Top military officials from India and Pakistan are due to speak on Monday to discuss finer details of the ceasefire agreed between them over the weekend.

The US-brokered ceasefire between the nuclear-armed neighbours appears to have held overnight after nearly four days of intense shelling and aerial incursions from both sides.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced the ceasefire between India and Pakistan, saying “it was time to stop the current aggression that could have led to the death and destruction of so many, and so much”.

Both nations have ceased hostilities since then but say they remain vigilant, warning each other of the consequences of violating the ceasefire.

India announced on Monday that it was reopening 32 airports for civilians that it had earlier said would remain closed until Thursday due to safety concerns.

The tensions were the latest in the decades-long rivalry between the neighbours who have fought two wars over Kashmir, a Himayalan region which they claim in full but administer in part.

The recent hostilities threatened to turn into a full-fledged war as both countries appeared unwilling to back down for days.

Both countries have said that dozens of people from both sides died over the four days of fighting last week, partly due to heavy shelling near the de facto border.

After the ceasefire, however, both the rivals have declared military victory.

On 7 May, India reported striking nine targets inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir – this was in response to a deadly militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 people.

The attack took place in a meadow in the picturesque Pahalgam valley on 22 April.

India blamed a Pakistan-based group for the attack but Islamabad denies any involvement.

In the days since the first strike, India and Pakistan accused each other of cross-border shelling and claimed to have shot down rival drones and aircraft in their airspace.

As the conflict escalated, both nations said they struck the rival’s military bases.

Indian officials reported striking 11 Pakistan Air Force bases, including one in Rawalpindi, near the capital Islamabad. India also claimed Pakistan lost 35-40 men at the Line of Control – the de facto border – during the conflict and that its air force lost a few aircraft.

Pakistan has accepted that some Indian projectiles landed at its air force bases.

Indian defence forces have also said that they struck nine armed group training facilities in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, killing more than 100 militants.

The Pakistan military, in turn, claims it targeted about 26 military facilities in India and that its drones hovered over capital Delhi.

India has confirmed that some Pakistani projectiles landed up at its air force bases, though it did not comment on the claim about Delhi.

Pakistan also claims to have shot down five Indian aircraft, including three French Rafales – India has not acknowledged this or commented on the number, though it said on Sunday that that “losses are a part of combat”.

Pakistan denied the claims that an Indian pilot was in its custody after she ejected following an aircraft crash. India has also said that “all our pilots are back home”.

Outlawed Kurdish group the PKK, which has waged a 40-year insurgency against Turkey, has announced it is laying down its arms and disbanding.

The move followed a call in February by the group’s jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, for it to disband.

The PKK insurgency initially aimed to create an independent homeland for Kurds, who account for about 20% of Turkey’s population. But it has since moved away from its separatist goals, focusing instead on more autonomy and greater Kurdish rights.

More than 40,000 people have been killed since the insurgency began.

The PKK – which is banned as a terrorist group in Turkey, the EU, UK and US – said it has “completed its historical mission” and would “end the method of armed struggle.”

From now on, the Kurdish issue “can be resolved through democratic politics”, the group said in a statement published on the PKK-affiliated news agency ANF.

In February, Ocalan, 76, called on his movement to lay down its arms and dissolve itself. The PKK leader has been in solitary confinement in prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara, south-west of Istanbul, since 1999.

Ocalan wrote a letter from prison in February saying “there is no alternative to democracy in the pursuit and realisation of a political system. Democratic consensus is the fundamental way.”

It is unclear what Ocalan and his supporters will get in return for disbanding but there is speculation that he may be paroled.

Kurdish politicians will be hoping for a new political dialogue, and a pathway towards greater Kurdish rights.

Both sides had reasons to do a deal now.

The PKK has been hit hard by the Turkish military in recent years, and regional changes have made it harder for them and their affiliates to operate in Iraq and Syria.

President Erdogan needs the support of pro Kurdish political parties if he is to be able to run again in Turkey’s next presidential election, due in 2028.

The decision to disband was an important step towards a “terror-free Turkey”, and the process would be monitored by state institutions, a spokesperson for President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party said, according to Reuters news agency.

Winthrop Rodgers, from the international affairs think tank Chatham House, said it would take “a major democratic transition by Turkey” to accommodate demands from Kurdish political parties.

There has been “some goodwill” from some Turkish leaders in recent months, Mr Rodgers said, which allowed the PKK disbandment to play out.

He added: “But whether that extends to the major changes needed to ensure full Kurdish participation in politics and society is far less clear.

“In a lot of ways, the ball is in Turkey’s court.”

Former members of UK Special Forces have broken years of silence to give BBC Panorama eyewitness accounts of alleged war crimes committed by colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Giving their accounts publicly for the first time, the veterans described seeing members of the SAS murder unarmed people in their sleep and execute handcuffed detainees, including children.

“They handcuffed a young boy and shot him,” recalled one veteran who served with the SAS in Afghanistan. ”He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age.”

Killing of detainees “became routine”, the veteran said. “They’d search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them”, before cutting off the plastic handcuffs used to restrain people and “planting a pistol” by the body, he said.

The new testimony includes allegations of war crimes stretching over more than a decade, far longer than the three years currently being examined by a judge-led public inquiry in the UK.

The SBS, the Royal Navy’s elite special forces regiment, is also implicated for the first time in the most serious allegations – executions of unarmed and wounded people.

A veteran who served with the SBS said some troops had a “mob mentality”, describing their behaviour on operations as “barbaric”.

“I saw the quietest guys switch, show serious psychopathic traits,” he said. “They were lawless. They felt untouchable.”

Special Forces were deployed to Afghanistan to protect British troops from Taliban fighters and bombmakers. The conflict was a deadly one for members of the UK’s armed forces – 457 lost their lives and thousands more were wounded.

Asked by the BBC about the new eyewitness testimony, the Ministry of Defence said that it was “fully committed” to supporting the ongoing public inquiry into the alleged war crimes and that it urged all veterans with relevant information to come forward. It said that it was “not appropriate for the MoD to comment on allegations” which may be in the inquiry’s scope.

The eyewitness testimony offers the most detailed public account of the killings to date from former members of UK Special Forces (UKSF), the umbrella group which contains the SAS, SBS and several supporting regiments.

The testimony, from more than 30 people who served with or alongside UK Special Forces, builds on years of reporting by BBC Panorama into allegations of extrajudicial killings by the SAS.

Panorama can also reveal for the first time that then Prime Minister David Cameron was repeatedly warned during his tenure that UK Special Forces were killing civilians in Afghanistan.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because of a de facto code of silence around special forces operations, the eyewitnesses told the BBC that the laws of war were being regularly and intentionally broken by the country’s most elite regiments during operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those laws state that on such operations people can be deliberately killed only when they pose a direct threat to the lives of British troops or others. But members of the SAS and SBS were making their own rules, the eyewitnesses said.

“If a target had popped up on the list two or three times before, then we’d go in with the intention of killing them, there was no attempt to capture them,” said one veteran who served with the SAS, referring to people who had been previously captured, questioned and then released.

“Sometimes we’d check we’d identified the target, confirm their ID, then shoot them,” he said. “Often the squadron would just go and kill all the men they found there.”

One witness who served with the SAS said that killing could become “an addictive thing to do” and that some members of the elite regiment were “intoxicated by that feeling” in Afghanistan. There were “lots of psychotic murderers”, he said.

“On some operations, the troop would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there,” he said. “They’d go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry. It’s not justified, killing people in their sleep.”

A veteran who served with the SBS told the BBC that after bringing an area under control, assault teams would sweep through the area shooting anyone on the ground, checking the bodies and killing anyone left alive. “It was expected, not hidden. Everyone knew,” he said.

Intentionally killing wounded people who do not pose a threat would be a clear breach of international law. But the SBS veteran told Panorama that wounded people were routinely killed. He described one operation during which a medic was treating someone who had been shot but was still breathing. “Then one of our blokes came up to him. There was a bang. He’d been shot in the head at point-blank range,” he said.

The killings were “completely unnecessary,” he added. “These are not mercy killings. It’s murder.”

More junior members of assault teams were told by more senior SAS operators to kill male detainees, according to the testimony, using instructions such as “he’s not coming back to base with us” or “this detainee, you make sure he doesn’t come off target”.

Detainees were people who had surrendered, been searched by special forces, and were typically handcuffed. British and international law forbid troops from deliberately killing unarmed civilians or prisoners of war.

A former SAS operator also described learning of an operation in Iraq during which someone was executed.

“It was pretty clear from what I could glean that he posed no threat, he wasn’t armed. It’s disgraceful. There’s no professionalism in that,” the former operator said. The killing was never properly investigated, he added. According to the SAS veteran, the problem started long before the regiment moved across to Afghanistan and “senior commanders were aware of that”.

The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.

Sources told the BBC that some members of the SAS kept their own individual counts, and that one operator personally killed dozens of people on one six-month tour of Afghanistan.

“It seemed like he was trying to get a kill on every operation, every night someone got killed,” a former colleague said. The operator was “notorious in the squadron, he genuinely seemed like a psychopath,” the former colleague added.

In one incident that sources say became infamous inside the SAS, the operator allegedly slit the throat of an injured Afghan man after telling an officer not to shoot the man again. It was “because he wanted to go and finish the wounded guy off with his knife,” another former colleague said. “He wanted to, you know, blood his knife.”

Knowledge of the alleged crimes was not confined to small teams or individual squadrons, according to the testimony. Within the UK Special Forces command structure, “everyone knew” what was happening, said one veteran.

“I’m not taking away from personal responsibility, but everyone knew,” he said. “There was implicit approval for what was happening.”

To avoid scrutiny of the killings, eyewitnesses said, members of the SAS and SBS would plant so-called “drop weapons” on the bodies of the dead, to make it look as though they had been armed in the photographs routinely taken by special forces teams at the scene.

“There was a fake grenade they’d take with them onto target, it couldn’t detonate,” said a former SAS operator. Another veteran said operators would carry AK-47 rifles which had a folding stock because they were easier to fit into their rucksacks and “easier to bring onto a target and plant by a body”.

Officers would then help to falsify post-operational reports in order to avoid scrutiny for the actions of assault teams on the ground, according to the testimony.

“We understood how to write up serious incident reviews so they wouldn’t trigger a referral to the military police,” one of the veterans said.

“If it looked like a shooting could represent a breach of the rules of conflict, you’d get a phone call from the legal adviser or one of the staff officers in HQ. They’d pick you up on it and help you to clarify the language. ‘Do you remember someone making a sudden move?’ ‘Oh yeah, I do now.’ That sort of thing. It was built into the way we operated.”

The reports were “a fiction”, another UKSF veteran said.

An intelligence officer who worked with the SBS described reports which said they had been caught in a firefight, while the photos showed bodies with “multiple clean headshots”.

Falsified paperwork could help prevent an investigation by the Royal Military Police, but British special forces operations generated deep concern from Afghan commanders and Afghan government officials.

David Cameron – who made seven visits to Afghanistan as prime minister between June 2010 and November 2013, the period now under scrutiny by the SAS public inquiry, was repeatedly made aware of the concerns by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, according to multiple people who attended the meetings.

Mr Karzai “consistently, repeatedly mentioned this issue”, former Afghan national security adviser Dr Rangin Dadfar Spanta told Panorama. He said Lord Cameron could have been left in no doubt that there were allegations of civilians, including children, being killed during operations carried out by UK Special Forces.

The Afghan president was “so consistent with his complaints about night raids, civilian casualties and detentions that there was no senior Western diplomat or military leader who would have missed the fact that this was a major irritant for him,” said Gen Douglas Lute, a former US ambassador to Nato.

Gen Lute said it would have been “extraordinarily unusual if there were a claim against British forces that the British chain of command was not aware of”.

A spokesperson for Lord Cameron told Panorama that “to the best of Lord Cameron’s recollection” the issues raised by President Karzai were about Nato forces in general and that “specific incidents with respect to UK Special Forces were not raised”.

The spokesperson also said that it was “right that we await the official findings of the Inquiry”, adding that “any suggestion that Lord Cameron colluded in covering up allegations of serious criminal wrongdoing is total nonsense.”

Unlike many other countries, including the US and France, the UK has no parliamentary oversight of its elite special forces regiments. Strategic responsibility for their actions falls ultimately to the prime minister, along with the defence secretary and head of special forces.

Bruce Houlder KC – a former director of service prosecutions, responsible for bringing charges and prosecuting those serving in the Armed Forces – told Panorama that he hoped the public inquiry would examine the extent of Lord Cameron’s knowledge of alleged civilian casualties on British special forces operations.

“You need to know how far the rot went up,” Mr Houlder said.

For Maria Khan, the ceasefire this weekend between India and Pakistan came too late.

Maria, who lives in Indian-administered Kashmir, lost her nephew and niece – 12-year-old twins Zain Ali and Urwa Fatima – to cross-border shelling on 7 May. Their parents, her sister Urusa and brother-in-law Rameez Khan, were also injured and are still in hospital.

Hours earlier that day, India had launched a series of strikes in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir in retaliation for an earlier militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 tourists.

The strikes were followed by a series of military actions from Islamabad and Delhi that went on till Saturday, including heavy cross-border shelling and drone strikes.

