US President Donald Trump has accused China of violating a two-week-old truce on tariffs – a sign trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies could again escalate.

Washington and Beijing agreed to temporarily lower tit-for-tat tariffs after talks in Geneva earlier this month.

Trump said on Friday in a Truth Social post that tariffs had left China in “grave economic danger”, before the countries had made a “fast deal”.

However he said China had “totally violated its agreement with us”, without explaining how.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer later said China had not been removing non-tariff barriers in the way that had been agreed. Beijing is yet to respond to the claims.

Greer told TV network CNBC that China was yet to properly roll back other trade restrictions it had levied on the US.

He said when China responded to the US’s tariffs with its own, they also put in place countermeasures such as putting some US companies on blacklists and restricting the flow of rare earth materials.

“They removed the tariff like we did but some of the countermeasures they’ve slowed on,” Ambassador Greer said.

He added the US had been closely watching China to make sure it would comply with the deal and they were “very concerned” with the progress.

Greer said: “The United States did exactly what it was supposed to do and the Chinese are slow-rolling their compliance which is completely unacceptable and has to be addressed”.

Beijing is yet to respond to the assertions. On Friday, its foreign ministry had declined to respond to comments made by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that trade talks with China had become “a bit stalled”.

Bessent told Fox News on Thursday: “I think that given the magnitude of the talks, given the complexity, that this is going to require [leaders of both the countries] to weigh in with each other.”

Trump’s global tariff regime was dealt a blow on Wednesday following a ruling that he had exceeded his authority. His plans have been temporarily reinstated after the White House appealed the decision.

His administration this week also moved to “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students studying in the US, of which there are an estimated 280,000.

In mid-May, Washington and Beijing had agreed to reduce tariffs imposed on each other’s imports in a deal where both nations cancelled some tariffs altogether and suspended others for 90 days.

Bessent said talks on a further deal had lost momentum, but stressed they were continuing.

“I believe that we will be having more talks with [China] in the next few weeks and I believe we may at some point have a call between the president and [Chinese President Xi Jinping],” Bessent said on Thursday.

He added the pair had “a very good relationship” and he was “confident that the Chinese will come to the table when President Trump makes his preferences known”.

Under the deal struck earlier this month, the US lowered tariffs imposed on goods from China from 145% to 30%.

China’s retaliatory tariffs on US goods dropped from 125% to 10%.

The US President has argued imposing tariffs on foreign goods would encourage US consumers to buy more American-made goods, bringing back manufacturing jobs while increase the amount of tax revenue raised.

They have been used by the Trump administration as leverage in negotiations as it seeks to reduce trade deficits with other nations.

A delegation from Japan are continuing trade talks with their US counterparts in Washington on Friday.

Bessent said “a couple” of US trade deals were “very close”, but “a couple of them are more complicated”.

Trump’s tariff regime remains in the balance following the decision by the US Court of International Trade, which ruled that Trump had overstepped his power by imposing the duties.

Some analysts believe it will mean countries will be less likely to rush to secure trade deals with the US.

A federal appeals court has granted a bid from the White House to temporarily suspend the lower court’s order, which Trump described as “horrific”.

“Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country [sic] threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

The last hospital providing health services in the North Gaza governorate is out of service after the Israeli military ordered its immediate evacuation, the hospital’s director has said.

Dr Mohammed Salha said patients were evacuated from al-Awda hospital in Jabalia on Thursday evening.

He told the BBC “we are feeling really bad about this forced evacuation” after “two weeks of siege”, saying there is now “no health facility working in the north”.

Israel has not yet commented, but the BBC has contacted the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

“We’re really sad that we evacuated the hospital, but the Israeli occupation forces threatened us that if we didn’t evacuate, they would enter and kill whoever is inside,” Dr Salha said in a voice note to the BBC.

“Or they would bomb the hospital. We were thinking of the lives of patients and our staff.”

Dr Salha told the BBC the hospital faced “a lot of bombing and shooting from the tanks” from around noon local time (09:00 GMT) on Thursday.

He received a call from the Israeli forces at about 13:00 to evacuate, and initially refused because there were patients in need of healthcare. He offered to stay with another 10 of his staff and evacuate the others, but the military refused, he said.

After seven hours of negotiations, the evacuation occurred at about 20:30.

Staff carried patients more than 300 metres (984 feet) to ambulances parked far away from the hospital “because the roads are totally destroyed”.

A video sent by Dr Salha of the evacuation, and verified by the BBC, shows a line of ambulances with lights and sirens on driving at night.

“Due to impassable roads” the hospital’s medical equipment could not be relocated, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

UN humanitarian agency OCHA said on Thursday “ongoing hostilities over the past two weeks have damaged the hospital, disrupted access, and created panic, deterring people from seeking care”.

Patients were evacuated to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.

Dr Salha told the BBC they would provide services through a primary health centre in Gaza City and said another might be established in a shelter.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said the closure of al-Awda meant there was no remaining functioning hospital in the North Gaza governorate, “severing a critical lifeline for the people there”.

“WHO pleads for the hospital’s protection and staff and patients’ safety, and reiterates its call for the active protection of civilians and healthcare,” he said. “Hospitals must never be attacked or militarized.”

The IDF had ordered evacuations of the areas of Al-Atatra, Jabalia Al-Balad, Shujaiya, Al-Daraj and Al-Zeitoun on Thursday evening, spokesperson Avichay Adraee said at the time on social media.

“Terrorist organisations continue their subversive activity in the region, and therefore the IDF will expand its offensive activity in the areas where you are present to destroy the capabilities of the terrorist organisations,” he said.

“From this moment on, the mentioned areas will be considered dangerous combat.”

Al-Awda hospital was inside an evacuation zone announced last week, but had still been functioning, its director previously said.

A statement from 18 charities on Thursday said the hospital was under military besiegement “for the fourth time since October 2023 and has been struck at least 28 times”.

The emergency room was hit, injuring four staff, and the desalination plant and storage unit also struck, leading to the loss of all medicine, supplies and equipment, the charities said.

The IDF told the BBC last week it was “operating in the area against terror targets”, but that it was “not aware of any siege on the hospital itself”.

Apart from hospitals, some primary healthcare centres are still operating in Gaza, with 61 out of 158 partially or fully functional as of 18 May, OCHA said.

Nine out of 27 UN Palestinian refugee agency health centres were also functioning.

OCHA did not report how many, if any, centres were in the north Gaza governorate.

Israel is continuing its bombardment of Gaza, which most Palestinians are not currently able to leave, after a two-month ceasefire earlier this year.

At least 72 people were killed over the past day, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said on Friday.

Israel began to allow a limited amount of aid into Gaza last week, after a nearly three-month blockade halted the delivery of supplies including food, medicine, fuel and shelter.

Security broke down and looting took place as Palestinians searched for food in Gaza City on Thursday.

Scenes of chaos have also broken out at aid distribution centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – a US-and Israeli-backed group.

The UN and many aid groups have refused to co-operate with the GHF’s plans, which they say contradict humanitarian principles.

The secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Christopher Lockyear, called the plan “ineffective” and said the most vulnerable have “virtually no chance” of accessing supplies.

GHF said it had distributed six truckloads of food on Friday and plans to build additional sites, including in northern Gaza, in the weeks ahead.

Israel said it imposed the blockade on Gaza to pressurise Hamas to release the remaining hostages, at least 20 of whom are believed to be alive. It has also accused Hamas of stealing aid, which the group denies.

A UN-backed assessment this month said Gaza’s 2.1 million people were at a “critical risk” of famine. The UN’s humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC people in the territory were being subjected to “forced starvation” by Israel.

Israel is facing international pressure to allow in more aid.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday “we will have to harden our collective position” if Israel does not do more “in the coming hours and days”.

Israel’s foreign ministry hit back on social media, saying “there is no humanitarian blockade” and accused Macron of continuing a “crusade against the Jewish state”.

Some protesters in Israel tried to block aid trucks from entering Gaza, with one saying aid should not be allowed until Hamas returns the hostages and accepts a US-proposed ceasefire.

A Hamas official said the group was “undertaking a thorough and responsible review” of the proposal, but it “fails to meet” their demands.

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

At least 54,321 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 4,058 since Israel resumed its offensive on 18 March, according to the health ministry.

India’s economy grew by 7.4% in the period between January and March – up from 6.2% the previous quarter and significantly beating analyst expectations.

However, growth for full 2024-25 year, which runs between April and March, is pegged at 6.5% – the slowest in four years.

The country’s central bank – the Reserve Bank of India – meets later in June and is expected to cut rates for the third time in a row to boost growth.

India remains the world’s fastest growing major economy, although growth has sharply dropped from the 9.2% high recorded in financial year 2023-24.

Asia’s third-largest economy benefitted from strong farm activity, steady public spending and improved rural demand in the last financial year, even as manufacturing and new investments by private companies remained weak.

While rural growth has improved on account of a strong winter harvest, it is not nearly enough to offset continuing weakness in urban consumption, which has flagged due to high unemployment and lower wages.

India’s growth engine remains heavily dependent on the government’s infrastructure spending on roads, ports and highways, in the absence of significant improvement in private investment.

Going forward, domestic growth should benefit from government’s income tax cuts announced in the federal budget, as well as “monetary easing, expectations of an above normal monsoon and lower food inflation”, Aditi Nayar, an economist with the ratings agency Icra, said.

But ongoing global uncertainties, including US President Donald Trump’s trade war, are expected to weigh on export demand.

India is currently negotiating a trade-agreement with the United States which is officially expected to conclude by fall. Trump slapped tariffs of up to 27% on Indian goods in April – and a 90-day pause on these ends on 9 July.

Economists expect GDP growth in the ongoing financial year 2025-26 to further slow to 6% on the back of these global slowdown worries which could delay new private capital spending on projects.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects global growth to drop to 2.8% in 2025 and 3% in 2026.

Data from Icra earlier showed private sector expenditure, as part of overall investments in India’s economy, fell to a 10-year low of 33% in the last financial year.

Net foreign direct investment (FDI) into India – at $0.35bn in 2024-25 – also fell to the lowest level in two decades, as rising outward foreign investment and repatriations by Indian companies, neutralised inward investment.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been attempting to position India as a manufacturing hub for global companies.

While companies like Apple indicated recently that it was shifting most of its production of iPhones headed to the US from China to India, trade analysts have cautioned that such manufacturing investment could yet stall, with the US and China agreeing to roll-back tariffs earlier this month.

Taylor Swift has bought back the rights to her first six albums, ending a long-running battle over the ownership of her music.

“All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me,” said the star, announcing the news on her official website. “I’ve been bursting into tears of joy… ever since I found out this is really happening.”

The saga began in June 2019, when music manager Scooter Braun bought Swift’s former record label Big Machine and, with it, all of the songs from Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Reputation.

Swift had personal objections to the deal, blaming Braun for complicity in the “incessant, manipulative bullying” against her by Kanye West, one of his clients.

Swift responded by vowing to re-record those records, effectively diminishing the value of those master tapes, and putting ownership back in her hands.

To date, she has released four re-recorded albums – known as “Taylor’s Versions” – with dozens of bonus tracks and supplementary material.

In her letter, the star told fans she had yet to complete the project, after “hitting a stopping point” while trying to remake 2017’s Reputation album – which dealt with public scrutiny of her private life, and the fall-out of her feud with Kanye West.

“The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life,” she explained. “All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposefully misunderstood…

“To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first six that I thought couldn’t be improved by re-doing it… so I kept putting it off.”

The star recently previewed the new version of Reputation’s first single, Look What You Made Me Do, in an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale – but her letter suggested that a full re-recording would be delayed or even scrapped.

However, she promised that vault tracks from the record would be released at a future date, if fans were “into the idea”.

In the music industry, the owner of a master controls all rights to exploit the recording. That includes distributing music to streaming services, pressing new physical CDs and vinyl, creating box sets, or licensing songs to movies or video games.

