Former US President Joe Biden, 82, has been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, a statement from his office said on Sunday.

Biden, who left office in January, was diagnosed on Friday after he saw a doctor last week for urinary symptoms.

The cancer is a more aggressive form of the disease, characterised by a Gleason score of 9 out of 10. This means his illness is classified as “high-grade” and the cancer cells could spread quickly, according to Cancer Research UK.

Biden and his family are said to be reviewing treatment options. His office added that the cancer was hormone-sensitive, meaning it could likely be managed.

In Sunday’s statement, Biden’s office said: “Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms.

“On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterised by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone.

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management.”

After news broke of his diagnosis, the former president received support from both sides of the aisle.

President Donald Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social that he and First Lady Melania Trump “are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis.”

“We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family,” he said, referring to former First Lady Jill Biden. “We wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.”

Former Vice-President Kamala Harris, who served under Biden, wrote on X that she and her husband Doug Emhoff are keeping the Biden family in their prayers.

“Joe is a fighter – and I know he will face this challenge with the same strength, resilience, and optimism that have always defined his life and leadership,” Harris said.

In a post on X, Barack Obama – who served as president from 2009 to 2017 with Joe Biden as his deputy – said that he and his wife Michelle were “thinking of the entire Biden family”.

“Nobody has done more to find breakthrough treatments for cancer in all its forms than Joe, and I am certain he will fight this challenge with his trademark resolve and grace. We pray for a fast and full recovery,” Obama said. In 2016, the former president launched a “Cancer Moonshot” programme and announced that Biden would lead it.

The news comes nearly a year after the former president was forced to drop out of the 2024 US presidential election over concerns about his health and age. He is the oldest person to have held the office in US history.

Biden, then the Democratic nominee vying for re-election, faced mounting criticism of his poor performance in a June televised debate against Republican nominee and current president Donald Trump. He was replaced as the Democratic candidate by his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer affecting men, behind skin cancer, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that 13 out of every 100 men will develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives.

Age is the most common risk factor, the CDC says.

Dr William Dahut, the Chief Scientific Officer at the American Cancer Society and a trained prostate cancer physician, told the BBC that the cancer is more aggressive in nature, based on the publicly-available information on Biden’s diagnosis.

“In general, if cancer has spread to the bones, we don’t think it is considered a curable cancer,” Dr Dahut said.

He noted, however, that most patients tend to respond well to initial treatment, “and people can live many years with the diagnosis”.

Dr Dahut said that someone with the former president’s diagnosis will likely be offered hormonal therapies to mitigate symptoms and to slow the growth of cancerous cells.

Biden had largely retreated from the public eye since leaving the White House and he has made few public appearances.

The former president delivered a keynote speech in April at a Chicago conference held by the Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled, a US-based advocacy group for people with disabilities.

In May, he sat down for an interview with the BBC – his first since leaving the White House – where he admitted that the decision to step down from the 2024 race was “difficult”.

Biden has faced questions about the status of his health in recent months.

In an appearance on The View programme that also took place in May, Biden denied claims that he had been experiencing cognitive decline in his final year at the White House. “There is nothing to sustain that,” he said.

For many years, the president had advocated for cancer research.

In 2022, he and Mrs Biden relaunched the Cancer Moonshot initiative with the goal of mobilising research efforts to prevent more than four million cancer deaths by the year 2047.

Biden himself lost his eldest son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015.

Israel has announced it will allow a “basic amount of food” to enter Gaza to ensure that “no starvation crisis develops” after blockading the territory for 10 weeks.

A statement from the prime minister’s office said the move was made on recommendation of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and based on the need to support its renewed military offensive against Hamas.

The announcement came hours after Israel’s military said it had begun “extensive ground operations” throughout Gaza.

Israel has come under increasing pressure to lift its blockade, during which no food, fuel or medicines have been allowed in.

Aid agencies have warned about the risk of famine among Gaza’s 2.1 million population, as footage and accounts emerge of emaciated children suffering malnutrition.

French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot called on Israel to allow the “immediate, massive and unhampered” resumption of aid to Gaza.

The statement from PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that Israel would allow “a basic quantity of food to be brought in for the population” of Gaza to “make certain no starvation crisis develops” – adding that such a situation would jeopardise its new offensive, named Operation Gideon’s Chariot.

Israel would also “act to deny Hamas’s ability to take control of the distribution of humanitarian assistance”, the statement added.

Earlier on Sunday, the IDF launched strikes on sites including a hospital in northern Gaza. Israel says it aims to free hostages held in Gaza and defeat Hamas.

Strikes hit the southern city of Khan Younis, as well as towns in the north of Gaza, including Beit Lahia and the Jabalia refugee camp, rescuers said.

At least 67 people have been killed and 361 injured in Gaza in the last 24 hours, the Hamas-run health ministry said.

A woman in Khan Younis told the BBC the situation there was “very difficult” and she had been kept awake by the sound of bombing, while enduring “severe shortages of flour and gas and food”.

The civil defence, Gaza’s main emergency service, said the al-Mawasi camp in the south, where displaced people had been sheltering, was also attacked overnight leading to 22 deaths and 100 people injured. The camp had previously been designated as a “safe zone”.

In the broad evacuation order on Sunday that it described as a “final warning”, the Israeli army said it would “launch a powerful strike on any area used for launching rockets”, and urged people to “move immediately west to the known shelters in al-Mawasi”.

Three public hospitals are now “out of action” in the North Gaza governorate, the health ministry said, amid Israel’s escalating air strikes.

Medical staff at one of them, the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia, told the BBC at about 21:40 local time (20:40 GMT) that IDF tanks had pulled up outside and were firing at the hospital.

They said 55 people were inside, including four doctors and eight nurses. The rest were immobilised patients who were not able to flee the hospital after the morning’s attack, they said.

About 50 minutes later staff said the IDF had left the vicinity of the hospital.

The IDF has said its troops are fighting “terrorist infrastructure sites” in northern Gaza, including the area adjacent to the Indonesian Hospital.

Earlier on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said staff and patients there had come under “heavy fire”. It accused Israel of besieging the hospital, cutting off access, and “effectively forcing the hospital out of service”.

Medics told the BBC no evacuation order or warning was issued before the attacks, and at no point were there any military targets in the Indonesian Hospital.

The onslaught comes as negotiators from Israel and Hamas continue trying to reach a ceasefire agreement in Qatar.

Israeli media quoted the office of the prime minister as saying Israel’s negotiating team was exhausting “every possibility” for a deal on Sunday.

Netanyahu’s statement said it “would include the release of all the hostages, the exile of Hamas terrorists, and the disarmament of the Gaza Strip”, reports said.

A senior Hamas source told the BBC that “no breakthrough or progress has been achieved so far in the ongoing negotiations in Doha due to continued Israeli intransigence”.

The source said Hamas had expressed willingness to release all Israeli hostages in a single phase, “on the condition of reaching a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire agreement – something the Israeli side continues to reject, as their negotiating team lacks the mandate to decide on key issues”.

The source stressed that Hamas “rejects any partial or temporary arrangements”.

The group has proposed releasing all hostages in exchange for an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners, a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and the entry of humanitarian aid.

“Israel wants to retrieve its hostages in one or two batches in return for a temporary truce,” the Hamas source told the BBC.

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Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, Mohammed Salha, director of the al-Awda private hospital in northern Gaza, said the closure of the Indonesian Hospital would affect the care he was able to provide.

He said al-Awda depended on the Indonesian Hospital for stores of oxygen and for its intensive care unit.

Mr Salha added that there had been a bombing near his hospital overnight causing “a lot of damage” to the facility that staff were attempting to quickly repair.

The latest damage to hospitals comes after Israeli strikes hit two of the largest medical centres in Khan Younis, the Nasser Medical Complex and European Hospital.

Israel accused Hamas of hiding a command and control centre beneath the European Hospital, and said it conducted a “precise strike” on “Hamas terrorists”.

Israeli media reported the target of the strike was senior Hamas figure Mohammed Sinwar – the younger brother of the former Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.

Thousands of people have been killed since Israel resumed its strikes on 18 March, following the collapse of a fragile ceasefire which lasted two months.

Israel’s military has said the expansion of its campaign is aimed at “achieving all the war’s objectives” including releasing hostages and “the defeat of Hamas”.

But the hostages’ families group said the operation posed “grave and escalating dangers” to hostages still held in Gaza.

“Testimonies from released hostages describe significantly worsened treatment following military strikes, including physical abuse, restraint and reduced food,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said.

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 58 hostages remain in Gaza, up to 23 of whom are believed to be alive.

More than 53,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Authorities have identified the suspect in a deadly car blast that targeted a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California as Guy Edward Bartkus, a 25-year-old man they said “had nihilistic ideations”.

The FBI said they believe he is the sole fatality in the incident.

They said on Sunday that he detonated explosives outside the clinic and tried to livestream the attack, but investigators are still piecing together his movements before the explosion.

The blast happened just before 11:00 local time (19:00 BST) on Saturday, less than a mile from downtown Palm Springs, near several businesses including the American Reproductive Centers (ARC). The clinic said no-one from the facility was harmed.

The FBI had called the attack an “intentional act of terrorism”. They believe the suspect deliberately targeted the in vitro fertilisation (IVF) facility. They added they are reviewing a manifesto they believe is linked to Bartkus.

Police said Bartkus is a resident of Twentynine Palms, home to a large marine base about an hour away from Palm Springs.

The FBI has executed a search warrant on his residence in Twentynine Palms, they said. Nearby residents had been evacuated.

Police stressed that there is no on-going threat to the public, both at the site of the blast and near the suspect’s home.

The blast was a result of a large vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, law enforcement sources told BBC’s US partner CBS News.

Akil Davis, the FBI’s assistant director in the Los Angeles field office, said the suspect used a 2010 silver Ford Fusion sedan in the attack.

Mr Davis said the FBI is still looking for the public’s help to piece together the suspect’s whereabouts before the blast, and will remain on scene for the next day or two to continue their investigation.

The blast was felt more than a mile away. Mr Davis referred to it as “the largest bombing scene” the FBI had seen in southern California in recent memory, and said police are working to survey evidence that is scattered 100 feet away from the explosion “in every direction”.

Several buildings were damaged in the blast, including the ACR fertility clinic with images showing a portion of its wall had been entirely destroyed.

In addition to the deceased suspect, four others were injured in the blast. Palm Springs police said they have since been released from hospital.

The ARC said the explosion occurred in the car park near its building.

The fertility clinic said their lab, including all eggs and embryos, remained “fully secure and undamaged”.

But Dr Maher Abdallah, who runs the clinic, told the Associated Press that the clinic’s office was damaged.

“I really have no clue what happened,” he said. “Thank God today happened to be a day that we have no patients.”

According to its website, the ARC clinic is the first full-service fertility centre and IVF lab in the Coachella Valley.

It offers services including fertility evaluations, IVF, egg donation and freezing, reproductive support for same-sex couples and surrogacy.

Warsaw’s liberal mayor Rafal Trzaskowski won a narrow victory in Poland’s presidential election, according to an exit poll, but a second-round run-off with conservative historian Karol Nawrocki will be required to decide the country’s next president.

According to a second exit poll released late on Sunday night, Trzaskowski, a deputy leader of prime minister Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Platform (PO) party, won 31.1% of the vote.

Nawrocki came second with 29.1% of the vote.

If the poll is confirmed by the final official result – not expected until late Monday – Trzaskowski and Nawrocki will compete in a second-round on 1 June as none of the 13 candidates won more than 50% of the vote.

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Trzaskowski told his supporters at a rally in Sandomierz, southern Poland: “We’re going to win.” But he said a lot of work and “great determination” would be needed.

“I’m convinced that all Poland will win,” he said.

He pledged to cooperate with prime minister Tusk’s coalition to liberalise the country’s strict abortion law and accelerate reform of the Polish judiciary, which was widely seen to have been politicised by the previous PiS-led government.

Trzaskowski performed worse than opinion polls predicted before the vote, which had him between 4%-6% ahead of Nawrocki.

Poland’s president has largely ceremonial powers but he or she is able to veto government legislation. Tusk’s coalition does not have a big enough parliamentary majority to overturn a presidential veto.

Tusk has failed to deliver many of his campaign promises, partly because the incumbent conservative president Andrzej Duda has vetoed his government’s legislation, but also due to divisions within the coalition over issues like abortion and civil partnerships.

A victory for Trzaskowski would remove the president’s veto, but Nawrocki would likely be an even tougher obstacle than Duda.

Nawrocki told his supporters in Gdansk that Tusk must be stopped from winning total power in Poland.

He called on supporters of two far-right candidates, Slawomir Mentzen, who came third and won 14.8%, and of Grzegorz Braun, who came fourth and won 6.3%, to “save Poland” from Tusk.

A lot will depend on which candidate can mobilise their electorate in the second round.

Nawrocki was unknown on a national scale before Law and Justice (PiS) chose him as its candidate. But he has improved on the job, and PiS is traditionally good at getting their vote out.

Trzaskowski will need to win the votes of supporters of his centrist party, but also those supporting the candidates of the junior coalition partners, the Left (Magdalena Biejat) and conservative Third Way (Szymon Holownia).

Another worry for Trzaskowski is the better than expected result of far-right candidates because many of their supporters will not vote for him.

Mentzen’s result was a strong showing and continued the improvement of his far-right Confederation party since it entered parliament in 2019.

Who will his, mainly young voters, back in the run-off?

Many would support Nawrocki for his Catholic, family-oriented views, but they dislike PiS’s left-wing economic policy of generous state benefits.

Mentzen is an anti-establishment candidate, and some of his supporters may not want to vote for either Nawrocki or Trzaskowski, who represent the two parties that have dominated Polish politics for two decades.

Far-right MEP, Grzegorz Braun’s result was a nasty surprise for Poland’s liberal voters.

Braun made headlines in 2023 when he put out the candles on a Jewish menorah in the Polish parliament with a fire extinguisher following a ceremony for the festival of Hanukkah.

Braun called the festival “satanic”. During a presidential debate last month he said: “Jews have far too much say in Polish affairs.”

Just as India showed flickers of progress toward its long-held dream of becoming the world’s factory, Washington and Beijing announced a trade “reset” that could derail Delhi’s ambitions to replace China as the global manufacturing hub.

Last week, Trump’s tariffs on China dropped overnight – from 145% to 30%, vs 27% for India – as the two sides thrashed out an agreement in Switzerland.

As a result, there’s a chance manufacturing investment that was moving from China to India could either “stall” or “head back”, feels Ajay Srivastava of the Delhi-based think tank, Global Trade Research Institute (GTRI).

“India’s low-cost assembly lines may survive, but value-added growth is in danger.”

The change in sentiment stands in sharp relief to the exuberance in Delhi last month when Apple indicated that it was shifting most of its production of iPhones headed to the US from China to India.

That may well still happen, even though US President Donald Trump revealed that he had told Apple CEO Tim Cook not to build in India because it was “one of the highest tariff nations in the world”.

“India is well positioned to be an alternative to China as a supplier of goods to the US in the immediate term,” Shilan Shah, an economist with Capital Economics, wrote in an investor note before the deal was announced. He pointed out that 40% of India’s exports to the US were “similar to those exported by China”.

There were early signs that Indian exporters were already stepping in to fill the gap left by Chinese producers. New export orders surged to a 14-year high, according to a recent survey of Indian manufacturers.

Nomura, a Japanese broking house, also pointed to growing “anecdotal evidence” of India emerging as a winner from “trade diversion and supply-chain shift in low and mid-tech manufacturing” particularly in sectors like electronics, textiles and toys.

Some analysts do believe that despite the so-called trade “reset” between Beijing and Washington, a larger strategic decoupling between China and the US will continue to benefit India in the long run.

For one, there’s greater willingness by Narendra Modi’s government to open its doors to foreign companies after years of protectionist policies, which could provide tailwind.

India and the US are also negotiating a trade deal that could put Asia’s third-largest economy in a sweet spot to benefit from the so-called “China exodus” – as global firms shift operations to diversify supply chains.

India has just signed a trade pact with the UK, sharply cutting duties in protected sectors like whiskey and automobiles. It offers a glimpse of the concessions Delhi might offer Trump in the ongoing India-US trade talks.

But all of this optimism needs to be tempered for more reasons than one.

Apart from the fact that China is now back in the running, companies are also “not entirely writing off other Asian competitors, with countries like Vietnam still on their radars”, economists Sonal Verma and Aurodeep Nandi from Nomura said in a note earlier this month.

“Hence, for India to capitalise on this opportunity, it needs to complement any tariff arbitrage with serious ease-of-doing-business reforms.”

A tough business climate has long frustrated foreign investors and stalled India’s manufacturing growth, with its share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) stuck at around 15% for two decades.

The Modi government’s efforts, such as the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, have delivered only limited success in boosting this figure.

The government’s think tank, Niti Aayog, has acknowledged India’s “limited success” in attracting investment shifting from China. It noted that factors like cheaper labour, simpler tax laws, lower tariffs, and proactive Free Trade Agreements helped countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia expand exports – while India lagged behind.

Another major concern, says Nomura, is India’s ongoing reliance on China for raw materials and components used in electronics like iPhones, limiting Delhi’s ability to fully capitalise on supply chain shifts.

“India’s earnings from making iPhones will only rise if more of the phone is made locally,” Mr Srivastava told the BBC.

According to him, right now Apple earns over $450 per iPhone sold in the US while India keeps less than $25 – even though the full $1,000 is counted as an Indian export.

