As stock markets continue to tumble after the US imposition of sweeping and swingeing tariffs, many are asking does this qualify as a stock market “crash” and what that could mean for them.

The word crash has been used sparingly over the decades and is usually reserved for a fall of over 20% from a recent peak in a day, or over the course of a couple of days.

On 19 October, 1987 – also known as Black Monday – the US stock market lost 23% of its value in a single day, and other stock markets had similar falls. The UK FTSE index fell 23% over two days – partly because it closes earlier than New York, and so it often plays catch up with whatever happens in the US the next morning.

That was most definitely a crash.

In 1929, the US stock market lost over 20% of its value in two days – and 50% within three weeks. That was the famous Wall Street Crash that ushered in the great depression of the 1930s.

By comparison, the US stock market has lost around 17% of its value from its peak in February and is now down 2% from where it was this time last year.

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Nevertheless, these are the biggest and quickest declines we have seen in world markets since they were gripped by the panic of Covid-19 in early 2020.

A decline of 20% from a peak is considered a “bear market” – a description of a market that appears to be more likely to go down than go up. We are very close to that description right now.

While many people own stocks and shares directly, most people’s exposure to stock markets come through their pension plans. There are two types – defined benefit schemes which guarantee a fixed pension income, and defined contribution where your pension pot rises and falls with financial markets.

That may sound like defined contribution plans are very vulnerable to this sell off – but not all of your contributions go into shares. Much of the money goes into safer investments such as government bonds. These tend to increase in value when stock markets fall as they are seen as a “safe haven” along with other assets such as gold.

That is exactly what has happened here.

Government bonds have risen in value and that can offset some or all of the fall in shares depending on how your pension savings are allocated.

The closer to retirement you are, the higher percentage of your pension pot is likely to be invested in bonds – so the less affected you will be.

There have been many falls like this in the decades since the Wall Street Crash but in the long term, shares have turned out to be a good investment – and pension savings is a long term game.

It does matter. A company’s share value is a measure of how profitable those companies are expected to be in the future. A plummeting market is an indication that most people think that most companies are likely to see their profits fall.

The markets believe that US President Donald Trump’s tariff bombshell is expected to raise prices, lower demand and reduce profits, making companies less valuable and more inclined to cut investment and jobs.

So the real warning sign here is not about the value of your pension but about the health of the economy in which we live and work.

Falls like this sometimes, often even, herald an economic downturn. That is more of a worry than the value of your pension, which has seen and will see volatility like this over the years.

But that’s not to say this is not a very big moment for the world economy.

Blanca Castro puts on a builder’s helmet before opening the door to her kitchen. Inside it, the ceiling has a large hole that is dripping water and it looks as if it could collapse at any moment.

Because the kitchen is unusable, Blanca has to wash her dishes in the bathtub, and she has improvised a cooking area with a gas camping stove in a corner of her living room.

Many of her fellow tenants in this apartment block near Madrid’s Atocha railway station have similar problems. They say the company that owns the building has stopped responding to requests for basic maintenance in recent months, since informing them that it will not renew their rental contracts.

“The current rental bubble is encouraging a lot of big owners to do what they are doing here,” says Blanca. “Which is to get rid of the current tenants who have been here a long time, in order to have short-term tourist flats, or simply to hike up the rent.”

Blanca and her fellow tenants have vowed to stay in the building despite what they see as efforts to push them out by the owners, who were not available for comment for this article.

The tenancy contracts last five years, during which time rent is fixed, but this area of central Madrid has seen housing costs soar in recent years.

“For another home like this [in this area], I’d have to pay double or more what I’m paying now,” says Blanca. “It’s not viable.”

She and her neighbours are among millions of Spaniards who are suffering the consequences of a housing crisis caused by spiralling rental costs.

While salaries have increased by around 20% over the past decade, the average rental in Spain has doubled during the same period. There has been an 11% increase over the last year alone, according to figures provided by property portal Idealista, and housing has become Spaniards’ biggest worry.

It’s also generating anger, with Spaniards taking to the streets to demand action from the authorities to make housing more affordable. On Saturday, 5 April thousands of people are expected to protest in Madrid and dozens of other cities.

A report by Spain’s central bank found that nearly 40% of families who rent now spend more than 40% of their income on their accommodation.

“The current problem is a huge imbalance between supply and demand,” says Juan Villén, of Idealista. “Demand is very good, the economy is growing a lot, but supply is dwindling very fast.”

Mr Villén offers the example of Barcelona, where rental increases have become notorious. Whereas nine families were competing to rent each property in the city five years ago, that number has risen to 54. Rental costs during that time have increased by 60%, he adds.

“We need to build more properties,” says Mr Villén. “And on the rental side we need more people willing to rent their properties, or willing to buy properties, refurbish them and put them on the rental market.”

The central government has described the situation as “a social emergency” and agrees that a lack of supply is driving the crisis. Last year, the Housing Ministry estimated that the country needs between 600,000 and one million new homes over the next four years in order to meet demand.

This need for more housing has been pushed up in part by the arrival of immigrants who have joined the workforce and are helping drive Spain’s economic growth. The ministry also pointed to a lack of social housing, which at 3.4% of total supply, is among the lowest in Europe.

In 2007, at the height of a property-ownership bubble, more than 600,000 homes were built in Spain. But high building costs, lack of available land and a shortage of manpower have all been factors in restricting construction in recent years, with just under 100,000 homes completed in 2024.

The government has taken measures to incentivise construction, apportioning land for the building of affordable homes, while trying to ensure that public housing does not end up in the private market, which has been a problem in the past.

But the Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has also expressed a willingness to intervene in the market in order to bring rental prices under control.

At a recent event to mark the opening of 218 low-rent flats in the southern city of Seville, he declared that Spaniards “want us to act, they want the housing market to operate according to the law of reason, of social justice, not the law of the jungle; they want to ensure that vulture funds and speculators are not doing whatever they like”.

The central government and a number of local administrations have identified short-term tourist accommodation as part of the problem. Last year, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands and several cities on the mainland saw protests by locals against surging tourist numbers, with their impact on rental costs the main complaint.

Several city halls have responded by announcing plans to restrict the granting of tourist-flat permits, while Barcelona is going further, revoking the licences of all of the city’s 10,000 or so registered short-term apartments by 2028.

The Sánchez government has also pushed through parliament a housing law, which includes a cap on rentals in so-called “high-tension” areas where prices are climbing out of control. Political resistance has meant that the legislation is so far only being implemented in the northern regions of the Basque Country, Navarre and Catalonia, and its success is open to debate.

The Socialist-led regional and central governments have pointed to a 3.7% drop in rental costs in “high-tension” areas of Catalonia since the cap’s introduction there a year ago, with Barcelona seeing a decrease of 6.4%.

However, critics warn that the rental cap has spooked owners and caused thousands of properties to be withdrawn from the market.

“On the supply side, the problem is that all measures taken by the local or national governments are going against landlords,” says Mr Villén. “Even people that were doing build-to-rent new properties have been selling their properties because they don’t want to get into the rental market.”

Another initiative proposed by the central government which has stirred up debate is a tax of up to 100% on properties bought by non-residents from outside the EU, on the grounds that such homes are often barely inhabited. This is a measure that, if rolled out, would heavily affect British buyers.

The conservative opposition has accused the government of being too heavy-handed with its approach. However, as public anger builds over this issue, there are many others who would like the country’s leaders to act much more stridently.

Gonzalo Álvarez, of the Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos, an organisation that campaigns for tenants’ rights, agrees that a shortage of available homes is a problem, but insists that building more is not the answer.

“There is a lack of housing because homes are being hijacked – on the one hand tourist flats, and on the other hand all the empty flats belonging to vulture funds and the banks,” he says. “So there’s no need to build more, it’s not necessary. But the housing we have has been hijacked.”

His organisation wants the government to impose drastic mandatory reductions in rent on owners and is threatening to orchestrate a nationwide strike by tenants that would see participants refuse to pay their rent.

“The [central and local] governments are not setting any limits,” says Mr Álvarez. “So who is going to? We will have to do it.”

On a quick drive around the small Ohio town of Delta, you can spot nearly as many Trump flags as American stars-and-stripes banners.

And at the petrol station near the Ohio Turnpike, the pumps bear relics of the last administration, with slogans slamming Trump’s predecessor: “Whoever voted for Biden owes me gas money!”

This is Trump country – the Republican ticket easily won here in November’s presidential election by a margin of almost two-to-one. And while the markets are in turmoil following Trump’s unveiling of expansive global tariffs this week, plenty of people in Delta and hundreds of Midwestern towns like it still back the president’s plans.

Those plans, to impose tariffs of between 10% and 50% on almost every country, have upended global trade and led to warnings that prices could soon rise for American consumers. Trump, meanwhile, has said the move will address unfair trade imbalances, boost US industry and raise revenue.

For some in Delta, the president’s argument about fairness resonates.

“I don’t want people in other countries to suffer, I really don’t,” said Mary Miller, manager of the Delta Candy Emporium, which sits in the middle of the village’s Main Street. “But we need to have an even playing field.”

Miller, a three-time Trump voter, believes other countries haven’t played fair on trade. And like many here, she prefers to buy American-made goods.

As she watches over her stock of multi-coloured confectionaries, many of them made in the US, and weighs up how they might be impacted by fresh import taxes, she recalls how decades ago she heard that one of her favourite brands was moving its factories abroad. She hasn’t bought another pair of Levi’s jeans since.

Miller is unfazed by the possibility of price increases, which many economists say these new tariffs will bring.

“Sometimes you have to walk through fire to get to the other side,” she said.

“If tariffs bring companies and business back to hard-working American people like the ones who live here, then it’s worth it.”

• Full list: See all Trump tariffs by country
• Watch: Why Trump’s tariffs aren’t really reciprocal
• Reaction: Americans react to the president’s trade policy
• Explainer: What are tariffs, and why is Trump using them?
• Prices: Americans could pay more for these everyday basics

These sentiments are common in Delta, a village of around 3,300 people less than 100 miles (160km) south of Detroit, even as other Midwestern towns brace for sharp shocks.

The automotive industry, with its complicated global supply chains, seems particularly vulnerable to the impact of major new tariffs, with companies in Michigan to the north and Indiana to the west already announcing factory shutdowns and job cuts.

But on the outskirts of Delta, there is a cluster of steel businesses that have been here since the 1990s and which may be better placed in a new era of American protectionism.

One of these businesses, North Star BlueScope, has urged Trump to expand tariffs on steel and aluminium.

At the same time, however, it has asked for an exemption for the raw materials it needs, such as scrap metal.

North Star BlueScope did not respond to interview requests, but in a back room at the nearby Barn Restaurant, a few local steelworkers who had just finished the night shift were drinking beers together early on Friday morning.

The workers, who asked not to be named, mostly laughed and shrugged when asked about the sweeping new tariffs that were announced by Trump at the White House on Wednesday.

It was a pretty clear indication that this economic news is unlikely to ruin their weekend.

Outside the restaurant, some Delta locals considered the possible upsides of these import taxes.

“Nobody’s frantic. We’re not going to lose any sleep over it,” said Gene Burkholder, who has a decades-long career in the agriculture industry.

Although he owns some stocks, Mr Burkholder said they were long-term investments and he was not obsessing over the sharp drops in the two days following the president’s announcement.

“If you have some spare cash, maybe it’s a good time to buy some shares while they’re cheap,” he said.

A couple of booths over, as she finished eating breakfast with her son Rob, Louise Gilson said – quietly – that she did not really trust the president.

But Gilson, along with many people here, said she wanted to see action. She wholeheartedly agreed when another diner commented: “Trump may be wrong, but at least he’s trying.”

