Hamas responded to a US ceasefire proposal by saying it is prepared to release 10 living Israeli hostages and 18 dead hostages in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners, while requesting some amendments to the plan.

The group repeated its demands for a permanent truce, a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and guarantees for the continuous flow of humanitarian aid. None of these are in the deal on the table.

It was neither an explicit rejection nor a clear acceptance of the US terms, which Washington says Israel has accepted.

Hamas said it had submitted its response to the US draft proposed by Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East.

In a statement, Witkoff said: “I received the Hamas response to the United States’ proposal. It is totally unacceptable and only takes us backward. Hamas should accept the framework proposal we put forward as the basis for proximity talks, which we can begin immediately this coming week.

“That is the only way we can close a 60-day ceasefire deal in the coming days.”

A statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said: “While Israel has agreed to the updated Witkoff outline for the release of our hostages, Hamas continues to adhere to its refusal.”

Hamas, a proscribed terror group in the US, UK and EU, said it was insisting on a “permanent ceasefire” and “complete withdrawal” of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

The group demanded a sustained flow of aid for Palestinians living in the enclave, and said it would release 10 living hostages and the bodies of 18 dead hostages in exchange for “an agreed upon number” of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

But Hamas now finds itself in the most complex and difficult position it has faced since the war began.

Under intense pressure from 2.2 million people living in the worst conditions in their history and from the mediators, the movement is unable to accept an American proposal that is, by all accounts, less generous than previous offers it has rejected multiple times, the most recent being in March.

At that time, senior Hamas official and head negotiator Khalil al-Hayya stated unequivocally that the movement would not agree to partial deals that fail to secure a complete and permanent end to the war.

Yet, Hamas also finds itself unable to reject the latest US offer outright, fully aware that Israel is preparing to escalate its ground offensive in Gaza.

The movement lacks the military capacity to prevent or even seriously resist such an assault.

Caught between these two realities, Hamas, in effect, responded to the US proposal not with an answer – but with an entirely new counterproposal.

The full details of the US plan have not been made public and are unconfirmed, but these key points are reportedly included:

• A 60-day pause in fighting

• The release of 28 Israeli hostages – alive and dead – in the first week, and the release of 30 more once a permanent ceasefire is in place

• The release of 1,236 Palestinian prisoners and the remains of 180 dead Palestinians

• The sending of humanitarian aid to Gaza via the UN and other agencies

The terms on offer were the ones Israel could accept – the White House made sure of that by getting Israel’s approval before passing the proposal to Hamas.

It is unlikely that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be willing to negotiate the changes Hamas wants.

He is under pressure to bring the hostages home and has said he is willing to accept a temporary ceasefire to do so.

But the Israeli government has always insisted on the right to return to hostilities, despite Hamas’s core demand for guarantees that the temporary truce be a path to ending the war.

Netanyahu has said the war will end when Hamas “lays down its arms, is no longer in government [and] its leaders are exiled from the Gaza Strip”.

Defence Minister Israel Katz was more blunt this week. “The Hamas murderers will now be forced to choose: accept the terms of the ‘Witkoff Deal’ for the release of the hostages – or be annihilated,” he said.

Earlier on Saturday, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said 60 people were killed and another 284 injured in the past 24-hours in Israeli strikes.

That does not include numbers from hospitals located in the North Gaza Strip Governorate because of the difficulty of accessing the area, it adds.

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

At least 54,381 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 4,117 since Israel resumed its offensive on 18 March, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Crowds of civilians have rushed aid trucks in Gaza, the World Food Programme has said, as hunger and desperation create chaotic scenes.

The humanitarian organisation said it had brought 77 trucks loaded with flour into Gaza overnight and early on Saturday.

“All trucks were stopped along the way, with food taken mainly by hungry people trying to feed their families,” WFP said.

Due to a “very high” chance convoys would not reach their warehouse, a decision was taken to let people take aid in the event of crowds, WFP spokeswoman Abeer Etefa told the BBC.

Israel eased an 11-week aid blockade on 19 May, but the UN says the amount sent in the last week amounts to just over 10% of people’s needs.

The crowds on Saturday were civilians who had received word that food was coming, “the desperate ones who cannot wait to get to distribution points”, Ms Etefa said.

WFP had chosen aid delivery routes “that are closer to the populations and safer, and away from the gangs”.

Workers instructed people to take only one bag of flour each, but were not able to control who took what as intended.

“After nearly 80 days of a total blockade, starving people will not let a food truck pass,” the WFP added.

A UN-backed assessment has said Gaza’s entire population is at “critical risk” of famine, with Ms Etefa saying two million people are in “desperate need” of food.

After the blockade partially lifted, WFP has been able to distribute trucks, but “not at the scale that we would like to and not at the quantities that should get there so that we can calm the situation and control the chaos”, she said.

Israel said it had imposed the blockade on Gaza to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages, at least 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

The UN Palestinian refugee agency chief said the 900 trucks sent in to Gaza over the past week were “just over 10% of the daily needs of people”.

“The aid that’s being sent now makes a mockery to the mass tragedy unfolding under our watch,” Philippe Lazzarini said on X.

Israeli military agency Cogat has accused the UN of not distributing aid already inside Gaza, with Israel’s foreign ministry saying hundreds of trucks are waiting.

“More aid would actually get to the people if you would collect the aid waiting for you by the crossings,” Cogat said to the UN on X on Friday.

The UN humanitarian office’s regional head, Jonathan Whittall, said the agency faced challenges in distributing aid because of escalating insecurity along routes, being given “inappropriate routes”, “long delays” in receiving approvals to move, and “desperate crowds” along the way.

Separately, a new US and Israel-backed organisation has also been distributing food at designated sites across Gaza. Israel set up the plan after accusing Hamas of stealing aid, which the group denies.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said it distributed two million meals this week, which the BBC has not been able to independently verify.

There were chaotic scenes at those distribution sites this week. The UN has refused to work with the operation, saying it contradicts humanitarian principles.

Meanwhile, Israeli air strikes continue. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Saturday that over the past day, it had struck “dozens of terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip”.

Sixty people were killed in Israeli military operations over the past 24 hours, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said.

The statistics do not include the North Gaza Governorate, where the last hospital closed on Thursday after the Israeli military ordered its evacuation.

Christos Georgalas, a Greek surgeon who until 21 May worked at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, told the BBC his patients were mainly children, usually with shrapnel injuries.

“Children were the main victims in terms of trauma and malnutrition,” he said on Friday.

Malnutrition slows down the healing process and increases the risk of infections because wounds remain open longer, he explained.

He and hospital staff eat only rice for lunch and dinner, which he said made them lucky compared to others. One of his colleagues told him he had lost 26 kilos (57 pounds) over recent months.

Georgalas said a lot of doctors had not been paid for a year. Some live in tents, commuting without protection to work, or have to evacuate at short notice.

“They are worried for their relatives and lives, they are starved, despite that they continue,” he said.

