Australia’s opposition party has been left reeling after a bruising defeat in Saturday’s federal election, with a result that is shaping up to be its worst ever loss.

Peter Dutton, the Liberal party leader, also lost his own seat of Dickson, which he had held for the past 24 years.

Labor’s landslide victory means the Liberal party is now scrambling to find a new leader – and figure out what went wrong for them this election cycle.

Some Liberal party members have called for a “serious review”, with one adviser summing up the loss as a failure of “the Dutton experiment”.

Dutton has also become the first federal opposition leader to ever lose their own seat at the same time as losing an election, which means he has been ousted from parliament.

Labor’s Ali France defeated Dutton in his home base of Dickson in Queensland.

In his first public appearance after Labor’s emphatic win, prime minister Anthony Albanese told media outside a Sydney cafe on Sunday that “the Australian people voted for unity rather than division”.

The Liberal party’s most crushing losses were in Australia’s major cities, where party members have been all but wiped out in metropolitan areas including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.

Liberal MP Keith Wolahan has called for a “serious review” of the systemic issues that led to the party’s shock defeat.

“You have to acknowledge things went wrong,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Insiders program.

“We have to listen to Australians. They have sent us a message, and our first task is to hear it. And that often takes time.”

Wolahan represents the seat of Menzies in Victoria, and said it was very likely he would also lose his seat.

When asked if Peter Dutton himself was the problem, Wolahan declined to answer directly, but said he has great respect for the Liberal leader.

Some were more blunt, like Andrew Carswell, a former adviser to Australia’s last Liberal prime minister, who told the ABC “the Dutton experiment failed”.

He went on to describe Saturday’s loss as “a complete catastrophe for the Coalition”, which he said showed that Australians had “clear hesitation with Peter Dutton”.

The looming presence of Donald Trump has also been cited as a major factor for thwarting Dutton’s already inconsistent campaign, with many people drawing parallels between him and the American president.

Dutton’s loss has now set in motion the scramble for a new Liberal party leader.

Carswell was hopeful about the prospect of some “very good up-and-coming Liberal MPs” stepping into leadership roles.

Those tipped as most likely contenders for the top job include shadow treasurer Angus Taylor and deputy leader Sussan Ley.

Shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan and shadow minister of defence Andrew Hastie have also been mentioned.

But without a clear frontrunner, the Liberal party will have to try to regroup in the coming days – as well as develop a new strategy to win back the voters they lost.

Labor’s Anthony Albanese has defied the so-called “incumbency curse” to be re-elected Australia’s prime minister in a landslide.

Official vote counting won’t finish for days, but Albanese’s centre-left government will dramatically increase its majority after the conservative Liberal-National coalition suffered a thumping defeat nationwide.

“Today, the Australian people have voted for Australian values: for fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all; for the strength to show courage in adversity and kindness to those in need,” Albanese said.

Coalition leader Peter Dutton, who lost his own seat of 24 years, said he accepted “full responsibility” for his party’s loss and apologised to his MPs.

Following the result, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio both said they looked forward to deepening their bilateral relationships with Australia.

Cost-of-living concerns – particularly the affordability of healthcare and housing – dominated the five-week campaign, but international relations also reared its head, with the issue of how to deal with Donald Trump looming large over the election.

Dutton was seen by many as Australia’s Trump, which appeared to go down badly with voters, despite his attempts to shake off comparisons made between his policies on immigration, public sector cuts and China, and the Trump administration.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told BBC Newshour that Dutton ran a “very Trumpian campaign”, and the US president was “the mood music that had a very big influence on how people perceived” the Liberal-National opposition.

Labor saw swings towards them right across the country – a rare feat for a second-term government in Australia – and Albanese becomes the first prime minister to win back-to-back elections in over 20 years.

The party’s success has also tempered a trend of voters abandoning the two major parties, which was the big story of the last election in 2022.

Labor is on track to finish with 86 seats, the Coalition about 40, and the Greens Party with one or two, according to projections by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Other minor parties and independents are ahead in nine seats.

That represents an increase of nine for Labor and a significant drop in support for the Greens. However most “teal” independents have been returned in their more conservative, inner-city electorates.

It’s a remarkable turnaround from the start of the year, when polling put Albanese’s popularity at record lows after three years of global economic pain, tense national debate, and growing government dissatisfaction.

In his Saturday night victory speech, Albanese addressed some of the election’s key issues, which also included migration, climate change and energy.

He reiterated his promises to make healthcare – most critically GP appointments – more affordable, put buying a house in reach for more Australians, and do more to address climate change and protect the environment.

Notably, he also vowed to advance reconciliation for First Nations people: “We will be a stronger nation when we Close the Gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.”

It’s a veiled reference to the biggest moment of Albanese’s tenure, the failed Voice referendum of October 2023, which sought to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the constitution, and simultaneously establish a parliamentary advisory body for them.

Australia remains the only Commonwealth country to have never signed a treaty with its Indigenous people.

The Voice was one of Albanese’s most defining policies, and his most striking setback – it was overwhelmingly rejected after months of often toxic and divisive national debate.

Indigenous Australians have told the BBC they feel like they’ve been forgotten by policymakers since.

The prime minister also found difficulty trying to walk a middle path on the Israel-Gaza war, raised eyebrows after buying a multi-million dollar beach pad in the midst of a housing crisis and, like other leaders globally, he grappled with tough economic conditions.

With tanking poll numbers, Albanese was broadly seen as the underdog coming into the election, and was poised to be the next victim of the “incumbency curse” – a term to explain a global trend where struggling constituents were turfing out governments after a single term.

Dutton, on the other hand, looked like he was writing a great political comeback – he was on the edge of bringing his party from its worst loss in 70 years back into office in a single term.

It has been almost a century since a first-term government has failed to win re-election, but as Australian National University Emeritus Professor John Warhurst said: “Dutton entered the campaign [year] in front. It was his to lose.”

Instead tonight Dutton has overseen a party loss so emphatic he has lost his own electorate of Dickson, to Labor’s Ali France.

“I love this country and have fought hard for it,” he told supporters in Brisbane, conceding defeat.

“We have been defined by our opponents in this election which is not a true story of who we are, but we will rebuild from here and we will do that because we know our values, we know our beliefs, and we will always stick to them.”

His campaign was marred by unforced errors: including a series of policy backflips which caused confusion, awkward mistakes on important issues like cost of living and, perhaps most memorably, accidentally booting an AFL ball into a cameraman’s head.

“The opposition has been shambolic,” Prof Warhurst says.

But the government – while resolute and disciplined in its campaign – was timid. It’s strategy was largely allowing voters to judge Dutton and his party, rather than advancing bold or convincing policies, analysts say.

And that’s something we heard from voters throughout the campaign too.

While the Coalition turns to licking its wounds and choosing its next leader, it will again have to reckon with its direction.

Last election, analysts and some of the party’s own MPs cautioned against a move towards the right. They questioned whether Dutton – a polarising figure considered by many to be a conservative hard man – was the right person to rebuild support, particularly in the moderate areas where they lost a lot of it.

After a campaign which in its dying days ventured into culture war territory and what some say are “Trumpian” politics, the Coalition is going to have to ask those questions again – and if they want to be competitive, perhaps find different answers.

“We have to stop drinking the Kool-Aid from the fire hose and we need to have a serious review… we delude ourselves that we are just a few tactical devices away from winning an election,” former Liberal strategist Tony Barry told the ABC.

But meanwhile Labor has to decide what it wants to achieve with the large mandate Australia has handed them.

Albanese’s “incumbency curse” turned out to be a gift, with international uncertainty appearing to have swayed voters in countries like Canada away from change. Likewise, Australia voted for stability.

Labor struck a “middle-of-the-road path” with its a policy platform, but can now afford to be braver, says Amy Remeikis, chief politicial analyst at the Australia Institute think tank.

“That was the path that they took to the election, and that is what they are seeing has paid dividends for them. But the question now is: ‘Will Labor actually do something with power?'”

US President Donald Trump has attracted criticism from some Catholics after posting an AI-generated image of himself as the Pope.

The picture, which was shared by official White House social media accounts, comes as Catholics mourn the death of Pope Francis, who died on 21 April, and prepare to choose the next pontiff.

The New York State Catholic Conference accused Trump of mocking the faith. The post comes days after he joked to reporters: “I’d like to be Pope.”

Trump is not the first president to be accused of making a mockery of the Catholic faith. Former US President Joe Biden caused outrage a year ago when he made the sign of the cross at a pro-abortion access rally in Tampa, Florida.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni declined to answer questions about Trump’s post during a briefing with journalists on Saturday. The Vatican is preparing to host a conclave to choose Francis’s successor beginning on Wednesday.

The image posted by Trump on Friday night features him wearing a white cassock and pointed mitre, traditionally worn by a bishop. He wears a large cross around his neck, and has his finger held up, with a solemn facial expression.

The New York State Catholic Conference, which represents bishops in New York, took to X to criticise the picture.

“There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr President,” the group wrote.

“We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St Peter. Do not mock us.”

Left-leaning Italian former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi also blasted Trump’s post.

“This is an image that offends believers, insults institutions and shows that the leader of the right-wing world enjoys clowning around,” Renzi wrote in Italian on X.

But the White House rejected any suggestion that the Republican president was making fun of the papacy.

“President Trump flew to Italy to pay his respects to Pope Francis and attend his funeral, and he has been a staunch champion for Catholics and religious liberty,” said press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

More than two million people have attended a free Lady Gaga concert on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, city officials say.

The pop star’s biggest ever concert was paid for by the city in an attempt to revitalise Rio’s economy.

They expect it could bring in $100m (£75m) to the local economy.

Saturday’s performance was part of a promotional tour for Lady Gaga’s eighth album, Mayhem, whose songs include Abracadabra and Die With a Smile. She last performed in Brazil in 2012.

Some fans – known as Gaga’s “Little Monsters” – began queuing early in the morning and waited in long lines to gain access to the beach.

A massive security operation was in place, with 5,000 police officers on duty and attendees having to pass through metal detectors. The authorities also used drones and facial recognition cameras to help police the event.

Lady Gaga is not the first person to play a free concert in Rio. Madonna gave a concert on Copacabana beach in May 2024, which was also paid for by the city.

“You waited for me, you waited for more than 10 years for me,” an emotional Lady Gaga told the crowds as she unfurled a Brazilian flag.

“Brazil, I’m ready. I’m going to give it my all.”

The pop star appeared in Brazil-themed costumes for some of her acts, with outfits inspired by the national football team.

Thousands sang along with her best known hits including Alejandro, Poker Face and Abracadabra, creating an electric atmosphere as many waved rainbow-themed fans and watched on huge screens along the beach.

Fans travelled from all across the country to see the grandiose performance.

One man, 28-year-old Luan Messias, said he spent all night on a bus from Itanhaem in neighbouring Sao Paulo state.

Alisha Duarte, 22, told AFP news agency she started queuing at 0740 in the morning. “Lady Gaga is worth it! It’s going to get super crowded, but we’ll survive,” she said.

Another fan, Paulo Oliveira, explained why people were so excited about the concert. She “tells us that we can be who we are, that we can be different and that being different is cool,” he told Reuters.

It’s going to be an “unforgettable show”, concert attendee Lai Borges told Reuters on her way in. “It’s going to be emotional and I’m going to cry a lot,” she said.

As the event drew to a close, Lady Gaga told the audience – in a reference to the nickname for Lady Gaga fans – “we are monsters and monsters never die,” and she brought the concert to a close with Bad Romance, perhaps her most famous song.

Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) has won by a landslide in an election dominated by concerns over the cost of living and the country’s future economic stability.

Led by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong in his first election since he became party leader last year, the PAP clinched 65.6% of the vote and an overwhelming majority of the 97 seats in parliament.

Singaporeans went to the polls on Saturday worrying about inflation, wage stagnation and job prospects.

The result will be widely seen as a flight to safety to the PAP amid fears of global turbulence.

“Singapore feels particularly vulnerable given its economy’s size and exposure to international forces… Also we are notoriously risk-averse voters,” said Ian Chong, an associate professor in political science at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

The main opposition, the centre-left Workers’ Party (WP), failed to capture more seats but continued to hold on to its 10 seats in parliament.

The centre-right PAP has governed Singapore continuously since 1959, making it one of the longest-ruling political parties in the world.

It has enjoyed strong support from Singaporeans, particularly from older generations that have seen the country flourish under PAP rule.

But while elections have been free from fraud and irregularities, critics also say the party maintains an unfair advantage through gerrymandering and a tightly controlled media.

In the last three polls prior to Saturday’s result, the PAP saw two of its lowest-ever vote shares, while the WP made increasing inroads in parliament.

The PAP won a reduced majority in the 2020 election, in what was seen as a referendum on their handling of the Covid outbreak.

But Saturday’s result saw the PAP return to form, as voters gave Wong a strong mandate.

In a televised address early on Sunday, he thanked voters and said the results “will put Singapore in a better position to face this turbulent world”.

“Many are watching the election closely, whether it’s international media, investors or foreign governments, they would have taken note of tonight’s results,” he said.

“It’s a clear signal of trust, stability and confidence in your government. Singaporeans, too, can draw strength from this and look ahead to our future.”

While its open and globalised economy remains fairly buoyant, Singapore saw inflation surge in the last few years.

The government has attributed this to external factors such as the Ukraine and Gaza wars and supply chain disruptions. Critics however say a controversial goods and services tax hike exacerbated it.

With the US-China trade war under way and a 10% US tariff looming, authorities and experts have warned of shocks to the economy and possibly a technical recession.

Against this backdrop, the PAP campaigned on a message of stability.

Wong repeatedly promised that his team would “steer Singapore through the storm”, while warning that if more opposition MPs were elected, he would lose capable ministers at a time when good governance was most needed.

It was a message that resounded with many voters. One PAP supporter, a start-up owner who only wanted to be known as Amanda, told the BBC that her business has been affected with clients pausing some projects due to the economic climate.

“The headwinds are not great, there’s a lot of uncertainty… I want a party with experience [running the government],” she said.

Though the PAP saw a series of scandals in recent years, including one involving a cabinet minister, this was hardly a talking point during the election period. Analysts said it was further from people’s minds given more immediate concerns about the economy.

Some see the result as a sign of confidence in Wong, who led Singapore’s Covid taskforce and became a familiar face as he regularly addressed the public during the pandemic.

“He’s shown that he is capable, with the Covid taskforce giving him credence. He was the guiding hand on that rudder… and he projects that stability for future global financial uncertainties,” said Rebecca Tan, a political science lecturer with NUS.

Wong is the first PAP prime minister to have improved the party’s vote share in his first election. Previous PMs saw dips in the polls in what analysts used to call the “new PM” effect”, or a reflection of voters’ uncertainty in a new leader.

The PAP’s strong result was also partly due to a fragmented opposition, with 10 parties going up against them. With few exceptions, most performed poorly.

Teo Kay Key, a research fellow at the think tank Institute of Policy Studies, said that despite recent elections showing there was a desire for political diversity, the latest result “shows that people are happy with the number of opposition MPs” for now.

But, she added, Singaporeans also “seem to be more selective” now when it comes to casting votes for the opposition, pointing to the WP’s performance.

The WP had campaigned on a platform of lowering the cost of living and strengthening the safety net.

While it failed to win more seats, it also saw increased vote shares in the constituencies it retained and close fights with the PAP in others, cementing its status as the country’s strongest opposition party.

It turned in a robust performance despite recent controversial cases involving a former Workers’ Party MP and WP leader Pritam Singh, who were both found guilty of lying to parliament. Many in the WP’s support base believe the case, against Singh especially, was politically motivated.

Addressing supporters shortly after the results for his constituency were declared, Singh acknowledged that “it was always going to be a difficult election”.

But he added: “The slate is wiped clean, we start work again tomorrow, and we go again.”

Eight men, including seven Iranian nationals, have been arrested in two separate counter-terrorism police investigations.

Five were arrested at various locations around England on Saturday as part of a “pre-planned” investigation into a plot to “target a specific premises”, the Metropolitan Police said.

Four – two aged 29, one aged 40 and one aged 46 – are Iranian nationals. Police said the nationality and age of the fifth was still being established.

Three other men, all Iranian, were arrested in London on Saturday as part of a separate investigation led by the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command. Police said the two operations were not connected.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper thanked police and security services “for the action they have taken to keep our country safe”.

She said: “These are serious events that demonstrate the ongoing requirement to adapt our response to national security threats.”

Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Health Secretary Wes Streeting thanked police and security services, saying “every single day these people are saving lives”. He said it would be inappropriate for him to comment further.

The Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command has responsibility for leading counter terrorism-related investigations and as well as investigations into espionage and state threats.

In the operation in which five men were arrested, four were detained under the Terrorism Act. The fifth man was arrested under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Pace).

All five were arrested on suspicion of preparation of an act of terrorism.

The men were arrested in Swindon, west London, Stockport, Rochdale and Manchester and remain in police custody.

Police said the investigation related to a suspected plot to target a “specific premises”.

The “affected site”, which it did not name, has been made aware and is being supported by police, the Met added.

The investigation is being led by the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command , supported by officers from Greater Manchester Police and Wiltshire Police, as well as counter-terrorism officers from across the country.

“The investigation is still in its early stages and we are exploring various lines of enquiry to establish any potential motivation as well as to identify whether there may be any further risk to the public linked to this matter,” said Cdr Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command.

“We understand the public may be concerned and as always, I would ask them to remain vigilant and if they see or hear anything that concerns them, then to contact us.”

In the separate operation, the Met said three men, aged 39, 44 and 55, were arrested under the National Security Act at three separate addresses in north-west London and west London and had been taken into custody while searches continued.

Police said this investigation was not connected to the arrest of the five people.

On Wednesday, a cache of dazzling jewels linked to the Buddha’s mortal remains, which have been hailed as one of the most astonishing archaeological finds of the modern era, will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.

For over a century these relics, unearthed from a dusty mound in northern India in 1898, have sat largely unseen, cradled by a private British collection.

Now, as the gems prepare to leave the custody of their keepers, they are stirring not just collectors’ appetites but also some unease.

They come from a glittering hoard of nearly 1,800 pearls, rubies, topaz, sapphires, and patterned gold sheets, first glimpsed deep inside a brick chamber in present-day Uttar Pradesh in India, near the Buddha’s birthplace.

Their discovery – alongside bone fragments identified by an inscribed urn as belonging to the Buddha himself – reverberated through the world of archaeology. Nicolas Chow, chairman of Sotheby’s Asia and worldwide head of Asian Art, believes this is “among the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time”.

Yet as these relics now face the glare of the auction room, experts tell the BBC that a question hangs heavy: can the sale of treasures so intimately woven into India’s sacred past be considered ethical?

In 1898, William Claxton Peppé, an English estate manager, excavated a stupa at Piprahwa, just south of Lumbini, where the Buddha is believed to have been born. He uncovered relics inscribed and consecrated nearly 2,000 years ago.

Historians agree these relics, intact until then, are the heritage of both the Buddha’s Sakya clan descendants and Buddhists worldwide. The bone relics have since been distributed to countries such as Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, where they continue to be venerated.

“Are the relics of the Buddha a commodity that can be treated like a work of art to be sold on the market?” wonders Naman Ahuja, a Delhi-based art historian. “And since they aren’t, how is the seller ethically authorised to auction them?

“Since the seller is termed the ‘custodian’, I would like to ask – custodian on whose behalf? Does custodianship permit them now to sell these relics?”

Chris Peppé, great-grandson of William, told the BBC the family looked into donating the relics, but all options presented problems and an auction seemed the “fairest and most transparent way to transfer these relics to Buddhists”.

