A US federal court has blocked President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, in a major blow to a key component of his economic policies.

The Court of International Trade ruled that an emergency law invoked by the White House did not give the president unilateral authority to impose tariffs on nearly every country.

The Manhattan-based court said the US Constitution gave Congress exclusive powers to regulate commerce with other nations and this was not superseded by the president’s remit to safeguard the economy.

The Trump administration lodged an appeal within minutes of the ruling.

The lawsuit was filed by the nonpartisan Liberty Justice Center on behalf of five small businesses that import goods from countries targeted by the duties.

It is the first major legal challenge to Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs.

A three-judge panel ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that Trump cited to justify the tariffs, does not give him the power to impose the sweeping import taxes.

The court also blocked a separate set of levies the Trump administration imposed on China, Mexico and Canada, in response to what it said was the unacceptable flow of drugs and illegal immigrants into the US.

However, the court was not asked to address tariffs imposed on some specific goods like cars, steel and aluminium, which fall under a different law.

The White House has criticised the ruling, though Trump has not yet commented directly.

“It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,” White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai said in a statement.

“President Trump pledged to put America First, and the administration is committed to using every lever of executive power to address this crisis and restore American greatness,” he added.

But Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, one of 12 states involved in the lawsuit, welcomed the decision.

“The law is clear: no president has the power to single-handedly raise taxes whenever they like,” Letitia James said.

“These tariffs are a massive tax hike on working families and American businesses that would have led to more inflation, economic damage to businesses of all sizes, and job losses across the country if allowed to continue,” she added.

Global markets have responded positively to the ruling. Stock markets in Asia rose on Thursday morning, US stock futures also jumped and the US dollar made gains against safe-haven peers, including the Japanese yen and Swiss franc.

The White House has 10 days to complete the bureaucratic process of halting the tariffs, although most are currently suspended anyway.

The case needs to go through the appeals process. If the White House is unsuccessful in its appeal, the US Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) will then issue directions to its officers, John Leonard, a former top official at the CBP, told the BBC.

That said, a higher court might be more Trump-friendly.

But if all courts do uphold the ruling, businesses who’ve had to pay tariffs will receive refunds on the amounts paid, with interest. These include the so-called reciprocal tariffs, which were lowered to 10% across the board for most countries and were raised to 145% on Chinese products, now 30%.

Mr Leonard said there will not be any changes at the border for now and tariffs will still have to be paid.

Market reactions showed, partly, investors “exhaling after weeks of white-knuckle volatility sparked by trade war brinkmanship,” Stephen Innes at SPI Asset Management wrote in a commentary.

Mr Innes said US judges gave a clear message: “The Oval Office isn’t a trading desk, and the Constitution isn’t a blank cheque.”

The ruling is “a structural pivot in the narrative: from strongman tariffs to institutional guardrails”, he said.

“Executive overreach may finally have found its ceiling. And with it, a fresh dose of macro stability – at least until the next headline.”

On 2 April, Trump unveiled an unprecedented global tariff regime by imposing import taxes on most of the US’s trading partners.

A 10% baseline tariff was placed on most countries, along with steeper reciprocal tariffs handed down to dozens of nations and blocs, including the EU, UK, Canada, Mexico and China.

Trump argued that the sweeping economic policy would boost American manufacturing and protect jobs.

Global markets have been thrown into disarray since the announcement and later after Trump’s reversals and pausing of tariffs as foreign governments came to the negotiating table.

Adding to the turmoil was a prolonged trade war with China, as the world’s two economic superpowers engaged in a back-and-forth raising of tariffs, which reached a peak with a 145% US tax on Chinese imports, and a 125% Chinese tax on US imports.

The world’s two biggest economies have since agreed to a truce, with US duties on China falling to 30%, and Chinese tariffs on some US imports reducing to 10%.

The UK and US have also announced a deal on lower tariffs between the two governments.

Trump threatened a 50% tariff from June on all goods coming from the EU after expressing frustration with the pace of trade talks with the bloc – but then agreed to extend the deadline by more than a month after EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said more time was needed.

India’s first ever feature film – Raja Harishchandra – in 1913, was made in the Marathi language. Over the past few decades, though, Marathi cinema lost its way, overshadowed by Hindi films from Bollywood. But could a revival be in sight?

The critically acclaimed Marathi language drama Sthal (A Match) opens with a striking role reversal: instead of the bride, it’s the prospective groom who endures the dehumanising ritual of being scrutinised for an arranged marriage.

But we soon learn it’s Savita, the film’s protagonist, waking from an impossible dream – her real life, like that of many Indian women caught in the tradition of arranged marriage, is the exact opposite.

Sthal offers an unsparing look at the grim side of arranged marriage in India—often romanticised on screen with song and dance. It’s also part of a wave of Marathi films earning global acclaim this year.

Sabar Bonda, a semi-personal rural romance between two men, made history as the first Marathi film to screen at Sundance—and won a Grand Jury Prize.

Meenakshi Shedde, a senior programme advisor for South Asian films at the Toronto International Film Festival, called it “a daring, exquisite rural gay romance”, and its bold, tender storytelling “historic”.

Once pioneers of Indian cinema, Marathi films have long been hurt by Bollywood’s dominating influence in the state of Maharashtra – where the language is spoken – and elsewhere in the country. But in the past decade, they’ve been quietly making a global mark, with diverse, acclaimed titles lighting up international festivals.

Nagraj Manjule’s romantic-tragedy Sairat was picked up for Berlinale in 2016. Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple won the best screenplay award at Venice a few years later – Oscar-winner Afonso Cuaron came on-board as its executive producer.

At least a dozen other independent and experimental Marathi films have since found a spot at global festivals, handling an impressive diversity of subjects.

Harshad Nalawade’s Follower, which was selected for the Rotterdam Film Festival and had a limited theatrical release for instance, dives into the radicalisation of India’s youth, exploring the life of a small-town troll with compassion.

In Second Chance, a black-and-white debut by Subhadra Mahajan, a woman’s post-trauma journey leads her to the Himalayas. Premiered at Busan, it hits Indian theatres this June.

With strong roots in Marathi literature and theatre, including experimental theatre, Marathi cinema has always produced strong films, Shedde says.

Many of the independent films offer “quiet spaces for reflection” she adds, unlike the bombastic commercial appeal of Bollywood.

The aesthetics of this cinema reflect the often marginal backgrounds of its makers – many are self-taught and outside traditional power circles.

Take Sabar Bonda director Rohan Kanawade, for instance – he grew up in Mumbai’s slums but dared to dream of making films.

“This brings a rich, unschooled, rawness and lived experience to their cinema. They are very different from the smooth universal polish of films that tend to come out of international script labs and international co-productions,” Shedde says.

But unlike the steady stream of content from other regional cinema – such as Malayalam films from Kerala – Marathi films still emerge in bursts.

That’s partly because there’s no institutional support, says Shefali Bhushan, Sthal’s producer, who, along with three other partners, put their own money to finance the film.

The big studios don’t pick-up Marathi projects without an “obvious commercial appeal”, which means an ecosystem supportive of experimental artistic voices is sorely lacking, she adds.

Unlike Kerala, Maharashtra also offers little state support for regional cinema and lacks a strong movie-going culture.

Being centred mainly around the cities of Mumbai and Pune, Marathi films “feel the full, suffocating weight of Bollywood, that other regional cinemas don’t”, says Shedde.

Besides, Maharashtra does not have Kerala’s highly “cine-literate audience” where “rice farmers discuss [legendary filmmaker Sergei] Eisenstein and his legacy”, giving those filmmakers confidence that their small indie film can recover costs and make money, she adds.

The makers are also to be partially blamed, says veteran film critic Ashok Rane, who was tasked by the state government to market the region’s films at Cannes in the last decade.

They’ve done little to explore subjects that “speak a universal language” and would appeal to the global audience, Rane told the BBC.

Shedde says the industry’s growth has also been stymied by the “lack of aggressive ambition” and the absence of a film distribution system meant that, for decades, India was the “graveyard of good cinema”.

However, she believes international recognition at festivals such as Sundance and Cannes will help to address this – especially for Indie filmmakers wanting to expand to non-traditional markets.

Bhushan agrees – the chance to show her film at Cannes, facilitated by the Maharashtra government, has opened new doors.

She says the festivals are “a chance to learn how to make sales to different territories, mount new projects as co-productions with people [from around the globle]”.

“There’s a whole world waiting to be tapped.”

Australian actress and comedian Magda Szubanski has been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer.

Szubanski is best known for her iconic role as Sharon Strzelecki in the Australian sitcom Kath & Kim, and for her film roles in Babe and Happy Feet.

In a video posted to social media, the 64-year-old said she had begun treatment to fight stage four Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a “fast-moving” form of blood cancer.

Calling the news “confronting”, Szubanski said she was receiving “world-class care” in Melbourne.

“I won’t sugar-coat it: it’s rough. But I’m hopeful,” she said.

“I’m being lovingly cared for by friends and family, my medical team is brilliant, and I’ve never felt more held by the people around me.”

The actress said she was undergoing Nordic protocol treatment, a regimen which combines chemotherapy and immunotherapy to treat Mantle Cell Lymphoma.

The cancer was only discovered incidentally after she requested blood tests after feeling unwell for “ages”.

“So the take away is – get tested and listen to your body!” she said.

Szubanksi rose to fame playing the netball-loving Strzelecki in the early 2000s, and has been a stalwart of the comedy scene in Australia since.

She was also a prominent advocate for the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Australia.

President Donald Trump’s administration says it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students studying in the US.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement the move would include “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields”.

Criteria will also be revised to “enhance scrutiny” of future visa applicants from China and Hong Kong, Rubio added.

Relations between Beijing and Washington have plummeted in recent months as a tit-for-tat trade war erupted between the two superpowers sparked by Trump’s tariffs.

On Monday, Rubio, who is America’s top diplomat, ordered US embassies around the world to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as the state department prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants.

Estimates indicate there were around 280,000 Chinese students studying in the US last year.

Chinese nationals used to account for the bulk of international students enrolled at American universities, though that has recently changed.

From pandemic-era restrictions to worsening relations between the two countries, their number has dropped in recent years, according to US state department data.

Rubio said in Wednesday’s statement: “Under President Trump’s leadership, the US State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.

“We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”

The Trump administration has already moved to deport a number of foreign students, while revoking thousands of visas for others. Many of these actions have been blocked by the courts.

It has also frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for universities. The president sees some of America’s most elite institutions, such as Harvard, as too liberal and accuses them of failing to combat antisemitism on campus.

Many US universities rely on foreign students for a significant chunk of their funding – as those scholars often pay higher tuition fees.

• Students say they ‘regret’ applying to US schools after visa changes

A number of international students have been reeling from the planned visa changes.

Some told the BBC they wished they had never opted to study in the US.

“I already regret it,” said a 22-year-old master’s student from Shanghai, who did not want to be named for fear of jeopardising a visa to study at the University of Pennsylvania.

Beijing has not yet responded to the US move to revoke the visas of Chinese students specifically.

But China responded earlier on Wednesday to the Trump administration’s move to cancel student visa appointments globally.

“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.

An official memo, reviewed by the BBC’s US partner CBS News, on Tuesday instructed US embassies across the world to remove all open appointments for students seeking visas, but to keep already-scheduled appointments in place.

Last week, a judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to strip Harvard of its ability to enrol international students.

