An Byunghui was in the middle of a video game on the night of 3 December when she learned that the South Korean president had declared martial law.

She couldn’t quite believe it – until the internet blew up with the evidence. The shock announcement from then-president Yoon Suk Yeol, the now-famous shots of soldiers breaking down the windows of the National Assembly and MPs scaling the walls to force their way into the building so they could vote the motion down.

Within hours, thousands had spurred into protest, especially young women. And Byunghui joined them, travelling hundreds of miles from Daegu in the south-east to the capital Seoul.

They turned up not just because Yoon’s decision had alarmed and angered them, but to protest against a president who insisted South Korea was free of sexism – despite the deep discrimination and flashes of violence that said otherwise.

They returned week after week as the investigation into Yoon’s abuse of power went on – and they rejoiced when he was impeached after four dramatic months.

And yet, with the country set to elect a new president on 3 June, those very women say they feel invisible again.

The two main candidates have been largely silent about equality for women. A polarising subject, it had helped Yoon into power in 2022 as he vowed to defend men who felt sidelined in a world that they saw as too feminist. And a third candidate, who is popular among young men for his anti-feminist stance, has been making headlines.

For many young South Korean women, this new name on the ballot symbolises a new fight.

“So many of us felt like we were trying to make the world a better place by attending the [anti-Yoon] rallies,” the 24-year-old college student says.

“But now, I wonder if anything has really improved… I can’t shake the feeling that they’re trying to erase women’s voices.”

When Byunghui arrived at the protests, she was struck by the atmosphere.

The bitter December cold didn’t stop tens of thousands of women from gathering. Huddling inside hooded jackets or under umbrellas, waving lightsticks and banners, singing hopeful K-pop numbers, they demanded Yoon’s ouster.

“Most of those around me were young women, we were singing ‘Into the World’ by Girls’ Generation,” Byunghui says.

Into the World, a hit from 2007 by one of K-pop’s biggest acts, became an anthem of sorts in the anti-Yoon rallies. Women had marched to the same song nearly a decade ago in anti-corruption protests that ended another president’s career.

“The lyrics – about not giving up on this world and dreaming of a new world,” Byunghui says, “just overwhelmed me. I felt so close to everyone”.

There are no official estimates of how many of the protesters were young women. Approximately one in three were in their 20s or 30s, according to research by local news outlet Chosun Daily.

An analysis by BBC Korean found that women in their 20s were the largest demographic at one rally in December, where there were 200,000 of them – almost 18% of those in attendance. In comparison, there were just over 3% of men in their 20s at that rally.

The protests galvanised women in a country where discrimination, sexual harassment and even violence against them has long been pervasive, and the gender pay gap – at 31% – is the widest among rich nations.

Like in so many other places, plummeting birth rates in South Korea too have upped the pressure on young women to marry and have children, with politicians often encouraging them to play their part in a patriarchal society.

“I felt like all the frustration that has built up inside me just burst forth,” says 23-year-old Kim Saeyeon . “I believe that’s why so many young women turned up. They wanted to express all that dissatisfaction.”

For 26-year-old Lee Jinha, it was the desire to see Yoon go: “I tried to go every week. It wasn’t easy. It was incredibly cold, super crowded, my legs hurt and I had a lot of work to do… but it was truly out of a sense of responsibility.”

That is not surprising, according to Go Min-hee, associate professor of political science at Ewha Women’s University, who says Yoon had the reputation of being “anti-feminist” and had “made it clear he was not going to support policies for young women”.

There were protests on the other side too, backing Yoon and his martial law order. Throughout, many young South Korean men have supported Yoon, who positioned himself as a champion of theirs, mirroring their grievances in his presidential campaign in 2022.

These men consider themselves victims of “reverse discrimination”, saying they feel marginalised by policies that favour young women. One that is often cited is the mandatory 18 months they must spend in the military, which they believe puts them at a severe disadvantage compared to women.

They label as “man haters” those women who call themselves feminists. And they have been at the heart of a fierce online backlash against calls for greater gender equality.

These groups have long existed, mostly out of the public eye. But over the years they moved closer to the mainstream as their traction online grew, especially under Yoon.

It was them that Yoon appealed to in his campaign pledges, vowing to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, saying it focused too much on women’s rights.

And he consistently denied systemic gender inequality existed in South Korea, which ranks near the bottom on the issue among developed countries.

But his message hit home. A survey by a local newspaper the year before he was elected had found that 79% of young men in their 20s felt “seriously discriminated against” because of their gender.

“In the last presidential election, gender conflict was mobilised by Yoon’s party,” says Kim Eun-ju, director of the Center for Korean Women and Politics. “They actively strengthened the anti-feminist tendencies of some young men in their 20s.”

During Yoon’s term, she says, government departments or publicly-funded organisations with the word “women” in their title largely disappeared or dropped the reference altogether.

The impact has been polarising. It alienated young women who saw this as a rollback of hard-won rights, even as it fuelled the backlash against feminism.

Byunghui saw this up-close back home in Daegu. She says anti-Yoon protests were overwhelmingly female. The few men who came were usually older.

Young men, she adds, even secondary school students, would often drive past the protests she attended cursing and swearing at them. She says some men even threatened to drive into the crowd.

“I wondered if they would have acted this way had the protest been led by young men?”

With Yoon gone, his People Power Party (PPP) is in disarray and still reeling from his fall.

And this is the first time in 18 years that there is no woman among the seven candidates runnning for president. “It’s shocking,” Jinha says, “that there’s no-one”. In the last election, there were two women among 14 presidential candidates.

The PPP’s Kim Moon-soo is trailing frontrunner Lee Jae-myung, from the main opposition Democratic Party (DP). But young women tell the BBC they have been disappointed by 61-year-old Lee.

“It’s only after criticism that that there were no policies targeting women that the DP began adding a few,” Saeyeon says. “I wish they could have drawn a blueprint for improving structural discrimination.”

When he was asked at the start of his campaign about policies targeting gender inequality, Lee responded: “Why do you keep dividing men and women? They are all Koreans.”

After drawing critcism, the DP acknowledged that women still “faced structural discrimination in many areas”. And it pledged to tackle inequality for women with more resources at every level.

During his presidential bid in 2022, Lee was more vocal about the prejudice South Korean women encounter, seeking their votes in the wake of high-profile sexual harassment scandals in his party.

He had promised to put women in top positions in the government and appointed a woman as co-chair of the DP’s emergency committee.

“It’s evident that the DP is focusing significantly less on young women than they did in the [2022] presidential election,” Ms Kim says.

Prof Go believes it’s because Lee “lost by a very narrow margin” back then. So this time, he is “casting the widest net possible” for votes. “And embracing feminist issues is not a good strategy for that.”

That stings for young women like Saeyeon, especially after the role they played in the protests calling for Yoon’s impeachment: “Our voices don’t seem to be reflected in the [campaign] pledges at all. I feel a bit abandoned.”

The ruling party’s Kim Moon-soo, who served in Yoon’s cabinet as labour minister, has emphasised raising birth rates by offering more financial support to parents.

But many women say rising costs are not the only obstacle. And that most politicians don’t address the deeper inequalities – which make it hard to balance a career and family – that are making so many women reconsider the usual choices.

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which Yoon had wanted to shut down, has also re-emerged as a sticking point.

Lee has vowed to strengthen the ministry, while Kim says he will replace it with a Ministry of Future Youth and Family.

The ministry already focuses on family services, education and welfare for children. Just under 7% of its total funding, which is about 0.2% of the government’s annual budget, goes towards improving equality for women. But Prof Go says the ministry was “politicised by Yoon and has since been weaponised”.

“The ministry itself is not huge but it’s symbolic… abolishing it would show that gender equality is unimportant.”

It’s also the target of a third candidate, 40-year-old Lee Jun-seok, a former leader of Yoon’s party, who has since launched his own Reform Party.

Although trailing Kim in polls, Lee Jun-seok has been especially popular with many young men for his anti-feminist views.

Earlier this week, he drew swift outrage after a presidential debate in which he said: “If someone says they want to stick chopsticks in women’s genitals or some place like that, is that misogyny?”

He said the “someone” was frontunner Lee Jae-myung’s son, who he claimed made the comment online, an allegation which the Lee camp has sidestepped, apologising for other controversial posts.

But watching Lee Jun-seok say that on live TV “was genuinely terrifying,” Byunghui says. “I had the scary thought that this might boost incel communities.”

Saeyeon describes “anger and even despair” sinking the “hopes I had for politics, which weren’t that great to begin with”.

She believes his popularity “among certain sections of young men is one of the “significant repercussions” of South Korea “long neglecting structural discrimination” against women.

The only candidate to address the issue, 61-year-old Kwon Young-gook, didn’t fare well in early polling.

“I’m still deliberating whether to vote for Lee Jae-myung or Kwon Young-gook,” Saeyeon says.

While Kwon represents her concerns, she says it’s smart to shore up the votes for Lee because she is “much more afraid of the next election, and the one after that”.

She is thinking about Lee Jun-seok, who some analysts believe could eat into the votes of a beleagured PPP, while appealing to Yoon’s base: “He is in the spotlight and as the youngest candidate, he could have a long career ahead.”

That is all the more reason to keep speaking out, Byunghui says. “It’s like there is dust on the wall. If you don’t know it’s there, you can walk by, but once you see it, it sticks with you.”

It’s the same for Jinha who says things can “never go back to how they were before Yoon declared martial law”.

That was a time when poliitics felt inaccessible, but now, Jinha adds, it “feels like something that affects me and is important to my life”.

She says she won’t give up because she wants to be free of “things like discrimination at work… and live my life in peace”.

“People see young women as weak and immature but we will grow up – and then the world will change again.”

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.

Responding to Witkoff’s latest comments, Hamas official Basem Naim told the BBC the group had last week come to an agreement with him on a proposal “which he deemed acceptable for negotiation” – but that the Israeli response “disagreed with all the provisions we had agreed upon”.

“Why, each time, is the Israeli response considered the only response for negotiation?” he said.

“This violates the integrity and fairness of mediation and constitutes a complete bias towards the other side.”

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.

A fifth of Ukrainian territory is now under Russian control, and for Ukrainians living under occupation there seems little chance that any future deal to end the war will change that.

Three Ukrainians in different Russian-controlled cities have told the BBC of the pressures they face, from being forced to accept a Russian passport to the risks of carrying out small acts of resistance. We are not using their real names for their own safety, and will call them Mavka, Pavlo and Iryna.

The potential dangers are the same, whether in Mariupol or Melitopol, seized by Russia in the full-scale invasion in 2022, or in Crimea which was annexed eight years before.

Mavka chose to stay in Melitopol when the Russians invaded her city on 25 February 2022, “because it is unfair that someone can just come to my home and take it out”.

She has lived there since birth, midway between the Crimean peninsula and the regional capital Zaporizhzhia.

In recent months she has noticed a ramping up of not only a strict policy of “Russification” in the city, but of an increased militarisation of all spheres of life, including in schools.

She has shared pictures of a billboard promoting conscription to young locals, a school notebook with Putin’s portrait on it, and photos and a video of pupils wearing Russian military uniforms instead of the school outfits – boys and girls – and performing military education tasks.

Some 200km (125 miles) along the coast of the sea of Azov, and much closer to the Russian border, the city of Mariupol feels as if it has been “cut off” from the outside world, according to Pavlo.

This key port and hub of Ukraine’s steel industry was captured after a devastating siege and bombardment that lasted almost three months in 2022.

Russian citizenship is now obligatory if you want to work or study or have an urgent medical help, Pavlo says.

“If someone’s child, let’s say, refuses to sing the Russian anthem at school in the morning, the FSB [Russia’s security service] will visit their parents, they will be ‘pencilled in’ and then anything can happen.”

Pavlo survived the siege despite being shot six times, including to his head.

Now that he has recuperated, he feels he cannot leave because of elderly relatives.

“Most of those who stayed in Mariupol or returned, did so to help their elderly parents or their sick grandparents, or because of their flat,” he tells me over the phone after midnight so no-one will overhear.

The biggest preoccupation in Mariupol is holding on to your home, as most of the property damaged in the Russian bombardment has been demolished, and the cost of living and unemployment has surged.