Julian King, Sotheby’s international specialist and head of sale, Himalayan Art, New York told the BBC the auction house had made a thorough review of the jewels.

“As is the case with any important items and collectibles that are offered for sale at Sotheby’s, we conducted requisite due diligence, including in relation to authenticity and provenance, legality and other considerations in line with our policies and industry standards for artworks and treasures,” King said.

Ashley Thompson, of Soas University of London, and curator Conan Cheong, both experts in Southeast Asian art, have more questions. In a joint statement they told the BBC: “Other ethical questions raised by the sale are: should human remains be traded? And who gets to decide what are human remains or not? For many Buddhist practitioners around the world, the gems on sale are part and parcel of the bones and ash.”

The sale of the relics has also sparked concern among Buddhist leaders.

“The Buddha teaches us not to take other people’s possessions without permission,” Amal Abeyawardene of London-based British MahaBodhi Society, told the BBC. “Historical records indicate that the Sakyamuni clan were granted custody of these relics, as the Buddha emanated from their community. Their wish was for these relics to be preserved alongside adornments, such as these gems, so that they may be venerated in perpetuity by the Buddha’s followers.”

Chris Peppé has written that the jewels passed from his great-uncle to his cousin, and in 2013 came to him and two other cousins. That’s when he began researching their discovery by his great-grandfather.

The Los Angeles-based television director and film editor wrote he had found 1898 newspaper reports – from Reuters to the New York Tribune – announcing the find of Buddha’s remains.

“The colonisation of India by the British had been a source of some cultural shame for me [and continues to be] but, amidst the treasure hunters who hauled their finds back to England, there had also been people focused on the pursuit of knowledge,” Chris Peppé writes.

He noted his research revealed a lot about his ancestors who he had dismissed as “prejudiced Victorians from a bygone era”.

“I learned that Willie Peppé’s first wife chose to travel around India for her honeymoon and loved the country and its culture. Sadly, she died from an unspecified illness. I learned that my grandmother was outraged at the land laws that applied to Indian women.

“And I learned that the excavation of the stupa was an attempt by Willie Peppé to provide work for his tenant farmers who had fallen victim to the famine of 1897.”

He writes his great-grandfather’s “technical diagrams of ramps and pulleys suggest that he was also a trained engineer who couldn’t resist a project”.

William Peppé handed the gems, relics and reliquaries to the colonial Indian government: the bone relics went to the Buddhist King of Siam (Rama V). Five relic urns, a stone chest and most other relics were sent to the Indian Museum in Kolkata – then the Imperial Museum of Calcutta.

Only a small “portion of duplicates”, which he was allowed to keep, remained in the Peppé family, he notes. (Sotheby’s notes say Peppé was allowed to keep approximately one-fifth of the discovery.)

Sources told the BBC the auction house considers the “duplicates” to be original items considered surplus to those donated, which the “Indian government permitted Peppé to retain”.

Over the past six years years, the gems have featured in major exhibitions, including one at The Met in 2023. The Peppé family has also launched a website to “share our research”.

Some scholars argue Buddha relics should never be treated as market commodities.

“The Sotheby’s auction transforms these highly sacred materials into saleable objects, in continuation of acts of colonial violence which extracted them from a stupa and called them ‘gems’ and ‘objects of interest to Europeans’, creating a false division with the ash and bone fragments they were consecrated with,” say Thompson and Cheong.

Chris Peppé told the BBC that in all the monasteries he had visited “no Buddhists regard these as corporeal relics”.

“A few Buddhist academics at western universities have recently offered a convoluted, fact-defying logic whereby they may be regarded as such. It’s an academic construct that is not shared by Buddhists in general who are familiar with the details of the find,” he said.

Peppé said the family “looked into donation [of the relics] to temples and museums and they all presented different problems on closer scrutiny”.

“An auction seems the fairest and most transparent way to transfer these relics to Buddhists and we are confident that Sotheby’s will achieve that.”

Some also point to The Koh-i-Noor, seized by the British East India Company and now part of the Crown Jewels, with many Indians viewing it as stolen. Should the Buddha’s jewels be next?

“Repatriation, I believe, is seldom necessary,” says Ahuja. “Such rare and sacred relics that are unique and which define a land’s cultural history, however, deserve the government’s exceptional attention.”

“Celebration? What celebration? It feels more like a funeral” – the damning words of a former senior Nato figure to describe this week’s ceremonies marking Victory in Europe Day.

The top-level diplomat who spent years at the transatlantic defence alliance asked not to be named in order to speak freely, but why so nihilistic? VE Day was a joint Allied triumph over Nazi Germany; over hatred, dictatorship, the Third Reich’s territorial expansionism and heinous crimes against humanity.

So much blood was spilled achieving that victory. Some 51 million Allied soldiers and civilians died during World War Two, united in a pursuit to rid the world of the scourge of Nazism.

But 80 years on, we’re surrounded by countless news and academic analyses breathlessly singling out Donald Trump as the modern day nail in the coffin of the strong transatlantic bonds forged back then. In Europe, the American president is viewed by many as the slayer-in-chief of decades-old common values; shared visions of security, democracy and rule of law.

But is that accurate, or too simplistic?

To get the full picture on what happened to allied ties after WW2, we cannot omit Russia, then or now.

By 1945, about 24 million Russians and other Soviets had been slaughtered in the war with Germany. Without their sacrifice, as well as that of the other allies, the Nazis would not have been vanquished.

“One thing we need to recognise, though, is Russia was never a true friend of the West,” says Michael Zantovsky, a former Czech Ambassador to Washington and to London.

“During WW2 it was an ally for existential reasons. It needed any help [against the Nazis] that it could get. And it was the same story with western powers, to be fair. They needed the help of the Soviet Union. But Russia did not plan on continuing the alliance after the war. As soon as the threat of Nazi Germany was destroyed, the Soviet Union intended to follow its own objectives.”

Splits appeared the moment Germany was defeated; there was even a disagreement over which day VE Day fell. Western powers witnessed the signing of Germany’s military capitulation in the French cathedral city of Reims, news that broke on 8 May 1945. The USSR wanted its own, separate, signing with surrendering Germany in Soviet-occupied Berlin a day later. Russia marks VE Day on 9 May to this day.

Depending where you are in Europe on VE Day, the mood is varied – particularly this year.

Western Europe welcomes liberty, democracy and an end to the Nazi threat. In the UK for example, multiple VE Day celebrations are planned this year, as with every year.

But people living in central and eastern Europe, such as Czechoslovakia, emerged from Nazi occupation in 1945 only to end up under Communist regimes – whether they liked it or not.

As a result, Ambassador Zantovsky describes his country’s relationship to VE Day as “ambiguous”.

“The western part of Czechoslovakia was liberated by US troops, the rest of the country by Soviet soldiers,” he tells me.

Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Communist Party in 1948 and fully invaded by the Soviet Union two decades later. “During communist times, the West’s role in WW2 was deliberately suppressed and marginalised. We were told we owed our liberty [from the Nazis] to the Soviets.”

Russia marks VE Day with triumphalist military parades – and President Vladimir Putin knows the deep sense of nationalist pride that Russians still feel at defeating the Nazi regime in 1945. It is no coincidence that he publicly labels Ukraine’s leadership “Nazis” as a means of besmirching them in Russian eyes.

For VE Day this year, President Putin called a three-day ceasefire with Ukraine – it’s presumed, because he wants to concentrate, uninterrupted, on showing off Russia’s military muscle in front of a crowd of foreign dignitaries, including President Xi Jinping of China.

The official reason Putin gave for the Ukraine ceasefire was “humanitarian grounds”. Quite the irony, since he’s the one who ordered the invasion of that sovereign country.

That invasion brought back difficult memories for Czechs of their own occupation and suppression. “That’s why we feel so strongly for Ukraine,” says Zantovsky.

“It’s only a few hundred kilometres away. Our sense of security is threatened once again.”

This is why most Europeans are so shocked at President Trump’s apparent respect for, even deference towards, Putin, while simultaneously verbally threatening the territorial integrity of traditionally close allies like Canada and Denmark.

Europe has viewed the US as its closest friend since WW2. Washington poured money into the war-shattered continent in the late 1940s – including West Germany, which was ever thankful to the US for bringing it back into the fold after the horrors of Nazism. The US also gave Europe post-war security guarantees; Nato was founded in 1949.

But this wasn’t American altruism, as Trump implies. It too was a marriage of convenience, of sorts.

Following WW2, the US worried about the spread of communism. It fretted that Europe, with its economy and infrastructure in tatters, was vulnerable both to home-grown communist parties and abroad from an expansionist Soviet Union. By swooping in to help rebuild Europe, the US was gaining a geostrategic foothold on the Soviet Union’s doorstep throughout the Cold War.

The idea of a “West” – made of countries sharing security goals and values – was born.

Might we now be witnessing its death, or gradual strangulation? With no common enemy anymore, the friendship is certainly fraying. In 2025, the president of the United States no longer feels threatened by Russia.

“Shared history served as the foundation for the (transatlantic) relationship for eight decades, but it’s not enough to propel the relationship forward anymore,” Washington’s former Nato ambassador Julie Smith told me.

The war in Ukraine is the biggest conflict in Europe since WW2. With Russia’s economy resolutely on a war footing, it has the potential to spread.

Europe, unlike the US, still feels threatened by Russia. Capitals across the continent have been left speechless and nervous by Trump appearing to blame Ukraine, not Moscow, for the bloodshed.

The televised press conference in the White House Oval Office in late February, where Trump and his deputy, JD Vance, seemingly tried to bait, berate and humiliate Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, was a turning point in European public opinion and politics.

A YouGov poll in March indicated that, 80 years on from VE Day, a large majority of Western Europeans (78% in the UK, 74% in Germany, 75% in Spain) now view the White House as a big threat to peace and security in Europe.

In Europe’s east, the Soviet Union’s former sphere of influence, people fear President Trump’s attitude to Ukraine will only embolden President Putin in his expansionist drive.

If Russia gets US recognition for “crimes of conquest” in Ukraine, says historian and author Timothy Garton Ash, VE Day this year would be better labelled DE Day – Defeat in Europe Day.

And with Trump frequently accusing Europe of free-loading, and taking advantage of the US, there’s a nervousness among leaders across the continent that they could be left alone to defend themselves for the first time since WW2. Boosting defence spending is now a huge topic in European capitals.

The message Berlin has taken from Trump’s first 100 days in office is: “We cannot rely on the US anymore,” says Peter Wittig, Germany’s former ambassador to Washington.

That’s a massive turnaround for Germans, who have been reluctant to rebuild their country’s military might after WW2. Instead, Germany leant particularly heavily on the US for its security. A large chunk of the estimated 100,000 US troops stationed in Europe are based in Germany. The US stores nuclear arms in the country too.

The Trump-shock among normally pro-US German politicians is so profound that it prompted a change in the country’s constitution this spring. Parliamentarians voted to lift Berlin’s long established debt brake – which limited government spending – in order to invest heavily and power up the country’s military going forward.

Ursula von der Leyen, once German’s defence minister, is now the president of the European Commission in Brussels. She is transatlantic-leaning and carefully-spoken, but even she summed up the present situation starkly: “The West as we knew it, no longer exists.”

Still, the pivot away from Europe by the US cannot just be blamed on Trump.

China, not Russia, has been viewed by the White House as strategic threat number one for some time now. In 2012, then-US President Barack Obama said he wanted to focus his foreign policy on Asia, and Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden invested a lot of time trying to shore up China-wary allies in the Indo-Pacific.

Trump or no Trump, concentrating foreign policy on Asia and withdrawing substantially from Europe is unlikely to change, says Ambassador Wittig – whichever political party wins the next US election – especially as there is now a growing reluctance in US public opinion to carry the burden of financing allies.

Wittig calls it “the end of an era – the end of engagement in Europe”.

Despite all the European hand wringing, there is a recognition among the continent’s leaders that, 80 years after VE Day, it is high time they take more responsibility for paying and providing for their own defence capabilities, rather than relying on Washington.

Some also see potential in the relationship reset. Ambassador Zantovsky calls this “an opportunity brought about by crisis, a sense of urgency regarding security that hasn’t existed [in Europe] for the last 30 years”.

Perhaps, but during the Cold War western European societies had younger populations and far more slim-line welfare states. Spending 4% or 5% of gross domestic product on defence was do-able.

Analysts say that’s what would be needed again now to wean Europe off US security support, but it’s unclear if present-day voters would accept the painful compromises needed – in terms of cuts in government spending on health or education for example – in return for boosting their country’s defence capabilities.

This is especially the case in European nations geographically further from Russia’s orbit, where the sense of immediate threat feels less acute.

Mr Garton Ash wonders if there is a transitional path from the current US-led Nato to a more European Nato, with the US still at the table but Europe taking responsibility for its own security.

“We need a new generation of political leaders who are up to the challenge,” says political historian and biographer Sir Anthony Seldon.

“A need can often bring forward the right people,” he added, reflecting on European and US leaders in the aftermath of WW2.

“Something has certainly broken. The future is uncertain. Do we have to go to war periodically to realise how terrible it is, and to force us to work together?”

Eight decades on from the hell they experienced, surviving WW2 veterans would tell you they fervently hope that won’t be the case.

A drone attack launched by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) struck a military airport in the city of Port Sudan on Sunday, according to the Sudanese army.

It marks the first time RSF attacks have reached the city – the de-facto capital of Sudan’s military-led government – since the conflict between the warring factions erupted two years ago.

Sudanese army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah said the RSF had launched several “suicide drones” at the eastern Red Sea port city, targeting the Osman Digna Air Base, “a goods warehouse and some civilian facilities”.

He said no injuries had been reported but the attack had caused “limited damage”. The RSF has not commented on the incident.

Sudan plunged into conflict in April 2023 when a vicious power struggle broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and RSF, a powerful paramilitary group, ahead of a planned transition to civilian rule.

At least 150,000 people are estimated to have died in the ensuing civil war, with some 12 million forced to flee their homes.

The United Nations has described the situation in Sudan as the world’s largest and most devastating humanitarian crisis, with over 30 million people in need of aid and millions facing acute food shortages and famine.

Prior to the attacks on Sunday, Port Sudan had avoided bombardment and was regarded as one of the safest places in the war-ravaged nation.

After the SAF lost control of the capital Khartoum early in the war, Port Sudan became the de facto headquarters for the military-led government helmed by General Abdel Fattah-al Burhan.

UN agencies moved their offices and staff to the coastal city and hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians have fled there during the war.

“We were on the way to the plane when we were quickly evacuated and taken out of the terminal,” a traveller told AFP news agency on Sunday following the strikes.

Video footage on social media, which the BBC has not independently verified, appears to show an explosion and huge plumes of black smoke billowing into the sky.

The airport has been closed and all flights suspended, a government source told AFP news agency.

The two-year conflict has left the nation divided into rival zones.

The RSF, led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – known as Hemedti – controls most of the vast Darfur region in western Sudan, and parts of the south.

The military-backed government controls eastern and northern Sudan, including the key Red Sea city of Port Sudan.

Sunday’s strike is the latest in a string of RSF drone attacks on military and civilian infrastructure in army-held territory. On Saturday, an army source reported a drone attack on Kassala, on Sudan’s eastern border, about 250 miles (400km) from the nearest RSF position.

The SAF has taken back swathes of territory in recent months, including regaining control of the presidential palace in Khartoum in March.

Taking back the capital was seen as a turning point in the two-year civil war, but while the SAF currently have momentum, it is unlikely that either side can achieve a victory that will enable them to govern the whole of Sudan, according to a report by the International Crisis Group.

This is Sudan’s third civil war in 70 years, but is regarded as worse than the others, tearing through the core of the country and hardening divisions.

Following a coup in 2021, a council of generals ran Sudan – led by the two men at the centre of the current conflict.

Al-Burhan was head of Sudan’s armed forces and in effect the country’s president, while Hemedti was his deputy and leader of the RSF.

The pair disagreed about the direction the country was going in and the proposed move towards civilian rule – in particular plans to absorb the 100,000-strong RSF into the army.

Tensions between the army and the RSF grew as a deadline for forming a civilian government approached, before fighting between the two sides for control of the Sudanese state began.

International efforts to broker peace have failed and both sides are backed by foreign powers who have poured weapons into the country.

Earlier this week American singer Katy Perry, best known for her bubblegum pop, said she felt like a “human Piñata” after weeks of online backlash.

The description felt suitably colourful – but the acknowledgement was serious. A decade on from headlining the Superbowl, Perry’s part in a much-derided Blue Origin spaceflight has seen her star crash down to Earth.

Mockery over the apparent worthiness of her reaction, including kissing the ground after landing and saying she felt “so connected to love”, spread online. Fast food chain Wendy’s even posted to ask: “Can we send her back?”

Trolls have now taken aim at her world tour, which began in Mexico on 23 April, criticising her dance moves and performances.

It seems the star who first broke through singing about a boyfriend’s mood swings now faces an icy reception. Perry’s blamed an “unhinged and unhealed” internet – but is toxic social media the only reason?

The music writer Michael Cragg, author of Reach for the Stars, believes Perry’s problem is that she’s stuck between pop cultures and feels increasingly out of touch.

“Her pop star persona was cemented in the 2010s as cartoon-y, fun and playful, all whipped cream bras and goofy videos where she wore oversized braces on her teeth,” he says.

For a period this worked. Her second album Teenage Dream, which doubled down on Perry’s staple cheeky, sexualised girl-next-door image, scored five Billboard number one singles to match a record set by Michael Jackson. Its follow-up, 2013’s Prism, bore transatlantic smash single Roar (her fourth solo UK number one), as well as Dark Horse in the US (her ninth domestically). Perry hasn’t topped charts under her own steam since.

“That was a long time ago in pop terms and it feels like she hasn’t evolved,” adds Cragg.

In the past year, her comeback single Woman’s World, touted as a female empowerment anthem, struck critics as lyrically shallow.

Some fans also seemed unimpressed that it was produced by Dr. Luke, who previously faced sexual assault allegations from the singer Kesha. The producer denied the claims and the pair reached an agreement to settle a defamation lawsuit in 2023, but Perry remained tainted by association.

The track failed to land in the top 50 in the US and only just managed in the UK, at 47. “Her sort of spiritual ‘let love lead the way’ messages she posts don’t really hold sway with very online pop fans in the face of that decision,” says Cragg.

“The regressive girl boss feel of Woman’s World, and then the album not being great hasn’t helped,” he adds, pointing to rapper Doja Cat’s success working with Dr. Luke without the same negative response.

It followed a pattern of failed reinvention attempts stretching back to 2017’s Witness, where Perry attempted to launch her socially conscious “purposeful pop” era.

But its Sia-written lead single Chained to the Rhythm, which boldly attacked mindless pop culture, appeared to be undermined by Bon Appetit, a song openly objectifying Perry as a sexual meal.

Female pop stardom has shifted. Last year’s biggest breakout music stars – Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX – were women joined by a thread of fierce self-assurance, underpinned by relatability and authenticity.

In contrast, Perry wanted distance from her pop persona – as the headline for Cragg’s 2017 Guardian interview with her put it: “I created this character called Katy Perry. I didn’t want to be Katheryn Hudson. It was too scary.”

Perry’s first hit I Kissed A Girl caused controversy for the fetishisation of lesbians even back in 2008 when it was released. But today Roan’s had global success telling her genuine queer awakening.

“The flip flopping has jarred in an era where… very defined pop star personas are the ones cutting through,” argues Cragg.