The ruling came after America’s oldest university filed a lawsuit against the administration. The White House accused the judge hearing the case of having a “liberal agenda”.

On Wednesday, Harvard said in a court filing that revoking its certification to host international students could inflict irreparable harm on the university.

In a declaration filed with the court motion, Harvard international office director Maureen Martin said the move was causing “significant emotional distress” for students and scholars.

She wrote that students were skipping graduation ceremonies, cancelling international travel and in some cases seeking transfer to other colleges.

Some had also reported fears of being forced to return to countries where they face active conflict or political persecution, according to the court filing.

Elon Musk has said he is leaving the Trump administration after helping lead a tumultuous drive to shrink the size of US government that saw thousands of federal jobs axed.

In a post on his social media platform X, the world’s richest man thanked Trump for the opportunity to help run the Department of Government Efficiency, known as Doge.

The White House began “offboarding” Musk as a special government employee on Wednesday night, the BBC understands.

His role was temporary and his exit is not unexpected, but it comes a day after Musk criticised the legislative centrepiece of Trump’s agenda.

“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk wrote on X.

“The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”

The South African-born tech tycoon had been designated as a “special government employee” – allowing him to work a federal job for 130 days each year.

• What is Doge and why is Musk leaving?
• How much has Elon Musk’s Doge cut?

Measured from Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, he would hit that limit towards the end of May.

But his departure comes a day after he said he was “disappointed” with Trump’s budget bill, which proposes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks and a boost to defence spending.

The SpaceX and Tesla boss said in an interview with BBC’s US partner CBS that the “big, beautiful bill”, as Trump calls it, would increase the federal deficit.

Musk also said he thought it “undermines the work” of Doge.

“I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful,” Musk said. “But I don’t know if it could be both.”

Musk, who had clashed in private with some Trump cabinet-level officials, initially pledged to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal government budget, before halving this target, then reducing it to $150bn.

An estimated 260,000 out of the 2.3 million-strong federal civilian workforce have had their jobs cut or accepted redundancy deals as a result of Doge.

In some cases, federal judges blocked the mass firings and ordered terminated employees to be reinstated.

The rapid-fire approach to cutting the federal workforce occasionally led to some workers mistakenly being let go, including staff at the US nuclear programme.

Musk announced in late April that he would step back to run his companies again after becoming a lightning rod for criticism of Trump’s efforts to shake up Washington.

“Doge is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” Musk told the Washington Post in Texas on Tuesday ahead of a Space X launch.

“Something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

Musk’s time in government overlapped with a significant decline in sales at his electric car company.

Tesla sales dropped by 13% in the first three months of this year, the largest drop in deliveries in its history.

The company’s stock price also tumbled by as much as 45%, but has mostly rebounded and is only down 10%.

Tesla recently warned investors that the financial pain could continue, declining to offer a growth forecast while saying “changing political sentiment” could meaningfully hurt demand for the vehicles.

Musk told investors on an earnings call last month that the time he allocates to Doge “will drop significantly” and that he would be “allocating far more of my time to Tesla”.

Activists have called for Tesla boycotts, staging protests outside Tesla dealerships, and vandalising the vehicles and charging stations.

The Tesla blowback became so violent and widespread that US Attorney General Pam Bondi warned her office would treat acts of vandalism as “domestic terrorism”.

Speaking at an economic forum in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday, Musk said he was committed to being the leader of Tesla for the next five years.

He said earlier this month he would cut back his political donations after spending nearly $300m to back Trump’s presidential campaign and other Republicans last year.

Australian actress Deborra-Lee Furness has said her “compassion goes out to everyone who has traversed the traumatic journey of betrayal”, after filing for divorce from her husband Hugh Jackman.

In a statement released to media, Furness, 69, said: “It’s a profound wound that cuts deep, however I believe in a higher power and that God/the universe… is always working FOR us.”

The couple filed for divorce in New York on 23 May. They announced their separation in September 2023 after 27 years of marriage.

Hugh Jackman, best known for playing Wolverine in the X-men film series, has not responded directly to Furness’s statement.

Furness said that she had gained “much knowledge and wisdom” from the “breakdown” of her marriage to Jackman, 56.

“Sometimes the universe has to create arduous circumstances for us to walk through in order to find our way home, back to our true essence and the sovereignty of self love.”

“It can hurt, but in the long run, returning to yourself and living within your own integrity, values and boundaries is liberation and freedom,” she added, in the statement first issued to the Daily Mail.

When Furness and Jackman announced their separation in 2023, the couple issued a joint statement which they said was “the sole statement either of us will make”.

“Our journey now is shifting and we have decided to separate to pursue our individual growth… We undertake this next chapter with gratitude, love and kindness,” they said at the time.

The pair met on the set of the Australian TV show Corelli in 1995, shortly after Jackman had left drama school.

They married the following year and later adopted two children.

Since Furness issued the statement, Jackman, currently performing in New York, posted a video to Instagram in which he is skipping to the NSYNC song Bye Bye Bye.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says that “hordes of hungry people” have broken into a food supply warehouse in central Gaza.

Two people are reported to have died and several others injured in the incident, the programme said, adding that it was still confirming details.

Video footage from AFP news agency showed crowds breaking into the Al-Ghafari warehouse in Deir Al-Balah and taking bags of flour and cartons of food as gunshots rang out. It was not immediately clear where the gunshots came from.

In a statement, the WFP said humanitarian needs in Gaza had “spiralled out of control” after an almost three-month Israeli blockade that was eased last week.

The WFP said that food supplies had been pre-positioned at the warehouse for distribution.

The programme added: “Gaza needs an immediate scale-up of food assistance. This is the only way to reassure people that they will not starve.”

The WFP said it had “consistently warned of alarming and deteriorating conditions on the ground, and the risks imposed by limiting humanitarian aid to hungry people in desperate need of assistance”.

Israeli authorities said on Wednesday that 121 trucks belonging to the UN and the international community carrying humanitarian aid including flour and food were transferred into Gaza.

Israel began to allow a limited amount of aid into Gaza last week. However, UN Middle East envoy Sigrid Kaag told the UN Security Council this was “comparable to a lifeboat after the ship has sunk” when everyone in Gaza was facing the risk of famine.

A controversial US and Israeli-backed group – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – was also established as a private aid distribution system. It uses US security contractors and bypasses the UN, which said it was unworkable and unethical.

The US and Israeli governments say the GHF, which has set up four distribution centres in southern and central Gaza, is preventing aid from being stolen by Hamas, which the armed group denies doing.

The UN Humans Right Office said 47 people were injured on Tuesday after people overran one of the GHF distribution sites in the southern city of Rafah, a day after it began working there.

Another senior UN official told journalists on Wednesday that desperate crowds were looting cargo off of UN aid trucks.

Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN’s humanitarian office for the occupied Palestinian territories, also said there was no evidence that Hamas was diverting aid coordinated through credible humanitarian channels.

He said the real theft of relief goods since the beginning of the war had been carried out by criminal gangs which the Israeli army “allowed to operate in proximity to the Kerem Shalom crossing point in Gaza”.

The UN has argued that a surge of aid like the one during the recent ceasefire between Israeli and Hamas would reduce the threat of looting by hungry people and allow it to make full use of its well-established network of distribution across the Gaza Strip.

An acrid smell hangs over the town of Rodynske. A couple of minutes after we drive into the city we see where it’s coming from.

A 250kg glide bomb has ripped through the town’s main administrative building, and taken down three residential blocks. We’re visiting a day after the bomb struck, but parts of the wreckage are still smoking. From the edges of the town we hear the sound of artillery fire, and of gunshots – Ukrainian soldiers shooting down drones.

Rodynske is about 15km (9 miles) north of the embattled city of Pokrovsk. Russia has been trying to capture it from the south since the autumn of last year, but Ukrainian forces have so far managed to stop Russian soldiers from marching in.

So Russia has changed tactics, moving instead to encircle the city, cutting off supply routes.

In the past two weeks, as hectic diplomatic efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine have failed, Russia has intensified its push, making its most significant advances since January.

We find proof of that in Rodynske.

Within minutes of us arriving in town, we hear a Russian drone above us. Our team runs to the closest cover available – a tree.

We press up against it so the drone won’t see us. Then there’s the sound of a loud explosion – it’s a second drone making impact nearby. The drone above us is still hovering. For a few more minutes, we hear the terrifying whirring sound of what’s become the deadliest weapon of this war.

When we can’t hear it any more we take the chance to run to hard cover in an abandoned building 100ft away.

From the shelter, we hear the drone again. It’s possible it returned after seeing our movement.

That Rodynske is being swarmed by Russian drones is evidence that the attacks are coming from positions much closer than known Russian positions to the south of Pokrovsk. They were most likely coming from newly captured territory on a key road running from the east of Pokrovsk to Kostyantynivka.

After half an hour of waiting in the shelter, when we can’t hear the drone anymore, we move quickly to our car parked under tree cover, and speed out of Rodynske. By the side of the highway we see smoke billowing and something burning – it’s most likely a downed drone.

We drive to Bilytske, further away from the frontline. We see a row of houses destroyed by a missile strike overnight. One of them was Svitlana’s home.

“It’s getting worse and worse. Earlier, we could hear distant explosions, they were far away. But now our town is getting targeted – we’re experiencing it ourselves,” says the 61-year-old, as she picks up a few belongings from the wreckage of her home. Luckily Svitlana wasn’t at home when the attack occurred.

“Go into the centre of the town, you’ll see so much that is destroyed there. And the bakery and zoo have been destroyed too,” she says.

At a safehouse just out of reach of drones, we meet soldiers of the artillery unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.

“You can feel the intensity of Russian assaults increasing. Rockets, mortars, drones, they’re using everything they have to cut off supply routes going into the city,” says Serhii.

His unit has been waiting for three days to deploy to their positions, waiting for cloud cover or high-speed winds to give them protection from drones.

In an ever-evolving conflict, soldiers have had to rapidly adapt to new threats posed by changing technology. And the latest threat comes from fibre optic drones. A spool of tens of kilometres of cable is fitted to the bottom of a drone and the physical fibre optic cord is attached to the controller held by the pilot.

“The video and control signal is transmitted to and from the drone through the cable, not through radio frequencies. This means it can’t be jammed by electronic interceptors,” says a soldier with the call sign Moderator, a drone engineer with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.

When drones began to be used in this war in a big way, both militaries fitted their vehicles with electronic warfare systems, which could neutralise drones. That protection has evaporated with the arrival of fibre optic drones, and in the deployment of these devices, Russia currently has the edge. Ukraine is trying to ramp up production.

“Russia started using fibre optic drones much before us, while we were still testing them. These drones can be used in places where we have to go lower than usual drones. We can even enter houses and look for targets inside,” says Venia, a drone pilot with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.

“We’ve started joking that maybe we should carry scissors to cut the cord,” says Serhii, the artillery man.

Fibre optic drones do have drawbacks – they are slower and the cable could get entangled in trees. But at the moment, their widespread use by Russia means that transporting soldiers to and from their positions can often be deadlier than the battlefield itself.

“When you enter a position, you don’t know whether you’ve been spotted or not. And if you have been spotted, then you may already be living the last hours of your life,” says Oles, Chief Sergeant of the reconnaissance unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.

This threat means that soldiers are spending longer and longer in their positions.

