Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for “direct talks” with Ukraine, saying they should “start without delay, as early as 15 May”.

“We seek serious talks… to remove the root causes of the conflict and start moving towards a lasting, strong peace”, he said on Saturday, in a rare televised late-night address from the Kremlin.

It comes hours after European leaders – including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron – visited Ukraine and urged Russia to agree to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire.

In response, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had said Moscow would “have to think this through” – but warned that “trying to pressure us is quite useless”.

In his statement, Putin said he would “not rule out” that in the course of the talks – which he proposed should happen in Turkey’s capital Istanbul – Russia and Ukraine may “be able to agree new ceasefires, a new truce”.

The Russian leader said he would speak to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday to discuss the details.

Kyiv has not commented on the proposal from Putin.

Earlier on Saturday, European leaders travelled to the Ukrainian capital and called on Moscow to agree to a month-long ceasefire with Ukraine, starting on Monday.

The call was issued at a meeting of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, with the leaders of France, Germany, the UK and Poland seen standing alongside Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

They made the announcement after discussing the plan, by phone, with US President Donald Trump – who initially mooted an unconditional ceasefire. The leaders threatened Russia with “massive” sanctions if it did not comply.

In response, the Kremlin said it was considering the proposal but would not respond to pressure.

After the meeting, Sir Keir said: “All of us here together with the US are calling [Russian President Vladimir] Putin out. If he is serious about peace, then he has a chance to show it.”

Zelensky added: “Thank you all for standing with us. Today we will focus on how to build and guarantee real and lasting security.”

Hours later, Putin made his own statement, with video showing journalists assembled in a hall inside the Kremlin.

“This would be the first step towards a long-term, lasting peace, rather than a prologue to more armed hostilities after the Ukrainian armed forces get new armaments and personnel, after feverish trench-digging and the establishment of new command posts,” he said.

“Who needs peace like that?”

Putin also accused Ukraine of having repeatedly failed to respond to three ceasefire proposals from Moscow – a 30-day halt in attacks on energy infrastructure, the Easter truce and a ceasefire ordered last month by Putin to coincide with World War Two commemorations last week.

Ukraine has previously said Russian attacks continued throughout these periods. Russia has made similar claims about Ukraine.

“In spite of everything, we are offering the Kyiv authorities to resume the negotiations… resume direct talks, and I stress, without any preconditions,” Putin said on Saturday night.

The last direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv happened shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began more than three years ago.

The US-China trade war could be letting up, with the world’s two largest economies beginning talks in Switzerland.

Top trade officials from both sides met on Saturday in the first high-level meeting since US President Donald Trump hit China with tariffs in January.

Beijing retaliated immediately and a tense stand-off ensued as the two countries heaped levies on each other. New US tariffs on Chinese imports stand at 145%, and some US exports to China face duties of 125%.

There have been weeks of stern, and sometimes fiery, rhetoric where each side sought to paint the other as the more desperate party.

And yet this weekend they face each other over the negotiating table.

So why now?

Despite multiple rounds of tit-for-tat tariffs, both sides have been sending signals that they want to break the deadlock. Except it wasn’t clear who would blink first.

“Neither side wants to appear to be backing down,” said Stephen Olson, senior visiting fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute and a former US trade negotiator.

“The talks are taking place now because both countries have judged that they can move forward without appearing to have caved in to the other side.”

Still, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian emphasised on Wednesday that “the talks are being held at the request of the US”.

And the commerce ministry framed it as a favour to Washington, saying it was answering the “calls of US businesses and consumers”.

The Trump administration, however, claims it’s Chinese officials who “want to do business very much” because “their economy is collapsing”.

“They said we initiated? Well, I think they ought to go back and study their files,” Trump said at the White House on Wednesday.

But as the talks drew closer, the president struck a more diplomatic note: “We can all play games. Who made the first call, who didn’t make the – it doesn’t matter,” he told reporters on Thursday. “It only matters what happens in that room.”

The timing is also key for Beijing because it’s during Xi’s visit to Moscow. He was a guest of honour on Friday at Moscow’s Victory Day parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the World War Two victory over Nazi Germany.

Xi stood alongside leaders from across the Global South – a reminder to Trump’s administration that China not only has other options for trade, but it is also presenting itself as an alternative global leader.

This allows Beijing to project strength even as it heads to the negotiating table.

Trump insists that the tariffs will make America stronger, and Beijing has vowed to “fight till the end”- but the fact is the levies are hurting both countries.

Factory output in China has taken a hit, according to government data. Manufacturing activity in April dipped to the lowest level since December 2023. And a survey by news outlet Caixin this week showed that services activity has reached a seven-month low.

The BBC found that Chinese exporters have been reeling from the steep tariffs, with stock piling up in warehouses, even as they strike a defiant note and look for markets beyond the US.

“I think [China] realises that a deal is better than no deal,” says Bert Hofman, a professor at the East Asian Institute in National University Singapore.

“So they’ve taken a pragmatic view and said, ‘OK, well we need to get these talks going.'”

And so with the major May Day holiday in China over, officials in Beijing have decided the time is right to talk.

On the other side, the uncertainty caused by tariffs led to the US economy contracting for the first time in three years.

And industries that have long depended on Chinese-made goods are especially worried. A Los Angeles toy company owner told the BBC that they were “looking at the total implosion of the supply chain”.

Trump himself has acknowledged that US consumers will feel the sting.

American children may “have two dolls instead of 30 dolls”, he said at a cabinet meeting this month, “and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally”.

Trump’s approval ratings have also slid over fears of inflation and a possible recession, with more than 60% of Americans saying he was focusing too much on tariffs.

“Both countries are feeling pressure to provide a bit of reassurance to increasingly nervous markets, businesses, and domestic constituencies,” Mr Olson says.

“A couple of days of meetings in Geneva will serve that purpose.”

While the talks have been met with optimism, a deal may take a while to materialise.

The talks will mostly be about “touching base”, Mr Hofman said, adding that this could look like an “exchange of positions” and, if things go well, “an agenda [will be] set for future talks”.

The negotiations on the whole are expected to take months, much like what happened during Trump’s first term.

After nearly two years of tit-for-tat tariffs, the US and China signed a “phase one” deal in early 2020 to suspend or reduce some levies. Even then, it did not include thornier issues, such as Chinese government subsidies for key industries or a timeline for scrapping the remaining tariffs.

In fact, many of them stayed in place through Joe Biden’s presidency, and Trump’s latest tariffs add to those older levies.

What could emerge this time is a “phase one deal on steroids”, Mr Olson said: that is, it would go beyond the earlier deal and try to address flashpoints. There are many, from the illegal fentanyl trade which Washington wants China to crack down harder on to Beijing’s relationship with Moscow.

But all of that is far down the line, experts warn.

“The systemic frictions that bedevil the US-China trade relationship will not be solved any time soon,” Mr Olson adds.

“Geneva will only produce anodyne statements about ‘frank dialogues’ and the desire to keep talking.”

Part of a Soviet-era spacecraft is likely to have re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere after being stuck in orbit for more than half a century, the European Space Agency said.

Kosmos 482, which launched in 1972 on a mission to Venus, never made it out of Earth’s orbit and instead broke into four pieces that have been circling the planet for more than five decades.

The EU Space Surveillance and Tracking centre (SST) said one fragment – believed to be the lander – “most likely” re-entered the atmosphere at about 06:16 GMT (07:16 BST) on Saturday.

It is unclear whether the object fell to the ground or burned up in the atmosphere.

It is also unclear exactly where the object re-entered the atmosphere.

While there is much experts do not know about the object’s re-entry, 70% of Earth is covered by sea so it is unlikely to have caused significant damage.

“It’s much more likely that you win the lottery than that you get impacted by this piece of space debris,” Stijn Lemmens, a senior analyst at the European Space Agency, said.

Kosmos 482’s lander capsule was built to survive the extreme heat and pressure of Venus’s atmosphere, meaning it had a robust heat shield and durable structure.

This is why experts think it may have survived an uncontrolled descent through Earth’s atmosphere.

However, Kosmos 482’s parachute system, originally intended to slow the lander’s descent towards Venus, is likely to have degraded after more than 50 years in space.

Mr Lemmens explained that the “re-entry of human-made objects into Earth’s atmosphere occurs quite frequently”. He said it happens weekly for bigger spacecraft and daily for smaller ones.

Objects typically burn up in the earth’s atmosphere before they reach the ground.

China’s Long March 5B booster re-entered over the Indian Ocean in 2022, and the Tiangong-1 space station mostly burned up over the Pacific in 2018.

Kosmos 482 is now being closely tracked by international space agencies.

Mr Lemmens said that future spacecraft “should be designed in such a way that they can take themselves out of orbit safely, preferably by doing controlled re-entries”.

This would allow for precise predictions of landing locations, reducing the risk of any debris impacting populated areas and protecting people and property while “managing the environmental impact of space debris”.

Taylor Swift’s representatives have told the BBC she is being brought into a legal row between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively to create “tabloid clickbait”.

The 35-year-old singer was summoned to a US court after it was alleged she encouraged Baldoni to accept script re-writes by Lively for It Ends With Us, a film that both starred in and is the centre of a sexual harassment case.

Baldoni says he was invited to Lively’s New York home in 2023 to discuss script changes, where Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, and Swift were there to serve as her “dragons”.

Representatives for Swift said “she was not involved in any casting or creative decision” and “never saw an edit or made any notes on the film”.

Lively, 37, sued Baldoni, 41, in December 2024, accusing him of sexual harassment and a smear campaign. Baldoni is counter-suing Lively and her husband, the actor Ryan Reynolds, on claims of civil extortion, defamation and invasion of privacy.

Lively and Baldoni have been locked in a dispute since the film, which is an adaption of a Colleen Hoover novel, was released last summer.

According to Baldoni, there were tensions over the 2023 re-write of the scene, at which he was surprised to find Reynolds and Swift present.

He alleges Lively wrote in a text to him: “If you ever get around to watching Game of Thrones, you’ll appreciate that I’m Khaleesi, and like her, I happen to have a few dragons. For better or worse, but usually better. Because my dragons also protect those I fight for.”

Baldoni says he responded supportively, writing: “I really love what you did. It really does help a lot. Makes it so much more fun and interesting. (And I would have felt that way without Ryan and Taylor).

“You really are a talent across the board. Really excited and grateful to do this together.”

It is also alleged that Swift was involved in the casting of Isabela Ferrer in the film, who played a younger version of Lively’s character, Lily Bloom.

Speaking at the New York premiere of It Ends With Us, Ferrer said: “She [Taylor Swift] was a helpful part of the audition, which I found out later when I got it, and that rocked my world.”

But Swift’s representatives said the only involvement she had in the film was permitting the use of her song, My Tears Ricochet, noting that she was among 20 artists featured in the film.

Swift “never set foot on the set of this movie, she was not involved in any casting or creative decisions, she did not score the film, [and] she never saw an edit or made any notes on the film”, they said.

They added that Swift did not see It Ends With Us until “weeks after its release” as she was “travelling around the globe” on tour at the time.

The popstar’s spokespeople argued that the subpoena “designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case”.

India and Pakistan have accused each other of “violations” hours after the two nations said they had agreed to a ceasefire following days of cross-border military strikes.

After sounds of explosions were heard in Indian-administered Kashmir, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said there had been “repeated violations of the understanding we arrived at”.

A short while later, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said it remained “committed to faithful implementation of a ceasefire…notwithstanding the violations being committed by India in some areas”.

The fighting between India and Pakistan over the last four days has been the worst military confrontation between the two rivals in decades.

The use of drones, missiles and artillery started when India struck targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir in response to a deadly militant attack in Pahalgam last month. Pakistan had denied any involvement.

After four days of cross-border strikes, India and Pakistan said they had agreed on a full and immediate ceasfire.

US President Donald Trump announced the news on his Truth Social Platform on Saturday morning. He said it had been brokered by the US.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister later confirmed the agreement had been reached by the two countries, adding that “three dozen countries” were involved in the diplomacy.

But hours after the announcement, residents – and BBC reporters – in the main Indian-administered Kashmiri cities of Srinagar and Jammu reported hearing the sounds of explosions and seeing flashes in the sky.

Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said: “For the last few hours, there have been repeated violations of the understanding we arrived at earlier this evening.

“This is a breach of the understanding arrived at earlier today.”

Misri said India’s armed forces was “giving an appropriate response” and he concluded his briefing by “calling upon Pakistan to address these violations”.

In response, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Pakistan remains committed to faithful implementation of ceasefire between Pakistan and India, announced earlier today.

“Notwithstanding the violations being committed by India in some areas, our forces are handling the situation with responsibility and restraint.

“We believe that any issues in smooth implementation of the ceasefire should be addressed through communication at appropriate levels.

“The troops on ground should also exercise restraint.”

Kashmir is claimed in full by India and Pakistan, but administered only in part by each since they were partitioned following independence from Britain in 1947.

It has been a flashpoint between the two nuclear-armed nations and they have fought two wars over it.

Confirming the ceasefire, India’s external affairs minister S Jaishankar said the two nations had “worked out an understanding on stoppage of firing and military action”.

“India has consistently maintained a firm and uncompromising stance against terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. It will continue to do so,” he added.

Later, in an address to the nation, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the ceasefire had been reached “for the benefit of everybody”.

Speaking after the ceasefire announcement, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said India and Pakistan had agreed to start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site.

He said he and US Vice-President JD Vance had spent 48 hours with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, including their respective Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shehbaz Sharif.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he welcomed “all efforts to de-escalate the conflict”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Britain has been “engaged” in talks for “some days”, with Foreign Secretary David Lammy speaking to both sides.

“I’m pleased to see today that there’s a ceasefire,” Sir Keir said. “The task now is to make sure that that is enduring and is lasting.”

The recent fighting came after two weeks of tension following the killing of 26 tourists in the resort town of Pahalgam.

Survivors of the 22 April attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, which killed 25 Indians and one Nepali national, said the militants were singling out Hindu men.

The Indian defence ministry said its strikes this week were part of a “commitment” to hold “accountable” those responsible for the attack. Pakistan described them as “unprovoked”.

Pakistan said Indian air strikes and cross-border fire since Wednesday had killed 36 people in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, while India’s army reported at least 21 civilians deaths from Pakistani shelling.

Fighting intensified overnight on Friday, with both countries accusing each other of targeting airbases and other military sites.

Being sealed off from the world in the conclave to choose the new Pope was “immensely peaceful”, England and Wales’s most senior Roman Catholic has told the BBC.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, was one of 133 cardinals who were shut into the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel and later elected Pope Leo XIV on Thursday.

He told BBC Breakfast on Saturday that nobody in the highly secretive meeting was saying who to vote for or who to not vote for, adding that there was “no rancour” or “politicking” among the cardinals.

“It was a much calmer process than that and I found it actually a rather wonderful experience,” he added.

Conclaves have taken place in the Sistine Chapel since the 15th Century and cardinals must have no communication with the outside world until a new Pope is elected. The recent conclave came after the death of Pope Francis on 21 April.

Cardinal Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, said that his mobile phone was taken off him, adding that he found he had “more time on my hands just to be prayerful, just to reflect, just to be still, rather than being constantly agitated… or prompted by what might be coming in” on his phone.

“For me, one of the experiences of these last few days was to learn a bit of patience, to just take this step by step,” he said.

“There was a calmness, a bit of solemnity,” he continued, adding that everyone he spoke to when in it was “peaceful and just wanting to do this well”.

At 79 years old, Cardinal Nichols was one of the oldest cardinals in the conclave as they must be under 80 to be eligible to vote.

There is no timescale on how long it takes for a conclave to elect a new Pope, with previous ones in 2005 and 2013 lasting two days. The conclave that elected Pope Leo lasted for one day.

“I think it was a short conclave in part because Pope Francis left us with a good inheritance,” the cardinal said.

“He left a college of cardinals who were dedicated, who had this desire for the church to be more missionary, and that led us forward actually very, very easily to the decision that we made.”

Pope Leo will be formally inaugurated at a mass in St Peter’s Square on 18 May, which delegations from countries around the world will attend.

The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Edward, will attend on behalf of King Charles, Buckingham Palace confirmed on Saturday.

Speaking about the new Pope, Cardinal Nichols said Pope Leo is “very decisive” in a “quiet way”, adding that he has seen him “make decisions which disappoint people but don’t destroy them”.

“A good thing about a pope is if he’s able to say, ‘No’, to you when he thinks something is not right and then give you a hug so you don’t go away offended, and I think he’s got that ability to do both those things, which is very important.”

When Charlie Hopkins thinks back to the three years he spent in one of America’s most famous prisons, he remembers the “deathly quiet” the most.

In 1955, Hopkins was sent to Alcatraz – a prison on an isolated island off the coast of San Francisco – after causing trouble at other prisons to serve a 17-year sentence for kidnapping and robbery.

Falling asleep at night in his cell on the remote island, he said, the only sound was the whistle of ships passing.

“That’s a lonely sound,” Hopkins said. “It reminds you of Hank Williams singing that song, ‘I’m so lonesome I could cry.'”

Now 93 and living in Florida, Hopkins said the San Francisco National Archives informed him that he is likely the last surviving former Alcatraz inmate. The BBC could not independently verify this.

In an interview with the BBC this week, Hopkins described life at Alcatraz, where he made friends with gangsters and once helped plan an unsuccessful escape. Although it closed decades ago, President Donald Trump claimed recently that he wants to re-open it as a federal prison.

When Hopkins was transferred to the high-security prison in 1955 from an Atlanta facility, he remembers it being clean, but barren. And there were few distractions – no radio at the time, and few books, he said.

“There was nothing to do,” he said. “You could walk back and forth in your cell or do push-ups.”