People living along the Line of Control (LoC), the de-factor border between India and Pakistan, were the most vulnerable as shells fell near their homes.

Maria, who lives in Poonch, a town in Indian-administered Kashmir near the LoC, is among dozens of people who lost family members in the conflict.

India has said that 16 people were killed on the morning of 7 May in the shelling by Pakistan. Pakistan has said that at least 30 civilians have died since India launched its retaliatory strikes in the early hours of 7 May.

On 6 May, like every other day, Zain and Urwa came back from school, did their homework, played a bit, had dinner and then went to sleep.

It wasn’t yet dawn when the Khan family heard the sound of gunfire just a few kilometres away from their home.

Terrified, they hunkered down at home and waited for a relative to come pick them up, Maria says.

“My sister was holding Urwa’s hand and my brother-in-law was holding Zain’s hand. They had just left the house when suddenly a shell exploded [nearby]. The splinters hit them – Urva died right there and Zain was flung somewhere in the force of the explosion,” Maria says.

She adds that her sister kept calling out to Zain. When she finally spotted him, a stranger was performing CPR on the boy, trying to revive him. But he was unsuccessful.

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Meanwhile, Rameez, who lay bleeding and unconscious, was rushed to hospital – first a local one in Poonch and later to a bigger hospital in Rajouri, about four hours away.

Since his injuries were serious, he was shifted again to a hospital in Jammu city, another four-hour journey.

Maria says that Urwa and Zain were the centre of their parents’ lives. Rameez, a teacher, wanted to give them the best education they could get and hence, they shifted to a house that was closer to the children’s school, called Christ School.

On 9 May, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said in a press briefing that during heavy shelling along the LoC, a Pakistani shell had fallen behind Christ School in Poonch town and exploded.

Rameez, Maria says, still doesn’t know about the deaths of his children as the family doesn’t want to upset him.

After the shelling on 7 May, hundreds of people left Poonch and other border towns to escape to safer areas. They are slowly returning after the ceasefire.

“The government should have informed people living near border areas earlier, so that they could leave from there and go to a safe place. Perhaps then our children would have been with us today,” she says.

“If war is necessary for the country’s security, we support it,” says Maria.

“We are also saddened by the Pahalgam attack, but we should also think about the lives of those living near the border. Are we not humans?” she asks.

“Now, whether there is a war or ceasefire, our children will not come back.”

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The first set of 49 white South Africans to be granted refugee status by President Donald Trump’s administration are on their way to the US.

On Sunday they boarded a flight from Johannesburg which is due to land in Washington DC later on Monday.

This comes after a weekend of speculation about when the Afrikaners would leave for America, amid criticism from the South African government who described the US resettlement scheme as “politically motivated”.

Relations between South Africa and the US have been tense for months, after an executive order in February in which President Trump stated that Afrikaners were victims of “racial discrimination”.

The US has criticised domestic South African policy, accusing the government of seizing land from white farmers without any compensation – something which the southern African nation says has not happened.

Top Trump adviser, South African-born Elon Musk, has previously said there was a “genocide of white people” in South Africa and accused the government of passing “racist ownership laws”.

The claims of a genocide of white people have been widely discredited.

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In a statement on Friday, South Africa’s foreign ministry said accusations the government discriminated against the country’s white minority were “unfounded” and that the US’s resettlement scheme was an attempt to undermine the country’s “constitutional democracy”.

The statement added that the country had worked “tirelessly” to stop discrimination, given its history of racial oppression under apartheid.

Bilateral tensions have been strained for some times as President Trump tasked his administration with formulating plans to potentially resettle Afrikaners, a group with mostly Dutch ancestry, in the US.

In March, South Africa’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled after accusing President Trump of using “white victimhood as a dog whistle”, leading to the US accusing Mr Rasool of “race-baiting”.

The US has also criticised South Africa for taking an “aggressive” position against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Pretoria has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of genocide against people in Gaza – a claim which the Israelis strongly reject.

The current group of white South African refugees comprises 49 people, who are expected to land in Washington DC later on Monday, before continuing to Texas.

President Trump’s openness to accepting Afrikaner refugees comes as the US has engaged in a wider crackdown on migrants and asylum seekers from other countries.

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A UN-backed assessment has said that Gaza’s population of around 2.1 million Palestinians is at “critical risk” of famine and faces “extreme levels of food insecurity” as an Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid continues.

The latest report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said there had been a “major deterioration” since October 2024, but concluded famine was not currently occurring.

The two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas “led to a temporary reprieve” in Gaza, the report said, but renewed hostilities and an Israeli blockade on aid – ongoing since early March – had “reversed” any improvements.

Some 244,000 people were currently experiencing the most severe, or “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity, it said, and called for urgent action to prevent the “increasingly likely” risk of famine.

Israel renewed its military operations in Gaza in mid-March and has prevented food, medication and other aid from entering Gaza for 70 days, saying it is putting pressure on Hamas to release its remaining hostages.

There has been international condemnation of the blockade, including from the UN which has said it has supplies at Gaza’s border crossings, ready to enter if Israel allows. Aid agencies have said the blockade could be a war crime and amounts to a policy of starvation.

The IPC assessment, released on Monday, found half a million people – or one in five – were facing starvation in Gaza. It said nearly 71,000 children under the age of five are expected to be acutely malnourished over the next 11 months to April 2026.

It added: “Many households are resorting to extreme measures to find food, including begging, and collecting garbage to sell to buy something to eat.”

The report said the current situation, compared to its October 2024 analysis, represented “a major deterioration in one of the world’s most severe food and nutrition crises driven by conflict and characterised by untold human suffering”.

Its analysis found that 1.95 million people, or 93% of Gaza’s population, were living through high levels of acute food insecurity, including 244,000 experiencing “catastrophic” levels.

The IPC – a global initiative by UN agencies, aid groups and governments – is the primary mechanism the international community uses to conclude whether a famine is happening.

Israeli officials have denied there is a hunger crisis in Gaza because of the quantity of aid that entered during the ceasefire.

It comes as Hamas said it would release Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander as part of efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement. The group said it was also intended to facilitate a deal for the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

The Israeli PM’s office said it had not committed to any ceasefire but only to a “safe corridor” for Mr Alexander’s release.

US President Donald Trump arrives in the Middle East on Tuesday, and Israel has vowed to expand its military offensive against Hamas if no deal is reached by the end of his visit.

Israeli officials have said the plans for their expanded offensive include seizing all of the territory indefinitely, forcibly displacing Palestinians to the south, and taking over aid distribution with private companies despite opposition from the UN and its humanitarian partners, who say they will not co-operate because it appears to “weaponise” aid.

In its report, the IPC said the aid distribution plans were estimated to be “highly insufficient” and it was expected that large parts of the population would “face significant issues in accessing the proposed distribution sites”.

The 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 hostages remain in Gaza, up to 24 of whom are believed to be alive.

Israel’s military campaign has killed 52,862 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

With US President Donald Trump due to visit Gulf states this week, a key focus will be securing significant new investment for the US economy.

“President Trump wants the announcement [of more Gulf money for the US],” says economist Karen Young, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank.

“He wants to have a big poster in a meeting that describes where these investments might go. And some estimation of what they will do to the American economy in terms of job creation or his big push, of course, on domestic manufacturing.”

Trump is due to arrive in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Tuesday 13 May, to meet the country’s de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Trump is then expected to attend a summit of Gulf leaders in the city on 14 May, before travelling to Qatar that same day, and then ending his three-day trip in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on 15 May.

The economic importance of the region to Trump is highlighted by the fact that the visit to Saudi Arabia was due to be the first overseas trip of his second term in the White House. That was before the death of Pope Francis necessitated Trump attending his funeral in Rome towards the end of April.

Saudi Arabia was also the first country that Trump visited during his first term of office, going against the modern practise of US presidents to start with the UK, Canada or Mexico.

Securing new investments in the US from Gulf states, and particularly from their state-backed sovereign wealth funds, will help Trump to signal back home that his “America First” agenda is delivering results.

The presidential visit is drawing top Wall Street and Silicon Valley leaders to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-US investment forum on 13 May in Riyadh will feature CEOs from BlackRock, Palantir, Citigroup, IBM, Qualcomm, Alphabet, and Franklin Templeton.

The push comes amid economic headwinds, as President Trump’s new import tariffs have significantly disrupted global trade, confidence, and the US economy itself. US economic output fell in the first three months of this year, its first fall in three years.

Back in January, Prince Mohammed said that Saudi Arabia would invest $600bn (£450bn) in the US over the next four years. However, Trump has already said that he’d like that to rise to $1tn, including purchases of more US military equipment.

According to Ali Shihabi – a Saudi commentator and author, with close ties to the Saudi government – a number of economic agreements will be signed during the trip.

“These deals will further integrate the Saudi and US economies together, joint ventures in the kingdom, in the United States, procurements of American weapons and goods,” says Mr Shihabi.

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment fund (PIF), which controls assets worth $925bn, already has numerous investments in the US. These include Uber, gaming firm Electronic Arts, and electric car firm Lucid.

Meanwhile, the UAE has already committed to investing $1.4tn in the US over the next 10 years, in sectors such as AI, semiconductors, energy and manufacturing. This was announced by the White House in March after the UAE’s national security advisor, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, met President Trump in Washington.

Yet Ms Young from the Middle East Institute says that the scale of these investments is not realistic in the short term. She instead says that they are long-term strategic moves, and that the figures should be taken “with a little bit of a grain of salt”.

Regarding specific deals that could be announced during Trump’s visit, it is widely reported that Saudi Arabia will agree to buy more than $100bn of US arms and other military items.

These are said to include missiles, radar systems and transport aircraft.

The US has been a longstanding arms supplier to Saudi Arabia, but in 2021 the then Biden administration stopped selling Riyadh offensive weapons, citing concerns about the country’s role in the war in neighbouring Yemen.

The 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was also widely reported to be a factor. A US report said that Prince Mohammed had approved the murder.

The Biden White House resumed the sale of these weapons last year. While it cited that the Saudis had stopped bombing Yemen, some commentators said that the US was seeking Saudi assistance to help end the conflict in Gaza and aid its future reconstruction.

Mr Shihabi says Saudi Arabia will be seeking assurances from the White House that the US will implement a “more efficient procurement system”, enabling the Gulf state to access ammunition and military equipment far more quickly and easily.

“The Trump administration is initiating procedures to facilitate those deals. So, it’s expected that this process will improve immediately,” he adds.

Artificial intelligence is the other topic that will dominate the agenda during Mr Trump’s visit. Talks are expected to centre on attracting greater Gulf investment into US tech firms, and boosting the region’s access to cutting-edge American semiconductors.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have been investing billions of dollars into tech and AI sectors as they try to diversify their economies away from oil.

The Emiratis, in particular, are keen to establish themselves as a global AI hub.

Last week, the Trump administration scrapped the Biden-era chip regulations that placed restrictions on exports of advanced US chips to more than 120 countries including the Gulf states.

The White House is expected to draft new rules that would potentially involve direct negotiations with countries like the UAE.

“For the UAE, this is absolutely essential,” says Ms Young. “They are aggressively building out their AI capacity. So, for them getting access to US technology is imperative to be the best.”

While much attention will be on Trump courting Gulf capital for the US, Saudi Arabia is equally focused on drawing American investment into its ambitious Vision 2030 program.

Led by giant construction projects, such as the building of a linear city called The Line, Vision 2030 is central to the Saudi government’s continuing efforts to diversify the country’s economy away from oil.

It also involves pouring resources into entertainment, tourism, mining and sports.

However, foreign direct investment into Saudi Arabia declined for a third straight year in 2024, reflecting persistent challenges in attracting overseas capital.

The fall in global oil prices since the start of the year has further strained Riyadh’s finances, increasing pressure to either raise debt or cut spending to sustain its development goals.

Oil prices tumbled to a four-year low amid growing concerns that a trade war could dampen global economic growth.

The decline was further fuelled by the group of oil producing nations, Opec+, announcing plans to increase output.

Saudi Arabia is part of that group, and some commentators said that the rise was in part a desire to please Trump, who has called for lower oil prices.

Other analysts said the reason was more that Opec+ remains confident that the global economy is growing.

The US-Saudi Business Council, is an organisation that aims to boost trade ties between the two countries.

It is hoping that Trump’s visit will push American businesses to explore more opportunities in Saudi Arabia, especially in sectors like AI, healthcare and education.

“The Saudi government is looking heavily to invest in these sectors. There is a very big appetite for Saudi companies to collaborate with American companies,” Hutham Al Jalal, who heads the Riyadh office for the organisation, tells the BBC.

Saudi officials are said to be confident that some deals in these sectors will be secured during Trump’s visit.

For Saudi Arabia, Trump’s visit is about strengthening ties with their longest-standing Western ally – a relationship that grew strained during the Biden years. For President Trump, it is about landing investment deals that can be framed as a win for his economic agenda.

“President Trump is looking for a headline of big investments in America, and he will get that from this trip,” adds Mr Shihabi.

The White House is in discussions with the royal family of Qatar to possibly receive a luxury jumbo jet, intended for use as an Air Force One presidential plane.

In a statement, Qatar denied that the plane would be a gift, but said the transfer of an aircraft for “temporary use” was under discussion between the two countries.

