The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has said that “Israeli strikes in Gaza go beyond what is necessary to fight Hamas” as the death toll there continues to mount.

Kallas also said that the EU did not support a new aid distribution model backed by the US and Israel which bypasses the UN and other humanitarian organisations.

“We don’t support the privatisation of the distribution of humanitarian aid. Humanitarian aid can not be weaponised”, she said.

Israeli air strikes and other military actions since it resumed the war in March following a ceasefire have killed 3,924 people, the Hamas-run health ministry says. Israel says it is acting to destroy Hamas and get back hostages the group holds.

Recent Israel bombardments have killed large numbers of civilians. Last Friday an air strike in Khan Younis killed nine of a Palestinian doctor’s 10 children. At least 35 people were killed in a school building sheltering displaced families in northern Gaza overnight into Monday.

Kallas’ remarks follows an intervention by new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz who declared he “no longer understands” Israel’s objectives in the besieged enclave.

“The way in which the civilian population has been affected… can no longer be justified by a fight against Hamas terrorism,” he said.

The EU is one of the largest donors of humanitarian aid to Gaza, yet Kallas said most of it was currently unable to get to Palestinians who need it. Israel imposed a complete blockade on Gaza in March and only began allowing a trickle of aid in after 11 weeks.

“The majority of the aid to Gaza is provided by the EU but it’s not reaching the people as it is blocked by Israel,” Kallas said.

“The suffering of the people is untenable.”

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen meanwhile described recent Israeli attacks on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure as “abhorrent” and “disproportionate”.

It also follows the strongest criticism yet by the UK, France and Canada, who demanded Israel end its military offensive in Gaza. The UK later said it was suspending trade talks with Israel.

The EU has launched a formal review of its own trade agreement with Israel and Kallas said she would present “options” at the upcoming EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on 23 June.

UN agencies have warned that Gaza’s 2.1 million population is facing catastrophic levels of hunger after an almost three-month Israeli blockade that was eased last week.

Israel and the US are backing a new aid distribution system run by a controversial new group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

The GHF’s aid distribution system uses US security contractors and bypasses the UN, which has rejected it as unethical and unworkable. The US and Israeli governments have said it is preventing aid from being stolen by Hamas, which the armed group denies doing.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Tuesday plans to relocate Gaza’s entire population to a “sterile zone” in the south of the territory while Israeli troops continue fighting Hamas elsewhere. He also vowed to facilitate what he described as the “voluntary emigration” of much of Gaza’s population to other countries – a plan many view as forcible expulsion.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response Hamas’ cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,084 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Joel Le Scouarnec, the former surgeon who has admitted sexually abusing hundreds of patients, mostly children, between 1989 and 2014 has been sentenced to a maximum term of 20 years in jail.

Le Scouarnec was dressed in black as he stood emotionless in court listening to judge Aude Burési deliver the verdict. He had admitted the charges in March.

Judge Burési said the court had taken into account the fact that the former surgeon had especially sought out unwell, vulnerable and sedated victims.

The sentence has a mandatory minimum term of two-thirds – and because Le Scouarnec has already served seven years, he may be eligible for parole by 2030.

Amélie Lévêque, one of Le Scouarnec’s victims, said: “To think one day he could walk down the street, see people – that upsets me. We [the victims] no longer have a normal life while they’re giving him back that life, and that disgusts me.”

“Twenty years is little compared to the number of victims in this trial,” said Francesca Satta, a lawyer for some of the victims. “It is time for the law to change so we can have more appropriate sentences.”

His lawyer Maxime Tessier said Le Scouarnec had no intention of appealing.

Le Scouarnec, 74, has been dubbed France’s most prolific paedophile. He is already in jail after being sentenced in 2020 to 15 years for raping and sexually assaulting four children, including two of his nieces.

The former doctor has been on trial in Brittany since late February.

During that time dozens of his victims have testified, telling the court how the abuse they sustained as children shaped their lives.

In March, Le Scouarnec admitted sexually abusing all 299 victims, many while they were under anaesthesia or waking up after operations.

He kept diaries in which he described the assaults in graphic detail, which allowed police to track down his victims – many of whom had no memory of the abuse they suffered while in Le Scouarnec’s care.

“I can no longer look at myself the same way because I am a paedophile and a child rapist,” Le Scouarnec said during his last statements to the court last week.

“Many things have been said. I don’t necessarily remember everything now. It will no doubt come back to me when I’m in my cell, but what I’ve witnessed [in court] is the suffering for which I am responsible,” he said.

He added he neither wanted or expected to be given any leniency.

Earlier this month he also said he was “responsible” for the deaths of two victims whose relatives say died by suicide, following the trauma of being sexually assaulted by Le Scouarnec when they were children.

The grandparents of one of them, Mathis Vinet, who died four years ago, told the BBC about the “descent into hell” experienced by his grandson when police revealed to him that his name appeared in one of the diaries.

The trial has sparked fury that Le Scouarnec got away with the abuse for over fifteen years, and that he was allowed to continue to treat children despite a conviction in 2005 for downloading paedophile images.

The Victims of Joel Le Scouarnec Collective group lamented that the trial had failed to capture the attention of politicians and society at large.

“No lesson has been drawn from this, neither from the medical world nor from politicians,” the group said in a statement. Several victims held a protest in front of the courthouse ahead of the verdict being delivered on Wednesday afternoon.

Catherine, the mother of a victim, said on the day of the verdict that it was the first time she had seen so many journalists covering the trial and added that she felt the victims had been forgotten.

“It’s a pity but my hope is that now our message can be passed on. Not for the generation that has been hurt but for my grandchildren,” she said, adding that she hoped institutions would “react”.

Le Scouarnec, who was present in court every day of the 14-week trial, repeatedly apologised for his “revolting” acts.

Many of his victims were left unimpressed with his demeanour. “His words are always the same, in the same tone, I don’t see any sincerity in them,” Louis-Marie, 35, told the BBC. “The only thing I hope is that he doesn’t do any more harm to society… that he stays locked up.”

“I never saw tears running down his cheeks,” said another victim named Manon Lemoine.

But Maxime Tessier, Le Scouarnec’s lawyer, said he believed his client had been sincere. “He was very moved during this trial… It was very important for him to confess as he did. It was a moment of truth and justice.”

Mr Tessier also pointed the finger at the medical establishment, which civil parties have accused of not doing more to stop Le Scouarnec’s from practicing medicine even when rumours of his paedophilia were circulating widely.

“No one acknowledged responsibility, whereas all the victims said it’s not only a man who did that – but also the system which let him do it,” he told the BBC.

The National Order of Doctors (Cnom), which has also filed a lawsuit against Le Scouranec, said in March that it “expressed its deep regrets” as the former surgeon should have been “prevented from practicing”.

“This situation has highlighted poor communication between the different entities of the Order of Doctors, and we deeply regret this,” they said in a statement.

The meat of brown bears, a protected species in the EU, could soon be available to eat in Slovakia after the populist government approved plans for sale.

Last month, the cabinet authorised a plan to shoot about a quarter of the country’s 1,300 brown bears in response to some recent fatal encounters.

The state-authorised slaughter has been criticised by conservationists and opposition politicians, including in the European Parliament. The brown bear is listed as a “near threatenend” species in the EU by the World Conservation Union.

However, Slovakia’s government is forging ahead with the plan and this week announced that meat from culled bears would be sold to the public to prevent waste.

From next week, organisations under the environment ministry can offer the meat for sale, provided all legal and hygiene conditions are met.

State Minister Filip Kuffa said it was wasteful that the animals had previously been sent to carcass disposal facilities.

“We will release every shot animal that meets certain conditions for consumption. Why? Because bear meat is edible,” he said.

Bears have become a political issue in Slovakia after a rising number of encounters with humans, including fatal attacks.

Slovakia ranks second in Europe, behind Romania which is estimated to have about 13,000 brown bears, for the number of attacks.

The country reported a total of 54 bear attacks from 2000-2020. The average number of attacks has also risen to 10 per year, rough figures suggest.

In April, a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest in Central Slovakia.

Shortly after, Prime Minister Robert Fico announced the cull, saying: “We can’t live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods.”

He said his government would shoot up to 350 brown bears – a figure equivalent to the species’ entire population in Spain.

His government argues that a bear overpopulation problem has led to the attacks.

However environmental groups and critics say the focus should be on prevention.

Michal Wiezik, an ecologist and MEP for the opposition party Progressive Slovakia, told the BBC last month the government’s plan was “absurd” and it had already failed to limit the number of attacks “by the unprecedented culling of this protected species.”

Wiezik argued that thousands of encounters a year passed without incident and he hoped the European Commission would intervene.

Miroslava Abelova of Greenpeace Slovakia called the culling plan “completely reckless,” accusing the government of ignoring conservation laws and scientific advice.

Brown bears are strictly protected under EU directives, and may only be killed in exceptional cases – such as threats to public safety – when no other alternatives exist.

Bear meat is not commonly eaten in Europe and is considered a delicacy only in a few regions, such as parts of Eastern Europe and the Nordic countries.

In most EU member states, strict hunting rules and the protected status of the bears mean the meat is rarely available. When it is, it is usually from controlled culls or licensed hunting and not commonly found in restaurants or shops.

Where bear meat is consumed, health officials warn of the risk of Trichinella – a parasite that can cause serious illness in humans.

The European Union Food Safety regulation requires all bear meat to be tested for Trichinella larvae before it can be sold and the US’ Centre for Disease Control Prevention stipulates an internally cooked temperature of at least 70 degrees centigrade to kill the parasite. Freezing, smoking or drying the meat does not make it safe.

A former college principal in the eastern Indian state of Odisha has been sentenced to life in prison for sending a parcel bomb that killed a newlywed man and his great aunt in 2018.

A court found Punjilal Meher, 56, guilty of murder, attempted murder, and use of explosives in what became known as the “wedding bomb” case that stunned India.

The bomb, disguised as a wedding gift, was delivered to the home of Soumya Sekhar Sahu, a 26-year-old software engineer, just days after his wedding.

When the couple opened the package, it exploded – killing Sahu and his great aunt, and leaving his wife, Reema, who opened the package, critically wounded.

While acknowledging the prosecution’s argument that it was a “heinous” crime, the court declined to classify it as a “rarest of the rare” case deserving the death penalty.

The BBC covered the incident in a detailed two-part investigative series.

• Who sent the wedding gift bomb that killed this newlywed?
• A wedding bomb, a letter and an unlikely suspect

The February 2018 explosion took place in Patnagarh, a quiet town in Odisha’s Bolangir district.

The victims had been married just five days and were preparing lunch when a parcel arrived at their home. It was addressed to Soumya and appeared to be a wedding gift, allegedly sent from Raipur in Chattisgarh state, over 230km (142 miles) away.

As Soumya pulled a thread on the parcel to open it, a powerful blast tore through the kitchen, killing him and his 85-year-old great-aunt Jemamani Sahu. Reema, then 22, survived with serious burns, a punctured eardrum, and trauma.

After a prolonged investigation, police arrested Meher, then 49, a teacher and former principal of a local college where Soumya’s mother worked.

Investigators had told me then that Meher harboured a grudge over professional rivalry and meticulously planned the attack. He used a false name and address to mail the bomb from Raipur, choosing a courier service without CCTV or parcel scanning.

The bomb travelled over 650km by bus, passing through multiple hands before being delivered. Investigators said it was a crude but deadly device wrapped in jute thread, rigged to detonate on opening.

The parcel carrying the explosive bore a fake name – SK Sharma from Raipur. Weeks passed with no clear suspects. Investigators scoured thousands of phone records and interrogated over 100 people, including one man who had made a threatening call after Reema’s engagement – but nothing stuck.

Then, in April, an anonymous letter reached the local police chief.

It claimed the bomb had been sent under the name “SK Sinha,” not Sharma, and cryptically mentioned motives of “betrayal” and money.

The letter claimed three men had “undertaken the project” and were now “beyond police reach”. It cited the groom’s “betrayal” and money – hinting at a scorned lover or property dispute – as motives. It also asked police to stop harassing innocents.

The letter turned the investigation.

Arun Bothra, a police officer who then headed Odisha’s crime branch, noticed that the handwriting on the parcel’s receipt had been misread: it did resemble “Sinha” more than “Sharma.”

Crucially, the letter writer seemed to know this – something only the sender could have known.

The police now believed the suspect had sent the letter himself.

“It was clear that the sender knew more about the crime than we did. By writing that it was being sent by a messenger, he wanted to tell us that the crime was not the work of a local man. He wanted to tell us that the plot was executed by three people. He wanted to be taken seriously, so he was kind of blowing his fake cover by pointing out a mistake we had made,” Mr Bothra told me in 2018.

The victim’s mother, a college teacher, recognised the letter’s writing style and phraseology as that of a colleague, Meher, a former principal she had replaced.

Police had previously dismissed Meher’s workplace rivalry as routine academic politics. Now he became the prime suspect.

Under questioning, Meher initially offered an implausible story about being forced to deliver the letter under threat.

Police allege he later confessed: he had hoarded firecrackers during Diwali, extracted gunpowder, built the bomb, and mailed it from Raipur using a courier.

He allegedly left his phone at home to create an alibi and avoided CCTV by not buying a train ticket. Meher had even attended both the victim’s wedding and funeral.

Elon Musk has criticised one of the signature policies of Donald Trump, marking a break from the US president who he helped to win re-election in 2024.

Last week, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed what Trump calls his “big, beautiful” bill, which includes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks and a pledge to increase defence spending. It will now head to the Senate.

Tech titan Musk told the BBC’s US partner CBS News he was “disappointed” by the plan, which he felt “undermines” the work he did for the president on reducing spending.

Musk was enlisted as Trump’s cost-cutting tsar – ending funds for US foreign aid among other projects – before announcing he would step back.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk said in the interview with CBS Sunday Morning, a clip of which was released by the broadcaster before transmission.

He went on to argue that Trump’s plan “increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it”.

It is thought that the legislation could increase the deficit – or the difference between what the US government spends and the revenue that it receives – by about $600bn (£444bn) in the next fiscal year.

Furthermore, the bill “undermines the work that the Doge team is doing”, Musk said, using the acronym of the cost-cutting advisory body the Department of Government Efficiency.

Referring to Trump’s moniker for the legislation, Musk told CBS: “I think a bill can be big or beautiful. I don’t know if it can be both.”

• US House passes Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ tax and spending bill
• A look at the key items in the bill

Musk’s intervention highlights the ongoing tension within Trump’s Republican Party over the tax and spend plans, which faced an uneasy passage through the House due to opposition from different wings of the party.

Long a policy priority of Trump’s, the legislation pledges to extend soon-to-expire tax cuts passed during his first administration in 2017, as well as provide an influx of money for defence spending and to fund the president’s mass deportations.