Hopkins kept busy part of the time with his job cleaning Alcatraz, sweeping the floors and buffing them “until they shined”, he said.

He was sent to prison in 1952 in Jacksonville, Florida, for his role in a series of robberies and kidnappings. He was part of a group that took hostages to get through roadblocks and steal cars, he said.

• ‘The cleverest escape in the prison’s 30 years’: The men who broke out of Alcatraz with a spoon

At Alcatraz, Hopkins had some infamous neighbours. The facility housed many violent criminals over its 30 years – Al Capone; Robert Stroud, a murderer known as the “Birdman of Alcatraz”; and crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger – making it the subject of a host of films and television shows.

A 22-acre island, 1.25 miles (2 kilometres) off San Francisco and surrounded by freezing waters with strong currents, Alcatraz was originally a naval defence force. It was rebuilt in the early 20th century as a military prison. The Justice Department took it over in the 1930s, transforming the facility into a federal prison to address rampant organised crime at the time.

Even in the high-security prison, Hopkins said he still managed to get into trouble and spent many days in the facility’s “D Block” – solitary confinement where inmates who misbehaved were held and rarely let out of their cells.

His longest stint there – six months – came after he tried to help several other prisoners, including notorious bank robber Forrest Tucker, escape Alcatraz, Hopkins said. He helped steal hacksaw blades from the prison’s electric shop to cut the prison bars in the basement kitchen.

The plan didn’t work – prison guards discovered the blades in other inmates’ cells, Hopkins said. “A few days after they locked them up, they locked me up,” he said.

But that did not stop one of the inmates.

In 1956, when Tucker was taken to a hospital for a kidney operation, he stabbed his ankle with a pencil so prison guards would have to remove his leg irons, Tucker told the New Yorker. Then, as he was taken to get an X-ray, he overpowered hospital orderlies and ran away, he said.

He was captured in a hospital gown in a cornfield hours later.

As more prisoners attempted to escape Alcatraz over the years, officials ramped up security, Hopkins said.

“When I left there in 1958, the security was so tight you couldn’t breathe,” he said.

All told, there were 14 separate attempts over the years involving 36 inmates, according to the National Park Service. One of the most famous involved Frank Morris, and brothers Clarence and John Anglin, who escaped in June 1962 by placing papier-mâché heads in their beds and breaking out through ventilation ducts. They were never found, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded they drowned in the cold waters surrounding the island.

A year later, the prison shut down after the government determined it would be more cost-effective to build new prisons than to keep the remote island facility in operation.

Now it’s a publicly run museum visited by millions each year that generates about $60m year in revenue for park partners.

The building is decrepit, with peeling paint, rusted pipes, and crumbling toilets in each cramped cell. Construction on the main prison facility began in 1907, and more than a century of exposure to the elements has rendered the place all but uninhabitable.

Trump said this week, however, that he wants his government to re-open and expand the island prison for the country’s “most ruthless and violent offenders”.

Alcatraz “represents something very strong, very powerful” – law and order, Trump said.

But experts and historians said Trump’s proposal to re-establish the prison is far-fetched, as it would cost billions to repair and bring up to date with other federal facilities.

Hopkins agrees. “It would be so expensive,” he said.

“Back then, the sewage system went into the ocean,” he added. “They’d have to come up with another way of handling that.”

Hopkins left Alcatraz five years before it closed its doors for good. He had been transferred to a prison in Springfield, Missouri and given psychiatric medication that improved his behaviour and helped him heal psychological issues, he said.

But the avid Trump supporter said he does not believe the president’s proposal is serious.

“He don’t really want to open that place,” Hopkins said, adding that Trump was trying to “get a point across to the public” about punishing criminals and those who enter the US illegally.

Hopkins was released in 1963, working first at a truck stop before taking on other jobs. He went back to his home state of Florida, where now he has a daughter and grandson.

After several decades reflecting on his crimes and life in Alcatraz, he wrote a 1,000-page memoir, with nearly half of the book detailing his troubled behaviour, he said.

“You wouldn’t believe the trouble I caused them when I was there,” he said. “I can see now, looking back, that I had problems.”

Rohit Sharma’s abrupt retirement from Test cricket has jolted Indian fans, leaving the team without its captain and most seasoned opener just weeks before a pivotal five-Test series starts in England.

India haven’t won a Test rubber in England since 2007. To lose their captain and most experienced opening batter will compel a rethink of selection strategy for the tour.

A charismatic leader and dashing batter, Sharma is widely regarded as a modern day great.

His stats in Test cricket – 4,301 runs in 67 matches at an average of 40.57 are not imposing.

But the aplomb and authority, tactical acumen and lead-from-the-front derring-do which he has displayed has won him admiration and respect all over the cricket world.

Sharma’s decision to retire from Test cricket, announced via a subdued Instagram post, has sparked widespread speculation. While various factors may have influenced his choice, his prolonged slump in Test form appears to be the primary catalyst.

In his last six Tests – three against New Zealand at home, three against Australia Down Under – Sharma’s form was woeful. In 10 innings in these matches, he could muster a paltry 122 runs.

To compound the problem, India lost all these Tests. Being whitewashed by New Zealand 3-0 at home – unprecedented in Indian cricket – put Sharma under harsh scrutiny in the ensuing Border-Gavaskar series in which too he found no relief. He took the laudable, but extreme step of dropping himself from the playing XI for the last Test at Sydney.

Since then, India won the ODI Champions Trophy in which Sharma’s form was impressive.

The first few weeks of the ongoing IPL were disappointing but Sharma rediscovered his touch, playing important knocks to put his team Mumbai Indians strongly in the running for a place in the knockouts. But success in white-ball cricket is not necessarily an index to similar form being replicated in red-ball cricket.

Sharma is 38. His recent Test form has been ungratifying. The next World Test Championship cycle would take two years to complete. Did he have the physical wherewithal, the mental bandwidth, motivation and mojo to continue playing Test cricket? Questions he likely asked himself before calling it quits.

Sharma was the first among a clutch of talented batters emerging from the Under-19 pipeline in the first decade of this century.

The others were Shikhar Dhawan, Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane. These four were to take over the mantle of India’s batting responsibility from Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Saurav Ganguly and Virender Sehwag.

Ironically, while Sharma got the India cap first, in an ODI against Ireland in 2007, he was the last among this quartet to play Test cricket.

He was part of MS Dhoni’s team which won the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007, but a Test place, which came relatively easily to Kohli, Pujara, Dhawan and Rahane, eluded him until Tendulkar’s farewell series in 2013.

On debut at the Eden Gardens, Sharma made 177. In Tendulkar’s swan song next match at the Wankhede, he made 111. These centuries were obscured by the overflowing of sentiment for Tendulkar, but Sharma’s sublime skills, which often raised batsmanship to an art form, was not lost on experts.

Ravi Shastri, who was to have a huge influence on his Test career later by making him opener, likened him to a “Swiss Watch” for the precision timing in his strokeplay. Dilip Vengsarkar, former India captain who spotted him for India, highlights his ability to play late which helps in judging length of the ball quicker and better and also enables improvisation.

The style and finesse which made the likes of VVS Laxman and Mark Waugh so wonderful to watch were manifest in Sharma’s batting from his earliest days as Test player.

Weaned on the “Bombay School” of batting which boasts exemplars of orthodox technique like Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar, Sharma’s batting carries that strain.

But growing up in a post-modern milieu when risk-taking has become fundamental to batting in every format, Sharma shifted into higher gears far quicker, often from the start in Tests too once he was secure of his place.

He did not exhibit the bravado of a Sehwag, but when in full flow, he has often shown up the destructive ability of Viv Richards, especially when playing horizontal bat shots like hook, pull and cut.

It was not until 2019, when the then chief coach Ravi Shastri and captain Virat Kohli coaxed and cajoled him to open the innings that Sharma’s career in red-ball cricket bloomed.

By this time, he had smashed three ODI double centuries – apart from a spate of match-winning scores in T20 – establishing him as a Goliath in white-ball cricket.

When he became India captain in 2021, Sharma set his sights on bagging a hat-trick of ICC trophies, and recast the team’s playing strategy for each format accordingly.

A genial, fun-loving bearing, marked by endearing earthiness helped him bond with his players easily and strongly. But he was no lax or loose on the field. He was astute, perceptive, intuitive in reading match situations, and particularly good in handling bowlers.

Five IPL titles for Mumbai Indians bespoke his leadership credentials even before he got the job for the national team.

Under Sharma, India reached the World Test Championship final in 2023, only to lose to Australia.

In the ODI World Cup the same year, his blazing batting as opener, and his strategy of “total attack” in which the batsmen would go after runs unrelentingly, took India into to the final where their dreams were dashed by an inspired Australian side. Winning the T20 World Cup a few months later, was some recompense, but not complete redemption.

It is pertinent that Sharma, who quit T20 cricket after winning the World Cup last year, hasn’t retired from ODI cricket yet.

Not being part of an ODI World Cup winning team has been festering in him since 2011 when he was not selected in the squad under Dhoni that was to bring India glory after 28 years.

In an interview with podcaster Vimal Kumar released a few days back, he said that his desire to be part of an ODI World Cup winning team remains alive.

The next ODI World Cup is in 2027. Whether Sharma can sustain fitness and form over the two years will be followed with interest in the cricket world.

But that is hardly the concern of India’s selectors. Right now, their worry is to find an opener and a captain to step into Sharma’s big boots.

The Eurovision Song Contest was watched by around 163 million people last year – meaning there are potentially 163 million different opinions on what makes a perfect entrant.

Do you go for a soulful ballad, guaranteed to leave Europe misty-eyed and full of love and peace?

Or do you opt for a cheesy extravaganza, complete with saucy takes on regional costumes and eye-popping staging that will have the entire continent (and Australia) raving in their living rooms?

Forensic musicologist at Boston’s Berklee College of Music Joe Bennett has analysed hundreds of Eurovision finalists, identifying two dominant musical styles.

One is the “Euro-banger” – high-energy, 120+ BPM songs with kick drums and synth-heavy production, like Sweden’s winning entries Euphoria (Loreen, 2012) and Heroes (Måns Zelmerlöw, 2015).

The other is the slow-burning ballad – typically around 70 BPM, such as Portugal’s Amar Pelos Dois (Salvador Sobral, 2017) and the Netherlands’ Arcade (Duncan Laurence, 2019).

There is a cliché that Eurovision songs are only about love and peace – reinforced by a song performed during the 2016 contest’s interval about writing a perfect Eurovision song, called Love Love Peace Peace.

According to Bennett, there is some validity to this, with every Eurovision song falling under six broad lyrical themes: “love, unity, self-assertion, partying, history and songs about making music”.

He adds that “songs of self-assertion or lyrical self-empowerment do very well” – as seen with Austria’s 2014 winner Rise Like a Phoenix (Conchita Wurst).

Acts might be tempted to go over the top on staging, but this may not be the way to secure victory, according to our experts.

Songwriter Thomas Stengaard co-wrote Denmark’s 2013 winner Only Teardrops (as well as this year’s UK entry What the Hell Just Happened by Remember Monday). He puts his success down, in part, to its simple staging, which he says made it easy to remember.

“If you asked a kid to draw that staging, they could. It was a girl with no shoes on, two guys playing the drums and a flute guy. Very simple, but it worked.”

Vocal coach Carrie Grant, who led the UK’s jury in 2014 and came sixth in the contest as part of Sweet Dreams in 1983, agrees.

“There is nothing worse than having an artist whose stage has lots of money but their performance doesn’t warrant it,” she says. “It makes that performance seem worse.”

The 2014 winner (and Carrie’s personal favourite) was Conchita Wurst – the first act to win the contest without backing singers or dancers on stage since 1970.

What made Conchita stand out was that she was a bearded drag queen. Carrie believes Eurovision fans love things that are quirky and that “embrace the LGBT community”.

But she adds that Conchita wasn’t a gimmick but instead “a brilliant singer who could deliver what we call in vocal coaching ‘money moments'”.

Minor-key songs increasingly dominate Eurovision.

Bennett debunks the idea that “major equals happy, minor equals sad”, adding that “minor keys are more a shorthand for emotional depth”.

In 2023, 85% of finalists performed in minor keys, according to the Press Association. In the last 20 years, only two major-key songs have won – 2011’s Running Scared (for Azerbaijan) and 2017’s Amar Pelos Dois.

Professor Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, a researcher in music cognition at Princeton, highlights source sensitivity – our instinct to associate a song’s sound with its intended context. A few bars of a techno song, for example, and we have a mental image of a dark nightclub, and of the sort of DJ who might perform there.

This means certain minor keys now immediately signal “Eurovision-ness” to audiences.

Remember Monday’s What the Hell Just Happened was written at a songwriting camp, with multiple songwriters working together at a countryside retreat to write the perfect song for this year’s UK act.

The song was intentionally written in a major key to stand out in a sea of minor-key songs – similar to the UK’s 2022 second-place entry, Spaceman by Sam Ryder (B Major).

Repetition is important to make a song stick in the mind, says Margulis. But songs should avoid being too repetitive. Margulis says that what particularly makes a song catchy is “not only when they are heard repeatedly, but also when they throw in some kind of surprise twist”.

Bucks Fizz’s 1981 winner for the UK, Making Your Mind Up, is a classic example. First, the song changes key, quickly followed by a memorable costume change in which the female singers’ skirts were ripped off to reveal shorter skirts – a joint visual and musical twist.

Earlier Eurovision winners were often mocked for their nonsense lyrics, like Sweden’s 1984 winner Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley, but Bennett argues this highlights Eurovision’s strong focus on melody.

“Eurovision really needs big melodic hooks. You want people across Europe to be singing that melody. The need for a very accessible, catchy chorus is essential.”

Key changes have long been a way to introduce novelty into Eurovision songs. The 2000s saw multiple winners follow this formula, including Olsen Brothers’ Fly on the Wings of Love for Norway (2000), and Serbia’s Molitva in 2007.

But as Bennett points out, though they are still present in around a fifth of finalists, no song with a final chorus key change has won since Molitva almost 20 years ago.

Stengaard’s song for this year’s UK act Remember Monday is certainly full of surprises. BBC music correspondent Mark Savage said the song featured “a dizzying array of key changes and tempo shifts”.

The song is the songwriter’s answer to the question he asks himself whenever he writes for Eurovision: “How do you stand out in a contest where everyone wants to stand out?”

Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to add at least 20,000 officers to enforce his deportation policies.

The directive was issued on Friday and forms part of the administration’s plan to incentivise undocumented immigrants to self-deport.

In a video, Trump said he was making it “as easy as possible” for them to leave the US.

The federal government will fund flights out of the US for undocumented people who choose to leave voluntarily, and provide an “exit bonus,” the executive order stated.

The order did not specify how the increase in staffing at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be funded.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the sub-agency that primarily deals with illegal immigration, currently has more than 21,000 employees.

Of those, Ice has 6,100 deportation officers and more than 750 enforcement removal assistants, according to the agency website.

Trump has long called for local and state law enforcement, as well as the National Guard, to assist with border enforcement.

The order calls on the DHS to supplement it’s current efforts “by deputising and contracting with State and local law enforcement officers, former federal officers, officers and personnel within other federal agencies.”

The president’s call to increase staff comes as his administration pursues multiple pathways to force undocumented immigrants to leave the US.

Trump has called for individuals to self deport, using a government app known as CPB Home. This week, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced $1,000 (£751) bonuses and paid travel for people who leave the US voluntarily.

Other deportation methods have been challenged or blocked federal courts, including Trump’s use of the 18th century Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants it accused of gang activity.

Earlier this month, US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, a Trump-appointed judge in Texas, found that the administration’s use of the act was “unlawful.” A second federal judge in New York later reached the same conclusion.

Trump dubbed his self-deportation initiative as “Project Homecoming.”

“Illegal aliens who stay in America face punishments, including significant jail time, enormous financial penalties confiscation of all property garnishment of all wages, imprisonment, and incarceration and sudden deportation, in a place, and manner, solely of our discretion,” Trump said.

The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest pops its cork on Sunday, with a “turquoise carpet” parade featuring competitors from all 37 nations.

But the competition really begins on Tuesday, when the first semi-final will see five countries unceremoniously kicked out.

Another six will lose their place at the second semi-final on Thursday, before the Grand Final takes place in Basel, Switzerland, on Saturday, 17 May.

This year’s entrants include two returning contestants, one professional opera singer, a thinly veiled allusion to sexual emissions and a dance anthem about a dead space dog.

It’s a lot to take in.

To help you prepare, here’s a guide to all 37 songs in the contest, which I’ve sorted into rough musical categories, mainly for my own sanity (it didn’t work).

Win or lose, UK contestants Remember Monday have given headline writers a gift with the title of their entry: What The Hell Just Happened?

A souped-up, full throttle pop anthem, it cherry-picks the best bits of Queen, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Beatles, presumably to remind voters of Britain’s rich musical heritage.

With eight tempo changes, it could prove tricky for voters to grasp, but the band’s stellar harmonies and sparkling personalities should carry them through.

Crucially, the song avoids the Eurovision cliches of jackhammer dance anthems and windswept balladry – something Remember Monday have in common with this year’s favourites.

Sweating it out at the top are Swedish representatives KAJ, whose song Bara Bada Bastu is an ode to the restorative powers of the sauna, complete with dancers in skimpy towels.

Unreasonably catchy, it’s won the approval of Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus, whose been singing the track in his own private sauna. As you do.

Stiff competition comes from Austrian singer JJ, and his operatic ballad Wasted Love.

A timeworn story of unrequited love, it leans on his training as a counter-tenor, before exploding into an unexpected techno breakdown.

