“She left no last words. She was dead when she was carried away,” says Hafiza quietly, as she describes how her mother was killed in a city under siege in Darfur, during Sudan’s civil war, which began exactly two years ago.

The 21-year-old recorded how her family’s life was turned upside down by her mother’s death, on one of several phones the BBC World Service managed to get to people trapped in the crossfire in el-Fasher.

Under constant bombardment, el-Fasher has been largely cut off from the outside world for a year, making it impossible for journalists to enter the city. For safety reasons, we are only using the first names of people who wanted to film their lives and share their stories on the BBC phones.

Hafiza describes how she suddenly found herself responsible for her five-year-old brother and two teenage sisters.

Their father had died before the start of the war, which has pitted the army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and caused the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

The two rivals had been allies – coming to power together in a coup – but fell out over an internationally backed plan to move towards civilian rule.

Hafiza’s home is the last major city controlled by the military in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, and has been under siege by the RSF for the past 12 months.

In August 2024, a shell hit the market where her mother had gone to sell household goods.

“Grief is very difficult, I still can’t bring myself to visit her workplace,” says Hafiza in one of her first video messages after receiving her phone, shortly after her mother’s death.

“I spend my time crying alone at home.”

Both sides in the war have been accused of war crimes and deliberately targeting civilians – which they deny. The RSF has also previously denied accusations from the US and human rights groups that it has committed a genocide against non-Arab groups in other parts of Darfur after it seized control of those areas.

The RSF controls passage in and out the city and sometimes allows civilians to leave, so Hafiza managed to send her siblings to stay with family in a neutral area.

But she stayed to try to earn money to support them.

In her messages, she describes her days distributing blankets and water to displaced people living in shelters, helping at a community kitchen and supporting a breast cancer awareness group in return for a little money to help her survive.

Her nights are spent alone.

“I remember the places where my mother and siblings used to sit, I feel broken,” she adds.

In almost every video 32-year-old Mostafa sent us, the sound of shelling and gunfire can be heard in the background.

“We endure relentless artillery shelling, both day and night, by the RSF,” he says.

One day, after visiting family, he returned to find his house near the city centre had been hit by shells – the roof and walls were damaged – and looters had ransacked what was left.

“Everything was turned upside down. Most houses in our neighbourhood have been looted,” he says, blaming the RSF.

While Mostafa was volunteering at a shelter for displaced people, the area came under intense attack. He kept his camera rolling as he hid, flinching at each explosion.

“There is no safe place in el-Fasher,” he says. “Even refugee camps are being bombed with artillery shells.

“Death can strike anyone, anytime, without warning… by a bullet, shelling, hunger or thirst.”

In another message, he talks about the lack of clean water, describing how people drink from sources contaminated with sewage.

Both Mostafa and 26-year-old Manahel, who also received a BBC phone, volunteered at community kitchens funded by donations from Sudanese people living elsewhere.

The UN has warned of famine in the city, something that has already happened at the nearby Zamzam camp, which is home to more than 500,000 displaced people.

Many people cannot get to the market “and if they go, they find high prices”, explains Manahel.

“Every family is equal now – there is no rich or poor. People can’t afford the basic necessities like food.”

After cooking meals such as rice and stew, they deliver the food to people in shelters. For many, it is the only meal they will have for the day.

When the war started, Manahel had just finished university, where she studied Sharia and law.

As the fighting reached el-Fasher, she moved with her mother and six siblings to a safer area, further away from the front line.

“You lose your home, everything you own and find yourself in a new place with nothing,” she says.

But her father refused to leave their house. Some neighbours had entrusted him with their belongings, and he decided to stay to protect them – a decision that cost him his life.

She says he was killed by RSF artillery in September 2024.

Since the siege began a year ago, almost 2,000 people have been killed or injured in el-Fasher, according to the UN.

After sunset, people rarely leave their homes. The lack of electricity can make night-time frightening for many of el-Fasher’s one million residents.

People with solar power or batteries are scared to turn lights on because they “could be detected by drones”, explains Manahel.

There were times we could not reach her or the others for several days because they had no internet access.

But above all these worries, there is one particular fear that both Manahel and Hafiza share if the city falls to the RSF.

“As a girl, I might get raped,” Hafiza says in one of her messages.

She, Manahel and Mostafa are all from non-Arabic communities and their fear stems from what happened in other cities that the RSF has taken, most notably el-Geneina, 250 miles (400km) west of el-Fasher.

In 2023 it witnessed horrific massacres, along ethnic lines, which the US and others say amounted to genocide. RSF fighters and allied Arab militia allegedly targeted people from non-Arab ethnic groups, such as the Massalit – which the RSF has previously denied.

A Massalit woman I met in a refugee camp over the border in Chad described how she was gang-raped by RSF fighters and was unable to walk for nearly two weeks, while the UN has said girls as young as 14 were raped.

One man told me how he witnessed a massacre by RSF forces – he escaped after he was injured and left for dead.

The UN estimates that between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in el-Geneina alone in 2023. And now more than a quarter of a million people from the city – half its former population – are among those living in refugee camps in Chad.

We put these accusations to the RSF but it did not respond. However, in the past it has denied any involvement in ethnic cleansing in Darfur, saying the perpetrators had worn RSF clothing to shift the blame to them.

Few reporters have had access to el-Geneina since then, but after months of negotiation with the city’s civil authorities, a BBC team was allowed to visit in December 2024.

We were assigned minders from the governor’s office and were only allowed to see what they wanted to show us.

It was immediately clear that the RSF was in control. I saw their fighters patrolling the streets in armed vehicles and had a brief conversation with some of them, when they showed me their anti-vehicle rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher.

It did not take long to realise how differently they viewed the conflict. Their commander insisted there were no civilians like Hafiza, Mostafa and Manahel living in el-Fasher.

“The person who stays in a war zone is participating in the war, there are no civilians, they are all from the army,” he said.

He claimed el-Geneina was now peaceful and that most of its residents – “around 90%” – had come back. “Homes that were previously empty are now occupied again.”

But hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents are still living as refugees in Chad, and I saw many deserted and destroyed neighbourhoods as we drove around.

With the minders watching us, it was hard to get a true picture of life in el-Geneina. They took us to a bustling vegetable market, where I asked people about their lives.

Each time I asked someone a question, I noticed them glance at the minder over my shoulder before answering that everything was “fine”, apart from a few comments about high prices.

However, my minder would often whisper in my ear afterwards, saying people were exaggerating about the prices.

We ended our trip with an interview with Tijani Karshoum, the governor of West Darfur whose predecessor was killed in May 2023 after accusing the RSF of committing genocide.

It was his first interview since 2023, and he maintained he was a neutral civilian during the el-Geneina unrest and did not side with anyone.

“We have turned a new page with the slogan of peace, coexistence, moving beyond the bitterness of the past,” he said, adding that the UN’s casualty figures were “exaggerated”.

Also in the room was a man who we understood to be a representative of the RSF.

Karshoum’s answers to nearly all my questions were almost identical, whether I was asking about accusations of ethnic cleansing or about what happened to the former governor, Khamis Abakar.

Nearly two weeks after I spoke to Karshoum, the European Union imposed sanctions on him, saying he “holds responsibility in the fatal attack” on his predecessor and that he had “been involved in planning, directing or committing… serious human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, including killings, rape and other serious forms of sexual and gender-based violence, and abduction”.

I followed up with him to get his response to these accusations, and he said: “Since I am a suspect in this matter, I believe any statement from me would lack credibility.”

But he stated that he “was never part of the tribal conflict and remained at home during the clashes” and added that he was not involved in any violations of humanitarian law.

“Accusations of killings, abductions, or rape must be addressed through an independent investigation” with which he would co-operate, Karshoum said.

“From the start of the conflict in Khartoum, we pushed for peace and proposed well-known initiatives to prevent violence in our socially fragile state,” he added.

Given the stark contrast between the narrative promoted by those in control of el-Geneina and the countless stories I heard from refugees across the border, it is hard to imagine people ever returning home.

The same goes for 12 million other Sudanese people who have fled their homes and are either refugees abroad or living in camps inside Sudan.

In the end, Hafiza, Mostafa and Manahel found life in el-Fasher unbearable and in November 2024 all three left the city to stay in nearby towns.

With the military regaining control of the capital, Khartoum, in March, Darfur remains the last major region where the paramilitaries are still largely in control – and that has turned el-Fasher into an even more intense battlefield.

“El-Fasher has become scary,” Manahel said as she packed her belongings.

“We are leaving without knowing our fate. Will we ever return to el-Fasher? When will this war end? We don’t know what will happen.”

A high-level international conference is under way in London to find “a pathway to peace” in Sudan, in the words of one of the hosts, the UK’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

Sudan’s civil war began exactly two years ago causing what aid agencies call the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The UK is promising an extra £120m ($159m) worth of food and medical assistance.

Charities say 30 million people in Sudan are in desperate need, and people are starving as a result of the war.

“Many have given up on Sudan – that is wrong – it’s morally wrong when we see so many civilians beheaded, infants as young as one subjected to sexual violence, more people facing famine than anywhere else in the world… We simply cannot look away,” Lammy said opening the meeting on Tuesday.

More than 12 million have been forced from their homes in Sudan and tens of thousands killed, amid widespread reports of sexual violence across the country and a genocide in Darfur.

In recent days, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) launched an intense ground and aerial assault on camps for displaced people close to the city of el-Fasher in an attempt to seize the last state capital in Darfur held by their rival, the Sudanese army.

Zamzam, which has provided temporary shelter for an estimated 500,000 people, is now being systematically destroyed by fire from intentional arson by RSF forces, according to the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which has analysed satellite images taken of the camp.

The RSF has not commented on the allegation. Meanwhile the aid group Doctors Without Border (MSF) says that over 20,000 people have fled to the town of Tawila in North Darfur in under two days.

“Some of them are dead upon arrival, others are lacking water, food. They didn’t drink a drop of water for two days, and children are dying of thirst. So water is the main need here,” MSF’s Marion Ramstein told the BBC.

Some survivors told the BBC they were robbed by armed gangs as they fled, and that they had to make the heart-breaking decision to leave injured people behind because they could not carry them.

“Looting gangs on the way took everything we owned and we have sick relatives with us. We left our mothers behind and we don’t know what’s happened to them,” one woman said.

Another said two of her children got sick and died on the days-long walk to Tawila, adding “some people also stopped us and took our phones and possessions… now we cannot move from the exhaustion and our legs are hurt from walking”.

Extra tents have been added outside Tawila’s only hospital which is “already overwhelmed”, says Ms Ramstein, and many more civilians are still arriving with gunshot wounds and other emergencies.

• BBC finds fear, loss and hope in Sudan’s ruined capital after army victory
• ‘Tortured and terrified’ – BBC witnesses the battle for Khartoum

Tuesday’s ministerial conference is co-chaired by the UK, EU and African Union.

Officials say the aim is to unite international partners around a common position, to get more food and medicine into Sudan and to begin charting a way to end the hostilities.

Neither of Sudan’s main warring parties – the Sudanese Armed Forces nor RSF – has been invited.

They will be represented instead by regional allies, some of whom diplomats say are fuelling the conflict. Among them is the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is accused of arming the RSF, something it denies.

The Kenyan government is attending Tuesday’s talks, despite accusations at home and abroad that they are backing the RSF. President William Ruto hosted RSF figures earlier this year in Nairobi, where they announced plans for a rival government in Sudan.

February’s RSF summit in Nairobi “was purely to dialogue among themselves”, Kenya’s Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi told the BBC’s Newsday programme. He insisted that events were misreported and “at no time has Kenya been party to a government in exile or a parallel government in any country… Kenya stands for one Sudan”.

“Kenya is a centre for mediation,” Mudavadi added saying that their approach was “not about taking sides” and they had previously hosted Sudan’s de facto leader Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan too.

The war – a power struggle between the army and the RSF – began on 15 April 2023, after the leaders of the army and RSF fell out over the political future of the country.

Speaking on Tuesday in London, the African Union (AU) envoy Bankole Adeoye said “there can be no military solution in Sudan, only an immediate, unconditional cessation of hostilities. This must be followed by an all-inclusive dialogue to end the war.

“Ordinary Sudanese people are bearing the brunt of this unnecessary war. The AU is calling on all belligerents to stop this war,” he added.

“The AU will not allow a Balkanization… or partition of Sudan.”

• BBC smuggles in phones to reveal hunger and fear in Sudan
• ‘A living hell’: Sudanese refugees face rape and abuse in Libya
• Sudan accuses UAE of ‘complicity in genocide’ at world court
• The gravedigger ‘too busy to sleep’

Singapore will head to the polls on 3 May, in what will be the first electoral test for its new prime minister Lawrence Wong.

The election campaign, which lasts just nine days, is expected to be dominated by the rising cost of living, housing needs, jobs, and a growing demand for healthcare amid an ageing population.

Voters are widely expected to return the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) to power. The PAP has won every election since Singapore was granted self rule by the British in 1959.

The country’s last election in 2020 saw the opposition Workers’ Party secure 10 seats – the biggest victory for the opposition since Singapore gained independence in 1965.

This time, 97 seats are up for grabs.

Though the PAP won 83 out of 93 seats in 2020, it will no doubt be looking for a stronger win this year – the last election result was widely seen as a setback for the party.

According to a Reuters report citing data from pollster YouGov, 44% of 1,845 Singaporeans surveyed in March have decided who to vote for. Of that number, 63% say they would choose the ruling party and 15% would back the leading opposition Workers’ Party.

The election is also being seen as the first real test of Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, who took office last year – replacing the city state’s long-serving premier Lee Hsien Loong, who served as leader for 20 years.

Presenting his first budget as the country’s leader in February, Wong unveiled a series of tax rebates, handouts and sector-specific measures to cushion against cost-of-living pressures – in what some analysts call a “feel good” budget aimed at sweetening the ground before the election.

Since becoming an independent nation in 1965, Singapore has only had four prime ministers – all from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP).

The first was Mr Lee’s father, Lee Kuan Yew, who is widely considered as the founder of modern Singapore and led the country for 25 years.

Singapore’s political landscape has been dominated by the PAP, though the party was rocked by a series of scandals in 2020 – including a senior minister’s arrest in a corruption probe as well as the resignation of two lawmakers over an extramarital affair.

Voting is compulsory for Singapore’s 2.75 million eligible citizens.

Singapore mirrors the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system, but there are key differences that make it harder for opposition parties.

MPs contest for constituencies that vary in size and the larger ones are not represented by an individual MP, but by a team of up to five MPs – called Group Representative Constituencies (GRCs).

The system was introduced in 1988 as a way to include more representation from Singapore’s minority groups in the predominantly Chinese city – so parties could “risk” running one or two minority candidates.