“The other people wouldn’t have done squat,” she said, referring to the Democratic Party.

The Gilsons agreed that the big local industrial employers have generally been good neighbours, contributing to the local economy, charities and the wider community, even as they have seen some less desirable effects of industrial development and worry about unequal sharing of the economic pie.

And as they recounted Delta’s history, they described a gradual erosion in quality of life that they believe has made many people willing to roll the dice even when economists say Trump’s tariff plan comes with stark risks.

“It was a good little town to grow up in,” Rob Gilson recalled. But he said it now seemed less safe and friendly than when he was growing up in the 60s and 70s.

“It seems like the heart of America is gone,” he said.

Delta, Louise Gilson added, “is the kind of place where 25% or 30% of the people are struggling with their demons”.

And while these issues have little to do with tariffs, the challenges faced by people in towns like Delta may go some way to explaining why many are willing to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt, even as markets plunge on faraway Wall Street.

Pained cries rang out in front of former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s official residence on Friday, as judges of the Constitutional Court judges confirmed his impeachment.

“I came here with hope in my heart, believing we would win … It’s so unfair,” 64-year-old Won Bog-sil told BBC Korean from the rally, where thousands had gathered in support of Yoon.

These scenes were live streamed to thousands more on YouTube – a platform popular with not just Yoon’s supporters but the president himself.

A disgraced Yoon is now stripped of his power, but he leaves behind an ever more divided South Korea.

Last December, Yoon’s shock martial law declaration cost him the confidence of much of the country. But among his supporters, his ongoing legal troubles have only further buttressed the image of a wronged saviour.

Many of them echo narratives peddled by influential right-wing YouTubers who support Yoon: that martial law was necessary to protect the country from pro-North Korea opposition lawmakers and a dangerously powerful opposition, and that Yoon’s conservative party was a victim of election fraud.

All this has culminated in a fringe movement that has become both more energised and extreme, spilling out from behind computer screens onto the streets.

“Stop the Steal” signs have become a fixture at pro-Yoon rallies – co-opted from supporters of US President Donald Trump, whose own political career has been helped by a network of conservative YouTubers.

Shortly after Yoon’s arrest in January, enraged supporters stormed a courthouse in Seoul, armed with metal beams, assaulting police officers who stood in their way.

Last month, an elderly man died after setting himself on fire near Seoul City Hall weeks earlier. A stack of fliers accusing opposition leaders of being pro-North Korean forces were found near him.

“If they remain here, our country will become a communist nation,” the fliers read. “There is no future for this country, no future for the youth.”

Even conservatives have been surprised and divided by this new trend of violence.

“He has watched too many trashy YouTube videos,” read one op-ed in Korea JoongAng Daily – one of many conservative news outlets that have become increasingly at odds with Yoon supporters. “A compulsive watcher of biased YouTube content can live in a fanatic world dominated by conspiracies.”

From the outset Yoon embraced right-wing YouTubers, inviting some of them to his inauguration in 2022.

In January, as he defied attempts to arrest him, the president told supporters that he was watching their rallies on YouTube livestream. PPP lawmakers said Yoon had urged them to consume “well-organised information on YouTube” instead of “biased” legacy media.

Entwined on these YouTube channels are narratives of the opposition Democratic Party being obsequious to Beijing and trying to curry favour with Pyongyang.

After the Democratic Party won at the polls by a landslide last April, some of these channels claimed that Yoon was a victim of electoral interference led by China, and that North Korea sympathisers lurking among the opposition were behind the ruling party’s defeat. Similar claims were echoed by Yoon when he tried to justify his short-lived martial law declaration.

These narratives have found resonance in an online audience that harbours a general distrust of mainstream media and worries about South Korea’s neighbours.

“I think [the election was] totally fraudulent, because when you vote, you fold the paper, but they kept finding papers that were not folded,” Kim, who gave only his surname, told the BBC at a pro-Yoon rally in January. Claims like these have not waned despite a previous Supreme Court ruling that the voting slips were not manipulated.

Kim, 28, is among a contingent of young men who have become the new faces of South Korea’s right-wing.

Young Perspective, a YouTube channel with more than 800,000 subscribers run by someone who describes himself as “a young man who values freedom”, often shares clips from parliamentary sessions showing PPP politicians taking down opposition members.

Another popular YouTuber is Jun Kwang-hoon, a pastor and founder of the evangelical Liberty Unification Party, who posts videos of politically loaded sermons urging his 200,000 subscribers to join pro-Yoon rallies. This is in line with the historically strong protestant support for conservatism in South Korea.

Nam Hyun-joo, an employee at a theological school, told the BBC that she believed the Chinese Communist Party was “the main actor behind the election fraud”. Standing alone outside the Constitutional Court in the biting January cold, she held a protest sign denouncing the judiciary.

Other voices dominating the virtual realm are a snapshot of the rest of Yoon’s support base: middle-aged or elderly men. One of them runs A Stroke of Genius, one of the largest pro-Yoon YouTube channels with 1.6 million subscribers. His livestreams of rallies and monologues pillorying Yoon’s opponents regularly rack up tens of thousands of views, with the comments section flooded with calls to “protect President Yoon”.

In the tumultuous months since Yoon’s martial law declaration, it appears that his party’s popularity has not suffered.

In fact, quite the opposite: While the PPP’s approval ratings sank to 26.2% in the days after Yoon declared martial law, it rebounded to more than 40% just weeks later – much higher than before the chaos.

Buoyed by the loyalty of his supporters, Yoon wrote in a letter to them in January that it was only after being impeached that he “felt like a president”.

“Everyone’s kind of scratching their heads a bit here,” Michael Breen, a Seoul-based consultant and former journalist who covered the Koreas, tells the BBC. While conservatives in South Korea have been “very divided and feeble” over the last decade, he says, Yoon is “now more popular with them than he was before he tried to introduce martial law”.

This solidarity has likely been fuelled by a shared dislike of the opposition, which has launched multiple attempts to impeach members of Yoon’s cabinet, pushed criminal investigations against Yoon and his wife, and used its parliamentary majority to impeach Yoon’s replacement Han Duck-soo.

“I think the opposition party’s power in the assembly went to its head,” says Mr Breen. “Now they’ve shot themselves in the foot.”

An embattled Yoon has become larger than life, rebranded as a martyr who saw martial law as the only way to save South Korea’s democracy.

“If it wasn’t for the good of the country, he wouldn’t have chosen martial law, where he would have to pay with his life if he failed,” a pro-Yoon rally attendee, who gave only his surname Park, told the BBC.

This has also contributed to a widening chasm within the PPP. While some have joined pro-Yoon rallies, others crossed party lines to vote for Yoon’s impeachment.

“Why are people worshipping him like a king? I can’t understand it,” said PPP lawmaker Cho Kyoung-tae, who supported Yoon’s impeachment.

Kim Sang-wook, another PPP lawmaker who has emerged as a prominent anti-Yoon voice among conservatives, said he was pressured to leave the party after supporting Yoon’s impeachment. And now YouTubers, according to Kim, have become the president’s public relations machine.

Worries have simmered over an increasingly ungovernable group within the conservative movement. And as influential left-wing YouTubers similarly rally anti-Yoon protesters, there are also concerns that political differences are being driven ever deeper into the fabric of South Korea’s society.

“Much damage has already been done in terms of radicalising the right, and the left as well for that matter,” US-based lawyer and Korea expert Christopher Jumin Lee told the BBC.

He added that at this point “any compromise with a conservative party that continues to embrace Yoon will likely be seen as anathema”.

“By driving his insurrection attempt into the centre of Korean politics, Yoon has effectively executed a decade’s worth of polarisation.”

India is a cricket-crazy nation, and it seems the AI chatbot ChatGPT hasn’t missed that fact.

So, when its founder Sam Altman fed it the prompt: “Sam Altman as a cricket player in anime style”, the bot seems to have immediately generated an image of Altman wielding a bat in a bright blue India jersey.

Altman shared his anime cricketer avatar on X on Thursday, sending Indian social media users into a tizzy.

Though the tech billionaire had shared AI-generated images before – joining last week’s viral Studio Ghibli trend – it was the India jersey that got people talking.

While some Indian users said they were delighted to see Altman sporting their team’s colours, many were quick to speculate about his motives behind sharing the image.

“Sam trying hard to attract Indian customers,” one user said.

“Now awaiting your India announcement. How much are you allocating out of that $40bn to India,” another user asked, alluding to the record funding recently secured by Altman for his firm, OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT.

Yet another user put into words a pattern he seemed to have spotted in Altman’s recent social media posts – and a question that seems to be on many Indian users’ minds.

“Over the past few days, you’ve been praising India and Indian customers a lot. How did this sudden love for India come about? It feels like there’s some deep strategy going on behind the scenes,” he wrote on X.

While the comment may sound a bit conspiratorial, there’s some truth to at least part of it.

Just hours before Altman shared his image in the cricket jersey, he’d shared a post on X praising India’s adoption of AI technology. He said it was “amazing to watch” and that it was “outpacing the world”.

This post too went viral in India, while the media wrote numerous stories documenting users’ reactions to it.

Someone even started a Reddit thread which quite comically aired the Redditor’s curiosity, and perhaps, confusion.

“Can someone tell me what Sam Altman is talking about here in his tweet?” the person posted on Reddit sharing Altman’s post.

A few days earlier, Altman had retweeted Studio Ghibli-style images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi which were shared by the federal government’s citizen engagement platform.

All these posts of Altman have generated a fair amount of comments questioning his motives.

The scepticism around Altman’s perceived courting of India could be because of his past views on the country’s AI capabilities.

During a visit in 2023, he had sounded almost dismissive of small Indian start-ups making AI tools that could compete with OpenAI’s creations.

Asked at a event how a small, smart team with a low budget of about $10m could build substantial AI foundational models, he answered that it would be “totally hopeless” to attempt this but that entrepreneurs should try anyway.

But when Altman visited India again this year, he had changed his tune.

In a meeting with federal minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in February, Altman expressed an eagerness to collaborate with India on making low-cost AI models.

He also praised India for its swift pace of adopting AI technologies and revealed that the country was OpenAI’s second-largest market, with users tripling over the past year.

The praise comes even as his company is locked in a legal battle with some of India’s biggest news media companies over the alleged unauthorised use of their content.

Experts say that Altman’s seemingly newfound affinity for India might have to do with the country’s profitability as a market.

According to the International Trade Administration, the AI market in India is projected to reach $8bn by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 40% from 2020 to 2025.

Nikhil Pahwa, founder-editor of MediaNama.com, a technology policy website, says that when it comes to founders of AI companies making “grand statements” about India, it has much to do with the country’s massive user base. He adds that Altman isn’t the only CEO wooing India.

In January, Aravind Srinivas, founder of Perplexity, an AI search engine, also expressed an eagerness to work with Indian AI start-ups.

Mr Srinivas said in a post on X that he was ready to invest $1m and five hours of his time per week to “make India great again in the context of AI”.

Technology writer Prasanto K Roy believes that the Ghibli-trend revealed India’s massive userbase for ChatGPT and, potentially, other AI platforms as well. And with competitor AI models like Gemini and Grok quickly gaining Indian users, Altman may be keen to retain existing users of his firm’s services and also acquire new ones, he says.

“India is a very large client base for all global AI foundational models and with ChatGPT being challenged by the much cheaper DeepSeek AI, Altman is likely eager to acquire more Indian customers and keep Indian developers positively aligned towards building on top of OpenAI’s services,” Mr Pahwa says.

“So when it comes to these grand overtures towards India, there’s no real love; it’s just business,” he adds.