The artist still earns royalties from those recordings but controlling the master offers a level of protection over how the work is used in the future.

Swift, as the writer or co-writer of her music, always maintained her publishing rights, which meant she was able to veto attempts to license songs like Shake It Off and Love Story to other companies.

“I do want my music to live on. I do want it to be in movies. I do want it to be in commercials. But I only want that if I own it,” she told Billboard in 2019.

It is not known how much Swift paid to acquire her masters, but the catalogue previously sold for $300 million (£222 million) in 2020.

Swift said the deal also included all of her concert films, music videos, artwork and unreleased recordings.

“To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it,” she added, thanking fans for their support as the drama played out.

“I almost stopped thinking it could ever happen, after 20 years of having the carrot dangled and then yanked away,” she wrote.

“But that’s all in the past now.”

When 14-year-old Taylor Swift moved to Nashville in 2004 to chase her dream of becoming a country pop star, she signed a record deal with Big Machine.

Label boss Scott Borchetta gave the unproven singer a big cash advance in exchange for having ownership of the master recordings to her first six albums “in perpetuity”.

This was fairly common practice in the era before streaming, when artists needed record label backing to get played on the radio, and for the manufacture and distribution of CDs.

Swift’s deal with Big Machine expired in 2018, at which point she left and signed with Republic Records and Universal Music Group (UMG).

A year later, Borchetta sold his label to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings.

Swift said she only learned about the deal when it was announced; characterising it as an act of aggression that “stripped me of my life’s work”.

She labelled Braun – who rose to prominence as the manager of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande – as “the definition of toxic male privilege in our industry”.

She also expressed frustration that she had been unable to make a counter offer for her music.

“I spent 10 years of my life trying rigorously to purchase my masters outright and was then denied that opportunity,” she told Billboard, adding that: “Artists should maybe have the first right of refusal to buy.”

• Was Taylor Swift really banned from playing her hits?
• What is the Swift vs Braun dispute all about
• Taylor Swift’s Red: The stories behind the songs
• Taylor Swift releases a ‘perfect replica’ of Fearless

Braun later told Variety that the dispute had “gotten out of hand” after he and his family received death threats.

The music mogul later sold his stake in Swift’s back catalogue to Shamrock Holdings, a Los Angeles investment fund founded by the Disney family in 1978, in November 2020.

The multi-million dollar deal left Swift feeling betrayed again.

“This is the second time my music had been sold without my knowledge,” she said in a social media post.

While she was “open to the possibility of a partnership with Shamrock”, she subsequently learnt that, under the terms of the sale, Braun would “continue to profit off my old music” for years.

“I simply cannot in good conscience bring myself to be involved in benefiting Scooter Braun’s interests,” she wrote in a letter to the company, which she posted on X.

She began releasing her re-recorded albums in 2021, starting with her breakthrough, coming-of-age album Fearless.

Produced with forensic attention to detail, they were often indistinguishable from the originals – albeit with slightly cleaner mixes, and greater separation between the instruments.

But the big attraction was the bonus tracks, including the unabridged, 10-minute version of her break-up ballad All Too Well – described by Variety magazine as the “holy grail” of the star’s back catalogue.

The song went on to top the US charts, and made number three in the UK – where it is the longest song ever to reach the top five.

In the meantime, the singer continued to release original material, including the Grammy Award-winning albums Folklore and Midnights.

In 2023, Forbes magazine reported that Swift had become the first musician to make $1 billion (£740 million) solely from songwriting and performing.

Half of her fortune came from music royalties and touring, while the rest came from the increasing value of her music catalogue, including her re-recordings.

Revisiting the old material also inspired Swift’s career-spanning Eras tour, which made more than $2 billion (£1.48 billion) in ticket sales across 2023 and 2024.

In her letter, Swift said the success of the Eras tour “is why I was able to buy back my music”.

She added that she was heartened to see her struggle inspiring other artists.

“Every time a new artist tells me they negotiated to own their master recordings in their record contract because of this fight, I’m reminded of how important it was for all of this to happen.

“Thank you being curious about something that used to be thought of as too industry-centric for broad discussion.

“You’ll never know how much it means to me that you cared. Every single bit of it counted, and ended us up here.”

Xiao Chen turned up at the US Consulate in Shanghai on Thursday morning, hours after Washington announced that it would “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students.

The 22-year-old had a visa appointment: she was headed to Michigan in the autumn to study communications.

After a “pleasant” conversation, she was told her application had been rejected. She was not given a reason.

“I feel like a drifting duckweed tossed in wind and storm,” she said, using a common Chinese expression to describe feeling both uncertain and helpless.

She had been hopeful because she already had the acceptance letter. And she thought she had narrowly escaped the bombshells in recent days.

First, Donald Trump’s administration moved to end Harvard University’s ability to enrol international students, a move that has since been blocked in court. And then it said it had stopped visa appointments for all foreign students.

But now, Chen is ready for plan B. “If I can’t get the visa eventually, I’ll probably take a gap year. Then I’ll wait to see if things will get better next year.”

A valid visa may still not be enough, she adds, because students with visas could be “stopped at the airport and deported”.

“It’s bad for every Chinese student. The only difference is how bad.”

It has been a bleak week for international students in the US – and perhaps even harder for the 280,000 or so Chinese students who would have noticed that their country has been singled out.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Harvard of “co-ordinating with the Chinese Communist Party”.

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

That could hit a wide swathe of them given membership of the Communist Party is common among officials, entrepreneurs, business people and even artists and celebrities in China.

Beijing has called it a “politically motivated and discriminatory action”, and its foreign ministry has lodged a formal protest.

There was a time when China sent the highest number of foreign students to American campuses. But those numbers slipped as the relationship between the two countries soured.

A more powerful and increasingly assertive Beijing is now clashing with Washington for supremacy in just about everything, from trade to tech.

Trump’s first term had already spelled trouble for Chinese students. He signed an order in 2020 barring Chinese students and researchers with ties to Beijing’s military from obtaining US visas.

That order remained in place during President Joe Biden’s term. Washington never clarified what constitutes “ties” to the military, so many students had their visas revoked or were turned away at US borders, sometimes without a proper explanation.

One of them, who did not wish to be named, said his visa was cancelled by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) when he landed in Boston in August 2023.

He had been accepted into a post-doctoral program at Harvard University. He was going to study regenerative medicine with a focus on breast cancer, and had done his master’s degree from a military-affiliated research institution in China.

He said he was not a member of the Communist Party and his research had nothing to do with the military.

“They asked me what the relationship was between my research and China’s defence affairs,” he told the BBC then. “I said, how could breast cancer have anything to do with national defence? If you know, please tell me.”

He believes he never stood a chance because the officials had already made up their minds. He recalled one of them asking: “Did Xi Jinping buy your suitcase for you?”

What was surprising, or even shocking then, slowly turned normal as more and more Chinese students struggled to secure visas or admissions to study science and technology in US universities.

Mr Cao, a psychology major whose research involves neuroscience, has spent the past school year applying for PhD programs in the US.

He had graduated from top-tier universities – credentials that could send him to an Ivy League school. But of the more than 10 universities he applied to, only one extended an offer.

Trump’s cuts to biomedical research didn’t help, but the mistrust surrounding Chinese researchers was also a factor. Allegations and rumours of espionage, especially in sensitive subjects, have loomed over Chinese nationals at US universities in recent years, even derailing some careers.

“One of the professors even told me, ‘We rarely give offers to Chinese students these days, so I cannot give you an interview,” Mr Cao told the BBC in February.

“I feel like I am just a grain of sand under the wheel of time. There is nothing I can do.”

For those who did graduate from US colleges, returning home to China has not been easy either.

They used to be lauded as a bridge to the rest of the world. Now, they find that their once-coveted degrees don’t draw the same reaction.

Chen Jian, who did not want to use his real name, said he quickly realised that his undergraduate degree from a US college had become an obstacle.

When he first came back in 2020, he interned at a state-owned bank and asked a supervisor if there was a chance to stay on.

The supervisor didn’t say it outright, but Chen got the message: “Employees should have local degrees. People like me (with overseas degrees) won’t even get a response.”

He later realised that “there really weren’t any colleagues with overseas undergraduate background in the department”.

He went back to the US and did his master’s at Johns Hopkins University, and now works at Chinese tech giant Baidu.

But despite the degree from a prestigious American university, Mr Chen does not feel he has an edge because of the stiff competition from graduates in China.

What also has not helped is the suspicion around foreign graduates. Beijing has ramped up warnings of foreign spies, telling civilians to be on the lookout for suspicious figures.

In April, prominent Chinese businesswoman Dong Mingzhu told shareholders in a closed-door meeting that her company, home appliance maker Gree Electric, will “never” recruit Chinese people educated overseas “because among them are spies”.

“I don’t know who is and who isn’t,” Ms Dong said, in comments that were leaked and went viral online.

Days later, the CIA released promotional videos encouraging Chinese officials dissatisfied with the government to become spies and provide classified information. “Your destiny is in your own hands,” the video said.

The suspicion of foreigners as the US and China pull further away from each other is a surprising turn for many Chinese people who remember growing up in a very different country.

Zhang Ni, who also did not want to use her real name, says she was “very shocked” by Ms Dong’s remarks.

The 24-year-old is a recent journalism graduate from Columbia University in New York. She says she “doesn’t care about working at Gree”, but what surprised her was the shift in attitudes.

That so many Chinese companies “don’t like anything that might be associated with the international” is a huge contrast from what Ms Zhang grew up with – a childhood “filled with [conversations centred on] the Olympics and World Expo”.

“Whenever we saw foreigners, my mom would push me to go talk to them to practice my English,” she says.

That willingness to exchange ideas and learn from the outside world appears to be waning in China, according to many.

And America, once a place that drew so many young Chinese people, is no longer that welcoming.

Looking back, Ms Zhang can’t help but recall a joke her friend made at a farewell dinner before she left for the US.

Then a flippant comment, it now sums up the fear in both Washington and Beijing: “Don’t become a spy.”

Russia has said it is sending a delegation to Istanbul for a second round of peace talks with Ukraine on 2 June, as the two sides reportedly remain far apart on how to end the war.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow’s conditions for a ceasefire would be discussed in Turkey. Russia is yet to send its proposals to Ukraine – a key demand by Kyiv.

Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said on Thursday he had handed over his country’s proposals to Russia, reaffirming “readiness for a full and unconditional ceasefire”.

The first round of talks in Istanbul on 16 May brought no breakthrough, aside from a prisoner of war swap – the biggest exchange since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

On Friday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha reiterated that Kyiv had already sent its own “vision of future steps” to Russia, adding Moscow “must accept an unconditional ceasefire” to pave the way for broader negotiations.

“We are interested in seeing these meetings continue because we want the war to end this year,” Sybiha said during a joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan.

If the talks go ahead on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are not expected to attend.

But Fidan said Turkey was hoping to eventually host a high-level summit.

“We sincerely think it is time to bring President Trump, President Putin and President Zelensky to the table,” he said.

Peskov said Russia’s ceasefire proposals would not be made public, and Moscow would only entertain the idea of a high-level summit if meaningful progress was achieved in preliminary discussions between the two countries.

He welcomed comments made by Trump’s envoy to Ukraine, retired Gen Keith Kellogg, who described Russian concerns over Nato enlargement as “fair”.

Gen Kellogg said Ukraine joining the military alliance, long hoped for by Kyiv, was not on the table.

He added President Trump was “frustrated” by what he described as Russia’s intransigence, but emphasised the need to keep negotiations alive.

On 19 May, Trump and Putin had a two-hour phone call to discuss a US-proposed ceasefire deal to halt the fighting.

The US president said he believed the call had gone “very well”, adding that Russia and Ukraine would “immediately start” negotiations towards a ceasefire and “an end to the war”.

Ukraine has publicly agreed to a 30-day ceasefire but Putin has only said Russia will work with Ukraine to craft a “memorandum” on a “possible future peace” – a move described by Kyiv and its European allies as delaying tactics so Russian troops could seize more Ukrainian territory.