“I’d say 95% of all talk in the city is about property: how to claim it back, how to sell it. You’ll hear people talk about it while queuing to buy some bread, on your way to a chemist, in the food market, everywhere,” he says.

Crimea has been under occupation since Vladimir Putin annexed the peninsula in 2014, when Russia’s war in Ukraine began.

Iryna decided to remain, also to care for an elderly relative but also because she did not want to leave “her beautiful home”.

All signs of Ukrainian identity have been banned in public, and Iryna says she cannot speak Ukrainian in public any more, “as you never know who can tell the authorities on you”.

Children at nursery school in Crimea are told to sing the Russian anthem every morning, even the very youngest. All the teachers are Russian, most of them wives of soldiers who have moved in from Russia.

Iryna occasionally puts on her traditional, embroidered top when she has video calls with friends elsewhere on the peninsula.

“It helps us to keep our spirits high, reminding us about our happy life before the occupation”.

But the risks are high, even for wearing a vyshyvanka. “They might not shoot you straight away, but you can simply disappear afterwards, silently,” she declares.

She speaks of a Ukrainian friend being questioned by police because Russian neighbours, who came to Crimea in 2014, told police he had illegal weapons. “Of course he didn’t. Luckily they let him go in the end, but it’s so frightening.”

Iryna complains that she cannot go out on her own even for coffee “because solders can put a gun at you and say something abusive or order you to please them”.

Resistance in Ukraine’s occupied cities is dangerous, and it often comes in small acts of defiance aimed at reminding residents that they are not alone.

In Melitopol, Mavka talks of being part of a secret female resistance movement called (Angry Mavka) “to let people know that Ukrainians don’t agree with the occupation, we didn’t call for it, and we will never tolerate it”.

The network is made up of women and girls in “pretty much all occupied cities”, according to Iryna, although she cannot reveal its size or scale because of the potential dangers for its members.

Mavka describes her role in running the network’s social media accounts, which document life under occupation and acts like placing Ukrainian symbols or leaflets in public places “to remind other Ukrainians that they are not alone”, or even riskier practices.

“Sometimes we also put a laxative in alcohol and baked goods for the Russian soldiers, as a ‘welcome pack’,” she says.

Punishment for that kind of act, which the BBC is unable to verify, would be severe.

Russia’s occupation authorities treat the Ukrainian language or anything related to Ukraine as extremist, says Mavka.

Ukrainians are well aware of what happened to journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, 27, who disappeared while investigating allegations of torture prisons in eastern Ukraine in 2023.

Russian authorities told her family she had died in custody in September 2024. Her body was returned earlier this month, with several organs removed and clear signs of torture.

Silent disappearance is what Mavka fears most: “When suddenly nobody can find out where you are or what’s happened to you.”

Her network has developed a set of tasks for new joiners to pass to avoid infiltration, and so far they have managed to avoid cyber attacks.

For now they are waiting and watching: “We cannot take up arms and fight back against the occupier right now, but we want at least to show that pro-Ukrainian population is here, and it will also be here”.

She and others in Melitopol are following closely what is happening in Kyiv, “because it is important for us to know whether Kyiv is ready to fight for us. Even small steps matter”.

“We have a rollercoaster of moods here. Many are worried documents might get signed that, God forbid, leave us under Russian occupation for even longer. Because we know what Russia will do here.”

The worry for Mavka and people close to her is that if Kyiv does agree a ceasefire it could mean Russia pursuing the same policy as in Crimea, erasing Ukrainian identity and repressing the population.

“They’ve been already replacing locals with their people. But people here are still hopeful, we will continue our resistance, we’ll just have to be more creative”.

Unlike Mavka, Pavlo believes the war must end, even if it means losing his ability to return to Ukraine.

“Human life is of the greatest value… but there are certain conditions for a ceasefire and not everyone might agree with them as it raises a question, why have all those people died then during the past three years? Would they feel abandoned and betrayed?”

Pavlo is wary of talking, even via an encrypted line, but adds: “I don’t envy anyone involved in this decision-making process. It won’t be simple, black and white.

Iryna fears for Crimea’s next generation who have grown up in an atmosphere of violence and, she says, copy their fathers who have returned from Russia’s war against Ukraine.

She shows me her bandaged cat, and says a child on her street shot it with a rubber bullet.

“For them it was fun. These kids are not taught to build peace, they are taught to fight. It breaks my heart.”

The US has sent Iran a proposal for a nuclear deal between Tehran and Washington, the White House confirmed on Saturday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he had been presented with “elements of a US deal” by his Omani counterpart Badr Albusaidi during a short visit to the Iranian capital.

It comes after a report by the UN nuclear watchdog said Iran had further stepped up its production of enriched uranium, a key component in the making of nuclear weapons.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday it was in Tehran’s “best interest to accept” the deal, adding: “President Trump has made it clear that Iran can never obtain a nuclear bomb”.

Leavitt said a “detailed and acceptable” proposal had been sent to Iran by US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.

The US proposal “will be appropriately responded to in line with the principles, national interests and rights of the people of Iran”, Araghchi wrote on X.

The precise details of the deal are not yet clear.

The proposal follows a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – seen by the BBC – which found Iran now possesses over 400kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity – close to the 90% purity required for weapons-grade uranium.

This is well above the level of purity sufficient for civilian nuclear power and research purposes.

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

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.

Iran insists its programme is peaceful. On Saturday, Iranian state media described the IAEA report as “politically motivated” containing “baseless accusations”.

Iran has said it will “implement appropriate measures” in response to any effort to take action against Tehran at the IAEA governors’ meeting.

The US has long sought to limit Iran’s nuclear capacity. Talks between the two powers mediated by Oman have been under way since April.

Both sides have expressed optimism during the course of the talks but remain divided over key issues – chief among them, whether Iran can continue enrichment under any future agreement.

Despite the ongoing negotiations between Tehran and Washington, the IAEA report offered no indication that Iran has slowed its nuclear enrichment efforts.

Iran has produced highly enriched uranium at a rate equivalent to roughly one nuclear weapon per month over the past three months, the IAEA report found.

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

Iran has long denied it is attempting to develop nuclear weapons. However, the IAEA said it could not confirm whether this was still the case because Iran refuses to grant access to senior inspectors and has not answered longstanding questions about its nuclear history.

Trump is seeking a new nuclear agreement with Tehran after pulling the US out of a previous nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers in 2018.

This nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, was signed in 2015 by Iran and the US, China, France, Russia, Germany and the UK.

The JCPOA sought to limit and monitor Iran’s nuclear programme in return for lifting sanctions that had been placed on the regime in 2010 over suspicions that its nuclear programme was being used to develop a bomb.

But Donald Trump withdrew from the deal during his first term in office, claiming JCPOA was a “bad deal” because it was not permanent and did not address Iran’s ballistic missile programme, amongst other things.

Trump then re-imposed US sanctions as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign to compel Iran to negotiate a new and expanded agreement.

In the intervening years, Tehran has steadily overstepped the 2015 agreement’s limits on its nuclear programme, designed to make it harder to develop an atomic bomb.

Trump has previously threatened to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if diplomacy fails to achieve a deal.

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.

At least seven people have died after a highway bridge collapsed on to railway tracks in Russia close to the Ukraine border, according to emergency services.

The bridge in Bryansk brought down several heavy trucks on to a moving passenger train as it collapsed, with 31 people also reportedly injured.

The Russian Emergencies Ministry said fire and rescue units were attempting to find people who had been travelling on the train.

In a statement posted to Telegram, Moscow Railway alleged the bridge had collapsed “as a result of illegal interference in transport operations”.

“Unfortunately, there are seven fatalities,” local governor Alexander Bogomaz said on Telegram, adding two people – including a child – are “seriously injured”.

All injured passengers have been taken to medical facilities in the Bryansk region, he added.

Moscow’s interregional transport prosecutor’s office said an investigation had been launched.

Authorities said the train’s locomotive and several cars derailed when the road bridge fell on to it late on Saturday evening.

Pictures online showed mangled carriages and passengers helping each other climb out of the wreckage in the dark.

Additional emergency workers, as well as rescue equipment and light towers for carrying out work at night have been sent to the area, according to Russian news agency Tass.

The train was going from the town of Klimovo to Moscow and was in the Vygonichsky district when the collapse happened, officials said

Passengers were evacuated and guided to a meeting point at a nearby station, Moscow Railway said, adding: “They will be able to continue their journey on a specially formed reserve train” travelling from Bryansk to Moscow.

The incident took place about 100km (62 miles) from the Ukraine border.

Indian singer Diljit Dosanjh’s Met Gala debut last month left a lasting impression on global fashion.

The 41-year-old singer, who is the only Punjabi musician to perform at Coachella, walked the red carpet dressed like an early 20th Century maharajah.

His opulent ivory and gold ensemble – created by designer Prabal Gurung – complete with a feathered bejewelled turban, trended in India for weeks.

He also wore a gorgeous diamond necklace, its design inspired by a Cartier piece worn by an erstwhile king of the northern Indian state of Punjab.

A Panthère de Cartier watch, a lion-headed and a jewel-studded sword completed the ensemble, which had a map of Dosanjh’s home state embroidered on the back of the cape along with letters from Gurmukhi, the script for Punjabi language.

Of course, Dosanjh is no stranger to such style.

Just like his music, he’s carved out a niche in fashion too – a hip hop singer who is known for melding traditional Punjabi styles with Western influences.

Often seen in anti-fit trousers, chunky sneakers, and stacks of necklaces that he matches with his colourful turbans, his unique form of self-expression has captured the imagination of millions, leading to interesting reinventions in the traditional Punjabi attire.

The changes can be felt everywhere. A 16-minute high-intensity bhangra competition in California would be impossible without high performance sneakers. And basement bhangra nights in Berlin are enjoyed in crop tops and deconstructed pants.

Punjabi music itself, high on volume and energy – with lyrics packed with the names of cities and global luxury brands – has become a subculture.

It’s not just Dosanjh – several other Punjabi musicians have also influenced the region’s style game.

Not long ago, Punjabi-Canadian singer Jazzy B’s rings, often the size of a cookie, along with his plus-sized Kanda pendant and silver blonde hair tints, were trending.

More recently, the yellow tinted glasses worn by singer Badshah; the baggy hoodies sported by Yo Yo Honey Singh; and AP Dhillon’s Louis Vuitton bombers and Chanel watches have been hugely popular with Punjabi youth.

But even though their influence was significant, it was restricted to a region. Dosanjh and a few others like him, however, have managed to mount it to a global level, their style speaking to both the Sikh diaspora as well as a broader audience. For instance, the t-shirts, pearls and sneakers Dosanjh wore to his world tour last year were sold out in a matter of hours. Dhillon’s style statements at Paris Couture Week have created aspiration among Punjabi youth.

Cultural experts say that this reinvention, both in music and fashion, has its roots in Western pop-culture as most of the artistes live and perform in the West.

“Punjabi men are inventive. The region has been at the forefront of fusion, it believes in hybridity. This is especially the case with the Punjabi diaspora – even when they live in ghettos, they are the showmen [of their lives],” says art historian, author and museum curator Alka Pande.

Over the years, as the Punjabi diaspora community grew, a new generation of musicians began mixing modern hip-hop sounds with elements of traditional Punjabi aesthetics.

Their distinct style lexicon – of gold chains, faux fur jackets, plus-sized accessories, braids and beards – went on to spawn media articles, books and doctoral theses on South Asian culture.

The coin dropped instantly back home in Punjab, which absorbed logo fashion like a sponge when luxury brands arrived in the 2000s. For Punjabis – who are largely a farming community – it was an aspirational uprising, symbolic of how success and prosperity should look.

“It symbolised the movement of the Punjabi identity from a farmer to a global consumer,” says acclaimed singer Rabbi Shergill.

Arguing that performers, like everyone else, are a product of their times, Shergill says these impulses are “a response to the hyper capitalist world”.

Curiously, the style game of Punjabi musicians – from hip-hop, R&B, bhangra pop, fusion, Punjabi rap, reggae or filmy music – has also remained rooted and androgynous, instead of being hyper masculine.