Since he left Gaza, his colleague told him the ICU had been “constantly full” and “overwhelmed”, with doctors having to ration care because so many patients need intubation.

Meanwhile, four Arab countries that had planned a landmark visit to the West Bank this weekend condemned Israel’s decision to block the trip.

The delegation that was planning to meet the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah included the foreign ministers of Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

An Israeli official said the intended meeting was meant to discuss promoting a Palestinian state, which the current Israeli government rejects.

Saudi Arabia and France are co-hosting an international conference next month meant to resurrect the two-state solution as an answer to the Gaza war.

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

At least 54,381 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 4,117 since Israel resumed its offensive on 18 March, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Iran has further stepped up its production of highly enriched uranium, according to the UN nuclear watchdog, which set out “serious concern” at the development.

In a confidential report seen by the BBC, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iran now possesses over 400kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity – well above the level used for civilian purposes and close to weapons grade, and a near 50% increase in three months.

It is enough for about 10 nuclear weapons if further refined, making Iran the only non nuclear-armed state producing uranium at this level.

Iran has long said its programme is peaceful.

But the IAEA said it could not confirm whether it remains so.

Iran has produced highly enriched uranium at a rate equivalent to roughly one nuclear weapon per month over the past three months, the report found, during the ongoing nuclear negotiations between Tehran and Washington.

“The significantly increased production and accumulation of highly enriched uranium by Iran… is of serious concern,” said IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi.

The report paves the way for the US, Britain, France and Germany to push for the IAEA’s board of governors to find Iran in violation of its non-proliferation obligations.

Following the IAEA report, Israel on Saturday accused Iran of being “totally determined” to acquire nuclear weapons.

“Such a level of enrichment exists only in countries actively pursuing nuclear weapons and has no civilian justification whatsoever,” a statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded that Tehran considers nuclear weapons “unacceptable”.

“If the issue is nuclear weapons, yes, we too consider this type of weapon unacceptable,” Araghchi, Iran’s lead negotiator in the US-Iran talks, said in a televised speech. “We agree with them on this issue.”

• What is Iran’s nuclear programme and what does the US want?
• Iran’s uranium enrichment ‘worrisome’ – nuclear watchdog
• Can Trump convince Iran to ditch its nuclear programme?

US officials estimate that, if Iran chooses to pursue a weapon, it could produce weapons-grade material in less than two weeks and potentially build a bomb within months.

The IAEA’s latest assessment, longer and more comprehensive than usual, also details troubling findings about Iran’s past nuclear work, including a secret programme carried out until the early 2000s.

It concluded that Tehran conducted undeclared nuclear activities at three previously unknown sites: Lavisan-Shian, Varamin and Turquzabad.

Despite ongoing negotiations between Tehran and Washington over a potential new nuclear deal, the report offered no indication that Iran has slowed its enrichment efforts.

Talks have been under way since April, with both sides expressing optimism but remaining divided over key issues – chief among them, whether Iran can continue enrichment under any future agreement.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful and has long denied accusations it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

However, the IAEA stated that it “cannot verify” this, citing Iran’s refusal to grant access to senior inspectors and its failure to answer longstanding questions about its nuclear history.

In recent months, two of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s advisors – Ali Larijani and Kamal Kharazi – have suggested Iran might reconsider its long-standing position against building nuclear weapons if international pressure intensifies.

Such statements have raised alarm among Western diplomats, who fear Iran is edging closer to becoming a nuclear threshold state.

The IAEA board is expected to meet in the coming days to discuss next steps, amid mounting international pressure on Tehran to fully cooperate with inspections and return to compliance with nuclear non-proliferation norms.

The report is likely to lead to Iran being referred to the UN Security Council, though that would probably happen at a later IAEA board meeting, diplomats told the Reuters news agency.

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 queueing 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 in the job when he was killed 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.”

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has warned of China posing an “imminent” threat to Taiwan, while urging Asian countries to boost defence spending and work with the US to deter war.

While the US does not “seek to dominate or strangle China”, it would not be pushed out of Asia nor allow its allies to be intimidated, Hegseth said while addressing a high-level Asian defence summit.

In response, China has accused the US of being the “biggest troublemaker” for regional peace.

Many in Asia fear potential instability if China invades Taiwan, a self-governing island claimed by Beijing. China has not ruled out the use of force.

Speaking at the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore, Hegseth characterised China as seeking to become a “hegemonic power” that “hopes to dominate and control too many parts” of Asia. China has clashed with several neighbours over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea.

He said Beijing was “credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power” in Asia, and referred to a 2027 deadline that President Xi Jinping has allegedly given for China’s military to be capable of invading Taiwan.

This is a date put forth by US officials and generals for years, but has never been confirmed by Beijing.

China “is building the military needed to do it, training for it, every day and rehearsing for the real deal”, Hegseth said.

“Let me be clear: any attempt by Communist China to conquer Taiwan by force would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world. There’s no reason to sugarcoat it. The threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent. We hope not but certainly could be.”

The US does not seek war or conflict with China, Hegseth added.

“We do not seek to dominate or strangle China, to encircle or provoke. We do not seek regime change… but we must ensure that China cannot dominate us or our allies and partners,” he said, adding “we will not be pushed out of this critical region”.

In response, the Chinese embassy in Singapore posted a note on its Facebook page saying the speech was “steeped in provocations and instigation” and said Hegseth had “repeatedly smeared and attacked China and relentlessly played up the so-called ‘China threat'”.

“As a matter of fact, the US itself is the biggest ‘troublemaker’ for regional peace and stability,” it added. Examples it cited included the US “deploying offensive weapons” in the South China Sea and conducting reconnaissance of what the embassy called “Chinese islands and reefs”.

“What the US now offers the most to the world is ‘uncertainty’,” the embassy said. “The country claims to safeguard peace and not to seek conflicts. We’ve heard it. Let’s see what moves will it take.”

China’s robust rhetoric came as it deliberately diminished its presence at the dialogue.

The Shangri-la Dialogue has traditionally served as a platform for the US and China to make their pitches to Asian countries as the superpowers jostle for influence.

But while this year the US has sent one of its largest delegations ever, China instead sent a notably lower-level team and scrapped its planned speech on Sunday. No explanation has been given for this.

To prevent war, the US wants “a strong shield of deterrence” forged with allies, said Hegseth, who promised the US would “continue to wrap our arms around our friends and find new ways to work together”.

But he stressed “deterrence does not come cheap” and urged Asian countries to ramp up their defence spending, pointing to Europe as an example.

US President Donald Trump has demanded members of the Western alliance Nato spend more on defence, at least 5% of their GDPs – an approach Hegseth called “tough love, but love nonetheless”. Some countries including Estonia have moved quickly to do so, while others such as Germany have signalled an openness to comply.

“How can it make sense for countries in Europe to do that while key allies and partners in Asia spend less in the face of a more formidable threat?” he said with reference to China, adding North Korea was a threat as well.

“Europe is stepping up. US allies in the Indo-Pacific can, and should, follow by quickly upgrading their own defences,” he insisted, saying they should be “partners, not dependents” on the US.

