President Donald Trump has announced the US will double its current tariff rate on steel and aluminium imports from 25% to 50%, starting on Wednesday.

Speaking at a rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Trump said the move would help boost the local steel industry and national supply, while reducing reliance on China.

Trump also said that $14bn would be invested in the area’s steel production through a partnership between US Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel, though he later told reporters he had yet to see or approve the final deal.

The announcement is the latest turn in Trump’s rollercoaster approach to tariffs since re-entering office in January.

“There will be no layoffs and no outsourcing whatsoever, and every US steelworker will soon receive a well deserved $5,000 bonus,” Trump told the crowd, filled with steelworkers, to raucous applause.

One of the major concerns from steelworkers about the US-Japan trade deal was how Japan would honour the workers’ union contract which regulates pay and hiring.

Trump began his remarks by saying he had “saved” US Steel, America’s biggest steel manufacturer, located in Pittsburgh, with the 25% tariffs he implemented during his first term as president in 2018.

Both sales and profits at US Steel have been falling in recent years.

Trump touted the increase to 50% as a way to ensure US Steel’s survival.

“At 50%, they can no longer get over the fence,” he said. “We are once again going to put Pennsylvania steel into the backbone of America, like never before.”

US steel manufacturing has been declining in recent years, and China, India and Japan have pulled ahead as the world’s top producers. Roughly a quarter of all steel used in the US is imported, and the country’s reliance on Mexican and Canadian steel has angered Trump.

The announcement comes amid a court battle over the legality of some of Trump’s global tariffs, which an appeals court has allowed to continue after the Court of International Trade ordered the administration to halt the taxes.

His tariffs on steel and aluminium were untouched by the lawsuit.

“It is a good day for steelworkers,” JoJo Burgess, a member of the local United Steelworkers union who was at Trump’s rally, told the BBC.

Mr Burgess, who is also the city mayor of nearby Washington, Pennsylvania, expressed optimism over the reported details of the partnership with Nippon Steel, saying he hoped it would help breed a new generation of steel workers in the area.

He recalled “making a lot of money” in the years after Trump instituted steel tariffs in his first term.

Although Burgess would not label himself a Trump supporter, and says he has only voted for Democratic nominees for president in the last two decades, he said: “I’m never going to disagree with something that’s going to level the playing field for American manufacturing.”

But so far the impacts of Trump’s tariffs have largely led to global economic chaos. Global trade and markets have been upended and cracks have formed – or widened – in relations between the US and other countries, including some of its closest partners.

The levies have strained relations between China and the US, the world’s two biggest global economies, and launched the countries into a tit-for-tat trade battle.

• ANALYSIS: Tariffs court fight threatens Trump’s power to wield his favourite economic weapon
• EXPLAINER: Trump tariffs get to stay in place for now. What happens next?
• China hits back after Trump claims it is ‘violating’ tariff truce

On Friday, without providing details, Trump accused China of violating a truce they had reached over tariffs earlier this month over talks in Geneva.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer later clarified that China had not been removing non-tariff barriers as agreed under the deal.

China then shot back with its own accusations of US wrongdoing. Beijing’s response on Friday did not address the US claims directly but urged the US to “cease discriminatory restrictions against China”.

China is the world’s largest manufacturer of steel, responsible for more than half of global steel production, according to World Steel Association statistics from 2022.

“If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country. You don’t have a country, you can’t make a military. What are we going to do? Say, ‘Let’s go to China to get our steel from the army tanks,'” Trump quipped at the Pittsburgh rally on Friday.

Trump’s roughly hour-long, wide-ranging rally speech hinted at the deal he said he had made with Japan’s Nippon Steel but he did not offer any new details. Both companies have not confirmed any deal was completed.

US Steel agreed in December 2023 to be taken over by Nippon in a deal valued at $15bn before it was eventually blocked by President Joe Biden on national security grounds.

While campaigning for president, Trump had said he was “totally against” US Steel being taken over by a “foreign company”.

He also said he would “block it instantaneously”, describing the takeover by Nippon as “so terrible”.

Under the reported new “partnership”, it is not clear who would own US Steel or who would operate the 124-year-old American business.

White House officials said Trump had convinced Nippon to boost its investment in the US and give the government key say over the operations of the US factories.

According to US media, Japan plans to invest $14bn over 14 months.

Other reported details include that the companies had said they would maintain ownership of US steel in the US, with US citizens on the board and in leadership positions; pledged not to cut production for 10 years; and agreed to give the government the right to veto potential production cuts after that period.

For many, Saturdays are something to look forward to – relaxed times, enjoyed with family and friends. But Elizabeth Young “dreads” them. It’s a weekly reminder of her daughter Jade’s violent murder at Westfield Bondi Junction.

“On a lovely autumn afternoon, to learn your daughter is dead, stabbed in broad daylight, killed amidst fellow unsuspecting shoppers… [when she] was living, breathing, just an hour ago… it’s the stuff of nightmares, of a parallel universe,” Elizabeth told an inquiry into the mass killing this week.

“The moment [the attacker] casually plunged that knife into Jade, our ordinary lives were shattered.”

Her pain was echoed by families of the other victims who gave emotional testimonies on the final day of a five-week coronial inquest into the fatal stabbings on 13 April last year.

The inquiry sought to understand how a 40-year-old Queensland man with a long history of mental illness was able to walk into the popular Sydney shopping centre on a busy Saturday afternoon and kill six people, injuring 10 others including a nine-month-old baby.

The court heard hours of evidence from dozens of witnesses – doctors, survivors, victims’ families, police – in a bid to find out how, or if, Australia can prevent a such a tragedy happening again.

“It seems to me that my daughter and five others were killed by the cumulative failures of numbers of people within a whole series of fallible systems,” Elizabeth told New South Wales (NSW) Coroners Court.

It was a mild, sparkling afternoon – the first day of school holidays – when Joel Cauchi walked into the sprawling shopping centre, just minutes from Australia’s most famous beach.

Just before 15:33 local time (GMT), Cauchi took a 30cm knife from his backpack and stabbed to death his first victim, 25-year-old Dawn Singleton.

Within three minutes, he had fatally attacked five others – Yixuan Cheng, 27; Jade Young, 47, Ashlee Good, 38; Faraz Tahir, 30; and Pikria Darchia, 55. Cauchi also injured 10 others including Good’s infant daughter.

At 15:38, five minutes after his rampage started, Cauchi was shot dead by police officer Amy Scott, who had been on duty nearby and arrived at the centre about a minute earlier.

As news outlets reported on the killings, Cauchi’s parents recognised their son on TV and called the police to alert them about his decades-long struggle with serious mental health problems.

Jade Young’s family was also confronted by images of her on TV, describing to the inquest the horror of seeing video which showed her “lifeless body being worked on”. Similarly, Julie Singleton, whose daughter Dawn was killed while standing in a line at a bakery, heard her daughter named as a victim on the radio before her body had even been formally identified and other relatives informed.

The scenes at Bondi sent shockwaves across the nation, where mass murder is rare, and prompted a rush of anger and fear from women in particular. All except two of the 16 victims were female, including five of the six people who died.

A key focus of the inquest was to scrutinise the multiple interactions Cauchi had with police and mental health professionals in the months and years leading up to the attacks.

The inquest heard that Cauchi was once a bright young man with a promising life ahead of him. His family say he was a gifted student, and had attended a private school on scholarship before topping his class at university.

At the age of 17, in 2001, Cauchi was diagnosed with schizophrenia and soon started taking medication for his condition.

After a decade of managing it in the public health system, Cauchi started regular sessions with psychiatrist Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack in his hometown of Toowoomba in 2012.

In 2015 he complained about the medication side effects, so Dr Boros-Lavack started to gradually reduce his dosage of clozapine – used for treatment-resistant schizophrenia – after seeking a second opinion from another psychiatrist, the inquest heard.

She weaned him off clozapine entirely in 2018 and Cauchi also stopped taking medication to treat his obsessive-compulsive disorder the year after, she said.

In 2019, for the first time in about 15 years, Cauchi was no longer on antipsychotic medications. No second opinion on completely stopping either drug was sought by Dr Boros-Lavack, she admitted under questioning.

The inquest heard from medical professionals who said that in most cases, patients coming off antipsychotic medications transition to another one, rather than ceasing treatment altogether.

Within months, Cauchi’s mum contacted his psychiatrist with concerns about her son’s mental state after finding notes showing he believed he was “under satanic control”. Around the same time, Cauchi developed what Dr Boros-Lavack told the inquest was “a compulsive interest in porn”. She wrote a prescription but told the inquest it was up to Cauchi to decide if he would start taking the medication again.

In 2020, Cauchi left his family home, moved to Brisbane and stopped seeing Dr Boros-Lavack.

At this time, after almost two decades of treatment, Cauchi had no regular psychiatrist, was not on any medications to treat his schizophrenia and had no family living nearby.

The inquest heard he began seeking a gun licence, contacting three Brisbane doctors for a medical certificate to support his application. They either didn’t request access to his medical file or weren’t given his whole history by Dr Boros-Lavack, who said if they needed more information they could have asked her for it. The third doctor gave Cauchi the clearance he was after, but he never applied for a gun, the court was told.

Meanwhile Cauchi was increasingly coming into contact with police. After moving to Brisbane, he was pulled over three times for driving erratically. In 2021, officers were called to Cauchi’s unit in Brisbane after residents heard a man screaming and banging sounds.

In 2022, Cauchi was reported to police after calling a girl’s school to ask if he could come and watch the students swim and play sports. Officers tried to call Cauchi but weren’t able to reach him.

In January 2023, Cauchi had moved back in with his parents in Toowoomba and called police to complain that his father had stolen his collection of “pigging knives”. At this time, his mother raised concerns with the officers, saying he should be back on medication.

Authorities can’t detain people for mental health reasons unless they are a risk to themselves and as the officers had assessed Cauchi did not meet that description, they left, the court heard.

After the call-out, one of the attending police officers sent an email to an internal police mental health coordinator, requesting they follow up on Cauchi. However, the email was overlooked due to understaffing, the inquest was told.

Months later, police in Sydney found Cauchi sleeping rough near a road after being called by a concerned passerby.

By 2024 Cauchi’s mental health had deteriorated, he was homeless, and isolated from his family.

The inquest looked closely at Cauchi’s mental health treatment in Queensland, with a panel of five psychiatrists tasked with reviewing it.

They found that Dr Boros-Lavack had missed opportunities to put him back on anti-psychotic medication, one member of the panel saying she had “not taken seriously enough” the concerns from Cauchi’s mother in late-2019.

The panel also gave evidence at the inquest that Cauchi was “floridly psychotic” – in the active part of a psychotic episode – when he walked into the shopping centre.

When questioned by the lawyer assisting the coroner, Dr Boros-Lavack stressed: “I did not fail in my care of Joel.”

She had earlier told the inquest she believed Cauchi was not psychotic during the attack and that medication would not have prevented the tragedy.

Dr Boros-Lavack said the attacks may have been “due to his sexual frustration, pornography and hatred towards women”.

But the next day, she withdrew that evidence, saying it was simply “conjecture” and she was not in a position to assess Cauchi’s mental state, having not treated him since 2019.

However the inquest is investigating whether Cauchi targeted specific individuals or groups.

For Peter Young, the brother of Jade, the answer seemed clear. “Fuelled by his frustration with not finding a ‘nice’ girl to marry”, his “rapid hunt found 16 victims, 14 of which were women,” he told the inquest.

The NSW Police Commissioner in the days after the attack said it was “obvious” to detectives that the offender had focussed on women.

However, during the inquest, the homicide squad’s Andrew Paul Marks said he did not believe there was evidence that Cauchi had specifically targeted women.

The inquiry also heard about a number of failings or near misses in the way security, police, paramedics and the media responded to the attack.

It was told that recruitment and training pressures for the security provider meant that the centre’s control room operator was “not match fit” for the role. At the exact moment when Cauchi stabbed his first victim, the room was unattended as she was on a toilet break.

Security guard Faraz Tahir, the sole male victim of the stabbings, was working his first day on the job when he was killing trying to stop Cauchi, raising questions over the powers and protection given to personnel like him.

His brother, Muzafar, told the inquest how Faraz died “with honour as a hero” and also acknowledged that Cauchi’s parents had lost their son: “We know that this tragedy is not their fault.”

The contractor responsible for security at the shopping centre has since updated its training and policies, as well as introducing stab-proof vests for guards.

Several families criticised media coverage in the wake of the attack, telling the inquiry they hoped the industry would reflect on how they should report sensitive stories so as not to further traumatise those affected.

After weeks of evidence, the inquest was adjourned on Thursday with NSW state coroner Teresa O’Sullivan expected to deliver her recommendations by the end of the year.

At the start of the inquest, O’Sullivan said the hearings weren’t about who was to blame for the attacks, but rather to “identify potential opportunities for reform or improvement to enable such events to be avoided in the future”.

“I want the families to know their loved ones will not be lost in this process.”

Elizabeth Young, though, told the court, for her, “nothing good” will come from the inquest.

“At 74, I have lost my way in life,” she said, describing the crippling impact of the killings.

But she said the action the country needed to take was already obvious to her.

“My daughter was murdered by an unmedicated, chronic schizophrenic… who had in his possession knives designed for killing.

“[This is] another cry out to an Australia that doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that what happened… is essentially the catastrophic consequence of years of neglect of, and within, our mental health systems.”

France’s President Emmanuel Macron warned the US and Europe risked losing their credibility and being accused of “double standards” if they do not resolve the wars in Ukraine and Gaza soon.

He also appealed to Asian countries to build a new alliance with Europe to ensure they do not become “collateral damage” in the struggle for power between the US and China.

Macron was speaking at the Shangri-la Dialogue, an annual high-level Asia defence summit held in Singapore.

Among the guests listening were US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as top military officials from the region.

Macron pointed out that if Russia could take Ukrainian territory “without any restrictions, without any constraints… what could happen in Taiwan? What will you do the day something happens in the Philippines?”

“What is at stake in Ukraine is our common credibility, that we are still able to preserve territorial integrity and sovereignty of people,” he said. “No double standards.”

Many in Asia worry of instability in the region should China attempt to forcibly “reunify” with Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing claims as part of its territory. China has also increasingly clashed with the Philippines over competing claims in the South China Sea.

Macron later answered a question posed by the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner on Europe’s military role in Asia while a full-scale war was still raging on the continent.

“If both the US and Europeans are unable to fix in the short term the Ukrainian situation, I think the credibility of both the US and Europeans pretending to fix any crisis in this region would be very low,” the French leader said.

US President Donald Trump has put increasing pressure on both Russia and Ukraine’s leaders to end the war, and has appeared to give Vladimir Putin a two-week deadline. Trump has also previously berated Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and accused him of being “not ready for peace”.

Macron also made his point about double standards on the war in Gaza, acknowledging there was a perception the West has given a “free pass” to Israel.

He stressed the importance of working towards a ceasefire and mutual recognition of a Palestinian state, saying: “If we abandon Gaza, if we consider there is a free pass for Israel, even if we do condemn the terrorist attacks, we kill our own credibility in the rest of the world.”

In recent weeks, European leaders have criticised Israel’s attacks for exacerbating the increasingly desperate humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Macron has moved closer to signalling recognition of a Palestinian state. Next month, France will co-host with Saudi Arabia a conference at the UN aimed at laying out a roadmap for a two-state solution.

He has been fiercely criticised by Israel, with the foreign ministry on Friday saying: “Instead of applying pressure on the jihadist terrorists, Macron wants to reward them with a Palestinian state.”

Last week, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also launched a blistering attack on Macron and the leaders of Canada and the UK, accusing them of effectively siding with Hamas and being “on the wrong side of humanity”.

Meanwhile the US has worked with Israel to table a ceasefire proposal to Hamas, while creating a much-criticised aid distribution model in Gaza.

Macron also used his speech on Friday to sell his vision of “strategic autonomy”, where countries protect their interests while also working closely together to uphold a rules-based global order not dominated by superpowers.

He touted France as an example of being friends with both the US and China while guarding its own sovereignty, and said this model could form the basis of a new alliance between Europe and Asia.

“We want to co-operate but we don’t want to depend… we don’t want to be instructed on a daily basis on what is allowed, what is not allowed and how our life can change because of a decision by a single person,” he said, in what appeared to be a veiled reference to Trump or Chinese President Xi Jinping.

He also made references to Trump’s global tariffs and allies’ uncertainty of the US’s security commitments, saying: “We cannot just remain seated and say… what do we do with tariffs, okay we are not so sure that we have the full-fledged guarantee in the existing alliance, what do we do?”