A pop star may wear Balenciaga or Indian designer Manish Malhotra’s opulent creations; perform anywhere from Ludhiana city to London; dance with Beyonce around Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, atop a luxury car, or in a British mansion – but they always wear their Punjabi identity on their sleeves.

Dosanjh underlined this clearly with his maharajah look at the Met Gala. “It’s like the popularity of his androgynous style was waiting to happen,” Pande says.

The composite impact of this trend on emerging artists is unmissable today in Punjab.

Local Bhangra performances, for instance, are no longer limited to traditional “dhoti-kurta-koti” costume sets paired with juttis (ethnic footwear). Performance attire now includes sneakers, typographic T-shirts, deconstructed bottoms and even denims.

“Such items are highly sought after by customers,” says Harinder Singh, owner of the brand 1469.

The merchandise in Singh’s stores, includes accessories popularised by Punjab’s music stars, such as versions of Phulkari turbans worn by Dosanjh, Kanda pendants that were first popularised by veteran Bhangra artist Pammi Bai. Singh himself owns turbans in more than a 100 shades.

Even overall men’s style in Punjab bears some of this cosmopolitan twang.

Young poet Gurpreet Saini, who performs at cultural festivals across India, says he sources his shawls – printed with ombre Gurmukhi letters – from Hariana, his hometown in Punjab, for a distinctive look. He admits to the influence of music icons, including those like folk singer Gurdas Mann, who he grew up watching.

What began as personal flair in some cases, went on to become fashion statements. Now these choices are cultural signatures. They have recast the Punjabi identity through rhythm, hybridity as well as a rooted sense of self.

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 on Saturday

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.

Organised by think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies, 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 official explanation has been given, although a state media piece sought to downplay it by quoting an anonymous expert who said China’s decision to not send its defence minister “should not be overinterpreted”.

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 Hegseth’s call to increase defence spending was “pretty standard for the US these days”, and 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.

William Choong, senior fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, said with few exceptions, “the perceptions of the threat from China among Asian countries is not parallel to European perceptions of Russia”.

Many countries in Asia have “a more sanguine take of China” where “they recognise the challenge posed by China in the South China Sea but otherwise they are willing to work with China on almost everything else”, said Dr Choong.

Hegseth’s call “at best is ignorance, at worse is hubris”.

Donald Trump has had a busy seven days. On Monday, he threatened to redirect $3bn in Harvard research funding to vocational schools. On Tuesday, the White House sent a letter to federal agencies, instructing them to review the approximately $100m in contracts the government has awarded Harvard and “find alternative vendors” where possible. On Wednesday, he had more to say on the matter still.

“Harvard’s got to behave themselves,” he told reporters gathered in the Oval Office. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.”

When combined with other administration attempts – freezing more than $3bn in research grants and suspending foreign students from enrolling in Harvard – Trump’s directives represent a frontal attack on one of America’s most prestigious, and wealthy, institutions of higher education.

Even if court challenges overrule some of these actions – some have already been put on hold – the impact is being felt across the landscape of American higher education.

“They’re doing multiple things every single day, some of those things are sneaking through,” says Greg Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors. “But more importantly, they’re changing the culture. They’re changing people.”

At Harvard’s commencement ceremonies on Thursday, students said there was a “palpable concern” on campus.

“People sort of knew Trump was trying some of these moves but [they were] shocked when it happens,” admits one graduate, a British national who requested anonymity because he was concerned public comments could threaten his US work visa. “It feels like the nuclear option.”

“If this can happen to Harvard it can happen to any university in the country,” he adds.

But the repercussions of this apparent Harvard-Trump fight run far deeper than the management of a single Ivy League university. Could the measures Trump is taking mark, as some suggest, the latest, albeit most ambitious, step by conservatives to erode some of the traditional pillars of support for the Democratic Party?

If that is the case, the campus has become a pivotal battle in shaping America’s cultural and political landscape.

Trump and his administration have offered various explanations for their actions, including a perceived lack of conservatives among the ranks of Harvard’s professors, along with suggestions of admitting too many foreign students and financial links to China.

But according to the White House, the most immediate cause has been the university’s apparent failure to address antisemitism on campus, in the wake of anti-Israel protests at universities across the US since the start of the Gaza war.

In December 2023, three prominent university presidents – including the then-president of Harvard, Claudine Gay – struggled to answer whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated their student conduct codes on bullying and harassment, sparking a firestorm of criticism.

Dr Gay, who was asked the question at a congressional hearing about antisemitism on US college campuses, answered that it depended on the context. She later apologised, telling the student newspaper: “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.”

On the campaign trail last year, Trump promised to cut off federal funding and government accreditation for colleges that he said were engaging in “antisemitic propaganda”. Once Trump returned to the White House in January, he began following through on this.

Several universities – including Columbia, which saw some of the most high profile protests – agreed to sweeping changes in campus security rules and closer supervision of its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies departments.

In April, Harvard released the results of a university task force review (commissioned before Trump’s election) of antisemitism and anti-Muslim prejudice on its own campus. It found that many Jewish and Muslim students faced bias, exclusion and alienation from the university curriculum and its community.

However, the administration’s demands go well beyond calls to address antisemitism. In a letter to the university, its “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” laid out a laundry list of changes that Harvard must make, including terminating diversity programmes, reforming admissions and hiring, screening foreign students for views hostile to “American values”, and expanding and protecting “viewpoint diversity” among students and faculty.

Trump’s shock-and-awe strategy of rapid and aggressive pressure has stunned many in higher education, who never imagined the scope of the demands or the force behind them.

“It’s not about higher education,” argues Mr Wolfson. “Higher education is one of the levers they see as critical to transforming our society.”

But the potential for a long-term transformation could largely depend on whether the majority of American universities choose to accommodate the administration’s demands – or whether it stands and fights, as Harvard is trying to do.

While Harvard has been the most prominent target of the administration’s ire, and the most visible in its resistance, it is just one of many high-profile American universities that has received funding cuts or been subject of investigations.

Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania have reported that the administration has suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in their research grants. The Department of Education has launched investigations of 10 universities for alleged antisemitism – and warned dozens of others that they could face similar inquiries. It is also investigating 52 universities for illegal race-based programmes.

To some, this all amounts to an across-the-board war on elite higher education by the Trump administration in an effort to reshape universities in a more conservative-friendly image. To others, this is no bad thing.

“Universities are not about the pursuit of knowledge, they’re about the forceful pushing of a left-wing world view,” Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, said in a Fox News interview last month. “We’re here to shake it up.”

Many on the right have long viewed American college campuses as hotbeds of liberal indoctrination, whether it has taken the form of left-wing anti-war radicalism in the 1960s, “political correctness” of the 1990s, Occupy Wall Street anti-capitalism of the 2000s or the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-Israel demonstrations in recent years.

Polling has illustrated a certain divide in beliefs between those who have and haven’t attended college. In a recent survey by the polling company Civiqs, non-college graduates were split on the job Trump is doing in office, with 49% disapproving and 47% approving.

College graduates, on the other hand, had a significantly different view, as 58% disapproved of Trump’s performance in office versus only 38% who approved.

“I think a lot of this blowback is from the sense that they have become the universities of blue [Democratic] America, and that this is the consequence,” says Rick Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

In recent years, according to Mr Hess, American higher education has become more closely tied to the government and more reliant on government funding.

He says that the new Trump team has simply adopted levers of control over higher education employed by recent Democratic administrations – including civil rights investigations, federal anti-discrimination laws and control over funding.

“In classic Trump form,” he added, “it’s absolutely the case that these levers have been turned up to 11.”

And there are fewer procedural and legal safeguards than there were under the Joe Biden and Barack Obama presidencies.

“It’s both an evolution and a revolution,” says Mr Hess.

But it is one, he argues, that universities have brought on themselves by being overtly political during Trump’s first term and making elite school the face of American higher education.

“The price for collecting billions a year in tax dollars is that institutions should both honour the promises they make, such as enforcing civil rights law, and hew to a mission in which they explicitly serve the whole nation,” says Mr Hess.

Withholding federal funding from universities may be a new challenge for higher education, but to some this is just the latest in a long effort by conservatives to undercut key traditional pillars of liberal power.

Through a combination of legislation and court rules, the influence of labour unions – which had provided the Democratic Party with volunteer personnel and funds – had diminished long before Trump succeeded in winning over white working-class voters in his three presidential runs.

State-level lawsuit reforms have also curtailed the vast sums that trial lawyers could contribute to Democratic coffers. And ongoing efforts to shrink the government workforce – which reached a peak with Elon Musk’s Doge reductions – have eroded another traditionally Democratic bloc.

However, Mr Wolfson fears that something greater could be lost if some of the Trump administration’s measures are enforced.

“The fact that we have multiracial, multicultural, multinational universities is a boon to our universities,” he says. “It creates really diverse communities, really diverse intellectual thought.”

Harvard – perhaps best known for its renowned law school – has turned the courts into its principle tool to resist Trump’s pressure.

On Thursday, a federal judge indefinitely suspended the administration’s attempts to prohibit foreign students from receiving visas to attend the university.

The university has also sued to prevent the Trump administration from terminating more than $2.2bn in federal grants, although that case is pending.

“The trade-off put to Harvard and other universities is clear,” Harvard wrote in its complaint filed with a Massachusetts federal court. “Allow the government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardise the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.”

Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, has also defended his university, saying that Harvard would be “firm” in its commitments to education and truth, during an interview with NPR.

“Harvard is a very old institution, much older than the country,” he continued. “As long as there has been a United States of America, Harvard has thought that its role is to serve the nation.”

Trump, meanwhile, has shared strong words of his own. “Harvard wants to fight,” he said on Wednesday. “They want to show how smart they are, and they’re getting their ass kicked.”

Opinion polls show that Trump’s political base supports his efforts, and the underlying message. Yet those same polls suggest a majority of the general population support American universities and don’t approve of his proposed funding cuts.

And opinion aside, the practicality of achieving such a fundamental reordering of America’s system of higher education, even with all the tools at the federal government’s disposal, is a daunting task.

According to Mr Wolfson, however, repairing what he says is the damage being done to academic independence will be equally challenging.

A growing number of members of the American Association of University Professors fear the consequences of expressing political views or conducting disfavoured research.

“The destruction is real,” argues Mr Wolfson. “Even if the courts step in, there will still be a massive undermining of the higher education project in this country due to Trump’s reckless, reckless moves.”

Mr Hess, who has pushed for conservative education reform for years, is less concerned. He believes that Trump’s chaotic, scattershot approach – including last week’s comments – could end up less effective than a more methodical restructuring of American universities.

“This is all an ambitious experiment,” Mr Hess said. “Whether it’s a strategy that’s going to work is very much an open question.”

One thing seems clear, however. Even if American universities resist – or outlast – Trump’s efforts, they are no longer insulated from the scorched-earth warfare of American politics. The walls of the ivory tower have been breached, regardless of whether one believes it is the barbarians – or liberators – at the gate.

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.

It’s a condition that affects more than 10 million people in the UK. It can change futures, end careers, and shrink worlds. So when a hack comes along that says it can “cure”, or at the very least fend off a migraine, people will try it.

While there are medical treatments, there is no cure. Prescription medication can be very effective – but it doesn’t always work. For many people there is no simple solution.

Some discover their own ways of managing the debilitating pain: sitting in a hot bath while wearing an ice pack and drinking a smoothie, blasting the side of their face with a hairdryer.

But now a new hack has suddenly gone viral – the McMigraine Meal. A simple offering of a full-fat coke and a portion of salty fries seems to be doing the trick for hundreds who’ve been extolling its virtues on TikTok.

If there is any science behind these hacks – what do they do to the body?

Nick Cook from Oxfordshire carries “a wallet full of drugs” around in case of a migraine attack. He will “try anything” to make the pain go away, he says.

“When you live with the condition, and you’re working a five-day week and you need to carry on, you’ll give anything a go.”

At its worst the pain around Nick’s eye socket can feel like his eyeball is getting crushed. He says it’s the caffeine and sugar in coke that helps him.

“If I catch it soon it enough it can sometimes work, when my vision goes fuzzy and I can feel one coming on.”

He stresses that drinking coke doesn’t replace his amitriptyline tablets – the daily pain medication he takes to try to prevent migraines – but it does sometimes help him “last until the end of the day”.