He touted US military hardware and also pointed to a new Indo-Pacific partnership for defence industrial resilience. Its first projects are establishing a radar repair centre in Australia for US maritime patrol aircraft purchased by allies, and aiding the production of unmanned drones in the region.

He also warned Asian countries against seeking economic ties with China, saying Beijing would use it as “leverage” to deepen its “malign influence”, complicating US defence decisions.

Hegseth’s speech came a day after French President Emmanuel Macron’s pitch at the same dialogue for Europe to be Asia’s ally as well.

Answering a question about Macron’s proposal, he said the US “would much prefer that the overwhelming balance of European investment be on that continent” so that the US could use its “comparative advantage” in the Indo-Pacific.

China’s response criticised the US’s approach to Europe. “Since the US commitment to its European allies is to urge the latter to spend more for self-defence, what will be its commitment to others?” the statement read.

“The US keeps expanding its already staggering defence expenditure. Will the expanded portion come from tariffs it imposes on other countries?” it added, referring to Trump’s global tariffs which have shaken up the world economic order and sparked concern among US allies.

Hegseth also sold Trump’s vision of “common sense” in dealing with the rest of the world, where “America does not have or seek permanent enemies”.

He compared the US President to the late Singaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew, who was famous for his pragmatic realpolitik in foreign relations.

“The United States is not interested in the moralistic and preachy approach to foreign policy of the past. We are not here to pressure other countries to embrace and adopt policies or ideologies. We are not here to preach to you about climate change or cultural issues. We are not here to impose our will on you,” he said.

It was an approach that Democratic Party Senator Tammy Duckworth, who was part of the US delegation in Singapore, criticised.

Speaking separately to reporters at the dialogue, the member of the Senate’s foreign relations committee said Hegseth and Trump’s vision was “inconsistent with the values on which our nation was founded”.

Others “know what we stand for, we stand for basic human rights, we stand for international law and order. And that’s what we are going to continue to push for. And I know that in the Senate we’re going to try to uphold that or else it would be un-American otherwise,” she said.

Duckworth also took aim at Hegseth’s overall message to allies in the region, calling it “patronising”.

“His idea where we wrap ourselves around you – we don’t need that kind of language. We need to stand with our allies, work together, and send the message that America is not asking people to choose between the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and us.”

Other members of the delegation, Republican representatives Brian Mast and John Moolenaar, told the BBC the speech sent a clear message of China’s threat and it was welcomed by many Asian countries, according to meetings they had with officials.

“The message I’ve heard is that people want to see freedom of navigation and respect for neighbours, but feel intimidated by some of the aggressive actions that China has displayed,” said Moolenaar, who is chairman of a House committee on competition between US and China.

“So the presence of the US is welcome and encouraged. And the message was to continue to be present.”

Ian Chong, a non-resident scholar with Carnegie China, said Asian governments would be reassured by the US’s commitment to the status quo.

Hegseth’s call to increase defence spending was “pretty standard for the US these days”, he said, adding that while it has been a “perennial issue” between the US and Asian allies like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan that goes back decades, “the Trump administration is more insistent and demands more”.

“I guess Asian governments will listen – but how much they will comply is a different story,” said Dr Chong.

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 EU has said it “strongly” regrets Donald Trump’s surprise plan to double US tariffs on steel and aluminium in a move that risks throwing bilateral trade talks into chaos.

On Friday, the US president told a rally in the steel-making city of Pittsburgh that the tariffs would rise from 25% to 50%, claiming this would boost local industry and national supplies.

The European Commission told the BBC on Saturday that Trump’s latest move on tariffs “undermines ongoing efforts” to reach a deal, warning about “countermeasures”.

This also raises questions about the UK’s zero tariff deal with the US on steel and aluminium which, although agreed, has not yet been signed.

UK steelmakers said the doubling of the tariffs is “yet another body blow” to the industry while a UK government spokesman said “we are engaging with the US on the implications of the latest tariff announcement and to provide clarity for industry”.

The UK – which left the EU following the 2016 Brexit referendum – was the first country to clinch a trade deal with the US earlier this month.

In a statement sent to the BBC on Saturday, the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said: “We strongly regret the announced increase of US tariffs on steel imports from 25% to 50%.

“This decision adds further uncertainty to the global economy and increases costs for consumers and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The tariff increase also undermines ongoing efforts to reach a negotiated solution.

“In good faith, the EU paused its countermeasures on 14 April to create space for continued negotiations,” the statement said, warning the bloc “is prepared to impose countermeasures”.

On Friday, Trump announced the tariff rate on steel and aluminium imports would double to 50%, starting on Wednesday.

He said the move would help boost the local steel industry and national supply, while reducing reliance on China.

Trump also said that $14bn (£10bn) 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 was 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.

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.

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.

Last week, Trump had agreed to extend a deadline to negotiate tariffs with the EU by more than a month.

In April, he announced a 20% tariff – or import tax – on most EU goods, but later cut this to 10% to allow time for negotiations. Trump expressed frustration with the pace of talks and threatened to raise the tariff rate to an even higher level of 50% as soon as 1 June.

But last week he wrote on social media that he was pushing his deadline back to 9 July, after a “very nice” call with Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission chief.

Emmy winning actress Valerie Mahaffey has died at age 71, her family has confirmed.

Mahaffey’s publicist confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the star died in California on Friday after being diagnosed with cancer.

The star was known for her work on television series including Desperate Housewives, Young Sheldon and Big Sky.

In a statement provided to Variety, Mahaffey’s husband Joseph Kell said that he had “lost the love of my life, and America has lost one of its most endearing actresses”.

“She will be missed,” he said.

On Facebook, the couple’s daughter Alice wrote: “I don’t really have the words to say right now. Cancer sucks. I’ll look for you in all the fun moments of life. I know that’s where you’ll be.”

In 1992, Mahaffey won an primetime Emmy for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of Eve in the American dark comedy Northern Exposure.

Her primetime success came after a daytime Emmy award in the previous decade for her role in The Doctors, a soap opera which aired from 1979-1981.

She also appeared in several films, including Sully and Seabiscuit.

More recent roles have included an appearance as Madame Reynard in the 2020 film French Exit, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.

Born to a Canadian mother and American father in Sumatra, Indonesia, Mahaffey relocated as a teen to Texas.

Her first film credit came in 1977, with a role in the film Tell Me My Name.

Mahaffey appeared in episodes of dozens of television series over her five-decade career, including medical drama ER, the dystopian series The Man in the High Castle, and the musical series Glee.

In Desperate Housewives, her memorable role as Alma Hodge, the manipulative ex-wife of Orson Hodge, saw her appear on the drama-filled Wisteria Lane for eight episodes.

She also appeared as teacher Victoria MacElroy in Young Sheldon, a spin-off of the Big Bang Theory that focuses on the upbringing of the show’s titular star Sheldon Cooper.

Mass firings of federal employees which were ordered by US President Donald Trump will remain paused, an appeals court has ruled.