The bill also proposes increasing to $4tn the debt ceiling – meaning the limit on the amount of money the government can borrow to pay its bills.

Musk’s comments on the issue imply a growing distance from Trump, who he helped to propel back to the White House last year with donations of more than $250m.

They come after the billionaire recently pledged to step back from Doge. Musk had stated that he wanted to help the government cut $1tn in spending by cancelling contracts and reducing the government workforce.

As of April, Doge’s website claims around $175bn has already been saved, but a BBC analysis of this figure shows it lacks some evidence.

Musk also said last week that he planned to do “a lot less” political spending in the future, and that he was committed to leading electric car company Tesla for another five years.

Tesla faced protests, boycotts and a drop in sales over Musk’s work as the Doge chief, including his controversial efforts to lay off thousands of federal workers and curb foreign aid.

Musk defended his actions in his comments last week, saying: “I did what needed to be done.” He and Trump previously justified the cuts as a matter of weeding out what they saw as fraud and abuse within federal spending.

Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has told Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky that Berlin will help Kyiv produce long-range missiles to defend itself from Russian attack.

“We want to talk about production and we will not publicly discuss details,” he said, when asked by reporters in Berlin if Germany would supply Kyiv with its Taurus missiles.

Merz took office earlier this month, promising to beef up German support for Ukraine, and said this week that there were “no longer” any range restrictions on weapons supplied by Kyiv’s Western allies.

The Taurus has a range of 500km (310 miles) and could reach deeper into Russian territory than other far-range missiles.

Although Merz did not refer to the Taurus by name during his press conference with the Ukrainian leader, he did say a “memorandum of understanding” on long-range missiles would be signed by the German and Ukrainian defence ministers later on Wednesday.

The Kremlin has warned that any decision to end range restrictions on the missiles that Ukraine can use would be a quite dangerous change in policy that would harm efforts to reach a political deal.

However, Merz has since emphasised that a decision on lifting range restrictions was taken by Western allies months ago.

The new chancellor is seeking to cut a far more assertive figure on support for Ukraine than his predecessor, Olaf Scholz.

So far, he is succeeding.

There may be many questions about the detail of Merz’s missile co-operation plan but his willingness to make big announcements that might antagonise the Kremlin stands in stark contrast to the cautious tone of the last government.

During his press conference with Zelensky, Merz promised Ukraine continued support for as long as necessary, warning Moscow that its refusal to take part in further peace talks would have “real consequences”.

Zelensky has called for talks aimed at reaching a settlement on the war to involve three leaders – “Trump-Putin-me” – although he added he was ready for any format.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not dismiss the idea out of hand but said such a meeting could only take place after “concrete agreements” had been reached between “the two delegations.”

Although Ukraine and Russia held their first direct talks for more than three years in Istanbul this month, the meeting involved low-level officials and they were only able to agree on a prisoner exchange, which took place last weekend.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested on Wednesday that a date for further talks would be announced in the “very near future”, but made clear that Moscow was looking to guarantee Ukraine’s “neutral, non-aligned and non-nuclear status”.

US President Donald Trump indicated this week that his patience was wearing thin with Russia’s failure to move forward with further talks.

He accused Vladimir Putin of “playing with fire”, after a deadly Russian missile strike that killed 13 Ukrainians, including children. However, Russian officials suggested that Trump was not sufficiently informed on the context of the conflict.

Ukraine’s president has urged Washington to impose sanctions on Russia’s banking and energy sectors. He said he had discussed the issue with Trump, adding that the US president had “confirmed that if Russia does not stop, sanctions will be imposed”.

Despite the continued diplomatic manoeuvres, Ukraine’s military reported one of its largest drone barrages on Russian targets to date overnight in to Wednesday, while Zelensky said Russia had launched more than 900 drones over a three-day period ending early on Monday morning.

On the ground, Ukraine’s defences have come under increased Russian attack in the northeast.

Zelensky said Moscow was “amassing” over 50,000 troops along the Sumy front, where Russian forces have seized several villages across the Ukrainian border in an effort to create what Putin calls “security buffer zones”.

Sumy governor Oleh Hryhorov said Russian forces had seized four villages and that fighting was continuing near other settlements in the area.

The war, now into its fourth year, has claimed tens of thousands of lives and left much of Ukraine’s east and south in ruins. Moscow controls roughly one-fifth of the country’s territory, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.

Zelensky has accused Moscow of delaying the peace process and said they are yet to deliver a promised memorandum of peace terms following talks in Istanbul. Peskov insisted the document was in its “final stages.”

Could India’s decades-long jungle insurgency finally be approaching its end?

Last week, the country’s most-wanted Maoist, Nambala Keshava Rao – popularly known as Basavaraju – was killed along with 26 others in a major security operation in the central state of Chhattisgarh. Home Minister Amit Shah called it “the most decisive strike” against the insurgency in three decades. One police officer also died in the encounter.

Basavaraju’s death marks more than a tactical victory – it signals a breach in the Maoists’ last line of defence in Bastar, the forested heartland where the group carved out its fiercest stronghold since the 1980s.

Maoists, also known as “Naxalites” after the 1967 uprising in Naxalbari village in West Bengal, have regrouped over the decades to carve out a “red corridor” across central and eastern India – stretching from Jharkhand in the east to Maharashtra in the west and spanning more than a third of the country’s districts. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh had described the insurgency as India’s “greatest internal security threat”.

The armed struggle for Communist rule has claimed nearly 12,000 lives since 2000, according to the South Asian Terrorism Portal. The rebels say they fight for the rights of indigenous tribes and the rural poor, citing decades of state neglect and land dispossession.

The Maoist movement – officially known as Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) – took formal shape in 2004 with the merger of key Marxist-Leninist groups into the CPI (Maoist). This party traces its ideological roots to a 1946 peasant uprising in the southern state of Telangana.

Now, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government pledging to end Maoism by March 2026, the battle-hardened rebellion stands at a crossroads: could this truly be the end – or just another pause in its long, bloody arc?

“There will be a lull. But Marxist-Leninist movements have transcended such challenges when the top leadership of the Naxalites were killed in the 70s and yet we are talking about Naxalism,” said N Venugopal, a journalist, social scientist and long-time observer of the movement, who is both a critic and sympathiser of the Maoists.

One of the senior-most officials in India’s home ministry who oversaw anti-Maoist operations, MA Ganapathy, holds a different view.

“At its core, the Maoist movement was an ideological struggle – but that ideology has lost traction, especially among the younger generation. Educated youth aren’t interested anymore,” says Mr Ganapathy.

“With Basavaraju neutralised, morale is low. They’re on their last leg.”

The federal home ministry’s latest report notes a 48% drop in violent incidents in Maoist-related violence – from 1,136 in 2013 to 594 in 2023 – and a 65% decline in related deaths, from 397 to 138.

However, it acknowledges a slight rise in security force casualties in 2023 compared to 2022, attributed to intensified operations in core Maoist areas.

The report says Chhattisgarh remained the worst-affected state in 2023, accounting for 63% of all Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) incidents and 66% of the related deaths.

Jharkhand followed, with 27% of the violence and 23% of the deaths. The remaining incidents were reported from Maharashtra, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.

The collapse of Maoism in Chhattisgarh, a stronghold of the insurgency, offers key clues to the movement’s broader decline.

A decade ago, the state’s police were seen as weak, according to Mr Ganapathy.

“Today, precise state-led strikes, backed by central paramilitary forces, have changed the game. While paramilitary held the ground, state forces gathered intelligence and launched targeted operations. It was clear role delineation and coordination,” he said.

Mr Ganapathy adds that access to mobile phones, social media, roads and connectivity have made people more aware and less inclined to support an armed underground movement.

“People have become aspirational, mobile phones and social media have become widespread and people are exposed to the outside world. Maoists also cannot operate in hiding in remote jungles while being out of sync with new social realities.

“Without mass support, no insurgency can survive,” he says.

A former Maoist sympathiser, who did not want to be named, pointed to a deeper flaw behind the movement’s collapse: a political disconnect.

“They delivered real change – social justice in Telangana, uniting tribespeople in Chhattisgarh – but failed to forge it into a cohesive political force,” he said.

At the heart of the failure, he argued, was a dated revolutionary vision: building isolated “liberated zones” beyond the state’s reach and “a theory to strike the state through a protracted people’s war”.

“These pockets work only until the state pushes back. Then the zones collapse, and thousands die. It’s time to ask – can a revolution really be led from cut-off forestlands in today’s India?”

The CPI (Maoist)’s 2007 political document clings to a Mao-era strategy: of creating a “liberated zone” and “encircling the cities from the countryside.” But the sympathiser was blunt: “That doesn’t work anymore.”

The party still retains some popular support in a few isolated pockets, primarily in the tribal regions of eastern Maharashtra, southern Chhattisgarh and parts of Odisha and Jharkhand – but without a strong military base.

Ongoing operations by state forces have significantly weakened the Maoist military infrastructure in their strongholds in southern Chhattisgarh. Cadres and leaders are now being killed regularly, reflecting the rebels’ growing inability to defend themselves.

Mr Venugopal believes the strategy needs rethinking – not abandonment.

The underground struggle has its place, he said, but “the real challenge is blending it with electoral politics”.

In contrast, Mr Ganapathy sees little hope for the Maoists to mount a meaningful fightback in the near future and argues that the time has come for a different approach – dialogue.

“It would be wise for them to go for talks now and perhaps unconditionally or even lay down the conditions and let the government consider them. This is the time to approach the government instead of unnecessarily sacrificing their own cadres, without a purpose,” he said.

Maoists enjoy support in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana from mainstream political parties. In Telangana, both the ruling Congress and the main opposition Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) have backed calls for a ceasefire, along with 10 smaller Left parties – an effort widely seen as aimed at protecting the group’s remaining leaders and cadres.

The Maoist movement, rooted in past struggles against caste oppression, still carries social legitimacy in parts of these states. Civil society activists have also joined the push for a truce.

“We, along with other civil rights groups, demanded a two-step process – an immediate ceasefire followed by peace talks,” said Ranjit Sur, general secretary of the Kolkata-based group Association for Protection of Democratic Rights.

Maoist-affected states remain resilient strongholds in part because they are rich in minerals – making them sites of intense resource battles. Mr Venugopal believes this is key to the CPI (Maoist’s) enduring presence.

Chhattisgarh, for instance, is India’s sole producer of tin concentrates and moulding sand, and a leading source of coal, dolomite, bauxite and high-grade iron ore, according to the ministry of mines.

It accounts for 36% of the country’s tin, 20% iron ore, 18% coal, 11% dolomite and 4% of diamond and marble reserves. Yet, despite strong interest, mining companies – both global and national – have long struggled to access these resources.

“Multinational companies couldn’t enter because the Maoist movement, built on the slogan ‘Jal, Jangal, Jameen (Water, Forest, Land),’ asserted that forests belong to tribespeople – not corporations,” Mr Venugopal said.

But with the Maoists now weakened, at least four Chhattisgarh mines are set to go to “preferred bidders” after successful auctions in May, according to an official notification.

Mr Venugopal believes that the resistance won’t die with the death of Maoist leaders.

“Leaders may fall, but the anger remains. Wherever injustice exists, there will be movements. We may not call them Maoism anymore – but they’ll be there.”

US President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered US embassies around the world to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as it prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants.

An official memo said social media vetting would be stepped up for student and foreign exchange visas, which would have “significant implications” for embassies and consulates.

It comes during a wide-ranging Trump crackdown on some of America’s most elite universities. He sees these institutions as too left-wing – accusing them of failing to combat antisemitism when pro-Palestinian protests have unfolded on campuses.

Responding to the move, China called on the US to protect international students.

“We urge the US side to earnestly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of international students, including those from China,” an official was quoted as saying. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students attend US universities.

The universities themselves are likely to be disquieted as well. Many of them rely on foreign students for a significant chunk of their funding – as those scholars often pay higher tuition fees.

Foreign students who want to study in the US are usually required to schedule interviews at a US embassy in their home country before approval.

State department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters on Tuesday: “We take very seriously the process of vetting who it is that comes into the country, and we’re going to continue to do that.”

• Are you a student who has been affected by the issues in this story? Tell us here

The memo, viewed by the BBC’s US partner CBS News, directed US embassies to remove any unfilled appointments from their calendars for students seeking visas, but said those with appointments already scheduled could go ahead.

The pause would last “until further guidance is issued”, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote.

The memo also said the state department was preparing for an “expansion of required social media screening and vetting” applicable to all student visa applications.

It did not spell out what the vetting would look for.

The Trump administration had already enhanced its vetting of student social media, according to a report by the Guardian in March, which linked the move to a broader crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses.

In April, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stated that it would consider “antisemitic activity on social media and the physical harassment of Jewish individuals as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests”.

As part of the broader crackdown, Trump’s team has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for universities and moved to deport students, while revoking thousands of visas for others. Many of these actions have been blocked by the courts.

The White House has accused some US universities of allowing pro-Palestinian activism on campus to be hijacked by antisemitism.

Universities have accused the Trump administration of trying to infringe on free speech. Critics say the new policy on social media vetting represents a further violation of the rights that are supposed to be enshrined by the First Amendment in the US Constitution.

Trump has throughout his presidency countered that he is working to defend free speech.

Harvard University has been the focal point of the president’s ire; he has frozen $2.65bn (£1.96bn) in federal grants to the institution and has sought to put other federal funding worth $100m under review.

The university’s president has said the cuts will “hurt” the country, not just Harvard, because academics were conducting research deemed “high-priority” by the government.

Last week, Trump also revoked Harvard’s ability to enrol international students or host foreign researchers. A federal judge blocked the policy.

If the measure is ultimately allowed, it could deliver a devastating blow to the university, where more than a quarter of students are from overseas. Students protested against the move at the university’s campus near Boston on Tuesday.

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

Police have been given extra time to question a man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a car ploughed into football fans during Liverpool’s Premier League victory parade.

Seven people remain in hospital from a total of 79 casualties struck by the Ford Galaxy on Water Street in the city centre shortly after 18:00 BST on Monday.

Merseyside Police said it had been given more time to question a 53-year-old man from West Derby, who was also detained on suspicion of dangerous driving and driving while unfit through drugs.

The force said the car had followed an ambulance through a road block, which had been lifted to allow medics to reach someone having a suspected heart attack.

Police said they had now spoken to 14 more people who had been injured after reporting 65 were hurt at a news conference on Tuesday.

Officers confirmed they had been granted further time to continue questioning the suspect until Thursday.

• Live page recap: Liverpool police continue to question suspect

Under laws around the detention of suspects, police forces can keep a person in custody for 24 hours without charge, while a senior officer of at least superintendent rank can sign off on an initial 12-hour extension.

After that, an application can be made to a magistrates’ court for further 12-hour extensions to a maximum of 96 hours – or 14 days if the offence is terrorism related.