“We want to act, we want to preserve our stability and our peace and our prosperity,” he said, calling for a “positive new alliance between Europe and Asia” where they would ensure “our countries are not collateral damage of the imbalances linked to the choices made by the superpowers”.

He noted that both Europe and Asia’s challenges were increasingly intertwined, and referenced the Ukraine war again where North Korea has been aiding Russia’s efforts with thousands of its troops.

Macron said that in the past he had objected to the Western alliance Nato having a role in Asia, “because I don’t want to be involved with someone else’s strategic rivalry”.

“But what’s happening with North Korea being present alongside Russia on European soil is a big question for all of us,” he said.

“So this is why if China doesn’t want Nato involved in South-East Asia or Asia, they should prevent clearly [North Korea] from being engaged on European soil.”

Mathieu Duchatel, director of international studies at the Paris-based think tank Institut Montaigne, said Macron’s comments on credibility had “implied criticism of the US’s Middle East policy, and a direct call on the US to adjust its diplomacy towards Russia”.

Observers agree China would likely be angered by Macron’s speech, with Dr Duchatel noting the French leader’s comments on Taiwan were “the furthest he has gone” on the issue.

Some parts of Asia may welcome Macron’s message on strategic autonomy given their anxieties about choosing between the US and China, said Andrew Small, senior fellow of the Asia-Pacific programme of Washington-based think tank GMF.

“His argument is that most of the rest of the world does not want to be stuck with this dichotomy and wants to hold together some version of global order – that’s what a number of states in Asia would agree,” he said.

Among several European and Asian states, Dr Small said, there was “genuine concern about how China will interpret a Russian victory” in Ukraine, while “the Trump administration takes a different view and is trying to make the case that there is no read across”.

He added that Macron’s mention of the recognition of a Palestinian state – on which France has been leading European efforts – was to signal “we are moving on this”.

Hundreds of thousands of people with advanced head and neck cancer could live longer without their cancer returning thanks to an immunotherapy drug, a clinical trial suggests.

This is the first sign of a breakthrough for patients with this difficult-to-treat cancer for 20 years, say scientists behind the research.

Laura Marston, 45, from Derbyshire, says she is “amazed she’s still here” after being given “dire” chances of survival following a diagnosis of advanced tongue cancer six years ago.

She received the immunotherapy before and after surgery, which researchers say helps the body learn to attack the cancer if it returns.

Cancers in the head and neck are notoriously difficult to treat and there’s been little change in the way patients are treated in two decades.

More than half those diagnosed with advanced head and neck cancers die within five years.

Laura was given only a 30% chance of surviving that long after her diagnosis in 2019, after having an ulcer on her tongue which wouldn’t go away.

The next step was major surgery to remove her tongue, as well as lymph nodes in her neck, and then she had to learn to talk and eat again.

“I was 39 and I was devastated,” she told BBC News.

As part of an international study into new ways to treat the cancer, involving experts from the Institute of Cancer Research in London, Laura was one of more than 350 patients given the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab before and after surgery to prime the body’s defences.

Prof Kevin Harrington, who led the trial in the UK, explains: “We give the immune system the chance to have a good look at the tumour to generate anti-tumour immunity and then, after removal of the tumour, we continue to amplify that immune response by giving the drug continually for up to a year.”

A similar number of patients diagnosed with similar cancers received the usual care offered. They all had advanced head and neck cancers in one area, that had not spread to the rest of the body.

The new approach showed positive results. It doubled the length of time patients were cancer free, on average, from around 2.5 years to five years.

After three years, patients given pembrolizumab had a 10% lower risk of their cancer returning elsewhere in the body.

Six years on, Laura is working full-time and says she’s “in a good place and doing really well”.

“It’s been phenomenal for me, because I’m here, able to talk to you.

“I wasn’t expected to come this far,” Laura says.

“My prognosis was quite dire.”

She had muscle taken from her left arm and placed into her mouth to fill the void left by her tongue. It has been a tough journey.

“Just having this amazing immunotherapy has given me my life back again.”

The researchers say the key to their results was giving patients the drug before surgery, which trains the body to hunt down and kill the cancer if it ever comes back.

Prof Harrington says immunotherapy “could change the world” for these patients.

“It significantly decreases the chance of cancer spreading around the body, at which point it’s incredibly difficult to treat,” he said.

About 12,800 new head and neck cancer cases are diagnosed in the UK every year.

The approach worked “particularly well” for some patients, but it was “really exciting” to see the treatment benefitting all the patients in the trial, Prof Harrington said. He added that it should now be made available on the NHS, .

The study findings are being presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting.

The trial, called Keynote, involved 192 hospitals in 24 countries, was led by Washington University Medical School in St Louis and funded by drug company MSD.

Listen to Jean read this article

The border between North and South Korea is swamped with layers of dense barbed-wire fencing and hundreds of guard posts. But dotted among them is something even more unusual: giant, green camouflaged speakers.

As I stood looking into the North one afternoon last month, one of the speakers began blasting South Korean pop songs interspersed with subversive messages. “When we travel abroad, it energises us”, a woman’s voice boomed out across the border – an obvious slight given North Koreans are not allowed to leave the country.

From the North Korean side, I could faintly hear military propaganda music, as its regime attempted to drown out the inflammatory broadcasts.

North and South Korea are technically still at war, and although it has been years since either side shelled the other, the two sides are fighting on a more subtle front: a war of information.

The South tries to get information into the North, and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un tries furiously to block it, as he attempts to shield his people from outside information.

North Korea is the only country in the world the internet has not penetrated. All TV channels, radio stations and newspapers are run by the state.

“The reason for this control is that so much of the mythology around the Kim family is made up. A lot of what they tell people is lies,” says Martyn Williams, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Center, and an expert in North Korean technology and information.

Expose those lies to enough people and the regime could come crumbling down, is how the thinking in South Korea goes.

The loudspeakers are one tool used by the South Korean government, but behind the scenes a more sophisticated underground movement has flourished.

A small number of broadcasters and non-profit organisations transmit information into the country in the dead of night on short and medium radio waves, so North Koreans can tune in to listen in secret.

Thousands of USB sticks and micro-SD cards are also smuggled over the border every month loaded with foreign information – among them, South Korean films, TV dramas, and pop songs, as well as news, all designed to challenge North Korean propaganda.

But now those working in the field fear that North Korea is gaining the upper hand.

Not only is Kim cracking down hard on those caught with foreign content, but the future of this work could be in jeopardy. Much of it is funded by the US government, and has been hit by US President Donald Trump’s recent aid cuts.

So where does this leave both sides in their longstanding information war?

Every month, a team at Unification Media Group (UMG), a South Korean non-profit organisation, sift through the latest news and entertainment offerings to put together playlists that they hope will resonate with those in the North.

They then load them onto devices, which are categorised according to how risky they are to view. On low-risk USBs are South Korean TV dramas and pop songs – recently they included a Netflix romance series When Life Give You Tangerines, and a hit from popular South Korean singer and rapper Jennie.

High-risk options include what the team calls “education programmes” – information to teach North Koreans about democracy and human rights, the content Kim is thought to fear the most.

The drives are then sent to the Chinese border, where UMG’s trusted partners carry them across the river into North Korea at huge risk.

South Korean TV dramas may seem innocuous, but they reveal much about ordinary life there – people living in high-rise apartments, driving fast cars and eating at upmarket restaurants. It highlights both their freedom and how North Korea is many years behind.

This challenges one of Kim’s biggest fabrications: that those in the South are poor and miserably oppressed.

“Some [people] tell us they cried while watching these dramas, and that they made them think about their own dreams for the very first time”, says Lee Kwang-baek, director of UMG.

It is difficult to know exactly how many people access the USBs, but testimonies from recent defectors seem to suggest the information is spreading and having an impact.

“Most recent North Korean defectors and refugees say it was foreign content that motivated them to risk their lives to escape”, says Sokeel Park, whose organisation Liberty in North Korea works to distribute this content.

There is no political opposition or known dissidents in North Korea, and gathering to protest is too dangerous – but Mr Park hopes some will be inspired to carry out individual acts of resistance.

Kang Gyuri, who is 24, grew up in North Korea, where she ran a fishing business. Then in late 2023, she fled to South Korea by boat.

Watching foreign TV shows partly inspired her to go, she says. “I felt so suffocated, and I suddenly had an urge to leave.“

When we met in a park on a sunny afternoon in Seoul last month, she reminisced about listening to radio broadcasts with her mum as a child. She got hold of her first K-drama when she was 10. Years later she learnt that USB sticks and SD cards were being smuggled into the country inside boxes of fruit.

The more she watched, the more she realised the government was lying to her. “I used to think it was normal that the state restricted us so much. I thought other countries lived with this control,” she explains. “But then I realised it was only in North Korea.”

Almost everyone she knew there watched South Korean TV shows and films. She and her friends would swap their USBs.

“We talked about the popular dramas and actors, and the K-pop idols we thought were good looking, like certain members of BTS.

“We’d also talk about how South Korea’s economy was so developed; we just couldn’t criticise the North Korean regime outright.”

The shows also influenced how she and her friends talked and dressed, she adds. “North Korea’s youth has changed rapidly.”

Kim Jong Un, all too aware of this risk to his regime, is fighting back.

During the pandemic, he built new electric fences along the border with China, making it more difficult for information to be smuggled in. And new laws introduced from 2020 have increased the punishments for people who are caught consuming and sharing foreign media. One stated that those who distribute the content could be imprisoned or executed.

This has had a chilling effect. “This media used to be available to buy in markets, people would openly sell it, but now you can only get it from people you trust,” says Mr Lee.

After the crackdown began Ms Kang and her friends became more cautious too. “We don’t talk to each other about this anymore, unless we’re really close, and even then we’re much more secretive,” she admits.

She says she is aware of more young people being executed for being caught with South Korean content.

Recently Kim has also cracked down on behaviour that could be associated with watching K-dramas. In 2023 he made it a crime for people to use South Korean phrases or speak in a South Korean accent.

Members of ‘youth crackdown squads’, patrol the streets, tasked with monitoring young people’s behaviour. Ms Kang recalls being stopped more often, before she escaped, and reprimanded for dressing and styling her hair like a South Korean.

The squads would confiscate her phone and read her text messages, she adds, to make sure she had not used any South Korean terms.

In late 2024, a North Korean mobile phone was smuggled out of the country by Daily NK, (Seoul-based media organisation UMG’s news service).

The phone had been programmed so that when a South Korean variant of a word is entered, it automatically vanishes, replaced with the North Korean equivalent – an Orwellian move.

“Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people”, says Mr Williams.

Following all these crackdown measures, he believes North Korea is now “starting to gain the upper hand” in this information war.

Following Donald Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year, funds were severed to a number of of aid organisations, including some working to inform North Koreans. He also suspended funds to two federally financed news services, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America (VOA), which had been broadcasting nightly into North Korea.

Trump accused VOA of being “radical” and anti-Trump”, while the White House said the move would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.

But Steve Herman, a former VOA bureau chief based in Seoul, argues: “This was one of the very few windows into the world the North Korean people had, and it has gone silent with no explanation.”

UMG is still waiting to find out whether their funding will be permanently cut.

Mr Park from Liberty in North Korea argues Trump has “incidentally” given Kim a helping hand, and calls the move “short-sighted”.

He argues that North Korea, with its expanding collection of nuclear weapons, poses a major security threat – and that given sanctions, diplomacy and military pressure have failed to convince Kim to denuclearise, information is the best remaining weapon.

“We’re not just trying to contain the threat of North Korea, we’re trying to solve it,” he argues. “To do that you need to change the nature of the country.

“If I was an American general I’d be saying ‘how much does this stuff cost, and actually that’s a pretty good use of our resources'”.

The question that remains is, who should fund this work. Some question why it has fallen almost entirely to the US.

One solution could be for South Korea to foot the bill – but the issue of North Korea is heavily politicised here.

The liberal opposition party tends to try to improve relations with Pyongyang, meaning funding information warfare is a no go. The party’s frontrunner in next week’s presidential election has already indicated he would turn off the loudspeakers if elected.

Yet Mr Park remains hopeful. “The good thing is that the North Korean government can’t go into people’s heads and take out the information that’s been building for years,” he points out.

And as technologies develop, he is confident that spreading information will get easier. “In the long run I really believe this is going to be the thing that changes North Korea”.

The masked and armed security contractor atop a dirt mound watches thousands of Palestinians who have been kettled into narrow lanes separated by fences below.

He makes a heart shape with his hands and the crowd responds – the fence begins to bend as they push against it.

This jubilant scene was filmed on Tuesday, the opening day of an aid distribution centre – a vital lifeline for Gazans who haven’t seen fresh supplies come into the strip for more than two months due to an Israeli blockade.

But by that afternoon, the scene was one of total chaos. Videos showed the distribution centre overrun by desperate civilians trampling over toppled barriers; people flinched as sounds of gunshots rang out.

This was the disorderly start to a controversial new aid distribution scheme operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly created body backed by the US and Israel.

GHF has been tasked with feeding desperately hungry Gazans. The UN said more than two million are at risk of starvation.

The foundation, which uses armed American security contractors, aims to bypass the UN as the main supplier of aid in Gaza. It has been roundly condemned and boycotted by aid agencies and the UN. But Israel has said an alternative to the existing aid system was needed to stop Hamas stealing aid, which the group denies doing.

To get a picture of the first few days of this new aid delivery system, BBC Verify has authenticated dozen of images at distribution sites, interviewed humanitarian and logistics experts, analysed Israeli aid transport data and official statements released by the GHF, and spoken with Gazans searching for supplies.

GHF said it aimed to feed one million Gazans in its first week of operations through four secure distribution sites.

A foundation spokesperson said on Friday, its fourth day of operations, that it had distributed two million meals. The BBC has not been able to verify this figure, which would be less than one meal per Gazan over the course of four days.

GHF did not respond to our inquiries about how it was tracking who had been receiving them.

In a video filmed at GHF’s northern site near Nuseirat on Thursday, Palestinians can be seen being running away from a perimeter fence after GHF contractors threw a projectile that exploded with a loud bang, a flash and smoke.

GHF in a statement said its personnel “encountered a tense and potentially dangerous crowd that refused to disperse”.

“To prevent escalation and ensure the safety of civilians and staff, non-lethal deterrents were deployed—including smoke and warning shots into the ground,” it said.

“These measures were effective”, it added, “and no injuries occurred.” BBC Verify cannot independently confirm this.

Later that evening, GHF warned Gazans via Facebook that it would shut down any site where looting occurred.

The GHF is not the only aid organisation facing serious challenges. The night before the GHF warning, a World Food Programme (WFP) warehouse was looted, resulting in several deaths which are still being investigated.

In response to the incident, the WFP said humanitarian challenges “have spiralled out of control” and called for “safe, unimpeded humanitarian access” to Gaza immediately.

The WFP did not respond to BBC questions about how it would implement further security measures at its warehouses.

Palestinians seeking aid have characterised the GHF-led operation as disorganised, saying a lack of communication has contributed to the chaotic scenes seen this week.

Things have been further muddied by misinformation. BBC Verify has seen at least two Facebook profiles purporting to be official GHF accounts, sharing inaccurate information about the status of the aid distribution centres.

One page with more than 4,000 followers posted inaccurate information, sometimes alongside AI-generated images, that aid had been suspended or that looting at GHF centres had been rampant.

A GHF spokesman confirmed to BBC Verify that both these Facebook accounts were fake. He also said that the foundation had launched an official Facebook channel.

Transparency information online showed the page was first created on Wednesday, the day after distribution operations started.

Aid organisation Oxfam and local Gazan residents have told the BBC that residents are instead relying on word of mouth to circulate information when aid was available.

“All of the people are hungry. Everyone fights to get what they want, how are we supposed to get anything?” said Um Mohammad Abu Hajar, who was unable to secure an aid box on Thursday.

Oxfam criticised the location of the GHF distribution sites, telling BBC Verify that it imposed “military control over aid operations”.

Its policy adviser, Bushra Khalidi, also questioned how vulnerable people, such as the elderly, would be able to reach these sites, which are located some distance away from some population centres.

When the UN had been delivering aid before Israel’s humanitarian blockade, there were 400 distribution points spread across Gaza. Under the present GHF distribution system there currently are four known sites.

“By and large, its designed to dramatically increase the concentration of the population by having the only sources of food remaining in a very small number of places,” said Chris Newton, a senior analyst at the brussels-based think tank Crisis Group.

“You either follow all their rules and probably survive in a small radius around these sites or you are very unlikely to survive.”

The presence of armed security and Israeli soldiers at or near the distribution sites has also alarmed experts, who said it undermined faith in aid operations.

“Distributing assistance in this kind of environment is extremely difficult. [It’s] much more effectively done when you are trying to work with, and through, the people there… rather than at the point of a mercenary’s gun,” said Prof Stuart Gordon at the London School of Economics.

