Judges at the UK Supreme Court have unanimously ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law.

It marks the culmination of a long-running legal battle which could have major implications for how sex-based rights apply across Scotland, England and Wales.

The court sided with campaign group For Women Scotland, which brought a case against the Scottish government arguing that sex-based protections should only apply to people that are born female.

Judge Lord Hodge said the ruling should not be seen as a triumph of one side over the other, and stressed that the law still gives protection against discrimination to transgender people.

The Scottish government argued in court that transgender people with a gender recognition certificate (GRC) are entitled to the same sex-based protections as biological women.

The Supreme Court was asked to decide on the proper interpretation of the 2010 Equality Act, which applies across Britain.

Lord Hodge said the central question was how the words “woman” and “sex” are defined in the legislation.

He told the court: “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.

“But we counsel against reading this judgement as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another, it is not.”

He added that the legislation gives transgender people “protection, not only against discrimination through the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment in substance in their acquired gender”.

Campaigners who brought the case against the Scottish government hugged each other and punched the air as they left the courtroom, with several of them in tears.

The Equality Act provides protection against discrimination on the basis of various characteristics, including “sex” and “gender reassignment”.

Judges at the Supreme Court in London were asked to rule on what that law means by “sex” – whether it means biological sex, or legal, “certificated” sex as defined by the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.

The Scottish government argued the 2004 legislation was clear that obtaining a GRC amounts to a change of sex “for all purposes”.

For Women Scotland argued for a “common sense” interpretation of the words man and woman, telling the court that sex is an “immutable biological state”.

First Minister John Swinney said the Scottish government accepted the judgement.

He posted on social media: “The ruling gives clarity between two relevant pieces of legislation passed at Westminster.

“We will now engage on the implications of the ruling.”

Swinney added: “Protecting the rights of all will underpin our actions.”

Outside the Supreme Court, For Women Scotland co-founder Susan Smith said: “Today the judges have said what we always believed to be the case, that women are protected by their biological sex.

“Sex is real and women can now feel safe that services and spaces designated for women are for women and we are enormously grateful to the Supreme Court for this ruling.”

A UK government spokesman said: “This ruling brings clarity and confidence, for women and service providers such as hospitals, refuges, and sports clubs.

“Single-sex spaces are protected in law and will always be protected by this government.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch described the ruling as a “victory for all of the women who faced personal abuse or lost their jobs for stating the obvious”.

“It’s important to be reminded the court strongly and clearly re-affirmed the Equality Act protects all trans people against discrimination, based on gender reassignment, and will continue to do so.”

But Scottish Green MSP Maggie Chapman, a prominent campaigner for trans-rights, said: “This is a deeply concerning ruling for human rights and a huge blow to some of the most marginalised people in our society.

“It could remove important protections and will leave many trans people and their loved ones deeply anxious and worried about how their lives will be affected and about what will come next.”

Stonewall chief executive Simon Blake said the LGBTQ+ charity shared “deep concern” about the ruling.

For Women Scotland had warned that if the court sided with the Scottish government, it would have implications for the running of single-sex spaces and services, such as hospital wards, prisons, refuges and support groups.

Transgender people warned the case could erode the protections they have against discrimination in their reassigned gender.

The case follows years of heated debate over transgender and women’s rights, including controversy over transgender rapist Isla Bryson initially being put in a women’s prison and an ongoing employment tribunal involving a female NHS Fife nurse who objected to a transgender doctor using a women’s changing room.

NHS Fife said it would “carefully consider” the court’s judgement.

The judges ruled that that Interpreting sex as “certificated” rather than “biological” would “cut across the definitions of man and “woman and thus the protected characteristic of sex in an incoherent way”.

They said a “certified” definition of sex would weaken protections for lesbians, citing the example of lesbian-only spaces and associations as it would mean that a trans woman who was attracted to women would be classed as a lesbian.

The ruling found the biological interpretation of sex was also required for single-sex spaces to “function coherently”.

It cited changing rooms, hostels, medical services and single-sex higher education institutions.

The judges noted “similar confusion and impracticability” had arisen in relation to single-sex associations and charities, women’s sport, public sector equality and the armed forces.

The judges added: “The practical problems that arise under a certificated sex approach are clear indicators that this interpretation is not correct.”

The legal dispute began in 2018, when the Scottish Parliament passed a bill designed to ensure gender balance on public sector boards.

For Women Scotland complained that ministers had included transgender people as part of the quotas in that law.

The issue has been contested several times in the Scottish courts.

Holyrood ministers won the most recent case in Scotland, with judge Lady Haldane ruling in 2022 that the definition of sex was “not limited to biological or birth sex”.

The Scottish Parliament passed reforms that year that would have made it easier for someone to change their legally recognised sex.

The move was blocked by the UK government, and has since been dropped by Holyrood ministers.

When investigators smashed through a hastily built wall, they uncovered a set of secret jail cells.

It turned out to be a freshly bricked-up doorway – an attempt to hide what lurked behind.

Inside, off a narrow hallway, were tiny rooms to the right and left. It was pitch-black.

The team may never have found this clandestine jail – a stone’s throw from Dhaka’s International Airport – without the recollections of Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem and others.

A critic of Bangladesh’s ousted leader, he was held there for eight years.

He was blindfolded for much of his time in the prison, so he leaned on the sounds he could recall – and he distinctly remembered the sound of planes landing.

That was what helped lead investigators to the military base near the airport. Behind the main building on the compound, they found the smaller, heavily guarded, windowless structure made of brick and concrete where detainees were kept.

It was hidden in plain sight.

Investigators have spoken to hundreds of victims like Quasem since mass protests toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s government last August, and inmates in the jails were released. Many others are alleged to have been killed unlawfully.

The people running the secret prisons, including the one over the road from Dhaka airport, were largely from an elite counter-terrorism unit, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), acting on orders directly from Hasina, investigators say.

“The officers concerned [said] all the enforced disappearance cases have been done with the approval, permission or order by the prime minister herself,” Tajul Islam, the chief prosecutor for the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh, told the BBC.

Hasina’s party says the alleged crimes were carried out without its knowledge, that it bears no responsibility and that the military establishment operated alone – a charge the army rejects.

Seven months on, Quasem and others may have been released, but they remain terrified of their captors, who are serving security force members and are all still free.

Quasem says he never leaves home without wearing a hat and mask.

“I always have to watch my back when I’m travelling.”

He slowly walks up a flight of concrete steps to show the BBC where he was kept. Pushing through a heavy metal door, he bends his head low and goes through another narrow doorway into “his” room, the cell where he was held for eight years.

“It felt like being buried alive, being totally cut off from the outside world,” he tells the BBC. There were no windows and no doors to natural light. When he was inside, he couldn’t tell between day or night.

Quasem, a lawyer in his 40s, has done interviews before but this is the first time he has taken the media for a detailed look inside the tiny cell where he was held.

Viewed by torchlight, it is so small an average-sized person would have difficulty standing up straight. It smells musty. Some of the walls are broken and bits of brick and concrete lie strewn on the ground – a last-ditch attempt by perpetrators to destroy any evidence of their crimes.

“[This] is one detention centre. We have found that more than 500, 600, 700 cells are there all through the country. This shows that this was widespread and systematic,” says Islam, the prosecutor, who accompanied the BBC on the visit to the jail.

Quasem also clearly remembers the faint blue tiles from his cell, now lying in pieces on the floor, which led investigators to this particular room. In comparison to the cells on the ground floor, this one is much larger, at 10ft x 14ft (3m x 4.3m). There is a squatting toilet off to one side.

In painful detail, Quasem walks around the room, describing how he spent his time during his years in captivity. During the summers, it was unbearably hot. He would crouch on the floor and put his face as close to the base of the doorway as he could, to get some air.

“It felt worse than death,” he says.

Coming back to relive his punishment seems cruel. But Quasem believes it is important for the world to see what was done.

“The high officials, the top brass who aided and abetted, facilitated the fascist regime are still in their position,” he says.

“We need to get our story out, and do whatever we can to ensure justice for those who didn’t return, and to help those who are surviving to rehabilitate into life.”

Previous reports said he was kept inside a notorious detention facility – known as Aynaghor, or “House of Mirrors” – inside the main intelligence headquarters in Dhaka, but investigators now believe there were many such sites.

Quasem told the BBC he spent all his detention at the RAB base, apart from the first 16 days. Investigators now suspect the first site was a detective branch of police in Dhaka.

He believes he was disappeared because of his family’s politics. In 2016 he’d been representing his father, a senior member of the country’s largest Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, who was on trial and later hanged.

Five other men the BBC spoke to described being taken away, blindfolded and handcuffed, kept in dark concrete cells with no access to the outside world. In many cases they say they were beaten and tortured.

While the BBC cannot independently verify their stories, almost all say they are petrified that one day, they might bump into a captor on the street or on a bus.

“Now, whenever I get into a car or I’m alone at home, I feel scared thinking about where I was,” Atikur Rahman Rasel, 35, says. “I wonder how I survived, whether I was really supposed to survive.

He says his nose was broken and his hand is still painful. “They put handcuffs on me and beat me a lot.”

Rasel says he was approached by a group of men outside a mosque in Dhaka’s old city last July, as anti-government protests raged. They said they were from law enforcement and he had to go with them.

The next minute, he was taken into a grey car, handcuffed, hooded and blindfolded. Forty minutes later, he was pulled out of the car, taken into a building and put in a room.

“After about half an hour, people started coming in one by one and asking questions. Who are you? What do you do?” Then the beatings started, he says.

“Being inside that place was terrifying. I felt like I would never get out.”

Rasel now lives with his sister and her husband. Sitting on a dining chair in her flat in Dhaka, he describes his weeks in captivity in detail. He speaks with little emotion, seemingly detached from his experience.

He too believes his detention was politically motivated because he was a student leader with the rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), of which his father was a senior member. His brother, who lived abroad, would frequently write social media posts critical of Hasina.

Rasel says there was no way of knowing where he was held. But after watching interim leader Muhammad Yunus visiting three detention centres earlier this year, he thinks he was kept in Agargaon district in Dhaka.

It was an open secret that Hasina had no tolerance for political dissent. Criticising her could get you “disappeared” without a trace, former detainees, opponents and investigators say.

But the total number of people who went missing may never become clear.

A Bangladeshi NGO that has tracked enforced disappearances since 2009 has documented at least 709 people who were forcibly disappeared. Among them, 155 people remain missing. Since the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances was created in September, they have received more than 1,676 complaints from alleged victims and more people continue to come forward.

But that doesn’t represent the total number, which is believed to be much higher.

It is through speaking to people like Quasem that Tajul Islam is able to build a case against those responsible for the detention centres, including Sheikh Hasina.

Despite being held at different sites, the narrative of victims is eerily similar.

Mohammad Ali Arafat, spokesperson for Hasina’s Awami League party, denies any involvement. He says if people were forcibly disappeared, it was not done under the direction of Hasina – who remains in India, where she fled – or anyone in her cabinet.

“If any such detention did occur, it would have been a product of complex internal military dynamics,” said Arafat. “I see [no] political benefit for the Awami League or for the government to keep these people in secret detention.”

The military’s chief spokesman said it “has no knowledge of the things being implied”.

“The army categorically denies operating any such detention centres,” Lt Col Abdullah Ibn Zaid told the BBC.

Tajul Islam believes the people held in these prisons are evidence of Awami League involvement. “All the people who were detained here were from different political identities and they just raised their voice against the previous regime, the government of that time, and that is why they were brought here.”

To date they have issued 122 arrest warrants, but no one has yet been brought to justice.

Which is why victims like Iqbal Chowdhury, 71, believe their lives are still in danger. Chowdhury wants to leave Bangladesh. For years after he was released in 2019, he didn’t leave his house, not even to go to the market. Chowdhury was warned by his captors never to speak of his detention.

“If you ever reveal where you were or what happened, and if you are taken again, no one will ever find or see you again. You will be vanished from this world,” he says he was told.

Accused of writing propaganda against India and the Awami League, Chowdhury says that is why he was tortured.

“I was physically assaulted with an electric shock as well as being beaten. Now one of my fingers is heavily damaged by the electric shock. I lost my leg’s strength, lost physical strength.” He remembers the sound of others being physically tortured, grown men howling and crying in agony.

“I am still scared,” says Chowdhury.

Rahmatullah, 23, is also terrified. “They took away a year and a half of my life. Those times won’t ever be returned,” he says. “They made me sleep in a place where a human being should not even be.”

On 29 August 2023, he was taken from his home at midnight by RAB officers, some in uniform and others dressed in plain clothes. He was working as a cook in a neighbouring town while training to be an electrician.

After repeated interrogations, it became clear to Rahmatullah he was being forcibly detained for his anti-India and Islamic posts on social media. Using a pen and paper, he draws the layout of his cell, including the open drain he would use to relieve himself.

“Even thinking about that place in Dhaka makes me feel horrible. There was no space to lie down properly, so I had to sleep being curled up. I couldn’t stretch my legs while lying down.”

The BBC also interviewed two other former detainees – Michael Chakma and Masrur Anwar – to corroborate some of the details about the secret prisons and what is alleged to have gone on inside them.

Some of the victims live with physical scars from their detentions. All of them talk about the psychological torment that follows them everywhere they go.

Bangladesh is at a pivotal moment in its history as it tries to rebuild after years of autocratic rule. A crucial test of the country’s progress towards democracy will be its ability to hold a fair trial for the perpetrators of these crimes.

Islam believes it can, and must happen. “We must stop the recurrence of this type of offence for our future generations. And we have to do justice for the victims. They suffered a lot.”

Standing in what remains of his concrete cell, Quasem says a trial must take place as soon as possible so the country can close this chapter.

It’s not so simple for Rahmatullah.

“The fear has not gone away. The fear will remain until I die.”

Harvard University says it will not acquiesce to US President Donald Trump’s demands – whether it continues to get federal funding or not.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach,” Harvard’s president Alan Garber said in a letter posted on the university’s website.

Not long after Harvard refused to agree to the White House’s sweeping list of demands – which included directions on how to govern, hire and teach – the Trump administration froze $2.2bn (£1.7bn) of federal funds to the institution.

Many students and alumni lauded the university’s decision to stand its ground, despite the consequences. Former President Barack Obama, an alumnus himself, called Trump’s move “ham-handed” and praised Harvard as “an example for other higher-ed institutions”.

In response to Harvard’s decision to refuse the government’s demands, the education department accused the university of a “troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws”.

With billions in the balance, the battle for the higher ground in the case of Harvard may just be the opening salvo in a war of attrition between the federal government and higher education.

• Obama calls Trump’s freeze of Harvard funding ‘unlawful’

Trump’s attacks on Harvard are not isolated – the government’s antisemitism task force has identified at least 60 universities for review.

Nor did the latest move come out of the blue. Trump and his Vice-President JD Vance have long railed against higher education institutions. In 2021, Vance gave a speech that described universities as the “enemy”.

Trump pitched a funding crackdown on universities in his presidential campaign, painting them as hostile to conservatives. Almost a year before the present conflict in Gaza began in October 2023, he introduced a free speech policy initiative that promised to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime” – in part targeting campuses.