Within two hours of the suspect’s arrest, the force confirmed he was a “white British male” and said the incident was not being treated as terror related.

Merseyside Police urged people not to speculate and reiterated that the only suspect in custody was a 53-year-old man from the West Derby area of Liverpool.

• Liverpool parade crash: How not to get caught out by fake news

Water Street reopened earlier after cordon was lifted and the aftermath of the parade and the incident was cleaned up overnight.

One survivor, Daniel Eveson from Telford in Shropshire, said his partner was dragged under the wheels of the car and his baby son’s pram was tossed down the street.

“I saw a gentleman on the bonnet and the rest was just chaos,” he told BBC Radio Shropshire.

“It was hard because I didn’t know where anyone was or what to do,” he said.

“A lot of people were angry and I saw the car getting smashed.”

Mr Eveson was able to locate his son, who was unharmed, and leave him in a restaurant as he went back to search for his partner.

Their baby was now as “good as gold”, he said, while his partner remained in hospital and was waiting to hear whether she could return home.

“It was the day it was meant to be to start off with, it was perfect,” he said, but added “under the sea of chaos it changed to the worst day of my life”.

Det Supt Rachel Wilson said on Thursday: “I’m pleased to say the number of people in hospital is reducing as they continue to recover from the awful incident.

“We continue to support those still receiving treatment and as part of our ongoing enquiries we are identifying more people who were injured.”

She said detectives were making “significant progress” in establishing the full circumstances that led to what happened.

Officers are carrying out a trawl of CCTV inquiries across the city to establish the movements of the Ford Galaxy before the incident took place.

Some flowers and cards with well wishes have been left as a reminder of the events which unfolded.

Hundreds of thousands of jubilant Liverpool fans packed the city centre on Bank Holiday Monday and lined the 10-mile (16km) parade route as the Reds celebrated winning their second Premier League crown and 20th top-flight league title.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says its military has “eliminated” Hamas’s Gaza chief Mohammed Sinwar, one of its most wanted men and the brother of the group’s late leader Yahya Sinwar.

Mohammed Sinwar was the target of a massive Israeli strike on the courtyard and surrounding area of the European hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis on 13 May, which the Israeli military said destroyed Hamas’s “underground infrastructure” there.

Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said that 28 people were killed. Hamas itself has neither confirmed nor denied Sinwar’s death.

Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, was killed by Israeli troops last October.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response Hamas’ cross-border attack 600 days ago, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,084 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Nitrous oxide – known colloquially as “laughing gas” – has many uses, from a painkiller during dental procedures to a whipping agent for canned whipped cream.

While its euphoric side effects have long been known, the rise of vaping has helped create a perfect delivery vehicle for the gas – and a perfect recipe for an addiction, experts warn.

Meg Caldwell’s death wasn’t inevitable.

The horse rider from Florida had started using nitrous oxide recreationally in university eight years ago. But like many young people, she started to use more heavily during the pandemic.

The youngest of four sisters, she was was “the light of our lives,” her sister Kathleen Dial told the BBC.

But Ms Caldwell’s use continued to escalate, to the point that her addiction “started running her life”.

She temporarily lost use of her legs after an overdose, which also rendered her incontinent. Still, she continued to use, buying it in local smoke shops, inhaling it in the car park and then heading straight back into the shop to buy more. She sometimes spent hundreds of dollars a day.

She died last November, in one of those car parks just outside a vape shop.

“She didn’t think that it would hurt her because she was buying it in the smoke shop, so she thought she was using this substance legally,” Ms Dial said.

The progression of Ms Caldwell’s addiction – from youthful misuse to life-threatening compulsion – has become increasingly common. The Annual Report of America’s Poison Centers found there was a 58 % increase in reports of intentional exposure to nitrous oxide in the US between 2023-2024.

• What is nitrous oxide and how dangerous is it?
• ‘Daily use of laughing gas left me in a wheelchair’

In a worst-case scenario, inhalation of nitrous oxide can lead to hypoxia, where the brain does not get enough oxygen. This can result in death. Regular inhalation can also lead to a Vitamin B12 deficiency which can cause nerve damage, degradation of the spinal column and even paralysis. The number of deaths attributed to nitrous oxide poisonings rose by more than 110% between 2019 and 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Possession of nitrous oxide was criminalised in the UK in 2023 after misuse among young people increased during the pandemic. But while many states have also outlawed the recreational use of the product in the US, it is still legal to sell as a culinary product. Only Louisiana has totally banned the retail sale of the gas.

Galaxy Gas, a major manufacturer, even offers recipes for dishes, including Chicken Satay with Peanut Chili Foam and Watermelon Gazpacho on their website. With flavours like Blue Raspberry or Strawberries and Cream, experts warn this loophole – as well as major changes in packaging and retail – has contributed to the rise in misuse.

Until recently users would take single-use plain metal canisters weighing around 8g and inhale the gas using a balloon. But when usage spiked during the pandemic, nitrous oxide manufacturers began selling much larger canisters online – as large as 2kg – and, eventually, in shops selling electronic vapes and other smoking paraphernalia.

Companies also began to package the gas in bright colourful canisters with designs featuring characters from computer games and television series.

Pat Aussem, of the Partnership to End Addiction, believes these developments are behind increased misuse:

“Even being called Galaxy Gas or Miami Magic is marketing,” she said. “If you have large canisters, then it means that more people can try it and use it and that can lead to a lot of peer pressure.”

The BBC reached out for comment to both Galaxy Gas and Miami Magic but did not receive a response. Amazon, where the gas is sold online, has said they are aware of customers misusing nitrous oxide and that they are working to implement further safety measures. In a response to reporting from CBS News, the BBC’s news partner in the US, Galaxy Gas maintained that the gas was intended for culinary use and that they include a message on their sites warning against misuse.

Concern about nitrous oxide misuse increased last year, after several videos of people using the product went viral online.

On social media, videos of young people getting high on gas became a trend. A video uploaded in July 2024 by an Atlanta-based fast-food restaurant featured a young man inhaling Strawberries and Cream flavoured nitrous oxide saying “My name’s Lil T, man”, his voice made deeper by the gas. To date the clip has been viewed about 40 million times and spawned thousands of copies.

Misuse also featured heavily in rap music videos and Twitch streaming. Guests tried it on the Joe Rogan Show and rappers including Ye (formerly Kanye West) spoke about abusing the substance publicly. Ye has since sued his dentist for “recklessly” supplying Ye with “dangerous amounts of nitrous oxide”.

In response to the trend, TikTok blocked searches for “galaxy gas,” and redirected users to a message offering resources about substance use and addiction. Rapper SZA also alerted her social media followers about its harms and slammed it for “being MASS marketed to black children”.

In March, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an official alert warning against inhaling the gas after it “observed an increase in reports of adverse events after inhalation of nitrous oxide products”.

The FDA told the BBC that it “continues to actively track adverse events related to nitrous oxide misuse and will take appropriate actions to protect the public health”.

But for some, these warnings came too late.

In 2023, the family of a 25-year-old woman, Marissa Politte successfully sued Nitrous Distributor United Brands for $745m in damages after the radiology technician was killed by a driver high on nitrous oxide. The jury found the company responsible for selling the product in the knowledge that it would be misused.

“Marissa Politte’s death shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but my God, it should be the last,” Johnny Simon, the Politte family’s lawyer, said at the time. In the years since there have been several fatal traffic accidents involving the gas both in the US and the UK.

Meanwhile, Ms Caldwell’s family have launched a class action lawsuit against manufacturers and distributors of nitrous oxide, hoping to remove the product from retail sales across the US for good.

“The people who administer nitrous oxide in a dentist office now have to go through hours and hours of training, she said. “It just is crazy to me that the drug can be purchased in a smoke shop to anyone who goes in.”

“Unfortunately, it’s become very obvious that the manufacturers and the owners of the smoke shops are not going to do the moral thing and take this off the shelves themselves,” Ms Dial said.

“My nerves are shattered,” says Noura, a 26-year-old Palestinian woman, explaining that she has been “left with nothing”.

After years of IVF treatment, she became pregnant in July 2023. “I was overjoyed,” she remembers, describing the moment she saw the positive pregnancy test.

She and her husband Mohamed decided to store two more embryos at Al-Basma Fertility Centre in Gaza City, which had helped them conceive, in the hope of having more children in the future.

“I thought my dream had finally come true,” she says. “But the day the Israelis came in, something in me said it was all over.”

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas’s cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

Since then at least 54,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Like thousands of Gazans, Noura and Mohamed had to repeatedly flee, and were unable to get the food, vitamins and medication she needed for a healthy pregnancy.

“We used to walk for long hours and move constantly from one place to another, amid terrifying random bombings,” says Mohamed.

Seven months into her pregnancy, Noura suffered a severe haemorrhage.

“She was bleeding heavily, and we couldn’t even find a vehicle to take her to the hospital. We finally managed to transport her in a garbage truck,” Mohamed explains.

“When we arrived, the miscarriage had already started.”

One of their twins was stillborn and the other died a few hours after birth. Mohamed says there were no incubators for premature babies available.

“Everything was gone in a minute,” says Noura.

As well as losing the twins, they have also lost their frozen embryos.

The director of Al-Basma Fertility Centre, Dr Baha Ghalayini, speaks with sorrow and disbelief as he explains that it was shelled in early December 2023.

He is unable to provide an exact date or time and bases this estimate on the last time a member of staff saw the fertility centre operational.

Dr Ghalayini says the most important part of the clinic housed two tanks that held nearly 4,000 frozen embryos and more than 1,000 samples of sperm and eggs.

“The two destroyed incubators – which cost over $10,000 – were filled with liquid nitrogen that preserved the samples,” he says.

They needed to be topped up regularly and “about two weeks before the shelling, the nitrogen began to run low and evaporate”.

The laboratory director, Dr Mohamed Ajjour, who had been displaced to southern Gaza, says he “made it to the nitrogen warehouse in Al-Nuseirat, and got two tanks”.

But he says the intensity of the shelling prevented him from delivering them to the clinic, about 12km away: “The centre was shelled and the nitrogen became useless.”

Dr Ghalayini says the centre stored embryos for patients being treated at other clinics as well as their own. “I’m talking about 4,000 frozen embryos. These are not just numbers, they’re people’s dreams. People who waited years, went through painful treatments, and pinned their hopes on these tanks that were ultimately destroyed.”

He estimates that between 100 and 150 women lost what may have been their only chance at having children, as many cannot undergo the procedure again. “Some are getting older, some are cancer patients, others suffer chronic illnesses. Many received strong fertility medications that they can receive just once. Starting again is not easy.”

When approached for comment, the Israel Defense Forces told the BBC they would be better able to respond if the “specific time of the strike” was provided.

They added that they “operate according to international law and take precautions to minimize civilian harm”.

In March this year, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory made the accusation that Israel “intentionally attacked and destroyed the Basma IVF clinic” in a measure “intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza”.

It also alleged that Israel prevented aid, including medicines necessary to ensure safe pregnancy, childbirth, and neonatal care from reaching women.

The commission went on to claim that Israeli authorities “destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group… one of the categories of genocidal acts”.

At the time of the report, Israel’s permanent mission to the UN issued a statement saying it “categorically rejects these baseless accusations”.

And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded angrily, calling the Human Rights Council – which commissioned the report – “an antisemitic, rotten, terrorist-supporting and irrelevant body”.

Instead of focusing on war crimes committed by Hamas, he said, it was attacking Israel with “false accusations”.

A spokesperson for the IDF told BBC Arabic it “does not deliberately target fertility clinics, nor does it seek to prevent the birthrate of Gaza’s civilian population.

“The claim that the IDF intentionally strikes such sites is baseless and demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of IDF operations in Gaza.”

Dr Ghalayini says all of Gaza’s nine fertility clinics have either been destroyed or are no longer able to operate.

Noura explains that leaves her and many others with little chance of ever having a child. People like Sara Khudari, who began her fertility treatment in 2020. She was preparing for an embryo to be implanted when the war began in October 2023. The procedure never happened. “I watched everything collapse,” she says.

And Islam Lubbad, who Al-Basma clinic helped to conceive in 2023, a few months before the war broke out. But a month after the fighting started, she lost her baby, like Noura. “There was no stability. We kept relocating. My body was exhausted,” she says, recalling how she miscarried.

Islam did have more frozen embryos stored at Al-Basma Fertility Centre, but they have now been lost and there are no IVF clinics operating left for her to try to get pregnant again.

Before the events of 3 December 2024, Lee Jae–myung’s path to South Korea’s presidency was littered with obstacles.

Ongoing legal cases, investigations for corruption and allegations of abusing power all looked set to derail the former opposition leader’s second presidential bid.

Then a constitutional crisis changed everything.

On that night, former president Yoon Suk Yeol’s abortive attempt to invoke martial law set in motion a series of events that appears to have cleared the path for Lee.

Now, as the Democratic Party candidate, he is the frontrunner to win South Korea’s election on 3 June.

It’s a dramatic reversal of fortunes for the 61-year-old, who at the time of Yoon’s martial law declaration stood convicted of making false statements during his last presidential campaign in 2022.

Those charges still cast a long shadow over Lee, and could yet threaten his years-long pursuit of the top job. But they are also just the latest in a string of controversies that have dogged him throughout his political career.

A rags-to-riches origin story combined with a bullish political style has made Lee into a divisive figure in South Korea.

“Lee Jae-myung’s life has been full of ups and downs, and he often takes actions that stir controversy,” Dr Lee Jun-han, professor of political science and international studies at Incheon National University, tells the BBC.

These actions typically include attempts at progressive reform – such as a pledge, made during his 2022 presidential campaign, to implement universal basic income scheme – which challenge the existing power structure and status quo in South Korea.

“Because of this, some people strongly support him, while others distrust or dislike him,” Dr Lee says. “He is a highly controversial and unconventional figure – very much an outsider who has made a name for himself in a way that doesn’t fit traditional Democratic Party norms.”

In a recent memoir, Lee described his childhood as “miserable”. Born in 1963 in a mountain village in Andong, Gyeongbuk Province, he was the fifth of five sons and two daughters, and – due to his family’s difficult circumstances – skipped middle school to illegally enter the workforce.

As a young factory worker, Lee suffered an industrial accident where his fingers got caught in a factory power belt, and at the age of 13 suffered a permanent injury to his arm after his wrist was crushed by a press machine.

Lee later applied for and was allowed to sit entrance exams for high school and university, passing in 1978 and 1980 respectively. He went on to study law with a full scholarship, and passed the Bar Examination in 1986.

In 1992, he married his wife Kim Hye-kyung, with whom he has two children.

He worked as a human rights lawyer for almost two decades before entering politics in 2005, joining the social-liberal Uri Party, a predecessor of the Democratic Party of Korea and the ruling party at the time.

While his poor upbringing has drawn scorn from members of South Korea’s upper class, Lee’s success in building his political career from the ground up has earned him support from working-class voters and those who feel disenfranchised by the political elite.

