A US federal court has blocked President Donald Trump’s sweeping global trade 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 one of the world’s countries.

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said the US Constitution gave Congress exclusive powers to regulate commerce with other nations, and that this was not superseded by the president’s remit to safeguard the economy.

The Trump administration said it would appeal within minutes of the ruling.

• Follow live updates after the court ruling

The ruling was based on two separate cases. The nonpartisan Liberty Justice Center brought one case on behalf of several small businesses that import goods from countries that were targeted by the duties, while a coalition of US state governments also challenged the import taxes.

The two cases mark the first major legal challenges 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, did 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 the administration 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.

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,” she said.

Stock markets in Asia rose on Thursday morning following the ruling, US stock futures also jumped and the US dollar made gains against safe-haven peers, including the Japanese yen and Swiss franc. European markets opened flat.

• What tariffs has Trump announced, and why?
• Trump agrees to extend EU trade talks after 50% tariff threat

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 which have 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 would not be any changes at the border for now and that tariffs would 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.

The UK and US governments agreed a deal to reduce tariffs on some goods traded between the countries earlier this month.

It included the lowering and removal of import taxes on some of the UK’s main exports to America, such as cars, steel and aluminium.

That aspect of the deal is not impacted by the court ruling, but the blanket 10% tariff on most other UK goods entering the US has now been called into question.

How that part of the deal could change remains uncertain following the ruling, with the agreement between both governments yet to be implemented.

The UK government has not commented on the court ruling but said it was working to ensure British businesses can benefit from the deal “as quickly as possible”.

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

The Iranian Embassy in India has said it is investigating the case of three Indian nationals who went missing in Tehran earlier this month.

The men, all of whom are from the northern state of Punjab, had a stopover in Iran on 1 May, and were on their way to Australia, where they were promised lucrative jobs by a local travel agent.

Their families allege that they were kidnapped upon their arrival by unknown men, who are now demanding a ransom of 5m rupees ($63,000; £47,000).

On Thursday, the Iranian Embassy said on X that it was keeping Indian authorities informed of all developments “within the judicial system” and warned about the dangers of taking illegal immigration routes.

“Given the nature of this incident, Indian citizens are strongly advised not to be deceived by the promises of unauthorised individuals or illegal Indian agencies offering travel to other countries,” it said.

The statement came a day after the Indian embassy in Iran said that it had “strongly taken up this matter with Iranian authorities” and requested that the missing Indians be “urgently traced and their safety ensured”.

Many Indians, particularly from Punjab, travel to developed countries in search of job opportunities and a better life.

Some fall victim to scams run by travel agents, who charge exorbitant fees and send them through illegal or unsafe routes, often without proper documentation.

Gurdeep Kaur recounted the events that led to her 23-year-old son Amritpal Singh going missing to BBC Punjabi.

The family had hired a travel agent in Hoshiarpur – where they live – to secure an Australian work permit for her son.

“Last month, the agent informed us that my son’s visa had been approved and asked for 1.8m rupees as payment,” she said.

“They told us they had booked a flight from Delhi to Australia on 26 April. But when my son went there, they told him that his documents were still not ready.”

The agent then told Amritpal that they had rebooked him on a flight for 29 April, but later claimed that even that ticket got cancelled.

On 1 May, the agent put Amritpal, along with the two other men, on a flight to Iran, describing it as a stopover en route to Australia, Ms Kaur said.

After landing, Amritpal called his mum to say that he had arrived safely and that a cab was on its way to take them to a hotel, before their next flight.

But an hour later, Ms Kaur said her son called again, this time to say that he had been kidnapped.

Before she could get any details, the call got cut abruptly and her son became unreachable.

Ms Kaur said that the family tried to contact the three agents in Punjab – they first gave them “vague responses” and then went missing. The next day, the family found that their homes and offices were locked.

Ms Kaur said they began receiving video calls from unknown men around the same time.

On the call, Ms Kaur alleged the kidnappers would show Amritpal and the two other men held hostage inside a room. They had injuries all over their body from being beaten up, she alleged.

At first, they demanded 20mn rupees but eventually reduced the amount, settling at 5.4m rupees, Ms Kaur said.

“But it has been more than 10 days days since we last heard from them,” said Gurdev Singh, Amritpal’s uncle. The family has not paid any ransom till now.

A police complaint has since been filed against the travel agents and an investigation is under way.

“The search for the three men is on. They are on the run, but we are conducting searches,” Gursahib Singh, an officer with Hoshiarpur police, told BBC Punjabi.