A favourite with the bookies, the song’s only Achilles heel is its similarity to last year’s winner, Nemo.

Distinctive in a different way is Ireland’s entry, Laika Party – a 90s trance-pop anthem about a dog who was sent to space by Russia and left to die there.

Singer Emmy aims for a hopeful spin on a tragic story but, despite a peppy performance, it’s a bit of a downer.

More palatable is Luxembourg’s Laura Thorn, whose La Poupée Monte Le Son is a callback to France Gall’s 1965 winning entry, Poupée De Cire, Poupée De Son.

Where the original was about a “fashion doll” operated by songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, Thorn’s response is all about taking control.

“,” she scolds. Yeouch.

Rome must be blushing. This year features not one, but two, songs about the vibrant culture of Il Bel Paese.

The first comes, not surprisingly, from San Marino – the independent microstate that nestles inside north-central Italy.

Titled Tutta L’Italia, it celebrates everything from the county’s football team and its vineyards, to the Mona Lisa (under her Italian name Gioconda).

Written by Gabry Ponte – one of the brains behind Eiffel 65’s Blue (Da Ba Dee) – it’s a slight, but fun, mixture of dance beats, traditional accordion playing and the folk dances of Calabria.

The staging could be its downfall, though, with Gabry marooned behind his DJ decks while the singers, who for some reason wish to remain anonymous, obscure their faces with masks.

More memorable, but definitely more unhinged, is Estonia’s Espresso Macchiato.

Performed by Tommy Cash (the only Eurovision contestant to have appeared on a Charli XCX record) it’s an affectionate-ish caricature of Italian stereotypes, featuring the indelible lyric: “”.

I’m trying to give up sexual innuendo, but Eurovision is making it har… difficult.

A trio of artists are trying to sneak smut past the censors, led by Malta’s Miriana Conte, with a throbbing club track called Serving.

In its original form, the song’s chorus revolved around the phrase “serving kant” – the word kant being Maltese for “singing” and a homophone for an English term that definitely mean singing.

It’s a reference to a well-known phrase in the drag / ballroom world; but several countries complained it broke broadcasting guidelines, prompting a hasty re-write.

If the stunt was meant to generate headlines it worked, but now that Miriana has our attention, she’s not letting go.

Her performance, featuring a giant disco ball pursed between two red lips, is gloriously OTT, and she has an enviable set of pipes. Too bad the song is riddled with Europop cliche.

Another contestant doubling his entendres is Australia’s Go-Jo, who wants us to “take a sip” of milkshake from his “special cup”. Interpret that how you want but I’d be wary of hitching a lift in his ice cream van, if I were you.

With a smattering of Electric Six’s saucy disco funk, Milkshake Man is tasty enough to get Australia back in the finals after only achieving a semi last year.

Finally, we have Finland’s Erika Vikman, whose song Ich Komme is billed as a “joyous message of pleasure, ecstasy and a state of trance”.

Structured to mimic the pneumatic realities of lovemaking, it recalls iconic gay anthems such as Kylie’s Your Disco Needs You and Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff – and ends with Erika shooting into the sky astride a massive gold microphone that’s definitely not a stand-in for a phallus.

Little in life is more devastating than the phrase “I’m afraid it’s cancer”.

The disease will affect one in two of us and, although survival rates have dramatically improved, the impact can be devastating.

This year, three separate Eurovision contestants have been touched by cancer, inspiring songs of unmatched heartbreak and reflection.

French singer Louane captures it best. Her song Maman, is an intimate conversation with her mother, who died when she was just 17 years old.

Over three verses, Louane describes the “emptiness” she was felt; and how she filled the void with bad behaviour and meaningless love affairs. But, as the song progresses, she tells her mum she’s settled down and found purpose… by becoming a mother herself.

She sings it beautifully, with a mixture of regret and strength. And when her daughter’s voice appears in the final moments of the song, it would take a steely heart not to shed a tear.

Over in Norway, 19-year-old Kyle Alessandro shared a similar story, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer in autumn 2023. Thankfully, she’s now in remission, but something she said during her treatment inspired his Eurovision entry: “Never lose your light.”

Kyle took that phrase and turned it into a thumping pop song about surviving adversity. “Nothing can burn me now,” he sings. “I’m my own Lighter.”

Klemen Slakonja, meanwhile, is a comedian best known in Slovenia for his impressions of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – but his ballad, How Much Time Do We Have Left was written after his wife, actress Mojca Fatur, was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer.

As he sings, Klemen’s dancers raise him into the air and hold him upside down, to represent the disorientation the family felt.

“When she read her diagnosis, our world turned upside down and I felt that rush of blood in my head, the same one I feel whenever I am upside down in the performance,” he told Eurovision World.

Defying the odds, Mojca survived, and joins him on stage at Eurovision. It’s a deeply intimate and moving moment.

Listening to this year’s line-up, it’s like the contestants all heard Cascada’s Evacuate the Dancefloor and went, “Nah, we’re good, thanks”.

There are club bangers everywhere, with Belgium’s Red Sebastian (named after the crab in The Little Mermaid, bless him) submitting an entire song about the loved-up liberation of an all-night rave.

“.”

A favourite with fans, the 90s rave elements of Strobe Lights feel a little dated to me, but his meticulously-choreographed performance is a treat.

Denmark’s Sissal takes a similar sound, with a throwback Euro-bop called Hallucination that effortlessly evokes two-time Eurovision winner Loreen.

Sissal said her biggest goal was for the audience to feel they couldn’t sit down during the song. Mission accomplished.

Germany, meanwhile, are pitching for a home run with Baller, a super-catchy trance anthem that wouldn’t sound out of place at Berlin superclub Berghain.

Performed by Austrian siblings Abor & Tynna, it’s languishing in the middle of the field, after Tynna developed laryngitis, robbing the duo of the chance to impress fans at Eurovision’s various pre-parties. But now that she’s recovered, the song could rise up the rankings.

That’s less likely for Væb, aka the Icelandic Jedward. Their energetic dance-rap song, Róa, is all about rowing from Iceland to the Faroe Islands, “because no matter what happens in life you just keep on rowing through the waves”.

Sadly, it’s not as deep as it sounds.

Spanish star Melody fares better with Esa Diva, a pumping house track with a sprinkling of flamenco guitar, that documents her journey to fame.

And Azerbaijan’s Mamagama go all Maroon 5 on Run With U, a smooth pop song elevated by a twinkling riff on the saz – a long-necked plucked instrument similar to the lute.

OK, so I’ve stolen that description from Shkodra Elektronike.

They’re an Albanian duo living in Italy, who fuse the ethnic music of their hometown, Shkodër, to a progressive electronic sound.

Their song Zjerm (Fire) imagines a time when cross-cultural understanding would lead to peace and harmony – a world without a need for soldiers and ambulances, and where “oil would smell like lilac” (no, me neither).

Greece’s entry, Asteromáta, is also rooted in history and memory, as Klavdia describes the unbreakable bond that refugees share with their homeland.

“” she sings, in a haunting ballad that blends traditional Greek and Pontic elements with soaring strings.

Taking a more upbeat approach is Dutch singer Claude. A refugee from the bloody civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he moved to the Netherlands at the age of nine and fell in love with Eurovision while waiting in the refugee centre.

His song, C’est La Vie, is a tribute to his mum, who taught him to see the positive in their situation.

Fizzing with freedom and joy, it combines elements of chanson and French-Caribbean zouk, and looks set for a top 10 placing.

The success of “goth gremlin witch” Bambie Thug at last year’s Eurovision has conjured a veritable coven of imitators in 2025.

Polish singer Justyna Steczkowska, representing her country for the second time, even includes a Slavic magic spell in her song, Gaja – summoning the spirit of the mother Earth to “cleanse” her of a toxic relationship.

It’s a suitably intense performance, with Justyna singing long sustained notes and playing a furious violin solo, before being hoiked into the rafters on a pair ropes.

What a time to be alive.

Marko Bošnjak, meanwhile, is cooking up a Poison Cake to feed to his tormentors – chiefly the people who bombarded him with homophobic hate messages after he was selected to represent Croatia.

The criticism was so intense that he lost his voice and couldn’t leave the house for five days.

His song is suitably melodramatic, replete with guttural synths and creepy playground chants. It’s a little overbaked, but should still sail through to the finals.

Taking a more ethereal approach are Latvian group Tautumeitas, whose song Bur Man Laimi translates as “a chant for happiness”.

Reminiscent of Bjork and Enya, its overlapping folk harmonies are based on traditional Latvian wedding songs, making it one of this year’s most captivating entries. I fear it may be too subtle to score well, though.

Further mystery is provided by, Theo Evan, Cyprus’s answer to Nick Jonas. The lyrics to his song, Shh, are a riddle, written by former tennis player Elke Tiel, whose “hidden truth will only be revealed on the Eurovision stage in May”.

He opens his performance perched between two pieces of scaffolding in a recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man sketch – so there’s a clue.

Shh is one of a number of gothic pop songs, sung by brooding young men with interesting hair.

Among the best is Kiss Kiss Goodbye, by Czechia’s Adonxs, who divebombs from an angelic falsetto to an unsettling baritone as he confronts his absent father.

Lithuanian band Katarsis are an interesting experiment, with a deliberately downbeat rock song that declares “the foundations of everything have begun to rot”.

Titled Tavo Akys (your eyes), it builds to a compelling climax, but it’s hard to see it being a vote-winner, unless Eurovision suddenly attracts an audience of depressed emo teens.

Rounding out the field are Armenian singer Parg, with the Imagine Dragons-inspired Survivor and Serbia’s Princ, whose overwrought ballad is called Mila.

Both performers give it their all, but the songs don’t feel strong enough to survive the semi-finals.

Four years after Måneskin’s victory, Eurovision’s rock revival continues apace.

Italy are back at it again, thanks to Lucio Corsi – think David Bowie as Pierrot – and his glam rock ballad Volevo Essere Un Duro (I wanted to be tough).

A delicate anthem for people who feel they don’t fit in, it recalls how Lucio was bullied as a kid, and how he’s grown to embrace his fragility. At one point, he sings: “Instead of a star, [I’m] just a sneeze.”

It’s a timeless bit of songwriting that pulls off that crucial Eurovision trick of sounding new and familiar all at once.

Portuguese indie band Napa also have a 70s vibe, channelling Paul McCartney’s Wings on the soft rock tear-jerker Deslocado (out of place).

It’s another song about migration, written after the band were forced to relocate from Madeira to the Portuguese mainland due to the economic crisis.

“Even though we’ve been here for a few years we always have that desire to go back, and that anguish of saying goodbye to family,” said singer Guilherme Gomes.

Last but not least are Ukraine’s Ziferblat, who continue the country’s astonishing run of high-quality entries in the midst of a war with Russia.

Their song, Bird Of Pray, is an unexpected mix of 70s new wave band Cars, birdsong and the guitar riff from Rachel Stevens’ Sweet Dreams My LA Ex – while the lyrics are full of hope for a peaceful reunion with their loved ones.

It’s better than that makes it sound.

Where would Eurovision be without a raven-haired woman bellowing into a wind machine set to “hurricane”?

Israel has strong form in this category, and sets the bar again with New Day Will Rise, a melancholy piano ballad sung in a mixture of English, French and Hebrew.

The song’s performed by Yuval Raphael, a 24-year-old who narrowly escaped with her life at the 2023 Nova music festival, where an attack by Hamas claimed the lives of 378 people and triggered Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza.

It’s hard not to interpret her lyrics as a response to those events – “everyone cries, don’t cry alone”. As a result, her participation hasn’t received the same level of criticism as Eden Golan, who represented Israel last year.

That can’t be said for Georgia’s contestant, Mariam Shengelia, who has been booed during pre-Eurovision appearances for her alleged support of the country’s authoritarian, pro-Russian, anti-LGBT ruling party, Georgian Dream.

Shengelia has denied the accusations, pointing out that her song – a stirring, quasi-militaristic ballad called Freedom – is about “freedom of choice, freedom to love, freedom to live as you want to live”.

“No amount of manufactured hate will change that,” she told the Eurovision fan site Wiwibloggs.

Montenegro’s Nina Žižić tackles domestic abuse in Dobrodošli, a brooding and refined orchestral ballad.

The singer, who previously entered Eurovision in 2013 with the cyborg pop oddity Igranka, delivers her lyrics with passion and sincerity, but somehow the song never quite takes off.

Last but not least, we have defending champions Switzerland, represented by 24-year-old Zoë Më, who describes herself as a “little fairy”.

Appropriately enough, her self-penned song, Voyage is delicate as a fairy’s wings, fluttering with a soft-spoken plea to treat each other with kindness.

Automatically qualifying for the final, it’s a welcome oasis of calm amidst the steamy sauna sessions, moody goth haircuts and thrusting innuendo.

But that’s Eurovision for you. All human life is here. See you in Basel!

When 68 million Filipinos head to the polls on Monday, Sara Duterte’s name will not be on the ballot.

But the results of the election, which includes 12 senate races, will have a huge impact on her political future.

They will affect both her role as the Philippines’ current vice-president and any hopes she might have of running for the country’s presidency one day, as she faces the prospect of a ban from politics – decided by lawmakers in the Senate.

The 46-year-old is the eldest daughter of the Philippines’ former President Rodrigo Duterte. She trained as a lawyer before entering politics in 2007, when she was elected as her father’s vice-mayor in their family’s hometown Davao.

Rodrigo Duterte has described her as the “alpha” character of the family, who always gets her way.

The younger Duterte was previously filmed punching a court official in the face after he refused her request, leading one local news outlet to bestow the nickname of “the slugger” upon her.

She and her father are known to share similar traits, as well as a shared passion for riding big motorbikes.

As one cable from the US embassy in Manila in 2009, leaked by Wikileaks, described her: “A tough-minded individual who, like her father, is difficult to engage.”

In 2010, she succeeded her father to become the first female mayor of Davao. But it was only in 2021 that she decided to make her way to national politics.

The next year she ran on a joint ticket with the scion of another political dynasty – Ferdinand Marcos Jr. He was going for the top job, with Duterte as his deputy.

The assumption was that she would then be in a prime position to contest the next presidential election in 2028, as presidents are limited only to one six-year term in the Philippines.

The strategy proved effective and the duo won by a landslide.

But then it quickly started to unravel.

Cracks started to emerge in their alliance even before the euphoria of their election win faded. Duterte publicly expressed her preference to be defence secretary but she was instead handed the education portfolio.

The House of Representatives soon after scrutinised Duterte’s request for confidential funds – millions of pesos that she could spend without stringent documentation.

Then, Rodrigo Duterte spoke at a late night rally, accusing President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos of being a junkie and a weak leader.

Soon after, First Lady Liza Marcos snubbed Sara Duterte at an event, in full view of news cameras. She admitted that it was intentional, saying Duterte should not have stayed silent in the background while her father accused the president of drug use.

After Duterte resigned from the cabinet in July last year, her language became increasingly inflammatory.

She said she had “talked to someone” to “go kill” Marcos, his wife and his cousin, who is also the speaker of the House. She also told reporters her relationship with Marcos had become toxic and she dreamed of cutting off his head.

Such remarks are shocking for someone who is not acquainted with Philippine politics. But Duterte’s strong personality has only endeared her to the public and she remains popular in the south, as well as among the millions of overseas Filipino workers.

But in February this year, lawmakers in the lower house of parliament voted to impeach Duterte, accusing her of misusing public funds and threatening to have President Marcos assassinated.

She will be tried by the Senate and, if found guilty, removed from office and banned from running in future elections.

Duterte has denied the charges and alleges she is the victim of a political vendetta.

But whether or not she will be impeached hinges a lot on the upcoming election – and the composition of the Senate thereafter.

For her to be impeached, two-thirds of the Senate would need to vote for this. The make-up of the upcoming Senate will be determined in Monday’s election, with both Marcos and Duterte backing competing candidates.

For Durterte, the election will also be a barometer of support for her family, and whether she can capitalise on this for her presidential run in 2028.

But for now, her fate hangs in the balance.

At the end of a waitressing shift, Kristina Lampert used to separate her tips in two piles: Canadian cash and American.

But it’s been weeks since she has done that.

Freighters, the restaurant where she works, is one of the first places people can grab a bite after crossing the US-Canada border between Sarnia, Ontario, and Port Huron, Michigan.

The Blue Water Bridge, which connects the US and Canada, is in full view from the restaurant’s windows.

“A lot of people used to come over and say ‘we’re here for the view’,” she says of Canadian diners. “I haven’t heard that at all recently.”

Border towns noticed almost instantly when US President Donald Trump began imposing tariffs on countries around the world and saying he wanted to make Canada the 51st US state – because the number of Canadians crossing the border plummeted.

Border crossings between the US and Canada are down some 17% since Trump started bringing in tariffs, according to CBP data.

Canadians car trips to the US are down almost 32% compared to March 2024, according to Statistics Canada.

Like many of the towns that dot along the 5,525 mile (8,891 km) border, the economies of Port Huron and Sarnia are linked and in some ways dependent on one another. Port Huron is a manufacturing town of less than 30,000 people with a quaint downtown and lots of retail, offering visitors an enticing opportunity for a day-trip.

On a day where there is little traffic, a Sarnia resident can cross the border and be in Michigan in a matter of minutes.

Many of these towns faced their first test more than five years ago when the Covid-19 pandemic shut crossings down for 19 months and left local economies reeling.

Now, they are seeing a second economic hit due to Trump’s trade war, with many Canadians choosing to “Buy Canadian” – purchase Canadian-made goods – and reducing travel to the US in response to the fraying relationship between the two neighbouring countries.