A GHF spokesperson said: “Our ability – and willingness – to act under pressure is exactly why GHF remains one of the only organisations still capable of delivering critical food aid to Gaza today.”

Images and videos taken by eyewitnesses and the Israeli military showed the GHF boxes appeared limited to canned food, pasta, rice, cooking oil and some biscuits and lentils.

“Humanitarian aid is not just a food box that you slap humanitarian on and you call it humanitarian aid,” Ms Khalidi said.

The supplies being given to families should be accompanied by medical support, hygiene and water purification kits, said Prof Gordon.

A 14-page document from GHF, seen by the BBC, promised to hand out water and hygiene kits at the sites.

On Friday, only one of the four GHF sites was distributing aid. It opened for less than an hour after which GHF announced on Facebook that it had closed because all its supplies had been “fully distributed”.

When asked by BBC Verify why only a single site was operational and why its boxes ran out so quickly, a GHF spokesperson said supply “will vary day by day”.

“Good news is we have provided two million meals in four days and will be ramping up in the coming days and weeks,” the spokesman said.

But many are still returning from distribution sites without boxes for their families.

“I am empty-handed like God created me,” said Hani Abed outside the centre near Netzarim on Thursday.

“I came empty-handed and I left empty-handed.”

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

After 13 years of school, Selma Jenvin-Steinsvag and her classmate Aksel were running to catch the Oslo metro in red overalls. “After that all our written exams will be done,” said Selma, 18.

The sight of school-leavers, known here as , walking around in colourful overalls is something of a coming-of-age tradition that brightens up the weeks before Norway’s national day on 17 May.

That marks the day the can finally relax after their exams and have one final party. But for increasing numbers of young Norwegians, the parties have been starting weeks earlier, well before their exams have finished.

And there is one side to the celebrations that has increasingly alarmed parents and politicians alike – the .

“It’s a party bus! We go out every night for a month, we get drunk, we’re partying with our friends and it’s just fun!” says 19-year-old Edvard Aanestad, who is finishing school on the west side of Oslo.

The fear is that all the weeks of partying as well as the peer pressure involved are having a detrimental effect on teenagers’ overall wellbeing, as well as their grades.

A small fortune is often spent renting the buses and decking them out and many school-leavers go into debt to pay for it all.

“Adrives all night from around midnight until early morning. We play really, really loud music and party all night,” says Edvard’s friend, Henrik Wathne, who’s 18.

Alongside all the fun, there have been complaints that the celebrations result in heavy drinking, drug use and little sleep. There are also concerns that many teenagers feel left out because they cannot afford the cost.

And all of it currently coincides with the exam period.

Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said last year that he too had enjoyed his graduation, but the party bus culture had spun out of control.

His intervention followed years of public debate, with objections from authorities as well as many of the school-leavers and their parents.

“We are worried about some negative trends in our schools and neighbourhoods, and within Norwegian youth culture in general,” says Solveig Haukenes Aase, whose eldest child is graduating this year.

Her two younger children are yet to start high school and she complains that the culture affects younger teenagers too: “In recent years, it has also started to have an impact on middle school kids.”

Together with other parents she formed a group aimed at making the environment for young people safer.

“The attitude of school authorities previously was that it’s a private matter, that the celebration is something that happens in your spare time,” she told the BBC.

“But there has been a change in mentality among teachers, principals and school authorities, and it’s now widely acknowledged that the new culture has a huge impact on the school environment.”

Norway’s minister of education, Kari Nessa Nordtun, said it had been “a problem for many years that the celebrations and the exam period have been intertwined”.

She told the BBC that school-leavers had experienced difficulties in concentrating on exams because of the partying and that results had declined because of it.

“The celebration has also become highly commercialised and exclusionary, and we see that these negative effects are spreading all the way down to lower secondary school.

“We want to put an end to social exclusion, peer pressure and high costs for many young people. We are now working to create a new and more inclusive graduation celebration.”

The plan now is to ensure that from next year celebrations are moved to the post-exam period.

The party bus tradition dates back to Oslo in the early 1980s and tends to be more prevalent among some of the more elite schools.

But it has now become national in scale and Ivar Brandvol, who has written about the tradition, believes the whole point of the bus has now changed, so that the bus celebrations no longer involve the whole school class but a more select group instead.

“Another change is the amount of money you need to be a part of a bus-group. Some of the bus-groups will have a budget up to 3m krone (£220,000) even if they choose to just rent it,” he says.

“Sound-systems are shipped from all over Europe. To pay the bills, the groups will often sell toilet paper to friends, family and neighbours for a little profit. But the kids have to sell tons of toilet paper to earn enough, and usually end up using savings and getting into debt.”

There is a broad acceptance in Norway that the school-leavers’ party bus culture has to be scaled back.

The government is also worried about potential risks to teenagers’ safety, as they dance on buses that are driven around during the night.

“We want this year’s graduating class to be the last class that is allowed to use converted buses with sideways-facing seats and standing room while driving,” says Jon-Ivar Nygard, Norway’s Minister of Transport. “We can no longer send our young people off in unsafe buses.”

For many prospective school-leavers in Norway the government’s plan goes too far.

“The government wants to take away the sideways seating on the buses and just have group seating. I think it’s the wrong way to go,” complains Edvard Aanestad.

And when it comes to addressing problems of inclusivity on the buses, he and his friend Henrik believe the authorities are taking the wrong approach.

Only half of the 120 school-leavers in his year were part of a party-bus group, and they agree part of the reason was the high cost.

But the two young men say they spent years planning their celebrations, even getting jobs on the side to pay for the whole experience.

“This isn’t going to help tackle exclusion,” warns Edvard, who points out that banning some of the buses will mean there will be fewer buses to go around. “If anything, it’s the opposite, so it’s the wrong way to go.”

Ukraine’s president has questioned Russia’s commitment to progressing peace talks after Moscow confirmed it was sending a team to talks in Istanbul on Monday.

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

But Volodymyr Zelensky accused Moscow of “doing everything it can to ensure the next possible meeting is fruitless”.

“For a meeting to be meaningful, its agenda must be clear, and the negotiations must be properly prepared,” he said. Ukraine had sent its proposals to Russia, reaffirming “readiness for a full and unconditional ceasefire”.

The first round of talks two weeks ago in Istanbul brought no breakthrough, but achieved a prisoner of war swap.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia currently controls about 20% of Ukraine’s territory, including the southern Crimea peninsula Moscow annexed in 2014.

As the talks approached, both Russia and Ukraine reported explosions on Friday night and in the early hours of Saturday morning.

In Ukraine’s Kherson region, three people were killed and 10 more were injured, according to Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the region’s military administration.

On social media, he said that the “Russian military hit critical and social infrastructure” as well as “residential areas of settlements in the region”.

Officials said at least one person had also been injured in explosions in the cities of Kharkiv and Izyum.

Meanwhile, at least seven people were injured in an explosion in Russia’s Kursk region, according to the acting local governor Alexander Khinshtein and Russia’s state-owned news agency, TASS.

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.

Putin and Zelensky are not expected to attend the talks on Monday.

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.

An estimated 250 million bees escaped from an overturned truck in the US state of Washington on Friday, sparking warnings from authorities for the public to avoid the swarm of stinging insects.

Emergency officials were helped by several master bee-keepers after the truck, which had been hauling roughly 70,000 lb (31,750 kg) of active honey bee hives, flipped over on a road near the Canadian border.

“The goal is to save as many bees as possible,” Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) said shortly after the incident.

The authorities said the site of the crash would remain closed “until the rescue is complete”.

“250 million bees are now loose,” wrote Whatcom County Sheriff. “AVOID THE AREA due to the potential of bee escaping and swarming”.

Bee-keepers worked with police “to assist in re-setting the box hives”, containers bee-keepers use to house honeybees.

“The plan is to allow the bees to re-hive and find their queen bee,” WCSO said, adding: “That should occur within the next 24-48 hours.”

In an update posted to social media later on Friday, police thanked “the wonderful community of bee-keepers”, saying “over two dozen” had turned up to help with the rescue efforts.

“By morning, most bees should have returned to their hives,” WCSO wrote on Facebook.

Footage shared by police showed huge numbers of bees swarming around the overturned lorry.

While some bee-keepers aim only to produce honey, many others rent out their hives to farmers who need the insects to pollinate their crops.

Loretta Swit, who won two Emmy awards for her role on the popular comedy TV series M*A*S*H, died on Friday, according to her representative.

She died at her home in New York at age 87, her publicist Harlan Boll told the BBC. She likely died of natural causes, although a coroner’s report is pending.

On M*A*S*H, Swit played US Army nurse Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan. The series, which followed a mobile Army surgical hospital during the Korean war, ran for 11 seasons from 1972 to 1983.

Swit was nominated for numerous awards, and appeared in nearly every episode of the series, including the finale which attracted a record 106m US viewers.

The show remains one of the most successful and acclaimed series in US television history. Its season finale was the most watched episode of any TV series in history when it ended in 1983.

As “Hot Lips,” Swit played a tough but vulnerable Army nurse who gained the nickname after having an affair with Major Frank Burns, who was played by Larry Linville.

The show used comedy and pranks to tackle tough issues like racism, sexism and the impacts of PTSD within the military, at a time when US forces were withdrawing from Vietnam and dealing with the consequences of that conflict.

It was based on the 1968 book, “MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors,” penned by a former Army surgeon.

Swit was born Loretta Szwed in New Jersey and trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.

Along with M*A*S*H, she also appeared in numerous other TV shows, movies and even game shows over her career.

She took to the Broadway stage in plays including Same Time, Next Year; Mame; and Shirley Valentine – a role for which she won Chicago’s top theatre prize, the Sarah Siddons Award.

Her TV work included appearances on The Muppet Show, Mission: Impossible and Murder, She Wrote.

In addition to her Emmys, Swit was nominated for four Golden Globe awards.

“Acting is not hiding to me, it’s revealing. We give you license to feel,” she said in an interview with the Star magazine in 2010. “That’s the most important thing in the world, because when you stop feeling, that’s when you’re dead.”

Speaking to an author about her character on M*A*S*H she said: “Around the second or third year, I decided to try to play her as a real person, in an intelligent fashion, even if it meant hurting the jokes. … She was a character in constant flux; she never stopped developing.”

Swit was also an artist and animal rights activist, and established a charity to campaign against animal cruelty, according to a statement from her publicist Mr Boll.

Jamie Farr, who also starred in M*A*S*H as Corporal Klinger, called Swit his “adopted sister”.

“From the first time I met her, on what was supposed to be a one-day appearance on M*A*S*H, we embraced each other and that became a lifetime friendship,” Farr said in a statement. “I can’t begin to express how much she will be missed.”

Shakira has cancelled her upcoming concert in Washington DC after “complications” with the stage at her previous show in Boston – an event that was also called off.

The Colombian pop star had been due to perform on Saturday as part of WorldPride, one of the largest LGBTQ+ festivals in the world.

In a statement released by the baseball stadium where the performance was set to take place, Nationals Park said “complications with the previous show in Boston” meant “Shakira’s full tour production cannot be transported to Washington, D.C” in time.

The Wherever, Whenever singer said she was “devastated” that the shows “were just not possible this time”.

“Because of the unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances that affected me and other artists in Boston, my full tour production is not able to be moved to Washington, DC in time for my scheduled performance on Saturday,” said Shakira, 48.

“I have been counting the days, excited to be reunited with my fans in both Washington and Boston”, she added.

“I promise that I will do everything in my power to be with you as soon I can.”

Nationals Park said that “despite every effort”, it was not possible for the concert to take place as planned. The venue promised automatic refunds for ticketholders.

The previous performance in Boston’s Fenway Park stadium was cancelled shortly before Shakira was due to take to the stage on 29 May, and performances by country singers Jason Aldean and Brooks & Dunn on 30 May were also cancelled.

According to the BBC’s US partner CBS News, the Boston gigs were called off because of a safety issue with the stage.

Entertainment company Live Nation said “structural elements were identified as not being up to standard” and the issues were discovered during a routine pre-show check.

Responding to the cancellation of the Washington DC show on social media, several fans said they had travelled to the city specifically to catch the performance.

“Flew in from LA for this. I’m experiencing a second cancellation of this tour,” one user wrote, adding: “Rather disappointing.”

Meanwhile, several users expressed their support for the singer. “She doesn’t deserve this horrible situation,” wrote one.

Shakira is currently performing in stadiums across north America as part of her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran tour, in support of her 12th studio album.

She is due to perform in Atlanta on Monday, 2 June.

The masked and armed security contractor atop a dirt mound watches thousands of Palestinians who have been kettled into narrow lanes separated by fences below.

He makes a heart shape with his hands and the crowd responds – the fence begins to bend as they push against it.

This jubilant scene was filmed on Tuesday, the opening day of an aid distribution centre – a vital lifeline for Gazans who haven’t seen fresh supplies come into the strip for more than two months due to an Israeli blockade.

But by that afternoon, the scene was one of total chaos. Videos showed the distribution centre overrun by desperate civilians trampling over toppled barriers; people flinched as sounds of gunshots rang out.

This was the disorderly start to a controversial new aid distribution scheme operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly created body backed by the US and Israel.

GHF has been tasked with feeding desperately hungry Gazans. The UN said more than two million are at risk of starvation.

The foundation, which uses armed American security contractors, aims to bypass the UN as the main supplier of aid in Gaza. It has been roundly condemned and boycotted by aid agencies and the UN. But Israel has said an alternative to the existing aid system was needed to stop Hamas stealing aid, which the group denies doing.

To get a picture of the first few days of this new aid delivery system, BBC Verify has authenticated dozen of images at distribution sites, interviewed humanitarian and logistics experts, analysed Israeli aid transport data and official statements released by the GHF, and spoken with Gazans searching for supplies.

GHF said it aimed to feed one million Gazans in its first week of operations through four secure distribution sites.

A foundation spokesperson said on Friday, its fourth day of operations, that it had distributed two million meals. The BBC has not been able to verify this figure, which would be less than one meal per Gazan over the course of four days.

GHF did not respond to our inquiries about how it was tracking who had been receiving them.

In a video filmed at GHF’s northern site near Nuseirat on Thursday, Palestinians can be seen being running away from a perimeter fence after GHF contractors threw a projectile that exploded with a loud bang, a flash and smoke.

GHF in a statement said its personnel “encountered a tense and potentially dangerous crowd that refused to disperse”.

“To prevent escalation and ensure the safety of civilians and staff, non-lethal deterrents were deployed—including smoke and warning shots into the ground,” it said.

“These measures were effective”, it added, “and no injuries occurred.” BBC Verify cannot independently confirm this.

Later that evening, GHF warned Gazans via Facebook that it would shut down any site where looting occurred.

The GHF is not the only aid organisation facing serious challenges. The night before the GHF warning, a World Food Programme (WFP) warehouse was looted, resulting in several deaths which are still being investigated.

In response to the incident, the WFP said humanitarian challenges “have spiralled out of control” and called for “safe, unimpeded humanitarian access” to Gaza immediately.

The WFP did not respond to BBC questions about how it would implement further security measures at its warehouses.

Palestinians seeking aid have characterised the GHF-led operation as disorganised, saying a lack of communication has contributed to the chaotic scenes seen this week.

Things have been further muddied by misinformation. BBC Verify has seen at least two Facebook profiles purporting to be official GHF accounts, sharing inaccurate information about the status of the aid distribution centres.

One page with more than 4,000 followers posted inaccurate information, sometimes alongside AI-generated images, that aid had been suspended or that looting at GHF centres had been rampant.

A GHF spokesman confirmed to BBC Verify that both these Facebook accounts were fake. He also said that the foundation had launched an official Facebook channel.

Transparency information online showed the page was first created on Wednesday, the day after distribution operations started.

Aid organisation Oxfam and local Gazan residents have told the BBC that residents are instead relying on word of mouth to circulate information when aid was available.

“All of the people are hungry. Everyone fights to get what they want, how are we supposed to get anything?” said Um Mohammad Abu Hajar, who was unable to secure an aid box on Thursday.

Oxfam criticised the location of the GHF distribution sites, telling BBC Verify that it imposed “military control over aid operations”.

Its policy adviser, Bushra Khalidi, also questioned how vulnerable people, such as the elderly, would be able to reach these sites, which are located some distance away from some population centres.

When the UN had been delivering aid before Israel’s humanitarian blockade, there were 400 distribution points spread across Gaza. Under the present GHF distribution system there currently are four known sites.

“By and large, its designed to dramatically increase the concentration of the population by having the only sources of food remaining in a very small number of places,” said Chris Newton, a senior analyst at the brussels-based think tank Crisis Group.