But until several years ago, opposition parties have not had the resources to recruit enough skilled and experienced people to genuinely contest these larger constituencies.

Candidates must also deposit S$13,500 ($9,700: £7,700) to contest and need to win more than one-eighth of total votes to get it back.

The electoral divisions of constituencies are also often changed to reflect population growth – opposition parties say this is not done transparently and amounts to gerrymandering, something the government has always denied.

Donald Trump has blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war with Russia – a day after a massive Russian attack killed 35 people and injured 117 others in Ukraine.

The US president said the Ukrainian leader shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin for “millions of people dead” in the Ukraine war.

“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he told reporters at the White House, also blaming former US President Joe Biden for the conflict.

Trump’s comments come after widespread outrage over Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday, which was the deadliest Russian attack on civilians this year.

Asked about the attack earlier, Trump said it was “terrible” and that he had been told Russia had “made a mistake”, but did not elaborate.

“Millions of people dead because of three people,” Trump said on Monday. “Let’s say Putin number one, let’s say Biden who had no idea what the hell he was doing, number two, and Zelensky.”

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, but not millions, of people have been killed or injured on all sides since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

Questioning Zelensky’s competence, Trump remarked that the Ukrainian leader was “always looking to purchase missiles”.

“When you start a war, you got to know you can win,” the US president said.

Trump has repeatedly blamed Zelensky and Biden for the war, despite Russia invading Ukraine first in 2014, five years before Zelensky won the presidency, and then on a far broader scale in 2022.

Trump further argued on Monday that “Biden could have stopped it and Zelensky could have stopped it, and Putin should have never started it. Everybody is to blame”.

Tensions between Trump and Zelensky have been high ever since their heated confrontation at the White House in February.

During that meeting, Trump accused Zelensky of “gambling with World War Three” and chided him for not starting peace talks with Russia earlier.

By contrast, the US president has made efforts to improve relations with Moscow.

Trump said he had a “great” phone call with Putin last month, and the Russian president sent him a portrait as a gift a week later.

In February, Washington voted with Moscow against a UN resolution that identified Russia as the “aggressor” in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

After talks between US and Russian officials failed to produce a ceasefire in Ukraine, Trump said he was “very angry” with Putin, though he added he had a “good relationship” with the Russian leader.

US envoy Steve Witkoff, who met Putin in St Petersburg for close to five hours on Friday, said the talks had been “compelling”.

He said the Russian leader’s request had been to get “a permanent peace… beyond a ceasefire”. The detailed discussions had included the future of five Ukrainian territories Russia is claiming to have annexed since it launched the full-scale invasion of its neighbour and “no Nato, Article 5” – referring to the Nato rule that says members will come to the defence of an ally that is under attack.

“I think we might be on the verge of something that would be very, very important for the world at large,” Witkoff told Fox News on Monday.

“There is a possibility to reshape the Russian-United states relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities that I think give real stability to the region, too. Partnerships create stability,” Trump’s envoy said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was less effusive, describing the contacts as positive but with no clear outlines of an agreement.

In an interview recorded before Russia’s deadly attack on Sumy, Zelensky had urged Trump to visit Ukraine before striking a deal with Putin to end the war.

“Please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead,” Zelensky said in an interview for CBS’s 60 Minutes programme.

At least 35 people were killed when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles into the heart of Sumy on Sunday.

The blasts took place minutes apart while many civilians were heading to church for Palm Sunday, a week before Easter.

A bus was destroyed in the attack and bodies were left strewn in the middle of a city streeet.

Moscow claimed it had targeted a meeting of Ukrainian soldiers, killing 60 of them, but did not provide any evidence.

Trump insisted he wanted to “stop the killing” and signalled there would be proposals soon, but did not elaborate.

The conflict in Ukraine goes back more than a decade, to 2014, when Kyiv’s pro-Russian president was overthrown. Russia then annexed Crimea and backed insurgents in bloody fighting in eastern Ukraine.

China’s President Xi Jinping has called on Vietnam to oppose “unilateral bullying” to upkeep a global system of free trade – though he stopped short of naming the US.

It comes as Xi is on a so called “charm offensive” trip across South East Asia, which will also see him visit Malaysia and Cambodia.

Though the trip was long-planned, it has taken on heightened significance in the wake of a mounting trade war between the US and China. Vietnam was facing US tariffs of up to 46% before the Trump administration issued a 90-day pause last week.

US President Donald Trump called Xi’s meeting with Vietnamese leaders a ploy to figure out how to “screw the United States of America”.

According to state media outlet Xinhua, Xi told Vietnam’s Communist Party Secretary-General To Lam to “jointly oppose unilateral bullying”.

“We must strengthen strategic resolve… and uphold the stability of the global free trade system as well as industrial and supply chains,” he said.

Stephen Olson, a former US trade negotiator, said Xi’s comments were “a very shrewd tactical move”.

“While Trump seems determined to blow up the trade system, Xi is positioning China as the defender of rules-based trade, while painting the US as a reckless rogue nation,” he added.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval office on Monday, Trump said he does not “blame” China or Vietnam but alleged that they were focused on how to harm the US.

“That’s a lovely meeting. Meeting like, trying to figure out, how do we screw the United States of America?” said Trump.

The world’s two largest economies are locked in an escalating trade battle, with the Trump administration putting tariffs of 145% on most Chinese imports earlier this month. Beijing later responded with its own 125% tariffs on American products coming into China.

On Saturday, a US customs notice revealed smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices would be excluded from the 125% tariff on goods entering the country from China.

But Trump later chimed in on social media saying there was no exemption for these products and called such reports about this notice false. Instead, he said that “they are just moving to a different tariff ‘bucket'”.

Xi arrived in Hanoi on Monday, where he was welcomed by well wishers waving Chinese and Vietnamese flags.

He then met top Vietnamese officials including the country’s Secretary-General and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh.

Earlier on Tuesday, Xi visited the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum to take part in a wreath laying ceremony at the resting place of the former Vietnamese founder and Communist leader.

Despite Xi’s visit, Vietnam will be careful to “manage the perception that it is colluding with China against the United States, as the US is too important a partner to put aside,” said Susannah Patton, Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute think-tank.

“In many ways, China is an economic competitor as well as an economic partner for South East Asian economies,” she added.

Xi has now left Vietnam and will arrive in Malaysia later on Tuesday. He is expected to meet the country’s King, as well as its Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.

It comes as Malaysian mobile data service company U Mobile said it will roll out the country’s second 5G network by using infrastructure technology from China’s Huawei and ZTE.

Ms Patton expects Xi to continue portraying the US as “a partner which is unreliable [and] protectionist”.

Meanwhile, he is likely to “portray China in stark contrast as a partner that is there”, she added.

“Now is really a golden opportunity for China to score that narrative win. I think this is how Xi’s visit to Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia will be seen.”

For a few hours on a warm April day, jets paused and silence reclaimed the skies above the international airport in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the southern Indian state of Kerala.

The airport’s closure was not due to bad weather or a technical glitch, as one might assume, but to make way for a Hindu temple procession that marches right across its runway.

Devotees pull ornate wooden chariots bearing temple idols along a 2km (1.2 miles) stretch of the runway, a tradition so revered that it shuts down operations for a few hours at the airport, which usually handles 90 landings and take-offs daily. Elephants, a common part of Hindu religious events in India, also walk on the runway.

The event, which took place last Friday, is part of the annual Painkuni festival held by the famed Sree Padmanabha Swamy Temple, home to treasures worth billions of rupees.

The procession, taken out on the final day of the 10-day festival, begins at the temple and heads through the runway to the Shanghumugham beach, around 6km away.

When the procession arrives at the beach, priests give a ritual bath in the sea to the idols. The return journey follows the same route, crossing the runway again and reaching the temple.

The procession is led by the head of the former royal family of Travancore, which built the airport in 1932. It’s not clear when the festival and the procession started but the ritual has been followed since then, even when the management of the airport passed on to the government and then a private company.

The airport is currently managed by Adani Airport Holdings Ltd, owned by billionaire Gautam Adani’s Group.

The airport also shuts down operations for a few hours for a similar procession during the temple’s Alpashi Festival, usually in October or November every year.

The Thiruvananthapuram International Airport is one of the few airports in the world that closes down for a religious event. Others include Indonesia’s Ngurah Rai Airport during the Balinese Hindu new year and Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport on Yom Kippur, which is the holiest day in Judaism.

But these are public holidays when the airport shuts down entirely and it’s rare for a high-security runway to be used to actually facilitate a religious or cultural event.

Rahul Bhatkoti, chief airport officer, said the airport was proud to have the opportunity to preserve the legacy of the temple’s procession.

“This is likely the only airport in the world which facilitates such a historic event,” he told the BBC before the procession entered the airfield on Friday evening.

Since the airport has only one runway, both domestic and international terminals are closed during the procession.

Most of the international flights operating here are to and from the Middle East, where a large number of Indian workers, including many from Kerala, live and work.

Airport authorities said they informed airlines of the closure two months in advance and 10 flights were rescheduled on the day.

“The procession begins around 16:45 local time and takes approximately four hours to complete,” Mahesh Balachandran, the temple’s executive officer, told the BBC.

Attendance at the event is limited and strictly monitored.

Only senior royal family members, priests, officials and selected devotees are allowed to take part, and they must have special passes issued by the temple trust, along with security clearance from airport authorities.

“The procession passes through the airport with full ritualistic vigour twice a year during the Painkuni and Alpashi festivals,” Mr Balachandran said. “It proceeds peacefully, without any incidents. Everything is planned meticulously.”

The Central Industrial Security Force, the paramilitary which handles airport security, barricades the entire runway for safety and manages the crowds. Authorities also monitor the crowd through surveillance cameras and inspect the runway carefully after the procession, officials said.

The procession passing through the airport is a reminder of how “heritage and modernity co-exist here, every year”, Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor wrote on X after last week’s procession.

At a workshop in Kabul where carpets are made, hundreds of women and girls work in a cramped space, the air thick and stifling.

Among them is 19-year-old Salehe Hassani. “We girls no longer have the chance to study,” she says with a faltering smile. “The circumstances have taken that from us, so we turned to the workshop.”

Since the Taliban seized power in 2021, girls over the age of 12 have been barred from getting an education, and women from many jobs.

In 2020, only 19% of women were part of the workforce – four times less than men. That number has dropped even further under Taliban rule.

The lack of opportunities, coupled with the dire economic situation the country faces, have pushed many into long, laborious days of carpet weaving – one of the few trades the Taliban government allows women to work in.

According to the UN, the livelihoods of about 1.2 to 1.5 million Afghans depend on the carpet weaving industry, with women making up nearly 90% of the workforce.

In an economy that the UN warned in a 2024 report had “basically collapsed” since the Taliban took power, the carpet export business is booming.

The Ministry of Industry and Commerce noted that in the first six months of 2024 alone, over 2.4 million kilograms of carpets – worth $8.7m (£6.6m) – were exported to countries such as Pakistan, India, Austria and the US.

But this has not necessarily meant better wages for the weavers. Some the BBC spoke to said they had seen none of the profit from a piece sold in Kazakhstan last year that fetched $18,000.

Within Afghanistan, carpets sell for far less – between $100-$150 per square metre. Needing money to help support their families and having few options for employment, workers are trapped in low-paid labour.

Carpet weavers say they earn about $27 for each square metre, which usually takes about a month to produce. That is less than a dollar a day despite the long, gruelling shifts that often stretch to 10 or 12 hours.

Nisar Ahmad Hassieni, head of the Elmak Baft company, who let the BBC go inside his workshops, said that he pays his employees between $39 and $42 per square metre. He said they are paid every two weeks, with an eight-hour workday.

The Taliban has repeatedly said that girls will be allowed to return to school once its concerns, such as aligning the curriculum with Islamic values, are resolved – but so far, no concrete steps have been taken to make that happen.

Mr Hassieni said that, following the rise of the Taliban government, his organisation made it its mission to support those left behind by the closures.

“We established three workshops for carpet weaving and wool spinning,” he says.

“About 50-60% of these rugs are exported to Pakistan, while the rest are sent to China, the USA, Turkey, France, and Russia to meet customer demand.”

Shakila, 22, makes carpets with her sisters in one of the rooms of the modest rental they also share with their elderly parents and three brothers. They live in the impoverished Dasht-e Barchi area, in the western outskirts of Kabul.

She once had dreams of becoming a lawyer, but now leads her family’s carpet-making operation.

“We couldn’t do anything else,” Shakila tells me. “There weren’t any other jobs”.

She explains how her father taught her to weave when she was 10 and he was recovering from a car accident.

What began as a necessary skill in times of hardship has now become the family’s lifeline.

Shakila’s sister, 18-year-old Samira, aspired to be a journalist. Mariam, 13, was forced to stop going to school before she could even begin to dream of a career.

Before the Taliban’s return, all three were students at Sayed al-Shuhada High School.

Their lives were forever altered after deadly bombings at the school in 2021 killed 90 people, mostly young girls, and left nearly 300 wounded.

The previous government blamed the Taliban for the attack, though the group denied any involvement.

Fearing another tragedy, their father made the decision to withdraw them from school.

Samira, who was at the school when the attacks happened, has been left traumatised, speaking with a stutter and struggling to express herself. Still, she says she would do anything to return to formal education.

“I really wanted to finish my studies,” she says. “Now that the Taliban are in power, the security situation has improved and there have been fewer suicide bombings.

“But the schools are still closed. That’s why we have to work.”

Despite the low pay and long hours of work these women face, the spirits of some are unbroken.

Back at one of the workshops, Salehe, determined and hopeful, confided that she had been studying English for the past three years.

“Even though schools and universities are closed, we refuse to stop our education,” she says.

One day, Salehe adds, she plans to become a leading doctor and build the best hospital in Afghanistan.

Several prisons in France have been hit by a wave of overnight attacks, according to the country’s authorities.

Vehicles were set on fire in prison car parks, and one prison entrance was targeted with gunfire from an automatic weapon.

Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said prisons had faced “intimidation attempts” and linked the attacks to the government’s crackdown on drug trafficking.

Seven establishments were attacked, according to the Parisien newspaper: in Toulon, Aix-En-Provence, Marseille, Valence and Nîmes in southern France, and in Villepinte and Nanterre, near Paris.

In a post on X, Darmanin said he was travelling to Toulon to offer his support to affected officers.

Without directly attributing blame for the attacks, he said the French government was “facing up to the problem of drug trafficking” and taking measures that would “profoundly disrupt” criminal networks.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said the government’s response must be “relentless”.

“Those who attack prisons and officers deserve to be locked up in those prisons and monitored by those officers,” he posted on X.

He added that he had instructed police to immediately strengthen security at prison facilities.