One place this is being felt is at Sarnia’s Duty Free, the last place you can purchase goods before leaving Canada and entering the US. The shelves of perfume and liquor are fuller and the parking lot is emptier since tariffs tensions began.

Barbara Barett, the executive director of Frontier Duty Free Association, says some of the 32 land-border duty frees in Canada have seen as much as an 80% decrease in sales since Trump’s return to the White House. Most stores have seeing a 50-60% drop in business.

“We’re 100% reliant on the travel across the border,” she says of duty frees. “Our stores are often pillars of these communities; communities depend on them.”

And while the crossing at Port Huron-Sarnia is faring better than most, on a Friday in May the parking lot of the Sarnia Duty Free is almost empty.

Tania Lee, who runs the store with her family, says that has become the new norm.

On Easter weekend – usually one of their busiest of the year, as Canadians take advantage of the break to stop in at a favourite restaurant and go to a church service in Port Huron – cars were few and far between and sales were not what they should have been, she says.

“We are suffering because of collateral damage at the border,” Ms Lee says of her second-generation family business.

Ms Lee notes that people who live in border towns often cross the boundary multiple times a week. She, for example, has a mailbox at a shipping facility in Port Huron that she visits regularly, as do her neighbours.

People across the Blue Water Bridge are feeling the effects too, Mayor Anita Ashford says.

She has heard from both residents of her town and Canadians frustrated about the increased tension between the nations.

Nationally, a 10% drop in Canadian tourism would cost the US up to 14,000 jobs and $2.1bn (£1.56b) in business, according to the US Travel Association.

Michigan is one of the places likely to see the brunt of that impact. In 2023, Canadians visitors spent a collective $238m in the state, according to tourism officials.

That money is essential for border towns like Port Huron, its mayor says.

“I hope people in Washington will start to understand what they’re doing to the people,” she says. “We are not responsible for this, the [federal] government put us in this position and now we have to deal with it respectfully.”

“We need each other,” she says.

Baby Reindeer and Mr Bates vs the Post Office will go head to head at the Bafta TV Awards, which take place later at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

The event is one of the most prestigious in the TV calendar, and will see shows broadcast in 2024 compete for awards voted for by the British Academy.

First screened by ITV in January 2024, Mr Bates vs the Post Office was one of the most impactful shows of the year and led to widespread public outcry about the wrongful convictions of hundreds of sub-postmasters.

Baby Reindeer, meanwhile, was a breakout viral hit for Netflix about an aspiring comedian and his stalker, but it also prompted a defamation claim from the woman said to have inspired it.

The TV Baftas mark the final stop on the awards circuit for both shows, after wins at other events such as the Emmys, Golden Globes, SAG and National Television Awards.

• 4 nominations – Baby Reindeer, Mr Bates vs The Post Office
• 3 – Rivals, Slow Horses, Mr Loverman, Say Nothing, The Traitors
• 2 – Sherwood, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, Gavin & Stacey: The Finale

The above tallies include nominations for the memorable moment prize, the only award voted by the public.

The numbers do not include the shows’ earlier nominations and wins at the Bafta Craft Awards, which took place last month and saw Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd take home best comedy writing, with Slow Horses and Inside No. 9 among the other winners.

The Post Office scandal is widely considered the biggest miscarriage of justice in modern British history, and saw hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted and convicted of crimes they didn’t commit, based on inaccurate data from the Horizon software system.

The story was reported in the media over several years, but ITV dramatisation Mr Bates vs the Post Office brought it a new league of public attention and prompted the government to announce new legislation to exonerate and compensate victims.

Meanwhile, Baby Reindeer told the story of a struggling stand-up comedian, the woman who stalks him, and the powerful man in the TV industry who mentors and then sexually assaults him. Richard Gadd’s partly autobiographical drama became one of the most dissected series of the year.

Other nominees include Rivals, a Disney+ adaptation of a Jilly Cooper novel about two powerful men battling for control of a local TV network, and Slow Horses, about a dysfunctional unit within MI5 made up of disgraced agents.

Say Nothing, which followed the lives of those growing up during the troubles in Belfast, is also nominated, alongside Mr Loverman, a screen adaptation of Bernadine Evaristo’s novel about an elderly man whose marriage falls apart after his long-term affair with his male friend is revealed.

Sherwood focused on a Nottinghamshire community still reeling from the 1980s miners’ strike, while Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light continued Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell’s continued rise to power and eventual fall from grace.

Other nominees include reality series The Traitors, a game of deception played in a Scottish castle, and Gavin & Stacey: The Finale, which saw the long-running series about two families from from Billericay in Essex and Barry in Wales reach an emotional conclusion.

Actor and TV presenter Alan Cumming will take over hosting duties this year, and we hope he brings just as much drama as he did to the latest cracking series of The Traitors US.

The Scottish star’s film credits include Eyes Wide Shut, GoldenEye and Emma, as well as two absolute masterpieces of 1990s cinema – Spice World: The Movie and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.

Bafta’s executive director of awards and content, Emma Baehr, said Cumming would “definitely bring a playful sense of mischief and fun to the ceremony”.

Elsewhere in the ceremony, Jessie J will deliver her first TV performance in six years, singing the appropriately titled The Award Goes To, while Tom Grennan will perform his new single Full Attention.

Awards will be presented by stars including Dame Mary Berry, Billy Porter, Suranne Jones, Ashley Walters, Katie Piper, Sir David Suchet, Big Zuu, Ellie Simmonds, Owen Cooper, Rose Ayling Ellis, Stacey Dooley and Baroness Benjamin.

The ceremony will be broadcast on BBC One at 19:00 BST.

But it actually takes place a couple of hours earlier, so that some sections of the ceremony can be edited down before the show airs.

BBC News will be running spoiler-free coverage, with winners revealed on our live page in line with when they are announced on BBC One.

Drama series

• Blue Lights – BBC One
• Sherwood – BBC One
• Supacell – Netflix
• Wolf Hall: The Mirror And The Light – BBC One

Limited drama

• Baby Reindeer – Netflix
• Lost Boys And Fairies – BBC One
• Mr Bates Vs The Post Office – ITV1
• One Day – Netflix

Scripted comedy

• Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two)
• Brassic (Sky Max)
• G’Wed (ITV1)
• Ludwig (BBC One)

Leading actress

• Anna Maxwell Martin – Until I Kill You (ITV1)
• Billie Piper – Scoop (Netflix)
• Lola Petticrew – Say Nothing (Disney+)
• Marisa Abela – Industry (BBC One)
• Monica Dolan – Mr Bates vs The Post Office (ITV1)
• Sharon D Clarke – Mr Loverman (BBC One)

Leading actor

• David Tennant – Rivals (Disney+)
• Gary Oldman – Slow Horses (Apple TV+)
• Lennie James – Mr Loverman (BBC One)
• Martin Freeman – The Responder (BBC One)
• Richard Gadd – Baby Reindeer (Netflix)
• Toby Jones – Mr Bates vs The Post Office (ITV1)

Supporting actress

• Jessica Gunning – Baby Reindeer (Netflix)
• Katherine Parkinson – Rivals (Disney+)
• Maxine Peake – Say Nothing – (Disney+)
• Monica Dolan – Sherwood (BBC One)
• Nava Mau – Baby Reindeer (Netflix)
• Sue Johnston – Truelove (Channel 4)

Supporting actor

• Ariyon Bakare, Mr Loverman (BBC One)
• Christopher Chung, Slow Horses (Apple TV+)
• Damian Lewis, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (BBC One
• Jonathan Pryce, Slow Horses (Apple TV+)
• McKinley Belcher III, Eric (Netflix)
• Sonny Walker, The Gathering (Channel 4)

Female performance in a comedy

• Anjana Vasan – We Are Lady Parts (Channel 4)
• Kate O’Flynn – Everyone Else Burns (Channel 4)
• Lolly Adefope – The Franchise (Sky Comedy)
• Nicola Coughlan – Big Mood (Channel 4)
• Ruth Jones – Gavin & Stacey: The Finale (BBC One)
• Sophie Willan – Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two)

Male performance in a comedy

• Bilal Hasna – Extraordinary (Disney+)
• Danny Dyer – Mr Bigstuff (Sky Comedy)
• Dylan Thomas-Smith – G’Wed (ITV2)
• Nabhaan Rizwan – Kaos – Sister (Netflix)
• Oliver Savell- Changing Ends (ITV1)
• Phil Dunning – Smoggie Queens (BBC Three)

Soap

• Casualty (BBC One)
• Coronation Street (ITV1)
• EastEnders (BBC One)

Entertainment programme

• The 1% Club (ITV1)
• Michael McIntyre’s Big Show (BBC One)
• Taskmaster (Channel 4)
• Would I Lie To You? (BBC One)

Entertainment performance

• Anthony McPartlin, Declan Donnelly – Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway – (ITV1)
• Claudia Winkleman – The Traitors (BBC One)
• Graham Norton – The Graham Norton Show (BBC One)
• Joe Lycett Late Night Lycett – (Channel 4)
• Romesh Ranganathan, Rob Beckett Rob & Romesh Vs (Sky Max)
• Stacey Solomon Sort Your Life Out – (BBC One)

Factual entertainment

• In Vogue: The 90s (Disney+)
• Race Across The World (BBC One)
• Rob And Rylan’s Grand Tour (BBC Two)
• Sort Your Life Out (BBC One)

Reality

• Dragons’ Den (BBC One)
• The Jury: Murder Trial (Channel 4)
• Love Is Blind (Netflix)
• The Traitors (BBC One)

Daytime

• Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure (BBC Two)
• Loose Women (ITV1)
• Morning Live (BBC One)
• Richard Osman’s House Of Games (BBC Two)

International

• After The Party (Channel 4)
• Colin From Accounts (BBC Two)
• Say Nothing (Disney+)
• Shōgun (Disney+)
• True Detective: Night Country (Sky Atlantic)
• You Are Not Alone: Fighting The Wolfpack (Netflix)

Live event coverage

• D-Day 80: Tribute To The Fallen (BBC One)
• Glastonbury 2024 (BBC Two)
• Last Night Of The Proms (BBC Two)

Current affairs

• Life and Death in Gaza – Storyville (BBC Two)
• Maternity: Broken Trust – Exposure (ITV1)
• State of Rage (Channel 4)
• Ukraine’s War: The Other Side (ITV1)

Single documentary

• Hell Jumper (BBC Two)
• Tell Them You Love Me (Sky Documentaries)
• Ukraine: Enemy In The Woods (BBC Two)
• Undercover: Exposing The Far Right (Channel 4)

Factual series

• American Nightmare (Netflix)
• Freddie Flintoff’s Field Of Dreams On Tour (BBC One)
• The Push: Murder On The Cliff (Channel 4)
• To Catch A Copper (Channel 4)

Specialist factual

• Atomic People (BBC Two)
• Billy & Molly: An Otter Love (National Geographic)
• Children of the Cult (ITV1)
• Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain (Channel 4)

News coverage

• BBC Breakfast: Post Office Special (BBC News/BBC One)
• Channel 4 News: Inside Sednaya – The Fall Of Assad (Channel 4 News/Channel 4)
• Channel 4 News: Undercover Inside Reform’s Campaign (Channel 4 News/Channel 4)

Sports coverage

• Euro 2024 (BBC Sport/BBC One)
• Paris 2024 Olympics (BBC Sport/BBC One)
• Wimbledon 2024 (BBC Sport/Wimbledon Broadcast Services/BBC One)

Memorable moment

• Bridgerton – “THE” carriage scene where Colin admits his true feelings for Penelope (Netflix)
• Gavin & Stacey: The Finale – Smithy’s Wedding: Mick Stands Up (BBC One)
• Mr Bates Vs The Post Office – Jo Hamilton phones the Horizon helpline (ITV1)
• Rivals – Rupert Campbell-Black and Sarah Stratton are caught in a game of naked tennis (Disney+)
• Strictly Come Dancing – Chris McCausland and Dianne Buswell Waltz to You’ll Never Walk Alone (BBC One)
• The Traitors – “Paul isn’t my son… but Ross is!” (BBC One)

Short form

• Brown Brit (Channel 4)
• Peaked (Channel 4)
• Quiet Life (BBC Three)

Read more about the Bafta nominees:

• Baby Reindeer stars win big at Emmy Awards
• Netflix fails to get Baby Reindeer lawsuit dropped
• The power of Mr Bates vs The Post Office in bringing about justice
• Mr Bates vs Post Office drama lost £1m, ITV boss says
• Rivals: Dame Jilly Cooper on why jogging is ruinous for our sex lives
• Gary Oldman wants to play shabby secret agent ‘for the long run’
• Marian Price to sue Disney over Say Nothing murder scene
• Life and Death in Gaza: ‘I say bye to my kids, in case we don’t wake up’
• Scoop: Why Gillian Anderson found it ‘scary’ to play Emily Maitlis
• Bankers ‘neither villains nor rock stars’, says Industry creator
• ‘I was told Mr Loverman was too niche for TV’
• Martin Freeman: The Responder star on why TV viewers can ‘smell lies’
• UK TV industry in crisis, says Wolf Hall director
• Eric: Benedict Cumberbatch says dressing as monster is ‘one of the most ludicrous things I’ve done’
• Sherwood actress aims to break Down’s syndrome barriers
• TV drama Truelove puts seaside town ‘on the map’
• We Are Lady Parts: Why Anjana Vasan is done people pleasing
• Nicola Coughlan: Why I hate on-screen vanity, in new show Big Mood
• Gavin and Stacey tops Christmas Day TV ratings
• Gavin & Stacey: An exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the Christmas finale
• Alma’s Not Normal: How anger and spa breaks fuelled new series
• Extraordinary: Peat & Diesel music to feature on new Disney show
• Blue Lights series two promises ‘absolute chaos’
• Supacell: Superhero series tackling knife crime and sickle cell
• Lost Boys and Fairies writer proud of adoption drama
• One Day: I rarely saw people like me in lead roles, says Ambika Mod
• Derek Thompson: Casualty’s Charlie Fairhead exits after 38 years
• Coronation Street’s Gail bids farewell after 50 years
• EastEnders gets ratings bump for ‘flawless’ live episode
• Why is Race Across the World so popular?
• Rylan Clark and Rob Rinder: ‘The tour that helped mend our broken hearts’
• Sort Your Life Out: How to plump up your saggy sofa
• Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway: More than 4m tune in for final show
• The Traitors finale was most-watched live episode in show’s history
• Late Night Lycett: Joe Lycett behind Banksy mural hoax
• Michael McIntyre’s Big Show: LeAnn Rimes in duet with Harrogate mum
• Romesh and Roisin remember the original Taskmaster
• Sara Davies to ‘step away’ from Dragons’ Den
• Matt and Emma Willis on a ‘very British’ Love is Blind
• Shogun: A guide to the hit Japanese samurai epic as its finale cuts deep
• King and Queen hear first-hand D-Day veteran stories
• Glastonbury 2024: 15 magical and memorable moments
• Thousands wave flags to classics at Last Night of the Proms
• Maternity: Broken Trust: Parents hope documentary will help maternity inquiry bid
• Hell Jumper: Story of Ukraine war victims’ rescuer told in film
• Freddie Flintoff: Star returns to BBC with second Field of Dreams series
• To Catch a Copper: Avon and Somerset Police staff ‘betrayed’ by Channel 4 documentary
• Atomic People: ‘Atomic bomb hell must never be repeated’ say Japan’s last survivors
• BBC Breakfast: Post Office Special: ‘I carried the shame – I refuse to carry it any longer’
• Euro 2024 final in numbers
• Paris 2024: How is France preparing for the Olympics and Paralympics?
• Five Wimbledon storylines to look out for
• Bridgerton or Strictly? Bafta opens vote on best TV moments of 2024
• Peaked: Actress returns home for Derbyshire-set comedy

“Whatever I was doing – maybe cleaning up or doing homework – when I heard the ‘oooh-oooh-oooooh’,” Adesoji Kukoyi says, mimicking the iconic Doctor Who theme tune, “I dropped everything and ran straight to the television.”

As a child growing up in 1980s Nigeria, Mr Kukoyi was infatuated with sci-fi sensation Doctor Who. British shows like Allo Allo and Fawlty Towers aired regularly as a cultural hangover from the colonial era, but none captured Mr Kukoyi’s imagination like the time-travelling Doctor did.

“He always spoke to me,” 44-year-old Mr Kukoyi, who currently has a vintage Doctor Who theme as the ringtone on his phone, tells the BBC.

“Like there’s somebody watching out for us… yes, we make mistakes, but we do our best, especially if we have a teacher that will lead us on the right path.”

Mr Kukoyi has been watching Doctor Who for decades, so when he heard that on Saturday an episode will, for the very first time, be set in Nigeria, he was elated.

“I was watching last week’s episode with my wife and the preview [for the following week] said: ‘Welcome to Lagos, Nigeria’. I screamed like a little girl!” Mr Kukoyi says.

The setting is momentous not just for Mr Kukoyi – a native of Nigeria’s biggest and liveliest city Lagos – but for the show too. Saturday’s adventure will be the first primarily set in Africa.

It is fitting that the producers chose Nigeria for this milestone – in 2013, fans worldwide were delighted when nine lost Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s were unearthed in a Nigerian TV facility.

Ariyon Bakare, who in the upcoming episode plays the mysterious Barber, says fans can expect “a time-bending cultural ancestral collision” and “hair, lots of hair”.

The preview also teases a vibrant barber shop, a brimming Lagos market and a towering, monstrous-looking spider.

Fans speculate that this creature is Anansi, a legendary character in West African and Caribbean folktales, but scriptwriter Inua Ellams is keeping specifics under wraps.