Meanwhile, around 150km (93 miles) away, in Dhuri village, the house of Husanpreet Singh, one of the other missing men, remains locked.

He lived there with his maternal grandmother, who is now busy going door-to-door to her relatives, asking them for help.

The Indian embassy in Tehran has said it was keeping the families informed of all developments.

India has recently intensified its crackdown on travel agents involved in illegal immigration, particularly after hundreds of undocumented Indians were deported from the US after President Donald Trump took office for a second term.

Images of these migrants in chains, disembarking from an American aircraft, had made headlines for weeks.

India’s first ever silent feature film – Raja Harishchandra – in 1913, was made with Marathi language title cards. 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. A few years later, Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple became the first Indian film to screen in Venice since Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding – 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.”

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 the move would include “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields”.

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.

There were an estimated 280,000 Chinese students studying in the US last year. It is not clear how many of them could be affected by the latest move.

China said it “firmly opposes” the move, and urged the US to pursue more constructive relations.

As part of the plan, criteria will also be revised to “enhance scrutiny” of future visa applicants from China and Hong Kong, Rubio added in his statement on Wednesday.

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.

On Monday, Rubio, who is America’s top diplomat, also 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.

That move, too, was opposed by China.

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.

Israeli ministers say 22 new Jewish settlements have been approved in the occupied West Bank – the biggest expansion in decades.

Several already exist as outposts, built without government authorisation, but will now be made legal under Israeli law, according to Defence Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

The issue of settlements – which are widely seen as illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this – is one of the most contentious between Israel and the Palestinians.

Katz said the move “prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel”, while the Palestinian presidency called it a “dangerous escalation”.

The Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now called it “the most extensive move of its kind” in more than 30 years and warned that it would “dramatically reshape the West Bank and entrench the occupation even further”.

Israel has built about 160 settlements housing some 700,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem – land Palestinians want as part of a future state – in the 1967 Middle East war.

Successive Israeli governments have allowed settlements to grow. However, expansion has risen sharply since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022 at the head of a right-wing, pro-settler coalition, as well as the start of the Gaza war, triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.

On Thursday, Israel Katz and Bezalel Smotrich – an ultranationalist leader and settler who has control over planning in the West Bank – officially confirmed a decision that is believed to have been taken by the government two weeks ago.

A statement said ministers had approved 22 new settlements, the “renewal of settlement in northern Samaria [northern West Bank], and reinforcement of the eastern axis of the State of Israel”.

It highlighted what the ministers described as the “historic return” to Homesh and Sa-Nur, two settlements deep in the northern West Bank which were evacuated at the same time as Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005.

Two years ago, a group of settlers established a Jewish religious school and an unauthorised outpost at Homesh, which reports say would be among nine made legal under Israeli law.

Another settlement will reportedly be built not far to the south on Mount Ebal, near Nablus.

Katz said the decision was a “strategic move that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel, and serves as a buffer against our enemies.”

“This is a Zionist, security, and national response – and a clear decision on the future of the country,” he added.

Smotrich called it a “once-in-a-generation decision” and declared: “Next step sovereignty!”

But a spokesperson for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – who governs parts of the West Bank not under full Israeli control – called it a “dangerous escalation” and accused Israel of continuing to drag the region into a “cycle of violence and instability”.

“This extremist Israeli government is trying by all means to prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh told Reuters news agency.

Lior Amihai, director of Peace Now, said: “The Israeli government no longer pretends otherwise: the annexation of the occupied territories and expansion of settlements is its central goal.”

This step is a blow to renewed efforts to revive momentum on a two-state solution to the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict – the internationally approved formula for peace that would see the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel – with a French-Saudi summit planned at the UN’s headquarters in New York next month.

Last year, the UN’s top court issued an advisory opinion that said “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful”. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) also said Israeli settlements “have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law”, and that Israel should “evacuate all settlers”.

Israel’s prime minister said at the time that the court had made a “decision of lies” and insisted that “the Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land”.

A Chinese paraglider has survived being accidentally propelled 8,500m (27,800ft) into the sky above north-west China, state media report.

Peng Yujiang, 55, was testing new equipment at 3,000m above sea level, over the Qilian mountains, when a rare updraft or air current known as a “cloud suck” pulled him about 5,000m higher into a cloud formation.

Saturday’s events were filmed on a camera that was mounted on Mr Peng’s glider and the footage has gone viral after being posted on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok.