President Trump had signed an executive order in February directing agency heads to begin “large-scale reductions” in staffing. Those efforts to slash the federal workforce were halted by a California judge earlier this month.

On Friday in a 2-1 ruling, a San Francisco-based appeals court denied the Trump administration’s request to unfreeze that injunction.

The administration may request for the US Supreme Court to weigh in.

“The Executive Order at issue here far exceeds the President’s supervisory powers under the Constitution,” the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote. “The President enjoys significant removal power with respect to the appointed officers of federal agencies.”

The Trump administration had sought an emergency stay of an injunction which had been given by Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco. The judge questioned how an overhaul of federal agencies could be actioned without congressional authorisation.

The case was brought by federal employees unions, local governments and non-profits who argued against Trump’s executive order, as well as directives which were issued by the Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget to implement Trump’s policy.

The cuts are part of the Trump administrations efforts to curtail government spending through funding freezes and firings – led by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

Trump has repeatedly promised to slash government spending and reduce the federal workforce. He tasked billionaire Elon Musk and Doge with leading that charge.

Tens of thousands of federal workers have reportedly been fired, taken buyouts or been placed on leave since Trump took office.

The Trump administration said they plan to fight back against the latest court ruling.

“A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch,” the White House said in a statement to US media.

Turkish authorities have ordered the arrests of dozens of people facing corruption allegations, including opposition party members, in Istanbul and the city of Adana.

The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office issued detention orders for 47 people and detained 30. Others detained included local municipal mayors and Istanbul officials.

The operation is the fifth wave of arrests against the government’s political opponents, starting with the jailing of Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, regarded as President Tayyip Erdogan’s main rival in March.

Turkey’s government has rejected claims of political interference, insisting the judiciary is independent.

Imamoglu sent a letter from prison to an opposition rally on Saturday, saying: “It is time to say “enough is enough” to this unjust and unlawful order.”

“Now you are taking our district mayors with fictitious excuses. What will you do? Where will you stop? Are you going to throw 16 million Istanbulites in jail one by one?” he said in the letter.

Imamoglu is part of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), who have been leading in many polls against Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party.

He was jailed over charges of corruption and aiding a terrorist group. He has denied all charges.

His arrest triggered mass protests and arrests across Turkey. The Istanbul prosecutor’s office has said 819 people arrested in protests will be tried in 20 criminal investigations.

Some 110 people were arrested in the first four waves of arrests under corruption allegations.

The fifth wave on Saturday consisted of four different operations in two cities. Municipal mayors, CHP party members and city officials were among those arrested.

CHP Party Assembly member Baki Aydöner wrote on X that he was in Ankara for a party meeting when his wife called and told him that the house was searched and there was a detention order against him. He said he was going to Istanbul.

The UN’s human rights office said in March it was “very concerned” at the mass arrests, with Amnesty International at the time calling the detentions “draconian actions”.

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.

At least 151 people in central Nigeria are now known to have died following flash floods that destroyed homes and displaced thousands of residents earlier this week.

The Niger State Emergency Management Agency (Nsema) confirmed to the BBC the death toll had risen sharply from 115, after floods hit the town of Mokwa.

A Nsema spokesman told the BBC more than 500 households with a population in excess of 3,000 people were affected. Some families are said to have lost between two and five relatives including children.

The agency warned the death toll could rise further after people were washed into the River Niger below the town.

Local authorities said 11 people had been rescued and taken to hospitals for treatment.

Nsema said the Tiffin Maza and Anguwan Hausawa districts of Mokwa were worst affected.

Mokwa’s district head Muhammad Shaba Aliyu said it has been 60 years since the community had suffered this kind of flooding.

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

But the officials appear to be overwhelmed by the scale of destruction as families desperately seek food and shelter.

Mokwa is located at the edge of the River Niger, a transit point between the northern and southern part of Nigeria.

A bridge linking the northern and south-western parts of the country has collapsed in the floods and left motorists stranded.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu directed “all relevant emergency and security agencies to intensify ongoing search and rescue operations”.

Torrential rain fell in the region on late Wednesday into Thursday, causing flash floods.

Nigeria’s rainy season is just beginning and usually lasts from April to October.

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

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 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.

Listen: Advice to a Norwegian daughter before russefeiring

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”.

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 queueing 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 in the job when he was killed 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.”

When astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore approached the International Space Station (ISS) last year with failing thrusters on their Boeing Starliner capsule, they were unable to fly forward to dock.

And if they couldn’t dock, they didn’t know if they could make it back home again.

“Docking was imperative,” Mr Wilmore told BBC News, two months after he and Ms Williams finally made a successful return to Earth. “If we weren’t able to dock, would we be able to make it back? We didn’t know.”

The astronauts had been travelling on a test flight that was meant to last eight days. Instead, they ended up staying in space for nearly 10 months.

The first challenge was to dock safely and successfully at the ISS, which they managed to do within several minutes after Mission Control on the ground helped them restart the craft’s thrusters.

Mr Wilmore said that the possibility they might never see Earth again “definitely went through our minds”.

But both astronauts said they didn’t communicate the worst-case scenarios out loud in those moments, because they were trained to move on with solving problems.

“You sort of read each other’s mind and know where we’re going with all the failures,” Ms Williams told the BBC.

“These were not expected,” she admitted. But thoughts quickly turned to solutions: “At the same time, you know, we’re like, what do we have? What can we do?”

• Astronauts Butch and Suni finally back on Earth
• How did the Nasa pair fill nine months in space?

The pair’s saga began in June 2024. They were taking part in the first crewed test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, which was developed by aerospace company Boeing.

But after a number of technical problems during their flight, the option of Starliner carrying the astronauts home as planned was deemed to be a risk not worth taking – given that the pair could instead be brought back by another company, SpaceX.

For that reason, they stayed in space until they hitched a ride back on a SpaceX capsule. For its part, Boeing maintained that its own capsule was safe to use – and was proven right when the craft returned, uncrewed, in September 2024.

After months of experiments aboard the space station, Ms Williams and Mr Wilmore eventually returned to Earth on 18 March.

During this phase of their mission, the pair were repeatedly described as stranded, implying there was no means for them to get off the ISS.

But that was not the case, as the space station always has spacecraft attached to it – which could have acted in an emergency as a lifeboat to carry the astronauts back to Earth.

Nonetheless, the pair’s stay was longer than expected – though the Nasa pair embraced this.

“We knew nobody was going to just let us down… we knew everybody had our back and was looking out for us,” Ms Williams said.

While in limbo, the pair even found themselves in the middle of a political row, after US President Donald Trump blamed his predecessor Joe Biden for abandoning them in space.

But the astronauts said they ignored the politics and didn’t feel abandoned. “We can’t speak to that at all,” said Mr Wilmore. “We understand space flight is hard, human space flight is even harder.”

After two months back on the ground, both astronauts say they are feeling fit and well, because the workouts that they undertook while in their zero-gravity environment paid off.

Exercising in zero gravity means your body doesn’t need much time to recover from the daily squats and deadlifts, Mr Wilmore explained.