As for why the show has enjoyed such popularity in Nigeria, he says: “There’s something Nigerian about the Doctor. Nigerians are sort of loud, gregarious people… the Doctor is mysterious, boisterous, sort of over-confident but somehow manages to save the day.”

Ellams, who moved from Nigeria to the UK as a child, also considers why in 62 years, a character known to traverse the universe has barely spent any time in Africa.

It could be that no writer has felt confident enough to produce an authentic African story, he says, or it might be down to the Doctor’s need to “blend into his environment and be inconspicuous”.

“Ncuti Gatwa [who plays the Doctor] being an actor of African descent means that we can tell new stories with the Doctor and negotiate in different spaces because of his appearance.

“And this is the brilliance of the show – every Doctor creates new opportunities to tell new stories in different ways,” Ellams tells the BBC.

But these fresh Doctor Who stories have a smaller reach than the old ones did, as the show is no longer broadcast on Nigerian public TV. If you are in the country and want to catch up on the Doctor’s exploits, you would have to subscribe to streaming service Disney Plus.

Regardless, Mr Kukoyi insists that a dedicated troop of Nigerian Doctor Who lovers will be sitting transfixed on their sofas on Saturday evening, bearing witness to the Tardis materialising in Lagos.

“I’m waiting with baited breath,” he says. “Finally, he is coming!”

Mr Kukoyi – whose first experience of the Doctor was one played by a stripy scarf-wearing Tom Baker – says his young daughters are not so taken with his beloved show.

He is “trying to get them onboard”, he says.

Perhaps seeing the Doctor wearing traditional Nigerian clothing, squeezing his way through a quintessential Lagos market and getting caught up in local folklore will help them fall in love with the show the way their father once did.

• Nuzo Onoh – the Queen of African horror who is terrified of ghosts
• The Nigerian teenagers who became sci-fi sensations
• Why black science fiction ‘can’t be ignored’

Symone has been using weight loss injections for nearly a year. She says they have done what the diet industry could never do for her – free her from a life controlled by food.

From a very young age, the 34-year-old could not switch off the constant noise in her head. When would her next meal come? What would it be? Would there be enough for her?

“The food noise was just so loud, it could be unbearable,” she says. “I have tried every single diet going – I’ve done Atkins, eating clean, SlimFast, Slimming World, meal-replacement shakes – you name it – I’ve done it and none have them worked for me.”

Several years ago, weighing 16st (102kg), she was one of the many millions who signed up to WeightWatchers, downloading the app and meticulously following its points plan, scanning in everything she ate and staying within her daily points budget.

WeightWatchers attributes points to food and drink, stating that it uses a “groundbreaking algorithm” to assess their nutritional makeup and then uses a point system to inform its members which food is better to eat.

But after a few weeks, Symone says she started to feel like she was being set up to fail.

“How could I lose weight long term if I had to follow this mad points system? Food is not measured in points – it’s measured in calories, fat, macro nutrients.

“I felt trapped, and the more research I did, the more I educated myself, the more I thought this is not for me.”

The only thing that has ever worked in her quest to lose weight, she says, is weight loss injection Mounjaro, which she started using nearly a year ago.

“I was at my heaviest, just over 21 stone, and the doctor told me I was pre-diabetic. I knew something had to change – I’ve got two children who depend on me too.”

She was advised to start on the weight loss medication but with a two-year wait, she decided to buy it privately online and within just a few days, she was crying with relief.

“I couldn’t believe that I had control over food. For the first time, I wasn’t panicking about when I would next eat.”

Weight loss jabs work by mimicking a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), which suppresses people’s appetites and makes them feel full.

Symone has now lost 4st 7lb (26kg) and is losing weight gradually, documenting her experiences on social media.

“I don’t want a quick fix,” she says, “I’m using weight loss injections to give me the control I never had.”

For many, weight loss jabs can produce rapid results, but some experts are concerned about the meteoric rise in their popularity and how people will be affected by them long term – both physically and mentally.

At its peak, WeightWatchers was seen as being synonymous with safe and controlled weight loss. With 4.5million subscribers globally, its workshops were held in most towns, on most high streets, popping up in local church halls – they were everywhere.

Now, after dominating the diet industry for more than half a century, it has lost more than a million members and filed for bankruptcy, struggling to compete in a market transformed by social media influencers and weight loss injections.

The company has stressed that it is not going out of business and that filing for bankruptcy will help it resolve its debt of $1.25bn (£860m).

In a statement, the brand says its weight loss programme (which also includes its own brand of weight loss jabs) and weight loss workshops will continue.

The company says it has been the brand with the most scientific backing in the diet industry for over 60 years, and that there have been more than 180 published studies showing the effectiveness of its approach.

WeightWatchers says it uses an “holistic model of care” to support “the whole person” with “access to obesity-trained clinicians and registered dietitians”.

It is also one of several companies GPs can use for weight loss referrals, with the NHS paying for patients to attend weekly meetings in the community.

“It’s no longer about calorie control and diets,” Deanne Jade, clinical director of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, told the BBC.

“There’s a new movement out there and it’s all about wellbeing.

“People like to move in tribes – it used to be the WeightWatchers tribe, counting points and calories, now millions follow different ways to lose weight or be healthy through social media influencers, through weight loss drugs, and they’re forming new tribes.”

She is not convinced that medication will be the answer that so many are looking for.

“None of these pharmaceutical interventions protect people from regaining the weight when they stop injecting.”

She believes they are not a quick fix, and that the best way to effectively lose weight and keep it off is to understand the psychological reasons behind overeating.

Dr Joanne Silver, lead psychologist at the London-based eating disorder clinic, Orri, agrees. She says the weight loss injections “completely silence what the body is asking for”, which is counterintuitive to understanding what the body needs.

“People can binge eat because of psychological reasons – they can use food to manage their emotions, to soothe themselves.

“Eating disorders are not just about food.”

Food and nutrition have become just one part of a more holistic approach so many are now adopting when it comes to their overall wellbeing.

Jennifer Pybis, a fitness coach based in Liverpool, works with clients both online and in person. She says achieving a healthy lifestyle is not just about hitting a target weight.

“I encourage the women I work with to consider lots of ways to measure their progress rather than just jumping on the scales.

“Thinking about how they feel, comparing photographs of themselves to see how their bodies have changed shape, how their sleep is, their resting heart rate, their improvements in the gym – all of that is so important.”

The diet industry might be transforming but there are many who still prefer the more traditional model of sitting together and sharing their experiences, supporting others in their community to lose weight.

In a small church hall in Winsford, Cheshire, a group of women are waiting patiently to get on the scales.

Muttering and good-natured laughter can be heard as they share their latest weights with each other.

“I’ve put on a pound! I did have a little bit – well maybe aof wine at the weekend.”

“Why didn’t you have gin?” another one asks, “it’s only 55 calories a shot!”

They’re here for their weekly check-in at the BeeWeighed slimming group. Some of the women have lost several pounds, others have a put on a pound or two, but overall, since joining the class, they have all lost weight.

They are learning about how to eat in moderation, how to exercise safely and how to feel good about themselves.

At first glance, it could be a WeightWatchers class – women meeting up to share their stories of weight loss and support each other – but there are crucial differences, says BeeWeighed owner and founder Lynda Leadbetter.

She was a group leader for WeightWatchers for 18 years but left to set up her own group in 2018.

“I think WeightWatchers did provide something different and something hopeful for so many women but I think it has lost its way,” she says.

“I teach nutrition, I educate, I don’t sell anything extra. I feel WeightWatchers became about selling extra products, it was always about pushing those extra sales, and not about supporting people to lose weight properly.”

She’s sceptical about the effectiveness of weight loss medications, and some members who have turned to the likes of Ozempic and WeGovy have left her groups, but many have stayed – continuing to attend the meetings for support while using weight loss injections.

Kathryn Brady, 38, has been a member of BeeWeighed since 2023, and in that time, she’s lost over three stone. But with her wedding in a matter of weeks, the burlesque dancer has started to take Mounjaro to lose weight more rapidly.

It’s not quite worked out as she had hoped.

“I’ve been on Mounjaro for over a month now, and while I lost 6lb in the first week or so, I’ve put half of that back on.

“Having absolutely no appetite for two weeks was really weird and I’m paying a lot of money to not lose that much weight.”

She’s going to keep on using it, but she’s not completely sold yet.

“Even if I continue with the skinny jab, I’ll still attend BeeWeighed, having others there supporting me keeps me going.”

For Jenny Watt, death is a key part of her life.

The 31-year-old spends two or three nights a week chatting to people – whether familiar faces or strangers she’s met for the first time – about everything connected with death, from working through grief to the ideal song for a funeral.

Jenny runs a handful of death cafés across Glasgow – community spaces that aim to encourage conversation and discussion about a topic few people like to raise.

BBC Scotland News attended one of the weekly gatherings, which Jenny believes can help break down taboos about the subject.

But what makes a person want to spend time talking about the end of life?

Jenny estimates around half the attendees at her groups are there to process grief in some way, whether for a recent loss or from 20 or 30 years ago.

“The same way people are called to nursing or religion, I’ve always been interested in death,” she explains.

“It’s going to happen to everybody. It might be unique for you and the relationships you are grieving but if you feel it just by yourself it can be a lonely experience.

“When you start talking about it you realise it’s not so scary.”

Jenny first attended a death café online during the coronavirus pandemic, and notes she wasn’t looking to work through any “traumatic bereavement” – she was simply interested in the subject.

As face-to-face meetings resumed, she could not find any local groups offering discussions about grief around Glasgow.

Taking the plunge, she set up her own meeting space around two and-a-half years ago in the Battlefield area of Glasgow, panicking that no-one would turn up.

However people did – sometimes just occasionally, others more consistently – to have some tea and a slice of cake while discussing mortality and life.

On the night BBC Scotland visited Jenny’s café, the attendees were a mix of regulars and first timers, drawn to the meeting for various reasons.

As well as those processing grief, Jenny believes another 25% or so would be people diagnosed with a serious condition or caring for someone. The remainder tends to be people simply interested in the topic.

“Whatever people want to talk about, nothing is off limits,” says Jenny.

“People laugh, they’ll cry and at the end I think everyone learns something, whether that’s reflecting on their own experience or suddenly realising they should get power of attorney.”

That sentiment is shared by Nicola Smith, one of the more regular attendees at the Battlefield meetings.

She came along to one of the sessions the same day a close friend of hers had died, and “the tears flowed”.

But letting her emotions pour out is not the only reason that Nicola keeps attending.

“It’s such an intrinsic part of our life and living, and yet we don’t talk about it,” she told BBC Scotland.

“We don’t know how to deal with it, because we don’t do enough talking about it. I lost a very dear relative when my children were very small, and it was the first time my daughter had seen me cry.

“She asked me why my face was wet, and it was the time to explain it was OK to cry and this is what happens when you lose someone you love. It’s not a weakness, it’s not something you hush up.”

Nicola added she believed the topic had become more taboo among modern generations due to the growth of hospice care since the 1960s, meaning a decrease in people dying at home.

Those trends could explain the growth in death cafés – the first in the UK was held in 2011 in London, and now there are 3,794 across the UK.

In Scotland there are dozens, from Ullapool to Kirkcudbright, but mostly clustered in cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Discussion topics bounce around at the meetings, from practical advice on wills and power of attorney to more emotional reflections on personal experiences.

They form part of a wider conversation on loss and care, exemplified by May’s Demystifying Death week that aims to help people support each other during traumatic experiences.

Another visitor in Jenny’s group, John Mackay, wrote his PHD about death and the mourning process. He was attending his first death café in Glasgow with the intention of discussing the subject more.

“There’s such a taboo about death, but you can take a lighter look at it,” he says.

“The problem is that people don’t talk about it. If you see funerals from other cultures it’s very loud and very expressive, but in this country it’s very reserved.

“You have to make sure you don’t say the wrong thing and that you wear the right clothes – it would be good to loosen it up as well.”

Others suggest the greatest benefit of the café is more simple – in that it provides perspective on life.

Spencer Mason previously attempted to end their life, but is currently coping with the end-of-life care of a person close to them.

“I think the more we discuss death then surely the more appreciative you become of life,” they say.

“In circumstances where I’ve become close to death, I’ve come out of them wanting life more than ever.”

Lesego Chombo’s enthusiasm for life is as infectious as her achievements are impressive: she has won the Miss Botswana 2022 and Miss World Africa 2024 crowns, is a working lawyer, has set up her own charitable foundation – and made history in November, becoming Botswana’s youngest cabinet minister.

She was just 26 years old at the time – and had clearly impressed Botswana’s incoming President Duma Boko, whose Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) had just won a landslide, ousting the party that had governed for 58 years.

It was a seismic shift in the politics of the diamond-rich southern African nation – and Boko, a 55-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, hit the ground running.

His main focus, he said, was fixing an economy too reliant on diamonds, telling the BBC ahead of his inauguration that he wanted young people to be the solution – “to become entrepreneurs, employ themselves and employ others”.

Key to this was finding a suitable ambassador – and Chombo was clearly it: a young woman already committed to various causes.

He made her minister of youth and gender.

“I’ve never been more proud to be young,” she told the BBC at the ministry’s headquarters in the capital, Gaborone.

“I’m a young person living in Botswana, passionate about youth development, gender equality, but also so passionate about the development of children.”

The beauty queen did not campaign to be an MP – she is what is called a specially elected member of parliament – and is now one of just six female MPs in the 69-member National Assembly.

Chombo said becoming an MP and then minister came as a complete surprise to her.

“I got appointed by a president who had never met me,” she said.

“Miss World and the journey that I thought I was supposed to pursue as my final destination was only the platform through which I would be seen for this very role.”

It was her crowning as Miss Botswana in 2022 that raised her profile and enabled her to campaign for social change, while trying to inspire other young women.

It also gave her the opportunity to set up the Lesego Chombo Foundation, which focuses on supporting disadvantaged youngsters and their parents in rural areas – and which she is still involved with, its projects funded by corporate companies and others.

“We strive to have a world where we feel seen and heard and represented. I’m very thrilled that I happen to be the very essence of that representation,” she said.

As she prepared for last year’s Miss World pageant, she said: “I really put myself in the zone of service. I really channelled it for this big crown.”

Now in political office, she is aware of the expectations placed on her in a country where approximately 60% of the population is below 35 years.

It also has a high level of unemployment – 28%, which is even higher for young people and women who have limited economic opportunities and battle systemic corruption.

Chombo said this was something she was determined to change: “Currently in Botswana, the rates of unemployment are so high.

“But it’s not just the rate of unemployment, it’s also just the sphere of youth development.

“It’s lacking, and so my desire is to create an ecosystem, an environment, a society, an economy in which youth can thrive.”

Chombo said her plan was to develop a comprehensive system that nurtured youth-led initiatives, strengthened entrepreneurship and ensured young people had a seat at the table when decisions were being made.

With Botswana’s anti-corruption policy undergoing a rigorous review, she said this would ensure that quotas for young entrepreneurs – when state departments and agencies put out tenders for goods and services – were actually reached.

The government has begun a 10-month forensic audit of government spending that will include 30 state-owned enterprises.

Indeed President Boko is intent on cracking down on corruption, seeing this as a way to bolter investor confidence and diversify the economy – something his deputy has been seeking to do on recent trips to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Switzerland.

And a key deal has now been secured with UAE-based CCI Global, a provider of business process outsourcing, to open a hub in Botswana.

While youth development is a central pillar of her work, gender equity also remains close to her heart.

Her short time in office has coincided with a growing outcry over gender-based violence.

According to a United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report, over 67% of women in Botswana have experienced abuse, more than double the global average.

“It hurts to know that it could be me next,” she admitted.

A month into her appointment, she was criticised for voting against an opposition motion in parliament to create “peace desks” at police stations and magistrate courts to quickly deal with victims.

At the time she said such provisions already existed within the law and what was needed was more public awareness.

This was followed in January by a police report noting that at least 100 women had been raped and another 10 murdered during the festive season – this caused public outrage with many lashing out at her on social media over the issue.

The minister reiterated – on several occasions, including before parliament in March – that Botswana had many laws and strategies in place and what was important was to ensure these they were actually applied.

But she told the BBC the government would be pushing for the implementation of a Gender-Based Violence Act, aimed at closing legal loopholes that have long hindered justice for survivors.

She said she was also advocating a more holistic approach, involving the ministries of health, education and local government.

“We want curriculums that promote gender equity from a young age,” Chombo said.

“We want to teach children what gender-based violence is and how to prevent it.

“It will boil down to inclusion of teaching gender equity at home, how parents behave around their children, how they model good behaviour.”

She has also been vocal about the need to address issues affecting men, particularly around mental health and positive masculinity, encouraging chiefs “to ensure that our patriarchal culture is not actively perpetuating gender violence”.

“I hear a lot of people say: ‘Why do you speak of women more than men?’

“It’s because as it stands in society, women are mostly prejudiced [against].

“But when we speak of gender equality, we’re saying that it should be applied equally for everyone. But what we strive for is gender equity.”

Chombo, who studied law at the University of Botswana, said she was thankful to her mother and other strong women for inspiring her – saying that women had to work “10 times harder” to succeed.

“[My mother] has managed to create an environment for me to thrive. And growing up, I got to realise that it’s not an easy thing.

“As women, we face so many pressures: ‘A woman cannot do this. A woman can’t do that. A woman can’t be young and in leadership.’ I’m currently facing that.”

She also credited Julia Morley, the CEO of Miss World, for helping her: “She has managed to create a legacy of what we call beauty with a purpose for so many young girls across the world.

“She has just inspired us so deeply to take up social responsibility.”

Chombo is serious about this. The beauty queen-cum-lawyer-cum-minister knows she has made history – but is also aware that her real work has only just begun.

“Impact. Tangible impact. That’s what success would look like to me,” she said.