For Kayleigh Webster, a 27-year-old who has had chronic migraines all her life, it’s the salt on the chips that might slow down a migraine attack.

“It can help,” she says cautiously, “but it’s certainly not a cure.

“Migraine is a complex neurological condition – and it can’t be cured by a bit of caffeine, salt and sugar in a fast food meal.”

Kayleigh’s tried cocktails of different medications, putting her feet in hot water, a flannel at the back of the head, acupuncture, cupping – but they’ve had little effect.

One of the few treatments that has given her relief is medical Botox – having dozens of injections in her head, face and neck. It’s still not clear how Botox works for migraine, but it’s believed to block powerful pain signals being released from the nerves.

A migraine – which can last days – is very different to a headache, which tend to be short-lived and can be treated more easily with painkillers like paracetamol. Migraines can cause head pain, neck pain, numbness, blurred vision, and even affect speech and movement.

Skulls dating back to 3,000 BC show ancient Egyptians even had trouble with migraines – but despite that long history, their exact cause is still unknown.

It’s thought pain receptors in the blood vessels and nerve tissue around the brain misfire – sending incorrect signals that something is wrong. But we don’t know why some people have an oversensitive nervous system – and why it reacts to some things and not others.

Experts say there’s not enough research into why only some people – around one in seven – are affected, or what can actually help.

Dr Kay Kennis, a GP who specialises in migraines, says while there are elements of the McMigraine meal that can help stave off an attack, these aren’t innate to “a McDonald’s”.

“The caffeine in the coke can act as a nerve disruptor, it is a substance that affects nerve activity. For some, that disturbance works in a positive way,” Dr Kennis says.

“There are some painkillers that people take for migraines that have caffeine – and some do respond well to that – but we don’t fully know why.”

But she warns against using caffeinated fizzy drinks like coke as a way of regularly managing migraines.

“Too much caffeine can be a trigger too – and you can end up in a worse situation in the long run,” Dr Kennis says.

Other ingredients in a fast food meal, like the salt on the chips, can affect nerve activity, she explains, but adds the effects of sodium on migraines have not been tested.

She also warns that not only is fast food often ultra-processed and not conducive to a healthy diet, it can contain high levels of Tyramine, a natural compound commonly found in many foods, which can actually cause severe migraines.

For Eloise Underwood none of the quick fixes on social media work.

The chronic migraine sufferer has been looking for a “magic cocktail” for seven years – she’s seen people recommend putting feet in scorching water (not recommended by experts and potentially dangerous); drinking hot coffee (caffeine can be a trigger); or various vibrating devices which have had little effect.

“There are so many videos online that take advantage of the desperation we all feel,” Eloise explains.

She’s left several jobs – often due to lighting and noise in an office environment triggering migraines. She recently stopped working as an interior designer and has now launched a business pressing and framing wedding flowers from her home.

She wears loop ear buds to reduce the sharpness of the sounds around her, and limits her social life.

“People think a migraine is just a headache – that’s just one symptom of it,” Eloise says. “For me, a migraine is a whole body experience…

“Migraines have completely made my life smaller.”

Prof Peter Goadsby, a neurologist at the NIHR-King’s Clinical Research Facility, says research is beginning to produce positive results after years of underfunding.

His latest study shows medications known as gepants could block a group of pain receptors in the lead-up to a migraine attack, cutting off the pain before it starts.

“Any new treatment is a glimmer of hope,” Eloise says. “They do say that nothing will work for everyone – but something will work for someone.”

Lifestyle changes can also make a difference, Prof Goadsby explains. It might be boring, he says, but basically – “be careful of your brain”.

“You want to have regularity, avoid the highs and lows. If you can feel the warning signs – yawning, sleepiness, mood change, passing more urine and even craving salt and sugar – listen to your body.

“Listen to your body – don’t listen to TikTok, that’s my advice.”

Nick has been doing exactly that. He might reach for the odd coke and salty fries, but he’s moulded his whole life in order to manage his migraines.

“I don’t drink, I wear sunglasses even if it’s cloudy,” he says. “I don’t go wild. When me and my partner go away, half the stuff we take is to help us manage our migraines.

On a recent stag-do weekend, Nick noticed the difference between his and his friends’ lives.

“They were up all night drinking to the early hours,” Nick says. “I turned up with my own pillow, apples, bananas, Weetabix, and any snacks I would need to keep me going, because hunger can be a major trigger.

“I’m in bed by midnight – but my mates know me, and that’s OK, because this is how I have to live my life.”

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.”

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”.

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.

• Succession creator Jesse Armstrong is writing about rich people again
• Jacqueline Wilson says she wouldn’t return to Tracy Beaker as an adult

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.”

Preye Maxwell looks distressed as he leaves his beloved dog Hanks at an animal shelter in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub.

Fighting back tears, he says: “I can’t afford to take care of him. I can’t afford to feed him the way he should be fed.”

His two-year old American Eskimo barks as his owner turns his back and walks out of the St Mark’s Animal Rescue Foundation in the Lagos suburb of Ajah.

Dr Mark Afua, a vet and chairman of the rescue centre, takes Hanks and puts him in a big metal cage – one of many in the single-storey building designed for dogs, cats, snakes and other animals.

Hanks wheels around in circles in his cage – and Dr Afua tries to calm the distressed fluffy-haired dog.

Mr Maxwell, an online media strategist, was recently made redundant. His job-hunting means he is never at home and so feels unable to look after Hanks.

“I’m trying to get whatever I have to do to survive. I don’t even have the time now [to look after Hanks] because I’m always out looking for jobs,” he told the BBC.

The 33-year-old’s decision was difficult to make, but it is one that many pet owners are taking in the face of the rising cost of living in Nigeria.

Africa’s most-populous nation has been hit by high inflation since President Bola Tinubu came to power two years ago and removed a long-standing fuel subsidy.

The inflation rate surged from 22% in May 2023 to 35% in December 2024, a 28-year high, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS.)

Inflation has since fallen back to 24% but this means that prices are still continuing to rise, just not as quickly as before.

The economic crunch has meant that some companies have had to downsize to keep afloat in the face of rising operating costs, pushing young people like Mr Maxwell into an already saturated labour market.

Animal rights activists and animal shelters say that they are seeing an unprecedented numbers of abandoned animals as the cost of looking after pets spirals out of control.

Prices for pet food and veterinary care have jumped by more 100% as some things, especially medication, are imported – and the local currency has plummeted against the dollar.

“About 10 years ago when we started this project, we really didn’t have people giving up their dogs because they were unable to feed the dogs,” Dr Afua told the BBC.

“Right now, we have 10, 12 animals being dropped in a month.”

Some, like Mr Maxwell, hand their pets over to a shelter for adoption but others simply abandon their animals.

Animal cruelty campaigner Jackie Idimogu, who is president of My Dog and I – a dog-lovers’ community in Lagos who often helps to rehome pets, says she has noticed the change.

“Now they don’t even have that patience [to find new owners]. They just tie the dog out to a post on the road or they just unleash it on the road,” she told the BBC.

The 32-year-old says more that 50% of her income as a furniture maker and interior designer now goes on looking after her four dogs.

“I’m spending roughly 250,000 naira ($158; £117) every month on pets,” she says, adding that this includes someone to walk the dogs and look after them when she was not around.

But Ms Idimogu says she cannot bear to give them up.

“As a single lady, I have no kids of my own yet. My dogs are my babies. I don’t see any difference between myself as a dog mum and a human mum. I don’t think I have it in me to give up any of my babies for any reason whatsoever.”

Instead, she has chosen to adapt her lifestyle – fewer luxuries for herself like jewellery, expensive hair styles and spa visits and fewer treats for her pets like chicken, yoghurt treats and car rides.

“I used to be flashy, but now I had to tone down because of my dogs.”

The same goes for Amartya Odanokende, who goes by the name “Jason the Cat Guy” on social media, where he likes to impart his love of felines to his fellow Nigerians who often regard cats with suspicion because of their association with witchcraft.

He spends approximately $160 a month on food for five big cats and some kittens, plus another $7 on 10kg of cat litter. Since he got his Prussian cats in 2020 he says what he spends has gone up 100%.

Such “skyrocketing maintenance cost” is a concern and he worries about getting into debt.

Lagos sales executive Iyke Elueze is also struggling to look after her 10 dogs.

“There’s a particular brand of food I used to use. It was just about 30,000 naira then. That same brand of dog food is 165,000 naira,” he told the BBC.

He credits his first dog Hennessey with saving his life at a time he was struggling with depression – nonetheless he would like to get rid of some of his animals as he now needs to prioritise his toddlers.

But the 36-year-old fears that his dogs could end up being eaten – as they are considered a delicacy in some parts of southern Nigeria.

Celebrity chef and Guinness record breaker Hilda Baci once came under fire on social media after she admitted making a dog-meat themed menu.

“I am very careful with who adopts my dogs. I don’t want my dogs ending up in any other person’s pots,” said the father-of-two.

Mistura Ibrahim, a young tattoo artist in Lagos who has made it her mission to help cats after saving two who were about to be stoned, is depressed about the situation and is finding it hard to find new homes for others she continues to rescue.

“I get some calls from people that I’ve given cats to in the past and they say that they really cannot afford to keep the cats.”

She no longer feeds her cats tinned meals, opting to give them food from her own plate.

Her advice is to take pet welfare seriously: “It’s just like having a child. If you can’t afford to have a child, then don’t bring a child to the world.”

For Dr Afua, who uses the profit from his veterinary practice to fund his shelter, it is getting harder to house the unwanted animals.

“We try to help the animals get homes quickly but I’m careful [about] the homes they go to so they don’t come back. And some animals will never find homes because of previous abuse.”

With St Mark’s Animal Rescue Foundation caring for more than 60 dogs at the moment – around twice its capacity – would he ever turn away an animal?

“I don’t have the heart to. As I speak I have dogs and cats everywhere. My office and home is full – and I still make room for the next.”

• ‘I’ve been sleeping under a bridge in Lagos for 30 years’
• Are Nigerians abroad widening the class divide back home?
• ‘I scarred my six children by using skin-lightening creams’
• Blank questions, power cuts and a suicide: Nigeria’s exams fiasco
• The Nigerian professor who makes more money welding

When Edna Nicole Luckett sings the Blues on the stage at Red’s, her voice, deep and soulful, echoes against the walls. The juke joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi is one of the last of its kind in the region, a landmark for a bygone era of American music.

“I was raised in Delta dirt, sunshine and flatland that goes on for miles and miles,” she sings, as people nod their heads and stomp their feet to the beat.

Ms Luckett, like many who were raised in the Mississippi Delta, grew up listening to locally-crafted Blues music and singing in her church choir. It’s experiences like hers – and places like Red’s – that are getting a fresh moment to shine with the box office success of Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners.

The genre-defying film has earned more than $300 million (£22 million) globally, against a $90m (£67m) budget, and attracted the world’s attention to a historic small town.

For the those who live there – and especially those who still sing the Blues – the spotlight is welcome, in no small part because of Coogler’s careful respect for their history.

“I’m protective of how the Mississippi Delta is represented,” Ms Luckett said.

Clarksdale was the place where blues legends like Sam Cooke, Johnny Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters got their start, but its significance was mostly known to music lovers.

Like other small towns in the US south, Clarksdale has faced struggles. The town, home to 14,000 people, lost its only movie theatre in 2003. That meant that residents couldn’t even watch Sinners in their hometown – until now. After a local appeal, Mr Coogler agreed to bring the film to town for six free showings this past week.

The charge was led by Tyler Yarbrough, a Clarksdale native, who wrote a public letter to the director after seeing the movie in a nearby town. Set in 1932, Sinners tells the story of twin brothers, both played by Michael B Jordan, who return home to Clarksdale after World War One. Combining elements of musicals, horror and period drama, the movie fuses vampire lore with meticulous historic research about that time and place in America.

“Beneath the horror and fantasy, your film captures the soul of this place: our history, our struggles, our genius, our joy, our community,” Mr Yarbrough wrote.

He told the BBC he was moved to see this place represented with careful detail.