He was elected mayor of Seongnam in 2010, rolling out a series of free welfare policies during his tenure, and in 2018 became governor of the broader Gyeonggi Province.

Lee would go on to receive acclaim for his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, during which he clashed with the central government due to his insistence on providing universal relief grants for all residents of the province.

It was also during this time that Lee became the Democratic Party’s final presidential candidate for the first time in October 2021 – losing by 0.76 percentage points. Less than a year later, in August 2022, he was elected as the party’s leader.

From that point on, Dr Lee says, Lee dialled back on the controversial, fire-and-brimstone approach for which he had become notorious – opting instead to play it safe and keep a low profile.

“After [Lee’s] term as a governor, his reformist image faded somewhat as he focused more on his presidential ambitions,” he says. “Still, on certain issues – like addressing past wrongs [during the Japanese colonial era], welfare and corruption – he has built a loyal and passionate support base by taking a firm and uncompromising stance.”

This uncompromising attitude has its detractors, with many members and supporters of the ruling People Power Party (PPP) viewing Lee as aggressive and abrasive in his approach.

Lee’s political career has also been marred by a series of scandals – including a drink driving incident in 2004, disputes with relatives in the late 2010s and allegations of an extramarital affair that emerged in 2018.

While in other parts of the world voters have shown forgiveness and even support for controversial politicians, in South Korea – a country that is still relatively conservative in what it expects of public figures – such scandals have not typically played well.

In recent years, Lee’s political ambitions have been saddled with even more pressing controversies – including the ongoing legal cases that continue to hang over him, threatening to hamstring if not scuttle his chances at election.

One of these concerns a string of high-profile charges, including corruption, bribery and breach of trust, associated with a land development project in 2023.

Another, perhaps more critical legal battle concerns allegations that Lee made a knowingly false statement during a debate in the last presidential campaign.

During the debate, which aired on South Korean television in December 2021, Lee had denied personally knowing Kim Moon-ki, a key figure in a corruption-ridden land development scandal who had taken his own life just days earlier.

Prosecutors allege that claim was false, thus violating the Public Official Election Act, and in November 2024 Lee was convicted of the false statements charge and given a one-year suspended prison sentence.

Then, in March, an appeals court cleared him of the charges – only for that ruling to be overturned by South Korea’s Supreme Court. At the time of writing, the case is still awaiting a verdict.

Other threats against Lee’s future political ambitions posed a more fatal danger.

In January 2024, while answering questions from reporters outside the construction site of a planned airport in Busan, Lee was stabbed in the neck by a man who had approached him asking for an autograph.

The injury to Lee’s jugular vein, though requiring extensive surgery, was not critical – but he now campaigns behind bulletproof glass, wearing a bulletproof vest, surrounded by agents carrying ballistic briefcases.

The assailant, who had written an eight-page manifesto and wanted to ensure that Lee never became president, was later sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The attack raised concerns about deepening political polarisation in South Korea – embodied perhaps most publicly in the bitter rivalry between Lee and Yoon, and more privately in the country’s increasingly extreme online discourse.

In December 2023, just weeks before Lee was attacked, a survey sponsored by the newspaper Hankyoreh found that more than 50% of respondents said they felt South Korea’s political divide worsening.

Some claim that, as Democratic Party leader, Lee played a major role in fuelling the problem, frequently blocking motions by Yoon’s government and effectively rendering him a lame duck president.

Such constant stonewalling by the Democratic Party only exacerbated Yoon’s leadership struggles – which also included repeated impeachment attempts against administration officials and constant opposition to his budget.

Finally, as the pressure against him mounted, the former president took the drastic step of declaring martial law.

Yoon’s declaration of martial law on 3 December – made in a self-proclaimed bid to eliminate “anti-state forces” and North Korea sympathisers – served as the catalyst for Lee to emerge as a leading presidential candidate.

Within hours of the declaration, Lee appealed to the public via a livestream broadcast and urged them to assemble in protest outside the National Assembly building in central Seoul.

Thousands responded, clashing with police and blocking military units as opposition lawmakers rushed into the assembly building, clambering over fences and walls in a desperate attempt to block Yoon’s order.

Lee was among them, climbing over the fence to enter the National Assembly and helping to pass the resolution to lift martial law.

The Democratic Party later decided to impeach President Yoon – a decision that was unanimously upheld by South Korea’s Constitutional Court on 4 April, 2025.

It was then that Lee began the path to a full-fledged election bid, announcing his resignation as leader of the Democratic Party on 9 April ahead of his presidential run. In the Democratic Party presidential primary held on April 27, he was selected as the general candidate with overwhelming support.

The result of Yoon’s abortive martial law attempt was a political maelstrom from which South Korea is still reeling: a constitutional crisis that ended the former president’s career and left his PPP in tatters.

But of the small few who have managed to leverage that chaos to their advantage, none have benefitted more than Lee.

Now the controversial presidential candidate awaits the verdict on his political future – not only from the South Korean people, but also the courts.

If his guilty ruling is ultimately confirmed, Lee will likely lose his seat in the National Assembly. As a candidate, that would prevent him from running for president for a period of five years.

But with the courts having now approved Lee’s request to postpone his legal hearings until after the election, another possibility has emerged: that Lee, who remains the electoral favourite, could be convicted after winning the presidency.

And that could mean that South Korea, having just endured a months-long period of political turmoil, may not be done with its leadership dramas just yet.

South Korea will elect a new president on 3 June to replace Yoon Suk Yeol, who was removed from office for placing the country under martial law for six hours in December.

The winner will be tasked with managing the political and economic fallout of Yoon’s move, which plunged the country in deep turmoil and divided opinions.

The snap election is also being held as South Korea faces an unpredictable ally in US President Donald Trump – and that will shape long-running challenges such as the threat from North Korea, and Seoul’s frosty relationship with China.

Here is what you need to know as the nation of about 52 million people chooses a new president who will lead it for the next five years.

Yoon was supposed to serve as president until 2027, but his term ended in disgrace.

He shocked the nation by declaring martial law on 3 December, citing threats from “anti-state forces” and North Korea – but it soon became clear that he was spurred by his own political troubles.

A week later, he was impeached by parliament. On 4 April, a constitutional court upheld his impeachment and removed him from office permanently, setting the stage for a snap presidential election within 60 days, as required by law.

In the six turbulent months since Yoon’s martial law attempt, the country has had three acting presidents, the most recent being Lee Ju-ho, the education minister who assumed the role one month before the election.

Lee replaced Prime Minister Han Duck Soo, who himself was impeached just weeks after taking over from Yoon as acting president. Finance minister Choi Sang-mok was acting president before Han was reinstated in March.

Yoon’s martial law laid bare the deep political divisions in the country, as those who supported his decision to impose martial law and those who opposed it took to the streets in protest.

The following months of uncertainty shook public confidence in South Korea’s economy. And this was at a time when US President Donald Trump unleashed his tariffs on America’s trading partners, with South Korean goods facing a 25% levy.

Closer to home, relations with North Korea are a persistent challenge. While 2025 has been relatively uneventful, the year before saw heightened tensions as Kim Jong Un escalated the rhetoric, and both sides spent months sending balloons and drones carrying propaganda materials across the border.

South Korea’s new leader must also balance Seoul’s relations between its biggest trading partner, Beijing, and its most important security ally, Washington.

Then there is the task of arresting the country’s declining birth rate, which is among the lowest in the world – 0.75.

Polls have placed Lee Jae-myung of the main opposition Democratic Party as the frontrunner among six candidates, followed by Kim Moon-soo from the ruling PPP.

Lee, who lost to Yoon by a razor-thin margin in 2022, is hailed by his supporters as a working class hero. He worked in a factory before he became a human rights lawyer and politician. He has promised to establish a “real Republic of Korea” with jobs and a fair society.

Kim, a former labour minister, has positioned himself as a president for the economy, promising to create a business-friendly environment.

The other candidates are Lee Jun-seok of the New Reform Party, Kwon Young-guk of the Democratic Labor Party and two independents – Hwang Kyo-ahn and Song Jin- ho.

For the first time in 18 years, there is no woman running for president. The first woman to run for president was Hong Suk-Ja in 1987, but she withdrew before the vote. The election in 2012 saw four female candidates contest for the top job.

The election is scheduled on 3 June and voting precincts will be open from 06:00 local time (22:00 GMT) to 20:00. South Koreans overseas were allowed to vote early from 20 to 25 May.

Results are expected to come in after polls close and the winner will likely be known in the early hours of the following day.

When Yoon defeated Lee in 2022, he was proclaimed the winner nine hours after the close of voting, or at 04:40 the morning after election day.

That was the closest presidential contest in the country’s history, which saw Yoon win by a 0.73% difference in votes.

The new president will take office immediately and unlike many of his predecessors, will not have the advantage of a formal transition from Yoon.

Yoon faces trial for an insurrection charge as a result of his attempt to impose martial law.

In January this year he became South Korea’s first sitting president to be arrested after investigators scaled barricades and cut through barbed wire to take him into custody. He was relased from detention weeks later on a technicality.

He was also recently indicted for abuse of power, a separate charge to insurrection.

Before the election, Yoon quit his party in what analysts said was an attempt to shore up the chances of PPP’s presidential candidate Kim Moon-soo.

Dubbed “Germany’s forgotten genocide”, and described by historians as the first genocide of the 20th Century, the systematic murder of more than 70,000 Africans is being marked with a national day of remembrance for the first time in Namibia.

Almost 40 years before their use in the Holocaust, concentration camps and pseudoscientific experiments were used by German officials to torture and kill people in what was then called South West Africa.

The victims, primarily from the Ovaherero and Nama communities, were targeted because they refused to let the colonisers take their land and cattle.

Genocide Remembrance Day in Namibia on Wednesday follows years of pressure on Germany to pay reparations.

This new, national holiday is “a symbol of unity and reflection” but the country will never forget its “emotional, psychological, economical and cultural scars”, said Namibia’s President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, joining community leaders in a candle-lighting ceremony in memory of genocide victims.

Members of the Ovaherero and Nama communities also performed a war cry – a rite that was historically performed by men before battle while women urged them to fight bravely.

Stern words accompanied Wednesday’s symbolism, with President Nandi-Ndaitwah urging a swift end to ongoing negotiations with Germany over Namibia’s demand for reparations.

“Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” she said.

Her government said it chose the date of 28 May, because it was on that day in 1907 that German officials announced the closure of the concentration camps following international criticism.

Control over South West Africa – along with what is now Cameroon, Togo and other colonial territories – was stripped from Germany by competing powers after World War One.

For many years Germany did not publicly acknowledge the mass slaughter that took place between 1904 and 1908.

But four years ago it formally recognised that German colonisers had committed the genocide, and offered €1.1bn (£940m; $1.34bn) in development aid to be paid out over 30 years – with no mention of “reparations” or “compensation” in the legal wording.

Namibia declined that offer, calling it “a first step in the right direction” that nonetheless had failed to include the formal apology and “reparations” it was seeking.

Many Namibians were not impressed by what they saw.

“That was the joke of the century,” Uahimisa Kaapehi told the BBC at the time. “We want our land. Money is nothing.”

He is an ethnic Ovaherero descendent and town councillor in Swakopmund, where many of the atrocities took place, and said “our wealth was taken, the farms, the cattle”.

A group representing genocide victims’ families was also scathing about the deal offered in 2021, calling it evidence of a “racist mindset on the part of Germany and neo-colonial subservience on the part of Namibia” in a joint statement.

Since then a draft deal has been reached between the two nations that would include a formal apology given by Germany, and which would reportedly increase the overall sum by an extra €50m.

But many Ovaherero and Nama campaigners say the deal is an insult to their ancestors’ memory and that they were unfairly excluded from the negotiating table. News of a national day of remembrance has been met with cynicism from some, with community activists saying restorative justice is still a long way off.

Many campaigners would like to see the German government buy back ancestral lands now in the hands of the German-speaking community, and return them to the Ovaherero and Nama descendants.

Historians point out the irony of Germany hitherto refusing to pay reparations, because prior to the genocide, Germany itself extracted its own so-called reparations from Ovaherero and Nama people who had fought back against the colonisers.

This was paid in the form of livestock and amounted to 12,000 cows – which is estimated by German-American historian Thomas Craemer to be somewhere between $1.2m and $8.8m in today’s money, and which he argues should be added to the reparations bill.

Those colonial lootings and battles were followed by the genocide, which began in 1904 with an extermination order from a German official named Lothar von Trotha.

“This extermination order indicated that they were no longer going to take on any prisoners – women, men, anyone with or without cattle – they were going to be executed,” Namibian historian Martha Akawa-Shikufa told the national broadcaster NBC.

This was followed by the introduction of concentration camps, she added.

“People got worked to death, a lot of people died in the concentration camps because of exhaustion. In fact there were pre-printed death certificates [saying] ‘death by exhaustion’, waiting for those people to die, because they knew they would die.”

The remains of some of those who were killed were then shipped to Germany for now-discredited research to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans. Many of the bones have now been repatriated.

Last year, Namibia criticised Germany after it offered to come to Israel’s defence to stop it answering a case for crimes of genocide in Gaza at the UN’s top court.

“The German government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil,” said then-President Hage Geingob.

• The Tanzanians searching for their grandfathers’ skulls in Germany
• UK museums willing to return skulls to Zimbabwe
• ‘Fees have fallen’ in Namibia as president announces free higher education
• ‘End of era’ for Africa as Namibia buries founding father
• Why Germany’s deal fell flat for Namibians

A record number of puffins have been recorded on a small island off the Pembrokeshire coast, despite global populations declining rapidly.

According to the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales (WTSWW), 43,626 puffins were counted on Skomer Island this year – a record high.

The WTSWW said the increased number of puffins on the nature reserve was a “conservation success story”, but warned that the birds were still a species under threat which should continue to be protected.

Skomer Island, a 1.13 sq mile (2.92 sq km) internationally important seabird island managed by the WTSWW, is located less than a mile from the Pembrokeshire coast.

The island’s isolation means that it is protected from predators such as rats, cats, dogs and foxes, and also from the human impact on the mainland.

As well as a growing population of puffins, Skomer is also home to 350,000 breeding pairs of manx shearwaters and thousands of guillemots and razorbills.

Every year, the WTSWW undertakes its annual seabird count on the island to monitor the population of birds that return every spring to breed.

The puffins are counted during the evening and early in the season by six members of staff.

Skomer Island’s visitor officer, Rob Knott, said counting the birds was “quite a job”.

“We split the island into sections and we go round about two hours before sunset when there’s the most on the land,” he said.

“We get our clickers out and we count all the ones on the land, then the sea and the ones in the air as well.”

The last record was set in 2023, when 42,513 puffins were recorded on and around the island.