Perry’s 2021-2023 playground-styled Las Vegas residency embraced her surreal, fantastical image to commercial and critical success.

But it’s not translating to a new generation of fans. “I think ultimately people see her as a bit cringeworthy now,” Cragg adds. “Being shot into space on a billionaire’s jolly while everyone watches that on social media platforms interspersed with war and the climate crisis… just feels tonally not ideal,” he says.

Perry may have misjudged the public mood, but at the same time, the venom in the blowback points to deeper issues in pop culture beyond her control.

There is no doubt that the social media landscape has become more frenzied in recent years, with stars like Roan speaking against toxic fandoms.

Simon Diego, the creator of Brazil’s Portal Katy Perry fan community, described the scale of the abuse towards the 40-year-old as “unbelievable”.

The group showed their support by clubbing together with other fan pages to pay for a digital billboard message in New York’s Times Square for 24 hours.

“We’re so proud of you and your magical journey and we love you to the moon and back,” it read.

“Know that you are safe, seen and celebrated. We’ll see you around the world, this is just the beginning.”

It was this that Perry replied to directly with her Piñata remark acknowledging the backlash.

“I think Katy and many other celebrities are feeling unsafe in the one space that used to connect them to fans,” Diego tells BBC News.

He believes that’s why Perry has never posted photos of her daughter’s face online.

But even that boundary was ignored in the wake of the spaceflight criticism, as commenters began targeting her four-year-old child simply because “it’s cool now”, he says. “They don’t understand how bad it could affect her.”

Others, like Marie Claire Australia editor Georgie McCourt, think pervasive misogyny plays a part.

“There’s a particular ire reserved for women like Perry: ambitious, unapologetic, hyper-visible,” she wrote in a column, noting that male celebrities have already gone into space without such surveillant reaction.

So where next for Perry? Cragg says a hit single would help.

“I’m not saying it will return her to the commercial highs of old, because that ship has sailed for a lot of pre-streaming artists, but it will steady the ship.”

On Mark Carney’s final day of a gruelling race to be elected PM of vast and sparsely populated Canada I was with him.

It was his last push, not just to win, but also to get the majority he said he needed to stand up to the chaotic territorial and trade ambitions of his “neighbour to the south”.

For someone who had got to see Carney as a cerebral technocrat, a crisis-managing central bank governor a decade ago, the transformation into public orator was quite something.

I recall endless interviews trying to get the then governor to say something newsworthy, or something that would make a good headline.

While this was a very different Mark Carney, the lineage in crisis economics was also part of his sell.

Carney told his audience in Edmonton, Alberta, sporting the local Oilers hockey shirt: “President Trump has ruptured the global economy… America’s leadership of the global economy is over. It’s still in play, but it is a tragedy, and our new reality… in this trade war, just like in hockey, we will win”.

His supporters shouted “Elbows Up” and put them up, a reference to a stand up and fight back posture in the occasionally rough game of ice hockey.

“What we are seeing around the country is Canadians acting on behalf of other Canadians, standing up for each other, buying from each other, travelling here…”

At his very final stop in the far West, in the isolation of Victoria, Vancouver Island, with only half an hour of campaigning allowed, Carney went “unplugged” among supporters.

“As the assembled media will tell you, I campaigned in prose,” Carney joked. “So I’m going to govern in econometrics,” he said of the nerdy mathematical strain of economics.

In normal circumstances, some of this might be interesting to the wider world. In current circumstances, the origins of his election win, his approach to policy making, and the nature of his mandate, could assume critical importance.

When I caught up with him for the BBC exclusive interview, just as the polls were closing on Monday, he appeared confident but was taking nothing for granted.

Mr Carney’s central argument remained consistent. He said he was the leader to take on Donald Trump’s “betrayal” and threats to Canada’s economy and sovereignty.

It was exemplified by his final large rally on the US-Canada border, with the Ambassador Bridge and a skyline of iconic Detroit motoring firms behind him.

This bridge is the main artery of Canadian-US trade. A lot of effort went into this backdrop of the two-way trade of the most integrated economies in the world, now tariffed at unimaginable levels. An unsubtle message from the Liberal Party leader, about a changed continent.

The election result was staggering.

Entering 2025, the Liberal Party was as low as 16%, versus 45% for the opposition Conservatives, in opinion polls.

Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives were not just heading for victory, but for a total landslide.

But then following President Trump’s imposition of national security tariffs on Canada, using the pretext of an alleged role in fentanyl traffic, and then his undiplomatic suggestion that Canada should join the USA, the polls tightened.

Then after Mark Carney was elected Liberal leader, just eight weeks ago, the Liberals achieved a consistent poll lead, which they rode to victory last week.

The election became a presidential-style verdict on who could cope with Trump.

Poilievre was fundamentally weakened by previous overtures to the US president and his style of government.

Carney incorporated voters on the left who were scared of a Conservative government amplified by Trump.

And incredibly, in Quebec, the Liberals won back support from separatists, who were more concerned about Canada’s independence from the US, than their own constitutional status within Canada. There is nothing more unifying than a credible external threat.

Carney gave some clues to his strategy during his interview with me. He talked of a “win win” partnership with the US, and reminded the president that Canada was the “biggest client” of 40 of the 50 US states, and a key energy and fertiliser supplier.

He also told me he “potentially could supply them with critical minerals”. This struck me as a negotiation tactic very targeted at what Trump has become fixated on elsewhere.

Canada has ample resources of critical minerals, and would be a much more dependable supplier across the West than many other nations. Carney is implicitly suggesting, however, that his country has deep strategic choices to make here, on for example, developing them with Europe rather than the US.

In any event, the PM will use the impetus of external threat to try to transform the Canadian economy. Even in the granting of an interview to BBC News, it was clear that he sees a critical need to diversify trade and strategic alliances. Defence partnerships are now on the cards.

He seemed to acknowledge that a stalled Canada-UK trade deal could be expedited.

On Friday he pulled off the historic announcement that King Charles would reopen the Canadian parliament in person at the end of the month. This has not happened since 1977. It is entirely in keeping with Canada’s constitution, but it is also a stunning assertion of enduring independence from the White House.

All roads now lead to the G7 Summit hosted by Carney in the middle of June in Alberta, bringing together the world’s seven largest economies, which dominate global trade and the international financial system.

Assuming that Trump comes, it will occur within days of the expiry of the pause in massive so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on most of the world.

It is often forgotten that if Canada and Mexico free themselves from the fentanyl tariffs, they will then, according to White House advisers, find themselves subject to this system, with a minimum of 10% tariffs.

All of this occurs within days of some growing frustration from America’s traditional allies with the entire “trade deal” process.

Japan is increasingly frustrated, with its finance minister now openly pointing to Japan’s unbeaten holding of US government debt as a “card” in negotiations.

The EU has not got very far. Even the UK has hinted that a deal with Europe may be a more effective way of boosting the economy.

It comes as tariffs are starting to have a visible and tangible negative impact on US businesses and consumers.

There is no great incentive to offer much up, while the US itself starts to feel the inevitable inflationary consequences of its actions.

The flotilla of empty Chinese cargo ships and empty docks on the US West Coast will soon be seen in the economic data of an already shrinking US economy.

As a veteran of economic crises arising from the uncertain experiments of governments, Carney might be uniquely placed on how these situations pan out. Many in the markets have been thoroughly unimpressed with the White House advisers sent out to reassure investors in recent weeks.

But Carney too has his own challenges. He just missed out on a majority in parliament, but has chosen to try to project this as a virtue.

He will reach across the aisle for a “Team Canada” approach to talks with the US.

The Premier of the oil-rich Alberta province, who is a regular visitor to Mar-a-Lago, immediately announced moves to make separation referendums easier.

This is a very complicated, domestic, continental and global environment economically and politically. Few would predict exactly where it goes. Carney may have a very large part in it, and not just for his own country.

Ahead of Sweden’s Walpurgis festival to mark the start of spring, young people were busy selecting outfits or getting their hair done. Not all of them made it there alive.

At a hair salon in Uppsala, a city north of Stockholm, three young men who police say were aged between 15 and 20 were shot dead on Tuesday before the celebrations started.

The horror left many shaken in the build-up to the festival, known as Valborg in Swedish, which is typically a convivial affair each 30 April on the eve of the Christian feast day of Saint Walpurga. Celebrated nationwide, Uppsala hosts the country’s largest and most high-profile Walpurgis events, popular with students.

The partying did go ahead in full swing, but a subtle heaviness hung over the Swedish blue and yellow flags which fluttered around the city.

And now, with the festival finished, it’s only police tape – not flags – fluttering outside the basement barber shop where the shooting took place close to Vaksala Square.

“It’s really sad,” says 20-year-old student Yamen Alchoum, who is in the area to eat at a nearby food truck. He says he was at another barber shop on the night of the shootings, but previously had his hair cut at this salon multiple times. “I think if I was there [on Tuesday]…I would be, like, involved in the shooting. And it’s a bit scary.”

According to witnesses speaking to Swedish media TV4 and Aftonbladet, two of the young victims were dressed in barber capes and sat in parlour chairs when they were shot in the head just after 5pm on Tuesday.

The city centre was busy at the time as commuters made their way to the nearby train station and students from the city’s prestigious university cycled back to their flats.

Witnesses reported hearing loud bangs which many mistook for fireworks. Minutes later several police cars and an ambulance arrived, blocking the street and forcing a bus to turn around. Helicopters and drones were dispatched to try and track down the suspect. Local media reported that he had worn a mask and used an electric scooter to get away from the scene.

“I heard the helicopters, so then I knew that something had happened,” says Sara, a 32-year-old who lives on the street. She says her phone quickly lit up with news notifications and texts from friends asking if she was okay.

Around two hours after the shootings, police arrested a 16-year-old boy. In Sweden, suspects can be held based on different levels of suspicion, and the teenager was initially held at the second-highest level, indicating strong suspicion.

However, by Friday, prosecutors said the case against him had weakened and he was released.

On Saturday, Swedish police confirmed that six people have now been arrested in connection with the case. The suspects range in age from under 18 to 45, according to the state prosecutor’s office, and one is suspected of carrying out the killings.

People intending to visit Uppsala for the Walpurgis festival were advised not to change their plans, as police promised extra resources on the cathedral city’s streets and suggested the shooting was likely an “isolated incident”.

While many were shaken, tens of thousands of Swedes still heeded their advice, packing the banks of Uppsala’s Fyris river to watch the annual student raft race, drinking in the city’s pubs and parks or heading to a huge public bonfire in the evening. Others joined the annual spring ceremony outside the university where current and former students gathered to wave white caps.

“I don’t really feel so scared,” says Alvin Rose, 19, a social studies student, having a snack in Vaksala Square, just around the corner from where the shootings happened. “It feels like there’s more security, more cops about.”

His friend Kassandra Fritz, an 18-year-old natural sciences student, says she has driven to Uppsala from her home in Gävle, two hours north, to “have fun and meet new people”.

She reflects that she no longer has a “strong” reaction to news about shootings in Sweden since they are frequently in the headlines. “There’s been so many shootings lately, not only here in Uppsala but like, everywhere in Sweden.”

Over the past decade, Sweden has emerged as a European hotspot for gun crime, often linked to criminal networks. Research for Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention released last year concluded that the profile of perpetrators is “increasingly younger”, with growing numbers of teenagers both carrying out or dying from gun violence.

Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson was on a work trip to Valencia when the Uppsala shooting took place, but has since described it as “an extremely violent act”.

“This underlines that the wave of violence is not over – it continues,” he said in an interview with Swedish news agency TT on Wednesday.

At a news conference the day after, officers said they were investigating the possibility that the deaths were linked to gang crime, but said it was too soon to confirm this.

Police in various Swedish cities have previously said it is becoming more common for gangs to contract vulnerable children to carry out crimes, because those who are 15 or younger are below the age of criminal responsibility in Sweden.

Sweden’s government recently proposed controversial new legislation that would allow police to wiretap children, in an attempt to prevent them from being recruited to teenage gangs.

Ministers have also said they want to tighten the country’s gun laws.

In February, 10 people were killed in the country’s worst mass shooting at an adult education centre in the Swedish town of Orebro. In this case, police suspect a 35-year-old was behind the killings. He legally owned a weapon, and was found dead inside the building.

Outside the hair salon in Uppsala, 20-year-old Yamen says he has never been involved in gang crime but knows plenty of others who have.

“Many times in my school, there was gang violence, and in the streets – dealers,” he says. “But my personality was to work, study, and now I am in college.”

As he leaves to meet friends, a steady stream of young people continue to stop at the street corner next to the hairdressers, some bringing bouquets of flowers. Several appear visibly shaken and have tears in their eyes.

“I knew him very well,” says Elias, a 16-year-old who says he was friends with one of the victims, and has asked the BBC not to share his surname. “It feels unreal, you know. It doesn’t feel like I’ve truly accepted the situation.”

Romanians will try again to elect a new president today, six months after the first attempt ended in scandal and confusion.

A radical outsider with mystical leanings, Calin Georgescu, came first on 24 November, but that result was annulled over allegations of campaign fraud and Russian interference.

In February, US Vice President JD Vance sharply criticised Romania for that decision, sending shockwaves through a Romanian political establishment which leans heavily on its special relationship with the US. Georgescu was nevertheless barred from taking part in today’s rerun.

This election pits a nationalist, George Simion, leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), against three centrists: the popular mayor of Bucharest Nicusor Dan; Crin Antonescu, a liberal who represents the governing Social-Democrat and National Liberal coalition; and Elena Lasconi, an independent.

Seven other candidates are on the ballot paper. If no candidate wins over 50% of the vote, a run-off between the first two candidates will be held on 18 May.

“This election is not about one candidate or another, but about every Romanian who has been lied to, ignored, humiliated, and still has the strength to believe and defend our identity and rights,” Simion posted on X on Friday.

Opinion polls – notoriously unreliable in Romania – suggest that he will come first today, then will face a tough contest with either Nicusor Dan or Crin Antonescu in the run-off.

The result is awaited nervously in European capitals, Washington, Kyiv and Moscow. Romania is an important transit route for weapon systems and ammunition to Ukraine. The country has a US missile defence shield at Deveselu, and three major airbases from which Nato flies air policing missions up to the border of Ukraine and Moldova, and out over the Black Sea.

Ukraine exports 70% of its grain down the Black Sea coast, through Romanian territorial waters, towards Istanbul. The Romanian navy demines those waters, and the Romanian air force trains Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s. The Trump administration is reassessing its commitment to Romania. A visa-waiver agreement was abruptly cancelled on the eve of the election.

“Forget about any more help to Ukraine if Simion becomes president,” says George Scutaru, a security expert at the New Strategy Center in Bucharest. As head of the National Security Council, the president can veto any decision, and has a strong influence on security policy. But Scutaru expresses “prudent optimism” that one of the centrists will win the run-off.

Public resentment at Romanian financial support for Ukrainian refugees has been a central plank in Simion’s campaign, though he denies he is pro-Russian.

On a baking May afternoon, crowds of sightseers throng the gardens of the Cotroceni Palace, the presidential residence in the west of Bucharest. The decision by interim President Ilie Bolojan to open the buildings and gardens to the public is very popular among the visitors.

White and purple irises line the paths beneath ancient horse chestnuts in full flower. A military band marches among flowerbeds of pansies and violets. The palace is a former monastery, converted in the 17th century, which became home to the Romanian royal family in the 19th century.

“I can’t really imagine Simion in here…” Ionut, a satirical writer, tells me beside an ornate waterfall, looking up at the palace walls. He voted for Simion in the first round of the election last November, out of anger at the constant delays to Romania’s full membership of the Schengen free-travel zone. And frustration with Romania’s outgoing president, Klaus Iohannis.

But Romania finally joined the Schengen land-borders on 1 January, and Iohannis stepped aside the same month. “Romanians are less angry now,” he believes. He told his daughter he will vote for Nicusor Dan in this election, but hasn’t quite made up his mind.

Ana, a management consultant, walking with her family through the palace gardens, also supports Nicusor Dan. “I want to vote for both continuity and change,” she says. “Continuity in Romania’s relationship with Europe, but change as far as corruption is concerned. We young people don’t relate to the old parties any more,” – something Nicusor Dan has in common with Simion.

Many in Romania’s large diaspora – a million are registered to vote – have already cast their ballots, especially in Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK. They are invisible in opinion polls, and could easily sway the final result.

“It’s not our night,” Australia’s opposition leader Peter Dutton told a roomful of supporters in Brisbane after his rival, Anthony Albanese, was re-elected as prime minister.

It was indeed a bruising night for Dutton, a 54-year-old political veteran who also lost his parliamentary seat of 24 years to a candidate from Albanese’s Labor Party.

This is a big win for the prime minister, who made a surprising comeback to secure a comfortable majority for a second term. But it’s an even bigger loss for Dutton and his Liberal National Coalition.

Dutton initially seemed to have an advantage over the incumbent PM who was battling a cost-of-living crisis and dismal ratings. But that advantage vanished as the campaign wore on, ending in a humiliating defeat.

An awkward and inconsistent campaign that did not do enough to reassure voters was partly to blame. But there is no mistaking the big part played by what some have called the “Trump effect”.

Dutton, whether he liked it or not, was a man who many saw as Australia’s Trump – but as it turns out Australians do not appear to want that.

Dutton’s brand of hard-line conservatism, his support for controversial immigration policies – like sending asylum seekers to offshore detention centres – and his fierce criticism of China, all led to comparisons with US President Donald Trump.

It’s a likeness he has rejected but then the Coalition pursued policies that seemed to have been borrowed from the Trump administration.

Dutton said that if elected he would cut public sector jobs – more than 40,000 by some estimates. This reminded voters of billionaire Elon Musk’s Doge, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has slashed US bureaucracy. Dutton later walked back the plan.

The Coalition even appointed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as shadow minister for government efficiency. And images of her wearing a cap with the words Maga – short for the popular Trump slogan, Make America Great Again – have become a key talking point.

None of this served Dutton well and he knew it. Towards the end of the campaign, he tried to shake off Trump’s shadow, and in the final leaders’ debate he repeatedly told the audience that he didn’t know Trump before attempting to answer questions on him.

“The Coalition will probably regret issuing messages that came across as supporting Trump and opposing the US Democrats,” said Frank Mols, a political science lecturer at the University of Queensland.

“Once the stock markets started to drop in response to the uncertainty created by the [Trump’s] tariffs, it became harder for the Coalition to profile itself as a safer pair of hands for the economy.”

The talk of trade wars and tariffs increased voters’ worries. Speaking to people across Australia – the BBC travelled to Perth in Western Australia and Melbourne in the final week of campaigning – it was clear that global politics only became more important through the campaign.

Australia has long balanced its military alliance with the US and its economic relationship with China, its biggest trading partner.

But a US-China trade war, along with an unpredictable White House, is tricky territory for any country – even a US ally like Australia.

Could Dutton provide stability in these unusual times?

Dutton had long tried to convince voters that he would be the politician best suited to dealing with Trump. He often cited his experience as a cabinet minister during tariff negotiations in Trump’s first term.

But in the end voters weren’t convinced.

Dutton’s own inconsistent policies and the Trump-esque rhetoric and decisions appear to have driven away an electorate that is deeply concerned about a new, tumultuous world order.

“Our message was confusing… Labor had a tight and very disciplined campaign,” Jitendra Prasad, a LNP supporter, told the BBC as he was about to leave the watch party on Saturday night after a disappointing outcome.

That was evident in the swings towards Labor across the country, which led to a fairly quick, emphatic result.

Towards the end of the campaign, Dutton also embraced the right-wing One Nation Party, which some Coalition members had warned was the wrong move. And it didn’t seem to have helped. Rather, it may have hurt him.