He said he performed squats and deadlifts “every single day for almost 10 months”, meaning that he returned to Earth “literally stronger than I’ve ever been in my life”.

Ms Williams agreed – she went running days after landing back on Earth and once ran a full marathon in space strapped to a treadmill – but said it’s not always easy to readjust to the weight of the world.

“Just getting gravity back on your head and your back and all that kind of stuff is a little bit painful,” she said.

Since their return, the pair have been working with Nasa and Boeing to fix problems with the malfunctioning spacecraft that took them into space last summer.

“We are very positively hopeful that there will be opportunities to fly the Boeing Starliner in the future,” Mr Wilmore said.

And both astronauts said they would personally fly in the craft again – once those technical issues were resolved.

“It’s a very capable spacecraft,” Ms Williams said. “It has unique capabilities compared to other spacecraft that are out there that are really great for future astronauts to fly.”

Bafta award-winning actor, writer, producer and director Sharon Horgan has told an audience at the Hay Festival she finally found confidence after the second series of her hit show Bad Sisters came out last year.

The star, whose back catalogue includes sitcoms Catastrophe, Pulling and Motherland, said she previously thought “there was a possibility I was just in the right place at the right time, or that I had the right people around.

“But I think with Bad Sisters, even though there’s a huge team of people, it felt like mine. That feeling I belonged in that room.”

Bad Sisters, an adaptation of Belgian series Clan on Apple TV+, is a revenge tale about sisters aiming to kill an abusive husband.

Horgan also talked about how she first turned to writing because she couldn’t land any acting roles, hence deciding to write parts for herself.

Speaking about penning her first pilot back in the early 2000s with Dennis Kelly for BBC Three show Pulling, about a group of 20-something women and their chaotic love lives, Horgan said: “Comedy was mainly written by men, writing the female parts. I was writing about myself and my friends – flawed women. No-one was really doing it at that point.”

She said she was concerned that because her female-led sitcom had been picked up, it might mean other women wouldn’t get their shows made.

“It felt like a one-in, one-out kind of system. Like, we’ve had the female comedy [quota].”

She then spent several years “waitressing and doing unsuccessful pilots” before eventually hooking up with Rob Delaney on X (then Twitter) and going on to create Catastrophe.

The Channel 4 show was about a couple who ended up settling down together following an accidental pregnancy after only a week of dating.

Horgan said: “We wanted to show how difficult it was to stay in love when you’re a parent… and you’ve got terrible people running around under three foot!”

Motherhood was a theme the Irish star returned to when she created the hit BBC series Motherland, alongside Holly Walsh and Graham Linehan.

Following a pilot episode aired in 2016, it went on to spawn three hit series, two Christmas specials, and recent spin-off, Amandaland.

The dark comedy sees a group of mum friends – and one dad – navigate the challenges of middle class motherhood.

Horgan told fans at Hay: “I was living it. I would go to my daughter’s primary school every day and just feel existential. You have to find your people, and that’s what happened to me. I met these two really great women who are still in my life now.

“It’s sort of just getting a group of misfits together. I felt like an outsider. It’s a really great, fun show but it’s also about how lonely it can be. I experienced that, walking through a park with my pushchair… and seeing a group of mums having a picnic and thinking, ‘Why aren’t I at that?'”

Since then, her career has continued to thrive and she has juggled multiple roles on many of her shows ranging from executive producer to actor to writer and even director.

But she admitted her perfectionism had occasionally caused an issue on set.

“I’m trying to get better at it. It’s also about having people around you that you really trust almost as much as you trust yourself. But I remember being pulled up on it by a big star in a show I did, just going: ‘Don’t you think all of these people can do their jobs? You think you can do your job better than all these people?’

“And I remember at the time thinking, ‘I can’t say this out loud,’ but ‘yes’!” she laughed.

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At the end of her discussion, Horgan is asked which of her characters she’d most like to be. She plumps for Sharon Morris from Catastrophe.

Despite her obvious success and new-found confidence, Horgan’s admiration for Morris, a funny, brave and strikingly honest woman just doing her best, is clear.

“Even though she’s selfish and can be awful… she was just able to articulate how she was feeling,” she said.

“I think that’s the great thing about writing. You get to say all those conversations that you have in your head and you wish you’d said. She had all my thoughts, the thoughts I was afraid to say at the time.”

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.

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 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.

Ncuti Gatwa has left his role as the Doctor after playing the iconic character for two series on Doctor Who.

At the end of this evening’s series finale, Gatwa regenerates into Billie Piper, who previously played the Doctor’s companion, Rose Tyler.

In a press release, the BBC refers to the Doctor’s regeneration, but says: “Just how and why she [Billie Piper] is back remains to be seen…”

Gatwa said: “This journey has been one that I will never forget, and a role that will be part of me forever.”

The credit at the end of the programme said: “Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor. Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. And introducing Billie Piper”.

Piper first appeared in the show in 2005 when it returned to TV for the first time since the 1990s, appearing alongside Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant.

Billie Piper, a former pop star who later turned to acting, has enjoyed a successful career on TV and on the stage.

After playing Rose Tyler for two full series in 2005 and 2006, she won acclaim for roles including sex worker Belle de Jour in Secret Diary of a Call Girl and the lead character in Sky Atlantic’s I Hate Suzie.

In 2017 she won a best actress award at the Olivier’s, for her performance in the play Yerma. And most recently was nominated for a Bafta for playing TV producer Sam McAlister in Scoop, a drama about Prince Andrew’s disastrous interview on Newsnight in 2019.

After Peter Capaldi stepped down as the 12th Doctor, Piper told the BBC that while she thought that a woman should take over the role, she was doubtful about playing the part herself. Capaldi went on to be replaced by Whittaker.

Gatwa has only played the Doctor for 18 months, appearing in two series. It’s the shortest time an actor has played the character since Christopher Eccleston left the show after one series in 2005.

There is still uncertainty about when the drama will return. Showrunner and head writer Russell T Davies has previously said that no decision would be made on commissioning the next series until this series had been broadcast.

The last two series of the show have been co-produced and broadcast internationally by streaming service Disney+, which has given the time travel drama a bigger budget. Discussions about whether the BBC and Disney wish to renew that deal, or whether other options should be explored, are likely to take some time.

For a new series to be ready for 2026, production would need to get under way relatively soon. So at the moment a new series or a special starring Billie Piper before 2027 looks unlikely.

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 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, it’s 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?

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”.

One person was also killed in the Sumy region, the administration there said.

Residents of 11 settlements in the region were ordered to evacuate, bringing the total number of evacuated settlements to 213.

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

Meanwhile, at least 14 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.

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 Narendra Modi’s BJP in India, Ram Madhav.

In Poland 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 Polish 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 Poland. 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.

Millions of 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.

Emergency officials were helped by several master beekeepers after the truck, which had been hauling roughly 70,000lb (31,750kg) 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”.

WCSO urged people to “avoid the area due to the potential of bees escaping and swarming”, and initially said 250 million bees were loose.