Oles and his men are in the infantry, serving in the trenches right at the very front of Ukraine’s defence. It’s rare for journalists these days to speak to infantrymen, as it’s become too risky to go to these trenches. We meet Oles and Maksym in a rural home converted into a makeshift base, where the soldiers come to rest when they’re not on deployment.

“The longest I spent at the position was 31 days, but I do know guys who have spent 90 and even 120 days there. Back before the drones arrived, the rotations could have been between 3 or 7 days at the position,” says Maksym.

“War is blood, death, wet mud and a chill that spreads from head to toe. And this is how you spend every day. I remember one instance when we didn’t sleep for three days, alert every minute. The Russians kept coming at us wave after wave. Even a minor lapse would have meant we were dead.”

Oles says Russia’s infantry has changed its tactics. “Earlier they attacked in groups. Now they only send one or two people at times. They also use motorcycles and in a few instances, quad bikes. Sometimes they slip through.”

What this means is that the front lines in some parts are no longer conventional lines with the Ukrainians on one side and the Russians on the other, but more like pieces on a chessboard during play, where positions can be intertwined.

This also makes it harder to see advances made by either side.

Despite Russia’s recent gains, it will not be quick or easy for it to take the whole of the Donetsk region, where Pokrovsk lies.

Ukraine has pushed back hard, but it needs a steady supply of weapons and ammunition to sustain the fight.

And as the war enters a fourth summer, Ukraine’s manpower issues against a much bigger Russian army are also evident. Most of the soldiers we meet joined the military after the war began. They’ve had a few months of training, but have had to learn a lot on the job in the middle of a raging war.

Maksym worked for a drinks company before he joined the military. I asked how his family copes with his job.

“It’s hard, it’s really hard. My family really supports me. But I have a two-year-old son, and I don’t get to see him much. I do video call him though, so everything is as fine as it could be under the circumstances,” he trails off, eyes welling up with tears.

Maksym is a soldier fighting for his country, but he’s also just a father missing his two-year-old boy.

US President Donald Trump has appeared to set a two-week deadline for Vladimir Putin, threatening a different response if the Russian counterpart was still stringing him along.

As the Kremlin escalated its attacks on Ukraine, Trump was asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday if he thought Putin wanted to end the war.

“I can’t tell you that, but I’ll let you know in about two weeks,” Trump told reporters, the latest amid a string of critical public remarks made by Trump about Putin.

Since Sunday, Trump has written multiple posts on social media saying that Putin has gone “absolutely crazy” and is “playing with fire” after Russia intensified its attacks on Ukraine.

The bombardments by Russia are said to have been some of the largest and deadliest attacks since the start of the war, now in its fourth year.

Russian strikes in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, killed at least 13 people and injured dozens more, including children, over the weekend.

And by Wednesday, the attacks had shown no signs of slowing down.

In Trump’s remarks about the escalation of violence and whether he thinks Putin is serious about ending the war, Trump said: “I’ll let you know in about two weeks.

“Within two weeks. We’re gonna find out whether or not (Putin is) tapping us along or not.

“And if he is, we’ll respond a little bit differently.”

The comments are a sign of Trump’s growing frustration, as the White House’s repeated efforts to negotiate a deal between Russia and Ukraine appear ever more futile.

This includes a recent two-hour phone call between Trump and Putin, after which the US president said the discussions went “very well”.

Putin walked away from the call saying he was ready to work with Ukraine on a “memorandum on a possible future peace agreement”.

That call was one week before Russia launched hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles towards Ukraine’s capital, according to Ukraine’s air force.

And a memorandum has yet to be produced by Russia.

So far, Trump’s threats have not appeared to concern Moscow sufficiently for it to concede to his demands. Trump has not delivered on previous such threats.

Since taking office, Trump has only taken action against Ukraine, as Washington sought to steer the countries to Trump’s demand for a truce.

This included an eight-day suspension of US military assistance and intelligence sharing with Kyiv in March.

Meanwhile the US administration has not publicly demanded any significant concessions from Russia.

The White House rejects accusations of appeasing Moscow or failing to enforce its will, pointing out that all the Biden-era sanctions remain in force against Russia.

But so far its mediation approach appears to have made the Kremlin more, not less, empowered.

After the latest attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “something has happened” to Putin, which the Kremlin said were comments made “connected to an emotional overload”.

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine continued in the days afterwards. Trump then escalated his criticism. On Tuesday, he said Putin was “playing with fire” and that “lots of bad things” would have happened to Russia if it were not for Trump’s involvement.

A Kremlin aid responded to the latest Trump Truth Social post by saying: “We have come to the conclusion that Trump is not sufficiently informed about what is really happening.”

Putin aide Yury Ushakov told Russian state TV channel Russia-1 that Trump must be unaware of “the increasingly frequent massive terrorist attacks Ukraine is carrying out against peaceful Russian cities.”

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

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

In the face of Russia’s recalcitrance, Trump has frequently softened his demands, shifting the emphasis from his original call for an immediate 30-day ceasefire, to which only Ukraine agreed, to more recently demanding a summit with Putin to get what he says would be a breakthrough.

Putin and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov have upped their demands from earlier positions since the US restored contacts with the Russians in February.

These have included a demand that Ukraine cede parts of its own country not even occupied by Russia and that the US recognises Crimea as a formal part of Russia.

Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Moscow, calls this a “poison pill” introduced by Russia: Creating conditions Kyiv could never agree to in order to shift blame onto Ukraine in Trump’s eyes.

The war 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 were yet to deliver a promised memorandum of peace terms following talks in Istanbul. Peskov insisted the document was in its “final stages.”

Prosecutors have confirmed for the first time the full list of 21 charges Andrew and Tristan Tate will face when they are returned to the UK, including rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking.

The Crown Prosecution Service said that it had authorised the charges against the brothers in 2024, before an extradition warrant was issued to bring them back from Romania.

The two British-Americans are under investigation in Romania, facing a number of charges, which they deny – and the CPS said “the domestic criminal matters in Romania must be settled first”.

The CPS’s charging decision came after it received a file of evidence from Bedfordshire Police about allegations made in the UK.

The CPS said Andrew Tate, a 38-year-old influencer and former kickboxer, faces 10 charges connected to three alleged victims, including rape, actual bodily harm, human trafficking and controlling prostitution for gain.

Tristan Tate, 36, faces 11 charges connected to one alleged victim, including rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking.

The pair were both born in the US but moved to Luton in the UK with their mother after their parents divorced.

In recent years, Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist, has built a massive online presence, including more than 10 million followers on X, sharing his lifestyle of fast cars, private jets, and yachts.

He and his brother were first arrested in Romania in December 2022, with Andrew accused of rape and human trafficking and Tristan suspected of human trafficking.

They both denied the charges and spent several months under house arrest. A year and a half later, in August 2024, they faced new allegations in Romania including sex with a minor and trafficking underage persons, all of which they deny.

Separately, the pair were detained in Bucharest in March 2024 after Bedfordshire Police said it had obtained an arrest warrant in relation to allegations of rape and trafficking.

According to the brothers’ legal representatives, the UK allegations dated back to between 2012 and 2015. At the time of the arrest warrant, the Tates said they “categorically reject all charges” and were “very innocent men”.

A Romanian court ruled that they could be extradited to the UK only once the separate proceedings against them in Romania concluded.

They were then released from custody. Prosecutors unexpectedly lifted a two-year travel ban earlier this year, after which the brothers travelled from Romania to the US state of Florida by private jet in February 2025.

They returned to Romania in March 2025, telling reporters that “innocent men don’t run from anything”.

The brothers say they registered with Bucharest authorities in a legal formality to demonstrate their compliance with an ongoing criminal investigation. Andrew did not say whether he would remain in Romania, but vowed to clear his name there and in the UK.

Students around the world are anxious and in limbo, they say, as the Trump administration makes plans to temporarily halt US student visa appointments.

An official memo seen by BBC’s US partner CBS ordered a temporary pause in appointments as the state department prepares to increase social media vetting of applicants for student and foreign exchange visas.

It is part of a wide-ranging crackdown by US President Donald Trump on some of America’s most elite universities, which he sees as overly liberal.

For students, the changes have brought widespread uncertainty, with visa appointments at US embassies now unavailable and delays that could leave scholarships up in the air.

Some students told the BBC that the confusion has even left them wishing they had applied to schools outside the US.

“I already regret it,” said a 22-year-old master’s student from Shanghai, who did not wish to be named for fear of jeopardising their visa to study at the University of Pennsylvania.

The student said they feel lucky their application was approved, but that has not eased their uncertainty.

“Even if I study in the US, I may be chased back to China without getting my degree,” they said. “That’s so scary.”

Asked about the decision to pause all student visa appointments, 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.”

As part of his wider crackdown on higher education, Trump has moved to ban Harvard from enrolling international students, accusing the school of not doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus.

Harvard filed a lawsuit in response, and a judge has halted Trump’s ban for now, with a hearing on the matter scheduled for 29 May.

A student from Guangzhou City, who runs a consultancy group for Chinese students wishing to study in the US, said they are not sure how to advise applicants because the rules keep changing.

The student, who also wished not to be named, added that they think there will be fewer students who see the US as a viable education option.

More than 1.1 million international students from over 210 countries were enrolled in US colleges in the 2023-24 school year, according to Open Doors, an organisation that collects data on foreign students.

Universities often charge these international students higher tuition fees – a crucial part of their operating budgets.

For Ainul Hussein, 24, from India, the visa implications are both financial and personal.

Mr Hussein said he was excited to begin the next chapter of his life in New Jersey, enrolled in a master’s of science programme in management.

He received a I-20 document from the university – a crucial piece of paper that allows him to apply for a US student visa.

But recent processing delays left him “deeply worried”, he said, with appointments at consulates now either postponed or unavailable.

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

He said he may be forced to book flights to the US, still unsure of the situation. He also risks losing his scholarship if he has to defer his studies.

Students in the UK are being affected, too.

Oliver Cropley, a 27-year-old from Norwich, said he was due to study abroad for a year in Kansas, but that plan is now in jeopardy.

“Currently I’ve no student visa, despite forking out £300 on the application process,” Mr Cropley said.

News of the US pausing visa applications is “a huge disappointment”.

He, too, risks losing a scholarship if he is unable to complete his study abroad in the US, and may have to find last-minute accommodation and liaise with the university to make sure it does not delay him academically.

Alfred Williamson, from Wales, told Reuters he was excited to travel after his first year at Harvard, but couldn’t wait to get back. But now, he hasn’t heard about his visa.

It’s “dehumanising”, he told Reuters.

“We’re being used like pawns in the game that we have no control of, and we’re being caught in this crossfire between the White House and Harvard,” Mr Williamson told the news agency.

The Rainbow Bridge, which crosses the Niagara River between the United States and Canada, has for decades been a symbol of peace connecting two countries.

But for Araceli, a Salvadorian migrant, and her family, the bridge represented a seemingly insurmountable hurdle.

Along with her partner and two daughters, aged four and 14, the family first attempted to cross the bridge on 17 March.

They had arrived with a suitcase and documents that they believed assured them they would soon be reunited with Araceli’s siblings on Canadian soil and escape the threat of US President Donald Trump’s mass deportations.

But the plan failed. Not just once, but twice.

While a third attempt proved successful, immigration experts and official statistics point to a rise of asylum seekers at the border fleeing not just their homelands, but President Trump’s immigration policies.

Araceli and her family had been living illegally in the US for more than a decade – only her youngest daughter, who was born in New Jersey, has a US passport.