“You either follow all their rules and probably survive in a small radius around these sites or you are very unlikely to survive.”

The presence of armed security and Israeli soldiers at or near the distribution sites has also alarmed experts, who said it undermined faith in aid operations.

“Distributing assistance in this kind of environment is extremely difficult. [It’s] much more effectively done when you are trying to work with, and through, the people there… rather than at the point of a mercenary’s gun,” said Prof Stuart Gordon at the London School of Economics.

A GHF spokesperson said: “Our ability – and willingness – to act under pressure is exactly why GHF remains one of the only organisations still capable of delivering critical food aid to Gaza today.”

Images and videos taken by eyewitnesses and the Israeli military showed the GHF boxes appeared limited to canned food, pasta, rice, cooking oil and some biscuits and lentils.

“Humanitarian aid is not just a food box that you slap humanitarian on and you call it humanitarian aid,” Ms Khalidi said.

The supplies being given to families should be accompanied by medical support, hygiene and water purification kits, said Prof Gordon.

A 14-page document from GHF, seen by the BBC, promised to hand out water and hygiene kits at the sites.

On Friday, only one of the four GHF sites was distributing aid. It opened for less than an hour after which GHF announced on Facebook that it had closed because all its supplies had been “fully distributed”.

When asked by BBC Verify why only a single site was operational and why its boxes ran out so quickly, a GHF spokesperson said supply “will vary day by day”.

“Good news is we have provided two million meals in four days and will be ramping up in the coming days and weeks,” the spokesman said.

But many are still returning from distribution sites without boxes for their families.

“I am empty-handed like God created me,” said Hani Abed outside the centre near Netzarim on Thursday.

“I came empty-handed and I left empty-handed.”

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

It’s been a big week in Europe for CPAC, the US Conservative Political Action Conference, with large gatherings in Poland and Hungary.

The timing is crucial, ahead of Poland’s presidential election run-off on Sunday, between a CPAC-backed nationalist, Karol Nawrocki, and the liberal Mayor of Warsaw Rafal Trzaskowski, which CPAC speakers describe as a “battle for Western civilisation”.

Traditionally a meeting place for conservative activists in America, CPAC’s visibility has soared with Donald Trump back in the White House and his Maga (Make America Great Again) movement in undisputed control of the Republican party.

“This is not a gathering of the defeated, but of those who have endured,” Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban told the opening session on Thursday in Budapest.

Describing President Trump as a “truth serum”, Orban emphasised his vision of a new Europe, in what he calls “the Age of Patriots”, based on the nation, the traditional family, and his version of Christianity.

To tumultuous applause, he and other speakers derided the European Union’s Green Deal, and complained of mass immigration and “gender and woke madness”.

In a congress hall replete with disco music, flashing lights, video clips, and celebrity show hosts, older politicians sometimes seemed dazzled by all the razzamatazz.

“Europeans do not feel safe in their own towns, homes, and countries,” Orban said. “They are strangers in their own homes. This is not integration, it is population replacement.”

It was a theme echoed by his guests Alice Weidel of Germany’s far-right AfD and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands’ Freedom Party.

This was a movement looking to reshape the whole European project with its own brand of conservativism, jettisoning the old EU liberalism.

Other speakers included Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and the leader of the Austrian Freedom party Herbert Kickl.

Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss was here too, with Australian ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott and former Polish and Czech Prime Ministers Mateusz Morawiecki and Andrej Babis, alongside an array of influential Republicans and South American politicians.

There was even a representative from Rajendra Modi’s BJP in India, Ram Madhav.

In Warsaw on Tuesday, and then in Budapest too, speakers laid out the case for what one of them called “an international nationalist movement, a global platform for anti-globalist forces”.

“Unlike CPAC in the US, CPAC Hungary seems to have more intellectual substance. And it also serves as an opportunity – rare in Europe – for nationalist and populist politicians and activists to get together and network,” Rod Dreher, a Budapest-based editor of the American Conservative told the BBC.

“Viktor Orban’s promise to make Budapest the intellectual capital of dissident European conservatism has come true.”

Orban relishes that “dissident” theme, while more mainstream European conservatives like Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, keep their distance.

There’s been a sense in Hungary and Poland this week that the Trump administration is here to pay back the support that Donald Trump received from nationalist leaders in Europe in his victory last November.

“If you elect a leader who will work with President Trump, the Polish people will have a strong ally,” Kristi Noem, Trump’s head of Homeland Security told the Warsaw CPAC conference.

“You will continue to have a US military presence here… and you will have equipment that is American made, high quality.”

She did not say what would happen if Karol Nawrocki did not win on Sunday.

While the Maga movement in Europe – translated by Viktor Orban into Mega (Make Europe Great Again) – sounds self-confident, it has also endured setbacks, most recently with the liberal mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, winning Romania’s presidential election.

In Albania, Sali Berisha, the Maga-backed leader of the Democratic Party, lost this month’s parliamentary election to the Socialist Edi Rama. Former Trump campaign strategist Chris LaCivita helped Berisha’s campaign.

And in Austria Herbert Kickl’s hopes of becoming chancellor were dashed by the formation of a new left-right coalition, which chose Christian Stocker of the Austrian People’s Party instead.

The throne is even wobbling beneath Viktor Orban, the host of the conference in Budapest.

Could his message, so fresh in the ears of his US admirers, have gone stale for Hungarians?

“If Nawrocki does not win in Poland, Hungary will be next and Viktor Orban will lose power,” George Simion, the Romanian nationalist defeated by Nicusor Dan warned in Warsaw. Hungary’s next parliamentary elections are due in April next year.

There are also cracks in the facade of unity.

Ukraine and Russia remain a source of division. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was conspicuous by her absence.

And there was bad news this week for Viktor Orban – the Hungarian fertility rate fell to 1.28 in April, almost as low as when he came to power in 2010, despite 15 years of tax and home-building incentives to encourage couples to have more children.

But as the chairs were packed away in the congress hall in Budapest on Friday evening, there was a mood of elation, eyes trained on the run-off in Poland.

As drivers sit in traffic near the Bridge of the Americas connecting Mexico with the USA, Silvia Delgado weaves between the cars handing out leaflets.

“I’m standing for penal judge,” she says brightly. “Vote for number 12 on the ballot papers!”

Most happily wind down their windows and accept a flyer from her. But in Sunday’s rather unique election – the first of two votes by which Mexicans will choose the country’s entire judiciary by direct ballot – Silvia Delgado is not an ordinary candidate.

Conspicuously absent from the short biography on her pamphlets is the name of her best-known client: she was the defence lawyer for the notorious drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Her critics say her past defending the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel should disqualify her from standing as a judge. She gives that idea short shrift.

“Why should it? For doing my job?” she retorts, her heckles immediately raised at any suggestion of a conflict of interest.

“For defending people’s individual guarantees? For mounting an adequate technical defence for a human being? Why should that make me illegitimate?” she asks.

Silvia Delgado has not been convicted of any crime, is not facing any charges and is not under investigation – whether over her links to El Chapo or anything else.

But a leading human rights and transparency organisation in Mexico called Defensorxs has included her in a list of 19 “high risk candidates” in the election. As well as Ms Delgado, the list includes a candidate with a drug trafficking conviction and another facing accusations of orchestrating violence against journalists.

The director of Defensorxs, Miguel Alfonso Meza, believes the so-called “high risk candidates” are a danger to the legitimacy of Mexico’s justice system:

“Someone that has already worked with a cartel, it is very difficult that they get out, even if it was only as a lawyer. It’s not even about whether she’s a good person or a bad person,” says Mr Meza, referring to Silvia Delgado.

“The Sinaloa Cartel is not only ‘El Chapo’ Guzman. It is a company that has criminal and economic interests which are being resolved in the justice system. The cartel could pressure her to show loyalty because she has already been their employee.”

Silvia Delgado visibly stiffens at the mention of Defensorxs and Miguel Alfonso Meza.

“It’s completely stupid,” she bristles, claiming she has challenged them to “dig into her past as much as they like”. She also dismisses their main accusation that she was paid with drug money and could be compromised if she is elected judge.

“How can you prove that? I received a payment which was the same as any normal monthly payment which was paid to me by lawyers, members of his legal team. I’m not his daughter or his sister or anything. I’m a professional.”

Ms Delgado is competing for one of more than 7,500 judicial position up for grabs – from local magistrates to all nine Supreme Court justices.

While it was under discussion, the judicial reform prompted widespread protests by law students and a strike by workers in the legal system. Its critics maintain that electing every judge in Mexico amounts to the politicisation of the country’s justice system.

“Of course, it’s a political attack [on the judiciary],” says Miguel Alfonso Meza.

“Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador didn’t like to have constraints from the judicial power. When the pressure became too great and the constraints too tight, the only solution they found was to remove all the judges in the country,” he adds.

This reform was passed before President Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in, but she is a firm supporter of it and polls suggest it has broad approval among the electorate too.

Supporters point out that the United States, Switzerland and Bolivia elect many of their judges. But Mexico will become the first country in the world to elect all of them. Markets remain unconvinced with investors fearful of the prospect of the ruling party controlling the presidency, the legislative branch and the judiciary.

Miguel Alfonso Meza believes that problems will arise from “the agreements and negotiations judges have to make with political actors… in order to get the support they need to win the elections”.

One of the 64 candidates seeking a seat on the Supreme Court is Olivia Aguirre Bonilla. Also from Ciudad Juárez, her legal background is in human rights law and as an activist against gender-based violence in the notoriously dangerous border city.

Like all the candidates, Ms Aguirre Bonilla has had to pay for her campaign out of her own pocket – candidates are banned from accepting public or private funding and forbidden from purchasing advertising spots. As such, she’s primarily used social media to push out her 6-point plan from clamping down on exorbitant salaries to opening the Supreme Court hearings to the public.

While she acknowledges the criticisms over the potential politicisation of Mexico’s justice system, Aguirre Bonilla believes the vote is an opportunity for meaningful change of a collapsed, corrupted and nepotistic judiciary.

“I think all the citizens in Mexico are politicised, and we’re all part of public life,” she says.

“The difference here is that our ‘untouchable’ legal system – and it was untouchable because it was controlled by the elites, by privilege – for the first time in history will be voted in. It will be democratised through the popular vote.”

Many people in the judiciary were there through influence and familial connections, Aguirre Bonilla argues, and it lacks the legitimacy of the executive and legislative branches.

“This vote will grant the justice system true independence as it’s not chosen by the President of the Republic but elected by the people of Mexico to represent them.”

So far, the arguments over constitutionality and legitimacy, over the process and the candidates have been bitter and fierce.

Now all eyes turn to the polling stations, particularly on the turnout and abstention rates as indicators of Mexicans’ backing for the reform.

As for Silvia Delgado, the woman who defended Mexico’s most wanted drug lord, she just hopes the people of Ciudad Juárez will respect her work enough to allow her to sit in judgement of other criminals who are brought before her.

A woman who travelled across the South West Coastal Path with her terminally ill husband has said a film depicting their journey took her “right back” to those difficult moments.

Raynor Winn, a writer who grew up on a farm in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, said a financial dispute meant she had lost her dream home in Wales in 2013 just days after her husband Moth was diagnosed with Corticobasal Degeneration, a rare brain disease.

With nothing to lose, the couple set off on a 630-mile trek from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall.

Their journey across England’s largest uninterrupted path has now been made into a film – The Salt Path – featuring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.

“As we were preparing to leave the house, and the bailiffs were knocking at the door, we were hiding under the stairs. We were not ready to go,” Mrs Winn said.

“It was in those last moments that I saw a book about someone who had walked the coastal path with their dog.

“In that desperate time, it just seemed like the most obvious thing to do. All we wanted to do was pack our bags and take a walk.”

Five years on from the adventure, in 2018, Mrs Winn released her memoir entitled The Salt Path.

It received nationwide acclaim and was shortlisted for the 2018 Wainwright Prize, an award that celebrates travel-based writing.

She said: “We had nowhere to go. We knew that when we stepped out of the door, we were going to be homeless.

“Moth’s illness had no treatment, or no cure. I was drawn to following a line on the map. It gave us a purpose, and that’s what it was all about.”

Just a few months after her book was published, Mrs Winn said she was approached by a producer and filming of The Salt Path started in the summer of 2023.

“It makes no sense. I remember the day we met. There was a knock at the door, and there was Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs outside.

“They told me to put the kettle on. That’s not what is supposed to happen to a girl from Melton Mowbray,” she said.

Mrs Winn – who continues to fundraise alongside her husband for research into his illness – said the film had taken her “straight back to those emotions that were so difficult”.

“The producer and director have created something that’s sparse in dialogue.

“It’s huge in emotion and it urges anyone to focus on the now. Just focus on now and all will turn out differently tomorrow,” she said.

For many, Saturdays are something to look forward to – relaxed times, enjoyed with family and friends. But Elizabeth Young “dreads” them. It’s a weekly reminder of her daughter Jade’s violent murder at Westfield Bondi Junction.

“On a lovely autumn afternoon, to learn your daughter is dead, stabbed in broad daylight, killed amidst fellow unsuspecting shoppers… [when she] was living, breathing, just an hour ago… it’s the stuff of nightmares, of a parallel universe,” Elizabeth told an inquiry into the mass killing this week.

“The moment [the attacker] casually plunged that knife into Jade, our ordinary lives were shattered.”

Her pain was echoed by families of the other victims who gave emotional testimonies on the final day of a five-week coronial inquest into the fatal stabbings on 13 April last year.

The inquiry sought to understand how a 40-year-old Queensland man with a long history of mental illness was able to walk into the popular Sydney shopping centre on a busy Saturday afternoon and kill six people, injuring 10 others including a nine-month-old baby.

The court heard hours of evidence from dozens of witnesses – doctors, survivors, victims’ families, police – in a bid to find out how, or if, Australia can prevent a such a tragedy happening again.

“It seems to me that my daughter and five others were killed by the cumulative failures of numbers of people within a whole series of fallible systems,” Elizabeth told New South Wales (NSW) Coroners Court.

It was a mild, sparkling afternoon – the first day of school holidays – when Joel Cauchi walked into the sprawling shopping centre, just minutes from Australia’s most famous beach.

Just before 15:33 local time (GMT), Cauchi took a 30cm knife from his backpack and stabbed to death his first victim, 25-year-old Dawn Singleton.

Within three minutes, he had fatally attacked five others – Yixuan Cheng, 27; Jade Young, 47, Ashlee Good, 38; Faraz Tahir, 30; and Pikria Darchia, 55. Cauchi also injured 10 others including Good’s infant daughter.

At 15:38, five minutes after his rampage started, Cauchi was shot dead by police officer Amy Scott, who had been on duty nearby and arrived at the centre about a minute earlier.

As news outlets reported on the killings, Cauchi’s parents recognised their son on TV and called the police to alert them about his decades-long struggle with serious mental health problems.

Jade Young’s family was also confronted by images of her on TV, describing to the inquest the horror of seeing video which showed her “lifeless body being worked on”. Similarly, Julie Singleton, whose daughter Dawn was killed while standing in a line at a bakery, heard her daughter named as a victim on the radio before her body had even been formally identified and other relatives informed.

The scenes at Bondi sent shockwaves across the nation, where mass murder is rare, and prompted a rush of anger and fear from women in particular. All except two of the 16 victims were female, including five of the six people who died.

A key focus of the inquest was to scrutinise the multiple interactions Cauchi had with police and mental health professionals in the months and years leading up to the attacks.

The inquest heard that Cauchi was once a bright young man with a promising life ahead of him. His family say he was a gifted student, and had attended a private school on scholarship before topping his class at university.

At the age of 17, in 2001, Cauchi was diagnosed with schizophrenia and soon started taking medication for his condition.

After a decade of managing it in the public health system, Cauchi started regular sessions with psychiatrist Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack in his hometown of Toowoomba in 2012.

In 2015 he complained about the medication side effects, so Dr Boros-Lavack started to gradually reduce his dosage of clozapine – used for treatment-resistant schizophrenia – after seeking a second opinion from another psychiatrist, the inquest heard.

She weaned him off clozapine entirely in 2018 and Cauchi also stopped taking medication to treat his obsessive-compulsive disorder the year after, she said.

In 2019, for the first time in about 15 years, Cauchi was no longer on antipsychotic medications. No second opinion on completely stopping either drug was sought by Dr Boros-Lavack, she admitted under questioning.

The inquest heard from medical professionals who said that in most cases, patients coming off antipsychotic medications transition to another one, rather than ceasing treatment altogether.