After receiving information from one of the beekeepers doing recovery work, it said that a more accurate total was considerably lower and closer to 14 million.

“The plan is to allow the bees to re-hive and find their queen bee,” WCSO said.

Authorities said they hoped this would happen “within the next 24-48 hours”.

In an update posted to social media later on Friday, police thanked “the wonderful community of beekeepers”, saying “over two dozen” had turned up to help with 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 beekeepers aim only to produce honey, many others rent out their hives to farmers who need the insects to pollinate their crops.

Ncuti Gatwa has left his role as the Doctor after playing the iconic character for two series on Doctor Who.

At the end of this evening’s series finale, Gatwa regenerates into Billie Piper, who previously played the Doctor’s companion, Rose Tyler.

In a press release, the BBC refers to the Doctor’s regeneration, but says: “Just how and why she [Billie Piper] is back remains to be seen…”

Gatwa said: “This journey has been one that I will never forget, and a role that will be part of me forever.”

The credit at the end of the programme said: “Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor. Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. And introducing Billie Piper”.

If confirmed as the new Doctor, Piper will be the third woman to have played the role, following Whittaker and Jo Martin.

In a statement, Piper said she was delighted to be returning to the show, but that fans would have to “wait and see” what her character did next.

“It’s no secret how much I love this show, and I have always said I would love to return to the Whoniverse as I have some of my best memories there, so to be given the opportunity to step back on that Tardis one more time was just something I couldn’t refuse, but who, how, why and when, you’ll just have to wait and see,” she said in a statement.

Moments after the series finale aired, Piper shared a series of photos on Instagram, including two selfies of her holding a white rose and two of her playing the character Rose. The caption under the photos read: “A rose is a rose is a rose !!!”

Doctor Who showrunner and head writer Russell T Davies said: “Billie once changed the whole of television, back in 2005, and now she’s done it again!

“It’s an honour and a hoot to welcome her back to the Tardis, but quite how and why and who is a story yet to be told.

“After 62 years, the Doctor’s adventures are only just beginning!”

The new doctor has always been introduced on the show through regeneration, but Davies’s statement does not make it clear whether Piper will be the 16th doctor.

Piper first appeared in the show in 2005 when it returned to TV for the first time since the 1990s, appearing alongside Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant.

Piper, a former pop star who later turned to acting, has enjoyed a successful career on TV and on the stage.

After playing Rose Tyler for two full series in 2005 and 2006, she won acclaim for roles including sex worker Belle de Jour in Secret Diary of a Call Girl and the lead character in Sky Atlantic’s I Hate Suzie.

In 2017 she won a best actress award at the Olivier’s, for her performance in the play Yerma. And most recently was nominated for a Bafta for playing TV producer Sam McAlister in Scoop, a drama about Prince Andrew’s disastrous interview on Newsnight in 2019.

After Peter Capaldi stepped down as the 12th Doctor, Piper told the BBC that while she thought that a woman should take over the role, she was doubtful about playing the part herself. Capaldi went on to be replaced by Whittaker.

Gatwa has only played the Doctor for 18 months, appearing in two series. It’s the shortest time an actor has played the character since Christopher Eccleston left the show after one series in 2005.

In a statement, Gatwa said of his departure: “You know when you get cast, at some point you are going to have to hand back that sonic screwdriver and it is all going to come to an end, but nothing quite prepares you for it.”

He added: “There are no words to describe what it feels like to be cast as the Doctor, nor are there words to explain what it feels like to be accepted into this iconic role that has existed for over 60 years and is truly loved by so many across the globe.”

Gatwa thanked “Whoniverse” fans for “welcoming me in, and making this such a touching experience.”

“I’ve loved every minute of it, but now is the time to hand over the keys to that beloved blue box and let someone else take control and enjoy it every bit as much as I have.

“I’ll truly miss it, and forever be grateful to it, and everyone that has played a part in my journey as the Doctor.”

There is still uncertainty about when the drama will return. Russell T Davies has previously said that no decision would be made on commissioning the next series until this series had been broadcast.

The last two series of the show have been co-produced and broadcast internationally by streaming service Disney+, which has given the time travel drama a bigger budget. Discussions about whether the BBC and Disney wish to renew that deal, or whether other options should be explored, are likely to take some time.

For a new series to be ready for 2026, production would need to get under way relatively soon. So at the moment a new series or a special starring Billie Piper before 2027 looks unlikely.

Hamas responded to a US ceasefire proposal by saying it is prepared to release 10 living Israeli hostages and 18 dead hostages in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners, while requesting some amendments to the plan.

The group repeated its demands for a permanent truce, a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and guarantees for the continuous flow of humanitarian aid. None of these are in the deal on the table.

It was neither an explicit rejection nor a clear acceptance of the US terms, which Washington says Israel has accepted.

Hamas said it had submitted its response to the US draft proposed by Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East.

In a statement, Witkoff said: “I received the Hamas response to the United States’ proposal. It is totally unacceptable and only takes us backward. Hamas should accept the framework proposal we put forward as the basis for proximity talks, which we can begin immediately this coming week.

“That is the only way we can close a 60-day ceasefire deal in the coming days.”

A statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said: “While Israel has agreed to the updated Witkoff outline for the release of our hostages, Hamas continues to adhere to its refusal.”

Hamas, a proscribed terror group in the US, UK and EU, said it was insisting on a “permanent ceasefire” and “complete withdrawal” of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

The group demanded a sustained flow of aid for Palestinians living in the enclave, and said it would release 10 living hostages and the bodies of 18 dead hostages in exchange for “an agreed upon number” of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

But Hamas now finds itself in the most complex and difficult position it has faced since the war began.

Under intense pressure from 2.2 million people living in the worst conditions in their history and from the mediators, the movement is unable to accept an American proposal that is, by all accounts, less generous than previous offers it has rejected multiple times, the most recent being in March.

At that time, senior Hamas official and head negotiator Khalil al-Hayya stated unequivocally that the movement would not agree to partial deals that fail to secure a complete and permanent end to the war.

Yet, Hamas also finds itself unable to reject the latest US offer outright, fully aware that Israel is preparing to escalate its ground offensive in Gaza.

The movement lacks the military capacity to prevent or even seriously resist such an assault.

Caught between these two realities, Hamas, in effect, responded to the US proposal not with an answer – but with an entirely new counterproposal.

The full details of the US plan have not been made public and are unconfirmed, but these key points are reportedly included:

• A 60-day pause in fighting

• The release of 28 Israeli hostages – alive and dead – in the first week, and the release of 30 more once a permanent ceasefire is in place

• The release of 1,236 Palestinian prisoners and the remains of 180 dead Palestinians

• The sending of humanitarian aid to Gaza via the UN and other agencies

The terms on offer were the ones Israel could accept – the White House made sure of that by getting Israel’s approval before passing the proposal to Hamas.

It is unlikely that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be willing to negotiate the changes Hamas wants.

He is under pressure to bring the hostages home and has said he is willing to accept a temporary ceasefire to do so.