In a rare rebuke to Putin just days later, Trump called the Kremlin leader “absolutely crazy” and threatened US sanctions. His comments followed Moscow’s largest drone and missile attacks on Ukraine.

On Wednesday, Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, told Zelensky that Berlin would help Kyiv produce long-range missiles to defend itself from future Russian attacks.

The Kremlin said any decision to end range restrictions on the missiles Ukraine could use would represent a dangerous change in policy that would harm efforts to bring an end to the war.

Moscow currently controls 20% of Ukraine’s internationally-recognised territory, including the southern peninsula of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.

More than a thousand Indians have “come back or [been] deported” from the United States since January, India’s foreign ministry has said.

Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that around 62% of them came on commercial flights, without providing more details.

This comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s campaign against undocumented migrants to the US. Trump had earlier said that India “will do what’s right” on the deportation of illegal migrants.

In February, the US had deported more than hundred Indians on a US military flight, with reports saying some of them were brought back shackled.

“We have close cooperation between India and the United States on migration issues,” Mr Jaiswal said during the ministry’s weekly briefing, adding that India verifies nationalities before “we take them back”.

In total, the US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered the country illegally.

Earlier this month, the US Embassy in India issued a warning that overstaying in the US could lead to deportation or a permanent ban on entry in the country, even for those who entered legally.

Mr Jaiswal also spoke about the Trump administration’s updated policy on student visas which is likely to impact Indian students planning to enrol in US universities.

The US had announced on Thursday that it had halted the scheduling of new visa interviews for foreign students as it considered expanding the screening of their social media activities.

“While we note that issuance of a visa is a sovereign function, we hope that the application of Indian students will be considered on merit, and they will be able to join their academic programs on time,” Mr Jaiswal said.

Mr Jaiswal also said that 330,000 Indians students had gone to the US for studies in 2023-24 – which makes India the largest source of international students in the country.

On Thursday, expanding its new visa policy, the US further announced that it was working to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields”.

Elon Musk’s time in the Trump administration is coming to an end after a tempestuous 129 days in which the world’s richest man took an axe to government spending – stirring ample controversy along the way.

Earlier this week, the South African-born billionaire, on his social media platform, X, thanked President Trump for his time at the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge.

Trump announced he will host a news conference in the Oval Office on Friday with Musk, writing: “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way.”

While Musk’s time in government lasted little more than four months, his work with Doge upended the federal government and had an impact not just in the halls of power in Washington – but around the world.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways Musk has left a mark.

Musk took a job with the Trump White House with one mission: to cut spending from the government as much as possible.

He began with an initial target of “at least $2 trillion”, which then shifted to $1tn and ultimately $150bn.

To date, Doge claims to have saved $175bn through a combination of asset sales, lease and grant cancellations, “fraud and improper payment deletion”, regulatory savings and a 260,000-person reduction from the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce.

A BBC analysis of those figures, however, found that evidence is sometimes lacking.

This mission has at times caused both chaos and controversy, including some instances in which federal judges halted mass firings and ordered employees reinstated.

In other instances, the administration has been forced to backtrack on firings.

In one notable instance in February, the administration stopped the firing of hundreds of federal employees working at the National Nuclear Security Administration, including some with sensitive jobs related to the US nuclear arsenal.

Musk himself repeatedly acknowledged that mass firings would inevitably include mistakes.

“We will make mistakes,” he said in February, after his department mistook a region of Mozambique for Hamas-controlled Gaza while cutting an aid programme. “But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

Doge’s efforts to access data also garnered controversy, particularly the department’s push for access to sensitive treasury department systems that control the private information of millions of Americans.

Polls show that cuts to government spending remain popular with many Americans – even if Musk’s personal popularity has waned.

The presence of Musk – an unelected “special government employee” with companies that count the US government as customers – in Trump’s White House has also raised eyebrows, prompting questions about potential conflicts of interest.

His corporate empire includes large companies that do business with US and foreign governments. SpaceX has $22 billion in US government contracts, according to the company’s chief executive.

Some Democrats also accused Musk of taking advantage of his position to drum up business abroad for his satellite internet services firm, Starlink.

The White House was accused of helping Musk’s businesses by showcasing vehicles made by Tesla – his embattled car company – on the White House lawn in March.

Musk and Trump have both shrugged off any suggestion that his work with the government is conflicted or ethically problematic.

Around the world, Musk’s work with Doge was most felt after the vast majority – over 80% – of the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) programmes were eliminated following a six-week review by Doge. The rest were absorbed by the State Department.

The Musk and Doge-led cuts formed part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to bring overseas spending closer in line with its “America First” approach.

The cuts to the agency – tasked with work such as famine detection, vaccinations and food aid in conflict areas – quickly had an impact on projects including communal kitchens in war-torn Sudan, scholarships for young Afghan women who fled the Taliban and clinics for transgender people in India.

USAID also was a crucial instrument of US “soft power” around the world, leading some detractors pointing to its elimination as a sign of waning American influence on the global stage.

While Musk – and Trump – have for years been accused by detractors of spreading baseless conspiracy theories, Musk’s presence in the White House starkly highlighted how misinformation has crept into discourse at the highest levels of the US government.

For example, Musk spread an unfounded internet theory that US gold reserves had quietly been stolen from Fort Knox in Kentucky. At one point, he floated the idea of livestreaming a visit there to ensure the gold was secured.

• Fact-checking Trump’s Oval Office confrontation with Ramaphosa

More recently, Musk spread widely discredited rumours that the white Afrikaner population of South Africa is facing “genocide” in their home country.

Those rumours found their way into the Oval Office earlier in May, when a meeting aimed at soothing tensions between the US and South Africa took a drastic twist after Trump presented South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with videos and articles he said were evidence of crimes against Afrikaners.

Musk’s work in government also showed that, despite public pledges of unity, there are tensions within the “Trump 2.0” administration.

While Trump publicly – and repeatedly – backed the work of Musk and Doge, Musk’s tenure was marked by reports of tension between him and members of the cabinet who felt Doge cuts were impacting their agencies.

“They have a lot of respect for Elon and that he’s doing this, and some disagree a little bit,” Trump acknowledged in a February cabinet meeting. “If they aren’t, I want them to speak up.”

At one point, he was asked whether any cabinet members had expressed dissatisfaction with Musk and turned to the room to ask them. No one spoke.

The announcement of Musk’s departure also came the same day that CBS – the BBC’s US partner – publicised part of an interview during which Musk said he was “disappointed” by Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill. The bill includes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks and a pledge to increase defence spending.

Musk said the bill “undermines” the work of Doge to cut spending – reflecting larger tensions within the Republican Party over the path forward.

Banksy’s latest piece of graffiti art, revealed to the world on Thursday, has now been traced to a street in Marseille.

Images posted on the elusive artist‘s Instagram depict a lighthouse stencilled on a drab, beige wall, along with the words: “I want to be what you saw in me.”

A false shadow appears to have been drawn on the pavement from a nearby bollard, giving the illusion that the lighthouse is itself a silhouette of the mundane street furniture.

Its location was initially a mystery, but BBC Verify has confirmed it as Rue Félix Fregier in the southern French city.

An image of the art circulating online shows a blurred person riding a scooter in front of the piece, with a graffiti tag seemingly reading “Yaze” further along the wall.

The tag matches that used by a Canadian graffiti artist Marco The Polo, whose Instagram account features photos of his own work but who has called Banksy an inspiration.

Banksy has kept his true identity a secret throughout his career, and it is only through the Instagram account that works are identified as genuine.

Often imbuing his works with a political message, his previous pieces have alluded to immigration, the war in Ukraine and homelessness, among other things.

The meaning of some of his works, though, is less clear – such as his motivation behind the series of animals painted in various locations across London last summer.

Prior to the lighthouse, in December, Banksy posted a piece depicting a Madonna and child, with a fixture in the wall appearing like a bullet wound in her chest.

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At least 110 people have died in floods caused by torrential rain in central Nigeria, officials have told the BBC.

The downpours lasted for several hours, said the head of the Niger State Emergency Management Agency (Nsema), Abullahi Baba-Arah.

He added that “surging flood water submerged and washed away over 50 residential houses with their occupants” in the town of Mokwa.

The Nigerian government has expressed its “profound sorrow” over the floods, with the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, saying that security and emergency agencies have been directed to assist in the search and rescue operation.

According to Nsema, the Tiffin Maza and Anguwan Hausawa districts of Mokwa were worst affected.

Mokwa’s District Head, Muhammad Shaba Aliyu, said it has been “60 years” since the community had suffered this kind of flooding.

“I beg the government to support us,” Mr Aliyu said.

The search and rescue operation is still ongoing and many more people are still at risk, authorities say.

A local fisherman told the AFP news agency that he had been left homeless.

“I don’t have a house to sleep in. My house has already collapsed,” Danjuma Shaba said.

Nigeria often experiences flooding during the rainy season, which usually lasts from April to October.

The authorities have warned of heavy downpours in at least 15 of the country’s 36 states.

Last year, many parts of northern Nigeria experienced heavy rainfall and flooding which caused deaths, displacement of people and destruction of houses and infrastructure.

The country also suffered severe flooding in 2022, which forced around 1.3 million people out of the homes and caused more than 600 deaths.

• Nigeria’s floods and drought worsening food insecurity
• Songs and testimonies from a drowning world
• Nigeria floods: ‘I have nowhere to go’

Gerry Adams has won €100,000 (£84,000) in damages over a BBC story about the murder of a British agent.

A court found the former Sinn Féin leader was defamed in a BBC NI Spotlight programme broadcast in 2016 and an accompanying online article, in which an anonymous contributor alleged he sanctioned the 2006 murder of Denis Donaldson.

Mr Adams, 76, denies any involvement.

He said taking the case “was about putting manners on the British Broadcasting Corporation”.

In a statement on Friday, the Donaldson family called for a public inquiry into the murder, adding they have been “stonewalled” while the libel case carried on.

The legal bill for the case is believed to be between €3-5 million (£2.5-4.2m), according to sources with knowledge of the case.

It is understood to be have been one of the most expensive cases the corporation has ever fought.

• As it happened: Ex-Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams awarded €100,000 in libel case against BBC

The head of the BBC in Northern Ireland said the implications of Mr Adams’ court win were “profound”.

Adam Smyth, director of BBC NI, said its legal team had warned the jury’s decision in the high-profile case could “hinder freedom of expression”.

The trial at the High Court in Dublin heard four weeks of evidence from 10 witnesses, including Mr Adams and BBC NI reporter Jennifer O’Leary.

The jury found words used in the programme and accompanying article meant Mr Adams sanctioned and approved Mr Donaldson’s murder.

They also found the BBC did not report the allegations in good faith and settled on €100,000 in damages.

The 11-person jury came to its findings after six hours and 49 minutes of deliberations.

Speaking to reporters, Mr Adams thanked the court and said he was “very mindful” of the Donaldson family in the course of the trial.

“I know many, many journalists. I like to think that I get on well with most of them and I wish you well and I would uphold your right to do your job,” he said.

“But the British Broadcasting Corporation upholds the ethos of the British state in Ireland and, in my view, it’s out of sync in many, many fronts with the Good Friday Agreement.

“It hasn’t caught on to where we are on this island as part of the process, the continuing process, of building peace and justice and harmony and hopefully, in the time ahead, unity.”

Mr Adams’ solicitor, Paul Tweed, called the allegations against his client “totally untrue and defamatory”.

“The BBC Spotlight team should not have included it in their broadcast,” he told reporters.

“Our client is very pleased with this resounding verdict and award of damages which speaks for itself.”

The fact the “false allegation has been left online for nine years” had “undermined the high standards of accuracy that is expected at the BBC,” Mr Tweed said.

“It begs the question whether there has been any political or outside pressure on the BBC to take the stand they have taken.”