According to CBS News, the BBC’s news partner in America, the plane would be donated to Trump’s presidential library at the end of his term.

The news comes as Trump is set to visit Qatar this week as part of the first major foreign trip of his second term.

Ali Al-Ansari, Qatar’s Media Attaché to the US, said negotiations were ongoing between Qatar’s Ministry of Defense and the US Department of Defense.

“The matter remains under review by the respective legal departments, and no decision has been made.”

Sources told CBS News that the plane, reported to be worth about $400m, will not be ready for use right away as it will need to retrofitted and cleared by security officials.

The potential value of the plane and its handling is likely to raise legal and ethical questions among critics.

Democrats were quick to accuse Trump of breaching ethics violations.

Senator Adam Schiff from California quoted a section of the US Constitution on social media that said no elected official could accept “any present… of any kind whatever” from the leader of a foreign state without congressional approval.

Laura Loomer, a longtime Trump ally, also criticised the move. After writing on social media that she would “take a bullet” for Trump, she said: “This is really going to be such a stain on the [administration] if this is true.”

On Sunday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “any gift given by a foreign government is always accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws. President Trump’s Administration is committed to full transparency”.

Defending the negotiations with Qatar, Trump referred to the plane as a gift and said it was offered for his use at no cost in a post to his Truth Social website on Sunday.

“So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane.” he wrote.

The White House’s current fleet includes two Boeing 747-200B planes customised for presidential use with special communications equipment and features like a stateroom, office and conference room, according to the US Air Force. The planes have been in use since 1990 and 1991.

Air Force One planes usually carry over to other administrations. According to the National Archives, only the Reagan presidential library has an Air Force One jet, and it flew seven presidents before being donated.

Qatar is said to be offering a version of a Boeing 747-8, a much newer model that ABC News reports has been upgraded into a “flying palace”.

Boeing had been contracted to provide the White House with newer planes, but Trump complained earlier this year that the company was behind schedule. His administration had initially negotiated with Boeing for two specialised 747-8 planes during his first administration.

The plane maker said the aircraft would not be available until 2027 or 2028.

“No, I’m not happy with Boeing. It takes them a long time to do, you know, Air Force One, we gave that contract out a long time ago,” Trump said in February.

“We may buy a plane or get a plane, or something.”

Trump had a positive diplomatic relationship with Qatar during his first term, which included an announcement in 2019 that the country would make a large purchase of American airplanes.

Qatar has also previously given private jets as gifts to other countries, such as a luxury plane given to Turkey in 2018.

At least 130 civilians were killed by Burkina Faso government forces and allied militia in March near the western town of Solenzo, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says in a new report.

It says the “massacre”, following an operation led by Burkinabè special forces, resulted in widespread civilian deaths and displacement of ethnic Fulanis.

The Fulani are a pastoralist, largely Muslim community who the government has often accused of backing Islamist militants – an allegation denied by community leaders.

About 40% of Burkina Faso is under the control of groups linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State operating in West Africa’s Sahel region.

The attacks, in which thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced, have continued despite promises by the country’s military leaders to deal with the insurgency.

Ahead of the release of the HRW findings on Monday, there were reports of more militant attacks over the weekend with dozens of military and civilian casualties.

The BBC has not been able to confirm these reports and the authorities do not routinely comment on reported jihadist attacks.

The BBC has approached the Burkina Faso government for comment on the HRW report.

Last year, the government described as “baseless” another HRW report that had accused soldiers of a “massacre” in which 223 villagers were killed.

It also said that any allegations of human rights abuses committed “in the fight against terrorism” were systematically investigated.

• Why Burkina Faso’s junta leader has captured hearts and minds around the world
• Why West Africa has more ‘terror deaths’ than rest of world combined

The rights group says it interviewed witnesses, militia members, journalists and the civil society and analysed videos shared on social media to make the findings regarding the army’s involvement in the March killings.

HRW previously said the army was “implicated” in the killings, based on videos that were being shared online showing dozens of dead and injured people, although the findings were not definitive.

It now says further research has “uncovered that Burkina Faso’s military was responsible for these mass killings of Fulani civilians”.

It adds that least 100 more civilians were killed last month in reprisal attacks by jihadist groups against those seen as helping the military.

“Mass killings of civilians by government security forces, militias, and Islamist armed groups amount to war crimes and other possible atrocity crimes,” it says.

The rights group has urged the government to investigate and prosecute all those responsible for the crimes.

This came as junta leader Capt Ibrahim Traoré returned from Moscow after a Friday meeting with Vladimir Putin on cooperation and security in the Sahel.

Since the military seized power, Burkina Faso has turned away from colonial power France and towards Russia for help in tacking the Islamist insurgency.

• Freed captive tells BBC of life in West African jihadist base
• Why some Ghanaians are fighting in insurgency-hit Burkina Faso
• Burkina Faso outcry over ‘conscription used to punish junta critics’
• Mali and Burkina Faso: Did the coups halt jihadist attacks?

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, commonly known by his nickname Bongbong, has been gearing up for a battle that could decide his political future.

Monday’s midterm elections are, in effect, a showdown between Marcos and his Vice-President Sara Duterte, daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte.

The pair, who each represent the country’s most powerful families, won the 2022 election together – but their alliance has since collapsed.

The midterms are a test for the presidency of 67-year-old Marcos, the son of an ousted dictator who rebranded his father’s turbulent reign to make a startling comeback in the 2022 election.

• Follow live updates: Millions vote in Philippines midterms as Marcos-Duterte feud heats up

Born in 1957 to Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Bongbong was just eight years old when his father became president. He was the second of three children, and the only son. The couple later adopted another girl.

Bongbong’s father, a former lawyer, served in the Congress and Senate, while his mother was a singer and former beauty pageant winner. Both would achieve notoriety – as the family amassed enormous wealth under a brutal regime, they became synonymous with excess and corruption.

During his first term between 1965 and 1969, Ferdinand Marcos Sr was fairly popular, and was re-elected by a landslide. But in 1972, a year before his second term was due to end, he declared martial law.

What followed was more than a decade of dictatorship, during which the country’s foreign debt grew, prices soared and ordinary Filipinos struggled to make ends meet. It was also a period of repression as opposition figures and critics were jailed, disappeared or killed.

Through it all, Marcos Sr was grooming his son for leadership.

Bongbong’s childhood bedroom in llocos Norte, the family’s stronghold in the north, which is now a museum, has a portrait of him wearing a golden crown and riding a white stallion.

But the elder Marcos was also worried about whether his son would step up to the role. A diary entry from 1972 read: “Bongbong is our principal worry. He is too carefree and lazy”.

Marcos enrolled in Oxford University to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics, but it was later revealed that he did not graduate with a bachelor’s degree as he claimed.

Oxford said in 2021 that he was awarded a special diploma in social studies in 1978. That too, local media reports alleged, was the result of lobbying by Philippine diplomats in the UK after Marcos Jr failed his exams.

He returned home and joined politics, becoming the vice-governor and then governor of Ilocos Norte.

But the political career his parents had envisioned for him would be cut short by a revolution in 1986.

An economic crisis had already triggered unrest – but the assassination of a prominent opposition leader brought tens of thousands onto the streets.

A sustained campaign eventually convinced a significant faction of the army to withdraw its support for the Marcos regime, and hastened its downfall.

The family fled to Hawaii with whatever valuables they could bring, but left behind enough proof of the lavish lives they had led.

Protesters who stormed the presidential palace found fanciful oil portraits of the family, a jacuzzi with gold-plated fixtures and the now-infamous 3,000 pairs of designer shoes owned by Imelda Marcos.

The family is accused of plundering an estimated $10bn of public money while in power. By the time Marcos Sr died in exile in 1989, his was a tarnished name.

And yet, some three decades later, his son was able to whitewash that past enough to win the presidential election.

After they returned to the Philippines in the 1990s, Marcos became a provincial governor, congressman and senator, before running – and winning – the presidential race in 2022.

Social media was a big part of this rebranding, winning Marcos new supporters – especially among the younger generation in a country where the median age is around 25.

On Facebook, the Marcos family legacy has been rewritten, with propaganda posts claiming that Marcos Sr’s regime was actually a “golden period” for the country.

On TikTok, a martial law anthem from the Marcos Sr era became the soundtrack to a cute challenge for Gen Z users, who would record older family members marching to the beat.

As his popularity grew, Marcos launched his presidential bid with Sara Duterte running for vice-president. She vowed to work with Bongbong to unify the country and make it “rise again”.

They called themselves the “uniTeam”, and combined the two families’ powerful bases: the Dutertes in the south, and the Marcos’s in the north.

It paid off. Marcos won with a thumping 31 million votes, more than double the total of his closest rival.

“Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my actions,” Marcos said as victory became apparent, vowing to “be a president for all Filipinos”.

Three years into his presidency, Marcos has brought Manila closer to the US and increasingly confronted an assertive China in the South China Sea – a key departure from Duterte’s presidency.

That wasn’t the only thing that caused a crack in his alliance with Sara Duterte, which eventually descended into a public spat.

He gave her the Education portfolio, when she had openly sought the more powerful Defence portfolio. His allies in Congress then initiated impeachment proceedings against her over alleged misuse of state funds.

And Marcos cleared the way for her father to be arrested and taken to the Hague for his role in a deadly war on drugs that killed thousands.

Sara Duterte’s impeachment, which has been approved by the lower house, now awaits a trial in the Senate, making Monday’s Senate races possible game-changers.

Whatever the outcome, the battle between these former allies will not end on Monday.

It still remains to be seen if the Marcos comeback can weather the Dutertes.

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 filmed in 2011 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 passion for riding big motorbikes. Sara is said to be her father’s favourite child, though she has also said they share a “love-hate relationship”.

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

• Follow live updates: Millions vote in Philippines midterms as Marcos-Duterte feud heats up

Born in 1978, Sara is Rodrigo Duterte’s second child with his first wife, flight attendant Elizabeth Zimmerman.

In 1999 she graduated with a major in BS Respiratory Therapy. During her inauguration as vice-president in 2022, she said that in her youth she was “consumed by a dream to become a doctor” but was “directed toward another way”.

In 2005 she graduated with a law degree and passed the Philippine Bar Examination. But it wasn’t long before her father expressed his wish for her to enter politics as his running mate in mayoral elections – hoping that if and when he ran for president, Sara would help protect his mayoral legacy.

Rodrigo would only go ahead with his presidential bid once Sara had agreed to succeed him as mayor of Davao – and in 2010, at 32, she succeeded her father to become the city’s first female mayor.

In response to many people’s apparent confusion as to how they should address her, Sara Duterte ended her inaugural address with a specific appeal: “call me Inday Sara”.

“Inday”, an honorific in the south, means a respected elder woman. It also played into the Duterte’s optics: of a family from the regional south facing off against imperial Manila.

In Manila, “inday” was previously used to refer to house help from the south – but Sara reclaimed the term. Now even her father calls her by that name.

It was in 2021 that Sara 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.

Another blow came in March when her father was arrested and extradited to the Hague over the thousands of killings during his war on drugs. She then flew to the Netherlandst to meet him while he was in custody.

He is still in jail, awaiting trial, although he is running for mayor of Davao, one of several local races on Monday.

Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest was a big part of his daughter’s campaign for her senate picks, which include two key family loyalists – she and the candidates often chanted “bring him home”.

The Senate elections are important to her because the composition of the house will determine whether or not she will be impeached.

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.

Dust was rising on the track. It hung in the hot midday air as the white jeep came towards us. The driver was less than a minute away.

“I think it’s Moshe Sharvit,” said Gil Alexander, 72, a devout religious Jew who tries to protect Palestinian shepherds from intimidation by Jewish settlers.

Over the last year we’ve been documenting his work with shepherds in the northern Jordan Valley, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The man approaching us was placed under sanctions by Britain and the EU last year after they said he had used “physical aggression, threatened families at gunpoint, and destroyed property as part of a targeted and calculated effort to displace Palestinian communities”.

In a case reported by our colleagues at BBC Eye Investigates last year, a Palestinian grandmother alleged that Moshe Sharvit had forced her to leave her family home in October 2023. Ayesha Shtayyeh also said he pointed a gun at her head and threatened to kill her.

• Confronting violent settlers in the occupied West Bank, together
• Extremist settlers rapidly seizing West Bank land

“We’ve been here for 50 years…What have I ever done to him?” she asked when BBC Eye interviewed her.

She said her family’s troubles began after Moshe Sharvit established a so-called ‘outpost’- a settlement that is illegal under both Israeli and international law – chasing away the family’s sheep, damaging property and constantly threatening them. The alleged incident with the gun was the final straw.

Moshe Sharvit did not respond to BBC Eye’s requests for a response to Ayesha’s account.

Back on the mountainside, the man accused of this violence stopped his car and approached us. Nodding towards Gil Alexander he asked us: “Do you know he’s a very dangerous guy?”

When our translator explained to Moshe Sharvit we were from the BBC he said: “Ah the BBC… great lovers of Israel…” He went on to call us bad and dangerous people.

Addressing our translator he said: “So, do you understand that they’re the people who are most dangerous to the State of Israel?”

Then he phoned the police, asking them to come to the scene. When he wasn’t calling the police he filmed us filming him.

Moshe Sharvit and Gil Alexander represent starkly different visions of Israel’s future.