“I want to look back and see that it is there and it is sustainable. That when I leave, someone else is able to carry it through.”

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Families of Israeli hostages taken to Gaza in the 7 October attacks have expressed their increasing concern about the fates of loved ones, as doubts grow about how many are still alive.

One family said the hostages were at risk “every day” they continued to be held captive by Hamas.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this week there was “uncertainty” over the condition of three of the 24 hostages previously believed to be alive.

He was reacting to US President Donald Trump’s statement on Tuesday that only 21 of those taken in the Hamas-led attacks were still alive.

The BBC spoke to two families – including the brother of a hostage released by Hamas this year – after Israel’s security cabinet approved an expanded offensive in Gaza.

Netanyahu said ministers had decided on a “forceful operation” to destroy Hamas and rescue the hostages, and that Gaza’s 2.1 million population “will be moved, to protect it”.

One family told the BBC they hoped the troops would only be used to help with the aim of freeing the hostages, not for any other reasons.

Liran Berman’s twin brothers Gali and Ziv have been held by Hamas for 19 months after they were kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on 7 October 2023.

About 1,200 people were killed by Hamas-led gunmen that day, while Gali and Ziv were among 251 others who were taken hostage.

More than 52,780 people have been killed in Gaza during the ensuing war, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel cut off all deliveries of aid and other supplies on 2 March and resumed its offensive two weeks later after it broke a two-month ceasefire that saw 33 Israeli and five Thai hostages released in exchange for about 1,900 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Following news of Israel’s plan to expand its military operation in Gaza using thousands more troops unless Hamas agreed a new ceasefire and released the remaining hostages, Liran Berman told BBC News: “I hope that Israel is sending the forces to put pressure on Hamas to sit down.

“When Hamas was feeling threatened, they did the deals. I hope they are not sending the troops to conquer or for revenge.”

Mr Berman said his 27-year-old brothers were “at risk every single day”.

“We know they are alive. The released hostages saw them.”

He said he believed Gali and Ziv had been injured when they were seized but that he worried their mental condition was “not good” after so long in captivity.

With the release of emaciated and frail hostages in February, Mr Berman said he was worried about his brothers’ conditions.

“We need to pressure Hamas and its enablers.”

For 491 days, Or Levy was held by Hamas not knowing whether his wife Einav had survived the 7 October attack on the Nova music festival where he was taken.

She didn’t and for more than a year his three-year-old son Almog was without both his parents. In February, Or, weak and painfully thin, was released by Hamas.

His brother, Michael Levy, told BBC News he was worried about the impact on the hostages if Israel sent more troops into Gaza.

“I’m concerned it will affect the hostages, that the terrorists can decide to do something to them,” he said. “I do believe the army knows what it’s doing and they will make sure the hostages aren’t affected, but it’s always a concern.”

But he said he wanted more pressure applied to get them released.

“There is a crime against humanity and everyone including President Trump needs to do more in order to bring them back.”

He said his brother did not receive enough food while he was held hostage in Hamas’s underground tunnels in Gaza and “didn’t see sunlight”. He said he showered “every two months or so”.

“My brother worries about the fact the rest of the hostages will end up dying in captivity because that was his worst fear about himself and it’s now his worst fear about those he left behind.”

Of the 251 people taken hostage on 7 October – and the four other captives held by Hamas for around a decade before the attacks – 59 now remain in Gaza.

The Israeli government has publicly confirmed the deaths of 35, leaving 24 hostages. There is now uncertainty about the fate of three of them.

All 59 were kidnapped in the 7 October attack apart from one – the soldier Hadar Goldin who was killed in combat in Gaza during a previous war in 2014.

The living hostages are men in their 20s or 30s, apart from Omri Miran who turned 48 in April.

Of the 35 whose bodies Israel has confirmed are being held in Gaza, nearly all are men who were between 19 and 86 years old when they died. Three are women.

Since the spate of releases earlier this year, former hostages have been speaking to the media and others about their time in captivity.

Tal Shoham, 49, released in February after 505 days, told a UN event last month: “There were many times that we received just one pita bread for an entire day… Traumatised by hunger, we collected crumb after crumb.”

Eliya Cohen, 28, who was also held for 505 days, told Israel’s Channel 12 that once a week Hamas gunmen would make him and other hostages take off all their clothes and would tell them: “You you’re not quite there, you’re not thin enough… I’m thinking about cutting the food even more.”

Ilana Gritzewsky was released during another ceasefire in November 2023. Her partner Matan Zangauker is still a hostage.

The 31-year-old told the New York Times in March that as she was kidnapped from her home she was molested by one of the kidnappers.

The article says she believes she was also sexually assaulted in Gaza. “When she came to, she said, she found herself on the floor in a dilapidated building, clearly in Gaza, her shirt up baring her breasts and pants pulled down, with seven gunmen standing over her.”

Ron Krivoi, a sound engineer, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival.

Last month, The Times of Israel quoted a Channel 12 interview in which he described the tunnels.

“We were inside a very, very small cage… and we had to lie down and rest in it – you couldn’t stand. No height, no toilets, no food. We were five people.”

Mexico is suing Google for ignoring repeated requests not to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America for US users on its maps service, Claudia Sheinbaum has said.

The Mexican president did not say where the lawsuit had been filed. Google did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

On Thursday, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to officially rename the Gulf for federal agencies.

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office in January calling for the body of water to be renamed, arguing the change was justified because the US “do most of the work there, and it’s ours”.

However, Sheinbaum’s government contends that Trump’s order applies only to the US portion of the continental shelf.

“All we want is for the decree issued by the US government to be complied with,” she said, asserting that the US lacks the authority to rename the entire gulf.

Sheinbaum wrote a letter to Google in January asking the firm to reconsider its decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico for US users. The following month, she threatened legal action.

At the time, Google said it made the change as part of “a longstanding practice” of following name changes when updated by official government sources.

It said the gulf – which is bordered by the US, Cuba and Mexico – would not be changed for people using the app in Mexico, and users elsewhere in the world will see the label: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

The Associated Press (AP) news agency’s refusal to use the Gulf of America name led to a months-long conflict with the White House, which restricted AP’s access to certain events.

A federal judge ordered the White House in April to stop sidelining the outlet.

Trump hinted on Wednesday that he may recommend changing the way the US refers to another body of water.

During an upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia, he plans to announce that the US will henceforth refer to the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf or the Gulf of Arabia, AP reported.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi has responded by saying he hopes the “absurd rumours” are “no more than a disinformation campaign” and that such a move would “bring the wrath of all Iranians”.

Catholicism has rarely been more prominent in US politics as the Trump administration openly embraces advisers and officials who proudly say faith has shaped their views.

But any jubilation on the American Make America Great Again right about the new Pope this week quickly dissipated as key voices from Donald Trump’s Maga movement came to a disappointed conclusion: the first American Pope does not appear to be “America first”.

Little is known about the political leanings of Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago.

He has voiced concerns for the poor and immigrants, chosen a name that may reference more liberal church leadership, and he appears to have both supported the liberal-leaning Pope Francis and criticised the US president’s policies on social media.

But the president so far has said only that Leo’s election was a “great honour” for the US. Still, some of Trump’s most prominent supporters were quick to attack Pope Leo, lambasting him as a possible challenge to Trump and on the perception that he will follow Pope Francis in areas like immigration.

“I mean it’s kind of jaw-dropping,” Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon told the BBC on Friday, speaking of Leo’s election.

“It is shocking to me that a guy could be selected to be the Pope that had had the Twitter feed and the statements he’s had against American senior politicians,” said Bannon, a hard-right Trump loyalist, practising Catholic and former altar boy.

And he predicted that there’s “definitely going to be friction” between Leo and Trump.

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The Pope’s brother, John Prevost, told The New York Times that he thinks his brother would voice his disagreements with the president.

“I know he’s not happy with what’s going on with immigration,” he said. “I know that for a fact. How far he’ll go with it is only one’s guess, but he won’t just sit back. I don’t think he’ll be the silent one.”

Recent survey data shows that about 20% of Americans identify as Catholic, according to the non-partisan Pew Research Center.

About 53% identify with or lean towards the Republican Party, though there’s plenty of nuance, too: America’s two Catholic presidents, John F Kennedy and Joe Biden, were both Democrats. And nearly two-thirds of US Catholics believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances – a departure from the Church’s current stance.

US Catholics also broadly supported Pope Francis: 78% of those surveyed in February viewed him favorably, including a majority of Catholic Republicans.

A number of Catholics in the new Pope’s home city of Chicago on Thursday aired disappointment with President Trump and said they hoped Pope Leo XIV would follow the path of his predecessor.

“We hope he’ll continue with Francis’s agenda going forward,” said Rick Stevens, a Catholic deacon from New Jersey who happened to be visiting Chicago when he heard the news.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which leads and coordinates US Catholic activities, celebrated Pope Leo’s election and the message it sends.

“Certainly, we rejoice that a son of this nation has been chosen by the cardinals, but we recognise that he now belongs to all Catholics and to all people of good will,” the conference said in a statement. “His words advocating peace, unity, and missionary activity already indicate a path forward.”

Though Maga supporters represent a small subset of US Catholics, it’s one with outsized access to conservative media and Trump’s ear.

On Bannon’s War Room podcast – known for its hard-right, pro-Trump bent – one guest after another heaped criticism on the new Pope.

“This guy has been massively embraced by the liberals and the progressives,” said Ben Harnwell, a journalist who led Bannon’s efforts to establish what he calls a “gladiator school” for the “Judeo-Christian West” outside of Rome.

“He is one of their own… he has [Pope] Francis’s DNA in him,” Harnwell said.

Jack Posobiec, another Maga commentator dialing in from Rome, was blunt: “This choice of the American cardinal was done as a response, as a message to President Trump.”

The full picture of what led to Pope Leo’s selection on Thursday is still emerging and church decisions don’t map neatly onto US politics. Still, watchers around the world have pored over Pope Leo’s social media profiles in search of clues about his leanings and beliefs.

An X account under his name, with tweets going as far back as 2015, shares links to criticism of Trump’s approach to immigration and hints at other political views, such as stricter gun control.

In February, the account sharply rebuked the US vice-president by posting a link to an opinion piece titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others”.

The account also posted a link to a letter from Pope Francis after he clashed with Vance over church doctrine and immigration. Vance – a Catholic convert – had given an interview in defence of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Vance has routinely invoked his faith in defense of the administration, particularly immigration policies, which the White House has said put “America first”.

“There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that,” Vance told Fox News.

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But US Democrats were not spared either on the account, which has more than a decade of posts. They appear to support Catholic employers who refuse to pay for contraceptives via employee health plans, and following the 2016 US presidential election, one post links to an article accusing Democrat Hillary Clinton of ignoring pro-life Catholic voters.

The BBC asked the Vatican to confirm the account was Leo’s, but did not receive a response.

Vice-President Vance told conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt on Friday: “I try not to play the politicisation of the Pope game.

“I’m sure he’s going to say a lot of things that I love. I’m sure he’ll say some things that I disagree with, but I’ll continue to pray for him and the Church despite it all and through it all, and that’ll be the way that I handle it.”

The new Pope’s LGBTQ views are also unclear, but some groups, including the conservative College of Cardinals, believe he may be less supportive than Pope Francis.

Matt Walsh, a commentator with the conservative Daily Wire, wrote: “There are some good signs and bad signs with this new Pope. I want to see what he actually does with his papacy before I pass any kind of judgment.”

But some of the most dedicated Maga supporters already have made up their minds.

Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer who has Trump’s ear, swaying the president on top personnel decisions, called the new Pope “anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis”.

Bannon, who had suggested Leo as a dark horse for the papacy, predicted tensions between the White House and Vatican – and said they could even tear apart American Catholics.

“Remember, President Trump was not shy about taking a shot at Pope Francis,” he said.

“So if this Pope – which he will do – tries to come between President Trump and his implementation of the mass deportation programme, I would stand by.”

The US has confirmed that a new system for providing humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza through private companies is being prepared, as Israel’s blockade continues for a third month.

US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said “distribution centres” protected by security contractors would provide food and other supplies to over a million people initially, as part of an effort to prevent Hamas stealing aid.

He denied Israel would take part in aid delivery or distribution, but said its forces would secure the centres’ perimeters.

It comes as details emerged about the controversial plan, which UN agencies have reiterated they will not co-operate with because it appears to “weaponise” aid.

“We will not participate,” the spokesman for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Jens Laerke, told the BBC in Geneva, “only in efforts that are in line with our principles”.

He added: “There is no reason to put in place a system that is at odds with the DNA of any principled humanitarian organisation.”

Since early March, Israel has cut off all supplies from reaching Gaza – including food, shelters, medicines and fuel – leading to a humanitarian crisis for its 2.1 million residents.

A third of the community kitchens in Gaza – one of the territory’s last remaining lifelines – have been forced to shut down over the past two weeks due to shortages of food and fuel, according to OCHA.

Among them were the last two field kitchens of World Central Kitchen, a US-based charity which had been providing 133,000 meals daily before it ran out of ingredients on Tuesday.

Prices of basic foodstuffs have also skyrocketed at local markets, with a 25kg (55lb) bag of flour now selling for $415 (£313) in Gaza City – a 30-fold increase compared to the end of February, OCHA says.

Huckabee told journalists in Jerusalem that US President Donald Trump saw aid for Gaza as an urgent matter and that his team was tasked “to do everything possible to accelerate that and to as expeditiously as possible get humanitarian aid into the people”.

Israel and the US accuse Hamas of diverting aid. “Previous actions have often been met with Hamas stealing the food that was intended for hungry people,” the ambassador said.

The UN and other agencies say they have strong supervisory mechanisms and that when aid has surged into Gaza, incidents of looting have largely halted. The World Health Organization says none of its medical supplies have been looted during the war.

The Trump administration is trying to build momentum behind the new aid initiative ahead of the president’s trip next week to wealthy Arab Gulf countries that could help to fund it.

It says that a non-governmental organisation has been set up and that aid delivery will not be under Israeli military control.

Huckabee said: “The Israelis are going to be involved in providing necessary security because this is a war zone. But they will not be involved in the distribution of the food, or even the bringing of food into Gaza.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked on Friday whether the plan would “militarise” aid distribution in the region.

“I would reject that characterisation,” she responded.

The newly registered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) appears to have been set up for this purpose.

A 14-page document from GHF, seen by the BBC, promises to set up four distribution sites, giving out food, water and hygiene kits initially for 1.2 million people – less than 60% of the population. It says the project aims to reach all Gazans eventually.

Aimed at potential donors, the paper states that “months of conflict have collapsed traditional relief channels in Gaza”.

It goes on: “GHF was established to restore that vital lifeline through an independent, rigorously-audited model that gets assistance directly – and only – to those in need.”

The document maintains that GHF is “guided by the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence”.

Its boards of directors and advisors are said to include a former chief executive of World Central Kitchen, along with the American former head of the UN’s World Food Programme, David Beasley – though his participation is not yet confirmed.

Full details of how the aid mechanism will work on the ground are not given.

The Gaza war was triggered by the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, which saw about 1,200 people killed and more than 250 taken hostage. Some 59 are still held captive, up to 24 of whom are believed to be alive.

Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 52,700 people in Gaza, mostly women, children and the elderly, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Last Sunday, Israel’s security cabinet approved an intensified military offensive against Hamas in Gaza which could involve forcibly displacing the population to the south, seizing the entire territory indefinitely, and controlling aid.

This was quickly met with widespread international condemnation. Many of Israel’s allies pointed out that it was bound under international law to allow the unhindered passage of humanitarian aid.

The UK’s Minister for the Middle East, Hamish Falconer, told Parliament on Monday that the British government was gravely concerned that the Israeli announcements could lead to the 19-month-long war in Gaza entering “a dangerous new phase”.

On the subject of aid, he said: “As the UN has said, it is hard to see how, if implemented, the new Israeli plan to deliver aid through private companies would be consistent with humanitarian principles and meet the scale of the need. We need urgent clarity from the Israeli government on their intentions.

“We must remember what is at stake. These humanitarian principles matter for every conflict around the world. They should be applied consistently in every war zone.”

This week, the US Special Envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, briefed members of the UN Security Council – which includes the UK – behind closed doors about the new plan to resume the delivery of aid.

The Council’s five European members – the UK, France, Denmark, Greece and Slovenia – have requested an urgent meeting to discuss the humanitarian situation in Gaza, likely to be scheduled for Tuesday.

The UK delegation said Israel’s blockade was “inexcusable”, adding that the only way to end the suffering of both Palestinians and Israelis was to return to a ceasefire, secure the release of all hostages and “surge” aid into Gaza.

Meanwhile, Israeli media reported that Israeli forces were already setting up distribution hubs in Rafah, in southern Gaza, in “a sterile zone” designed to be free of any Hamas presence.

According to reports, Israel expects that aid will be distributed to security-screened representatives from each Gazan family who would be allowed to take supplies for his or her relatives only. They would be allowed into the hubs only on foot.

The Israeli defence establishment was said to have assessed that the average quantity of aid that would have to be distributed as 70kg (154lb) per family per week.

The Israeli military would ultimately be stationed outside the distribution hubs, allowing aid workers to hand out food without soldiers being directly involved, the reports say.

Israel and the US argue that the new system would prevent Hamas from being able to steal food for its own benefit. By preventing its access to aid and involvement in security for convoys, they hope to reduce the group’s influence over the Gazan population.

However, there are major questions over the plan’s feasibility. The current UN system uses some 400 points of aid distribution, while the situation in Gaza is now at a crisis point, with warnings that mass starvation is imminent.