It showed Mr Peng holding on to the glider’s controls, with his face and much of his body covered in ice crystals.

“It was terrifying… Everything was white. I couldn’t see any direction. Without the compass, I wouldn’t have known which way I was going. I thought I was flying straight, but in reality, I was spinning,” he told China Media Group.

Mr Peng narrowly survived death as oxygen levels are thin at that altitude, which is slightly lower than the 8,849m peak of Mount Everest. Temperatures can also plummet to -40C.

“I wanted to come down quickly, but I just couldn’t. I was lifted higher and higher until I was inside the cloud,” he said.

Mr Peng, who has been paragliding for four-and-a-half years, said he might have lost consciousness during his descent, adding that the most frightening part of his ordeal was trying to regain control of the glider as it spiralled in the air.

Chinese authorities are investigating the incident and Mr Peng has been suspended for six months because the flight was unauthorised, state-run Global Times reported.

Mr Peng had no intention to fly that day and was only testing the fit and comfort of his parachute on the ground, Global Times said.

However, strong winds lifted him off the ground and grew even stronger, until he encountered the updraft that shot him up into the clouds.

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.

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

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.”

Kylie Minogue was among the stars offering their support on social media.

“Sending all love,” the Australian singer replied on Instagram, along with heart emojis.

Actor Richard E Grant also sent a string of hearts and wrote: “WE ALL LOVE YOU SOOOOOO MUCH Mags.”

Jurassic Park star Sam Neill, who was diagnosed with a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2022, wrote to his Ride Like A Girl co-star: “Right there with you darling xx.”

Australian actress Toni Collette added: “Sending huge, healing love and hugs to you, dear Magda. You are supported and held in all our hearts.”

Szubanski 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.

A South African woman convicted of kidnapping and trafficking her six-year-old daughter has been sentenced to life in prison, along with her two accomplices.

The jail terms for Racquel “Kelly” Smith, her boyfriend Jacquen Appollis and their friend Steveno van Rhyns come more than a year after Joshlin Smith mysteriously disappeared outside her home in Saldanha Bay, near Cape Town.

Despite a highly publicised search for the girl, who vanished in February 2024, she is yet to be found.

The sentencing follows an eight-week trial that captivated South Africa, with witnesses and prosecutors making a number of shocking allegations.

Judge Nathan Erasmus said he “drew no distinction” between the trio in handing down the sentences.

“On the human trafficking charge, you are sentenced to life imprisonment. On the kidnapping charge, you are sentenced to 10 years imprisonment,” he said to loud applause in the courtroom.

Judge Erasmus took over an hour to deliver the sentence and was measured as he gave a brief summary of the case and highlighted points that stood out during the trial.

He rebuked the trio, especially Van Rhyn and Smith, saying they showed no remorse for their actions.

“There is nothing that I can find that is redeeming or deserving of a lesser sentence,” he said.

He also spoke of the impact their conduct had on the community of Middelpos, where the girl lived, saying it had left residents “fractured”.

Smith, 35, and her accomplices showed no emotion as their sentences were read out in the community centre in Saldanha where the trial was held to allow residents to attend proceedings.

• Tears and heartbreak over tragic story of Joshlin Smith

Police said the search for the little girl would continue, even beyond South Africa’s borders.

“We will not rest until we find [out] what happened to Joshlin. We are continuing day and night looking for her,” Western Cape police commissioner Thembisile Patekile told local media.

Emotions were high ahead of the sentencing, with angry community members saying the trio should get a “harsh sentence because they deserve it”.

Ahead of sentencing, Joshlin’s grandmother, Amanda Smith-Daniels, once again pleaded with her daughter to “bring my [grand]child back or tell me where she is”.

“I don’t feel that any sentence they get will bring my grandchild back,” she told local broadcaster Newzroom Afrika.

Ms Smith-Daniels said that Joshlin’s disappearance had left her family “broken”.

She urged her daughter to stop blaming others for her misfortune as she “was the person that did the deed”.

During the trial, the court heard testimonies from more than 30 witnesses, who painted a picture of the young girl’s troubled life and subsequent disappearance.

Kelly Smith and her accomplices refused to testify or call any witnesses for their defence.

The most explosive came from Lourentia Lombaard, a friend and neighbour of Smith who turned state witness.

Ms Lombaard alleged that Smith told her she had done “something silly” and sold Joshlin to a traditional healer, known in South Africa as a “sangoma”.

The “person who [allegedly took] Joshlin wanted her for her eyes and skin”, Ms Lombaard told the court.