Moshe Sharvit believes all of the West Bank – which settlers and the Israeli government call Judea and Samaria – were given by God to the Jews.

In this he is supported by senior ministers in the government, including the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the Minister of Public Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Both men are settlers and leaders of far-right ultranationalist parties.

Smotrich has said Gaza will be “totally destroyed” and that its people will be “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”.

The ‘other places’ he envisages are foreign countries. Ben-Gvir, who is responsible for the police, has convictions for inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, relies on the support of the far-right settler movement to keep his government in power.

He criticised the sanctions imposed on Moshe Sharvit and other settlers, saying his government viewed the move “with great severity”. US sanctions against Moshe Sharvit were dropped when President Donald Trump came to power.

The UN’s top court ruled last year that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is against international law and that all settlement activity is illegal.

Israel rejects this and argues that settlements are necessary for security, citing lethal attacks by Palestinian gunmen on settlers, such as the killing of three people last January in the West Bank.

Settlement expansion is anathema to Gil Alexander. He considers himself a Zionist, but within the existing borders of Israel.

These are the frontiers that existed before it seized the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war.

He is part of a network called the Jordan Valley Activists – Moshe Sharvit calls them “anarchists” – offering solidarity, and working for peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians.

“What they [the settlers] want to see happen,” Gil Alexander told us, “[is] that it will be an area completely free of Arabs. It isn’t Moshe. It’s all the people above him who sent him here. Meaning from the top”.

Moshe Sharvit’s desire to have the Jordan Valley empty of Palestinians is shared by the leader of the regional council, a government-supported body, David Elhayani, who has visited the sanctioned settler.

In his air conditioned office about 15km (9 miles) from Moshe Sharvit’s settler outpost he told us “the notion of settler violence is an invention of the anarchist, extreme left meant to harm the settlement image”.

As for the future of the Palestinians, he was emphatic. They should go to neighbouring Jordan.

“This country needs to be free of Arabs. It’s the only way. It’s a global interest. Why global? Because the minute there won’t be Arabs here it will be a Jewish nation for the Jews who won’t have to hurt each other, there won’t be conflict, there won’t be anything.”

Gil Alexander and Moshe Sharvit have a history of antagonism. During an altercation on a Palestinian farmer’s land in January 2023, Moshe Sharvit says Gil Alexander tried to seize his firearm from its holster.

While speaking to our translator he produced a video of the incident on his phone.

“You can see Gil Alexander. Same hat and glasses. That’s me. Here you see he grabs my gun.”

Gil Alexander says he was acting in self-defence after Moshe Sharvit had grabbed his walking stick, and the phone of a woman friend who he alleges was pushed violently to the ground.

He says he feared Moshe Sharvit was going to use the weapon. As a result, Moshe Sharvit got a restraining order which forbids Gil Alexander from being within 2.5km (1.5 miles) of his farm.

The police have charged Gil Alexander with illegal possession of a weapon (the one he allegedly tried to take from Moshe Sharvit) and assault. The issue will be considered by the Israeli courts.

Moshe Sharvit himself is the subject of a restraining order forbidding him to approach a Palestinian family living near his outpost for six months, since March this year.

During our encounter the settler claimed that Gil Alexander had breached his restraining order by taking us to the high ground overlooking the valley. The peace activist told us later that he had mistakenly strayed just over half a kilometre inside the area of the order.

Although Moshe Sharvit’s settlement is illegal, even under Israeli law, it has not been removed.

Human rights organisations and numerous eyewitnesses testify that the Israeli army and police frequently stand by while settlers attack Palestinian villages.

The violence has escalated sharply since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 kidnapped, and which triggered the Gaza war.

According to a report issued by the UN office for Humanitarian Affairs there were 1,804 attacks by settlers against Palestinians in the period January 2024 to March 2025.

The Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din (There is Law), reported that only 3% of complaints made against settlers resulted in a conviction. In six days last month – from 22 to 28 April – the UN recorded 14 incidents involving settlers that left 36 Palestinians injured.

In the tense atmosphere on the mountainside, and wanting to avoid any escalation, we decided to leave.

As we walked away, Moshe Sharvit went to his jeep and drove ahead of us, stopping where the track turned down the mountain. Our way out was blocked. There was no-one we could appeal to apart from the man preventing us from leaving.

Again, he phoned the police asking them to come. Gil Alexander phoned the police and his lawyer. Our team was worried that more settlers would come.

Then something surprising happened. I suggested to Moshe Sharvit that he should agree to be interviewed. After a brief pause, he said: “Bring the camera.”

What followed was less an interview, than a series of declarations. He was doing the work of God, he said.

Why did local Bedouin shepherds say they were very afraid of him? I asked.

“No, that is a lie. They’re telling stories so the world will think we’re crazy. It’s not true. It’s all lies that are built on lies of dozens of years of lying…” he said.

“The Arabs, since the formation of the country and before – all the past 77 years they’ve been preoccupied with harming the people of Israel, harming the land of Israel and causing the nation of Israel to be miserable and pitiful. But they don’t understand that the harder they try, the Lion will wake from his sleep and within one day we’ll end this story.”

He repeated the analogy of the Lion later in the interview saying, in what sounded like ominous words, that the Palestinians were “pushing the lion so hard into the corner that there will be no choice left but to finish this story”.

“7 October was small. One day it’ll be big.”

As for peaceful co-existence such as Gil Alexander supports, he said there was “no such thing as peace with enemies who try to destroy you”.

Moshe Sharvit’s brother Harel was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023.

His world is the pastureland, the stony hills of the Jordan Valley, his sheep and cattle, the bed and breakfast he has opened.

He produced a glossy video, replete with a backing track of American country music, to promote his venture.

He spoke with contempt for the British sanctions against him. They were a new kind of antisemitism, he claimed.

“The minute someone tries to hurt me I get stronger. My spirit…I receive energies, my spirit continues on its mission, I continue advancing forward and planting roots deep into the land of Israel. I’m not bothered by Britain or America or anyone.”

Then he drove away. We were free to move on. Later as we were having lunch in a café about 15km (nine miles) away, a policeman appeared, looking for Gil Alexander.

He went with the police officer for questioning. After about an hour he returned, telling us he had been ordered not to enter the Jordan Valley for two weeks. He plans to lodge his own complaint against Moshe Sharvit over the incident.

We went to Gil Alexander’s home in a kibbutz inside Israel that overlooks the Valley. Gunmen from the Palestinian city of Jenin fired at the kibbutz two years ago.

Gil Alexander is not a pacifist. If he is attacked by Hamas or any other group, he will defend himself.

He said: “A son of our friends, two months ago he was killed here by a terrorist. He was a soldier in the reserves, 46 years old with six children. He volunteered for the reserves to protect me.”

“If the army hadn’t been there, they would have come here. He was killed while defending me. And today he is buried next to my two sons.”

But Gil Alexander seemed weary as we sat drinking tea amid the bright red flowers of his well-tended garden, and the fluttering yellow flags that symbolise Israel’s hostages held in Gaza.

He spoke of a beloved nephew killed fighting in Lebanon in an earlier war.

Did he not, I wondered, at the age of 72, think about retiring from the struggle and enjoying his garden? He laughed.

There was no chance of that. After two of his sons took their own lives – one was in the army, the other was about to enter the military – he had found a purpose in working for what he calls the “humanitarian” ideals of Judaism.

“After the tragedies of my sons, if I don’t find meaning in life, I’ll go crazy… And the things I do, are things I believe in. And these are things I also got from my father who was in the French underground during World War Two and fought for French liberation but was against any type of occupation and said, ‘Occupation is Occupation.'”

Two days after our encounter with Moshe Sharvit, a lone woman peace activist filmed him banging on the window of her car and rocking the vehicle.

The woman is clearly frightened by the intimidation. Moshe Sharvit acts as if he has nothing to fear.

In a dramatic turn of events, US President Donald Trump took to social media on Saturday to announce that India and Pakistan – after four tense days of cross-border clashes – had agreed to a “full and immediate ceasefire”.

Behind the scenes, US mediators, alongside diplomatic backchannels and regional players, proved critical in pulling the nuclear-armed rivals back from the brink, experts say.

However, hours after a ceasefire deal, India and Pakistan were trading accusations of fresh violations – underscoring its fragility.

India accused Pakistan of “repeated violations” while Pakistan insisted it remained committed to the ceasefire, with its forces showing “responsibility and restraint.”

Before Trump’s ceasefire announcement, India and Pakistan were spiralling towards what many feared could become a full-blown conflict.

After a deadly militant attack killed 26 tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir last month, India launched air strikes inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir – triggering days of aerial clashes, artillery duels and, by Saturday morning, accusations from both sides of missile strikes on each other’s airbases.

The rhetoric escalated sharply, with each country claiming to have inflicted heavy damage while foiling the other’s attacks.

• Why India and Pakistan fight over Kashmir
• Drone war opens a new chapter in India-Pakistan conflict

Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, says US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s call to Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir on 9 May “might have been the crucial point”.

“There’s still much we don’t know about the roles of various international actors, but it’s clear over the past three days that at least three countries were working to de-escalate – the US, of course, but also the UK and Saudi Arabia,” she says.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar told Pakistani media that “three dozen countries” were involved in the diplomacy – including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the US.

“One question is whether, if this call had come earlier – right after the initial Indian strikes, when Pakistan was already claiming some Indian losses and an off-ramp was available – it might have prevented further escalation,” Ms Madan says.

This isn’t the first time US mediation has helped defuse an India–Pakistan crisis.

In his memoir, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo claimed he was woken up to speak with an unnamed “Indian counterpart”, who feared Pakistan was preparing nuclear weapons during the 2019 standoff.

Former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan Ajay Bisaria later wrote that Pompeo overstated both the risk of nuclear escalation and the US role in calming the conflict.

But diplomats say there is little doubt the US played an important role in defusing the crisis this time.

“The US was the most prominent external player. Last time, Pompeo claimed they averted nuclear war. While they’ll likely exaggerate, they may have played the primary diplomatic role, perhaps amplifying Delhi’s positions in Islamabad,” Mr Bisaria told the BBC on Saturday.

Yet at the outset, the US appeared strikingly standoffish.

As tensions flared, US Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday that the US was not going to get involved in a war that’s “fundamentally none of our business”.

“We can’t control these countries though. Fundamentally, India has its gripes with Pakistan… America can’t tell the Indians to lay down their arms. We can’t tell the Pakistanis to lay down their arms. And so we’re going to continue to pursue this thing through diplomatic channels, ” he said in a television interview.

Meanwhile, President Trump said earlier this week: “I know both [leaders of India and Pakistan] very well, and I want to see them work it out… I want to see them stop, and hopefully they can stop now”.

Ejaz Haider, a Lahore-based defence analyst, told the BBC this appeared to be the only difference from previous occasions.

“The American role was a continuation of past patterns, but with one key difference – this time, they initially stayed hands-off, watching the crisis unfold instead of jumping in right away. Only when they saw how it was playing out did they step in to manage it,” Mr Haider told the BBC.

Experts in Pakistan say as the escalation cycle deepened, Pakistan sent “dual signals”, retaliating militarily while announcing a National Command Authority (NCA) meeting – a clear reminder of the nuclear overhang.

The NCA controls and takes operational decisions regarding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

This was around the time US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stepped in.

“The US was indispensable. This outcome would not have occurred without Secretary Rubio’s efforts,” Ashley J Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the BBC.

What also helped was Washington’s deepening ties with Delhi.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal rapport with Trump, plus the US’s broader strategic and economic stakes, gave the US administration diplomatic leverage to push both nuclear-armed rivals towards de-escalation.

Indian diplomats see three key peace tracks that happened this time, much like after Pulwama–Balakot in 2019:

• US and UK pressure
• Saudi mediation, with the Saudi junior foreign minister visiting both capitals
• The direct India-Pakistan channel between the two national security advisors (NSAs)

Despite shifting global priorities and a hands-off posture at first, the US ultimately stepped in as the indispensable mediator between South Asia’s nuclear rivals.

Whether overstated by its own officials or underacknowledged by Delhi and Islamabad, experts believe the US’s role as crisis manager remains as vital – and as complicated – as ever.

Doubts do, however, linger over the ceasefire’s durability after Saturday’s events, with some Indian media reporting it was essentially brokered by senior military officials of the two countries – not the US.

“This ceasefire is bound to be a fragile one. It came about very quickly, amid sky-high tensions. India appears to have interpreted it differently than did the US and Pakistan,” Michael Kugelman, a foreign policy analyst, told the BBC.

“Also, since it was put together so hastily, the accord may lack the proper guarantees and assurances one would need at such a tense moment.”

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.”

For Maria Khan, the ceasefire this weekend between India and Pakistan came too late.

Maria, who lives in Indian-administered Kashmir, lost her nephew and niece – 12-year-old twins Zain Ali and Urwa Fatima – to cross-border shelling on 7 May. Their parents, her sister Urusa and brother-in-law Rameez Khan, were also injured and are still in hospital.

Hours earlier that day, India had launched a series of strikes in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir in retaliation for an earlier militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 tourists.

The strikes were followed by a series of military actions from Islamabad and Delhi that went on till Saturday, including heavy cross-border shelling and drone strikes.

People living along the Line of Control (LoC), the de-factor border between India and Pakistan, were the most vulnerable as shells fell near their homes.