“We think [the counting accuracy] is probably within a few hundred or perhaps a thousand birds,” said Rob.

“Of course, that number is not going to be dead on the right number of puffins that are here, but because we do it in the same way every year and record those birds in the same way, it’s always been reported as the final number of that count that we do every year.”

Although the puffins seem to be thriving in Pembrokeshire, there is a rapid decline elsewhere.

Like many seabird species, puffins are listed as vulnerable to extinction on the global International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list, as they face pollution, food shortages and climate change.

According to the WTSWW, the growth in Skomer Island’s puffin population is “likely linked to the abundance of food in the wider area, meaning there is plenty of fish for chicks resulting in high breeding success”.

They said the absence of rats and other predators on the island had also contributed to the seabirds’ success.

Rob said the island’s 25,000 visitors each year were often “mind-blown” by the number of puffins.

He warned, however, that there were novel threats facing seabirds – including bird flu and the recent marine heatwave conditions experienced around parts of the UK coastline.

“I think the monitoring work is absolutely vital, it informs how these seabirds are doing, particularly in this part of Wales but also on a wider scale in terms of how puffin numbers are doing throughout the UK,” he said.

“It helps us look towards policy on how these numbers can increase in the future.

“They’re doing well here, but we can point to this as a good example, there’s other places where these numbers are really going down quite rapidly.

“We’re quite cautiously optimistic about the numbers that we’re seeing.

“They’re absolutely iconic birds and the fact that they’re on the red list is wrong for so many reasons, not least, because they used to be absolutely thriving, so we’re doing what we can to try and improve those numbers.”

Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to keep up with the latest climate and environment stories with the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.

A court in Germany has rejected a lawsuit brought by a Peruvian farmer against German energy giant RWE in a long-awaited decision.

Saúl Luciano Lliuya had argued that the firm’s global emissions contributed to the melting of glaciers in Peru – threatening his hometown of Huaraz with flooding.

He was seeking €17,000 (£14,250) in compensation – money he said he would use to pay for a flood defence project to protect the city.

However, the higher regional court in the German city of Hamm on Wednesday blocked the case from proceeding further and ruled out any appeals, putting an end to Mr Lliuya’s 10-year legal battle.

RWE said it was not active in Peru and questioned why it was singled out.

It also pointed to its plans to phase out its coal-fired power plants and become carbon neutral by 2040.

In their ruling on Wednesday, judges deemed that the flood risk to the property of Mr Lliuya was not high enough for the case to proceed.

However, in what climate change groups have hailed as a win, they did say that energy companies could be held responsible for the costs caused by their carbon emissions.

While the sum demanded by Mr Lliuya was very low, the case has become a cause celebre for climate change activists, who hope that it will set a precedent for holding powerful firms to account.

The 44-year-old mountain guide and farmer said he had brought the case because he had seen first-hand how rising temperatures were causing glaciers near Huaraz to melt.

He said that as a result, Lake Palcacocha – which is located above the city – now has four times as much water than in 2003 and that residents like him were at risk of flooding, especially if blocks of ice were to break off from Palcacocha glacier and fall into the lake, causing it to overflow.

He alleged that emissions caused by RWE were contributing to the increase in temperature in Peru’s mountain region and demanded that the German firm pay towards building a flood defence.

Mr Lliuya also said that he chose the company because a 2013 database tracking historic emissions from major fossil fuel producers listed the German energy giant as one of the biggest polluters in Europe.

Mr Lliuya’s original case was rejected by a lower court in Germany in 2015, with judges arguing that a single firm could not be held responsible for climate change.

But in a surprise twist, Mr Lliuya in 2017 won his appeal with judges at the higher regional court, which accepted there was merit to his case and allowed it to proceed.

His lawyers previously argued that RWE was responsible for 0.5% of global CO2 emissions and demanded that the energy firm pay damages amounting to a proportional share of the cost of building a $3.5m-flood defence for Huaraz.

Germanwatch, an environmental NGO which backed Mr Lliuya’s case, celebrated the court’s ruling saying it had “made legal history”.

“Although the court dismissed the specific claim – finding flood risk to Luciano Lliuya’s home was not sufficiently high – it confirmed for the first time that major emitters can be held liable under German civil law for risks resulting from climate change,” it said in a statement.

The group said it was hopeful that the decision could positively influence similar cases in other countries.

A man wrongly identified on social media as being the driver of a car which ploughed into crowds of people in Liverpool says he has moved his children out of their home because he fears for their safety.

Peter Cunningham, 54, had his picture circulated online after the incident on Monday, when 79 people were injured while celebrating Liverpool’s Premier League victory.

Police have been granted more time to question the suspected driver of the Ford Galaxy that hit pedestrians at the parade – a 53-year-old man from West Derby in Liverpool who has not been named.

Water Street, where the incident happened, reopened on Wednesday morning. Seven people remain in a stable condition in hospital.

Peter Cunningham, from Huyton in Liverpool, told the BBC on Wednesday that he had been with his children along the parade route about four miles (6.4km) away from Water Street at the time of the incident, which he didn’t find out about until he got home.

He said of the false accusations: “It’s not me. I’m in work – the police need to give the [suspect’s] name out because I’m getting accused.

“Family members and friends are ringing and asking me, but it could get a whole lot worse. The police need to do something.

“I was down Queens Drive with my children. I’m in a completely different car anyway, I’ve got a Hyundai.

“I wouldn’t go into town because I knew it was too chocka to go up there with the girls.”

When asked if he was fearful of an attack due to the viral post about him, Mr Cunningham said: “It can still put me at great harm, I’ve had to move my children to a different house today because we’re that nervous.”

Research by BBC Verify found the name Peter Cunningham was mentioned by a user on X on Monday evening, in response to a post enquiring about the identity of the suspect.

On Tuesday night, an Instagram post with an image of Mr Cunningham was shared by a user claiming to be based in Liverpool, along with the false claim that it was the first photo of the suspect.

This same image appears on Mr Cunningham’s own Facebook profile. The Instagram post featuring Mr Cunningham’s picture – which has also been shared on Facebook – has now been deleted.

The BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring said false accusations about the identities of suspects can flood social media following high-profile attacks or incidents.

“The problem is exacerbated by the limitations police forces face when it comes to releasing more information about a suspect when they’re yet to be charged,” she said.

“Ultimately, there are few repercussions for those sharing these defamatory posts online. The impact is principally felt by the person whose reputation is dragged through the virtual mud, as worried family and friends watch on.

“And it’s yet another example where some of the social media sites take little to no action over what’s posted on their platforms – principally because they don’t know the facts either, but also because they have relaxed their policies to deal with disinformation and abuse.”

Merseyside Police said in an update on Wednesday that it had been granted more time to question the suspect following a previous extension, which will remain in place until Thursday.

Police do not ordinarily name a suspect before they are charged, and Merseyside Police have urged people not to speculate on the identity of the man in custody.

The arrest was made shortly after 18:00 BST on Monday, and police usually have 24 hours to question a suspect in custody before they have to either charge them or let them go.

People suspected of terrorism offences can be held for up to a fortnight without a charge, but police have ruled out terrorism in this case.

Det Supt Rachel Wilson said the force was making “significant progress” to establish the “full circumstances that led to what happened”, with CCTV being used to track the movements of the car before it hit the crowds.

“I’m pleased to say that the number of people in hospital is reducing as they continue to recover from the awful incident,” she said.

“We continue to support those still receiving treatment and, as part of our ongoing enquiries, we are identifying more people who were injured.”

South Africans are paying tribute to actor Presley Chweneyagae, who has died at the age of 40.

His family said he had died from natural causes after experiencing breathing problems.

Family spokesperson Mzwakhe Sigudla said that paramedics had attended to him, but he “couldn’t make it”.

Chweneyagae, who was born in 1984 in South Africa’s North-West Province, got his big international break after starring in the 2005 film Tsotsi, which earned the country its first Oscar for best foreign language film.

Tsotsi, a powerful crime film in which Chweneyagae plays the lead role, explores gang life in a South Africa.

The film is in a mix of different South African languages including Tsotsitaal, which is primarily spoken in townships.

Speaking to the BBC, South African film critic Stephen Aspeling said Tsotsi was a “landmark film” which came at a “critical juncture for South Africa’s film industry but also for South Africa on the international platform”.

“It’s taking a look at post-apartheid South Africa, the social inequalities, conveying poverty [and] crime in townships,” Mr Aspeling said, outlining that before Tsotsi, South Africa hadn’t featured much at the Oscars.

The year after the film’s release, its director, Gavin Hood, told an American student newspaper that Chweneyagae had “never done a film”, before he scouted him for the movie, highlighting that Chweneyagae himself came from a “tough neighborhood”.

Chweneyagae spoke about his acting technique in an interview on a South African podcast, where he said he liked to draw on his own experiences.

“You need to draw from your own emotional memory to make the scene more believable.”

He added that acting is all he had ever done work-wise, starting off with his first professional play in 1998.

Mr Aspeling also highlighted Chweneyagae’s role in iNumber Number, a film where he played a police officer, demonstrating his “versatility”.

In a statement announcing his death, his agency described him as a “South African icon” and one of the country’s “most gifted and beloved actors”.

The South African government published a post on X describing him as “a gifted storyteller whose talent lit up our screens and hearts”.

Chweneyagae also starred in the Nelson Mandela biopic Long Walk to Freedom in 2013, as well as acting in various theatre productions.

The South African Film and Television Awards described him as a “true legend of South African cinema” and a “powerhouse performer”.

The Ministry of Sports, Art and Culture released a statement highlighting his role in the popular South African series River and Cobrizzi.

“The Department of Sports, Art and Culture, mourns the loss of a true trailblazer – a storyteller who held the soul of a nation in his craft,” Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie said in the statement.

Speaking on the MacG podcast in 2020, Chweneyagae outlined what he hoped his legacy would be.

“I just want to be remembered as an actor who loved his work, and who had great respect for others. I think that’s about it.”

• Trailblazing African film-maker and Cannes winner dies
• Idris Elba: Why I’m planning a move to Africa
• Teenage actress takes on child marriage in role mirroring real life

Norway’s Princess Ingrid Alexandra is moving to Australia for her university studies, enrolling in a degree programme at the University of Sydney.

Alexandra, who is second in line to Norway’s throne, will join her classmates from August and will study “international relations and political economy,” Norway’s royal household said.

The 21-year-old will study full-time and live in a student residence on campus, a university spokesperson said.

Norway’s King Harald is Alexandra’s grandfather and her father is Crown Prince Haakon.

“Her Royal Highness looks forward to dedicating herself to her studies in the years to come,” Norway’s royal household said in a statement.

The princess’s mother, Crown Princess Mette-Marit, spent a year during her senior school studies at Wangaratta High School in Victoria.

The University of Sydney is looking forward to welcoming the princess, said its vice-president, Kirsten Andrews.

“We know how valuable the campus experience is and we hope the Princess makes the most of our beautiful grounds and surrounds, clubs and societies, as well as our proximity to the best Sydney has to offer,” Ms Andrews said in a statement.

Born and raised in Oslo, the princess recently completed her military service, spending 15 months as an engineer soldier and rifleman.

Her biography on the royal family’s website lists environmental protection and climate change as key interests.

The possession of small quantities of cannabis for personal use should be decriminalised, a report backed by the London mayor has concluded.

The report by the London Drugs Commission, chaired by former Labour cabinet minister Lord Falconer, makes 42 recommendations, including removing natural cannabis from the Misuse of Drugs Act (MDA).

Lord Falconer told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme that “continuing to have possession as a crime meant continuing have problems between the police and ethnic communities”.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said the report’s recommendations were “not the government position and we are not going to be changing our policy”.

Lord Falconer said the current law “doesn’t work, is disproportionate” and is also used to relieve genuinely symptoms of certain illnesses.

He said: “Stop and search in London for example is most commonly based on ‘the smell of cannabis’ and it is disproportionately used against young black men.”

He added: “The law treats cannabis the same as a whole range of much more serious drugs. The right course now, we think, is keep dealing criminal but make sure that possession is not a crime.”

Sir Sadiq Khan said current rules “cannot be justified”, adding that the commission’s findings had provided “a compelling, evidence-based case” for decriminalisation.

David Raynes, of the National Prevention of Drugs Alliance (NPDA), said any reduction in the legal consequences around cannabis would wrongly send the message that “cannabis was less harmful”.

The report makes recommendations in areas covering education, healthcare and the policing of cannabis.

Among the recommendations, it says natural cannabis should be removed from the MDA, where it is considered Class B alongside drugs like ketamine, and instead maintain it as a controlled substance under the Psychoactive Substances Act (PSA).

The report states: “The possibility of a custodial prison sentence of any length, but certainly up to the current maximum of five years, for possession of cannabis for personal use feels excessive.”

While acknowledging that it is very rare for anyone to be sentenced anywhere close to the five years, the authors said the “consequences of serving any time in prison are significant”.

The report states that police officers often identify cannabis possession through the use of stop and search which “continues to be utilised in a racially disproportionate way”.

Its authors call for the suspicion of cannabis possession to be removed as a reason officers can initiate a search.

The authors argue even when a person is found with an amount deemed beyond personal use, the current legal consequences “feel extreme, relative to the dangers of cannabis itself”.

Sir Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police commissioner, said the law on drugs and cannabis was “a matter for parliament” and the force would “keep working to our current law”.

He added: “At the moment, we see drugs being at the centre of a lot of crime.

“Drug dealing is so linked to violence. We see a lot of communities complaining about public drug use and that’s a big issue in terms of antisocial behaviour.

“If the law changes, we’ll change around that, but it’s not something we’re calling for.”

Among the other recommendations made in the report are to:

• Improve public health services for cannabis-related harm, including better treatment access and coordination
• Enhance cannabis education with earlier, age-appropriate, and credible content in schools and beyond
• Support fair access to medical cannabis, including addressing cost barriers and expanding research
• Monitor international developments and reassess the case for broader legalisation in five years

Regulating cannabis under the PSA, the authors argue, would expose fewer people to stop and search, help tackle “racial disproportionality”, and make any legal consequences “commensurate with the risks posed”.

They add decriminalising it would reduce the impact on those who take cannabis for medicinal purposes but are not able to get a legal prescription.

Janet Hills, the commission’s deputy chair who was a former detective sergeant and chair of the Met’s Black Police Association, said it was time to “shift in our approach to cannabis enforcement”.

She said the recommendations would “create a more equitable and just system”.

Mr Raynes, who has long been against any liberalisation in Britain’s drug policy, said that the report’s authors were attempting to “modify the law as gently as possible”.

“The real danger is that we send a signal to the youth of London that cannabis is less harmful,” he said.

Asked about the point made in the report that cannabis is still widely used despite the current legal consequences, Mr Raynes said it was about “restricting the damage” done by illegal substances.