“It was time traveling back to 1930’s in Clarksdale, in our town, so this is the lives of my great grandma,” he said. “The history from the farms to the juke joints was on full display.”

Mr Coogler, who also made Black Panther and Creed, said it was his Uncle James, a Mississippi native who loved Delta Blues, who helped inspire the film.

Although the movie was ultimately filmed in Louisiana, he visited Clarksdale to do extensive research.

“I never got to come here until working on this script,” Mr Coogler told a crowd of 1,500 on Thursday. “It blew my mind — I got to meet musicians, I got to meet community members. It really changed me just to come here and do the research.”

While some remnants of the town depicted in the film remain, like many towns in America, its storefronts have been emptied and modernised – though it still enjoys tourist interest for its history.

Odes to some of Clarksdale’s blues legends, like Robert Johnson, are colourfully painted onto the sides of buildings, reminding people of the history of the streets where they walk.

One of those streets used to be home to Delta Blues Alley Cafe, a blues joint owned by Jecorry Miller that burned to the ground last month.

Mr Miller wants people to have a better understanding of the history that lives on the streets on Clarksdale and the movie is a way to grasp that.

“The movie itself is going to be great for the town – we get nine times the population of our city that comes to visit the city every year, now it could be ten or 11 times the population that visits Clarksdale,” Mr Miller said. “People being here spending their dollars is a great thing for us.”

And local residents said the attention is all the more welcome because they see themselves and their culture in the film.

At the Thursday screening, longtime Clarksdale residents relished the details.

Ms Luckett, the Blues singer, was listening to make sure the characters’ dialect sounded right. She watched to see if the land in the backdrop of the film was as flat and green as it is in real life.

“It was,” she said with a smile.

Few 27-year-olds look at used cooking oil and see a green business opportunity to produce soap or dog food.

But that is what Hugo Daniel Chávez, a project manager for the NGO Sustenta Honduras, has done.

“We have so many businesses and domestic practices that create waste, so we are trying to transform waste and give it a second life,” he tells the BBC.

Across Latin America, several million tonnes of cooking oil are consumed every year. It is often used to fry food, mostly chicken, plantain strips, chips and pork.

But reusing and heating it too often – as is often the case in Honduras, where there is a huge black market for used cooking oil – can create compounds which are bad for consumers’ health.

Improperly discarded, it can also have a massive detrimental impact on the environment.

If it is drained down the sink, it can damage pipes and contaminate groundwater, and when it is tossed by the side of the road, it can contaminate freshwater and crops many communities rely on.

Faced with these health and environmental hazards, the young green entrepreneurs behind Sustenta tried to come up with a solution which would not only give businesses an incentive to dispose of their oil and grease properly, but also turn these waste products into something useful.

The NGO’s executive director, Ricardo Pineda, explains that their idea originated from earlier efforts by different companies and organisations to transform used cooking oil into biodiesel. “But in Honduras, we don’t have a market for biodiesel,” he says.

“So we decided to produce products that can do well in our domestic markets [such as soap and dog food].”

In order to make it more attractive to people to get rid of the oil legally rather than sell it to unscrupulous buyers, Sustenta offers to buy the used cooking oil and pick it up regularly from the shops that participate in their project.

Their efforts have gained international recognition, most notably when they were awarded a $20,000-prize as one of the winners of the 2023 Youth4Climate Energy Challenge, a global initiative co-led by the Italian government and the United Nations Development Programme.

Sustenta also receives funding from the embassy of the The Netherlands in the region, which told the BBC that it chose Sustenta because “their project offered an innovative and viable solution, using an enterprising approach which has a social impact”.

“It [their project] not only contributes to lessening the environmental impact through an emphasis on creating a circular economy, but also empowers young people and women – the groups most affected by climate change – and generates green jobs.”

Sustenta offers between 2.50 and 3.50 Lempiras (£0.08 and £0.11) per pound of used cooking oil.

And it is not just small businesses it deals with.

In May of 2024, the NGO signed a contract with the Mexican and Central American division of the retail giant Walmart.

This contract guarantees a flow of used cooking oil and grease from all companies related to Walmart to Sustenta, which Mr Pineda says is critical to Sustenta’s project.

“We needed a reliable flow to scale up production. (…) Otherwise, we could quickly run out of used cooking oil, because of the black market that is competing with us,” adds Mr Chávez.

It then brings the cooking oil and grease to a plant in Comayagua, where they are purified and processed in a reaction known as saponification. This process combines fats or oils with an alkali to produce soap.

Mr Pineda says that Sustenta is keen to develop “a circular ecological system in which we reuse everything”.

“Next to our plant that produces the soap and dog food, someone else has a water purification plant and we use the water that plant cannot purify, its waste so to say, for our water cooling system,” he explains.

The idea of teaming up with Walmart, Mr Pineda says, is “to sell the dog food and soap we have refined from their waste at Walmart”.

“They could profit from their own waste and also see the economic value behind circular economies, ” he tells the BBC.

At 15 lempiras (£0.45) per bar of soap, the project makes a monthly revenue of over 106,000 Lempiras (£3,194.70), which excludes fixed costs like salaries, commission and distribution.

Mr Pineda emphasises that “the money doesn’t stay with us”. “We just help with the implementation of the project and as soon as it’s up and running we seek new opportunities,” he says.

The recycling of cooking oil is just one several projects running simultaneously at Sustenta.

The organisation is comprised of young people, all under 30 and averaging 23 years of age, and their youthful enthusiasm and impatience with established ways of doing things has been key to their approach.

“We started as a young group that was sick of the regular ways large institutions handle issues with climate change and the environment,” Mr Pineda says.

“We want to create actual solutions and not sit around only talking about what could be done.”

Their strategy also differs from that of other young environmental organisations in the region, who often focus on a confrontational approach, trying to halt large mining or energy projects and holding politicians accountable for corruption.

But Sustenta’s project coordinator, Paola Acevedo, says the two approached are not at odds, but rather complement each other: “This type of [classical] environmentalism is very important and there is no doubt that we need it.”

“We try to focus on solutions, while the others fight on the front lines,” she adds.

Indian singer Diljit Dosanjh’s Met Gala debut last month left a lasting impression on global fashion.

The 41-year-old singer, who is the only Punjabi musician to perform at Coachella, walked the red carpet dressed like an early 20th Century maharajah.

His opulent ivory and gold ensemble – created by designer Prabal Gurung – complete with a feathered bejewelled turban, trended in India for weeks.

He also wore a gorgeous diamond necklace, its design inspired by a Cartier piece worn by an erstwhile king of the northern Indian state of Punjab.

A Panthère de Cartier watch, a lion-headed and a jewel-studded sword completed the ensemble, which had a map of Dosanjh’s home state embroidered on the back of the cape along with letters from Gurmukhi, the script for Punjabi language.

Of course, Dosanjh is no stranger to such style.

Just like his music, he’s carved out a niche in fashion too – a hip hop singer who is known for melding traditional Punjabi styles with Western influences.

Often seen in anti-fit trousers, chunky sneakers, and stacks of necklaces that he matches with his colourful turbans, his unique form of self-expression has captured the imagination of millions, leading to interesting reinventions in the traditional Punjabi attire.

The changes can be felt everywhere. A 16-minute high-intensity bhangra competition in California would be impossible without high performance sneakers. And basement bhangra nights in Berlin are enjoyed in crop tops and deconstructed pants.

Punjabi music itself, high on volume and energy – with lyrics packed with the names of cities and global luxury brands – has become a subculture.

It’s not just Dosanjh – several other Punjabi musicians have also influenced the region’s style game.

Not long ago, Punjabi-Canadian singer Jazzy B’s rings, often the size of a cookie, along with his plus-sized Kanda pendant and silver blonde hair tints, were trending.

More recently, the yellow tinted glasses worn by singer Badshah; the baggy hoodies sported by Yo Yo Honey Singh; and AP Dhillon’s Louis Vuitton bombers and Chanel watches have been hugely popular with Punjabi youth.

But even though their influence was significant, it was restricted to a region. Dosanjh and a few others like him, however, have managed to mount it to a global level, their style speaking to both the Sikh diaspora as well as a broader audience. For instance, the t-shirts, pearls and sneakers Dosanjh wore to his world tour last year were sold out in a matter of hours. Dhillon’s style statements at Paris Couture Week have created aspiration among Punjabi youth.

Cultural experts say that this reinvention, both in music and fashion, has its roots in Western pop-culture as most of the artistes live and perform in the West.

“Punjabi men are inventive. The region has been at the forefront of fusion, it believes in hybridity. This is especially the case with the Punjabi diaspora – even when they live in ghettos, they are the showmen [of their lives],” says art historian, author and museum curator Alka Pande.

Over the years, as the Punjabi diaspora community grew, a new generation of musicians began mixing modern hip-hop sounds with elements of traditional Punjabi aesthetics.

Their distinct style lexicon – of gold chains, faux fur jackets, plus-sized accessories, braids and beards – went on to spawn media articles, books and doctoral theses on South Asian culture.

The coin dropped instantly back home in Punjab, which absorbed logo fashion like a sponge when luxury brands arrived in the 2000s. For Punjabis – who are largely a farming community – it was an aspirational uprising, symbolic of how success and prosperity should look.

“It symbolised the movement of the Punjabi identity from a farmer to a global consumer,” says acclaimed singer Rabbi Shergill.

Arguing that performers, like everyone else, are a product of their times, Shergill says these impulses are “a response to the hyper capitalist world”.

Curiously, the style game of Punjabi musicians – from hip-hop, R&B, bhangra pop, fusion, Punjabi rap, reggae or filmy music – has also remained rooted and androgynous, instead of being hyper masculine.

A pop star may wear Balenciaga or Indian designer Manish Malhotra’s opulent creations; perform anywhere from Ludhiana city to London; dance with Beyonce around Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, atop a luxury car, or in a British mansion – but they always wear their Punjabi identity on their sleeves.

Dosanjh underlined this clearly with his maharajah look at the Met Gala. “It’s like the popularity of his androgynous style was waiting to happen,” Pande says.

The composite impact of this trend on emerging artists is unmissable today in Punjab.

Local Bhangra performances, for instance, are no longer limited to traditional “dhoti-kurta-koti” costume sets paired with juttis (ethnic footwear). Performance attire now includes sneakers, typographic T-shirts, deconstructed bottoms and even denims.

“Such items are highly sought after by customers,” says Harinder Singh, owner of the brand 1469.

The merchandise in Singh’s stores, includes accessories popularised by Punjab’s music stars, such as versions of Phulkari turbans worn by Dosanjh, Kanda pendants that were first popularised by veteran Bhangra artist Pammi Bai. Singh himself owns turbans in more than a 100 shades.

Even overall men’s style in Punjab bears some of this cosmopolitan twang.

Young poet Gurpreet Saini, who performs at cultural festivals across India, says he sources his shawls – printed with ombre Gurmukhi letters – from Hariana, his hometown in Punjab, for a distinctive look. He admits to the influence of music icons, including those like folk singer Gurdas Mann, who he grew up watching.

What began as personal flair in some cases, went on to become fashion statements. Now these choices are cultural signatures. They have recast the Punjabi identity through rhythm, hybridity as well as a rooted sense of self.

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.”

A military aircraft and helicopters are being used to evacuate residents in the Canadian province of Manitoba from fast-moving wildfires.

Thousands have already evacuated western Canada, particularly the central prairie provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as firefighters face growing flames and hot, dry weather predictions in the coming days.

Dense smoke from the fires – of which there are more than 180 according to officials – has spread across Canada and into parts of the US.

Both Saskatchewan and Manitoba have declared states of emergency for the next month and asked for international help in fighting the fires.

Large parts of Alberta and British Columbia have also ordered evacuations as the fires spread.

The evacuation of residents of the northern First Nations community of Pukatawagan, is a “rapidly evolving situation”, a Manitoba official told the BBC.

Canadian Armed Forces, Manitoba Wildfire Service and Manitoba’s Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Team have been using a military aircraft and helicopters to bring people to safety from the northern community in Manitoba.

As of Friday, more than 2,000 people still needed to be transported out of Pukatawagan.

In Flin Flon, a city of 5,000 in Manitoba, only firefighters and support workers are left in the town.