The prison guard union, FO Justice, expressed its “deepest concern and anger” following the “extremely serious” attacks overnight.

The union posted updates from the aftermath of several attacks on X, including images of burnt-out vehicles in prison car parks and bullet holes in the Toulon prison entrance gate.

It called for urgent government action to protect prison staff.

Monday night’s attacks come after seven vehicles were set on fire in a similar attack on France’s national school of prison administration on Sunday, according to the union.

“It is worrying to note that some people no longer hesitate to directly attack the prison’s property, a symbol of state authority,” it said in a statement.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but La Parisien reports that the letters DDPF – meaning “French prisoners’ rights” – were found inscribed on damaged vehicles. The AFP news agency says anarchist slogans were found at some sites.

AFP quotes a source close to the case as saying the attacks appeared to be coordinated and “clearly linked” to the government’s strategy against drug trafficking.

A law is passing through the French parliament which creates a special prosecutor’s office to deal with drugs crime, with new powers for investigators.

The Vatican has put Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí on the path to sainthood in recognition of his “heroic virtues”.

Gaudí – who has been dubbed by some as “God’s architect” – is the designer of one of Spain’s most famous religious sites and tourist attractions, the unfinished Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona.

On Monday, the Vatican issued a statement which said Pope Francis had authorised a decree declaring the Catalonia-born architect “venerable”.

That is an early step on the road to a candidate for sainthood being formally canonised by the Catholic Church.

It is the latest development in a decades-long campaign to have Gaudí, who was a devout Catholic, recognised as a saint.

The Archbishop of Barcelona, Cardinal Juan Jose Omella, called the news a “joy”.

“It is a recognition not only of his architectural work but something more important,” he said, according to AFP news agency.

The cardinal continued: “He is saying you… amid life’s difficulties, amid work, amid pain, amid suffering, are destined to be saints.”

The usual formal process for someone to be declared a saint would next involve beatification, one step short of full sainthood.

That is a category reserved for martyrs, those deemed to have lived a life of heroic values and candidates who the Church declares to have a saintly reputation.

In the case of Gaudí, who died in 1926 after being hit by a tram while walking to church, the Vatican would likely require proof of a miracle that could be attributed to him post-death in order to proceed with beatification.

Gaudí was born in 1852 and many of his best known works continue to attract visitors to Barcelona, where much of his legacy is situated.

The Sagrada Familia basilica has been under construction since 1883 and remains unfinished.

It has been placed on Unesco’s World Heritage list, along with some of Gaudi’s other works, and was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010.

The Trump administration has said it is freezing more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in federal funds for Harvard University, hours after the elite college rejected a list of demands from the White House.

The White House sent a list of demands to Harvard last week which it said were designed to fight antisemitism on campus. They included changes to hiring, admissions and teaching.

Since Donald Trump was re-elected, his government has tried to reshape elite universities by threatening to withhold federal funds, mostly spent on research.

Harvard became the first major US university to reject the administration’s demands on Monday, accusing the White House of trying to “control” its community.

The sweeping changes demanded by the White House would have transformed its operations and ceded a large amount of control to the government.

Its letter to Harvard on Friday, obtained by the New York Times, said the university had failed to live up to the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” that justify federal investment.

The letter included 10 categories for proposed changes, including:

• reporting students to the federal government who are “hostile” to American values
• ensuring each academic department is “viewpoint diverse”
• hiring an external government-approved party to audit programs and departments “that most fuel antisemitic harassment”
• checking faculty staff for plagiarism

President Trump has accused leading universities of failing to protect Jewish students when college campuses around the country were roiled by protests against the war in Gaza and US support for Israel last year.

The letter orders the university to take disciplinary action for “violations” that happened during protests.

In explaining its rejection of these demands, Harvard President Alan Garber said the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights under the First Amendment protecting free speech.

“Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard,” he said.

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Shortly after his letter of resistance was sent, the education department said it was freezing $2.2bn in grants and $60m in contracts to Harvard immediately.

“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges,” the Department of Education said in a statement.

The disruption of learning plaguing campuses is unacceptable and the harassment of Jewish students intolerable, the statement said.

A professor of history at Harvard, David Armitage, told the BBC that the school could afford to resist as the richest university in the US and no price was too high to pay for freedom.

“It’s a not unexpected act of entirely groundless and vengeful activity by the Trump administration which wants nothing more than to silence freedom of speech,” he said.

In March, the Trump administration said it was reviewing roughly $256m in federal contracts and grants at Harvard, and an additional $8.7bn in multi-year grant commitments.

Harvard professors filed a lawsuit in response, alleging the government was unlawfully attacking freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Harvard, which has a $53bn endowment, is one of a number of elite universities in the crosshairs of the new presidency.

Columbia University in New York City agreed to a number of demands last month after the White House pulled $400m in federal funding.

Polling by Gallup last summer suggested that confidence in higher education has been falling over time among Americans of all political backgrounds, partly driven by a growing belief that universities push a political agenda. The decline was particularly steep among Republicans.

Columbia agreed to several of the administration’s demands, drawing criticism from some students and faculty.

Earlier on Monday, a lawyer for an organiser of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University said her client had been arrested by immigration officials as he attended an interview as part of his application for US citizenship.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who is due to graduate next month, was detained on Monday in Colchester, Vermont.

Others who took part in campus protests against the war, including Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University’s Rumeysa Ozturk, have been detained in recent weeks.

An organiser of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University has been arrested by immigration officials as he attended an interview as part of his application for US citizenship, his lawyer says.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who is due to graduate next month from the New York City college, was detained on Monday in Colchester, Vermont.

His lawyer said Mr Mahdawi was taken into custody “in direct retaliation” for his role in campus demonstrations against the Israel-Gaza war.

Others who took part in campus protests against the war, including Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University’s Rumeysa Ozturk, have been detained.

The BBC has contacted US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for more details on Mr Mahdawi’s case.

Video shared on social media apparently shows him being escorted into a car by two officers wearing police jackets.

His lawyer, Luna Droubi, said: “The Trump administration detained Mohsen Mahdawi in direct retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and because of his identity as a Palestinian.

“His detention is an attempt to silence those who speak out against the atrocities in Gaza. It is also unconstitutional.”

The attorney applied to a federal court for a temporary restraining order to prevent US immigration authorities moving Mr Mahdawi out of Vermont or expelling him from the US.

Judge William Sessions, an Obama appointee, quickly granted that order.

The court filing says Mr Mahdawi was born in a refugee camp in the West Bank and moved to the US in 2014.

It describes the philosophy major as a committed Buddhist who believes in “non-violence and empathy as a central tenet of his religion”.

The whereabouts of Mr Mahdawi, who has held US permanent resident status since 2015, are unknown, according to Ms Droubi.

Mr Mahdawi, who co-founded Columbia’s Palestinian Student Society, has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s military operation in Gaza.

Last December, he did an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes programme in which he accused Israel of genocide, which it denies.

Mr Mahdawi’s detention comes amid an immigration crackdown by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Last month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at least 300 foreign students’ visas had been revoked in an effort to tackle antisemitism on university campuses.

Critics say US officials are falsely accusing students of anti-Jewish bigotry and violating their right to free speech.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said on X that Mr Mahdawi “was illegally detained by ICE during what was supposed to be the final step in his citizenship process”.

The senator said he “must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention”.

Judge Sessions also held a hearing on Monday in the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student at Boston’s Tufts University, who was arrested by immigration authorities last month.

He questioned whether the Trump administration would provoke a “constitutional crisis” by not releasing the student from custody if the court were to order that she be moved from detention in Louisiana back to Vermont.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil are currently challenging an immigration judge’s ruling on Friday allowing the government to deport him as a national security risk.

The Columbia University protest leader was detained last month outside his campus accommodation and transferred to a Louisiana detention centre.

More than 1,000 people have been left with respiratory problems after a sandstorm swept across Iraq’s central and southern parts of the country, health officials said.

One official in Muthanna province reported to the AFP news agency at least 700 cases of what they said was suffocation.

Footage shared online showed areas cloaked in a thick orange haze, with local media reporting power cuts and the suspension of flights in a number of regions.

Dust storms are common in Iraq, but some experts believe they are becoming more frequent due to climate change.

Pedestrians and police wore face masks to protect themselves from the dust and paramedics were on site to assist people with difficulty breathing, according to AFP.

Hospitals in Muthanna province in southern Iraq received at least “700 cases of suffocation”, a local health official said.

More than 250 people were taken to hospital in Najaf province, and at least 322 patients including children were sent to hospitals in Diwaniyah province.

A further 530 people reported breathing issues in Dhi Qar and Basra provinces.

The sandstorm blanketed Iraq’s southern provinces in an orange cloud that reduced visibility to less than one kilometre (0.62 mile).

The authorities were forced to shut down airports in the provinces of Najaf and Basra.

Conditions are expected to gradually improve by Tuesday morning, according to local weather services.

Iraq is listed by the UN as one of the five countries most vulnerable to climate change as it encounters regular sandstorms, sweltering heat and water scarcity.

A severe sandstorm in 2022 left one person dead and more than 5,000 needing treatment for respiratory illnesses.

Iraq will be experiencing more “dust days” in the future, according to its environment ministry.

Machias Seal Island is a tiny dot on maps of North America. But the uninhabited, fogbound rock is significant for its location in an area known as the “Grey Zone” – the site of a rare international dispute between Canada and the United States.

The two neighbours and long-time allies have each long laid claim to the island and surrounding water, where the US state of Maine meets Canada’s New Brunswick province – and with that claim, the right to catch and sell the prized local lobsters.

John Drouin, a US lobsterman who has fished in the Grey Zone for 30 years, tells of the mad dash by Canadian and American fishermen to place lobster traps at the start of the summer catching season each year.

“People have literally lost parts of their bodies, have had concussions, [their] head smashed and everything,” he says.

The injuries have been caused when lobstermen have been caught up in each other’s lines. He says one friend lost his thumb after it became caught up in a Canadian line, what Mr Drouin calls his battle scar from the Grey Zone.

The 277 square miles of sea around Machias Seal Island has been under dispute since the late 1700s – and in 1984, an international court ruling gave both the US and Canada the right to fish in the waterway.

It has stood as a quirk – an isolated area of tension in what had been, until now, an otherwise close relationship between the two countries.

But that could all be about to change.

US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, steep tariffs on Canadian imports and rhetoric about making the country the 51st state has sparked a series of fresh flashpoints, with the possibility that he may ultimately wish to subsume Canada into the US hanging over everything. Amid the biggest shift in the relationship between the two countries in decades, the question is, what does he really want from Canada?

Cutler, Maine, is the closest US town to the Grey Zone. It has a collection of scattered houses, one supply store and, for good reason, a lobster wholesaler.

Aside from a few big-city retirees and holiday-goers, Cutler owes its existence to the bountiful crustaceans that inhabit the offshore waters. And for the lobstermen of Cutler, the international limbo of the Grey Zone is their everyday reality, as they scatter their traps along the bottom of the Gulf of Maine to catch the prized lobsters and bring them to market.

During lobster season, the Grey Zone is packed with boats and buoys marking the location of their traps. When the waters get crowded and livelihoods are at stake, things can get ugly.

“Do we like it? Not in the least,” says Mr Drouin. He has caught lobsters in the Grey Zone for 30 years. “I will continue to complain about it until I can’t breathe anymore.”

Another Maine lobsterman, Nick Lemieux, said he and his sons have had nearly 200 traps stolen in recent years – and he blames their rivals to the north.

“This is our area, and it’s all we have to work with,” he said. “Things like that don’t sit very well with us.”

Americans accuse the Canadians of operating under a different, more accommodating set of rules that allow them to catch larger lobsters.

Canadians counter that the Americans have higher catch limits and are surreptitiously fishing in their territorial waters.

The union representing Canada’s border officials recently complained that Americans have responded to their enforcement efforts with threats of violence – and some of its officers have refused to work in the Grey Zone.

Canada regularly dispatches maintenance workers to Machias Seal Island to check on an automated lighthouse – evidence, they say, of their control. The Americans point to US Marines who occupied the island during World War One as their proof of sovereignty.

The dispute appears to be going nowhere, but during Trump’s first presidency, events in the Grey Zone did not appear to be intruding greatly on the overall warmth between the US and Canada.

When Trump hosted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House in 2017, he spoke about the US-Canada relationship in glowing terms, remarking on the “special bonds” between the two nations that “share much more than a border”.

Yet his rhetoric has since changed sharply.

In recent months, Trump has repeatedly called Canada the “51st state” of the US – and the White House has expressed a willingness to open up new areas of dispute all along the US-Canada border.

In September, the president voiced designs on Canadian water in British Columbia in the west of the country, for instance, suggesting it could be piped to drought-parched California: “You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north… they have essentially a very large faucet”.

Approximately 1,500 miles further east, the Great Lakes could become another site of potential conflict, as US officials told their Canadian counterparts they are considering withdrawing from treaties over their coordinated environmental regulation.

And even further east, a library has become the unlikely setting for a flashpoint: built deliberately to straddle the Vermont-Quebec border as a symbol of cooperation between Canada and the US, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House used to be open to residents from both nations.

However in March, America changed the rules so that Canadians are required to pass through immigration control before they access the building, with the US Department of Homeland Security claiming it was in response to drug trafficking.

Natural resources are another source of dispute. Canada has vast supplies of rare earth metals, gold, oil, coal and lumber – the kind of natural wealth that Trump has long prized.

While Trump has disavowed any desire for Canada’s lumber, energy stockpiles or manufactured products, in February Trudeau reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Canadian business and labour leaders that he saw it differently.

“I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may even be why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state. They’re very aware of our resources, of what we have, and they very much want to be able to benefit from those,” the CBC quoted Trudeau as saying.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings, a Canadian journalist and host of The Big Story podcast, believes Trump wants Canadian resources, and that the president’s annexation comments should be taken seriously.

“He likes the idea of being the guy to bring in a huge land mass,” says Mr Heath-Rawlings. “He probably wants the Arctic, which is obviously going to become much more valuable in the years to come.”

For Trump, even the US-Canadian border itself is suspect. “If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it between Canada and the US,” he said in March. “Somebody did it a long time ago, and it makes no sense.”

Needless to say, Trump’s comments have rankled Canadian leaders, who warn of the president’s ultimate designs on their homeland.

In March, Trudeau accused the US president of planning “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us”.

The previous month, after Trump first announced new tariffs on Canada, Trudeau had said: “Trump has it in mind that one of the easiest ways of doing that [annexing Canada] is absorbing our country. And it is a real thing.”

If US territorial ambitions for Canada are, in fact, a “real thing”, it presents a simple, vexing question. Why? Why would the US, which has had the closest of diplomatic, military, economic and cultural ties with its northern neighbour for more than a century, put all of that at risk?

