,” he added.

On whether Ukraine should be allowed to join Nato, Zelensky said his “battle-hardened” nation would make the alliance stronger, though he noted that the Trump administration had ruled out membership for Kyiv.

The interview took place shortly after Zelensky met French President Emmaunuel Macron in Paris, where the Eiffel Tower has been lit in the colours of the Ukrainian flag in his honour.

Ukraine’s president has returned to Europe to rally his allies and convince them to take the threat of Putin seriously.

They are now doing so – some might even say scrambling to do so – but have previously relied on the Americans to do the heavy lifting in terms of military capacity.

After everything Trump has said in the last two months, Europeans realise the Americans may not be there in the future, which has concentrated their minds.

President Zelensky’s challenge is to get them to deliver hard cash commitments rather than just sentiments.

His meeting with Macron has already proven fruitful, with the French president announcing a new €2bn ($2.2bn; £1.6bn) package of military aid for the war-torn nation.

Referring to the Kremlin’s request to lift sanctions, Macron said Moscow cannot “dictate the conditions” for peace, adding that it was too early to considering lifting European sanctions on Russia.

It comes ahead of a gathering of European leaders in Paris on Thursday to discuss the war in Ukraine.

The “coalition of the willing” – which does not include the US – is attempting to form an agreement on what support European and other nations could offer to maintain a future ceasefire, if one was to be agreed.

Rachel Reeves has squeezed the welfare budget further and boosted defence spending in a Spring Statement aimed at kick-starting the faltering economy.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – the government’s financial watchdog – halved its growth forecast for this year to 1%.

The chancellor blamed global instability, arguing that the world was “changing before our eyes” and promising a “new era of security and national renewal”.

The OBR painted a more upbeat picture of subsequent years, predicting growth will be higher than expected thanks, in part, to more housebuilding.

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The Spring Statement was meant to be a routine update on the public finances but Reeves made more extensive changes after her plans were blown off course by lower growth and higher government borrowing costs.

Reeves used her statement to announce a further £2.2bn for defence, while a target has been set to reduce the administrative costs of government departments by 15% by 2030.

Real household disposable income per person is expected to grow by an average of around 0.5% a year, the OBR said.

Reeves said this meant that by 2029 households would be on average more than £500 a year better off compared with what the OBR had expected in October.

The Conservatives claimed her statement was an “emergency budget” to “clean up the mess” created by her decision in October to increase national insurance costs for business and government borrowing to fund public services.

Shadow chancellor Mel Stride accused the chancellor of having “tanked the economy” due to her “ineptitude”.

This is hotly disputed by the government who insist they are sticking to rigid “fiscal rules” aimed at keeping a lid on borrowing – to prevent a repeat of the economic meltdown seen after Conservative PM Liz Truss’s “mini budget”.

But the OBR – which was set up in 2010 to evaluate the government’s figures – said Reeves will only manage to avoid breaking her fiscal rules through billions in public spending cuts.

The government insists the most vulnerable will be protected from spending cuts – but some Labour MPs have accused the chancellor of seeking to balance the books on the backs of the poor and are threatening to vote against the changes.

The Department for Work and Pensions’ assessment finds that 3.8 million families are set to be on average £420 per year better off due to the changes.

But the government analysis suggests more than 3 million families will on average be £1,720 a year worse off by 2030 due to benefit cuts.

On social media, Labour MP Jon Trickett said: “I will not be voting for cuts to poorest people on welfare benefits. The chancellor has other options.

“Picking on disabled people is not the right thing to do.”

Another Labour MP, Brian Leishman, said he was “very disappointed” with the chancellor’s statement, saying “I’m not on board with that whatsoever” and confirmed he would not vote in favour.

Reeves also restored the government’s £9.9bn “headroom” – spare cash it will have by the end of its five year budget period to deal with unexpected developments.

But the OBR says this is a “very small margin” and it would not take much to knock the government’s finances off course.