In Manitoba, there are a total of 25 fires burning, according to the province’s fire situation report, with 10 classified as out of control.

While Manitoba is facing the harshest conditions, other provinces are also dealing with worsening wildfires.

In Saskatchewan, there are 16 wildfires burning as of Saturday, with seven classified as not contained. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) classified conditions in the province as extreme.

Danielle Desjardins, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada based in Winnipeg, told the BBC that the forecast for both provinces is not promising.

While a cold front is expected to hit some parts of Saskatchewan, it will not bring relief to the regions where fires are burning.

“The bad news about this cold front is it’s going to be windy,” said Ms Desjardins, adding that the wind, coupled with the heat and lack of rain, are prime conditions for wildfire spread.

Smoke from the fires has also left an estimated 22 million Americans under air quality alerts this weekend.

Michigan and Wisconsin advisories are currently in place.

In northern Minnesota, residents have been warned smoke could reach levels “unhealthy for everyone”, while the rest of the state faces air quality warnings for sensitive groups. That alert runs through Monday evening.

Canada experienced its worst wildfire season on record in 2023, when more than 42 million acres (17.3m hectares) burned.

Fires happen naturally in many parts of the world, including in Canada.

But climate change is making the weather conditions needed for wildfires to spread more likely, according to the UN’s climate body.

Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground and vegetation.

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.

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.

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”.

Ncuti Gatwa regenerated into Billie Piper in the series finale of Doctor Who on Saturday night.

He left the role after playing the iconic character for two series.

Piper, who previously played the Doctor’s assistant, Rose Tyler, said the opportunity to “step back on that Tardis one more time was just something I couldn’t refuse”.

In a press release, the BBC said: “Just how and why she [Billie Piper] is back remains to be seen…”

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

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.

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

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

Piper added: “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.”

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!”

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 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.

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?

Donald Trump has had a busy seven days. On Monday, he threatened to redirect $3bn in Harvard research funding to vocational schools. On Tuesday, the White House sent a letter to federal agencies, instructing them to review the approximately $100m in contracts the government has awarded Harvard and “find alternative vendors” where possible. On Wednesday, he had more to say on the matter still.

“Harvard’s got to behave themselves,” he told reporters gathered in the Oval Office. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.”

When combined with other administration attempts – freezing more than $3bn in research grants and suspending foreign students from enrolling in Harvard – Trump’s directives represent a frontal attack on one of America’s most prestigious, and wealthy, institutions of higher education.

Even if court challenges overrule some of these actions – some have already been put on hold – the impact is being felt across the landscape of American higher education.

“They’re doing multiple things every single day, some of those things are sneaking through,” says Greg Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors. “But more importantly, they’re changing the culture. They’re changing people.”

At Harvard’s commencement ceremonies on Thursday, students said there was a “palpable concern” on campus.

“People sort of knew Trump was trying some of these moves but [they were] shocked when it happens,” admits one graduate, a British national who requested anonymity because he was concerned public comments could threaten his US work visa. “It feels like the nuclear option.”

“If this can happen to Harvard it can happen to any university in the country,” he adds.

But the repercussions of this apparent Harvard-Trump fight run far deeper than the management of a single Ivy League university. Could the measures Trump is taking mark, as some suggest, the latest, albeit most ambitious, step by conservatives to erode some of the traditional pillars of support for the Democratic Party?

If that is the case, the campus has become a pivotal battle in shaping America’s cultural and political landscape.

Trump and his administration have offered various explanations for their actions, including a perceived lack of conservatives among the ranks of Harvard’s professors, along with suggestions of admitting too many foreign students and financial links to China.

But according to the White House, the most immediate cause has been the university’s apparent failure to address antisemitism on campus, in the wake of anti-Israel protests at universities across the US since the start of the Gaza war.

In December 2023, three prominent university presidents – including the then-president of Harvard, Claudine Gay – struggled to answer whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated their student conduct codes on bullying and harassment, sparking a firestorm of criticism.

Dr Gay, who was asked the question at a congressional hearing about antisemitism on US college campuses, answered that it depended on the context. She later apologised, telling the student newspaper: “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.”

On the campaign trail last year, Trump promised to cut off federal funding and government accreditation for colleges that he said were engaging in “antisemitic propaganda”. Once Trump returned to the White House in January, he began following through on this.

Several universities – including Columbia, which saw some of the most high profile protests – agreed to sweeping changes in campus security rules and closer supervision of its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies departments.

In April, Harvard released the results of a university task force review (commissioned before Trump’s election) of antisemitism and anti-Muslim prejudice on its own campus. It found that many Jewish and Muslim students faced bias, exclusion and alienation from the university curriculum and its community.

However, the administration’s demands go well beyond calls to address antisemitism. In a letter to the university, its “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” laid out a laundry list of changes that Harvard must make, including terminating diversity programmes, reforming admissions and hiring, screening foreign students for views hostile to “American values”, and expanding and protecting “viewpoint diversity” among students and faculty.

Trump’s shock-and-awe strategy of rapid and aggressive pressure has stunned many in higher education, who never imagined the scope of the demands or the force behind them.

“It’s not about higher education,” argues Mr Wolfson. “Higher education is one of the levers they see as critical to transforming our society.”

But the potential for a long-term transformation could largely depend on whether the majority of American universities choose to accommodate the administration’s demands – or whether it stands and fights, as Harvard is trying to do.

While Harvard has been the most prominent target of the administration’s ire, and the most visible in its resistance, it is just one of many high-profile American universities that has received funding cuts or been subject of investigations.

Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania have reported that the administration has suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in their research grants. The Department of Education has launched investigations of 10 universities for alleged antisemitism – and warned dozens of others that they could face similar inquiries. It is also investigating 52 universities for illegal race-based programmes.

To some, this all amounts to an across-the-board war on elite higher education by the Trump administration in an effort to reshape universities in a more conservative-friendly image. To others, this is no bad thing.

“Universities are not about the pursuit of knowledge, they’re about the forceful pushing of a left-wing world view,” Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, said in a Fox News interview last month. “We’re here to shake it up.”

Many on the right have long viewed American college campuses as hotbeds of liberal indoctrination, whether it has taken the form of left-wing anti-war radicalism in the 1960s, “political correctness” of the 1990s, Occupy Wall Street anti-capitalism of the 2000s or the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-Israel demonstrations in recent years.

Polling has illustrated a certain divide in beliefs between those who have and haven’t attended college. In a recent survey by the polling company Civiqs, non-college graduates were split on the job Trump is doing in office, with 49% disapproving and 47% approving.

College graduates, on the other hand, had a significantly different view, as 58% disapproved of Trump’s performance in office versus only 38% who approved.

“I think a lot of this blowback is from the sense that they have become the universities of blue [Democratic] America, and that this is the consequence,” says Rick Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

In recent years, according to Mr Hess, American higher education has become more closely tied to the government and more reliant on government funding.

He says that the new Trump team has simply adopted levers of control over higher education employed by recent Democratic administrations – including civil rights investigations, federal anti-discrimination laws and control over funding.

“In classic Trump form,” he added, “it’s absolutely the case that these levers have been turned up to 11.”

And there are fewer procedural and legal safeguards than there were under the Joe Biden and Barack Obama presidencies.

“It’s both an evolution and a revolution,” says Mr Hess.

But it is one, he argues, that universities have brought on themselves by being overtly political during Trump’s first term and making elite school the face of American higher education.

“The price for collecting billions a year in tax dollars is that institutions should both honour the promises they make, such as enforcing civil rights law, and hew to a mission in which they explicitly serve the whole nation,” says Mr Hess.

Withholding federal funding from universities may be a new challenge for higher education, but to some this is just the latest in a long effort by conservatives to undercut key traditional pillars of liberal power.

Through a combination of legislation and court rules, the influence of labour unions – which had provided the Democratic Party with volunteer personnel and funds – had diminished long before Trump succeeded in winning over white working-class voters in his three presidential runs.

State-level lawsuit reforms have also curtailed the vast sums that trial lawyers could contribute to Democratic coffers. And ongoing efforts to shrink the government workforce – which reached a peak with Elon Musk’s Doge reductions – have eroded another traditionally Democratic bloc.

However, Mr Wolfson fears that something greater could be lost if some of the Trump administration’s measures are enforced.

“The fact that we have multiracial, multicultural, multinational universities is a boon to our universities,” he says. “It creates really diverse communities, really diverse intellectual thought.”

Harvard – perhaps best known for its renowned law school – has turned the courts into its principle tool to resist Trump’s pressure.

On Thursday, a federal judge indefinitely suspended the administration’s attempts to prohibit foreign students from receiving visas to attend the university.

The university has also sued to prevent the Trump administration from terminating more than $2.2bn in federal grants, although that case is pending.

“The trade-off put to Harvard and other universities is clear,” Harvard wrote in its complaint filed with a Massachusetts federal court. “Allow the government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardise the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.”

Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, has also defended his university, saying that Harvard would be “firm” in its commitments to education and truth, during an interview with NPR.

“Harvard is a very old institution, much older than the country,” he continued. “As long as there has been a United States of America, Harvard has thought that its role is to serve the nation.”

Trump, meanwhile, has shared strong words of his own. “Harvard wants to fight,” he said on Wednesday. “They want to show how smart they are, and they’re getting their ass kicked.”

Opinion polls show that Trump’s political base supports his efforts, and the underlying message. Yet those same polls suggest a majority of the general population support American universities and don’t approve of his proposed funding cuts.

And opinion aside, the practicality of achieving such a fundamental reordering of America’s system of higher education, even with all the tools at the federal government’s disposal, is a daunting task.

According to Mr Wolfson, however, repairing what he says is the damage being done to academic independence will be equally challenging.

A growing number of members of the American Association of University Professors fear the consequences of expressing political views or conducting disfavoured research.

“The destruction is real,” argues Mr Wolfson. “Even if the courts step in, there will still be a massive undermining of the higher education project in this country due to Trump’s reckless, reckless moves.”

Mr Hess, who has pushed for conservative education reform for years, is less concerned. He believes that Trump’s chaotic, scattershot approach – including last week’s comments – could end up less effective than a more methodical restructuring of American universities.

“This is all an ambitious experiment,” Mr Hess said. “Whether it’s a strategy that’s going to work is very much an open question.”

One thing seems clear, however. Even if American universities resist – or outlast – Trump’s efforts, they are no longer insulated from the scorched-earth warfare of American politics. The walls of the ivory tower have been breached, regardless of whether one believes it is the barbarians – or liberators – at the gate.

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.

Responding to Witkoff’s latest comments, Hamas official Basem Naim told the BBC the group had last week come to an agreement with him on a proposal “which he deemed acceptable for negotiation” – but that the Israeli response “disagreed with all the provisions we had agreed upon”.

“Why, each time, is the Israeli response considered the only response for negotiation?” he said.

“This violates the integrity and fairness of mediation and constitutes a complete bias towards the other side.”

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.

At least seven people have died after a highway bridge collapsed on to railway tracks in Russia close to the Ukraine border, according to emergency services.

The bridge in Bryansk brought down several heavy trucks on to a moving passenger train as it collapsed, with 31 people also reportedly injured.

The Russian Emergencies Ministry said fire and rescue units were attempting to find people who had been travelling on the train.

In a statement posted to Telegram, Moscow Railway alleged the bridge had collapsed “as a result of illegal interference in transport operations”.

“Unfortunately, there are seven fatalities,” local governor Alexander Bogomaz said on Telegram, adding two people – including a child – are “seriously injured”.

All injured passengers have been taken to medical facilities in the Bryansk region, he added.

Moscow’s interregional transport prosecutor’s office said an investigation had been launched.

Authorities said the train’s locomotive and several cars derailed when the road bridge fell on to it late on Saturday evening.

Pictures online showed mangled carriages and passengers helping each other climb out of the wreckage in the dark.

Additional emergency workers, as well as rescue equipment and light towers for carrying out work at night have been sent to the area, according to Russian news agency Tass.

The train was going from the town of Klimovo to Moscow and was in the Vygonichsky district when the collapse happened, officials said

Passengers were evacuated and guided to a meeting point at a nearby station, Moscow Railway said, adding: “They will be able to continue their journey on a specially formed reserve train” travelling from Bryansk to Moscow.