Polling by Gallup last summer suggested that confidence in higher education had 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.

At issue now, Trump’s team says, is last year’s pro-Palestinian campus protests. These wracked campuses across the country, and contributed to the harassment of Jewish students, according to Trump’s administration.

Last month, Columbia University agreed to many of the administration’s demands in the wake of the protests – after the government cut $400m in funding.

Harvard, too, made concessions. It agreed to engage with the administration’s task force to combat antisemitism. The school dismissed the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies and suspended its Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative over accusations of anti-Israel bias.

And in January, Harvard settled two lawsuits brought by Jewish students alleging antisemitism. It did not admit any wrongdoing, and said the settlement showed its commitment to supporting its Jewish students and staff.

But the university drew the line at the White House’s list of demands on Friday.

Harvard student Sa’maia Evans, who is an activist and member of the university’s African and African American Resistance Organization, said the university’s decision to take a stand was a long time coming.

“Harvard will only do that of which it is held accountable to,” she told the BBC. She pointed to campus protests in the past few weeks – and the widespread criticism of Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration – as helping to put pressure on university officials.

“They know the public – they would experience public backlash” if they capitulated, Ms Evans said.

“It would be atypical (for) Harvard to do anything outside of what would be in its own interest.”

With a $53.2bn endowment – a figure that is larger than the GDP of some small countries – Harvard is uniquely able to weather the storm. But experts say it is still left in a crunch.

“Most policymakers think of endowments as a chequing account, a debit card where you can withdraw money and use it for any purpose,” said Steven Bloom, the spokesperson for American Council on Education. “But it’s not.”

While Harvard’s endowment is eye-popping, it says 70% of the money is earmarked for specific projects – which is typical for educational endowments, according to Mr Bloom.

Harvard has to spend the money the way the donors have directed, or it risks legal liability.

And Harvard’s expenses are huge – its 2024 operating budget was $6.4bn. About a third of that was funded by the endowment – with 16% coming from the federal government, often to help with things that are supposed to create good for the whole of the US, such as biomedical research.

Mr Bloom said the golden rule for endowment finance was that universities should not spend more than 5% of their total endowment each year. Making up for a $2bn loss means the school will need to boost its endowment by $40bn.

“You can’t find 40 billion dollars under a rock,” Mr Bloom said.

And that pain will only increase if Trump is able to make good on his threat to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status. That status helps the school avoid paying taxes on its investments and properties. Harvard has campuses all over the Greater Boston area, and is estimated by Bloomberg to have saved $158m on its property tax bills in 2023.

• Trump threatens Harvard’s tax-exempt status after freezing $2bn funding

The realities of the situation have made some students sceptical about how long it can go on.

“There’s more the government can do if it wants to attack Harvard, and I’m not optimistic that it’s going to stop after cutting $2.2 billion,” Matthew Tobin, the academic representative on Harvard’s student council.

Mr Tobin said the idea that the Trump administration was making these demands to help Harvard is “malarkey”.

“Its a total bad-faith attack,” he told the BBC. “The funding cuts have to do with Trump attacking an institution that he views as liberal, and wanting to exercise more control over what people teach and how students learn and think.”

China has unexpectedly appointed a new trade envoy, as officials said the US’s practice of “tariff barriers and trade bullying” is having a serious impact on the global economic order.

Li Chenggang, a former assistant commerce minister and WTO ambassador, is taking over from veteran trade negotiator Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen.

The shift comes as Beijing refuses to back down in an escalating trade war with Washington triggered by US President Donald Trump’s hefty tariffs on Chinese goods.

China’s already sluggish economy is bracing for the impact on a key source of revenue – exports.

Beijing announced on Wednesday its GDP grew by 5.4% between January and March, compared with the same period a year earlier.

The figure has exceeded expectations but reflects the period before US tariffs jumped from 10% to 145%, and Chinese officials warned of more economic pain ahead.

While both Washington and Beijing have said they are open to negotiating, neither have made a move to do so yet.

When that happens, Li, 58, will play a key role. He previously served as a deputy permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva and has held several key jobs in the commerce ministry.

Speaking to Reuters, one expert said the change in jobs was “very abrupt and potentially disruptive” given the current trade tensions – adding that Wang also had experience negotiating with US since the first Trump administration.

“It might be that in the view of China’s top leadership, given how tensions have continued escalating, they need someone else to break the impasse… and finally start negotiating,” said Alfredo Montufar-Helu, a senior adviser to the Conference Board’s China Centre.

However, another analyst who spoke to Reuters suggested the move could just be a “routine promotion” that just happened to come at a particularly tense period in time.

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Sheng Laiyun, deputy commissioner of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) warned that US levies would put pressure on China’s foreign trade and economy, but added that China’s economy is resilient and should improve in the long term.

“We firmly oppose the US practice of tariff barriers and trade bullying,” said Sheng.

“It violates the economic laws and the principles of the World Trade Organization, has a serious impact on the world economic order, and drags down the recovery of the world economy.”

In an editorial by state news outlet China Daily earlier this week, the outlet described the US’s behaviour as “capricious and destructive”, adding that it should “stop whining about itself being a victim in global trade”.

“The US is not getting ripped off by anybody…rather… [it] has been taking a free ride on the globalisation train,” the editorial went on to say.

Beijing’s GDP figures for the first quarter have beaten analysts’ expectations – which hovered around 5.1%.

Growth in the world’s second-largest economy was underscored by strong retail sales and promising factory output.

But US tariffs on China soared only in recent weeks. Trump raised them to 145% early last week, and Beijing retaliated by raising levies on US goods to 125%.

So some of the expansion could be down to factories rushing out shipments to beat Trump’s tariffs – a concept called “front loading”.

Analysts say a surge in China’s exports in March will be sharply reversed in the months ahead as tariffs take full effect.

China’s property downturn is also still dragging on growth. Property investment fell by almost 10% in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same period last year.

New home prices also were unchanged compared to the previous month – a sign that there are still too many empty homes, and not enough people buying them.

Officials have said there is ample room for stimulus measures, and plenty of tools that they can use to bolster the economy and roll out more support measures.

But it will be especially important for China to boost domestic demand and spending this year as Washington’s tariffs hits Beijing’s crucial export sector.

India’s opposition Congress party has said it will organise nationwide protests on Wednesday after the country’s financial crimes agency charged senior leaders Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and others with money laundering.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) presented its findings in a Delhi court on Tuesday, accusing the Gandhis of forming a shell company to illegally acquire assets of the National Herald newspaper worth more than 20bn rupees ($233mn; £176mn).

Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh called the charges “politics of vendetta and intimidation” by the government.

The Gandhis who have previously denied any wrongdoing have not commented on the charges.

The investigation also names other members of the Congress party, including its overseas chief Sam Pitroda, according to news agency ANI.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) began investigating the case in 2021 after a private complaint filed by Subramanian Swamy, a member of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Swamy alleged that the Gandhis used party funds to take over Associated Journals Limited (AJL), which published the National Herald newspaper, and illegally acquired properties worth millions through AJL. The newspaper ceased operations in 2008 but was later relaunched as a digital publication.

The Congress maintains that it bailed out the publisher due to its historical legacy and had lent more than 900m rupees to AJL over the years.

In 2010, AJL became debt-free by swapping its debt for equity and assigning the shares to a newly created company called Young Indian, which the party says is a “not-for-profit company” with no dividends paid to its shareholders and directors.

Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are among Young Indian’s directors and they each own 38% of the company. The remaining 24% is owned by Congress leaders, including Motilal Vora and Sam Pitroda.

Last week, the Enforcement Directorate said Young Indian had acquired AJL properties worth 20bn rupees for just 5m, significantly undervaluing their worth.

It also served several notices to seize assets worth 6.6bn rupees across several Indian cities – including Delhi and Mumbai – which are connected to Young Indian.

The case is scheduled to come up for hearing on 25 April.

In recent years, the opposition has repeatedly accused the Narendra Modi government of weaponising the Enforcement Directorate against its political opponents.

According to data compiled by Reuters in 2024, the agency has summoned, questioned or raided around 150 opposition politicians since Modi came to power in 2014.

Last year, the ED arrested former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal in connection with an alleged liquor scam just a month before key general elections. He spent five months in jail before being freed on bail.

The National Herald newspaper was founded in 1938 by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather.

It ceased publication in 2008 after running into financial troubles but was later acquired by the Congress in 2010 and relaunched as a digital news outlet in 2016.

It was published by Associated Journals Limited (AJL), which was established in 1937 with 5,000 freedom fighters as shareholders. AJL also published Qaumi Awaz in Urdu and Navjeevan in Hindi.

The National Herald became known for its association with India’s freedom struggle and its nationalist stance.

Nehru often wrote strong-worded columns, which led to the British government banning the paper in 1942. It reopened three years later.

After India gained independence in 1947, Nehru resigned as chairman of the newspaper to become prime minister.

But the Congress continued to play a huge role in shaping the newspaper’s ideology.

In a message to the National Herald on its silver jubilee in 1963, Nehru spoke about the paper “generally favouring Congress policy” while maintaining “an independent outlook”.

Over the years, the National Herald grew to be a leading English daily, supported by the Congress party, until it shut down in 2008 after years of financial troubles.

The US has “dropped the ball” on chip manufacturing over the years, allowing China and other Asian hubs to steam ahead. So said Gina Raimondo, who at the time was the US Commerce Secretary, in an interview with me back in 2021.

Four years on, chips remain a battleground in the US-China race for tech supremacy, and US President Donald Trump now wants to turbocharge a highly complex and delicate manufacturing process that has taken other regions decades to perfect.

He says his tariff policy will liberate the US economy and bring jobs home, but it is also the case that some of the biggest companies have long struggled with a lack of skilled workers and poor-quality products in their American factories.

So what will Trump do differently? And, given that Taiwan and other parts of Asia have the secret sauce on creating high-precision chips, is it even possible for the US to produce them too, and at scale?

Semiconductors are central to powering everything from washing machines to iPhones, and military jets to electric vehicles. These tiny wafers of silicon, known as chips, were invented in the United States, but today, it is in Asia that the most advanced chips are being produced at phenomenal scale.

Making them is expensive and technologically complex. An iPhone for example may contain chips that were designed in the US, manufactured in Taiwan, Japan or South Korea, using raw materials like rare earths which are mostly mined in China. Next they may be sent to Vietnam for packaging, then to China for assembly and testing, before being shipped to the US.

It is a deeply integrated ecosystem, one that has evolved over the decades.

Trump has praised the chip industry but also threatened it with tariffs. He has told industry leader, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), it would have to pay a tax of 100% if it did not build factories in the US.

With such a complex ecosystem, and fierce competition, they need to be able to plan for higher costs and investment calls in the long term, well beyond Trump’s administration. The constant changes to policies aren’t helping. So far, some have shown a willingness to invest in the US.

The significant subsidies that China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea have given to private companies developing chips are a big reason for their success.

That was largely the thinking behind the US Chips and Science Act, which became law in 2022 under President Joe Biden – an effort to re-shore the manufacture of chips and diversify supply chains – by allocating grants, tax credits, and subsidies to incentivise domestic manufacturing.

Some companies like the world’s largest chipmaker TSMC and the world’s largest smartphone maker Samsung have become major beneficiaries of the legislation, with TSMC receiving $6.6 billion in grants and loans for plants in Arizona, and Samsung receiving an estimated $6 billion for a facility in Taylor, Texas.

TSMC announced a further $100 billion investment into the US with Trump, on top of $65 billion pledged for three plants. Diversifying chip production works for TSMC too, with China repeatedly threatening to take control of the island.

But both TSMC and Samsung have faced challenges with their investments, including surging costs, difficulty recruiting skilled labour, construction delays and resistance from local unions.

“This isn’t just a factory where you make boxes,” says Marc Einstein, research director at market intelligence firm Counterpoint. “The factories that make chips are such high-tech sterile environments, they take years and years to build.”

And despite the US investment, TSMC has said that most of its manufacturing will remain in Taiwan, especially its most advanced computer chips.

Today, TSMC’s plants in Arizona produce high-quality chips. But Chris Miller, author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, argues that “they’re a generation behind the cutting edge in Taiwan”.

“The question of scale depends on how much investment is made in the US versus Taiwan,” he says. “Today, Taiwan has far more capacity.”

The reality is, it took decades for Taiwan to build up that capacity, and despite the threat of China spending billions to steal Taiwan’s prowess in the industry, it continues to thrive.

TSMC was the pioneer of the “foundry model” where chip makers took US designs and manufactured chips for other companies.

Riding on a wave of Silicon Valley start-ups like Apple, Qualcomm and Intel, TSMC was able to compete with US and Japanese giants with the best engineers, highly skilled labour and knowledge sharing.

“Could the US make chips and create jobs?” asks Mr Einstein. “Sure, but are they going to get chips down to a nanometre? Probably not.”

One reason is Trump’s immigration policy, which can potentially limit the arrival of skilled talent from China and India.

“Even Elon Musk has had an immigration problem with Tesla engineers,” says Mr Einstein, referring to Musk’s support for the US’s H-1B visa programme that brings skilled workers to the US.

“That’s a bottleneck and there’s nothing they can do, unless they change their stance on immigration entirely. You can’t just magic PhDs out of nowhere.”

Even so, Trump has doubled down on tariffs, ordering a national security trade investigation into the semiconductor sector.

“It’s a wrench in the machine – a big wrench,” says Mr Einstein. “Japan for example was basing its economic revitalisation on semiconductors and tariffs were not in the business plan.”

The longer-term impact on the industry, according to Mr Miller, is likely to be a renewed focus on domestic manufacturing in many of the world’s key economies: China, Europe, the US.

Some companies could look for new markets. Chinese technology giant Huawei, for example, expanded into Europe and emerging markets including Thailand, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and many countries in Africa in the face of export controls and tariffs, although the margins in developing nations are small.

“China ultimately will want to win – it has to innovate and invest in R&D. Look at what it did with Deepseek,” says Mr Einstein, referring to the China-built AI chatbot.

“If they build better chips, everyone is going to go to them. Cost-effectiveness is something they can do now, and looking forward, it’s the ultra-high-tech fabrication.”

In the meantime, new manufacturing hubs may emerge. India has a lot of promise, according to experts who say there is more chance of it becoming integrated into the chip supply chain than the US – it’s geographically closer, labour is cheap and education is good.

India has signalled a willingness that it is open to chip manufacturing, but it faces a number of challenges, including land acquisition for factories, and water – chip production needs the highest quality water and a lot of it.

Chip companies are not completely at the mercy of tariffs. The sheer reliance and demand for chips from major US companies like Microsoft, Apple and Cisco could apply pressure on Trump to reverse any levies on the chip sector.

Some insiders believe intense lobbying by Apple CEO Tim Cook secured the exemptions to smartphone, laptop and electronic tariffs, and Trump reportedly lifted a ban on the chips Nvidia can sell to China as a result of lobbying.

Asked specifically about Apple products on Monday in the Oval Office, Trump said, “I’m a very flexible person,” adding that “there will be maybe things coming up, I speak to Tim Cook, I helped Tim Cook recently.”

Mr Einstein thinks it all comes down to Trump ultimately trying to make a deal – he and his administration know they can’t just build a bigger building when it comes to chips.