“They just read the rooms incorrectly,” says Ben Wellings, associate professor of Politics and International Relations at Monash University.

“It was one of the things that we always say about the electorate in Australia – it’s a small C conservative and maybe the radical right message was just in the end, too radical and seemed too disruptive.”

What also didn’t help was that Dutton’s was never a smooth campaign.

There were gaffes, such as when he accidentally hit a cameraman with a football, and costly missteps, like getting the price of a carton of eggs wrong during an election debate – his guess (A$4.20) was, in fact, half the actual price.

It was not a good look in an election where cost-of-living has been a dominant theme.

“Dutton has seemed more comfortable attacking Labor than presenting a strong alternative,” says Jacob Broom, a lecturer in politics and policy at Murdoch University in Perth.

“I think it has been effective for Labor to point to the Liberals voting against cost-of-living measures like the tax cuts which they proposed toward the end of the term.”

While Dutton criticised Labour’s tax relief measures and spending, he then announced that he would also effect tax rebates and big spends, including billions to boost defence and fix an ailing public healthcare system.

But at the same time he also promised cuts. Analysts say this inconsistency confused voters and became an unfortunate theme in his campaign.

He announced and then walked back plans for huge changes to the bureaucracy, including job cuts and the plans to end work from home arrangements. He said it was “a mistake”.

But “the backflips on working from home and his uncertainty over public service cuts,” complicated his message, according to John Warhurst, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University.

The result, many believe, was the lack of a coherent campaign.

“I think people couldn’t understand Dutton’s policies,” a member of Dutton’s own party in his Dickson constituency told the BBC earlier on Saturday.

He wondered if Dutton’s support for nuclear energy put people off – an issue that analysts such as Dr Mols said could have worked against him because Australian voters had not “warmed up” to the idea of nuclear energy.

Ultimately, the biggest issue this election – cost-of-living – may have helped Labor cement its message that theirs was the steadier hand.

Evanthia Smith, another voter in Dutton’s Dickson seat, said she voted for Labor because she believed their candidate would do more to improve public education and access to healthcare.

Dutton acknowledged the huge loss the Coalition had faced: “Our Liberal family is hurting across the country tonight, including in my electorate of Dickson… We’ll rebuild from here.”

It was the same advice a supporter in Brisbane had for the party: “The party needs to go back to the drawing block and look at their policies. We need to focus on the typical issues: Housing, cost-of-living – they are the biggest.”

From an office perched on the scalloped edge of the continent, Victoria Bradley jokes that she has the most beautiful doctor’s practice in Australia.

Outside her window, farmland rolls into rocky coastline, hemming a glasslike bay striped with turquoise and populated by showboating dolphins.

Home to about 3,000 people, a few shops, two roundabouts and a tiny hospital, Streaky Bay is an idyllic beach town.

For Dr Bradley, though, it is anything but. The area’s sole, permanent doctor, she spent years essentially on call 24/7.

Running the hospital and the general practitioner (GP) clinic, life was a never-ending game of catch up. She’d do rounds at the wards before, after and in between regular appointments. Even on good days, lunch breaks were often a pipe dream. On bad days, a hospital emergency would blow up her already punishing schedule.

Burnt out, two years ago she quit – and the thread holding together the remnants of the town’s healthcare system snapped.

Streaky Bay is at the forefront of a national crisis: inadequate government funding is exacerbating a shortage of critical healthcare workers like Dr Bradley; wait times are ballooning; doctors are beginning to write their own rules on fees, and costs to patients are skyrocketing.

A once-revered universal healthcare system is crumbling at every level, sometimes barely getting by on the sheer willpower of doctors and local communities.

As a result, more and more Australians, regardless of where they live, are delaying or going without the care they need.

Health has become a defining issue for voters ahead of the nation’s election on 3 May, with both of Australia’s major parties promising billions of dollars in additional funding.

But experts say the solutions being offered up are band-aid fixes, while what is needed are sweeping changes to the way the system is funded – reform for which there has so far been a lack of political will.

Australians tell the BBC the country is at a crossroads, and needs to decide if universal healthcare is worth saving.

Healthcare was the last thing on Renee Elliott’s mind when she moved to Streaky Bay – until the 40-year-old found a cancerous lump in her breast in 2019, and another one four years later.

Seeing a local GP was the least of her problems. With the expertise and treatment she needed only available in Adelaide, about 500km away, Mrs Elliott has spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars accessing life-saving care, all while raising three boys and running a business.

Though she has since clawed back a chunk of the cost through government schemes, it made an already harrowing time that much more draining: financially, emotionally and physically.

“You’re trying to get better… but having to juggle all that as well. It was very tricky.”

When Australia’s modern health system was born four decades ago – underpinned by a public insurance scheme called Medicare – it was supposed to guarantee affordable and accessible high-quality care to people like Mrs Elliott as “a basic right”.

Health funding here is complex and shared between states and federal governments. But the scheme essentially meant Australians could present their bright green Medicare member card at a doctor’s office or hospital, and Canberra would be sent a bill. It paid through rebates funded by taxes.

Patients would either receive “bulk billed” – completely free – care, mostly through the emerging public system, or heavily subsidised treatment through a private healthcare sector offering more benefits and choice to those who wanted them.

Medicare became a national treasure almost instantly. It was hoped this set up would combine the best parts of the UK’s National Health Service and the best of the United States’ system.

Fast forward 40 years and many in the industry say we’re on track to end up with the worst of both.

There is no denying that healthcare in Australia is still miles ahead of much of the world, particularly when it comes to emergency care.

But the core of the crisis and key to this election is GP services, or primary care, largely offered by private clinics. There has historically been little need for public ones, with most GPs choosing to accept Medicare rebates as full payment.

That is increasingly uncommon though, with doctors saying those allowances haven’t kept up with the true cost of delivering care. At the same time, staff shortages, which persist despite efforts to recruit from overseas, create a scarcity that only drives up prices further.

According to government data, about 30% of patients must now pay a “gap fee” for a regular doctor’s appointment – on average A$40 (£19.25; $25.55) out of pocket.

But experts suspect the true figure is higher: it’s skewed by seniors and children, who tend to visit doctors more often and still enjoy mostly bulk-billed appointments. Plus there’s a growing cohort of patients not captured by statistics, who simply don’t go to the doctor because of escalating fees.

Brisbane electrician Callum Bailey is one of them.

“Mum or my partner will pester and pester and pester… [but] I’m such a big ‘I’ll just suffer in silence’ person because it’s very expensive.”

And every dollar counts right now, the 25-year-old says: “At my age, I probably should be in my prime looking for housing… [but] even grocery shopping is nuts.

“[I] just can’t keep up.”

This is a tale James Gillespie kept hearing.

So his startup Cleanbill began asking the question: if the average Australian adult walked into a GP clinic, could they get a free, standard appointment?

This year, they called almost all of the nation’s estimated 7,000 GP clinics – only a fifth of them would bulk bill a new adult patient. In the entire state of Tasmania, for example, they couldn’t find a single one.

The results resonate with many Australians, he says: “It really brought it home to them that, ‘Okay, it’s not just us. This is happening nationwide’.”

And that’s just primary care.

Public specialists are so rare and so overwhelmed – with wait times often far beyond safe levels – that most patients are funnelled toward exorbitantly expensive private care. The same goes for a lot of non-emergency hospital treatments or dental work.

There are currently no caps on how much private specialists, dentists or hospitals can charge and neither private health insurance nor slim Medicare rebates reliably offer substantial relief.

The BBC spoke to people across the country who say the increasing cost of healthcare had left them relying on charities for food, avoiding dental care for almost a decade, or emptying their retirement savings to fund treatment.

Others are borrowing from their parents, taking out pay-day loans to buy medication, remortgaging their houses, or selling their possessions.

Kimberley Grima regularly lies awake at night, calculating which of her three children – who, like her, all have chronic illnesses – can see their specialists. Her own overdue health checks and tests are barely an afterthought.

“They’re decisions that you really don’t want to have to make,” the Aboriginal woman from New South Wales tells the BBC.

“But when push comes to shove and you haven’t got the money… you’ve got no other option. It’s heart-breaking.”

Another woman tells the BBC that had she been able to afford timely appointments, her multiple sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disease, would have been identified, and slowed, quicker.

“I was so disabled by the time I got a diagnosis,” she says.

The people missing out tend to be the ones who need it the most, experts say.

“We have much more care in healthier, wealthier parts of Australia than in poorer, sicker parts of Australia,” Peter Breadon, from the Grattan Institute think tank says.

All of this creates a vicious cycle which feeds even more pressure back into an overwhelmed system, while entrenching disadvantage and fuelling distrust.

Every single one of those issues is more acute in the regions.

Streaky Bay has long farewelled the concept of affordable healthcare, fighting instead to preserve access to any at all.

It’s why Dr Bradley lasted only three months after quitting before “guilt” drove her back to the practice.

“There’s a connection that goes beyond just being the GP… You are part of the community.

“I felt that I’d let [them] down. Which was why I couldn’t just let go.”

She came back to a far more sustainable three-day week in the GP clinic, with Streaky Bay forced to wage a bidding war with other desperate regions for pricey, fly-in-fly-out doctors to fill in the gaps.

It’s yet another line on the tab for a town which has already invested so much of its own money into propping up a healthcare system supposed to be funded by state and private investment.

“We don’t want a gold service, but what we want is an equitable service,” says Penny Williams, who helps run the community body which owns the GP practice.

When the clinic was on the verge of closure, the town desperately rallied to buy it. When it was struggling again, the local council diverted funding from other areas to top up its coffers. And even still most standard patients – unless they are seniors or children – fork out about A$50 per appointment.

It means locals are paying for their care three times over, Ms Williams says: through their Medicare taxes, council rates, and then out-of-pocket gap fees.

“No-one would say this is the Australia that we want, surely,” Elizabeth Deveny, from the Consumers Health Forum of Australia, tells the BBC.

Like many wealthy countries, the nation is struggling to cope with a growing population which is, on average, getting older and sicker.

There’s a small but increasing cohort which says it is time to let go of the notion of universal healthcare, as we’ve known it.

Many doctors, a handful of economists, and some conservative politicians have sought to redefine Medicare as a “safety net” for the nation’s most vulnerable rather than as a scheme for all.

Health economist Yuting Zhang argues free healthcare and universal healthcare are different things.

The taxes the government collects for Medicare are already nowhere near enough to support the system, she says, and the country either needs to have some tough conversations about how it will find additional funds, or accept reasonable fees for those who can afford them.

“There’s always a trade-off… You have limited resources, you have to think about how to use them effectively and efficiently.”

The original promise of Medicare has been “undermined by decades of neglect”, the Australian Medical Association’s Danielle McMullen says, and most Australians now accept they need to contribute to their own care.

She says freezes to Medicare rebates – which were overseen by both parties between 2013 and 2017 and meant the payments didn’t even keep up with inflation – were the last straw. Since then, many doctors have been dipping into their own pockets to help those in need.

Both the Labor Party and the Liberal-National coalition accept there is a crisis, but blame each other for it.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton says his government will invest A$9bn in health, including funds for extra subsidised mental health appointments and for regional universities training key workers.

“Health has become another victim of Labor’s cost of living crisis… we know it has literally never been harder or more expensive to see a GP than it is right now,” health spokesperson Anne Ruston told the BBC in a statement.

On the other side, Albanese – whipping out his Medicare card almost daily – has sought to remind voters that Labor created the beloved system, while pointing out the Coalition’s previously mixed support of the universal scheme and the spending cuts Dutton proposed as Health Minister a decade ago.

“At this election, this little card here, your Medicare card, is what is at stake,” Albanese has said.

His government has started fixing things already, he argues, and has pledged an extra A$8.5bn for training more GPs, building additional public clinics, and subsidising more medicines.

But the headline of their rescue packages is an increase to Medicare rebates and bigger bonuses for doctors who bulk bill.

Proposed by Labor, then matched by the Coalition, the changes will make it possible for 9 out of 10 Australians to see a GP for free, the parties claim.

One Tasmanian doctor tells the BBC it is just a “good election sound bite”. He and many other clinicians say the extra money is still not enough, particularly for the longer consults more and more patients are seeking for complex issues.

Labor has little patience for those criticisms, citing research which they claim shows their proposal will leave the bulk of doctors better off and accusing them of wanting investment “without strings attached”.

But many of the patients the BBC spoke to are sceptical either parties’ proposals will make a huge difference.

There’s far more they need to be doing, they say, rattling off a wish list: more work on training and retaining rural doctors; effective regulation of private fees and more investment in public specialist clinics; universal bulk billing of children for all medical and dental expenses; more funding for allied health and prevention.

Experts like Mr Breadon say, above all else, the way Medicare pays clinicians needs to be overhauled to keep healthcare access genuinely universal.

That is, the government needs to stop paying doctors a set amount per appointment, and give them a budget based on how large and sick the populations they serve are – that is something several recent reviews have said.

And the longer governments wait to invest in these reforms, the more they’re going to cost.

“The stars may be aligning now… It is time for these changes, and delaying them would be really dangerous,” Mr Breadon says.

In Streaky Bay though, locals like Ms Williams wonder if it’s too late. Things are already dangerous here.

“Maybe that’s the cynic in me,” she says, shaking her head.

“The definition of universal is everyone gets the same, but we know that’s not true already.”

In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Guillaume Broche was like millions of others around the world.

“Bored in their job and wanting to do something different.”

Working for French gaming giant Ubisoft at the time, he had an idea for his own project – a role-playing game inspired by one of his childhood favourites, the classic Japanese series Final Fantasy.

That would become Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 which, five years later, has become a sensation.

It sold one million copies in just three days, topped Spotify viral charts with its soundtrack, and even won praise from French President Emmanuel Macron.

But one of the most remarkable things about it is the story of how it was made – a tale of random Reddit messages, “massive luck” and an unusual approach to game development.

Expedition 33 is set in Lumiere, a fictional world overshadowed by a huge monolith bearing a glowing numeral on its face.

Each year an entity known as The Paintress emerges and lowers the number by one, causing everyone of that age to vanish, and the game follows a group on a quest to destroy the mysterious being.

It’s an intriguing set-up for an epic tale, but the game’s aesthetic, inspired by 19th-Century France, and its old-school turn-based battles also set it apart.

But the conventional wisdom when Guillaume began was that players didn’t want something like that.

So, five years ago, he started to recruit people for his passion project, firing out messages on Reddit and online forums to potential colleagues.

One of those who responded was Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, who was under lockdown in Australia at the time.

“I saw a post on Reddit by Guillaume asking for voice actors to record something for free for a demo,” she says.

“I was like: ‘I’ve never done that, it sounds kinda cool’, so I sent him an audition.”

Jennifer was originally cast as a major character in an early version of the game, but eventually switched roles to become the team’s lead writer.

Guillaume eventually left Ubisoft and formed Sandfall Interactive to work on Clair Obscur full-time from its base in Montpellier, France.

After securing funding from publisher Kepler Interactive, the core team grew to about 30 people.

Many of them were found in a similar, unusual manner to Jennifer.

Composer Lorien Testard – who had never worked on a video game before – was discovered via posts on music-sharing website Soundcloud.

“I call this the Guillaume effect. He’s very good at finding really cool people,” says Jennifer.

Guillaume more modestly attributes his success rate to Covid – people looking for a creative outlet – and also “massive luck”.

“It’s always the same story,” he says.

“I have a list of 15 people to contact and I’m like: ‘Okay I’m probably going to get maybe no one at all’.

“And every time the first one is like: ‘Yeah, let’s do it’.”

But Guillaume does admit that he targeted people who seemed to be “in line with the direction” he wanted to take the project.

“Lorien, when we discussed the game for the first time, we had exactly the same references,” he says.

“We loved the same thing. We watched the same things. The discussion was so fluid.”

Expedition 33 has also been widely praised for its production values – rivalling those of games worked on by hundreds, even thousands of staff.

Guillaume attributes some of this to recent advances in tools used to make games, which allowed the team to work more efficiently.

Having the backing of Kepler allowed the studio to attract actors including Daredevil’s Charlie Cox, Lord of the Rings star Andy Serkis, and video game actors Jennifer English and Ben Starr.

And while Sandfall did call on extra input from support studios, musicians and other specialists, Jennifer and Guillaume say the core team ended up “wearing a lot of different hats”.

“And so we all pitch in and do different parts, things that may be outside of our traditional role,” says Jennifer, who was also in charge of translating the game into different languages.

“We have, I think, an amazing team mostly of junior people but they are so incredibly invested in the project and talented,” says Guillaume.

“Somehow it worked, which still makes no sense to me after all these years.”

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

Last week’s deadly militant attack in Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, which claimed 26 civilian lives, has reignited a grim sense of déjà vu for India’s security forces and diplomats.

This is familiar ground. In 2016, after 19 Indian soldiers were killed in Uri, India launched “surgical strikes” across the Line of Control – the de facto border between India and Pakistan – targeting militant bases.

In 2019, the Pulwama bombing, which left 40 Indian paramilitary personnel dead, prompted airstrikes deep into Balakot – the first such action inside Pakistan since 1971 – sparking retaliatory raids and an aerial dogfight.

And before that, the horrific 2008 Mumbai attacks – a 60-hour siege on hotels, a railway station, and a Jewish centre – claimed 166 lives.

Each time, India has held Pakistan-based militant groups responsible for the attacks, accusing Islamabad of tacitly supporting them – a charge Pakistan has consistently denied.

Since 2016, and especially after the 2019 airstrikes, the threshold for escalation has shifted dramatically. Cross-border and aerial strikes by India have become the new norm, provoking retaliation from Pakistan. This has further intensified an already volatile situation.

Once again, experts say, India finds itself walking the tightrope between escalation and restraint – a fragile balance of response and deterrence. One person who understands this recurring cycle is Ajay Bisaria, India’s former high commissioner to Pakistan during the Pulwama attack, who captured its aftermath in his memoir, Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan.

“There are striking parallels between the aftermath of the Pulwama bombing and the killings in Pahalgam,” Mr Bisaria told me on Thursday, 10 days after the latest attack.

Yet, he notes, Pahalgam marks a shift. Unlike Pulwama and Uri, which targeted security forces, this attack struck civilians – tourists from across India – evoking memories of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. “This attack carries elements of Pulwama, but much more of Mumbai,” he explains.

“We’re once again in a conflict situation, and the story is unfolding in much the same way,” Mr Bisaria says.

A week after the latest attack, Delhi moved quickly with retaliatory measures: closing the main border crossing, suspending a key water-sharing treaty, expelling diplomats, and halting most visas for Pakistani nationals – who were given days to leave. Troops on both sides have exchanged intermittent small-arms fire across the border in recent days.

Delhi also barred all Pakistani aircraft – commercial and military – from its airspace, mirroring Islamabad’s earlier move. Pakistan retaliated with its own visa suspensions and suspended a 1972 peace treaty with India. (Kashmir, claimed in full by both India and Pakistan but administered in parts by each, has been a flashpoint between the two nuclear-armed nations since their partition in 1947.)

In his memoir, Mr Bisaria recounts India’s response after the Pulwama attack on 14 February 2019.

He was summoned to Delhi the morning after, as the government moved quickly to halt trade – revoking Pakistan’s most-favoured-nation status, granted in 1996. In the following days, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) imposed a 200% customs duty on Pakistani goods, effectively ending imports, and suspended trade at the land border at Wagah.

Mr Bisaria notes that a broader set of measures was also proposed to scale down engagement with Pakistan, most of which were subsequently implemented.