But the Israeli government has always insisted on the right to return to hostilities, despite Hamas’s core demand for guarantees that the temporary truce be a path to ending the war.

Netanyahu has said the war will end when Hamas “lays down its arms, is no longer in government [and] its leaders are exiled from the Gaza Strip”.

Defence Minister Israel Katz was more blunt this week. “The Hamas murderers will now be forced to choose: accept the terms of the ‘Witkoff Deal’ for the release of the hostages – or be annihilated,” he said.

Earlier on Saturday, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said 60 people were killed and another 284 injured in the past 24-hours in Israeli strikes.

That does not include numbers from hospitals located in the North Gaza Strip Governorate because of the difficulty of accessing the area, it adds.

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

At least 54,381 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 4,117 since Israel resumed its offensive on 18 March, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The EU has said it “strongly” regrets Donald Trump’s surprise plan to double US tariffs on steel and aluminium in a move that risks throwing bilateral trade talks into chaos.

On Friday, the US president told a rally in the steel-making city of Pittsburgh that the tariffs would rise from 25% to 50%, claiming this would boost local industry and national supplies.

The European Commission told the BBC on Saturday that Trump’s latest move on tariffs “undermines ongoing efforts” to reach a deal, warning about “countermeasures”.

This also raises questions about the UK’s zero tariff deal with the US on steel and aluminium which, although agreed, has not yet been signed.

UK steelmakers said the doubling of the tariffs is “yet another body blow” to the industry while a UK government spokesman said “we are engaging with the US on the implications of the latest tariff announcement and to provide clarity for industry”.

The UK – which left the EU following the 2016 Brexit referendum – was the first country to clinch a trade deal with the US earlier this month.

In a statement sent to the BBC on Saturday, the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said: “We strongly regret the announced increase of US tariffs on steel imports from 25% to 50%.

“This decision adds further uncertainty to the global economy and increases costs for consumers and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The tariff increase also undermines ongoing efforts to reach a negotiated solution.

“In good faith, the EU paused its countermeasures on 14 April to create space for continued negotiations,” the statement said, warning the bloc “is prepared to impose countermeasures”.

On Friday, Trump announced the tariff rate on steel and aluminium imports would double to 50%, starting on Wednesday.

He said the move would help boost the local steel industry and national supply, while reducing reliance on China.

Trump also said that $14bn (£10bn) 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 was 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.

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.

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.

Last week, Trump had agreed to extend a deadline to negotiate tariffs with the EU by more than a month.

In April, he announced a 20% tariff – or import tax – on most EU goods, but later cut this to 10% to allow time for negotiations. Trump expressed frustration with the pace of talks and threatened to raise the tariff rate to an even higher level of 50% as soon as 1 June.

But last week he wrote on social media that he was pushing his deadline back to 9 July, after a “very nice” call with Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission chief.

Emmy winning actress Valerie Mahaffey has died at age 71, her family has confirmed.

Mahaffey’s publicist confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the star died in California on Friday after being diagnosed with cancer.

The star was known for her work on television series including Desperate Housewives, Young Sheldon and Big Sky.

In a statement provided to Variety, Mahaffey’s husband Joseph Kell said that he had “lost the love of my life, and America has lost one of its most endearing actresses”.

“She will be missed,” he said.

On Facebook, the couple’s daughter Alice wrote: “I don’t really have the words to say right now. Cancer sucks. I’ll look for you in all the fun moments of life. I know that’s where you’ll be.”

In 1992, Mahaffey won an primetime Emmy for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of Eve in the American dark comedy Northern Exposure.

Her primetime success came after a daytime Emmy award in the previous decade for her role in The Doctors, a soap opera which aired from 1979-1981.

She also appeared in several films, including Sully and Seabiscuit.

More recent roles have included an appearance as Madame Reynard in the 2020 film French Exit, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.

Born to a Canadian mother and American father in Sumatra, Indonesia, Mahaffey relocated as a teen to Texas.

Her first film credit came in 1977, with a role in the film Tell Me My Name.

Mahaffey appeared in episodes of dozens of television series over her five-decade career, including medical drama ER, the dystopian series The Man in the High Castle, and the musical series Glee.

In Desperate Housewives, her memorable role as Alma Hodge, the manipulative ex-wife of Orson Hodge, saw her appear on the drama-filled Wisteria Lane for eight episodes.

She also appeared as teacher Victoria MacElroy in Young Sheldon, a spin-off of the Big Bang Theory that focuses on the upbringing of the show’s titular star Sheldon Cooper.

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 queueing 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 in the job when he was killed 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.”

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has warned of China posing an “imminent” threat to Taiwan, while urging Asian countries to boost defence spending and work with the US to deter war.

While the US does not “seek to dominate or strangle China”, it would not be pushed out of Asia nor allow its allies to be intimidated, Hegseth said while addressing a high-level Asian defence summit.

In response, China has accused the US of being the “biggest troublemaker” for regional peace.

Many in Asia fear potential instability if China invades Taiwan, a self-governing island claimed by Beijing. China has not ruled out the use of force.

Speaking at the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore, Hegseth characterised China as seeking to become a “hegemonic power” that “hopes to dominate and control too many parts” of Asia. China has clashed with several neighbours over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea.

He said Beijing was “credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power” in Asia, and referred to a 2027 deadline that President Xi Jinping has allegedly given for China’s military to be capable of invading Taiwan.

This is a date put forth by US officials and generals for years, but has never been confirmed by Beijing.

China “is building the military needed to do it, training for it, every day and rehearsing for the real deal”, Hegseth said.

“Let me be clear: any attempt by Communist China to conquer Taiwan by force would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world. There’s no reason to sugarcoat it. The threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent. We hope not but certainly could be.”

The US does not seek war or conflict with China, Hegseth added.

“We do not seek to dominate or strangle China, to encircle or provoke. We do not seek regime change… but we must ensure that China cannot dominate us or our allies and partners,” he said, adding “we will not be pushed out of this critical region”.

In response, the Chinese embassy in Singapore posted a note on its Facebook page saying the speech was “steeped in provocations and instigation” and said Hegseth had “repeatedly smeared and attacked China and relentlessly played up the so-called ‘China threat'”.

“As a matter of fact, the US itself is the biggest ‘troublemaker’ for regional peace and stability,” it added. Examples it cited included the US “deploying offensive weapons” in the South China Sea and conducting reconnaissance of what the embassy called “Chinese islands and reefs”.

“What the US now offers the most to the world is ‘uncertainty’,” the embassy said. “The country claims to safeguard peace and not to seek conflicts. We’ve heard it. Let’s see what moves will it take.”

China’s robust rhetoric came as it deliberately diminished its presence at the dialogue.

The Shangri-la Dialogue has traditionally served as a platform for the US and China to make their pitches to Asian countries as the superpowers jostle for influence.

But while this year the US has sent one of its largest delegations ever, China instead sent a notably lower-level team and scrapped its planned speech on Sunday. No explanation has been given for this.