“I think what the Trump administration is trying to do is what it has done with TikTok’s owner Bytedance. He is saying I’m not going to let you operate in the US anymore unless you give Oracle or another US company a stake,” says Mr Einstein.

“I think they’re trying to fandangle something similar here – TSMC isn’t going anywhere, let’s just force them to do a deal with Intel and take a slice of the pie.”

But the blueprint of the Asia semiconductor ecosystem has a valuable lesson: no one country can operate a chip industry on its own, and if you want to make advanced semiconductors, efficiently and at scale – it will take time.

Trump is trying to create a chip industry through protectionism and isolation, when what allowed the chip industry to emerge throughout Asia is the opposite: collaboration in a globalised economy.

A German palliative care doctor has been charged with murdering 15 of his patients using a cocktail of lethal drugs.

Prosecutors in Berlin have accused the 40-year-old of setting fire to the homes of some of his suspected victims to cover his tracks.

He allegedly killed 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024, though prosecutors have said they believe that total could rise.

The doctor, who has not been named due to strict privacy laws in Germany, has not admitted to the charges, prosecutors said.

He is accused of administering an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant to his patients without their knowledge or consent.

The relaxant “paralysed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes”, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

He worked in several German states, and the ages of those whose deaths are being treated as suspicious range from 25 to 94.

It is also alleged that the suspect set fire to the apartments of his alleged victims to cover up the killings on five different occasions.

The suspect is accused of killing two patients in a single day in July 2024 – a 75-year-old man at his home in central Berlin, and a 76-year-old woman in a neighbouring district “a few hours later”.

Prosecutors said the doctor tried to set fire to the woman’s house but failed, adding: “When he noticed this, he reportedly informed a relative of the woman, claiming that he was standing in front of her apartment and that no one had responded to his ringing.”

The doctor was initially suspected of having killed four people in his care when he was arrested in August 2024 but investigations have uncovered other suspicious deaths, with more exhumations on potential victims planned.

A “lifelong professional ban” and “preventative detention” is being sought for the 40-year-old suspect. He remains in custody.

France has recalled its ambassador to Algeria and ordered 12 Algerian diplomats to leave Paris as a diplomatic row escalated.

Algeria earlier this week expelled 12 French officials after one of its consular staff was arrested over the kidnapping of a government critic living in Paris. President Emmanuel Macron’s office called the move “unjustified and incomprehensible”.

However, relations have been on the slide for months. Observers have described the crisis as unprecedented since Algeria secured independence from France in 1962.

There had been hopes that tensions would ease after France’s foreign minister held talks with Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune in Algiers earlier this month.

The two countries have blamed each other for what Paris has called a “sudden deterioration in our bilateral relations”.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said “Algerian authorities have chosen escalation”.

But Algerian minister Sofiane Chaib said the latest “fabricated” spat was down to French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, when relations had been in a “phase of warming up”.

They soured last year when Macron announced France was recognising Moroccan sovereignty of Western Sahara and backed a plan for limited autonomy for the disputed territory.

Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front in Western Sahara and is seen as its main ally.

French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal was then arrested at Algiers airport in November and jailed last month for five years.

Prosecutors said he had undermined national security for making remarks that questioned Algeria’s borders.

However, Retailleau became increasingly involved in the row when Algiers refused to accept around 60 Algerians that his ministry classed as “dangerous” and wanted removed.

A deadly February knife attack in the eastern city of Mulhouse would not have happened, Retailleau said, “if Algeria had respected the law and its obligations”.

Macron sought to clear the air with Algeria’s president late last month in what they described as a “long, frank and friendly exchange”.

Barrot followed that up with a visit to Algiers, saying “France wishes to turn the page on current tensions”.

But the high-profile contacts were unable to bring an end to the spiral of underlying problems.

The latest escalation came after an Algerian consular official was arrested with two other people last Friday over the April 2024 kidnapping of an exiled Algerian influencer called Amir DZ.

A high-profile critic of the Algerian government with more than a million followers on social media, Amir DZ was eventually released in a forest.

An incensed Algiers said the consular official’s arrest was aimed to “humiliate” Algeria and responded by ordering the expulsion of 12 French officials who it said were all under the supervision of France’s interior ministry.

Sofiane Chaib, Algeria’s secretary of state told national TV on Tuesday that Retailleau had “full responsibility for this new situation”. He condemned the rationale behind the arrest of the consular official as “grotesque”.

Retailleau said it was “unacceptable that France is a playground for Algerian intelligence”.

Paris responded late on Tuesday with the expulsion of 12 Algerian officials, and recalled its ambassador Stéphane Romatet for consultations.

Barrot meanwhile said the ambassador would be back in Paris within 48 hours, but said that his government would eventually have to resume dialogue with Algiers.

“If we want results for the French people, sooner or later we’ll have to have a frank, level-headed and challenging dialogue,” he said.

Joe Biden has used his first speech since leaving office to criticise the Trump administration’s welfare policies.

The ex-US president told a conference in Chicago that the government had “taken a hatchet” to the social security system, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk – who is leading the White House’s cost-cutting efforts – claim is beset by fraud.

The administration wants to cut staff at the agency responsible for spending $1.6 trillion (£1.2 trillion) in benefits a year.

Biden did not refer to Trump by name during his speech on Tuesday, but said: “In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction. It’s kind of breath-taking.”

He described social security as a “sacred promise”, adding: “We know just how much social security matters to people’s lives.”

Biden – who was speaking at a disability rights event – did not address his departure from the White House or the 2024 presidential election during his remarks.

The Social Security Agency (SSA) provides a base income for people in the US who are retired or cannot work because of a disability. It covers about 67 million Americans, primarily older citizens.

Democratic politicians have repeatedly accused the administration of planning sweeping social security cuts.

Members of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been making cuts to the agency since February, with the target of slashing 7,000 jobs – about 10% of its total staff.

Musk has described social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”.

Trump has previously said that he intends to target fraudulent claims and payments to illegal immigrants and not make wholesale cuts to benefits.

On Tuesday, he signed an order preventing illegal immigrants and “other ineligible people” from obtaining social security payments.

Before Biden’s Chicago speech, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the president was “absolutely certain” about protecting benefits for “law-abiding tax-paying American citizens and seniors”.

“He will always protect that programme,” she added.

In a post on X, the SSA – which is now controlled by a Trump appointee – said Biden had been “lying” during his Chicago speech.

Since leaving office, Biden has kept a relatively low profile. In February, he signed with Creative Artists Agency, the Los Angeles talent agency that represented him between 2017 and 2020.

Barack Obama also criticised the Trump administration on Tuesday, saying on X that its decision to freeze more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in federal funds for Harvard University was “unlawful and ham-handed”.

Trump is freezing the fund because Harvard said it would not make changes to its hiring, admissions and teaching practices that he claims are key to fighting alleged antisemitism on campus.

Obama has rarely criticised or rebuked government officials or government policies on social media since leaving the White House almost a decade ago.

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

An American pastor who was kidnapped by armed men during a church service in South Africa last week has been rescued following a “high-intensity shoot-out” that left three people dead, police say.

Josh Sullivan was found unharmed in the township in Gqeberha in the Eastern Cape on Tuesday evening – the area where the 45-year-old was snatched from last Thursday.

There were no immediate details on the kidnappers who are suspected of having been familiar with the family’s movements.

Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase in kidnappings for ransom in South Africa.

Mr Sullivan’s kidnappers had made a ransom demand, prompting the intervention of South Africa’s elite police unit, known as the Hawks.

In a statement released on Wednesday morning, the Hawks said that Sullivan had been rescued following “verified intelligence wherein a coordinated team… moved swiftly to the identified location”.

Hawks spokesperson Avele Fumba said that as the officers approached the house, the suspects attempted to flee inside a vehicle, while opening fire.

“The officers responded with tactical precision, leading to a high-intensity shootout in which three unidentified suspects were fatally wounded,” Mr Fumba said.

• South Africa kidnapping: ‘I survived but part of me died that day’

Mr Sullivan’s family and friends had made impassioned pleas for his safe return since his abduction.

Jeremy Hall, the Sullivan family’s spokesman, told local newspaper TimesLIVE that he was at the church with his wife and their children when he was kidnapped.

“They knew his name,” he said at the time.

Mr Sullivan describes himself as “a church planting missionary” on his personal website.

On it, he says he moved to South Africa with his wife and children in 2018 to establish a church for Xhosa-speaking people.

• The expelled envoy at the heart of the latest US-South Africa row
• Is South Africa’s coalition government about to fall apart?
• Ghosts of apartheid haunt South Africa as compensation anger brews
• Even in his final seconds of life, first gay imam pushed boundaries

Computer chip giant Nvidia says it will be hit with $5.5bn (£4.2bn) in costs after the US government tightened export rules to China.

The firm, which has been at the heart of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, will require licences to export its H20 AI chip to China, which has been one of its most popular.

The rules come amid an escalating trade war between the US and China, with both countries introducing steep trade tariffs on each other covering various goods.

Nvidia shares plunged almost 6% in after-hours trading.

Nvidia announced on Tuesday that the US government had told it last week that the H20 chip required a permit to be sold to China, including Hong Kong.

The tech giant said federal officials had advised them the licence requirement “will be in effect for the indefinite future”.

“The [government] indicated that the license requirement addresses the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a supercomputer in China,” Nvidia said.

The company declined to comment further when contacted by the BBC.

Marc Einstein from the Counterpoint Research consultancy said the $5.5bn hit estimated by Nvidia was in line with his estimates.

“While this is certainly a lot of money, this is something Nvidia can bear,” he said.

“But as we have seen in the last few days and weeks, this may largely be a negotiating tactic. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some exemptions or changes made to tariff policy in the near future, given this not only impacts Nvidia but the entire US semiconductor ecosystem,” Mr Einstein added.

Chips remain a battleground in the US-China race for tech supremacy, and US President Donald Trump now wants to turbocharge a highly complex and delicate manufacturing process that has taken other regions decades to perfect.

Nvidia’s AI chips have been a key focus of US export controls. Founded in 1993, it was originally known for making the type of computer chips that process graphics, particularly for computer games.

Long before the AI revolution, it started adding features to its chips that it says help machine learning. It is now seen as a key company to watch to see how fast AI-powered tech is spreading across the business world.

The company’s value took a hit in January when it was reported that a rival Chinese AI app, DeepSeek, had been built at a fraction of the cost of other chatbots.

At the time, the US was considered to have been caught off guard by their rival’s technological achievement.

Nvidia said its $5.5bn charges would be associated with H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments and related reserves.

Rui Ma, founder of the Tech Buzz China podcast, said she expects the US and China AI semiconductor supply chains to be “fully decoupled” if restrictions stay in place.

She added: “It doesn’t make any sense for any Chinese customer to be dependent on US chips” especially since there is an oversupply of data centres in China.

Adverts from six companies selling liquid Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs) have been banned in the UK for trivialising the risks and exploiting women’s insecurities around body image.

All of them appeared on Facebook or Instagram and used time-limited deals to “irresponsibly pressurise” customers into booking, says the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

One ad, for example, tried to entice customers with an “exclusive opportunity” to get a “perfect peachy look”.

Liquid BBLs involve injecting filler into the buttocks to lift them and make them look bigger or rounded.

The ASA says because of the risks involved, cosmetic surgery should be portrayed as a decision that needs time and thought, rather than urgency to book quickly and grab a deal.

Clinics must be socially responsible and should not trivialise procedures or play on consumers’ insecurities, it says.

One ad said: “Get the curves and contours you’ve always wanted with our safe and effective body filler treatments. Feel confident every step of the way! Safe, proven, and beautifully natural results.”

Another claimed a 0% infection rate at its sterile clinic, with minimal pain.

The ASA says liquid BBLs would carry some level of risk to the patient, such as infections.

It adds: “Marketers must not suggest that happiness or wellbeing depends on conforming to a particular body shape or physical appearance.”

The advertising watchdog says it has been using AI to proactively search for online ads that might break the rules.

Three of the clinics – Beautyjenics, Bomb Doll Aesthetics and Ccskinlondondubai -did not respond to the ASA’s inquiries.

Rejuvenate Clinics said it has reviewed ASA guidance and will remove all references to time-limited offers and state in ads that the surgery is carried out by a medical professional with ultrasound, to minimise risks and enhance safety.

EME Aesthetics said all its clients are given a full consultation and are under no obligation to book any procedures, and it therefore considers that its ad had not pressured consumers or trivialised the risks of cosmetic procedures.

Dr Ducu said it will ensure it follows the ASA’s rules and guidance, that the time-limited Black Friday offer was intended to provide consumers with an opportunity to access the company’s services at a discounted rate, and it always encourages consumers to make informed decisions without pressure.

• Plastic surgeons say liquid BBLs can carry significant risks and require expert skill and training to perform
• The UK industry is not regulated though – beauty clinics offer them
• Large amounts of filler may be injected with possible serious side-effects, such as blood clots and sepsis
• The recent death of mum-of-five Alice Webb has highlighted safety concerns around BBLs

“Trump is a crazy man,” says Lionel Xu, who is surrounded by his company’s mosquito repellent kits – many were once best sellers in Walmart stores in the United States.

Now those products are sitting in boxes in a warehouse in China and will remain there unless President Donald Trump lifts his 145% tariffs on all Chinese goods bound for the US.

“This is so hard for us,” he adds.

Around half of all products made by his company Sorbo Technology are sold to the US.

It is a small company by Chinese standards and has around 400 workers in Zhejiang province. But they are not alone in feeling the pain of this economic war.

“We are worried. What if Trump doesn’t change his mind? That will be a dangerous thing for our factory,” says Mr Xu.

Nearby, Amy is helping to sell ice cream makers at her booth for the Guangdong Sailing Trade Company. Her key buyers, including Walmart, are also in the US.

“We have stopped production already,” she says. “All the products are in the warehouse.”

It was the same story at nearly every booth in the sprawling Canton Fair in the trading hub of Guangzhou.

When the BBC speaks to Mr Xu, he is getting ready to take some Australian buyers to lunch. They have come looking for a bargain and hope to drive down the price.

“We will see,” he says about the tariffs. He believes Trump will back down.

“Maybe it will get better in one or two months,” Mr Xu adds with his fingers crossed. Maybe, maybe…”

Last week, President Trump temporarily paused the vast majority of tariffs after global stock markets tumbled, and a sell-off in the US bond market.

But he kept the import levies targeted at Chinese goods being shipped to the US. Beijing responded by imposing its own 125% levies on American imports.

This has bewildered traders from more than 30,000 businesses who have come to the annual fair to show off their goods in several exhibition halls the size of 200 football pitches.

In the homeware section, firms displayed everything from washing machines to tumble dryers, electric toothbrushes to juicers and waffle makers. Buyers come from all over the world to see the products for themselves and make a deal.

But the cost of a food mixer or a vacuum cleaner from China with the added tariffs are now too high for most American firms to pass on the cost to their customers.

The world’s two largest economies have hit an impasse and Chinese goods meant for US households are piling up on factory floors.

The effects of this trade war will likely be felt in kitchens and living rooms across America, who will now have to buy these goods at higher prices.