Within months, Cauchi’s mum contacted his psychiatrist with concerns about her son’s mental state after finding notes showing he believed he was “under satanic control”. Around the same time, Cauchi developed what Dr Boros-Lavack told the inquest was “a compulsive interest in porn”. She wrote a prescription but told the inquest it was up to Cauchi to decide if he would start taking the medication again.

In 2020, Cauchi left his family home, moved to Brisbane and stopped seeing Dr Boros-Lavack.

At this time, after almost two decades of treatment, Cauchi had no regular psychiatrist, was not on any medications to treat his schizophrenia and had no family living nearby.

The inquest heard he began seeking a gun licence, contacting three Brisbane doctors for a medical certificate to support his application. They either didn’t request access to his medical file or weren’t given his whole history by Dr Boros-Lavack, who said if they needed more information they could have asked her for it. The third doctor gave Cauchi the clearance he was after, but he never applied for a gun, the court was told.

Meanwhile Cauchi was increasingly coming into contact with police. After moving to Brisbane, he was pulled over three times for driving erratically. In 2021, officers were called to Cauchi’s unit in Brisbane after residents heard a man screaming and banging sounds.

In 2022, Cauchi was reported to police after calling a girl’s school to ask if he could come and watch the students swim and play sports. Officers tried to call Cauchi but weren’t able to reach him.

In January 2023, Cauchi had moved back in with his parents in Toowoomba and called police to complain that his father had stolen his collection of “pigging knives”. At this time, his mother raised concerns with the officers, saying he should be back on medication.

Authorities can’t detain people for mental health reasons unless they are a risk to themselves and as the officers had assessed Cauchi did not meet that description, they left, the court heard.

After the call-out, one of the attending police officers sent an email to an internal police mental health coordinator, requesting they follow up on Cauchi. However, the email was overlooked due to understaffing, the inquest was told.

Months later, police in Sydney found Cauchi sleeping rough near a road after being called by a concerned passerby.

By 2024 Cauchi’s mental health had deteriorated, he was homeless, and isolated from his family.

The inquest looked closely at Cauchi’s mental health treatment in Queensland, with a panel of five psychiatrists tasked with reviewing it.

They found that Dr Boros-Lavack had missed opportunities to put him back on anti-psychotic medication, one member of the panel saying she had “not taken seriously enough” the concerns from Cauchi’s mother in late-2019.

The panel also gave evidence at the inquest that Cauchi was “floridly psychotic” – in the active part of a psychotic episode – when he walked into the shopping centre.

When questioned by the lawyer assisting the coroner, Dr Boros-Lavack stressed: “I did not fail in my care of Joel.”

She had earlier told the inquest she believed Cauchi was not psychotic during the attack and that medication would not have prevented the tragedy.

Dr Boros-Lavack said the attacks may have been “due to his sexual frustration, pornography and hatred towards women”.

But the next day, she withdrew that evidence, saying it was simply “conjecture” and she was not in a position to assess Cauchi’s mental state, having not treated him since 2019.

However the inquest is investigating whether Cauchi targeted specific individuals or groups.

For Peter Young, the brother of Jade, the answer seemed clear. “Fuelled by his frustration with not finding a ‘nice’ girl to marry”, his “rapid hunt found 16 victims, 14 of which were women,” he told the inquest.

The NSW Police Commissioner in the days after the attack said it was “obvious” to detectives that the offender had focussed on women.

However, during the inquest, the homicide squad’s Andrew Paul Marks said he did not believe there was evidence that Cauchi had specifically targeted women.

The inquiry also heard about a number of failings or near misses in the way security, police, paramedics and the media responded to the attack.

It was told that recruitment and training pressures for the security provider meant that the centre’s control room operator was “not match fit” for the role. At the exact moment when Cauchi stabbed his first victim, the room was unattended as she was on a toilet break.

Security guard Faraz Tahir, the sole male victim of the stabbings, was working his first day on the job when he was killing trying to stop Cauchi, raising questions over the powers and protection given to personnel like him.

His brother, Muzafar, told the inquest how Faraz died “with honour as a hero” and also acknowledged that Cauchi’s parents had lost their son: “We know that this tragedy is not their fault.”

The contractor responsible for security at the shopping centre has since updated its training and policies, as well as introducing stab-proof vests for guards.

Several families criticised media coverage in the wake of the attack, telling the inquiry they hoped the industry would reflect on how they should report sensitive stories so as not to further traumatise those affected.

After weeks of evidence, the inquest was adjourned on Thursday with NSW state coroner Teresa O’Sullivan expected to deliver her recommendations by the end of the year.

At the start of the inquest, O’Sullivan said the hearings weren’t about who was to blame for the attacks, but rather to “identify potential opportunities for reform or improvement to enable such events to be avoided in the future”.

“I want the families to know their loved ones will not be lost in this process.”

Elizabeth Young, though, told the court, for her, “nothing good” will come from the inquest.

“At 74, I have lost my way in life,” she said, describing the crippling impact of the killings.

But she said the action the country needed to take was already obvious to her.

“My daughter was murdered by an unmedicated, chronic schizophrenic… who had in his possession knives designed for killing.

“[This is] another cry out to an Australia that doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that what happened… is essentially the catastrophic consequence of years of neglect of, and within, our mental health systems.”

Last year, tens of thousands of ‘Swifties’ – Taylor Swift fans – thronged Madrid to watch back-to-back concerts at the Spanish capital’s famous Bernabéu stadium, home to Real Madrid, who won Europe’s Champions League final less than 24 hours later, on 1 June.

The mega-concert was one of dozens of high-profile gigs staged at the newly renovated stadium in 2024 to boost the club’s revenue.

But the project was short lived. In September all gigs were cancelled after residents living within earshot of the music filed a legal complaint over the noise.

Now, nine months later, Spanish pop singer Aitana is the latest artist to switch venues from the Bernabéu to the Metropolitano Stadium – home to rivals Atletico Madrid – as the court case rumbles on.

“In every concert it is exactly the same,” says Enrique Martínez de Azagra, president of the neighbours’ association. He and other locals say the sound from concerts like Taylor Swift’s has become too much.

“It is impossible to suffer this kind of noise and it affects our health, it affects migraines, insomnia and heart attacks and it is a criminal offence in our laws,” adds Enrique.

In Madrid, the noise levels measured by the neighbours exceeded 90 decibels regularly during the concerts.

Ian Marnane from the European Environment Agency says that in Europe any level of 55 decibels or above is considered to be harmful, and continued exposure can lead to increased blood pressure and cardiovascular disease such as strokes. There are also links between noise exposure and diabetes.

Enrique says there is a significant difference between the noise from the concerts compared with that from football matches. He and most of his neighbours have lived in the area for decades. Many of them are life-long Real Madrid supporters and are on committees that represent the interests of the club.

“Football is a sport that lasts two hours, more or less. The noise is normal. Only when there is a goal, the passion surges,” says Enrique. The problem he sees with the concerts is that they spew continuously high levels of noise for long periods of hours at a time.

To reduce their exposure to these high levels of noise, Enrique and his neighbours took Real Madrid to court.

Sports journalist Felippo Maria Ricci believes they have a strong case.

“The Bernabéu is right in the heart of Madrid. The neighbours who live there have good positions and know the right people,” says Felippo. “This battle for the concerts can be quite long but at the moment Real Madrid is losing this battle.”

The neighbours say the city government is hesitant to resolve the issue as it benefits from the tourism and the money the concerts generate. According to local media reports, tourists coming for the Taylor Swift concerts alone spent about €25m (£21m; $28m).

Filippo says that the £1.1bn renovation to make the stadium multi-purpose was supposed to provide a huge financial boost to Real Madrid.

They also signed a contract with a US company selling the commercial rights to the stadium.

“They spent a lot of money to develop a new system for the pitch, to take it off when they have the concerts,” says Filippo. “Now all this new super system is quite useless, at the moment, all that money is gone.”

Ed Sheeran, Imagine Dragons and AC/DC are among the acts playing at the rival Atlético stadium this summer.

Madrid City Council, the Mayor’s office and Real Madrid have not responded to requests for comment by the BBC.

Real Madrid has previously said it is trying to sound proof the stadium. According to local reports the club hired a specialist company and windows were installed in the skywalk area.

When I put to the neighbours that Real Madrid is trying to soundproof the stadium, they chuckled. Enrique works as an engineer and thinks it is “quite impossible to soundproof the stadium”.

While the Bernabéu’s roof can close, the stadium is never completely closed, as there is an open gap between the roof and the facade all the way around the stadium.

The neighbours say they are not against all concerts.

“We’ve had concerts in the past, but once a year,” says Pablo Baschwitz, a lawyer and one of the neighbours campaigning for change.

He recalls concerts with music legends such as Frank Sinatra and Julio Iglesias at the Bernabéu – but says having 20 concerts scheduled per year is just too much.

From the roof terrace of one of the neighbours’ flats the proximity to the stadium is plain to see.

They point to a health centre that they say struggles to accurately measure patients’ blood pressure at times because the sound waves from the concerts disturb the readings in their machines.

Pablo says the concerts aren’t the only problem – there are also rehearsals and sound checks during the day which disturb the local community, including schools.

Luis Jordana de Pozas lives right across from the stadium, and some of the noise measurements were taken on the outside and inside of his flat.

On his terrace overlooking the Bernabéu, he explains how newly added metal plates on the stadium’s exterior have amplified the sound, and shows me recorded videos of the “unbearable” noise.

In Madrid, the facades of the houses around the stadium are lined with banners. Draped from their windows, balconies and terraces the neighbours put their protest posters on display, reading “conciertos no” (no concerts) and “ruído no” (no noise).

For now, while the case is in court, the music has stopped.

In the summer of 2000, a 17-year-old Dublin girl emerged with a debut single that would redefine the perception of Irish pop music.

Here was a voice a far cry from the ethereal, mega-selling Celtic sounds of Enya; the pop-meets-Irish trad mash-up of The Corrs; or slick boy-band contemporaries, like Westlife and Ronan Keating who, between them, had already notched multiple UK numbers ones that year.

Instead, Samantha Mumba’s Gotta Tell You was a sleek, radio-ready hit that climbed international charts and, almost 25 years ago to the day, introduced a confident and cool new voice to the noughties music scene.

Not that the woman herself remembers it that way.

“I was an obnoxious little teenager,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t really think I had a clue what I was doing. I was just winging it and hoping for the best.”

Winging it is one way to put it – Mumba followed Gotta Tell You with more hits, including the Davie Bowie-sampling Body II Body; a debut album that entered the top ten in UK and Ireland; and a starring role in a Hollywood blockbuster The Time Machine with Guy Pierce.

It was a meteoric ascent.

But subsequent years proved to be a bruising education in the music business, from record label problems to an unsuccessful bid to represent Ireland at Eurovision earlier this year.

Not that Mumba is all about looking back.

“This is my new chapter to do anything and everything that I want to do,” she said.

“I’ve got so much drive, I’m a hard worker and up for the challenge.”

Born in Dublin in 1983, Mumba’s musical journey began when she was three and her parents enrolled her at the Billie Barry Stage School for dance lessons.

Her key musical influences took hold early – Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton and her “obsession” Michael Jackson.

“I used to write him letters. I remember being sent a letter back from the Neverland Ranch – to this day, I’m devastated we don’t have it any more.”

Performing in stage productions until she was 15, she attracted plenty of attention.

“Back then you didn’t really very often see young black girls on stage in Dublin. I was young and I had a big voice, and so I started getting a lot of press. I was very lucky in that regard,” she said.

The industry soon came knocking and she was invited to a meeting with the Spice Girls’ producers, which later led her to future manager Louis Walsh.

Known for his success with Westlife and Boyzone, Mumba admits she was “definitely a different project” for the future X Factor judge.

After signing a deal with Polydor Records, Mumba set about recording her debut with heavyweight producers like Dave Pensado, Teddy Riley and Stargate.

She built a “big rapport” with the team behind Gotta Tell You – and it was soon apparent they were doing something right.

“You can feel when you’re making something special, and I’ll never forget it… we all were like: ‘Oh God, no, wait, this is really, really special.’

“I still stand by that song to this day. I still feel like it could be released now.”

First released in Ireland on 2 June 2000, the single quickly shot up the charts, peaking at number four in the United States, and clearing the top three in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

She still remembers her surprise.

“Are you kidding me? I was beyond shocked. I just couldn’t get my head around it.

“I remember being in a bubble and doing tonnes of press, but that didn’t really compute with me, I was still a teenager.”

The cultural significance of her rise also didn’t immediately register with the new-born star.

Born into an interracial marriage, Mumba was giving people something they had rarely heard before – an Irish accent on a famous black girl.

Race “just wasn’t a thing” for her then, but now, at 42, she said it blows her mind.

“When girls send me messages or I meet them and they say how much it meant to them to see me, and that they looked like me… that just means so much,” she said.

“I wasn’t raised with race being significant, obviously I am a black woman now and I have a black daughter and I’m very aware of the significance of representation, and the importance of that.

“I’m just grateful I got to be that for anybody, because I certainly didn’t have that growing up.”

Mumba’s debut album came out in October 2000, making her contemporaries the likes of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Destiny’s Child.

After a string of successful singles, she set about recording a follow-up while also juggling commitments such as her role in The Time Machine opposite Guy Pierce and a collaboration with Damian Marley.

But, Mumba’s sophomore album – Woman – never saw the light of day.

“I kind of got caught in between when all the labels merged,” she said.

“I was frozen, I couldn’t be released from my label, but they wouldn’t release music at that time.

“If I had to go back and do it all over again, I would, just with better attorneys and kind of industry savvy,” she laughed.

Instead, Mumba was “ready to be a normal girl” – she moved to Los Angeles, in an effort to “live a little bit and grow up”.

On her return to the stage in recent years, Mumba said she is trying to adapt to a very different industry.

The rise of social media and streaming has been an advantage “because it’s taken a lot of the power away from the labels”, she said, adding she can now release music without expectation, connect with people instantly and shut down any untrue rumours.

“I remember things would be written about me in newspapers and there was nothing I could do. Whereas [now] you can just laugh and nix it immediately.”

Indeed, social media was to the fore when Mumba’s emoji-loaded post criticising Ireland’s Eurovision selection process made headlines earlier this year.

Mumba, who came second with her track My Way, questioned some of the judging panel’s credentials for the Eurosong competition.

In hindsight, would she have reacted differently?

“I stand 10 toes down, absolutely,” she said.

“I’ve been asked about [competing in Eurosong] for years and never at my age would I have thought I would consider doing a competition.

“So it was very personal for me. It was really more just about me pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I have zero regrets.”

Eurovision aspirations aside, Mumba said there is still “an awful lot more” she would like to achieve.

She’s been guest starring in Irish mystery-drama Harry Wild since 2023 and popping up on summer music festival bills, including Mighty Hoopla in London this weekend.

Audiences, evidently, are still drawn to the Dubliner and she’s keen to get unreleased music from “back in the day” out to the public – although she wants to strike a balance.

“I’m constantly trying to teeter on, you know, ‘are people over the old stuff? Do they want new stuff?'”

For now, Mumba said she’s happy to be riding the current wave of noughties nostalgia.

“It was a great time in all of our lives. Things were a lot simpler, easier, happier, and almost a lot more innocent,” she reflected.

“I’m grateful that 25 years in people still stream the song and and come and see me perform. That’s not lost on me at all.

“But yeah, it it definitely feels like a lifetime ago.”

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.

On her website, Swift said that reclaiming the rights to her music had, for a long time, seemed unimaginable.

“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 can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now.

“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.”

In the music industry, the owner of a master recording controls the way it is distributed and licenced. The artist still earns royalties, but controlling the masters offers protection over how the work is used in future.

Swift responded to the original sale of her masters 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.”

Last week, the star 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”.

She also confirmed that she had re-recorded her self-titled debut, adding: “I really love how it sounds now”.

“Those two albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right,” she added.

“But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”

As the name suggests, a master recording is the original recorded performance of a song. Whoever owns it controls all the rights to exploit the music.

That includes distributing it to streaming services, pressing new physical CDs and vinyl, creating box sets, or licensing songs to movies or video games.

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 it cost Swift to acquire her masters, but the catalogue previously sold for $300m (£222m) in 2020.

The BBC understands that rumours she paid between $600m to $1bn are inaccurately high.

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.”

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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.”

Elon Musk’s time in the Trump administration has come to an end with a news conference in the Oval Office in which he and the US president defended the work of Doge – and vowed it would continue, even without Musk.

According to President Trump, Musk is “not really leaving” and will continue to be “back and forth” to the White House.

“It’s his baby,” Trump said of Musk’s work with Doge, short for the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk’s departure comes 130 days after Trump returned to office, the maximum allowable through his status as a “special government employee”.