“Just assembling more iPhones in India won’t help much unless Apple and its suppliers also start making components and doing high-value work here. Without that, India’s share stays small, and the export numbers go up only on paper -possibly triggering more scrutiny from the US without real economic gain for India,” Mr Srivastava said.

The jobs created by such assembly lines aren’t very high quality either, says GTRI.

Quite unlike companies like Nokia which set up a factory in the southern city of Chennai in 2007 where suppliers moved in together, “today’s smartphone makers mostly import parts and push for lower tariffs instead of building supply chains in India”, explained Mr Srivastava. He noted that, in certain instances, the investment made could be lower than the subsidies received under India’s PLI scheme.

Finally there are concerns that Chinese exporters could try to use India to reroute products to the US.

India doesn’t seem averse to this idea despite the pitfalls. The country’s top economic adviser said last year that the country should attract more Chinese businesses to set-up export oriented factories and boost its manufacturing industry – a tacit admission that its own industrial policy hadn’t delivered.

But experts caution, this could further curtail India’s ability to build local know-how and grow its own industrial base.

All of this shows that beyond the headline-grabbing announcements by the likes of Apple, India is still a long way from realising its factory ambitions.

“Slash production costs, fix logistics, and build regulatory certainty,” Mr Srivastava urged policymakers in a social media post.

“Let’s be clear. This US-China reset is damage control, not a long-term solution. India must play the long game, or risk getting side-lined.”

British mountaineer Kenton Cool has scaled Mount Everest for the 19th time, breaking his own record for the most climbs up the world’s tallest mountain for a non-sherpa.

The 51-year-old, who was accompanied by Nepali sherpa Dorji Gyaljen, reached the 8,849m (29,000ft) high summit at 11:00 local time (04:15 GMT) on Sunday.

Mr Cool first climbed Everest in 2004 and has summited it almost yearly since.

Mr Gyaljen logged his 23rd climb up Everest. Another Nepali sherpa, Kami Rita, holds the record for making the most number of Everest summits at 30, and is also currently on the mountain attempting to set a new record.

Mr Cool’s record-setting feat comes after at least two climbers – Subrata Ghosh from India and Philipp “PJ” Santiago II from the Philippines – died on Mount Everest this week.

After his 16th Everest ascent in 2022, Mr Cool appeared to play down his record, noting that many Nepali climbers have surpassed it.

“I’m really surprised by the interest… considering that so many of the sherpas have so many more ascents,” he told AFP in an interview then.

Four days before the latest feat, Mr Cool told his Instagram followers that he “finally [had] a positive forecast” that will allow him to go ahead with the attempt.

“Let’s hope that we manage to thread the needle with regard to numbers of climbers and we have a safe and enjoyable time up high,” he wrote.

Fellow climbers hailed the achievement.

Mr Cool is a “great person to share stories from two decades on the mountain”, American adventurer Adrian Ballinger told Reuters news agency.

“His experience, charisma, and strength make him a valuable part of the Everest community,” says Mr Ballinger, who is currently guiding a team up Everest.

“Amazing, Kenton,” wrote Jordanian mountaineer Mostafa Salameh, who is one of only 20 people to complete the climb the highest mountains on all seven continents and conquer the North and South Poles.

Mr Cool is also a mountain guide who has lead British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, among others, on several notable climbs including Everest.

The liberal, pro-EU mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, has fought off a strong challenge from a Romanian right-wing nationalist to win the presidency after months of political turbulence.

George Simion, the leader of the far-right AUR party, won a dramatic first-round victory earlier this month, riding a wave of anger from Romanians who had seen the presidential race annulled late last year because of claims of Russian interference.

But it was the softly spoken Nicusor Dan who swept to victory, winning 55% of the vote in Romania, even though Simion was more successful in the diaspora.

“We need to build Romania together irrespective of who you voted for,” said Dan, once his victory was secure.

More than 11.6 million Romanians voted in Sunday’s run-off, and Dan attracted the support of more than six million of them, with about 53% of the vote.

The mathematician waited until after midnight on Sunday before he could be absolutely sure that the numbers were on his side and he could join his supporters in a park opposite City Hall in Bucharest.

They went wild, chanting his name and cheering. At one point he was almost mobbed but this was a huge moment for the president-elect and for his supporters after months of political tension.

“A community of Romanians who want a profound change in Romania won,” he said.

Romanians are broadly unhappy with the dominance of mainstream parties and the turbulence in this European Union and Nato member state intensified earlier this month when the government collapsed because its candidate had failed to make the second round.

While Nicusor Dan campaigned on fighting corruption and maintaining support for northern neighbour Ukraine, Simion attacked the EU and called for cutting aid to Kyiv.

“Russia, don’t forget, Romania isn’t yours,” Dan’s supporters chanted.

Even though exit polls had given him victory, they did not include the all-important diaspora vote and Simion clung to the belief that he could still win.

“I won, I am the new president of Romania and I am giving back power to the Romanians,” he insisted initially.

It was not until the early hours of Monday that he conceded victory on Facebook. A protest planned by his supporters was then apparently called off.

During the election campaign Simion had stood side by side with Calin Georgescu, the far-right fringe figure who had stunned Romania with a first-round presidential victory at the end of last year, buoyed by an enormous TikTok campaign.

The vote was annulled over allegations of campaign fraud and Russian interference and Georgescu was barred from running again. Russia denied any involvement.

Asked by the BBC on Sunday whether he was acting as Georgescu’s puppet, George Simion said: “The puppets are those who annulled the elections… I am a man of my people and my people voted for Calin Georgescu.

“Do we like democracy only when the good guy has won? I don’t think this is an option.”

He said he was a patriot and accused what he called the mainstream media of smearing him as a pro-Russian or fascist.

The key to Simion’s success in the first round was his extraordinary win among diaspora voters in Western Europe, including in the UK.

His supporters turned out in force again on Sunday, with partial results giving him 68.5% support in Spain, 66.8% in Italy and 67% in Germany. He also had the edge in the UK, where voters said they would have picked Calin Georgescu if authorities had not barred him from running.

“We didn’t know anything about [Georgescu] but then I listened to what he was saying, and you can tell he’s a good Christian,” said 37-year-old Catalina Grancea.

She had vowed to go back to Romania if Simion had won and her mother Maria said she too had voted for change: “Our children were forced to leave Romania because they couldn’t find any jobs there.”

However, Nicusor Dan’s voters came out in even bigger numbers both in Romania and abroad. In neighbouring Moldova 87% of Romanians backed the mayor of Bucharest.

The presidents of both Moldova and Ukraine congratulated him on his victory.

“Moldova and Romania stand together, supporting one another and working side by side for a peaceful, democratic, and European future for all our citizens,” said Maia Sandu.

“For Ukraine, as a neighbour and friend, it is important to have Romania as a reliable partner,” said Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on social media that Romanians had turned out in massive numbers and had “chosen the promise of an open, prosperous Romania in a strong Europe”.

Gary Lineker is set to leave the BBC with an announcement expected on Monday.

Speculation is mounting the 64-year-old will step down after he presents his final Match of the Day next weekend.

Lineker, listed as the highest-paid BBC presenter, had been due to remain at the forefront of the BBC’s coverage of next season’s FA Cup and the World Cup in 2026, despite previously announcing he will leave Match of the Day at the end of this season.

But last week he had to apologise after sharing a social media post about Zionism that included an illustration of a rat, historically used as an antisemitic insult.

Lineker said he very much regretted the references, adding he would never knowingly share anything antisemitic and that he had deleted the post once he had learned about the symbolism of the image.

Last week, BBC Director General Tim Davie said: “The BBC’s reputation is held by everyone, and when someone makes a mistake, it costs us.”

It is understood that BBC bosses considered Lineker’s position untenable.

The former England striker has attracted criticism before for his posts on social media in the past.

He was temporarily suspended from the BBC in March 2023 after an impartiality row over a post in which he said language used to promote a government asylum policy was “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.

The BBC’s social media rules were then rewritten to say presenters of flagship programmes outside news and current affairs – including Match of the Day – have “a particular responsibility to respect the BBC’s impartiality, because of their profile on the BBC”.

In November 2024, Lineker announced his departure from Match of the Day, but said he would remain with the BBC to front FA Cup and World Cup coverage.

In an interview earlier this year about leaving, Lineker said he believed the BBC wanted him to leave Match of the Day as he was negotiating a new contract last year, saying: “Well, perhaps they want me to leave. There was the sense of that.”

The BBC didn’t comment on Lineker’s suggestion at the time but called him a “world-class presenter” and added that Match of the Day “continually evolves for changing viewing habits”.

Kelly Cates, Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan have been announced as new presenters of the show for the start of the 2025-26 season.

Lineker has not publicly commented on his departure from the BBC.

In his interview last month, Lineker also reflected on his 2023 tweets, saying that he did not regret the comments and adding “would I, in hindsight, do it again? No I wouldn’t, because of all the nonsense that came with it.”

Speaking to the BBC’s Amol Rajan, he indicated his next career move “won’t be more telly”, adding: “I think I’ll step back from that now” and .I think I’ll probably focus more on the podcast world”.

Among the cactuses in the desert of Arizona, just outside Phoenix, an extraordinary collection of buildings is emerging that will shape the future of the global economy and the world.

The hum of further construction is creating not just a factory for the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Eventually, it will mass produce the most advanced chips in the world. This work is being done in the US for the first time, with the Taiwanese company behind it pledging to spend billions more here in a move aimed at heading off the threat of tariffs on imported chips.

It is, in my view, the most important factory in the world, and it’s being built by a company you may have never heard of: TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. It makes 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors. Until now they were all made in Taiwan, the island off the Chinese mainland. The Apple chip in your iPhone, the Nvidia chips powering your ChatGPT queries, the chips in your laptop or computer network, all are made by TSMC.

Its Arizona facility “Fab 21” is closely guarded. Blank paper or personal devices are not allowed in case designs are leaked. It houses some of the most important intellectual property in the world, and the process to make these chips is one of the most complicated and intensive in global manufacturing.

They’re hugely protective of the secrets that lie within. Important customers, such as Apple and Nvidia, trust this company to safeguard their designs for future products.

But after months of asking, TSMC let the BBC in to look at the partial transfer of what some argue is the most critical, expensive, complex and important manufacturing in the world.

President Trump certainly seems to think so. He often mentions the factory in passing. “TSMC is the biggest there is,” he has said. “We gradually lost the chip business, and now it’s almost exclusively in Taiwan. They stole it from us.” This is one of the US President’s regular refrains.

TSMC’s recent decision to expand its investments in the US by a further $100bn (£75bn) is something Trump attributes to his threats of tariffs on Taiwan and on the global semiconductor business.

The expansion of the Arizona facility, which was announced in March is, he believes, the poster child for his economic policies – in particular the encouragement of foreign companies to relocate factories to the US to avoid hefty tariffs.

China is also watching developments carefully. Taiwan’s chip making prowess has been part of what its government has called its “Silicon Shield,” against a much-feared invasion. While the original strategy was to make Taiwan indispensable in this area of critical technology, the pandemic supply chain difficulties changed the calculus because relying on a single country seemed like a greater risk.

So, many currents of the world economy, frontier technology and geopolitics flow through this one site and within it lies the essential contradiction of Trump’s economic and diplomatic policy.

He sees this plant as the exemplar of America First, and the preservation of economic and military superiority over China. Yet the manufacture of these modern miniaturised miracles at the frontier of physics and chemistry inherently rely on a combination of the very best technologies from around the world.

Greg Jackson, one of the facilities managers, takes me around in a golf buggy. The factories are almost a carbon copy of the TSMC spaces in Taiwan, where he trained. “I would say these facilities are probably some of the most advanced and complicated in the world,” he says.

“It’s quite the dichotomy. You’ve got really, really small chips with really small structures, and it takes this massive facility with all the infrastructure to be able to make them… Just the sheer complexity, the amount of systems that it takes, is staggering.”

Inside the “Gowning Building,” workers dress in protective clothing before crossing a bridge that is supposed to create the cleanest environment on Earth, in order to protect the production of these extraordinary microscopic transistors that create the microchips underpinning everything.

Konstantinos Ninios, an engineer, shows me some of the very first productions from TSMC Arizona: a silicon wafer with what is known as ‘4 nanometre chips’.

“This is the most advanced wafer in the US right now,” he explains. “[It] contains about 10 to 14 trillion transistors… The whole process is three to 4,000 steps.”

If you could somehow shrink your body to the same scale and get inside the wafer, he says that the many different layers would look like very tall streets and skyscrapers.

TSMC was founded at the behest of the Taiwanese government in 1987, when chip executive Morris Chang was directed to start the business. The model was to become a dedicated foundry for microchips – manufacturing other companies’ designs. It became wildly successful.

Driving the advancement of the technology is the miniaturisation of the smallest feature on chips. Their size is measured these days in billionths of a metre or nanometres. This progress has enabled mobile phones to become smartphones, and is now setting the pace for the mass deployment of artificial intelligence.

It requires incredible complexity and expense through the use of “extreme ultraviolet (UV) light”. This is used to etch the intricate building blocks of our modern existence in a process called “lithography”.

The world’s dependence on TSMC is built on highly specialised bus-sized machines, which are in turn sourced almost entirely from a Dutch company called ASML, including in Arizona.

These machines shoot UV light tens of thousands of times through drops of molten tin, which creates a plasma, and is then refracted through a series of specialised mirrors.

The almost entirely automated process for each wafer of silicon is repeated thousands of times in layers over months, before the $1m LP-sized wafer of 4nm silicon chips is formed.

“Just imagine a particle or a dust particle falling into this,” Mr Ninios says to me incredulously. “The transistors are not going to work. So all of this is cleaner than hospital operating rooms.”

Taiwan does not have special access to the raw materials – but it has the know-how to stay years ahead of other companies in the intricate process of producing these atomic building blocks of modern life.

Some in the Taiwanese government are cautious about spreading the frontier of this technology off the island. Trump wasted little time in claiming the firm’s decision to bring its highest level of technology to the US was due to his economic policies.

He said this would not have happened without the stick of his planned tariffs on Taiwan and semiconductors. Those I speak to at TSMC are diplomatic about that claim.

Much of this was already planned and subsidised under former US President Biden administration’s Chips Act.

On the walkway into the building are photographs showing Biden’s visit in 2022, with the building site draped in the Stars and Stripes and a banner saying “a future Made in America”.

“The semiconductor supply chain is global,” says Rose Castanares, the President of TSMC Arizona. “There’s really no single country at this moment that can do everything from chemicals to wafer manufacturing to packaging, and so it’s very difficult to unwind that whole thing very quickly.”

As for the semiconductor supply chain, tariffs will not help. The supply chain stretches all over the world. Whether it’s the silicon wafers from Japan, the machines required from the Netherlands, or mirrors from Germany, all sorts of materials from all around the world are required. Now, they could face import charges.

That said, TSMC’s boss was quick off the mark in confirming the expansion of the US site at an event with Trump at the White House. In recent weeks, America’s tech elite – from Apple’s Tim Cook, to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang – have been queueing up to tell the world that TSMC Arizona will now produce many of the chips in their US products.

The global chip industry is very sensitive to the economic cycle, but its cutting edge technology enjoys very healthy margins, that could cushion some of these planned tariffs.

There are many geopolitical subtexts here. The factory sits at the heart of US strategy to gain technological, AI and economic supremacy over China.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations have developed policies to try and limit Chinese access to the frontier semiconductor technology – from a ban of exports to China of ASML’s machines, to new legislation to ban the use of Huawei AI chips in US software or technology anywhere in the world.

Taiwan’s President Lai this week urged democracies such as Japan and the US to develop “non-Red” supply chains to counter China.

Not everyone is convinced that this strategy is working, however. Chinese technologists have been effective at working around the bans to develop competitive indigenous technology. And Bill Gates this week said that these policies “have forced the Chinese in terms of chip manufacturing and everything to go full speed ahead”.

Trump wants TSMC Arizona to become a foundation stone for his American golden age. But the company’s story to date is perhaps the ultimate expression of the success of modern globalisation.

So for now, it’s a battle for global tech and economic supremacy, in which Taiwan’s factory technology, some of which is now being moved to the Arizona desert, is the critical asset.

Portugal’s governing right-of-centre Democratic Alliance has won snap parliamentary elections – the third in as many years – again falling short of a majority.

Its leader Luís Montenegro promised supporters to “stimulate investment” and to “guarantee prosperity and social justice”.

Socialist leader Pedro Nuno Santos announced his resignation after his party finished in second, and lost so many seats it ended up neck-and-neck with far-right Chega – a relatively newcomer.

The Socialists could even slip behind Chega if results from voters abroad, which take a few days to come in, mirror those in last year’s election, when two out of the four seats went to Chega, and one to the Socialists.

Chega leader André Ventura said the “historic” result marked the end of two-party dominance in Portugal.

His campaign had focussed on the issues of immigration and corruption, and Chega was probably helped by the fact that this election and the previous one were both triggered by scandals involving the prime minister of the day.

Montenegro, in his remarks to supporters, thanked both his family and the “political family” that defended him from attacks relating to deals done by a company he set up before he became party leader, and which is now owned by his sons.

This was the controversy that triggered the election, after the government lost a vote of confidence.

Meanwhile, Santos, in his own parting comments, reiterated his view that Montenegro was not fit to be prime minister, suggesting that the Socialist Party should not let the matter drop.

Ukraine says Russia has launched its biggest drone attack since the full-scale invasion began, targeting several regions including Kyiv, where one woman died.

The barrage came just a day before a scheduled call between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The US President has been urging a ceasefire.