China has maintained its defiant stance and has vowed to fight this trade war “until the end.”

It is a tone also used by some at the fair. Hy Vian, who was looking to buy some electric ovens for his firm, waved off the effects of tariffs.

“If they don’t want us to export – then let them wait. We already have a domestic market in China, we will give the best products to the Chinese first.”

China does have a large population of 1.4 billion people and in theory this is a strong domestic market.

Chinese policymakers have also been trying to stimulate more growth in a sluggish economy by encouraging consumers to spend.

But it is not working. Many of the country’s middle classes have invested their savings in buying the family home, only to watch their house prices slump in the last four years. Now they want to save money – not spend it.

While China may be better placed to weather the storm than other countries, the reality is that it is still an export-driven economy. Last year, exports accounted for around half of the country’s economic growth.

China also remains the world’s factory – with Goldman Sachs estimating that around 10 to 20 million people in China may be working on US-bound exports alone.

Some of those workers are already feeling the pain.

Not far from the Canton Fair, there are warrens of workshops in Guangdong making clothes, shoes and bags. This is the manufacturing hub for companies such as Shein and Temu.

Each building houses several factories on several floors where workers will labour for 14 hours a day.

On a pavement near some shoe factories, a few workers were squatting down to chat and smoke.

“Things are not going well,” says one, who was unwilling to give his name. His friend urges him to stop talking. Discussing economic difficulties can be sensitive in China.

“We’ve had problems since the Covid pandemic, and now there’s this trade war. I used to be paid 300-400 yuan ($40-54) a day, and now I will be lucky if I get 100 yuan a day.”

The worker says it is difficult to find work these days. Others making shoes on the street also told us they only earned enough to live a basic life.

While some in China feel pride in their product, others feel the pain of increasing tariffs and wonder how this crisis will end.

China is facing the prospect of losing a trading partner which buys more than $400bn (£302bn) worth of goods each year, but the pain will also be felt on the other side, with economists warning that the US could be heading for a recession.

Adding to the uncertainty is President Trump, who is known for his brinkmanship. He has continued to push Beijing and China has refused to back down.

However, Beijing has said it will not add any more to the current 125% tariff rate on US goods. They could retaliate in other ways – but it offers the two sides some breathing room from a week that sparked an economic war.

There is reportedly little contact between Washington and Beijing and neither side appears willing to head to the negotiating table any time soon.

In the meantime, some companies at the Canton Fair are using the event to try to find new markets.

Amy hopes her ice cream makers will head in a new direction.

“We hope to open the new European market. Maybe Saudi Arabia – and of course Russia,” she adds.

Others believe there is still money to be made in China. Among them is Mei Kunyan, 40, who says he is earning around 10,000 yuan a month at his shoe firm which sells to Chinese customers. Many major shoe manufacturers have moved to Vietnam where labour costs are cheaper.

Mr Mei has also realised something that businesses around him are now discovering: “The Americans are too tricky.”

The tussle between Starlink boss Elon Musk and South Africa over the company’s failure to launch in the country stems from the nation’s black empowerment laws, and could be one factor behind the diplomatic row between the US and Africa’s most industrialised nation.

To his more than 219 million followers on his social media platform X, Mr Musk made the racially charged claim that his satellite internet service provider was “not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because I’m not black“.

But the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) – a regulatory body in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors – told the BBC that Starlink had never submitted an application for a licence.

As for the foreign ministry, it said the company was welcome to operate in the country “provided there’s compliance with local laws”.

To operate in South Africa, Starlink needs to obtain network and service licences, which both require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups.

This mainly refers to South Africa’s majority black population, which was shut out of the economy during the racist system of apartheid.

White-minority rule ended in 1994 after Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC) came to power.

Since then, the ANC has made “black empowerment” a central pillar of its economic policy in an attempt to tackle the racial injustices of the past.

This has included adopting legislation requiring investors to give local black firms a 30% stake in their businesses in South Africa.

Mr Musk – who was born in South Africa in 1971 before moving to Canada in the late 1980s and then to the US, where he became the world’s richest man – appears to see this as the main stumbling block for Starlink to operate in the country.

Starlink, in a written submission to Icasa, said the black empowerment provisions in legislation excluded “many” foreign satellite operators from the South African market, according to local news site TechCentral.

But foreign ministry spokesperson Clayson Monyela challenged this view in March, saying on X that more than 600 US companies, including computing giant Microsoft, were operating in South Africa in compliance with its laws – and “thriving”.

Mr Musk’s Starlink has a potential ally in South Africa’s Communications Minister Solly Malatsi.

He comes from the Democratic Alliance (DA) – the second-biggest party in South Africa – which joined a coalition government after the ANC failed to get a parliamentary majority in last year’s election.

The DA is a fierce critic of the current black empowerment laws, claiming they have fuelled cronyism and corruption with investors forced to link up with ANC-connected companies to operate in South Africa or to win state contracts.

Last October, Malatsi hinted that he was looking for a way to circumvent the 30% black equity requirement, saying he intended to issue a “policy direction” to Icasa with the aim of clarifying “the position on the recognition of equity equivalent programmes”.

In simple terms, Malatsi seemed to be suggesting that Starlink would not a require black business partner in South Africa, though it would have to invest in social programmes aimed at benefiting black people – especially the poor.

But some six months later, Malatsi has failed to change the policy, with a spokesperson for his department telling the BBC that their legal team was still looking into the matter.

It seems the communications minister may be facing political resistance from ANC lawmakers in parliament.

Khusela Diko, the chairperson of the parliamentary communications committee to which Malatsi is accountable, warned him earlier this month that “transformation” in the tech sector was non-negotiable, appearing to oppose giving Mr Musk’s Starlink any special treatment.

Diko said that “the law is clear on compliance” and, crucially added, that “cutting corners and circumvention is not an option – least of all to appease business interests”.

Diko’s tough position comes as no surprise, as relations between the South African government and the US have hit rock bottom during US President Donald Tump’s second term.

Mr Musk, part of Trump’s inner circle, has railed on X against what he calls “racist ownership laws” in South Africa, while the US president has threatened to boycott the G20 summit of world leaders to be held in the country later this year.

“How could we be expected to go to South Africa for the very important G20 Meeting when Land Confiscation and Genocide is the primary topic of conversation? They are taking the land of white Farmers, and then killing them and their families,” Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social.

His claims of a genocide against white farmers have been widely dismissed as false, but they echo those of the tech billionaire.

Last month, Mr Musk accused “a major” political party in South Africa – a reference to the radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which came fourth in last year’s election – of “actively promoting white genocide”.

“A month ago, the South African government passed a law legalizing taking property from white people at will with no payment,” Mr Musk said.

“Where is the outrage? Why is there no coverage by the legacy media?

South Africa did pass a law earlier this year allowing the government to seize property without compensation, but only in certain cases.

Nevertheless, Musk links these issues to his failure to get a licence for Starlink.

“Starlink can’t get a license to operate in South Africa simply because I’m not black.” he said back in March.

His hard-line stance comes despite meeting South Africa’s president in New York last year.

At the time, Mr Musk described the meeting as “great”, while President Cyril Ramaphosa said he had tried to persuade the billionaire to invest in South Africa.

“Meeting Elon Musk was a clear intention of mine… Some people call it bromance, so it’s a whole process of rekindling his affection and connection with South Africa,” Ramaphosa told South Africa’s public broadcaster, SABC.

But he added that nothing had yet been “bedded down”.

“As it happens with potential investors, you have to court them; you have to be talking to them, and you’ve got to be demonstrating to them that there is a conducive environment for them to invest. So, we will see how this turns out,” the president said.

“He is South African-born and South Africa is his home, and I would want to see him coming to South Africa for a visit, tour or whatever.”

But the “bromance” has long ended, with Mr Musk appearing to move closer to South Africa’s right wing.

Lesotho appears to have bowed to pressure from the Trump administration by announcing on Monday that it had given a 10-year licence to Starlink.

It comes after Trump imposed a 50% tariff on imports from Lesotho, threatening thousands of jobs in the country.

Trump subsequently paused that for 90 days, but a 10% tariff still came into effect on 5 April.

Some reports suggest the Lesotho Communications Authority (LCA) cleared regulatory hurdles to stave off the threat of a further tariff hike by granting Starlink a licence.

However, this was denied by Foreign Minister Lejone Mpotjoane.

“The licence application and the tariff negotiations should not be conflated,” he said.

The decision to grant the licence was condemned by civil society group Section Two, which raised concern that Starlink Lesotho was 100% foreign-owned and lacked local ownership, South Africa’s GroundUp news site reported.

“Such actions can only be described as a betrayal – a shameful sell-out by a government that appears increasingly willing to place foreign corporate interests above the democratic will and long-term developmental needs of the people of Lesotho,” Section Two’s co-ordinator Kananelo Boloetse was quoted as saying.

During public consultations over Starlink’s application, Vodacom Lesotho had also argued that Mr Musk’s company should establish local shareholding before receiving a licence, the Space in Africa website reported.

“These concerns highlight broader tensions surrounding Starlink’s operations across Africa, particularly the growing demand for local partnerships,” it added.

Starlink also appears to be seeking an exemption in Namibia from the requirement to bring in a local partner.

Namibia is a former colony of Germany, and was under the rule of South Africa’s white-minority regime until it gained independence in 1990.

It has more stringent requirements than its post-apartheid neighbour, with businesses operating in Namibia needing to be 51% locally owned.

The Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia (Cran) told the BBC that Starlink had submitted an application for a telecommunications service licence in June 2024.

Cran said that while this process usually took between three to six months, a decision had not yet been taken because it “must first wait for the ownership exemption application to be finalised” by Namibia’s information and communication technology minister.

Starlink is now operating in more than 20 African countries, with Somalia, hit by an Islamist insurgency, giving it a 10-year licence on 13 April, two days before Lesotho’s decision to do so.

“We welcome Starlink’s entry to Somalia. This initiative aligns with our vision to deliver affordable and accessible internet services to all Somalis, regardless of where they live,” Technology Minister Mohamed Adam Moalim Ali said.

Starlink aims to provide high-speed internet services to remote or underserved areas, making it a potential game-changer for rural areas unable to access traditional forms of connectivity such as mobile broadband and fibre.

This is because Starlink, rather than relying on fibre optics or cables to transmit data, uses a network of satellites in low Earth orbit. Because they are closer to the ground, they have faster transmission speeds than traditional satellites.

Nigeria was the first African state to allow Starlink to operate, in 2023. The company has since grown into the second-biggest internet service provider in Africa’s most-populous country.

But Starlink still has no presence in South Africa – the continent’s most industrialised nation.

Enterprising locals had found a way to connect to the service by using regional roaming packages purchased in countries where the service was available.

Starlink put an end to this last year while Icasa also warned local companies that those found providing the service illegally could face a hefty fine.

Yet with an estimated 20% of South Africans not having access to the internet at all – many in rural areas – it could prove beneficial for both Starlink and the government to reach a compromise.

For Starlink it could prove a lucrative market, while satellite broadband may help the government achieve its goal of providing universal internet access by 2030.

On Monday, Ramaphosa appointed former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas as his special envoy to the US, signalling his determination to mend relations with the Trump administration.

But Jonas’ appointment faced a backlash in right-wing circles, as in a 2020 speech he called Trump a “racist homophobe” and a “narcissistic right-winger”.

In an interview on the Money Show podcast, Jonas said that he made the comments when he was not in government and “people move on”.

He acknowledged that it would be a “long slog to rebuild understanding”, but added that South Africa’s relationship with the US was “fundamentally important” and he was determined to improve it.

Jonas’ comments are not surprising as the US is a major trading partner for South Africa. With Trump having threatened a 30% tariff on its goods, Ramaphosa cannot afford to see relations continuing to deteriorate and the economy taking further knocks.

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Actress Cate Blanchett has said she wants to quit acting to do other things, joining a long line of big Hollywood stars who gave up the red carpets for a different lifestyle.

The 55-year-old is seen as one of the most talented and bankable actresses in film, but she has indicated several times in recent years that she’s keen to break away from the big screen.

“My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it. I am serious about giving up acting,” she told the Radio Times in a new interview. “[There are] a lot of things I want to do with my life.”

Speaking about her experience of being a celebrity she added: “When you go on a talk show, or even here now, and then you see soundbites of things you’ve said, pulled out and italicised, they sound really loud. I’m not that person.

“I make more sense in motion – it’s been a long time to remotely get comfortable with the idea of being photographed.”

Her remarks echoed comments she made to BBC Radio 4’s This Natural Life last year, when she said she “absolutely loved” acting, but also said it would be “brilliant” to give it up and spoke about her passion for nature and conservation.

Blanchett is best known for appearing in films such as Tár, Notes on a Scandal and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and won Oscars for her performances in Blue Jasmine and The Aviator.

She wouldn’t be the first successful actor to switch careers slightly later in life. Here are 10 other actors who retired from acting (including a few who came back):

The US actress was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the 90s and 00s, having made her debut at the age of 21 opposite Jim Carey in The Mask more than 30 years ago.

Initially finding fame for her goofy performances in romcoms such as My Best Friend’s wedding, and comedies including There’s Something About Mary, Diaz went on to prove her dramatic acting chops in movies like Being John Malkovich and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.

But she took a hiatus from Hollywood following her turn as Ms Hannigan in 2014’s remake of the musical Annie, confirming her “retirement” in 2018. “I was free to be [like] ‘I’m a mum, I’m a wife, I’m living my life’ – it was so lovely.”

She said the decade she spent in retirement from acting was “the best 10 years” of her life. But she was eventually persuaded to return to screens earlier this year for spy thriller Back in Action with actor Jamie Foxx.

The Oscar-winning star, considered one of his generation’s finest actors, apparently retired in 2017, but it wasn’t the first time he had stepped away from the spotlight.

Day-Lewis, who holds both British and Irish citizenship, has won an incredible three best actor Academy Awards for roles in My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood and Lincoln.

Known for leaving long stretches between roles, in the 1990s Day-Lewis went into what he called “semi-retirement” and became a shoemaker’s apprentice in Florence, Italy.

He was coaxed back to acting by Martin Scorsese and his offer of the role in Gangs of New York.

A statement issued through the star’s agent in 2017, when he was aged 60, said he “will no longer be working as an actor”.

Again, however, that proved not to be permanent. Day-Lewis is soon to star in Anemone, the debut feature film from his son Ronan Day-Lewis. Daniel and Ronan co-wrote the script which “explores the intricate relationships between fathers, sons and brothers, and the dynamics of familial bonds”.

Whether it’s a one-off due to the family connection or the start of a big return to film remains to be seen.

Nicholson is one of only three actors (including Day-Lewis, above) to have won three Academy Awards for acting. Two of Nicholson’s were for best actor (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and As Good As It Gets) and another for best supporting actor (Terms of Endearment).

The legendary star’s other famous roles include Easy Rider, The Shining, The Departed, A Few Good Men and Batman.

Although he’s never formally announced he is quitting or retiring, he previously said his retreat from the spotlight was brought on by a desire to not “be out there anymore”.

His last film role was in 2010 romcom How Do You Know.