The BBC had argued a defence of fair and reasonable reporting on a matter of public interest.

Speaking outside court, the director of BBC Northern Ireland said he was disappointed.

“We believe we supplied extensive evidence to the court of the careful editorial process and journalistic diligence applied to this programme and accompanying online article,” said Mr Smyth.

“We didn’t want to come to court, but it was important that we defend our journalism and we stand by that decision.

“Of course, a case of this importance, duration and complexity involves significant expense.

“In common with other media organisations the BBC, has insurance and makes financial provision for ongoing and anticipated legal claims.”

Denis Donaldson was once a key figure in Sinn Féin’s rise as a political force in Northern Ireland.

He was found murdered in 2006 after it emerged he had worked for the police and MI5 from inside Sinn Féin for 20 years.

In 2009, the Real IRA said it had murdered him.

Mr Donaldson’s daughter said the murder and surrounding circumstances have “devastated” the family.

In a statement issued on Friday Jane Donaldson said the family “supported neither side” in this case, and she criticised the court for not allowing her to testify.

“The jury heard sensitive, privileged family information tossed around without our consent, but did not hear my testimony,” she said.

She also criticised Mr Adams.

“By reducing events which damaged our lives to a debate about damage to his reputation, the plaintiff has trivialised our family tragedy,” she said.

“The plaintiff prioritised his own financial and reputational interests over any regard for retraumatising my family.”

Mr Adams was the leader of republican party Sinn Féin from 1983 until 2018.

He served as MP in his native west Belfast from 1983 to 1992 and again from 1997 until 2011 before sitting as a TD (Teachta Dála) in the Dáil (lower house of Irish parliament) between 2011 and 2020.

Mr Adams led the Sinn Féin delegation during peace talks that eventually brought an end to the Troubles after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

He was detained in the early 1970s when the government in Northern Ireland introduced internment without trial for those suspected of paramilitary involvement.

Mr Adams has consistently denied being a member of the IRA.

Mr Justice Alexander Owens blocked three people appearing as witnesses, including Denis Donaldson’s daughter, who the BBC wanted to call to testify.

However, the judge ruled what she intended to say was irrelevant in respect of what the jury had to consider.

The BBC also wanted to call Austin Stack, whose father Brian, a prison officer, was fatally wounded in an IRA gun attack in Dublin in 1983.

It also attempted to call Eunan O’Halpin, a professor of contemporary Irish history at Trinity College, Dublin.

BBC NI Spotlight reporter Jennifer O’Leary thanked the legal team involved in “defending the BBC’s journalism”, and the BBC’s witnesses in court.

“I said in the witness box that I had nothing to hide, only sources to protect, and I want to thank them for trusting me,” she said.

Jury trials are usually longer – and therefore more expensive – than those held in front of a judge acting alone.

The Republic of Ireland is in the process of overhauling its defamation laws, including the elimination of jury trials in High Court defamation cases.

In Northern Ireland, there has been “a presumption against jury trials” in libel cases since 2022.

Paul Doyle has appeared in court accused of driving his car into a crowd of people after Liverpool FC’s trophy parade.

The former Royal Marine, 53, faces seven charges including wounding with intent, causing grievous bodily harm (GBH) with intent, attempting to cause GBH with intent and dangerous driving.

The charges relate to six victims, including two children aged 11 and 17, after a total of 79 people were injured in the city centre on Monday evening.

The father-of-three of Burghill Road in West Derby, Liverpool, was visibly emotional as he was escorted into the dock at Liverpool Magistrates Court wearing a black suit, grey tie and white shirt.

His case was then fast-tracked to Liverpool Crown Court, where more serious offences are dealt with.

Mr Doyle was not asked to respond to the charges at the hearing, which lasted about 45 minutes.

He sat with his head down as the charges were read to him, and was told he would next appear on 14 August for a plea hearing.

As the hearing went on, he looked around the courtroom from the glass panelled dock at a room.

Judge Menary said that reporting restrictions, introduced when Mr Doyle appeared before magistrates earlier, would remain in place.

Those restrictions prohibit the identification of the six victims named in the charges so far from being published.

The case was listed twice on the same day, first before magistrates, and then the higher court, both of which are in the same building.

Judge Menary said: “Given the genuine and not surprising public interest in this case it occurred to me it would be appropriate for the matter, on being sent to this court, to be listed before me for further directions.”

Philip Astbury, prosecuting, told Judge Menary the charges “as they stand may change”.

“This is an ongoing investigation and there are a great deal of witnesses to be interviewed and footage to be reviewed,” he said.

The court heard that the dangerous driving charge included Mr Doyle’s home street of Burghill Road and Water Street, as well as unnamed roads in between.

Damian Nolan, defending, said there would be no application for bail at the hearing.

Judge Menary set a provisional trial date for 24 November, with an estimated length of three to four weeks.

Mr Doyle stood with his hands clasped and nodded as he was remanded in custody.

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

Reports of a car colliding with pedestrians along Water Street, just off the parade route, were first received by police at about 18:00 on Monday.

Ambulances arrived to take people to hospital, with a nine-year-old among the youngest victims of the incident.

A pram carrying a baby boy was spun metres down the street when it was struck, but the child was not hurt.

A fundraising campaign set up for those affected by the incident has raised more than £30,000, including a £10,000 donation from ex-player Jamie Carragher’s charity foundation.

China does not want to go to war with anyone, especially the US.

But Beijing does have aspirations to be the number one economic power in the world.

And that means flexing its muscles to rid the seas around East and South East Asia of their US military presence, so it can dominate the shipping lanes so vital for global trade.

By building up its nuclear and conventional arsenals, China aims to show the US that times have changed and that it’s too dangerous a power to challenge.

The US has long had the upper hand in the Asia-Pacific – with tens of thousands of troops based in Japan and South Korea, alongside several military bases.

Trump’s administration has clearly focused its energy on countering China – by initiating a trade war and seeking to strengthen alliances with Asian nations.

The Shangri-La Dialogue has historically been the setting for top-level encounters between the US and China – an arena for the superpowers to set out their vision for security in the region.

And it’s opening again in Singapore on Friday. Here’s what we can expect from the three-day event:

The growing struggle for dominance between the US and China is undoubtedly the biggest issue in Asia-Pacific security.

Gone are the days when China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was characterised by outdated weaponry and rigid Maoist doctrine. Today it is a formidable force deploying state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles and fifth-generation warplanes like the J20.

Its navy has the largest number of warships in the world, outstripping the United States.

While China lags far behind the US and Russia in its number of nuclear warheads, it is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, with missiles that can travel up to 15,000km, putting the continental US easily within range.

The US Navy’s formidable 7th Fleet, based in Yokosuka, just south of Tokyo, can no longer claim to have guaranteed naval supremacy in the region.

China’s array of Dong Feng missiles and swarms of explosive drones would make any approach to its shores extremely hazardous for US warships.

Ultimately, Beijing is believed to be working to “push” the US military out of the western Pacific.

Taiwan is a liberal, self-governing, pro-Western island democracy that China’s President Xi Jinping has vowed to “take back” by force if necessary.

It has an economic importance well beyond its geographic small size. It manufactures more than 90% of the world’s high-end microchips, the all-important semi-conductors that power so much of our tech.

Recent opinion polls have made clear that a majority of Taiwanese people do not want to be ruled by Beijing, but Xi has made this a key policy aim.

The US has done much to help Taiwan bolster its defences but the key question of whether Washington would go to war with China over Taiwan has always been shrouded in something called “strategic ambiguity”, i.e. keeping Beijing guessing.

On more than one occasion President Biden indicated the US would respond militarily in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. But the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office has brought back a degree of uncertainty.

There are also major concerns in the region over China’s attempts to turn the entire South China Sea into what some have called a “Chinese lake”.

The PLA Navy has established military bases on reefs, many artificially dredged, across the strategically important South China Sea, an area through which an estimated $3 trillion’s worth of maritime trade passes annually.

Today China deploys a vast, industrial fishing fleet across the South China Sea, backed by its fleet of coastguard ships and warships. These vessels clash frequently with Filipino fishermen, fishing close to their own country’s shores.

China frequently challenges planes and ships transiting the South China Sea, warning them they are entering Chinese territory without permission, when the rest of the world considers this to be international waters.

Donald Trump, when asked during his first presidency if North Korea could ever develop nuclear missiles that could reach the continental United States, vowed “it’s never going to happen”. But it has.

In what amounts to a serious CIA intelligence failure, Pyongyang has demonstrated that it now possesses both the nuclear know-how and the means to deliver those warheads across the Pacific Ocean.

Successive US presidencies have failed to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and this isolated, economically backward yet militarily powerful nation is thought to have at least 20 nuclear warheads.

It also has an enormous, well-armed army, some of which its autocratic leader Kim Jong Un has sent to help Russia fight Ukraine.

Defence analysts are still dissecting the recent, brief but alarming conflict between these two nuclear-armed neighbours. India’s military far outnumbers Pakistan’s and yet the latter was allegedly able to land an embarrassing blow against India’s air force, when Pakistan’s Chinese-made J10-C jets went up against India’s advanced, French-made Rafales.

Pakistan reportedly shot down at least one of the Indian warplanes, using Chinese-made PL-15 air-to-air missiles. The reports were denied in India’s media.

China’s assistance to Pakistan in the conflict has reportedly been critical to Islamabad, including repositioning its satellites to provide it with real-time intelligence.

Both India and Pakistan are expected to make high-level addresses at the Shangri-La Dialogue this weekend while the US and others will be looking for ways to prevent a repeat of their clash over Kashmir.

All of this is happening in a dramatically changed US context.

Donald Trump’s sudden imposition of trade tariffs, while eventually modified, has caused many in the region to rethink their reliance on Washington. Would an ally that is prepared to inflict so much economic pain on its friends really come to their aid if they were attacked?

China has been quick to capitalise on the confusion. It reached out to neighbours such as Vietnam – a country it went to war with in 1979 – to point out the People’s Republic represented stability and continuity in an unstable world.

Under the previous US administration, Washington signed up to a multi-billion dollar trilateral partnership between the US, UK and Australia under the acronym of Aukus.

It aims to not only build Canberra’s next generation of submarines but to guarantee freedom of navigation across the South China Sea using intelligence and naval force deployed by the three nations.

President Trump, when asked in February about his commitment to the Aukus pact, appeared not to recognise the term, asking in reply: “What does that mean?”

But early this Saturday morning the US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth will be addressing the Shangri-La Dialogue, potentially offering some clarity on Aukus as well as how the US plans to work with, and quite possibly against, China’s interests across the Asia-Pacific region.

The US Court of International Trade on Wednesday struck down President Donald Trump’s tariffs imposed under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

The court ruled IEEPA did not give the president the authority to impose certain tariffs.

This affects the “fentanyl” tariffs imposed by the White House on Canada, Mexico, China since Trump returned to the White House. These tariffs were brought in to curb smuggling of the narcotic into the US.

It also affects the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs announced on 2 April, including the universal 10% baseline tariff on all imports to the US.

However, the ruling does not affect the Trump administration’s 25% “sectoral” tariffs on steel and aluminium imports and also his 25% additional tariffs on cars and car part imports, as these were implemented under a different legal justification.

A US federal appeals court decided on Thursday night that Trump’s global tariffs can temporarily stay in place while it considers the White House’s appeal against the trade court’s judgement – but the future of the President’s tariff agenda remains in the balance.

Data from US Customs shows the amount of revenue collected in the 2025 financial year to date (ie between 1 October 2024 and 30 April) under various tariffs.

The data gives an approximate sense of the proportion of tariffs struck down and unaffected by the trade court’s ruling.

It shows the tariffs imposed under IEEPA on China, Mexico and Canada in relation to the fentanyl smuggling had brought in $11.8bn (£8.7bn) since February 2025.

The 10% reciprocal tariffs – also justified under IEEPA – implemented in April had brought in $1.2bn (£890m).