The watchdog believes Reeves has just over a 50% chance of meeting her own borrowing and debt rules by the end of the decade.

But Reeves insisted at a news conference that she was determined to keep a grip on the public finances.

“People should have no doubt about my commitment and how seriously I take the fiscal rules, as I said today they are non-negotiable,” she told reporters.

She said the government would continue to make the case for free trade, amid the looming threat of US tariffs.

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump announced new import taxes of 25% on cars and car parts coming into America in a move that threatened to widen the global trade war.

Lib Dem Treasury spokeswoman Daisy Cooper warned the chancellor she was “flying blind” into a trade war with Donald Trump that would leave her plans in “tatters” and the government should instead seek a new trade deal with the EU.

Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice described the OBR’s forecasts as “delusional” and said Labour should not rely so much on their advice.

“We can’t keep spending more than we’re earning,” he told BBC Radio 5’s Matt Chorley.

“I’m afraid we’re heading to a very difficult place, led by the R-word – recession.”

Benefit cuts announced last week were extended after the OBR said they would not raise as much money as the government had expected.

A rise in the standard rate of universal credit will be £1 a week lower than previously announced, and the health element of universal credit – which reflects a limited capability to work – will be frozen at £97 a week until 2029 for existing claimants.

An extra 250,000 people, including 50,000 children, will be pushed into relative poverty by the government’s changes, according to its own impact assessment.

And an estimated 800,000 people will lose out on personal independent payments (Pips) by 2030.

A further 2.25 million people currently receiving the health top up to universal credit will lose an average of £500 a year as a result of the freeze, and 730,000 future recipients will lose out.

About 3.9 million households not on the health element of universal credit are expected to gain an average of £265 a year from the increase to the standard allowance.

But the government stresses there are limits to their estimates because they don’t take into account of funding for measures to support those with disabilities into employment.

They also do not take into account the new protections for those with severe lifelong conditions.

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This is the gravest crisis for Western security since the end of World War Two, and a lasting one. As one expert puts it, “Trumpism will outlast his presidency”. But which nations are equipped to step to the fore as the US stands back?

At 09.00 one morning in February 1947, the UK ambassador in Washington, Lord Inverchapel, walked into the State Department to hand the US Secretary of State, George Marshall, two diplomatic messages printed on blue paper to emphasise their importance: one on Greece, the other on Turkey.

Exhausted, broke and heavily in debt to the United States, Britain told the US that it could no longer continue its support for the Greek government forces that were fighting an armed Communist insurgency. Britain had already announced plans to pull out of Palestine and India and to wind down its presence in Egypt.

The United States saw immediately that there was now a real danger that Greece would fall to the Communists and, by extension, to Soviet control. And if Greece went, the United States feared that Turkey could be next, giving Moscow control of the Eastern Mediterranean including, potentially, the Suez Canal, a vital global trade route.

Almost overnight, the United States stepped into the vacuum left by the departing British.

“It must be a policy of the United States,” President Harry Truman announced, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.”

It was the start of what became known as the Truman Doctrine. At its heart was the idea that helping to defend democracy abroad was vital to the United States’ national interests.

There followed two major US initiatives: the Marshall Plan, a massive package of assistance to rebuild the shattered economies of Europe, and the creation of Nato in 1949, which was designed to defend democracies from a Soviet Union that had now extended its control over the eastern part of Europe.

It is easy to see this as the moment that leadership of the western world passed from Britain to the United States. More accurately it is the moment that revealed that it already had.

The United States, traditionally isolationist and safely sheltered by two vast oceans, had emerged from World War Two as the leader of the free world. As America projected its power around the globe, it spent the post-war decades remaking much of the world in its own image.

The baby boomer generation grew up in a world that looked, sounded and behaved more like the United States than ever before. And it became the western world’s cultural, economic and military hegemon.

Yet the fundamental assumptions on which the United States has based its geostrategic ambitions now look set to change.