Some see a pattern in Trump’s designs on Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal – one that reflects a dramatic change in how the US sees itself in the world.

It has been most clearly articulated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said in January that the post-World War Two dominance of the US was more the exception than the norm.

“Eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multi-polar world, multiple great powers in different parts of the planet,” he said. “We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and … rogue states like Iran and North Korea.”

According to Michael Williams, professor of international affairs at the University of Ottawa, if the current Trump administration thinks that American world dominance is no longer possible or even desired, the US might pull back from far-flung conflicts and European commitments.

Instead, says Prof Williams, the US would prioritise its “territorial core”, creating a continental fortress of sorts, insulated on both sides by the vastness of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

“If this is your plan, you seek to control key geographic choke points,” he says. “You maximise access to natural resources, of which Canada has plenty, and you reshore industry whenever possible.”

Such a geopolitical outlook is hardly new. In the 1820s, US President James Monroe articulated a new global order in which America and Europe confined themselves to their own hemispheres.

But it does represent a remarkable shift in US foreign policy since the end of World War Two.

Prof Williams acknowledges that it’s difficult to figure out exactly what the US president is thinking – a view wholeheartedly endorsed by John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser for more than a year of his first presidential term.

“Trump has no philosophy,” he says. “He gets ideas, but does not follow a coherent pattern. There is no underlying strategy.”

The president is currently fixated on minerals and natural resources, he said, but Mr Bolton argues the best way to go about doing that is through the private sector, not by floating the idea of annexing an ally. Canada, for its part, has offered to work with US companies on joint mining partnerships.

Prof Williams and Mr Bolton agree that whatever the motivations behind Trump’s designs on Canada, the diplomatic damage that’s being done will be difficult to undo – and the possibility of unanticipated consequences is high.

“Trump likes to say in a lot of contexts that other people don’t have any cards,” says Prof Williams. “But the further you push people to the wall, the more you may find that they have cards that you didn’t know they had – and they might be willing to play them. And even if you have more cards, the consequences of doing so can easily spiral out of control in some really bad ways.”

Canadians have already been boycotting US products and cancelling winter trips south, which has had an impact on tourist communities in Florida.

“We’re not looking for a fight, but Canada’s ready for one,” says Mr Heath-Rawlings.

The idea that the trust between the US and Canada has been broken is one that’s been embraced by the country’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, as a general election looms.

“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” he said recently. “I reject any attempts to weaken Canada, to wear us down, to break us so that America can own us.”

Back in the 19th Century, territorial conflicts and flare-ups along the US-Canada border were a more frequent occurrence. Americans made multiple unsuccessful attempts to capture Canadian territory during the 1812 War.

In 1844, some Americans called for military force if the UK wouldn’t agree to its claims in the Pacific Northwest.

The 1859 “pig dispute” involved contested islands near Vancouver and the unfortunate shooting of a British hog that had intruded on an American’s garden.

All that seemed the stuff of dusty history books, where the Grey Zone was a diplomatic oddity – an exception to a peaceful norm in the modern world of developed and integrated democracies.

But that calm is now broken, and no one is sure where these stormy waters will lead either country.

Buying or renting a home has become unaffordable for the average Australian, driven by a perfect storm of astronomical house prices, relentless rental increases and a lack of social housing.

With less than a month until the federal election, housing remains among the top issues for voters, and the country’s two major parties – the Labor Party and the Liberal-National Coalition – have both pledged to tackle the crisis in a range of ways.

Australians are already struggling under cost-of-living pressures and bracing for the effects of Donald Trump’s global tariff war. And it remains to be seen whether either party will sway voters with their promise of restoring the Australian dream.

Simply put, Australia has not been building enough homes to meet the demands of its rapidly growing population, creating a scarcity that makes any available home more expensive to buy or rent.

Compounding the issue are Australia’s restrictive planning laws, which prevent homes being built where most people want to live, such as in major cities.

Red tape means that popular metropolitan areas like Melbourne and Sydney are far less dense than comparably sized cities around the world.

The steady decline of public housing and ballooning waitlists have made matters worse, tipping people into homelessness or overcrowded living conditions.

Climate change has also made many areas increasingly unliveable, with natural disasters such as bushfires and severe storms destroying large swathes of properties.

Meanwhile, decades of government policies have commercialised property ownership. So the ideal of owning a home, once seen as a right in Australia, has turned into an investment opportunity.

In short: it depends where you live.

Sydney is currently the second least affordable city in the world to buy a property, according to a 2023 Demographia International Housing Affordability survey.

The latest data from property analytics company CoreLogic shows the average Sydney home costs almost A$1.2m (£570,294, $742,026).

Across the nation’s capital cities, the combined average house price sits at just over A$900,000.

House prices in Australia overall have also jumped 39.1% in the last five years – and wages have failed to keep up.

It now takes the average prospective homeowner around 10 years to save the 20% deposit usually required to buy an average home, according to a 2024 State of the Housing System report.

The rental market has provided little relief, with rents increasing by 36.1% nationally since the onset of Covid – an equivalent rise of A$171 per week.

Sydney topped the charts with a median weekly rent of A$773, according to CoreLogic’s latest rental review. Perth came in second with average rents at A$695 per week, followed by Canberra at A$667 per week.

Immigration and foreign property purchases are often cited as causes for Australia’s housing crisis. But experts say that they are not significant contributors statistically.

Many people who move to Australia are temporary migrants, such as international students who live in dedicated student accommodation rather than entering the housing market, according to Michael Fotheringham, head of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

“The impact [of migrants] on the housing market is not as profound as some commentators have suggested,” Mr Fotheringham tells the BBC.

The federal government also recently sought to crack down on foreign homebuyers, by tripling fees.

However that is “a very small issue” with not much meaningful impact on housing strain, says Brendan Coates, from the Grattan Institute public policy think tank.

The latest data released by the Australian Taxation Office supports this, with homes purchased by foreign buyers in 2022-23 representing less than one percent of all sales.

“It’s already very difficult for foreigners to purchase homes under existing foreign investment rules. They are subject to a wide range of taxes, particularly in some states,” Mr Coates explains.

Labor and the Coalition have both promised to invest in building more homes – with Labor offering 1.2 million by 2029, and the Coalition vowing to unlock 500,000.

In their respective campaign launches, both parties promote housing initiatives aimed at first homebuyers.

Labor has pledged to expand an existing shared-equity scheme to allow all first homebuyers to purchase homes with a 5% deposit, an ease on the 20% deposit typically needed.

Albanese also promised 100,000 of the new homes his government creates will only be available to first homebuyers, in addition to building more social housing and introducing subsidies to help low-to-moderate-income earners.

The Coalition, if elected, will allow first-time buyers to use up to $50,000 from their superannuation retirement savings to fund a house purchase. They will make mortgage payments partially tax free for up to five years for all first homebuyers with newly built properties.

Central to the Coalition’s housing affordability policy is cutting migration, reducing the number of international students and implementing a two-year ban on foreign investment in existing properties.

Additionally, they have promised a A$5bn boost to infrastructure to support local councils by paying for water, power and sewerage at housing development sites.

The Greens’ policies, meanwhile, have focused on alleviating pressures on renters by calling for national rent freezes and caps.

They have also said that in the event of a minority government, they will be pushing to reform tax incentives for investors.

In short, experts say that while both Labor and the Coalition’s policies are steps in the right direction, neither are sufficient to solve the housing problem.

“A combination of both parties’ platforms would be better than what we’re seeing from either side individually,” Mr Coates tells the BBC.

A 2025 State of the Land report by the Urban Development Institute of Australia says the federal government will fail to meet its target of 1.2 million new homes by 2029 – falling short by almost 400,000.

The Coalition’s focus on reducing immigration, meanwhile, will only make housing marginally cheaper while making Australia poorer in the long-term, according to Mr Coates.

The cuts to migration will mean fewer skilled migrants, he explains, and the loss of revenue from those migrants will result in higher taxes for Australians.

Decades of underinvestment in social housing also means demand in that area is massively outstripping supply – which at 4% of housing stock is significantly lower than many other countries, according to Mr Fotheringham.

There’s also concern about grants for first homebuyers, which drive prices up further.

While commending the fact that these issues are finally being treated seriously, Mr Fotheringham believes it will take years to drag Australia out of a housing crisis that has been building for decades.

“We’ve been sleepwalking into this as a nation for quite some time,” he says. “[Now] the nation is paying attention, the political class is paying attention.”

The fate of the Scunthorpe steel works has shone a fresh spotlight on Chinese investment in the UK economy with critics raising questions over potential security risks.

The British Steel plant had been owned by China’s Jingye Steel.

But the UK government has now taken control of the Scunthorpe site, amid claims the Chinese owners were planning to permanently decommission its two blast furnaces and use its rolling mills to process imported Chinese-made metal instead.

BBC Verify looks at what we know about the extent of Chinese investment in the UK economy – and how much of a concern it should be.

Data from the Office for National Statistics suggests total Chinese investment in the UK in 2023 amounted to about £4.3bn – a small fraction of the total £2 trillion of overseas investment in the British economy in that year.

However, this is likely to be a considerable underrepresentation of the true scale of Chinese investment in the UK because the official data only includes the immediate investing country, not the ultimate source of the money – and because of a lack of transparency from Beijing when it comes to overseas ownership stakes.

Independent estimates from the American Enterprise Institute think tank, using corporate reports, suggest total public and private Chinese investment in the UK between 2005 and 2024 added up to $105bn, or £82bn.

This would have made Britain the third largest national destination of Chinese investment over this period, after only the US and Australia.

There is a wide range of Chinese investment in the UK, ranging from critical energy and transport infrastructure, to stakes in private companies and football clubs.

Significant Chinese investments in UK infrastructure include a 10% stake in London’s Heathrow airport by the China Investment Corporation, a sovereign wealth fund wholly owned by the Chinese state.

The Hong Kong-based industrialist Li Ka-shing’s investment group owns UK Power Networks, which operates electricity distribution infrastructure across London, the South East of England and the East of England.

The billionaire’s group also owns a 75% stake in Northumbrian Water Group, which provides water supply and sewerage in the north east of England.

There is also a large Chinese investment in the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset.

China General Nuclear Power Group originally had a 33.5% stake, with the rest owned by the French company EDF.

But EDF reports that the Chinese company has stopped contributing additional financing to the joint project – which has been running over budget – and, as a result the Chinese stake at the end of last year had declined to 27.4%.

The same Chinese company has an even larger stake – 66.5% – in the proposed Bradwell B nuclear site in Essex, according to the project website. EDF owns the rest.

Chinese companies have backed significant investments in the battery sector too.

The Minety battery site in Wiltshire is one of the largest energy storage projects in Europe. It was funded and constructed by Huaneng, a Chinese state-owned company which also operates the facility.

“The biggest growth of investment in Europe by Chinese firms is in EV [electric vehicle] batteries and much of this is private firms rather than Chinese state-owned firms,” says Professor Giles Mohan of the Open University.

The Hangzhou-based Chinese car company, Geely Auto, owns the Coventry-headquartered London EV Company, which manufactures electric black taxis.

The drive to achieve climate targets in the UK and Europe has welcomed Chinese investment in other green energy sectors like wind farms.

Red Rock Renewables, which is owned by the Chinese state-controlled SDIC Power, has a 25% share in the Beatrice offshore wind farm in Scotland.

As for investment in consumer brands, Li Ka-shing’s group owns the Suffolk-headquartered pub chain and brewery Greene King.

Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club is owned by the Shanghai-based conglomerate Fosun.

While Jingye steel had total control of the Scunthorpe steel plant, it’s important to bear in mind that Chinese investors do not always have majority stakes in UK businesses, which would interfere with their ability to determine those companies’ operational decisions.

Some of these organisations such as airports and water utilities are also tightly regulated, potentially limiting the freedom of manoeuvre of their Chinese owners in controlling the assets.

Chinese investors are also estimated to have considerable holdings of UK land and buildings.

The Leadenhall Building, known as the “cheesegrater”, in the City of London was acquired by a Chinese property investor for £1.15bn in 2017.

The potential danger posed by Chinese investment in UK infrastructure has been extensively debated in recent years – and a particular flashpoint was the involvement of the Shenzhen-based Chinese technology company Huawei in building the UK’s 5G communications infrastructure.

Huawei was founded by Ren Zhengfei, a former Chinese army officer, in 1987.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre initially judged in 2019 that any risk posed by Huawei was manageable.

But the UK, nevertheless, required the Chinese company to begin pulling out of the UK’s telecoms infrastructure in 2020, after coming under pressure from the US government during Donald Trump’s first term as President.

The involvement of Huawei in UK networks was also opposed by a number of MPs.

Grace Theodoulou, policy fellow on China at the Council on Geostrategy, says there are two main potential threats to consider for Chinese investment in UK critical infrastructure.

“The first is the potential for espionage – for example, having Chinese-made audiovisual equipment installed in government buildings or devices.

“The second is the infrastructure can be controlled by the manufacturer and, as such, could be disrupted for geopolitical leverage,” she said.

Some analysts argue that Chinese law – which mandates all Chinese companies to align closely with Chinese Communist Party directives and to assist with national intelligence efforts – represents an inherent security risk in all Chinese investments in Western infrastructure.

“A likely scenario where it might be in China’s interests [to harm UK infrastructure] would be to impede Britain’s ability to impose sanctions against Beijing in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

“If China were to invade Taiwan, and should they have control over parts of our critical infrastructure, it would highly impact the potential to enforce sanctions or similar measures,” Ms Theodoulou said.

However, other analysts are sceptical over whether it would be in the financial interest of Chinese investors to sabotage UK infrastructure or firms, as such actions would collapse the value of their investments and likely lead to their appropriation by the UK government.

“This threat is asserted and not proven, and these companies are profit-driven so it is not in their interests to sabotage our infrastructure,” said Prof Giles Mohan.

And they argue that a distinction should be drawn between Chinese investments in vital infrastructure and investments into UK firms which own consumer brands where the potential for public harm is considerably lower.

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In the chaotic minutes after US President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly reversed course and paused dozens of sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, one man quickly became the public face of the decision: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

“It took great courage,” the bespectacled 62-year-old former hedge fund manager told the dozens of reporters gathered around him on 9 April. “Great courage to stay the course until this moment.”

Notably absent during the press briefing – after which markets rocketed – were the other two men tasked with delivering Trump’s tariff message to the American people: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and trade adviser Pete Navarro.

Bessent’s centre-stage role in the tariffs announcement, some trade policy veterans have suggested, starkly highlights how shifting power dynamics within the White House brought the US back from the brink of an all-out global trade war, even if all the players are broadly supportive of Trump’s economic agenda.