They included suspending a cross-border train known as the Samjhauta Express, and a bus service linking Delhi and Lahore; deferring talks between border guards on both sides and negotiations over the historic Kartarpur corridor to one of Sikhism’s holiest shrines, halting visa issuance, ceasing cross border, banning Indian travel to Pakistan, and suspending flights between the two countries.

“How hard it was to build trust, I thought. And how easy was it to break it,” Mr Bisaria writes.

“All the confidence-building measures planned, negotiated, and implemented over years in this difficult relationship, could be slashed off on a yellow notepad in minutes.”

The strength of the Indian high commission in Islamabad was reduced from 110 to 55 only in June 2020 after a separate diplomatic incident. (It now stands at 30 after the Pahalgam attack.) India also launched a diplomatic offensive.

A day after the attack, then foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale briefed envoys from 25 countries – including the US, UK, China, Russia, and France – on the role of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), the Pakistan-based militant group behind the bombing, and accused Pakistan of using terrorism as state policy. JeM, designated a terrorist organisation by India, the UN, the UK, and the US, had claimed responsibility for the bombing.

India’s diplomatic offensive continued on 25 February, 10 days after the attack, pushing for JeM chief Masood Azhar‘s designation as a terrorist by the UN sanctions committee and inclusion on the EU’s “autonomous terror list”.

While there was pressure to abrogate the Indus Waters Treaty – a key river water sharing agreement – India opted instead to withhold any data beyond treaty obligations, Mr Bisaria writes. A total of 48 bilateral agreements were reviewed for possible suspension. An all-party meeting was convened in Delhi, resulting in a unanimous resolution.

At the same time, communication channels remained open – including the hotline between the two countries’ Directors General of Military Operations (DGMO), a key link for military-to-military contact, as well as both high commissions. In 2019, as now, Pakistan said the attack was a “false-flag operation”.

Much like this time a crackdown in Kashmir saw the arrest of over 80 “overground workers” – local supporters who may have provided logistical help, shelter, and intelligence to militants from the Pakistan-based group. Rajnath Singh, then Indian home minister, visited Jammu and Kashmir, and dossiers on the attack and suspected perpetrators were prepared.

In a meeting with the external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, Mr Bisaria told her that “that India’s diplomatic options in dealing with a terrorist attack of this nature was limited”.

“She gave me the impression that some tough action was round the corner, after which, I should expect the role of diplomacy to expand,” Mr Bisaria writes.

On 26 February, Indian airstrikes – its first across the international border since 1971 – targeted JeM’s training camp in Balakot.

Six hours later, the Indian foreign secretary announced the strikes had killed “a very large number” of militants and commanders. Pakistan swiftly denied the claim. More high-level meetings followed in Delhi.

The crisis escalated dramatically the next morning, 27 February, when Pakistan launched retaliatory air raids.

In the ensuing dogfight, an Indian fighter jet was shot down, and its pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, ejected and landed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Captured by Pakistani forces, his detention in enemy territory triggered a wave of national concern and further heightened tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.

Mr Bisaria writes India activated multiple diplomatic channels, with US and UK envoys pressing Islamabad. The Indian message was “any attempt by Pakistan to escalate situation further or to cause harm to the pilot would lead to escalation by India.”

Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan announced the pilot’s release on 28 February, with the handover occurring on 1 March under prisoner of war protocol. Pakistan presented the move as a “goodwill gesture” aimed at de-escalating tensions.

By 5 March, with the dust settling from Pulwama, Balakot, and the pilot’s return, India’s political temperature had cooled. The Cabinet Committee on Security decided to send India’s high commissioner back to Pakistan, signalling a shift towards diplomacy.

“I arrived in Islamabad on 10 March, 22 days after leaving in the wake of Pulwama. The most serious military exchange since Kargil had run its course in less than a month,” Mr Bisaria writes,

“India was willing to give old-fashioned diplomacy another chance…. This, with India having achieved a strategic and military objective and Pakistan having claimed a notion of victory for its domestic audience.”

Mr Bisaria described it as a “testing and fascinating time” to be a diplomat. This time, he notes, the key difference is that the targets were Indian civilians, and the attack occurred “ironically, when the situation in Kashmir had dramatically improved”.

He views escalation as inevitable, but notes there’s also a “de-escalation instinct alongside the escalation instinct”. When the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) meets during such conflicts, he says, their decisions weigh the conflict’s economic impact and seek measures that hurt Pakistan without triggering a backlash against India.

“The body language and optics are similar [this time],” he says, but highlights what he sees as the most significant move: India’s threat to annul the Indus Waters Treaty. “If India acts on this, it would have long-term, serious consequences for Pakistan.”

“Remember, we’re still in the middle of a crisis,” says Mr Bisaria. “We haven’t yet seen any kinetic [military] action.”

At a military training ground near the city of Wroclaw, ordinary Poles are lining up, waiting to be handed guns and taught how to shoot. “Once the round is loaded, the weapon is ready to fire,” barks the instructor, a Polish soldier, his face smeared with camouflage paint.

Young and old, men and women, parents and children, they’ve all come here for one reason: to learn how to survive an armed attack.

As well as a turn on the shooting range, this Saturday morning programme, called “Train with the Army”, also teaches civilians hand-to-hand combat, first aid and how to put on a gas mask.

“The times are dangerous now, we need to be ready,” says the co-ordinator of the project, Captain Adam Sielicki. “We have a military threat from Russia, and we are preparing for this.”

Capt Sielicki says the programme is oversubscribed, and the Polish government now has plans to expand it so that every adult male in the country receives training. Poland, which shares borders with both Russia and Ukraine, says it will spend almost 5% of GDP on defence this year, the highest in Nato.

Last week, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Poland aims to build “the strongest army in the region”. Warsaw has been on a spending spree, buying planes, ships, artillery systems and missiles from the US, Sweden and South Korea, among others.

Dariusz is one of those attending the Saturday course in Wroclaw, and says he would be the “very first” to volunteer if Poland were attacked. “History has taught us that we must be prepared to defend ourselves on our own. We cannot rely on anyone else. Today alliances exist, and tomorrow they are broken.”

As he removes his gas mask, Bartek says he thinks most Poles “will take up arms” if attacked, “and be ready to defend the country.”

Agata is attending with a friend. She says the election of Donald Trump has made people more worried. “He wants to pull out [of Europe]. That’s why we feel even less safe. If we’re not prepared and Russia attacks us, we’ll simply become their prisoners.”

Statements by Donald Trump and members of his administration have caused deep concern among officials in Warsaw. During a visit to the Polish capital in February, the US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said Europe mustn’t assume that the US troop presence on the continent “will last forever”.

The US currently has 10,000 troops stationed in Poland, but Washington announced last month it was pulling out of a key military base in the city of Rzeszow in the east of Poland. Officials say the troops will be redeployed within Poland, but the move has caused yet more unease in the country.

Donald Trump’s apparent hostility towards Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and warm words for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have only added to the worry.

Poland is due to sign a defence agreement with France in the coming days, and another pact with the UK is in the pipeline – further moves by Warsaw to pivot away from its historically strong military ties with Washington. There is also talk of Poland being brought under the French military’s “nuclear umbrella”.

“I think [Trump] has certainly pressed us to think more creatively about our security,” says Tomasz Szatkowski, the permanent representative of Poland to Nato and presidential advisor on defence. “I think the US can’t afford to lose Poland, because that would be a sign… that you can’t rely on the US. However, we do have to think of other options and develop our own capabilities.”

“If the Russians continue their aggressive intentions towards Europe, we’re going to be the first one – the gatekeeper,” Mr Szatkowski says. He ascribes Poland’s rapid military build-up to “first of all, the geopolitical situation, but also, the experience of history.”

The painful legacy of Russian occupation can be felt everywhere here.

At a state-run care home in Warsaw, 98-year-old Wanda Traczyk-Stawska recalls the last time Russian forces invaded – in 1939, when a pact between Stalin and Hitler resulted in Poland being carved up between the USSR and Nazi Germany.

“In 1939 I was twelve years old. I remember my father was very concerned about [the Russians],” Wanda recalls, “We knew that Russia had attacked us, they took advantage of the fact that the Germans had exposed us.”

On a shelf is a photograph of Wanda as a fighter, brandishing a machine gun during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the Polish underground fought the German Army amidst the ruins of the city. After pushing back the Germans in the dying days of World War Two, the Soviet Union installed a pro-Moscow regime in Poland, which ruled the country until 1989.

Currently, around 216,000 servicemen and women make up the Polish armed forces. The government says they intend to increase that to half a million, including reservists – which would give it the second-largest military in Nato after the United States.

I ask Wanda whether she thinks it’s a good thing that Poland is building up its military. “Of course, yes. Russia has this aggression written into its history. I’m not talking about people, but the authorities are always like that,” she sighs. “It is better to be a well-armed country than to wait for something to happen. Because I am a soldier who remembers that weapons are the most important thing.”

Eighty years since the end of World War Two, Poles are once again eyeing their neighbours nervously. In a warehouse in southern Poland, by popular demand, one company has constructed a mock-up of a bomb shelter.

“These shelters are designed primarily to protect against a nuclear bomb, but also against armed attacks,” says Janusz Janczy, the boss of ShelterPro, who shows me around the steel bunker, complete with bunk beds and a ventilation system. “People are building these shelters simply because they don’t know what to expect tomorrow.”

Janusz says demand for his shelters has soared since Donald Trump took office. “It used to be just a few phone calls a month. Now there are dozens a week,” he says, “My clients are most afraid of Russia. And they’re concerned that Nato wouldn’t come to defend Poland.”

But are Poles ready to defend the country if those fears become a reality? A recent poll found that only 10.7% of adults said they would join the army as volunteers in the event of war, and a third said they would flee.

On a sunny afternoon in Wroclaw, I ask Polish students whether they’d be ready to defend their country if attacked. Most say they wouldn’t. “The war is very close but feels quite far,” says medical student Marcel, “but if Russia attacked, I think I’d run.”

“I would probably be the first one trying to escape the country,” says another student, Szymon. “I just don’t really see anything worth dying for here.”

In the first week of 2025, Nigel Farage told me his ultimate goal was to become prime minister. It stuck in my mind that he chose to add: “I’m not joking.”

Nobody in the two traditional main parties finds his stunning success this week funny. “Farage is no longer someone we can just laugh off,” a former Conservative cabinet minister told me. If the idea of Farage in No 10 seemed outlandish in January, the backing of millions of voters this week shows it’s not a wild notion.

The next General Election is, of course, miles away. Parties can surge and sink. But this week’s results show that Farage has changed the race.

For Labour, it’s a race to prove that government can actually be a force for good. Minister after minister trotted out the same lines as the results came in – waiting lists are starting to come down, the minimum wage has gone up, and new breakfast clubs are opening in schools. I could almost recite their script by the end of our election coverage.

There is little appetite in No 10 to budge on any of the big decisions they’ve already made, however many times internal critics, and increasing numbers of loyalists, complain about cutting winter fuel payments or raising employer National Insurance contributions.

But Downing Street is desperate to show that despite its unpopularity in the polls and grisly performance in real elections, there are signs of progress. Labour is well aware its main rival at the next election could be Reform, not the Tories – the disappointment and disillusionment felt by some in the UK finding a voice in Farage.

Yet has the party’s top brass understood how serious the threat could be?

One party veteran suggests it’s only “just starting to dawn” on those at the top, warning “the coming years could be existential for Labour”.

While the government can ‘do’, opposition parties can only ‘say’. For the Tories it’s now a race to look like a serious outfit and for Kemi Badenoch it’s a race to become not just a leader who voters recognise, but one they warm to.

In politics it’s often said you’re quick or you’re dead – but the Conservative leader’s pitch to her party was “Renewal 2030”, and she’s repeatedly suggested her approach is to have a long, hard think about what the party should do next.

There is a push for Badenoch to do more faster, and to be more visible. A former council leader has called for her to resign.

Another said the “main part of the job is grabbing attention – it doesn’t matter what you do if no-one sees or hears”.

Badenoch will join us on Sunday’s programme alongside Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay and Zia Yusuf, chairman of Reform UK.

Pollsters report that six months into the job, Badenoch is still an unknown for huge numbers of voters. Farage is a past master at grabbing headlines, seizing on issues other politicians are sometimes reluctant to, talking in terms that raise eyebrows, creating rows and news coverage.

Reform has already been ahead of the Conservatives in the polls for months – and many Tories acknowledge privately it’s not impossible that Farage’s party could replace them in the medium term. It’s “not inevitable”, one of the former ministers said, “but we have to throw everything at it to make sure it doesn’t happen, not just hope or guess”.

The race for Reform is to show that they can go beyond effective campaigning to running things. When they walk over the threshold of county halls and mayors’ offices for the first time, they cross the threshold from being a party of protest to a party with responsibility.

They have built a campaigning machine, a brand, and a platform at breakneck speed with lots of money to spend. But being in charge, making choices that affect voters’ lives directly, is a different job. We know relatively little about how they’ll operate beyond promises of opening the books, Elon Musk-style, and rooting out waste.

When pressed for what that would mean, Reform has mentioned council equality officers being axed, and cutting spending on cycle lanes or traffic calming zones. When asked how they would close asylum hotels, as promised in the parts of the country they’ll run, Richard Tice, the deputy leader, said: “I’ll come back to you.”

One of Reform’s new mayors, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, suggested migrants could be housed in tents instead. With responsibility comes scrutiny, and you can bet the other parties will be watching like hawks and seize on any mishaps.

• What might Reform do with its newly-won power?

But this week’s extraordinary success for Reform UK is leading an increasing number of politicians in the two traditional big parties to ponder how deep the public’s disillusionment really is with the political system – and what they can really do to address it.

One member of the government told me they have to deal with “anger and frustration. Rebellion. Patriotism. A big four years coming up”.

A shadow minister, referring to both the Tories and Labour, said: “We’re not connecting and politics isn’t working… either Labour will be able to get themselves sorted and show government can work, or Reform will win.”

The Liberal Democrats had impressive advances this week too, and the Greens made some steady progress. The elections were only in England and at a UK-wide level the jigsaw is already much more complicated. But voters’ decisions this week have shaken the central dynamic in our national politics, which is always, in the end, a fight between one big bloc on the left and one big bloc on the right.

Our two-party system has been declared over on many previous occasions – then miraculously survived. But after this week, you wouldn’t say it could never happen.

That week back in January when Farage declared he wanted to get into No 10, a senior government figure told me that their party “mustn’t over think the threat” Reform posed. After this week, that is a phrase they’d be unlikely to repeat.

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The bride, Evelyn Sekgalakane, sparkled in white as she walked down the aisle hand-in-hand with Shirley Molala, who was about to become her “sister wife” at a mass wedding celebration at a South African church that encourages polygamy.

Behind them came the groom Lesiba Molala, who was marrying another wife at the elaborate ceremony at the International Pentecostal Holiness Church (IPHC) south-west of Johannesburg.

The polygamous bridal party was among 55 marriages that took place there on Easter Sunday – a loud, long and joyous occasion.

Only seven of the unions were welcoming an extra wife to the family – but all were open to doing so in the future.

“He is a God [who approves] of polygamy,” rang out repeatedly across the packed auditorium. Polygamy is the practice of having more than one spouse at the same time.

Shirley, who is Mr Molala’s second wife and has been married to him for 25 years, told me ahead of the big day: “I love polygamy because it is rooted in Biblical teaching” – a reference to passages in the Old Testament of the Bible.

She was handpicked by his first wife, who has since died, while a third wife had also joined the family – leaving in the wake of a leadership row that split the congregation.

The 48-year-old explained that as the process of adding another spouse had started spiritually, it made it easier to regard the incoming wife as a sister and friend.

“We [first three wives] got along to a point where we’d wear matching clothes. So I learnt this from the Molala family and that’s why I was able to do the same for Evelyn.”

Before the official start of the marriage ceremonies – which each involved an exchange of rings but no spoken vows – the jubilant congregation gathered outside the auditorium at around noon in a riot of colour and noise.

Loudspeakers blaring out church songs competed with the cheers of thousands of well-wishers – some of whom were dressed in the church’s blue-and-white uniforms, while others sported their Sunday best.

Over the next five hours bridal parties arrived to great fanfare and tried to outdo one another: one large contingent of bridesmaids was dressed in different shades of electric lime green, another featured a Gucci-clad groomsman.

Beforehand church officials had checked the outfits at the gate to make sure everyone in attendance was suitably dressed – no skimpy outfits, bare arms or trousers allowed for women, who also had to cover their heads, with jackets prescribed for men.

The church has a strict moral code – the sexes sit separately inside the auditorium during ordinary services and dating is not allowed.

“I only learned about polygamy when I joined the church and was taught that simply dating a woman was not allowed. So because I realised that one woman would not be enough for me, I felt that rather than cheat, let me get another wife,” Lesiba Molala, 67, told the BBC.

These mass weddings take place three times a year at the church’s grand headquarters in the small rural town of Zuurbekom – at Easter, in September and December.

After each wedding party’s raucous arrival was over, the group walked a red carpet to take photos.

Then it was time for the church’s leader, Leonard Frederick G Modise, to arrive – and his entrance almost stole the show.

Referred to as “the comforter”, he was ushered in – along with his family – by a marching band, horse parade and a series of luxury vehicles, among them a midnight sapphire Rolls Royce.

As the sun began to set, it was time for the official programme to begin – with each entourage entering the auditorium to make their way slowly down the white-carpeted aisle.

I caught up with the Molala trio before their turn. Evelyn was excited and all smiles about her dress: “I told you, you would not recognise me!”

The service, which went on until 22:00, ended with a blessing from Mr Modise for the new couples and their other spouses – with the festivities going on long into the night.

While such pageantry is often associated with weddings here – albeit not on such a grand scale – multiple marriage ceremonies are unusual, even in a country as diverse and multicultural as South Africa.

So too is the inclusion of polygamous unions. While polygyny – the marriage of a man to several women – is allowed in South Africa, such relationships are usually registered as customary marriages and are not celebrated in church.

However, the IPHC is one of what is known as an African independent church, which is allowed to officiate them – as long as the marriages are also registered with the country’s home affairs department.

According to the 2022 census, more than 85% of South Africans identified as Christian, followed by 8%, who said they practised traditional African beliefs.

Several churches with large congregations mix both belief systems – like the IPHC – though mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches remain the biggest denominations.

For the IPHC, polygamy has been taught and encouraged and has “evolved with the church” from its inception in Soweto in 1962 to a congregation today of 3.1 million across southern Africa, senior church official Mpho Makwana told the BBC.

Mr Molala married his first wife in 1991, six years after joining the church. She was also a member – an important factor for those looking to take a spouse. The church explicitly forbids marriages to outsiders.

Nine years later, Mr Molala and his wife sat down to discuss the expansion of the family. After a church-wide search, the couple settled on Shirley who was then 23.

“I felt important [because I was] noticed among the many women in the church,” she said.

Evelyn too was selected after a church-initiated process that began in February. She admitted it took a while for her to warm to the idea of joining a polygamous union, though Shirley’s receptive attitude made it easier for her.

The 44-year-old had grown up in the church but later left, going on to have three children, before returning to the fold a few years ago.

With his marriage to Evelyn, Mr Molala has informally adopted her children, bringing the total number of his offspring to 13.

Each of his families live in separate houses – although Evelyn will join him at his home for the early stages of the marriage.

Polygamy, traditionally practised in some South African cultures, does divide people in the country. In recent years several reality shows have given an insight into life in plural families – and sparked debate about whether they are still relevant.