He added that the London Drugs Commission, which Sir Sadiq established in 2022, was “an enormous piece of self-indulgence by the mayor” in a policy area in which he has no authority over.

Responding to the report, the mayor said: “I’ve long been clear that we need fresh thinking on how to reduce the substantial harms associated with drug-related crime in our communities.”

He added: “We must recognise that better education, improved healthcare and more effective, equitable policing of cannabis use are long overdue.”

In March, Dame Diana Johnson, a minister at the department, said the government had “no plans” to legalise cannabis but did not address decriminalisation.

In a 2023 interview as opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer said drug policy was “settled” in the UK.

Sign up for our Politics Essential newsletter to keep up with the inner workings of Westminster and beyond.

Writers including Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Russell T Davies have put their names to an open letter – signed by more than 400 authors and organisations – calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The letter, also signed by Jeanette Winterson, Irvine Welsh, Kate Mosse and Elif Shafak, describes Israel’s military campaign in the territory as “genocidal”.

The writers urge people to join them in “ending our collective silence and inaction in the face of horror”.

Israel says it is working to destroy the Palestinian armed group Hamas and get back hostages they have taken. It has strongly denied allegations of genocide, claims which are also being examined by the International Court of Justice.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response Hamas’ cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,056 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 3,901 over the past 10 weeks, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Half a million people face starvation in the coming months, according to an assessment by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

Responding to the accusation of genocide made by rights group Amnesty International in December, Israel’s foreign ministry described the group’s 295-page report as “entirely false and based on lies”, while the Israeli military said the claims were “entirely baseless and fail to account for the operational realities” it faces.

The authors’ letter is entitled Writers Demand Immediate Gaza Ceasefire and organised by writers Horatio Clare, Kapka Kassabova and Monique Roffey.

It notes that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, as well as independent experts appointed by the United Nations human rights council, have, it says, “clearly identified genocide or acts of genocide in Gaza, enacted by the Israel Defence Force and directed by the government of Israel”.

The authors call for the “immediate unrestricted distribution of food and medical aid in Gaza by the UN”, and a ceasefire “which guarantees safety and justice for all Palestinians, the release of all Israeli hostages, and the release of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners arbitrarily held in Israeli jails”.

Sanctions should be imposed, the letter argues, if the Israeli government does not take action.

While taking this stand, the authors also used the letter to “assert without reservation our absolute opposition to and loathing of antisemitism, of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli prejudice”.

The letter continues: “We reject and abhor attacks, hate and violence – in writing, speech and action – against Palestinian, Israeli, and Jewish people in all and any form. We stand in solidarity with the resistance of Palestinian, Jewish, and Israeli people to the genocidal policies of the current Israeli government.”

Organisers said the letter was composed with input from a dozen British writers, based on another letter published in France’s Liberation newspaper earlier this week, which was signed by 300 French-speaking writers.

It begins by quoting the poem A Star Said Yesterday by the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2023.

And it goes on to say that Palestinians “are not the abstract victims of an abstract war…

“Too often, words have been used to justify the unjustifiable, deny the undeniable, defend the indefensible. Too often, too, the right words – the ones that mattered – have been eradicated, along with those who might have written them.”

The term genocide “is not a slogan”, the letter states. “It carries legal, political, and moral responsibilities.”

The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted following the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

The Giant’s Causeway has faced many threats to its survival, from mythical fights between giants to coastal erosion and rising sea levels.

Now there’s a new problem.

At first, you don’t notice them but as soon as you see one, you start to see them everywhere – hundreds of them, in every fissure and crevice.

They are coins, inserted into the tiny gaps between one of Northern Ireland’s most famous and photographed natural resources, the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway.

Like the padlocks left on the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris, people often leave the coins behind for love or luck.

But, like that tradition, the coins are causing problems, and now visitors are being asked to keep their spare change in their pockets.

In Paris, it has been made illegal to attach a padlock after part of the bridge collapsed in 2014.

At the Giant’s Causeway, the practice started years ago – but the caretakers for the site, the National Trust, believe it has increased significantly in scale in the last decade or so.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists and locals visit each year and only a fraction leave behind this unwanted memento.

But the coins are having a direct impact on the rocks themselves. The worst affected are the basalt columns that make up The Loom – 10 ft high leaning towers of rock.

They are a slightly lighter colour than the iconic hexagonal black basalt at the point of the causeway.

It is easy to see at first glance the discolouration caused by the coins – a reddish-brown wash over the surface.

Dr Cliff Henry, nature engagement officer with the National Trust, said the rocks are affected on a number of levels.

“People see others put coins in, so they copycat, they take a coin out of their pocket and they might take a stone off the ground to hammer the coin in, but they might miss and chip the stone itself so that’s doing damage.”

He added: “Once the coin is in there it starts to rust and due to the atmosphere here it rusts at an accelerated level.

“The coin then expands and that’s putting pressure on the joint near the edge so we have seen on a number of places here that the corners have popped off.

“And the rusting metal in there is starting to leach. The iron and nickel and copper is leaching out over the rocks and it looks unsightly.”

He said they’re appealing to people to stop inserting the coins before more damage is done to these 60-million-year-old rocks.

“On a geological timescale, this is very rapid erosion.”

A report from the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland shed some light on the problem.

Dr Kirstin Lemon said: “The advice of the Geological Survey to the National Trust is to see if we can remove as many of those coins as we can.

“By removing them, it means we’re stopping any further physical impact on the site itself. We’re also stopping that chemical impact as well.”

She said she hoped that by removing coins, it would stop others adding more.

A specialist stonemason has started the work and has removed about 10% of them so far.

“He’s done some test sites already so we know we can take these coins out without doing damage to the stones themselves,” said Dr Henry.

“We want him to do it – we don’t want the general public to do that, we don’t want to cause any further damage.”

Signs will also be put up and visitors are already warned not to insert the coins by tour guides at the Giant’s Causeway, like Mark Adams.

“I think it’s a simple thing of wanting to leave something of themselves behind,” he said.

“But if you want to leave something behind, take a photo, put it online, it’ll be there forever.”

Last year, the Giant’s Causeway received about 684,000 visits.

The numbers are steadily climbing back to their pre-pandemic levels. There were nearly a million visits in 2019.

The National Trust said not only is it Northern Ireland’s most valuable natural phenomenon, it is important for the economy too.

“It’s an icon for Northern Ireland – if we can’t look after this, what’s the hope for the rest of the country?,” said Dr Henry.

“We really need to be looking after the causeway as best we can.”

The Giant’s Causeway became a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage Site in 1986.

The World Heritage list includes 1,223 properties across the world and recognises the sites for their cultural or natural importance.

Elon Musk has criticised one of the signature policies of Donald Trump, marking a break from the US president who he helped to win re-election in 2024.

Last week, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed what Trump calls his “big, beautiful” bill, which includes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks and a pledge to increase defence spending. It will now head to the Senate.

Tech titan Musk told the BBC’s US partner CBS News he was “disappointed” by the plan, which he felt “undermines” the work he did for the president on reducing spending.

Musk was enlisted as Trump’s cost-cutting tsar – ending funds for US foreign aid among other projects – before announcing he would step back.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk said in the interview with CBS Sunday Morning, a clip of which was released by the broadcaster before transmission.

He went on to argue that Trump’s plan “increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it”.

It is thought that the legislation could increase the deficit – or the difference between what the US government spends and the revenue that it receives – by about $600bn (£444bn) in the next fiscal year.

Furthermore, the bill “undermines the work that the Doge team is doing”, Musk said, using the acronym of the cost-cutting advisory body the Department of Government Efficiency.

Referring to Trump’s moniker for the legislation, Musk told CBS: “I think a bill can be big or beautiful. I don’t know if it can be both.”

• US House passes Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ tax and spending bill
• A look at the key items in the bill

Musk’s intervention highlights the ongoing tension within Trump’s Republican Party over the tax and spend plans, which faced an uneasy passage through the House due to opposition from different wings of the party.

Long a policy priority of Trump’s, the legislation pledges to extend soon-to-expire tax cuts passed during his first administration in 2017, as well as provide an influx of money for defence spending and to fund the president’s mass deportations.

The bill also proposes increasing to $4tn the debt ceiling – meaning the limit on the amount of money the government can borrow to pay its bills.

Musk’s comments on the issue imply a growing distance from Trump, who he helped to propel back to the White House last year with donations of more than $250m.

They come after the billionaire recently pledged to step back from Doge. Musk had stated that he wanted to help the government cut $1tn in spending by cancelling contracts and reducing the government workforce.

As of April, Doge’s website claims around $175bn has already been saved, but a BBC analysis of this figure shows it lacks some evidence.

Musk also said last week that he planned to do “a lot less” political spending in the future, and that he was committed to leading electric car company Tesla for another five years.

Tesla faced protests, boycotts and a drop in sales over Musk’s work as the Doge chief, including his controversial efforts to lay off thousands of federal workers and curb foreign aid.

Musk defended his actions in his comments last week, saying: “I did what needed to be done.” He and Trump previously justified the cuts as a matter of weeding out what they saw as fraud and abuse within federal spending.

Joel Le Scouarnec, the former surgeon who has admitted sexually abusing hundreds of patients, mostly children, between 1989 and 2014 has been sentenced to a maximum term of 20 years in jail.

Le Scouarnec was dressed in black as he stood emotionless in court listening to judge Aude Burési deliver the verdict. He had admitted the charges in March.

Judge Burési said the court had taken into account the fact that the former surgeon had especially sought out unwell, vulnerable and sedated victims.

The sentence has a mandatory minimum term of two-thirds – and because Le Scouarnec has already served seven years, he may be eligible for parole by 2030.

Amélie Lévêque, one of Le Scouarnec’s victims, said: “To think one day he could walk down the street, see people – that upsets me. We [the victims] no longer have a normal life while they’re giving him back that life, and that disgusts me.”

“Twenty years is little compared to the number of victims in this trial,” said Francesca Satta, a lawyer for some of the victims. “It is time for the law to change so we can have more appropriate sentences.”

His lawyer Maxime Tessier said Le Scouarnec had no intention of appealing.

Le Scouarnec, 74, has been dubbed France’s most prolific paedophile. He is already in jail after being sentenced in 2020 to 15 years for raping and sexually assaulting four children, including two of his nieces.

The former doctor has been on trial in Brittany since late February.

During that time dozens of his victims have testified, telling the court how the abuse they sustained as children shaped their lives.

In March, Le Scouarnec admitted sexually abusing all 299 victims, many while they were under anaesthesia or waking up after operations.

He kept diaries in which he described the assaults in graphic detail, which allowed police to track down his victims – many of whom had no memory of the abuse they suffered while in Le Scouarnec’s care.

“I can no longer look at myself the same way because I am a paedophile and a child rapist,” Le Scouarnec said during his last statements to the court last week.

“Many things have been said. I don’t necessarily remember everything now. It will no doubt come back to me when I’m in my cell, but what I’ve witnessed [in court] is the suffering for which I am responsible,” he said.

He added he neither wanted or expected to be given any leniency.

Earlier this month he also said he was “responsible” for the deaths of two victims whose relatives say died by suicide, following the trauma of being sexually assaulted by Le Scouarnec when they were children.

The grandparents of one of them, Mathis Vinet, who died four years ago, told the BBC about the “descent into hell” experienced by his grandson when police revealed to him that his name appeared in one of the diaries.

The trial has sparked fury that Le Scouarnec got away with the abuse for over fifteen years, and that he was allowed to continue to treat children despite a conviction in 2005 for downloading paedophile images.

The Victims of Joel Le Scouarnec Collective group lamented that the trial had failed to capture the attention of politicians and society at large.

“No lesson has been drawn from this, neither from the medical world nor from politicians,” the group said in a statement. Several victims held a protest in front of the courthouse ahead of the verdict being delivered on Wednesday afternoon.

Catherine, the mother of a victim, said on the day of the verdict that it was the first time she had seen so many journalists covering the trial and added that she felt the victims had been forgotten.

“It’s a pity but my hope is that now our message can be passed on. Not for the generation that has been hurt but for my grandchildren,” she said, adding that she hoped institutions would “react”.

Le Scouarnec, who was present in court every day of the 14-week trial, repeatedly apologised for his “revolting” acts.

Many of his victims were left unimpressed with his demeanour. “His words are always the same, in the same tone, I don’t see any sincerity in them,” Louis-Marie, 35, told the BBC. “The only thing I hope is that he doesn’t do any more harm to society… that he stays locked up.”

“I never saw tears running down his cheeks,” said another victim named Manon Lemoine.

But Maxime Tessier, Le Scouarnec’s lawyer, said he believed his client had been sincere. “He was very moved during this trial… It was very important for him to confess as he did. It was a moment of truth and justice.”

Mr Tessier also pointed the finger at the medical establishment, which civil parties have accused of not doing more to stop Le Scouarnec’s from practicing medicine even when rumours of his paedophilia were circulating widely.

“No one acknowledged responsibility, whereas all the victims said it’s not only a man who did that – but also the system which let him do it,” he told the BBC.

The National Order of Doctors (Cnom), which has also filed a lawsuit against Le Scouranec, said in March that it “expressed its deep regrets” as the former surgeon should have been “prevented from practicing”.

“This situation has highlighted poor communication between the different entities of the Order of Doctors, and we deeply regret this,” they said in a statement.

The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has said that “Israeli strikes in Gaza go beyond what is necessary to fight Hamas” as the death toll there continues to mount.

Kallas also said that the EU did not support a new aid distribution model backed by the US and Israel which bypasses the UN and other humanitarian organisations.

“We don’t support the privatisation of the distribution of humanitarian aid. Humanitarian aid can not be weaponised”, she said.

Israeli air strikes and other military actions since it resumed the war in March following a ceasefire have killed 3,924 people, the Hamas-run health ministry says. Israel says it is acting to destroy Hamas and get back hostages the group holds.

Recent Israel bombardments have killed large numbers of civilians. Last Friday an air strike in Khan Younis killed nine of a Palestinian doctor’s 10 children. At least 35 people were killed in a school building sheltering displaced families in northern Gaza overnight into Monday.

Kallas’ remarks follows an intervention by new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz who declared he “no longer understands” Israel’s objectives in the besieged enclave.

“The way in which the civilian population has been affected… can no longer be justified by a fight against Hamas terrorism,” he said.

The EU is one of the largest donors of humanitarian aid to Gaza, yet Kallas said most of it was currently unable to get to Palestinians who need it. Israel imposed a complete blockade on Gaza in March and only began allowing a trickle of aid in after 11 weeks.

“The majority of the aid to Gaza is provided by the EU but it’s not reaching the people as it is blocked by Israel,” Kallas said.

“The suffering of the people is untenable.”

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen meanwhile described recent Israeli attacks on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure as “abhorrent” and “disproportionate”.

It also follows the strongest criticism yet by the UK, France and Canada, who demanded Israel end its military offensive in Gaza. The UK later said it was suspending trade talks with Israel.