In the US, Araceli built a life for herself and tried to initiate an asylum application process, but was unsuccessful.

“They charged me money and told me I would get a work permit. I paid that to a lawyer, but they never gave me an answer as to whether it was approved or not,” she told BBC Mundo from a migrant shelter near the US-Canada border.

Araceli has 12 siblings, and like her, several left El Salvador due to safety concerns in the rural community where they grew up. Two of them managed to start from scratch in Canada.

After President Trump’s inauguration, amid reports of mass raids and deportations, Araceli began to fear for her and her family’s safety – especially after the administration began sending illegal migrants to a notorious Salvadorian prison.

But because both Canada and the US have signed onto the “safe third country agreement,” migrants, like Araceli, who have been denied refuge in one country are not supposed to be granted asylum in the other. The agreement states that asylum seekers must apply for asylum in the first country where they land.

There are exceptions. One of them is if the asylum seeker arriving from the US can prove they have a close relative in Canada who meets certain requirements, they can enter the country and begin their refugee claim again.

So Araceli and her family said goodbye to the life they had built in the US to join her two brothers in Canada.

After crossing the Rainbow Bridge, they arrived at the border check point to make their asylum claim. She said she had all the original documents proving her relationship to her brother.

“They took everything, even our backpack, and we were left with nothing,”

They spent the entire night in a waiting room, occasionally answering questions, until an agent found a problem with the application.

“They found a small detail: on my [birth] certificate, my father only had one last name, and on my brother’s, he had two.”

And although the document had a clarification explaining that such inaccuracies are common in El Salvador, the agent denied them entry to Canada.

The family returned, resigned and anguished, having to face their greatest fear: being separated and deported.

At the US checkpoint, they were put in a room with no windows.

“The four of us spent 14 days in that cell,” Araceli said, clarifying that they could go out to use the bathroom, but were barely allowed outside.

Her brother reached out to an organisation that works with migrants, who helped them hire an attorney, Heather Neufeld.

While she was preparing their documentation, and without any explanation, the family was given an apparent second chance.

“Two agents arrived at the cell and said: ‘Congratulations, you’re going to Canada’,” Araceli recalled.

But their hopes were short-lived.

“We’ve been too generous in welcoming you back here,” she recalled the agent saying after the family applied for asylum in Canada a second time. “The United States will see what it does with you.”

A spokesperson declined to comment on Araceli’s case in particular, citing the country’s privacy laws.

• ‘It’s not fair’: Other refugees in limbo as US welcomes white South Africans
• What is the 1798 law that Trump used to deport migrants?
• What is habeas corpus and why might Donald Trump want to suspend it?

One thing is for sure – more families like Araceli’s are seeking exceptions to come to Canada.

While the number of people attempting to cross into the United States from Canada has decreased significantly, the number of asylum seekers being denied entry into Canada from the US has increased.

According to official figures from the United States government,13,547 apprehensions were reported along the entire northern border as of March 2025 – a 70% decrease compared to the number recorded in the first quarter of 2024.

Conversely, the number of migrants seeking asylum in Canada and being returned to the US has increased this year, according to data from Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

In April of this year, 359 people, including adults and children, were found ineligible for asylum in Canada, compared to 180 people in April 2024.

Ms Neufeld believes the increase in the number of people turned away is due to “stricter” border policy at the Canadian side. In December 2024, Canada announced an investment of C$1.3bn ($950m; £705m) to “strengthen border security and strengthen the immigration system”.

The move was largely seen as an attempt to placate Trump, who has justified widespread tariffs against Canada by blaming the country for illegal immigration into the US.

In February, amid a brewing trade war, the Canadian government announced it would further expand this programme.

The CBSA has also committed to increasing the number of removals from 16,000 to 20,000 (a 25% increase) for fiscal years 2025-2027.

Still, a spokesperson for CBSA told BBC Mundo that they have not changed how they do things: “We have made no changes to policies or processes”.

Denied entry to Canada for the second time, Araceli and her family had to cross the border back into the US, which scared them.

“In this day and age, it’s not just about being sent to the United States. There’s an immediate risk of detention and deportation,” Ms Neufeld said.

The problem now was that this second trip to Canada was counted as a reconsideration of the case, the only one the family is entitled to under that country’s regulations.

Ms Neufeld said that Canadian border agents made a mistake.

“They didn’t act like they had in the past with other clients, nor did they agree to an interview with the brother when they normally do,” she stated.

According to Ms Neufeld, the family didn’t return to Canada of their own free will, but because the US authorities told them to, and so their second attempt should not have been considered an official reconsideration.

To get a third opportunity to cross the border and make an asylum claim, Araceli would need a Canadian court to intervene.

When they returned to America, her partner was sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre, while Araceli was made to wear an ankle monitor and she and her children went to a migrant shelter.

“They came to tell us they were giving us three minutes to say goodbye because my husband was going to be taken to a detention center,” Araceli recalls, her voice breaking.

A week later, following complex negotiations between the lawyers, a Canadian federal court agreed to allow the family to return to the border to be re-evaluated.

On 5 May, seven weeks after the first attempt, Araceli crossed the bridge once again. This time, she had her lawyer with her.

After 12 hours, a border agent opened the doors and said “welcome to Canada and good luck with your new life”, she recalled.

“I felt immense joy, it’s indescribable,” Araceli told Canadian public broadcaster CBC earlier in May, adding: “My daughters gave me so much strength.”

But it was a bittersweet celebration, as her partner remained in the US for two more weeks, caught up in ongoing legal proceedings. The family hired a lawyer to take on his case.

“They managed to get him out on bail, and that’s something not all detention centres allow. The whole family had to make a huge effort; they had to sell things to be able to pay for it,” Ms Neufeld said.

According to her, this family’s case reflects the changes that have recently occurred on the northern border.

“There are many more Aracelis, but we can’t know where they are or what situation they are facing. Most people lack the capacity to fight to have their rights respected.”

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 “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 ruining 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.

Listen to Henry read this article

“Could this be like the 1920s where the Liberals got overtaken by Labour – but this time it’s the Conservative Party being overtaken by Reform?”

It’s an interesting question – perhaps a little niche. But it’s certainly not a question you’d expect to find a senior member of Kemi Badenoch’s team openly pondering.

The shadow cabinet minister went on to stress that they were more optimistic: that the resilience of what is often called the world’s most successful political party should never be underestimated.

Yet it’s not so rare to find Conservative MPs entertaining the demise of the party under whose banner they were elected only last year.

Why? Because since July – when the Conservatives were not just turfed out of office but reduced to their fewest MPs ever – things have only got worse.

The initial excitement of a leadership contest and the opportunity to renew their party in opposition has given way, for many Conservative MPs, to a deep and deepening despondency.

And while almost nobody believes that Kemi Badenoch, leader of the party for just under seven months, is problem, more and more Conservatives admit to seeing her as problem.

“It’s pretty bad,” says one Conservative adviser. “I don’t think you would find many of her supporters at all who would either tell you it’s going well or that they expect her to be there at the general election.”

Another senior Conservative puts it more starkly. “This is a hugely important crossroads for the party. Trying to win an election again or just becoming a sort of heritage party that shrivels.”

The immediate cause of these statements – one about Badenoch, the other about the party more generally, both utterly fatalistic – was the local election results at the start of the month, a grim reminder for the Conservatives that the only way isn’t up.

What began as expectation management, that the Conservatives might lose control of every council they held at the start of the night, became a prophecy. Crucially, the local elections proved that the rapid surge of Reform UK in the polls was real at the ballot box too.

The results also made clear that the challenge facing Badenoch is a dramatically distinctive one.

The Conservatives last left government in 1997, and in the following set of local elections in 1998, their new leader William Hague made modest gains.

When Labour lost office in 2010, their new leader, Ed Miliband, made gains at the local elections the following year. There is a template for how defeated parties fare in their early period out of office – and Badenoch’s Conservative Party is diverging from it significantly.

In fact, new analysis by the BBC’s Political Research Unit shows that things have got worse for the Conservatives even in the few weeks since the local elections. The Conservatives have lost 44 more councillors since polling day, a rate of about two a day.

There are diverse reasons for this – six (including two this week) have defected to Reform UK, whereas others who have quit have generally left to become independents. Three have died. And it’s worth noting that on the other side of the ledger, one independent councillor has defected to the Conservatives since the start of May.

While not completely unheard of, it is unusual for a party to lose so many councillors in such a short period of time and will be interpreted by some as another sign that the pillars of Conservative strength are continuing to crumble.

In the same time period, Reform have gained 19 new councillors, both through defections and by-elections, although they have also lost five.

The Conservatives’ polling position has deteriorated since the local elections too. A YouGov poll last week put the party in fourth place on 16%, their lowest share with the pollster ever.

While probably an outlier – a new poll this week had the Conservatives back in third – falling even temporarily to fourth was a blow to Tory morale at the start of what became a difficult week for its leader.

Badenoch’s performances at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) had been seen by her colleagues to be steadily improving. That changed on 21 May when Sir Keir Starmer opened the session with an announcement that he was U-turning on the winter fuel allowance. Badenoch proceeded with her planned questions anyway, only coming to the winter fuel allowance midway through.

Badenoch denied what many of her own MPs believed – that she had simply failed to notice the significance of what the PM had said. “Lots of people who have never done PMQs all have lots of suggestions,” Badenoch said.

Some members of the team preparing Badenoch for PMQs have been urging her to change her approach, advising her to deploy more jokes in an effort to break through in what is typically her highest-profile event of the week. Badenoch disagrees.

“She wants it to be more serious,” says a party source. “She feels PMQs should be a proper exchange of arguments and views.”

An oddity of PMQs at present is that, given Reform’s surge, Starmer often uses Badenoch’s questions to jab at Reform, who have a tiny Commons presence.

Some argue that in a funny way the Conservatives are a victim of Starmer’s unpopularity: Labour’s polling decline has been so fast that voters who are unwilling to forgive the Conservatives are flowing to Reform instead.

Unexpected though it may have been, Reform’s success arguably feeds on a crucial early strategic call Badenoch made.

During her leadership campaign, a point of difference between Badenoch and her rivals was policy. Not necessarily what party policies themselves should be, but more fundamentally, when and whether to have policies.

She argued that the Conservatives needed to take the time to go back to first principles and work out what the government should and should not do. This, Badenoch was explicit, would take time.

In practice that has meant Badenoch repeatedly refusing to be drawn on policy questions, instead launching a string of policy reviews which will weigh up what direction to take the party in.

To many of her colleagues we’ve spoken to, that is being increasingly revealed as naive at best.

“The way in which she’s just vacated the playing field has been a total disaster,” one senior Conservative says. “Reform has become the de facto opposition. And that’s because of a conscious choice she and her team made.”

Even some shadow cabinet ministers – each of them responsible for the policy reviews in their areas – agree. “We need more policy sooner,” says one.

Another urged Badenoch to do more to “articulate our values” even while sticking to her policy development timetable.

Others argue that criticism of Badenoch on policy development is wide of the mark. A shadow cabinet minister pointed out that Badenoch had said she would reverse Labour’s policies on inheritance tax on farms and VAT on private school fees, as well as changing the Conservative position on net zero targets and the European Convention on Human Rights.

“It’s not that we’re not saying things,” says the shadow minister. “It’s that people don’t want to listen to us.”

Accompanying that strategic debate are more mundane frustrations, many of them stemming from money – or the lack of it.