Maria, who lives in Poonch, a town in Indian-administered Kashmir near the LoC, is among dozens of people who lost family members in the conflict.

India has said that 16 people were killed on the morning of 7 May in the shelling by Pakistan. Pakistan has said that at least 30 civilians have died since India launched its retaliatory strikes in the early hours of 7 May.

On 6 May, like every other day, Zain and Urwa came back from school, did their homework, played a bit, had dinner and then went to sleep.

It wasn’t yet dawn when the Khan family heard the sound of gunfire just a few kilometres away from their home.

Terrified, they hunkered down at home and waited for a relative to come pick them up, Maria says.

“My sister was holding Urwa’s hand and my brother-in-law was holding Zain’s hand. They had just left the house when suddenly a shell exploded [nearby]. The splinters hit them – Urva died right there and Zain was flung somewhere in the force of the explosion,” Maria says.

She adds that her sister kept calling out to Zain. When she finally spotted him, a stranger was performing CPR on the boy, trying to revive him. But he was unsuccessful.

• India-Pakistan ceasefire appears to hold after accusations of violations
• How backchannels and US mediators pulled India and Pakistan back from the brink

Meanwhile, Rameez, who lay bleeding and unconscious, was rushed to hospital – first a local one in Poonch and later to a bigger hospital in Rajouri, about four hours away.

Since his injuries were serious, he was shifted again to a hospital in Jammu city, another four-hour journey.

Maria says that Urwa and Zain were the centre of their parents’ lives. Rameez, a teacher, wanted to give them the best education they could get and hence, they shifted to a house that was closer to the children’s school, called Christ School.

On 9 May, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said in a press briefing that during heavy shelling along the LoC, a Pakistani shell had fallen behind Christ School in Poonch town and exploded.

Rameez, Maria says, still doesn’t know about the deaths of his children as the family doesn’t want to upset him.

After the shelling on 7 May, hundreds of people left Poonch and other border towns to escape to safer areas. They are slowly returning after the ceasefire.

“The government should have informed people living near border areas earlier, so that they could leave from there and go to a safe place. Perhaps then our children would have been with us today,” she says.

“If war is necessary for the country’s security, we support it,” says Maria.

“We are also saddened by the Pahalgam attack, but we should also think about the lives of those living near the border. Are we not humans?” she asks.

“Now, whether there is a war or ceasefire, our children will not come back.”

ALSO READ:

• Watch: How tensions escalated between India and Pakistan
• ‘It felt like the sky turned red’, says witness to India strike in Pakistan
• Villagers tell BBC they survived shelling in Indian-administered Kashmir

A former Royal Marine has reached the summit of Mount Everest after swimming, cycling and running more than 8,000 miles.

Mitch Hutchcraft started by swimming the English Channel on 15 September and the 240-day challenge concluded when he topped the world’s highest mountain on Sunday at 07:30 BST.

His team said it was the world’s longest ever ascent of Everest from sea to summit.

The 31-year-old, from Ramsey in Cambridgeshire, said the achievement was “more magical than I could have ever dreamed”.

“Although I lost my dad 11 years ago, he was with me every step of the way,” said Hutchcraft, speaking to his team over the phone after summiting.

“It’s been tough. Really tough. The most difficult thing I’ve ever done.

“But I couldn’t be happier and more proud of finishing this epic adventure.”

After swimming the 35km width (21 miles) of the Channel from Dover, Hutchcraft cycled about 12,000 km (7,456 miles) from Europe to Digha in India.

He then ran 900km (559 miles) to Kathmandu in Nepal, before starting his 360km (223-mile) trek to Everest basecamp.

Hutchcraft, who now lives in Torquay in Devon, said he had dreamed of completing the climb since he was eight years old.

“Never in a million years did I think this would be how I’d get here,” he said.

“I just want it to inspire others to believe that whatever they’re dreaming, however small, they just need to get out there and smash it.”

In his previous challenges, Hutchcraft has rowed 3,000 miles (4,800km) across the Atlantic and cycled 5,000km (3,100 miles) across North America.

Hutchcraft, who has had a full knee reconstruction, was once told the surgery would make it impossible to even join the military, let alone complete a challenge of this magnitude.

He has been raising money for SAVSIM, a wildlife conservation organisation, dedicated to providing mental health support to veterans and others suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and similar issues.

He said: “For me this is so much more than just a dream to make history, it is also the chance to raise funds and awareness for an amazing non-profit organisation very close to my heart and give back to veteran mental health and wildlife conservation.”

His father died suddenly when he was 20, which became a driving force in his decision to join the Royal Marines.

He served six years until 2021.

His challenge, named Project Limitless, is being filmed by a production team and is due to officially end when he returns to basecamp – which he was due to do by Monday morning.

The Swiss city of Basel is going into party mode this weekend, as it prepares to welcome the Eurovision Song Contest.

It’s been 36 years since Switzerland last hosted the contest, after Celine Dion won in 1988, so the wait to roll out Eurovision’s famous turquoise carpet has been long.

Switzerland hosted the first ever Eurovision at Lugano in 1956, but its record since Dion’s victory in Dublin has been mixed.

Between 2007 and 2010, and again between 2015 and 2018, its entries failed to even qualify for the final. Swiss singer Nemo finally won last year with The Code.

Perhaps because of that, Basel is determined to make this contest memorable for all the right reasons. At 1.3km (0.8 miles), its turquoise carpet will be Eurovision’s longest ever, stretching from Basel town hall, across the river Rhine all the way to the Eurovision village.

The head of Basel’s government, Conradin Cramer, believes his city of just 175,000 residents is the natural home for Eurovision’s estimated half a million visitors.

Because of its borders with both France and Germany, Basel is “the heart of Europe”, he says. What’s more, he points out, the city has a long humanist tradition; when other cities in medieval Europe were cracking down on free thinkers, Basel welcomed them.

So Basel, with its geographic location and its history of tolerance, and Eurovision with its tradition of inclusivity and diversity are, he says “the perfect match”.

Last year’s contest in Malmo attracted thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators and further protests against the war in Gaza are expected in Basel too.

Police have not yet released their plans to manage this, but have said that everyone should have the right to express their opinion, as long they stay within the law, and do not risk the safety of others.

Throughout the contest they say 1,300 officers will be on duty. Basel has also unveiled a security operation to ensure visitors can enjoy the song contest safely. They are promising “mobile awareness teams”, safe retreats for victims of violence or hostility and a 24-hour hotline. The concept, which Basel officials describe as unique, aims to prevent violence, sexual assault or harassment, and racist aggression and insults.

The awareness teams, recognisable by their pink jackets, will be available 24 hours a day across the city. Basel’s security director Stephanie Eymann said the teams were a “low-threshold” measure to give visitors a chance to report harassment or assaults, and seek protection, even if some might not want to approach the police.

The entire town appears to have embraced the event, with turquoise welcome flags now waving from every lamp post. Tickets for the contest itself sold out in minutes, but Basel is promising that there will be “something for everyone”, ticket or no ticket, and most of it will be free.

“There will be concerts all over the city, there will be art projects,” says tourism director Letizia Elia. Basel has 40 museums and galleries in a space of just 37 square kilometres, a record for a European city, and they are all getting involved.

An exhibition featuring works by Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso has opened at the Beyeler Foundation, where Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s We are Poems rainbow sculpture sits on the roof. There’s also a Glitz and Glam exhibition at Basel’s museum of natural history.

The celebrations have spread across Switzerland, with competitions across the country for the best school band – the top four will get a spot on stage in Basel.

But hosting an event like Eurovision is never hitch-free, and this one is no exception. The final choice of Basel as a venue was only made at the end of August last year, allowing just over seven months to organise everything.

Then came objections from evangelical Christian groups, who claimed Eurovision undermined traditional family values and that performers regularly sang about satanism and the occult. They gathered enough signatures to force a referendum aimed at banning public money for the event.

But on 24 November voters gave a huge yes to the song contest; with 66.6% approving Basel’s budget of almost $40m. Conradin Cramer had expected a referendum, because “that’s how Switzerland works, it’s perfectly fine.” But he was still delighted at the size of the vote in favour: “It shows this is a city where people really want to do this.”

He is very conscious that the global debate around diversity and inclusion has changed in the year since Swiss singer Nemo became the first non-binary person to win Eurovision.

The overriding message of Basel, Mr Cramer says, is “everyone is welcome”.

On-stage and in the dressing rooms though, things are stricter. EBU, which runs the contest itself, has stuck to its rules saying performers can only bring their own national flags onstage or into the green rooms. This means that they will not be able to fly the Pride flag or that of any other gender identity or sexuality.

Fans, however, will be able to bring whatever flags they like into the arena.

Last year Swiss winner Nemo did wave a non-binary flag during the performance, but said they had to ‘smuggle’ the flag in. This year LGBTQ+ groups say they are disappointed the EBU has not relaxed the rules.

“Banning our symbols is a slap in the face for the LGBTIQ community’, said Swiss group Pink Cross. “It sends the wrong message at a time when queer communities across Europe are facing increasing hostility.”

EBU has said that the guidelines were designed to create clarity and balance explaining: “Eurovision needs no flag to demonstrate its alliance and celebration of the LGBTQ+ community.”

Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump’s administration is actively removing government support for diversity and inclusion measures, and he is asking partnered European institutions (including some Swiss universities) to do the same.

That’s why Basel, says Mr Cramer, should take a stand, even if the EBU will not.

“These are our European values. People and nations are coming together in a friendly championship. Whoever you are, if you are young, if you are not that young, if you are straight, if you are gay, if you are female, male, or if you are non-binary, this is all perfectly fine. And I think this is not just what Basel stands for, this is what Europe should stand for.”

So if everyone is welcome, how do they get there? The host country being Switzerland, punctual transport is catered for. Swiss railways is laying on hundreds of extra trains. In Basel, the trams will run 24 hours a day.

And, for those who are really in Eurovision mode, there is even a karaoke tram, where passengers can take a free 90-minute journey right across town, all the while singing their hearts out.

Amber Heard has announced the arrival of twins in an Instagram post shared on Mother’s Day in the United States.

The American actor revealed that she had welcomed daughter Agnes and son Ocean and was “elated beyond words” to celebrate the “completion” of her family.

Heard, 39, welcomed her first daughter, Oonagh, in 2021.

Under a picture of three pairs of feet, Heard wrote: “Becoming a mother by myself and on my own terms despite my own fertility challenges has been the most humbling experience of my life.”

The actor said she had chosen motherhood “responsibly and thoughtfully” and “couldn’t possibly burst with more joy”.

She described her family as one she had “strived to build for years”.

“To all the moms, wherever you are today and however you got here, my dream family and I are celebrating with you,” she added.

When Heard announced the birth of her first daughter in 2021, she spoke about her desire for it to be “normalised to not want a ring in order to have a crib”.

“I now appreciate how radical it is for us as women to think about one of the most fundamental parts of our destinies in this way,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.

Heard is best known for her films The Rum Diary, Drive Angry, Zombieland and Aquaman.

She was married to actor Johnny Depp from 2015 to 2016.

After their marriage ended, the pair accused each other of domestic abuse and engaged in two lengthy and high-profile defamation cases.

In the Depp v. News Group Newspapers (NGN) trial in 2020, Depp lost his UK libel case against the Sun newpaper after Heard gave evidence to back claims in the newspaper that he was a “wife-beater”.

In the widely publicised Depp v. Heard trial in the US, Heard was found liable for defaming Depp.

For six weeks in 2022, a court in the US state of Virginia heard details of the couple’s volatile relationship.

Depp sued his ex-wife for defamation over an opinion article she wrote for the Washington Post that alleged she was a domestic abuse victim, although it did not mention him by name. Heard counter-sued.

Jurors awarded Depp – who denied abusing Heard – $15m (£12m) in compensatory and punitive damages.

Heard won one of three counter-claims against Depp and was awarded $2m in compensatory damages.

A father tried in vain to save his teenage son before both drowned off the coast of Australia, an inquest has heard.

Robin Reed and his son Owen, of Blackwood, Caerphilly county, were swept out to sea while on holiday at a popular tourist beach in Queensland on 13 April.

Opening the inquests into their deaths in Newport, coroner Rose Farmer said Mr Reed, 46, had been in the sea “no deeper than waist height” at Round Hill Head, Seventeen Seventy, at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef.

His 17-year-old son Owen was close by when he was pulled out to sea by an “unexpected wave”.

“Mr Reed dived into the water, trying to save Owen and he has then also been swept into the sea,” she added.

Search and rescue teams pulled the father and son from the sea but were declared dead at the scene.

A cause of death for both was given as consistent with drowning.

The court heard inquiries were ongoing and the inquest was adjourned until a full hearing on 12 November.

Mr Reed was described as a “good friend to many” in a community that was in shock among tributes have been paid by his local football club and Pengam Boys and Girls Club where he volunteered.

Poland has accused Russian intelligence services of orchestrating a massive fire that nearly completely destroyed a shopping centre in the capital Warsaw last year.

In a post on X, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Poland knows “for sure” that the blaze at the Marywilska shopping centre was caused by arson ordered by the Russian special services.

Some of those responsible are already in custody, Tusk added, while all the others alleged to have been involved have been identified and are being searched for.