Prof Musa Xulu, a religious expert with South Africa’s Cultural, Religious and Linguistics Rights Communities Rights Commission, said it was common to come across families in such unions who had been devastated in the initial stages of the HIV/Aids pandemic, which has ravaged South Africa.

The situation had stabilised, though it was still “a big problem”, he told the BBC.

Mr Makwana said the IPHC had addressed this head on – putting in place measures about a decade ago to better protect couples and polygamous unions from HIV/Aids after one family’s experience, which had been an “eye-opener” for the church’s leadership.

Those intending to get married must first get tested for HIV.

“You can’t proceed without going through that process… so there are no surprises ahead,” he said.

The couple must tell each other their results, decide whether to continue and then the church keeps a record on file.

This “100% transparency” also reduced the number of divorces that had often resulted when deception came to light, he said.

Prof Xulu said churches like the IPHC, while having an “eclectic approach to Christianity” that was “half-Christian, half-African”, did have doctrinal justifications for their traditions as well as “internal dispute-resolution mechanisms”.

“They will assist families who are undergoing distress,” he said.

The IPHC is heavily involved in the vetting process once a proposal has been accepted. It takes several months and is marked by three pre-nuptial ceremonies.

During this time, couples were “taken through a spiritual process of ensuring they know what they are committing to”, Mr Makwana said.

Most couples are relative strangers before the formal proposal is made – as was the case for Freddy Letsoalo, 35, and 31-year-old Rendani Maemu.

They also tied the knot in Zuurbekom over Easter – both marrying for the first time.

Mr Letsoalo said he first spotted his bride-to-be at a friend’s wedding nearly a decade ago – also celebrated at one of the mass marriage ceremonies.

But they “didn’t talk or do anything else” after their initial meeting, he told the BBC.

“It was love at first sight but remember, we know… the teachings of our church.”

While the two would later become Facebook friends, their interactions were restricted to birthday wishes – that was until December 2024 when Mr Letsoalo set the wheels in motion, alerting first his family and then the church’s leadership of his intentions.

“I wasn’t aware that he was interested in me. When I became aware… I was excited. I’ve always dreamt of my wedding day,” a blushing Ms Maemu, who was raised in the church, told me before the nuptials.

Her dream came true and she did look resplendent before going down the aisle along with nine bridesmaids in a crystal-encrusted gown, tiara and a bridal train several metres long.

While the couple are currently focused on their new life together, both are willing to embrace polygamy should the right opportunity present itself in the future.

“I know there’s a chance that my husband will want to enter into a polygamous marriage,” said the new Mrs Letsoalo.

“I believe in polygamy.”

A view that may be controversial for many South Africans.

• South Africa polyamory: When three’s not a crowd in a relationship
• Outcry over South Africa’s multiple husbands proposal
• One man, four wives: South Africa’s hit reality TV show
• How royal divorce papers have shaken the Zulu kingdom

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been re-elected as the country’s leader, becoming the first in decades to secure a second term.

He defeated opposition leader Peter Dutton of the centre-right Liberal-National coalition. Dutton also lost his seat in Dickson, Queensland – one he had held for 24 years.

It is a remarkable turnaround for Albanese, 62, whose popularity was at record lows at the start of the year as Australians grappled with a cost of living crisis and challenges in healthcare and housing.

US President Donald Trump’s global tariff policy, which did not spare Australia, was also on voters’ minds.

Here’s a look at how that played out in charts, based on an unofficial count by Australian broadcaster ABC:

Albanese needed at least 76 seats in the House of Representatives to form a government.

Before the dissolution of parliament, Labor had a razor-thin majority of 77 seats.

With some 70.8% of the seats already counted, the ABC puts Labor on track to finish with 85 seats – far above the 76 seats needed, giving it a comfortable majority.

The Coalition is expected to gain 36 seats and the Independents stand at 10.

Here’s a reminder of what the seats in the House of Representatives looked like before tonight’s results.

Current projections mean Labor has so far claimed 34.7% of first-preference votes, with the Coalition trailing behind at 31.7%.

The Greens stand at 12.2% of first-preference votes.

As compared to the 2022 election, its clear Labor has increased its share of the national vote, with an increase of 2.1% so far – though that number could increase as counting goes on.

Official vote counting won’t conclude for days but its clear that the Labor government is set to dramatically increase its majority – with swings towards them in almost every area.

This BBC interview with Prince Harry will become one of those famous moments when television collides with the world of the royals.

It was like an emotional avalanche. It began with some stones being kicked over with questions about security and then the interview turned into a spectacular release of what seemed to be a rolling mountain of pent-up frustration and a poignant sense of separation.

The starting point was Prince Harry’s defeat in the courts as he sought to overturn a downgrading of his security in the UK. He seemed wounded. Had he decided it was time to have his say? And then really say some more?

A conversation about security was suddenly becoming about a whole range of insecurities.

Prince Harry looked upset, it seemed a cry from the heart when he said that his father “won’t speak to me because of this security stuff”, even though he didn’t know “how much longer my father has”.

This was a first-hand confirmation of the scale of the rift in the Royal Family. There was also the lack of contact between his children and their wider family in the UK. He was “gutted” and “devastated” and tired of only coming home for funerals and court cases.

And like all family rows, there was a balancing act between wanting to air grievances, to throw emotional punches, and then still want to get back together and hug and make friends.

So Prince Harry talked of the downgrading in his security in terms of this family dispute, suggesting that the Royal Household had influenced the decision, using security as leverage to keep him within the Royal Family.

Then he talked with great frankness, sounding like a slightly homesick son stuck overseas, when he spoke about wanting reconciliation. “There’s no point continuing to fight any more. Life is precious,” he said, holding out an olive branch the size of a small palace.

The “sticking point” for reconciliation is security when he visits the UK, said Prince Harry. And as well as calling on his father the King to help resolve this, he also called on the prime minister and home secretary to intervene.

At that point, it’s worth stepping away from the drama and taking a cold draught of unemotive legal air, from the judge who ruled against Prince Harry on Friday afternoon.

Sir Geoffrey Vos told the court that Prince Harry’s “sense of grievance” did not add up to the same thing as a legal argument. He upheld the decision that security arrangements had been changed because Prince Harry’s circumstances had changed, he was no longer a working royal and no longer living in the UK.

It might have annoyed Prince Harry, but the courts had again rejected his claim about unfair treatment.

There was also a response from Buckingham Palace that sounded like a weary parent.

“All of these issues have been examined repeatedly and meticulously by the courts, with the same conclusion reached on each occasion.”

It wouldn’t be right for the King to wade into issues being reviewed by the courts and considered by government departments, suggested the Palace.

The Home Office, meanwhile, said it was “pleased” that the judgement was in the government’s favour, adding the UK’s security system is “rigorous and proportionate”.

While Prince Harry wore his frustration on his sleeve in this interview, you have to wonder how the rest of his family will privately respond to this outburst, with this story ricocheting around the world, on billions of mobile phones and TV screens.

These clips are going to be seen again and again. Netflix would have spun it out into a mini-series.

VE Day 80 is coming up next week, with the Royal Family prominent at commemorations. But the public might still be thinking of Prince Harry’s accusations about them. How will that work alongside messages of togetherness and unity?

Like in all families, arguments can go back a long way. And Prince Harry’s testimony was disarmingly candid, restlessly baring his feelings, and suggesting that his departure from the UK was still unresolved.

He was looking back with some uncertainty at home, and the question now will be how people at home look back at him.

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The bestselling novelist Robert Harris says a conclave to select a new Pope has a similar dynamic to hit TV show The Traitors.

The author of Conclave, which was last year turned into an Oscar-winning film adaptation, said the programme – in which “faithful” contestants are tasked with trying to work out the “traitors” among them – was “the nearest analogy I can come to”.

“Suddenly everyone swings to one person – you can’t see why, particularly, but it happens,” he tells BBC News ahead of the election to replace Pope Francis, due to begin next week.

“And in a funny way, a similar dynamic does operate in a conclave, which is why often it produces a surprise.”

But Harris argues that it is a process UK political parties should learn from.

The writer argues his book and the subsequent film illustrates how the ancient, secretive ritual in the Sistine Chapel is a “rather brilliant device” for finding the right person to lead an organisation.

Only male cardinals under the age of 80 are entitled to participate. The voting is conducted in total privacy, with the news of a decision announced by white smoke emerging from a chimney on the chapel’s roof.

Political parties throwing the election of their leaders open to the wider membership “has not produced very good results”, Harris says.

He says it would be better if a select number “who have seen the candidates close up, day in, day out, choose who the leader should be”.

He continues: “To lock the door and say you’re not going to come out until you’ve come up with a result concentrates the mind – and if you look back, the popes have been pretty good.

“I didn’t come away from researching the novel thinking this is a terrible idea [and that] I must write a novel to expose how awful it is. In a way, the novel shows a conclave working.”

However, the Fatherland and Archangel author thinks it is strange that women are excluded from the Catholic priesthood and the election for a new Pope.

“Can any sophisticated religion, with such a huge following, really go on and on into the future with such a secondary, demeaning role for women?” he asks.

“I mean, it just seems odd. Would Christ really have only wanted his word to be spread by men?”

Harris says the character of Sister Agnes – a nun who speaks out during a crucial moment in his fictitious conclave – was a “vital” creation.

“I wanted to find some way of getting the female voice in this process, and the only way is the women who serve the meals, clean the rooms and run the hostel when the cardinals are there,” he explains. “I really wanted to make them a part of the story.”

Harris says that, while researching his novel about conclave, Pope Francis’s office gave him permission to visit parts of the Vatican generally off-limits to outsiders.

“They showed me the most extraordinary things and allowed me to walk along the corridor to the balcony where the new Pope shows himself to the huge crowd in St Peter’s Square,” he recounts. “That was a breathtaking moment.”

Harris says that, when piecing together the process of the conclave, he realised he had “stumbled on a treasure trove”.

“I think that the conclave is a rather brilliant device for finding the right sort of person who can command the respect of the church.”

“It’s spiritual and human and political drama all woven into one,” he says. “A conclave is as dramatic as the reading of a will. It’s that level of natural drama.”

After the publication of Conclave in 2016, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor – who had helped Harris with his research – asked for a copy in Italian to give to Pope Francis.

“I gave him the book and he said he thought the translation looked pretty good, but I don’t know whether the Pope did read it. If he did, he didn’t say anything to me.”

Warren Buffett has announced he will retire as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year.

The veteran investor, known as the Oracle of Omaha, told his company’s annual meeting he would hand over the reins to Vice-Chairman Greg Abel.

“I think the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive of the company at year end,” said Buffett, 94.

Mr Buffett, who built Berkshire Hathaway from a failing textile maker into an investment juggernaut worth $1.16tn (£870bn), is arguably the world’s most successful investor.

After standing applause from the audience of around 40,000, he joked: “The enthusiasm shown by that response could be interpreted in two ways.”

The billionaire told Saturday’s company meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, that the only people who had known about his decision were his two children, Howard and Susie Buffett.

Mr Abel, sitting next to Mr Buffett on stage, was apparently caught unaware by the announcement.

Mr Buffett handpicked Mr Abel as his successor four years ago but gave no indication at the time that he would retire.

During the meeting, Mr Buffett added that he does not plan to sell off any of his Berkshire stocks.

“I have no intention, zero, of selling one share of Berkshire Hathaway. It will get given away,” he said, as the crowd cheered.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was among several business leaders who released statements praising Mr Buffett’s business legacy.

“There’s never been someone like Warren, and countless people, myself included, have been inspired by his wisdom,” Mr Cook wrote on X/Twitter.

“It’s been one of the great privileges of my life to know him. And there’s no question that Warren is leaving Berkshire in great hands with Greg.”

In 2023, Mr Buffett issued a rare letter in which he acknowledged that whilst he had no desire to step down, he was “playing in extra innings”.

Berkshire Hathaway owns more than 60 companies, including insurer Geico, battery-maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen.

It also has major stakes in Apple, Coca Cola, Bank of America and American Express, among others.

Mr Buffett, who has given away billions to charity, was last month ranked by Bloomberg as the world’s fourth-wealthiest person, with a net worth of $154bn.

He earned his first money as a six-year-old, bought his first shares at 11 and filed his first tax return at 13.

Despite being one of the richest people in the world, Mr Buffett has lived in the same modest house in Omaha for more than 65 years.

The announcement came as Mr Buffet spoke out against President Donald Trump’s tariffs, telling investors that the US should not use “trade as a weapon”.

“It’s a big mistake in my view when you have 7.5 billion people who don’t like you very well, and you have 300 million who are crowing about how they have done,” he said earlier in the meeting.

“We should be looking to trade with the rest of the world. We should do what we do best and they should do what they do best,” he added.

One week ago, Mac Speake lined up at the start of the London Marathon and prayed his body would carry him to the end.

At 83, the retired GP is the eldest of a dwindling band of men, known as the Ever Presents, who have run every London Marathon since it began in 1981.

“I hope I will be able to do it again next year but I haven’t decided yet. I would be a bit lost without it. It’s been a huge part of my life, but this year was really hard,” he says.

He is speaking from his home in Kettlebaston, Suffolk, where he has spent the past seven days recovering.

“I was doing really well until 22 miles when I blew it. I lost my balance and it all went a bit pear-shaped,” he says.

During his 45 marathons, he has run with broken bones and norovirus so bad he vomited “gallons”.

But he also has “the greatest memories”, with his personal best of two hours and 44 minutes achieved in 1983.

His wife Ros has been to support him every year, apart from one, when she had a stroke.

She recalls their four children hanging off the gates of Buckingham Palace during the first event in 1981, when just 6,500 runners took part, compared to 56,000 this year.

“It was raining and the children were soaked and I couldn’t get to the finish line to give Mac his clothes to change into. So it was a bit stressful,” she says.

Four decades on, supporting Mac is still a bit stressful for Ros.

Along with their daughter, she had to almost carry him across the line this year.

He finished in nine hours and 14 minutes, half an hour quicker than last year – a race Mac went into with a bad back and which he describes as “catastrophic”.

“I worry that his body can’t take it anymore. But I could never stop him from doing it,” says Ros.

After the 15th London Marathon in 1995, the group of 42 men who had completed every event were given a special medal and guaranteed entry to future races.

Now there are only six.

Mac has a strong bond with the other Ever Presents, and affectionately describes 66-year-old Chris Finill from Surrey as the baby of the group.

“Part of me doesn’t want to be defined by the club but I have been doing this event since I was 22 and now I’m a grandfather,” he says.

Chris joined Harrow Athletics Club at the age of 15 and still runs for them, taking the race just as seriously now as he did when he was younger.

“The elites and the people in fancy dress get a lot of attention but I like to think we represent the club runners who were at the core of that very first marathon,” he says.

Chris has witnessed many changes to the marathon over the years, from the landscape, particularly around Canary Wharf, to the number of competitors and the crowds.

In the early days, it was difficult to find out how well you had performed.

“Chip timing wasn’t a thing so if it took you a few minutes to reach the start line, that would be added on,” Chris says.

“The Times used to publish a list so you would either read your official time in the paper the next day, or have to wait for it to arrive in the post.”

In 2018, Chris completed the race despite breaking his arm in four places less than four miles (6km) in.

“I fell to the ground and landed on my arm straight and it was just hanging there. I got a sling and just carried on, then I went straight to hospital from the finish line.”

He completed this year’s race in three hours and 15 minutes and says there is some sadness as the group inevitably gets smaller.

One of the group died between marathons, while another was hit by a motorbike and could not take part.

Some have started the race knowing they would get a DNF (did not finish) while others have chosen a DNS (did not start), knowing they would not be able to complete it.

“Some have been persuaded by their friends and family that they are not quite strong enough. Everyone deals with it in a different way,” he says.

Six nearly became five this year, when David Walker thought he would have to drop out after pulling a muscle in training.

However, he managed to complete the marathon virtually in just under 10 hours near his home in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, with the help of his sons.

Chris tries not to think about the day when he might be the last one standing.

“At the moment I’m not looking much further ahead but I would be thrilled if I got to 50 [races]. You have to take it one race at a time,” he says.

He is full of admiration for Mac and the other Ever Presents, who he describes as a brotherhood.

“We’re all trying to conquer the distance and we all want to see each other succeed.

“To me, as the youngest, it is a big deal seeing Mac and David out there on their feet for so many hours.

“I can only hope I’ll be doing the same when I’m their age.”

Hugh Brasher, chief executive of London Marathon Events, says: “The Ever Presents are a very special part of London Marathon history.

“For most people, training and taking part in just one marathon is a monumental challenge. For these six individuals to have done it 45 times is simply incredible.

“We salute them all and hope to see them on the TCS London Marathon start line for many years to come.”

The six men are part of a club they dread having to leave; one you can easily leave but no longer join.

“Nobody else can ever get in,” Mac says. “There is almost a pressure to carry on, it has given me so much.

“I look back at my life and think ‘I’m not very good at many things but at least I’ve achieved something.’

“I have to be careful because Ros is looking at me, but I think, on balance, I will give it another go next year.”

At least seven people have been killed after a hospital and market were bombed in South Sudan, a medical charity has said, as fears grow of a return to civil war.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said helicopter gunships dropped a bomb on the pharmacy of the hospital it runs in Old Fangak, Jonglei state, burning it down, before firing on the town for 30 minutes. A drone then bombed a local market, MSF said.

The hospital is the only one in Fangak county, which has a population of more than 110,000 people, MSF said, and all its medical supplies were destroyed.

The charity called the attack, which left 20 people injured, a “clear violation of international humanitarian law”.

MSF spokesman Mamman Mustapha told the BBC’s Newshour programme the charity was still trying to establish the facts, but local witnesses had said the aircraft were “government forces helicopters”.

“The hospital is clearly marked as ‘hospital’ with our logo,” he said. “We have shared also our coordinates for all the warring parties in the area so the hospital should be known to both parties as a hospital.”

There was no immediate comment from South Sudan’s government. The BBC has contacted the foreign affairs ministry.

In recent weeks, Nicholas Haysom, who leads the UN mission in South Sudan, has warned the country is “teetering on the brink of a return to full-scale civil war”.

Those worries have been stoked by an escalating feud between President Salva Kiir and Vice-President Riek Machar.

Hours before the hospital bombing, the head of the army, Paul Majok Nang, promised punitive strikes after several barges on a river were hijacked.

He blamed those attacks on a militia linked to Vice-President Machar, who has not commented on the claim.

Machar was arrested in March along with several of his associates, and accused of trying to stir up a rebellion.

The government has recently listed counties it considers to be hostile – in other words allied to Machar.

That increased the suspicion that South Sudan could be headed for another conflict involving the country’s two largest ethnic groups.

South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but two years later, a civil war erupted when President Kiir dismissed Machar as vice-president, accusing him of plotting a coup.

The ensuing conflict, largely fought along ethnic lines between supporters of the two leaders, resulted in an estimated 400,000 deaths and 2.5 million people being forced from their homes – more than a fifth of the population.

A peace deal was reached in 2018 and a unity government forged with the same two men at the helm, but elections that were supposed to have been called since then have not happened.

The peace deal was also meant to see the end of all the militias and the formation of one united army – but that has not happened and many armed groups are still loyal to different politicians.

The current crisis was sparked earlier this year when the White Army militia, which was allied to Machar during the civil war, clashed with the army in Upper Nile state and overran a military base in Nasir.

Then, in March, a UN helicopter attempting to evacuate troops came under fire, leaving several dead, including a high-ranking army general.

Rights groups have been calling for the military to stop bombing civilian areas.