After hours of heated debate, India’s parliament has passed a controversial bill that seeks to change how properties worth billions of dollars donated by Muslims over centuries are governed.

The upper house passed the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024 early on Friday, a day after the lower house cleared it amid strong opposition criticism.

Muslim leaders and opposition parties say the bill is “unconstitutional” and infringes on the rights of India’s Muslim-minority community.

But the government says the bill aims to make the management of waqf (Muslim properties) more transparent.

The bill will now be sent to India’s president for her assent before it becomes law. This approval is expected to come soon.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the passing of the bill a “watershed moment”.

In a post on X, he said the waqf system [the system of governing waqf or Muslim properties] had been “synonymous with a lack of transparency and accountability” for decades.

“The legislation passed by parliament will boost transparency and also safeguard people’s rights,” he wrote.

However, the opposition has been vociferous in their condemnation of the bill and allege that it is another ploy by the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to dilute the rights of minorities.

Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge noted that while 288 members voted in favour of the bill in the lower house, a significant 232 opposed it.

“From this, we can guess that despite opposition from various parties, this bill was brought arbitrarily,” he wrote on X.

Legal website LiveLaw reported on Friday that lawmaker Asaduddin Owaisi, president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen party and a fierce critic of the bill, had challenged it in the Supreme Court.

In Islamic tradition, a waqf is a charitable or religious donation made by Muslims for the benefit of the community. Such properties cannot be sold or used for any other purpose.

They are important to India’s 200 million Muslims as they are used for mosques, madrassas, graveyards and orphanages.

The properties are governed by the Waqf Act, 1995, which mandated the formation of state-level boards to manage them.

These boards include nominees from the state government, Muslim lawmakers, members of the state bar council, Islamic scholars and managers of waqf properties.

Last August, the BJP government introduced a bill to amend the Waqf Act.

The government said the changes proposed by the bill would modernise waqf administration and reduce legal loopholes. But Muslim leaders and opposition parties alleged that the amendments would give the government more control over these properties.

The bill was sent to a panel for scrutiny. In February, the panel cleared the bill with some amendments.

For one, the new bill proposes changes to how a waqf property is determined.

Historically, many properties that were donated through oral declarations or community customs have been legitimised as waqf properties because of their continuous use by the Muslim community.

Under the new bill, Waqf boards must provide valid documents to claim a property as waqf. In case of disputes – particularly over land deemed government-owned -the final decision will rest with the government.

Secondly, the bill proposes allowing non-Muslims to be appointed on waqf boards and tribunals.

The bill also allows for judicial intervention in disputes – replacing the earlier system where decisions by waqf tribunals were considered final.

The bill also proposes a centralised registration system, requiring all waqf properties to be registered within six months of the law coming into effect.

Requests for new registrations of waqf properties also need to be submitted to waqf boards via this system.

The bill also has provisions that give the government a greater role in surveying of waqf properties.

A Thai court has issued an arrest warrant for an American academic under Thailand’s lese-majeste law that forbids insulting the monarchy.

The army filed a complaint against Paul Chambers, a lecturer at Naresuan University in central Thailand, under lese-majeste and computer crime laws, according to his legal representation.

Mr Chambers and his lawyer are due to report to police on Tuesday, where charges are expected to be filed.

Akarachai Chaimaneekarakate, advocacy lead for the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights Centre representing Mr Chambers, told the BBC he did not know the reason for the complaint.

If convicted, Mr Chambers could face three to 15 years in prison for each lese-majeste count.

The BBC has contacted Royal Thai Police for comment.

It is rarer for the lese-majeste law to be used against foreigners, but it has happened before, Mr Akarachai said.

The army filed the complaint against Mr Chambers for “defamation, contempt or malice” towards the royal family, “importing false computer data” in a way “likely to damage national security or cause public panic”, and disseminating computer data “that may affect national security”, according to a letter from police received by the university’s social sciences faculty on Friday, his legal representation said.

The court had already issued the arrest warrant on Monday, Thai Lawyers for Human Rights Centre added.

If charges are filed against Mr Chambers next Tuesday, police could release him on bail or detain him, in which case his lawyer would apply for bail.

Police will then investigate and if they believe he did commit the offense, pass a case along to prosecutors, who will decide whether to indict him.

According to his LinkedIn page, Mr Chambers first lived and worked in Thailand 30 years ago, and has spent years since then lecturing and researching in the country, including writing books on its military.

He has not received a subpoena before, his legal representation said.

Thailand’s lese-majeste law has been in place since the creation of the country’s first criminal code in 1908, although the penalty was toughened in 1976.

The government says the law is necessary to protect the monarchy. Critics say the law is used to clamp down on free speech.

Mr Akarachai told the BBC lese-majeste has been used more since student-led pro-democracy protests, which also targeted the monarchy, swept the country in 2020.

After months of protests, Thailand revived the lese-majeste law for the first time in more than two years.

Since late 2020, Thai Lawyers for Human Rights Centre has seen more than 300 cases of lese-majeste involving more than 270 people, including 20 children under the age of 18, Mr Akarachai said.

“When people take to the streets to demand monarchy reforms, they face the risk of political prosecution. Now, when academics write or discuss about those issues in academic settings, it seems they also face the same risk of political prosecution,” he said.

Last year, a reformist political party was dissolved by court order after the court ruled the party’s campaign promise to change lese-majeste was unconstitutional.

The European Parliament called on Thailand last month to reform the law, which it said was “among the strictest in the world”, and grant amnesty to those prosecuted and imprisoned under it.

On Wednesday, Thai parliament is set to discuss the issue of amnesty bills, Mr Akarachai said.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to return a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was expelled last month along with hundreds of alleged gang members, must be returned to the US by no later than Monday, US District Judge Paula Xinis ordered.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said in a recent court filing that deporting Mr Garcia was an “administrative error”. An immigration judge granted him legal protection from deportation in 2019.

The White House has alleged Mr Garcia is an MS-13 gang member, but his lawyers argued there is no evidence to prove that he is gang-affiliated.

Mr Garcia is one of the 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans whom the Trump administration deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (Cecot), alleging they were gang members.

But Mr Garcia’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, says his client has never been charged with a crime in any country and rejected the gang accusation.

“This was the equivalent of a forcible expulsion,” Mr Sandoval-Moshenberg said.

ICE officials said Mr Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error” and an “oversight”.

But the Department of Homeland Security has still argued that the court does not have jurisdiction to order Mr Garcia’s return, because he is in El Salvador’s custody.

Judge Xinis called Mr Garcia’s deportation “an illegal act” when issuing her order on Friday. She said he must be returned by Monday.

The Trump administration has stood by its deportations and criticised judges as politically motivated.

In a post on X, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller referred to Judge Xinis as a “Marxist”, who “now thinks she’s president of El Salvador”.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “We suggest the Judge contact President [Nayib] Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.”

Mr Garcia’s family, including his wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a US citizen, have been calling for his release since his deportation in mid-March.

Ms Sura has told reporters that she has not spoken to her husband since he was taken by US authorities.

Mr Garcia’s lawyer said the claims by the Trump administration that his client could not be returned were “outrageous”.

“They’re coming before this court and saying, ‘We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of options,'” Mr Sandoval-Moshenberg told Judge Xinis.

Department of Justice attorney Erez Reuveni, who represented the government in court on Friday, acknowledged there were issues with Mr Garcia’s deportation. He said he was ”frustrated” by the lack of answers he was able to provide.

The government lawyer conceded that Mr Garcia “should not have been removed”, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

“There is no warrant for his arrest. There is no statement of probable cause,” Judge Xinis said. “What is the actual document that got this process started?”

Mr Reuveni said he did “not have that order. It is not on the record”.

The justice department lawyer noted that, in his view, “the government made a choice here to produce no evidence”, adding that this “absence of evidence speaks for itself”.

The case has drawn criticism from Democrats, who have accused the Trump immigration authorities of flouting due process.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, wrote on X this week: “They’ve admitted to making an error and I urge them to correct it.”

But Vice-President JD Vance said this week that Democrats who criticised the Trump administration’s deportations have “gone off the deep end, and they’ve got to come back to reality”.

Nintendo says it will no longer open pre-orders for the Switch 2 in the United States next week, following the introduction of steep tariffs on exports from Japan.

The firm unveiled the much-anticipated console on Wednesday, the same day US President Donald Trump announced his sweeping new global tariffs.

It said then that US pre-orders would open in a matter of days, but it has been now been forced to revise its plans.

“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the US will not start April 9 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” it said in a statement.

It says it still intends to launch the console on June 5, as originally planned.

Nintendo confirmed the announcement applies to the US market only, so UK pre-orders will not be affected.

Tariffs are taxes charged on goods imported from other countries.

Japan, where the gaming company is based, has been hit with a 24% tariff – a cost which the firm must swallow or pass onto consumers.

Trump says that his global tariffs will boost the US economy and protect jobs – but Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba called them a “national crisis” on Friday according to local media.

“The government will do its utmost to respond to this crisis, involving the entire country,” he said.

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The decision may raise concerns amongst fans that Nintendo could be considering a change in prices in the US.

The cost of the console’s games has already emerged as an area of concern.

On Wednesday, it revealed the Switch 2 would cost $449.99 in the US, with a physical copy of its big game Mario Kart World coming in at $79.99 – though it can be purchased for less if bought with the console.

It is not known whether Nintendo factored potential tariffs into its original pricing – though, even if it did, it is unlikely it would have expected the rate to be as high as the 24% announced by Trump.

Val Kilmer is joking around in his trailer on the set of Top Gun, pretending to bark demands into a packet of More cigarettes as if it’s a phone and he’s talking to the studio boss.

“He wants more! More sex! More drugs! More wine! More tobacco! More headaches! More ulcers! More herpes! More women! And less of Tom Cruise!”

Co-stars Rick Rossovich and Barry Tubb, also on a break from playing the film’s elite fighter pilots, are in the trailer too, cracking up with laughter.

Rossovich, aka Kilmer’s on-screen partner Slider, is apparently the person who wants “more”. Wearing shades but no shirt, he proceeds to pretend to throw a chair at Kilmer’s head, before jumping out of the trailer into the sunshine and dancing off.

Kilmer took his video camera everywhere to film behind the scenes, and picked these snapshots of the carefree tomfoolery on the Top Gun set in 1985 as the opening shots for a 2021 documentary about his life.

“He had the first video camera I’d ever seen,” recalls Tubb, who played Wolfman. “They got so tired of telling him to turn it off on the set of Top Gun that they finally just let it go.

“We had a fun time with it because we tried to catch everyone on the toilet with the video camera. That was our goofing around. So there’s video somewhere of everyone with the door open on the toilet. We were goofballs.”

He adds: “Cruise never hung out with us. It was all of us, except for Cruise. He was method acting as the loner, and we were all at this beach hotel, riding motorcycles down hallways and things.”

And Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, “unlike some producers, threw parties every other night”, he says. “And so it was definitely in the air.”

Tubb is one of many former co-stars who have been fondly remembering Kilmer’s acting and his antics, following his death at the age of 65.

“He was the coolest cat I’ve ever met,” Tubb tells BBC News. “Not only did he have great acting chops, but he was funny as hell.”

Top Gun was a breakthrough for Kilmer, who played Iceman, the rival to Cruise’s hotshot Maverick at the US Navy’s academy for elite fighter pilots.

On screen, saving the USA from Soviet MiG jets was serious business. Off screen, filming in California and Nevada, things were less serious.

“As Sean Penn once said, working in Hollywood is like being in high school with money,” Tubb says.

“I was 22 years old, and I was the younger of the bunch.