Doge – which is an advisory body, rather than a formal government department – has the stated aim of slashing government spending, saving taxpayer money and reducing the US national debt, which stands at $36tn (£28.9tn).

Musk’s work with Doge, however, has come with considerable controversy, particularly after mass lay-offs across federal agencies and the elimination of most programmes run by USAID, the main US foreign aid organisation.

It also led to Musk’s companies coming under scrutiny, with global protests against Tesla and calls for boycotts. In turn, the company saw sales plummet to their lowest level in years.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump praised Musk, who he credited with “tirelessly helping lead the most sweeping and consequential government reform programme in generations”.

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Trump added that the “mindsets” of federal officials have changed as a result of Doge’s work to detect fraud and “slash waste”.

According to Doge’s website, it had saved the US government a total of $175bn as of 29 May.

A BBC analysis conducted in late April, however, found that only $61.5bn of that amount was itemised, and evidence of how the savings were achieved was available about $32.5bn of the total.

“He’s not really leaving,” Trump said of Musk. “He’s going to be back and forth…I think he’s going to be doing a lot of things.”

Musk, for his part, insisted that Doge will continue to “relentlessly” seek $1 trillion in reductions.

The meeting between the two men comes just days after an interview with CBS – the BBC’s US partner – in which Musk said he was “disappointed” in what Trump has referred to as his “big, beautiful” bill, which includes multi-trillion dollar tax breaks and a pledge to increase defence spending.

While Musk had previously said he believes that the bill “undermines” the work of Doge, he did not comment on it during the Oval Office meeting. Trump, though, delivered a lengthy defence of the “unbelievable” legislation that “does amazing things”.

“But there are two things I’d like to see,” Trump said. “Maybe cut a little bit more. I’d like to see a bigger cut in taxes.”

The news conference also took several turns, including when Musk was asked about a New York Times report this week that suggested he was using drugs heavily during Trump’s 2024 campaign.

After cutting off the reporter before he could finish the question, Musk responded by citing a recent judge’s decision that Trump can proceed with a defamation case against the Washington Post and New York Times for their reporting on alleged connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

“That New York Times?” Musk asked. “Let’s move on.”

Additionally, Musk was asked why he appeared to have a bruised eye.

“I wasn’t anywhere near France,” Musk replied, a reference to a recent incident between French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigette.

Musk explained his injury by saying he had told his five-year-old son, X Æ A-12 – known as X – to punch him in the face.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron warned the US and Europe risked losing their credibility and being accused of “double standards” if they do not resolve the wars in Ukraine and Gaza soon.

He also appealed to Asian countries to build a new alliance with Europe to ensure they do not become “collateral damage” in the struggle for power between the US and China.

Macron was speaking at the Shangri-la Dialogue, an annual high-level Asia defence summit held in Singapore.

Among the guests listening were US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as top military officials from the region.

Macron pointed out that if Russia could take Ukrainian territory “without any restrictions, without any constraints… what could happen in Taiwan? What will you do the day something happens in the Philippines?”

“What is at stake in Ukraine is our common credibility, that we are still able to preserve territorial integrity and sovereignty of people,” he said. “No double standards.”

Many in Asia worry of instability in the region should China attempt to forcibly “reunify” with Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing claims as part of its territory. China has also increasingly clashed with the Philippines over competing claims in the South China Sea.

Macron later answered a question posed by the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner on Europe’s military role in Asia while a full-scale war was still raging on the continent.

“If both the US and Europeans are unable to fix in the short term the Ukrainian situation, I think the credibility of both the US and Europeans pretending to fix any crisis in this region would be very low,” the French leader said.

US President Donald Trump has put increasing pressure on both Russia and Ukraine’s leaders to end the war, and has appeared to give Vladimir Putin a two-week deadline. Trump has also previously berated Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and accused him of being “not ready for peace”.

Macron also made his point about double standards on the war in Gaza, acknowledging there was a perception the West has given a “free pass” to Israel.

He stressed the importance of working towards a ceasefire and mutual recognition of a Palestinian state, saying: “If we abandon Gaza, if we consider there is a free pass for Israel, even if we do condemn the terrorist attacks, we kill our own credibility in the rest of the world.”

In recent weeks, European leaders have criticised Israel’s attacks for exacerbating the increasingly desperate humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Macron has moved closer to signalling recognition of a Palestinian state. Next month, France will co-host with Saudi Arabia a conference at the UN aimed at laying out a roadmap for a two-state solution.

He has been fiercely criticised by Israel, with the foreign ministry on Friday saying: “Instead of applying pressure on the jihadist terrorists, Macron wants to reward them with a Palestinian state.”

Last week, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also launched a blistering attack on Macron and the leaders of Canada and the UK, accusing them of effectively siding with Hamas and being “on the wrong side of humanity”.

Meanwhile the US has worked with Israel to table a ceasefire proposal to Hamas, while creating a much-criticised aid distribution model in Gaza.

Macron also used his speech on Friday to sell his vision of “strategic autonomy”, where countries protect their interests while also working closely together to uphold a rules-based global order not dominated by superpowers.

He touted France as an example of being friends with both the US and China while guarding its own sovereignty, and said this model could form the basis of a new alliance between Europe and Asia.

“We want to co-operate but we don’t want to depend… we don’t want to be instructed on a daily basis on what is allowed, what is not allowed and how our life can change because of a decision by a single person,” he said, in what appeared to be a veiled reference to Trump or Chinese President Xi Jinping.

He also made references to Trump’s global tariffs and allies’ uncertainty of the US’s security commitments, saying: “We cannot just remain seated and say… what do we do with tariffs, okay we are not so sure that we have the full-fledged guarantee in the existing alliance, what do we do?”

“We want to act, we want to preserve our stability and our peace and our prosperity,” he said, calling for a “positive new alliance between Europe and Asia” where they would ensure “our countries are not collateral damage of the imbalances linked to the choices made by the superpowers”.

He noted that both Europe and Asia’s challenges were increasingly intertwined, and referenced the Ukraine war again where North Korea has been aiding Russia’s efforts with thousands of its troops.

Macron said that in the past he had objected to the Western alliance Nato having a role in Asia, “because I don’t want to be involved with someone else’s strategic rivalry”.

“But what’s happening with North Korea being present alongside Russia on European soil is a big question for all of us,” he said.

“So this is why if China doesn’t want Nato involved in South-East Asia or Asia, they should prevent clearly [North Korea] from being engaged on European soil.”

Mathieu Duchatel, director of international studies at the Paris-based think tank Institut Montaigne, said Macron’s comments on credibility had “implied criticism of the US’s Middle East policy, and a direct call on the US to adjust its diplomacy towards Russia”.

Observers agree China would likely be angered by Macron’s speech, with Dr Duchatel noting the French leader’s comments on Taiwan were “the furthest he has gone” on the issue.

Some parts of Asia may welcome Macron’s message on strategic autonomy given their anxieties about choosing between the US and China, said Andrew Small, senior fellow of the Asia-Pacific programme of Washington-based think tank GMF.

“His argument is that most of the rest of the world does not want to be stuck with this dichotomy and wants to hold together some version of global order – that’s what a number of states in Asia would agree,” he said.

Among several European and Asian states, Dr Small said, there was “genuine concern about how China will interpret a Russian victory” in Ukraine, while “the Trump administration takes a different view and is trying to make the case that there is no read across”.

He added that Macron’s mention of the recognition of a Palestinian state – on which France has been leading European efforts – was to signal “we are moving on this”.

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.

After hearing of the fatal shootout, Chriselda Kananda, a spokesperson for Ms Mongale’s family, told South African broadcaster SABC News: “It is quite a relief for the family that justice for Olorato, before we even lay her body to rest, would have been served.”

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.

The family spokesperson said Ms Mongale’s body had been “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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The French scientist who created the abortion pill has died at the age of 98.

Étienne-Émile Baulieu helped develop the oral drug RU-486, also known as mifepristone, which has provided millions of women across the world with a safe and inexpensive alternative to a surgical abortion.

Dr Baulieu died at his home in Paris on Friday, his widow confirmed in a statement.

Simone Harari Baulieu said: “His research was guided by his commitment to progress through science, his dedication to women’s freedom and his desire to enable everyone to live better and longer lives.”

French President Emmanuel Macron called Dr Baulieu “a beacon of courage” and “a progressive mind who enabled women to win their freedom”.

“Few French people have changed the world to such an extent,” he added in a post on X.

Aurore Bergé, France’s gender equality minister, said Dr Baulieu “was guided throughout his life by one requirement: that of human dignity” in a post on X.

Dr Baulieu was born Étienne Blum on 12 December 1926 in Strasbourg. He changed his name to join the French resistance against the Nazi occupation when he was 15.

Following his graduation, he travelled to the United States where he worked with the man known as the father of the contraceptive pill, Dr Gregory Pincus. Dr Pincus advised him on focusing on sex hormones.

Back in France, Dr Baulieu designed a method to block the effect of the hormone progesterone – which is essential for the egg to implant in the uterus following fertilisation.

While the abortion pill was developed within 10 years, Dr Baulieu spent decades pushing international governments to authorise the drug despite facing fierce criticism and sometimes threats from opponents of abortion.

The approval for sale of the pill in 1988 sparked backlash, both in Europe and the United States, where to this day it remains a point of contention between pro-choice and anti-abortion campaigners.

While use of the drug has been approved in over 100 countries globally, access to mifepristone is still heavily regulated or restricted in the US and several other countries.

In recent years, some anti-abortion campaigners have also promoted claims that abortion medication – cast as “chemical abortion” – ineffective and dangerous, despite medical authorities consistently saying it is safe for use.

Since its approval in 2000, the US Food and Drug Administration has reported a total of 26 deaths associated with mifepristone – a rate of about 0.65 deaths per 100,000 medication abortions.

For comparison, the death rate associated with habitual aspirin use is about 15.3 deaths per 100,000 aspirin users.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) added mifepristone to its list of essential medication in 2010.

Upon Wyoming becoming the first US state to ban the abortion pill in 2023, Dr Baulieu noted he had spent a large part of his life trying to increase “the freedom of women”, adding such bans were a step in the wrong direction.

His recent research included trying to find a way to prevent the development of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as a treatment for severe depression.

French President Macron presented Dr Baulieu with the Grand Cross of the Legion d’Honneur in 2023 saying: “You, a Jew and a member of the resistance, were heaped with the most atrocious insults and compared to Nazi scientists.

“But you held firm, out of love for freedom and science.”

President Donald Trump has announced the US will double its current tariff rate on steel and aluminium imports from 25% to 50%, starting on Wednesday.

Speaking at a rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Trump said the move would help boost the local steel industry and national supply, while reducing reliance on China.

Trump also said that $14bn would be invested in the area’s steel production through a partnership between US Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel, though he later told reporters he had yet to see or approve the final deal.

The announcement is the latest turn in Trump’s rollercoaster approach to tariffs since re-entering office in January.

“There will be no layoffs and no outsourcing whatsoever, and every US steelworker will soon receive a well deserved $5,000 bonus,” Trump told the crowd, filled with steelworkers, to raucous applause.

One of the major concerns from steelworkers about the US-Japan trade deal was how Japan would honour the workers’ union contract which regulates pay and hiring.

Trump began his remarks by saying he had “saved” US Steel, America’s biggest steel manufacturer, located in Pittsburgh, with the 25% tariffs he implemented during his first term as president in 2018.

He touted the increase to 50% as a way to ensure US Steel’s survival.

“At 50%, they can no longer get over the fence,” he said. “We are once again going to put Pennsylvania steel into the backbone of America, like never before.”

US steel manufacturing has been declining in recent years, and China, India and Japan have pulled away as the world’s top producers. Roughly a quarter of all steel used in the US is imported, and the country’s reliance on Mexican and Canadian steel has angered Trump.

The announcement comes amid a court battle over the legality of some of Trump’s global tariffs, which an appeals court has allowed to continue after the Court of International Trade ordered the administration to halt the taxes.

His tariffs on steel and aluminium were untouched by the lawsuit.

“It is a good day for steelworkers,” JoJo Burgess, a member of the local United Steelworkers union who was at Trump’s rally, told the BBC.

Mr Burgess, who is also the city mayor of nearby Washington, Pennsylvania, expressed optimism over the reported details of the partnership with Nippon Steel, saying he hoped it would help breed a new generation of steel workers in the area.

He recalled “making a lot of money” in the years after Trump instituted steel tariffs in his first term.

Although Burgess would not label himself a Trump supporter, and says he has only voted for Democratic nominees for president in the last two decades, he said: “I’m never going to disagree with something that’s going to level the playing field for American manufacturing.”

But so far the impacts of Trump’s tariffs have largely led to global economic chaos. Global trade and markets have been upended and cracks have formed – or widened – in relations between the US and other countries, including some of its closest partners.

The levies have strained relations between China and the US, the world’s two biggest global economies, and launched the countries into a tit-for-tat trade battle.

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On Friday, without providing details, Trump accused China of violating a truce they had reached over tariffs earlier this month over talks in Geneva.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer later clarified that China had not been removing non-tariff barriers as agreed under the deal.

China then shot back with its own accusations of US wrongdoing. Beijing’s response on Friday did not address the US claims directly but urged the US to “cease discriminatory restrictions against China”.

China is the world’s largest manufacturer of steel, responsible for more than half of global steel production, according to World Steel Association statistics from 2022.

“If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country. You don’t have a country, you can’t make a military. What are we going to do? Say, ‘Let’s go to China to get our steel from the army tanks,'” Trump quipped at the Pittsburgh rally on Friday.

Trump’s roughly hour-long, wide-ranging rally speech hinted at the deal he said he had made with Japan’s Nippon Steel but he did not offer any new details. Both companies have not confirmed any deal was completed.

While campaigning for president, Trump had said he would block foreign acquisition of US Steel, the storied 124-year-old American steel company. It is unclear how the reported partnership would operate and who would own the company.

White House officials said Trump had convinced Japan’s Nippon Steel to boost its investment in the US and give the government key say over the operations of the US factories.

According to US media, Japan plans to invest $14bn over 14 months.

Other reported details include that the companies had said they would maintain ownership of US steel in the US, with US citizens on the board and in leadership positions; pledged not to cut production for 10 years; and agreed to give the government the right to veto potential production cuts after that period.

Hundreds of thousands of people with advanced head and neck cancer could live longer without their cancer returning thanks to an immunotherapy drug, a clinical trial suggests.

This is the first sign of a breakthrough for patients with this difficult-to-treat cancer for 20 years, say scientists behind the research.

Laura Marston, 45, from Derbyshire, says she is “amazed she’s still here” after being given “dire” chances of survival following a diagnosis of advanced tongue cancer six years ago.

She received the immunotherapy before and after surgery, which researchers say helps the body learn to attack the cancer if it returns.

Cancers in the head and neck are notoriously difficult to treat and there’s been little change in the way patients are treated in two decades.

More than half those diagnosed with advanced head and neck cancers die within five years.

Laura was given only a 30% chance of surviving that long after her diagnosis in 2019, after having an ulcer on her tongue which wouldn’t go away.

The next step was major surgery to remove her tongue, as well as lymph nodes in her neck, and then she had to learn to talk and eat again.

“I was 39 and I was devastated,” she told BBC News.

As part of an international study into new ways to treat the cancer, involving experts from the Institute of Cancer Research in London, Laura was one of more than 350 patients given the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab before and after surgery to prime the body’s defences.

Prof Kevin Harrington, who led the trial in the UK, explains: “We give the immune system the chance to have a good look at the tumour to generate anti-tumour immunity and then, after removal of the tumour, we continue to amplify that immune response by giving the drug continually for up to a year.”

A similar number of patients diagnosed with similar cancers received the usual care offered. They all had advanced head and neck cancers in one area, that had not spread to the rest of the body.

The new approach showed positive results. It doubled the length of time patients were cancer free, on average, from around 2.5 years to five years.

After three years, patients given pembrolizumab had a 10% lower risk of their cancer returning elsewhere in the body.

Six years on, Laura is working full-time and says she’s “in a good place and doing really well”.

“It’s been phenomenal for me, because I’m here, able to talk to you.

“I wasn’t expected to come this far,” Laura says.

“My prognosis was quite dire.”

She had muscle taken from her left arm and placed into her mouth to fill the void left by her tongue. It has been a tough journey.

“Just having this amazing immunotherapy has given me my life back again.”

The researchers say the key to their results was giving patients the drug before surgery, which trains the body to hunt down and kill the cancer if it ever comes back.

Prof Harrington says immunotherapy “could change the world” for these patients.

“It significantly decreases the chance of cancer spreading around the body, at which point it’s incredibly difficult to treat,” he said.

About 12,800 new head and neck cancer cases are diagnosed in the UK every year.

