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.

The son of a British couple who were detained by the Taliban nine weeks ago is calling on the US to help secure their release from an Afghan prison.

Peter Reynolds, 79, and wife Barbie, 75, were arrested on 1 February while returning to their home in the central Bamiyan province.

Their son Jonathan called on the White House to intervene after Faye Hall, an American who was detained alongside them, was released last week by the Taliban, which returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021.

He told BBC News the detention of his parents – who have lived in Afghanistan for 18 years and ran education projects – had been “harrowing and exhausting” for their family.

Mr Reynolds said: “Anybody who has the ability to unlock that key and let them out, whether it be the Taliban, whether it be the British government or whether it be the American government, I would ask – do it now, please.

“And if you have the ability to put the pressure on the people who hold that key, do it now, please.”

Ms Hall became the fourth US citizen to be released by the Taliban since January after talks between officials in Kabul – in what the group described as a “goodwill gesture” towards the Trump administration.

That prompted Mr Reynolds to appeal to US President Donald Trump directly to aid in Peter and Barbie’s release, in a video taken outside the White House earlier this week.

Mr Reynolds, a US citizen, told BBC News that his parents had not been formally accused of any crime.

He said: “They’ve been in and out of court, which is infuriating for them because there’s no charges and they are told every single time: yes, they are innocent, it’s just a formality, we’ve made a mistake.”

An Afghan interpreter was also arrested alongside the British couple.

Mr Reynolds said his parents had sought to work with the Taliban and had “been open” about their work in the country.

He said he believes his mother received “the only certificate for a woman to actually teach and train even men”, despite women typically being banned from employment under Taliban rule.

“They deeply love the country,” he added.

The couple married in Kabul in 1970 and later became Afghan citizens. They are being held separately in prison and Peter’s health has deteriorated while detained, Mr Reynolds said.

He said he had been able to speak to his parents via a prison payphone and described the conversations as “excruciatingly painful”.

He continued: “Just to think of your parents, elderly parents and grandparents to my kids – and they’ve got great-grandkids even – and wondering if we’re going to see them again.

“We want to see our parents again, to hug them and hold them.”

Mr Reynolds said securing his parents release was “complex” as they wish to remain in Afghanistan and continue their education work.

He said: “They want to be released from prison because they’ve done nothing wrong, but they want to be released so they can carry on doing the work they’re doing – which just speaks to the character and the stamina and the vision and conviction that they have.”

He said the UK government had been “very supportive” and discussions with he US State Department had been “encouraging”.

A Taliban official told the BBC in February that the group planned to release the couple “as soon as possible”.

The UK shut its embassy in Kabul after the Taliban returned to power. The Foreign Office said this means its ability to help UK nationals in Afghanistan is “extremely limited”.

The Fab Four came together on stage this week for an all-star Beatles announcement that left some of the internet swooning.

No, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr aren’t reuniting through AI for a joint album with Taylor Swift.

Instead, the 60s rock ‘n’ roll icons will be played by four leading heartthrobs of the moment: Paul Mescal (McCartney), Harris Dickinson (Lennon), Joseph Quinn (Harrison) and Barry Keoghan (Starr), in a big-screen quadrilogy directed by Sir Sam Mendes – all set for release in 2028.

Each actor fits the mould of “the internet’s boyfriends” – a term defined by Glamour magazine as “a famous or semi-famous male person whom your entire Twitter feed has a crush on at the same time”.

When Sir Sam walked out on stage with his “band” at Las Vegas’ CinemaCon on Tuesday, the message was clear.

If 1960s Beatlemania was defined by teenage girls fainting and screaming, the plan now is arguably to get Gen Z – in internet parlance – “screaming, crying, throwing up” from behind their phone screens in excitement.

“Each star brings their own brand of modern-day hysteria,” says the Evening Standard’s celebrity reporter Lisa McLoughlin, “the kind fuelled by social media virality and fan video edits”.

This is particularly true of Mescal, whose “popularity mirrors a smidge the frenzy the Beatles once sparked”.

After shooting to fame in 2020’s BBC adaptation of Normal People, the Irishman scored an Oscar nomination as a tormented father in Aftersun, before finding blockbuster status in Gladiator II – rising from indie heartbreaker to Hollywood heartthrob.

Similar is true of fellow Irishman Keoghan. Also Oscar-nominated for Banshees of Inisherin, he embraced rugged sex symbol status in last year’s cult hit Saltburn.

Dickinson and Quinn are earlier in their trajectory, but still burning bright – the former recently starring alongside Nicole Kidman in erotic thriller Babygirl and the latter turning heads in Netflix’s Stranger Things.

McLoughlin describes the casting as “logical and predictable” – a strategic move as the band look to secure their legacy with a new generation, while studios grapple with the ambition of luring streaming era, post-Covid, audiences back to the cinema not once, but four times in close proximity.

The timing and scope of the project sums up the Beatles’ unique heritage as the best-selling band of all-time – the catalyst for shifting youth culture and the boundaries of pop.

It’s been 56 years since all four members last recorded together. Lennon was shot dead just over a decade later at 40, while Harrison died of cancer in 2001, aged 58. The two surviving Beatles, Sir Paul and Sir Ringo, are now into their 80s.

And yet, as the band’s only official biographer Hunter Davies told Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday: “The strange thing about the Beatles is that the longer we get from them, the bigger they become”.

Recent years have seen Sir Paul seemingly work to bookend the Beatles’ music – becoming Glastonbury’s oldest ever headliner at 80, before driving the 2023 release of Now and Then, a “final” Beatles track rebuilt from Lennon’s demo vocals. It became the band’s 18th UK number one single, over five decades from their last, and won a Grammy.

The forthcoming biopics appear to be a way of continuing this on the big screen.

Four years on from Peter Jackson’s sprawling Get Back docuseries, this is the first time that all four band members and their estates have granted full life story and music rights for a scripted film.

The casting reflects the distinct identities and histories of the members, each offering something different to lovelorn girls and copycat boys so intoxicated by Beatlemania.

McLoughlin feels the choices “make commercial sense” as the perfect foil for an audience now two generations removed from the original Beatlemania.

“They all have dedicated younger fan bases (many of whom may not be regular cinema-goers or deeply connected to the Beatles), acting credibility and experience leading or co-leading major productions”.

Each film will focus on an individual member of the band. “They intersect in different ways – sometimes overlapping, sometimes not,” Sir Sam explained.

“They’re four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply.”

The Barbenheimer phenomenon of summer 2023 highlighted the increasing influence online audience reactions hold on cultural currency.

It also turbocharged Hollywood’s acceptance of “event cinema” as a way to lure younger audiences. A generation that Warner Bros Discovery’s executive director Vera Chien previously told Forbes, already see the streaming-social media relationship as the norm.

Sir Sam’s four-film schedule plays into this. It’s aimed at creating what Sony executive Tom Rothman described as “the first bingeable theatrical experience”.

“Frankly, we need big cinematic events to get people out of the house,” Sir Sam said.

Films can now develop distinct digital identities through audience projection, as seen by the viral success of Saltburn.

The makers of the Beatles biopics are arguably betting on its cast of “internet boyfriends” pulling younger audiences – without the same nostalgic attachment to the Beatles – engaged on social media and, executives hope, looking up from phone screen to big screen.

The extent to which musical performances will feature is unknown.

But the Beatle biopics could capitalise on the booming money-spinning genre that’s found awards success over the past decade. .

It’s also proven fertile heartthrob ground, with the Beatles cast following Jacob Elordi and Austin Butler’s turns as Elvis, alongside Timothee Chalamet’s Oscar-nominated take as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.

Still, there are risks, says Dade Hayes, business writer at Deadline and co-author of Binge Times.

He says that whilst he commends Rothman’s “clever handle” and the cinephile in him values the biopics’ “bold statement about the value of cinemas and communal viewing,” market realities present cautionary signs.