Donald Trump is the first US President since World War Two to challenge the role that his country set for itself many decades ago. And he is doing this in such a way that, to many, the old world order appears to be over – and the new world order has yet to take shape.

The question is, which nations will step forward? And, with the security of Europe under greater strain than at any time almost in living memory, can its leaders, who are currently scrabbling around, find an adequate response?

President Trump’s critique of the post-1945 international order dates back decades. Nearly 40 years ago he took out full-page advertisements in three US newspapers to criticise the United States’ commitment to the defence of the world’s democracies.

“For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” he wrote in 1987. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?

“The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

It’s a position he has repeated since his second inauguration.

And the fury felt by some in his administration for what they perceive as European reliance on the United States was apparently shown in the leaked messages about air strikes on Houthis in Yemen that emerged this week.

In the messages, an account named Vice-President JD Vance wrote that European countries might benefit from the strikes. It said: “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

Another account, identified as Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

Trump’s own position appears to go beyond criticising those he says are taking advantage of the United State’s generosity. At the start of his second presidency, he seemed to embrace Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling Russia that Ukraine would not be granted Nato membership and that it should not expect to get back the territory it has lost to Russia.

Many saw this as giving away two major bargaining chips before talks had even started. He apparently asked Russia for nothing in return.

On the flipside, certain Trump supporters see in Putin a strong leader who embodies many of the conservative values they themselves share.

To some, Putin is an ally in a “war on woke”.

The United States’ foreign policy is now driven, in part at least, by the imperatives of its culture wars. The security of Europe has become entangled in the battle between two polarised and mutually antagonistic visions of what the United States stands for.

Some think the division is about more than Trump’s particular views and that Europe can not just sit tight waiting for his term in office to end.

“The US is becoming divorced from European values,” argues Ed Arnold, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. “That’s difficult [for Europeans] to swallow because it means that it’s structural, cultural and potentially long-term. “

“I think the current trajectory of the US will outlast Trump, as a person. I think Trumpism will outlast his presidency.”

The Trump White House has said it will no longer be the primary guarantor of European security, and that European nations should be responsible for their own defence and pay for it.

“If [Nato countries] don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them. No, I’m not going to defend them,” the president said earlier this month.

For almost 80 years, the cornerstone of European security has been embedded in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack on one member state of the alliance is an attack on all.

In Downing Street last month, just before his visit to the White House, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told me during an interview that he was satisfied that the United States remained the leading member of Nato and that Trump personally remained committed to Article 5.

Others are less sure.

Ben Wallace, who was defence secretary in the last Conservative government, told me earlier this month: “I think Article 5 is on life support.

“If Europe, including the United Kingdom, doesn’t step up to the plate, invest a lot on defence and take it seriously, it’s potentially the end of the Nato that we know and it’ll be the end of Article 5.

“Right now, I wouldn’t bet my house that Article 5 would be able to be triggered in the event of a Russian attack… I certainly wouldn’t take for granted that the United States would ride to the rescue.”

According to polling by the French company Institut Elabe, nearly three quarters of French people now think that the United States is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavourable views of the United States as well.

“The damage Trump has done to Nato is probably irreparable,” argues Robert Kagan, a conservative commentator, author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC who has been a long time critic of Trump.

“The alliance relied on an American guarantee that is no longer reliable, to say the least”.

And yet Trump is by no means the first US president to tell Europe to get its defence spending in order. In 2016 Barack Obama urged Nato allies to increase theirs, saying: “Europe has sometimes been complacent about its own defence.”

All of this is great news for Putin. “The entire system of Euro-Atlantic security is crumbling before our eyes,” he said last year. “Europe is being marginalised in global economic development, plunged into the chaos of challenges such as migration, and losing international agency and cultural identity.”

In early March, three days after Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous meeting with Trump and Vance in the White House, a Kremlin spokesman declared “the fragmentation of the West has begun”.