The approach worked “particularly well” for some patients, but it was “really exciting” to see the treatment benefitting all the patients in the trial, Prof Harrington said. He added that it should now be made available on the NHS, .

The study findings are being presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting.

The trial, called Keynote, involved 192 hospitals in 24 countries, was led by Washington University Medical School in St Louis and funded by drug company MSD.

After 13 years of school, Selma Jenvin-Steinsvag and her classmate Aksel were running to catch the Oslo metro in red overalls. “After that all our written exams will be done,” said Selma, 18.

The sight of school-leavers, known here as , walking around in colourful overalls is something of a coming-of-age tradition that brightens up the weeks before Norway’s national day on 17 May.

That marks the day the can finally relax after their exams and have one final party. But for increasing numbers of young Norwegians, the parties have been starting weeks earlier, well before their exams have finished.

And there is one side to the celebrations that has increasingly alarmed parents and politicians alike – the .

“It’s a party bus! We go out every night for a month, we get drunk, we’re partying with our friends and it’s just fun!” says 19-year-old Edvard Aanestad, who is finishing school on the west side of Oslo.

The fear is that all the weeks of partying as well as the peer pressure involved are having a detrimental effect on teenagers’ overall wellbeing, as well as their grades.

A small fortune is often spent renting the buses and decking them out and many school-leavers go into debt to pay for it all.

“Adrives all night from around midnight until early morning. We play really, really loud music and party all night,” says Edvard’s friend, Henrik Wathne, who’s 18.

Alongside all the fun, there have been complaints that the celebrations result in heavy drinking, drug use and little sleep. There are also concerns that many teenagers feel left out because they cannot afford the cost.

And all of it currently coincides with the exam period.

Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said last year that he too had enjoyed his graduation, but the party bus culture had spun out of control.

His intervention followed years of public debate, with objections from authorities as well as many of the school-leavers and their parents.

“We are worried about some negative trends in our schools and neighbourhoods, and within Norwegian youth culture in general,” says Solveig Haukenes Aase, whose eldest child is graduating this year.

Her two younger children are yet to start high school and she complains that the culture affects younger teenagers too: “In recent years, it has also started to have an impact on middle school kids.”

Together with other parents she formed a group aimed at making the environment for young people safer.

“The attitude of school authorities previously was that it’s a private matter, that the celebration is something that happens in your spare time,” she told the BBC.

“But there has been a change in mentality among teachers, principals and school authorities, and it’s now widely acknowledged that the new culture has a huge impact on the school environment.”

Norway’s minister of education, Kari Nessa Nordtun, said it had been “a problem for many years that the celebrations and the exam period have been intertwined”.

She told the BBC that school-leavers had experienced difficulties in concentrating on exams because of the partying and that results had declined because of it.

“The celebration has also become highly commercialised and exclusionary, and we see that these negative effects are spreading all the way down to lower secondary school.

“We want to put an end to social exclusion, peer pressure and high costs for many young people. We are now working to create a new and more inclusive graduation celebration.”

The plan now is to ensure that from next year celebrations are moved to the post-exam period.

The party bus tradition dates back to Oslo in the early 1980s and tends to be more prevalent among some of the more elite schools.

But it has now become national in scale and Ivar Brandvol, who has written about the tradition, believes the whole point of the bus has now changed, so that the bus celebrations no longer involve the whole school class but a more select group instead.

“Another change is the amount of money you need to be a part of a bus-group. Some of the bus-groups will have a budget up to 3m krone (£220,000) even if they choose to just rent it,” he says.

“Sound-systems are shipped from all over Europe. To pay the bills, the groups will often sell toilet paper to friends, family and neighbours for a little profit. But the kids have to sell tons of toilet paper to earn enough, and usually end up using savings and getting into debt.”

There is a broad acceptance in Norway that the school-leavers’ party bus culture has to be scaled back.

The government is also worried about potential risks to teenagers’ safety, as they dance on buses that are driven around during the night.

“We want this year’s graduating class to be the last class that is allowed to use converted buses with sideways-facing seats and standing room while driving,” says Jon-Ivar Nygard, Norway’s Minister of Transport. “We can no longer send our young people off in unsafe buses.”

For many prospective school-leavers in Norway the government’s plan goes too far.

“The government wants to take away the sideways seating on the buses and just have group seating. I think it’s the wrong way to go,” complains Edvard Aanestad.

And when it comes to addressing problems of inclusivity on the buses, he and his friend Henrik believe the authorities are taking the wrong approach.

Only half of the 120 school-leavers in his year were part of a party-bus group, and they agree part of the reason was the high cost.

But the two young men say they spent years planning their celebrations, even getting jobs on the side to pay for the whole experience.

“This isn’t going to help tackle exclusion,” warns Edvard, who points out that banning some of the buses will mean there will be fewer buses to go around. “If anything, it’s the opposite, so it’s the wrong way to go.”

Listen to Jean read this article

The border between North and South Korea is swamped with layers of dense barbed-wire fencing and hundreds of guard posts. But dotted among them is something even more unusual: giant, green camouflaged speakers.

As I stood looking into the North one afternoon last month, one of the speakers began blasting South Korean pop songs interspersed with subversive messages. “When we travel abroad, it energises us”, a woman’s voice boomed out across the border – an obvious slight given North Koreans are not allowed to leave the country.

From the North Korean side, I could faintly hear military propaganda music, as its regime attempted to drown out the inflammatory broadcasts.

North and South Korea are technically still at war, and although it has been years since either side shelled the other, the two sides are fighting on a more subtle front: a war of information.

The South tries to get information into the North, and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un tries furiously to block it, as he attempts to shield his people from outside information.

North Korea is the only country in the world the internet has not penetrated. All TV channels, radio stations and newspapers are run by the state.

“The reason for this control is that so much of the mythology around the Kim family is made up. A lot of what they tell people is lies,” says Martyn Williams, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Center, and an expert in North Korean technology and information.

Expose those lies to enough people and the regime could come crumbling down, is how the thinking in South Korea goes.

The loudspeakers are one tool used by the South Korean government, but behind the scenes a more sophisticated underground movement has flourished.

A small number of broadcasters and non-profit organisations transmit information into the country in the dead of night on short and medium radio waves, so North Koreans can tune in to listen in secret.

Thousands of USB sticks and micro-SD cards are also smuggled over the border every month loaded with foreign information – among them, South Korean films, TV dramas, and pop songs, as well as news, all designed to challenge North Korean propaganda.

But now those working in the field fear that North Korea is gaining the upper hand.

Not only is Kim cracking down hard on those caught with foreign content, but the future of this work could be in jeopardy. Much of it is funded by the US government, and has been hit by US President Donald Trump’s recent aid cuts.

So where does this leave both sides in their longstanding information war?

Every month, a team at Unification Media Group (UMG), a South Korean non-profit organisation, sift through the latest news and entertainment offerings to put together playlists that they hope will resonate with those in the North.

They then load them onto devices, which are categorised according to how risky they are to view. On low-risk USBs are South Korean TV dramas and pop songs – recently they included a Netflix romance series When Life Give You Tangerines, and a hit from popular South Korean singer and rapper Jennie.

High-risk options include what the team calls “education programmes” – information to teach North Koreans about democracy and human rights, the content Kim is thought to fear the most.

The drives are then sent to the Chinese border, where UMG’s trusted partners carry them across the river into North Korea at huge risk.

South Korean TV dramas may seem innocuous, but they reveal much about ordinary life there – people living in high-rise apartments, driving fast cars and eating at upmarket restaurants. It highlights both their freedom and how North Korea is many years behind.

This challenges one of Kim’s biggest fabrications: that those in the South are poor and miserably oppressed.

“Some [people] tell us they cried while watching these dramas, and that they made them think about their own dreams for the very first time”, says Lee Kwang-baek, director of UMG.

It is difficult to know exactly how many people access the USBs, but testimonies from recent defectors seem to suggest the information is spreading and having an impact.

“Most recent North Korean defectors and refugees say it was foreign content that motivated them to risk their lives to escape”, says Sokeel Park, whose organisation Liberty in North Korea works to distribute this content.

There is no political opposition or known dissidents in North Korea, and gathering to protest is too dangerous – but Mr Park hopes some will be inspired to carry out individual acts of resistance.

Kang Gyuri, who is 24, grew up in North Korea, where she ran a fishing business. Then in late 2023, she fled to South Korea by boat.

Watching foreign TV shows partly inspired her to go, she says. “I felt so suffocated, and I suddenly had an urge to leave.“

When we met in a park on a sunny afternoon in Seoul last month, she reminisced about listening to radio broadcasts with her mum as a child. She got hold of her first K-drama when she was 10. Years later she learnt that USB sticks and SD cards were being smuggled into the country inside boxes of fruit.

The more she watched, the more she realised the government was lying to her. “I used to think it was normal that the state restricted us so much. I thought other countries lived with this control,” she explains. “But then I realised it was only in North Korea.”

Almost everyone she knew there watched South Korean TV shows and films. She and her friends would swap their USBs.

“We talked about the popular dramas and actors, and the K-pop idols we thought were good looking, like certain members of BTS.

“We’d also talk about how South Korea’s economy was so developed; we just couldn’t criticise the North Korean regime outright.”

The shows also influenced how she and her friends talked and dressed, she adds. “North Korea’s youth has changed rapidly.”

Kim Jong Un, all too aware of this risk to his regime, is fighting back.

During the pandemic, he built new electric fences along the border with China, making it more difficult for information to be smuggled in. And new laws introduced from 2020 have increased the punishments for people who are caught consuming and sharing foreign media. One stated that those who distribute the content could be imprisoned or executed.

This has had a chilling effect. “This media used to be available to buy in markets, people would openly sell it, but now you can only get it from people you trust,” says Mr Lee.

After the crackdown began Ms Kang and her friends became more cautious too. “We don’t talk to each other about this anymore, unless we’re really close, and even then we’re much more secretive,” she admits.

She says she is aware of more young people being executed for being caught with South Korean content.

Recently Kim has also cracked down on behaviour that could be associated with watching K-dramas. In 2023 he made it a crime for people to use South Korean phrases or speak in a South Korean accent.

Members of ‘youth crackdown squads’, patrol the streets, tasked with monitoring young people’s behaviour. Ms Kang recalls being stopped more often, before she escaped, and reprimanded for dressing and styling her hair like a South Korean.

The squads would confiscate her phone and read her text messages, she adds, to make sure she had not used any South Korean terms.

In late 2024, a North Korean mobile phone was smuggled out of the country by Daily NK, (Seoul-based media organisation UMG’s news service).

The phone had been programmed so that when a South Korean variant of a word is entered, it automatically vanishes, replaced with the North Korean equivalent – an Orwellian move.

“Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people”, says Mr Williams.

Following all these crackdown measures, he believes North Korea is now “starting to gain the upper hand” in this information war.

Following Donald Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year, funds were severed to a number of of aid organisations, including some working to inform North Koreans. He also suspended funds to two federally financed news services, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America (VOA), which had been broadcasting nightly into North Korea.

Trump accused VOA of being “radical” and anti-Trump”, while the White House said the move would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.

But Steve Herman, a former VOA bureau chief based in Seoul, argues: “This was one of the very few windows into the world the North Korean people had, and it has gone silent with no explanation.”

UMG is still waiting to find out whether their funding will be permanently cut.

Mr Park from Liberty in North Korea argues Trump has “incidentally” given Kim a helping hand, and calls the move “short-sighted”.

He argues that North Korea, with its expanding collection of nuclear weapons, poses a major security threat – and that given sanctions, diplomacy and military pressure have failed to convince Kim to denuclearise, information is the best remaining weapon.

“We’re not just trying to contain the threat of North Korea, we’re trying to solve it,” he argues. “To do that you need to change the nature of the country.

“If I was an American general I’d be saying ‘how much does this stuff cost, and actually that’s a pretty good use of our resources'”.

The question that remains is, who should fund this work. Some question why it has fallen almost entirely to the US.

One solution could be for South Korea to foot the bill – but the issue of North Korea is heavily politicised here.

The liberal opposition party tends to try to improve relations with Pyongyang, meaning funding information warfare is a no go. The party’s frontrunner in next week’s presidential election has already indicated he would turn off the loudspeakers if elected.

Yet Mr Park remains hopeful. “The good thing is that the North Korean government can’t go into people’s heads and take out the information that’s been building for years,” he points out.

And as technologies develop, he is confident that spreading information will get easier. “In the long run I really believe this is going to be the thing that changes North Korea”.

US President Donald Trump has accused China of violating a truce on tariffs struck earlier this month, a claim China has responded to with its own accusations of US wrongdoing.

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

But Trump said on Friday that China had “totally violated its agreement with us”. He did not give details but US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer later said China had not been removing non-tariff barriers as agreed under the deal.

Beijing’s response on Friday did not address the US claims directly but urged the US to “cease discriminatory restrictions against China”.

The strong statements from both sides have raised concerns that trade tensions could again escalate between the world’s two largest economies despite recent negotiations.

Trump on Friday said in a Truth Social post that the tariffs his administration had imposed had been “devastating” for China and so he had “made a FAST DEAL” to save them from “what I thought was going to be a very bad situation”.

“Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!! The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”

He did not expand on his accusation, but Ambassador Greer later told TV network CNBC that China was yet to properly roll back other trade restrictions it had levied on the US.

Greer 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 exports of rare earth magnets, a critical component in cars, aircraft and semiconductors.

“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.

“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,” Greer said.

China responded on Friday urging the US to “immediately correct its erroneous actions, cease discriminatory restrictions against China and jointly uphold the consensus reached at the high-level talks in Geneva”.

A spokesman from its Washington embassy said China had recently “repeatedly raised concerns” with the US over its “abuse of export control measures in the semiconductor sector”. The US already has restrictions in place on technology exports to China, and on Wednesday paused more sales to China of chip technologies – crucial to semiconductors – and also paused exports of chemicals and machinery.

Pengyu Liu said both sides had maintained communication since the talks in Geneva on 11 May, which had ended on a positive note.

However on Thursday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had said 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 Geneva, 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 increasing 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.

For many, Saturdays are something to look forward to – relaxed times, enjoyed with family and friends. But Elizabeth Young “dreads” them. It’s a weekly reminder of her daughter Jade’s violent murder at Westfield Bondi Junction.

“On a lovely autumn afternoon, to learn your daughter is dead, stabbed in broad daylight, killed amidst fellow unsuspecting shoppers… [when she] was living, breathing, just an hour ago… it’s the stuff of nightmares, of a parallel universe,” Elizabeth told an inquiry into the mass killing this week.

“The moment [the attacker] casually plunged that knife into Jade, our ordinary lives were shattered.”

Her pain was echoed by families of the other victims who gave emotional testimonies on the final day of a five-week coronial inquest into the fatal stabbings on 13 April last year.

The inquiry sought to understand how a 40-year-old Queensland man with a long history of mental illness was able to walk into the popular Sydney shopping centre on a busy Saturday afternoon and kill six people, injuring 10 others including a nine-month-old baby.

The court heard hours of evidence from dozens of witnesses – doctors, survivors, victims’ families, police – in a bid to find out how, or if, Australia can prevent a such a tragedy happening again.

“It seems to me that my daughter and five others were killed by the cumulative failures of numbers of people within a whole series of fallible systems,” Elizabeth told New South Wales (NSW) Coroners Court.

It was a mild, sparkling afternoon – the first day of school holidays – when Joel Cauchi walked into the sprawling shopping centre, just minutes from Australia’s most famous beach.

Just before 15:33 local time (GMT), Cauchi took a 30cm knife from his backpack and stabbed to death his first victim, 25-year-old Dawn Singleton.

Within three minutes, he had fatally attacked five others – Yixuan Cheng, 27; Jade Young, 47, Ashlee Good, 38; Faraz Tahir, 30; and Pikria Darchia, 55. Cauchi also injured 10 others including Good’s infant daughter.

At 15:38, five minutes after his rampage started, Cauchi was shot dead by police officer Amy Scott, who had been on duty nearby and arrived at the centre about a minute earlier.

As news outlets reported on the killings, Cauchi’s parents recognised their son on TV and called the police to alert them about his decades-long struggle with serious mental health problems.

Jade Young’s family was also confronted by images of her on TV, describing to the inquest the horror of seeing video which showed her “lifeless body being worked on”. Similarly, Julie Singleton, whose daughter Dawn was killed while standing in a line at a bakery, heard her daughter named as a victim on the radio before her body had even been formally identified and other relatives informed.

The scenes at Bondi sent shockwaves across the nation, where mass murder is rare, and prompted a rush of anger and fear from women in particular. All except two of the 16 victims were female, including five of the six people who died.

A key focus of the inquest was to scrutinise the multiple interactions Cauchi had with police and mental health professionals in the months and years leading up to the attacks.