True, political parties often shrink their staffing operations a little at this point in the cycle, having tooled up for the general election. But at Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ), a string of voluntary, then compulsory, redundancies were especially severe, prompting so much briefing that Badenoch was moved to write to party members assuring them the rebuild was strategic rather than due to a shortage of funds. “Ignore ill-informed media reports from the disgruntled,” she says.

Shadow cabinet ministers have repeatedly complained of going without advisers, several of them being told the party does not have enough money for them to hire yet.

“You go from having a whole department of thousands of civil servants filling your red box with briefings to working out how to respond to the government in the House of Commons all by yourself,” says one shadow minister, sitting alone at a table in parliament.

Badenoch’s defenders – and indeed some of her critics – say that both the money and personnel issues are yet more facets of her miserable inheritance.

“People don’t realise how bad a state CCHQ was in,” one MP says. “A lot of work has had to go into getting the party back on its feet, and I don’t think it fully is yet.”

Opposition parties are funded by a scheme known as Short Money. While there is a fixed sum for the staffing costs of Badenoch’s office as leader of the opposition, the rest of the money given to the Conservatives is calculated from a formula on the basis of the number of seats and votes they won at the general election. Both were low – so, as a result, is the Conservatives’ income.

Badenoch did not exactly have the luxury of choice for her shadow cabinet, given its members constitute almost 20 per cent of Conservative MPs. Still, there are frequent complaints that some have taken to opposition with significantly more energy and commitment than others, and that Badenoch ought to promote newly-elected Conservatives to senior roles sooner rather than later.

Reshuffle rumours are the preserve of any political party. But those complaints, as with all the others, take on a greater urgency while Reform is lurking.

A few months ago, the word that probably figured most often in conversations with Conservatives about Reform was “pact” – should there be one between the two parties come the next general election.

Now it is probably “existential” – the crisis the Conservatives have been plunged into by Reform’s success.

“Right now it would not be a pact,” says one Conservative MP, “it would just be us folding into Reform.”

Even those who believe the Conservatives will overpower Reform in time wonder at what point more pessimistic Conservative MPs might follow the logic of their own predictions and defect.

Top of many of her colleagues’ lists is Suella Braverman, the former home secretary.

Asked earlier this month whether she would join Reform, Braverman spoke of her “many decades” of commitment to the Conservative Party but warned her colleagues that “Reform is here to stay”.

What worries some Conservatives more is not defections of current MPs but a brain drain of future MPs and advisers – the kinds of people who keep the ecosystem of a political party healthy.

They warn of a “crossover point” where ambitious young people on the right entering politics might decide it makes more sense to sign up to Reform than to join the Conservatives.

For all their frustration, many Conservative MPs are still sticking to the view that Badenoch ought to be given longer to prove her worth. For them, the next set of local elections just under a year from now will be the pivotal moment – not least because they coincide with elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments too.

A shadow cabinet minister says: “Realistically you need to give any leader, including this one, at least two years to show their worth.”

Others disagree. “People say ‘you can’t change leader again, you’ll look mad’,” says one senior Conservative. “Well I remember all that with Liz [Truss]. People said the country wouldn’t allow it. Actually the country was just relieved.”

One crucial factor in Badenoch’s favour is that, beneath the loud despair, there are still plenty of Conservatives who believe Reform’s surge will fizzle out. One shadow cabinet minister says that just as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was the beneficiary of a “speeding up” of politics, he will soon become a victim and be seen by the public as “old news”.

Others believe that Farage’s prominence masks how thin Reform’s bench is. “You can’t win a general election or be the largest party as a one-man band. Farage will have to find a way of sharing the limelight.”

Those the words of a senior figure from the last Conservative government.

Last as in most recent? Or last as in final?

Overwrought it may sound, but there really are plenty of Conservatives now entertaining those questions.

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.

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.”

The Swiss village of Blatten has been partially destroyed after a huge chunk of glacier crashed down into the valley.

Although the village had been evacuated some days ago because of fears the Birch glacier was disintegrating, one person has been reported missing, and many homes have been completely flattened.

Blatten’s mayor, Matthias Bellwald, said “the unimaginable has happened” but promised the village still had a future.

Local authorities have requested support from the Swiss army’s disaster relief unit and members of the Swiss government are on their way to the scene.

The disaster that has befallen Blatten is the worst nightmare for communities across the Alps.

The village’s 300 inhabitants had to leave their homes on 19 May after geologists monitoring the area warned that the glacier appeared unstable. Now many of them may never be able to return.

Appearing to fight back tears, Bellwald said: “We have lost our village, but not our heart. We will support each other and console each other. After a long night, it will be morning again.”

The Swiss government has already promised funding to make sure residents can stay, if not in the village itself, at least in the locality.

However, Raphaël Mayoraz, head of the regional office for Natural Hazards, warned that further evacuations in the areas close to Blatten might be necessary.

Climate change is causing the glaciers – frozen rivers of ice – to melt faster and faster, and the permafrost, often described as the glue that holds the high mountains together, is also thawing.

Drone footage showed a large section of the Birch glacier collapsing at about 15:30 (14:30 BST) on Wednesday. The avalanche of mud that swept over Blatten sounded like a deafening roar, as it swept down into the valley leaving an enormous cloud of dust.

Glaciologists monitoring the thaw have warned for years that some alpine towns and villages could be at risk, and Blatten is not even the first to be evacuated.

In eastern Switzerland, residents of the village of Brienz were evacuated two years ago because the mountainside above them was crumbling.

Since then, they have only been permitted to return for short periods.

In 2017, eight hikers were killed, and many homes destroyed, when the biggest landslide in over a century came down close to the village of Bondo.

The most recent report into the condition of Switzerland’s glaciers suggested they could all be gone within a century, if global temperatures could not be kept within a rise of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, agreed ten years ago by almost 200 countries under the Paris climate accord.

Many climate scientists suggest that target has already been missed, meaning the glacier thaw will continue to accelerate, increasing the risk of flooding and landslides, and threatening more communities like Blatten.

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.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who has died aged 87, was a titan of modern African literature – a storyteller who refused to be bound by jail, exile and illness.

His work spanned roughly six decades, primarily documenting the transformation of his country – Kenya – from a colonial subject to a democracy.

Ngũgĩ was tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature countless times, leaving fans dismayed each time the medal slipped through his fingers.

He will be remembered not only as a Nobel-worthy writer, but also as a fierce proponent of literature written in native African languages.

Ngũgĩ was born James Thiong’o Ngũgĩ in 1938, when Kenya was under British colonial rule. He grew up in the town of Limuru among a large family of low-income agricultural workers.

His parents scrimped and saved to pay for his tuition at Alliance, a boarding school run by British missionaries.

In an interview, Ngũgĩ recalled returning home from Alliance at the end of term to find his entire village had been razed by the colonial authorities.

His family members were among the hundreds and thousands forced to live in detention camps during a crackdown on the Mau Mau, a movement of independence fighters.

The Mau Mau uprising, which lasted from 1952 to 1960, touched Ngũgĩ’s life in numerous, devastating ways.

In one of the most crushing, Ngũgĩ’s brother, Gitogo, was fatally shot in the back for refusing to comply with a British soldier’s command.

Gitogo had not heard the command because he was deaf.

In 1959, as the British struggled to maintain their grip on Kenya, Ngũgĩ left to study in Uganda. He enrolled at Makerere University, which remains one of Africa’s most prestigious universities.

During a writers’ conference at Makerere, Ngũgĩ shared the manuscript for his debut novel with revered Nigerian author Chinua Achebe.

Achebe forwarded the manuscript to his publisher in the UK and the book, named Weep Not, Child, was released to critical acclaim in 1964. It was the first major English-language novel to be written by an East African.

Ngũgĩ swiftly followed up with two more popular novels, A Grain of Wheat and The River Between. In 1972, the UK’s Times newspaper said Ngũgĩ, then aged 33, was “accepted as one of Africa’s outstanding contemporary writers”.

Then came 1977 – a period that marked a huge change in Ngũgĩ’s life and career. For starters, this was the year he became Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and shed his birth name, James. Ngũgĩ made the change as he wanted a name free of colonial influence.

He also dropped English as the primary language for his literature and vowed to only write in his mother tongue, Kikuyu.

He published his last English language novel, Petals of Blood, in 1977.

Ngũgĩ’s previous books had been critical of the colonial state, but Petals of Blood attacked the new leaders of independent Kenya, portraying them as an elite class who had betrayed ordinary Kenyans.

Ngũgĩ didn’t stop there. The same year, he co-wrote the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), which was a searing look at Kenya’s class struggle.

Its theatre run was shut down by the government of then President Jomo Kenyatta and Ngũgĩ was locked up in a maximum security jail for a year without trial.

It was a fruitful 12 months, however – as Ngũgĩ wrote his first Kikuyu novel, Devil on the Cross, while in prison. It is said he used toilet paper to write the entire book, as he did not have access to a notebook.

Ngũgĩ was released after Daniel arap Moi replaced Mr Kenyatta as president.

Ngũgĩ said that four years later, while in London for a book launch, he learnt there was a plot to kill him on his return to Kenya.

Ngũgĩ began self-imposed exile in the UK and then the US. He did not return to Kenya for 22 years.

When he finally did return, he received a hero’s welcome – thousands of Kenyans turned out to greet him.

But the homecoming was marred when assailants broke into Ngũgĩ’s apartment, brutally attacking the author and raping his wife.

Ngũgĩ insisted the assault was “political”.

He returned to the US, where he had held professorships at universities including Yale, New York and California Irvine.

In academia and beyond, Ngũgĩ became known as one of the foremost advocates of literature written in African languages.

Throughout his career – and to this day – African literature was dominated by books written in English or French, official languages in most countries on the continent.

“What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?” Ngũgĩ asked in a seminal, fiery essay collection, named Decolonising the Mind.

In one section, Ngũgĩ called out Chinua Achebe – the author who helped to launch his career – for writing in English. Their friendship soured as a result.

Away from his literary career, Ngũgĩ was married – and divorced – twice. He had nine children, four of whom are published authors.

“My own family has become one of my literary rivals,” Ngũgĩ joked in a 2020 LA Times interview.

His son, Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ, has alleged that his mother was physically abused by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

“Some of my earliest memories are me going to visit her at my grandmother’s where she would seek refuge,” his son wrote in a social media post, which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o did not respond to.

Later in his life, Ngũgĩ’s health deteriorated. He had triple heart bypass surgery in 2019 and began to struggle with kidney failure. In 1995, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and given three months to live.

Ngũgĩ recovered, however, adding cancer to the lengthy list of struggles he had overcome.

But now one of African literature’s guiding lights – as Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once called him – is gone, leaving the world of words a little darker.

• Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his son discuss family and writing
• Why Tanzanian Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah is hardly known back home
• Africa’s lost languages: How English can fuel an identity crisis

In Sarajevo it is, once again, the Year of the Rat.

Social media posts from residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s capital have shown an abundance of rodents swimming in the Miljacka river which flows through the centre of the city.

Sarajevans long accustomed to poor public services have also posted photos of overflowing rubbish containers and illegal dumping – along with complaints that the authorities have failed to clear away dead animals from public areas including children’s playgrounds.

It all makes for a wonderful environment for rats to thrive. For humans, however, the picture is rather less rosy.

Health experts blame a failure to control Sarajevo’s rodent population for an alarming rise in the number of cases of rat-borne diseases.