The EU has launched a formal review of its own trade agreement with Israel and Kallas said she would present “options” at the upcoming EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on 23 June.

UN agencies have warned that Gaza’s 2.1 million population is facing catastrophic levels of hunger after an almost three-month Israeli blockade that was eased last week.

Israel and the US are backing a new aid distribution system run by a controversial new group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

The GHF’s aid distribution system uses US security contractors and bypasses the UN, which has rejected it as unethical and unworkable. The US and Israeli governments have said it is preventing aid from being stolen by Hamas, which the armed group denies doing.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Tuesday plans to relocate Gaza’s entire population to a “sterile zone” in the south of the territory while Israeli troops continue fighting Hamas elsewhere. He also vowed to facilitate what he described as the “voluntary emigration” of much of Gaza’s population to other countries – a plan many view as forcible expulsion.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response Hamas’ cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,084 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.

A former college principal in the eastern Indian state of Odisha has been sentenced to life in prison for sending a parcel bomb that killed a newlywed man and his great aunt in 2018.

A court found Punjilal Meher, 56, guilty of murder, attempted murder, and use of explosives in what became known as the “wedding bomb” case that stunned India.

The bomb, disguised as a wedding gift, was delivered to the home of Soumya Sekhar Sahu, a 26-year-old software engineer, just days after his wedding.

When the couple opened the package, it exploded – killing Sahu and his great aunt, and leaving his wife, Reema, who opened the package, critically wounded.

While acknowledging the prosecution’s argument that it was a “heinous” crime, the court declined to classify it as a “rarest of the rare” case deserving the death penalty.

The BBC covered the incident in a detailed two-part investigative series.

• Who sent the wedding gift bomb that killed this newlywed?
• A wedding bomb, a letter and an unlikely suspect

The February 2018 explosion took place in Patnagarh, a quiet town in Odisha’s Bolangir district.

The victims had been married just five days and were preparing lunch when a parcel arrived at their home. It was addressed to Soumya and appeared to be a wedding gift, allegedly sent from Raipur in Chattisgarh state, over 230km (142 miles) away.

As Soumya pulled a thread on the parcel to open it, a powerful blast tore through the kitchen, killing him and his 85-year-old great-aunt Jemamani Sahu. Reema, then 22, survived with serious burns, a punctured eardrum, and trauma.

After a prolonged investigation, police arrested Meher, then 49, a teacher and former principal of a local college where Soumya’s mother worked.

Investigators had told me then that Meher harboured a grudge over professional rivalry and meticulously planned the attack. He used a false name and address to mail the bomb from Raipur, choosing a courier service without CCTV or parcel scanning.

The bomb travelled over 650km by bus, passing through multiple hands before being delivered. Investigators said it was a crude but deadly device wrapped in jute thread, rigged to detonate on opening.

The parcel carrying the explosive bore a fake name – SK Sharma from Raipur. Weeks passed with no clear suspects. Investigators scoured thousands of phone records and interrogated over 100 people, including one man who had made a threatening call after Reema’s engagement – but nothing stuck.

Then, in April, an anonymous letter reached the local police chief.

It claimed the bomb had been sent under the name “SK Sinha,” not Sharma, and cryptically mentioned motives of “betrayal” and money.

The letter claimed three men had “undertaken the project” and were now “beyond police reach”. It cited the groom’s “betrayal” and money – hinting at a scorned lover or property dispute – as motives. It also asked police to stop harassing innocents.

The letter turned the investigation.

Arun Bothra, a police officer who then headed Odisha’s crime branch, noticed that the handwriting on the parcel’s receipt had been misread: it did resemble “Sinha” more than “Sharma.”

Crucially, the letter writer seemed to know this – something only the sender could have known.

The police now believed the suspect had sent the letter himself.

“It was clear that the sender knew more about the crime than we did. By writing that it was being sent by a messenger, he wanted to tell us that the crime was not the work of a local man. He wanted to tell us that the plot was executed by three people. He wanted to be taken seriously, so he was kind of blowing his fake cover by pointing out a mistake we had made,” Mr Bothra told me in 2018.

The victim’s mother, a college teacher, recognised the letter’s writing style and phraseology as that of a colleague, Meher, a former principal she had replaced.

Police had previously dismissed Meher’s workplace rivalry as routine academic politics. Now he became the prime suspect.

Under questioning, Meher initially offered an implausible story about being forced to deliver the letter under threat.

Police allege he later confessed: he had hoarded firecrackers during Diwali, extracted gunpowder, built the bomb, and mailed it from Raipur using a courier.

He allegedly left his phone at home to create an alibi and avoided CCTV by not buying a train ticket. Meher had even attended both the victim’s wedding and funeral.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered US embassies around the world to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as it prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants.

An official memo said social media vetting would be stepped up for student and foreign exchange visas, which would have “significant implications” for embassies and consulates.

It comes during a wide-ranging Trump crackdown on some of America’s most elite universities. He sees these institutions as too left-wing – accusing them of failing to combat antisemitism when pro-Palestinian protests have unfolded on campuses.

Responding to the move, China called on the US to protect international students.

“We urge the US side to earnestly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of international students, including those from China,” an official was quoted as saying. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students attend US universities.

The universities themselves are likely to be disquieted as well. Many of them rely on foreign students for a significant chunk of their funding – as those scholars often pay higher tuition fees.

Foreign students who want to study in the US are usually required to schedule interviews at a US embassy in their home country before approval.

State department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters on Tuesday: “We take very seriously the process of vetting who it is that comes into the country, and we’re going to continue to do that.”

• Are you a student who has been affected by the issues in this story? Tell us here

The memo, viewed by the BBC’s US partner CBS News, directed US embassies to remove any unfilled appointments from their calendars for students seeking visas, but said those with appointments already scheduled could go ahead.

The pause would last “until further guidance is issued”, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote.

The memo also said the state department was preparing for an “expansion of required social media screening and vetting” applicable to all student visa applications.

It did not spell out what the vetting would look for.

The Trump administration had already enhanced its vetting of student social media, according to a report by the Guardian in March, which linked the move to a broader crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses.

In April, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stated that it would consider “antisemitic activity on social media and the physical harassment of Jewish individuals as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests”.

As part of the broader crackdown, Trump’s team has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for universities and moved to deport students, while revoking thousands of visas for others. Many of these actions have been blocked by the courts.

The White House has accused some US universities of allowing pro-Palestinian activism on campus to be hijacked by antisemitism.

Universities have accused the Trump administration of trying to infringe on free speech. Critics say the new policy on social media vetting represents a further violation of the rights that are supposed to be enshrined by the First Amendment in the US Constitution.

Trump has throughout his presidency countered that he is working to defend free speech.

Harvard University has been the focal point of the president’s ire; he has frozen $2.65bn (£1.96bn) in federal grants to the institution and has sought to put other federal funding worth $100m under review.

The university’s president has said the cuts will “hurt” the country, not just Harvard, because academics were conducting research deemed “high-priority” by the government.

Last week, Trump also revoked Harvard’s ability to enrol international students or host foreign researchers. A federal judge blocked the policy.

If the measure is ultimately allowed, it could deliver a devastating blow to the university, where more than a quarter of students are from overseas. Students protested against the move at the university’s campus near Boston on Tuesday.

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

Could India’s decades-long jungle insurgency finally be approaching its end?

Last week, the country’s most-wanted Maoist, Nambala Keshava Rao – popularly known as Basavaraju – was killed along with 26 others in a major security operation in the central state of Chhattisgarh. Home Minister Amit Shah called it “the most decisive strike” against the insurgency in three decades. One police officer also died in the encounter.

Basavaraju’s death marks more than a tactical victory – it signals a breach in the Maoists’ last line of defence in Bastar, the forested heartland where the group carved out its fiercest stronghold since the 1980s.

Maoists, also known as “Naxalites” after the 1967 uprising in Naxalbari village in West Bengal, have regrouped over the decades to carve out a “red corridor” across central and eastern India – stretching from Jharkhand in the east to Maharashtra in the west and spanning more than a third of the country’s districts. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh had described the insurgency as India’s “greatest internal security threat”.

The armed struggle for Communist rule has claimed nearly 12,000 lives since 2000, according to the South Asian Terrorism Portal. The rebels say they fight for the rights of indigenous tribes and the rural poor, citing decades of state neglect and land dispossession.

The Maoist movement – officially known as Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) – took formal shape in 2004 with the merger of key Marxist-Leninist groups into the CPI (Maoist). This party traces its ideological roots to a 1946 peasant uprising in the southern state of Telangana.

Now, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government pledging to end Maoism by March 2026, the battle-hardened rebellion stands at a crossroads: could this truly be the end – or just another pause in its long, bloody arc?

“There will be a lull. But Marxist-Leninist movements have transcended such challenges when the top leadership of the Naxalites were killed in the 70s and yet we are talking about Naxalism,” said N Venugopal, a journalist, social scientist and long-time observer of the movement, who is both a critic and sympathiser of the Maoists.

One of the senior-most officials in India’s home ministry who oversaw anti-Maoist operations, MA Ganapathy, holds a different view.

“At its core, the Maoist movement was an ideological struggle – but that ideology has lost traction, especially among the younger generation. Educated youth aren’t interested anymore,” says Mr Ganapathy.

“With Basavaraju neutralised, morale is low. They’re on their last leg.”

The federal home ministry’s latest report notes a 48% drop in violent incidents in Maoist-related violence – from 1,136 in 2013 to 594 in 2023 – and a 65% decline in related deaths, from 397 to 138.

However, it acknowledges a slight rise in security force casualties in 2023 compared to 2022, attributed to intensified operations in core Maoist areas.

The report says Chhattisgarh remained the worst-affected state in 2023, accounting for 63% of all Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) incidents and 66% of the related deaths.

Jharkhand followed, with 27% of the violence and 23% of the deaths. The remaining incidents were reported from Maharashtra, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.

The collapse of Maoism in Chhattisgarh, a stronghold of the insurgency, offers key clues to the movement’s broader decline.

A decade ago, the state’s police were seen as weak, according to Mr Ganapathy.

“Today, precise state-led strikes, backed by central paramilitary forces, have changed the game. While paramilitary held the ground, state forces gathered intelligence and launched targeted operations. It was clear role delineation and coordination,” he said.

Mr Ganapathy adds that access to mobile phones, social media, roads and connectivity have made people more aware and less inclined to support an armed underground movement.

“People have become aspirational, mobile phones and social media have become widespread and people are exposed to the outside world. Maoists also cannot operate in hiding in remote jungles while being out of sync with new social realities.

“Without mass support, no insurgency can survive,” he says.

A former Maoist sympathiser, who did not want to be named, pointed to a deeper flaw behind the movement’s collapse: a political disconnect.

“They delivered real change – social justice in Telangana, uniting tribespeople in Chhattisgarh – but failed to forge it into a cohesive political force,” he said.

At the heart of the failure, he argued, was a dated revolutionary vision: building isolated “liberated zones” beyond the state’s reach and “a theory to strike the state through a protracted people’s war”.

“These pockets work only until the state pushes back. Then the zones collapse, and thousands die. It’s time to ask – can a revolution really be led from cut-off forestlands in today’s India?”

The CPI (Maoist)’s 2007 political document clings to a Mao-era strategy: of creating a “liberated zone” and “encircling the cities from the countryside.” But the sympathiser was blunt: “That doesn’t work anymore.”

The party still retains some popular support in a few isolated pockets, primarily in the tribal regions of eastern Maharashtra, southern Chhattisgarh and parts of Odisha and Jharkhand – but without a strong military base.

Ongoing operations by state forces have significantly weakened the Maoist military infrastructure in their strongholds in southern Chhattisgarh. Cadres and leaders are now being killed regularly, reflecting the rebels’ growing inability to defend themselves.

Mr Venugopal believes the strategy needs rethinking – not abandonment.

The underground struggle has its place, he said, but “the real challenge is blending it with electoral politics”.

In contrast, Mr Ganapathy sees little hope for the Maoists to mount a meaningful fightback in the near future and argues that the time has come for a different approach – dialogue.

“It would be wise for them to go for talks now and perhaps unconditionally or even lay down the conditions and let the government consider them. This is the time to approach the government instead of unnecessarily sacrificing their own cadres, without a purpose,” he said.

Maoists enjoy support in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana from mainstream political parties. In Telangana, both the ruling Congress and the main opposition Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) have backed calls for a ceasefire, along with 10 smaller Left parties – an effort widely seen as aimed at protecting the group’s remaining leaders and cadres.

The Maoist movement, rooted in past struggles against caste oppression, still carries social legitimacy in parts of these states. Civil society activists have also joined the push for a truce.

“We, along with other civil rights groups, demanded a two-step process – an immediate ceasefire followed by peace talks,” said Ranjit Sur, general secretary of the Kolkata-based group Association for Protection of Democratic Rights.

Maoist-affected states remain resilient strongholds in part because they are rich in minerals – making them sites of intense resource battles. Mr Venugopal believes this is key to the CPI (Maoist’s) enduring presence.

Chhattisgarh, for instance, is India’s sole producer of tin concentrates and moulding sand, and a leading source of coal, dolomite, bauxite and high-grade iron ore, according to the ministry of mines.

It accounts for 36% of the country’s tin, 20% iron ore, 18% coal, 11% dolomite and 4% of diamond and marble reserves. Yet, despite strong interest, mining companies – both global and national – have long struggled to access these resources.

“Multinational companies couldn’t enter because the Maoist movement, built on the slogan ‘Jal, Jangal, Jameen (Water, Forest, Land),’ asserted that forests belong to tribespeople – not corporations,” Mr Venugopal said.

But with the Maoists now weakened, at least four Chhattisgarh mines are set to go to “preferred bidders” after successful auctions in May, according to an official notification.

Mr Venugopal believes that the resistance won’t die with the death of Maoist leaders.

“Leaders may fall, but the anger remains. Wherever injustice exists, there will be movements. We may not call them Maoism anymore – but they’ll be there.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says its military has “eliminated” Hamas’s Gaza chief Mohammed Sinwar, one of its most wanted men and the brother of the group’s late leader Yahya Sinwar.

Mohammed Sinwar was the target of a massive Israeli strike on the courtyard and surrounding area of the European hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis on 13 May, which the Israeli military said destroyed Hamas’s “underground infrastructure” there.

Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said that 28 people were killed. Hamas itself has neither confirmed nor denied Sinwar’s death.

Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, was killed by Israeli troops last October.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response Hamas’ cross-border attack 600 days ago, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,084 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Police have been given extra time to question a man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a car ploughed into football fans during Liverpool’s Premier League victory parade.

Seven people remain in hospital from a total of 79 casualties struck by the Ford Galaxy on Water Street in the city centre shortly after 18:00 BST on Monday.