Moscow has not commented on the allegations, but has previously denied accusations of sabotage in Europe.

The fire in May 2024 destroyed 1,400 small businesses, with many of the staff there being members of Warsaw’s Vietnamese community.

Poland carried out a year-long investigation into the incident, which has now concluded the fire was organised by an unnamed person in Russia.

A joint statement by Poland’s justice and interior ministers said the actions of those in custody were “organised and directed by a specific person residing in the Russian Federation.”

The two ministries added that they were co-operating with Lithuania “where some of the perpetrators also carried out acts of diversion”.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland has detained and convicted several people accused of sabotage on behalf of Russian intelligence services.

Polish officials have said that these attacks have been part of a “hybrid war” waged by Moscow.

Hybrid warfare is when a hostile state carries out an anonymous, deniable attack, usually in highly suspicious circumstances. It will be enough to harm their opponent, especially their infrastructure assets, but stop short of being an attributable act of war.

Nato also believes Russia is waging “hybrid warfare” in Europe, with the aim of punishing or deterring Western nations from continuing their military support for Ukraine.

Russia has denied repeated allegations by Nato countries that its secret services are engaged in sabotage operations across Europe.

Back in March, Lithuanian prosecutors accused Russia’s military intelligence service of being behind an arson attack on a branch of Ikea in the capital Vilnius last year.

At the time, Tusk said Lithuania had confirmed Warsaw’s “suspicions that [those] responsible for setting fires to shopping centres in Vilnius and Warsaw are the Russian secret services.”

Two Ukrainian suspects were arrested.

The Marywilska shopping centre opened in 2010 and in the fire many workers lost important documents and large sums of cash which were kept at the shopping centre due to fear of breaks ins at home.

Three months after the fire, a temporary shopping centre was opened by Marywilska’s owners, where approximately 400 traders resumed operations.

An alternative shopping centre in Warsaw, Modlinska 6D, was opened in October 2024 with traders relocating their businesses to the new site.

Search efforts for a British hiker who has been missing for more than a week in New Zealand have been “paused”, police have said.

Eli Sweeting, 25, who is originally from Bristol, was reported missing on 4 May after failing to return from a solo hike up Mitre Peak, a steep mountain on the country’s South Island.

A large-scale search was launched with teams of local volunteers alongside helicopters and search dogs, and some of his family flying out to help.

But on Monday afternoon, local time, Insp Matt Scoles, acting commander for the district, said police had made the “difficult decision” to pause search efforts.

“We have been supporting the tramper’s [hiker’s] family and we know this is difficult news for them to hear at what has been an incredibly distressing time,” he said.

“While the search has now been paused, we will be reviewing our efforts and looking to see if there is anything further we can do.”

In a fundraising post, Mr Sweeting’s sister, Serena Sweeting, said he was an “experienced climber” who had “hiked in this terrain many times”.

Insp Coles said the Milford Sound area, where the search had been focused, was “extremely dangerous and challenging terrain”.

“We have focussed on searching the route used by climbers as well as an aerial search of the entire area using two helicopters and thermal imagery. Additionally a drone has also been deployed,” he said.

The search party had focused on a route heading down the mountain after spotting a light there, but the dense forest created issues with detecting movement.

Police remain in frequent contact with the family, Insp Coles added.

The first head-to-head trial of two blockbuster weight-loss drugs has shown Mounjaro is more effective than rival Wegovy.

Both drugs led to substantial weight loss, but Mounjaro’s 20% weight reduction, after 72 weeks of treatment, exceeded the 14% from Wegovy, according to the trial’s findings.

Researchers who led the trial said both drugs had a role, but Mounjaro may help those with the most weight to lose.

Both drugs trick the brain into making you feel full so you eat less and instead burn fat stored in the body – but subtle differences in how they work to explain the difference in effectiveness.

Wegovy, also known as semaglutide, mimics a hormone released by the body after a meal to flip one appetite switch in the brain. Mounjaro, or tirzepatide, flips two.

The trial, which was paid for by Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Mounjaro, involved 750 obese people, with an average weight of 113kg (nearly 18 stone).

They were asked to take the highest dose they could tolerate of one of the two drugs.

The findings, presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Malaga and in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed:

• 32% of people lost a quarter of their body weight on Mounjaro compared to 16% on Wegovy
• Those on Mounjaro lost an average of 18cm from their waistlines compared with 13cm on Wegovy.
• Those on Mounjaro had better blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels.
• Both had similar levels of side-effects.
• Women tended to lose more weight than men.

Dr Louis Aronne, who conducted the trial at the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, said: “The majority of people with obesity will do just fine with semaglutide (Wegovy), those at the higher end may ultimately do better with tirzepatide (Mounjaro).”

In the UK, the two medicines are available from specialist weight-management services, but can also be bought privately.

Prof Naveed Sattar, from the University of Glasgow, said the drugs were “good options” for patients, but while “many will be satisfied with 15% weight loss… many want as much weight loss as possible”.

“In the UK, tirzepatide sales privately are now well ahead of semaglutide – that’s just a reality – and this paper will accelerate that I imagine,” he added.

However, Wegovy is also licensed for other conditions – such as preventing heart attacks – while the equivalent trials with Mounjaro have not been completed.

• Weight-loss drug approved for heart problems in UK
• How do weight loss drugs like Mounjaro and Wegovy work?

A huge amount of research into weight-loss drugs is still taking place. Higher doses of current drugs are being tested, as are new ways of taking them such as oral pills and new medicines that act on the body in different ways are being investigated.

It means the final winner in this field has yet to be determined.

Prof Sattar says the amount of research taking place means we may be approaching the point where “obesity prevention may also be possible soon”, but argues “it would be far better” to make our society healthier to prevent more people developing obesity.

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Top military officials from India and Pakistan are due to speak on Monday to discuss finer details of the ceasefire agreed between them over the weekend.

The US-brokered ceasefire between the nuclear-armed neighbours appears to have held overnight after nearly four days of intense shelling and aerial incursions from both sides.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced the ceasefire between India and Pakistan, saying “it was time to stop the current aggression that could have led to the death and destruction of so many, and so much”.

Both nations have ceased hostilities since then but say they remain vigilant, warning each other of the consequences of violating the ceasefire.

India announced on Monday that it was reopening 32 airports for civilians that it had earlier said would remain closed until Thursday due to safety concerns.

The tensions were the latest in the decades-long rivalry between the neighbours who have fought two wars over Kashmir, a Himayalan region which they claim in full but administer in part.

The recent hostilities threatened to turn into a full-fledged war as both countries appeared unwilling to back down for days.

Both countries have said that dozens of people from both sides died over the four days of fighting last week, partly due to heavy shelling near the de facto border.

After the ceasefire, however, both the rivals have declared military victory.

On 7 May, India reported striking nine targets inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir – this was in response to a deadly militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 people.

The attack took place in a meadow in the picturesque Pahalgam valley on 22 April.

India blamed a Pakistan-based group for the attack but Islamabad denies any involvement.

In the days since the first strike, India and Pakistan accused each other of cross-border shelling and claimed to have shot down rival drones and aircraft in their airspace.

As the conflict escalated, both nations said they struck the rival’s military bases.

Indian officials reported striking 11 Pakistan Air Force bases, including one in Rawalpindi, near the capital Islamabad. India also claimed Pakistan lost 35-40 men at the Line of Control – the de facto border – during the conflict and that its air force lost a few aircraft.

Pakistan has accepted that some Indian projectiles landed at its air force bases.

Indian defence forces have also said that they struck nine armed group training facilities in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, killing more than 100 militants.

The Pakistan military, in turn, claims it targeted about 26 military facilities in India and that its drones hovered over capital Delhi.

India has confirmed that some Pakistani projectiles landed up at its air force bases, though it did not comment on the claim about Delhi.

Pakistan also claims to have shot down five Indian aircraft, including three French Rafales – India has not acknowledged this or commented on the number, though it said on Sunday that that “losses are a part of combat”.

Pakistan denied the claims that an Indian pilot was in its custody after she ejected following an aircraft crash. India has also said that “all our pilots are back home”.

Former members of UK Special Forces have broken years of silence to give BBC Panorama eyewitness accounts of alleged war crimes committed by colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Giving their accounts publicly for the first time, the veterans described seeing members of the SAS murder unarmed people in their sleep and execute handcuffed detainees, including children.

“They handcuffed a young boy and shot him,” recalled one veteran who served with the SAS in Afghanistan. ”He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age.”

Killing of detainees “became routine”, the veteran said. “They’d search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them”, before cutting off the plastic handcuffs used to restrain people and “planting a pistol” by the body, he said.

The new testimony includes allegations of war crimes stretching over more than a decade, far longer than the three years currently being examined by a judge-led public inquiry in the UK.

The SBS, the Royal Navy’s elite special forces regiment, is also implicated for the first time in the most serious allegations – executions of unarmed and wounded people.

A veteran who served with the SBS said some troops had a “mob mentality”, describing their behaviour on operations as “barbaric”.

“I saw the quietest guys switch, show serious psychopathic traits,” he said. “They were lawless. They felt untouchable.”

Special Forces were deployed to Afghanistan to protect British troops from Taliban fighters and bombmakers. The conflict was a deadly one for members of the UK’s armed forces – 457 lost their lives and thousands more were wounded.

Asked by the BBC about the new eyewitness testimony, the Ministry of Defence said that it was “fully committed” to supporting the ongoing public inquiry into the alleged war crimes and that it urged all veterans with relevant information to come forward. It said that it was “not appropriate for the MoD to comment on allegations” which may be in the inquiry’s scope.

The eyewitness testimony offers the most detailed public account of the killings to date from former members of UK Special Forces (UKSF), the umbrella group which contains the SAS, SBS and several supporting regiments.

The testimony, from more than 30 people who served with or alongside UK Special Forces, builds on years of reporting by BBC Panorama into allegations of extrajudicial killings by the SAS.

Panorama can also reveal for the first time that then Prime Minister David Cameron was repeatedly warned during his tenure that UK Special Forces were killing civilians in Afghanistan.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because of a de facto code of silence around special forces operations, the eyewitnesses told the BBC that the laws of war were being regularly and intentionally broken by the country’s most elite regiments during operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those laws state that on such operations people can be deliberately killed only when they pose a direct threat to the lives of British troops or others. But members of the SAS and SBS were making their own rules, the eyewitnesses said.

“If a target had popped up on the list two or three times before, then we’d go in with the intention of killing them, there was no attempt to capture them,” said one veteran who served with the SAS, referring to people who had been previously captured, questioned and then released.

“Sometimes we’d check we’d identified the target, confirm their ID, then shoot them,” he said. “Often the squadron would just go and kill all the men they found there.”

One witness who served with the SAS said that killing could become “an addictive thing to do” and that some members of the elite regiment were “intoxicated by that feeling” in Afghanistan. There were “lots of psychotic murderers”, he said.

“On some operations, the troop would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there,” he said. “They’d go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry. It’s not justified, killing people in their sleep.”

A veteran who served with the SBS told the BBC that after bringing an area under control, assault teams would sweep through the area shooting anyone on the ground, checking the bodies and killing anyone left alive. “It was expected, not hidden. Everyone knew,” he said.

Intentionally killing wounded people who do not pose a threat would be a clear breach of international law. But the SBS veteran told Panorama that wounded people were routinely killed. He described one operation during which a medic was treating someone who had been shot but was still breathing. “Then one of our blokes came up to him. There was a bang. He’d been shot in the head at point-blank range,” he said.

The killings were “completely unnecessary,” he added. “These are not mercy killings. It’s murder.”

More junior members of assault teams were told by more senior SAS operators to kill male detainees, according to the testimony, using instructions such as “he’s not coming back to base with us” or “this detainee, you make sure he doesn’t come off target”.

Detainees were people who had surrendered, been searched by special forces, and were typically handcuffed. British and international law forbid troops from deliberately killing unarmed civilians or prisoners of war.

A former SAS operator also described learning of an operation in Iraq during which someone was executed.

“It was pretty clear from what I could glean that he posed no threat, he wasn’t armed. It’s disgraceful. There’s no professionalism in that,” the former operator said. The killing was never properly investigated, he added. According to the SAS veteran, the problem started long before the regiment moved across to Afghanistan and “senior commanders were aware of that”.

The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.

Sources told the BBC that some members of the SAS kept their own individual counts, and that one operator personally killed dozens of people on one six-month tour of Afghanistan.

“It seemed like he was trying to get a kill on every operation, every night someone got killed,” a former colleague said. The operator was “notorious in the squadron, he genuinely seemed like a psychopath,” the former colleague added.

In one incident that sources say became infamous inside the SAS, the operator allegedly slit the throat of an injured Afghan man after telling an officer not to shoot the man again. It was “because he wanted to go and finish the wounded guy off with his knife,” another former colleague said. “He wanted to, you know, blood his knife.”

Knowledge of the alleged crimes was not confined to small teams or individual squadrons, according to the testimony. Within the UK Special Forces command structure, “everyone knew” what was happening, said one veteran.

“I’m not taking away from personal responsibility, but everyone knew,” he said. “There was implicit approval for what was happening.”

To avoid scrutiny of the killings, eyewitnesses said, members of the SAS and SBS would plant so-called “drop weapons” on the bodies of the dead, to make it look as though they had been armed in the photographs routinely taken by special forces teams at the scene.