Russia and Ukraine held their first face-to-face talks in more than three years on Friday in Turkey, agreeing a new prisoner swap deal but little else.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia had launched 273 drones by 08:00 Sunday (05:00 GMT) targeting the central Kyiv region, and Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions in the east.

It said 88 drones were intercepted and another 128 went astray “without negative consequences”.

The strikes killed one person in Obukhiv district in the Kyiv region, and injured at least three others – one of whom was a four-year-old child – officials reported.

The previous largest drone attack from Russia happened on the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion on 23 February, when Moscow launched 267 drones.

Russia’s military said it had intercepted 25 Ukrainian drones overnight and on Sunday morning.

Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Sunday that he and leaders of the UK, France, and Poland would have a virtual meeting with Trump before his conversation with Putin on Monday morning.

The four leaders jointly visited Ukraine over two weeks ago to spearhead calls for a 30-day-ceasefire, backed by the so-called “coalition of the willing”.

Ukraine’s intelligence agency has said it believes Russia could be planning to carry out a “training and combat” launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile overnight, as an attempted intimidation.

Russia has not responded to the claim.

Ukrainian officials said Saturday night’s strikes showed Russia had no intention of stopping the war, despite international pressure for a ceasefire.

“For Russia, the negotiations [on Friday] in Istanbul are just a pretence. Putin wants war,” said Andriy Yermak, a top aide to the Ukrainian president.

Following the talks in Turkey, Trump had suggested there would be no progress towards peace until he and Putin meet face-to-face.

The US president has proposed a 30-day ceasefire agreement and threatened tougher sanctions if Russia doesn’t comply.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has said he is ready to accept the proposal for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

But Russia will only agree to a pause in fighting if military supplies to Ukraine are halted.

Putin has also said any negotiations must include discussions about the cause of the war. Russia’s terms include Ukraine becoming a neutral country, cutting the size of its military, and abandoning its Nato membership ambitions – conditions that Ukraine has rejected as tantamount to capitulation.

Moscow now controls approximately 20% of Ukraine’s territory, including the southern Crimea peninsula it illegally annexed in 2014.

Zelensky was at the Vatican on Sunday where he had a private meeting with Pope Leo following the new pontiff’s inauguration mass. He also briefly met US Vice President JD Vance in Rome.

The Ukrainian leader said they talked about the “low-level” delegation Putin sent to Turkey, the “need for sanctions against Russia”, and how to achieve peace.

Authorities in New York are investigating the site where a Mexican sailing ship struck the Brooklyn Bridge for clues about how the fatal collision occurred.

Two people on board were killed and at least 19 others were injured when the Mexican Navy training ship crashed into the bridge on Saturday night.

Police said early investigations showed the ship had lost power before the collision. Video showed the ship’s three tall masts crumbling as horrified onlookers watched from the shore.

It’s not clear how the vessel came to approach the bridge, which authorities confirmed was not damaged by the strike. It had reopened to traffic late on Saturday.

Police said the Cuauhtémoc ship had a 48.2m (158ft) mast height while the bridge had a 41.1m (135ft) clearance at its centre, according to the New York transport department’s website.

Responders were able to remove at least 27 people from the ship for treatment, while all 277 personnel on the ship were accounted for, said New York fire authorities.

The ship lost all three masts and has been moved to a nearby pier for investigation.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to assist in the investigation, which is being coordinated between the US and Mexico governments.

Mexico’s Navy Secretary Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles said in a statement the results of any investigation would be followed with “total transparency and responsibility”.

The Cuauhtémoc left Acapulco, Mexico, on 6 April on a tour that included stops in New York and Aberdeen, Scotland, for the city’s Tall Ships race in July.

Sixteen-year-old Nimra stood outside, rooted to the spot, as the Indian missiles that had woken her a moment ago rained down on the mosque a few metres from her house in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. She watched one tear the minaret off the top of the building. But she failed to realise she, too, had been struck – in the chest.

When the family reached the relative safety of her aunt’s house nearby, someone turned on a phone torch. “My aunt gasped. There was blood on my frock. It was pink and white but now soaked in red. I hadn’t seen it before.” Again they ran. “I was running but my hand was pressed on my chest the whole time. I didn’t want to take it off. I thought if I let go, everything inside me would come out.” A piece of shrapnel was lodged near her heart, she later discovered.

A few hours later, in Poonch, Indian-administered Kashmir, a different family was dodging shelling which Pakistan had launched in response to India’s missile strikes.

“When the firing began, everyone ran for their lives – children clinging to their parents in fear,” said MN Sudhan, 72. “Some families managed to leave for Jammu in their vehicles. We also decided to escape. But barely 10 minutes into our journey, a shell landed near our vehicle. The shrapnel tore through the car. My grandson died on the spot.”

“Our future was shattered at that [very] moment,” Mr Sudhan said of 13-year-old Vihaan’s death. “Now we’re left with nothing but grief. I have witnessed two wars between India and Pakistan, but never in my life have I seen shelling as intense as this.”

Nimra and Vihaan were among many of the villagers caught up in the deadliest attacks for several years in a decades-long conflict between two of the world’s nuclear powers – India and Pakistan. Both sides administer the Himalayan region in part but claim it in full. Both governments deny targeting civilians, but BBC journalists in the region have spoken to families caught up in the violence.

The strike that injured Nimra was part of India’s armed response after a militant attack killed 26 people – mostly Indian tourists – last month at a beauty spot in India-administered Kashmir. Police there claimed militants included at least two Pakistan nationals. Pakistan has asked India for evidence of this, and has called for an independent inquiry into who was behind the attack.

What followed was four days of tit-for-tat shelling and drone attacks, intensifying each day and culminating in missile strikes on military bases, which threatened to tip over into full-blown conflict. Then, suddenly, a ceasefire brokered by the US and other international players on 10 May brought the two nuclear powers back from the brink.

Families on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) – the de facto border in Kashmir – told us they had had loved ones killed and property destroyed. At least 16 people are reported to have been killed on the Indian side, while Pakistan claims 40 civilian deaths, though it remains unclear how many were directly caused by the shelling. We also heard from Indian and Pakistani government insiders about the mood in their respective administrations as the conflict escalated.

In Delhi’s corridors of power, the atmosphere was initially jubilant, an Indian government source told the BBC. Its missile attacks on targets in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and in Pakistan itself – including the Bilal Mosque in Muzaff arabad, which India claims is a militant camp, though Pakistan denies this – were deemed a success.

“The strikes… were not limited to Pakistani-administered Kashmir or along the Line of Control,” an Indian government source told the BBC. “We went deep – even into the Pakistani side of Punjab, which has always been Pakistan’s red line.”

But the Pakistani military had been prepared, a source from the Pakistan Air Force told the BBC. Days earlier, the Pakistani government said it was expecting an attack.

“We knew something was coming, and we were absolutely ready,” one officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He said Indian fighter jets approached Pakistani territory and the air force was under instructions to shoot down any that crossed into its airspace or dropped a payload.

Pakistan claims to have shot down five Indian jets that night, something India has remained silent on.

“We were well prepared, and honestly, we were also lucky,” the source said – his account repeated by two other sources.

But Mr Sudhan, Vihaan’s grandfather, said there had been no warning to stay indoors or evacuate. “Why didn’t they inform us? We, the people, are caught in the middle.”

It is likely that no evacuation orders had been issued because the Indian government needed to keep the military strikes confidential, though the local administration had, following the April militant attack, directed locals to clean out community bunkers as a precautionary measure.

A day after the initial missile strikes, Thursday, both sides launched drone attacks, though they each accused the other of making the first move.

India began to evacuate thousands of villagers along the Indian side of the LoC. Just after 21:00 that evening, the Khan family in India-administered Kashmir decided they must flee their home in Uri, 270km (168 miles) to the north of Poonch. Most of their neighbours had already left.

But after travelling for just 10 minutes, their vehicle was struck by shrapnel from a shell, fatally injuring 47-year-old Nargis. Her sister-in-law Hafeeza was seriously injured. They headed to the nearest hospital, only to find the gates locked.

“I somehow climbed the hospital wall and called out for help, telling them we had injured people with us. Only then did the staff come out and open the gate. As soon as they did, I collapsed. The doctors were terrified by the ongoing shelling and had closed everything out of fear,” Hafeeza said.

Hafeeza’s sister-in-law Nargis is survived by six children. The youngest daughter Sanam, 20, said the first hospital they went to was not equipped to help, and as they headed to another, her mother died of her injuries.

“A piece of shrapnel had torn through her face. My clothes were soaked in her blood… We kept talking to her, urging her to stay with us. But she passed away on the way.”

Since a ceasefire agreement between India and Pakistan in 2021 there had been relative peace in the region, locals told the BBC. For the first time in years, they had been able to live normal lives, they said, and now this sense of security was destroyed.

Sanam, who lost her mother, said: “I appeal to both governments – if you’re heading into war, at least secure your civilians. Prepare… Those who sit in comfort and demand war – they should be sent to the borders. Let them witness what it really means. Let them lose someone before their eyes.”

Sajjad Shafi, the representative for Uri in the regional government, said he had acted as promptly as possible.

“The moment I got the news that India has attacked, I got in touch with people and started moving them out.”

After two days of attacks and counter attacks, the Indian government source said there was now a “clear sense in… power corridors that things were escalating but we were ready.

“We were ready because India had spent the last 10 years acquiring and building strategic military assets – missiles, warheads and defence systems.”

On the international stage, there had been consternation that the tensions would not be de-escalated by the US, despite its diplomatic overtures during India and Pakistan’s previous Kashmir clashes.

US Vice President JD Vance said a potential war would be “none of our business”.

This statement came as no surprise, the Indian government source told the BBC. At that stage, “it was clear the US didn’t want to get involved”.

By the following day, Friday, shelling had become more intense.

Muhammed Shafi was at home with his wife in Shahkot village in the Neelum Valley, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, on the LoC.

The 30-year-old was standing in the doorway, just a few steps away from where his son was playing; his wife standing in their courtyard.

“I remember looking up and seeing a mortar shell coming from a distance. In the blink of an eye, it struck her. She didn’t even have time to scream. One second she was there, and the next, she was gone. Her face… her head… there was nothing left. Just a cloud of smoke and dust. My ears went numb. Everything went silent. I didn’t even realise I was screaming.

“That night, her body lay there, right in our home. The entire village was hiding in bunkers. The shelling continued all night, and I stayed beside her, weeping. I held her hand for as long as I could.”

One of those in a bunker was his niece, 18-year-old Umaima. She and her family were holed up in the shelter for four days, on and off, in brutal conditions.

“There were six or seven of us packed into it,” she said. “The other bunker was already full. There’s no place to lie down in there – some people stood, others sat. There was no drinking water, no food,” with people shouting, crying and reciting prayers in the pitch black.

Also in a bunker, in the Leepa Valley, Pakistan-Administered Kashmir – one of the most militarised and vulnerable valleys in the region – was Shams Ur Rehman and family. It is Shams’s own bunker, but that night he shared it with 36 other people, he said.

Leepa is surrounded on three sides by the LoC and Indian-administered territory, so Shams was used to living with cross-border tensions. But he was not prepared for the complete destruction of his house.

He left the bunker at three in the morning to survey the scene.

“Everything was gone. Wooden beams and debris from the house were scattered everywhere. The blast was so powerful, the shockwave pushed in the main wall. The metal sheets on the roof were shredded. The entire structure shifted – by at least two inches.

“A house is a person’s life’s work. You’re always trying to improve it – but in the end, it’s all gone in seconds.”

Four hours later, back in the Neelum Valley, Umaima and her family also emerged on Saturday 10 May to a transformed landscape.

“We came out of the bunker at seven in the morning. That’s when we saw – nothing was left.”

As Umaima surveyed the ruins of her village, India and Pakistan’s forces that day were trading ever more destructive blows – firing missiles at each other’s military installations, which both sides accused the other of instigating.

India had targeted three Pakistani air bases, including one in Rawalpindi – the garrison city that houses the Pakistan Army’s General Headquarters.

“This was a red line crossed,” said one Pakistani officer. “The prime minister gave the go-ahead to the army chief. We already had a plan, and our forces were desperately ready to execute it… For anyone in uniform, it was one of those unforgettable days.”

Pakistan hit back at Indian military installations. On the diplomatic front, this was seen as a moment to highlight the issue of Kashmir on the international stage, an official in the Pakistan foreign office told the BBC.

“It was non-stop. Endless meetings, coordination, and back-to-back calls to and from other countries for both foreign minister and then the prime minister. We welcomed mediation offers from the US, the Saudis, the Iranians, or anyone who could help de-escalate.”

On the Indian side, the Pahalgam attack on 22 April had already prompted External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar to speak to at least 17 world leaders or diplomats, including UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In most of these conversations, he has tweeted, the emphasis had been on the “cross-border terrorist attack” and focused on building a case to hold the perpetrators accountable for the attack.

Then, on Saturday afternoon local time, in the aftermath of the latest missile exchanges, came a diplomatic breakthrough out of nowhere. US President Donald Trump took to social media to reveal that a ceasefire had been agreed.

“After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE.

“Congratulations to both Countries on using Common Sense and Great Intelligence,” he wrote on social media platform Truth Social.

India has since downplayed Washington’s role in the ceasefire and it has rejected that trade was used as a lever to achieve this.

Behind the scenes, US mediators, diplomatic backchannels and regional players, including the US, the UK and Saudi Arabia, had proved critical in negotiating the climbdown, experts say.

“We hit Pakistani strategic bases deep inside their territory and that must have worried the US,” the Indian government source believes.

In Pahalgam, the site of the militant gun attack that sparked the crisis, the search is still on for the perpetrators.

Vinay Narwal, a 26-year-old Indian Navy officer, was on his honeymoon in Pahalgam when he was killed. He had got married just a week before the attack.

A photo of Vinay’s wife Himanshi, sitting near her husband’s body following the attack, has been widely shared on social media.

His grandfather Hawa Singh Narwal wants “exemplary punishment” for the killers.

“This terrorism should end. Today, I lost my grandson. Tomorrow, someone else will lose their loved one,” he said.

A witness to the attack’s aftermath, Rayees Ahmad Bhat, who used to lead pony treks to the beauty spot where the shootings took place, said his industry was now in ruins.

“The attackers may have killed tourists that day, but we – the people of Pahalgam – are dying every day since. They’ve stained the name of this peaceful town… Pahalgam is terrorised, and its people broken.”

The attack was a huge shock for a government which had begun to actively promote tourism in stunningly picturesque Kashmir, famed for its lush valleys, lakes and snow-capped mountains.

The source in the Indian administration said this might have lulled Delhi into a false sense of security.

“Perhaps we got carried away by the response to tourism in Kashmir. We thought we were over a hump but we were not.”

The four-day conflict has once again shown how fragile peace can be between the two nations.

Sharing a dirty cell with a dozen others, constant sleep deprivation, cells with lights on 24-hours a day; poor hygiene and forced labour. These are some of what prisoners in Chinese jails are subjected to, according to Australian citizen Matthew Radalj, who spent five years at the Beijing No 2 prison – a facility used for international inmates.

Radalj, who is now living outside China, has decided to go public about his experience, and described undergoing and witnessing severe physical punishment, forced labour, food deprivation and psychological torture.

The BBC has been able to corroborate Radalj’s testimony with several former prisoners who were behind bars at the same time he was.

Many requested anonymity, because they feared retribution on loved ones still living inside the country. Others said they just wanted to try to forget the experience and move on.

The Chinese government has not responded to the BBC’s request for comment.

“I was in really bad shape when I arrived. They beat me for two days straight in the first police station that I was in. I hadn’t slept or eaten or had water for 48 hours and then I was forced to sign a big stack of documents,” said Radalj of his introduction to imprisonment in China, which began with his arrest on 2 January, 2020.

The former Beijing resident claims he was wrongfully convicted after a fight with shopkeepers at an electronics market, following a dispute over the agreed price to fix a mobile phone screen.

He claims he ended up signing a false confession to robbery, after being told it would be pointless to try to defend his innocence in a system with an almost 100% criminal conviction rate and in the hope that this would reduce the time of his incarceration.

Court documents indicate that this worked at least to some extent, earning him a four-year sentence.

Once in prison, he said he first had to spend many months in a separate detention centre where he was subjected to a more brutal “transition phase”.

During this time prisoners must follow extremely harsh rules in what he described as horrific conditions.

“We were banned from showering or cleaning ourselves, sometimes for months at a time. Even the toilet could be used only at specific allotted times, and they were filthy – waste from the toilets above would constantly drip down on to us.”

Eventually he was admitted to the “normal” prison where inmates had to bunk together in crowded cells and where the lights were never turned off.

You also ate in the same room, he said.

According to Radalj, African and Pakistani prisoners made up the largest groups in the facility, but there were also men being held from Afghanistan, Britain, the US, Latin America, North Korea and Taiwan. Most of them had been convicted for acting as drug mules.

Radalj said that prisoners were regularly subjected to forms of what he described as psychological torture.

One of these was the “good behaviour points system” which was a way – at least in theory – to reduce your sentence.

Prisoners could obtain a maximum of 100 good behaviour points per month for doing things like studying Communist Party literature, working in the prison factory or snitching on other prisoners. Once 4,200 points were accumulated, they could in theory be used to reduce prison time.

If you do the maths, that would mean a prisoner would have to get maximum points every single month for three-and-half years before this could start to work.

Radalj said that in reality it was used as a means of psychological torture and manipulation.

He claims the guards would deliberately wait till an inmate had almost reached this goal and then penalise them on any one of a huge list of possible infractions which would cancel out points at the crucial time.