But just last week, that film’s director James L Brooks told Hollywood Reporter: “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jack work again. I mean, it’s been a hunk of time but I don’t know. Maybe it could be the right thing. He’s reading scripts all the time, I think.”

Legendary Swedish screen siren Greta Garbo declared in 1941 at the ripe old age of 36 that she would be taking a “temporary” retirement.

It proved to be permanent. The Camille and Queen Christina star never appeared on film again.

Always the reluctant celebrity, the reclusive actress never played the Hollywood game, refusing interviews and avoiding film premieres and other public appearances.

The enigmatic star, whose famous line “I want to be alone” from Grand Hotel somewhat mirrored her desire in real life as well as on screen, only succeeded in increasing her mystique by stepping away from the spotlight.

However, she later clarified in an interview: “I never said: ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be let alone! There is all the difference’.”

One of the few silent movie stars to transition successfully to the “talkies”, Garbo moved away from Hollywood to New York, where she lived until her death in 1990 at the age of 84.

Synonymous with James Bond, the late Scottish star first found fame through modelling and body-building before landing a few small theatre and TV roles.

He made his film debut in No Road Back in 1957, but playing Secret Intelligence Service agent 007 in Dr No a few years later gave him his big breakthrough. He went on to star in five further Bond movies including From Russia with Love and Goldfinger.

Connery appeared in numerous other films over his long career, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, The Man Who Would Be King opposite Sir Michael Caine, The Untouchables (for which he won an Oscar) and The Hunt for Red October. But he would forever be wedded to 007.

In 2005, however, he said he was “fed up with the idiots” adding there was an “ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who greenlight the movies.”

That declaration came a couple of years after he starred in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which many concluded was one of the main reasons for his retirement.

The poorly received comic book caper was to be his final screen appearance.

Kids of the 80s and 90s: You know. This guy was a huge star back in the day, the comedy backbone of popular films such as Ghostbusters, Honey I Shrunk The Kids and the musical Little Shop of Horrors (Suddenly, Seymour anyone?).

But then he just seemed to disappear off the face of the earth. So what happened?

He began to cut back on work after his wife died of cancer in 1991 to concentrate on raising his children, with his final big screen outing being the 1997 sequel Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves.

“I’m a single parent, and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the travelling involved in making movies,” he told USA Today in 2005.

“So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn’t miss it.”

He did continue to do voiceover work, however, and Moranis was set to make a comeback in a Honey I Shrunk the Kids reboot, which sadly fell through.

We sadly lost this acting legend earlier this year, along with his second wife Betsy Arakawa, but the star hadn’t been seen on screen for years after retiring from the profession on the advice of his heart doctor – opting for a quiet life in New Mexico.

Hackman shot to fame in Bonnie and Clyde at the end of the 60s and was rarely out of work – in films like The French Connection, Mississippi Burning and Superman.

He chose to bow out from acting in the political satire Welcome to Mooseport in 2004.

Explaining his decision, he told Reuters that he didn’t want to risk going out on a sour note.

“The business for me is very stressful. The compromises that you have to make in films are just part of the beast,” he said, “and it had gotten to a point where I just didn’t feel like I wanted to do it any more.”

Fonda, from the famous family dynasty, is another star who quit at the height of her fame.

Starring in 80s and 90s hits such as Scandal (about the Profumo Affair), Cameron Crowe’s Singles, The Godfather Part III and Single White Female (everyone wanted to copy that elfin crop, not just Jennifer Jason Leigh). And then… nothing.

Fonda never formally retired, she just seemed to retreat. Her last big screen appearance was in The Whole Shebang in 2001.

When asked in 2023 by a reporter if she would return to acting at some point, she replied: “I don’t think so, it’s too nice being a civilian.” Fair enough!

Fonda’s aunt Jane also quit acting in 1990 for several years, explaining later in Vogue that “she wasn’t having fun anymore”.

But she later came out of retirement for the romcom movie Monster-in-Law.

“It was just a gut feeling of, Why the hell not? It’d been 15 years, and I wanted to act again.”

Another star we sadly lost in the last year, Shelley Duval was best known for her roles in film like The Shining, Annie Hall and Nashville.

Her step back from the spotlight wasn’t just her choice. Movie roles began to drop off in the 90s and then she decided to move back to Texas after her brother was diagnosed with cancer.

A year before her death, she told People magazine: “It’s the longest sabbatical I ever took but it was for really important reasons – to get in touch with my family again.”

Duvall did return to acting in horror movie, 2023’s The Forest Hills.

“Acting again – it’s so much fun. It enriches your life,” she told People.

“[Jessica Tandy] won an Oscar when she was 80. I can still win,” she joked. Sadly, she didn’t get the chance.

Who could forget 2024 award season’s most charming star, Oscar winner and Everything, Everywhere All At Once actor Ke Huy Quan?

He first found fame as a child actor in the 80s when he landed the role of Short Round in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, before taking another starring role in childhood adventure hit The Goonies.

A couple of TV roles followed but then the work largely dried up, and he settled for working behind the scenes as a stunt co-ordinator and assistant director.

“It’s always difficult to make the transition from a child actor to an adult actor,” he told the Telegraph. “But when you’re Asian, then it’s 100 times more difficult.”

He reluctantly gave up – only due to lack of opportunity – and it took years before he took a punt on inventive, off-the wall movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, where his role as Waymond Wang won him an Oscar and made him a Hollywood darling once again.

Angry Nigerians are turning to social media to describe how they have been locked out of their accounts on the digital financial platform, CBEX.

People have posted videos of themselves crying, saying that they could not withdraw their investments and worried that their money had gone.

Some furious customers ransacked a CBEX office in the south-west city of Ibadan, carting off chairs, air-conditioners and a solar panel. CBEX has not yet publicly commented.

The company had promised that investors would double their money every month. Nigeria is currently facing straitened economic times and many are desperate to find a way to boost their income.

One investor, identified as Ola, told BBC Pidgin that he feared he had lost 450,000 naira ($280; £210).

“I was ready to withdraw all my investment just last week but my friend told me to be patient and wait – and now it has crashed,” Ola said.

Many others have shared similar stories online, with one person talking about losing $16,000.

The problem was first noticed over the weekend, but the anger boiled over when Monday came and people were still not able to access their money.

Some investors who made complaints on the private messaging service Telegram received responses from CBEX.

They were told that the problem was the result of a hack and things will be resolved soon.

Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (Sec), which regulates the investment secotr, has not yet responded to a BBC request for comment. But Sec has previously warned citizens about the risks surrounding unregulated digital platforms and potential Ponzi schemes

For some, the situation brings back painful memories from 2016 when another popular financial scheme, called MMM, froze its transactions, leaving many investors heartbroken.

Members were supposed to receive a 30% return on their investment in just 30 days. It launched in Nigeria in November 2015 and according to its founders, had up to three million members before it collapsed.

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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.

“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.”

Yellow diggers are shoring up mounds of earth, as construction workers prepare to lay the foundations for what’s set to become the largest start-up campus in Europe.

The project is an expansion of Maria 01, a co-working and event space for entrepreneurs and investors, as well as larger corporations that want to collaborate with tech start-ups.

Its existing facilities across the street already house around 240 start-ups. They are spread across six buildings that used to make up the city’s first hospital, founded in the 19th Century and notorious in Helsinki for treating patients with the plague.

Now, the current 20,000 sq m site is a hub for companies developing innovative health technologies, alongside AI, cybersecurity, gaming and defence tech start-ups.

“The whole place is really based on community,” says Maria 01’s CEO Sarita Runeberg. “We bring people together so they can network… and find different kinds of resources to grow their businesses.”

There are also office perks including a pool table, table football, running and ice bathing clubs, and in true Finnish-style, a sauna.

“We wouldn’t be a proper start-up hub if we didn’t have our own sauna here!” laughs Ms Runeberg.

While co-working spaces for tech companies are well established across the Nordics, Maria 01 is the largest of its kind in the region.

It is run as a not-for-profit organisation partly funded by the city of Helsinki, which has invested more than €6m ($6.7m; £5.2m) in the hub since its launch in 2016.

Ms Runeberg believes it will become the biggest start-up campus in Europe following the completion of three new buildings by 2028, adding a 50,000 sqm floor area.

Later this year it is launching an accelerator programme designed to support and guide high-growth start-ups.

The hub’s current and former members have already collectively raised over €1bn in funding.

This represents around 40% of all early stage funding raised annually by Finnish start-ups.

Ruben Byron is the Belgian co-founder of a start-up offering cloud services to AI developers.

He has already scaled his business from a handful of staff using the hub’s hot desks to a team of around 40 working from private offices in the former hospital, as well as remotely.

“That has been a great experience, that we’ve kind of been able [to] be nurtured here in a way,” he says.

Although not as mature – or well known globally – as other European start-up hubs like Sweden and the UK, Finland has been steadily making a name for itself in the tech scene over the last two decades.

The small Nordic nation, which has a population of around 5.6 million, has spawned 12 unicorn businesses – firms worth a billion dollars or more – including sleep and fitness tracking ring Oura, game developers Supercell, Rovio (the creators of the Angry Birds game), and food delivery platform Wolt.

Last year, Startup Blink, a global index mapping more than 100 countries ranked Finland’s start-up ecosystem the 7th best in western Europe, and 14th in the world.

The index cites factors including hubs like Maria 01, alongside high levels of state and university support, and Slush – a huge annual non-profit gathering for global start-ups and investors.

It also highlights Finland’s transparent and open business culture.

“There is an authenticity with the Finns,” says Jack Parker, a Helsinki-based founder originally from Newcastle upon Tyne, who runs a healthcare innovation start-up.

“Ego doesn’t really play a part. So if I reach out to somebody, it’s quite likely eight out of 10 times that they will respond.”

Finland’s right-wing coalition, which came into power in 2023, is on a mission to push the country even further up global indices, stating in its official government programme that it wants the Nordic nation to become a leader in fostering a dynamic start-up and growth company ecosystem.

“It’s not just about rankings,” says Marjo Ilmari, who runs the start-up services team at Business Finland, the government agency that promotes investment and innovation.

In 2024 Business Finland alone invested €112m in start-ups, an increase of 30% compared to the previous year.

“The real goal is to create an environment where our ground-breaking start-ups can emerge and really tackle global challenges.”

The agency hopes this will help drive growth in the Finnish economy, which went into recession in 2023 and is currently making a sluggish recovery, with the Bank of Finland forecasting an increase of less than 1% this year.

The country is also trying to attract more global talent by offering start-up permits for international founders who want to grow their businesses in Finland.

These entrepreneurs are eligible for a so-called soft-landing support package provided by Business Finland.

“They give you advice, support, sometimes grants to support the initiation phase,” explains Lalin Keyvan, a Turkish-born entrepreneur at Maria 01 who says the scheme was one of the main reasons why she relocated to Helsinki.

Business Finland’s marketing campaigns for would-be movers highlight social and lifestyle factors too: Finns tend to prioritise wellbeing, plus there’s free education and subsidised healthcare and childcare.

“You don’t really have to choose between building a high-growth company and enjoying life, because you can do both,” says Ms Ilmari.

But whether all this is enough for Finland to compete with Europe’s more established start-up hubs is up for debate.

Data suggests it still has a long way to go to catch up with neighbouring Sweden, long the Nordic darling of the European start-up scene.

It is home to more than 40 unicorn businesses including Spotify, payments platform Klarna and game developer King.

In Startup Blink’s ecosystem ranking Sweden ranks second in Europe after the UK, and top in the EU.

In the last decade it has attracted more than $29bn in funding compared to just over $8bn in Finland, according to the annual State of European Tech report by investment company Atomico.

“I love Finland’s bold approach,” says Charlotte Ekelund, deputy CEO of Sting, a non-profit organisation that helps develop start-ups in Stockholm. However she believes Finland is still years behind Sweden in terms of pulling in capital and developing its ecosystem.

“We observe some of the things that the Finnish ecosystem is doing now, Sting was part of driving 10 or 15 years ago here – co-working spaces, [and] new organisations in the ecosystem that can support in different ways.”

Mikael Pentikainen, CEO of the Federation of Finnish Enterprises, says the country’s government is currently losing support amongst entrepreneurs despite its pro-start-up and pro-business approach.

A recent survey for the organisation found 41% of small and medium-sized business owners are satisfied with the coalition’s actions, down from 54% in June.

One likely reason for the dip, says Mr Pentikainen, is a decision to raise VAT from 24% to 25.5% last September, the highest rate in western Europe. The government said this was a “difficult but necessary” move designed to stabilise public finances.

But Mr Pentikainen suggests it could make Finland’s start-up ecosystem less competitive for international founders.

The Finnish government has also recently toughened up citizenship requirements, meaning foreign entrepreneurs now need to stay at least eight years instead of five in order to obtain a passport, and will soon also be required to pass a test on Finnish society and culture if they want to settle long-term.

Back at Maria 01, Mr Parker, the health company founder, says he’s confident Finland’s start-up ecosystem will continue to expand and attract international talent. But he warns it might lose some of the aspects that have so far made it an attractive option for entrepreneurs.

“The advantage of the ecosystem right now is this kind of ‘small town, everybody knows each other’ [feeling]. Scaling that up, there is the risk of actually losing that element of it.”

Former President Barack Obama is applauding Harvard University’s decision to refuse the White House’s demands that it change its policies or lose federal money, in his first social media post to criticise the Trump administration since at least Inauguration Day.

President Donald Trump is freezing more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in federal funds for Harvard because it would not make changes to its hiring, admissions and teaching practices that his administration said were key to fighting antisemitism on campus.

Obama, a Harvard alum, described the freeze as “unlawful and ham-handed”.

He called on other institutions to follow Harvard’s lead in not conceding to Trump’s demands.

“Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect,” Obama wrote on social media.

The former president, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991, has rarely criticised or rebuked government officials or government policies on social media since leaving the White House almost a decade ago. His posts during the election typically extolled Trump’s challenger, then-Vice-President Kamala Harris, and since Inauguration Day, he has mainly posted tributes, personal messages and thoughts on sports.

Obama is one of a handful of US political figures and university officials now speaking out against the Trump administration’s attempts to reshape the country’s top universities, through pressure to change what they teach and who they hire and threats to cut research funding.

Hundreds of faculty members at Yale University, published a letter expressing their support for Harvard’s decision to reject the Trump administration’s demands.

“We stand together at a crossroads,” the letter read. “American universities are facing extraordinary attacks that threaten the bedrock principles of a democratic society, including rights of free expression, association, and academic freedom. We write as one faculty, to ask you to stand with us now.”

Many US universities receive some type of federal funding which is mostly designated for scientific research in areas such as drug development.

Since Trump returned to office in January, elite institutions such as Stanford University have had to freeze hiring and cut budgets in the face of shrinking federal funds.

Some of the funding has been paused to press universities to take steps that the Trump administration says will fight antisemitism. Trump has accused them of failing to protect Jewish students during last year’s campus protests against the war in Gaza and US support for Israel.

Stanford President Jonathan Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez on Tuesday said in a statement praising Harvard that “universities need to address legitimate criticisms with humility and openness”.

“But the way to bring about constructive change is not by destroying the nation’s capacity for scientific research, or through the government taking command of a private institution,” they wrote.