“There was a fake grenade they’d take with them onto target, it couldn’t detonate,” said a former SAS operator. Another veteran said operators would carry AK-47 rifles which had a folding stock because they were easier to fit into their rucksacks and “easier to bring onto a target and plant by a body”.

Officers would then help to falsify post-operational reports in order to avoid scrutiny for the actions of assault teams on the ground, according to the testimony.

“We understood how to write up serious incident reviews so they wouldn’t trigger a referral to the military police,” one of the veterans said.

“If it looked like a shooting could represent a breach of the rules of conflict, you’d get a phone call from the legal adviser or one of the staff officers in HQ. They’d pick you up on it and help you to clarify the language. ‘Do you remember someone making a sudden move?’ ‘Oh yeah, I do now.’ That sort of thing. It was built into the way we operated.”

The reports were “a fiction”, another UKSF veteran said.

An intelligence officer who worked with the SBS described reports which said they had been caught in a firefight, while the photos showed bodies with “multiple clean headshots”.

Falsified paperwork could help prevent an investigation by the Royal Military Police, but British special forces operations generated deep concern from Afghan commanders and Afghan government officials.

David Cameron – who made seven visits to Afghanistan as prime minister between June 2010 and November 2013, the period now under scrutiny by the SAS public inquiry, was repeatedly made aware of the concerns by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, according to multiple people who attended the meetings.

Mr Karzai “consistently, repeatedly mentioned this issue”, former Afghan national security adviser Dr Rangin Dadfar Spanta told Panorama. He said Lord Cameron could have been left in no doubt that there were allegations of civilians, including children, being killed during operations carried out by UK Special Forces.

The Afghan president was “so consistent with his complaints about night raids, civilian casualties and detentions that there was no senior Western diplomat or military leader who would have missed the fact that this was a major irritant for him,” said Gen Douglas Lute, a former US ambassador to Nato.

Gen Lute said it would have been “extraordinarily unusual if there were a claim against British forces that the British chain of command was not aware of”.

A spokesperson for Lord Cameron told Panorama that “to the best of Lord Cameron’s recollection” the issues raised by President Karzai were about Nato forces in general and that “specific incidents with respect to UK Special Forces were not raised”.

The spokesperson also said that it was “right that we await the official findings of the Inquiry”, adding that “any suggestion that Lord Cameron colluded in covering up allegations of serious criminal wrongdoing is total nonsense.”

Unlike many other countries, including the US and France, the UK has no parliamentary oversight of its elite special forces regiments. Strategic responsibility for their actions falls ultimately to the prime minister, along with the defence secretary and head of special forces.

Bruce Houlder KC – a former director of service prosecutions, responsible for bringing charges and prosecuting those serving in the Armed Forces – told Panorama that he hoped the public inquiry would examine the extent of Lord Cameron’s knowledge of alleged civilian casualties on British special forces operations.

“You need to know how far the rot went up,” Mr Houlder said.

For Maria Khan, the ceasefire this weekend between India and Pakistan came too late.

Maria, who lives in Indian-administered Kashmir, lost her nephew and niece – 12-year-old twins Zain Ali and Urwa Fatima – to cross-border shelling on 7 May. Their parents, her sister Urusa and brother-in-law Rameez Khan, were also injured and are still in hospital.

Hours earlier that day, India had launched a series of strikes in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir in retaliation for an earlier militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 tourists.

The strikes were followed by a series of military actions from Islamabad and Delhi that went on till Saturday, including heavy cross-border shelling and drone strikes.

People living along the Line of Control (LoC), the de-factor border between India and Pakistan, were the most vulnerable as shells fell near their homes.

Maria, who lives in Poonch, a town in Indian-administered Kashmir near the LoC, is among dozens of people who lost family members in the conflict.

India has said that 16 people were killed on the morning of 7 May in the shelling by Pakistan. Pakistan has said that at least 30 civilians have died since India launched its retaliatory strikes in the early hours of 7 May.

On 6 May, like every other day, Zain and Urwa came back from school, did their homework, played a bit, had dinner and then went to sleep.

It wasn’t yet dawn when the Khan family heard the sound of gunfire just a few kilometres away from their home.

Terrified, they hunkered down at home and waited for a relative to come pick them up, Maria says.

“My sister was holding Urwa’s hand and my brother-in-law was holding Zain’s hand. They had just left the house when suddenly a shell exploded [nearby]. The splinters hit them – Urva died right there and Zain was flung somewhere in the force of the explosion,” Maria says.

She adds that her sister kept calling out to Zain. When she finally spotted him, a stranger was performing CPR on the boy, trying to revive him. But he was unsuccessful.

• India-Pakistan ceasefire appears to hold after accusations of violations
• How backchannels and US mediators pulled India and Pakistan back from the brink

Meanwhile, Rameez, who lay bleeding and unconscious, was rushed to hospital – first a local one in Poonch and later to a bigger hospital in Rajouri, about four hours away.

Since his injuries were serious, he was shifted again to a hospital in Jammu city, another four-hour journey.

Maria says that Urwa and Zain were the centre of their parents’ lives. Rameez, a teacher, wanted to give them the best education they could get and hence, they shifted to a house that was closer to the children’s school, called Christ School.

On 9 May, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said in a press briefing that during heavy shelling along the LoC, a Pakistani shell had fallen behind Christ School in Poonch town and exploded.

Rameez, Maria says, still doesn’t know about the deaths of his children as the family doesn’t want to upset him.

After the shelling on 7 May, hundreds of people left Poonch and other border towns to escape to safer areas. They are slowly returning after the ceasefire.

“The government should have informed people living near border areas earlier, so that they could leave from there and go to a safe place. Perhaps then our children would have been with us today,” she says.

“If war is necessary for the country’s security, we support it,” says Maria.

“We are also saddened by the Pahalgam attack, but we should also think about the lives of those living near the border. Are we not humans?” she asks.

“Now, whether there is a war or ceasefire, our children will not come back.”

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The first set of 49 white South Africans to be granted refugee status by President Donald Trump’s administration are on their way to the US.

On Sunday they boarded a flight from Johannesburg which is due to land in Washington DC later on Monday.

This comes after a weekend of speculation about when the Afrikaners would leave for America, amid criticism from the South African government who described the US resettlement scheme as “politically motivated”.

Relations between South Africa and the US have been tense for months, after an executive order in February in which President Trump stated that Afrikaners were victims of “racial discrimination”.

The US has criticised domestic South African policy, accusing the government of seizing land from white farmers without any compensation – something which the southern African nation says has not happened.

Top Trump adviser, South African-born Elon Musk, has previously said there was a “genocide of white people” in South Africa and accused the government of passing “racist ownership laws”.

The claims of a genocide of white people have been widely discredited.

• Racially charged row between Musk and South Africa over Starlink
• What’s really driving Trump’s fury with South Africa?

In a statement on Friday, South Africa’s foreign ministry said accusations the government discriminated against the country’s white minority were “unfounded” and that the US’s resettlement scheme was an attempt to undermine the country’s “constitutional democracy”.

The statement added that the country had worked “tirelessly” to stop discrimination, given its history of racial oppression under apartheid.

Bilateral tensions have been strained for some times as President Trump tasked his administration with formulating plans to potentially resettle Afrikaners, a group with mostly Dutch ancestry, in the US.

In March, South Africa’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled after accusing President Trump of using “white victimhood as a dog whistle”, leading to the US accusing Mr Rasool of “race-baiting”.

The US has also criticised South Africa for taking an “aggressive” position against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Pretoria has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of genocide against people in Gaza – a claim which the Israelis strongly reject.

The current group of white South African refugees comprises 49 people, who are expected to land in Washington DC later on Monday, before continuing to Texas.

President Trump’s openness to accepting Afrikaner refugees comes as the US has engaged in a wider crackdown on migrants and asylum seekers from other countries.

• Almost 70,000 South Africans interested in US asylum
• Is it checkmate for South Africa after Trump threats?

The White House is in discussions with the royal family of Qatar to possibly receive a luxury jumbo jet, intended for use as an Air Force One presidential plane.

In a statement, Qatar denied that the plane would be a gift, but said the transfer of an aircraft for “temporary use” was under discussion between the two countries.

According to CBS News, the BBC’s news partner in America, the plane would be donated to Trump’s presidential library at the end of his term.

The news comes as Trump is set to visit Qatar this week as part of the first major foreign trip of his second term.

Ali Al-Ansari, Qatar’s Media Attaché to the US, said negotiations were ongoing between Qatar’s Ministry of Defense and the US Department of Defense.

“The matter remains under review by the respective legal departments, and no decision has been made.”

Sources told CBS News that the plane, reported to be worth about $400m, will not be ready for use right away as it will need to retrofitted and cleared by security officials.

The potential value of the plane and its handling is likely to raise legal and ethical questions among critics.

Democrats were quick to accuse Trump of breaching ethics violations.

Senator Adam Schiff from California quoted a section of the US Constitution on social media that said no elected official could accept “any present… of any kind whatever” from the leader of a foreign state without congressional approval.

Laura Loomer, a longtime Trump ally, also criticised the move. After writing on social media that she would “take a bullet” for Trump, she said: “This is really going to be such a stain on the [administration] if this is true.”

On Sunday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “any gift given by a foreign government is always accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws. President Trump’s Administration is committed to full transparency”.

Defending the negotiations with Qatar, Trump referred to the plane as a gift and said it was offered for his use at no cost in a post to his Truth Social website on Sunday.

“So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane.” he wrote.

The White House’s current fleet includes two Boeing 747-200B planes customised for presidential use with special communications equipment and features like a stateroom, office and conference room, according to the US Air Force. The planes have been in use since 1990 and 1991.

Air Force One planes usually carry over to other administrations. According to the National Archives, only the Reagan presidential library has an Air Force One jet, and it flew seven presidents before being donated.

Qatar is said to be offering a version of a Boeing 747-8, a much newer model that ABC News reports has been upgraded into a “flying palace”.

Boeing had been contracted to provide the White House with newer planes, but Trump complained earlier this year that the company was behind schedule. His administration had initially negotiated with Boeing for two specialised 747-8 planes during his first administration.

The plane maker said the aircraft would not be available until 2027 or 2028.

“No, I’m not happy with Boeing. It takes them a long time to do, you know, Air Force One, we gave that contract out a long time ago,” Trump said in February.

“We may buy a plane or get a plane, or something.”

Trump had a positive diplomatic relationship with Qatar during his first term, which included an announcement in 2019 that the country would make a large purchase of American airplanes.

Qatar has also previously given private jets as gifts to other countries, such as a luxury plane given to Turkey in 2018.

Ofcom has launched investigations into two pornographic websites it believes may be falling foul of the UK’s newly introduced child safety rules.

The regulator said Itai Tech Ltd – which operates a so-called “nudifying” site – and Score Internet Group LLC had failed to detail how they were preventing children from accessing their platforms.

Ofcom announced in January that, in order to comply with the Online Safety Act, all websites on which pornographic material could be found must introduce “robust” age-checking techniques from July.

It said the two services it was investigating did not appear to have any effective age checking mechanisms.

Firms found to be in breach of the Act face huge fines.

The regulator said on Friday that many services publishing their own porn content had, as required, provided details of “highly effective age assurance methods” they were planning to implement.

• What the Online Safety Act is – and how to keep children safe online

They added that this “reassuringly” included some of the largest services that fall under the rules.

It said a small number of services had also blocked UK users entirely to prevent children accessing them.

Itai Tech Ltd and Score Internet Group LLC did not respond to its request for information or show they had plans to introduce age checks, it added.

The “nudifying” technology that one of the company’s platforms features involves the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create the impression of having removed a person’s clothing in an image or video.

The Children’s Commissioner recently called on the government to introduce a total ban on such AI apps that could be used to create sexually explicit images of children.

Under the Online Safety Act, platforms that publish their own pornographic content were required to take steps to implement age checks from January.

These can include requiring UK users to provide photo ID or running credit card checks.

But all websites where a user might encounter pornographic material are also required to demonstrate the robustness of the measures they are taking to verify the age of users.

These could even apply to some social media platforms, Ofcom told the BBC in January.

The rules are expected to change the way many UK adults will use or encounter some digital services, such as porn sites.

“As age checks start to roll out in the coming months, adults will start to notice a difference in how they access certain online services,” said Dame Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, in January.

In April, Discord said it would start testing face-scanning as a way to verify some users’ ages in the UK and Australia.

Experts said it marked “the start of a bigger shift” for platforms as lawmakers worldwide look to impose strict internet safety rules.

Critics suggest such measures risk pushing young people to “darker corners” of the internet where there are smaller, less regulated sites hosting more violent or explicit material.

With US President Donald Trump due to visit Gulf states this week, a key focus will be securing significant new investment for the US economy.

“President Trump wants the announcement [of more Gulf money for the US],” says economist Karen Young, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank.

“He wants to have a big poster in a meeting that describes where these investments might go. And some estimation of what they will do to the American economy in terms of job creation or his big push, of course, on domestic manufacturing.”

Trump is due to arrive in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Tuesday 13 May, to meet the country’s de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Trump is then expected to attend a summit of Gulf leaders in the city on 14 May, before travelling to Qatar that same day, and then ending his three-day trip in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on 15 May.