First, the UK box office is yet to fully bounce back from the pandemic, whilst US takings are more than 20% below pre-Covid levels. “If people aren’t dying to return at regular intervals to cinemas,” says Hayes, “then you are holding an expensive set of assets that are hard to monetise”.

And a multi-release strategy relies on the “fuse being lit with the first instalment”, Hayes says.

He points to Kevin Costner’s Horizon films, originally envisioned as a multi-part theatrical franchise, only to flounder once the first instalment tanked, as an example of the dangers.

For McLoughlin, the three-year gap between the casting announcement and 2028 release date adds further risk, especially in the fast-moving online space where fanbases can shift.

But beyond industry dynamics there’s also a cast talking point much closer to home.

The Beatles biopics, celebrating four Scouse lads who conquered the world and put Liverpool on the map, will not feature any local talent in the lead roles.

As one Liverpudlian put it in a TikTok video liked over 200,000 times: “I love Mescal as much as the next gal but [the lack of representation] is breaking my heart”.

McLoughlin agrees, pointing out that James Corden last week urged the TV industry to be “bolder” and back ideas that “might scare you a little.” She feels film studios should do the same.

“The Beatles themselves were unknown until they weren’t,” she says. “This could have been a chance for a newcomer to have their own Beatles moment – rising from obscurity in real-time”.

And perhaps the biggest missed opportunity of all McLoughlin adds, is the failure to put Liverpudlian actors front and centre in a Beatles biopic. “The band is Liverpool’s greatest cultural export, yet the city’s deep talent pool was completely overlooked,” she adds.

Social media, meanwhile, is already awash with doubt over Keoghan’s ability to deliver a consistent Scouse accent, questioning his attempts in Saltburn.

Still, as Hunter Davies put it, the Beatles have long been more than just a local band. They keep growing.

Way back in 1966, Lennon infamously described them as bigger than Jesus. Over five decades on, the studio behind the four films – and perhaps cinema in general – is no doubt banking on a Beatlemania revival.

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

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initially denied the vehicles had their headlights or emergency signals on.

But in response to the new video, the IDF told the BBC: “All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation”.

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

The latest video, which the PRCS said had been shown to the UN Security Council, 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.

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.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has fired one of his deputies for taking a “lavish” trip to Antarctica with his wife during Nowruz, the Persian new year.

The president’s office described Shahram Dabiri’s trip as “unjustifiable and unacceptable given the ongoing economic challenges” in Iran.

A picture of Dabiri and his wife posing in front of MV Plancius, which was bound for Antarctica, circulated widely on social media and caused outrage in Iran.

In a statement on Saturday, Pezeshkian said Dabari had been removed as vice president of parliamentary affairs for “indefensible” actions, regardless of whether they were financed from his own pocket.

“In a government that seeks to follow the values of the first Shia Imam (Imam Ali), and amid significant economic pressures on our people, the lavish travels of government officials, even when personally financed, are indefensible,” Pezeshkian said.

Iran’s economy is under significant strain, and subject to Western sanctions due in part to its support of groups including Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been proscribed terrorist organisations by the US, UK and the EU.

Iran’s unemployment rate as of October 2024 was 8.4%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), while its annual inflation rate was 29.5%.

Pezeshkian said Dabiri’s actions “starkly contradict the principle of simplicity that is paramount for those in positions of authority”.

The Antarctica expedition on the MV Plancius reportedly has a starting cost equivalent to $6,685 (£5,187).

Usually, visits to the coldest and least populated continent in the world are carried out by scientists and seasoned explorers.

However, tourism voyages on cruises have surged in popularity in recent years. The Dutch vessel pictured in the picture of Dabiri, for example, was used by the Royal Netherlands Navy for military and civilian research between 1976 and 2004.

It is not clear what expedition package Dabiri chose or what mode of transport he took from Iran to Antarctica.

On one of the many package deals available online, explorers need to embark and disembark from Ushuaia, one of the southernmost points of Argentina. The town is about 3,079km (1,913 miles) from Buenos Aires, the Argentinian capital.

The Iranian president was elected last year with a promise to revive the economy and improve Iranians’ daily lives. He replaced Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash.

Iranian media reported that many of Pezeshkian’s supporters urged him to remove Dabiri from post as the public grew disgruntled over the trip.

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 protested 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.”

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”.

Sir Elton John has said he can’t see his sons playing rugby after an infection last summer left him struggling with his eyesight.

“I can’t see TV, I can’t read. I can’t see my boys playing rugby and soccer,” the 78-year-old superstar told The Times.

“It has been a very stressful time because I’m used to soaking it all up. It’s distressing,” he added.

In September, the singer wrote on Instagram that a “severe” infection had left him with “only limited vision” in one eye, adding that his recovery would “take time”.

• Elton John left with ‘limited vision’ in one eye
• Elton John on red carpet after vision issues
• Elton John album on hold because he ‘can’t see’

Sir Elton and his filmmaker husband David Furnish have two sons, Zachary and Elijah.

The songwriter said he “can’t see the telly”, adding: “I haven’t been able to see anything since last July.”

He admitted he does get “emotional” about his sight loss.

“But you have to get used to it, because I’m lucky to have the life I have. I still have my wonderful family, and I can still see something out of here,” he said, pointing at his left eye.

“So you say to yourself, just get on with it.”

Sir Elton previously said he’d been unable to finish his new album due to his eyesight issues.

In November, he said “it’s been a while since I’ve done anything”.

But on Friday, he released his new collaborative album with US musician Brandi Carlile, Who Believes In Angels?

The pair worked with producer Andrew Watt and his long-term songwriting partner Bernie Taupin on the album.

Sir Elton said that they “didn’t all agree”, adding that he became “frustrated” when they stood up to him.

He said: “If I want to make a great album aged 76 or 77 I’ve got to be told and they put up with my little foibles, which were really about anxiety, self-doubt and not feeling very well at the time.

“I was tired so I thought, I’m going to abandon this.

“The problem was three other people were involved and I knew that if I walked away from it I would hate myself for the rest of my life.”

He added that it is not the first time he has had doubts about his music.

“You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have fear and doubt. It’s good for artists. Every album I’ve done, good, bad or indifferent, I’ve had doubts about,” he said.

“And the most doubts I’ve ever had have been with this one.”

The album has mostly been praised by critics. Writing in the Guardian, Lisa Wright awarded it four stars, praising its “poignant moments”, while The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick gave it five stars, calling it a “glorious return to his bombastic, melodious 1970s pomp”.

In January, Sir Elton’s career-spanning greatest hits collection, Diamonds, reached number one after 374 weeks on the charts.

Featuring signature songs like Tiny Dancer, I’m Still Standing and Rocket Man, the 51-track collection has gave the star his ninth number one album.

Last year, Sir Elton also won his first Emmy Award which finally gave him EGOT status, meaning he joined an exclusive club of performers who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has dismissed accusations that Washington was left unable to help in the Myanmar earthquake due to the Donald Trump administration’s shuttering of its humanitarian aid agency.

Asked by the BBC why the US had not meaningfully responded, as it routinely has to past such disasters, Rubio said “we are not the government of the world”.

Earlier this week, former officials at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) said the US was left unable to send rescuers and dogs due to the agency’s dismantling.

Rubio said the US had to balance global humanitarian rescue work with “other needs” and “other priorities” that were in the US national interests.

“There’s a lot of other rich countries in the world, they should all be pitching in.

“We’re going to do our part. We already have people there. We’ll have more people there. We’ll help as much as we can [but] it’s not the easiest place to work… they have a military junta that doesn’t like us,” Rubio said.

On Tuesday, a former USAID official told the BBC the shuttering of the agency, led by the billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk, meant the White House could not send teams from the US to save lives in the immediate aftermath of the 28 March magnitude 7.7 earthquake.

The confirmed death toll rose to 3,354 on 4 April, Myanmar’s ruling military said. The number of injured stood at 4,508, while 220 were still missing.

Routinely in such earthquakes, the US can deploy up to 200 rescue workers and sniffer dogs along with specialist equipment, and is often the biggest and best equipment foreign response team on the ground.