The inquest heard that Cauchi was once a bright young man with a promising life ahead of him. His family say he was a gifted student, and had attended a private school on scholarship before topping his class at university.

At the age of 17, in 2001, Cauchi was diagnosed with schizophrenia and soon started taking medication for his condition.

After a decade of managing it in the public health system, Cauchi started regular sessions with psychiatrist Dr Andrea Boros-Lavack in his hometown of Toowoomba in 2012.

In 2015 he complained about the medication side effects, so Dr Boros-Lavack started to gradually reduce his dosage of clozapine – used for treatment-resistant schizophrenia – after seeking a second opinion from another psychiatrist, the inquest heard.

She weaned him off clozapine entirely in 2018 and Cauchi also stopped taking medication to treat his obsessive-compulsive disorder the year after, she said.

In 2019, for the first time in about 15 years, Cauchi was no longer on antipsychotic medications. No second opinion on completely stopping either drug was sought by Dr Boros-Lavack, she admitted under questioning.

The inquest heard from medical professionals who said that in most cases, patients coming off antipsychotic medications transition to another one, rather than ceasing treatment altogether.

Within months, Cauchi’s mum contacted his psychiatrist with concerns about her son’s mental state after finding notes showing he believed he was “under satanic control”. Around the same time, Cauchi developed what Dr Boros-Lavack told the inquest was “a compulsive interest in porn”. She wrote a prescription but told the inquest it was up to Cauchi to decide if he would start taking the medication again.

In 2020, Cauchi left his family home, moved to Brisbane and stopped seeing Dr Boros-Lavack.

At this time, after almost two decades of treatment, Cauchi had no regular psychiatrist, was not on any medications to treat his schizophrenia and had no family living nearby.

The inquest heard he began seeking a gun licence, contacting three Brisbane doctors for a medical certificate to support his application. They either didn’t request access to his medical file or weren’t given his whole history by Dr Boros-Lavack, who said if they needed more information they could have asked her for it. The third doctor gave Cauchi the clearance he was after, but he never applied for a gun, the court was told.

Meanwhile Cauchi was increasingly coming into contact with police. After moving to Brisbane, he was pulled over three times for driving erratically. In 2021, officers were called to Cauchi’s unit in Brisbane after residents heard a man screaming and banging sounds.

In 2022, Cauchi was reported to police after calling a girl’s school to ask if he could come and watch the students swim and play sports. Officers tried to call Cauchi but weren’t able to reach him.

In January 2023, Cauchi had moved back in with his parents in Toowoomba and called police to complain that his father had stolen his collection of “pigging knives”. At this time, his mother raised concerns with the officers, saying he should be back on medication.

Authorities can’t detain people for mental health reasons unless they are a risk to themselves and as the officers had assessed Cauchi did not meet that description, they left, the court heard.

After the call-out, one of the attending police officers sent an email to an internal police mental health coordinator, requesting they follow up on Cauchi. However, the email was overlooked due to understaffing, the inquest was told.

Months later, police in Sydney found Cauchi sleeping rough near a road after being called by a concerned passerby.

By 2024 Cauchi’s mental health had deteriorated, he was homeless, and isolated from his family.

The inquest looked closely at Cauchi’s mental health treatment in Queensland, with a panel of five psychiatrists tasked with reviewing it.

They found that Dr Boros-Lavack had missed opportunities to put him back on anti-psychotic medication, one member of the panel saying she had “not taken seriously enough” the concerns from Cauchi’s mother in late-2019.

The panel also gave evidence at the inquest that Cauchi was “floridly psychotic” – in the active part of a psychotic episode – when he walked into the shopping centre.

When questioned by the lawyer assisting the coroner, Dr Boros-Lavack stressed: “I did not fail in my care of Joel.”

She had earlier told the inquest she believed Cauchi was not psychotic during the attack and that medication would not have prevented the tragedy.

Dr Boros-Lavack said the attacks may have been “due to his sexual frustration, pornography and hatred towards women”.

But the next day, she withdrew that evidence, saying it was simply “conjecture” and she was not in a position to assess Cauchi’s mental state, having not treated him since 2019.

However the inquest is investigating whether Cauchi targeted specific individuals or groups.

For Peter Young, the brother of Jade, the answer seemed clear. “Fuelled by his frustration with not finding a ‘nice’ girl to marry”, his “rapid hunt found 16 victims, 14 of which were women,” he told the inquest.

The NSW Police Commissioner in the days after the attack said it was “obvious” to detectives that the offender had focussed on women.

However, during the inquest, the homicide squad’s Andrew Paul Marks said he did not believe there was evidence that Cauchi had specifically targeted women.

The inquiry also heard about a number of failings or near misses in the way security, police, paramedics and the media responded to the attack.

It was told that recruitment and training pressures for the security provider meant that the centre’s control room operator was “not match fit” for the role. At the exact moment when Cauchi stabbed his first victim, the room was unattended as she was on a toilet break.

Security guard Faraz Tahir, the sole male victim of the stabbings, was working his first day on the job when he was killing trying to stop Cauchi, raising questions over the powers and protection given to personnel like him.

His brother, Muzafar, told the inquest how Faraz died “with honour as a hero” and also acknowledged that Cauchi’s parents had lost their son: “We know that this tragedy is not their fault.”

The contractor responsible for security at the shopping centre has since updated its training and policies, as well as introducing stab-proof vests for guards.

Several families criticised media coverage in the wake of the attack, telling the inquiry they hoped the industry would reflect on how they should report sensitive stories so as not to further traumatise those affected.

After weeks of evidence, the inquest was adjourned on Thursday with NSW state coroner Teresa O’Sullivan expected to deliver her recommendations by the end of the year.

At the start of the inquest, O’Sullivan said the hearings weren’t about who was to blame for the attacks, but rather to “identify potential opportunities for reform or improvement to enable such events to be avoided in the future”.

“I want the families to know their loved ones will not be lost in this process.”

Elizabeth Young, though, told the court, for her, “nothing good” will come from the inquest.

“At 74, I have lost my way in life,” she said, describing the crippling impact of the killings.

But she said the action the country needed to take was already obvious to her.

“My daughter was murdered by an unmedicated, chronic schizophrenic… who had in his possession knives designed for killing.

“[This is] another cry out to an Australia that doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that what happened… is essentially the catastrophic consequence of years of neglect of, and within, our mental health systems.”

The masked and armed security contractor atop a dirt mound watches thousands of Palestinians who have been kettled into narrow lanes separated by fences below.

He makes a heart shape with his hands and the crowd responds – the fence begins to bend as they push against it.

This jubilant scene was filmed on Tuesday, the opening day of an aid distribution centre – a vital lifeline for Gazans who haven’t seen fresh supplies come into the strip for more than two months due to an Israeli blockade.

But by that afternoon, the scene was one of total chaos. Videos showed the distribution centre overrun by desperate civilians trampling over toppled barriers; people flinched as sounds of gunshots rang out.

This was the disorderly start to a controversial new aid distribution scheme operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly created body backed by the US and Israel.

GHF has been tasked with feeding desperately hungry Gazans. The UN said more than two million are at risk of starvation.

The foundation, which uses armed American security contractors, aims to bypass the UN as the main supplier of aid in Gaza. It has been roundly condemned and boycotted by aid agencies and the UN. But Israel has said an alternative to the existing aid system was needed to stop Hamas stealing aid, which the group denies doing.

To get a picture of the first few days of this new aid delivery system, BBC Verify has authenticated dozen of images at distribution sites, interviewed humanitarian and logistics experts, analysed Israeli aid transport data and official statements released by the GHF, and spoken with Gazans searching for supplies.

GHF said it aimed to feed one million Gazans in its first week of operations through four secure distribution sites.

A foundation spokesperson said on Friday, its fourth day of operations, that it had distributed two million meals. The BBC has not been able to verify this figure, which would be less than one meal per Gazan over the course of four days.

GHF did not respond to our inquiries about how it was tracking who had been receiving them.

In a video filmed at GHF’s northern site near Nuseirat on Thursday, Palestinians can be seen being running away from a perimeter fence after GHF contractors threw a projectile that exploded with a loud bang, a flash and smoke.

GHF in a statement said its personnel “encountered a tense and potentially dangerous crowd that refused to disperse”.

“To prevent escalation and ensure the safety of civilians and staff, non-lethal deterrents were deployed—including smoke and warning shots into the ground,” it said.

“These measures were effective”, it added, “and no injuries occurred.” BBC Verify cannot independently confirm this.

Later that evening, GHF warned Gazans via Facebook that it would shut down any site where looting occurred.

The GHF is not the only aid organisation facing serious challenges. The night before the GHF warning, a World Food Programme (WFP) warehouse was looted, resulting in several deaths which are still being investigated.

In response to the incident, the WFP said humanitarian challenges “have spiralled out of control” and called for “safe, unimpeded humanitarian access” to Gaza immediately.

The WFP did not respond to BBC questions about how it would implement further security measures at its warehouses.

Palestinians seeking aid have characterised the GHF-led operation as disorganised, saying a lack of communication has contributed to the chaotic scenes seen this week.

Things have been further muddied by misinformation. BBC Verify has seen at least two Facebook profiles purporting to be official GHF accounts, sharing inaccurate information about the status of the aid distribution centres.

One page with more than 4,000 followers posted inaccurate information, sometimes alongside AI-generated images, that aid had been suspended or that looting at GHF centres had been rampant.

A GHF spokesman confirmed to BBC Verify that both these Facebook accounts were fake. He also said that the foundation had launched an official Facebook channel.

Transparency information online showed the page was first created on Wednesday, the day after distribution operations started.

Aid organisation Oxfam and local Gazan residents have told the BBC that residents are instead relying on word of mouth to circulate information when aid was available.

“All of the people are hungry. Everyone fights to get what they want, how are we supposed to get anything?” said Um Mohammad Abu Hajar, who was unable to secure an aid box on Thursday.

Oxfam criticised the location of the GHF distribution sites, telling BBC Verify that it imposed “military control over aid operations”.

Its policy adviser, Bushra Khalidi, also questioned how vulnerable people, such as the elderly, would be able to reach these sites, which are located some distance away from some population centres.

When the UN had been delivering aid before Israel’s humanitarian blockade, there were 400 distribution points spread across Gaza. Under the present GHF distribution system there currently are four known sites.

“By and large, its designed to dramatically increase the concentration of the population by having the only sources of food remaining in a very small number of places,” said Chris Newton, a senior analyst at the brussels-based think tank Crisis Group.

“You either follow all their rules and probably survive in a small radius around these sites or you are very unlikely to survive.”

The presence of armed security and Israeli soldiers at or near the distribution sites has also alarmed experts, who said it undermined faith in aid operations.

“Distributing assistance in this kind of environment is extremely difficult. [It’s] much more effectively done when you are trying to work with, and through, the people there… rather than at the point of a mercenary’s gun,” said Prof Stuart Gordon at the London School of Economics.

A GHF spokesperson said: “Our ability – and willingness – to act under pressure is exactly why GHF remains one of the only organisations still capable of delivering critical food aid to Gaza today.”

Images and videos taken by eyewitnesses and the Israeli military showed the GHF boxes appeared limited to canned food, pasta, rice, cooking oil and some biscuits and lentils.

“Humanitarian aid is not just a food box that you slap humanitarian on and you call it humanitarian aid,” Ms Khalidi said.

The supplies being given to families should be accompanied by medical support, hygiene and water purification kits, said Prof Gordon.

A 14-page document from GHF, seen by the BBC, promised to hand out water and hygiene kits at the sites.

On Friday, only one of the four GHF sites was distributing aid. It opened for less than an hour after which GHF announced on Facebook that it had closed because all its supplies had been “fully distributed”.

When asked by BBC Verify why only a single site was operational and why its boxes ran out so quickly, a GHF spokesperson said supply “will vary day by day”.

“Good news is we have provided two million meals in four days and will be ramping up in the coming days and weeks,” the spokesman said.

But many are still returning from distribution sites without boxes for their families.

“I am empty-handed like God created me,” said Hani Abed outside the centre near Netzarim on Thursday.

“I came empty-handed and I left empty-handed.”

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An estimated 250 million bees escaped from an overturned truck in the US state of Washington on Friday, sparking warnings from authorities for the public to avoid the swarm of stinging insects.

Emergency officials were helped by several master bee-keepers after the truck, which had been hauling roughly 70,000 lb (31,750 kg) of active honey bee hives, flipped over on a road near the Canadian border.

“The goal is to save as many bees as possible,” Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) said shortly after the incident.

The authorities said the site of the crash would remain closed “until the rescue is complete”.

“250 million bees are now loose,” wrote Whatcom County Sheriff. “AVOID THE AREA due to the potential of bee escaping and swarming”.

Bee-keepers worked with police “to assist in re-setting the box hives”, containers bee-keepers use to house honeybees.

“The plan is to allow the bees to re-hive and find their queen bee,” WCSO said, adding: “That should occur within the next 24-48 hours.”

In an update posted to social media later on Friday, police thanked “the wonderful community of bee-keepers”, saying “over two dozen” had turned up to help with the rescue efforts.

“By morning, most bees should have returned to their hives,” WCSO wrote on Facebook.

Footage shared by police showed huge numbers of bees swarming around the overturned lorry.

While some bee-keepers aim only to produce honey, many others rent out their hives to farmers who need the insects to pollinate their crops.

Loretta Swit, who won two Emmy awards for her role on the popular comedy TV series M*A*S*H, died on Friday, according to her representative.

She died at her home in New York at age 87, her publicist Harlan Boll told the BBC. She likely died of natural causes, although a coroner’s report is pending.

On M*A*S*H, Swit played US Army nurse Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan. The series, which followed a mobile Army surgical hospital during the Korean war, ran for 11 seasons from 1972 to 1983.

Swit was nominated for numerous awards, and appeared in nearly every episode of the series, including the finale which attracted a record 106m US viewers.

The show remains one of the most successful and acclaimed series in US television history. Its season finale was the most watched episode of any TV series in history when it ended in 1983.

As “Hot Lips,” Swit played a tough but vulnerable Army nurse who gained the nickname after having an affair with Major Frank Burns, who was played by Larry Linville.

The show used comedy and pranks to tackle tough issues like racism, sexism and the impacts of PTSD within the military, at a time when US forces were withdrawing from Vietnam and dealing with the consequences of that conflict.

It was based on the 1968 book, “MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors,” penned by a former Army surgeon.

Swit was born Loretta Szwed in New Jersey and trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.

Along with M*A*S*H, she also appeared in numerous other TV shows, movies and even game shows over her career.

She took to the Broadway stage in plays including Same Time, Next Year; Mame; and Shirley Valentine – a role for which she won Chicago’s top theatre prize, the Sarah Siddons Award.

Her TV work included appearances on The Muppet Show, Mission: Impossible and Murder, She Wrote.

In addition to her Emmys, Swit was nominated for four Golden Globe awards.

“Acting is not hiding to me, it’s revealing. We give you license to feel,” she said in an interview with the Star magazine in 2010. “That’s the most important thing in the world, because when you stop feeling, that’s when you’re dead.”

Speaking to an author about her character on M*A*S*H she said: “Around the second or third year, I decided to try to play her as a real person, in an intelligent fashion, even if it meant hurting the jokes. … She was a character in constant flux; she never stopped developing.”

Swit was also an artist and animal rights activist, and established a charity to campaign against animal cruelty, according to a statement from her publicist Mr Boll.

Jamie Farr, who also starred in M*A*S*H as Corporal Klinger, called Swit his “adopted sister”.

“From the first time I met her, on what was supposed to be a one-day appearance on M*A*S*H, we embraced each other and that became a lifetime friendship,” Farr said in a statement. “I can’t begin to express how much she will be missed.”

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.

On her website, Swift said that reclaiming the rights to her music had, for a long time, seemed unimaginable.

“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 can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now.

“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.”

In the music industry, the owner of a master recording controls the way it is distributed and licenced. The artist still earns royalties, but controlling the masters offers protection over how the work is used in future.

Swift responded to the original sale of her masters 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.”

Last week, the star 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”.

She also confirmed that she had re-recorded her self-titled debut, adding: “I really love how it sounds now”.

“Those two albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right,” she added.

“But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”

As the name suggests, a master recording is the original recorded performance of a song. Whoever owns it controls all the rights to exploit the music.

That includes distributing it to streaming services, pressing new physical CDs and vinyl, creating box sets, or licensing songs to movies or video games.

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 it cost Swift to acquire her masters, but the catalogue previously sold for $300m (£222m) in 2020.

The BBC understands that rumours she paid between $600m to $1bn are inaccurately high.

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.”

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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.”