“We had a deal that if one of us wanted to go to Mexico, all of us had to go. And Val had his van from high school, so we would all pile into Val’s van and go over to Mexico for dinner.

“We were young and bulletproof.”

Tubb whispered one of the film’s famous lines when the class watched a video of aerial dogfights: “This gives me a hard-on.”

That came about after he played a practical joke by switching the real tape in the academy’s VHS player for a pornographic video.

“[Director] Tony Scott heard me say that and he said, ‘Keep that in’. We were doing things like that. We were cutting up and having fun the whole time.”

Kilmer originally didn’t want to appear in the film, saying he throught the script was silly and he disliked its warmongering.

To the audition, he “wore oversize gonky Australian shorts in nausea green” in an attempt to put the producers off, he wrote in his autobiography.

“I read the lines indifferently. And yet, amazingly, I was told I had the part.”

The script contained “very little” substance to Iceman’s character, he said in his documentary.

“So I attempted to make him real. I manifested a backstory for him, where he had a father who ignored him, and as a result, was driven by the need to be perfect in every way. This obsession with perfection is what made him so arrogant.”

He added that he would “purposely play up the rivalry between Tom’s character and mine off screen” as well as on.

“What ended up happening is the actors, in true method fashion, split into two distinct camps.

“You had Maverick and Goose on one side, and Slider, Hollywood, Wolfman and me, Iceman, on the other.

“It was fun to play up the conflict between our characters, but in reality I’ve always thought of Tom as a friend, and we’ve always supported each other.”

By the time a sequel was finally shot in 2018 and 2019, Kilmer had suffered from throat cancer. He had a tracheotomy operation, affecting his voice and making it difficult to speak.

But Cruise was the one who insisted Iceman should return. The pair shared a highly emotional scene as Kilmer’s character, now an admiral, typed out part of his side of the conversation on a screen, before sharing a hug.

“Cruise couldn’t have been cooler,” Kilmer said. “Tom and I took up where we left off. The reunion felt great.”

Many of the cast had remained friends after the original film, Tubb says, and Rossovich’s home in the Hollywood Hills became the “Top Gun club house”.

“I remember going to Rick’s house and they were painting Rick’s kitchen, and Val got up on top of the refrigerator and did 20 minutes of Hamlet. Never missed a word.”

Kilmer was “an actors’ actor”, who raised the bar for the rest of the cast, Tubb says.

“He had a level of artistry that transcended the Hollywood norm.

“Val was a cool cat. Also, he could back it up. I remember seeing The Doors movie and I just saw Jim Morrison.

“His ability to disappear into characters was incredible. Same with Iceman.”

He adds: “Val, among his peers, was well loved. He came fully loaded.”

The love for Kilmer has shone through in the tributes from his fellow actors.

Kelly McGillis, who played Cruise’s love interest Charlie and starred with Kilmer in 1999’s At First Sight, told the BBC in a statement: “I need some time to process what Val has meant in my walk here on Earth.

“He was an enigmatic presence sprinkled here & there throughout my journey. A force with depth & weight which will take some time to sort out.

“There are just so many feelings at the moment.

“Gratitude being the first.”

English actor and dancer Will Kemp, who appeared alongside Kilmer in the 2004 slasher film Mindhunters, said the news of his death came as a “real shock”.

He recalls how the star had set him at ease and made him laugh with his “wicked sense of humour” when he was a nervous young actor on his first production.

“I entered into it with sort of trepidation really because I had heard all sorts of rumours about possible bad behaviour on set, and also he’s this acting legend that I’d grown up with.

“But Val was really sweet, fun, generous, but really, really unpredictable!”

His memories of his first ever big scene will forever be tied up with Kilmer.

“I have a very clear memory of the first scene that I shot that was in a helicopter, and we’re flying around with [director] Renny Harlin shouting, ‘why are we not shooting?’

“We’re halfway through take one, and Val – totally unscripted – somehow pulls out a cheeseburger and was just casually munching on it.

“He turns over to me and goes, ‘hey, is everybody having fun?’

“It just blew my mind.”

Kemp, also known for his portrayal of the Swan in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, admitted Kilmer’s acting methods on set sometimes appeared to be “crazy” while at other times there were “moments of absolute genius”.

He added: “He created so many iconic characters and was a real enigmatic movie star.”

Russell Brand has been charged with rape, indecent assault and sexual assault between 1999 and 2005.

The charges relate to four separate women.

Brand has been interviewed multiple times by police since an investigation by the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches in September 2023 revealed multiple serious allegations against him.

In a new video posted on X this afternoon, Brand said: “What I never was, was a rapist. I’ve never engaged in non-consensual activity.”

He added: “I’m now going to have the opportunity to defend these charges in court and I’m incredibly grateful for that.”

In a short statement, the Metropolitan Police said it had written to Brand to inform him that he was being charged with one allegation of rape, one allegation of indecent assault, one of oral rape and two further counts of sexual assault.

The force said it is alleged that:

• In 1999 a woman was raped in the Bournemouth area.
• In 2001 a woman was indecently assaulted in the Westminster area of London.
• In 2004 a woman was orally raped and sexually assaulted in the Westminster area of London.
• Between 2004 and 2005, a woman was sexually assaulted in the Westminster area of London.

Brand has been told to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 2 May, but he is believed to be in the United States.

In these situations, where a suspect may be overseas, prosecutors seek to agree the defendant’s return. If there is no co-operation from a suspect, authorities then consider seeking extradition.

In February a civil case for “personal injury” and “sexual abuse” was lodged against Brand at the High Court in London by an anonymous woman, referred to in court documents as AGX.

Jaswant Narwal of the Crown Prosecution Service said: “We have today authorised the Metropolitan Police to charge Russell Brand with a number of sexual offences.

“We carefully reviewed the evidence after a police investigation into allegations made following the broadcast of a Channel 4 documentary in September 2023.

“We have concluded that Russell Brand should be charged with offences including rape, sexual assault and indecent assault. These relate to reported non-recent offences between 1999 and 2005, involving four women.

“The Crown Prosecution Service reminds everyone that criminal proceedings are active, and the defendant has the right to a fair trial. It is extremely important that there be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice these proceedings.”

The Metropolitan Police’s detective superintendent Andy Furphy, who is leading the investigation, said: “The women who have made reports continue to receive support from specially trained officers.

“The Met’s investigation remains open and detectives ask anyone who has been affected by this case, or anyone who has any information, to come forward and speak with police. A dedicated team of investigators is available via email at CIT@met.police.uk.

“Support is also available by contacting the independent charity, Rape Crisis at 24/7 Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Line.”

Brand, who was born in Essex, rose to fame as a stand-up comedian, performing at the Hackney Empire in 2000 and later the Edinburgh Fringe.

He later moved into broadcasting, hosting national television and radio programmes.

The turning point in his career came in the mid-2000s, when he hosted Big Brother’s Big Mouth, a companion show to the hugely popular reality series Big Brother.

It provided the springboard he was looking for and led to him becoming one of the most sought-after presenters in the UK.

Brand went on to host the NME, MTV and Brit awards ceremonies, had his own debate series by E4, and fronted the UK leg of charity concert Live Earth.

But he was never far away from controversy, particularly at awards ceremonies – which provided the kind of live, anything-can-happen chaos where he was most at home.

His career included hosting radio shows on the BBC, in particular for 6 Music and Radio 2, between 2006 and 2008.

But inappropriate phone calls he made to the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs during a show in 2008 prompted a huge scandal – and ultimately led to his dismissal.

He rebounded with a Hollywood career, starring in films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him To The Greek.

Recent years have seen him take a new direction – particularly since the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

Brand grew his following on YouTube as he discussed scepticism surrounding the disease.

He has developed a cult following for his views on politics and society, through videos which challenge the mainstream reporting of a range of subjects and often amplify conspiracy theories. He has also established himself as a wellness guru.

A Nigerian man has told the BBC how he managed to survive an attack on his hunting party that left 16 of his companions dead, and shocked the nation.

The group of young men, mostly in their 20s, was travelling in the back of a truck when they were stopped by vigilantes.

“They asked us to alight from the vehicle and without saying much, one of them hit our leader on the shoulder with an axe,” Abubakar Shehu, 20, told BBC Pidgin.

“Then they started beating us. I was able to dodge a couple of punches and tackles and ran as far as I could.

“I fell into a ditch, got up and was able to hide in an unused property for many hours before coming out around 10pm,” he said.

While hiding, he could hear the shouts and cries of his friends as they were being beaten and then burnt to death.

“I could hear all the noise from what has happening and I was scared for my life. Thankfully no-one saw me,” Mr Shehu said.

He then returned to the road, where he was able to stop a truck and the driver picked him up and took him to safety.

Last week’s gruesome attack on the group from northern Nigeria heightened tensions across the country. They had spent several weeks travelling in the south hunting wild animals to sell, and were going home to celebrate Eid.

Amnesty International and other rights groups have called on the authorities to make sure justice is served.

President Bola Tinubu also condemned the killings, saying that Nigerians had the right to move freely anywhere in the country. He ordered security agencies to find the killers, adding that “jungle justice” had no place in the country.

Police say they have arrested 14 people in relation to the case and many across the country will be closely following to see how the case pans out.

Relations between northern and southern Nigerians are fraught following years of clashes between northern animal herders and southern farmers over access to water and grazing land, which have left thousands dead.

Along with the lack of security across Nigeria, this is one of the reasons why residents of Uromi town in Edo state, and many others, have set up vigilante groups.

The hunters from the northern Kano state were armed with traditional rifles but they say they showed licences for these weapons when they were stopped by the vigilantes.

For the family of the victims in Toronkawa village, the cries and mourning continue more than a week after the horrific incident.

Adama Ali, the mother of one of the victims, is devastated. “I kept calling his phone but no-one was picking up,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Earlier this week, Edo state governor Monday Okpebholo visited his Kano counterpart to try and ease tensions. He also paid his condolences to the victims’ families and promised them compensation.

Having lost so many of its young men, the village is still in mourning as everyone knows the victims. Their families houses are full of guests paying their condolences.

The chairman of the villages’ hunters association, Mustapha Usman, said nothing would please them more than seeing justice served.

Mr Shehu agrees.

“I thank God for sparing my life and bringing me back home and I pray for those that lost their lives,” he said.

A landmine-detecting rat in Cambodia has set a new world record to become the first rodent to uncover more than 100 mines and other deadly war remnants.

Ronin, an African giant pouched rat, has uncovered 109 landmines and 15 items of unexploded ordnance since 2021, charity Apopo, which trains the animals, said in a statement.

Cambodia remains littered with millions of unexploded munitions following about 20 years of civil war that ended in 1998.

The Guinness Book of World Records said that Ronin’s “crucial work” is making a real difference to people who have had to live with the “fear that one misstep while going about their day-to-day lives could be their last.”

Apopo, which is based in Tanzania, currently has 104 rodent recruits, or HeroRATS, as the non-profit likes to call them.

The rats are trained to sniff out chemicals that are found in landmines and other weapons abandoned on battlefields. Because of their small size, the rats are not heavy enough to detonate the mines.

The rats can check an area the size of a tennis court in about 30 minutes, the charity says, whereas a human with a metal detector might take four days to clear the same land.

They can also detect tuberculosis, an infectious disease that commonly affects the lungs, far quicker than it would be found in a lab using conventional microscopy, Apopo says.

Ronin’s impressive work in Cambodia’s northern Preah Vihear province has surpassed the previous record held Magawa, a rat who sniffed out 71 mines and was presented with a gold medal for his heroism in 2020.