• Why fears are growing of a return of civil war to South Sudan
• The mother and children trapped between two conflicts
• End conflict to honour Pope, Vatican diplomat tells South Sudan
• South Sudan’s Olympic basketball win unites ‘every single tribe’

Thai prosecutors have said they will not pursue charges against an American academic who was arrested last month under a strict law against defaming the monarchy.

Paul Chambers, a lecturer at Naresuan University, was arrested after the army filed a complaint against him.

On Thursday, prosecutors said they would request for charges against him to be dropped, though this has to be reviewed by the police. If they disagree, the decision will fall to the attorney-general.

Mr Chambers’ arrest marked a rare instance of a foreigner being charged under the lese-majeste law, which the government says is necessary to protect the monarchy but critics say is used to clamp down on free speech.

“The director-general had decided not to indict the suspect,” said the Office of the Attorney-General, adding that prosecutors would seek to dismiss the case in court and coordinate with police.

Mr Chambers first lived and worked in Thailand 30 years ago, and in recent years has been lecturing and researching at Naresuan University in northern Thailand. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Thai military.

The complaint against him centres on a notice for an academic webinar organised by a Singapore research institute about Thailand’s military and police reshuffles. Mr Chambers was one of the webinar’s speakers.

The army had accused Mr Chambers of “defamation, contempt or malice” towards the royal family, “importing false computer data” in a way “likely to damage national security or cause public panic”, and disseminating computer data “that may affect national security”, according to a letter from police that was received by the university’s social sciences faculty.

Mr Chambers stated that he did not write or publish the notice for the webinar. The army based its complaint on a Facebook post by a Thai royalist, who translated the webinar notice into Thai.

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

Since late 2020, the legal aid group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR) has seen more than 300 cases of lese-majeste involving more than 270 people, including 20 children under the age of 18, said Akarachai Chaimaneekarakate, the group’s advocacy lead.

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

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

Police in Hong Kong have arrested the father and brother of US-based pro-democracy activist Anna Kwok for allegedly helping with her finances, according to media reports.

It is the first time the relatives of an “absconder” have been charged under the territory’s security law, Reuters news agency said.

The authorities accused Ms Kwok, 26, of breaching Hong Kong’s national security laws after participating in pro-democracy protests in 2019.

She fled the territory in 2020 and now serves as the Executive Director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC), an organisation based in Washington DC.

Police said they had arrested two men aged 35 and 68 on suspicion of handling “funds or other financial assets” belonging to Kwok, Reuters said.

Local media later identified the two men as relatives of Ms Kwok, citing police sources.

According to a report by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), police launched an investigation into the pair after observing they had met Ms Kwok overseas.

The 68-year-old, identified by local media as Ms Kwok’s father Kwok Yin-sang, is accused of helping his daughter handle her insurance policy upon his return to Hong Kong.

According to a charge sheet seen by Reuters, Kwok Yin-sang had been trying to access Ms Kwok’s life and personal accident insurance policy which could be used to obtain funds on her behalf.

He has been denied bail by national security judge Victor So at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts, Reuters reported.

The 35-year-old man, identified by local media as Ms Kwok’s brother, is accused of supporting their father’s attempts to retrieve the money, Reuters said.

He has reportedly been released on bail pending further investigation.

Under Hong Kong’s Safeguarding National Security Bill, it is illegal to “make available, directly or indirectly, any funds or other financial assets or economic resources to, or for the benefit of, a relevant absconder”.

In 2023, Hong Kong placed a bounty on the heads of several pro-democracy activists – including Ms Kwok – who had fled the territory.

The eight activists targeted were accused of colluding with foreign forces – a crime that can carry a sentence of life in prison.

At the time, Ms Kwok said the bounty was aimed at intimidating her and her fellow activists.

“That’s exactly the kind of thing the Hong Kong government and the Chinese Communist party would do – which is to intimidate people into not doing anything, silencing them,” she told BBC’s Newshour at the time.

The former British colony became a special administrative region of China in 1997, when Britain’s 99-year lease of the New Territories, north of Hong Kong island, expired.

Hong Kong still enjoys freedoms not seen in mainland China, but they are widely thought to be on the decline.

An election on Saturday is likely to incorporate a new city on the southern tip of Texas dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.

Local residents are voting on incorporating a patch of land known as Boca Chica Village as a new municipality called Starbase.

Most of the 283 eligible voters are SpaceX employees, and most voted early, according to county records.

The creation of a new municipality would establish a local government with a mayor and two commissioners that would have power over planning, taxation and other local issues. But some nearby residents have opposed the measure and accuse the company of harming the local environment.

The proposed city covers about 1.6 sq miles (3.9 sq km) that was sparsely populated before SpaceX began buying land in the area in 2012.

Since then, company housing and SpaceX facilities have sprouted up, and Mr Musk has a residence in the area. Other evidence of the tycoon’s presence includes a road called Memes Street and a giant bust of the tycoon himself, which was recently vandalised.

Around 500 people are estimated to live nearby.

The possibility of incorporation as a city was rumoured for years before a petition submitted in December 2024 paved the way for Saturday’s vote.

If the measure is approved, the first mayor of Starbase will be Bobby Peden, a SpaceX vice-president who – along with two other local residents looking to fill the commissioner seats – is running unopposed. The BBC contacted Mr Peden for comment.

Starbase will be a Type C city – a category of municipality of fewer than 5,000 people and a designation that among other things will allow officials to levy a property tax of up to 1.5%, according to the Texas Municipal League.

If Starbase is incorporated, a bill currently winding through the Texas state legislature could give the new city’s officials the ability to close a local highway and limit access to nearby Boca Chica Beach and Boca Chica State Park during rocket launches and other company activity.

Currently closures around SpaceX launches are managed by Cameron County, which includes the nearby city of Brownsville and the resort town of South Padre Island.

The vote could set up tussles between county officials and Starbase over access to Boca Chica Beach as SpaceX looks to increase the number of launches at its Texas site from five to 25 per year.

The top official in Cameron County, Judge Eddie Trevino Jr, opposes the state bill that would allow Starbase control over closures.

In recent years Musk has moved many of his operations and corporate headquarters from California to Texas, citing more favourable regulation and his opposition to California’s Democratic Party-dominated politics.

The headquarters of his companies X and Boring are now on the outskirts of Bastrop, a small city near the state capital Austin and about a five-and-a-half-hour drive north of Starbase.

• Inside the rural Texas town where Elon Musk is basing his business empire

In contrast with Starbase, the development outside Austin does not include much new housing for company workers – most of whom live in Bastrop or other surrounding communities.

Environmental groups have criticised SpaceX’s impact on nearby wildlife, and say the company has increased light pollution and littered the area with debris from rocket launches.

In 2024 the company was fined nearly $150,000 (£113,000) by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for dumping waste water.

The company has called the fines the result of “disagreements over paperwork” and maintains it follows environmental laws. The BBC approached SpaceX for comment.

US President Donald Trump has attracted criticism from some Catholics after posting an AI-generated image of himself as the Pope.

The picture, which was shared by official White House social media accounts, comes as Catholics mourn the death of Pope Francis, who died on 21 April, and prepare to choose the next pontiff.

The New York State Catholic Conference accused Trump of mocking the faith. The post comes days after he joked to reporters: “I’d like to be Pope.”

Trump is not the first president to be accused of making a mockery of the Catholic faith. Former US President Joe Biden caused outrage a year ago when he made the sign of the cross at a pro-abortion access rally in Tampa, Florida.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni declined to answer questions about Trump’s post during a briefing with journalists on Saturday. The Vatican is preparing to host a conclave to choose Francis’s successor beginning on Wednesday.

The image posted by Trump on Friday night features him wearing a white cassock and pointed mitre, traditionally worn by a bishop. He wears a large cross around his neck, and has his finger held up, with a solemn facial expression.

The New York State Catholic Conference, which represents bishops in New York, took to X to criticise the picture.

“There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr President,” the group wrote.

“We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St Peter. Do not mock us.”

Left-leaning Italian former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi also blasted Trump’s post.

“This is an image that offends believers, insults institutions and shows that the leader of the right-wing world enjoys clowning around,” Renzi wrote in Italian on X.

But the White House rejected any suggestion that the Republican president was making fun of the papacy.

“President Trump flew to Italy to pay his respects to Pope Francis and attend his funeral, and he has been a staunch champion for Catholics and religious liberty,” said press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Australia’s opposition party has been left reeling after a bruising defeat in Saturday’s federal election, with a result that is shaping up to be its worst ever loss.

Peter Dutton, the Liberal party leader, also lost his own seat of Dickson, which he had held for the past 24 years.

Labor’s landslide victory means the Liberal party is now scrambling to find a new leader – and figure out what went wrong for them this election cycle.

Some Liberal party members have called for a “serious review”, with one adviser summing up the loss as a failure of “the Dutton experiment”.

Dutton has also become the first federal opposition leader to ever lose their own seat at the same time as losing an election, which means he has been ousted from parliament.

Labor’s Ali France defeated Dutton in his home base of Dickson in Queensland.

In his first public appearance after Labor’s emphatic win, prime minister Anthony Albanese told media outside a Sydney cafe on Sunday that “the Australian people voted for unity rather than division”.

The Liberal party’s most crushing losses were in Australia’s major cities, where party members have been all but wiped out in metropolitan areas including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.

Liberal MP Keith Wolahan has called for a “serious review” of the systemic issues that led to the party’s shock defeat.

“You have to acknowledge things went wrong,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Insiders program.

“We have to listen to Australians. They have sent us a message, and our first task is to hear it. And that often takes time.”

Wolahan represents the seat of Menzies in Victoria, and said it was very likely he would also lose his seat.

When asked if Peter Dutton himself was the problem, Wolahan declined to answer directly, but said he has great respect for the Liberal leader.

Some were more blunt, like Andrew Carswell, a former adviser to Australia’s last Liberal prime minister, who told the ABC “the Dutton experiment failed”.

He went on to describe Saturday’s loss as “a complete catastrophe for the Coalition”, which he said showed that Australians had “clear hesitation with Peter Dutton”.

The looming presence of Donald Trump has also been cited as a major factor for thwarting Dutton’s already inconsistent campaign, with many people drawing parallels between him and the American president.

Dutton’s loss has now set in motion the scramble for a new Liberal party leader.

Carswell was hopeful about the prospect of some “very good up-and-coming Liberal MPs” stepping into leadership roles.

Those tipped as most likely contenders for the top job include shadow treasurer Angus Taylor and deputy leader Sussan Ley.

Shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan and shadow minister of defence Andrew Hastie have also been mentioned.

But without a clear frontrunner, the Liberal party will have to try to regroup in the coming days – as well as develop a new strategy to win back the voters they lost.

A missile fired from Yemen landed near the main terminal of Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Sunday morning, Israeli authorities said.

Unverified footage posted online appeared to show drivers on a road nearby pulled over to take cover as a projectile lands, creating a plume of black smoke near the airport, which is on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

Four people were injured by the blast, with another two injured on their way to a shelter, Israeli media reported, citing emergency services.

Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said in a statement: “Anyone who hits us, we will hit them seven times stronger”.

Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said in a televised statement that the Israeli airport was “no longer safe for air travel”.

• Who are the Houthis?

The airport has now reopened to flights, after temporarily halting them.

Sirens were activated in several parts of the country as the missile approached – and the Israeli Air Force said it was investigating the failure to intercept it.

Senior Israeli police commander Yair Hetzroni showed journalists a crater caused by the impact of the missile, which airport authorities said had landed beside a road near a Terminal three parking lot.

“You can see the scene right behind us here, a hole that opened up with a diameter of tens of metres and also tens of metres deep,” Hetzroni said, adding that there was no significant damage.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to meet ministers and defence officials on Sunday to discuss a response, Israel’s Channel 12 News said.

The Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group based in Yemen, have regularly launched missile attacks at Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, but it is rare for one to make it through Israel’s sophisticated air defences.

The group have also been carrying out attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which the US has responded to by leading a bombing campaign against it – which the UK has assisted in.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been re-elected as the country’s leader, becoming the first in decades to secure a second term.

He defeated opposition leader Peter Dutton of the centre-right Liberal-National coalition. Dutton also lost his seat in Dickson, Queensland – one he had held for 24 years.

It is a remarkable turnaround for Albanese, 62, whose popularity was at record lows at the start of the year as Australians grappled with a cost of living crisis and challenges in healthcare and housing.

US President Donald Trump’s global tariff policy, which did not spare Australia, was also on voters’ minds.

Here’s a look at how that played out in charts, based on an unofficial count by Australian broadcaster ABC:

Albanese needed at least 76 seats in the House of Representatives to form a government.

Before the dissolution of parliament, Labor had a razor-thin majority of 77 seats.

With some 70.8% of the seats already counted, the ABC puts Labor on track to finish with 85 seats – far above the 76 seats needed, giving it a comfortable majority.

The Coalition is expected to gain 36 seats and the Independents stand at 10.

Here’s a reminder of what the seats in the House of Representatives looked like before tonight’s results.

Current projections mean Labor has so far claimed 34.7% of first-preference votes, with the Coalition trailing behind at 31.7%.

The Greens stand at 12.2% of first-preference votes.

As compared to the 2022 election, its clear Labor has increased its share of the national vote, with an increase of 2.1% so far – though that number could increase as counting goes on.

Official vote counting won’t conclude for days but its clear that the Labor government is set to dramatically increase its majority – with swings towards them in almost every area.

Eight men, including seven Iranian nationals, have been arrested in two separate counter-terrorism police investigations.

Five were arrested at various locations around England on Saturday as part of a “pre-planned” investigation into a plot to “target a specific premises”, the Metropolitan Police said.

Four – two aged 29, one aged 40 and one aged 46 – are Iranian nationals. Police said the nationality and age of the fifth was still being established.

Three other men, all Iranian, were arrested in London on Saturday under national security legislation as part of a separate investigation led by the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command. Police said the two operations were not connected.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper thanked police and security services “for the action they have taken to keep our country safe”.

She said: “These are serious events that demonstrate the ongoing requirement to adapt our response to national security threats.”

Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Health Secretary Wes Streeting thanked police and security services, saying “every single day these people are saving lives”. He said it would be inappropriate for him to comment further.

The Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command has responsibility for leading counter terrorism-related investigations and as well as investigations into espionage and state threats.

In the operation in which five men were arrested, four were detained under the Terrorism Act. The fifth man was arrested under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Pace).

All five were arrested on suspicion of preparation of an act of terrorism.

The men were arrested in Swindon, west London, Stockport, Rochdale and Manchester and remain in police custody.

Police said the investigation related to a suspected plot to target a “specific premises”.

The “affected site”, which it did not name, has been made aware and is being supported by police, the Met added.

The investigation is being led by the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command , supported by officers from Greater Manchester Police and Wiltshire Police, as well as counter-terrorism officers from across the country.

“The investigation is still in its early stages and we are exploring various lines of enquiry to establish any potential motivation as well as to identify whether there may be any further risk to the public linked to this matter,” said Cdr Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command.

“We understand the public may be concerned and as always, I would ask them to remain vigilant and if they see or hear anything that concerns them, then to contact us.”

In the separate operation, the Met said three men, aged 39, 44 and 55, were arrested under the National Security Act at three separate addresses in north-west London and west London and had been taken into custody while searches continued.

Police said this investigation was not connected to the arrest of the five people.

Labor’s Anthony Albanese has defied the so-called “incumbency curse” to be re-elected Australia’s prime minister in a landslide.

Official vote counting won’t finish for days, but Albanese’s centre-left government will dramatically increase its majority after the conservative Liberal-National coalition suffered a thumping defeat nationwide.

“Today, the Australian people have voted for Australian values: for fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all; for the strength to show courage in adversity and kindness to those in need,” Albanese said.

Coalition leader Peter Dutton, who lost his own seat of 24 years, said he accepted “full responsibility” for his party’s loss and apologised to his MPs.

Following the result, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio both said they looked forward to deepening their bilateral relationships with Australia.

Cost-of-living concerns – particularly the affordability of healthcare and housing – dominated the five-week campaign, but international relations also reared its head, with the issue of how to deal with Donald Trump looming large over the election.

Dutton was seen by many as Australia’s Trump, which appeared to go down badly with voters, despite his attempts to shake off comparisons made between his policies on immigration, public sector cuts and China, and the Trump administration.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told BBC Newshour that Dutton ran a “very Trumpian campaign”, and the US president was “the mood music that had a very big influence on how people perceived” the Liberal-National opposition.

Labor saw swings towards them right across the country – a rare feat for a second-term government in Australia – and Albanese becomes the first prime minister to win back-to-back elections in over 20 years.

The party’s success has also tempered a trend of voters abandoning the two major parties, which was the big story of the last election in 2022.

Labor is on track to finish with 86 seats, the Coalition about 40, and the Greens Party with one or two, according to projections by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Other minor parties and independents are ahead in nine seats.

That represents an increase of nine for Labor and a significant drop in support for the Greens. However most “teal” independents have been returned in their more conservative, inner-city electorates.

It’s a remarkable turnaround from the start of the year, when polling put Albanese’s popularity at record lows after three years of global economic pain, tense national debate, and growing government dissatisfaction.

In his Saturday night victory speech, Albanese addressed some of the election’s key issues, which also included migration, climate change and energy.

He reiterated his promises to make healthcare – most critically GP appointments – more affordable, put buying a house in reach for more Australians, and do more to address climate change and protect the environment.

Notably, he also vowed to advance reconciliation for First Nations people: “We will be a stronger nation when we Close the Gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.”

It’s a veiled reference to the biggest moment of Albanese’s tenure, the failed Voice referendum of October 2023, which sought to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the constitution, and simultaneously establish a parliamentary advisory body for them.

Australia remains the only Commonwealth country to have never signed a treaty with its Indigenous people.

The Voice was one of Albanese’s most defining policies, and his most striking setback – it was overwhelmingly rejected after months of often toxic and divisive national debate.

Indigenous Australians have told the BBC they feel like they’ve been forgotten by policymakers since.

The prime minister also found difficulty trying to walk a middle path on the Israel-Gaza war, raised eyebrows after buying a multi-million dollar beach pad in the midst of a housing crisis and, like other leaders globally, he grappled with tough economic conditions.

With tanking poll numbers, Albanese was broadly seen as the underdog coming into the election, and was poised to be the next victim of the “incumbency curse” – a term to explain a global trend where struggling constituents were turfing out governments after a single term.

Dutton, on the other hand, looked like he was writing a great political comeback – he was on the edge of bringing his party from its worst loss in 70 years back into office in a single term.

It has been almost a century since a first-term government has failed to win re-election, but as Australian National University Emeritus Professor John Warhurst said: “Dutton entered the campaign [year] in front. It was his to lose.”

Instead tonight Dutton has overseen a party loss so emphatic he has lost his own electorate of Dickson, to Labor’s Ali France.

“I love this country and have fought hard for it,” he told supporters in Brisbane, conceding defeat.

“We have been defined by our opponents in this election which is not a true story of who we are, but we will rebuild from here and we will do that because we know our values, we know our beliefs, and we will always stick to them.”

His campaign was marred by unforced errors: including a series of policy backflips which caused confusion, awkward mistakes on important issues like cost of living and, perhaps most memorably, accidentally booting an AFL ball into a cameraman’s head.

“The opposition has been shambolic,” Prof Warhurst says.

But the government – while resolute and disciplined in its campaign – was timid. It’s strategy was largely allowing voters to judge Dutton and his party, rather than advancing bold or convincing policies, analysts say.

And that’s something we heard from voters throughout the campaign too.

While the Coalition turns to licking its wounds and choosing its next leader, it will again have to reckon with its direction.