At a UN briefing in Geneva, aid officials said they had carried out “careful analysis” before deciding they could not participate in the US-Israeli scheme. They said they had not been formally presented with the GHF document that is currently circulating.

James Elder, spokesman for the UN’s children’s agency Unicef, said the plan that had been laid out would lead to more children suffering, not fewer. He noted that civilians would have to travel to militarised zones to receive aid, meaning the most vulnerable – children and the elderly – would struggle to get there.

He said the decision to locate all the distribution points in the south appeared designed to use aid as “a bait” to forcibly displace Gazans once again. The UN says 90% of the population has been displaced during the war, often many times.

The plan that has been discussed with UN agencies envisages just 60 lorry loads of aid entering each day – far less than they say is needed to meet growing needs, and a tenth of the number that went in daily during the recent two-month ceasefire.

OCHA’s Jens Laerke said that in short, the proposals from Israel “do not meet the minimum bar for principled humanitarian support”.

Analysts say that the current impasse over aid for Gaza is not only an existential threat to the UN’s vast humanitarian operation in the Palestinian territory but could also have implications for its future work.

If it was to agree to a scheme accommodating the demands of the military on one side in a conflict, it could dent perceptions of the UN’s neutrality and impartiality, and set a dangerous precedent leading to similar demands in other war zones where it operates.

The UN and other aid agencies also point out that they currently have tonnes of supplies piled up near Gaza’s border crossings, ready to enter, if Israel would allow it.

Without an end to the blockade, the risk of famine is expected to grow.

In Jabalia, in northern Gaza, which has already been the focus of Israeli military operations against Hamas, Palestinian families told the BBC of their growing despair as they waited for a food handout at a takia, or community kitchen, which turned into a chaotic scramble.

“Every day I come here and wait with my cooking pot to feed my children,” Umm Ahmed said. “The pot doesn’t fill us up. We have been suffering for two months. There’s no flour or anything. Open the borders so we can eat properly.”

She said she would not comply with Israeli efforts to force her to move south to Rafah to receive aid.

“We don’t have money for transport, we don’t have money to eat!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want to evacuate from here, I’d rather die than leave.”

“The takia is our last source of food,” said Mohammed, who had been waiting for five hours in line. “My wife is pregnant and sick, and I’m unable to get her to the hospital. How am I supposed to get to Rafah?”

India and Pakistan have accused each other of “violations” hours after the two nations said they had agreed to a ceasefire following days of cross-border military strikes.

After sounds of explosions were heard in Indian-administered Kashmir, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said there had been “repeated violations of the understanding we arrived at”.

A short while later, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said it remained “committed to faithful implementation of a ceasefire…notwithstanding the violations being committed by India in some areas”.

The fighting between India and Pakistan over the last four days has been the worst military confrontation between the two rivals in decades.

The use of drones, missiles and artillery started when India struck targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir in response to a deadly militant attack in Pahalgam last month. Pakistan had denied any involvement.

After four days of cross-border strikes, India and Pakistan said they had agreed on a full and immediate ceasfire.

US President Donald Trump announced the news on his Truth Social Platform on Saturday morning. He said it had been brokered by the US.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister later confirmed the agreement had been reached by the two countries, adding that “three dozen countries” were involved in the diplomacy.

But hours after the announcement, residents – and BBC reporters – in the main Indian-administered Kashmiri cities of Srinagar and Jammu reported hearing the sounds of explosions and seeing flashes in the sky.

Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said: “For the last few hours, there have been repeated violations of the understanding we arrived at earlier this evening.

“This is a breach of the understanding arrived at earlier today.”

Misri said India’s armed forces was “giving an appropriate response” and he concluded his briefing by “calling upon Pakistan to address these violations”.

In response, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Pakistan remains committed to faithful implementation of ceasefire between Pakistan and India, announced earlier today.

“Notwithstanding the violations being committed by India in some areas, our forces are handling the situation with responsibility and restraint.

“We believe that any issues in smooth implementation of the ceasefire should be addressed through communication at appropriate levels.

“The troops on ground should also exercise restraint.”

Kashmir is claimed in full by India and Pakistan, but administered only in part by each since they were partitioned following independence from Britain in 1947.

It has been a flashpoint between the two nuclear-armed nations and they have fought two wars over it.

Confirming the ceasefire, India’s external affairs minister S Jaishankar said the two nations had “worked out an understanding on stoppage of firing and military action”.

“India has consistently maintained a firm and uncompromising stance against terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. It will continue to do so,” he added.

Later, in an address to the nation, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the ceasefire had been reached “for the benefit of everybody”.

Speaking after the ceasefire announcement, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said India and Pakistan had agreed to start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site.

He said he and US Vice-President JD Vance had spent 48 hours with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, including their respective Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shehbaz Sharif.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he welcomed “all efforts to de-escalate the conflict”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Britain has been “engaged” in talks for “some days”, with Foreign Secretary David Lammy speaking to both sides.

“I’m pleased to see today that there’s a ceasefire,” Sir Keir said. “The task now is to make sure that that is enduring and is lasting.”

The recent fighting came after two weeks of tension following the killing of 26 tourists in the resort town of Pahalgam.

Survivors of the 22 April attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, which killed 25 Indians and one Nepali national, said the militants were singling out Hindu men.

The Indian defence ministry said its strikes this week were part of a “commitment” to hold “accountable” those responsible for the attack. Pakistan described them as “unprovoked”.

Pakistan said Indian air strikes and cross-border fire since Wednesday had killed 36 people in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, while India’s army reported at least 21 civilians deaths from Pakistani shelling.

Fighting intensified overnight on Friday, with both countries accusing each other of targeting airbases and other military sites.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for “direct talks” with Ukraine, saying they should “start without delay, as early as 15 May”.

“We seek serious talks… to remove the root causes of the conflict and start moving towards a lasting, strong peace”, he said on Saturday, in a rare televised late-night address from the Kremlin.

It comes hours after European leaders – including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron – visited Ukraine and urged Russia to agree to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire.

In response, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had said Moscow would “have to think this through” – but warned that “trying to pressure us is quite useless”.

In his statement, Putin said he would “not rule out” that in the course of the talks – which he proposed should happen in Turkey’s capital Istanbul – Russia and Ukraine may “be able to agree new ceasefires, a new truce”.

The Russian leader said he would speak to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday to discuss the details.

Kyiv has not commented on the proposal from Putin.

Earlier on Saturday, European leaders travelled to the Ukrainian capital and called on Moscow to agree to a month-long ceasefire with Ukraine, starting on Monday.

The call was issued at a meeting of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, with the leaders of France, Germany, the UK and Poland seen standing alongside Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

They made the announcement after discussing the plan, by phone, with US President Donald Trump – who initially mooted an unconditional ceasefire. The leaders threatened Russia with “massive” sanctions if it did not comply.

In response, the Kremlin said it was considering the proposal but would not respond to pressure.

After the meeting, Sir Keir said: “All of us here together with the US are calling [Russian President Vladimir] Putin out. If he is serious about peace, then he has a chance to show it.”

Zelensky added: “Thank you all for standing with us. Today we will focus on how to build and guarantee real and lasting security.”

Hours later, Putin made his own statement, with video showing journalists assembled in a hall inside the Kremlin.

“This would be the first step towards a long-term, lasting peace, rather than a prologue to more armed hostilities after the Ukrainian armed forces get new armaments and personnel, after feverish trench-digging and the establishment of new command posts,” he said.

“Who needs peace like that?”

Putin also accused Ukraine of having repeatedly failed to respond to three ceasefire proposals from Moscow – a 30-day halt in attacks on energy infrastructure, the Easter truce and a ceasefire ordered last month by Putin to coincide with World War Two commemorations last week.

Ukraine has previously said Russian attacks continued throughout these periods. Russia has made similar claims about Ukraine.

“In spite of everything, we are offering the Kyiv authorities to resume the negotiations… resume direct talks, and I stress, without any preconditions,” Putin said on Saturday night.

The last direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv happened shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began more than three years ago.

When Charlie Hopkins thinks back to the three years he spent in one of America’s most famous prisons, he remembers the “deathly quiet” the most.

In 1955, Hopkins was sent to Alcatraz – a prison on an isolated island off the coast of San Francisco – after causing trouble at other prisons to serve a 17-year sentence for kidnapping and robbery.

Falling asleep at night in his cell on the remote island, he said, the only sound was the whistle of ships passing.

“That’s a lonely sound,” Hopkins said. “It reminds you of Hank Williams singing that song, ‘I’m so lonesome I could cry.'”

Now 93 and living in Florida, Hopkins said the San Francisco National Archives informed him that he is likely the last surviving former Alcatraz inmate. The BBC could not independently verify this.

In an interview with the BBC this week, Hopkins described life at Alcatraz, where he made friends with gangsters and once helped plan an unsuccessful escape. Although it closed decades ago, President Donald Trump claimed recently that he wants to re-open it as a federal prison.

When Hopkins was transferred to the high-security prison in 1955 from an Atlanta facility, he remembers it being clean, but barren. And there were few distractions – no radio at the time, and few books, he said.

“There was nothing to do,” he said. “You could walk back and forth in your cell or do push-ups.”

Hopkins kept busy part of the time with his job cleaning Alcatraz, sweeping the floors and buffing them “until they shined”, he said.

He was sent to prison in 1952 in Jacksonville, Florida, for his role in a series of robberies and kidnappings. He was part of a group that took hostages to get through roadblocks and steal cars, he said.

• ‘The cleverest escape in the prison’s 30 years’: The men who broke out of Alcatraz with a spoon

At Alcatraz, Hopkins had some infamous neighbours. The facility housed many violent criminals over its 30 years – Al Capone; Robert Stroud, a murderer known as the “Birdman of Alcatraz”; and crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger – making it the subject of a host of films and television shows.

A 22-acre island, 1.25 miles (2 kilometres) off San Francisco and surrounded by freezing waters with strong currents, Alcatraz was originally a naval defence force. It was rebuilt in the early 20th century as a military prison. The Justice Department took it over in the 1930s, transforming the facility into a federal prison to address rampant organised crime at the time.

Even in the high-security prison, Hopkins said he still managed to get into trouble and spent many days in the facility’s “D Block” – solitary confinement where inmates who misbehaved were held and rarely let out of their cells.

His longest stint there – six months – came after he tried to help several other prisoners, including notorious bank robber Forrest Tucker, escape Alcatraz, Hopkins said. He helped steal hacksaw blades from the prison’s electric shop to cut the prison bars in the basement kitchen.

The plan didn’t work – prison guards discovered the blades in other inmates’ cells, Hopkins said. “A few days after they locked them up, they locked me up,” he said.

But that did not stop one of the inmates.

In 1956, when Tucker was taken to a hospital for a kidney operation, he stabbed his ankle with a pencil so prison guards would have to remove his leg irons, Tucker told the New Yorker. Then, as he was taken to get an X-ray, he overpowered hospital orderlies and ran away, he said.

He was captured in a hospital gown in a cornfield hours later.

As more prisoners attempted to escape Alcatraz over the years, officials ramped up security, Hopkins said.

“When I left there in 1958, the security was so tight you couldn’t breathe,” he said.

All told, there were 14 separate attempts over the years involving 36 inmates, according to the National Park Service. One of the most famous involved Frank Morris, and brothers Clarence and John Anglin, who escaped in June 1962 by placing papier-mâché heads in their beds and breaking out through ventilation ducts. They were never found, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded they drowned in the cold waters surrounding the island.

A year later, the prison shut down after the government determined it would be more cost-effective to build new prisons than to keep the remote island facility in operation.

Now it’s a publicly run museum visited by millions each year that generates about $60m year in revenue for park partners.

The building is decrepit, with peeling paint, rusted pipes, and crumbling toilets in each cramped cell. Construction on the main prison facility began in 1907, and more than a century of exposure to the elements has rendered the place all but uninhabitable.

Trump said this week, however, that he wants his government to re-open and expand the island prison for the country’s “most ruthless and violent offenders”.

Alcatraz “represents something very strong, very powerful” – law and order, Trump said.

But experts and historians said Trump’s proposal to re-establish the prison is far-fetched, as it would cost billions to repair and bring up to date with other federal facilities.

Hopkins agrees. “It would be so expensive,” he said.

“Back then, the sewage system went into the ocean,” he added. “They’d have to come up with another way of handling that.”

Hopkins left Alcatraz five years before it closed its doors for good. He had been transferred to a prison in Springfield, Missouri and given psychiatric medication that improved his behaviour and helped him heal psychological issues, he said.

But the avid Trump supporter said he does not believe the president’s proposal is serious.

“He don’t really want to open that place,” Hopkins said, adding that Trump was trying to “get a point across to the public” about punishing criminals and those who enter the US illegally.

Hopkins was released in 1963, working first at a truck stop before taking on other jobs. He went back to his home state of Florida, where now he has a daughter and grandson.

After several decades reflecting on his crimes and life in Alcatraz, he wrote a 1,000-page memoir, with nearly half of the book detailing his troubled behaviour, he said.

“You wouldn’t believe the trouble I caused them when I was there,” he said. “I can see now, looking back, that I had problems.”

At the end of a waitressing shift, Kristina Lampert used to separate her tips in two piles: Canadian cash and American.

But it’s been weeks since she has done that.

Freighters, the restaurant where she works, is one of the first places people can grab a bite after crossing the US-Canada border between Sarnia, Ontario, and Port Huron, Michigan.

The Blue Water Bridge, which connects the US and Canada, is in full view from the restaurant’s windows.

“A lot of people used to come over and say ‘we’re here for the view’,” she says of Canadian diners. “I haven’t heard that at all recently.”

Border towns noticed almost instantly when US President Donald Trump began imposing tariffs on countries around the world and saying he wanted to make Canada the 51st US state – because the number of Canadians crossing the border plummeted.

Border crossings between the US and Canada are down some 17% since Trump started bringing in tariffs, according to CBP data.

Canadians car trips to the US are down almost 32% compared to March 2024, according to Statistics Canada.

Like many of the towns that dot along the 5,525 mile (8,891 km) border, the economies of Port Huron and Sarnia are linked and in some ways dependent on one another. Port Huron is a manufacturing town of less than 30,000 people with a quaint downtown and lots of retail, offering visitors an enticing opportunity for a day-trip.

On a day where there is little traffic, a Sarnia resident can cross the border and be in Michigan in a matter of minutes.

Many of these towns faced their first test more than five years ago when the Covid-19 pandemic shut crossings down for 19 months and left local economies reeling.

Now, they are seeing a second economic hit due to Trump’s trade war, with many Canadians choosing to “Buy Canadian” – purchase Canadian-made goods – and reducing travel to the US in response to the fraying relationship between the two neighbouring countries.

One place this is being felt is at Sarnia’s Duty Free, the last place you can purchase goods before leaving Canada and entering the US. The shelves of perfume and liquor are fuller and the parking lot is emptier since tariffs tensions began.

Barbara Barett, the executive director of Frontier Duty Free Association, says some of the 32 land-border duty frees in Canada have seen as much as an 80% decrease in sales since Trump’s return to the White House. Most stores have seeing a 50-60% drop in business.

“We’re 100% reliant on the travel across the border,” she says of duty frees. “Our stores are often pillars of these communities; communities depend on them.”

And while the crossing at Port Huron-Sarnia is faring better than most, on a Friday in May the parking lot of the Sarnia Duty Free is almost empty.

Tania Lee, who runs the store with her family, says that has become the new norm.

On Easter weekend – usually one of their busiest of the year, as Canadians take advantage of the break to stop in at a favourite restaurant and go to a church service in Port Huron – cars were few and far between and sales were not what they should have been, she says.

“We are suffering because of collateral damage at the border,” Ms Lee says of her second-generation family business.

Ms Lee notes that people who live in border towns often cross the boundary multiple times a week. She, for example, has a mailbox at a shipping facility in Port Huron that she visits regularly, as do her neighbours.

People across the Blue Water Bridge are feeling the effects too, Mayor Anita Ashford says.

She has heard from both residents of her town and Canadians frustrated about the increased tension between the nations.

Nationally, a 10% drop in Canadian tourism would cost the US up to 14,000 jobs and $2.1bn (£1.56b) in business, according to the US Travel Association.

Michigan is one of the places likely to see the brunt of that impact. In 2023, Canadians visitors spent a collective $238m in the state, according to tourism officials.

That money is essential for border towns like Port Huron, its mayor says.

“I hope people in Washington will start to understand what they’re doing to the people,” she says. “We are not responsible for this, the [federal] government put us in this position and now we have to deal with it respectfully.”

“We need each other,” she says.

Donald Trump’s administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus – the right of a person to challenge their detention in court – one of the US president’s top aides has said.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters on Friday that the US Constitution allowed for the legal liberty to be suspended in times of “rebellion or invasion”.

His comments come as judges have sought to challenge some recent detentions made by the Trump administration in an effort to combat illegal immigration, as well as remove dissenting foreign students.

“A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” Miller said.

There are several pending civil cases against the Trump administration’s deportation of undocumented migrants based on habeaus corpus.

Most recently, a federal judge ordered the release of a Turkish university student who had been detained for six weeks after writing an article that was critical of Israel.

Last week, another judge ordered a Columbia University student detained over his advocacy for Palestinians be released after a petition on habeas corpus grounds.

However, other judges have sided with the Trump administration in such disputes.

Miller described habeas corpus as a “privilege”, and said Congress had already passed a law stripping judicial courts of jurisdiction over immigration cases.

Legal experts and critics have questioned the veracity of his interpretation of US law.

“Congress has the authority to suspend habeas corpus – not Stephen Miller, not the president,” Marc Elias, an attorney for the Democratic Party, told MSNBC.