On the other side of the ledger, the tariffs on metals and car parts – which are unaffected by this ruling – brought in around $3.3bn (£2.4bn), based on rounded figures.

And the biggest source of tariff revenue for the US in the period was from tariffs imposed on China dating back to Trump’s first term in office, which raised $23.4bn (£17.3bn). These are also not affected by the court ruling, as they were not justified by IEEPA.

However, this is a backward looking picture – and the new tariffs were expected to raise considerably more revenue over a full financial year.

Analysts at the investment bank Goldman Sachs have estimated that the tariffs the trade court has struck down were likely to have raised almost $200bn (£148bn) on an annual basis.

In terms of the overall impact on Donald Trump’s tariff agenda, the consultancy Capital Economics estimates the court ruling would reduce the US’s average external tariff this year from 15% to 6.5%.

This would still be a considerable increase on the 2.5% level of 2024 and would be the highest since 1970.

Yet 15% would have been the highest since the late 1930s.

Trump had been using his tariffs as negotiating leverage in talks with countries hit by his 2 April tariffs.

Some analysts believe this trade court ruling will mean countries will now be less likely to rush to secure deals with the US.

The European Union (EU) intensified negotiations with the White House last weekend after Trump threatened to increase the tariff on the bloc to 50% under IEEPA.

The EU – and others, such as Japan and Australia – might now judge it would be more prudent to wait to see what happens to the White House’s appeal against the trade court ruling before making any trade concessions to the US to secure a deal.

The response of stock markets around the world to the trade court ruling on Wednesday suggested it would be positive.

But it also means greater uncertainty.

Some analysts say Trump could attempt to reimpose the tariffs under different legal justifications.

For instance, Trump could attempt to re-implement the tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which empowers the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to address foreign practices that violate trade agreements or are deemed “discriminatory”.

And Trump has also threatened other sectoral tariffs, including on pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. Those could still go into effect if they are not justified by IEEPA.

Last month the World Trade Organization (WTO) said that the outlook for global trade had “deteriorated sharply” due to Trump’s tariffs.

The WTO said it expected global merchandise trade to decline by 0.2% in 2025 as a result, having previously projected it would grow by 2.7 per cent this year.

The trade court ruling – if it holds – might help global trade perform somewhat better than this.

But the dampening impact of uncertainty regarding whether US tariffs will materialise or not remains.

The bottom line is that many economists think trade will still be very badly affected this year.

“Trump’s trade war is not over – not by a long shot,” is the verdict of Grace Fan of the consultancy TS Lombard.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

This week saw Elon Musk part ways with the White House, Gary Lineker present his final Match of the Day, and the world of television pay tribute to former BBC presenter and executive Alan Yentob.

But how much attention did you pay to what else happened in the world?

Quiz collated by Ben Fell.

Fancy testing your memory? Try last week’s quiz, or have a go at something from the archives.

If President Donald Trump says he’s punishing Harvard University to protect Jewish students, not everybody is convinced.

More than 2,000 Harvard students identify as Jewish, and for some of those from abroad, Trump’s rhetoric has stirred fear and uncertainty.

“I thought when I left Israel I was leaving a conflict zone,” PhD student Genia, 41, tells me.

It’s foreign students like her that fear becoming collateral damage in Trump’s crackdown on some of America’s most elite universities.

After last week trying to strip Harvard of its ability to enrol international students, the Trump administration suffered a legal blow on Thursday when a judge indicated she would block the move while the case plays out in court.

But the ruling is unlikely to deescalate the conflict between Trump and Harvard, an institution he accuses of being too left-wing and failing to combat antisemitism when pro-Palestinian protests have unfolded on campuses.

“It’s been hard. We’ve had guest speakers here saying my heritage and sacred texts should be decolonised, and questioning my existence” says Genia, who is studying psychology.

She is halfway through her studies which focus on language acquisition in babies who are blind. She worries being sent back to Israel if the foreign ban prevails.

“I do think that it is very important to learn to be uncomfortable and offended. But I think it should be applied to both sides… it’s not been balanced. “

“I’ve had two years of dealing with massive amounts of campus hostility and now we get this mayhem… it’s not making things better.”

In a small backdown from its attempt to end the university’s international student program, the government has given Harvard 30 days to prove it meets the requirements of enrolling foreign students.

If the measure is ultimately allowed, it could deliver a devastating blow to the university, where more than a quarter of students are from overseas. There are no exceptions for Israelis or other international Jewish students.

An order ostensibly designed to protect Jewish students like Genia appears to have put those from abroad in peril. It’s led to accusations that President Trump has politicised antisemitism.

Genia says: “I think that it is very important that we recognise that there is a distinction between what we want and what the US government probably wants.”

The university’s president insists Harvard has taken major steps to tackle all forms of hatred, including antisemitism. Alan Garber says the cuts the Trump administration is imposing on the institution will “hurt” the country, not just Harvard, because academics were conducting research deemed “high-priority” by the government.

Nitsan Machlis, 27, is about to graduate. Her family is here to see her walk the stage in her cap and gown. She is upbeat but that feeling had been missing for a while.

“For the first time in a long time, I feel very proud to be a student at Harvard. Harvard has been under immense pressure by the Trump administration, and the institution has shown it is making decisions with integrity to defend its academic freedom and to not bow down to the power grab,” she says.

“The university still has a lot to prove and do when it comes to tackling antisemitism” she adds, “but I’m proud with what President Garber is saying and doing.”

Another Israeli at Harvard – who works as a research fellow – is concerned about the Trump administration’s approach. The 38-year-old didn’t want to be identified as she weighs up her future..

“I see that Harvard is really trying to address the problems… but you cannot change a culture and problems. These are not Harvard specific problems, and they’re not even problems of the American elite. These are big problems in the world and it does not take a week, or a day, to solve them.”

She draws parallels with her home country and adopted country

“Israelis have been experiencing democratic backsliding in a very intense way and I think we should be the first to recognise what’s going on here in the US.”

Harvard Professor Steven Levitsky goes further. He has spent decades studying authoritarian governments and believes that President Trump is using antisemitism as a cover to bring elite education under his control.

“We’re the biggest fish. We’re the most prominent, most prestigious, and also the best university in the country. So if you want a single representative of higher education to take a whack at, Harvard is the obvious target,” he tells me.

“If the Trump administration is able to bully Harvard into acquiescence, then it knows that no other university will be able to stand up to it.”

Reflecting on experiencing antisemitism throughout his life, he says: “I’ve never seen or experienced antisemitism here at Harvard. And so the kind of the notion that we have a serious problem that requires federal intervention, as a Jew who’s lived here for 25 years, I can tell you it’s laughable.”

But this ongoing battle threatens to leave Harvard in a different place even if the school is successful in its fight. Many international students say they’re already looking to build their academic future elsewhere, while others who have graduated say they plan to take their skills to countries outside of America.

A suspect wanted for the murder of a South African university student has been killed in a shootout with police.

The man had been linked to the death of Olorato Mongale, whose body was found in Johannesburg on Sunday, about two hours after she was reported missing having gone on a date.

In the early hours of Friday morning, police officers found the main suspect hiding at a residential complex in the coastal town of Amanzimtoti, police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said.

The suspect, who has not been named by the police, shot at the officers, who returned fire and killed him, Brigadier Mathe added.

Regional police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi said that at the time of the suspect’s death, he had 28 ID cards and a dozen mobile phones in his possession.

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

The country has one of the highest rates of femicide and gender-based violence in the world.

In an impassioned statement, Police Minister Senzo Mchunu called Ms Mongale’s killing “inhumane” and “gruesome”, adding: “To all men, this is a plea – simple, urgent, and human: Please, stop killing women.”

While continuing the search for two other men allegedly linked to the murder, the police took the parents of the deceased suspect into custody.

The suspect’s mother is accused of enabling him to “evade arrest” by tipping him off about the police’s presence at her house.

The police also said the suspect’s father is the owner of a VW Polo allegedly used in Ms Mongale’s murder.

The vehicle, which has been seized by the police, had traces of blood inside it, Brig Mathe said.

The suspect’s parents were questioned in custody but have now been released, said commissioner Mkhwanazi.

Earlier this week, the police named the three suspects linked to the killing as Fezile Ngubane, Philangenkosi Sibongokuhle Makhanya and Bongani Mthimkhulu.

Two of them – Mr Makhanya and Mr Mthimkhulu – were last month arrested for kidnapping and robbing a woman in KwaZulu-Natal, using the same VW Polo involved in Ms Mongale’s murder, police said. Both men had been freed on bail.

As part of their investigation into the killing, the police have identified a criminal gang or “syndicate” who have been targeting women in malls “for kidnapping and robbery”, said police spokesperson Mathe.

“They propose them, request to take them out on a date. When they agree, that is when they plan to rob them,” she added.

When Ms Mongale was last seen on Sunday, she was on a date with a man she had met a few days earlier at a shopping centre.

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

The 30-year-old’s friends said she was invited for a date by a man only identified as John, who she had 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 Lombardy West, at the site where her body was found.

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

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Bernard Kerik, New York City’s former police commissioner during the 11 September 2001 attacks, has died aged 69.

His death was confirmed by FBI Director Kash Patel, who said the former police officer died Thursday after a “private battle with illness.”

Kerik oversaw the police response to the deadliest terrorist attack in US history, and was later appointed by former US President George Bush as head of a provisional police force in Iraq.

He pleaded guilty to charges of tax fraud in 2009 and served three years in prison, though he was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020.

Those who paid tribute to Kerik include former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was in office when Kerik served as commissioner of the NYPD, and current mayor Eric Adams.

“We’ve been together since the beginning. He’s like my brother,” Giuiliani said Thursday on his show.

“I was a better man for having known Bernie,” Giuiliani said. “I certainly was a braver and stronger man.”

Adams, who had been friends with Kerik for nearly 30 years, said he had visited him in hospital before his death.

“He was with his loved ones who are in my prayers tonight,” Adams said in a statement. “He was a great New Yorker and American.”

Kerik, a former army veteran and a decorated law enforcement officer, rose up the ranks through his career, and was nearly tapped to run the Department of Homeland Security under Bush in 2004 before he abruptly withdrew his nomination.

In 2009, Kerik pleaded guilty to federal charges after he was accused of lying to investigators about interest-free loans he received from an Israeli billionaire and a New York real estate magnet while he was in public office.

He was granted a full pardon by Trump in 2020, and later joined Giuiliani’s efforts to overturn Trump’s election loss that same year.

Flights were temporarily disrupted at Liberia main airport on Thursday night after a private jet carrying President Joseph Boakai almost crashed while landing.

Part of the presidential jet’s landing gear malfunctioned while approaching the runway, causing a rough landing, airport authorities said.

The incident, which sparked panic at the airport, forced the cancellation of all scheduled flights for the night, local media reported.

President Boakai, who was returning from a trip in Nigeria with his entourage, was safely evacuated unharmed, as authorities announced an investigation.

Photos of the stalled jet at the Roberts International Airport (RIA) circulated on social media, triggering concerns about the president’s safety.

Local media, citing airport authorities, said one of the plane’s tyres had burst upon landing leaving it stranded on the runway.

In a statement, the Liberia Airport Authority (LAA) confirmed the “unfortunate near-accident situation” involving the presidential jet.

The authority dismissed reports suggesting that the incident was caused by poor runway conditions.

“The runway infrastructure remains fully compliant with international aviation safety standards,” the LAA said.

The aircraft has since been removed from the runway and normal operations have resumed at the airport, the authorities said.

“At this stage, investigation to establish the actual cause of the incident is ongoing, and the airport authority will keep the public informed,” the LAA said.

The Liberian presidency is yet to comment on the incident but it shared photos of Boakai arriving at the airport, where he briefly spoke to journalists without mentioning the plane scare.

He had gone to Nigeria to attend the 50th anniversary of the regional Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas).

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More than a thousand Indians have “come back or [been] deported” from the United States since January, India’s foreign ministry has said.

Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that around 62% of them came on commercial flights, without providing more details.

This comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s campaign against undocumented migrants to the US. Trump had earlier said that India “will do what’s right” on the deportation of illegal migrants.

In February, the US had deported more than hundred Indians on a US military flight, with reports saying some of them were brought back shackled.

“We have close cooperation between India and the United States on migration issues,” Mr Jaiswal said during the ministry’s weekly briefing, adding that India verifies nationalities before “we take them back”.

In total, the US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered the country illegally.

Earlier this month, the US Embassy in India issued a warning that overstaying in the US could lead to deportation or a permanent ban on entry in the country, even for those who entered legally.

Mr Jaiswal also spoke about the Trump administration’s updated policy on student visas which is likely to impact Indian students planning to enrol in US universities.

The US had announced on Thursday that it had halted the scheduling of new visa interviews for foreign students as it considered expanding the screening of their social media activities.

“While we note that issuance of a visa is a sovereign function, we hope that the application of Indian students will be considered on merit, and they will be able to join their academic programs on time,” Mr Jaiswal said.

Mr Jaiswal also said that 330,000 Indians students had gone to the US for studies in 2023-24 – which makes India the largest source of international students in the country.

On Thursday, expanding its new visa policy, the US further announced that it was working to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields”.

The captain of a cargo ship that crashed into an oil tanker in the North Sea has pleaded not guilty to gross negligence manslaughter.

Vladimir Motin was captain of the Portuguese-flagged cargo ship Solong which crashed into the US tanker Stena Immaculate off the East Yorkshire coast on 10 March.

Mark Angelo Pernia, 38, a Filipino crew member on the Solong, is missing presumed dead.

Mr Motin, 59, and from Primorsky in St Petersburg, Russia, was remanded in custody until trial. A further case management hearing has been set for 10 September.

Assisted by a Russian interpreter, Mr Motin confirmed his identity before he entered his plea at London’s Central Criminal Court, known as the Old Bailey, via video link from prison.

A trial date has been set for 12 January 2026.

The crash took place about 13 miles (20km) off the East Yorkshire coast, near Hull and Grimsby, in a busy shipping area.

The Solong had been making its way south from the Scottish port of Grangemouth to Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

According to an interim report into the crash, produced by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch, 36 crew were saved by rescuers from both ships.

Hull and East Yorkshire on BBC Soundslatest episode of Look North her

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary is on track to pocket bonuses worth more than €100m in what could reportedly mark one of the biggest pay-outs in European corporate history.

It comes after shares in the budget airline closed above €21 (£17.65) for a 28th consecutive day on Thursday, meeting a key performance target.

Mr O’Leary will have the option to receive 10 million shares worth some €111.2m (£93.3m) providing he stays with the airline until the end of July 2028.

The Irish boss, known for his punchy comments, said earlier this month that Ryanair was “delivering exceptional value” to shareholders despite it reporting a fall in full-year profits.

“I think Ryanair shareholders are getting a particular value out of our share options – both mine and the rest of the management team,” he said in response to being asked about the share option on an analyst call earlier this month.

“We’re delivering exceptional value for Ryanair shareholders in an era when premiership footballers or the managers are getting paid 20 to 25 million a year.”

Ryanair said in a statement that the share price aspect of the bonus was “on only one of two conditions”, adding: “The second condition is that Michael and the rest of the management team must remain employed by Ryanair until the end of July 2028, so these share options won’t vest for another three years yet.”

Mr O’Leary has indicated that he could stay on longer at the airline when his current contract expires in 2028. He has been with Ryanair since 1988.

Since becoming chief executive in 1994, He has spearheaded the airline’s sharp trajectory from a relatively small regional airline into a Europe’s largest low-cost carrier.

“There’ll have to be some discussion I presume with the board as to how my remuneration will be fixed from 2028 onwards, if they want me to stay on after 2028,” he said.

The long-term incentive scheme for Mr O’Leary was first set out in 2019, the year he became group chief executive.

But the High Pay Centre, a think tank which tracks executives’ pay, criticised the bonus, saying “regardless of how successful a business or how effective the company’s leader is, no-one individual’s contribution can ever be great enough to be worth a €100m bonus”.

A statement added: “This is especially true when most of Ryanair’s employees – who also play a crucial role in the company’s success – are unlikely to earn more than a fraction of that across their whole working lives.”

Low-cost rival carrier, Wizz Air has a similar potential pay deal in place for its chief executive József Váradi.

Mr Váradi stands to earn £100m if his airline’s share price hits £120 by 2028. But Wizz Air has previously conceded that this was unlikely to be met with the shares trading well below that level.

Earlier this month, Ryanair ordered some flight attendants in Spain to repay salary increases following a legal dispute with their union.

President Donald Trump’s administration can temporarily revoke the legal status of over 500,000 migrants living in the US, the US Supreme Court ruled on Friday.

The ruling put on hold a previous federal judge’s order stopping the administration from ending the “parole” immigration programme, established by former President Joe Biden. The programme protected immigrants fleeing economic and political turmoil in their home countries.

The new order puts roughly 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela at risk of being deported.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, two of the court’s three liberal justices, dissented.

The parole programme allows immigrants temporary status to work and live in the US for two years because of “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit”, according to the US government.

The Trump administration had filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the administration from ending the programme, also known as CHNV humanitarian parole.

The White House “celebrated” the opportunity to deport 500,000 “invaders”, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN. “The Supreme Court justly stepped in”.

In her dissent, Justice Jackson wrote that the court’s order would “have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims”.

On the day he took office, Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to get rid of parole programmes. Then, in March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the end of CHNV humanitarian parole.

Several immigrants rights groups and migrants from the programme sued the Trump administration over the decision, arguing they could “face serious risks of danger, persecution and even death” if deported back to their home countries.

The ruling comes after the Supreme Court earlier this month allowed Trump officials to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) – a separate programme – for some 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants living and working in the US.

Humanitarian parole programmes have been used for decades to allow immigrants fleeing war and other tumultuous conditions in their home countries to come to the US, including Cubans in the 1960s following the revolution.

The Biden administration also established a parole programme in 2022 for Ukrainians fleeing after Russia’s invasion.

US President Donald Trump has accused China of violating a two-week-old truce on tariffs – a sign trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies could again escalate.

Washington and Beijing agreed to temporarily lower tit-for-tat tariffs after talks in Geneva earlier this month.

Trump said on Friday in a Truth Social post that tariffs had left China in “grave economic danger”, before the countries had made a “fast deal”.

However he said China had “totally violated its agreement with us”, without explaining how.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer later said China had not been removing non-tariff barriers in the way that had been agreed. Beijing is yet to respond to the claims.

Greer told TV network CNBC that China was yet to properly roll back other trade restrictions it had levied on the US.

He said when China responded to the US’s tariffs with its own, they also put in place countermeasures such as putting some US companies on blacklists and restricting the flow of rare earth materials.

“They removed the tariff like we did but some of the countermeasures they’ve slowed on,” Ambassador Greer said.

He added the US had been closely watching China to make sure it would comply with the deal and they were “very concerned” with the progress.

Greer said: “The United States did exactly what it was supposed to do and the Chinese are slow-rolling their compliance which is completely unacceptable and has to be addressed”.

Beijing is yet to respond to the assertions. On Friday, its foreign ministry had declined to respond to comments made by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that trade talks with China had become “a bit stalled”.

Bessent told Fox News on Thursday: “I think that given the magnitude of the talks, given the complexity, that this is going to require [leaders of both the countries] to weigh in with each other.”

Trump’s global tariff regime was dealt a blow on Wednesday following a ruling that he had exceeded his authority. His plans have been temporarily reinstated after the White House appealed the decision.

His administration this week also moved to “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students studying in the US, of which there are an estimated 280,000.

In mid-May, Washington and Beijing had agreed to reduce tariffs imposed on each other’s imports in a deal where both nations cancelled some tariffs altogether and suspended others for 90 days.

Bessent said talks on a further deal had lost momentum, but stressed they were continuing.

“I believe that we will be having more talks with [China] in the next few weeks and I believe we may at some point have a call between the president and [Chinese President Xi Jinping],” Bessent said on Thursday.

He added the pair had “a very good relationship” and he was “confident that the Chinese will come to the table when President Trump makes his preferences known”.

Under the deal struck earlier this month, the US lowered tariffs imposed on goods from China from 145% to 30%.

China’s retaliatory tariffs on US goods dropped from 125% to 10%.

The US President has argued imposing tariffs on foreign goods would encourage US consumers to buy more American-made goods, bringing back manufacturing jobs while increase the amount of tax revenue raised.

They have been used by the Trump administration as leverage in negotiations as it seeks to reduce trade deficits with other nations.

A delegation from Japan are continuing trade talks with their US counterparts in Washington on Friday.

Bessent said “a couple” of US trade deals were “very close”, but “a couple of them are more complicated”.

Trump’s tariff regime remains in the balance following the decision by the US Court of International Trade, which ruled that Trump had overstepped his power by imposing the duties.

Some analysts believe it will mean countries will be less likely to rush to secure trade deals with the US.

A federal appeals court has granted a bid from the White House to temporarily suspend the lower court’s order, which Trump described as “horrific”.

“Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country [sic] threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Banksy’s latest piece of graffiti art, revealed to the world on Thursday, has now been traced to a street in Marseille.

Images posted on the elusive artist‘s Instagram depict a lighthouse stencilled on a drab, beige wall, along with the words: “I want to be what you saw in me.”

A false shadow appears to have been drawn on the pavement from a nearby bollard, giving the illusion that the lighthouse is itself a silhouette of the mundane street furniture.

Its location was initially a mystery, but BBC Verify has confirmed it as Rue Félix Fregier in the southern French city.

An image of the art circulating online shows a blurred person riding a scooter in front of the piece, with a graffiti tag seemingly reading “Yaze” further along the wall.

The tag matches that used by a Canadian graffiti artist Marco The Polo, whose Instagram account features photos of his own work but who has called Banksy an inspiration.

Banksy has kept his true identity a secret throughout his career, and it is only through the Instagram account that works are identified as genuine.

Often imbuing his works with a political message, his previous pieces have alluded to immigration, the war in Ukraine and homelessness, among other things.

The meaning of some of his works, though, is less clear – such as his motivation behind the series of animals painted in various locations across London last summer.

Prior to the lighthouse, in December, Banksy posted a piece depicting a Madonna and child, with a fixture in the wall appearing like a bullet wound in her chest.

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A former Royal Marine who is accused of “deliberately” driving his car into a crowd after Liverpool FC’s trophy parade leaving 79 people injured has appeared in court.

Paul Doyle, 53, appeared at both Liverpool Magistrates’ Court and Liverpool Crown Court on Friday where he faced seven charges including wounding with intent, causing grievous bodily harm (GBH) with intent, attempting to cause GBH with intent and dangerous driving.

The court heard the prosecution allege the father-of-three used his car “as a weapon” when it was driven into the crowds.

Mr Doyle, of Burghill Road in West Derby, Liverpool appeared emotional as he appeared in court for the first time, speaking quietly only to confirm his date of birth and age. No family members or friends were present in either court rooms.

Philip Astbury, prosecuting, said: “This defendant, it is the prosecution’s case, drove deliberately in that car at people amongst that crowd as they tried to leave the area.

“Six charges of assault reflect the most seriously injured of those who were struck by the vehicle. The first count of dangerous driving reflects the manner of driving before and up until the point he used his vehicle deliberately as a weapon to injure those individuals.”

Mr Doyle faces charges relating to six victims, including two children aged 11 and 17, after a total of 79 people were injured in the city centre on Monday evening.

The father-of-three of Burghill Road in West Derby, Liverpool was escorted into the dock at Liverpool Magistrates Court wearing a black suit, grey tie and white shirt.

His case was then fast-tracked to Liverpool Crown Court, where more serious offences are dealt with.

Mr Doyle was not asked to respond to the charges at the hearing.