“He’s playing the good cop,” William Alan Reinsch, the former head of the National Foreign Trade Council, told the BBC. “And Lutnick and Navarro are playing the bad cop.”

• What are tariffs and why is Trump using them?
• Trump had five tariff goals – has he achieved any of them?

Publicly, the White House has been largely quiet on the chain of events that led to Trump’s market-shaking decision to pause reciprocal tariffs for most countries while raising levies on China, with the president saying only that he had been “thinking about it” for a “few days” before it “came together” early on the morning of 9 April.

But according to US media reports, it was Bessent, inundated with calls from business leaders, that played a key part in swaying Trump, including with conversations on Air Force One the weekend beforehand and in the Oval Office on the morning of the decision.

Earlier in his career, Bessent expressed reservations about tariffs. Some observers believe these views, together with long experience in the bond market, ultimately made it possible for him to gain the president’s ear over Navarro and Lutnick, both of whom represented a harder-line stance on the tariffs.

“I think what happened was that Trump wasn’t paying attention to the bond market,” added Mr Reinsch, now an economics expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And Bessent got him to pay attention.”

Mr Reinsch, who was also undersecretary of commerce for export administration in the 1990s during President Bill Clinton’s administration, said that Bessent’s approach, so far, has been “a classic way to deal with Trump”.

“Don’t tell him he’s wrong or made a mistake,” he added. “Tell him there’s a better way forward to achieve his objectives, and that the market is not reacting the way we want it to react.”

On the morning of the announcement on 9 April, Trump met in the Oval Office with Bessent as well as National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and Lutnick, the 63-year-old former chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald and a noted China hawk.

Two other key players in tariffs policy were notably absent, prompting one source close to the White House to tell Reuters news agency there had been a “pecking order change”.

One, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, was just a short drive away on Capitol Hill, testifying about tariffs before a House of Representative committee.

He would later that day learn of the tariffs announcement in real-time along with the lawmakers, prompting a tense exchange in which he was accused of having the “rug pulled out” from underneath him.

The other, Peter Navarro, was similarly absent despite being one of the most visible figures in the media on tariffs, prompting speculation his stance had fallen out of favour with the president.

At times, the various figures involved in tariffs gave contradictory statements on the policy, which experts say contributed to confusion and market volatility.

“They are not singing on the same page,” said Mark Sobel, who spent nearly 40 years at the Treasury Department, including as deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy.

“You hear Navarro, you hear Bessent, you hear the president and you feel you’re getting whiplash,” he added. “This is not a disciplined group.”

Terry Haines, the founder of Washington DC-based consultancy Pangaea Policy, told the BBC he believes that it was “deliberate” that the administration put forward various people to become the public faces of tariffs.

“[They wanted to] throw as many spokespeople out there, say different things, and flood the zone with opinion,” he said. “It may have efficacy in politics, but it confuses the hell out of markets.”

As an example, Mr Haines pointed to Navarro, who he said gets “more leeway than you’d expect” owing to the four-month jail term he served for contempt of Congress after ignoring a subpoena from a House committee investigating the 2021 US Capitol riot.

“They appeal to different audiences. Bessent would be interested in the financial press, while Navarro has a different message,” he said.

Haines, however, cautioned against assuming that any one person contributed the most to Trump’s decision.

“Markets want winners and losers, like People magazine-style stuff,” he said. “But we need to know who to listen to, and that became, pretty much by default, Bessent.”

Several experts contacted by the BBC said they expect Bessent to now take a much more prominent public role in tariff policy, with Lutnick taking charge of the negotiations, while Navarro, Hassett and Greer play supporting roles.

Haines, for example, said he believes Bessent will become, in real terms, “the spokesman for economic policy”.

Ultimately, a more structured approach could contribute to market stability, according to Andrew Hale, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“I imagine it will get more certain as we go forward,” he said. “It’s what businesses and investors want.”

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has taken the witness stand in a landmark antitrust trial to defend his company against allegations that his company operates a social media monopoly.

His testimony is part of a case first brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2020 during the final days of the first Trump administration.

The US competition watchdog alleges Meta unfairly dominated the market through its acquisitions of photo-sharing app Instagram in 2012 and the messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.

The FTC is seeking to break up Meta by forcing a spinoff of Instagram or WhatsApp. Meta says there’s plenty of competition in social media, including from apps such as TikTok, X, and YouTube.

Wearing a dark suit and light blue tie, Mr Zuckerberg was the first witness in the case on Monday at a federal court in Washington DC. The trial is expected to last for two months.

The FTC pointed to a 2011 email Mr Zuckerberg sent saying: “Instagram seems like it’s growing quickly.”

The following year, he sent another email saying the company was “so far behind that we don’t even understand how far behind we are… I worry that it will take us too long to catch up”.

On the stand, Mr Zuckerberg defended his statements, calling the emails “relatively early” conversations about buying the app. He added that Meta had improved Instagram over the years.

Mr Zuckerberg also said he wanted to buy Instagram because of its camera technology, not because of its social network. He is expected to continue his testimony on Tuesday.

The FTC says the company overpaid when it acquired Instagram for $1bn and WhatsApp for $19bn as a defensive move.

“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” said FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson in his opening statement at Monday’s trial.

Meta countered that the lawsuit from the FTC, which originally reviewed and approved both those acquisitions, was “misguided”.

Meta “acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to improve and grow them alongside Facebook”, the company’s attorney Mark Hansen argued.

The FTC lawyer cited a 2012 memo from Mr Zuckerberg in which he discusses the importance of “neutralising” Instagram.

Mr Matheson called that message “a smoking gun”.

Meta, on the other hand, said the purchases made the consumer experience better.

“Acquisitions to improve and grow” have never been found unlawful, Meta’s lead litigator, said on Monday, “and they should not be found unlawful here”.

Meta said last year that it had 3.27 billion daily active users across its products.

Instagram was expected to account for more than half of Meta’s advertising revenue in the US in 2025. according to research firm Emarketer.

Meta has been making regular overtures to Trump since his election.

The company contributed $1m to Trump’s inaugural fund, and has added former Trump adviser Dina Powell McCormick and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) boss Dana White, a Trump ally, to Meta’s board of directors this year.

The company also announced in January that it was rolling back content moderation policies that Republicans said had amounted to censorship.

It also agreed to pay Trump $25m to settle a lawsuit over the suspension of his accounts after the US Capitol riot in 2021.

Mr Zuckerberg has also visited the White House in recent weeks.

The Meta boss has lobbied Trump in person to have the FTC drop the case, according to the Wall Street Journal.

When asked by the BBC to confirm that report, Meta sidestepped the question but said in a statement: “The FTC’s lawsuits against Meta defies reality.”

FTC v Meta begins as another major antitrust case – USA v Google – grinds on.

The Department of Justice won the first phase of that case last summer when Judge Amit Mehta found that Google holds a monopoly in online search, with a market share of around 90%.

Last month, government attorneys reiterated a demand made during the Biden administration that a court break up Google’s search monopoly.

The FTC’s case against Meta will be tougher to prove, says Laura Phillips-Sawyer, an associate professor of business law at the University of Georgia.

“I think they have a real uphill battle,” Ms Phillips-Sawyer said of the FTC.

“They have a long road before any consideration of divestiture of Instagram or WhatsApp is considered.”

That’s because compared to online search, there’s more competition in the personal network services space that Meta operates in, Ms Phillips-Sawyer said.

Amazon and Apple also face antitrust lawsuits by US enforcers.

Rapper and musician Lil Nas X has revealed he is suffering from a sudden partial paralysis of the face.

Posting to Instagram from hospital, the star told his 10.4 million followers that he has “lost control” of the right-hand side of his face.

“This is me doing a full smile right now, by the way,” he said in a video, as he unsuccessfully tried to grin. “Bro, I can’t even laugh right.”

In a follow-up post, Lil Nas X reassured fans that he was “OK” and asked them to “stop being sad”.

“Shake ur ass for me instead!” he joked.

In a third post, he wrote: “I’mma look funny for a lil bit but that’s it.”

In the comments section, his fans and celebrity friends expressed their concern.

“Get well baby,” said actress Taraji P Henson. “Sending you love,” wrote Garbage singer Shirley Manson.

Comedian Wanda Sykes added: “Sometimes your body tells you to sit down somewhere. Rest up.”

The 26-year-old, whose real name is Montero Lamar Hill, appeared to be in good spirits, despite his condition.

In one video, he panned the camera from the left side of his face to the right, joking: “We normal over here, we get crazy over here!”

The star did not disclose the cause of his condition, but fans speculated it could be Bell’s Palsy, a nerve condition that causes paralysis to part of the face, or Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, in which a shingles outbreak affects the facial nerve near the ear, and cause hearing issues such as tinnitus.

Both conditions are usually temporary, and can be triggered by infections or stress.

Justin Bieber cancelled several dates on his 2022 world tour after contracting Ramsay Hunt Syndrome.

In a video, he showed fans that he was unable to blink his right eye and, although the symptoms persisted for some time, he recovered fully.

Musician and TV presenter Tulisa Contostavlos also has recurring instances of Bell’s Palsy, which developed after she suffered nerve damage in a horse riding accident.

Speaking in 2020, she said that an attack could last up to seven months if she didn’t take steroids within the first 72 hours.

Before his hospital visit, Lil Nas X had been promoting his eight-track EP Days Before Dreamboy, which previews the highly anticipated follow-up to his 2021 debut album, Montero.

Speaking to Atlanta radio station Hot 107.9 last month, he said the album had had a painful gestation.

“At the top of 2024… I feel like I was very lost and trying to cater to everybody except myself,” he said.

The Old Town Road rapper said he had started trying to cater to what he thought “the world wanted from me” – including the need “to be outrageous all the time”.

“But it’s like, no, sometimes I can just be on my chill [side],” he added.

Speaking at last month’s GLAAD Awards, the star added that he’d recently turned down the opportunity to collaborate with Taylor Swift.

“We were working on something,” he told E! News on the red carpet.

“She offered to let me try a verse on something, but I couldn’t catch a vibe for it, so it didn’t happen.”

Spanish authorities have arrested a couple suspected of selling exotic cats online, including protected species like white tigers, pumas and clouded leopards.

Civil Guard police raided the couple’s home on the island of Majorca after learning that they were owning and breeding rare feline species which they then sold on social media.

In total, 19 felines were found on the property and rescued by agents. They included a caracal, two servals and 16 hybrid felines.

The Civil Guard say the discovery was just “the tip of the iceberg of a plot” of a global criminal organisation involving breeders, transporters and vets.

“Most of the animals offered for sale came from countries such as Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, to be smuggled into the European Union,” the Civil Guard said.

The authorities said the couple’s social media was “extremely active” as people from other countries contacted them to purchase these types of animals.

The animals were smuggled into the EU through Poland’s border with Belarus and then distributed with false documents, they added.

Europe is a central hub for exotic wildlife trade and the illicit black market is on the rise, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

The couple also advertised other animals through social media including hyenas, desert lynxes and pumas.

A clouded leopard – an animal native to the Himalayas – with a price tag of €60,000 (£52,000; $68,000) was also put up for sale online.

This raid was part of a wider operation which began last March. One other person is being investigated for selling various species of exotic animals on the internet.

The animals have been temporarily placed at the Son Servera Safari Zoo in Majorca. They may be later relocated to a rescue centre near Alicante, although this is still under discussion.

The high demand for exotic cats is fuelled by social media because the felines can be seen as a sign of wealth or status, according the IFAW.

But these cats – which require a lot of space – are difficult to look after.

“They are very aggressive and can pose a danger to people or other animals” which leads to many people getting rid of them, the Spanish Civil Guard said.

The families of five people murdered by Hashem Abedi in the Manchester Arena bombing have told the justice secretary of their “absolute disbelief” that he was allowed to attack prison officers in HMP Frankland.

Despite being held in a high-security unit, Abedi, 28, attacked three prison officers on Saturday with improvised blades and hot cooking oil.

In a letter seen by the BBC, the families say Abedi “should not have access to anything that he can weaponise” and urged the government to ensure he “cannot be allowed to hurt anyone else”.

Abedi was jailed for life with a minimum 55 years in prison after being convicted of murdering 22 people in the 2017 attack carried out by his brother, Salman.

Separately, Russell Hayward, the boyfriend of Martyn Hett who was also killed in the attack, told BBC Newsnight the latest incident was “sickening and outrageous”.

Since the letter was sent to Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood on Monday, inmates of separation centres have been barred from using kitchens.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s spokesman said it was “clear that something went terribly wrong” with how Abedi had been handled.

Abedi had been held in a separation centre – which holds a small number of inmates deemed to be dangerous and extremist – at Frankland.

He moved to Frankland after carrying out an earlier attack on prison officers in London’s Belmarsh prison in 2020, for which three years and 10 months was added to his sentence.

Two prison officers remain in hospital with serious injuries from the latest attack, while a third has been discharged.

One suffered a severed artery after being stabbed in the neck and the other received severe stab wounds to the back, the chairman of the prison officers’ association said. Abedi is suspected of fashioning the blades from a baking tray, Mark Fairhurst added.

The letter says “we are writing in absolute disbelief” that, once again, the “evil Hashem Abedi has been allowed to cause danger to life”.

They go on: “As the families of Megan Hurley, Eilidh Macleod, Chloe Rutherford, Liam Curry, and Kelly Brewster, our beautiful, beloved children who were so tragically murdered along with 16 others in the Manchester Arena terror attack in May 2017, we find this situation beyond comprehension.”

The families say they understood prison to mean “confinement in a cell for 23 hours a day, meals served through a hatch, and a single hour outside the cell, accompanied by a prison officer” – which they described as “the very minimum measure of justice for the devastation he caused”.

They write: “In our view, he should not be allowed any privileges whatsoever while serving a sentence for the deaths of 22 innocent lives and the injuring of many more.

“He should not have access to anything that he can weaponise, such as hot oil or items he can turn into blades.”

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has said there would be a full, independent review into the incident, which saw the three prison officers suffer stab wounds and burns.

The families asked Mahmood to “consider the full gravity of Abedi’s actions when determining any further punishment”.

They wrote “His continuing violence in prison, attacking prison officers in Belmarsh and now attempting to murder three more, shows he feels no remorse and has no respect for human life.

“We send our heartfelt sympathies to the three prison officers who were injured on Saturday, as well as their families. Hashem Abedi cannot be allowed to hurt anyone else.

“As broken families, we firmly believe the appropriate punishment for this individual should be permanent solitary confinement. In truth, anything harsher would be more fitting.”

The MoJ said in a statement responding to the letter: “Our thoughts remain with the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing and their families who are understandably concerned by the shocking attack at HMP Frankland this weekend.

“We’ve already taken immediate action to suspend access to kitchens in separation and close supervision centres.”