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While Columbia University ceded to some of Trump’s demands earlier this month, Harvard became the first major US university to take the opposite approach.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said in a statement on Monday.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) followed Harvard’s lead on Monday and also rejected the Trump administration’s demands.

Despite the criticism, Trump is standing fast. On Tuesday he took another strike against Harvard, threatening to revoke its tax-exempt status.

Universities, as well as many charities and religious groups, are exempted from paying federal income taxes. This valuable tax break, though, can be removed if the groups become involved in political activities or move away from their stated purposes.

Hamas says it has “lost contact” with the group of fighters holding an Israeli-American hostage captive in Gaza following an Israeli strike on their location.

The 21-year-old soldier, Edan Alexander, has appeared in videos released by the group in recent days.

Israel had asked for him to be released on day one of a new 45-day ceasefire proposal put forward last week which has been rejected by Hamas.

Hamas on Tuesday did not indicate when contact had been lost and has not produced any evidence for their claim. Israel regularly asserts it avoids hitting locations where it believes hostages are being held.

“We announce that we have lost contact with the group holding soldier Edan Alexander following a direct strike on their location,” Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida said in a statement.

“We are still trying to reach them at this moment,” he added.

Of the 251 hostages taken during Hamas’s 2023 attack, 59 remain in the enclave, 24 of whom are believed to be alive.

Five of the hostages in Gaza are believed to be US citizens and Alexander was thought to be the only one still alive.

Hamas later on Tuesday also released a video addressed to the families of the remaining hostages, warning that they would return in coffins if Israel continued its military offensive in Gaza.

On Saturday, Hamas had released a video of Alexander alive in which he pleads for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump to negotiate his release.

Alexander was part of an Israeli proposal for a 45-day ceasefire that would involve “the release of half of the hostages in the first week of the agreement,” a Hamas official told AFP. The official said the proposal called for Alexander’s release on the first day as a “gesture of goodwill”.

A two-month ceasefire at the start of the year saw Hamas release 33 hostages in return for the release of 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and aid and goods entering the strip.

After negotiations for a second phase unravelled, Israel resumed its offensive on 18 March.

Born in Tel Aviv but raised in New Jersey, Alexander was serving in an elite infantry unit on the border with Gaza when he was captured by Hamas militants during the 7 October attack.

His father, Adi Alexander, had questioned Netanyahu’s actions in an interview on Monday with US outlet NewsNation, asking: “How do you plan to get hostages out without ending this war and without committing to the second phase of this deal?”

Hamas has said it is ready to return all of those still held captive in exchange for a complete end to hostilities and full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

On Tuesday, the group rejected Israel’s proposal for a renewed ceasefire.

A senior Palestinian official told the BBC: “The Israeli proposal relayed to the movement through Egypt explicitly called for the disarmament of Hamas without any Israeli commitment to end the war or withdraw from Gaza. Hamas therefore rejected the offer in its entirety.”

Since Israel restarted its offensive in Gaza, at least 1,630 people have been killed – bringing the total killed in 18 months of war to 51,000, according to the latest figures from the Hamas-run health ministry.

The war was triggered by the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

Peru’s former president, Ollanta Humala, has been found guilty of money laundering and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

A court in the capital, Lima, said he had accepted illegal funds from the Venezuelan president at the time, Hugo Chávez, and from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht to bankroll his election campaigns in 2006 and 2011.

Humala’s lawyer said he would appeal against the conviction.

His wife, Nadine Heredia, was also found guilty of money laundering and sentenced to 15 years in jail. However, she has been granted safe passage to Brazil after seeking asylum in the Brazilian embassy.

Humala’s lawyer said he would appeal against the conviction.

Unlike her husband, Heredia was not present in court when Judge Nayko Coronado passed sentence – she had entered the Brazilian embassy along with the couple’s son before an arrest warrant could be executed.

Brazil offered her asylum and the Peruvian government said it would honour the 1954 asylum convention to grant both Heredia and her son safe passage.

The former president, 62, was meanwhile taken to Barbadillo prison, where two other former leaders, Alejandro Toledo and Pedro Castillo, are already being held.

Humala was the first of four Peruvian presidents to be investigated in connection with the Odebrecht scandal.

Toledo, who governed from 2001 to 2006, was sentenced last year to more than 20 years in prison for taking $35m (£26m) in bribes from the company.

Alan García, president from 1985 to 1990 and 2006 to 2011, killed himself in 2019 as he faced imminent arrest over allegations he was bribed by Odebrecht. He had denied the accusations.

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, in office from 2016 to 2018, faced impeachment proceedings after it emerged that Odebrecht had paid him millions of dollars in his previous government role.

Kuczynski has always maintained the payments were not illegal but an investigation is ongoing.

Prosecutors said that Humala and his wife, with whom he cofounded the Nationalist Party, had accepted $3m in illegal contributions from the firm, which they used to finance his 2011 presidential campaign.

They also accused him of taking $200,000 from Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez to bankroll the 2006 campaign.

The couple have always maintained that they are the victims of political persecution.

Humala’s lawyer, Wilfredo Pedraza, also said that their 15-year sentence was “excessive”.

Prosecutors had asked for 20 years for the ex-president and 25 and a half years for Heredia.

Humala is a former army officer who fought against the Maoist Shining Path rebels. He first came to national prominence in 2000 when he led a short-lived military rebellion against then-president Alberto Fujimori.

In 2006, he ran for president on a platform inspired by the socialist revolution of Venezuela’s Chávez.

Alan García, Humala’s election rival, warned voters “not to let Peru turn into another Venezuela” and won the presidency.

In 2011, Humala ran on a more moderate platform emulating the policies of Brazil’s then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to defeat right-wing rival Keiko Fujimori, the eldest daughter of Alberto Fujimori.

Violent social conflicts quickly dented his popularity, and he lost the support of many members of Congress.

His legal troubles started shortly after his term finished in 2016, when Odebrecht admitted to bribing Latin American government officials and political parties with hundreds of millions of dollars to win business.

Prosecutors accused Humala and his wife of receiving millions from Odebrecht, as well as the illegal funding from Chávez to finance the 2006 presidential campaign.

A year later, a judge ordered that the couple be placed in pre-trial detention. They were released after a year but the investigations against them continued, culminating in today’s verdict.

Jordan’s security services say they have arrested 16 people suspected of plotting attacks inside the country involving rockets and drones.

The General Intelligence Department said the suspects had been under surveillance since 2021 and their plans were aimed at “targeting national security, sowing chaos and sabotage”.

They involved possession of explosives and automatic weapons, the manufacture of rockets, the concealment of one rocket ready to be launched, a project to manufacture drones, and the training of individuals both in Jordan and abroad, it alleged.

State media cited the government’s spokesman as saying the suspects were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which denied any involvement.

Communications Minister Mohammed al-Momani told reporters that the 16 suspects were divided into four cells with separate assignments, according to Petra news agency:

• The first cell, which had three main members who were arrested in 2023, transported and stored explosives, including TNT, C4 and Semtex, as well as automatic weapons smuggled from abroad, he said. A fourth member of the cell allegedly worked to conceal a Katyusha rocket equipped with a detonator in the south-western Marj al-Hamam neighbourhood of the capital, Amman. Momani said the rockets had a range of between three and five kilometres, which indicated that the suspects planned to target locations in Jordan

• The second three-member cell, which was arrested in February, had begun manufacturing short-range rockets and storing them in warehouses in Amman and the city of Zarqa, just to the north-east, he said, adding that they had received training and funding from abroad

• External parties were also allegedly supporting the third, four-member cell involved in the drone manufacturing project

• Momani said the fourth cell, with five members, had worked to recruit operatives to undergo illegal security training courses.

All 16 suspects have been referred to the State Security Court on charges of violating the Anti-Terrorism law, according to Momani.

Later, state-run Jordan Television broadcast what it said were confessions of eight of the suspects, six of whom said they were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Petra.

A statement from the Brotherhood rejected what it called the “unjust accusations” made by Momani and insisted it had no links to, or knowledge of, the plots.

The Islamist group – whose political arm, the Islamic Action Front, is the largest opposition group in parliament – also stressed that it “adhered to the national line” and “remained committed to its peaceful approach”.

Jordanian officials have previously accused the Brotherhood of instigating pro-Hamas protests following the start of the Gaza war with the aim of destabilising the kingdom, which borders Israel and several Arab states.

Several suspects were also cited as saying that they had travelled to Lebanon to meet and undergo training with the person overseeing the plots.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam, told his Jordanian counterpart Jafar Hassan that it was ready to co-operate in tackling potential threats to their countries, Petra reported.

Pedestrian crossings in several areas of northern California have been hacked with fake greetings mocking the tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Officials in Silicon Valley are investigating and have disabled the audio feature on the crossings which usually plays instructions to “walk” or “wait”.

The surprise message were noticed over the weekend in Palo Alto, Redwood City and Menlo Park – which is home to Zuckerberg’s sprawling Meta campus.

One Musk impersonation offered to buy passing pedestrians a Tesla Cybertruck if they agreed to be his friend. Another from a false Zuckerberg said “real ones call me The Zuck”.

It is still unclear who created the messages or how they ended up being played from the crossings.

Officials in the affected areas, which are all just south of San Francisco, told the BBC engineers were investigating how the crossings were tampered with.

Pedro Quintana, a spokesman for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), said about 10 pedestrian crossings within the Menlo Park and Palo Alto areas had been impacted.

All of those are now working on a timer system and the buttons which launched the fake messages have been deactivated, he said.

The messages appeared across Silicon Valley, where both tech billionaires have business.

One of the fake messages in Musk’s voice welcomes people to Palo Alto, which is home to Tesla operations.

“You know, they say money can’t buy happiness and… I guess that’s true. God knows I’ve tried,” the message says in one video shared multiple times on social media.

One from a fake Zuckerberg starts with him introducing himself before discussing inserting AI “into every facet of your conscious experience”.

Neither man has commented on the incident.

The city of Palo Alto separately told the BBC that at least 12 crossings in the downtown area had been tampered with.

Meghan Horrigan-Taylor, a spokeswoman for the city, said another city employee alerted officials to the issue on Saturday when they noticed the voice feature was not functioning properly. She added officials believe the tampering may have occurred on Friday.

“City staff have disabled the audible feature until further repairs can be made,” she said. “Other traffic signals in the city were checked and the impact is isolated.”

Local media also reported that several crossings in the Redwood City area were also hacked to sound like the two billionaires.

Judges at the UK Supreme Court have unanimously ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law.

It marks the culmination of a long-running legal battle which could have major implications for how sex-based rights apply across Scotland, England and Wales.

The court sided with campaign group For Women Scotland, which brought a case against the Scottish government arguing that sex-based protections should only apply to people that are born female.

Judge Lord Hodge said the ruling should not be seen as a triumph of one side over the other, and stressed that the law still gives protection against discrimination to transgender people.

The Scottish government argued in court that transgender people with a gender recognition certificate (GRC) are entitled to the same sex-based protections as biological women.

The Supreme Court was asked to decide on the proper interpretation of the 2010 Equality Act, which applies across Britain.

Lord Hodge said the central question was how the words “woman” and “sex” are defined in the legislation.

He told the court: “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.

“But we counsel against reading this judgement as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another, it is not.”

He added that the legislation gives transgender people “protection, not only against discrimination through the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment in substance in their acquired gender”.

Campaigners who brought the case against the Scottish government hugged each other and punched the air as they left the courtroom, with several of them in tears.

The Equality Act provides protection against discrimination on the basis of various characteristics, including “sex” and “gender reassignment”.

Judges at the Supreme Court in London were asked to rule on what that law means by “sex” – whether it means biological sex, or legal, “certificated” sex as defined by the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.

The Scottish government argued the 2004 legislation was clear that obtaining a GRC amounts to a change of sex “for all purposes”.

For Women Scotland argued for a “common sense” interpretation of the words man and woman, telling the court that sex is an “immutable biological state”.

First Minister John Swinney said the Scottish government accepted the judgement.

He posted on social media: “The ruling gives clarity between two relevant pieces of legislation passed at Westminster.

“We will now engage on the implications of the ruling.”

Swinney added: “Protecting the rights of all will underpin our actions.”

Outside the Supreme Court, For Women Scotland co-founder Susan Smith said: “Today the judges have said what we always believed to be the case, that women are protected by their biological sex.

“Sex is real and women can now feel safe that services and spaces designated for women are for women and we are enormously grateful to the Supreme Court for this ruling.”

A UK government spokesman said: “This ruling brings clarity and confidence, for women and service providers such as hospitals, refuges, and sports clubs.

“Single-sex spaces are protected in law and will always be protected by this government.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch described the ruling as a “victory for all of the women who faced personal abuse or lost their jobs for stating the obvious”.

“It’s important to be reminded the court strongly and clearly re-affirmed the Equality Act protects all trans people against discrimination, based on gender reassignment, and will continue to do so.”

But Scottish Green MSP Maggie Chapman, a prominent campaigner for trans-rights, said: “This is a deeply concerning ruling for human rights and a huge blow to some of the most marginalised people in our society.

“It could remove important protections and will leave many trans people and their loved ones deeply anxious and worried about how their lives will be affected and about what will come next.”

Stonewall chief executive Simon Blake said the LGBTQ+ charity shared “deep concern” about the ruling.

For Women Scotland had warned that if the court sided with the Scottish government, it would have implications for the running of single-sex spaces and services, such as hospital wards, prisons, refuges and support groups.

Transgender people warned the case could erode the protections they have against discrimination in their reassigned gender.

The case follows years of heated debate over transgender and women’s rights, including controversy over transgender rapist Isla Bryson initially being put in a women’s prison and an ongoing employment tribunal involving a female NHS Fife nurse who objected to a transgender doctor using a women’s changing room.

NHS Fife said it would “carefully consider” the court’s judgement.

The judges ruled that that Interpreting sex as “certificated” rather than “biological” would “cut across the definitions of man and “woman and thus the protected characteristic of sex in an incoherent way”.

They said a “certified” definition of sex would weaken protections for lesbians, citing the example of lesbian-only spaces and associations as it would mean that a trans woman who was attracted to women would be classed as a lesbian.

The ruling found the biological interpretation of sex was also required for single-sex spaces to “function coherently”.

It cited changing rooms, hostels, medical services and single-sex higher education institutions.

The judges noted “similar confusion and impracticability” had arisen in relation to single-sex associations and charities, women’s sport, public sector equality and the armed forces.

The judges added: “The practical problems that arise under a certificated sex approach are clear indicators that this interpretation is not correct.”

The legal dispute began in 2018, when the Scottish Parliament passed a bill designed to ensure gender balance on public sector boards.

For Women Scotland complained that ministers had included transgender people as part of the quotas in that law.

The issue has been contested several times in the Scottish courts.

Holyrood ministers won the most recent case in Scotland, with judge Lady Haldane ruling in 2022 that the definition of sex was “not limited to biological or birth sex”.

The Scottish Parliament passed reforms that year that would have made it easier for someone to change their legally recognised sex.

The move was blocked by the UK government, and has since been dropped by Holyrood ministers.

When investigators smashed through a hastily built wall, they uncovered a set of secret jail cells.