These infractions included – but were not limited to – hoarding or sharing food with other prisoners, walking “incorrectly” in the hallway by straying from a line painted on the ground, hanging socks on a bed incorrectly, or even standing too close to the window.

Other prisoners who spoke about the points system to the BBC described it as a mind game designed to crush spirits.

Former British prisoner Peter Humphrey, who spent two years in detention in Shanghai, said his facility had a similar points calculation and reduction system which was manipulated to control prisoners and block sentence reductions.

“There were cameras everywhere, even three to a cell,” he said. “If you crossed a line marked on the ground and were caught by a guard or on camera, you would be punished. The same if you didn’t make your bed properly to military standard or didn’t place your toothbrush in the right place in the cell.

“There was also group pressure on prisoners with entire cell groups punished if one prisoner did any of these things.”

One ex-inmate told the BBC that in his five years in prison, he never once saw the points actually used to mitigate a sentence.

Radalj said that there were a number of prisoners – including himself – who didn’t bother with the points system.

So authorities resorted to other means of applying psychological pressure.

These included cutting time off monthly family phone calls or the reduction of other perceived benefits.

But the most common daily punishment involved the reduction of food.

The BBC has been told by numerous former inmates that the meals at Beijing’s No 2 prison were mostly made up of cabbage in dirty water which sometimes also had bits of carrot and, if they were lucky, small slivers of meat.

They were also given mantou – a plain northern Chinese bread. Most of the prisoners were malnourished, Radalj added.

Another prisoner described how inmates ate a lot of mantou, as they were always hungry. He said that their diets were so low in nutrition – and they could only exercise outside for half an hour each week – that they developed flimsy upper bodies but retained bloated looking stomachs from consuming so much of the mantou.

Prisoners were given the opportunity to supplement their diet by buying meagre extra rations, if money from relatives had been put into what were called their “accounts”: essentially a prison record of funds delivered to purchase provisions like soap or toothpaste.

They could also use this to purchase items like instant noodles or soy milk powder. But even this “privilege” could be taken away.

Radalj said he was blocked from making any extra purchases for 14 months because he refused to work in the prison factory, where inmates were expected to assemble basic goods for companies or compile propaganda leaflets for the ruling Communist Party.

To make things worse, they were made to work on a “farm”, where they did manage to grow a lot of vegetables, but were never allowed to eat them.

Radalj said the farm was displayed to a visiting justice minister as an example of how impressive prison life was.

But, he said, it was all for show.

“We would be growing tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages and okra and then – at the end of the season – they would push it all into a big hole and bury it,” he added.

“And if you were caught with a chilli or a cucumber in general population you would go straight to solitary confinement for eight months.”

Another prisoner said they would occasionally suddenly receive protein, like a chicken leg, to make their diet look better when officials visited the prison.

Humphrey said there were similar food restrictions in his Shanghai prison, adding that this led to power struggles among the inmates: “The kitchen was run by prison labour. Those who worked there stole the best stuff and it could then be distributed.”

Radalj described a battle between African and Taiwanese groups in Beijing’s Prison No 2 over this issue.

The Nigerian inmates were working in the kitchen and “were getting small benefits, like a bag of apples once a month or some yogurt or a couple of bananas”, he said.

Then the Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese inmates were able to convince the guards to let them take over, giving them control of precious extra food items.

This led to a large brawl, and Radalj said he was caught in the middle of it. He was sent to solitary confinement for 194 days after hitting another prisoner.

Inside solitary, he finally had the lights turned off only to realise he’d be with very little light nearly all of the time, giving him the opposite sensory problem.

His small food ration was also cut in half. There were no reading materials and there was nobody to talk to while he was held in a bare room of 1.2 by 1.8 metres (4ft by 6ft) for half a year.

“You start to go crazy, whether you like it or not, and that’s what solitary is designed to do… So you’ve got to decide very quickly whether your room is really, really small, or really, really big.

“After four months, you just start talking to yourself all the time. The guards would come by and ask ‘Hey, are you okay?’. And you’re like, ‘why?’. They replied, ‘because you’re laughing’.”

Then, Radalj said, he would respond, in his own mind: “It’s none of your business.”

Another feature of Chinese prison life, according to Radalji, was the fake “propaganda” moments officials would stage for Chinese media or visiting officials to paint a rosy picture of conditions there.

He said, at one point, a “computer suite” was set up. “They got everyone together and told us that we’d get our own email address and that we would be able to send emails. They then filmed three Nigerian guys using these computers.”

The three prisoners apparently looked confused because the computers were not actually connected to the internet – but the guards had told them to just “pretend”.

“Everything was filmed to present a fake image of prisoners with access to computers,” Radalj said.

But, he claims, soon after the photo opportunity, the computers were wrapped up in plastic and never touched again.

Throughout much of the ordeal, Radalj had been secretly keeping a journal by peeling open Covid masks and writing tiny sentences inside, with the help of some North Korean prisoners, who have also since been released.

“I would be writing, and the Koreans would say: ‘No smaller… smaller!’.”

Radalj said many of the prisoners had no way of letting their families know they were in jail.

Some had not made phone calls to their relatives because no money had been placed in their accounts for phone calls. For others, their embassies had not registered family telephone numbers for the prison phone system. Only calls to officially approved numbers worked.

So, after word got round that the Australian was planning to try to smuggle his notes out, they passed on details to connect with their families.

“I had 60 or 70 people hoping I could contact their loved ones after I got out to tell them what was happening.”

He wrapped the pieces of Covid mask as tight as he could with sticky tape hoarded from the factory and tried to swallow the egg-sized bundle without the guards seeing.

But he couldn’t keep it down.

The guards saw what was happening on camera and started asking, “Why are you vomiting? Why do you keep gagging? What’s wrong?”

So, he gave up and hid the bundle instead.

When he was about to leave on 5 October 2024, he was given his old clothes which had been ripped five years earlier in the struggle over his initial arrest.

There was a tear in the lining of his jacket and he quickly dropped the notes inside before a guard could see him.

Radalj said he thinks someone told the prison officers of his plan because they searched his room and questioned him before he left.

“Did you forget something?” the guards asked.

“They trashed all my belongings. I was thinking they’re gonna take me back to solitary confinement. There will be new charges.”

But the guard holding his clothes never knew the secret journal had been slipped inside.

“They were like, ‘Get out of here!’. And it wasn’t until I was on the plane, and we had already left, and the seat belt sign was switched off, that I reached into my jacket to check.”

The notes were still there.

Just before he had boarded the plane in Beijing a policeman who had escorted him to the gate had used Radalj’s boarding pass to buy duty free cigarettes for his mates.

“He said don’t come back to China. You’re banned for 10 years. And I said ‘yeah cool. Don’t smoke. It’s bad for your health'”.

The officer laughed.

He arrived back in Australia and hugged his father at Perth airport. The tears were flowing.

Then he got married to his long-time girlfriend and now they spend their days making candles and other products.

Radalj says he is still angry about his experience and has a long way to go to recover properly.

But he is making his way through the contact list of his former inmate friends – “I have spent the best part of six months contacting their families, lobbying their embassies so they might try to do a better job of helping them during their incarceration.”

Some of them, he said, haven’t spoken to people back home for nearly a decade. And helping them has also helped with the transition back to his old life.

“With freedom comes a great sense of gratitude,” Radalj says. “You have a deeper appreciation for the very simplest things in life. But I also have a great sense of responsibility to the people I left behind in prison.”

A woman balancing a dozen cocktails on a tray atop her head inched carefully through the steadily building crowds and chaos on Saturday morning at the Pimlico Race Course clubhouse.

“How much is that,” a man in purple trousers yelled towards her, the glassware inches above her eyebrow clanking as she paused.

“Twenty dollars,” she replied.

Ray De Rubin repeated the number in disbelief, mumbled an expletive under his breath, then said: “I’ll take two.”

He and his mother were at Pimlico for the first time – here to wager on US horse racing’s esteemed Preakness Stakes on its 150th anniversary. Just two weeks ago, during his 14th trip to the Kentucky Derby, he won big.

“This is the exact same outfit I wore on Derby day. Same underwear, same socks, same hat,” he said. “I still got my Derby wristband on.”

His wager at Pimlico? “I can’t tell you. I don’t want the IRS coming after me,” he said with a grin.

On the other side of Pimlico – just beyond the thousand-dollar seats, champagne flutes, and air-conditioned tents on the infield – five thoroughbreds idled behind the starting line. Mr De Rubin had bets on three of them.

There was a brief moment of quiet before the race. Then the gates flung open, and the horses took off. Mr De Rubin, eyes fixed on the screens above, stood frozen. But only for a moment.

“I get really loud when I watch the race. I put a lot of work into this,” he said.

One of three annual thoroughbred races – along with the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes – that make up what is known as the Triple Crown, the Preakness Stakes has long been known as one of the most glamorously bacchanal events in US sports. Held at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Maryland, it brings together the rowdy and the rich. But this year, its traditions have been thrown into question.

In his second term as president, Donald Trump has enforced swift, dramatic economic policy changes, leading to significant consumer pessimism. Virtually no corner of the American market has been spared – from the fast-food hamburger to the Preakness Stakes.

Much of the current market-rattling turmoil is a result of Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, announced on 2 April. Dubbed “Liberation Day”, he said the new economic strategy would usher in “the golden age of America”. Instead, in the 48 hours after his announcement, the S&P 500 had its worst two-day sell-off in years, as trillions of dollars were wiped from the stock market.

Three weeks later, the International Monetary Fund warned of a global recession. Even McDonald’s reported a drop in sales, which the burger chain’s CEO attributed to customers “grappling with uncertainty”. But while the stock market has mostly recovered following tariff agreements with the UK and China, the tariffs’ impact may be just beginning; mega corporations like Walmart and Amazon recently warned of price increases.

But at Pimlico, the state of Maryland is betting big, with plans to demolish the track right after Saturday’s event and rebuild a new course in its place, plus a state-of-the-art training facility.

The tariffs’ shadow looms here, too. “We expect there to be some kind of impact,” the Maryland Stadium Authority told the BBC in a statement. But for now, they said the effects on the half-billion dollar project remains unclear.

Aside from tariffs, horse race attendance has shrunk in recent years. Just over 46,000 people attended the Preakness in 2024, down from the 131,000 that attended in 2019. The Derby drew a much larger crowd of roughly 150,000 this year but was still well under its peak of 170,000 in 2015.

Bill Carstanjen, CEO of the Derby’s home, Churchill Downs, said a dip in sales this year was due to buyer “hesitancy” that “correlates perfectly” with Trump’s tariffs.

“We didn’t have the endless pool of demand that we’ve seen in prior years,” Mr Carstanjen told the Lexington Herald.

Still, gambling records this year were broken at the Derby and Preakness. Over a week before the Preakness and before the horses running were finalised, a Preakness record of $348,000 was wagered on betting futures, up from last year’s record of $260,000. All just a drop in the bucket compared to the millions that will be wagered by the time the last horse crosses the finish line.

University of Kansas economics professor Justin Balthrop told the BBC that a rise in gambling also could be a sign of economic distress.

“People who reach a certain level of despair will start to take on more risk, in an effort to literally gamble their way back to a place where they feel like they can be more comfortable,” Professor Balthrop said.

“You combine that with this idea that maybe they are so pessimistic, that this gives them the dopamine rush or endorphin release.”

Waiting in a long line on Pimlico’s infield, Anthony Walker was among those looking for “a little reprieve”.

He was glad “to be able to take a few hours away from all that instability” in the stock market as well as the disruption caused by Trump’s downsizing of the federal government.

Mr Walker planned to gamble – “you can’t come to the race without putting a little something out there” – but a bit less than he might have in more certain times.

“I’m wagering 50% less, for sure,” he estimated. “Because of what’s happening in the economy – the way this administration is taking a wrecking ball to the longstanding traditions and institutions that give credence to the American way of life.”

At the Preakness, there are still endless ways to get a quick dose of gambling-induced dopamine. Even for as little as 10 cents.

“I’ve seen a 10 cent (wager) pay $75,000,” said Peter Rotondo, who heads racing and wagering for 1/ST, the organisation running Preakness.

To do so, one would have to wager on what’s called a superfecta: correctly guessing which four horses will place in the top four in the exact order, odds that are about on par with getting struck by lightning.

“That’s the beauty of the super,” Mr Rotondo said.

The pricey cocktail Mr De Rubin grumbled about is the Black-Eyed Susan, also Maryland’s official flower. The crazed concoction – bourbon, vodka, and a splash of mixers – leaves one to wonder whether it’s truly a tribute to the state flower or a wink to the likely black eye after having too many.

The drink is one of many traditions at the annual event. There’s also the decades-old Tiffany & Co-made trophy called the Woodlawn Vase, considered “the most valuable trophy in sports”. Made of 30lb of sterling silver, it’s valued at an estimated $4m (£3m), and thus is kept in a museum most of the year. The Preakness winner leaves with a replica.

But for many, the Preakness wouldn’t be the Preakness without the party on the infield.

“I went a lot in my 20s and 30s. It was an absolutely crazy party,” Bobby Duke, 51, said in an email to the BBC. “In 1998, a guy jumped the fence and tried to punch a horse while racing. It’s on YouTube.”

Though Pimlico always had offerings for elegant, fans like Mr Duke fondly remember piling into the infield for “the most salacious party on the sports calendar”, as ESPN once put it, where patrons would race across a long row of porta-pottys while dodging beer cans hurled at them by inebriated onlookers. (That tradition ended around 2009, when Pimlico stopped its BYOB policy.)

Maryland officials said the new Pimlico will become a year-round racing facility, and hopefully bring an economic boost to the low-income Park Heights neighbourhood surrounding it.

In his purple pants and every-colour-of-the-rainbow shirt, Mr De Rubin grew agitated as his luck began to unravel during the five-horse race.

“(Horse number five) is dead last. I don’t think they’re going to catch this,” he said with growing animation, rattling the ice in his Black-Eyed Susan. He placed bets on horses one, three and five.

“Oh, (crap), the three horse. Here comes the one horse. Come on, one!”

In a span of about three minutes, the anticipation, anxiety, fear and hope all came crashing to an end. Mr De Rubin didn’t win. But he didn’t lose either. The even spread on the winning horse basically gave him back what he put into it.

He compared the experience to today’s seesaw stock market.

“Investing, and betting on horses, is gambling. You have ups and downs,” he said.

His stock portfolio has taken a wild downward spin through Trump’s global tariff tit-for-tat. But recently it sprang back into the green and is up around 20%, he said.

Unlike the horses, “you can’t watch the market. It’ll give you a heart attack”, he advised.

“I have faith in Trump. He’s a little crazy with it right now, but it’ll all work out.”

A photographer has spent a decade carrying out “garden safaris” in order to capture the diversity and beauty of Britain’s back garden wildlife.

The images, including battling birds and squabbling squirrels, showed just what could be found “under our noses”, said Andrew Fusek Peters.

“I wanted to celebrate the everyday stories and reveal the beauty of our birds, mammals and insects that live alongside us,” the Shropshire photographer added.

Hundreds of his images feature in a new book.

The majority of the photographs were taken in his “modest” garden, and local village of Lydbury.

“You don’t have to travel to nature reserves or mountains,” he said.

“I sometimes get snobbery from the big photographers who go to Africa and do the lions and tigers, or Greenland for the Polar bears,” he explained.

“And they think I’m somehow inferior because I do blue tits in the garden.”

But, he added, capturing rare images such as a hare feeding her leveret on someone’s back lawn was “just amazing”.

“At the time I took it, that had been photographed maybe less than 10 times in the world,” he said.

“It was sheer gold on my memory card.”

He had also travelled to other parts of the UK in order to capture other “extraordinary moments,” including a fox family playing in Clapham, south London, and a pair of red squirrels on the Isle of Wight.

Mr Fusek Peters started concentrating on his own garden wildlife after a diagnosis of bowel cancer in 2018, perfecting a technique to “make time stop” to get shots of birds and butterflies taking off and in mid flight.

Using his kitchen as a hide, he has also taken rare pictures of birds – showing the effect of diffraction on their wings, giving a rainbow effect.

“This winter I got a woodpecker and a nuthatch” he said, adding the images were “extraordinary”.

“Everyone’s going to accuse me of using AI, but it’s not – it’s actually scientific.”

He added he was “one of the few in the world” to have taken such images.

“I just seem to have this blessed luck when I concentrate on what’s out of the kitchen window.”

The book was also a “rallying cry” to transform “over-manicured spaces into more wildlife friendly havens,” he said.

“These places are important, I think they really are,” he added.

“As we know with climate change and with what’s happening with habitat a lot of species are really suffering, and that includes our garden visitors so it’s important to showcase them.

“They are just as important as all the wonderful creatures of the jungle and the desert,” he added.

Springwatch presenter Iolo Williams said of the book, Garden Safari: “Andrew makes the ordinary look extraordinary – stunning photography which helps to emphasise the importance of our gardens for wildlife.”

“I think this is the best compliment I’ve ever had,” the photographer commented.

“It’s a cold world out there. We need to huddle together.”

So said a European Union diplomat to me, confident of the magnetising effect on both the EU and the UK of the world having changed so significantly since the original Brexit deal.

Both sides privately talk up what is seen as the remorseless logic of closer defence and security ties.

The British government, in trying to ensure it has the political space to justify a (partial) re-writing or tweaking of the relationship, talks of now being in “the mid 2020s” as a reminder of the time that has elapsed, and events that have unfolded, since all the noise, negotiations, anger and elections that leaving the EU provoked.