The incident took place about 100km (62 miles) from the Ukraine border.

An Byunghui was in the middle of a video game on the night of 3 December when she learned that the South Korean president had declared martial law.

She couldn’t quite believe it – until the internet blew up with the evidence. The shock announcement from then-president Yoon Suk Yeol, the now-famous shots of soldiers breaking down the windows of the National Assembly and MPs scaling the walls to force their way into the building so they could vote the motion down.

Within hours, thousands had spurred into protest, especially young women. And Byunghui joined them, travelling hundreds of miles from Daegu in the south-east to the capital Seoul.

They turned up not just because Yoon’s decision had alarmed and angered them, but to protest against a president who insisted South Korea was free of sexism – despite the deep discrimination and flashes of violence that said otherwise.

They returned week after week as the investigation into Yoon’s abuse of power went on – and they rejoiced when he was impeached after four dramatic months.

And yet, with the country set to elect a new president on 3 June, those very women say they feel invisible again.

The two main candidates have been largely silent about equality for women. A polarising subject, it had helped Yoon into power in 2022 as he vowed to defend men who felt sidelined in a world that they saw as too feminist. And a third candidate, who is popular among young men for his anti-feminist stance, has been making headlines.

For many young South Korean women, this new name on the ballot symbolises a new fight.

“So many of us felt like we were trying to make the world a better place by attending the [anti-Yoon] rallies,” the 24-year-old college student says.

“But now, I wonder if anything has really improved… I can’t shake the feeling that they’re trying to erase women’s voices.”

When Byunghui arrived at the protests, she was struck by the atmosphere.

The bitter December cold didn’t stop tens of thousands of women from gathering. Huddling inside hooded jackets or under umbrellas, waving lightsticks and banners, singing hopeful K-pop numbers, they demanded Yoon’s ouster.

“Most of those around me were young women, we were singing ‘Into the World’ by Girls’ Generation,” Byunghui says.

Into the World, a hit from 2007 by one of K-pop’s biggest acts, became an anthem of sorts in the anti-Yoon rallies. Women had marched to the same song nearly a decade ago in anti-corruption protests that ended another president’s career.

“The lyrics – about not giving up on this world and dreaming of a new world,” Byunghui says, “just overwhelmed me. I felt so close to everyone”.

There are no official estimates of how many of the protesters were young women. Approximately one in three were in their 20s or 30s, according to research by local news outlet Chosun Daily.

An analysis by BBC Korean found that women in their 20s were the largest demographic at one rally in December, where there were 200,000 of them – almost 18% of those in attendance. In comparison, there were just over 3% of men in their 20s at that rally.

The protests galvanised women in a country where discrimination, sexual harassment and even violence against them has long been pervasive, and the gender pay gap – at 31% – is the widest among rich nations.

Like in so many other places, plummeting birth rates in South Korea too have upped the pressure on young women to marry and have children, with politicians often encouraging them to play their part in a patriarchal society.

“I felt like all the frustration that has built up inside me just burst forth,” says 23-year-old Kim Saeyeon . “I believe that’s why so many young women turned up. They wanted to express all that dissatisfaction.”

For 26-year-old Lee Jinha, it was the desire to see Yoon go: “I tried to go every week. It wasn’t easy. It was incredibly cold, super crowded, my legs hurt and I had a lot of work to do… but it was truly out of a sense of responsibility.”

That is not surprising, according to Go Min-hee, associate professor of political science at Ewha Women’s University, who says Yoon had the reputation of being “anti-feminist” and had “made it clear he was not going to support policies for young women”.

There were protests on the other side too, backing Yoon and his martial law order. Throughout, many young South Korean men have supported Yoon, who positioned himself as a champion of theirs, mirroring their grievances in his presidential campaign in 2022.

These men consider themselves victims of “reverse discrimination”, saying they feel marginalised by policies that favour young women. One that is often cited is the mandatory 18 months they must spend in the military, which they believe puts them at a severe disadvantage compared to women.

They label as “man haters” those women who call themselves feminists. And they have been at the heart of a fierce online backlash against calls for greater gender equality.

These groups have long existed, mostly out of the public eye. But over the years they moved closer to the mainstream as their traction online grew, especially under Yoon.

It was them that Yoon appealed to in his campaign pledges, vowing to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, saying it focused too much on women’s rights.

And he consistently denied systemic gender inequality existed in South Korea, which ranks near the bottom on the issue among developed countries.

But his message hit home. A survey by a local newspaper the year before he was elected had found that 79% of young men in their 20s felt “seriously discriminated against” because of their gender.

“In the last presidential election, gender conflict was mobilised by Yoon’s party,” says Kim Eun-ju, director of the Center for Korean Women and Politics. “They actively strengthened the anti-feminist tendencies of some young men in their 20s.”

During Yoon’s term, she says, government departments or publicly-funded organisations with the word “women” in their title largely disappeared or dropped the reference altogether.

The impact has been polarising. It alienated young women who saw this as a rollback of hard-won rights, even as it fuelled the backlash against feminism.

Byunghui saw this up-close back home in Daegu. She says anti-Yoon protests were overwhelmingly female. The few men who came were usually older.

Young men, she adds, even secondary school students, would often drive past the protests she attended cursing and swearing at them. She says some men even threatened to drive into the crowd.

“I wondered if they would have acted this way had the protest been led by young men?”

With Yoon gone, his People Power Party (PPP) is in disarray and still reeling from his fall.

And this is the first time in 18 years that there is no woman among the seven candidates runnning for president. “It’s shocking,” Jinha says, “that there’s no-one”. In the last election, there were two women among 14 presidential candidates.

The PPP’s Kim Moon-soo is trailing frontrunner Lee Jae-myung, from the main opposition Democratic Party (DP). But young women tell the BBC they have been disappointed by 61-year-old Lee.

“It’s only after criticism that that there were no policies targeting women that the DP began adding a few,” Saeyeon says. “I wish they could have drawn a blueprint for improving structural discrimination.”

When he was asked at the start of his campaign about policies targeting gender inequality, Lee responded: “Why do you keep dividing men and women? They are all Koreans.”

After drawing critcism, the DP acknowledged that women still “faced structural discrimination in many areas”. And it pledged to tackle inequality for women with more resources at every level.

During his presidential bid in 2022, Lee was more vocal about the prejudice South Korean women encounter, seeking their votes in the wake of high-profile sexual harassment scandals in his party.

He had promised to put women in top positions in the government and appointed a woman as co-chair of the DP’s emergency committee.

“It’s evident that the DP is focusing significantly less on young women than they did in the [2022] presidential election,” Ms Kim says.

Prof Go believes it’s because Lee “lost by a very narrow margin” back then. So this time, he is “casting the widest net possible” for votes. “And embracing feminist issues is not a good strategy for that.”

That stings for young women like Saeyeon, especially after the role they played in the protests calling for Yoon’s impeachment: “Our voices don’t seem to be reflected in the [campaign] pledges at all. I feel a bit abandoned.”

The ruling party’s Kim Moon-soo, who served in Yoon’s cabinet as labour minister, has emphasised raising birth rates by offering more financial support to parents.

But many women say rising costs are not the only obstacle. And that most politicians don’t address the deeper inequalities – which make it hard to balance a career and family – that are making so many women reconsider the usual choices.

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which Yoon had wanted to shut down, has also re-emerged as a sticking point.

Lee has vowed to strengthen the ministry, while Kim says he will replace it with a Ministry of Future Youth and Family.

The ministry already focuses on family services, education and welfare for children. Just under 7% of its total funding, which is about 0.2% of the government’s annual budget, goes towards improving equality for women. But Prof Go says the ministry was “politicised by Yoon and has since been weaponised”.

“The ministry itself is not huge but it’s symbolic… abolishing it would show that gender equality is unimportant.”

It’s also the target of a third candidate, 40-year-old Lee Jun-seok, a former leader of Yoon’s party, who has since launched his own Reform Party.

Although trailing Kim in polls, Lee Jun-seok has been especially popular with many young men for his anti-feminist views.

Earlier this week, he drew swift outrage after a presidential debate in which he said: “If someone says they want to stick chopsticks in women’s genitals or some place like that, is that misogyny?”

He said the “someone” was frontunner Lee Jae-myung’s son, who he claimed made the comment online, an allegation which the Lee camp has sidestepped, apologising for other controversial posts.

But watching Lee Jun-seok say that on live TV “was genuinely terrifying,” Byunghui says. “I had the scary thought that this might boost incel communities.”

Saeyeon describes “anger and even despair” sinking the “hopes I had for politics, which weren’t that great to begin with”.

She believes his popularity “among certain sections of young men is one of the “significant repercussions” of South Korea “long neglecting structural discrimination” against women.

The only candidate to address the issue, 61-year-old Kwon Young-gook, didn’t fare well in early polling.

“I’m still deliberating whether to vote for Lee Jae-myung or Kwon Young-gook,” Saeyeon says.

While Kwon represents her concerns, she says it’s smart to shore up the votes for Lee because she is “much more afraid of the next election, and the one after that”.

She is thinking about Lee Jun-seok, who some analysts believe could eat into the votes of a beleagured PPP, while appealing to Yoon’s base: “He is in the spotlight and as the youngest candidate, he could have a long career ahead.”

That is all the more reason to keep speaking out, Byunghui says. “It’s like there is dust on the wall. If you don’t know it’s there, you can walk by, but once you see it, it sticks with you.”

It’s the same for Jinha who says things can “never go back to how they were before Yoon declared martial law”.

That was a time when poliitics felt inaccessible, but now, Jinha adds, it “feels like something that affects me and is important to my life”.

She says she won’t give up because she wants to be free of “things like discrimination at work… and live my life in peace”.

“People see young women as weak and immature but we will grow up – and then the world will change again.”

A fifth of Ukrainian territory is now under Russian control, and for Ukrainians living under occupation there seems little chance that any future deal to end the war will change that.

Three Ukrainians in different Russian-controlled cities have told the BBC of the pressures they face, from being forced to accept a Russian passport to the risks of carrying out small acts of resistance. We are not using their real names for their own safety, and will call them Mavka, Pavlo and Iryna.

The potential dangers are the same, whether in Mariupol or Melitopol, seized by Russia in the full-scale invasion in 2022, or in Crimea which was annexed eight years before.

Mavka chose to stay in Melitopol when the Russians invaded her city on 25 February 2022, “because it is unfair that someone can just come to my home and take it out”.

She has lived there since birth, midway between the Crimean peninsula and the regional capital Zaporizhzhia.

In recent months she has noticed a ramping up of not only a strict policy of “Russification” in the city, but of an increased militarisation of all spheres of life, including in schools.

She has shared pictures of a billboard promoting conscription to young locals, a school notebook with Putin’s portrait on it, and photos and a video of pupils wearing Russian military uniforms instead of the school outfits – boys and girls – and performing military education tasks.

Some 200km (125 miles) along the coast of the sea of Azov, and much closer to the Russian border, the city of Mariupol feels as if it has been “cut off” from the outside world, according to Pavlo.

This key port and hub of Ukraine’s steel industry was captured after a devastating siege and bombardment that lasted almost three months in 2022.

Russian citizenship is now obligatory if you want to work or study or have an urgent medical help, Pavlo says.

“If someone’s child, let’s say, refuses to sing the Russian anthem at school in the morning, the FSB [Russia’s security service] will visit their parents, they will be ‘pencilled in’ and then anything can happen.”

Pavlo survived the siege despite being shot six times, including to his head.

Now that he has recuperated, he feels he cannot leave because of elderly relatives.

“Most of those who stayed in Mariupol or returned, did so to help their elderly parents or their sick grandparents, or because of their flat,” he tells me over the phone after midnight so no-one will overhear.

The biggest preoccupation in Mariupol is holding on to your home, as most of the property damaged in the Russian bombardment has been demolished, and the cost of living and unemployment has surged.

“I’d say 95% of all talk in the city is about property: how to claim it back, how to sell it. You’ll hear people talk about it while queuing to buy some bread, on your way to a chemist, in the food market, everywhere,” he says.

Crimea has been under occupation since Vladimir Putin annexed the peninsula in 2014, when Russia’s war in Ukraine began.