Since Apopo’s work began 25 years ago, the organisation has cleared 169,713 landmines and other explosives worldwide – more than 52,000 have been in Cambodia. The charity also works in other countries affected by war, including Ukraine, South Sudan and Azerbaijan.

There are still an estimated four to six million landmines and other exploded munitions buried in Cambodia, according to the Landmine Monitor.

Prince Andrew’s involvement with an alleged Chinese spy came at a time his chief aide and other royals believed his reputation was “irrecoverable”.

Previously secret documents detail how ex-advisor Dominic Hampshire saw Yang Tengbo as Andrew’s “only light at the end of the tunnel” after his Newsnight interview in 2019.

The documents also reveal details of Andrew’s “communication channel” with China’s President Xi Jinping – including sending an annual birthday letter – and how MI5 intervened to warn against Andrew having contact with the alleged spy.

The documents were disclosed after the BBC and other media outlets pushed for them to be released by the courts.

Mr Yang has denied all wrongdoing.

Newly released papers include Mr Hampshire’s full witness statement, which he wrote in support of Mr Yang and sought to keep private.

It sheds new light on links between the royal and alleged spy, who became a close advisor on Andrew’s business ventures. The document also reveals:

• Mr Hampshire believed there were “leaks everywhere at all sorts of levels” in the Royal Household that made it difficult to keep Andrew’s plans private
• Andrew’s activities were discussed at two meetings between King Charles, the duke and Mr Hampshire – for which Andrew was smuggled into Windsor Castle to avoid press attention
• There was tension among aides advising Andrew, which led to his private secretary being excluded from some meetings regarding the duke’s business plans

Mr Hampshire’s statement details how Andrew believed that, with the help of Mr Yang, he could salvage a prominent public position by pursuing business opportunities in China – even though, as his aide acknowledged, ties to Beijing are “not a good look anywhere or for anyone”.

Andrew had a “communication channel” with the Chinese president, the document reveals, which Mr Hampshire said was largely used to promote his Pitch@Palace start-up business initiative in China.

He said that because of “cultural differences”, Mr Yang helped him draft letters to Xi, including in relation to plans for the Eurasia Fund, an investment vehicle which Andrew was seeking to raise money for.

In a separate document released on Friday, Mr Yang confirmed he personally pitched the fund to Xi and the wider Chinese government.

Mr Hampshire said in his witness statement that there was “nothing to hide” in the exchanges between Andrew and Xi – and they were full of “top-level nothingness”, such as birthday wishes.

Mr Hampshire said the late Queen Elizabeth II knew about the contacts with China and they were “perhaps even encouraged”.

• Who is alleged Chinese spy linked to Prince Andrew?

He described Andrew as a “valuable communication point with China” – though the document reveals that Mr Hampshire thought “China would prefer a different royal”.

After the papers were released on Friday, Buckingham Palace emphasised the King had no connection with Mr Yang.

The alleged spy was not “mentioned at any time or in any way” in meetings with Andrew, the Palace said, and there was no approval given for any business relationships with him.

These latest revelations show how much Andrew had become an isolated figure after his disastrous 2019 BBC Newsnight interview – as well as the palace intrigue surrounding his attempts to recover his position.

The fallout from the interview led the prince to withdraw from public duties and led to the end of Pitch@Palace events in the UK and China, a scheme widely seen as one of Andrew’s more successful ventures.

Mr Yang had lived in the UK since 2002 and became a trusted confidant to Andrew in the wake of the interview.

Commenting on the mood in the Palace after the interview, which saw him questioned over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Mr Hampshire said it was “clear” the duke’s “reputation was irrecoverable”.

The documents show how as Andrew’s public status fell, Mr Yang’s role as a potential bridge to business opportunities in China grew in its importance.

Separately, Mr Hampshire also reflected on his worries about people trying to ingratiate themselves with Andrew “in order to make excessive money out the Duke or their association with him”.

In December, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) said Mr Yang had formed an “unusual degree of trust” with Andrew.

It found Mr Yang had not disclosed his links to an arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which is involved in clandestine “political interference”.

That term is used for suspected Chinese state agents who use their position to secretly influence key decision-makers in the British state, including politicians, academics and business leaders.

These agents aim to subtly and slowly make key figures amenable to the aims of the CCP in a long-term operation often referred to as “elite capture”.

It was previously revealed Mr Hampshire credited Mr Yang with salvaging Andrew’s reputation in China.

US President Donald Trump has granted TikTok a second 75-day extension to comply with a law that requires the hugely popular video app to either sell its US operation or face a ban in the country.

“We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark’,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal.” The platform is currently owned by Chinese company ByteDance.

Trump’s first extension was granted after he took office in January and was set to expire on Saturday.

The social media platform, which says it has more than 170 million users in the US, must close in the US under a law passed by Congress – unless a buyer is found.

In a statement on Friday, ByteDance said it had been in discussion with the Trump administration, but “an agreement has not been executed”.

“There are key matters to be resolved. Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law,” a spokesperson said.

Former US President Joe Biden’s administration had argued that TikTok could be used by China as a tool for spying and political manipulation.

Congress passed a bipartisan law last year that gave ByteDance six months to sell its controlling stake in TikTok or see the app blocked in the US.

Opponents of a ban have cited freedom of speech as a reason for keeping the platform open.

The new extension comes as the Trump administration tries to broker a deal to bring the social media platform under American ownership, and keep the popular app running in the US.

“The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Friday.

• Who might buy TikTok as ban deadline looms? Amazon joins bidders

A TikTok deal was reportedly nearly finalised on Wednesday, but fell apart after Trump on the same day announced sweeping global tariffs, including on China.

ByteDance representatives contacted the White House to inform them China would no longer approve the deal unless negotiations on the tariffs could take place, a source familiar with the deal told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The unnamed source said the plan had been for Trump to sign an order initiating a 120-day period for closing the deal, allowing time to finish paperwork and secure financing.

The agreement had won approval from existing investors, new investors, ByteDance, and the US government, but China backed out once Trump imposed the global import taxes, CBS reports.

The Chinese embassy in Washington DC said in a statement that it “opposed practices that violate the basic principles of the market economy”.

China faces a 54% aggregate tariff on goods imported into the US, and has retaliated with 34% in counter tariffs.

Reports suggest several potential buyers for TikTok have cropped up in recent days.

Amazon has put in a last-minute offer to the White House to acquire the platform, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS, though the firm has declined comment.

Several other potential buyers include billionaire Frank McCourt, together with Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary. Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit, has said he has joined Mr McCourt’s bid.

Computing giant Microsoft, private equity giant Blackstone, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and search engine Perplexity AI are also reportedly in the running for a stake.

Trump has said his administration was in touch with four separate groups interested in a potential TikTok deal, though he has not named them.

Vice-President JD Vance is spearheading the administration’s effort to find a buyer.

The president has also suggested the US could offer a deal where China agrees to approve a TikTok sale in exchange for relief from US tariffs on Chinese imports.

“We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He added that the trade levies are “the most powerful economic tool, and every important to our national security”.

Susan was no more than puzzled when she saw the first results from her home DNA testing kit.

Now a woman in her mid 70s, she had never known much about her grandfather, and paid for the private test to see if it threw up anything unusual.

“I did notice there was a lot of Irish heritage, which as far as I knew was wrong,” she says.

“But I just pushed it aside and didn’t think any more of it. I stopped paying for my subscription and that was that.”

Except it very much wasn’t.

It took another six years for Susan – not her real name – to realise everything she knew about her family history was wrong.

She later found out that back in the 1950s, she had been swapped at birth for another baby girl in a busy NHS maternity ward.

Her case is now the second of its type uncovered by the BBC. Lawyers say they expect more to come forward driven by the boom in cheap genetic testing and ancestry websites.

A sharp, funny woman with shoulder-length white hair, Susan tells me her story from her sunny front room somewhere in southern England.

Her husband is sitting next to her, jogging her memory and chipping in from time to time.

After taking that DNA test almost a decade ago, the genealogy company entered her data into its vast family tree, allowing other users to make contact with their genetic relatives – close or distant.

Six years later she received a message out of the blue.

The stranger said that his data matched hers in a way that could only mean one thing: he must be her genetic sibling.

“That was just panic. It was every emotion I could think of, my brain was all over the place,” she says.

Susan’s first reaction was that she may have been secretly adopted. Both her parents had died some years before, so she plucked up the courage and asked her older brother.

He was sure the whole thing was a scam. His sister had always been part of his life, and he was “absolutely certain” that one of his first memories was of his mother being pregnant.

Susan though still had her suspicions. She was slightly taller than her brother and, with her striking blonde hair, had never looked like the rest of family.

Her eldest daughter did some digging and found a copy of all the births registered in the local area on the day her mother was born.

The next baby girl on the list, registered at the same NHS hospital, had the exact same surname as the man who had contacted her through the genealogy website.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. The only possible explanation was a mistake or mix-up in that maternity ward more than seven decades ago.

Until recently cases like this were unheard of in the UK, although there have been a handful of examples in other countries.

The standard practice in the NHS today is to place two bands around babies’ ankles immediately after birth and keep mother and child together through their hospital stay.

In the 1950s maternity care was very different. Babies were often separated, placed in large nursery rooms and cared for by midwives.

“The whole system was far less sophisticated back then,” says Jason Tang, from the London law firm Russell Cooke, which is representing Susan.

“It may be that staff didn’t attach a card or tag immediately, or that it simply fell off and was put back on the wrong baby or on the wrong crib.”

From the late 1940s the UK also saw a post-war baby boom putting more pressure on busy maternity services in the newly formed NHS.

This, of course, meant nothing to Susan for decades.

She grew up as part of a “normal, working class” household, met her husband and ended up working for the NHS herself in a “hands-on” clinical role.

Other than “a bit of the usual trauma” in her teenage years, she remembers her parents as a “very good, loving” couple who “did everything they could and always encouraged me”.

“In a way, I’m so glad they are not here anymore to see this,” says Susan. “If they are up there watching me, I really hope they don’t know what’s gone on.”

If home DNA tests had been available earlier, she doesn’t think she could have told them the truth “because it would have been so awful”.

“But I really don’t think that for me, anything has changed about them, they are still mum and dad,” she says.

On the other hand, her relationship with the man she has always known as her older brother has, she thinks, been strengthened by what she’s gone through.

“It’s actually brought us closer together. Now we meet up more often and I get cards sent to ‘my dear sister’,” she says.

“Both he and his wife have been absolutely fantastic, honestly I cannot praise them enough.”

She remembers receiving another “lovely letter” from a cousin at the time who told her, “Oh don’t worry, you’re still part of the family”.

As for her new blood relations, she says the situation has been more difficult.

She has met up with the man who contacted her, her biological sibling, and laughs as she remembers how similar they both looked.

“If you’d put a wig on him and a bit of makeup, it could honestly have been me,” she jokes.

She has also seen photographs of the other woman who she was swapped with at birth, and her sons.

But building a relationship with that new side of her family has not been easy.

“I know they are my biological relatives but I didn’t grow up with them so there’s not that emotional connection there,” she says.

“They closed ranks, basically, through loyalty to their sister which is admirable and I understand.”

Susan’s genetic parents died some years ago but she’s been told she looks like her biological mother.

“I’d still like to know a bit more about her – what she was like and all that – but I never will, so there you go,” she says.

“But if I take the emotion out of it, and just think logically and clearly, I was better off how I grew up.”

Susan is one of the first to ever receive compensation – the amount is not being disclosed – in a case like this.

She needed to take a second DNA test before the NHS trust involved accepted its historic mistake and made a “very lovely” apology.

Last year, the BBC reported on another decades-old case of babies swapped at birth, which again came to light after someone was given a DNA testing kit for Christmas.