Without question, Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine and President Trump’s overt reluctance to subsidise European security as he sees it have changed the conversation about defence.

Whatever your views about Brexit, a word of warning: the next 24 hours or so might be triggering if the kind of headlines and phrases that made the news for years on end became mildly off-putting roughly between 2016 and 2020.

There will be talk of haggling, of fish, of sovereignty, of cash and of courts. And we have already had senior figures on both sides talking about last-minute tweaks and that old favourite in the phraseology of EU negotiations: “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

It feels like a landmark moment. After the years of Brexit noise, there were the years of (relative) Brexit silence. Now, it is returning to the news again.

What will change is actually relatively narrowly defined – the government has promised it won’t take the UK back into three of the biggest pillars of the EU: its customs union, single market or the freedom of movement of people around the bloc.

But that much accepted, there is plenty that is being talked about.

Over the weekend, the negotiations rumbled on, led on the UK side by Nick Thomas Symonds, the minister in charge of the UK’s relations with the EU.

Alongside him has been Michael Ellam, who returned to government in January to lea, at an officials-level, the negotiations with the EU. Ellam was previously director of communications in Downing Street when Gordon Brown was prime minister.

In the last hours, the talks took place virtually.

At various points in recent months they have happened face to face.

So what can, or should, we expect?

The Labour manifesto from last year’s general election is worth a look as both both a guide to what the government wants, and a tool to scrutinise what they manage to pull off.

Here is what it says:

On page 117, the party wrote that it wanted “an improved and ambitious relationship with the European Union” which would “deepen ties.”

On the following page, it promises to “improve the UK’s trade and investment relationship with the European Union” and remove “unnecessary barriers to trade.”

It adds that they want a “veterinary agreement,” which is diplomatic-speak for making it easier to move food around, an arrangement to make it easier for touring artists such as bands to travel, the mutual recognition of professional qualifications and a security pact.

So, when we get the details, we can measure what has already been achieved, where there is broad agreement but not yet agreement on the specifics, where there is no agreement at all and where things have been signed up to that were not in the manifesto.

We can expect both sides to herald the importance of improved defence and security cooperation.

Ministers have also been talking up the removal of queues for Brits visiting EU countries.

What does the EU want?

It is very keen on a youth mobility scheme, allowing young people from the UK and EU to travel more easily.

After months of denying it had any plans for such a scheme, the government has in recent weeks been acknowledging publicly that one is being discussed and has started to sell what they see as its merits.

The government is keenly aware that some will see it as freedom of movement by the back door.

Let’s see precisely what, if any, details have been agreed and what the scheme is called.

Then there is fish, never far away when the EU negotiates.

And then two Brexit perennials: cash and courts.

What is the UK willing to pay to access various EU schemes and what role will the European Union’s court have in settling any disputes?

Some of those who long argued for Brexit and would now see themselves as custodians of the deal Boris Johnson negotiated worry that the government will sign up to what is known as “dynamic alignment” – an acceptance not just of EU rules now in a certain area, but an agreement to accept them if they change in the future.

They would see this as a fundamental dilution of a key tenet of Brexit and, critics point out, it was not in the Labour manifesto.

So again, detail will be key here when we see what has been agreed.

Sir Keir Starmer will argue his manifesto and his majority gives him a mandate for closer ties and can point to opinion polls that also suggest support for negotiating a closer relationship.

He will argue that a deal with the EU, alongside the ones with India and the United States announced this month, show a willingness to both leverage the freedoms of Brexit while getting what he will see as a better relationship with Brussels.

But it is also true that he risks inflaming all those old Brexit rows, angering Brexiteers and doing little to pacify those who have long hated Brexit.

Endangered water voles in Wales are being fed edible glitter in a bid to save them from extinction.

Once commonly found across south Wales, water voles are now effectively extinct in all but a few locations, according to the Wildlife Trust.

With their future hanging in the balance, conservationists have been looking for new ways to track the naturally shy individuals in the wild – which is where the glitter comes in.

Nature Conservation Cymru hopes that by offering the animals something sparkly to eat, the sparkle should come out the other end – providing some much-needed answers.

Rob Parry, chief executive of Nature Conservation Cymru, said his team had consulted with vets to ensure the edible and biodegradable glitter – the type used to decorate cakes – would not be harmful to the semi-aquatic creatures.

“It’s something that we’ve done in nature conservation before for other species, for badgers in particular where we use pellets to put in with peanuts, which badgers love,” said Mr Parry.

“So we’ve taken that idea and scaled it down to water vole size, which means using glitter.”

The hope is that if the water voles are willing to consume the glitter then it will come out in their poo, allowing the small mammals – which are often mistaken for brown rats – to be tracked by conservationists.

Different colours of glitter could be used to allow conservationists to track different families of water voles and how far they range.

It might sound like a fun idea, but Mr Parry and his team could not be more serious.

If they can track where water voles are located in the wild, they can make adjustments to the environment – like removing invasive conifers from wetland habitats or fencing off certain riverbanks to stop sheep grazing.

Measures like this could help the species to disperse through the landscape undisturbed and potentially be a life-saving intervention.

“We’ll be able to see the types of territory, the size and where they go in,” said Mr Parry.

“Are they just using the linear features, the ditches, or are they spreading out into the bog and the molinia grassland habitat?

“That will be really crucial for when it comes to planning for our upland habitats.”

The team is first testing out their theory on some captive-bred water voles which are part of a wider Natural Resources Wales (NRW) project to reintroduce colonies into the wild.

The glitter is spread onto chunks of apple, not part of their normal diet in the wild, but a food the animals love and do well on in captivity, according to Richard Davies from NRW.

“They get everything they need from apples, carrots, and some dried rabbit food as well,” he said.

He has successfully bred hundreds of water voles which have been reintroduced into the wild, though he said their release was no guarantee of survival.

“Most predators in the UK would quite happily take a water vole. They need to be able to cope with this heavy predation and replace themselves a lot,” he said.

With a BBC News camera present, the glittery purple apple was placed on top of the straw bedding which covered the water voles’ pen.

After 20 minutes, the food remained untouched, but an hour later most of it had disappeared.

The success of the project, however, does not just depend on the appetite of the water voles, but how well the glitter can retain its shine from end to end.

Mr Parry said without interventions like this, the future for water voles was uncertain.

“It’s been a perfect storm of bad things that’s happened to water voles in the last few decades,” he said.

“We have drained an awful lot of their wetland habitat, forced them into linear ditches where we find them now, and then the biggest problem is the American mink, an invasive species that was let out and released from pens and they just turned out to be the perfect water vole predators. The water voles don’t stand a chance, really.”

But now, at least, he is more hopeful.

The water voles, known for being nervous about any changes to to their environment, had not rejected the glitter.

So, did the experiment work?

Just 24 hours later, a tiny glittery poo was spotted.

The conservation team was elated.

In July last year, Jesús Cometa was shot at as he was driving through the Cauca Valley in southwest Colombia.

Gunmen on motorbikes pulled up alongside his car and sprayed it with bullets. Mr Cometa escaped uninjured but his bodyguard was hit.

“He still has a bullet lodged in his chest,” he says.

Mr Cometa is one of thousands of trade unionists who have been attacked in recent years in Colombia which, by some measurements, is the most dangerous place in the world for organised labour.

The Cauca Valley is home to the country’s sugar industry, and he is a local representative of Sintrainagro, Colombia’s largest agricultural trade union.

“When you take on these roles in the union, you lose your social life,” Mr Cometa says. “You can’t just go and hang out in a crowded bar, or on a street corner, because you never know when you might be targeted.

“Your family suffers too because they know that they’re also targets.”

This is a problem with a long history.

In his ground-breaking novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombia’s Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez famously highlighted the massacre of workers on banana plantations in the country in the 1920s.

The Labour Ministry says that since the early 1970s, well over 3,000 trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia.

And even though the nation is more peaceful than it once was, the attacks continue.

“For many years now already, unfortunately, Colombia is the deadliest country in the world for trade unionists and for trade union work,” says Luc Triangle, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), a global umbrella organization based in Brussels.

Every year the ITUC publishes a survey of the atrocities carried out against trade unionists around the world. Its most recent edition covers the year to the end of March 2024.

It found that in those 12 months, 22 trade unionists were killed for their activism around the world. Eleven of them were murdered in Colombia.

“Generally, these are targeted murders,” Mr Triangle says. “They know what they are doing. They know who they want to murder.

“It’s not targeting the big bosses of the trade unions or the leaders. They are targeting in small villages people that are doing active trade union work.

“Between 2020 and 2023, we recorded 45 murders in Colombia. In 2022, 29 murders. It’s less violent than it once was, but it’s still very violent, certainly if you compare it with other countries.”

Why is this happening?

Fabio Arias, the head of Colombia’s largest trade union federation, the CUT, says it is all part of Colombia’s long and complex civil conflict, which pitted left-wing rebel groups against right-wing paramilitaries, drug traffickers and the Colombian state, and which still rumbles on in some parts of the country.

“The trade union movement has always been linked to the parties of the left and unfortunately the many right-wing governments we’ve had in Colombia have always claimed that anyone who is a leftist is a guerrilla, a terrorist,” Mr Arias says.

“And once you’ve established that, then people feel justified in attacking them.”

He says the attacks on workers are also linked to Colombia’s illegal economies, notably the cocaine trade and illegal mining.

“If you look at where these attacks are happening, it’s in the departments of Cauca, Nariño, Putumayo, Arauca, Norte de Santander and Caquetá, because that’s where the biggest coca plantations are, and where the illegal mining is.”

It is not clear who is carrying out these killings and who is ordering them. Some trade unionists blame the private sector, saying businesses, desperate to stifle any attempt by workers to organize, are paying armed groups to carry out these atrocities.

They point to the fact that threats and attacks tend to spike at times when businesses and unions are in wage negotiations.

But as many of the attacks go unpunished, it is difficult to know who exactly is to blame.

“In the Cauca Valley there are so many different armed groups you never really know who’s behind the attacks, who’s carrying them out, who’s ordering them,” says Zenón Escobar, another sugar cane worker and local representative of Sintrainagro.

The threats in the Cauca Valley are not limited to the sugar industry.

“In 2007, I was in a van, and guys drew up next to us on a motorbike and asked for me, and then opened fire,” recalls Jimmy Núñez, the leader of a union that represents street traders in the regional capital Cali.

“My colleague who was sitting next to me was killed, and my wife was injured. In 2010 they attacked me again, on the road between Cauca and Cali.

“They opened fire on my car. In 2012 we were attacked in a shopping centre in Cali and one of us was killed. And in 2013 my family had to leave Cauca due to threats.

“In this country social leaders and trade union leaders are killed every day.”

The government says it is doing what it can to protect trade unionists. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, heads a left-wing administration that is broadly sympathetic to the country’s workers.

In 2023, it took a step towards redressing the past by formally recognizing the trade union movement – collectively, and for the first time – as a victim of Colombia’s conflict. That gives victims a greater chance of having their cases investigated.

“We consider this as an important step to recognize the violence against trade unionists in Colombia, which was not the case before,” says Luc Triangle of the ITUC.

He also says foreign companies with operations in Colombia must do more.

“If I were the CEO of a multinational, I would question my activities in Colombia,” he says.

“There is a huge responsibility for multinational companies. They cannot have a nice code of conduct, and at the same time remain silent when trade unionists are killed.

“That’s not acceptable. Global companies and foreign investors in Colombia must step up.”

“Don’t expect miracles. But do know – everyone wants this to work.”

On Monday in London the EU and UK hold their first bilateral summit since Brexit. Symbolically, this is a big moment.

Officials and analysts I speak to, on and off the record, like the individual I just quoted, are quick to point out difficulties that exist between the two sides.

But all acknowledge the bilateral bitterness provoked by Brexit is no more. It’s been eviscerated by the gravity of global events.

Concerns about Russia and China, the war in Ukraine, the shock of the US under Donald Trump no longer prioritising European defence, plus a growing sense of voter insecurity is propelling the two powers to work closer together.

“Failure to do so, in the current international context, would not be a good look,” says Anand Menon, director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe.

Most European countries realise that, he adds: “Even the French.”

More than most EU countries, France has been playing hardball in pre-summit negotiations.

Is it a coincidence that as talks went to the wire before Monday’s summit, the UK announced that France’s president has been invited for his first state visit?

King Charles and Queen Camilla will host Emmanuel Macron and his wife at Windsor Castle in July. A UK attempt to butter up the French leader, perhaps?

“It’ll be interesting to see if they can agree common language [for a summit agreement],” says Georgina Wright, European policy expert at the Institut Montaigne.

“Everyone in the EU wants closer relations with the UK right now and France doesn’t want to be seen as the one country blocking closer UK-EU cooperation. But that does not mean that Paris is willing to give up on core interests.”

Interests like fishing rights in UK waters and bidding for EU defence contracts.

Negotiating – or to be more accurate – haggling over the “meat” of the summit will, I’m told, continue till the last moment.

On the day itself, we can expect three separate announcements:

• A joint declaration that addresses the worrying geopolitical situation and emphasises UK-EU shared foreign policy priorities – such as supporting Ukraine, keeping up pressure on Russia, and ending civilian suffering in Gaza
• An EU-UK security and defence pact
• A package of measures targeted at removing some trade barriers between the EU and UK that have come about because of Brexit

These trade measures are the “reset” of relations with the EU that UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has promised since his party won a general election last summer.

They are far from an economic gamechanger for the UK, though. Hardly what you’d call ambitious.

Destroying all trade barriers with the EU is impossible if the Labour government keeps to its own “red lines” of not rejoining the bloc’s customs union or single market.

Despite promising to prioritise UK economic growth, and polls suggesting the majority of Britons want to do more trade with the EU, Labour will feel hemmed in by the increasingly popular, Eurosceptic Reform Party.

It performed well in recent local elections in the UK.

While some in Labour (quietly) admit they are tempted by a customs union with the EU to boost growth, any economic benefits would likely not be apparent to voters before the next UK election.

Party members fear they would risk being punished at the polls, amidst accusations by the opposition Conservatives and Reform that the government would have betrayed Brexit.

These concerns make the Starmer government “more cautious, less bold”, says Mr Menon.

The UK is taking a sector-by-sector approach to try to reduce costly trade barriers with the EU.

Many EU-UK negotiating hours have gone into agreeing a plant and animal health deal, known as an SPS agreement.

This will facilitate the export and import of meat and plant products between the EU and UK and help reduce post-Brexit trade complications between Northern Ireland and Britain.

In exchange, the EU insists the UK must agree to following any new SPS rules introduced in the future and accept a role for the European Court of Justice in policing the agreement.

Those conditions will likely be unpopular with ardent Brexit supporters.

They might also put backs up in Washington and complicate the UK doing a wider future deal on agriculture with the US, as the UK would be tied to stringent EU standards.

But the Labour government knows public opinion polls suggest most people in the UK prioritise trade with the EU over the US.

Currently the EU counts for 41% of UK exports; the US for 21%.

The UK government will probably insist the SPS agreement is good for the British economy. Though animal and plant exports and imports are, in fact, a small part of overall GDP.

In reality “growth is a bit of a red herring here”, says Mr Menon.

On the EU side, the French, backed by other fishing nations like the Netherlands and Denmark, have taken a tough stance in these talks – refusing to sign up unless the UK agrees to long-term EU fishing rights in UK waters.

The current post-Brexit fishing agreement expires next year.

The reset we’ll hear about at Monday’s summit will also include a “mobility” section.

Starmer will get his ask, for the EU to recognise UK professional qualifications, to encourage cross-border business.

There will also be a reduction in visa restrictions for UK musicians travelling and performing in the EU.

In exchange, the EU – and Germany, most passionately – wants a youth mobility scheme, allowing young EU citizens to travel, study, and even work in the UK.

The UK has similar schemes with Canada, Australia, South Korea and Japan, amongst others. But this has been tricky to agree.

Reducing migration figures is a number one priority for the Labour government.

It’s a hot-button issue and the UK Home Office will seek to toughen conditions and limit EU numbers.

Negotiations are ongoing but, according to EU sources, the scheme already has a name: YES, or Youth Experience Scheme.

Some areas of negotiation are more advanced than others. This will be reflected in Monday’s announcement.

There will also be talk at the summit of plans to tackle illegal migration, cooperate on carbon border taxes, and simplify energy trading between the EU and UK.

Reducing EU-UK trade barriers on chemicals and pharmaceutical goods is also a UK ambition, as is getting access to EU databases, like the Schengen Information System, to better track down criminals.

But for now, at least, the EU is saying no to that. If it makes an exception for the UK, other non-EU countries will demand the same, it insists.

Of course, it’s in the interest of both sides to fight cross-border crime. The UK argues the current state of the world calls for more flexible thinking from Brussels.

The case for more flexible thinking is also something the UK is calling for when it comes to Monday’s defence and security pact with the EU.

The EU and UK already work closely together on Russian sanctions and defending Ukraine. And the pact isn’t a legally binding document, so how complicated can these talks be, you may ask?

The answer is pretty complicated.

The UK wants its defence companies to be allowed to bid for contracts under the EU’s new re-armament scheme, SAFE (Security Action for Europe).

“The UK has earned the right to access such a deal because of the leadership it’s shown over Ukraine,” says international defence expert Sophia Gaston, a visiting fellow at King’s College London.

“Britain is a serious player both in traditional defence capabilities, like producing munitions, and in cutting edge defence innovation, where new growth and energy is.

“If the UK has access to the emerging EU defence programmes, it can contribute to mass and pace. [The war in Ukraine] has shown that both are needed.”