To prevent war, the US wants “a strong shield of deterrence” forged with allies, said Hegseth, who promised the US would “continue to wrap our arms around our friends and find new ways to work together”.

But he stressed “deterrence does not come cheap” and urged Asian countries to ramp up their defence spending, pointing to Europe as an example.

US President Donald Trump has demanded members of the Western alliance Nato spend more on defence, at least 5% of their GDPs – an approach Hegseth called “tough love, but love nonetheless”. Some countries including Estonia have moved quickly to do so, while others such as Germany have signalled an openness to comply.

“How can it make sense for countries in Europe to do that while key allies and partners in Asia spend less in the face of a more formidable threat?” he said with reference to China, adding North Korea was a threat as well.

“Europe is stepping up. US allies in the Indo-Pacific can, and should, follow by quickly upgrading their own defences,” he insisted, saying they should be “partners, not dependents” on the US.

He touted US military hardware and also pointed to a new Indo-Pacific partnership for defence industrial resilience. Its first projects are establishing a radar repair centre in Australia for US maritime patrol aircraft purchased by allies, and aiding the production of unmanned drones in the region.

He also warned Asian countries against seeking economic ties with China, saying Beijing would use it as “leverage” to deepen its “malign influence”, complicating US defence decisions.

Hegseth’s speech came a day after French President Emmanuel Macron’s pitch at the same dialogue for Europe to be Asia’s ally as well.

Answering a question about Macron’s proposal, he said the US “would much prefer that the overwhelming balance of European investment be on that continent” so that the US could use its “comparative advantage” in the Indo-Pacific.

China’s response criticised the US’s approach to Europe. “Since the US commitment to its European allies is to urge the latter to spend more for self-defence, what will be its commitment to others?” the statement read.

“The US keeps expanding its already staggering defence expenditure. Will the expanded portion come from tariffs it imposes on other countries?” it added, referring to Trump’s global tariffs which have shaken up the world economic order and sparked concern among US allies.

Hegseth also sold Trump’s vision of “common sense” in dealing with the rest of the world, where “America does not have or seek permanent enemies”.

He compared the US President to the late Singaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew, who was famous for his pragmatic realpolitik in foreign relations.

“The United States is not interested in the moralistic and preachy approach to foreign policy of the past. We are not here to pressure other countries to embrace and adopt policies or ideologies. We are not here to preach to you about climate change or cultural issues. We are not here to impose our will on you,” he said.

It was an approach that Democratic Party Senator Tammy Duckworth, who was part of the US delegation in Singapore, criticised.

Speaking separately to reporters at the dialogue, the member of the Senate’s foreign relations committee said Hegseth and Trump’s vision was “inconsistent with the values on which our nation was founded”.

Others “know what we stand for, we stand for basic human rights, we stand for international law and order. And that’s what we are going to continue to push for. And I know that in the Senate we’re going to try to uphold that or else it would be un-American otherwise,” she said.

Duckworth also took aim at Hegseth’s overall message to allies in the region, calling it “patronising”.

“His idea where we wrap ourselves around you – we don’t need that kind of language. We need to stand with our allies, work together, and send the message that America is not asking people to choose between the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and us.”

Other members of the delegation, Republican representatives Brian Mast and John Moolenaar, told the BBC the speech sent a clear message of China’s threat and it was welcomed by many Asian countries, according to meetings they had with officials.

“The message I’ve heard is that people want to see freedom of navigation and respect for neighbours, but feel intimidated by some of the aggressive actions that China has displayed,” said Moolenaar, who is chairman of a House committee on competition between US and China.

“So the presence of the US is welcome and encouraged. And the message was to continue to be present.”

Ian Chong, a non-resident scholar with Carnegie China, said Asian governments would be reassured by the US’s commitment to the status quo.

Hegseth’s call to increase defence spending was “pretty standard for the US these days”, he said, adding that while it has been a “perennial issue” between the US and Asian allies like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan that goes back decades, “the Trump administration is more insistent and demands more”.

“I guess Asian governments will listen – but how much they will comply is a different story,” said Dr Chong.

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”.

A body has been found in the search for a girl missing in the River Thames in Kent.

Police were called at 13:45 BST on Friday after concerns were raised for two children who had entered the river at Royal Pier Road in Gravesend.

Emergency services attended the scene, where a boy was retrieved from the water and taken to a local hospital. He remains in a stable condition.

At about 11:40 BST, Kent Police and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) recovered a body from the river, since confirmed to be that of the missing girl.

On Friday, HM Coastguard said it had responded to a report of two children in difficulty in the water. Their ages have not been revealed.

The search for the missing girl was suspended on Friday evening before recommencing on Saturday morning.

Kent Police said her body was found in the river near Gravesend at about 11:40 BST after a search of the water and river bank.

Formal identification by the girl’s next of kin has taken place.

The death is not being treated as suspicious at this stage and a report will be prepared for the coroner, the force added.

Millions of 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.

Emergency officials were helped by several master beekeepers after the truck, which had been hauling roughly 70,000lb (31,750kg) 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”.

WCSO urged people to “avoid the area due to the potential of bees escaping and swarming”, and initially said 250 million bees were loose.

After receiving information from one of the beekeepers doing recovery work, it said that a more accurate total was considerably lower and closer to 14 million.

“The plan is to allow the bees to re-hive and find their queen bee,” WCSO said.

Authorities said they hoped this would happen “within the next 24-48 hours”.

In an update posted to social media later on Friday, police thanked “the wonderful community of beekeepers”, saying “over two dozen” had turned up to help with 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 beekeepers aim only to produce honey, many others rent out their hives to farmers who need the insects to pollinate their crops.

Mass firings of federal employees which were ordered by US President Donald Trump will remain paused, an appeals court has ruled.

President Trump had signed an executive order in February directing agency heads to begin “large-scale reductions” in staffing. Those efforts to slash the federal workforce were halted by a California judge earlier this month.

On Friday in a 2-1 ruling, a San Francisco-based appeals court denied the Trump administration’s request to unfreeze that injunction.

The administration may request for the US Supreme Court to weigh in.

“The Executive Order at issue here far exceeds the President’s supervisory powers under the Constitution,” the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote. “The President enjoys significant removal power with respect to the appointed officers of federal agencies.”

The Trump administration had sought an emergency stay of an injunction which had been given by Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco. The judge questioned how an overhaul of federal agencies could be actioned without congressional authorisation.

The case was brought by federal employees unions, local governments and non-profits who argued against Trump’s executive order, as well as directives which were issued by the Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget to implement Trump’s policy.

The cuts are part of the Trump administrations efforts to curtail government spending through funding freezes and firings – led by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

Trump has repeatedly promised to slash government spending and reduce the federal workforce. He tasked billionaire Elon Musk and Doge with leading that charge.

Tens of thousands of federal workers have reportedly been fired, taken buyouts or been placed on leave since Trump took office.

The Trump administration said they plan to fight back against the latest court ruling.

“A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch,” the White House said in a statement to US media.