Last election, analysts and some of the party’s own MPs cautioned against a move towards the right. They questioned whether Dutton – a polarising figure considered by many to be a conservative hard man – was the right person to rebuild support, particularly in the moderate areas where they lost a lot of it.

After a campaign which in its dying days ventured into culture war territory and what some say are “Trumpian” politics, the Coalition is going to have to ask those questions again – and if they want to be competitive, perhaps find different answers.

“We have to stop drinking the Kool-Aid from the fire hose and we need to have a serious review… we delude ourselves that we are just a few tactical devices away from winning an election,” former Liberal strategist Tony Barry told the ABC.

But meanwhile Labor has to decide what it wants to achieve with the large mandate Australia has handed them.

Albanese’s “incumbency curse” turned out to be a gift, with international uncertainty appearing to have swayed voters in countries like Canada away from change. Likewise, Australia voted for stability.

Labor struck a “middle-of-the-road path” with its a policy platform, but can now afford to be braver, says Amy Remeikis, chief politicial analyst at the Australia Institute think tank.

“That was the path that they took to the election, and that is what they are seeing has paid dividends for them. But the question now is: ‘Will Labor actually do something with power?'”

More than two million people have attended a free Lady Gaga concert on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, city officials say.

The pop star’s biggest ever concert was paid for by the city in an attempt to revitalise Rio’s economy.

They expect it could bring in $100m (£75m) to the local economy.

Saturday’s performance was part of a promotional tour for Lady Gaga’s eighth album, Mayhem, whose songs include Abracadabra and Die With a Smile. She last performed in Brazil in 2012.

Some fans – known as Gaga’s “Little Monsters” – began queuing early in the morning and waited in long lines to gain access to the beach.

A massive security operation was in place, with 5,000 police officers on duty and attendees having to pass through metal detectors. The authorities also used drones and facial recognition cameras to help police the event.

Lady Gaga is not the first person to play a free concert in Rio. Madonna gave a concert on Copacabana beach in May 2024, which was also paid for by the city.

“You waited for me, you waited for more than 10 years for me,” an emotional Lady Gaga told the crowds as she unfurled a Brazilian flag.

“Brazil, I’m ready. I’m going to give it my all.”

The pop star appeared in Brazil-themed costumes for some of her acts, with outfits inspired by the national football team.

Thousands sang along with her best known hits including Alejandro, Poker Face and Abracadabra, creating an electric atmosphere as many waved rainbow-themed fans and watched on huge screens along the beach.

Fans travelled from all across the country to see the grandiose performance.

One man, 28-year-old Luan Messias, said he spent all night on a bus from Itanhaem in neighbouring Sao Paulo state.

Alisha Duarte, 22, told AFP news agency she started queuing at 0740 in the morning. “Lady Gaga is worth it! It’s going to get super crowded, but we’ll survive,” she said.

Another fan, Paulo Oliveira, explained why people were so excited about the concert. She “tells us that we can be who we are, that we can be different and that being different is cool,” he told Reuters.

It’s going to be an “unforgettable show”, concert attendee Lai Borges told Reuters on her way in. “It’s going to be emotional and I’m going to cry a lot,” she said.

As the event drew to a close, Lady Gaga told the audience – in a reference to the nickname for Lady Gaga fans – “we are monsters and monsters never die,” and she brought the concert to a close with Bad Romance, perhaps her most famous song.

Earlier this week American singer Katy Perry, best known for her bubblegum pop, said she felt like a “human Piñata” after weeks of online backlash.

The description felt suitably colourful – but the acknowledgement was serious. A decade on from headlining the Superbowl, Perry’s part in a much-derided Blue Origin spaceflight has seen her star crash down to Earth.

Mockery over the apparent worthiness of her reaction, including kissing the ground after landing and saying she felt “so connected to love”, spread online. Fast food chain Wendy’s even posted to ask: “Can we send her back?”

Trolls have now taken aim at her world tour, which began in Mexico on 23 April, criticising her dance moves and performances.

It seems the star who first broke through singing about a boyfriend’s mood swings now faces an icy reception. Perry’s blamed an “unhinged and unhealed” internet – but is toxic social media the only reason?

The music writer Michael Cragg, author of Reach for the Stars, believes Perry’s problem is that she’s stuck between pop cultures and feels increasingly out of touch.

“Her pop star persona was cemented in the 2010s as cartoon-y, fun and playful, all whipped cream bras and goofy videos where she wore oversized braces on her teeth,” he says.

For a period this worked. Her second album Teenage Dream, which doubled down on Perry’s staple cheeky, sexualised girl-next-door image, scored five Billboard number one singles to match a record set by Michael Jackson. Its follow-up, 2013’s Prism, bore transatlantic smash single Roar (her fourth solo UK number one), as well as Dark Horse in the US (her ninth domestically). Perry hasn’t topped charts under her own steam since.

“That was a long time ago in pop terms and it feels like she hasn’t evolved,” adds Cragg.

In the past year, her comeback single Woman’s World, touted as a female empowerment anthem, struck critics as lyrically shallow.

Some fans also seemed unimpressed that it was produced by Dr. Luke, who previously faced sexual assault allegations from the singer Kesha. The producer denied the claims and the pair reached an agreement to settle a defamation lawsuit in 2023, but Perry remained tainted by association.

The track failed to land in the top 50 in the US and only just managed in the UK, at 47. “Her sort of spiritual ‘let love lead the way’ messages she posts don’t really hold sway with very online pop fans in the face of that decision,” says Cragg.

“The regressive girl boss feel of Woman’s World, and then the album not being great hasn’t helped,” he adds, pointing to rapper Doja Cat’s success working with Dr. Luke without the same negative response.

It followed a pattern of failed reinvention attempts stretching back to 2017’s Witness, where Perry attempted to launch her socially conscious “purposeful pop” era.

But its Sia-written lead single Chained to the Rhythm, which boldly attacked mindless pop culture, appeared to be undermined by Bon Appetit, a song openly objectifying Perry as a sexual meal.

Female pop stardom has shifted. Last year’s biggest breakout music stars – Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX – were women joined by a thread of fierce self-assurance, underpinned by relatability and authenticity.

In contrast, Perry wanted distance from her pop persona – as the headline for Cragg’s 2017 Guardian interview with her put it: “I created this character called Katy Perry. I didn’t want to be Katheryn Hudson. It was too scary.”

Perry’s first hit I Kissed A Girl caused controversy for the fetishisation of lesbians even back in 2008 when it was released. But today Roan’s had global success telling her genuine queer awakening.

“The flip flopping has jarred in an era where… very defined pop star personas are the ones cutting through,” argues Cragg.

Perry’s 2021-2023 playground-styled Las Vegas residency embraced her surreal, fantastical image to commercial and critical success.

But it’s not translating to a new generation of fans. “I think ultimately people see her as a bit cringeworthy now,” Cragg adds. “Being shot into space on a billionaire’s jolly while everyone watches that on social media platforms interspersed with war and the climate crisis… just feels tonally not ideal,” he says.

Perry may have misjudged the public mood, but at the same time, the venom in the blowback points to deeper issues in pop culture beyond her control.

There is no doubt that the social media landscape has become more frenzied in recent years, with stars like Roan speaking against toxic fandoms.

Simon Diego, the creator of Brazil’s Portal Katy Perry fan community, described the scale of the abuse towards the 40-year-old as “unbelievable”.

The group showed their support by clubbing together with other fan pages to pay for a digital billboard message in New York’s Times Square for 24 hours.

“We’re so proud of you and your magical journey and we love you to the moon and back,” it read.

“Know that you are safe, seen and celebrated. We’ll see you around the world, this is just the beginning.”

It was this that Perry replied to directly with her Piñata remark acknowledging the backlash.

“I think Katy and many other celebrities are feeling unsafe in the one space that used to connect them to fans,” Diego tells BBC News.

He believes that’s why Perry has never posted photos of her daughter’s face online.

But even that boundary was ignored in the wake of the spaceflight criticism, as commenters began targeting her four-year-old child simply because “it’s cool now”, he says. “They don’t understand how bad it could affect her.”

Others, like Marie Claire Australia editor Georgie McCourt, think pervasive misogyny plays a part.

“There’s a particular ire reserved for women like Perry: ambitious, unapologetic, hyper-visible,” she wrote in a column, noting that male celebrities have already gone into space without such surveillant reaction.

So where next for Perry? Cragg says a hit single would help.

“I’m not saying it will return her to the commercial highs of old, because that ship has sailed for a lot of pre-streaming artists, but it will steady the ship.”

Ahead of Sweden’s Walpurgis festival to mark the start of spring, young people were busy selecting outfits or getting their hair done. Not all of them made it there alive.

At a hair salon in Uppsala, a city north of Stockholm, three young men who police say were aged between 15 and 20 were shot dead on Tuesday before the celebrations started.

The horror left many shaken in the build-up to the festival, known as Valborg in Swedish, which is typically a convivial affair each 30 April on the eve of the Christian feast day of Saint Walpurga. Celebrated nationwide, Uppsala hosts the country’s largest and most high-profile Walpurgis events, popular with students.

The partying did go ahead in full swing, but a subtle heaviness hung over the Swedish blue and yellow flags which fluttered around the city.

And now, with the festival finished, it’s only police tape – not flags – fluttering outside the basement barber shop where the shooting took place close to Vaksala Square.

“It’s really sad,” says 20-year-old student Yamen Alchoum, who is in the area to eat at a nearby food truck. He says he was at another barber shop on the night of the shootings, but previously had his hair cut at this salon multiple times. “I think if I was there [on Tuesday]…I would be, like, involved in the shooting. And it’s a bit scary.”

According to witnesses speaking to Swedish media TV4 and Aftonbladet, two of the young victims were dressed in barber capes and sat in parlour chairs when they were shot in the head just after 5pm on Tuesday.

The city centre was busy at the time as commuters made their way to the nearby train station and students from the city’s prestigious university cycled back to their flats.

Witnesses reported hearing loud bangs which many mistook for fireworks. Minutes later several police cars and an ambulance arrived, blocking the street and forcing a bus to turn around. Helicopters and drones were dispatched to try and track down the suspect. Local media reported that he had worn a mask and used an electric scooter to get away from the scene.

“I heard the helicopters, so then I knew that something had happened,” says Sara, a 32-year-old who lives on the street. She says her phone quickly lit up with news notifications and texts from friends asking if she was okay.

Around two hours after the shootings, police arrested a 16-year-old boy. In Sweden, suspects can be held based on different levels of suspicion, and the teenager was initially held at the second-highest level, indicating strong suspicion.

However, by Friday, prosecutors said the case against him had weakened and he was released.

On Saturday, Swedish police confirmed that six people have now been arrested in connection with the case. The suspects range in age from under 18 to 45, according to the state prosecutor’s office, and one is suspected of carrying out the killings.

People intending to visit Uppsala for the Walpurgis festival were advised not to change their plans, as police promised extra resources on the cathedral city’s streets and suggested the shooting was likely an “isolated incident”.

While many were shaken, tens of thousands of Swedes still heeded their advice, packing the banks of Uppsala’s Fyris river to watch the annual student raft race, drinking in the city’s pubs and parks or heading to a huge public bonfire in the evening. Others joined the annual spring ceremony outside the university where current and former students gathered to wave white caps.

“I don’t really feel so scared,” says Alvin Rose, 19, a social studies student, having a snack in Vaksala Square, just around the corner from where the shootings happened. “It feels like there’s more security, more cops about.”

His friend Kassandra Fritz, an 18-year-old natural sciences student, says she has driven to Uppsala from her home in Gävle, two hours north, to “have fun and meet new people”.

She reflects that she no longer has a “strong” reaction to news about shootings in Sweden since they are frequently in the headlines. “There’s been so many shootings lately, not only here in Uppsala but like, everywhere in Sweden.”

Over the past decade, Sweden has emerged as a European hotspot for gun crime, often linked to criminal networks. Research for Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention released last year concluded that the profile of perpetrators is “increasingly younger”, with growing numbers of teenagers both carrying out or dying from gun violence.

Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson was on a work trip to Valencia when the Uppsala shooting took place, but has since described it as “an extremely violent act”.

“This underlines that the wave of violence is not over – it continues,” he said in an interview with Swedish news agency TT on Wednesday.

At a news conference the day after, officers said they were investigating the possibility that the deaths were linked to gang crime, but said it was too soon to confirm this.

Police in various Swedish cities have previously said it is becoming more common for gangs to contract vulnerable children to carry out crimes, because those who are 15 or younger are below the age of criminal responsibility in Sweden.

Sweden’s government recently proposed controversial new legislation that would allow police to wiretap children, in an attempt to prevent them from being recruited to teenage gangs.

Ministers have also said they want to tighten the country’s gun laws.

In February, 10 people were killed in the country’s worst mass shooting at an adult education centre in the Swedish town of Orebro. In this case, police suspect a 35-year-old was behind the killings. He legally owned a weapon, and was found dead inside the building.

Outside the hair salon in Uppsala, 20-year-old Yamen says he has never been involved in gang crime but knows plenty of others who have.

“Many times in my school, there was gang violence, and in the streets – dealers,” he says. “But my personality was to work, study, and now I am in college.”

As he leaves to meet friends, a steady stream of young people continue to stop at the street corner next to the hairdressers, some bringing bouquets of flowers. Several appear visibly shaken and have tears in their eyes.

“I knew him very well,” says Elias, a 16-year-old who says he was friends with one of the victims, and has asked the BBC not to share his surname. “It feels unreal, you know. It doesn’t feel like I’ve truly accepted the situation.”

On Wednesday, a cache of dazzling jewels linked to the Buddha’s mortal remains, which have been hailed as one of the most astonishing archaeological finds of the modern era, will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.

For over a century these relics, unearthed from a dusty mound in northern India in 1898, have sat largely unseen, cradled by a private British collection.

Now, as the gems prepare to leave the custody of their keepers, they are stirring not just collectors’ appetites but also some unease.

They come from a glittering hoard of nearly 1,800 pearls, rubies, topaz, sapphires, and patterned gold sheets, first glimpsed deep inside a brick chamber in present-day Uttar Pradesh in India, near the Buddha’s birthplace.

Their discovery – alongside bone fragments identified by an inscribed urn as belonging to the Buddha himself – reverberated through the world of archaeology. Nicolas Chow, chairman of Sotheby’s Asia and worldwide head of Asian Art, believes this is “among the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time”.

Yet as these relics now face the glare of the auction room, experts tell the BBC that a question hangs heavy: can the sale of treasures so intimately woven into India’s sacred past be considered ethical?

In 1898, William Claxton Peppé, an English estate manager, excavated a stupa at Piprahwa, just south of Lumbini, where the Buddha is believed to have been born. He uncovered relics inscribed and consecrated nearly 2,000 years ago.

Historians agree these relics, intact until then, are the heritage of both the Buddha’s Sakya clan descendants and Buddhists worldwide. The bone relics have since been distributed to countries such as Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, where they continue to be venerated.

“Are the relics of the Buddha a commodity that can be treated like a work of art to be sold on the market?” wonders Naman Ahuja, a Delhi-based art historian. “And since they aren’t, how is the seller ethically authorised to auction them?

“Since the seller is termed the ‘custodian’, I would like to ask – custodian on whose behalf? Does custodianship permit them now to sell these relics?”

Chris Peppé, great-grandson of William, told the BBC the family looked into donating the relics, but all options presented problems and an auction seemed the “fairest and most transparent way to transfer these relics to Buddhists”.

Julian King, Sotheby’s international specialist and head of sale, Himalayan Art, New York told the BBC the auction house had made a thorough review of the jewels.

“As is the case with any important items and collectibles that are offered for sale at Sotheby’s, we conducted requisite due diligence, including in relation to authenticity and provenance, legality and other considerations in line with our policies and industry standards for artworks and treasures,” King said.

Ashley Thompson, of Soas University of London, and curator Conan Cheong, both experts in Southeast Asian art, have more questions. In a joint statement they told the BBC: “Other ethical questions raised by the sale are: should human remains be traded? And who gets to decide what are human remains or not? For many Buddhist practitioners around the world, the gems on sale are part and parcel of the bones and ash.”

The sale of the relics has also sparked concern among Buddhist leaders.

“The Buddha teaches us not to take other people’s possessions without permission,” Amal Abeyawardene of London-based British MahaBodhi Society, told the BBC. “Historical records indicate that the Sakyamuni clan were granted custody of these relics, as the Buddha emanated from their community. Their wish was for these relics to be preserved alongside adornments, such as these gems, so that they may be venerated in perpetuity by the Buddha’s followers.”

Chris Peppé has written that the jewels passed from his great-uncle to his cousin, and in 2013 came to him and two other cousins. That’s when he began researching their discovery by his great-grandfather.

The Los Angeles-based television director and film editor wrote he had found 1898 newspaper reports – from Reuters to the New York Tribune – announcing the find of Buddha’s remains.

“The colonisation of India by the British had been a source of some cultural shame for me [and continues to be] but, amidst the treasure hunters who hauled their finds back to England, there had also been people focused on the pursuit of knowledge,” Chris Peppé writes.

He noted his research revealed a lot about his ancestors who he had dismissed as “prejudiced Victorians from a bygone era”.

“I learned that Willie Peppé’s first wife chose to travel around India for her honeymoon and loved the country and its culture. Sadly, she died from an unspecified illness. I learned that my grandmother was outraged at the land laws that applied to Indian women.

“And I learned that the excavation of the stupa was an attempt by Willie Peppé to provide work for his tenant farmers who had fallen victim to the famine of 1897.”

He writes his great-grandfather’s “technical diagrams of ramps and pulleys suggest that he was also a trained engineer who couldn’t resist a project”.

William Peppé handed the gems, relics and reliquaries to the colonial Indian government: the bone relics went to the Buddhist King of Siam (Rama V). Five relic urns, a stone chest and most other relics were sent to the Indian Museum in Kolkata – then the Imperial Museum of Calcutta.

Only a small “portion of duplicates”, which he was allowed to keep, remained in the Peppé family, he notes. (Sotheby’s notes say Peppé was allowed to keep approximately one-fifth of the discovery.)

Sources told the BBC the auction house considers the “duplicates” to be original items considered surplus to those donated, which the “Indian government permitted Peppé to retain”.

Over the past six years years, the gems have featured in major exhibitions, including one at The Met in 2023. The Peppé family has also launched a website to “share our research”.

Some scholars argue Buddha relics should never be treated as market commodities.

“The Sotheby’s auction transforms these highly sacred materials into saleable objects, in continuation of acts of colonial violence which extracted them from a stupa and called them ‘gems’ and ‘objects of interest to Europeans’, creating a false division with the ash and bone fragments they were consecrated with,” say Thompson and Cheong.

Chris Peppé told the BBC that in all the monasteries he had visited “no Buddhists regard these as corporeal relics”.

“A few Buddhist academics at western universities have recently offered a convoluted, fact-defying logic whereby they may be regarded as such. It’s an academic construct that is not shared by Buddhists in general who are familiar with the details of the find,” he said.

Peppé said the family “looked into donation [of the relics] to temples and museums and they all presented different problems on closer scrutiny”.

“An auction seems the fairest and most transparent way to transfer these relics to Buddhists and we are confident that Sotheby’s will achieve that.”

Some also point to The Koh-i-Noor, seized by the British East India Company and now part of the Crown Jewels, with many Indians viewing it as stolen. Should the Buddha’s jewels be next?

“Repatriation, I believe, is seldom necessary,” says Ahuja. “Such rare and sacred relics that are unique and which define a land’s cultural history, however, deserve the government’s exceptional attention.”