But Ms Gaston admits, UK companies getting the go-ahead from Brussels is a “messy” process.

“Re-Arm EU”, as Brussels dubs its new drive, is still a work in progress, spurred by rapidly changing geopolitics, including fears the US will withdraw at least some of the crucial security support Europe has relied on since World War Two.

This is not yet a fully formed EU strategy that the UK can “pay to play” a part in, as it has done post-Brexit with the EU’s research and innovation scheme Horizon, for example.

An agreement with the UK in this defence industrial context will be brand new and bespoke. And it’s getting political.

Signing the security pact on Monday is just a step in the process.

France wants to severely restrict non-EU companies bidding for the bloc’s defence contracts, including the UK but Canadian and American firms too.

If the EU is spending its taxpayers’ money on defence, it argues it should be spent with EU companies to help boost EU economies.

Paris also says, in this rapidly changing world of shifting alliances and allegiances, the EU should be self-reliant, not dependent on suppliers outside the bloc.

Sceptics suspect France, which has a sophisticated defence industry, of wanting to hoover up lucrative EU contracts for itself.

But it looks like it is losing the internal EU argument, with the Nordics, the Baltics, Poland, Italy and the Netherlands favouring more openness on defence contracts, and particularly with the EU’s biggest economic power, Germany, championing the UK.

“Germany and France have very different attitudes towards the UK,” says German economist Armin Steinbach from think tank Bruegel.

Germany will always put relations with EU heavyweights France and Poland first, says Mr Steinbach.

But he believes the UK will be helped in defence and economic negotiations with the EU by new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who argues “a unified Europe is the absolute priority in the current geopolitical setting”.

A priority maybe, but it’s still a hugely tall order because it’s all about compromise.

Political leaders will seek to justify increases in defence spending by insisting to voters that it’s for their personal security and in the interest of their national economy, with boosts in revenue for domestic defence industries.

But achieving a pan-European industrial base – built to be efficient, avoid duplication, and to replace much of the US capacity relied on by the continent today – would mean some European countries winning more defence contracts than others.

It would also mean some national businesses shutting down, in favour of better-suited ones elsewhere on the continent.

That’s a hard sell for political leaders facing their voters.

As is another big trade-off: Big increases in defence spending will mean governments have less money to spend on public services.

The challenge for Europe is breathtaking. By comparison, Monday’s symbolic EU-UK summit, may seem like a walk in the park.

Princess Eugenie has said she “couldn’t get out of bed or do anything for myself” while recovering after scoliosis surgery as a child.

In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, the King’s niece opened up about her surgery, saying that she felt “very embarrassed” ahead of the operation and later struggled with the emotional impact of post-surgery care.

Surgeons inserted titanium rods into her spine to correct a curvature caused by scoliosis when she was 12 years old and she spent 10 days on her back after the operation.

She said that her mother, the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, helped her see the post-surgery scar on her back as a “badge of honour”.

Scoliosis is a condition where the spine twists and curves to the side. The cause of it is often unknown, and commonly starts in children aged between 10 and 15, according to the NHS.

Eugenie was treated at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, in north London, and it was four months before she was able to return to school after it.

“I had a corner room in the hospital with two windows looking out over a car park,” the 35-year-old said. “I was too young to notice I couldn’t get outside; all I cared about was where my parents and sister were.

“But I do remember watching someone waving to my incredible red-haired nurse through the window and having this feeling that I couldn’t reach them,” she said.

“I couldn’t get out of bed or do anything for myself.”

Speaking about how she felt ahead of the operation, she said she felt “very embarrassed about the whole thing”.

“I remember being woken up really early before my surgery – I pulled my blanket over my head. I said: ‘I don’t want to see anyone and I don’t want them to see me’,” she said.

The operation left a visible scar on her back and she said her mother helped to “train” her brain to think that “scars are cool”.

“She was amazing. She’d ask me if she could show it to people, then she’d turn me around and say, ‘my daughter is superhuman, you’ve got to check out her scar’,” Eugenie said.

“All of sudden it was a badge of honour – a cool thing I had,” she added.

“It became a positive memory, a part of me, that I could do something with in the future. I could help heal other people.”

The princess’s wedding dress in 2018 showed the scar at the top of her back and ahead of the wedding, she spoke of the importance of showing “people your scars”.

Speaking to ITV’s This Morning at the time, she described it as a “lovely way to honour the people who looked after me and a way of standing up for young people who also go through this”.

“I think you can change the way beauty is, and you can show people your scars and I think it’s really special to stand up for that,” she added.

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At a time when women’s participation in the film industry was frowned upon, a young woman dared to dream differently.

In 1920s pre-independence India, PK Rosy became the first female lead in Malayalam-language cinema, in what is now the southern state of Kerala.

She starred in a movie called Vigathakumaran, or The Lost Child, in the 1920s. But instead of being remembered as a pioneer, her story was buried – erased by caste discrimination and social backlash.

Rosy belonged to a lower-caste community and faced intense criticism for portraying an upper-caste woman in Vigathakumaran.

Almost a hundred years later, there is no surviving evidence of Rosy’s role. The film’s reel was destroyed and the cast and crew have all died.

Only a few pictures of the film from a contested press release dated October 1930 survive, along with an unverified black-and-white photo popularised by local newspapers as Rosy’s only portrait.

Even a Google Doodle celebrating her 120th birthday used an illustration similar to the woman in the photograph. But Rosy’s nephew and others who have researched her life told the BBC that they could not conclusively say that it is her in the picture.

PK Rosy was born as Rajamma in the early 1900s in the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore, now Kerala.

She belonged to a family of grass cutters from the Pulaya community, part of the Dalits, who are at the bottom of India’s harsh caste hierarchy and have been historically oppressed.

“People from the Pulaya community were considered slave labour and auctioned off with land,” says Malavika Binny, a professor of history at Kannur University.

“They were considered the ‘lowliest’. They were flogged, raped, tied to trees and set on fire for any so-called transgressions,” she adds.

Despite the dire social challenges, Rosy chose to dream differently.

She was supported by her uncle, who was a theatre artist himself, and with his help Rosy entered the field of entertainment.

“There are few available facts about Rosy’s life, but it is known that she was popular for her performances in local plays,” says Vinu Abraham, the author of The Lost Heroine, a novel based on Rosy’s life.

While her acting skills earned admiration, it was rare for a Dalit woman to take up acting at the time.

“She was likely aware of the fact that this was a new arena and making herself visible was important,” says Prof Binny.

She soon became a well-known figure in local theatre circles and her talent caught the eye of director JC Daniel, who was then searching for a lead actor for his film – a character named Sarojini.

Daniel was aware of Rosy’s caste identity and chose to cast her in the role.

“She was paid five rupees a day for 10 days of filming,” said Mr Abraham. “This was a substantial amount of money in the 1920s.”

On the day of the film’s premiere, Rosy and her family were barred from attending the screening.

They were stopped because they were Dalits, Rosy’s nephew Biju Govindan says.

And so began a chain of events that pushed Rosy out of the public eye and her home.

“The crowd that came to watch the movie were provoked by two things: Rosy playing an upper-caste woman and the hero picking a flower from her hair and kissing it in one scene,” said Mr Abraham.

“They started throwing rocks at the screen and chased Daniel away,” he added.

There are differing accounts of the extent of the damage to the theatre but what is clear is the toll the incident took on both Rosy and Daniel.

Daniel had spent a lot of money to establish a studio and gather resources to produce the film, and was heavily debt-ridden. Facing immense social and financial pressure, the director, who is now widely regarded as the father of Malayalam cinema, never made another film.

Rosy fled her hometown after an angry mob set her house on fire.

She cut all ties with her family to avoid being recognised and never spoke publicly about her past. She rebuilt her life by marrying an upper-caste man and took the name Rajammal.

She lived the rest of her life in obscurity in the town of Nagercoil in Tamil Nadu, Mr Abraham says.

Her children refused to accept that PK Rosy, the Dalit actor, was their mother, Rosy’s nephew Mr Govindan says.

“Her children were born with an upper-caste Kesavan Pillai’s identity. They chose their father’s seed over their mother’s womb,” he says.

“We, her family, are part of PK Rosy’s Dalit identity before the film’s release,” he said.

“In the space they inhabit, caste restricts them from accepting their Dalit heritage. That is their reality and our family has no place in it.”

In 2013, a Malayalam TV channel tracked down Rosy’s daughter Padma, who was living in financial strain somewhere in Tamil Nadu. She told them that she did not know much about her mother’s life before her marriage but that she did not act after that.

The BBC made attempts to contact Rosy’s children, but their relatives said they were not comfortable with the attention.

Prof Binny says that the erasure of Rosy’s legacy shows how deeply caste-based trauma can run.

“It can be so intense that it shapes or defines the rest of one’s life,” she says, adding that she is glad Rosy eventually found a safe space.

In recent years, Dalit filmmakers and activists have sought to reclaim Rosy’s legacy. Influential Tamil director Pa Ranjith has launched a yearly film festival in her name which celebrates Dalit cinema. A film society and foundation have also been established.

But there is still a haunting sense that while Rosy was ultimately saved, it was at the cost of her passion and identity.

“Rosy prioritised survival over art and, as a result, never tried to speak publicly or reclaim her lost identity. That’s not her failure – it’s society’s,” says Mr Govindan.

Subjected to brutal bullying as a child, Amit Ghose says he still has to deal with constant staring, pointing and comments, and has even been refused service in a cafe because of his face.

The 35-year-old from Birmingham described how visiting an independent coffee shop in London recently “everyone was staring at me, and it was like they’d almost seen a ghost”.

“The person serving looked at me and said: ‘Oh, we’re not serving any more’.

“She turned around and walked off. But clearly, clearly they were still serving.”

Amit was born with Neurofibromatosis type 1, a condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow along nerves.

But after “learning acceptance” of his facial disfigurement he now shares his motivational story in schools with the aim of helping children “embrace their personalities and celebrate who they are”.

Another recent experience of abuse spurred him on to self publish a children’s book, Born Different.

“I had a couple of individuals come over to me in a park and ask me what happened to my face, and I thought they were just being curious,” he said.

“But actually they started laughing, giggling, saying: ‘Oh my God, if I had a face like you I wouldn’t even come out my house’.”

He said the encounter “really upset” him, “and I thought to myself, I need to do something about this. I need to get this book out. Now is the right time”.

“If I had this book when I was a young child, I think it would have helped me.”

Amit had his left eye surgically removed at the age of 11, leading to further facial disfigurement as well as abuse and bullying.

In the run up to Halloween one year, a child at school told him “you don’t need a Halloween mask, you’ve got one for life”, he recalled.

“That broke me to the point where I did not accept the left hand side of my face,” he said.

“For a very, very long time I hid the face, I just was not comfortable showing it to the world at all.”

Looking back, he said he had not understood the depth of depression and anxiety he experienced then.

“Other children not wanting to come and sit next to me or hiding behind their parents all had a mental effect on me,” he said.

At school, cricket was his passion and it was through playing the game that he eventually made friends.

“Cricket helped me become Amit, that boy who plays cricket, from Amit, the boy who has a funny face,” he explained.

But, he said, even as an adult he still experienced “constant staring”.

“The pointing, the tapping the friend next to them saying ‘have you seen that guy’s face’, that is also constant,” he said.

“But there is kindness out there as well, and that needs highlighting.”

It was his wife Piyali who eventually taught him the “art of acceptance,” he explained.

“Really that I’ve got to accept myself before others can accept me,” he added.

She also persuaded him to start sharing his story on social media.

“I thought TikTok was all about singing and dancing, and I thought maybe not, but she convinced me.

“I created a video and I said to the world: ‘I want to take you all on a journey to help and support and inspire you using my lived experiences.'”

He started his account in early 2023, and has since gone on to gain almost 200,000 followers and millions of likes.

“Me helping people on social media by sharing my story has helped me become more accepting of myself.

“Now I say to the world, this is me, take it or leave it.”

At about the same time, he left his job at a law firm to take up motivational speaking full time.

Helping young people felt so much more important, he said.

He is also about to launch a podcast in which he speaks to others who have had similar experiences, including Oliver Bromley who was ejected from a restaurant because staff said he was “scaring the customers”.

“We’re going to have lots of fun and inspire a lot of people,” he said.

“Disability or no disability, visible difference or no visible difference, we all have insecurities, we all have things that we’re faced with, and challenges we’re faced with.

“I just want to give this narrative to people that if we truly celebrate who we are, accept who we are, fall in love with who we are, then we can be more confident.”

Former US President Joe Biden, 82, has been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, a statement from his office said on Sunday.

Biden, who left office in January, was diagnosed on Friday after he saw a doctor last week for urinary symptoms.

The cancer is a more aggressive form of the disease, characterised by a Gleason score of 9 out of 10. This means his illness is classified as “high-grade” and the cancer cells could spread quickly, according to Cancer Research UK.

Biden and his family are said to be reviewing treatment options. His office added that the cancer was hormone-sensitive, meaning it could likely be managed.

In Sunday’s statement, Biden’s office said: “Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms.

“On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterised by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone.

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management.”

After news broke of his diagnosis, the former president received support from both sides of the aisle.

President Donald Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social that he and First Lady Melania Trump “are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis.”

“We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family,” he said, referring to former First Lady Jill Biden. “We wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.”

Former Vice-President Kamala Harris, who served under Biden, wrote on X that she and her husband Doug Emhoff are keeping the Biden family in their prayers.

“Joe is a fighter – and I know he will face this challenge with the same strength, resilience, and optimism that have always defined his life and leadership,” Harris said.

In a post on X, Barack Obama – who served as president from 2009 to 2017 with Joe Biden as his deputy – said that he and his wife Michelle were “thinking of the entire Biden family”.

“Nobody has done more to find breakthrough treatments for cancer in all its forms than Joe, and I am certain he will fight this challenge with his trademark resolve and grace. We pray for a fast and full recovery,” Obama said. In 2016, the former president launched a “Cancer Moonshot” programme and announced that Biden would lead it.

The news comes nearly a year after the former president was forced to drop out of the 2024 US presidential election over concerns about his health and age. He is the oldest person to have held the office in US history.

Biden, then the Democratic nominee vying for re-election, faced mounting criticism of his poor performance in a June televised debate against Republican nominee and current president Donald Trump. He was replaced as the Democratic candidate by his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer affecting men, behind skin cancer, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that 13 out of every 100 men will develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives.

Age is the most common risk factor, the CDC says.

Dr William Dahut, the Chief Scientific Officer at the American Cancer Society and a trained prostate cancer physician, told the BBC that the cancer is more aggressive in nature, based on the publicly-available information on Biden’s diagnosis.

“In general, if cancer has spread to the bones, we don’t think it is considered a curable cancer,” Dr Dahut said.

He noted, however, that most patients tend to respond well to initial treatment, “and people can live many years with the diagnosis”.

Dr Dahut said that someone with the former president’s diagnosis will likely be offered hormonal therapies to mitigate symptoms and to slow the growth of cancerous cells.

Biden had largely retreated from the public eye since leaving the White House and he has made few public appearances.

The former president delivered a keynote speech in April at a Chicago conference held by the Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled, a US-based advocacy group for people with disabilities.

In May, he sat down for an interview with the BBC – his first since leaving the White House – where he admitted that the decision to step down from the 2024 race was “difficult”.

Biden has faced questions about the status of his health in recent months.

In an appearance on The View programme that also took place in May, Biden denied claims that he had been experiencing cognitive decline in his final year at the White House. “There is nothing to sustain that,” he said.

For many years, the president had advocated for cancer research.

In 2022, he and Mrs Biden relaunched the Cancer Moonshot initiative with the goal of mobilising research efforts to prevent more than four million cancer deaths by the year 2047.

Biden himself lost his eldest son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015.

Gary Lineker is set to leave the BBC with an announcement expected on Monday.

Speculation is mounting the 64-year-old will step down after he presents his final Match of the Day next weekend.

Lineker, listed as the highest-paid BBC presenter, had been due to remain at the forefront of the BBC’s coverage of next season’s FA Cup and the World Cup in 2026, despite previously announcing he will leave Match of the Day at the end of this season.

But last week he had to apologise after sharing a social media post about Zionism that included an illustration of a rat, historically used as an antisemitic insult.

Lineker said he very much regretted the references, adding he would never knowingly share anything antisemitic and that he had deleted the post once he had learned about the symbolism of the image.

Last week, BBC Director General Tim Davie said: “The BBC’s reputation is held by everyone, and when someone makes a mistake, it costs us.”

It is understood that BBC bosses considered Lineker’s position untenable.

The former England striker has attracted criticism before for his posts on social media in the past.

He was temporarily suspended from the BBC in March 2023 after an impartiality row over a post in which he said language used to promote a government asylum policy was “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.

The BBC’s social media rules were then rewritten to say presenters of flagship programmes outside news and current affairs – including Match of the Day – have “a particular responsibility to respect the BBC’s impartiality, because of their profile on the BBC”.

In November 2024, Lineker announced his departure from Match of the Day, but said he would remain with the BBC to front FA Cup and World Cup coverage.

In an interview earlier this year about leaving, Lineker said he believed the BBC wanted him to leave Match of the Day as he was negotiating a new contract last year, saying: “Well, perhaps they want me to leave. There was the sense of that.”

The BBC didn’t comment on Lineker’s suggestion at the time but called him a “world-class presenter” and added that Match of the Day “continually evolves for changing viewing habits”.

Kelly Cates, Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan have been announced as new presenters of the show for the start of the 2025-26 season.