Last week, the state department said a US team of three advisers based in the region was being sent to disaster zone.

Speaking to reporters at a Nato meeting in Brussels, Rubio blamed the military regime in Myanmar for the lack of access, even though the state department said earlier this week the country had made a formal request for assistance.

Former USAID officials say their work is seen as non-political, and they have previously accessed countries regarded as politically hostile.

“That would have impeded our response, no matter what,” said Rubio.

“That said, we are willing to continue to help in the humanitarian crisis. Other countries need to do so as well. China is a very rich country. India is a rich country. There are a lot of other countries in the world, and everyone should pitch in.”

China and India were among the first to have teams on the ground in Myanmar, according to former American humanitarian officials.

Rubio dismissed the accounts of humanitarian aid experts who said the inability to deploy a large US rescue team was due to the USAID cuts.

“These are people that make millions and hundreds of millions of dollars in these NGOs [non-governmental organisations] all over the world that stand up and they get flooded with the US taxpayer money, and then we have to spend 10 [or] 100 million dollars to get 10 million to people. We’re not doing that anymore. Okay? We have stopped. We are no longer going to spend 10 million, 100 million dollars to get 10 million to recipients.

“We’re not going to fund these global NGOs all over the world that are living off of this. We’re not doing it.

“We are prepared to help and work with governments and appropriate NGOs on the ground that are delivering assistance. We will be there, and we will be helpful [but] there are a lot of other rich countries, they should also pitch in and help… we are going to do our part,” Rubio added.

As news of the Myanmar earthquake emerged, the White House had reportedly tried to deploy a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) from the US – but could not do so because the Trump administration’s cuts had cancelled logistics contracts and fired officials who oversaw such deployments, according to the former officials.

The cuts to USAID had been led by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) after President Trump targeted foreign assistance on his first day in office, calling it an “industry” that was in many cases “antithetical to American values”.

• What is USAID and why is Trump poised to ‘close it down’?
• More than 80% of USAID programmes ‘officially ending’

Jaguar Land Rover has announced it will “pause” all shipments to the US as it works to “address the new trading terms” after tariffs were imposed earlier this week.

A 25% levy on car imports came into force on Thursday, one of several measures announced by US President Donald Trump which have sent shockwaves through global supply chains.

The US is the second largest export market for the UK’s car industry, after the European Union.

In a statement, a Jaguar Land Rover spokesperson said the company was “taking some short-term actions including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid to longer-term plans”.

The Coventry-based car manufacturer – which also has sites in Solihull and Wolverhampton – said the US is an “important market for JLR’s luxury brands”.

More cars are exported to the US from the UK than any other good. In a 12-month period up to the end of the third quarter of 2024, the trade was worth £8.3bn, according to the UK trade department.

An initial wave of tariffs on cars came into effect from 3 April, with import taxes on auto parts due to follow next month.

A separate 10% tariff will be imposed on all other UK imports, with higher rates in place for some other major economies.

Global stock markets have incurred heavy losses in recent days as firms grapple with how to adapt to the new trading environment.

• Trump tells US to ‘hang tough’ over tariffs
• The Trump tariffs explained

The FTSE 100 – which measures the performance of the 100 leading firms listed on the London Stock Exchange – plummeted by 4.9% on Friday, its steepest fall since the start of the pandemic.

Exchanges in Germany and France also saw similar declines.

Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK will take a calm approach to the trade tariffs and has ruled out “jumping into a trade war”.

The prime minister spoke to his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Saturday, the first of several discussions planned between Sir Keir and European leaders over the weekend.

Downing Street said Sir Keir and Macron had agreed “a trade war was in nobody’s interest” but “nothing should be off the table”.

On Thursday, the prime minister warned the global economy was “entering a new era” and said there would “clearly” be an impact on the UK.

The government is consulting on products it could impose retaliatory measures on but talks between UK and US officials continue on a possible trade deal which the British governments hopes would see tariffs relaxed.

Sir Keir is holding talks with other European leaders to discuss how to respond to the White House’s trade moves.

The Nike Air Jordan 1 is, in some ways, the iconic US trainer. It’s a popular line by a large American brand, created four decades ago for homegrown basketball legend Michael Jordan.

But although Nike sells most of its products in the US, almost all of its trainers are made in Asia – a region targeted by President Donald Trump’s tariffs salvo against foreign countries he accuses of “ripping off” Americans.

Nike’s shares fell 14% the day after the tariffs announcement, on fears over the impact they could have on the company’s supply chain.

Follow live updates

So what will all this mean for the price of Nike’s trainer?

It depends on how much of the cost increase Nike decides to pass on to customers, if any, and how long they think the tariffs will actually be in place for.

Goods from Vietnam, Indonesia and China face some of the heaviest US import taxes – between 32% to 54%.

Hopes remain that Trump might be willing to negotiate those rates lower. On Friday, he said he had had a “very productive” call with the leader of Vietnam, helping Nike shares to recover some ground after their steep Thursday falls.

But most analysts think the firm’s prices will have to go up.

Swiss bank UBS estimates that there will be a 10% to 12% increase in the prices of goods that come from Vietnam – where Nike produces half of its shoes.

Meanwhile, Indonesia and China account for almost all of the balance of its trainer production.

“Our view is that, given how extensive the list of tariffs is, the industry will realise there are few ways to mitigate the impact in the medium term other than by raising prices,” UBS analyst Jay Sole said in a note.

David Swartz, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, agrees that price rises are likely but says any large price increase would reduce demand.

“This is a very competitive industry. My guess is that it would be difficult for Nike to raise prices by much more than 10-15%. I don’t think it could offset most of the tariff,” he says.

Many other western brands such as H&M, Adidas, Gap and Lululemon will be facing the same predicament.

Nike is already facing a tight bottom line.

It had around $51bn (£39.6bn) in sales in its most recent fiscal year. The cost of making products, including shipping, third-party profits and warehouse fees, consumed only about 55% of revenue, giving it a healthy gross profit margin of more than 40%.

But that profit gets whittled away once you add in the cost of other business operations. A third of its revenue, for example, is consumed by selling and administrative expense.

By the time you factor in interest and taxes, Nike’s profit margin has shrunk to about 11%.

That is across all its products, as they don’t break down costs separately for its different items.

Rahul Cee, who set up the trainer review website Sole Review, says there are other ways Nike could keep retail prices low.

Mr Cee, who trained as a footwear designer and worked for Nike and Vans in India, says one way could be to downgrade the level of tech in the trainer.

“So instead of using high-performance midsole foams and construction, stick to injection moulded EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate),” he says.

Another option would be instead of bringing out a new design every one to two years, to refresh the design cycle every three to four years.

Simeon Siegel, managing director at BMO Capital Markets, says most companies were looking at Wednesday’s announcement as “still far from the final conclusion”.

“I don’t think that many people believe that those numbers are etched in stone just yet,” he says.

Theoretically, Nike is such a big brand that it should be able to put up prices without it hitting their sales, he says, but adds: “Do they have it right now is the question and do they have it across their product offering is another?”

Even before the announcement, Nike was facing a slump in sales that had curbed its ability to command full price for its shoes.

Finance chief Matthew Friend has also cited tariffs as an example of developments that were affecting consumer confidence.

And Nike relies heavily on US sales, with the market contributing to roughly $21.5bn of its sales – almost everything it sells in its largest market of North America.

Sentiment in the US is a “significant concern” for Nike as it directly affects demand for its footwear, says Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware.

But ultimately he says firms may be forced to pass the cost of the levies on to consumers.

“Nike is very likely to raise prices if the tariff war persists. There is no way for brands to absorb a 30% to 50% increase in sourcing costs.”

He adds: “How US trading partners react against the reciprocal tariff policy will also have a major impact.”

China has already hit back with a 34% tariff of its own.

Part of the rationale behind Trump’s tariff policy is because he wants more companies to manufacture their goods in the US.