Merseyside Police said it had been given more time to question a 53-year-old man from West Derby, who was also detained on suspicion of dangerous driving and driving while unfit through drugs.

The force said the car had followed an ambulance through a road block, which had been lifted to allow medics to reach someone having a suspected heart attack.

Police said they had now spoken to 14 more people who had been injured after reporting 65 were hurt at a news conference on Tuesday.

Officers confirmed they had been granted further time to continue questioning the suspect until Thursday.

• Live page recap: Liverpool police continue to question suspect

Under laws around the detention of suspects, police forces can keep a person in custody for 24 hours without charge, while a senior officer of at least superintendent rank can sign off on an initial 12-hour extension.

After that, an application can be made to a magistrates’ court for further 12-hour extensions to a maximum of 96 hours – or 14 days if the offence is terrorism related.

Within two hours of the suspect’s arrest, the force confirmed he was a “white British male” and said the incident was not being treated as terror related.

On Thursday 54-year-old Peter Cunningham, from Huyton in Merseyside, spoke out after his picture was circulated on social media by people falsely claiming he was the suspect.

“I’m in work – the police need to give the name out because I’m getting accused”, he told the BBC.

Merseyside Police urged people not to speculate and reiterated that the only suspect in custody was a 53-year-old man from the West Derby area of Liverpool.

• Liverpool parade crash: How not to get caught out by fake news

Water Street reopened earlier after cordon was lifted and the aftermath of the parade and the incident was cleaned up overnight.

One survivor, Daniel Eveson from Telford in Shropshire, said his partner was dragged under the wheels of the car and his baby son’s pram was tossed down the street.

“I saw a gentleman on the bonnet and the rest was just chaos,” he told BBC Radio Shropshire.

“It was hard because I didn’t know where anyone was or what to do,” he said.

“A lot of people were angry and I saw the car getting smashed.”

Mr Eveson was able to locate his son, who was unharmed, and leave him in a restaurant as he went back to search for his partner.

Their baby was now as “good as gold”, he said, while his partner remained in hospital and was waiting to hear whether she could return home.

“It was the day it was meant to be to start off with, it was perfect,” he said, but added “under the sea of chaos it changed to the worst day of my life”.

Det Supt Rachel Wilson said on Thursday: “I’m pleased to say the number of people in hospital is reducing as they continue to recover from the awful incident.

“We continue to support those still receiving treatment and as part of our ongoing enquiries we are identifying more people who were injured.”

She said detectives were making “significant progress” in establishing the full circumstances that led to what happened.

Officers are carrying out a trawl of CCTV inquiries across the city to establish the movements of the Ford Galaxy before the incident took place.

Some flowers and cards with well wishes have been left as a reminder of the events which unfolded.

Hundreds of thousands of jubilant Liverpool fans packed the city centre on Bank Holiday Monday and lined the 10-mile (16km) parade route as the Reds celebrated winning their second Premier League crown and 20th top-flight league title.

Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has told Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky that Berlin will help Kyiv produce long-range missiles to defend itself from Russian attack.

“We want to talk about production and we will not publicly discuss details,” he said, when asked by reporters in Berlin if Germany would supply Kyiv with its Taurus missiles.

Merz took office earlier this month, promising to beef up German support for Ukraine, and said this week that there were “no longer” any range restrictions on weapons supplied by Kyiv’s Western allies.

The Taurus has a range of 500km (310 miles) and could reach deeper into Russian territory than other far-range missiles.

Although Merz did not refer to the Taurus by name during his press conference with the Ukrainian leader, he did say a “memorandum of understanding” on long-range missiles would be signed by the German and Ukrainian defence ministers later on Wednesday.

The Kremlin has warned that any decision to end range restrictions on the missiles that Ukraine can use would be a quite dangerous change in policy that would harm efforts to reach a political deal.

However, Merz has since emphasised that a decision on lifting range restrictions was taken by Western allies months ago.

The new chancellor is seeking to cut a far more assertive figure on support for Ukraine than his predecessor, Olaf Scholz.

So far, he is succeeding.

There may be many questions about the detail of Merz’s missile co-operation plan but his willingness to make big announcements that might antagonise the Kremlin stands in stark contrast to the cautious tone of the last government.

During his press conference with Zelensky, Merz promised Ukraine continued support for as long as necessary, warning Moscow that its refusal to take part in further peace talks would have “real consequences”.

Zelensky has called for talks aimed at reaching a settlement on the war to involve three leaders – “Trump-Putin-me” – although he added he was ready for any format.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not dismiss the idea out of hand but said such a meeting could only take place after “concrete agreements” had been reached between “the two delegations.”

Although Ukraine and Russia held their first direct talks for more than three years in Istanbul this month, the meeting involved low-level officials and they were only able to agree on a prisoner exchange, which took place last weekend.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested on Wednesday that a date for further talks would be announced in the “very near future”, but made clear that Moscow was looking to guarantee Ukraine’s “neutral, non-aligned and non-nuclear status”.

US President Donald Trump indicated this week that his patience was wearing thin with Russia’s failure to move forward with further talks.

He accused Vladimir Putin of “playing with fire”, after a deadly Russian missile strike that killed 13 Ukrainians, including children. However, Russian officials suggested that Trump was not sufficiently informed on the context of the conflict.

Ukraine’s president has urged Washington to impose sanctions on Russia’s banking and energy sectors. He said he had discussed the issue with Trump, adding that the US president had “confirmed that if Russia does not stop, sanctions will be imposed”.

Despite the continued diplomatic manoeuvres, Ukraine’s military reported one of its largest drone barrages on Russian targets to date overnight in to Wednesday, while Zelensky said Russia had launched more than 900 drones over a three-day period ending early on Monday morning.

On the ground, Ukraine’s defences have come under increased Russian attack in the northeast.

Zelensky said Moscow was “amassing” over 50,000 troops along the Sumy front, where Russian forces have seized several villages across the Ukrainian border in an effort to create what Putin calls “security buffer zones”.

Sumy governor Oleh Hryhorov said Russian forces had seized four villages and that fighting was continuing near other settlements in the area.

The war, now into its fourth year, has claimed tens of thousands of lives and left much of Ukraine’s east and south in ruins. Moscow controls roughly one-fifth of the country’s territory, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.

Zelensky has accused Moscow of delaying the peace process and said they are yet to deliver a promised memorandum of peace terms following talks in Istanbul. Peskov insisted the document was in its “final stages.”

Nitrous oxide – known colloquially as “laughing gas” – has many uses, from a painkiller during dental procedures to a whipping agent for canned whipped cream.

While its euphoric side effects have long been known, the rise of vaping has helped create a perfect delivery vehicle for the gas – and a perfect recipe for an addiction, experts warn.

Meg Caldwell’s death wasn’t inevitable.

The horse rider from Florida had started using nitrous oxide recreationally in university eight years ago. But like many young people, she started to use more heavily during the pandemic.

The youngest of four sisters, she was was “the light of our lives,” her sister Kathleen Dial told the BBC.

But Ms Caldwell’s use continued to escalate, to the point that her addiction “started running her life”.

She temporarily lost use of her legs after an overdose, which also rendered her incontinent. Still, she continued to use, buying it in local smoke shops, inhaling it in the car park and then heading straight back into the shop to buy more. She sometimes spent hundreds of dollars a day.

She died last November, in one of those car parks just outside a vape shop.

“She didn’t think that it would hurt her because she was buying it in the smoke shop, so she thought she was using this substance legally,” Ms Dial said.

The progression of Ms Caldwell’s addiction – from youthful misuse to life-threatening compulsion – has become increasingly common. The Annual Report of America’s Poison Centers found there was a 58 % increase in reports of intentional exposure to nitrous oxide in the US between 2023-2024.

• What is nitrous oxide and how dangerous is it?
• ‘Daily use of laughing gas left me in a wheelchair’

In a worst-case scenario, inhalation of nitrous oxide can lead to hypoxia, where the brain does not get enough oxygen. This can result in death. Regular inhalation can also lead to a Vitamin B12 deficiency which can cause nerve damage, degradation of the spinal column and even paralysis. The number of deaths attributed to nitrous oxide poisonings rose by more than 110% between 2019 and 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Possession of nitrous oxide was criminalised in the UK in 2023 after misuse among young people increased during the pandemic. But while many states have also outlawed the recreational use of the product in the US, it is still legal to sell as a culinary product. Only Louisiana has totally banned the retail sale of the gas.

Galaxy Gas, a major manufacturer, even offers recipes for dishes, including Chicken Satay with Peanut Chili Foam and Watermelon Gazpacho on their website. With flavours like Blue Raspberry or Strawberries and Cream, experts warn this loophole – as well as major changes in packaging and retail – has contributed to the rise in misuse.

Until recently users would take single-use plain metal canisters weighing around 8g and inhale the gas using a balloon. But when usage spiked during the pandemic, nitrous oxide manufacturers began selling much larger canisters online – as large as 2kg – and, eventually, in shops selling electronic vapes and other smoking paraphernalia.

Companies also began to package the gas in bright colourful canisters with designs featuring characters from computer games and television series.

Pat Aussem, of the Partnership to End Addiction, believes these developments are behind increased misuse:

“Even being called Galaxy Gas or Miami Magic is marketing,” she said. “If you have large canisters, then it means that more people can try it and use it and that can lead to a lot of peer pressure.”

The BBC reached out for comment to both Galaxy Gas and Miami Magic but did not receive a response. Amazon, where the gas is sold online, has said they are aware of customers misusing nitrous oxide and that they are working to implement further safety measures. In a response to reporting from CBS News, the BBC’s news partner in the US, Galaxy Gas maintained that the gas was intended for culinary use and that they include a message on their sites warning against misuse.

Concern about nitrous oxide misuse increased last year, after several videos of people using the product went viral online.

On social media, videos of young people getting high on gas became a trend. A video uploaded in July 2024 by an Atlanta-based fast-food restaurant featured a young man inhaling Strawberries and Cream flavoured nitrous oxide saying “My name’s Lil T, man”, his voice made deeper by the gas. To date the clip has been viewed about 40 million times and spawned thousands of copies.

Misuse also featured heavily in rap music videos and Twitch streaming. Guests tried it on the Joe Rogan Show and rappers including Ye (formerly Kanye West) spoke about abusing the substance publicly. Ye has since sued his dentist for “recklessly” supplying Ye with “dangerous amounts of nitrous oxide”.

In response to the trend, TikTok blocked searches for “galaxy gas,” and redirected users to a message offering resources about substance use and addiction. Rapper SZA also alerted her social media followers about its harms and slammed it for “being MASS marketed to black children”.

In March, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an official alert warning against inhaling the gas after it “observed an increase in reports of adverse events after inhalation of nitrous oxide products”.

The FDA told the BBC that it “continues to actively track adverse events related to nitrous oxide misuse and will take appropriate actions to protect the public health”.

But for some, these warnings came too late.

In 2023, the family of a 25-year-old woman, Marissa Politte successfully sued Nitrous Distributor United Brands for $745m in damages after the radiology technician was killed by a driver high on nitrous oxide. The jury found the company responsible for selling the product in the knowledge that it would be misused.

“Marissa Politte’s death shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but my God, it should be the last,” Johnny Simon, the Politte family’s lawyer, said at the time. In the years since there have been several fatal traffic accidents involving the gas both in the US and the UK.

Meanwhile, Ms Caldwell’s family have launched a class action lawsuit against manufacturers and distributors of nitrous oxide, hoping to remove the product from retail sales across the US for good.

“The people who administer nitrous oxide in a dentist office now have to go through hours and hours of training, she said. “It just is crazy to me that the drug can be purchased in a smoke shop to anyone who goes in.”

“Unfortunately, it’s become very obvious that the manufacturers and the owners of the smoke shops are not going to do the moral thing and take this off the shelves themselves,” Ms Dial said.

Police have been given extra time to question a man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a car ploughed into football fans during Liverpool’s Premier League victory parade.

Seven people remain in hospital from a total of 79 casualties struck by the Ford Galaxy on Water Street in the city centre shortly after 18:00 BST on Monday.

Merseyside Police said it had been given more time to question a 53-year-old man from West Derby, who was also detained on suspicion of dangerous driving and driving while unfit through drugs.

The force said the car had followed an ambulance through a road block, which had been lifted to allow medics to reach someone having a suspected heart attack.

Police said they had now spoken to 14 more people who had been injured after reporting 65 were hurt at a news conference on Tuesday.

Officers confirmed they had been granted further time to continue questioning the suspect until Thursday.

• Live page recap: Liverpool police continue to question suspect

Under laws around the detention of suspects, police forces can keep a person in custody for 24 hours without charge, while a senior officer of at least superintendent rank can sign off on an initial 12-hour extension.

After that, an application can be made to a magistrates’ court for further 12-hour extensions to a maximum of 96 hours – or 14 days if the offence is terrorism related.

Within two hours of the suspect’s arrest, the force confirmed he was a “white British male” and said the incident was not being treated as terror related.

On Thursday 54-year-old Peter Cunningham, from Huyton in Merseyside, spoke out after his picture was circulated on social media by people falsely claiming he was the suspect.

“I’m in work – the police need to give the name out because I’m getting accused”, he told the BBC.

Merseyside Police urged people not to speculate and reiterated that the only suspect in custody was a 53-year-old man from the West Derby area of Liverpool.

• Liverpool parade crash: How not to get caught out by fake news

Water Street reopened earlier after cordon was lifted and the aftermath of the parade and the incident was cleaned up overnight.

One survivor, Daniel Eveson from Telford in Shropshire, said his partner was dragged under the wheels of the car and his baby son’s pram was tossed down the street.

“I saw a gentleman on the bonnet and the rest was just chaos,” he told BBC Radio Shropshire.

“It was hard because I didn’t know where anyone was or what to do,” he said.

“A lot of people were angry and I saw the car getting smashed.”

Mr Eveson was able to locate his son, who was unharmed, and leave him in a restaurant as he went back to search for his partner.

Their baby was now as “good as gold”, he said, while his partner remained in hospital and was waiting to hear whether she could return home.

“It was the day it was meant to be to start off with, it was perfect,” he said, but added “under the sea of chaos it changed to the worst day of my life”.

Det Supt Rachel Wilson said on Thursday: “I’m pleased to say the number of people in hospital is reducing as they continue to recover from the awful incident.

“We continue to support those still receiving treatment and as part of our ongoing enquiries we are identifying more people who were injured.”

She said detectives were making “significant progress” in establishing the full circumstances that led to what happened.

Officers are carrying out a trawl of CCTV inquiries across the city to establish the movements of the Ford Galaxy before the incident took place.

Some flowers and cards with well wishes have been left as a reminder of the events which unfolded.

Hundreds of thousands of jubilant Liverpool fans packed the city centre on Bank Holiday Monday and lined the 10-mile (16km) parade route as the Reds celebrated winning their second Premier League crown and 20th top-flight league title.