Lineker has not publicly commented on his departure from the BBC.

In his interview last month, Lineker also reflected on his 2023 tweets, saying that he did not regret the comments and adding “would I, in hindsight, do it again? No I wouldn’t, because of all the nonsense that came with it.”

Speaking to the BBC’s Amol Rajan, he indicated his next career move “won’t be more telly”, adding: “I think I’ll step back from that now” and .I think I’ll probably focus more on the podcast world”.

Among the cactuses in the desert of Arizona, just outside Phoenix, an extraordinary collection of buildings is emerging that will shape the future of the global economy and the world.

The hum of further construction is creating not just a factory for the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Eventually, it will mass produce the most advanced chips in the world. This work is being done in the US for the first time, with the Taiwanese company behind it pledging to spend billions more here in a move aimed at heading off the threat of tariffs on imported chips.

It is, in my view, the most important factory in the world, and it’s being built by a company you may have not have heard of: TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. It makes 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors. Until now they were all made in Taiwan, the island off the Chinese mainland. The Apple chip in your iPhone, the Nvidia chips powering your ChatGPT queries, the chips in your laptop or computer network, all are made by TSMC.

Its Arizona facility “Fab 21” is closely guarded. Blank paper or personal devices are not allowed in case designs are leaked. It houses some of the most important intellectual property in the world, and the process to make these chips is one of the most complicated and intensive in global manufacturing.

They’re hugely protective of the secrets that lie within. Important customers, such as Apple and Nvidia, trust this company to safeguard their designs for future products.

But after months of asking, TSMC let the BBC in to look at the partial transfer of what some argue is the most critical, expensive, complex and important manufacturing in the world.

President Trump certainly seems to think so. He often mentions the factory in passing. “TSMC is the biggest there is,” he has said. “We gradually lost the chip business, and now it’s almost exclusively in Taiwan. They stole it from us.” This is one of the US President’s regular refrains.

TSMC’s recent decision to expand its investments in the US by a further $100bn (£75bn) is something Trump attributes to his threats of tariffs on Taiwan and on the global semiconductor business.

The expansion of the Arizona facility, which was announced in March is, he believes, the poster child for his economic policies – in particular the encouragement of foreign companies to relocate factories to the US to avoid hefty tariffs.

China is also watching developments carefully. Taiwan’s chip-making prowess has been part of what its government has called its “Silicon Shield,” against a much-feared invasion. While the original strategy was to make Taiwan indispensable in this area of critical technology, the pandemic supply chain difficulties changed the calculus because relying on a single country seemed like a greater risk.

So, many currents of the world economy, frontier technology and geopolitics flow through this one site and within it lies the essential contradiction of Trump’s economic and diplomatic policy.

He sees this plant as the exemplar of America First, and the preservation of economic and military superiority over China. Yet the manufacture of these modern miniaturised miracles at the frontier of physics and chemistry inherently rely on a combination of the very best technologies from around the world.

Greg Jackson, one of the facilities managers, takes me around in a golf buggy. The factories are almost a carbon copy of the TSMC spaces in Taiwan, where he trained. “I would say these facilities are probably some of the most advanced and complicated in the world,” he says.

“It’s quite the dichotomy. You’ve got really, really small chips with really small structures, and it takes this massive facility with all the infrastructure to be able to make them… Just the sheer complexity, the amount of systems that it takes, is staggering.”

Inside the “Gowning Building,” workers dress in protective clothing before crossing a bridge that is supposed to create the cleanest environment on Earth, in order to protect the production of these extraordinary microscopic transistors that create the microchips underpinning everything.

Konstantinos Ninios, an engineer, shows me some of the very first productions from TSMC Arizona: a silicon wafer with what is known as ‘4 nanometre chips’.

“This is the most advanced wafer in the US right now,” he explains. “[It] contains about 10 to 14 trillion transistors… The whole process is three to 4,000 steps.”

If you could somehow shrink your body to the same scale and get inside the wafer, he says that the many different layers would look like very tall streets and skyscrapers.

TSMC was founded at the behest of the Taiwanese government in 1987, when chip executive Morris Chang was directed to start the business. The model was to become a dedicated foundry for microchips – manufacturing other companies’ designs. It became wildly successful.

Driving the advancement of the technology is the miniaturisation of the smallest feature on chips. Their size is measured these days in billionths of a metre or nanometres. This progress has enabled mobile phones to become smartphones, and is now setting the pace for the mass deployment of artificial intelligence.

It requires incredible complexity and expense through the use of “extreme ultraviolet (UV) light”. This is used to etch the intricate building blocks of our modern existence in a process called “lithography”.

The world’s dependence on TSMC is built on highly specialised bus-sized machines, which are in turn sourced almost entirely from a Dutch company called ASML, including in Arizona.

These machines shoot UV light tens of thousands of times through drops of molten tin, which creates a plasma, and is then refracted through a series of specialised mirrors.

The almost entirely automated process for each wafer of silicon is repeated thousands of times in layers over months, before the $1m LP-sized wafer of 4nm silicon chips is formed.

“Just imagine a particle or a dust particle falling into this,” Mr Ninios says to me incredulously. “The transistors are not going to work. So all of this is cleaner than hospital operating rooms.”

Taiwan does not have special access to the raw materials – but it has the know-how to stay years ahead of other companies in the intricate process of producing these atomic building blocks of modern life.

Some in the Taiwanese government are cautious about spreading the frontier of this technology off the island. Trump wasted little time in claiming the firm’s decision to bring its highest level of technology to the US was due to his economic policies.

He said this would not have happened without the stick of his planned tariffs on Taiwan and semiconductors. Those I speak to at TSMC are diplomatic about that claim.

Much of this was already planned and subsidised under former US President Biden administration’s Chips Act.

On the walkway into the building are photographs showing Biden’s visit in 2022, with the building site draped in the Stars and Stripes and a banner saying “a future Made in America”.

“The semiconductor supply chain is global,” says Rose Castanares, the President of TSMC Arizona. “There’s really no single country at this moment that can do everything from chemicals to wafer manufacturing to packaging, and so it’s very difficult to unwind that whole thing very quickly.”

As for the semiconductor supply chain, tariffs will not help. The supply chain stretches all over the world. Whether it’s the silicon wafers from Japan, the machines required from the Netherlands, or mirrors from Germany, all sorts of materials from all around the world are required. Now, they could face import charges.

That said, TSMC’s boss was quick off the mark in confirming the expansion of the US site at an event with Trump at the White House. In recent weeks, America’s tech elite – from Apple’s Tim Cook, to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang – have been queueing up to tell the world that TSMC Arizona will now produce many of the chips in their US products.

The global chip industry is very sensitive to the economic cycle, but its cutting-edge technology enjoys very healthy margins, that could cushion some of these planned tariffs.

There are many geopolitical subtexts here. The factory sits at the heart of US strategy to gain technological, AI and economic supremacy over China.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations have developed policies to try and limit Chinese access to the frontier semiconductor technology – from a ban of exports to China of ASML’s machines, to new legislation to ban the use of Huawei AI chips in US software or technology anywhere in the world.

Taiwan’s President Lai this week urged democracies such as Japan and the US to develop “non-Red” supply chains to counter China.

Not everyone is convinced that this strategy is working, however. Chinese technologists have been effective at working around the bans to develop competitive indigenous technology. And Bill Gates this week said that these policies “have forced the Chinese in terms of chip manufacturing and everything to go full speed ahead”.

Trump wants TSMC Arizona to become a foundation stone for his American golden age. But the company’s story to date is perhaps the ultimate expression of the success of modern globalisation.

So for now, it’s a battle for global tech and economic supremacy, in which Taiwan’s factory technology, some of which is now being moved to the Arizona desert, is the critical asset.

Just as India showed flickers of progress toward its long-held dream of becoming the world’s factory, Washington and Beijing announced a trade “reset” that could derail Delhi’s ambitions to replace China as the global manufacturing hub.

Last week, Trump’s tariffs on China dropped overnight – from 145% to 30%, vs 27% for India – as the two sides thrashed out an agreement in Switzerland.

As a result, there’s a chance manufacturing investment that was moving from China to India could either “stall” or “head back”, feels Ajay Srivastava of the Delhi-based think tank, Global Trade Research Institute (GTRI).

“India’s low-cost assembly lines may survive, but value-added growth is in danger.”

The change in sentiment stands in sharp relief to the exuberance in Delhi last month when Apple indicated that it was shifting most of its production of iPhones headed to the US from China to India.

That may well still happen, even though US President Donald Trump revealed that he had told Apple CEO Tim Cook not to build in India because it was “one of the highest tariff nations in the world”.

“India is well positioned to be an alternative to China as a supplier of goods to the US in the immediate term,” Shilan Shah, an economist with Capital Economics, wrote in an investor note before the deal was announced. He pointed out that 40% of India’s exports to the US were “similar to those exported by China”.

There were early signs that Indian exporters were already stepping in to fill the gap left by Chinese producers. New export orders surged to a 14-year high, according to a recent survey of Indian manufacturers.

Nomura, a Japanese broking house, also pointed to growing “anecdotal evidence” of India emerging as a winner from “trade diversion and supply-chain shift in low and mid-tech manufacturing” particularly in sectors like electronics, textiles and toys.

Some analysts do believe that despite the so-called trade “reset” between Beijing and Washington, a larger strategic decoupling between China and the US will continue to benefit India in the long run.

For one, there’s greater willingness by Narendra Modi’s government to open its doors to foreign companies after years of protectionist policies, which could provide tailwind.

India and the US are also negotiating a trade deal that could put Asia’s third-largest economy in a sweet spot to benefit from the so-called “China exodus” – as global firms shift operations to diversify supply chains.

India has just signed a trade pact with the UK, sharply cutting duties in protected sectors like whiskey and automobiles. It offers a glimpse of the concessions Delhi might offer Trump in the ongoing India-US trade talks.

But all of this optimism needs to be tempered for more reasons than one.

Apart from the fact that China is now back in the running, companies are also “not entirely writing off other Asian competitors, with countries like Vietnam still on their radars”, economists Sonal Verma and Aurodeep Nandi from Nomura said in a note earlier this month.

“Hence, for India to capitalise on this opportunity, it needs to complement any tariff arbitrage with serious ease-of-doing-business reforms.”

A tough business climate has long frustrated foreign investors and stalled India’s manufacturing growth, with its share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) stuck at around 15% for two decades.

The Modi government’s efforts, such as the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, have delivered only limited success in boosting this figure.

The government’s think tank, Niti Aayog, has acknowledged India’s “limited success” in attracting investment shifting from China. It noted that factors like cheaper labour, simpler tax laws, lower tariffs, and proactive Free Trade Agreements helped countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia expand exports – while India lagged behind.

Another major concern, says Nomura, is India’s ongoing reliance on China for raw materials and components used in electronics like iPhones, limiting Delhi’s ability to fully capitalise on supply chain shifts.

“India’s earnings from making iPhones will only rise if more of the phone is made locally,” Mr Srivastava told the BBC.

According to him, right now Apple earns over $450 per iPhone sold in the US while India keeps less than $25 – even though the full $1,000 is counted as an Indian export.

“Just assembling more iPhones in India won’t help much unless Apple and its suppliers also start making components and doing high-value work here. Without that, India’s share stays small, and the export numbers go up only on paper -possibly triggering more scrutiny from the US without real economic gain for India,” Mr Srivastava said.

The jobs created by such assembly lines aren’t very high quality either, says GTRI.

Quite unlike companies like Nokia which set up a factory in the southern city of Chennai in 2007 where suppliers moved in together, “today’s smartphone makers mostly import parts and push for lower tariffs instead of building supply chains in India”, explained Mr Srivastava. He noted that, in certain instances, the investment made could be lower than the subsidies received under India’s PLI scheme.

Finally there are concerns that Chinese exporters could try to use India to reroute products to the US.

India doesn’t seem averse to this idea despite the pitfalls. The country’s top economic adviser said last year that the country should attract more Chinese businesses to set-up export oriented factories and boost its manufacturing industry – a tacit admission that its own industrial policy hadn’t delivered.

But experts caution, this could further curtail India’s ability to build local know-how and grow its own industrial base.

All of this shows that beyond the headline-grabbing announcements by the likes of Apple, India is still a long way from realising its factory ambitions.

“Slash production costs, fix logistics, and build regulatory certainty,” Mr Srivastava urged policymakers in a social media post.

“Let’s be clear. This US-China reset is damage control, not a long-term solution. India must play the long game, or risk getting side-lined.”

The liberal, pro-EU mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, has fought off a strong challenge from a Romanian right-wing nationalist to win the presidency after months of political turbulence.

George Simion, the leader of the far-right AUR party, won a dramatic first-round victory earlier this month, riding a wave of anger from Romanians who had seen the presidential race annulled late last year because of claims of Russian interference.

But it was the softly spoken Nicusor Dan who swept to victory, winning 54% of the vote in Romania, even though Simion was more successful in the diaspora.

“We need to build Romania together irrespective of who you voted for,” said Dan, once his victory was secure.

More than 11.6 million Romanians voted in Sunday’s run-off, and Dan attracted the support of more than six million of them.

The mathematician waited until after midnight on Sunday before he could be absolutely sure that the numbers were on his side and he could join his supporters in a park opposite City Hall in Bucharest.

They went wild, chanting his name and cheering. At one point he was almost mobbed but this was a huge moment for the president-elect and for his supporters after months of political tension.

“A community of Romanians who want a profound change in Romania won,” he said.

Romanians are broadly unhappy with the dominance of mainstream parties and the turbulence in this European Union and Nato member state intensified earlier this month when the government collapsed because its candidate had failed to make the second round.

While Nicusor Dan campaigned on fighting corruption and maintaining support for northern neighbour Ukraine, Simion attacked the EU and called for cutting aid to Kyiv.

“Russia, don’t forget, Romania isn’t yours,” Dan’s supporters chanted.

Even though exit polls had given him victory, they did not include the all-important diaspora vote and Simion clung to the belief that he could still win.

“I won, I am the new president of Romania and I am giving back power to the Romanians,” he insisted initially.

It was not until the early hours of Monday that he conceded victory on Facebook. A protest planned by his supporters was then apparently called off.

During the election campaign Simion had stood side by side with Calin Georgescu, the far-right fringe figure who had stunned Romania with a first-round presidential victory at the end of last year, buoyed by an enormous TikTok campaign.

The vote was annulled over allegations of campaign fraud and Russian interference and Georgescu was barred from running again. Russia denied any involvement.

Asked by the BBC on Sunday whether he was acting as Georgescu’s puppet, George Simion said: “The puppets are those who annulled the elections… I am a man of my people and my people voted for Calin Georgescu.

“Do we like democracy only when the good guy has won? I don’t think this is an option.”

He said he was a patriot and accused what he called the mainstream media of smearing him as a pro-Russian or fascist.

The key to Simion’s success in the first round was his extraordinary win among diaspora voters in Western Europe, including in the UK.

His supporters turned out in force again on Sunday, with partial results giving him 68.5% support in Spain, 66.8% in Italy and 67% in Germany. He also had the edge in the UK, where voters said they would have picked Calin Georgescu if authorities had not barred him from running.

“We didn’t know anything about [Georgescu] but then I listened to what he was saying, and you can tell he’s a good Christian,” said 37-year-old Catalina Grancea.

She had vowed to go back to Romania if Simion had won and her mother Maria said she too had voted for change: “Our children were forced to leave Romania because they couldn’t find any jobs there.”

However, Nicusor Dan’s voters came out in even bigger numbers both in Romania and abroad. In neighbouring Moldova 87% of Romanians backed the mayor of Bucharest.

The presidents of both Moldova and Ukraine congratulated him on his victory.

“Moldova and Romania stand together, supporting one another and working side by side for a peaceful, democratic, and European future for all our citizens,” said Maia Sandu.

“For Ukraine, as a neighbour and friend, it is important to have Romania as a reliable partner,” said Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on social media that Romanians had turned out in massive numbers and had “chosen the promise of an open, prosperous Romania in a strong Europe”.

Israel has announced it will allow a “basic amount of food” to enter Gaza to ensure that “no starvation crisis develops” after blockading the territory for 10 weeks.

A statement from the prime minister’s office said the move was made on recommendation of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and based on the need to support its renewed military offensive against Hamas.

The announcement came hours after Israel’s military said it had begun “extensive ground operations” throughout Gaza.

Israel has come under increasing pressure to lift its blockade, during which no food, fuel or medicines have been allowed in.

Aid agencies have warned about the risk of famine among Gaza’s 2.1 million population, as footage and accounts emerge of emaciated children suffering malnutrition.

French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot called on Israel to allow the “immediate, massive and unhampered” resumption of aid to Gaza.

The statement from PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that Israel would allow “a basic quantity of food to be brought in for the population” of Gaza to “make certain no starvation crisis develops” – adding that such a situation would jeopardise its new offensive, named Operation Gideon’s Chariot.

Israel would also “act to deny Hamas’s ability to take control of the distribution of humanitarian assistance”, the statement added.

Earlier on Sunday, the IDF launched strikes on sites including a hospital in northern Gaza. Israel says it aims to free hostages held in Gaza and defeat Hamas.

Strikes hit the southern city of Khan Younis, as well as towns in the north of Gaza, including Beit Lahia and the Jabalia refugee camp, rescuers said.

At least 67 people have been killed and 361 injured in Gaza in the last 24 hours, the Hamas-run health ministry said.

A woman in Khan Younis told the BBC the situation there was “very difficult” and she had been kept awake by the sound of bombing, while enduring “severe shortages of flour and gas and food”.