However, Prof Lu does not see Nike, or other companies, significantly reshaping its supply chain any time soon “due to the complexity involved in footwear manufacturing”.

That includes the time needed to “consider a long list of factors when deciding where to source their products – quality, costs, speed to market and various social and environmental compliance risks”.

Matt Powers from the Powers Advisory Group says the lack of American textile mills will make it “difficult and expensive [for Nike] to pivot production back to the US”.

Mr Powers added: “This transition, if pursued, would take years and require significant investment.”

Nike did not respond to BBC requests for comment for this article.

We also contacted 30 suppliers in Asia but none responded.

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.

Follow live updates

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 had been 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.

Thursday was a “terrible” and “devastating” day for people involved in Lesotho’s textile sector as they digested the news that the country’s exports to the US would be hit by a 50% import tax, or tariff.

Teboho Kobeli, who founded Afri-Expo Textiles and employs 2,000 people in the country, could barely disguise his distress as he told the BBC about the impact of potentially losing a huge chunk of the US market because the prices of his goods will have to increase.

The small southern African nation has become the poster child for the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) – a 25-year-old piece of US legislation guaranteeing duty-free access to American consumers for certain goods from Africa.

Considered the cornerstone of US-Africa economic relations, the aim was to help industrialise the continent, create employment and lift dozens of countries out of poverty.

It was based on a philosophy of replacing aid with trade.

The act’s overall impact is debateable but it has been credited with creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, particularly in the textiles sector.

Though President Donald Trump did not mention it by name, Agoa’s status is now uncertain.

Like so much that has come out of the White House in the whirlwind first few weeks of his presidency, Wednesday’s announcement has sown confusion – especially, in this case, in Africa.

On the one hand there is Agoa, with its tariff-free arrangement, and on the other there is Trump outlining tariffs ranging from 10% (including Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana) to 31% (South Africa) and 50% (Lesotho).

Which takes precedence?

South Africa, which exports metals and cars to the US, believes this spells the end of Agoa.

“The reciprocal tariffs effectively nullify the preferences that sub-Saharan Africa countries enjoy under Agoa,” South Africa’s foreign and trade ministers said in a joint statement on Friday.

But Kenya’s Principal Secretary for Foreign Affairs Korir Sing’oei had a different take.

“It is our considered view that until the law lapses end of September 2025 or unless repealed earlier by Congress, the new tariffs imposed by President Trump will, in any event, still not be immediately applicable,” he said in a statement.

Kenya, which exports clothes to the US, has tried to put a brave face on the issue, saying that as it was not hit as hard as other textile exporters, such as Vietnam and Sri Lanka, it would still have a competitive advantage.

Whatever happens to Agoa in the immediate term, it seems that Trump’s sweeping tariffs have scuppered hopes of the legislation being renewed.

The Clinton-era law, which in the current climate is beginning to feel like a relic of a bygone time, was up for renewal later this year.

Since 2000, certain African countries had duty-free access to the US market for a raft of goods including clothing and textiles, cocoa products and wine, as well as crude oil.

The access was tied to a number of conditions including free market policies, labour and human rights and political pluralism. Thirty-two countries from sub-Saharan Africa were eligible as of last year.

In 2023, two-way trade under Agoa totalled $47.5bn (£36.4bn), with the US exporting $18.2bn billion worth of goods and imports amounting to $29.3bn.

By virtue of being among the continent’s largest economies, South Africa and Nigeria have dominated trade under the act, but Lesotho has taken full advantage and has become a significant exporters of garments to the US, supplying brands such as Walmart, GAP and Old Navy.

But a future without Agoa – for Lesotho and others – presents big challenges.

If nothing changes, “a tariff of 50% sounds like a death knell to the Agoa manufacturing in Lesotho”, says Mukhisa Kituyi, a former secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development and a former Kenyan trade minister.

In 2018, the World Bank modelled a scenario where Lesotho experienced the sudden loss of Agoa privileges and found that the impact would “reach 1% of GDP” within two years. The report concluded that impact on welfare would be “dramatic.”

But, as witnessed with the aid cuts, arguing about the human impact or fairness will not fly in the current set-up, in the face of “disruptive populism and post-fact, post-truth society”, Dr Kituyi argues.

He thinks countries, like Kenya, that have the new tariffs set at 10% could still try to hold ground in the US market, with the exporters and their American importers negotiating how to absorb the new taxes without raising prices for the consumer too much.

As Dr Kituyi was involved in trade negotiations, including Agoa, he has seen first-hand the effort that goes into “fine-tuning these processes” to create a “shared benefit from stable, predictable rules-based trading”.

But now, he reckons, such agreements are “hostage to the wishes of the dominant political group in America”.

Michelle Gavin, a senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Washington-based Council for Foreign Relations, said the way the new tariffs have been calculated “makes no sense at all” to economists.

It’s difficult to sort of see “any kind of clear strategy or intention,” from the Trump administration so far, she tells the BBC.

But the decisions will only exacerbate the loss of American influence in Africa, she warns. China, already the continent’s biggest trading partner, could take further advantage.

“It looks like a withdrawal, an ignoring of an entire huge region of the world,” Ms Gavin says.

Coming shortly after the Trump administration severely pared back the US Agency for International Development, leading to the cancelation of both humanitarian and life-saving health assistance, the analyst says America appears to be “destroying its own instruments of influence with abandon now”.

Agoa has long been viewed as an important tool of US soft power, especially in countering the growing influence of China and Russia in Africa.

There has in the past been bipartisan support for it among American legislators, and Dr Kituyi sees this as “a glimmer of hope”.

A bill seeking a renewal of Agoa until 2041 was released by Democrat Senator Chris Coons over a year ago, but it may not make any progress in the current Congress.

Ms Gavin does not believe that Agoa is now a priority given the global upheaval Trump’s drastic and unpredictable policy shifts have created.

“I think a non-reciprocal trade agreement is a very tough sell for this Congress, which is dominated by the Republican Party that has thus far been quite accommodating of the administration’s agenda.”

She believes that while it “makes good sense as a matter of policy,” it is unlikely to be front and centre of legislators’ agenda “as a matter of politics” even if Congress starts to assert itself more.

As Trump’s tariffs throw the world into turmoil, the specific needs of the continent are unlikely to be uppermost for others around the world.

If Agoa does become defunct, Africa will have to look within itself and make good on the promises of creating a continental free-trade area. It will also have to work harder to find new trading partners or expand existing markets.

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.”

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.

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.”

Ashley Cain visited dangerous places around the world – and tried to understand why some young men choose a life of crime.

“It’s absolutely devastating. People are losing their lives every single day,” says Cain about the impact of crime in some of the world’s most hostile environments.

In his new BBC series, the ex-professional footballer speaks to young men involved in criminality, from favelas in Brazil to gangs in Sweden. And he also explores other topics like rhino poaching in South Africa and illegal gold mining in Colombia.

He wanted to understand why they had chosen a life of crime, its “heartbreaking” impact on people and how some were finding a way out.

Cain recalls meeting one mother in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, whose two children had been murdered.

“It hit me deeply,” he says. “To find out how she picked her son up in nothing but a bag of bones from one of the cartels was devastating.”

The presenter, who has faced the loss of his own child, says he hoped “in that moment, just to make this lady feel comforted, feel heard and feel like she had a voice to speak about all that’s wrong in that area”.

Favelas are informal settlements and there are more than 1,000 in Rio de Janeiro.

Cain shares his shock walking into one favela and seeing people openly selling drugs or walking around with guns “like it was normal”.

“Criminality is around these guys,” he says, explaining that they get picked up off the street and promised they’re going to be looked after. “In the end, they always end up in the same place, unfortunately.”

He adds that many of the people he met were not happy. “They don’t enjoy doing what they’re doing, they’re scared, they’re worried, they’re in pain,” he says.

Cain travelled to different favelas, including to one where documentary crews had never been allowed to film.