The economic importance of the region to Trump is highlighted by the fact that the visit to Saudi Arabia was due to be the first overseas trip of his second term in the White House. That was before the death of Pope Francis necessitated Trump attending his funeral in Rome towards the end of April.

Saudi Arabia was also the first country that Trump visited during his first term of office, going against the modern practise of US presidents to start with the UK, Canada or Mexico.

Securing new investments in the US from Gulf states, and particularly from their state-backed sovereign wealth funds, will help Trump to signal back home that his “America First” agenda is delivering results.

The presidential visit is drawing top Wall Street and Silicon Valley leaders to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-US investment forum on 13 May in Riyadh will feature CEOs from BlackRock, Palantir, Citigroup, IBM, Qualcomm, Alphabet, and Franklin Templeton.

The push comes amid economic headwinds, as President Trump’s new import tariffs have significantly disrupted global trade, confidence, and the US economy itself. US economic output fell in the first three months of this year, its first fall in three years.

Back in January, Prince Mohammed said that Saudi Arabia would invest $600bn (£450bn) in the US over the next four years. However, Trump has already said that he’d like that to rise to $1tn, including purchases of more US military equipment.

According to Ali Shihabi – a Saudi commentator and author, with close ties to the Saudi government – a number of economic agreements will be signed during the trip.

“These deals will further integrate the Saudi and US economies together, joint ventures in the kingdom, in the United States, procurements of American weapons and goods,” says Mr Shihabi.

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment fund (PIF), which controls assets worth $925bn, already has numerous investments in the US. These include Uber, gaming firm Electronic Arts, and electric car firm Lucid.

Meanwhile, the UAE has already committed to investing $1.4tn in the US over the next 10 years, in sectors such as AI, semiconductors, energy and manufacturing. This was announced by the White House in March after the UAE’s national security advisor, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, met President Trump in Washington.

Yet Ms Young from the Middle East Institute says that the scale of these investments is not realistic in the short term. She instead says that they are long-term strategic moves, and that the figures should be taken “with a little bit of a grain of salt”.

Regarding specific deals that could be announced during Trump’s visit, it is widely reported that Saudi Arabia will agree to buy more than $100bn of US arms and other military items.

These are said to include missiles, radar systems and transport aircraft.

The US has been a longstanding arms supplier to Saudi Arabia, but in 2021 the then Biden administration stopped selling Riyadh offensive weapons, citing concerns about the country’s role in the war in neighbouring Yemen.

The 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was also widely reported to be a factor. A US report said that Prince Mohammed had approved the murder.

The Biden White House resumed the sale of these weapons last year. While it cited that the Saudis had stopped bombing Yemen, some commentators said that the US was seeking Saudi assistance to help end the conflict in Gaza and aid its future reconstruction.

Mr Shihabi says Saudi Arabia will be seeking assurances from the White House that the US will implement a “more efficient procurement system”, enabling the Gulf state to access ammunition and military equipment far more quickly and easily.

“The Trump administration is initiating procedures to facilitate those deals. So, it’s expected that this process will improve immediately,” he adds.

Artificial intelligence is the other topic that will dominate the agenda during Mr Trump’s visit. Talks are expected to centre on attracting greater Gulf investment into US tech firms, and boosting the region’s access to cutting-edge American semiconductors.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have been investing billions of dollars into tech and AI sectors as they try to diversify their economies away from oil.

The Emiratis, in particular, are keen to establish themselves as a global AI hub.

Last week, the Trump administration scrapped the Biden-era chip regulations that placed restrictions on exports of advanced US chips to more than 120 countries including the Gulf states.

The White House is expected to draft new rules that would potentially involve direct negotiations with countries like the UAE.

“For the UAE, this is absolutely essential,” says Ms Young. “They are aggressively building out their AI capacity. So, for them getting access to US technology is imperative to be the best.”

While much attention will be on Trump courting Gulf capital for the US, Saudi Arabia is equally focused on drawing American investment into its ambitious Vision 2030 program.

Led by giant construction projects, such as the building of a linear city called The Line, Vision 2030 is central to the Saudi government’s continuing efforts to diversify the country’s economy away from oil.

It also involves pouring resources into entertainment, tourism, mining and sports.

However, foreign direct investment into Saudi Arabia declined for a third straight year in 2024, reflecting persistent challenges in attracting overseas capital.

The fall in global oil prices since the start of the year has further strained Riyadh’s finances, increasing pressure to either raise debt or cut spending to sustain its development goals.

Oil prices tumbled to a four-year low amid growing concerns that a trade war could dampen global economic growth.

The decline was further fuelled by the group of oil producing nations, Opec+, announcing plans to increase output.

Saudi Arabia is part of that group, and some commentators said that the rise was in part a desire to please Trump, who has called for lower oil prices.

Other analysts said the reason was more that Opec+ remains confident that the global economy is growing.

The US-Saudi Business Council, is an organisation that aims to boost trade ties between the two countries.

It is hoping that Trump’s visit will push American businesses to explore more opportunities in Saudi Arabia, especially in sectors like AI, healthcare and education.

“The Saudi government is looking heavily to invest in these sectors. There is a very big appetite for Saudi companies to collaborate with American companies,” Hutham Al Jalal, who heads the Riyadh office for the organisation, tells the BBC.

Saudi officials are said to be confident that some deals in these sectors will be secured during Trump’s visit.

For Saudi Arabia, Trump’s visit is about strengthening ties with their longest-standing Western ally – a relationship that grew strained during the Biden years. For President Trump, it is about landing investment deals that can be framed as a win for his economic agenda.

“President Trump is looking for a headline of big investments in America, and he will get that from this trip,” adds Mr Shihabi.

The US and China have agreed a deal that will significantly cut the import tariffs they have imposed on each other, in a major de-escalation of their trade war.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said both countries would lower their reciprocal tariffs by 115% for 90 days.

The announcement came after the two countries held talks in Switzerland, the first between the two countries since US President Donald Trump had levied steep tariffs on Chinese imports last month.

Shares jumped on news of the deal. Last month, the imposition of the tariffs had caused turmoil in financial markets and sparked fears of a global recession.

The trade war between China and the US intensified last month after President Trump announced a universal baseline tariff on all imports to the US, on what he called “Liberation Day”.

Around 60 trading partners, which the White House described as the “worst offenders”, were subjected to higher rates than others, and this included China.

China retaliated with tariffs of its own, and this ratcheting up of levies ultimately led to the US imposing a 145% tariff on Chinese imports, while Beijing had a 125% levy on some US goods.

Under the new agreement, the US and China have both suspended all but 10% of their Liberation Day tariffs for 90 days and cancelled other retaliatory tariffs.

This will cut US tariffs on Chinese imports to 30%, while Chinese tariffs on US imports will be cut to 10%. The pause will begin on 14 May.

The US measures still include an extra 20% component aimed at putting pressure on Beijing to do more to curb the illegal trade in fentanyl, a powerful opioid drug.

• LIVE: Latest updates on US-China agreement

The huge tariffs imposed had raised the prospect of trade between the two countries slumping, with US ports reporting a sharp drop in the number of ships scheduled to arrive from China.

Meanwhile Beijing has become increasingly concerned about the impact the tariffs could have on its economy. Factory output has already slowed and there are reports some firms were having to lay off workers as production lines of goods bound for the US began to grind to a halt.

Announcing the agreement, Bessent said: “The consensus from both delegations this weekend is neither side wants a decoupling.

“What had occurred with these very high tariffs was the equivalent of an embargo, and neither side wants that.

“We do want trade, we want more balanced trade, and I think that both sides are committed to achieving that.”

China’s commerce ministry said the agreement reached with the US was an important step to “resolve differences” and “lay the foundation to bridge differences and deepen co-operation”.

Neil Shearing, group chief economist at Capital Economics, said the agreement represented a “significant de-escalation” of the trade war.

“We’ve come from a place where tariffs imposed… were so high as to almost preclude trade in the long run between the world’s two largest economies,” he told the BBC.

However, he added, while trade will now continue, “it will happen at a higher price and that higher price will be borne by US consumers and US businesses”.

News of the agreement boosted stock markets, with Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index ending the day up 3%. China’s Shanghai Composite Index had closed before details of the deal came out, and ended 0.8% higher.

European stocks rose and early indications were that the main US stock markets will open up by 2-3%.

The deal has boosted shares in shipping companies, with Denmark’s Maersk up more than 12% and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd jumping 14%.

Maersk told the BBC the US-China agreement was “a step in the right direction”.

“We hope it can lay the foundation for the parties to also reach a permanent deal that can create the long-term predictability our customers need.”

However, the gold price – which has benefited from its safe-haven status in recent weeks given the disruption caused by the tariffs – fell 3% to $3,224.34 an ounce.

In a joint statement, both countries said they would establish “a mechanism to continue discussions about economic and trade relations”, led by Scott Bessent and China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng.

It added that both countries believe that “continued discussions have the potential to address the concerns of each side in their economic and trade relationship”.

President Trump has long been unhappy with the fact that the US buys substantially more goods from China than it sells it.

Other concerns include a lack of protection for the intellectual property rights of American companies in China including the forced transfer of technology.

There’s also unhappiness about alleged Chinese government subsidies that give their companies an unfair advantage – something Beijing says Washington also does.

When President Trump first announced the tariffs, he argued they would boost American manufacturing and protect jobs.

But many economists argued they would hit growth in the global economy, and make many products more expensive for US consumers.

Last month, the International Monetary Fund cut its growth forecast for the global economy for this year to 2.8% from 3.3%, arguing that the uncertainty caused by the tariffs would hit supply chains and lead to firm’s either pausing or cutting investment.

The UK and US reached a deal last week over tariffs on some goods traded between the countries.

The blanket 10% tariffs on imports entering the US from countries around the world still applies to most UK goods, but the deal reduced or removed tariffs on some UK exports, including cars, steel and aluminium.

Search efforts for a British hiker who has been missing for more than a week in New Zealand have been “paused”, police have said.

Eli Sweeting, 25, who is originally from Bristol, was reported missing on 4 May after failing to return from a solo hike up Mitre Peak, a steep mountain on the country’s South Island.

A large-scale search was launched with teams of local volunteers alongside helicopters and search dogs, and some of his family flying out to help.

But on Monday afternoon, local time, Insp Matt Scoles, acting commander for the district, said police had made the “difficult decision” to pause search efforts.

“We have been supporting the tramper’s [hiker’s] family and we know this is difficult news for them to hear at what has been an incredibly distressing time,” he said.

“While the search has now been paused, we will be reviewing our efforts and looking to see if there is anything further we can do.”

In a fundraising post, Mr Sweeting’s sister, Serena Sweeting, said he was an “experienced climber” who had “hiked in this terrain many times”.

Insp Coles said the Milford Sound area, where the search had been focused, was “extremely dangerous and challenging terrain”.

“We have focussed on searching the route used by climbers as well as an aerial search of the entire area using two helicopters and thermal imagery. Additionally a drone has also been deployed,” he said.

The search party had focused on a route heading down the mountain after spotting a light there, but the dense forest created issues with detecting movement.

Police remain in frequent contact with the family, Insp Coles added.

Outlawed Kurdish group the PKK, which has waged a 40-year insurgency against Turkey, has announced it is laying down its arms and disbanding.

The move followed a call in February by the group’s jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, for it to disband.

The PKK insurgency initially aimed to create an independent homeland for Kurds, who account for about 20% of Turkey’s population. But it has since moved away from its separatist goals, focusing instead on more autonomy and greater Kurdish rights.

More than 40,000 people have been killed since the insurgency began.

The PKK – which is banned as a terrorist group in Turkey, the EU, UK and US – said it has “completed its historical mission” and would “end the method of armed struggle.”

From now on, the Kurdish issue “can be resolved through democratic politics”, the group said in a statement published on the PKK-affiliated news agency ANF.

In February, Ocalan, 76, called on his movement to lay down its arms and dissolve itself. The PKK leader has been in solitary confinement in prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara, south-west of Istanbul, since 1999.

Ocalan wrote a letter from prison in February saying “there is no alternative to democracy in the pursuit and realisation of a political system. Democratic consensus is the fundamental way.”

It is unclear what Ocalan and his supporters will get in return for disbanding but there is speculation that he may be paroled.

Kurdish politicians will be hoping for a new political dialogue, and a pathway towards greater Kurdish rights.

Both sides had reasons to do a deal now.

The PKK has been hit hard by the Turkish military in recent years, and regional changes have made it harder for them and their affiliates to operate in Iraq and Syria.

President Erdogan needs the support of pro Kurdish political parties if he is to be able to run again in Turkey’s next presidential election, due in 2028.

The decision to disband was an important step towards a “terror-free Turkey”, and the process would be monitored by state institutions, a spokesperson for President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party said, according to Reuters news agency.

Winthrop Rodgers, from the international affairs think tank Chatham House, said it would take “a major democratic transition by Turkey” to accommodate demands from Kurdish political parties.

There has been “some goodwill” from some Turkish leaders in recent months, Mr Rodgers said, which allowed the PKK disbandment to play out.

He added: “But whether that extends to the major changes needed to ensure full Kurdish participation in politics and society is far less clear.

“In a lot of ways, the ball is in Turkey’s court.”