A local pastor testified that in 2023, he had heard Smith – a mother of three – talk of selling her children for 20,000 rand ($1,100; £850) each, though she had said she was willing to accept a lower figure of $275.

Joshlin’s teacher then alleged in court that Smith had told her during the search that her daughter was already “on a ship, inside a container, and they were on the way to West Africa”.

It was the testimonies of Ms Lombard and the clergyman that were key to securing a conviction.

During sentencing hearings, Smith was described as manipulative and someone who told “bald-faced lies”. A social worker appointed to compile a report on Smith and her accomplices, went so far as to say it would not be a “stretch to conclude that [Kelly] Smith is the mastermind behind the trafficking of her own daughter”.

The court also heard powerful statements from those who knew Joshlin about the devastating effect of her disappearance on the community.

• Joshlin Smith’s disappearance spreads fear in South Africa’s Saldhana Bay
• ‘The selfie that revealed I was a stolen baby’

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.

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.

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.

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 May, 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 47 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. One has defected to Labour. 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.

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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.

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.”

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.

An animal sanctuary has announced one of its rare snow leopards has given birth to a cub after months of dedicated work.

The cub, nicknamed Little Lady, was born at The Big Cat Sanctuary in Smarden, Kent, on 10 May.

Her successful birth follows months of work by primary trainer Simon Jackaman, who built the trust necessary for mother Laila to voluntarily participate in ground-breaking ultrasound sessions.

Celebrity chef and charity ambassador Paul Hollywood said: “Laila has had a special place in my heart for many years and to see her become a mum for the fourth time is truly heartwarming.”

Little Lady weighed 630g (1.4lb) at her first health check when she was five days old.

She is the second female snow leopard to be born at the centre, after her sister Zaya in 2023.

Mother Laila has had three previous litters with breeding partner Yarko as part of the sanctuary’s breeding programme.

Snow leopards are listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list, with an estimated 2,700 to 3,300 mature adults remaining in the wild.

They are predicted to lose 30% of their habitat because of climate change in the next 50 to 100 years and they also face threats from poaching and the illegal wildlife trade.

“This birth is a testament to our commitment to the participation in the endangered species breeding programme and the conservation of this vulnerable species,” said Cam Whitnall, managing director of The Big Cat Sanctuary.

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Domestic cats can tell the difference between the smell of their owner and that of a stranger, a new study suggests.

The study by Tokyo University of Agriculture found cats spent significantly longer sniffing tubes containing the odours of unknown people compared to tubes containing their owner’s smell.

This suggests cats can discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar humans based on their odour, the researchers say, but that it is unclear whether they can identify specific people.

Cats are known to use their strong sense of smell to identify and communicate with other cats, but researchers had not yet studied whether they can also use it to distinguish between people.

Previous studies of human recognition by cats have shown they are able to distinguish between voices, interpret someone’s gaze to find food, and change their behaviour according to a person’s emotional state that is recognised via their odour.

In the study published on Wednesday, researchers presented 30 cats with plastic tubes containing either a swab containing the odour of their owner, a swab containing the odour of a person of the same sex as their owner who they had never met, or a clean swab.

The swabs containing odours had been rubbed under the armpit, behind the ear, and between the toes of the owner or stranger.

Cats spent significantly more time sniffing the odours of unknown people compared to those of their owner or the empty tube, suggesting they can discriminate between the smells of familiar and unfamiliar people, the researchers said.

The idea of sniffing an unknown stimulus for longer has been shown before in cats – weaned kittens sniff unknown female cats for longer compared to their mothers.

However, the researchers cautioned that it cannot be concluded the cats can identify specific people such as their owner.

“The odour stimuli used in this study were only those of known and unknown persons,” said one of the study’s authors, Hidehiko Uchiyama.

“Behavioural experiments in which cats are presented with multiple known-person odour stimuli would be needed, and we would need to find specific behavioural patterns in cats that appear only in response to the owner’s odour.”

Serenella d’Ingeo, a researcher at the University of Bari who was not involved in this study but who has studied cat responses to human odours, also said the results demonstrated cats react differently to familiar and unfamiliar smells, but that conclusions couldn’t be drawn over their motivations.

“We don’t know how the animal felt during the sniffing… We don’t know for instance whether the animal was relaxed or tense,” she said.

Ms d’Ingeo added that the presentation of samples to cats by their own owners, who naturally added their own odour to the environment, could have increased the cats’ interest in the unfamiliar ones.