It turned out to be a freshly bricked-up doorway – an attempt to hide what lurked behind.

Inside, off a narrow hallway, were tiny rooms to the right and left. It was pitch-black.

The team may never have found this clandestine jail – a stone’s throw from Dhaka’s International Airport – without the recollections of Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem and others.

A critic of Bangladesh’s ousted leader, he was held there for eight years.

He was blindfolded for much of his time in the prison, so he leaned on the sounds he could recall – and he distinctly remembered the sound of planes landing.

That was what helped lead investigators to the military base near the airport. Behind the main building on the compound, they found the smaller, heavily guarded, windowless structure made of brick and concrete where detainees were kept.

It was hidden in plain sight.

Investigators have spoken to hundreds of victims like Quasem since mass protests toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s government last August, and inmates in the jails were released. Many others are alleged to have been killed unlawfully.

The people running the secret prisons, including the one over the road from Dhaka airport, were largely from an elite counter-terrorism unit, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), acting on orders directly from Hasina, investigators say.

“The officers concerned [said] all the enforced disappearance cases have been done with the approval, permission or order by the prime minister herself,” Tajul Islam, the chief prosecutor for the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh, told the BBC.

Hasina’s party says the alleged crimes were carried out without its knowledge, that it bears no responsibility and that the military establishment operated alone – a charge the army rejects.

Seven months on, Quasem and others may have been released, but they remain terrified of their captors, who are serving security force members and are all still free.

Quasem says he never leaves home without wearing a hat and mask.

“I always have to watch my back when I’m travelling.”

He slowly walks up a flight of concrete steps to show the BBC where he was kept. Pushing through a heavy metal door, he bends his head low and goes through another narrow doorway into “his” room, the cell where he was held for eight years.

“It felt like being buried alive, being totally cut off from the outside world,” he tells the BBC. There were no windows and no doors to natural light. When he was inside, he couldn’t tell between day or night.

Quasem, a lawyer in his 40s, has done interviews before but this is the first time he has taken the media for a detailed look inside the tiny cell where he was held.

Viewed by torchlight, it is so small an average-sized person would have difficulty standing up straight. It smells musty. Some of the walls are broken and bits of brick and concrete lie strewn on the ground – a last-ditch attempt by perpetrators to destroy any evidence of their crimes.

“[This] is one detention centre. We have found that more than 500, 600, 700 cells are there all through the country. This shows that this was widespread and systematic,” says Islam, the prosecutor, who accompanied the BBC on the visit to the jail.

Quasem also clearly remembers the faint blue tiles from his cell, now lying in pieces on the floor, which led investigators to this particular room. In comparison to the cells on the ground floor, this one is much larger, at 10ft x 14ft (3m x 4.3m). There is a squatting toilet off to one side.

In painful detail, Quasem walks around the room, describing how he spent his time during his years in captivity. During the summers, it was unbearably hot. He would crouch on the floor and put his face as close to the base of the doorway as he could, to get some air.

“It felt worse than death,” he says.

Coming back to relive his punishment seems cruel. But Quasem believes it is important for the world to see what was done.

“The high officials, the top brass who aided and abetted, facilitated the fascist regime are still in their position,” he says.

“We need to get our story out, and do whatever we can to ensure justice for those who didn’t return, and to help those who are surviving to rehabilitate into life.”

Previous reports said he was kept inside a notorious detention facility – known as Aynaghor, or “House of Mirrors” – inside the main intelligence headquarters in Dhaka, but investigators now believe there were many such sites.

Quasem told the BBC he spent all his detention at the RAB base, apart from the first 16 days. Investigators now suspect the first site was a detective branch of police in Dhaka.

He believes he was disappeared because of his family’s politics. In 2016 he’d been representing his father, a senior member of the country’s largest Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, who was on trial and later hanged.

Five other men the BBC spoke to described being taken away, blindfolded and handcuffed, kept in dark concrete cells with no access to the outside world. In many cases they say they were beaten and tortured.

While the BBC cannot independently verify their stories, almost all say they are petrified that one day, they might bump into a captor on the street or on a bus.

“Now, whenever I get into a car or I’m alone at home, I feel scared thinking about where I was,” Atikur Rahman Rasel, 35, says. “I wonder how I survived, whether I was really supposed to survive.

He says his nose was broken and his hand is still painful. “They put handcuffs on me and beat me a lot.”

Rasel says he was approached by a group of men outside a mosque in Dhaka’s old city last July, as anti-government protests raged. They said they were from law enforcement and he had to go with them.

The next minute, he was taken into a grey car, handcuffed, hooded and blindfolded. Forty minutes later, he was pulled out of the car, taken into a building and put in a room.

“After about half an hour, people started coming in one by one and asking questions. Who are you? What do you do?” Then the beatings started, he says.

“Being inside that place was terrifying. I felt like I would never get out.”

Rasel now lives with his sister and her husband. Sitting on a dining chair in her flat in Dhaka, he describes his weeks in captivity in detail. He speaks with little emotion, seemingly detached from his experience.

He too believes his detention was politically motivated because he was a student leader with the rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), of which his father was a senior member. His brother, who lived abroad, would frequently write social media posts critical of Hasina.

Rasel says there was no way of knowing where he was held. But after watching interim leader Muhammad Yunus visiting three detention centres earlier this year, he thinks he was kept in Agargaon district in Dhaka.

It was an open secret that Hasina had no tolerance for political dissent. Criticising her could get you “disappeared” without a trace, former detainees, opponents and investigators say.

But the total number of people who went missing may never become clear.

A Bangladeshi NGO that has tracked enforced disappearances since 2009 has documented at least 709 people who were forcibly disappeared. Among them, 155 people remain missing. Since the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances was created in September, they have received more than 1,676 complaints from alleged victims and more people continue to come forward.

But that doesn’t represent the total number, which is believed to be much higher.

It is through speaking to people like Quasem that Tajul Islam is able to build a case against those responsible for the detention centres, including Sheikh Hasina.

Despite being held at different sites, the narrative of victims is eerily similar.

Mohammad Ali Arafat, spokesperson for Hasina’s Awami League party, denies any involvement. He says if people were forcibly disappeared, it was not done under the direction of Hasina – who remains in India, where she fled – or anyone in her cabinet.

“If any such detention did occur, it would have been a product of complex internal military dynamics,” said Arafat. “I see [no] political benefit for the Awami League or for the government to keep these people in secret detention.”

The military’s chief spokesman said it “has no knowledge of the things being implied”.

“The army categorically denies operating any such detention centres,” Lt Col Abdullah Ibn Zaid told the BBC.

Tajul Islam believes the people held in these prisons are evidence of Awami League involvement. “All the people who were detained here were from different political identities and they just raised their voice against the previous regime, the government of that time, and that is why they were brought here.”

To date they have issued 122 arrest warrants, but no one has yet been brought to justice.

Which is why victims like Iqbal Chowdhury, 71, believe their lives are still in danger. Chowdhury wants to leave Bangladesh. For years after he was released in 2019, he didn’t leave his house, not even to go to the market. Chowdhury was warned by his captors never to speak of his detention.

“If you ever reveal where you were or what happened, and if you are taken again, no one will ever find or see you again. You will be vanished from this world,” he says he was told.

Accused of writing propaganda against India and the Awami League, Chowdhury says that is why he was tortured.

“I was physically assaulted with an electric shock as well as being beaten. Now one of my fingers is heavily damaged by the electric shock. I lost my leg’s strength, lost physical strength.” He remembers the sound of others being physically tortured, grown men howling and crying in agony.

“I am still scared,” says Chowdhury.

Rahmatullah, 23, is also terrified. “They took away a year and a half of my life. Those times won’t ever be returned,” he says. “They made me sleep in a place where a human being should not even be.”

On 29 August 2023, he was taken from his home at midnight by RAB officers, some in uniform and others dressed in plain clothes. He was working as a cook in a neighbouring town while training to be an electrician.

After repeated interrogations, it became clear to Rahmatullah he was being forcibly detained for his anti-India and Islamic posts on social media. Using a pen and paper, he draws the layout of his cell, including the open drain he would use to relieve himself.

“Even thinking about that place in Dhaka makes me feel horrible. There was no space to lie down properly, so I had to sleep being curled up. I couldn’t stretch my legs while lying down.”

The BBC also interviewed two other former detainees – Michael Chakma and Masrur Anwar – to corroborate some of the details about the secret prisons and what is alleged to have gone on inside them.

Some of the victims live with physical scars from their detentions. All of them talk about the psychological torment that follows them everywhere they go.

Bangladesh is at a pivotal moment in its history as it tries to rebuild after years of autocratic rule. A crucial test of the country’s progress towards democracy will be its ability to hold a fair trial for the perpetrators of these crimes.

Islam believes it can, and must happen. “We must stop the recurrence of this type of offence for our future generations. And we have to do justice for the victims. They suffered a lot.”

Standing in what remains of his concrete cell, Quasem says a trial must take place as soon as possible so the country can close this chapter.

It’s not so simple for Rahmatullah.

“The fear has not gone away. The fear will remain until I die.”

Harvard University says it will not acquiesce to US President Donald Trump’s demands – whether it continues to get federal funding or not.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach,” Harvard’s president Alan Garber said in a letter posted on the university’s website.

Not long after Harvard refused to agree to the White House’s sweeping list of demands – which included directions on how to govern, hire and teach – the Trump administration froze $2.2bn (£1.7bn) of federal funds to the institution.

Many students and alumni lauded the university’s decision to stand its ground, despite the consequences. Former President Barack Obama, an alumnus himself, called Trump’s move “ham-handed” and praised Harvard as “an example for other higher-ed institutions”.

In response to Harvard’s decision to refuse the government’s demands, the education department accused the university of a “troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws”.

With billions in the balance, the battle for the higher ground in the case of Harvard may just be the opening salvo in a war of attrition between the federal government and higher education.

• Obama calls Trump’s freeze of Harvard funding ‘unlawful’

Trump’s attacks on Harvard are not isolated – the government’s antisemitism task force has identified at least 60 universities for review.

Nor did the latest move come out of the blue. Trump and his Vice-President JD Vance have long railed against higher education institutions. In 2021, Vance gave a speech that described universities as the “enemy”.

Trump pitched a funding crackdown on universities in his presidential campaign, painting them as hostile to conservatives. Almost a year before the present conflict in Gaza began in October 2023, he introduced a free speech policy initiative that promised to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime” – in part targeting campuses.

Polling by Gallup last summer suggested that confidence in higher education had 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.

At issue now, Trump’s team says, is last year’s pro-Palestinian campus protests. These wracked campuses across the country, and contributed to the harassment of Jewish students, according to Trump’s administration.

Last month, Columbia University agreed to many of the administration’s demands in the wake of the protests – after the government cut $400m in funding.

Harvard, too, made concessions. It agreed to engage with the administration’s task force to combat antisemitism. The school dismissed the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies and suspended its Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative over accusations of anti-Israel bias.

And in January, Harvard settled two lawsuits brought by Jewish students alleging antisemitism. It did not admit any wrongdoing, and said the settlement showed its commitment to supporting its Jewish students and staff.

But the university drew the line at the White House’s list of demands on Friday.

Harvard student Sa’maia Evans, who is an activist and member of the university’s African and African American Resistance Organization, said the university’s decision to take a stand was a long time coming.

“Harvard will only do that of which it is held accountable to,” she told the BBC. She pointed to campus protests in the past few weeks – and the widespread criticism of Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration – as helping to put pressure on university officials.

“They know the public – they would experience public backlash” if they capitulated, Ms Evans said.

“It would be atypical (for) Harvard to do anything outside of what would be in its own interest.”

With a $53.2bn endowment – a figure that is larger than the GDP of some small countries – Harvard is uniquely able to weather the storm. But experts say it is still left in a crunch.

“Most policymakers think of endowments as a chequing account, a debit card where you can withdraw money and use it for any purpose,” said Steven Bloom, the spokesperson for American Council on Education. “But it’s not.”

While Harvard’s endowment is eye-popping, it says 70% of the money is earmarked for specific projects – which is typical for educational endowments, according to Mr Bloom.

Harvard has to spend the money the way the donors have directed, or it risks legal liability.

And Harvard’s expenses are huge – its 2024 operating budget was $6.4bn. About a third of that was funded by the endowment – with 16% coming from the federal government, often to help with things that are supposed to create good for the whole of the US, such as biomedical research.

Mr Bloom said the golden rule for endowment finance was that universities should not spend more than 5% of their total endowment each year. Making up for a $2bn loss means the school will need to boost its endowment by $40bn.

“You can’t find 40 billion dollars under a rock,” Mr Bloom said.

And that pain will only increase if Trump is able to make good on his threat to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status. That status helps the school avoid paying taxes on its investments and properties. Harvard has campuses all over the Greater Boston area, and is estimated by Bloomberg to have saved $158m on its property tax bills in 2023.

• Trump threatens Harvard’s tax-exempt status after freezing $2bn funding

The realities of the situation have made some students sceptical about how long it can go on.

“There’s more the government can do if it wants to attack Harvard, and I’m not optimistic that it’s going to stop after cutting $2.2 billion,” Matthew Tobin, the academic representative on Harvard’s student council.

Mr Tobin said the idea that the Trump administration was making these demands to help Harvard is “malarkey”.

“Its a total bad-faith attack,” he told the BBC. “The funding cuts have to do with Trump attacking an institution that he views as liberal, and wanting to exercise more control over what people teach and how students learn and think.”

Joe Biden has used his first speech since leaving office to criticise the Trump administration’s welfare policies.

The ex-US president told a conference in Chicago that the government had “taken a hatchet” to the social security system, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk – who is leading the White House’s cost-cutting efforts – claim is beset by fraud.

The administration wants to cut staff at the agency responsible for spending $1.6 trillion (£1.2 trillion) in benefits a year.

Biden did not refer to Trump by name during his speech on Tuesday, but said: “In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction. It’s kind of breath-taking.”

He described social security as a “sacred promise”, adding: “We know just how much social security matters to people’s lives.”

Biden – who was speaking at a disability rights event – did not address his departure from the White House or the 2024 presidential election during his remarks.

The Social Security Agency (SSA) provides a base income for people in the US who are retired or cannot work because of a disability. It covers about 67 million Americans, primarily older citizens.

Democratic politicians have repeatedly accused the administration of planning sweeping social security cuts.

Members of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been making cuts to the agency since February, with the target of slashing 7,000 jobs – about 10% of its total staff.

Musk has described social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”.

Trump has previously said that he intends to target fraudulent claims and payments to illegal immigrants and not make wholesale cuts to benefits.

On Tuesday, he signed an order preventing illegal immigrants and “other ineligible people” from obtaining social security payments.

Before Biden’s Chicago speech, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the president was “absolutely certain” about protecting benefits for “law-abiding tax-paying American citizens and seniors”.

“He will always protect that programme,” she added.

In a post on X, the SSA – which is now controlled by a Trump appointee – said Biden had been “lying” during his Chicago speech.

Since leaving office, Biden has kept a relatively low profile. In February, he signed with Creative Artists Agency, the Los Angeles talent agency that represented him between 2017 and 2020.