It added that it would be setting out the terms and scope of the review into the incident in the coming days.

Mahmood has said separately that she will be pushing for the “strongest possible punishment” for Abedi.

Speaking on Newsnight, Mr Hayward said Abedi needs to be “watched all the time”.

“I didn’t expect someone of his status to be so freely near a kitchen, let alone there long enough to construct this weapon and then traumatise more people,” he said.

“This person has caused more pain and inflicted more trauma on people.

“I think he should be in solitary confinement, 24/7.

“I think his life inside should be so horrific, there should be no treats. He should be in a straightjacket.”

With his brother, the suicide bomber Salman Abedi, Hashem Abedi planned and prepared the attack on the Ariana Grande concert in 2017.

He was in Libya when the blast took place and was later extradited to the UK to face trial.

Hashem Abedi was found guilty in 2020 of 22 counts of murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to cause an explosion likely to endanger life, and sentenced to a minimum term of at least 55 years before he could be considered for parole.

The sentence was a record for a fixed-length prison term.

It is understood that Hashem Abedi has been moved to the separation centre at HMP Full Sutton following the kitchen attack.

A man arrested for allegedly setting a dangerous fire at the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion would have attacked Governor Josh Shapiro with a hammer if he had found him inside, police said.

Cody Balmer, 38, was arraigned on charges of attempted murder, terrorism, aggravated arson, aggravated assault and burglary on Monday evening. A judge denied bail.

Authorities say Mr Balmer used Molotov cocktails to start the blaze overnight on Saturday.

Shapiro, his wife, his four children, and guests and staff members were able to escape unscathed, but the official residence in the state capital of Harrisburg was severely damaged.

According to a police report, Mr Balmer, a Harrisburg resident, walked for about an hour from his home, scaled a perimeter fence, used a hammer to break two windows and set the building alight at around 01:30 local time Sunday.

Pennsylvania State Police said Mr Balmer had admitted to them that he removed petrol from a lawn mower and poured it into beer bottles to make the Molotov cocktails he allegedly used in the attack.

An arrest affidavit said Mr Balmer had admitted to “harbouring hatred” towards Shapiro.

The suspect initially evaded state troopers but turned himself in to authorities several hours later. Police said they searched Mr Balmer’s home, and found clothes and a hammer matching the items that the attacker was seen wearing and holding on surveillance video captured at the governor’s residence.

An ex-girlfriend of Mr Balmer contacted police and said that he was responsible for setting the fire, according to the police report.

On Monday, Pennsylvania officials said Mr Balmer was transported to a local hospital due to a medical event unconnected with the incident or his arrest.

In an interview with CBS, the BBC’s US news partner, his mother, Christie Balmer, said her son had struggled with mental illness and recently stopped taking psychiatric medication.

“So he was mentally ill, went off his meds, and this is what happened,” she said.

A Facebook account that matches the name, location and other personal details of the suspect included a number of posts both criticising former President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and mocking supporters of President Donald Trump, a Republican.

Mr Balmer served in the US Army Reserve from 2004-12, according to a US Army spokesperson.

At a news conference on Sunday, Shapiro said he was not “fearful” but said: “I’m obviously emotional, worried about my family. I want my kids to be OK.”

“This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society,” the governor added.

“And I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, or one particular person or another. It is not OK, and it has to stop.”

Shapiro, who is Jewish, said his family had celebrated the first night of Passover just hours before the arson attack.

The governor, a Democrat, was among the top contenders to be Kamala Harris’s running mate during the 2024 election but was ultimately passed over in favour of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. He has frequently been mentioned as a possible future presidential candidate.

Shapiro said FBI Director Kash Patel had promised “all the resources of the federal government” in investigating the attack.

In an online post, Attorney General Pam Bondi praised the swift work of police and wrote: “I am deeply relieved that Governor Shapiro and his family are safe.”

The governor’s residence in Harrisburg is a 29,000 sq ft (2,700 sq m) Georgian-style home built in 1968.

Shapiro has served as Pennsylvania’s governor since 2023, after working as the state’s attorney general.

Singapore will head to the polls on 3 May, in what will be the first electoral test for its new prime minister Lawrence Wong.

The election campaign, which lasts just nine days, is expected to be dominated by the rising cost of living, housing needs, jobs, and a growing demand for healthcare amid an ageing population.

Voters are widely expected to return the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) to power. The PAP has won every election since Singapore was granted self rule by the British in 1959.

The country’s last election in 2020 saw the opposition Workers’ Party secure 10 seats – the biggest victory for the opposition since Singapore gained independence in 1965.

This time, 97 seats are up for grabs.

Though the PAP won 83 out of 93 seats in 2020, it will no doubt be looking for a stronger win this year – the last election result was widely seen as a setback for the party.

According to a Reuters report citing data from pollster YouGov, 44% of 1,845 Singaporeans surveyed in March have decided who to vote for. Of that number, 63% say they would choose the ruling party and 15% would back the leading opposition Workers’ Party.

The election is also being seen as the first real test of Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, who took office last year – replacing the city state’s long-serving premier Lee Hsien Loong, who served as leader for 20 years.

Presenting his first budget as the country’s leader in February, Wong unveiled a series of tax rebates, handouts and sector-specific measures to cushion against cost-of-living pressures – in what some analysts call a “feel good” budget aimed at sweetening the ground before the election.

Since becoming an independent nation in 1965, Singapore has only had four prime ministers – all from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP).

The first was Mr Lee’s father, Lee Kuan Yew, who is widely considered as the founder of modern Singapore and led the country for 25 years.

Singapore’s political landscape has been dominated by the PAP, though the party was rocked by a series of scandals in 2020 – including a senior minister’s arrest in a corruption probe as well as the resignation of two lawmakers over an extramarital affair.

Voting is compulsory for Singapore’s 2.75 million eligible citizens.

Singapore mirrors the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system, but there are key differences that make it harder for opposition parties.

MPs contest for constituencies that vary in size and the larger ones are not represented by an individual MP, but by a team of up to five MPs – called Group Representative Constituencies (GRCs).

The system was introduced in 1988 as a way to include more representation from Singapore’s minority groups in the predominantly Chinese city – so parties could “risk” running one or two minority candidates.

But until several years ago, opposition parties have not had the resources to recruit enough skilled and experienced people to genuinely contest these larger constituencies.

Candidates must also deposit S$13,500 ($9,700: £7,700) to contest and need to win more than one-eighth of total votes to get it back.

The electoral divisions of constituencies are also often changed to reflect population growth – opposition parties say this is not done transparently and amounts to gerrymandering, something the government has always denied.

Donald Trump has blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war with Russia – a day after a massive Russian attack killed 35 people and injured 117 others in Ukraine.

The US president said the Ukrainian leader shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin for “millions of people dead” in the Ukraine war.

“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he told reporters at the White House, also blaming former US President Joe Biden for the conflict.

Trump’s comments come after widespread outrage over Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday, which was the deadliest Russian attack on civilians this year.

Asked about the attack earlier, Trump said it was “terrible” and that he had been told Russia had “made a mistake”, but did not elaborate.

“Millions of people dead because of three people,” Trump said on Monday. “Let’s say Putin number one, let’s say Biden who had no idea what the hell he was doing, number two, and Zelensky.”

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, but not millions, of people have been killed or injured on all sides since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

Questioning Zelensky’s competence, Trump remarked that the Ukrainian leader was “always looking to purchase missiles”.

“When you start a war, you got to know you can win,” the US president said.

Trump has repeatedly blamed Zelensky and Biden for the war, despite Russia invading Ukraine first in 2014, five years before Zelensky won the presidency, and then on a far broader scale in 2022.

Trump further argued on Monday that “Biden could have stopped it and Zelensky could have stopped it, and Putin should have never started it. Everybody is to blame”.

Tensions between Trump and Zelensky have been high ever since their heated confrontation at the White House in February.

During that meeting, Trump accused Zelensky of “gambling with World War Three” and chided him for not starting peace talks with Russia earlier.

By contrast, the US president has made efforts to improve relations with Moscow.

Trump said he had a “great” phone call with Putin last month, and the Russian president sent him a portrait as a gift a week later.

In February, Washington voted with Moscow against a UN resolution that identified Russia as the “aggressor” in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

After talks between US and Russian officials failed to produce a ceasefire in Ukraine, Trump said he was “very angry” with Putin, though he added he had a “good relationship” with the Russian leader.

US envoy Steve Witkoff, who met Putin in St Petersburg for close to five hours on Friday, said the talks had been “compelling”.

He said the Russian leader’s request had been to get “a permanent peace… beyond a ceasefire”. The detailed discussions had included the future of five Ukrainian territories Russia is claiming to have annexed since it launched the full-scale invasion of its neighbour and “no Nato, Article 5” – referring to the Nato rule that says members will come to the defence of an ally that is under attack.

“I think we might be on the verge of something that would be very, very important for the world at large,” Witkoff told Fox News on Monday.

“There is a possibility to reshape the Russian-United states relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities that I think give real stability to the region, too. Partnerships create stability,” Trump’s envoy said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was less effusive, describing the contacts as positive but with no clear outlines of an agreement.

In an interview recorded before Russia’s deadly attack on Sumy, Zelensky had urged Trump to visit Ukraine before striking a deal with Putin to end the war.

“Please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead,” Zelensky said in an interview for CBS’s 60 Minutes programme.

At least 35 people were killed when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles into the heart of Sumy on Sunday.

The blasts took place minutes apart while many civilians were heading to church for Palm Sunday, a week before Easter.

A bus was destroyed in the attack and bodies were left strewn in the middle of a city streeet.

Moscow claimed it had targeted a meeting of Ukrainian soldiers, killing 60 of them, but did not provide any evidence.

Trump insisted he wanted to “stop the killing” and signalled there would be proposals soon, but did not elaborate.

The conflict in Ukraine goes back more than a decade, to 2014, when Kyiv’s pro-Russian president was overthrown. Russia then annexed Crimea and backed insurgents in bloody fighting in eastern Ukraine.

The Trump administration has said it is freezing more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in federal funds for Harvard University, hours after the elite college rejected a list of demands from the White House.

The White House sent a list of demands to Harvard last week which it said were designed to fight antisemitism on campus. They included changes to hiring, admissions and teaching.

Since Donald Trump was re-elected, his government has tried to reshape elite universities by threatening to withhold federal funds, mostly spent on research.

Harvard became the first major US university to reject the administration’s demands on Monday, accusing the White House of trying to “control” its community.

The sweeping changes demanded by the White House would have transformed its operations and ceded a large amount of control to the government.

Its letter to Harvard on Friday, obtained by the New York Times, said the university had failed to live up to the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” that justify federal investment.

The letter included 10 categories for proposed changes, including:

• reporting students to the federal government who are “hostile” to American values
• ensuring each academic department is “viewpoint diverse”
• hiring an external government-approved party to audit programs and departments “that most fuel antisemitic harassment”
• checking faculty staff for plagiarism

President Trump has accused leading universities of failing to protect Jewish students when college campuses around the country were roiled by protests against the war in Gaza and US support for Israel last year.

The letter orders the university to take disciplinary action for “violations” that happened during protests.

In explaining its rejection of these demands, Harvard President Alan Garber said the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights under the First Amendment protecting free speech.

“Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard,” he said.

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Shortly after his letter of resistance was sent, the education department said it was freezing $2.2bn in grants and $60m in contracts to Harvard immediately.

“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges,” the Department of Education said in a statement.

The disruption of learning plaguing campuses is unacceptable and the harassment of Jewish students intolerable, the statement said.

A professor of history at Harvard, David Armitage, told the BBC that the school could afford to resist as the richest university in the US and no price was too high to pay for freedom.

“It’s a not unexpected act of entirely groundless and vengeful activity by the Trump administration which wants nothing more than to silence freedom of speech,” he said.

In March, the Trump administration said it was reviewing roughly $256m in federal contracts and grants at Harvard, and an additional $8.7bn in multi-year grant commitments.

Harvard professors filed a lawsuit in response, alleging the government was unlawfully attacking freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Harvard, which has a $53bn endowment, is one of a number of elite universities in the crosshairs of the new presidency.

Columbia University in New York City agreed to a number of demands last month after the White House pulled $400m in federal funding.

Polling by Gallup last summer suggested that confidence in higher education has been falling over time among Americans of all political backgrounds, partly driven by a growing belief that universities push a political agenda. The decline was particularly steep among Republicans.

Columbia agreed to several of the administration’s demands, drawing criticism from some students and faculty.

Earlier on Monday, a lawyer for an organiser of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University said her client had been arrested by immigration officials as he attended an interview as part of his application for US citizenship.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who is due to graduate next month, was detained on Monday in Colchester, Vermont.

Others who took part in campus protests against the war, including Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University’s Rumeysa Ozturk, have been detained in recent weeks.

Machias Seal Island is a tiny dot on maps of North America. But the uninhabited, fogbound rock is significant for its location in an area known as the “Grey Zone” – the site of a rare international dispute between Canada and the United States.

The two neighbours and long-time allies have each long laid claim to the island and surrounding water, where the US state of Maine meets Canada’s New Brunswick province – and with that claim, the right to catch and sell the prized local lobsters.

John Drouin, a US lobsterman who has fished in the Grey Zone for 30 years, tells of the mad dash by Canadian and American fishermen to place lobster traps at the start of the summer catching season each year.

“People have literally lost parts of their bodies, have had concussions, [their] head smashed and everything,” he says.

The injuries have been caused when lobstermen have been caught up in each other’s lines. He says one friend lost his thumb after it became caught up in a Canadian line, what Mr Drouin calls his battle scar from the Grey Zone.

The 277 square miles of sea around Machias Seal Island has been under dispute since the late 1700s – and in 1984, an international court ruling gave both the US and Canada the right to fish in the waterway.

It has stood as a quirk – an isolated area of tension in what had been, until now, an otherwise close relationship between the two countries.

But that could all be about to change.

US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, steep tariffs on Canadian imports and rhetoric about making the country the 51st state has sparked a series of fresh flashpoints, with the possibility that he may ultimately wish to subsume Canada into the US hanging over everything. Amid the biggest shift in the relationship between the two countries in decades, the question is, what does he really want from Canada?

Cutler, Maine, is the closest US town to the Grey Zone. It has a collection of scattered houses, one supply store and, for good reason, a lobster wholesaler.

Aside from a few big-city retirees and holiday-goers, Cutler owes its existence to the bountiful crustaceans that inhabit the offshore waters. And for the lobstermen of Cutler, the international limbo of the Grey Zone is their everyday reality, as they scatter their traps along the bottom of the Gulf of Maine to catch the prized lobsters and bring them to market.