“In that situation, owners present not only their visual presence but also their odour,” she said.

“So of course if they present other odours that are different from their personal one, in a way they engage more the cat.”

The study’s authors concluded that “cats use their olfaction [smell] for the recognition of humans”.

They also noted cats rubbed their faces against the tubes after sniffing – which cats do to mark their scent on something – indicating that sniffing may be an exploratory behaviour that precedes odour marking.

The researchers cautioned that this relationship needs further investigation, along with the theory of whether cats can recognise a specific person from their smell.

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 the move would include “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields”.

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.

There were an estimated 280,000 Chinese students studying in the US last year. It is not clear how many of them could be affected by the latest move.

China said it “firmly opposes” the move, and urged the US to pursue more constructive relations.

As part of the plan, criteria will also be revised to “enhance scrutiny” of future visa applicants from China and Hong Kong, Rubio added in his statement on Wednesday.

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.

On Monday, Rubio, who is America’s top diplomat, also 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.

That move, too, was opposed by China.

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.

Motown legend Smokey Robinson has filed a $500m (£370m) defamation lawsuit against four former housekeepers who have accused the singer of sexual assault.

The legal case filed by the star and his wife Frances on Wednesday in California accused the women of fabricating the sexual assault allegations as part of an “extortionate” lawsuit.

The Robinsons say the alleged victims, who filed their case anonomously, went on family holidays with the couple and celebrated holidays together.

The singer, who is now also under criminal investigation in Los Angeles over accusations of sexual assault, has denied all the allegations, and his lawyer said those behind the accusations were after his money.

Mr Robinson’s lawyers also filed a motion to dismiss the women’s lawsuit, arguing they should not have been granted anonymity.

“The Robinsons did not abuse, harm, or take advantage of plaintiffs; they treated plaintiffs with the utmost kindness and generosity,” the lawsuit states.

The women filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on 6 May under the pseudonyms Jane Doe 1, 2, 3 and 4.

In the 27-page legal action, they alleged several incidents that they said dated back to 2006, and accused Mr Robinson of pressuring them into sex.

All four women, who are of Hispanic descent, said they had not come forward until now because they feared losing their livelihoods, familial reprisal or embarrassment. Some were concerned the allegations could affect their immigration status.

They are seeking at least $50m (£38m) in damages and a jury trial.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department then opened its investigation, which the 85-year-old singer said at the time he welcomed “because exposure to the truth is a powerful thing”.

Mr Robinson was Motown’s first hitmaker, writing number one records like Mary Wells’ My Guy and The Temptations’ My Girl.

He was both a talent scout for the record label and one of its most prominent recording artists in his own right, known for songs like Tracks of My Tears, Shop Around and Tears of a Clown.

He has spots in both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and claims to have credits on more than 4,000 songs.

Police in South Africa have named three men believed to be directly involved in the murder of a university student who had gone on a date.

Olorato Mongale’s body was discovered on Sunday in Lombardy, north of Johannesburg, about two hours after she was reported missing.

Police late on Wednesday said they had seized a VW Polo that was allegedly used in the murder of the 30-year-old student.

“The vehicle was found with traces of blood inside at a panel beater workshop in Phoenix, Durban,” police spokesperson Brig Athlenda Mathe said.

One man, who police believed was the owner of the vehicle, has been arrested.

Photographs of three other suspects – Fezile Ngubane, Philangenkosi Sibongokuhle Makhanya and Bongani Mthimkhulu – who are said to be on the run, have been released by police.

Brig Mathe said the men were “dangerous” and cautioned members of the public not to come near them.

• A reminder of South Africa’s femicide problem
• South Africa: Violence against women like a war

“These suspects are warned to hand themselves over at their nearest police station.”

Ms Mongale was last seen on Sunday in the company of a man she had met a few days earlier at a mall.

CCTV footage showed her leaving a location in Kew, Johannesburg, and walking towards a white VW Polo, with fake licence plates.

Her friends said she was invited for a date by a man only identified as John, who she met in Johannesburg, where she was studying for a postgraduate degree at Witwatersrand University.

She texted one of her friends shortly before leaving home, saying that she was excited and getting ready for her date.

But police later found her body in an open field, sparking public outrage and calls for justice.

Family spokesperson Criselda Kananda said Ms Mongale’s body was “brutally violated.”

A candlelight vigil was held on Wednesday evening in Lombardi West, at the site where the body was found dumped.

Family and friends have described her as an outspoken, bubbly woman who “lived with purpose and love”, local media reported.