Susan says the settlement was never about money but the recognition a mistake had been made all those years ago.

“I suppose you always want someone to blame, don’t you?” she asks.

“But I know this will be with me for the rest of my life. I just wanted a conclusion.”

On a quick drive around the small Ohio town of Delta, you can spot nearly as many Trump flags as American stars-and-stripes banners.

And at the petrol station near the Ohio Turnpike, the pumps bear relics of the last administration, with slogans slamming Trump’s predecessor: “Whoever voted for Biden owes me gas money!”

This is Trump country – the Republican ticket easily won here in November’s presidential election by a margin of almost two-to-one. And while the markets are in turmoil following Trump’s unveiling of expansive global tariffs this week, plenty of people in Delta and hundreds of Midwestern towns like it still back the president’s plans.

Those plans, to impose tariffs of between 10% and 50% on almost every country, have upended global trade and led to warnings that prices could soon rise for American consumers. Trump, meanwhile, has said the move will address unfair trade imbalances, boost US industry and raise revenue.

For some in Delta, the president’s argument about fairness resonates.

“I don’t want people in other countries to suffer, I really don’t,” said Mary Miller, manager of the Delta Candy Emporium, which sits in the middle of the village’s Main Street. “But we need to have an even playing field.”

Miller, a three-time Trump voter, believes other countries haven’t played fair on trade. And like many here, she prefers to buy American-made goods.

As she watches over her stock of multi-coloured confectionaries, many of them made in the US, and weighs up how they might be impacted by fresh import taxes, she recalls how decades ago she heard that one of her favourite brands was moving its factories abroad. She hasn’t bought another pair of Levi’s jeans since.

Miller is unfazed by the possibility of price increases, which many economists say these new tariffs will bring.

“Sometimes you have to walk through fire to get to the other side,” she said.

“If tariffs bring companies and business back to hard-working American people like the ones who live here, then it’s worth it.”

• Full list: See all Trump tariffs by country
• Watch: Why Trump’s tariffs aren’t really reciprocal
• Reaction: Americans react to the president’s trade policy
• Explainer: What are tariffs, and why is Trump using them?
• Prices: Americans could pay more for these everyday basics

These sentiments are common in Delta, a village of around 3,300 people less than 100 miles (160km) south of Detroit, even as other Midwestern towns brace for sharp shocks.

The automotive industry, with its complicated global supply chains, seems particularly vulnerable to the impact of major new tariffs, with companies in Michigan to the north and Indiana to the west already announcing factory shutdowns and job cuts.

But on the outskirts of Delta, there is a cluster of steel businesses that have been here since the 1990s and which may be better placed in a new era of American protectionism.

One of these businesses, North Star BlueScope, has urged Trump to expand tariffs on steel and aluminium.

At the same time, however, it has asked for an exemption for the raw materials it needs, such as scrap metal.

North Star BlueScope did not respond to interview requests, but in a back room at the nearby Barn Restaurant, a few local steelworkers who had just finished the night shift were drinking beers together early on Friday morning.

The workers, who asked not to be named, mostly laughed and shrugged when asked about the sweeping new tariffs that were announced by Trump at the White House on Wednesday.

It was a pretty clear indication that this economic news is unlikely to ruin their weekend.

Outside the restaurant, some Delta locals considered the possible upsides of these import taxes.

“Nobody’s frantic. We’re not going to lose any sleep over it,” said Gene Burkholder, who has a decades-long career in the agriculture industry.

Although he owns some stocks, Mr Burkholder said they were long-term investments and he was not obsessing over the sharp drops in the two days following the president’s announcement.

“If you have some spare cash, maybe it’s a good time to buy some shares while they’re cheap,” he said.

A couple of booths over, as she finished eating breakfast with her son Rob, Louise Gilson said – quietly – that she did not really trust the president.

But Gilson, along with many people here, said she wanted to see action. She wholeheartedly agreed when another diner commented: “Trump may be wrong, but at least he’s trying.”

“The other people wouldn’t have done squat,” she said, referring to the Democratic Party.

The Gilsons agreed that the big local industrial employers have generally been good neighbours, contributing to the local economy, charities and the wider community, even as they have seen some less desirable effects of industrial development and worry about unequal sharing of the economic pie.

And as they recounted Delta’s history, they described a gradual erosion in quality of life that they believe has made many people willing to roll the dice even when economists say Trump’s tariff plan comes with stark risks.

“It was a good little town to grow up in,” Rob Gilson recalled. But he said it now seemed less safe and friendly than when he was growing up in the 60s and 70s.

“It seems like the heart of America is gone,” he said.

Delta, Louise Gilson added, “is the kind of place where 25% or 30% of the people are struggling with their demons”.

And while these issues have little to do with tariffs, the challenges faced by people in towns like Delta may go some way to explaining why many are willing to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt, even as markets plunge on faraway Wall Street.

As stock markets continue to tumble after the US imposition of sweeping and swingeing tariffs, many are asking does this qualify as a stock market “crash” and what that could mean for them.

The word crash has been used sparingly over the decades and is usually reserved for a fall of over 20% from a recent peak in a day, or over the course of a couple of days.

On 19 October, 1987 – also known as Black Monday – the US stock market lost 23% of its value in a single day, and other stock markets had similar falls. The UK FTSE index fell 23% over two days – partly because it closes earlier than New York, and so it often plays catch up with whatever happens in the US the next morning.

That was most definitely a crash.

In 1929, the US stock market lost over 20% of its value in two days – and 50% within three weeks. That was the famous Wall Street Crash that ushered in the great depression of the 1930s.

By comparison, the US stock market has lost around 17% of its value from its peak in February and is now down 2% from where it was this time last year.

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Nevertheless, these are the biggest and quickest declines we have seen in world markets since they were gripped by the panic of Covid-19 in early 2020.

A decline of 20% from a peak is considered a “bear market” – a description of a market that appears to be more likely to go down than go up. We are very close to that description right now.

While many people own stocks and shares directly, most people’s exposure to stock markets come through their pension plans. There are two types – defined benefit schemes which guarantee a fixed pension income, and defined contribution where your pension pot rises and falls with financial markets.

That may sound like defined contribution plans are very vulnerable to this sell off – but not all of your contributions go into shares. Much of the money goes into safer investments such as government bonds. These tend to increase in value when stock markets fall as they are seen as a “safe haven” along with other assets such as gold.

That is exactly what has happened here.

Government bonds have risen in value and that can offset some or all of the fall in shares depending on how your pension savings are allocated.

The closer to retirement you are, the higher percentage of your pension pot is likely to be invested in bonds – so the less affected you will be.

There have been many falls like this in the decades since the Wall Street Crash but in the long term, shares have turned out to be a good investment – and pension savings is a long term game.

It does matter. A company’s share value is a measure of how profitable those companies are expected to be in the future. A plummeting market is an indication that most people think that most companies are likely to see their profits fall.

The markets believe that US President Donald Trump’s tariff bombshell is expected to raise prices, lower demand and reduce profits, making companies less valuable and more inclined to cut investment and jobs.

So the real warning sign here is not about the value of your pension but about the health of the economy in which we live and work.

Falls like this sometimes, often even, herald an economic downturn. That is more of a worry than the value of your pension, which has seen and will see volatility like this over the years.

But that’s not to say this is not a very big moment for the world economy.

After hours of heated debate, India’s parliament has passed a controversial bill that seeks to change how properties worth billions of dollars donated by Muslims over centuries are governed.

The upper house passed the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024 early on Friday, a day after the lower house cleared it amid strong opposition criticism.

Muslim leaders and opposition parties say the bill is “unconstitutional” and infringes on the rights of India’s Muslim-minority community.

But the government says the bill aims to make the management of waqf (Muslim properties) more transparent.

The bill will now be sent to India’s president for her assent before it becomes law. This approval is expected to come soon.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the passing of the bill a “watershed moment”.

In a post on X, he said the waqf system [the system of governing waqf or Muslim properties] had been “synonymous with a lack of transparency and accountability” for decades.

“The legislation passed by parliament will boost transparency and also safeguard people’s rights,” he wrote.

However, the opposition has been vociferous in their condemnation of the bill and allege that it is another ploy by the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to dilute the rights of minorities.

Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge noted that while 288 members voted in favour of the bill in the lower house, a significant 232 opposed it.

“From this, we can guess that despite opposition from various parties, this bill was brought arbitrarily,” he wrote on X.

Legal website LiveLaw reported on Friday that lawmaker Asaduddin Owaisi, president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen party and a fierce critic of the bill, had challenged it in the Supreme Court.

In Islamic tradition, a waqf is a charitable or religious donation made by Muslims for the benefit of the community. Such properties cannot be sold or used for any other purpose.

They are important to India’s 200 million Muslims as they are used for mosques, madrassas, graveyards and orphanages.

The properties are governed by the Waqf Act, 1995, which mandated the formation of state-level boards to manage them.

These boards include nominees from the state government, Muslim lawmakers, members of the state bar council, Islamic scholars and managers of waqf properties.

Last August, the BJP government introduced a bill to amend the Waqf Act.

The government said the changes proposed by the bill would modernise waqf administration and reduce legal loopholes. But Muslim leaders and opposition parties alleged that the amendments would give the government more control over these properties.

The bill was sent to a panel for scrutiny. In February, the panel cleared the bill with some amendments.

For one, the new bill proposes changes to how a waqf property is determined.

Historically, many properties that were donated through oral declarations or community customs have been legitimised as waqf properties because of their continuous use by the Muslim community.

Under the new bill, Waqf boards must provide valid documents to claim a property as waqf. In case of disputes – particularly over land deemed government-owned -the final decision will rest with the government.

Secondly, the bill proposes allowing non-Muslims to be appointed on waqf boards and tribunals.

The bill also allows for judicial intervention in disputes – replacing the earlier system where decisions by waqf tribunals were considered final.

The bill also proposes a centralised registration system, requiring all waqf properties to be registered within six months of the law coming into effect.

Requests for new registrations of waqf properties also need to be submitted to waqf boards via this system.

The bill also has provisions that give the government a greater role in surveying of waqf properties.

India is a cricket-crazy nation, and it seems the AI chatbot ChatGPT hasn’t missed that fact.

So, when its founder Sam Altman fed it the prompt: “Sam Altman as a cricket player in anime style”, the bot seems to have immediately generated an image of Altman wielding a bat in a bright blue India jersey.

Altman shared his anime cricketer avatar on X on Thursday, sending Indian social media users into a tizzy.

Though the tech billionaire had shared AI-generated images before – joining last week’s viral Studio Ghibli trend – it was the India jersey that got people talking.

While some Indian users said they were delighted to see Altman sporting their team’s colours, many were quick to speculate about his motives behind sharing the image.

“Sam trying hard to attract Indian customers,” one user said.

“Now awaiting your India announcement. How much are you allocating out of that $40bn to India,” another user asked, alluding to the record funding recently secured by Altman for his firm, OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT.

Yet another user put into words a pattern he seemed to have spotted in Altman’s recent social media posts – and a question that seems to be on many Indian users’ minds.

“Over the past few days, you’ve been praising India and Indian customers a lot. How did this sudden love for India come about? It feels like there’s some deep strategy going on behind the scenes,” he wrote on X.

While the comment may sound a bit conspiratorial, there’s some truth to at least part of it.

Just hours before Altman shared his image in the cricket jersey, he’d shared a post on X praising India’s adoption of AI technology. He said it was “amazing to watch” and that it was “outpacing the world”.

This post too went viral in India, while the media wrote numerous stories documenting users’ reactions to it.