Barack Obama also criticised the Trump administration on Tuesday, saying on X that its decision to freeze more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in federal funds for Harvard University was “unlawful and ham-handed”.

Trump is freezing the fund because Harvard said it would not make changes to its hiring, admissions and teaching practices that he claims are key to fighting alleged antisemitism on campus.

Obama has rarely criticised or rebuked government officials or government policies on social media since leaving the White House almost a decade ago.

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

A German palliative care doctor has been charged with murdering 15 of his patients using a cocktail of lethal drugs.

Prosecutors in Berlin have accused the 40-year-old of setting fire to the homes of some of his suspected victims to cover his tracks.

He allegedly killed 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024, though prosecutors have said they believe that total could rise.

The doctor, who has not been named due to strict privacy laws in Germany, has not admitted to the charges, prosecutors said.

He is accused of administering an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant to his patients without their knowledge or consent.

The relaxant “paralysed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes”, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

He worked in several German states, and the ages of those whose deaths are being treated as suspicious range from 25 to 94.

It is also alleged that the suspect set fire to the apartments of his alleged victims to cover up the killings on five different occasions.

The suspect is accused of killing two patients in a single day in July 2024 – a 75-year-old man at his home in central Berlin, and a 76-year-old woman in a neighbouring district “a few hours later”.

Prosecutors said the doctor tried to set fire to the woman’s house but failed, adding: “When he noticed this, he reportedly informed a relative of the woman, claiming that he was standing in front of her apartment and that no one had responded to his ringing.”

The doctor was initially suspected of having killed four people in his care when he was arrested in August 2024 but investigations have uncovered other suspicious deaths, with more exhumations on potential victims planned.

A “lifelong professional ban” and “preventative detention” is being sought for the 40-year-old suspect. He remains in custody.

China has unexpectedly appointed a new trade envoy, as officials said the US’s practice of “tariff barriers and trade bullying” is having a serious impact on the global economic order.

Li Chenggang, a former assistant commerce minister and WTO ambassador, is taking over from veteran trade negotiator Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen.

The shift comes as Beijing refuses to back down in an escalating trade war with Washington triggered by US President Donald Trump’s hefty tariffs on Chinese goods.

China’s already sluggish economy is bracing for the impact on a key source of revenue – exports.

Beijing announced on Wednesday its GDP grew by 5.4% between January and March, compared with the same period a year earlier.

The figure has exceeded expectations but reflects the period before US tariffs jumped from 10% to 145%, and Chinese officials warned of more economic pain ahead.

While both Washington and Beijing have said they are open to negotiating, neither have made a move to do so yet.

When that happens, Li, 58, will play a key role. He previously served as a deputy permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva and has held several key jobs in the commerce ministry.

Speaking to Reuters, one expert said the change in jobs was “very abrupt and potentially disruptive” given the current trade tensions – adding that Wang also had experience negotiating with US since the first Trump administration.

“It might be that in the view of China’s top leadership, given how tensions have continued escalating, they need someone else to break the impasse… and finally start negotiating,” said Alfredo Montufar-Helu, a senior adviser to the Conference Board’s China Centre.

However, another analyst who spoke to Reuters suggested the move could just be a “routine promotion” that just happened to come at a particularly tense period in time.

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Sheng Laiyun, deputy commissioner of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) warned that US levies would put pressure on China’s foreign trade and economy, but added that China’s economy is resilient and should improve in the long term.

“We firmly oppose the US practice of tariff barriers and trade bullying,” said Sheng.

“It violates the economic laws and the principles of the World Trade Organization, has a serious impact on the world economic order, and drags down the recovery of the world economy.”

In an editorial by state news outlet China Daily earlier this week, the outlet described the US’s behaviour as “capricious and destructive”, adding that it should “stop whining about itself being a victim in global trade”.

“The US is not getting ripped off by anybody…rather… [it] has been taking a free ride on the globalisation train,” the editorial went on to say.

Beijing’s GDP figures for the first quarter have beaten analysts’ expectations – which hovered around 5.1%.

Growth in the world’s second-largest economy was underscored by strong retail sales and promising factory output.

But US tariffs on China soared only in recent weeks. Trump raised them to 145% early last week, and Beijing retaliated by raising levies on US goods to 125%.

So some of the expansion could be down to factories rushing out shipments to beat Trump’s tariffs – a concept called “front loading”.

Analysts say a surge in China’s exports in March will be sharply reversed in the months ahead as tariffs take full effect.

China’s property downturn is also still dragging on growth. Property investment fell by almost 10% in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same period last year.

New home prices also were unchanged compared to the previous month – a sign that there are still too many empty homes, and not enough people buying them.

Officials have said there is ample room for stimulus measures, and plenty of tools that they can use to bolster the economy and roll out more support measures.

But it will be especially important for China to boost domestic demand and spending this year as Washington’s tariffs hits Beijing’s crucial export sector.

An American pastor who was kidnapped by armed men during a church service in South Africa last week has been rescued following a “high-intensity shoot-out” that left three people dead, police say.

Josh Sullivan was found unharmed in the township in Gqeberha in the Eastern Cape on Tuesday evening – the area where the 45-year-old was snatched from last Thursday.

There were no immediate details on the kidnappers who are suspected of having been familiar with the family’s movements.

Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase in kidnappings for ransom in South Africa.

Mr Sullivan’s kidnappers had made a ransom demand, prompting the intervention of South Africa’s elite police unit, known as the Hawks.

In a statement released on Wednesday morning, the Hawks said that Sullivan had been rescued following “verified intelligence wherein a coordinated team… moved swiftly to the identified location”.

Hawks spokesperson Avele Fumba said that as the officers approached the house, the suspects attempted to flee inside a vehicle, while opening fire.

“The officers responded with tactical precision, leading to a high-intensity shootout in which three unidentified suspects were fatally wounded,” Mr Fumba said.

• South Africa kidnapping: ‘I survived but part of me died that day’

Mr Sullivan’s family and friends had made impassioned pleas for his safe return since his abduction.

Jeremy Hall, the Sullivan family’s spokesman, told local newspaper TimesLIVE that he was at the church with his wife and their children when he was kidnapped.

“They knew his name,” he said at the time.

Mr Sullivan describes himself as “a church planting missionary” on his personal website.

On it, he says he moved to South Africa with his wife and children in 2018 to establish a church for Xhosa-speaking people.

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The tussle between Starlink boss Elon Musk and South Africa over the company’s failure to launch in the country stems from the nation’s black empowerment laws, and could be one factor behind the diplomatic row between the US and Africa’s most industrialised nation.

To his more than 219 million followers on his social media platform X, Mr Musk made the racially charged claim that his satellite internet service provider was “not allowed to operate in South Africa simply because I’m not black“.

But the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) – a regulatory body in the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors – told the BBC that Starlink had never submitted an application for a licence.

As for the foreign ministry, it said the company was welcome to operate in the country “provided there’s compliance with local laws”.

To operate in South Africa, Starlink needs to obtain network and service licences, which both require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups.

This mainly refers to South Africa’s majority black population, which was shut out of the economy during the racist system of apartheid.

White-minority rule ended in 1994 after Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC) came to power.

Since then, the ANC has made “black empowerment” a central pillar of its economic policy in an attempt to tackle the racial injustices of the past.

This has included adopting legislation requiring investors to give local black firms a 30% stake in their businesses in South Africa.

Mr Musk – who was born in South Africa in 1971 before moving to Canada in the late 1980s and then to the US, where he became the world’s richest man – appears to see this as the main stumbling block for Starlink to operate in the country.

Starlink, in a written submission to Icasa, said the black empowerment provisions in legislation excluded “many” foreign satellite operators from the South African market, according to local news site TechCentral.

But foreign ministry spokesperson Clayson Monyela challenged this view in March, saying on X that more than 600 US companies, including computing giant Microsoft, were operating in South Africa in compliance with its laws – and “thriving”.

Mr Musk’s Starlink has a potential ally in South Africa’s Communications Minister Solly Malatsi.

He comes from the Democratic Alliance (DA) – the second-biggest party in South Africa – which joined a coalition government after the ANC failed to get a parliamentary majority in last year’s election.

The DA is a fierce critic of the current black empowerment laws, claiming they have fuelled cronyism and corruption with investors forced to link up with ANC-connected companies to operate in South Africa or to win state contracts.

Last October, Malatsi hinted that he was looking for a way to circumvent the 30% black equity requirement, saying he intended to issue a “policy direction” to Icasa with the aim of clarifying “the position on the recognition of equity equivalent programmes”.

In simple terms, Malatsi seemed to be suggesting that Starlink would not a require black business partner in South Africa, though it would have to invest in social programmes aimed at benefiting black people – especially the poor.

But some six months later, Malatsi has failed to change the policy, with a spokesperson for his department telling the BBC that their legal team was still looking into the matter.

It seems the communications minister may be facing political resistance from ANC lawmakers in parliament.

Khusela Diko, the chairperson of the parliamentary communications committee to which Malatsi is accountable, warned him earlier this month that “transformation” in the tech sector was non-negotiable, appearing to oppose giving Mr Musk’s Starlink any special treatment.

Diko said that “the law is clear on compliance” and, crucially added, that “cutting corners and circumvention is not an option – least of all to appease business interests”.

Diko’s tough position comes as no surprise, as relations between the South African government and the US have hit rock bottom during US President Donald Tump’s second term.

Mr Musk, part of Trump’s inner circle, has railed on X against what he calls “racist ownership laws” in South Africa, while the US president has threatened to boycott the G20 summit of world leaders to be held in the country later this year.

“How could we be expected to go to South Africa for the very important G20 Meeting when Land Confiscation and Genocide is the primary topic of conversation? They are taking the land of white Farmers, and then killing them and their families,” Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social.

His claims of a genocide against white farmers have been widely dismissed as false, but they echo those of the tech billionaire.

Last month, Mr Musk accused “a major” political party in South Africa – a reference to the radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which came fourth in last year’s election – of “actively promoting white genocide”.

“A month ago, the South African government passed a law legalizing taking property from white people at will with no payment,” Mr Musk said.

“Where is the outrage? Why is there no coverage by the legacy media?

South Africa did pass a law earlier this year allowing the government to seize property without compensation, but only in certain cases.

Nevertheless, Musk links these issues to his failure to get a licence for Starlink.

“Starlink can’t get a license to operate in South Africa simply because I’m not black.” he said back in March.

His hard-line stance comes despite meeting South Africa’s president in New York last year.

At the time, Mr Musk described the meeting as “great”, while President Cyril Ramaphosa said he had tried to persuade the billionaire to invest in South Africa.

“Meeting Elon Musk was a clear intention of mine… Some people call it bromance, so it’s a whole process of rekindling his affection and connection with South Africa,” Ramaphosa told South Africa’s public broadcaster, SABC.

But he added that nothing had yet been “bedded down”.

“As it happens with potential investors, you have to court them; you have to be talking to them, and you’ve got to be demonstrating to them that there is a conducive environment for them to invest. So, we will see how this turns out,” the president said.

“He is South African-born and South Africa is his home, and I would want to see him coming to South Africa for a visit, tour or whatever.”

But the “bromance” has long ended, with Mr Musk appearing to move closer to South Africa’s right wing.

Lesotho appears to have bowed to pressure from the Trump administration by announcing on Monday that it had given a 10-year licence to Starlink.

It comes after Trump imposed a 50% tariff on imports from Lesotho, threatening thousands of jobs in the country.

Trump subsequently paused that for 90 days, but a 10% tariff still came into effect on 5 April.

Some reports suggest the Lesotho Communications Authority (LCA) cleared regulatory hurdles to stave off the threat of a further tariff hike by granting Starlink a licence.

However, this was denied by Foreign Minister Lejone Mpotjoane.

“The licence application and the tariff negotiations should not be conflated,” he said.

The decision to grant the licence was condemned by civil society group Section Two, which raised concern that Starlink Lesotho was 100% foreign-owned and lacked local ownership, South Africa’s GroundUp news site reported.

“Such actions can only be described as a betrayal – a shameful sell-out by a government that appears increasingly willing to place foreign corporate interests above the democratic will and long-term developmental needs of the people of Lesotho,” Section Two’s co-ordinator Kananelo Boloetse was quoted as saying.

During public consultations over Starlink’s application, Vodacom Lesotho had also argued that Mr Musk’s company should establish local shareholding before receiving a licence, the Space in Africa website reported.

“These concerns highlight broader tensions surrounding Starlink’s operations across Africa, particularly the growing demand for local partnerships,” it added.

Starlink also appears to be seeking an exemption in Namibia from the requirement to bring in a local partner.

Namibia is a former colony of Germany, and was under the rule of South Africa’s white-minority regime until it gained independence in 1990.

It has more stringent requirements than its post-apartheid neighbour, with businesses operating in Namibia needing to be 51% locally owned.

The Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia (Cran) told the BBC that Starlink had submitted an application for a telecommunications service licence in June 2024.

Cran said that while this process usually took between three to six months, a decision had not yet been taken because it “must first wait for the ownership exemption application to be finalised” by Namibia’s information and communication technology minister.

Starlink is now operating in more than 20 African countries, with Somalia, hit by an Islamist insurgency, giving it a 10-year licence on 13 April, two days before Lesotho’s decision to do so.

“We welcome Starlink’s entry to Somalia. This initiative aligns with our vision to deliver affordable and accessible internet services to all Somalis, regardless of where they live,” Technology Minister Mohamed Adam Moalim Ali said.

Starlink aims to provide high-speed internet services to remote or underserved areas, making it a potential game-changer for rural areas unable to access traditional forms of connectivity such as mobile broadband and fibre.

This is because Starlink, rather than relying on fibre optics or cables to transmit data, uses a network of satellites in low Earth orbit. Because they are closer to the ground, they have faster transmission speeds than traditional satellites.

Nigeria was the first African state to allow Starlink to operate, in 2023. The company has since grown into the second-biggest internet service provider in Africa’s most-populous country.

But Starlink still has no presence in South Africa – the continent’s most industrialised nation.

Enterprising locals had found a way to connect to the service by using regional roaming packages purchased in countries where the service was available.

Starlink put an end to this last year while Icasa also warned local companies that those found providing the service illegally could face a hefty fine.

Yet with an estimated 20% of South Africans not having access to the internet at all – many in rural areas – it could prove beneficial for both Starlink and the government to reach a compromise.

For Starlink it could prove a lucrative market, while satellite broadband may help the government achieve its goal of providing universal internet access by 2030.

On Monday, Ramaphosa appointed former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas as his special envoy to the US, signalling his determination to mend relations with the Trump administration.

But Jonas’ appointment faced a backlash in right-wing circles, as in a 2020 speech he called Trump a “racist homophobe” and a “narcissistic right-winger”.

In an interview on the Money Show podcast, Jonas said that he made the comments when he was not in government and “people move on”.

He acknowledged that it would be a “long slog to rebuild understanding”, but added that South Africa’s relationship with the US was “fundamentally important” and he was determined to improve it.

Jonas’ comments are not surprising as the US is a major trading partner for South Africa. With Trump having threatened a 30% tariff on its goods, Ramaphosa cannot afford to see relations continuing to deteriorate and the economy taking further knocks.

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