One of Trump’s key campaign pledges was to deport millions of immigrants from the US, and his administration has pursued different means of expediting deportations since returning to the White House.

In March, a federal judge’s order prevented the Trump administration from invoking a centuries-old wartime law to justify deporting more than 200 Venezuelans, despite the flights going ahead.

But deportations have lagged behind detentions – while one person has been deported erroneously.

• Trump’s first 100 days in office

CNN reported, citing unnamed sources, that Trump was personally involved in the discussions around suspending habeas corpus.

Trump himself has not mentioned the suspension of habeas corpus, but has said he would take steps to combat injunctions against his actions on deportation.

• Listen: The President’s Path: Doubling Down on Deportations

“There are ways to mitigate it and there’s some very strong ways,” he said in April.

“There’s one way that’s been used by three very highly respected presidents, but we hope we don’t have to go that route.”

Habeas corpus – which literally means “you should have the body” – allows for a person to be brought before a judge so the legality of their detention can be decided by a judge.

The legal right has been suspended four times in US history: during the American Civil War under Abraham Lincoln, in Hawaii following the 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, in the Philippines during US ownership in 1905, and while combat the activities of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan group in the 19th Century.

The section of the US Constitution which includes the suspension of habeas corpus grants its powers to Congress and not the president.

Taylor Swift’s representatives have told the BBC she is being brought into a legal row between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively to create “tabloid clickbait”.

The 35-year-old singer was summoned to a US court after it was alleged she encouraged Baldoni to accept script re-writes by Lively for It Ends With Us, a film that both starred in and is the centre of a sexual harassment case.

Baldoni says he was invited to Lively’s New York home in 2023 to discuss script changes, where Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, and Swift were there to serve as her “dragons”.

Representatives for Swift said “she was not involved in any casting or creative decision” and “never saw an edit or made any notes on the film”.

Lively, 37, sued Baldoni, 41, in December 2024, accusing him of sexual harassment and a smear campaign. Baldoni is counter-suing Lively and her husband, the actor Ryan Reynolds, on claims of civil extortion, defamation and invasion of privacy.

Lively and Baldoni have been locked in a dispute since the film, which is an adaption of a Colleen Hoover novel, was released last summer.

According to Baldoni, there were tensions over the 2023 re-write of the scene, at which he was surprised to find Reynolds and Swift present.

He alleges Lively wrote in a text to him: “If you ever get around to watching Game of Thrones, you’ll appreciate that I’m Khaleesi, and like her, I happen to have a few dragons. For better or worse, but usually better. Because my dragons also protect those I fight for.”

Baldoni says he responded supportively, writing: “I really love what you did. It really does help a lot. Makes it so much more fun and interesting. (And I would have felt that way without Ryan and Taylor).

“You really are a talent across the board. Really excited and grateful to do this together.”

It is also alleged that Swift was involved in the casting of Isabela Ferrer in the film, who played a younger version of Lively’s character, Lily Bloom.

Speaking at the New York premiere of It Ends With Us, Ferrer said: “She [Taylor Swift] was a helpful part of the audition, which I found out later when I got it, and that rocked my world.”

But Swift’s representatives said the only involvement she had in the film was permitting the use of her song, My Tears Ricochet, noting that she was among 20 artists featured in the film.

Swift “never set foot on the set of this movie, she was not involved in any casting or creative decisions, she did not score the film, [and] she never saw an edit or made any notes on the film”, they said.

They added that Swift did not see It Ends With Us until “weeks after its release” as she was “travelling around the globe” on tour at the time.

The popstar’s spokespeople argued that the subpoena “designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case”.

Being sealed off from the world in the conclave to choose the new Pope was “immensely peaceful”, England and Wales’s most senior Roman Catholic has told the BBC.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, was one of 133 cardinals who were shut into the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel and later elected Pope Leo XIV on Thursday.

He told BBC Breakfast on Saturday that nobody in the highly secretive meeting was saying who to vote for or who to not vote for, adding that there was “no rancour” or “politicking” among the cardinals.

“It was a much calmer process than that and I found it actually a rather wonderful experience,” he added.

Conclaves have taken place in the Sistine Chapel since the 15th Century and cardinals must have no communication with the outside world until a new Pope is elected. The recent conclave came after the death of Pope Francis on 21 April.

Cardinal Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, said that his mobile phone was taken off him, adding that he found he had “more time on my hands just to be prayerful, just to reflect, just to be still, rather than being constantly agitated… or prompted by what might be coming in” on his phone.

“For me, one of the experiences of these last few days was to learn a bit of patience, to just take this step by step,” he said.

“There was a calmness, a bit of solemnity,” he continued, adding that everyone he spoke to when in it was “peaceful and just wanting to do this well”.

At 79 years old, Cardinal Nichols was one of the oldest cardinals in the conclave as they must be under 80 to be eligible to vote.

There is no timescale on how long it takes for a conclave to elect a new Pope, with previous ones in 2005 and 2013 lasting two days. The conclave that elected Pope Leo lasted for one day.

“I think it was a short conclave in part because Pope Francis left us with a good inheritance,” the cardinal said.

“He left a college of cardinals who were dedicated, who had this desire for the church to be more missionary, and that led us forward actually very, very easily to the decision that we made.”

Pope Leo will be formally inaugurated at a mass in St Peter’s Square on 18 May, which delegations from countries around the world will attend.

The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Edward, will attend on behalf of King Charles, Buckingham Palace confirmed on Saturday.

Speaking about the new Pope, Cardinal Nichols said Pope Leo is “very decisive” in a “quiet way”, adding that he has seen him “make decisions which disappoint people but don’t destroy them”.

“A good thing about a pope is if he’s able to say, ‘No’, to you when he thinks something is not right and then give you a hug so you don’t go away offended, and I think he’s got that ability to do both those things, which is very important.”

The US-China trade war could be letting up, with the world’s two largest economies beginning talks in Switzerland.

Top trade officials from both sides met on Saturday in the first high-level meeting since US President Donald Trump hit China with tariffs in January.

Beijing retaliated immediately and a tense stand-off ensued as the two countries heaped levies on each other. New US tariffs on Chinese imports stand at 145%, and some US exports to China face duties of 125%.

There have been weeks of stern, and sometimes fiery, rhetoric where each side sought to paint the other as the more desperate party.

And yet this weekend they face each other over the negotiating table.

So why now?

Despite multiple rounds of tit-for-tat tariffs, both sides have been sending signals that they want to break the deadlock. Except it wasn’t clear who would blink first.

“Neither side wants to appear to be backing down,” said Stephen Olson, senior visiting fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute and a former US trade negotiator.

“The talks are taking place now because both countries have judged that they can move forward without appearing to have caved in to the other side.”

Still, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian emphasised on Wednesday that “the talks are being held at the request of the US”.

And the commerce ministry framed it as a favour to Washington, saying it was answering the “calls of US businesses and consumers”.

The Trump administration, however, claims it’s Chinese officials who “want to do business very much” because “their economy is collapsing”.

“They said we initiated? Well, I think they ought to go back and study their files,” Trump said at the White House on Wednesday.

But as the talks drew closer, the president struck a more diplomatic note: “We can all play games. Who made the first call, who didn’t make the – it doesn’t matter,” he told reporters on Thursday. “It only matters what happens in that room.”

The timing is also key for Beijing because it’s during Xi’s visit to Moscow. He was a guest of honour on Friday at Moscow’s Victory Day parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the World War Two victory over Nazi Germany.

Xi stood alongside leaders from across the Global South – a reminder to Trump’s administration that China not only has other options for trade, but it is also presenting itself as an alternative global leader.

This allows Beijing to project strength even as it heads to the negotiating table.

Trump insists that the tariffs will make America stronger, and Beijing has vowed to “fight till the end”- but the fact is the levies are hurting both countries.

Factory output in China has taken a hit, according to government data. Manufacturing activity in April dipped to the lowest level since December 2023. And a survey by news outlet Caixin this week showed that services activity has reached a seven-month low.

The BBC found that Chinese exporters have been reeling from the steep tariffs, with stock piling up in warehouses, even as they strike a defiant note and look for markets beyond the US.

“I think [China] realises that a deal is better than no deal,” says Bert Hofman, a professor at the East Asian Institute in National University Singapore.

“So they’ve taken a pragmatic view and said, ‘OK, well we need to get these talks going.'”

And so with the major May Day holiday in China over, officials in Beijing have decided the time is right to talk.

On the other side, the uncertainty caused by tariffs led to the US economy contracting for the first time in three years.

And industries that have long depended on Chinese-made goods are especially worried. A Los Angeles toy company owner told the BBC that they were “looking at the total implosion of the supply chain”.

Trump himself has acknowledged that US consumers will feel the sting.

American children may “have two dolls instead of 30 dolls”, he said at a cabinet meeting this month, “and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally”.

Trump’s approval ratings have also slid over fears of inflation and a possible recession, with more than 60% of Americans saying he was focusing too much on tariffs.

“Both countries are feeling pressure to provide a bit of reassurance to increasingly nervous markets, businesses, and domestic constituencies,” Mr Olson says.

“A couple of days of meetings in Geneva will serve that purpose.”

While the talks have been met with optimism, a deal may take a while to materialise.

The talks will mostly be about “touching base”, Mr Hofman said, adding that this could look like an “exchange of positions” and, if things go well, “an agenda [will be] set for future talks”.

The negotiations on the whole are expected to take months, much like what happened during Trump’s first term.

After nearly two years of tit-for-tat tariffs, the US and China signed a “phase one” deal in early 2020 to suspend or reduce some levies. Even then, it did not include thornier issues, such as Chinese government subsidies for key industries or a timeline for scrapping the remaining tariffs.

In fact, many of them stayed in place through Joe Biden’s presidency, and Trump’s latest tariffs add to those older levies.

What could emerge this time is a “phase one deal on steroids”, Mr Olson said: that is, it would go beyond the earlier deal and try to address flashpoints. There are many, from the illegal fentanyl trade which Washington wants China to crack down harder on to Beijing’s relationship with Moscow.

But all of that is far down the line, experts warn.

“The systemic frictions that bedevil the US-China trade relationship will not be solved any time soon,” Mr Olson adds.

“Geneva will only produce anodyne statements about ‘frank dialogues’ and the desire to keep talking.”

Part of a Soviet-era spacecraft is likely to have re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere after being stuck in orbit for more than half a century, the European Space Agency said.

Kosmos 482, which launched in 1972 on a mission to Venus, never made it out of Earth’s orbit and instead broke into four pieces that have been circling the planet for more than five decades.

The EU Space Surveillance and Tracking centre (SST) said one fragment – believed to be the lander – “most likely” re-entered the atmosphere at about 06:16 GMT (07:16 BST) on Saturday.

It is unclear whether the object fell to the ground or burned up in the atmosphere.

It is also unclear exactly where the object re-entered the atmosphere.

While there is much experts do not know about the object’s re-entry, 70% of Earth is covered by sea so it is unlikely to have caused significant damage.

“It’s much more likely that you win the lottery than that you get impacted by this piece of space debris,” Stijn Lemmens, a senior analyst at the European Space Agency, said.

Kosmos 482’s lander capsule was built to survive the extreme heat and pressure of Venus’s atmosphere, meaning it had a robust heat shield and durable structure.

This is why experts think it may have survived an uncontrolled descent through Earth’s atmosphere.

However, Kosmos 482’s parachute system, originally intended to slow the lander’s descent towards Venus, is likely to have degraded after more than 50 years in space.

Mr Lemmens explained that the “re-entry of human-made objects into Earth’s atmosphere occurs quite frequently”. He said it happens weekly for bigger spacecraft and daily for smaller ones.

Objects typically burn up in the earth’s atmosphere before they reach the ground.

China’s Long March 5B booster re-entered over the Indian Ocean in 2022, and the Tiangong-1 space station mostly burned up over the Pacific in 2018.

Kosmos 482 is now being closely tracked by international space agencies.

Mr Lemmens said that future spacecraft “should be designed in such a way that they can take themselves out of orbit safely, preferably by doing controlled re-entries”.

This would allow for precise predictions of landing locations, reducing the risk of any debris impacting populated areas and protecting people and property while “managing the environmental impact of space debris”.

Catholicism has rarely been more prominent in US politics as the Trump administration openly embraces advisers and officials who proudly say faith has shaped their views.

But any jubilation on the American Make America Great Again right about the new Pope this week quickly dissipated as key voices from Donald Trump’s Maga movement came to a disappointed conclusion: the first American Pope does not appear to be “America first”.

Little is known about the political leanings of Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago.

He has voiced concerns for the poor and immigrants, chosen a name that may reference more liberal church leadership, and he appears to have both supported the liberal-leaning Pope Francis and criticised the US president’s policies on social media.

But the president so far has said only that Leo’s election was a “great honour” for the US. Still, some of Trump’s most prominent supporters were quick to attack Pope Leo, lambasting him as a possible challenge to Trump and on the perception that he will follow Pope Francis in areas like immigration.

“I mean it’s kind of jaw-dropping,” Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon told the BBC on Friday, speaking of Leo’s election.

“It is shocking to me that a guy could be selected to be the Pope that had had the Twitter feed and the statements he’s had against American senior politicians,” said Bannon, a hard-right Trump loyalist, practising Catholic and former altar boy.

And he predicted that there’s “definitely going to be friction” between Leo and Trump.

• Pope Leo XIV calls Church ‘a beacon to illuminate dark nights’ in first Mass
• Pope’s first speech in full
• Who is Robert Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV?

The Pope’s brother, John Prevost, told The New York Times that he thinks his brother would voice his disagreements with the president.

“I know he’s not happy with what’s going on with immigration,” he said. “I know that for a fact. How far he’ll go with it is only one’s guess, but he won’t just sit back. I don’t think he’ll be the silent one.”

Recent survey data shows that about 20% of Americans identify as Catholic, according to the non-partisan Pew Research Center.

About 53% identify with or lean towards the Republican Party, though there’s plenty of nuance, too: America’s two Catholic presidents, John F Kennedy and Joe Biden, were both Democrats. And nearly two-thirds of US Catholics believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances – a departure from the Church’s current stance.

US Catholics also broadly supported Pope Francis: 78% of those surveyed in February viewed him favorably, including a majority of Catholic Republicans.

A number of Catholics in the new Pope’s home city of Chicago on Thursday aired disappointment with President Trump and said they hoped Pope Leo XIV would follow the path of his predecessor.

“We hope he’ll continue with Francis’s agenda going forward,” said Rick Stevens, a Catholic deacon from New Jersey who happened to be visiting Chicago when he heard the news.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which leads and coordinates US Catholic activities, celebrated Pope Leo’s election and the message it sends.

“Certainly, we rejoice that a son of this nation has been chosen by the cardinals, but we recognise that he now belongs to all Catholics and to all people of good will,” the conference said in a statement. “His words advocating peace, unity, and missionary activity already indicate a path forward.”

Though Maga supporters represent a small subset of US Catholics, it’s one with outsized access to conservative media and Trump’s ear.

On Bannon’s War Room podcast – known for its hard-right, pro-Trump bent – one guest after another heaped criticism on the new Pope.

“This guy has been massively embraced by the liberals and the progressives,” said Ben Harnwell, a journalist who led Bannon’s efforts to establish what he calls a “gladiator school” for the “Judeo-Christian West” outside of Rome.

“He is one of their own… he has [Pope] Francis’s DNA in him,” Harnwell said.

Jack Posobiec, another Maga commentator dialing in from Rome, was blunt: “This choice of the American cardinal was done as a response, as a message to President Trump.”

The full picture of what led to Pope Leo’s selection on Thursday is still emerging and church decisions don’t map neatly onto US politics. Still, watchers around the world have pored over Pope Leo’s social media profiles in search of clues about his leanings and beliefs.

An X account under his name, with tweets going as far back as 2015, shares links to criticism of Trump’s approach to immigration and hints at other political views, such as stricter gun control.

In February, the account sharply rebuked the US vice-president by posting a link to an opinion piece titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others”.

The account also posted a link to a letter from Pope Francis after he clashed with Vance over church doctrine and immigration. Vance – a Catholic convert – had given an interview in defence of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Vance has routinely invoked his faith in defense of the administration, particularly immigration policies, which the White House has said put “America first”.

“There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that,” Vance told Fox News.

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But US Democrats were not spared either on the account, which has more than a decade of posts. They appear to support Catholic employers who refuse to pay for contraceptives via employee health plans, and following the 2016 US presidential election, one post links to an article accusing Democrat Hillary Clinton of ignoring pro-life Catholic voters.

The BBC asked the Vatican to confirm the account was Leo’s, but did not receive a response.

Vice-President Vance told conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt on Friday: “I try not to play the politicisation of the Pope game.

“I’m sure he’s going to say a lot of things that I love. I’m sure he’ll say some things that I disagree with, but I’ll continue to pray for him and the Church despite it all and through it all, and that’ll be the way that I handle it.”

The new Pope’s LGBTQ views are also unclear, but some groups, including the conservative College of Cardinals, believe he may be less supportive than Pope Francis.

Matt Walsh, a commentator with the conservative Daily Wire, wrote: “There are some good signs and bad signs with this new Pope. I want to see what he actually does with his papacy before I pass any kind of judgment.”

But some of the most dedicated Maga supporters already have made up their minds.

Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer who has Trump’s ear, swaying the president on top personnel decisions, called the new Pope “anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis”.

Bannon, who had suggested Leo as a dark horse for the papacy, predicted tensions between the White House and Vatican – and said they could even tear apart American Catholics.

“Remember, President Trump was not shy about taking a shot at Pope Francis,” he said.

“So if this Pope – which he will do – tries to come between President Trump and his implementation of the mass deportation programme, I would stand by.”