He sat with his head down as the charges were read to him, and was told he would next appear on 14 August for a plea hearing.

Judge Andrew Menary KC said that reporting restrictions, introduced when Mr Doyle appeared before magistrates earlier, would remain in place.

Those restrictions prohibit the identification of the six victims named in the charges so far from being published.

Philip Astbury, prosecuting, told Judge Menary: “This is an ongoing investigation and there are a great deal of witnesses to be interviewed and footage to be reviewed.”

The court heard that the dangerous driving charge included Mr Doyle’s home street of Burghill Road and Water Street, as well as unnamed roads in between.

Damian Nolan, defending, said there would be no application for bail at the hearing.

Judge Menary set a provisional trial date for 24 November, with an estimated length of three to four weeks.

Mr Doyle stood with his hands clasped and nodded as he was remanded in custody.

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

Reports of a car colliding with pedestrians along Water Street, just off the parade route, were first received by police at about 18:00 on Monday.

Ambulances arrived to take people to hospital, with a nine-year-old among the youngest victims of the incident.

A pram carrying a baby boy was spun metres down the street when it was struck, but the child was not hurt.

A fundraising campaign set up for those affected by the incident has raised more than £30,000, including a £10,000 donation from ex-player Jamie Carragher’s charity foundation.

A British woman accused of attempting to smuggle drugs into Sri Lanka has told the BBC about the conditions in the jail where she is being held.

Charlotte May Lee, 21, from south London, was arrested earlier this month after authorities allegedly found 46kg of cannabis in her suitcases when she arrived on a flight from Thailand.

“I can’t compare it to anything,” she said, adding she shares a cell with five other women and sleeps on a thin mattress on the concrete floor, using her clothes as a pillow.

Ms Lee has not yet been charged, but has previously denied knowing the alleged drugs were in her luggage. If found guilty, she could face up to 25 years behind bars.

The former flight attendant told the BBC she had travelled from Bangkok to Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo to renew her Thai visa.

She made a procedural court appearance on Friday while the investigation into her alleged offences continues.

Speaking to the BBC before appearing in court, Ms Lee appeared to be in good spirits.

She described her living conditions at a prison in Negombo, a city just north of the capital, saying she spends most of her day inside, although she does get to go outside for fresh air.

“I have never been to prison and I’ve never been to Sri Lanka,” she said. “This heat and just sitting on a concrete floor all of the time.”

Ms Lee said she tries not to dwell too much on her current predicament.

“I am not trying to think about it. If I think, then I feel bad. I’ll still rather not process it.”

She said she is concerned for the other women who are also in prison.

“There are people from so many different countries who have been here for two years, two-and-a-half years. And it’s still just waiting and no-one actually knows anything.”

She has managed to find other English-speaking women with whom she has developed a kinship. But she has not been able to speak with her family since her arrest.

Ms Lee arrived at Negombo Magistrate’s Court on Friday wearing a white knee-length dress, her long hair parted to the side.

She was held in a cell at the back of the courtroom before being brought to the witness box. She was visibly upset as she stood with her hands crossed behind her back, facing the magistrate.

Authorities wheeled in a large brown box containing the alleged 46kg of cannabis found in Ms Lee’s luggage.

The narcotics division of the Sri Lanka police told the court they intend to file an update on the investigation.

Ms Lee’s lawyer, Sampath Perera, asked if the alleged drugs had been examined by the relevant government authorities to ascertain if the materials were in fact an illegal substance.

The magistrate ordered it to be tested and for a report to be submitted to the court as soon as possible.

Speaking to the BBC from outside the courthouse after the hearing, Mr Perera said the next step is to make a bail application for Ms Lee, which could take three months.

Under Sri Lankan law, people being held on remand must appear before a judge every 14 days.

Ms Lee is being held on suspicion of keeping illegal drugs in her possession and drug smuggling. Her next court appearance will be on 13 July.

India’s economy grew by 7.4% in the period between January and March – up from 6.2% the previous quarter and significantly beating analyst expectations.

However, growth for full 2024-25 year, which runs between April and March, is pegged at 6.5% – the slowest in four years.

The country’s central bank – the Reserve Bank of India – meets later in June and is expected to cut rates for the third time in a row to boost growth.

India remains the world’s fastest growing major economy, although growth has sharply dropped from the 9.2% high recorded in financial year 2023-24.

Asia’s third-largest economy benefitted from strong farm activity, steady public spending and improved rural demand in the last financial year, even as manufacturing and new investments by private companies remained weak.

While rural growth has improved on account of a strong winter harvest, it is not nearly enough to offset continuing weakness in urban consumption, which has flagged due to high unemployment and lower wages.

India’s growth engine remains heavily dependent on the government’s infrastructure spending on roads, ports and highways, in the absence of significant improvement in private investment.

Going forward, domestic growth should benefit from government’s income tax cuts announced in the federal budget, as well as “monetary easing, expectations of an above normal monsoon and lower food inflation”, Aditi Nayar, an economist with the ratings agency Icra, said.

But ongoing global uncertainties, including US President Donald Trump’s trade war, are expected to weigh on export demand.

India is currently negotiating a trade-agreement with the United States which is officially expected to conclude by fall. Trump slapped tariffs of up to 27% on Indian goods in April – and a 90-day pause on these ends on 9 July.

Economists expect GDP growth in the ongoing financial year 2025-26 to further slow to 6% on the back of these global slowdown worries which could delay new private capital spending on projects.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects global growth to drop to 2.8% in 2025 and 3% in 2026.

Data from Icra earlier showed private sector expenditure, as part of overall investments in India’s economy, fell to a 10-year low of 33% in the last financial year.

Net foreign direct investment (FDI) into India – at $0.35bn in 2024-25 – also fell to the lowest level in two decades, as rising outward foreign investment and repatriations by Indian companies, neutralised inward investment.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been attempting to position India as a manufacturing hub for global companies.

While companies like Apple indicated recently that it was shifting most of its production of iPhones headed to the US from China to India, trade analysts have cautioned that such manufacturing investment could yet stall, with the US and China agreeing to roll-back tariffs earlier this month.

Elon Musk’s time in the Trump administration is coming to an end after a tempestuous 129 days in which the world’s richest man took an axe to government spending – stirring ample controversy along the way.

Earlier this week, the South African-born billionaire, on his social media platform, X, thanked President Trump for his time at the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge.

Trump announced he will host a news conference in the Oval Office on Friday with Musk, writing: “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way.”

While Musk’s time in government lasted little more than four months, his work with Doge upended the federal government and had an impact not just in the halls of power in Washington – but around the world.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways Musk has left a mark.

Musk took a job with the Trump White House with one mission: to cut spending from the government as much as possible.

He began with an initial target of “at least $2 trillion”, which then shifted to $1tn and ultimately $150bn.

To date, Doge claims to have saved $175bn through a combination of asset sales, lease and grant cancellations, “fraud and improper payment deletion”, regulatory savings and a 260,000-person reduction from the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce.

A BBC analysis of those figures, however, found that evidence is sometimes lacking.

This mission has at times caused both chaos and controversy, including some instances in which federal judges halted mass firings and ordered employees reinstated.

In other instances, the administration has been forced to backtrack on firings.

In one notable instance in February, the administration stopped the firing of hundreds of federal employees working at the National Nuclear Security Administration, including some with sensitive jobs related to the US nuclear arsenal.

Musk himself repeatedly acknowledged that mass firings would inevitably include mistakes.

“We will make mistakes,” he said in February, after his department mistook a region of Mozambique for Hamas-controlled Gaza while cutting an aid programme. “But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

Doge’s efforts to access data also garnered controversy, particularly the department’s push for access to sensitive treasury department systems that control the private information of millions of Americans.

Polls show that cuts to government spending remain popular with many Americans – even if Musk’s personal popularity has waned.

The presence of Musk – an unelected “special government employee” with companies that count the US government as customers – in Trump’s White House has also raised eyebrows, prompting questions about potential conflicts of interest.

His corporate empire includes large companies that do business with US and foreign governments. SpaceX has $22 billion in US government contracts, according to the company’s chief executive.

Some Democrats also accused Musk of taking advantage of his position to drum up business abroad for his satellite internet services firm, Starlink.

The White House was accused of helping Musk’s businesses by showcasing vehicles made by Tesla – his embattled car company – on the White House lawn in March.

Musk and Trump have both shrugged off any suggestion that his work with the government is conflicted or ethically problematic.

Around the world, Musk’s work with Doge was most felt after the vast majority – over 80% – of the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) programmes were eliminated following a six-week review by Doge. The rest were absorbed by the State Department.

The Musk and Doge-led cuts formed part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to bring overseas spending closer in line with its “America First” approach.

The cuts to the agency – tasked with work such as famine detection, vaccinations and food aid in conflict areas – quickly had an impact on projects including communal kitchens in war-torn Sudan, scholarships for young Afghan women who fled the Taliban and clinics for transgender people in India.

USAID also was a crucial instrument of US “soft power” around the world, leading some detractors pointing to its elimination as a sign of waning American influence on the global stage.

While Musk – and Trump – have for years been accused by detractors of spreading baseless conspiracy theories, Musk’s presence in the White House starkly highlighted how misinformation has crept into discourse at the highest levels of the US government.

For example, Musk spread an unfounded internet theory that US gold reserves had quietly been stolen from Fort Knox in Kentucky. At one point, he floated the idea of livestreaming a visit there to ensure the gold was secured.

• Fact-checking Trump’s Oval Office confrontation with Ramaphosa

More recently, Musk spread widely discredited rumours that the white Afrikaner population of South Africa is facing “genocide” in their home country.

Those rumours found their way into the Oval Office earlier in May, when a meeting aimed at soothing tensions between the US and South Africa took a drastic twist after Trump presented South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with videos and articles he said were evidence of crimes against Afrikaners.

Musk’s work in government also showed that, despite public pledges of unity, there are tensions within the “Trump 2.0” administration.

While Trump publicly – and repeatedly – backed the work of Musk and Doge, Musk’s tenure was marked by reports of tension between him and members of the cabinet who felt Doge cuts were impacting their agencies.

“They have a lot of respect for Elon and that he’s doing this, and some disagree a little bit,” Trump acknowledged in a February cabinet meeting. “If they aren’t, I want them to speak up.”

At one point, he was asked whether any cabinet members had expressed dissatisfaction with Musk and turned to the room to ask them. No one spoke.

The announcement of Musk’s departure also came the same day that CBS – the BBC’s US partner – publicised part of an interview during which Musk said he was “disappointed” by Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill. The bill includes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks and a pledge to increase defence spending.

Musk said the bill “undermines” the work of Doge to cut spending – reflecting larger tensions within the Republican Party over the path forward.

Russia has continued to make billions from fossil fuel exports to the West, data shows, helping to finance its full-scale invasion of Ukraine – now in its fourth year.

Since the start of that invasion in February 2022, Russia has made more than three times as much money by exporting hydrocarbons than Ukraine has received in aid allocated by its allies.

Data analysed by the BBC show that Ukraine’s Western allies have paid Russia more for its hydrocarbons than they have given Ukraine in aid.

Campaigners say governments in Europe and North America need to do more to stop Russian oil and gas from fuelling the war with Ukraine.

Proceeds made from selling oil and gas are key to keeping Russia’s war machine going.

Oil and gas account for almost a third of Russia’s state revenue and more than 60% of its exports.

In the wake of the February 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s allies imposed sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. The US and UK banned Russian oil and gas, while the EU banned Russian seaborne crude imports, but not gas.

Despite this, by 29 May, Russia had made more than €883bn ($973bn; £740bn) in revenue from fossil fuel exports since the start of the full-scale invasion, including €228bn from the sanctioning countries, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

The lion’s share of that amount, €209bn, came from EU member states.

EU states continued importing pipeline gas directly from Russia until Ukraine cut the transit in January 2025, and Russian crude oil is still piped to Hungary and Slovakia.