In just one 24 hour period this week, the country’s largest hospital reported a dozen cases of leptospirosis. That follows a steady stream of other infections earlier in the month.

One of the disease’s nicknames, rat fever, reflects its key vector of infection. It generally spreads to humans through water or soil contaminated with rodent urine or faeces.

Symptoms can range from headaches and muscle pain to bleeding on the lungs. The acute form of the illness, Weil’s disease, can cause jaundice and even kidney failure.

The local authorities in Sarajevo have declared an epidemic, allowing the imposition of emergency measures, including a long overdue clean-up.

Extra municipal workers armed with disinfectant sprays have been deployed to carry out an urban “spring clean” in public areas across the city, while additional rubbish collections are being arranged. Schools have been directed to clean their playgrounds, mow any grass areas and check their basements for rats.

The current all-action approach is a stark contrast to the laissez-faire situation of the past two years, during which there were no pest control measures in Sarajevo at all. Officials blame a botched tender process for extermination and sanitation work, which has allowed the city to go to the rats – and, for that matter, the dogs, as packs of strays are also a common sight around the capital.

Sarajevo Canton Health Minister Enis Hasanovic described the situation as “not a health crisis, but a communal crisis”, due to local authorities failing to fulfil essential municipal hygiene requirements.

But a former director of the Sarajevo’s University Clinical Centre, Sebija Izetbegović, believes the health situation could deteriorate further. Now a member of Sarajevo Canton Assembly, she points out that “well-fed rats” are currently so numerous in the city that “we can also expect hantavirus”.

In one respect at least, Sarajevo has been lucky. Left untreated, leptospirosis can be deadly, with a mortality rate of more than 50% for people who suffer from severe bleeding of the lungs.

But so far none of the cases reported in the current epidemic have been serious.

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.

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 reportedly 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 “underground infrastructure”.

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 Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, was killed by Israeli troops last October.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response the unprecedented 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 Hamas-run health ministry.

Mohammed Sinwar, 49, joined Hamas shortly after it was founded in the late 1980s and become a member of the group’s military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.

He rose through the ranks and by 2005 he was commander of the Khan Younis Brigade.

He was believed to have been one of the masterminds of a 2006 cross-border attack in which Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was seized. Sgt Shalit was released after five years in captivity in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, including Yahya Sinwar.

Mohammed Sinwar was also reported to have been close to Hamas’s late military chief Mohammed Deif and been involved in the planning of the 7 October 2023 attack.

Netanyahu announced that he was dead during a special debate in the Israeli parliament on Tuesday called by the opposition to address what it called “the government’s complete failure to achieve the war’s goals: the return of all the hostages and defeating Hamas”.

In response to the criticism, the prime minister listed Israel’s achievements.

“In 600 days of the ‘War of Revival’, we have indeed changed the face of the Middle East,” he said. “We drove the terrorists out of our territory, entered the Gaza Strip with force, eliminated tens of thousands of terrorists, eliminated Mohammed Deif, [political leader Ismail] Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Sinwar.”

Until now, Israeli officials have been cautious when speaking about Mohammed Sinwar’s fate.

The Israeli military’s statement about the 13 May air strike did not mention him, saying only that it targeted “Hamas terrorists who were operating in a command-and-control centre that was embedded in an underground terrorist infrastructure site underneath the European hospital”. However, Israeli media reported at the time that he was the intended target.

Five days later, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz told parliament that, while there was no official confirmation, “all indications” from Israeli intelligence were that Sinwar was killed.

The European hospital has been out of service since the attack two weeks ago.

CCTV footage shows children, women and men walking around the hospital’s courtyard just before it is engulfed by an explosion. As the smoke clears, a large crater begins to form.

Medics said they received no warning from Israeli authorities. The hospital was also not covered by any Israeli evacuation orders issued since the military resumed its offensive against Hamas on 18 March, following the collapse of a two-month ceasefire.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said the killing of civilians was “as tragic as it is abhorrent”, and that Israel was bound by international law to ensure to spare their lives even if it believed that destroying the underground structures offered a definite military advantage.

Netanyahu also addressed on Tuesday the issue of the 58 hostages still being held by Hamas.

“I am fully focused on the mission of bringing back all our hostages – both the living and the fallen,” he said. “According to the information we currently have, there are 20 hostages who are confirmed to be alive. This is undisputed. In addition, there are up to 38 other hostages who are believed to be deceased.”

Earlier this month, the prime minister said there was “uncertainty” about the condition of three of the 24 hostages previously believed to be alive in captivity.

Days later, one of the living hostages, Israeli-American Edan Alexander, was freed by Hamas in what the group said was a goodwill gesture to US President Donald Trump, who is attempting to broker a new ceasefire and hostage release deal.

Netanyahu also declared that Israel had made “a dramatic shift toward the complete defeat of Hamas” over the past two days by “taking control of food distribution in the Gaza Strip”.

He was referring to the controversial new aid distribution system run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The system uses US security contractors and bypasses the UN, which says it goes against fundamental humanitarian principles.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents many hostages’ families, welcomed the prime minister’s announcement about Mohammed Sinwar but told him: “The time has come to achieve true national victory – one that includes bringing home all the hostages and beginning the restoration of Israeli society.”

Australian actress Deborra-Lee Furness has said her “compassion goes out to everyone who has traversed the traumatic journey of betrayal”, after filing for divorce from her husband Hugh Jackman.

In a statement released to media, Furness, 69, said: “It’s a profound wound that cuts deep, however I believe in a higher power and that God/the universe… is always working FOR us.”

The couple filed for divorce in New York on 23 May. They announced their separation in September 2023 after 27 years of marriage.

Hugh Jackman, best known for playing Wolverine in the X-men film series, has not responded directly to Furness’s statement.

Furness said that she had gained “much knowledge and wisdom” from the “breakdown” of her marriage to Jackman, 56.

“Sometimes the universe has to create arduous circumstances for us to walk through in order to find our way home, back to our true essence and the sovereignty of self love.”

“It can hurt, but in the long run, returning to yourself and living within your own integrity, values and boundaries is liberation and freedom,” she added, in the statement first issued to the Daily Mail.

When Furness and Jackman announced their separation in 2023, the couple issued a joint statement which they said was “the sole statement either of us will make”.

“Our journey now is shifting and we have decided to separate to pursue our individual growth… We undertake this next chapter with gratitude, love and kindness,” they said at the time.

The pair met on the set of the Australian TV show Corelli in 1995, shortly after Jackman had left drama school.

They married the following year and later adopted two children.

Since Furness issued the statement, Jackman, currently performing in New York, posted a video to Instagram in which he is skipping to the NSYNC song Bye Bye Bye.

Elon Musk has said he is leaving the Trump administration after helping lead a tumultuous drive to shrink the size of US government that saw thousands of federal jobs axed.

In a post on his social media platform X, the world’s richest man thanked Trump for the opportunity to help run the Department of Government Efficiency, known as Doge.

The White House began “offboarding” Musk as a special government employee on Wednesday night, the BBC understands.

His role was temporary and his exit is not unexpected, but it comes a day after Musk criticised the legislative centrepiece of Trump’s agenda.

“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk wrote on X.

“The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”

The South African-born tech tycoon had been designated as a “special government employee” – allowing him to work a federal job for 130 days each year.

• What is Doge and why is Musk leaving?
• How much has Elon Musk’s Doge cut?

Measured from Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, he would hit that limit towards the end of May.

But his departure comes a day after he said he was “disappointed” with Trump’s budget bill, which proposes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks and a boost to defence spending.

The SpaceX and Tesla boss said in an interview with BBC’s US partner CBS that the “big, beautiful bill”, as Trump calls it, would increase the federal deficit.

Musk also said he thought it “undermines the work” of Doge.

“I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful,” Musk said. “But I don’t know if it could be both.”

Musk, who had clashed in private with some Trump cabinet-level officials, initially pledged to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal government budget, before halving this target, then reducing it to $150bn.

An estimated 260,000 out of the 2.3 million-strong federal civilian workforce have had their jobs cut or accepted redundancy deals as a result of Doge.

In some cases, federal judges blocked the mass firings and ordered terminated employees to be reinstated.

The rapid-fire approach to cutting the federal workforce occasionally led to some workers mistakenly being let go, including staff at the US nuclear programme.

Musk announced in late April that he would step back to run his companies again after becoming a lightning rod for criticism of Trump’s efforts to shake up Washington.

“Doge is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” Musk told the Washington Post in Texas on Tuesday ahead of a Space X launch.

“Something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.”

Musk’s time in government overlapped with a significant decline in sales at his electric car company.

Tesla sales dropped by 13% in the first three months of this year, the largest drop in deliveries in its history.

The company’s stock price also tumbled by as much as 45%, but has mostly rebounded and is only down 10%.

Tesla recently warned investors that the financial pain could continue, declining to offer a growth forecast while saying “changing political sentiment” could meaningfully hurt demand for the vehicles.

Musk told investors on an earnings call last month that the time he allocates to Doge “will drop significantly” and that he would be “allocating far more of my time to Tesla”.

Activists have called for Tesla boycotts, staging protests outside Tesla dealerships, and vandalising the vehicles and charging stations.

The Tesla blowback became so violent and widespread that US Attorney General Pam Bondi warned her office would treat acts of vandalism as “domestic terrorism”.

Speaking at an economic forum in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday, Musk said he was committed to being the leader of Tesla for the next five years.

He said earlier this month he would cut back his political donations after spending nearly $300m to back Trump’s presidential campaign and other Republicans last year.

President Donald Trump’s administration says it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students studying in the US.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement the move would include “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields”.

Criteria will also be revised to “enhance scrutiny” of future visa applicants from China and Hong Kong, Rubio added.

Relations between Beijing and Washington have plummeted in recent months as a tit-for-tat trade war erupted between the two superpowers sparked by Trump’s tariffs.

On Monday, Rubio, who is America’s top diplomat, ordered US embassies around the world to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as the state department prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants.

Estimates indicate there were around 280,000 Chinese students studying in the US last year.

Chinese nationals used to account for the bulk of international students enrolled at American universities, though that has recently changed.

From pandemic-era restrictions to worsening relations between the two countries, their number has dropped in recent years, according to US state department data.

Rubio said in Wednesday’s statement: “Under President Trump’s leadership, the US State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.

“We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”

The Trump administration has already moved to deport a number of foreign students, while revoking thousands of visas for others. Many of these actions have been blocked by the courts.

It has also frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for universities. The president sees some of America’s most elite institutions, such as Harvard, as too liberal and accuses them of failing to combat antisemitism on campus.

Many US universities rely on foreign students for a significant chunk of their funding – as those scholars often pay higher tuition fees.

• Students say they ‘regret’ applying to US schools after visa changes

A number of international students have been reeling from the planned visa changes.

Some told the BBC they wished they had never opted to study in the US.

“I already regret it,” said a 22-year-old master’s student from Shanghai, who did not want to be named for fear of jeopardising a visa to study at the University of Pennsylvania.

Beijing has not yet responded to the US move to revoke the visas of Chinese students specifically.

But China responded earlier on Wednesday to the Trump administration’s move to cancel student visa appointments globally.

“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.

An official memo, reviewed by the BBC’s US partner CBS News, on Tuesday instructed US embassies across the world to remove all open appointments for students seeking visas, but to keep already-scheduled appointments in place.

Last week, a judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to strip Harvard of its ability to enrol international students.