During lobster season, the Grey Zone is packed with boats and buoys marking the location of their traps. When the waters get crowded and livelihoods are at stake, things can get ugly.

“Do we like it? Not in the least,” says Mr Drouin. He has caught lobsters in the Grey Zone for 30 years. “I will continue to complain about it until I can’t breathe anymore.”

Another Maine lobsterman, Nick Lemieux, said he and his sons have had nearly 200 traps stolen in recent years – and he blames their rivals to the north.

“This is our area, and it’s all we have to work with,” he said. “Things like that don’t sit very well with us.”

Americans accuse the Canadians of operating under a different, more accommodating set of rules that allow them to catch larger lobsters.

Canadians counter that the Americans have higher catch limits and are surreptitiously fishing in their territorial waters.

The union representing Canada’s border officials recently complained that Americans have responded to their enforcement efforts with threats of violence – and some of its officers have refused to work in the Grey Zone.

Canada regularly dispatches maintenance workers to Machias Seal Island to check on an automated lighthouse – evidence, they say, of their control. The Americans point to US Marines who occupied the island during World War One as their proof of sovereignty.

The dispute appears to be going nowhere, but during Trump’s first presidency, events in the Grey Zone did not appear to be intruding greatly on the overall warmth between the US and Canada.

When Trump hosted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House in 2017, he spoke about the US-Canada relationship in glowing terms, remarking on the “special bonds” between the two nations that “share much more than a border”.

Yet his rhetoric has since changed sharply.

In recent months, Trump has repeatedly called Canada the “51st state” of the US – and the White House has expressed a willingness to open up new areas of dispute all along the US-Canada border.

In September, the president voiced designs on Canadian water in British Columbia in the west of the country, for instance, suggesting it could be piped to drought-parched California: “You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north… they have essentially a very large faucet”.

Approximately 1,500 miles further east, the Great Lakes could become another site of potential conflict, as US officials told their Canadian counterparts they are considering withdrawing from treaties over their coordinated environmental regulation.

And even further east, a library has become the unlikely setting for a flashpoint: built deliberately to straddle the Vermont-Quebec border as a symbol of cooperation between Canada and the US, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House used to be open to residents from both nations.

However in March, America changed the rules so that Canadians are required to pass through immigration control before they access the building, with the US Department of Homeland Security claiming it was in response to drug trafficking.

Natural resources are another source of dispute. Canada has vast supplies of rare earth metals, gold, oil, coal and lumber – the kind of natural wealth that Trump has long prized.

While Trump has disavowed any desire for Canada’s lumber, energy stockpiles or manufactured products, in February Trudeau reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Canadian business and labour leaders that he saw it differently.

“I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may even be why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state. They’re very aware of our resources, of what we have, and they very much want to be able to benefit from those,” the CBC quoted Trudeau as saying.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings, a Canadian journalist and host of The Big Story podcast, believes Trump wants Canadian resources, and that the president’s annexation comments should be taken seriously.

“He likes the idea of being the guy to bring in a huge land mass,” says Mr Heath-Rawlings. “He probably wants the Arctic, which is obviously going to become much more valuable in the years to come.”

For Trump, even the US-Canadian border itself is suspect. “If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it between Canada and the US,” he said in March. “Somebody did it a long time ago, and it makes no sense.”

Needless to say, Trump’s comments have rankled Canadian leaders, who warn of the president’s ultimate designs on their homeland.

In March, Trudeau accused the US president of planning “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us”.

The previous month, after Trump first announced new tariffs on Canada, Trudeau had said: “Trump has it in mind that one of the easiest ways of doing that [annexing Canada] is absorbing our country. And it is a real thing.”

If US territorial ambitions for Canada are, in fact, a “real thing”, it presents a simple, vexing question. Why? Why would the US, which has had the closest of diplomatic, military, economic and cultural ties with its northern neighbour for more than a century, put all of that at risk?

Some see a pattern in Trump’s designs on Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal – one that reflects a dramatic change in how the US sees itself in the world.

It has been most clearly articulated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said in January that the post-World War Two dominance of the US was more the exception than the norm.

“Eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multi-polar world, multiple great powers in different parts of the planet,” he said. “We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and … rogue states like Iran and North Korea.”

According to Michael Williams, professor of international affairs at the University of Ottawa, if the current Trump administration thinks that American world dominance is no longer possible or even desired, the US might pull back from far-flung conflicts and European commitments.

Instead, says Prof Williams, the US would prioritise its “territorial core”, creating a continental fortress of sorts, insulated on both sides by the vastness of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

“If this is your plan, you seek to control key geographic choke points,” he says. “You maximise access to natural resources, of which Canada has plenty, and you reshore industry whenever possible.”

Such a geopolitical outlook is hardly new. In the 1820s, US President James Monroe articulated a new global order in which America and Europe confined themselves to their own hemispheres.

But it does represent a remarkable shift in US foreign policy since the end of World War Two.

Prof Williams acknowledges that it’s difficult to figure out exactly what the US president is thinking – a view wholeheartedly endorsed by John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser for more than a year of his first presidential term.

“Trump has no philosophy,” he says. “He gets ideas, but does not follow a coherent pattern. There is no underlying strategy.”

The president is currently fixated on minerals and natural resources, he said, but Mr Bolton argues the best way to go about doing that is through the private sector, not by floating the idea of annexing an ally. Canada, for its part, has offered to work with US companies on joint mining partnerships.

Prof Williams and Mr Bolton agree that whatever the motivations behind Trump’s designs on Canada, the diplomatic damage that’s being done will be difficult to undo – and the possibility of unanticipated consequences is high.

“Trump likes to say in a lot of contexts that other people don’t have any cards,” says Prof Williams. “But the further you push people to the wall, the more you may find that they have cards that you didn’t know they had – and they might be willing to play them. And even if you have more cards, the consequences of doing so can easily spiral out of control in some really bad ways.”

Canadians have already been boycotting US products and cancelling winter trips south, which has had an impact on tourist communities in Florida.

“We’re not looking for a fight, but Canada’s ready for one,” says Mr Heath-Rawlings.

The idea that the trust between the US and Canada has been broken is one that’s been embraced by the country’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, as a general election looms.

“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” he said recently. “I reject any attempts to weaken Canada, to wear us down, to break us so that America can own us.”

Back in the 19th Century, territorial conflicts and flare-ups along the US-Canada border were a more frequent occurrence. Americans made multiple unsuccessful attempts to capture Canadian territory during the 1812 War.

In 1844, some Americans called for military force if the UK wouldn’t agree to its claims in the Pacific Northwest.

The 1859 “pig dispute” involved contested islands near Vancouver and the unfortunate shooting of a British hog that had intruded on an American’s garden.

All that seemed the stuff of dusty history books, where the Grey Zone was a diplomatic oddity – an exception to a peaceful norm in the modern world of developed and integrated democracies.

But that calm is now broken, and no one is sure where these stormy waters will lead either country.

For a few hours on a warm April day, jets paused and silence reclaimed the skies above the international airport in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the southern Indian state of Kerala.

The airport’s closure was not due to bad weather or a technical glitch, as one might assume, but to make way for a Hindu temple procession that marches right across its runway.

Devotees pull ornate wooden chariots bearing temple idols along a 2km (1.2 miles) stretch of the runway, a tradition so revered that it shuts down operations for a few hours at the airport, which usually handles 90 landings and take-offs daily. Elephants, a common part of Hindu religious events in India, also walk on the runway.

The event, which took place last Friday, is part of the annual Painkuni festival held by the famed Sree Padmanabha Swamy Temple, home to treasures worth billions of rupees.

The procession, taken out on the final day of the 10-day festival, begins at the temple and heads through the runway to the Shanghumugham beach, around 6km away.

When the procession arrives at the beach, priests give a ritual bath in the sea to the idols. The return journey follows the same route, crossing the runway again and reaching the temple.

The procession is led by the head of the former royal family of Travancore, which built the airport in 1932. It’s not clear when the festival and the procession started but the ritual has been followed since then, even when the management of the airport passed on to the government and then a private company.

The airport is currently managed by Adani Airport Holdings Ltd, owned by billionaire Gautam Adani’s Group.

The airport also shuts down operations for a few hours for a similar procession during the temple’s Alpashi Festival, usually in October or November every year.

The Thiruvananthapuram International Airport is one of the few airports in the world that closes down for a religious event. Others include Indonesia’s Ngurah Rai Airport during the Balinese Hindu new year and Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport on Yom Kippur, which is the holiest day in Judaism.

But these are public holidays when the airport shuts down entirely and it’s rare for a high-security runway to be used to actually facilitate a religious or cultural event.

Rahul Bhatkoti, chief airport officer, said the airport was proud to have the opportunity to preserve the legacy of the temple’s procession.

“This is likely the only airport in the world which facilitates such a historic event,” he told the BBC before the procession entered the airfield on Friday evening.

Since the airport has only one runway, both domestic and international terminals are closed during the procession.

Most of the international flights operating here are to and from the Middle East, where a large number of Indian workers, including many from Kerala, live and work.

Airport authorities said they informed airlines of the closure two months in advance and 10 flights were rescheduled on the day.

“The procession begins around 16:45 local time and takes approximately four hours to complete,” Mahesh Balachandran, the temple’s executive officer, told the BBC.

Attendance at the event is limited and strictly monitored.

Only senior royal family members, priests, officials and selected devotees are allowed to take part, and they must have special passes issued by the temple trust, along with security clearance from airport authorities.

“The procession passes through the airport with full ritualistic vigour twice a year during the Painkuni and Alpashi festivals,” Mr Balachandran said. “It proceeds peacefully, without any incidents. Everything is planned meticulously.”

The Central Industrial Security Force, the paramilitary which handles airport security, barricades the entire runway for safety and manages the crowds. Authorities also monitor the crowd through surveillance cameras and inspect the runway carefully after the procession, officials said.

The procession passing through the airport is a reminder of how “heritage and modernity co-exist here, every year”, Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor wrote on X after last week’s procession.

Several prisons in France have been hit by a wave of overnight attacks, according to the country’s authorities.

Vehicles were set on fire in prison car parks, and one prison entrance was targeted with gunfire from an automatic weapon.

Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said prisons had faced “intimidation attempts” and linked the attacks to the government’s crackdown on drug trafficking.

Seven establishments were attacked, according to the Parisien newspaper: in Toulon, Aix-En-Provence, Marseille, Valence and Nîmes in southern France, and in Villepinte and Nanterre, near Paris.

In a post on X, Darmanin said he was travelling to Toulon to offer his support to affected officers.

Without directly attributing blame for the attacks, he said the French government was “facing up to the problem of drug trafficking” and taking measures that would “profoundly disrupt” criminal networks.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said the government’s response must be “relentless”.

“Those who attack prisons and officers deserve to be locked up in those prisons and monitored by those officers,” he posted on X.

He added that he had instructed police to immediately strengthen security at prison facilities.

The prison guard union, FO Justice, expressed its “deepest concern and anger” following the “extremely serious” attacks overnight.

The union posted updates from the aftermath of several attacks on X, including images of burnt-out vehicles in prison car parks and bullet holes in the Toulon prison entrance gate.

It called for urgent government action to protect prison staff.

Monday night’s attacks come after seven vehicles were set on fire in a similar attack on France’s national school of prison administration on Sunday, according to the union.

“It is worrying to note that some people no longer hesitate to directly attack the prison’s property, a symbol of state authority,” it said in a statement.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but La Parisien reports that the letters DDPF – meaning “French prisoners’ rights” – were found inscribed on damaged vehicles. The AFP news agency says anarchist slogans were found at some sites.

AFP quotes a source close to the case as saying the attacks appeared to be coordinated and “clearly linked” to the government’s strategy against drug trafficking.

A law is passing through the French parliament which creates a special prosecutor’s office to deal with drugs crime, with new powers for investigators.

Singapore will head to the polls on 3 May, in what will be the first electoral test for its new prime minister Lawrence Wong.

The election campaign, which lasts just nine days, is expected to be dominated by the rising cost of living, housing needs, jobs, and a growing demand for healthcare amid an ageing population.

Voters are widely expected to return the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) to power. The PAP has won every election since Singapore was granted self rule by the British in 1959.

The country’s last election in 2020 saw the opposition Workers’ Party secure 10 seats – the biggest victory for the opposition since Singapore gained independence in 1965.

This time, 97 seats are up for grabs.

Though the PAP won 83 out of 93 seats in 2020, it will no doubt be looking for a stronger win this year – the last election result was widely seen as a setback for the party.

According to a Reuters report citing data from pollster YouGov, 44% of 1,845 Singaporeans surveyed in March have decided who to vote for. Of that number, 63% say they would choose the ruling party and 15% would back the leading opposition Workers’ Party.

The election is also being seen as the first real test of Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, who took office last year – replacing the city state’s long-serving premier Lee Hsien Loong, who served as leader for 20 years.

Presenting his first budget as the country’s leader in February, Wong unveiled a series of tax rebates, handouts and sector-specific measures to cushion against cost-of-living pressures – in what some analysts call a “feel good” budget aimed at sweetening the ground before the election.

Since becoming an independent nation in 1965, Singapore has only had four prime ministers – all from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP).

The first was Mr Lee’s father, Lee Kuan Yew, who is widely considered as the founder of modern Singapore and led the country for 25 years.

Singapore’s political landscape has been dominated by the PAP, though the party was rocked by a series of scandals in 2020 – including a senior minister’s arrest in a corruption probe as well as the resignation of two lawmakers over an extramarital affair.

Voting is compulsory for Singapore’s 2.75 million eligible citizens.

Singapore mirrors the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system, but there are key differences that make it harder for opposition parties.

MPs contest for constituencies that vary in size and the larger ones are not represented by an individual MP, but by a team of up to five MPs – called Group Representative Constituencies (GRCs).

The system was introduced in 1988 as a way to include more representation from Singapore’s minority groups in the predominantly Chinese city – so parties could “risk” running one or two minority candidates.

But until several years ago, opposition parties have not had the resources to recruit enough skilled and experienced people to genuinely contest these larger constituencies.

Candidates must also deposit S$13,500 ($9,700: £7,700) to contest and need to win more than one-eighth of total votes to get it back.

The electoral divisions of constituencies are also often changed to reflect population growth – opposition parties say this is not done transparently and amounts to gerrymandering, something the government has always denied.

China’s President Xi Jinping has called on Vietnam to oppose “unilateral bullying” to upkeep a global system of free trade – though he stopped short of naming the US.

It comes as Xi is on a so called “charm offensive” trip across South East Asia, which will also see him visit Malaysia and Cambodia.

Though the trip was long-planned, it has taken on heightened significance in the wake of a mounting trade war between the US and China. Vietnam was facing US tariffs of up to 46% before the Trump administration issued a 90-day pause last week.