Ms Mongale was a journalism graduate from Rhodes University and worked briefly as a multimedia reporter at the TimesLIVE news website.

While working as a journalist, she covered the murder of Karabo Mokoena – a young woman who was murdered by her boyfriend in 2017.

Ms Mongale’s killing has sparked a fierce debate about the levels of violence faced by women in South Africa.

It is the latest femicide in a country which has a particular problem with femicide and violence against women.

In 2020, an average of one woman died at the hands of her intimate partner every eight hours, according to a study by the University of the Free State.

In 2019, South Africa ranked among the five countries with the highest rates of the murder of women, according to the United Nations.

The country has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world, with rape being the most reported crime against children.

• Chris Brown concert shines spotlight on violence against women in South Africa
• Missing South Africa girl: Our children are scared
• Sexual violence in South Africa: ‘I was raped, now I fear for my daughters’

Hailey Bieber is selling her make-up brand Rhode to e.l.f. Beauty in a deal worth up to $1bn (£740m).

The 28-year-old model, who is married to singer Justin Bieber, co-founded the line of skincare products, which includes blush and lip tints, in 2022, giving it her middle name.

It has expanded rapidly thanks in part to its online popularity, reporting more than $200m in net sales over the 12 months to March, with plans of being offered in Sephora stores in the US and UK this year.

In its announcement of the deal, buyer e.l.f. Beauty called the business “a beautiful brand that we believe is ready for rocketship growth”.

e.l.f – short for eyes, lips and face – is paying $800m in cash and stock for the company, with a further $200m payout possible depending on future sales growth.

The deal is expected to close later this year.

Ms Bieber, who will stay with the company as chief creative officer, wrote on social media that the deal marked the “next chapter” for the brand. Other co-founders and current executives will continue to lead the business after the sale.

“Our partnership with e.l.f. Beauty marks an incredible opportunity to elevate and accelerate our ability to reach more of our community with even more innovative products and widen our distribution globally,” she said in the business announcement.

The brand has become particularly popular on social media, with viral TikToks about their pocket blush and “peptide lip treatments”.

Ms Bieber’s decision to launch a beauty line follows in the footsteps of other celebrities, such as Rihanna, whose Fenty Beauty was worth nearly $3bn last year, according to Forbes estimates.

It also follows Kylie Jenner, who sold a stake of her cosmetics company in 2020 to Coty for $600m, and Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty line, which earned her a place on the Bloomberg billionaire index last year.

Overall in 2023, celebrity beauty brands generated more than $1bn in sales in 2023, according to a Nielsen IQ report.

Ms Bieber is the daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin and niece of actors Alec, William and Daniel Baldwin. She had her first child with her husband last year.

In an interview for a Vogue cover story published before the announcement of the deal, she said the success of the Rhode brand had been a surprise.

“In my wildest dreams, it’s already gone beyond what I would’ve hoped for,” she said.

A US federal court has blocked President Donald Trump’s sweeping global trade 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 one of the world’s countries.

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

The Trump administration said it would appeal within minutes of the ruling.

• Follow live updates after the court ruling

The ruling was based on two separate cases. The nonpartisan Liberty Justice Center brought one case on behalf of several small businesses that import goods from countries that were targeted by the duties, while a coalition of US state governments also challenged the import taxes.

The two cases mark the first major legal challenges 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, did 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 the administration 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.

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,” she said.

Stock markets in Asia rose on Thursday morning following the ruling, US stock futures also jumped and the US dollar made gains against safe-haven peers, including the Japanese yen and Swiss franc. European markets opened flat.

• What tariffs has Trump announced, and why?
• Trump agrees to extend EU trade talks after 50% tariff threat

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 which have 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 would not be any changes at the border for now and that tariffs would 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.

The UK and US governments agreed a deal to reduce tariffs on some goods traded between the countries earlier this month.

It included the lowering and removal of import taxes on some of the UK’s main exports to America, such as cars, steel and aluminium.

That aspect of the deal is not impacted by the court ruling, but the blanket 10% tariff on most other UK goods entering the US has now been called into question.

How that part of the deal could change remains uncertain following the ruling, with the agreement between both governments yet to be implemented.

The UK government has not commented on the court ruling but said it was working to ensure British businesses can benefit from the deal “as quickly as possible”.

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

A South African woman convicted of kidnapping and trafficking her six-year-old daughter has been sentenced to life in prison, along with her two accomplices.