He spoke to masked men selling drugs out in the open and carrying large weapons – they explained that teenagers as young as 13 had sometimes become involved in criminal activity in the favela.

When asked by Cain why they don’t choose other ways to make money, one man talked about the lack of jobs in the area.

However, Cain says it was “really shocking” to speak to an armed young man working for a cartel who was from a “relatively middle-class” background.

“I’m thinking, you’re risking your life every single day because of what you believe to be perceived as a good thing, as a cool thing,” he says.

Cain notes that for many in favelas it is a “reality to see and hear bullets flying every single day”.

Cain also spoke to young men looking for other options.

He remembers meeting one man running a music enterprise, trying to get young men out of gangs by providing them opportunities to DJ and “teaching them skills to allow them to live a much more prosperous and safer life”.

Cain also met a young man at a cocktail-making class from a favela who had previously been shot – but was now choosing to learn new skills.

“That shows with the right support, with initiatives and with people that are trying to make a difference in these communities, you can save lives,” he says.

The main thing Cain says he took away from speaking to these young men was to be there to listen to his sons and to “lead by example [to] be the kind of man that I would enjoy to see my sons being”.

Cain says he hopes the series encourages people to talk to their children.

“Somebody might be sitting next to their young son, who’s the same age as some of these guys here wielding weapons, and just think, ‘maybe I need to pay more attention, maybe I need to pay more time, maybe I need to listen more.'”

“When I heard about it and I saw her name, I thought ‘that’s not that woman – that’s not the same woman that we’ve lived by all these years’.”

That was how a resident of a cul-de-sac in Liverpool described the moment she learned her neighbour for more than 30 years – Joanne Sharkey – had been charged with the 1998 killing of her baby boy.

Another neighbour said when police first arrived at the family’s “immaculate” semi-detached house in July 2023, she had thought one of the lodgers they sometimes hosted must have been in trouble.

It simply did not make sense that someone like “kind, funny and normal” council worker Joanne Sharkey could have committed a crime.

But the truth was detectives had, finally, cracked a cold case that had lingered unsolved on the books of Cheshire Police for 25 years.

On Friday Sharkey was handed a two year prison term, suspended for two years, after a judge concluded her post-natal depression had impaired her judgement so severely the case “called for compassion” rather than punishment.

For Sharkey the past quarter of a century had, in her own words, been spent “waiting for that knock on the door”.

In March 1998, a man walking his dog in the Callands area of Warrington, Cheshire, spotted something wrapped in two knotted bin-bags.

Inside was the body of a newborn baby boy, weighing 7lbs 5oz.

With no immediate clue where he had come from, local people gave him the name Callum, after the Callands area where he was found.

Around 20 miles away in Croxteth, Liverpool, his mother had not told a soul – including her husband Neil Sharkey.

Not only had Sharkey hidden the birth and death of Baby Callum, but no-one had ever known she had been pregnant.

Mr Sharkey would spend the next 25 years oblivious to the fact he had fathered a second child.

Years later, it was older son Matthew, born in 1996, who inadvertently unlocked the mystery of Callum’s identity.

• Mum who killed baby in 1998 gets suspended sentence
• Depression led mum to kill baby after secret birth

In the days after Baby Callum’s discovery, tests found wads of tissue paper had been inserted into his mouth and throat, confirming it was not likely to have been an accident.

Forensic investigators found blood from the baby’s mother on the binbags and were able to extract a full DNA profile.

A list was drawn up of teenage girls who had been absent from three local schools around the time of Baby Callum’s death so their DNA could be tested.

A number of young women were even arrested after their families suggested to detectives they might be involved.

But the original investigation stalled, and the years rolled on.

In 2016, the first review of the national DNA database was ordered, resulting in a list of hundreds of names of potentially linked people.

Some attempts had been made to narrow it down by the time Det Insp Hannah Friend took on the case in 2021.

Early in the case, detectives were “thrilled” when a name caught their attention. It was someone who lived near where Callum was found and had been spoken to by the original investigation team.

But they had not given a statement or had their details recorded properly.

“We thought maybe this is somebody who slipped through the net and as it turned out it wasn’t at all,” Det Insp Friend said.

“We were all so disappointed because we thought we’d solved it.”

After two years of ruling out potential suspects from the original list, Det Insp Friend made the decision in 2023 to run a new trawl of the national DNA database.

She was confronted with a fresh list of roughly 500 names, and, in her words, a new search for “a needle in a haystack”.

But this time was different – amongst the names was Matthew Sharkey.

Initially his name was one among several interesting DNA profiles which were sent to a forensic scientist for more detailed comparison with Baby Callum.

A few months before Joanne Sharkey was arrested, Det Insp Friend got an email from that scientist with the subject heading: “Are you sitting down?”.

The email confirmed Matthew Sharkey was a direct relative of Baby Callum, with a one in 36 billion likelihood of him not being.

Det Insp Friend said: “We were able to identify a woman who we thought was the mother of Callum – and that was Joanne Sharkey.”

The investigation team were at pains to be as sure as they could be that they had the right person before moving in – as the next step was a devastating one.

“I didn’t want to be walking through that door and destroying people’s lives”, Det Insp Friend said.

Joanne Sharkey was sitting on a couch in pink pyjamas bearing the word “mum” when police went in on 28 July 2023.

Bodyworn camera footage showed her listening to the arresting officer, wide-eyed but quiet and compliant.

Gesturing towards her stunned husband, she told the arresting officer: “He doesn’t know anything about this.”

With no evidence at that stage about how Callum had died or at whose hands, both parents were arrested.

A court later heard that, unbeknown to them, they were recorded as they sat in the back of a police car on the way to the custody suite.

Sharkey said to her husband: “I’m not… going to deny nothing. It is what it is, isn’t it? I… did it.”

In hours of police interviews, Sharkey explained how in the summer of 1998 she had become pregnant for a second time.

In the grip of severe but undiagnosed post-natal depression following the birth of Matthew, she said her reaction had been “I can’t do this again”.

She told police she had been “terrified” to see news coverage about Baby Callum and think “that was me”.

“It’s haunting, something you think about every day,” she said. “You try and push it out but it creeps back in.”

Early on, she had been unsure if she was pregnant, but there were no doubts from around five months in.

She told police her husband’s long hours and shifts meant they had been “strangers in the night” and it had not been difficult to hide her growing bump by wearing baggy clothing.

In a remarkable statement later read in court by Joanne Sharkey’s barrister, Neil Sharkey himself described how he was “not the greatest husband and father” and how he “blamed himself” for what had happened.

Sharkey told police her memory was scattered with blanks about Callum’s birth – but she recalled how Neil and Matthew must have been out of the house.

She also could not recall precisely what she did to end his life, only that she felt she “just had to make him quiet”.

Medical evidence suggested Callum had likely been subjected to some form of mechanical asphyxiation.

Sharkey described driving aimlessly until she came to the spot near Gulliver’s World theme park where she dumped Callum’s body.

It later emerged she was spotted on that day by a retired man out for a walk who remembered a woman emerging from the woodland looking visibly upset.

From this point, the questions left were complex legal and medical ones.

Was Joanne Sharkey capable of forming a rational judgement when she killed Callum, and was she guilty of murder or manslaughter?

The evidence from psychiatrists commissioned by both the defence and the prosecution all pointed the same way – Sharkey’s mental illness meant she had a partial defence to murder.

Det Insp Friend said: “My responsibility as an investigator is to follow the evidence and to develop that evidence so we can seek the truth.

“My personal feelings about [Sharkey]? You wonder on one hand how anybody could do this to a beautiful child, a precious child who deserved to live.

“On the other hand I think, how awful to be in this situation where you think that is the best and only option that you have.”

Sharkey’s fate was decided at Liverpool Crown Court on Friday morning by judge Mrs Justice Eady, who decided the sentencing exercise “called for compassion”.

She was given a two-year prison sentence suspended for two years, with a requirement for mental health treatment.

For Det Insp Friend and her team, that promise made by Callum’s graveside in 2021 had been fulfilled.