The ruling came after America’s oldest university filed a lawsuit against the administration. The White House accused the judge hearing the case of having a “liberal agenda”.

On Wednesday, Harvard said in a court filing that revoking its certification to host international students could inflict irreparable harm on the university.

In a declaration filed with the court motion, Harvard international office director Maureen Martin said the move was causing “significant emotional distress” for students and scholars.

She wrote that students were skipping graduation ceremonies, cancelling international travel and in some cases seeking transfer to other colleges.

Some had also reported fears of being forced to return to countries where they face active conflict or political persecution, according to the court filing.

The Swiss village of Blatten has been partially destroyed after a huge chunk of glacier crashed down into the valley.

Although the village had been evacuated some days ago because of fears the Birch glacier was disintegrating, one person has been reported missing, and many homes have been completely flattened.

Blatten’s mayor, Matthias Bellwald, said “the unimaginable has happened” but promised the village still had a future.

Local authorities have requested support from the Swiss army’s disaster relief unit and members of the Swiss government are on their way to the scene.

The disaster that has befallen Blatten is the worst nightmare for communities across the Alps.

The village’s 300 inhabitants had to leave their homes on 19 May after geologists monitoring the area warned that the glacier appeared unstable. Now many of them may never be able to return.

Appearing to fight back tears, Bellwald said: “We have lost our village, but not our heart. We will support each other and console each other. After a long night, it will be morning again.”

The Swiss government has already promised funding to make sure residents can stay, if not in the village itself, at least in the locality.

However, Raphaël Mayoraz, head of the regional office for Natural Hazards, warned that further evacuations in the areas close to Blatten might be necessary.

Climate change is causing the glaciers – frozen rivers of ice – to melt faster and faster, and the permafrost, often described as the glue that holds the high mountains together, is also thawing.

Drone footage showed a large section of the Birch glacier collapsing at about 15:30 (14:30 BST) on Wednesday. The avalanche of mud that swept over Blatten sounded like a deafening roar, as it swept down into the valley leaving an enormous cloud of dust.

Glaciologists monitoring the thaw have warned for years that some alpine towns and villages could be at risk, and Blatten is not even the first to be evacuated.

In eastern Switzerland, residents of the village of Brienz were evacuated two years ago because the mountainside above them was crumbling.

Since then, they have only been permitted to return for short periods.

In 2017, eight hikers were killed, and many homes destroyed, when the biggest landslide in over a century came down close to the village of Bondo.

The most recent report into the condition of Switzerland’s glaciers suggested they could all be gone within a century, if global temperatures could not be kept within a rise of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, agreed ten years ago by almost 200 countries under the Paris climate accord.

Many climate scientists suggest that target has already been missed, meaning the glacier thaw will continue to accelerate, increasing the risk of flooding and landslides, and threatening more communities like Blatten.

An acrid smell hangs over the town of Rodynske. A couple of minutes after we drive into the city we see where it’s coming from.

A 250kg glide bomb has ripped through the town’s main administrative building, and taken down three residential blocks. We’re visiting a day after the bomb struck, but parts of the wreckage are still smoking. From the edges of the town we hear the sound of artillery fire, and of gunshots – Ukrainian soldiers shooting down drones.

Rodynske is about 15km (9 miles) north of the embattled city of Pokrovsk. Russia has been trying to capture it from the south since the autumn of last year, but Ukrainian forces have so far managed to stop Russian soldiers from marching in.

So Russia has changed tactics, moving instead to encircle the city, cutting off supply routes.

In the past two weeks, as hectic diplomatic efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine have failed, Russia has intensified its push, making its most significant advances since January.

We find proof of that in Rodynske.

Within minutes of us arriving in town, we hear a Russian drone above us. Our team runs to the closest cover available – a tree.

We press up against it so the drone won’t see us. Then there’s the sound of a loud explosion – it’s a second drone making impact nearby. The drone above us is still hovering. For a few more minutes, we hear the terrifying whirring sound of what’s become the deadliest weapon of this war.

When we can’t hear it any more we take the chance to run to hard cover in an abandoned building 100ft away.

From the shelter, we hear the drone again. It’s possible it returned after seeing our movement.

That Rodynske is being swarmed by Russian drones is evidence that the attacks are coming from positions much closer than known Russian positions to the south of Pokrovsk. They were most likely coming from newly captured territory on a key road running from the east of Pokrovsk to Kostyantynivka.

After half an hour of waiting in the shelter, when we can’t hear the drone anymore, we move quickly to our car parked under tree cover, and speed out of Rodynske. By the side of the highway we see smoke billowing and something burning – it’s most likely a downed drone.

We drive to Bilytske, further away from the frontline. We see a row of houses destroyed by a missile strike overnight. One of them was Svitlana’s home.

“It’s getting worse and worse. Earlier, we could hear distant explosions, they were far away. But now our town is getting targeted – we’re experiencing it ourselves,” says the 61-year-old, as she picks up a few belongings from the wreckage of her home. Luckily Svitlana wasn’t at home when the attack occurred.

“Go into the centre of the town, you’ll see so much that is destroyed there. And the bakery and zoo have been destroyed too,” she says.

At a safehouse just out of reach of drones, we meet soldiers of the artillery unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.

“You can feel the intensity of Russian assaults increasing. Rockets, mortars, drones, they’re using everything they have to cut off supply routes going into the city,” says Serhii.

His unit has been waiting for three days to deploy to their positions, waiting for cloud cover or high-speed winds to give them protection from drones.

In an ever-evolving conflict, soldiers have had to rapidly adapt to new threats posed by changing technology. And the latest threat comes from fibre optic drones. A spool of tens of kilometres of cable is fitted to the bottom of a drone and the physical fibre optic cord is attached to the controller held by the pilot.

“The video and control signal is transmitted to and from the drone through the cable, not through radio frequencies. This means it can’t be jammed by electronic interceptors,” says a soldier with the call sign Moderator, a drone engineer with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.

When drones began to be used in this war in a big way, both militaries fitted their vehicles with electronic warfare systems, which could neutralise drones. That protection has evaporated with the arrival of fibre optic drones, and in the deployment of these devices, Russia currently has the edge. Ukraine is trying to ramp up production.

“Russia started using fibre optic drones much before us, while we were still testing them. These drones can be used in places where we have to go lower than usual drones. We can even enter houses and look for targets inside,” says Venia, a drone pilot with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.

“We’ve started joking that maybe we should carry scissors to cut the cord,” says Serhii, the artillery man.

Fibre optic drones do have drawbacks – they are slower and the cable could get entangled in trees. But at the moment, their widespread use by Russia means that transporting soldiers to and from their positions can often be deadlier than the battlefield itself.

“When you enter a position, you don’t know whether you’ve been spotted or not. And if you have been spotted, then you may already be living the last hours of your life,” says Oles, Chief Sergeant of the reconnaissance unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.

This threat means that soldiers are spending longer and longer in their positions.

Oles and his men are in the infantry, serving in the trenches right at the very front of Ukraine’s defence. It’s rare for journalists these days to speak to infantrymen, as it’s become too risky to go to these trenches. We meet Oles and Maksym in a rural home converted into a makeshift base, where the soldiers come to rest when they’re not on deployment.

“The longest I spent at the position was 31 days, but I do know guys who have spent 90 and even 120 days there. Back before the drones arrived, the rotations could have been between 3 or 7 days at the position,” says Maksym.

“War is blood, death, wet mud and a chill that spreads from head to toe. And this is how you spend every day. I remember one instance when we didn’t sleep for three days, alert every minute. The Russians kept coming at us wave after wave. Even a minor lapse would have meant we were dead.”

Oles says Russia’s infantry has changed its tactics. “Earlier they attacked in groups. Now they only send one or two people at times. They also use motorcycles and in a few instances, quad bikes. Sometimes they slip through.”

What this means is that the front lines in some parts are no longer conventional lines with the Ukrainians on one side and the Russians on the other, but more like pieces on a chessboard during play, where positions can be intertwined.

This also makes it harder to see advances made by either side.

Despite Russia’s recent gains, it will not be quick or easy for it to take the whole of the Donetsk region, where Pokrovsk lies.

Ukraine has pushed back hard, but it needs a steady supply of weapons and ammunition to sustain the fight.

And as the war enters a fourth summer, Ukraine’s manpower issues against a much bigger Russian army are also evident. Most of the soldiers we meet joined the military after the war began. They’ve had a few months of training, but have had to learn a lot on the job in the middle of a raging war.

Maksym worked for a drinks company before he joined the military. I asked how his family copes with his job.

“It’s hard, it’s really hard. My family really supports me. But I have a two-year-old son, and I don’t get to see him much. I do video call him though, so everything is as fine as it could be under the circumstances,” he trails off, eyes welling up with tears.

Maksym is a soldier fighting for his country, but he’s also just a father missing his two-year-old boy.

A US federal court has blocked President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, in a major blow to a key component of his economic policies.

The Court of International Trade ruled that an emergency law invoked by the White House did not give the president unilateral authority to impose tariffs on nearly every country.

The Manhattan-based court said the US Constitution gave Congress exclusive powers to regulate commerce with other nations and this was not superseded by the president’s remit to safeguard the economy.

The Trump administration lodged an appeal within minutes of the ruling.

The lawsuit was filed by the nonpartisan Liberty Justice Center on behalf of five small businesses that import goods from countries targeted by the duties.

It is the first major legal challenge to Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs.

A three-judge panel ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that Trump cited to justify the tariffs, does not give him the power to impose the sweeping import taxes.

The court also blocked a separate set of levies the Trump administration imposed on China, Mexico and Canada, in response to what it said was the unacceptable flow of drugs and illegal immigrants into the US.

However, the court was not asked to address tariffs imposed on some specific goods like cars, steel and aluminium, which fall under a different law.

The White House has criticised the ruling, though Trump has not yet commented directly.

“It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,” White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai said in a statement.

“President Trump pledged to put America First, and the administration is committed to using every lever of executive power to address this crisis and restore American greatness,” he added.

But Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, one of 12 states involved in the lawsuit, welcomed the decision.

“The law is clear: no president has the power to single-handedly raise taxes whenever they like,” Letitia James said.

“These tariffs are a massive tax hike on working families and American businesses that would have led to more inflation, economic damage to businesses of all sizes, and job losses across the country if allowed to continue,” she added.

Global markets have responded positively to the ruling. Stock markets in Asia rose on Thursday morning, US stock futures also jumped and the US dollar made gains against safe-haven peers, including the Japanese yen and Swiss franc.

The White House has 10 days to complete the bureaucratic process of halting the tariffs, although most are currently suspended anyway.

The case needs to go through the appeals process. If the White House is unsuccessful in its appeal, the US Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) will then issue directions to its officers, John Leonard, a former top official at the CBP, told the BBC.

That said, a higher court might be more Trump-friendly.

But if all courts do uphold the ruling, businesses who’ve had to pay tariffs will receive refunds on the amounts paid, with interest. These include the so-called reciprocal tariffs, which were lowered to 10% across the board for most countries and were raised to 145% on Chinese products, now 30%.

Mr Leonard said there will not be any changes at the border for now and tariffs will still have to be paid.

Market reactions showed, partly, investors “exhaling after weeks of white-knuckle volatility sparked by trade war brinkmanship,” Stephen Innes at SPI Asset Management wrote in a commentary.

Mr Innes said US judges gave a clear message: “The Oval Office isn’t a trading desk, and the Constitution isn’t a blank cheque.”