Someone even started a Reddit thread which quite comically aired the Redditor’s curiosity, and perhaps, confusion.

“Can someone tell me what Sam Altman is talking about here in his tweet?” the person posted on Reddit sharing Altman’s post.

A few days earlier, Altman had retweeted Studio Ghibli-style images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi which were shared by the federal government’s citizen engagement platform.

All these posts of Altman have generated a fair amount of comments questioning his motives.

The scepticism around Altman’s perceived courting of India could be because of his past views on the country’s AI capabilities.

During a visit in 2023, he had sounded almost dismissive of small Indian start-ups making AI tools that could compete with OpenAI’s creations.

Asked at a event how a small, smart team with a low budget of about $10m could build substantial AI foundational models, he answered that it would be “totally hopeless” to attempt this but that entrepreneurs should try anyway.

But when Altman visited India again this year, he had changed his tune.

In a meeting with federal minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in February, Altman expressed an eagerness to collaborate with India on making low-cost AI models.

He also praised India for its swift pace of adopting AI technologies and revealed that the country was OpenAI’s second-largest market, with users tripling over the past year.

The praise comes even as his company is locked in a legal battle with some of India’s biggest news media companies over the alleged unauthorised use of their content.

Experts say that Altman’s seemingly newfound affinity for India might have to do with the country’s profitability as a market.

According to the International Trade Administration, the AI market in India is projected to reach $8bn by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 40% from 2020 to 2025.

Nikhil Pahwa, founder-editor of MediaNama.com, a technology policy website, says that when it comes to founders of AI companies making “grand statements” about India, it has much to do with the country’s massive user base. He adds that Altman isn’t the only CEO wooing India.

In January, Aravind Srinivas, founder of Perplexity, an AI search engine, also expressed an eagerness to work with Indian AI start-ups.

Mr Srinivas said in a post on X that he was ready to invest $1m and five hours of his time per week to “make India great again in the context of AI”.

Technology writer Prasanto K Roy believes that the Ghibli-trend revealed India’s massive userbase for ChatGPT and, potentially, other AI platforms as well. And with competitor AI models like Gemini and Grok quickly gaining Indian users, Altman may be keen to retain existing users of his firm’s services and also acquire new ones, he says.

“India is a very large client base for all global AI foundational models and with ChatGPT being challenged by the much cheaper DeepSeek AI, Altman is likely eager to acquire more Indian customers and keep Indian developers positively aligned towards building on top of OpenAI’s services,” Mr Pahwa says.

“So when it comes to these grand overtures towards India, there’s no real love; it’s just business,” he adds.

Mobile phone footage has emerged that appears to contradict Israel’s account of why soldiers opened fire on a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck on March 23, killing 15 rescue workers.

The video was published by the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), which said it was obtained from the phone of a paramedic who was killed. It shows the vehicles moving in darkness with headlights and emergency flashing lights switched on – before coming under fire.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initial statement said “several uncoordinated vehicles were identified advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals. IDF troops then opened fire at the suspected vehicles.”

A surviving paramedic previously told the BBC that the ambulances were clearly marked and had their internal and external lights on.

The IDF has been approached for comment about the video, which the PRCS said had been shown to the UN Security Council.

First published by the New York Times, the video shows the marked vehicles drawing to a halt on the edge of the road, lights still flashing, and at least two emergency workers stepping out wearing reflective clothing.

The windscreen of the vehicle being filmed from is cracked and shooting can then be heard lasting for several minutes as the person filming says prayers. He is understood to be one of the dead paramedics.

The footage was found on his phone after his body was recovered from a shallow grave one week after the incident. The bodies of the eight paramedics, six Gaza Civil Defence workers and one UN employee were found buried in sand, along with their wrecked vehicles. It took international organisations days to negotiate safe access to the site.

Israel claimed a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants had been killed in the incident, but it has not provided any evidence or further explained the threat to its troops.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar earlier this week echoed the army account, saying “the IDF did not randomly attack an ambulance”.

The IDF promised to investigate the circumstances after a surviving paramedic questioned its account.

In an interview with the BBC, paramedic Munther Abed said: “During day and at night, it’s the same thing. External and internal lights are on. Everything tells you it’s an ambulance vehicle that belongs to the Palestinian Red Crescent. All lights were on until the vehicle came under direct fire.”

He also denied he or his team had any militant connections.

“All crews are civilian. We don’t belong to any militant group. Our main duty is to offer ambulance services and save people’s lives. No more, no less,” he said.

Speaking at the United Nations yesterday the President of the PRCS, Dr Younis Al-Khatib, referred to the video recording, saying: “I heard the voice of one of those team members who was killed. His last words before being shot…’forgive me mum, I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’. It’s heartbreaking”.

He called for “accountability” and “an “independent and thorough investigation” of what he called an “atrocious crime”.

One paramedic is still unaccounted for following the 23 March incident.

Donald Trump, in announcing his sweeping new tariffs on US imports on Wednesday, promised that the history books would record 2 April as America’s “liberation day”.

After two days of stock market turmoil, however, this may also be remembered as the week the president’s second-term agenda ran headfirst into economic – and political – reality.

US stocks have been in a tailspin since Trump unveiled his tariffs at Wednesday afternoon’s White House Rose Garden event, with signs that America’s trading partners – Canada, the European Union and China, most notably – are not backing away from a fight.

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Meanwhile, other presidential efforts, on foreign policy and immigration, and at the ballot box – have faced notable setbacks in recent days.

The White House on Thursday felt a bit like a building battening down for a coming storm. The four big posters showing America’s “reciprocal” tariffs on a long list of countries were on prominent display in the press briefing room, but administration officials available to respond to media questions were few and far between.

Out on Pennsylvania Avenue, workers unloaded pallets of metal fencing, which will ring the White House grounds in preparation for what officials anticipate to be a large anti-Trump demonstration at the nearby Washington Monument on Saturday. The first lady announced that a White House garden tour event that had been scheduled for that day was postponed because of security concerns.

Even the normally loquacious president stopped only briefly to talk with the crush of reporters on his way to board the Marine One helicopter on the first leg of his journey to Florida.

“I said this would be exactly the way it is,” he declared when asked about the day’s stock market turmoil. The markets – and America as a whole – would soon boom, he said.

The president, it seems, is willing to wait out the tempest created by his tariff plan. He appears confident that his economic vision of a rebuilt, job-rich American manufacturing sector protected from foreign competition – a vision he has closely held for decades – will ultimately be proven right.

• Worst week for US stocks since Covid crash as China hits back on tariffs
• At a glance: What Trump’s new tariffs mean for the EU, China and others
• Explainer: What are tariffs and why is Trump using them?
• Analysis: How worried should we be about markets turmoil?

The Trump agenda’s close encounter with cold, hard reality wasn’t limited to trade this week, however.

His two top foreign policy priorities – ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine – both appear mired in the kind of messy details and conflicting agendas that often obstruct lasting peace.

Israel has once again moved into Gaza and escalated a bombing campaign that is generating reports of widespread civilian casualties. The ceasefire that Trump touted in the days before he took office appears to be in tatters.

Russia, meanwhile, continues to pile new conditions on to negotiations for a full ceasefire with Ukraine, which is an indication that the nation may be buying time to allow its ground forces to take more territory.

“If I think they’re tapping us along, I will not be happy about it,” Trump said of Russia. But he added that he still believes President Vladimir Putin wants to “make a deal”.

Evidence so far indicates the contrary, according to Jake Sullivan, who was President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

In an interview with the BBC, he accused Trump of handing Russia most of its demands, though he acknowledged it was still early in the process and things could yet change.

“So the current dynamic in these negotiations a) is not in fact producing Russian willingness to reach a fair and just compromise, but b) is actually stimulating a view in Moscow that if they just keep holding out, they’re just going to keep getting concessions from the United States. And so far that is what has happened.”

Even Trump’s deportation and immigration enforcement efforts, which still have high public support, have been at least partially derailed by legal challenges.

While his administration has successfully completed several flights transferring alleged Tren de Aragua Venezuelan gang members to an El Salvadoran high-security prison, the judge presiding over a case challenging those deportations said on Thursday there was a “fair likelihood” officials had violated his court order to turn the flights around.

Other court challenges – to Trump’s suspension of political asylum processing and refugee resettlement, his attempt to end birthright citizenship and his revocation of temporary protected status for about 350,000 Venezuelans – are currently working their way through the US legal system.

At some point, the US Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on many of these disputes.

This week also marked the biggest round of elections since Trump’s November 2024 victory, as voters headed to the polls in Wisconsin to elect a state judge and in two Florida special elections for seats in the House of Representatives.

While the Republican candidates in Florida prevailed, their winning margins were about 15%, which is about half of what Trump posted in those congressional districts in November.

In Wisconsin, a key political battleground state, the Democratic-backed candidate won. Democrats were able to maintain the liberal majority on the court despite the tens of millions of dollars spent by conservative groups, including by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who campaigned there in person.

Taken as a whole the results suggest that Democrats are doing well in hotly contested races and may be making inroads even in reliably conservative areas – in part by campaigning against Musk and his efforts to massively cut federal programmes and staff.

That could be an indication that the party will have the political wind at their backs in state elections this November and the midterm congressional elections next year.

The stock market tumult, and those ballot-box results, may be behind a few scattered signs of dissent within Republican ranks.

Ted Cruz, an arch-conservative senator from Texas, said on his podcast on Friday that Trump’s tariffs “could hurt jobs and could hurt America” – particularly if other nations retaliate, as China has already done.

“If we’re in a scenario 30 days from now, 60 days from now, 90 days from now, with massive American tariffs, and massive tariffs on American goods in every other country on Earth, that is a terrible outcome,” he continued.

On Wednesday night in the US Senate, four Republicans joined with Democrats to support rescinding the emergency declaration that justifies Trump’s earlier Canada tariffs.

And on Thursday, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa joined with Democrat Maria Cantwell of Washington to back a measure that would require Congress to directly approve tariffs that stay in effect longer than 60 days.

Republicans by and large have been sticking with the president. They seem unwilling, or unable, to sway Trump from his current course on tariffs and government cuts and appear fearful of the political consequences of breaking with the man who has a vice-like grip on the party.

But if the current economic shock becomes a long-term hardship, and if government programme cuts translate into tangible disruptions in popular services or if Trump’s standing in opinion polls continues to sag, members of his own party may begin eyeing the exit signs for the first time in years.

And that would bring an unceremonious end to some of Trump’s most ambitious efforts.

Trump, no longer worried about standing before voters, may feel liberated from the immediate political consequences of his actions – but reality has a way of asserting itself in the end.

Russell Brand has been charged with rape, indecent assault and sexual assault between 1999 and 2005.

The charges relate to four separate women.

Brand has been interviewed multiple times by police since an investigation by the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches in September 2023 revealed multiple serious allegations against him.

In a new video posted on X this afternoon, Brand said: “What I never was, was a rapist. I’ve never engaged in non-consensual activity.”

He added: “I’m now going to have the opportunity to defend these charges in court and I’m incredibly grateful for that.”

In a short statement, the Metropolitan Police said it had written to Brand to inform him that he was being charged with one allegation of rape, one allegation of indecent assault, one of oral rape and two further counts of sexual assault.

The force said it is alleged that:

• In 1999 a woman was raped in the Bournemouth area.
• In 2001 a woman was indecently assaulted in the Westminster area of London.
• In 2004 a woman was orally raped and sexually assaulted in the Westminster area of London.
• Between 2004 and 2005, a woman was sexually assaulted in the Westminster area of London.

Brand has been told to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 2 May, but he is believed to be in the United States.