US President Donald Trump called Xi’s meeting with Vietnamese leaders a ploy to figure out how to “screw the United States of America”.

According to state media outlet Xinhua, Xi told Vietnam’s Communist Party Secretary-General To Lam to “jointly oppose unilateral bullying”.

“We must strengthen strategic resolve… and uphold the stability of the global free trade system as well as industrial and supply chains,” he said.

Stephen Olson, a former US trade negotiator, said Xi’s comments were “a very shrewd tactical move”.

“While Trump seems determined to blow up the trade system, Xi is positioning China as the defender of rules-based trade, while painting the US as a reckless rogue nation,” he added.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval office on Monday, Trump said he does not “blame” China or Vietnam but alleged that they were focused on how to harm the US.

“That’s a lovely meeting. Meeting like, trying to figure out, how do we screw the United States of America?” said Trump.

The world’s two largest economies are locked in an escalating trade battle, with the Trump administration putting tariffs of 145% on most Chinese imports earlier this month. Beijing later responded with its own 125% tariffs on American products coming into China.

On Saturday, a US customs notice revealed smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices would be excluded from the 125% tariff on goods entering the country from China.

But Trump later chimed in on social media saying there was no exemption for these products and called such reports about this notice false. Instead, he said that “they are just moving to a different tariff ‘bucket'”.

Xi arrived in Hanoi on Monday, where he was welcomed by well wishers waving Chinese and Vietnamese flags.

He then met top Vietnamese officials including the country’s Secretary-General and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh.

Earlier on Tuesday, Xi visited the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum to take part in a wreath laying ceremony at the resting place of the former Vietnamese founder and Communist leader.

Despite Xi’s visit, Vietnam will be careful to “manage the perception that it is colluding with China against the United States, as the US is too important a partner to put aside,” said Susannah Patton, Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute think-tank.

“In many ways, China is an economic competitor as well as an economic partner for South East Asian economies,” she added.

Xi has now left Vietnam and will arrive in Malaysia later on Tuesday. He is expected to meet the country’s King, as well as its Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.

It comes as Malaysian mobile data service company U Mobile said it will roll out the country’s second 5G network by using infrastructure technology from China’s Huawei and ZTE.

Ms Patton expects Xi to continue portraying the US as “a partner which is unreliable [and] protectionist”.

Meanwhile, he is likely to “portray China in stark contrast as a partner that is there”, she added.

“Now is really a golden opportunity for China to score that narrative win. I think this is how Xi’s visit to Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia will be seen.”

“She left no last words. She was dead when she was carried away,” says Hafiza quietly, as she describes how her mother was killed in a city under siege in Darfur, during Sudan’s civil war, which began exactly two years ago.

The 21-year-old recorded how her family’s life was turned upside down by her mother’s death, on one of several phones the BBC World Service managed to get to people trapped in the crossfire in el-Fasher.

Under constant bombardment, el-Fasher has been largely cut off from the outside world for a year, making it impossible for journalists to enter the city. For safety reasons, we are only using the first names of people who wanted to film their lives and share their stories on the BBC phones.

Hafiza describes how she suddenly found herself responsible for her five-year-old brother and two teenage sisters.

Their father had died before the start of the war, which has pitted the army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and caused the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

The two rivals had been allies – coming to power together in a coup – but fell out over an internationally backed plan to move towards civilian rule.

Hafiza’s home is the last major city controlled by the military in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, and has been under siege by the RSF for the past 12 months.

In August 2024, a shell hit the market where her mother had gone to sell household goods.

“Grief is very difficult, I still can’t bring myself to visit her workplace,” says Hafiza in one of her first video messages after receiving her phone, shortly after her mother’s death.

“I spend my time crying alone at home.”

Both sides in the war have been accused of war crimes and deliberately targeting civilians – which they deny. The RSF has also previously denied accusations from the US and human rights groups that it has committed a genocide against non-Arab groups in other parts of Darfur after it seized control of those areas.

The RSF controls passage in and out the city and sometimes allows civilians to leave, so Hafiza managed to send her siblings to stay with family in a neutral area.

But she stayed to try to earn money to support them.

In her messages, she describes her days distributing blankets and water to displaced people living in shelters, helping at a community kitchen and supporting a breast cancer awareness group in return for a little money to help her survive.

Her nights are spent alone.

“I remember the places where my mother and siblings used to sit, I feel broken,” she adds.

In almost every video 32-year-old Mostafa sent us, the sound of shelling and gunfire can be heard in the background.

“We endure relentless artillery shelling, both day and night, by the RSF,” he says.

One day, after visiting family, he returned to find his house near the city centre had been hit by shells – the roof and walls were damaged – and looters had ransacked what was left.

“Everything was turned upside down. Most houses in our neighbourhood have been looted,” he says, blaming the RSF.

While Mostafa was volunteering at a shelter for displaced people, the area came under intense attack. He kept his camera rolling as he hid, flinching at each explosion.

“There is no safe place in el-Fasher,” he says. “Even refugee camps are being bombed with artillery shells.

“Death can strike anyone, anytime, without warning… by a bullet, shelling, hunger or thirst.”

In another message, he talks about the lack of clean water, describing how people drink from sources contaminated with sewage.

Both Mostafa and 26-year-old Manahel, who also received a BBC phone, volunteered at community kitchens funded by donations from Sudanese people living elsewhere.

The UN has warned of famine in the city, something that has already happened at the nearby Zamzam camp, which is home to more than 500,000 displaced people.

Many people cannot get to the market “and if they go, they find high prices”, explains Manahel.

“Every family is equal now – there is no rich or poor. People can’t afford the basic necessities like food.”

After cooking meals such as rice and stew, they deliver the food to people in shelters. For many, it is the only meal they will have for the day.

When the war started, Manahel had just finished university, where she studied Sharia and law.

As the fighting reached el-Fasher, she moved with her mother and six siblings to a safer area, further away from the front line.

“You lose your home, everything you own and find yourself in a new place with nothing,” she says.

But her father refused to leave their house. Some neighbours had entrusted him with their belongings, and he decided to stay to protect them – a decision that cost him his life.

She says he was killed by RSF artillery in September 2024.

Since the siege began a year ago, almost 2,000 people have been killed or injured in el-Fasher, according to the UN.

After sunset, people rarely leave their homes. The lack of electricity can make night-time frightening for many of el-Fasher’s one million residents.

People with solar power or batteries are scared to turn lights on because they “could be detected by drones”, explains Manahel.

There were times we could not reach her or the others for several days because they had no internet access.

But above all these worries, there is one particular fear that both Manahel and Hafiza share if the city falls to the RSF.

“As a girl, I might get raped,” Hafiza says in one of her messages.

She, Manahel and Mostafa are all from non-Arabic communities and their fear stems from what happened in other cities that the RSF has taken, most notably el-Geneina, 250 miles (400km) west of el-Fasher.

In 2023 it witnessed horrific massacres, along ethnic lines, which the US and others say amounted to genocide. RSF fighters and allied Arab militia allegedly targeted people from non-Arab ethnic groups, such as the Massalit – which the RSF has previously denied.

A Massalit woman I met in a refugee camp over the border in Chad described how she was gang-raped by RSF fighters and was unable to walk for nearly two weeks, while the UN has said girls as young as 14 were raped.

One man told me how he witnessed a massacre by RSF forces – he escaped after he was injured and left for dead.

The UN estimates that between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in el-Geneina alone in 2023. And now more than a quarter of a million people from the city – half its former population – are among those living in refugee camps in Chad.

We put these accusations to the RSF but it did not respond. However, in the past it has denied any involvement in ethnic cleansing in Darfur, saying the perpetrators had worn RSF clothing to shift the blame to them.

Few reporters have had access to el-Geneina since then, but after months of negotiation with the city’s civil authorities, a BBC team was allowed to visit in December 2024.

We were assigned minders from the governor’s office and were only allowed to see what they wanted to show us.

It was immediately clear that the RSF was in control. I saw their fighters patrolling the streets in armed vehicles and had a brief conversation with some of them, when they showed me their anti-vehicle rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher.

It did not take long to realise how differently they viewed the conflict. Their commander insisted there were no civilians like Hafiza, Mostafa and Manahel living in el-Fasher.

“The person who stays in a war zone is participating in the war, there are no civilians, they are all from the army,” he said.

He claimed el-Geneina was now peaceful and that most of its residents – “around 90%” – had come back. “Homes that were previously empty are now occupied again.”

But hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents are still living as refugees in Chad, and I saw many deserted and destroyed neighbourhoods as we drove around.

With the minders watching us, it was hard to get a true picture of life in el-Geneina. They took us to a bustling vegetable market, where I asked people about their lives.

Each time I asked someone a question, I noticed them glance at the minder over my shoulder before answering that everything was “fine”, apart from a few comments about high prices.

However, my minder would often whisper in my ear afterwards, saying people were exaggerating about the prices.

We ended our trip with an interview with Tijani Karshoum, the governor of West Darfur whose predecessor was killed in May 2023 after accusing the RSF of committing genocide.

It was his first interview since 2023, and he maintained he was a neutral civilian during the el-Geneina unrest and did not side with anyone.

“We have turned a new page with the slogan of peace, coexistence, moving beyond the bitterness of the past,” he said, adding that the UN’s casualty figures were “exaggerated”.

Also in the room was a man who we understood to be a representative of the RSF.

Karshoum’s answers to nearly all my questions were almost identical, whether I was asking about accusations of ethnic cleansing or about what happened to the former governor, Khamis Abakar.

Nearly two weeks after I spoke to Karshoum, the European Union imposed sanctions on him, saying he “holds responsibility in the fatal attack” on his predecessor and that he had “been involved in planning, directing or committing… serious human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, including killings, rape and other serious forms of sexual and gender-based violence, and abduction”.

I followed up with him to get his response to these accusations, and he said: “Since I am a suspect in this matter, I believe any statement from me would lack credibility.”

But he stated that he “was never part of the tribal conflict and remained at home during the clashes” and added that he was not involved in any violations of humanitarian law.

“Accusations of killings, abductions, or rape must be addressed through an independent investigation” with which he would co-operate, Karshoum said.

“From the start of the conflict in Khartoum, we pushed for peace and proposed well-known initiatives to prevent violence in our socially fragile state,” he added.

Given the stark contrast between the narrative promoted by those in control of el-Geneina and the countless stories I heard from refugees across the border, it is hard to imagine people ever returning home.

The same goes for 12 million other Sudanese people who have fled their homes and are either refugees abroad or living in camps inside Sudan.

In the end, Hafiza, Mostafa and Manahel found life in el-Fasher unbearable and in November 2024 all three left the city to stay in nearby towns.

With the military regaining control of the capital, Khartoum, in March, Darfur remains the last major region where the paramilitaries are still largely in control – and that has turned el-Fasher into an even more intense battlefield.

“El-Fasher has become scary,” Manahel said as she packed her belongings.

“We are leaving without knowing our fate. Will we ever return to el-Fasher? When will this war end? We don’t know what will happen.”

Two British tourists have drowned off the coast of a popular tourist town at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef.

A boy, 17, and a man, 46, were swept out to sea on Sunday while swimming at a beach without lifeguards in Seventeen Seventy – a town in Queensland named for the year Captain James Cook arrived in Australia.

The pair were declared dead at the scene after being pulled from the water by a police rescue helicopter.

An Australian man is also in a life-threatening condition after being swept out to sea, and was airlifted to hospital with serious head injuries.

While police revealed that the deceased were from the UK, their names have not yet been released.

“Sunday’s mission was a difficult one,” CapRescue, the emergency rescue service which found the three men, shared on social media – adding that the deaths had occurred “despite the best efforts of all involved”.

Police say the injured Australian man was from Monto, a town about 150km inland from Seventeen Seventy.

“We’re not sure whether the third person jumped into the water trying to perform a rescue,” Surf Life Saving Queensland’s Darren Everard told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

There is only one beach patrolled by lifeguards within a 50-kilometre radius of Seventeen Seventy.

Police are treating the drownings as non-suspicious and will prepare a report for the coroner.

One-hundred-and-seven people drowned in Australia last year, with 25% of them born overseas, according to Royal Life Saving Australia.

Australia’s coastal fatalities mostly occur around creeks and headlands at high tide when “it’s chaos in the water”, Everard explained.

Speaking to ABC, he encouraged tourists to “seek local knowledge” and swim between the flags.

An organiser of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University has been arrested by immigration officials as he attended an interview as part of his application for US citizenship, his lawyer says.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who is due to graduate next month from the New York City college, was detained on Monday in Colchester, Vermont.

His lawyer said Mr Mahdawi was taken into custody “in direct retaliation” for his role in campus demonstrations against the Israel-Gaza war.

Others who took part in campus protests against the war, including Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University’s Rumeysa Ozturk, have been detained.

The BBC has contacted US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for more details on Mr Mahdawi’s case.

Video shared on social media apparently shows him being escorted into a car by two officers wearing police jackets.

His lawyer, Luna Droubi, said: “The Trump administration detained Mohsen Mahdawi in direct retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians and because of his identity as a Palestinian.

“His detention is an attempt to silence those who speak out against the atrocities in Gaza. It is also unconstitutional.”

The attorney applied to a federal court for a temporary restraining order to prevent US immigration authorities moving Mr Mahdawi out of Vermont or expelling him from the US.

Judge William Sessions, an Obama appointee, quickly granted that order.

The court filing says Mr Mahdawi was born in a refugee camp in the West Bank and moved to the US in 2014.

It describes the philosophy major as a committed Buddhist who believes in “non-violence and empathy as a central tenet of his religion”.

The whereabouts of Mr Mahdawi, who has held US permanent resident status since 2015, are unknown, according to Ms Droubi.

Mr Mahdawi, who co-founded Columbia’s Palestinian Student Society, has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s military operation in Gaza.

Last December, he did an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes programme in which he accused Israel of genocide, which it denies.

Mr Mahdawi’s detention comes amid an immigration crackdown by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Last month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at least 300 foreign students’ visas had been revoked in an effort to tackle antisemitism on university campuses.

Critics say US officials are falsely accusing students of anti-Jewish bigotry and violating their right to free speech.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said on X that Mr Mahdawi “was illegally detained by ICE during what was supposed to be the final step in his citizenship process”.

The senator said he “must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention”.

Judge Sessions also held a hearing on Monday in the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student at Boston’s Tufts University, who was arrested by immigration authorities last month.

He questioned whether the Trump administration would provoke a “constitutional crisis” by not releasing the student from custody if the court were to order that she be moved from detention in Louisiana back to Vermont.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil are currently challenging an immigration judge’s ruling on Friday allowing the government to deport him as a national security risk.

The Columbia University protest leader was detained last month outside his campus accommodation and transferred to a Louisiana detention centre.