The civil defence, Gaza’s main emergency service, said the al-Mawasi camp in the south, where displaced people had been sheltering, was also attacked overnight leading to 22 deaths and 100 people injured. The camp had previously been designated as a “safe zone”.

In the broad evacuation order on Sunday that it described as a “final warning”, the Israeli army said it would “launch a powerful strike on any area used for launching rockets”, and urged people to “move immediately west to the known shelters in al-Mawasi”.

Three public hospitals are now “out of action” in the North Gaza governorate, the health ministry said, amid Israel’s escalating air strikes.

Medical staff at one of them, the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia, told the BBC at about 21:40 local time (20:40 GMT) that IDF tanks had pulled up outside and were firing at the hospital.

They said 55 people were inside, including four doctors and eight nurses. The rest were immobilised patients who were not able to flee the hospital after the morning’s attack, they said.

About 50 minutes later staff said the IDF had left the vicinity of the hospital.

The IDF has said its troops are fighting “terrorist infrastructure sites” in northern Gaza, including the area adjacent to the Indonesian Hospital.

Earlier on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said staff and patients there had come under “heavy fire”. It accused Israel of besieging the hospital, cutting off access, and “effectively forcing the hospital out of service”.

Medics told the BBC no evacuation order or warning was issued before the attacks, and at no point were there any military targets in the Indonesian Hospital.

The onslaught comes as negotiators from Israel and Hamas continue trying to reach a ceasefire agreement in Qatar.

Israeli media quoted the office of the prime minister as saying Israel’s negotiating team was exhausting “every possibility” for a deal on Sunday.

Netanyahu’s statement said it “would include the release of all the hostages, the exile of Hamas terrorists, and the disarmament of the Gaza Strip”, reports said.

A senior Hamas source told the BBC that “no breakthrough or progress has been achieved so far in the ongoing negotiations in Doha due to continued Israeli intransigence”.

The source said Hamas had expressed willingness to release all Israeli hostages in a single phase, “on the condition of reaching a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire agreement – something the Israeli side continues to reject, as their negotiating team lacks the mandate to decide on key issues”.

The source stressed that Hamas “rejects any partial or temporary arrangements”.

The group has proposed releasing all hostages in exchange for an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners, a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and the entry of humanitarian aid.

“Israel wants to retrieve its hostages in one or two batches in return for a temporary truce,” the Hamas source told the BBC.

• Hamas proposes releasing some hostages in fresh talks after new Israel offensive
• US ‘troubled’ by humanitarian situation in Gaza, Rubio tells BBC
• Ros Atkins on… how world leaders are responding to Israel’s blockade of Gaza

Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, Mohammed Salha, director of the al-Awda private hospital in northern Gaza, said the closure of the Indonesian Hospital would affect the care he was able to provide.

He said al-Awda depended on the Indonesian Hospital for stores of oxygen and for its intensive care unit.

Mr Salha added that there had been a bombing near his hospital overnight causing “a lot of damage” to the facility that staff were attempting to quickly repair.

The latest damage to hospitals comes after Israeli strikes hit two of the largest medical centres in Khan Younis, the Nasser Medical Complex and European Hospital.

Israel accused Hamas of hiding a command and control centre beneath the European Hospital, and said it conducted a “precise strike” on “Hamas terrorists”.

Israeli media reported the target of the strike was senior Hamas figure Mohammed Sinwar – the younger brother of the former Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.

Thousands of people have been killed since Israel resumed its strikes on 18 March, following the collapse of a fragile ceasefire which lasted two months.

Israel’s military has said the expansion of its campaign is aimed at “achieving all the war’s objectives” including releasing hostages and “the defeat of Hamas”.

But the hostages’ families group said the operation posed “grave and escalating dangers” to hostages still held in Gaza.

“Testimonies from released hostages describe significantly worsened treatment following military strikes, including physical abuse, restraint and reduced food,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said.

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 58 hostages remain in Gaza, up to 23 of whom are believed to be alive.

More than 53,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Authorities have identified the suspect in a deadly car blast that targeted a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California as Guy Edward Bartkus, a 25-year-old man they said “had nihilistic ideations”.

The FBI said they believe he is the sole fatality in the incident.

They said on Sunday that he detonated explosives outside the clinic and tried to livestream the attack, but investigators are still piecing together his movements before the explosion.

The blast happened just before 11:00 local time (19:00 BST) on Saturday, less than a mile from downtown Palm Springs, near several businesses including the American Reproductive Centers (ARC). The clinic said no-one from the facility was harmed.

The FBI had called the attack an “intentional act of terrorism”. They believe the suspect deliberately targeted the in vitro fertilisation (IVF) facility. They added they are reviewing a manifesto they believe is linked to Bartkus.

Police said Bartkus is a resident of Twentynine Palms, home to a large marine base about an hour away from Palm Springs.

The FBI has executed a search warrant on his residence in Twentynine Palms, they said. Nearby residents had been evacuated.

Police stressed that there is no on-going threat to the public, both at the site of the blast and near the suspect’s home.

The blast was a result of a large vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, law enforcement sources told BBC’s US partner CBS News.

Akil Davis, the FBI’s assistant director in the Los Angeles field office, said the suspect used a 2010 silver Ford Fusion sedan in the attack.

Mr Davis said the FBI is still looking for the public’s help to piece together the suspect’s whereabouts before the blast, and will remain on scene for the next day or two to continue their investigation.

The blast was felt more than a mile away. Mr Davis referred to it as “the largest bombing scene” the FBI had seen in southern California in recent memory, and said police are working to survey evidence that is scattered 100 feet away from the explosion “in every direction”.

Several buildings were damaged in the blast, including the ACR fertility clinic with images showing a portion of its wall had been entirely destroyed.

In addition to the deceased suspect, four others were injured in the blast. Palm Springs police said they have since been released from hospital.

The ARC said the explosion occurred in the car park near its building.

The fertility clinic said their lab, including all eggs and embryos, remained “fully secure and undamaged”.

But Dr Maher Abdallah, who runs the clinic, told the Associated Press that the clinic’s office was damaged.

“I really have no clue what happened,” he said. “Thank God today happened to be a day that we have no patients.”

According to its website, the ARC clinic is the first full-service fertility centre and IVF lab in the Coachella Valley.

It offers services including fertility evaluations, IVF, egg donation and freezing, reproductive support for same-sex couples and surrogacy.

Ukraine says Russia has launched its biggest drone attack since the full-scale invasion began, targeting several regions including Kyiv, where one woman died.

The barrage came just a day before a scheduled call between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The US President has been urging a ceasefire.

Russia and Ukraine held their first face-to-face talks in more than three years on Friday in Turkey, agreeing a new prisoner swap deal but little else.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia had launched 273 drones by 08:00 Sunday (05:00 GMT) targeting the central Kyiv region, and Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions in the east.

It said 88 drones were intercepted and another 128 went astray “without negative consequences”.

The strikes killed one person in Obukhiv district in the Kyiv region, and injured at least three others – one of whom was a four-year-old child – officials reported.

The previous largest drone attack from Russia happened on the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion on 23 February, when Moscow launched 267 drones.

Russia’s military said it had intercepted 25 Ukrainian drones overnight and on Sunday morning.

Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Sunday that he and leaders of the UK, France, and Poland would have a virtual meeting with Trump before his conversation with Putin on Monday morning.

The four leaders jointly visited Ukraine over two weeks ago to spearhead calls for a 30-day-ceasefire, backed by the so-called “coalition of the willing”.

Ukraine’s intelligence agency has said it believes Russia could be planning to carry out a “training and combat” launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile overnight, as an attempted intimidation.

Russia has not responded to the claim.

Ukrainian officials said Saturday night’s strikes showed Russia had no intention of stopping the war, despite international pressure for a ceasefire.

“For Russia, the negotiations [on Friday] in Istanbul are just a pretence. Putin wants war,” said Andriy Yermak, a top aide to the Ukrainian president.

Following the talks in Turkey, Trump had suggested there would be no progress towards peace until he and Putin meet face-to-face.

The US president has proposed a 30-day ceasefire agreement and threatened tougher sanctions if Russia doesn’t comply.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has said he is ready to accept the proposal for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

But Russia will only agree to a pause in fighting if military supplies to Ukraine are halted.

Putin has also said any negotiations must include discussions about the cause of the war. Russia’s terms include Ukraine becoming a neutral country, cutting the size of its military, and abandoning its Nato membership ambitions – conditions that Ukraine has rejected as tantamount to capitulation.

Moscow now controls approximately 20% of Ukraine’s territory, including the southern Crimea peninsula it illegally annexed in 2014.

Zelensky was at the Vatican on Sunday where he had a private meeting with Pope Leo following the new pontiff’s inauguration mass. He also briefly met US Vice President JD Vance in Rome.

The Ukrainian leader said they talked about the “low-level” delegation Putin sent to Turkey, the “need for sanctions against Russia”, and how to achieve peace.

Warsaw’s liberal mayor Rafal Trzaskowski won a narrow victory in Poland’s presidential election, according to an exit poll, but a second-round run-off with conservative historian Karol Nawrocki will be required to decide the country’s next president.

According to a second exit poll released late on Sunday night, Trzaskowski, a deputy leader of prime minister Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Platform (PO) party, won 31.1% of the vote.

Nawrocki came second with 29.1% of the vote.

If the poll is confirmed by the final official result – not expected until late Monday – Trzaskowski and Nawrocki will compete in a second-round on 1 June as none of the 13 candidates won more than 50% of the vote.

• LIVE: Follow the latest from elections in Romania, Portugal and Poland

Trzaskowski told his supporters at a rally in Sandomierz, southern Poland: “We’re going to win.” But he said a lot of work and “great determination” would be needed.

“I’m convinced that all Poland will win,” he said.

He pledged to cooperate with prime minister Tusk’s coalition to liberalise the country’s strict abortion law and accelerate reform of the Polish judiciary, which was widely seen to have been politicised by the previous PiS-led government.

Trzaskowski performed worse than opinion polls predicted before the vote, which had him between 4%-6% ahead of Nawrocki.

Poland’s president has largely ceremonial powers but he or she is able to veto government legislation. Tusk’s coalition does not have a big enough parliamentary majority to overturn a presidential veto.

Tusk has failed to deliver many of his campaign promises, partly because the incumbent conservative president Andrzej Duda has vetoed his government’s legislation, but also due to divisions within the coalition over issues like abortion and civil partnerships.

A victory for Trzaskowski would remove the president’s veto, but Nawrocki would likely be an even tougher obstacle than Duda.

Nawrocki told his supporters in Gdansk that Tusk must be stopped from winning total power in Poland.

He called on supporters of two far-right candidates, Slawomir Mentzen, who came third and won 14.8%, and of Grzegorz Braun, who came fourth and won 6.3%, to “save Poland” from Tusk.

A lot will depend on which candidate can mobilise their electorate in the second round.

Nawrocki was unknown on a national scale before Law and Justice (PiS) chose him as its candidate. But he has improved on the job, and PiS is traditionally good at getting their vote out.

Trzaskowski will need to win the votes of supporters of his centrist party, but also those supporting the candidates of the junior coalition partners, the Left (Magdalena Biejat) and conservative Third Way (Szymon Holownia).

Another worry for Trzaskowski is the better than expected result of far-right candidates because many of their supporters will not vote for him.

Mentzen’s result was a strong showing and continued the improvement of his far-right Confederation party since it entered parliament in 2019.

Who will his, mainly young voters, back in the run-off?

Many would support Nawrocki for his Catholic, family-oriented views, but they dislike PiS’s left-wing economic policy of generous state benefits.

Mentzen is an anti-establishment candidate, and some of his supporters may not want to vote for either Nawrocki or Trzaskowski, who represent the two parties that have dominated Polish politics for two decades.

Far-right MEP, Grzegorz Braun’s result was a nasty surprise for Poland’s liberal voters.

Braun made headlines in 2023 when he put out the candles on a Jewish menorah in the Polish parliament with a fire extinguisher following a ceremony for the festival of Hanukkah.

Braun called the festival “satanic”. During a presidential debate last month he said: “Jews have far too much say in Polish affairs.”

Subjected to brutal bullying as a child, Amit Ghose says he still has to deal with constant staring, pointing and comments, and has even been refused service in a cafe because of his face.

The 35-year-old from Birmingham described how visiting an independent coffee shop in London recently “everyone was staring at me, and it was like they’d almost seen a ghost”.

“The person serving looked at me and said: ‘Oh, we’re not serving any more’.

“She turned around and walked off. But clearly, clearly they were still serving.”

Amit was born with Neurofibromatosis type 1, a condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow along nerves.

But after “learning acceptance” of his facial disfigurement he now shares his motivational story in schools with the aim of helping children “embrace their personalities and celebrate who they are”.

Another recent experience of abuse spurred him on to self publish a children’s book, Born Different.

“I had a couple of individuals come over to me in a park and ask me what happened to my face, and I thought they were just being curious,” he said.

“But actually they started laughing, giggling, saying: ‘Oh my God, if I had a face like you I wouldn’t even come out my house’.”

He said the encounter “really upset” him, “and I thought to myself, I need to do something about this. I need to get this book out. Now is the right time”.

“If I had this book when I was a young child, I think it would have helped me.”

Amit had his left eye surgically removed at the age of 11, leading to further facial disfigurement as well as abuse and bullying.

In the run up to Halloween one year, a child at school told him “you don’t need a Halloween mask, you’ve got one for life”, he recalled.

“That broke me to the point where I did not accept the left hand side of my face,” he said.

“For a very, very long time I hid the face, I just was not comfortable showing it to the world at all.”

Looking back, he said he had not understood the depth of depression and anxiety he experienced then.

“Other children not wanting to come and sit next to me or hiding behind their parents all had a mental effect on me,” he said.

At school, cricket was his passion and it was through playing the game that he eventually made friends.

“Cricket helped me become Amit, that boy who plays cricket, from Amit, the boy who has a funny face,” he explained.

But, he said, even as an adult he still experienced “constant staring”.

“The pointing, the tapping the friend next to them saying ‘have you seen that guy’s face’, that is also constant,” he said.

“But there is kindness out there as well, and that needs highlighting.”

It was his wife Piyali who eventually taught him the “art of acceptance,” he explained.

“Really that I’ve got to accept myself before others can accept me,” he added.

She also persuaded him to start sharing his story on social media.

“I thought TikTok was all about singing and dancing, and I thought maybe not, but she convinced me.

“I created a video and I said to the world: ‘I want to take you all on a journey to help and support and inspire you using my lived experiences.'”

He started his account in early 2023, and has since gone on to gain almost 200,000 followers and millions of likes.

“Me helping people on social media by sharing my story has helped me become more accepting of myself.

“Now I say to the world, this is me, take it or leave it.”

At about the same time, he left his job at a law firm to take up motivational speaking full time.

Helping young people felt so much more important, he said.

He is also about to launch a podcast in which he speaks to others who have had similar experiences, including Oliver Bromley who was ejected from a restaurant because staff said he was “scaring the customers”.

“We’re going to have lots of fun and inspire a lot of people,” he said.

“Disability or no disability, visible difference or no visible difference, we all have insecurities, we all have things that we’re faced with, and challenges we’re faced with.

“I just want to give this narrative to people that if we truly celebrate who we are, accept who we are, fall in love with who we are, then we can be more confident.”

Gary Lineker is set to leave the BBC with an announcement expected on Monday.

Speculation is mounting the 64-year-old will step down after he presents his final Match of the Day next weekend.

Lineker, listed as the highest-paid BBC presenter, had been due to remain at the forefront of the BBC’s coverage of next season’s FA Cup and the World Cup in 2026, despite previously announcing he will leave Match of the Day at the end of this season.

But last week he had to apologise after sharing a social media post about Zionism that included an illustration of a rat, historically used as an antisemitic insult.

Lineker said he very much regretted the references, adding he would never knowingly share anything antisemitic and that he had deleted the post once he had learned about the symbolism of the image.

Last week, BBC Director General Tim Davie said: “The BBC’s reputation is held by everyone, and when someone makes a mistake, it costs us.”

It is understood that BBC bosses considered Lineker’s position untenable.

The former England striker has attracted criticism before for his posts on social media in the past.

He was temporarily suspended from the BBC in March 2023 after an impartiality row over a post in which he said language used to promote a government asylum policy was “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.

The BBC’s social media rules were then rewritten to say presenters of flagship programmes outside news and current affairs – including Match of the Day – have “a particular responsibility to respect the BBC’s impartiality, because of their profile on the BBC”.

In November 2024, Lineker announced his departure from Match of the Day, but said he would remain with the BBC to front FA Cup and World Cup coverage.

In an interview earlier this year about leaving, Lineker said he believed the BBC wanted him to leave Match of the Day as he was negotiating a new contract last year, saying: “Well, perhaps they want me to leave. There was the sense of that.”

The BBC didn’t comment on Lineker’s suggestion at the time but called him a “world-class presenter” and added that Match of the Day “continually evolves for changing viewing habits”.

Kelly Cates, Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan have been announced as new presenters of the show for the start of the 2025-26 season.

Lineker has not publicly commented on his departure from the BBC.

In his interview last month, Lineker also reflected on his 2023 tweets, saying that he did not regret the comments and adding “would I, in hindsight, do it again? No I wouldn’t, because of all the nonsense that came with it.”

Speaking to the BBC’s Amol Rajan, he indicated his next career move “won’t be more telly”, adding: “I think I’ll step back from that now” and .I think I’ll probably focus more on the podcast world”.