In these situations, where a suspect may be overseas, prosecutors seek to agree the defendant’s return. If there is no co-operation from a suspect, authorities then consider seeking extradition.

In February a civil case for “personal injury” and “sexual abuse” was lodged against Brand at the High Court in London by an anonymous woman, referred to in court documents as AGX.

Jaswant Narwal of the Crown Prosecution Service said: “We have today authorised the Metropolitan Police to charge Russell Brand with a number of sexual offences.

“We carefully reviewed the evidence after a police investigation into allegations made following the broadcast of a Channel 4 documentary in September 2023.

“We have concluded that Russell Brand should be charged with offences including rape, sexual assault and indecent assault. These relate to reported non-recent offences between 1999 and 2005, involving four women.

“The Crown Prosecution Service reminds everyone that criminal proceedings are active, and the defendant has the right to a fair trial. It is extremely important that there be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice these proceedings.”

The Metropolitan Police’s detective superintendent Andy Furphy, who is leading the investigation, said: “The women who have made reports continue to receive support from specially trained officers.

“The Met’s investigation remains open and detectives ask anyone who has been affected by this case, or anyone who has any information, to come forward and speak with police. A dedicated team of investigators is available via email at CIT@met.police.uk.

“Support is also available by contacting the independent charity, Rape Crisis at 24/7 Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Line.”

Brand, who was born in Essex, rose to fame as a stand-up comedian, performing at the Hackney Empire in 2000 and later the Edinburgh Fringe.

He later moved into broadcasting, hosting national television and radio programmes.

The turning point in his career came in the mid-2000s, when he hosted Big Brother’s Big Mouth, a companion show to the hugely popular reality series Big Brother.

It provided the springboard he was looking for and led to him becoming one of the most sought-after presenters in the UK.

Brand went on to host the NME, MTV and Brit awards ceremonies, had his own debate series by E4, and fronted the UK leg of charity concert Live Earth.

But he was never far away from controversy, particularly at awards ceremonies – which provided the kind of live, anything-can-happen chaos where he was most at home.

His career included hosting radio shows on the BBC, in particular for 6 Music and Radio 2, between 2006 and 2008.

But inappropriate phone calls he made to the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs during a show in 2008 prompted a huge scandal – and ultimately led to his dismissal.

He rebounded with a Hollywood career, starring in films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him To The Greek.

Recent years have seen him take a new direction – particularly since the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

Brand grew his following on YouTube as he discussed scepticism surrounding the disease.

He has developed a cult following for his views on politics and society, through videos which challenge the mainstream reporting of a range of subjects and often amplify conspiracy theories. He has also established himself as a wellness guru.

Rural North Yorkshire is having its Hollywood moment.

The latest production to be filmed in the region is a new adaptation of the classic novel Wuthering Heights, which has just finished shooting in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

It stars Australian actress Margot Robbie, who recently took the lead role in Barbie, and will play Cathy alongside Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff.

Emily Bronte’s novel was written in 1847 and set in the rugged Yorkshire moors.

The locations chosen for the new film included Arkengarthdale, Swaledale and the village of Low Row. Robbie, 35, stayed at the hotel Simonstone Hall, near Hawes, with other cast members.

She was also photographed in a white wedding gown surrounded by film crew for a scene believed to be her marriage to Heathcliff’s rival, Edgar Linton.

Fashion bible Vogue has criticised her dress as being historically inaccurate, as the style was only popularised by Queen Victoria 40 years after the story is set.

The hotel is a “historic country lodge” where presenter Jeremy Clarkson famously got into a fight with a Top Gear producer in 2015.

A staff member said Robbie was “very lovely” and even enjoyed a Sunday roast and afternoon tea there with her husband and new baby.

The employee told the BBC: “It was a very positive stay for over a week and they enjoying the restaurant and and eating in the bar with her co-stars and production crew too.

“The weekend was great fun, where she met lots of other guests and visitors and she introduced her baby to the resident pigs and peacocks here.”

The film crew’s base camp was near Holiday Home Yorkshire in Reeth, whose owner said it was “very exciting” seeing the trailers in the tiny village.

One local holiday let owner said he saw Robbie driving a tractor with her co-star – although the agricultural vehicles were not invented until the late 19th Century.

He said: “There were four tractors, old-fashioned open-to-the-elements style and they were being escorted by two Range Rovers.”

Another Dales resident said he had seen filming at Surrender Bridge, which is close to an old lead smelting mill. The landmark also featured in the opening scene of the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small in the 1980s and is on the Coast to Coast path route.

Crew members also stayed at the Charles Bathurst Inn, in Arkengarthdale, and were described as “very friendly”.

The film, directed by Emerald Fennell, is due for release in February 2026.

There are hopes that it will lead to an upsurge in interest in the Bronte sisters and their work.

The director of the Bronte Parsonage Museum, a literary museum located at the former Bronte family home in Haworth, West Yorkshire, said: “Every screen or theatre adaptation brings something fresh for contemporary audiences to think about.

“It is a testimony of Emily’s legacy that her writing continues to inspire creatives today and we look forward to seeing what Emerald Fennell’s adaptation adds to the mix.”

Haworth Parsonage is where Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights and lived with her sisters Charlotte and Anne, and it was gifted to the Bronte Society in 1928.

It has the largest collection of Brontë items in the world.

Director Rebecca Yorke added: “We’re also delighted that some filming has taken place at nearby locations and hope that this will attract new visitors to the area and to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.”

There have been at least 10 film and television adaptations of Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte’s only novel.

One of the most well-known was the 1939 version starring Merle Oberon as Cathy and Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Other high-profile actors who have played Heathcliff over the years include Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy and Richard Burton.

Meanwhile, North Yorkshire was also the filming location for a Christmas film starring Rebel Wilson and Kiefer Sutherland.

Tinsel Town will be released in December 2025 and was shot in Knaresborough.

Wilson, 45, said at the time she “loved” the area and had been practising her Yorkshire accent.

In 2021, Tom Cruise surprised locals of Pickering when he touched down in a helicopter to shoot scenes for Mission: Impossible at a heritage railway.

The owner of a local B&B said in a Facebook post they had been walking the dog when they “bumped into” the Hollywood megastar.

Blanca Castro puts on a builder’s helmet before opening the door to her kitchen. Inside it, the ceiling has a large hole that is dripping water and it looks as if it could collapse at any moment.

Because the kitchen is unusable, Blanca has to wash her dishes in the bathtub, and she has improvised a cooking area with a gas camping stove in a corner of her living room.

Many of her fellow tenants in this apartment block near Madrid’s Atocha railway station have similar problems. They say the company that owns the building has stopped responding to requests for basic maintenance in recent months, since informing them that it will not renew their rental contracts.

“The current rental bubble is encouraging a lot of big owners to do what they are doing here,” says Blanca. “Which is to get rid of the current tenants who have been here a long time, in order to have short-term tourist flats, or simply to hike up the rent.”

Blanca and her fellow tenants have vowed to stay in the building despite what they see as efforts to push them out by the owners, who were not available for comment for this article.

The tenancy contracts last five years, during which time rent is fixed, but this area of central Madrid has seen housing costs soar in recent years.

“For another home like this [in this area], I’d have to pay double or more what I’m paying now,” says Blanca. “It’s not viable.”

She and her neighbours are among millions of Spaniards who are suffering the consequences of a housing crisis caused by spiralling rental costs.

While salaries have increased by around 20% over the past decade, the average rental in Spain has doubled during the same period. There has been an 11% increase over the last year alone, according to figures provided by property portal Idealista, and housing has become Spaniards’ biggest worry.

It’s also generating anger, with Spaniards taking to the streets to demand action from the authorities to make housing more affordable. On Saturday, 5 April thousands of people are expected to protest in Madrid and dozens of other cities.

A report by Spain’s central bank found that nearly 40% of families who rent now spend more than 40% of their income on their accommodation.

“The current problem is a huge imbalance between supply and demand,” says Juan Villén, of Idealista. “Demand is very good, the economy is growing a lot, but supply is dwindling very fast.”

Mr Villén offers the example of Barcelona, where rental increases have become notorious. Whereas nine families were competing to rent each property in the city five years ago, that number has risen to 54. Rental costs during that time have increased by 60%, he adds.

“We need to build more properties,” says Mr Villén. “And on the rental side we need more people willing to rent their properties, or willing to buy properties, refurbish them and put them on the rental market.”

The central government has described the situation as “a social emergency” and agrees that a lack of supply is driving the crisis. Last year, the Housing Ministry estimated that the country needs between 600,000 and one million new homes over the next four years in order to meet demand.

This need for more housing has been pushed up in part by the arrival of immigrants who have joined the workforce and are helping drive Spain’s economic growth. The ministry also pointed to a lack of social housing, which at 3.4% of total supply, is among the lowest in Europe.

In 2007, at the height of a property-ownership bubble, more than 600,000 homes were built in Spain. But high building costs, lack of available land and a shortage of manpower have all been factors in restricting construction in recent years, with just under 100,000 homes completed in 2024.

The government has taken measures to incentivise construction, apportioning land for the building of affordable homes, while trying to ensure that public housing does not end up in the private market, which has been a problem in the past.

But the Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has also expressed a willingness to intervene in the market in order to bring rental prices under control.

At a recent event to mark the opening of 218 low-rent flats in the southern city of Seville, he declared that Spaniards “want us to act, they want the housing market to operate according to the law of reason, of social justice, not the law of the jungle; they want to ensure that vulture funds and speculators are not doing whatever they like”.

The central government and a number of local administrations have identified short-term tourist accommodation as part of the problem. Last year, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands and several cities on the mainland saw protests by locals against surging tourist numbers, with their impact on rental costs the main complaint.

Several city halls have responded by announcing plans to restrict the granting of tourist-flat permits, while Barcelona is going further, revoking the licences of all of the city’s 10,000 or so registered short-term apartments by 2028.

The Sánchez government has also pushed through parliament a housing law, which includes a cap on rentals in so-called “high-tension” areas where prices are climbing out of control. Political resistance has meant that the legislation is so far only being implemented in the northern regions of the Basque Country, Navarre and Catalonia, and its success is open to debate.

The Socialist-led regional and central governments have pointed to a 3.7% drop in rental costs in “high-tension” areas of Catalonia since the cap’s introduction there a year ago, with Barcelona seeing a decrease of 6.4%.

However, critics warn that the rental cap has spooked owners and caused thousands of properties to be withdrawn from the market.

“On the supply side, the problem is that all measures taken by the local or national governments are going against landlords,” says Mr Villén. “Even people that were doing build-to-rent new properties have been selling their properties because they don’t want to get into the rental market.”

Another initiative proposed by the central government which has stirred up debate is a tax of up to 100% on properties bought by non-residents from outside the EU, on the grounds that such homes are often barely inhabited. This is a measure that, if rolled out, would heavily affect British buyers.

The conservative opposition has accused the government of being too heavy-handed with its approach. However, as public anger builds over this issue, there are many others who would like the country’s leaders to act much more stridently.

Gonzalo Álvarez, of the Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos, an organisation that campaigns for tenants’ rights, agrees that a shortage of available homes is a problem, but insists that building more is not the answer.

“There is a lack of housing because homes are being hijacked – on the one hand tourist flats, and on the other hand all the empty flats belonging to vulture funds and the banks,” he says. “So there’s no need to build more, it’s not necessary. But the housing we have has been hijacked.”

His organisation wants the government to impose drastic mandatory reductions in rent on owners and is threatening to orchestrate a nationwide strike by tenants that would see participants refuse to pay their rent.

“The [central and local] governments are not setting any limits,” says Mr Álvarez. “So who is going to? We will have to do it.”