She added: “We will, once sentencing has concluded, go back to his grave to lay some flowers and just pay him our respects and I hope that he can rest in peace.”

A Russian missile attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih has killed at least 18 people and left dozens wounded, Ukrainian officials have said.

Nine of the dead were children, said President Volodymyr Zelensky, who grew up in Kryvyi Rih. Local officials said a ballistic missile had hit a residential area.

Images showed at least one victim lying in a playground, while a video showed a large section of a 10-storey block of flats destroyed and victims lying on the road.

Russia’s defence ministry later claimed a “high-precision missile strike” had targeted a meeting of “unit commanders and Western instructors” in a restaurant, and that up to 85 were killed. It provided no evidence.

Ukraine’s military responded by saying that Russia was spreading false information to try to “cover up its cynical crime”. It said Moscow had fired an Iskander-M ballistic missile with a cluster warhead to maximise casualties.

The attack, early on Friday evening, was among the deadliest on Kryvyi Rih since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and comes as US President Donald Trump pushes for a ceasefire.

Zelensky wrote on social media that at least five buildings had been damaged in Friday’s strike: “There is only one reason why this continues: Russia doesn’t want a ceasefire, and we see it.”

The head of Kryvyi Rih’s defence, Oleksandr Vilkul, said a residential area was hit.

“The missile exploded in the air… to injure more people,” he said. “Children were killed on or near a playground.”

Serhii Lysak, the head of the Dnipropetrovsk region where Kryvyi Rih is located, said more than 40 people were treated for wounds, and the youngest was only three months old.

Later on Friday, Vilkul reported more explosions, saying the city was under a “mass” drone attack that triggered fires in at least four locations.

He said one elderly woman burned to death in a private house hit by a drone. Another five people were injured elsewhere.

Military chiefs from both the UK and France met Zelensky in Kyiv earlier in the day to discuss plans for foreign peacekeepers to be stationed in Ukraine as part of a potential ceasefire deal.

But there has been little sign of a let-up in the violence.

Kryvyi Rih also came under attack earlier this week when a building in the centre was struck, leaving four people dead.

On Thursday, Russian drone strikes on the north-eastern city of Kharkiv claimed another five lives, local officials said.

• US says Putin will make decision on ceasefire in ‘weeks, not months’
• Rosenberg: Trump takes US-Russia relations on rollercoaster ride

France and the UK have accused Russia of dragging its feet on the Ukraine peace deal. UK Foreign Minister David Lammy told reporters at a Nato summit in Brussels that the Russian leader “could accept a ceasefire now, [but] he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Russians knew the American position, “and we will know from their answers very soon whether they are serious about proceeding with real peace or whether it is a delay tactic”.

Kryvyi Rih is about 40 miles (70km) from the front line in eastern Ukraine and with a population of 600,000 it is reputed to be the longest city in Europe.

MP Dan Norris has been arrested on suspicion of rape, child sex offences, child abduction and misconduct in a public office.

The Labour Party says it “immediately suspended” the MP for North East Somerset and Hanham after being made aware of his arrest.

Avon and Somerset Police confirmed that a man in his 60s was arrested on Friday and released on conditional bail.

BBC News has contacted Norris for comment.

Norris, 65, was elected as the MP for North East Somerset and Hanham in 2024, defeating the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.

He had previously been in Parliament from 1997 to 2010 representing the seat of Wansdyke.

The MP was a junior minister under Gordon Brown and was an assistant whip under Tony Blair.

Norris has also served as the Mayor of the West of England since 2021 but is due to step down ahead of May’s local elections.

According to the West of England Combined Authority website, Norris previously worked as an NSPCC-trained child protection officer.

In a statement, Avon and Somerset Police said: “In December 2024, we received a referral from another police force relating to alleged non-recent child sex offences having been committed against a girl.

“Most of the offences are alleged to have occurred in the 2000s but we’re also investigating an alleged offence of rape from the 2020s.

“An investigation, led by officers within Operation Bluestone, our dedicated rape and serious sexual assault investigation team, remains ongoing and at an early stage.

“The victim is being supported and given access to any specialist help or support she needs.

“A man, aged in his 60s, was arrested on Friday (April 4) on suspicion of sexual offences against a girl (under the Sexual Offences Act 1956), rape (under the Sexual Offences Act 2003), child abduction and misconduct in a public office.

“He’s been released on conditional bail for enquiries to continue.”

A Labour Party spokesperson said on Saturday: “Dan Norris MP was immediately suspended by the Labour Party upon being informed of his arrest.

“We cannot comment further while the police investigation is ongoing.”

The suspension means Mr Norris, the MP for North East Somerset and Hanham, is also understood to have had the party whip suspended, meaning he is not able to sit as a Labour MP in the Commons.

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: “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.

A 24-year-old bull rider has died after sustaining injuries while competing in a rodeo event in Texas, the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association said.

Dylan Grant was injured after being bucked off by a bull in the arena during the second round of the Wharton County Youth Fair Xtreme Bulls event on Thursday evening local time.

Medics rushed him into an ambulance where they began working to stabilise him. He was then taken by helicopter to a hospital in Houston, where he died.

The association sent its condolences to Grant’s family, friends and “the entire rodeo/bull riding community”, while loved ones mourned him on social media as a son, brother and friend.

Friends and family posted on Facebook grieving his death, with one calling him “the life of the party” and “the kindest soul”.

“The rodeo world is a small one, and the bull riding world is even smaller. But within it, Dylan made a big impact,” another post said, adding that “we never imagined we’d get the call saying Dylan didn’t make it home at all”.

Grant was from Laramie, Wyoming and competed for the University of Wyoming rodeo team.

The team posted on Facebook that it was “heartbroken” to learn of his death, saying its thoughts and prayers were with Grant’s mother and father “during this unthinkable time”.

Grant graduated in 2023 with a degree in Physical Education Teacher Education, the university team said.

“Dylan was a champion of life inside and outside of the arena,” the team said.

Grant competed in multiple professional rodeo events in his career, obtaining his Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association permit in 2018 and buying his association card in 2024, the group said.

The potential for injury requiring medical intervention for rodeo athletes is high, a study published in the Kansas Journal of Medicine said.

The study identified 70 patients from rodeos treated at a trauma centre over 10 years. Head injuries were most common, reported in around half of patients. One person died as a result of their injuries.

Another article published in Sports Medicine found bull riding was responsible for the greatest proportion of rodeo injuries.

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.

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

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initially denied the vehicles had their headlights or emergency signals on.

But in response to the new video, the IDF told the BBC: “All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation”.

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

The latest video, which the PRCS said had been shown to the UN Security Council, 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.

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.”

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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.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has fired one of his deputies for taking a “lavish” trip to Antarctica with his wife during Nowruz, the Persian new year.

The president’s office described Shahram Dabiri’s trip as “unjustifiable and unacceptable given the ongoing economic challenges” in Iran.

A picture of Dabiri and his wife posing in front of MV Plancius, which was bound for Antarctica, circulated widely on social media and caused outrage in Iran.

In a statement on Saturday, Pezeshkian said Dabari had been removed as vice president of parliamentary affairs for “indefensible” actions, regardless of whether they were financed from his own pocket.

“In a government that seeks to follow the values of the first Shia Imam (Imam Ali), and amid significant economic pressures on our people, the lavish travels of government officials, even when personally financed, are indefensible,” Pezeshkian said.

Iran’s economy is under significant strain, and subject to Western sanctions due in part to its support of groups including Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been proscribed terrorist organisations by the US, UK and the EU.

Iran’s unemployment rate as of October 2024 was 8.4%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), while its annual inflation rate was 29.5%.

Pezeshkian said Dabiri’s actions “starkly contradict the principle of simplicity that is paramount for those in positions of authority”.

The Antarctica expedition on the MV Plancius reportedly has a starting cost equivalent to $6,685 (£5,187).