“Executive overreach may finally have found its ceiling. And with it, a fresh dose of macro stability – at least until the next headline.”

Paul Ashworth, from Capital Economics, said the ruling “will obviously throw into disarray the Trump administration’s push to quickly seal trade ‘deals’ during the 90-day pause from tariffs“.

He predicted other countries “will wait and see” what happens next.

On 2 April, Trump unveiled an unprecedented global tariff regime by imposing import taxes on most of the US’s trading partners.

A 10% baseline tariff was placed on most countries, along with steeper reciprocal tariffs handed down to dozens of nations and blocs, including the EU, UK, Canada, Mexico and China.

Trump argued that the sweeping economic policy would boost American manufacturing and protect jobs.

Global markets have been thrown into disarray since the announcement and later after Trump’s reversals and pausing of tariffs as foreign governments came to the negotiating table.

Adding to the turmoil was a prolonged trade war with China, as the world’s two economic superpowers engaged in a back-and-forth raising of tariffs, which reached a peak with a 145% US tax on Chinese imports, and a 125% Chinese tax on US imports.

The world’s two biggest economies have since agreed to a truce, with US duties on China falling to 30%, and Chinese tariffs on some US imports reducing to 10%.

The UK and US have also announced a deal on lower tariffs between the two governments.

Trump threatened a 50% tariff from June on all goods coming from the EU after expressing frustration with the pace of trade talks with the bloc – but then agreed to extend the deadline by more than a month after EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said more time was needed.

US President Donald Trump has appeared to set a two-week deadline for Vladimir Putin, threatening a different response if the Russian counterpart was still stringing him along.

As the Kremlin escalated its attacks on Ukraine, Trump was asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday if he thought Putin wanted to end the war.

“I can’t tell you that, but I’ll let you know in about two weeks,” Trump told reporters, the latest amid a string of critical public remarks made by Trump about Putin.

Since Sunday, Trump has written multiple posts on social media saying that Putin has gone “absolutely crazy” and is “playing with fire” after Russia intensified its attacks on Ukraine.

The bombardments by Russia are said to have been some of the largest and deadliest attacks since the start of the war, now in its fourth year.

Russian strikes in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, killed at least 13 people and injured dozens more, including children, over the weekend.

And by Wednesday, the attacks had shown no signs of slowing down.

In Trump’s remarks about the escalation of violence and whether he thinks Putin is serious about ending the war, Trump said: “I’ll let you know in about two weeks.

“Within two weeks. We’re gonna find out whether or not (Putin is) tapping us along or not.

“And if he is, we’ll respond a little bit differently.”

The comments are a sign of Trump’s growing frustration, as the White House’s repeated efforts to negotiate a deal between Russia and Ukraine appear ever more futile.

This includes a recent two-hour phone call between Trump and Putin, after which the US president said the discussions went “very well”.

Putin walked away from the call saying he was ready to work with Ukraine on a “memorandum on a possible future peace agreement”.

That call was one week before Russia launched hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles towards Ukraine’s capital, according to Ukraine’s air force.

And a memorandum has yet to be produced by Russia.

So far, Trump’s threats have not appeared to concern Moscow sufficiently for it to concede to his demands. Trump has not delivered on previous such threats.

Since taking office, Trump has only taken action against Ukraine, as Washington sought to steer the countries to Trump’s demand for a truce.

This included an eight-day suspension of US military assistance and intelligence sharing with Kyiv in March.

Meanwhile the US administration has not publicly demanded any significant concessions from Russia.

The White House rejects accusations of appeasing Moscow or failing to enforce its will, pointing out that all the Biden-era sanctions remain in force against Russia.

But so far its mediation approach appears to have made the Kremlin more, not less, empowered.

After the latest attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “something has happened” to Putin, which the Kremlin said were comments made “connected to an emotional overload”.

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine continued in the days afterwards. Trump then escalated his criticism. On Tuesday, he said Putin was “playing with fire” and that “lots of bad things” would have happened to Russia if it were not for Trump’s involvement.

A Kremlin aid responded to the latest Trump Truth Social post by saying: “We have come to the conclusion that Trump is not sufficiently informed about what is really happening.”

Putin aide Yury Ushakov told Russian state TV channel Russia-1 that Trump must be unaware of “the increasingly frequent massive terrorist attacks Ukraine is carrying out against peaceful Russian cities.”

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

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

In the face of Russia’s recalcitrance, Trump has frequently softened his demands, shifting the emphasis from his original call for an immediate 30-day ceasefire, to which only Ukraine agreed, to more recently demanding a summit with Putin to get what he says would be a breakthrough.

Putin and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov have upped their demands from earlier positions since the US restored contacts with the Russians in February.

These have included a demand that Ukraine cede parts of its own country not even occupied by Russia and that the US recognises Crimea as a formal part of Russia.

Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Moscow, calls this a “poison pill” introduced by Russia: Creating conditions Kyiv could never agree to in order to shift blame onto Ukraine in Trump’s eyes.

The war 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 were yet to deliver a promised memorandum of peace terms following talks in Istanbul. Peskov insisted the document was in its “final stages.”

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says that “hordes of hungry people” have broken into a food supply warehouse in central Gaza.

Two people are reported to have died and several others injured in the incident, the programme said, adding that it was still confirming details.

Video footage from AFP news agency showed crowds breaking into the Al-Ghafari warehouse in Deir Al-Balah and taking bags of flour and cartons of food as gunshots rang out. It was not immediately clear where the gunshots came from.

In a statement, the WFP said humanitarian needs in Gaza had “spiralled out of control” after an almost three-month Israeli blockade that was eased last week.

The WFP said that food supplies had been pre-positioned at the warehouse for distribution.

The programme added: “Gaza needs an immediate scale-up of food assistance. This is the only way to reassure people that they will not starve.”

The WFP said it had “consistently warned of alarming and deteriorating conditions on the ground, and the risks imposed by limiting humanitarian aid to hungry people in desperate need of assistance”.

Israeli authorities said on Wednesday that 121 trucks belonging to the UN and the international community carrying humanitarian aid including flour and food were transferred into Gaza.

Israel began to allow a limited amount of aid into Gaza last week. However, UN Middle East envoy Sigrid Kaag told the UN Security Council this was “comparable to a lifeboat after the ship has sunk” when everyone in Gaza was facing the risk of famine.

A controversial US and Israeli-backed group – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – was also established as a private aid distribution system. It uses US security contractors and bypasses the UN, which said it was unworkable and unethical.

The US and Israeli governments say the GHF, which has set up four distribution centres in southern and central Gaza, is preventing aid from being stolen by Hamas, which the armed group denies doing.

The UN Humans Right Office said 47 people were injured on Tuesday after people overran one of the GHF distribution sites in the southern city of Rafah, a day after it began working there.

Another senior UN official told journalists on Wednesday that desperate crowds were looting cargo off of UN aid trucks.

Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN’s humanitarian office for the occupied Palestinian territories, also said there was no evidence that Hamas was diverting aid coordinated through credible humanitarian channels.

He said the real theft of relief goods since the beginning of the war had been carried out by criminal gangs which the Israeli army “allowed to operate in proximity to the Kerem Shalom crossing point in Gaza”.

The UN has argued that a surge of aid like the one during the recent ceasefire between Israeli and Hamas would reduce the threat of looting by hungry people and allow it to make full use of its well-established network of distribution across the Gaza Strip.

Students around the world are anxious and in limbo, they say, as the Trump administration makes plans to temporarily halt US student visa appointments.

An official memo seen by BBC’s US partner CBS ordered a temporary pause in appointments as the state department prepares to increase social media vetting of applicants for student and foreign exchange visas.

It is part of a wide-ranging crackdown by US President Donald Trump on some of America’s most elite universities, which he sees as overly liberal.

For students, the changes have brought widespread uncertainty, with visa appointments at US embassies now unavailable and delays that could leave scholarships up in the air.

Some students told the BBC that the confusion has even left them wishing they had applied to schools outside the US.

“I already regret it,” said a 22-year-old master’s student from Shanghai, who did not wish to be named for fear of jeopardising their visa to study at the University of Pennsylvania.

The student said they feel lucky their application was approved, but that has not eased their uncertainty.

“Even if I study in the US, I may be chased back to China without getting my degree,” they said. “That’s so scary.”

Asked about the decision to pause all student visa appointments, 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.”

As part of his wider crackdown on higher education, Trump has moved to ban Harvard from enrolling international students, accusing the school of not doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus.

Harvard filed a lawsuit in response, and a judge has halted Trump’s ban for now, with a hearing on the matter scheduled for 29 May.

A student from Guangzhou City, who runs a consultancy group for Chinese students wishing to study in the US, said they are not sure how to advise applicants because the rules keep changing.

The student, who also wished not to be named, added that they think there will be fewer students who see the US as a viable education option.

More than 1.1 million international students from over 210 countries were enrolled in US colleges in the 2023-24 school year, according to Open Doors, an organisation that collects data on foreign students.

Universities often charge these international students higher tuition fees – a crucial part of their operating budgets.

For Ainul Hussein, 24, from India, the visa implications are both financial and personal.

Mr Hussein said he was excited to begin the next chapter of his life in New Jersey, enrolled in a master’s of science programme in management.

He received a I-20 document from the university – a crucial piece of paper that allows him to apply for a US student visa.

But recent processing delays left him “deeply worried”, he said, with appointments at consulates now either postponed or unavailable.

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

He said he may be forced to book flights to the US, still unsure of the situation. He also risks losing his scholarship if he has to defer his studies.

Students in the UK are being affected, too.

Oliver Cropley, a 27-year-old from Norwich, said he was due to study abroad for a year in Kansas, but that plan is now in jeopardy.

“Currently I’ve no student visa, despite forking out £300 on the application process,” Mr Cropley said.

News of the US pausing visa applications is “a huge disappointment”.

He, too, risks losing a scholarship if he is unable to complete his study abroad in the US, and may have to find last-minute accommodation and liaise with the university to make sure it does not delay him academically.

Alfred Williamson, from Wales, told Reuters he was excited to travel after his first year at Harvard, but couldn’t wait to get back. But now, he hasn’t heard about his visa.

It’s “dehumanising”, he told Reuters.

“We’re being used like pawns in the game that we have no control of, and we’re being caught in this crossfire between the White House and Harvard,” Mr Williamson told the news agency.

Australian actress and comedian Magda Szubanski has been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer.

Szubanski is best known for her iconic role as Sharon Strzelecki in the Australian sitcom Kath & Kim, and for her film roles in Babe and Happy Feet.

In a video posted to social media, the 64-year-old said she had begun treatment to fight stage four Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a “fast-moving” form of blood cancer.

Calling the news “confronting”, Szubanski said she was receiving “world-class care” in Melbourne.

“I won’t sugar-coat it: it’s rough. But I’m hopeful,” she said.

“I’m being lovingly cared for by friends and family, my medical team is brilliant, and I’ve never felt more held by the people around me.”

The actress said she was undergoing Nordic protocol treatment, a regimen which combines chemotherapy and immunotherapy to treat Mantle Cell Lymphoma.

The cancer was only discovered incidentally after she requested blood tests after feeling unwell for “ages”.

“So the take away is – get tested and listen to your body!” she said.

Szubanksi rose to fame playing the netball-loving Strzelecki in the early 2000s, and has been a stalwart of the comedy scene in Australia since.

She was also a prominent advocate for the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Australia.