The jail terms for Racquel “Kelly” Smith, her boyfriend Jacquen Appollis and their friend Steveno van Rhyns come more than a year after Joshlin Smith mysteriously disappeared outside her home in Saldanha Bay, near Cape Town.

Despite a highly publicised search for the girl, who vanished in February 2024, she is yet to be found.

The sentencing follows an eight-week trial that captivated South Africa, with witnesses and prosecutors making a number of shocking allegations.

Judge Nathan Erasmus said he “drew no distinction” between the trio in handing down the sentences.

“On the human trafficking charge, you are sentenced to life imprisonment. On the kidnapping charge, you are sentenced to 10 years imprisonment,” he said to loud applause in the courtroom.

Judge Erasmus took over an hour to deliver the sentence and was measured as he gave a brief summary of the case and highlighted points that stood out during the trial.

He rebuked the trio, especially Van Rhyn and Smith, saying they showed no remorse for their actions.

“There is nothing that I can find that is redeeming or deserving of a lesser sentence,” he said.

He also spoke of the impact their conduct had on the community of Middelpos, where the girl lived, saying it had left residents “fractured”.

Smith, 35, and her accomplices showed no emotion as their sentences were read out in the community centre in Saldanha where the trial was held to allow residents to attend proceedings.

• Tears and heartbreak over tragic story of Joshlin Smith

Police said the search for the little girl would continue, even beyond South Africa’s borders.

“We will not rest until we find [out] what happened to Joshlin. We are continuing day and night looking for her,” Western Cape police commissioner Thembisile Patekile told local media.

Emotions were high ahead of the sentencing, with angry community members saying the trio should get a “harsh sentence because they deserve it”.

Ahead of sentencing, Joshlin’s grandmother, Amanda Smith-Daniels, once again pleaded with her daughter to “bring my [grand]child back or tell me where she is”.

“I don’t feel that any sentence they get will bring my grandchild back,” she told local broadcaster Newzroom Afrika.

Ms Smith-Daniels said that Joshlin’s disappearance had left her family “broken”.

She urged her daughter to stop blaming others for her misfortune as she “was the person that did the deed”.

During the trial, the court heard testimonies from more than 30 witnesses, who painted a picture of the young girl’s troubled life and subsequent disappearance.

Kelly Smith and her accomplices refused to testify or call any witnesses for their defence.

The most explosive came from Lourentia Lombaard, a friend and neighbour of Smith who turned state witness.

Ms Lombaard alleged that Smith told her she had done “something silly” and sold Joshlin to a traditional healer, known in South Africa as a “sangoma”.

The “person who [allegedly took] Joshlin wanted her for her eyes and skin”, Ms Lombaard told the court.

A local pastor testified that in 2023, he had heard Smith – a mother of three – talk of selling her children for 20,000 rand ($1,100; £850) each, though she had said she was willing to accept a lower figure of $275.

Joshlin’s teacher then alleged in court that Smith had told her during the search that her daughter was already “on a ship, inside a container, and they were on the way to West Africa”.

It was the testimonies of Ms Lombard and the clergyman that were key to securing a conviction.

During sentencing hearings, Smith was described as manipulative and someone who told “bald-faced lies”. A social worker appointed to compile a report on Smith and her accomplices, went so far as to say it would not be a “stretch to conclude that [Kelly] Smith is the mastermind behind the trafficking of her own daughter”.

The court also heard powerful statements from those who knew Joshlin about the devastating effect of her disappearance on the community.

• Joshlin Smith’s disappearance spreads fear in South Africa’s Saldhana Bay
• ‘The selfie that revealed I was a stolen baby’

Israeli ministers say 22 new Jewish settlements have been approved in the occupied West Bank – the biggest expansion in decades.

Several already exist as outposts, built without government authorisation, but will now be made legal under Israeli law. Others are completely new, according to Defence Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Settlements – which are widely seen as illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this – are one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians.

Katz said the move “prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel”, while the Palestinian presidency called it a “dangerous escalation”.

The Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now called it “the most extensive move of its kind” in more than 30 years and warned that it would “dramatically reshape the West Bank and entrench the occupation even further”.

Israel has built about 160 settlements housing some 700,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem – land Palestinians want, along with Gaza, for their hoped-for future state – in the 1967 Middle East war.

Successive Israeli governments have allowed settlements to grow. However, expansion has risen sharply since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022 at the head of a right-wing, pro-settler coalition, as well as the start of the Gaza war, triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.