Usually, visits to the coldest and least populated continent in the world are carried out by scientists and seasoned explorers.

However, tourism voyages on cruises have surged in popularity in recent years. The Dutch vessel pictured in the picture of Dabiri, for example, was used by the Royal Netherlands Navy for military and civilian research between 1976 and 2004.

It is not clear what expedition package Dabiri chose or what mode of transport he took from Iran to Antarctica.

On one of the many package deals available online, explorers need to embark and disembark from Ushuaia, one of the southernmost points of Argentina. The town is about 3,079km (1,913 miles) from Buenos Aires, the Argentinian capital.

The Iranian president was elected last year with a promise to revive the economy and improve Iranians’ daily lives. He replaced Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash.

Iranian media reported that many of Pezeshkian’s supporters urged him to remove Dabiri from post as the public grew disgruntled over the trip.

Sir Elton John has said he can’t see his sons playing rugby after an infection last summer left him struggling with his eyesight.

“I can’t see TV, I can’t read. I can’t see my boys playing rugby and soccer,” the 78-year-old superstar told The Times.

“It has been a very stressful time because I’m used to soaking it all up. It’s distressing,” he added.

In September, the singer wrote on Instagram that a “severe” infection had left him with “only limited vision” in one eye, adding that his recovery would “take time”.

• Elton John left with ‘limited vision’ in one eye
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• Elton John album on hold because he ‘can’t see’

Sir Elton and his filmmaker husband David Furnish have two sons, Zachary and Elijah.

The songwriter said he “can’t see the telly”, adding: “I haven’t been able to see anything since last July.”

He admitted he does get “emotional” about his sight loss.

“But you have to get used to it, because I’m lucky to have the life I have. I still have my wonderful family, and I can still see something out of here,” he said, pointing at his left eye.

“So you say to yourself, just get on with it.”

Sir Elton previously said he’d been unable to finish his new album due to his eyesight issues.

In November, he said “it’s been a while since I’ve done anything”.

But on Friday, he released his new collaborative album with US musician Brandi Carlile, Who Believes In Angels?

The pair worked with producer Andrew Watt and his long-term songwriting partner Bernie Taupin on the album.

Sir Elton said that they “didn’t all agree”, adding that he became “frustrated” when they stood up to him.

He said: “If I want to make a great album aged 76 or 77 I’ve got to be told and they put up with my little foibles, which were really about anxiety, self-doubt and not feeling very well at the time.

“I was tired so I thought, I’m going to abandon this.

“The problem was three other people were involved and I knew that if I walked away from it I would hate myself for the rest of my life.”

He added that it is not the first time he has had doubts about his music.

“You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have fear and doubt. It’s good for artists. Every album I’ve done, good, bad or indifferent, I’ve had doubts about,” he said.

“And the most doubts I’ve ever had have been with this one.”

The album has mostly been praised by critics. Writing in the Guardian, Lisa Wright awarded it four stars, praising its “poignant moments”, while The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick gave it five stars, calling it a “glorious return to his bombastic, melodious 1970s pomp”.

In January, Sir Elton’s career-spanning greatest hits collection, Diamonds, reached number one after 374 weeks on the charts.

Featuring signature songs like Tiny Dancer, I’m Still Standing and Rocket Man, the 51-track collection has gave the star his ninth number one album.

Last year, Sir Elton also won his first Emmy Award which finally gave him EGOT status, meaning he joined an exclusive club of performers who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award.

The son of a British couple who were detained by the Taliban nine weeks ago is calling on the US to help secure their release from an Afghan prison.

Peter Reynolds, 79, and wife Barbie, 75, were arrested on 1 February while returning to their home in the central Bamiyan province.

Their son Jonathan called on the White House to intervene after Faye Hall, an American who was detained alongside them, was released last week by the Taliban, which returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021.

He told BBC News the detention of his parents – who have lived in Afghanistan for 18 years and ran education projects – had been “harrowing and exhausting” for their family.

Mr Reynolds said: “Anybody who has the ability to unlock that key and let them out, whether it be the Taliban, whether it be the British government or whether it be the American government, I would ask – do it now, please.

“And if you have the ability to put the pressure on the people who hold that key, do it now, please.”

Ms Hall became the fourth US citizen to be released by the Taliban since January after talks between officials in Kabul – in what the group described as a “goodwill gesture” towards the Trump administration.

That prompted Mr Reynolds to appeal to US President Donald Trump directly to aid in Peter and Barbie’s release, in a video taken outside the White House earlier this week.

Mr Reynolds, a US citizen, told BBC News that his parents had not been formally accused of any crime.

He said: “They’ve been in and out of court, which is infuriating for them because there’s no charges and they are told every single time: yes, they are innocent, it’s just a formality, we’ve made a mistake.”

An Afghan interpreter was also arrested alongside the British couple.

Mr Reynolds said his parents had sought to work with the Taliban and had “been open” about their work in the country.

He said he believes his mother received “the only certificate for a woman to actually teach and train even men”, despite women typically being banned from employment under Taliban rule.

“They deeply love the country,” he added.

The couple married in Kabul in 1970 and later became Afghan citizens. They are being held separately in prison and Peter’s health has deteriorated while detained, Mr Reynolds said.

He said he had been able to speak to his parents via a prison payphone and described the conversations as “excruciatingly painful”.

He continued: “Just to think of your parents, elderly parents and grandparents to my kids – and they’ve got great-grandkids even – and wondering if we’re going to see them again.

“We want to see our parents again, to hug them and hold them.”

Mr Reynolds said securing his parents release was “complex” as they wish to remain in Afghanistan and continue their education work.

He said: “They want to be released from prison because they’ve done nothing wrong, but they want to be released so they can carry on doing the work they’re doing – which just speaks to the character and the stamina and the vision and conviction that they have.”

He said the UK government had been “very supportive” and discussions with he US State Department had been “encouraging”.

A Taliban official told the BBC in February that the group planned to release the couple “as soon as possible”.

The UK shut its embassy in Kabul after the Taliban returned to power. The Foreign Office said this means its ability to help UK nationals in Afghanistan is “extremely limited”.

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.”

The Fab Four came together on stage this week for an all-star Beatles announcement that left some of the internet swooning.

No, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr aren’t reuniting through AI for a joint album with Taylor Swift.

Instead, the 60s rock ‘n’ roll icons will be played by four leading heartthrobs of the moment: Paul Mescal (McCartney), Harris Dickinson (Lennon), Joseph Quinn (Harrison) and Barry Keoghan (Starr), in a big-screen quadrilogy directed by Sir Sam Mendes – all set for release in 2028.

Each actor fits the mould of “the internet’s boyfriends” – a term defined by Glamour magazine as “a famous or semi-famous male person whom your entire Twitter feed has a crush on at the same time”.

When Sir Sam walked out on stage with his “band” at Las Vegas’ CinemaCon on Tuesday, the message was clear.

If 1960s Beatlemania was defined by teenage girls fainting and screaming, the plan now is arguably to get Gen Z – in internet parlance – “screaming, crying, throwing up” from behind their phone screens in excitement.

“Each star brings their own brand of modern-day hysteria,” says the Evening Standard’s celebrity reporter Lisa McLoughlin, “the kind fuelled by social media virality and fan video edits”.

This is particularly true of Mescal, whose “popularity mirrors a smidge the frenzy the Beatles once sparked”.

After shooting to fame in 2020’s BBC adaptation of Normal People, the Irishman scored an Oscar nomination as a tormented father in Aftersun, before finding blockbuster status in Gladiator II – rising from indie heartbreaker to Hollywood heartthrob.

Similar is true of fellow Irishman Keoghan. Also Oscar-nominated for Banshees of Inisherin, he embraced rugged sex symbol status in last year’s cult hit Saltburn.

Dickinson and Quinn are earlier in their trajectory, but still burning bright – the former recently starring alongside Nicole Kidman in erotic thriller Babygirl and the latter turning heads in Netflix’s Stranger Things.