“Look at Russia’s objectives in Europe,” says Armida van Rij, head of the Europe programme at Chatham House. “Its objectives are to destabilise Europe. It is to weaken Nato, and get the Americans to withdraw their troops from here.

“And at the moment you could go ‘tick, tick and almost tick’. Because it is destabilising Europe. It is weakening Nato. It hasn’t gone as far as to get the US to withdraw troops from Europe, but in a few months time, who knows where we’ll be?”

One of the great challenges Europe, in particular, faces from here is the question of how to arm itself adequately. Eighty years of reliance on the might of the United States has left many European democracies exposed.

Britain, for example, has cut military spending by nearly 70% since the height of the Cold War. (At the end of the Cold War, in the early 1990s, Europe allowed itself a peace dividend and began a decades-long process of reducing defence spending.)

“We had a big budget [during the Cold War] and we took a peace dividend,” says Wallace. “Now, you could argue that that was warranted.

“The problem is we went from a peace dividend to corporate raiding. [Defence] just became the go-to department to take money from. And that is where we just forgot the lessons of our history.”

The prime minister told parliament last month that Britain would increase defence spending from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5% by 2027. But is that enough?

“It isn’t enough just to stand still,” argues Wallace. “It wouldn’t be enough to fix the things we need to make ourselves more deployable, and to plug the gaps if the Americans left.”

Then there is the wider question of military recruitment. “The West is in freefall in its military recruiting, it’s not just Britain,” argues Wallace.

“At the moment, young people aren’t joining the military. And that’s a problem.”

But Germany’s new Chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, has said Europe must make itself independent of the United States. And “Europeanising” NATO will require the build up of an indigenous European military-industrial complex capable of delivering capabilities that currently only the United States has.

Others share the view that Europe must become more self reliant militarily – but some are concerned that not all of Europe is on board with this.

“Where we are at the moment is that the East Europeans by and large, don’t need to get the memo,” says Ian Bond, deputy director, Centre for European Reform. “The further west you go, the more problematic it becomes until you get to Spain and Italy.”

Mr Arnold agrees: “The view in Europe now is this isn’t really a debate anymore, it’s a debate of how we do it and maybe how quickly we do it, but we need to do this now.”

There is a short list of “very important things” that only the United States currently provides, according to historian Timothy Garton Ash.

“These are the so-called strategic enablers,” he says. “The satellites, the intelligence, the Patriot air defence batteries, which are the only ones that can take down Russian ballistic missiles. And within three to five years we [countries other than the US] should aim to have our own version of these.

“And in this process of transition, from the American-led Nato [the idea is] you will have a Nato that is so Europeanised that its forces, together with national forces and EU capacities, are capable of defending Europe – even if an American president says ‘leave us out of this’.”

The question is how to achieve this.

Ms van Rij stresses that, in her view, Europe does need to build a Europe-owned European defence industrial base – but she foresees difficulties.

“What’s really difficult are the divisions within Europe on how to actually do this and whether to actually do this.”

The European Commission and experts have been trying to figure out how this defence may work for several decades. “It has traditionally been very difficult because of vested national interests… So this is not going to be easy.”

In the meantime, Trump appears ready to turn the page on the post-Cold War rules-based international order of sovereign states that are free to choose their own destinies and alliances.

What he seems to share with Vladimir Putin is a desire for a world in which the major powers, unconstrained by internationally agreed laws, are free to impose their will on smaller, weaker nations, as Russia has traditionally done in both its Tsarist and Soviet Empires. That would mean a return to the “spheres of interest” system that prevailed for 40 years after the Second World War.

We don’t know exactly what Donald Trump would do were a Nato country to be attacked. But the point is that the guarantee of US help can no longer be taken for granted. That means Europe has to react. Its challenge appears to be to stay united, finally make good on funding its own defence, and avoid being drawn into the “sphere of influence” of any of the big powers.

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