On Thursday, Israel Katz and Bezalel Smotrich – an ultranationalist leader and settler who has control over planning in the West Bank – officially confirmed a decision that is believed to have been taken by the government two weeks ago.

A statement said ministers had approved 22 new settlements, the “renewal of settlement in northern Samaria [northern West Bank], and reinforcement of the eastern axis of the State of Israel”.

It highlighted what the ministers described as the “historic return” to Homesh and Sa-Nur, two settlements deep in the northern West Bank which were evacuated at the same time as Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005.

Two years ago, a group of settlers established a Jewish religious school and an unauthorised outpost at Homesh, which reports say would be among nine made legal under Israeli law.

Another settlement will reportedly be built not far to the south on Mount Ebal, near Nablus.

Katz said the decision was a “strategic move that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel, and serves as a buffer against our enemies.”

“This is a Zionist, security, and national response – and a clear decision on the future of the country,” he added.

Smotrich called it a “once-in-a-generation decision” and declared: “Next step sovereignty!”

But a spokesperson for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – who governs parts of the West Bank not under full Israeli control – called it a “dangerous escalation” and accused Israel of continuing to drag the region into a “cycle of violence and instability”.

“This extremist Israeli government is trying by all means to prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh told Reuters news agency.

Lior Amihai, director of Peace Now, said: “The Israeli government no longer pretends otherwise: the annexation of the occupied territories and expansion of settlements is its central goal.”

This step is a blow to renewed efforts to revive momentum on a two-state solution to the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict – the internationally approved formula for peace that would see the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel – with a French-Saudi summit planned at the UN’s headquarters in New York next month.

Last year, the UN’s top court issued an advisory opinion that said “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful”. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) also said Israeli settlements “have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law”, and that Israel should “evacuate all settlers”.

Israel’s prime minister said at the time that the court had made a “decision of lies” and insisted that “the Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land”.

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.

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

A Chinese paraglider has survived being accidentally propelled 8,500m (27,800ft) into the sky above north-west China, state media report.

Peng Yujiang, 55, was testing new equipment at 3,000m above sea level, over the Qilian mountains, when a rare updraft or air current known as a “cloud suck” pulled him about 5,000m higher into a cloud formation.

Saturday’s events were filmed on a camera that was mounted on Mr Peng’s glider and the footage has gone viral after being posted on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok.

It showed Mr Peng holding on to the glider’s controls, with his face and much of his body covered in ice crystals.

“It was terrifying… Everything was white. I couldn’t see any direction. Without the compass, I wouldn’t have known which way I was going. I thought I was flying straight, but in reality, I was spinning,” he told China Media Group.

Mr Peng narrowly survived death as oxygen levels are thin at that altitude, which is slightly lower than the 8,849m peak of Mount Everest. Temperatures can also plummet to -40C.

“I wanted to come down quickly, but I just couldn’t. I was lifted higher and higher until I was inside the cloud,” he said.

Mr Peng, who has been paragliding for four-and-a-half years, said he might have lost consciousness during his descent, adding that the most frightening part of his ordeal was trying to regain control of the glider as it spiralled in the air.

Chinese authorities are investigating the incident and Mr Peng has been suspended for six months because the flight was unauthorised, state-run Global Times reported.

Mr Peng had no intention to fly that day and was only testing the fit and comfort of his parachute on the ground, Global Times said.

However, strong winds lifted him off the ground and grew even stronger, until he encountered the updraft that shot him up into the clouds.

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 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.

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 the move would include “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields”.

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.

There were an estimated 280,000 Chinese students studying in the US last year. It is not clear how many of them could be affected by the latest move.

China said it “firmly opposes” the move, and urged the US to pursue more constructive relations.

As part of the plan, criteria will also be revised to “enhance scrutiny” of future visa applicants from China and Hong Kong, Rubio added in his statement on Wednesday.

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.

On Monday, Rubio, who is America’s top diplomat, also 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.

That move, too, was opposed by China.

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.

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.”

Kylie Minogue was among the stars offering their support on social media.

“Sending all love,” the Australian singer replied on Instagram, along with heart emojis.

Actor Richard E Grant also sent a string of hearts and wrote: “WE ALL LOVE YOU SOOOOOO MUCH Mags.”

Jurassic Park star Sam Neill, who was diagnosed with a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2022, wrote to his Ride Like A Girl co-star: “Right there with you darling xx.”

Australian actress Toni Collette added: “Sending huge, healing love and hugs to you, dear Magda. You are supported and held in all our hearts.”

Szubanski 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.

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.