Russian gas is still piped to Europe in increasing quantities via Turkey: CREA’s data shows that its volume rose by 26.77% in January and February 2025 over the same period in 2024.

Hungary and Slovakia are also still receiving Russian pipeline gas via Turkey.

Despite the West’s efforts, in 2024 Russian revenues from fossil fuels fell by a mere 5% compared with 2023, along with a similar 6% drop in the volumes of exports, according to CREA. Last year also saw a 6% increase in Russian revenues from crude oil exports, and a 9% year-on-year increase in revenues from pipeline gas.

Russian estimates say gas exports to Europe rose by up to 20% in 2024, with liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports reaching record levels. Currently, half of Russia’s LNG exports go the EU, CREA says.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, says the alliance has not imposed “the strongest sanctions” on Russian oil and gas because some member states fear an escalation in the conflict and because buying them is “cheaper in the short term”.

LNG imports have not been included in the latest, 17th package of sanctions on Russia approved by the EU, but it has adopted a road map towards ending all Russian gas imports by the end of 2027.

Data shows that money made by Russia from selling fossil fuels has consistently surpassed the amount of aid Ukraine receives from its allies.

The thirst for fuel can get in the way of the West’s efforts to limit Russia’s ability to fund its war.

Mai Rosner, a senior campaigner from the pressure group Global Witness, says many Western policymakers fear that cutting imports of Russian fuels will lead to higher energy prices.

“There’s no real desire in many governments to actually limit Russia’s ability to produce and sell oil. There is way too much fear about what that would mean for global energy markets. There’s a line drawn under where energy markets would be too undermined or too thrown off kilter,” she told the BBC.

In addition to direct sales, some of the oil exported by Russia ends up in the West after being processed into fuel products in third countries via what is known as “the refining loophole”. Sometimes it gets diluted with crude from other countries, too.

CREA says it has identified three “laundromat refineries” in Turkey and three in India processing Russian crude and selling the resulting fuel on to sanctioning countries. It says they have used €6.1bn worth of Russian crude to make products for sanctioning countries.

India’s petroleum ministry criticised CREA’s report as “a deceptive effort to tarnish India’s image”.

“[These countries] know that sanctioning countries are willing to accept this. This is a loophole. It’s entirely legal. Everyone’s aware of it, but nobody is doing much to actually tackle it in a big way,” says Vaibhav Raghunandan, an analyst at CREA.

Campaigners and experts argue that Western governments have the tools and means available to stem the flow of oil and gas revenue into the Kremlin’s coffers.

According to former Russian deputy energy minister Vladimir Milov, who is now a diehard opponent of Vladimir Putin, sanctions imposed on trade in Russian hydrocarbons should be better enforced – particularly the oil price cap adopted by the G7 group of nations, which Mr Milov says “is not working“.

He is fearful, though, that the US government shake-up launched by President Donald Trump will hamper agencies such as the US Treasury or the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which are key for sanctions enforcement.

Another avenue is continued pressure on Russia’s “shadow fleet” of tankers involved in dodging the sanctions.

“That is a complex surgery operation. You need to periodically release batches of new sanctioned vessels, shell companies, traders, insurers etc. every several weeks,” Mr Milov says. According to him, this is an area where Western governments have been much more effective, particularly with the introduction of new sanctions by Joe Biden’s outgoing administration in January 2025.

Mai says that banning Russian LNG exports to Europe and closing the refining loophole in Western jurisdictions would be “important steps in finishing the decoupling of the West from Russian hydrocarbons”.

According to Mr Raghunandan from CREA, it would be relatively easy for the EU to give up Russian LNG imports.

“Fifty percent of their LNG exports are directed towards the European Union, and only 5% of the EU’s total [LNG] gas consumption in 2024 was from Russia. So if the EU decides to completely cut off Russian gas, it’s going to hurt Russia way more then it’s going to hurt consumers in the European Union,” he told the BBC.

Experts interviewed by the BBC have dismissed Donald Trump’s idea that the war with Ukraine will end if Opec brings oil prices down.

“People in Moscow are laughing at this idea, because the party which will suffer the most… is the American shale oil industry, the least cost-competitive oil industry in the world,” Mr Milov told the BBC.

Mr Raghunandan says that Russia’s cost of producing crude is also lower than in Opec countries like Saudi Arabia, so they would be hurt by lower oil prices before Russia.

“There is no way that Saudi Arabia is going to agree to that. This has been tried before. This has led to conflict between Saudi Arabia and the US,” he says.

Ms Rosner says there are both moral and practical issues with the West buying Russian hydrocarbons while supporting Ukraine.

“We now have a situation in which we are funding the aggressor in a war that we’re condemning and also funding the resistance to the war,” she says. “This dependence on fossil fuels means that we are really at the whims of energy markets, global energy producers and hostile dictators.”

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Xiao Chen turned up at the US Consulate in Shanghai on Thursday morning, hours after Washington announced that it would “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students.

The 22-year-old had a visa appointment: she was headed to Michigan in the autumn to study communications.

After a “pleasant” conversation, she was told her application had been rejected. She was not given a reason.

“I feel like a drifting duckweed tossed in wind and storm,” she said, using a common Chinese expression to describe feeling both uncertain and helpless.

She had been hopeful because she already had the acceptance letter. And she thought she had narrowly escaped the bombshells in recent days.

First, Donald Trump’s administration moved to end Harvard University’s ability to enrol international students, a move that has since been blocked in court. And then it said it had stopped visa appointments for all foreign students.

But now, Chen is ready for plan B. “If I can’t get the visa eventually, I’ll probably take a gap year. Then I’ll wait to see if things will get better next year.”

A valid visa may still not be enough, she adds, because students with visas could be “stopped at the airport and deported”.

“It’s bad for every Chinese student. The only difference is how bad.”

It has been a bleak week for international students in the US – and perhaps even harder for the 280,000 or so Chinese students who would have noticed that their country has been singled out.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Harvard of “co-ordinating with the Chinese Communist Party”.

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

That could hit a wide swathe of them given membership of the Communist Party is common among officials, entrepreneurs, business people and even artists and celebrities in China.

Beijing has called it a “politically motivated and discriminatory action”, and its foreign ministry has lodged a formal protest.

There was a time when China sent the highest number of foreign students to American campuses. But those numbers slipped as the relationship between the two countries soured.

A more powerful and increasingly assertive Beijing is now clashing with Washington for supremacy in just about everything, from trade to tech.

Trump’s first term had already spelled trouble for Chinese students. He signed an order in 2020 barring Chinese students and researchers with ties to Beijing’s military from obtaining US visas.

That order remained in place during President Joe Biden’s term. Washington never clarified what constitutes “ties” to the military, so many students had their visas revoked or were turned away at US borders, sometimes without a proper explanation.

One of them, who did not wish to be named, said his visa was cancelled by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) when he landed in Boston in August 2023.

He had been accepted into a post-doctoral program at Harvard University. He was going to study regenerative medicine with a focus on breast cancer, and had done his master’s degree from a military-affiliated research institution in China.

He said he was not a member of the Communist Party and his research had nothing to do with the military.

“They asked me what the relationship was between my research and China’s defence affairs,” he told the BBC then. “I said, how could breast cancer have anything to do with national defence? If you know, please tell me.”

He believes he never stood a chance because the officials had already made up their minds. He recalled one of them asking: “Did Xi Jinping buy your suitcase for you?”

What was surprising, or even shocking then, slowly turned normal as more and more Chinese students struggled to secure visas or admissions to study science and technology in US universities.

Mr Cao, a psychology major whose research involves neuroscience, has spent the past school year applying for PhD programs in the US.

He had graduated from top-tier universities – credentials that could send him to an Ivy League school. But of the more than 10 universities he applied to, only one extended an offer.

Trump’s cuts to biomedical research didn’t help, but the mistrust surrounding Chinese researchers was also a factor. Allegations and rumours of espionage, especially in sensitive subjects, have loomed over Chinese nationals at US universities in recent years, even derailing some careers.

“One of the professors even told me, ‘We rarely give offers to Chinese students these days, so I cannot give you an interview,” Mr Cao told the BBC in February.

“I feel like I am just a grain of sand under the wheel of time. There is nothing I can do.”

For those who did graduate from US colleges, returning home to China has not been easy either.

They used to be lauded as a bridge to the rest of the world. Now, they find that their once-coveted degrees don’t draw the same reaction.

Chen Jian, who did not want to use his real name, said he quickly realised that his undergraduate degree from a US college had become an obstacle.

When he first came back in 2020, he interned at a state-owned bank and asked a supervisor if there was a chance to stay on.

The supervisor didn’t say it outright, but Chen got the message: “Employees should have local degrees. People like me (with overseas degrees) won’t even get a response.”

He later realised that “there really weren’t any colleagues with overseas undergraduate background in the department”.

He went back to the US and did his master’s at Johns Hopkins University, and now works at Chinese tech giant Baidu.

But despite the degree from a prestigious American university, Mr Chen does not feel he has an edge because of the stiff competition from graduates in China.

What also has not helped is the suspicion around foreign graduates. Beijing has ramped up warnings of foreign spies, telling civilians to be on the lookout for suspicious figures.

In April, prominent Chinese businesswoman Dong Mingzhu told shareholders in a closed-door meeting that her company, home appliance maker Gree Electric, will “never” recruit Chinese people educated overseas “because among them are spies”.

“I don’t know who is and who isn’t,” Ms Dong said, in comments that were leaked and went viral online.

Days later, the CIA released promotional videos encouraging Chinese officials dissatisfied with the government to become spies and provide classified information. “Your destiny is in your own hands,” the video said.

The suspicion of foreigners as the US and China pull further away from each other is a surprising turn for many Chinese people who remember growing up in a very different country.

Zhang Ni, who also did not want to use her real name, says she was “very shocked” by Ms Dong’s remarks.

The 24-year-old is a recent journalism graduate from Columbia University in New York. She says she “doesn’t care about working at Gree”, but what surprised her was the shift in attitudes.

That so many Chinese companies “don’t like anything that might be associated with the international” is a huge contrast from what Ms Zhang grew up with – a childhood “filled with [conversations centred on] the Olympics and World Expo”.

“Whenever we saw foreigners, my mom would push me to go talk to them to practice my English,” she says.

That willingness to exchange ideas and learn from the outside world appears to be waning in China, according to many.

And America, once a place that drew so many young Chinese people, is no longer that welcoming.

Looking back, Ms Zhang can’t help but recall a joke her friend made at a farewell dinner before she left for the US.

Then a flippant comment, it now sums up the fear in both Washington and Beijing: “Don’t become a spy.”

More than a thousand Indians have “come back or [been] deported” from the United States since January, India’s foreign ministry has said.

Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that around 62% of them came on commercial flights, without providing more details.

This comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s campaign against undocumented migrants to the US. Trump had earlier said that India “will do what’s right” on the deportation of illegal migrants.

In February, the US had deported more than hundred Indians on a US military flight, with reports saying some of them were brought back shackled.

“We have close cooperation between India and the United States on migration issues,” Mr Jaiswal said during the ministry’s weekly briefing, adding that India verifies nationalities before “we take them back”.

In total, the US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered the country illegally.

Earlier this month, the US Embassy in India issued a warning that overstaying in the US could lead to deportation or a permanent ban on entry in the country, even for those who entered legally.

Mr Jaiswal also spoke about the Trump administration’s updated policy on student visas which is likely to impact Indian students planning to enrol in US universities.

The US had announced on Thursday that it had halted the scheduling of new visa interviews for foreign students as it considered expanding the screening of their social media activities.

“While we note that issuance of a visa is a sovereign function, we hope that the application of Indian students will be considered on merit, and they will be able to join their academic programs on time,” Mr Jaiswal said.

Mr Jaiswal also said that 330,000 Indians students had gone to the US for studies in 2023-24 – which makes India the largest source of international students in the country.

On Thursday, expanding its new visa policy, the US further announced that it was working to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields”.