McLoughlin describes the casting as “logical and predictable” – a strategic move as the band look to secure their legacy with a new generation, while studios grapple with the ambition of luring streaming era, post-Covid, audiences back to the cinema not once, but four times in close proximity.

The timing and scope of the project sums up the Beatles’ unique heritage as the best-selling band of all-time – the catalyst for shifting youth culture and the boundaries of pop.

It’s been 56 years since all four members last recorded together. Lennon was shot dead just over a decade later at 40, while Harrison died of cancer in 2001, aged 58. The two surviving Beatles, Sir Paul and Sir Ringo, are now into their 80s.

And yet, as the band’s only official biographer Hunter Davies told Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday: “The strange thing about the Beatles is that the longer we get from them, the bigger they become”.

Recent years have seen Sir Paul seemingly work to bookend the Beatles’ music – becoming Glastonbury’s oldest ever headliner at 80, before driving the 2023 release of Now and Then, a “final” Beatles track rebuilt from Lennon’s demo vocals. It became the band’s 18th UK number one single, over five decades from their last, and won a Grammy.

The forthcoming biopics appear to be a way of continuing this on the big screen.

Four years on from Peter Jackson’s sprawling Get Back docuseries, this is the first time that all four band members and their estates have granted full life story and music rights for a scripted film.

The casting reflects the distinct identities and histories of the members, each offering something different to lovelorn girls and copycat boys so intoxicated by Beatlemania.

McLoughlin feels the choices “make commercial sense” as the perfect foil for an audience now two generations removed from the original Beatlemania.

“They all have dedicated younger fan bases (many of whom may not be regular cinema-goers or deeply connected to the Beatles), acting credibility and experience leading or co-leading major productions”.

Each film will focus on an individual member of the band. “They intersect in different ways – sometimes overlapping, sometimes not,” Sir Sam explained.

“They’re four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply.”

The Barbenheimer phenomenon of summer 2023 highlighted the increasing influence online audience reactions hold on cultural currency.

It also turbocharged Hollywood’s acceptance of “event cinema” as a way to lure younger audiences. A generation that Warner Bros Discovery’s executive director Vera Chien previously told Forbes, already see the streaming-social media relationship as the norm.

Sir Sam’s four-film schedule plays into this. It’s aimed at creating what Sony executive Tom Rothman described as “the first bingeable theatrical experience”.

“Frankly, we need big cinematic events to get people out of the house,” Sir Sam said.

Films can now develop distinct digital identities through audience projection, as seen by the viral success of Saltburn.

The makers of the Beatles biopics are arguably betting on its cast of “internet boyfriends” pulling younger audiences – without the same nostalgic attachment to the Beatles – engaged on social media and, executives hope, looking up from phone screen to big screen.

The extent to which musical performances will feature is unknown.

But the Beatle biopics could capitalise on the booming money-spinning genre that’s found awards success over the past decade. .

It’s also proven fertile heartthrob ground, with the Beatles cast following Jacob Elordi and Austin Butler’s turns as Elvis, alongside Timothee Chalamet’s Oscar-nominated take as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.

Still, there are risks, says Dade Hayes, business writer at Deadline and co-author of Binge Times.

He says that whilst he commends Rothman’s “clever handle” and the cinephile in him values the biopics’ “bold statement about the value of cinemas and communal viewing,” market realities present cautionary signs.

First, the UK box office is yet to fully bounce back from the pandemic, whilst US takings are more than 20% below pre-Covid levels. “If people aren’t dying to return at regular intervals to cinemas,” says Hayes, “then you are holding an expensive set of assets that are hard to monetise”.

And a multi-release strategy relies on the “fuse being lit with the first instalment”, Hayes says.

He points to Kevin Costner’s Horizon films, originally envisioned as a multi-part theatrical franchise, only to flounder once the first instalment tanked, as an example of the dangers.

For McLoughlin, the three-year gap between the casting announcement and 2028 release date adds further risk, especially in the fast-moving online space where fanbases can shift.

But beyond industry dynamics there’s also a cast talking point much closer to home.

The Beatles biopics, celebrating four Scouse lads who conquered the world and put Liverpool on the map, will not feature any local talent in the lead roles.

As one Liverpudlian put it in a TikTok video liked over 200,000 times: “I love Mescal as much as the next gal but [the lack of representation] is breaking my heart”.

McLoughlin agrees, pointing out that James Corden last week urged the TV industry to be “bolder” and back ideas that “might scare you a little.” She feels film studios should do the same.

“The Beatles themselves were unknown until they weren’t,” she says. “This could have been a chance for a newcomer to have their own Beatles moment – rising from obscurity in real-time”.

And perhaps the biggest missed opportunity of all McLoughlin adds, is the failure to put Liverpudlian actors front and centre in a Beatles biopic. “The band is Liverpool’s greatest cultural export, yet the city’s deep talent pool was completely overlooked,” she adds.

Social media, meanwhile, is already awash with doubt over Keoghan’s ability to deliver a consistent Scouse accent, questioning his attempts in Saltburn.

Still, as Hunter Davies put it, the Beatles have long been more than just a local band. They keep growing.

Way back in 1966, Lennon infamously described them as bigger than Jesus. Over five decades on, the studio behind the four films – and perhaps cinema in general – is no doubt banking on a Beatlemania revival.

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.

European Union firms will try to export goods via Northern Ireland in an attempt to get a reduced tariff rate when exporting to the US, a Nobel prize winning economist has suggested.

US President Donald Trump has imposed a 10% tariff on UK goods but a 20% tariff on EU goods.

Northern Ireland is part of UK customs territory but also has an open trade border with the Republic of Ireland, which is in the EU.

Paul Krugman made the comments in conversation with the journalist Ezra Klein.

“Probably a lot of EU goods trans-ship through Northern Ireland to get the lower tariff rate,” he said.

Typically goods cannot just be exported via a lower tariff country to get a lower tariff.

Instead they need to undergo “substantial transformation” in the lower tariff country which usually means some form of processing, although the rules differ from product to product.

Mr Krugman won the Nobel prize for economics in 2008 for his work on on international trade theory and economic geography.

MP Dan Norris has been arrested on suspicion of rape, child sex offences, child abduction and misconduct in a public office.

The Labour Party says it “immediately suspended” the MP for North East Somerset and Hanham after being made aware of his arrest.

Avon and Somerset Police confirmed that a man in his 60s was arrested on Friday and released on conditional bail.

BBC News has contacted Norris for comment.

Norris, 65, was elected as the MP for North East Somerset and Hanham in 2024, defeating the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.

He had previously been in Parliament from 1997 to 2010 representing the seat of Wansdyke.

The MP was a junior minister under Gordon Brown and was an assistant whip under Tony Blair.

Norris has also served as the Mayor of the West of England since 2021 but is due to step down ahead of May’s local elections.

According to the West of England Combined Authority website, Norris previously worked as an NSPCC-trained child protection officer.

In a statement, Avon and Somerset Police said: “In December 2024, we received a referral from another police force relating to alleged non-recent child sex offences having been committed against a girl.

“Most of the offences are alleged to have occurred in the 2000s but we’re also investigating an alleged offence of rape from the 2020s.

“An investigation, led by officers within Operation Bluestone, our dedicated rape and serious sexual assault investigation team, remains ongoing and at an early stage.

“The victim is being supported and given access to any specialist help or support she needs.

“A man, aged in his 60s, was arrested on Friday (April 4) on suspicion of sexual offences against a girl (under the Sexual Offences Act 1956), rape (under the Sexual Offences Act 2003), child abduction and misconduct in a public office.

“He’s been released on conditional bail for enquiries to continue.”

A Labour Party spokesperson said on Saturday: “Dan Norris MP was immediately suspended by the Labour Party upon being informed of his arrest.

“We cannot comment further while the police investigation is ongoing.”

The suspension means Mr Norris, the MP for North East Somerset and Hanham, is also understood to have had the party whip suspended, meaning he is not able to sit as a Labour MP in the Commons.