Iryna decided to remain, also to care for an elderly relative but also because she did not want to leave “her beautiful home”.

All signs of Ukrainian identity have been banned in public, and Iryna says she cannot speak Ukrainian in public any more, “as you never know who can tell the authorities on you”.

Children at nursery school in Crimea are told to sing the Russian anthem every morning, even the very youngest. All the teachers are Russian, most of them wives of soldiers who have moved in from Russia.

Iryna occasionally puts on her traditional, embroidered top when she has video calls with friends elsewhere on the peninsula.

“It helps us to keep our spirits high, reminding us about our happy life before the occupation”.

But the risks are high, even for wearing a vyshyvanka. “They might not shoot you straight away, but you can simply disappear afterwards, silently,” she declares.

She speaks of a Ukrainian friend being questioned by police because Russian neighbours, who came to Crimea in 2014, told police he had illegal weapons. “Of course he didn’t. Luckily they let him go in the end, but it’s so frightening.”

Iryna complains that she cannot go out on her own even for coffee “because solders can put a gun at you and say something abusive or order you to please them”.

Resistance in Ukraine’s occupied cities is dangerous, and it often comes in small acts of defiance aimed at reminding residents that they are not alone.

In Melitopol, Mavka talks of being part of a secret female resistance movement called (Angry Mavka) “to let people know that Ukrainians don’t agree with the occupation, we didn’t call for it, and we will never tolerate it”.

The network is made up of women and girls in “pretty much all occupied cities”, according to Iryna, although she cannot reveal its size or scale because of the potential dangers for its members.

Mavka describes her role in running the network’s social media accounts, which document life under occupation and acts like placing Ukrainian symbols or leaflets in public places “to remind other Ukrainians that they are not alone”, or even riskier practices.

“Sometimes we also put a laxative in alcohol and baked goods for the Russian soldiers, as a ‘welcome pack’,” she says.

Punishment for that kind of act, which the BBC is unable to verify, would be severe.

Russia’s occupation authorities treat the Ukrainian language or anything related to Ukraine as extremist, says Mavka.

Ukrainians are well aware of what happened to journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, 27, who disappeared while investigating allegations of torture prisons in eastern Ukraine in 2023.

Russian authorities told her family she had died in custody in September 2024. Her body was returned earlier this month, with several organs removed and clear signs of torture.

Silent disappearance is what Mavka fears most: “When suddenly nobody can find out where you are or what’s happened to you.”

Her network has developed a set of tasks for new joiners to pass to avoid infiltration, and so far they have managed to avoid cyber attacks.

For now they are waiting and watching: “We cannot take up arms and fight back against the occupier right now, but we want at least to show that pro-Ukrainian population is here, and it will also be here”.

She and others in Melitopol are following closely what is happening in Kyiv, “because it is important for us to know whether Kyiv is ready to fight for us. Even small steps matter”.

“We have a rollercoaster of moods here. Many are worried documents might get signed that, God forbid, leave us under Russian occupation for even longer. Because we know what Russia will do here.”

The worry for Mavka and people close to her is that if Kyiv does agree a ceasefire it could mean Russia pursuing the same policy as in Crimea, erasing Ukrainian identity and repressing the population.

“They’ve been already replacing locals with their people. But people here are still hopeful, we will continue our resistance, we’ll just have to be more creative”.

Unlike Mavka, Pavlo believes the war must end, even if it means losing his ability to return to Ukraine.

“Human life is of the greatest value… but there are certain conditions for a ceasefire and not everyone might agree with them as it raises a question, why have all those people died then during the past three years? Would they feel abandoned and betrayed?”

Pavlo is wary of talking, even via an encrypted line, but adds: “I don’t envy anyone involved in this decision-making process. It won’t be simple, black and white.

Iryna fears for Crimea’s next generation who have grown up in an atmosphere of violence and, she says, copy their fathers who have returned from Russia’s war against Ukraine.

She shows me her bandaged cat, and says a child on her street shot it with a rubber bullet.

“For them it was fun. These kids are not taught to build peace, they are taught to fight. It breaks my heart.”

It’s a condition that affects more than 10 million people in the UK. It can change futures, end careers, and shrink worlds. So when a hack comes along that says it can “cure”, or at the very least fend off a migraine, people will try it.

While there are medical treatments, there is no cure. Prescription medication can be very effective – but it doesn’t always work. For many people there is no simple solution.

Some discover their own ways of managing the debilitating pain: sitting in a hot bath while wearing an ice pack and drinking a smoothie, blasting the side of their face with a hairdryer.

But now a new hack has suddenly gone viral – the McMigraine Meal. A simple offering of a full-fat coke and a portion of salty fries seems to be doing the trick for hundreds who’ve been extolling its virtues on TikTok.

If there is any science behind these hacks – what do they do to the body?

Nick Cook from Oxfordshire carries “a wallet full of drugs” around in case of a migraine attack. He will “try anything” to make the pain go away, he says.

“When you live with the condition, and you’re working a five-day week and you need to carry on, you’ll give anything a go.”

At its worst the pain around Nick’s eye socket can feel like his eyeball is getting crushed. He says it’s the caffeine and sugar in coke that helps him.

“If I catch it soon it enough it can sometimes work, when my vision goes fuzzy and I can feel one coming on.”

He stresses that drinking coke doesn’t replace his amitriptyline tablets – the daily pain medication he takes to try to prevent migraines – but it does sometimes help him “last until the end of the day”.

For Kayleigh Webster, a 27-year-old who has had chronic migraines all her life, it’s the salt on the chips that might slow down a migraine attack.

“It can help,” she says cautiously, “but it’s certainly not a cure.

“Migraine is a complex neurological condition – and it can’t be cured by a bit of caffeine, salt and sugar in a fast food meal.”

Kayleigh’s tried cocktails of different medications, putting her feet in hot water, a flannel at the back of the head, acupuncture, cupping – but they’ve had little effect.

One of the few treatments that has given her relief is medical Botox – having dozens of injections in her head, face and neck. It’s still not clear how Botox works for migraine, but it’s believed to block powerful pain signals being released from the nerves.

A migraine – which can last days – is very different to a headache, which tend to be short-lived and can be treated more easily with painkillers like paracetamol. Migraines can cause head pain, neck pain, numbness, blurred vision, and even affect speech and movement.

Skulls dating back to 3,000 BC show ancient Egyptians even had trouble with migraines – but despite that long history, their exact cause is still unknown.

It’s thought pain receptors in the blood vessels and nerve tissue around the brain misfire – sending incorrect signals that something is wrong. But we don’t know why some people have an oversensitive nervous system – and why it reacts to some things and not others.

Experts say there’s not enough research into why only some people – around one in seven – are affected, or what can actually help.

Dr Kay Kennis, a GP who specialises in migraines, says while there are elements of the McMigraine meal that can help stave off an attack, these aren’t innate to “a McDonald’s”.

“The caffeine in the coke can act as a nerve disruptor, it is a substance that affects nerve activity. For some, that disturbance works in a positive way,” Dr Kennis says.

“There are some painkillers that people take for migraines that have caffeine – and some do respond well to that – but we don’t fully know why.”

But she warns against using caffeinated fizzy drinks like coke as a way of regularly managing migraines.

“Too much caffeine can be a trigger too – and you can end up in a worse situation in the long run,” Dr Kennis says.

Other ingredients in a fast food meal, like the salt on the chips, can affect nerve activity, she explains, but adds the effects of sodium on migraines have not been tested.

She also warns that not only is fast food often ultra-processed and not conducive to a healthy diet, it can contain high levels of Tyramine, a natural compound commonly found in many foods, which can actually cause severe migraines.

For Eloise Underwood none of the quick fixes on social media work.

The chronic migraine sufferer has been looking for a “magic cocktail” for seven years – she’s seen people recommend putting feet in scorching water (not recommended by experts and potentially dangerous); drinking hot coffee (caffeine can be a trigger); or various vibrating devices which have had little effect.

“There are so many videos online that take advantage of the desperation we all feel,” Eloise explains.

She’s left several jobs – often due to lighting and noise in an office environment triggering migraines. She recently stopped working as an interior designer and has now launched a business pressing and framing wedding flowers from her home.

She wears loop ear buds to reduce the sharpness of the sounds around her, and limits her social life.

“People think a migraine is just a headache – that’s just one symptom of it,” Eloise says. “For me, a migraine is a whole body experience…

“Migraines have completely made my life smaller.”

Prof Peter Goadsby, a neurologist at the NIHR-King’s Clinical Research Facility, says research is beginning to produce positive results after years of underfunding.

His latest study shows medications known as gepants could block a group of pain receptors in the lead-up to a migraine attack, cutting off the pain before it starts.

“Any new treatment is a glimmer of hope,” Eloise says. “They do say that nothing will work for everyone – but something will work for someone.”

Lifestyle changes can also make a difference, Prof Goadsby explains. It might be boring, he says, but basically – “be careful of your brain”.

“You want to have regularity, avoid the highs and lows. If you can feel the warning signs – yawning, sleepiness, mood change, passing more urine and even craving salt and sugar – listen to your body.

“Listen to your body – don’t listen to TikTok, that’s my advice.”

Nick has been doing exactly that. He might reach for the odd coke and salty fries, but he’s moulded his whole life in order to manage his migraines.

“I don’t drink, I wear sunglasses even if it’s cloudy,” he says. “I don’t go wild. When me and my partner go away, half the stuff we take is to help us manage our migraines.

On a recent stag-do weekend, Nick noticed the difference between his and his friends’ lives.

“They were up all night drinking to the early hours,” Nick says. “I turned up with my own pillow, apples, bananas, Weetabix, and any snacks I would need to keep me going, because hunger can be a major trigger.

“I’m in bed by midnight – but my mates know me, and that’s OK, because this is how I have to live my life.”

The US has sent Iran a proposal for a nuclear deal between Tehran and Washington, the White House confirmed on Saturday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he had been presented with “elements of a US deal” by his Omani counterpart Badr Albusaidi during a short visit to the Iranian capital.

It comes after a report by the UN nuclear watchdog said Iran had further stepped up its production of enriched uranium, a key component in the making of nuclear weapons.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday it was in Tehran’s “best interest to accept” the deal, adding: “President Trump has made it clear that Iran can never obtain a nuclear bomb”.

Leavitt said a “detailed and acceptable” proposal had been sent to Iran by US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.

The US proposal “will be appropriately responded to in line with the principles, national interests and rights of the people of Iran”, Araghchi wrote on X.

The precise details of the deal are not yet clear.

The proposal follows a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), – seen by the BBC – which found Iran now possesses over 400kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity – close to the 90% purity required for weapons-grade uranium.

This is well above the level of purity sufficient for civilian nuclear power and research purposes.

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 insists its programme is peaceful.

The US has long sought to limit Iran’s nuclear capacity. Talks between the two powers mediated by Oman have been under way since April.

Both sides have expressed optimism during the course of the talks but remain divided over key issues – chief among them, whether Iran can continue enrichment under any future agreement.

Despite the ongoing negotiations between Tehran and Washington, the IAEA report offered no indication that Iran has slowed its nuclear enrichment efforts.

Iran has produced highly enriched uranium at a rate equivalent to roughly one nuclear weapon per month over the past three months, the IAEA report found.

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

Iran has long denied it is attempting to develop nuclear weapons. However, the IAEA said it could not confirm whether this was still the case because Iran refuses to grant access to senior inspectors and has not answered longstanding questions about its nuclear history.

Trump is seeking a new nuclear agreement with Tehran after pulling the US out of a previous nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers in 2018.

This nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, was signed in 2015 by Iran and the US, China, France, Russia, Germany and the UK.

The JCPOA sought to limit and monitor Iran’s nuclear programme in return for lifting sanctions that had been placed on the regime in 2010 over suspicions that its nuclear programme was being used to develop a bomb.

But Donald Trump withdrew from the deal during his first term in office, claiming JCPOA was a “bad deal” because it was not permanent and did not address Iran’s ballistic missile programme, amongst other things.

Trump then re-imposed US sanctions as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign to compel Iran to negotiate a new and expanded agreement.

In the intervening years, Tehran has steadily overstepped the 2015 agreement’s limits on its nuclear programme, designed to make it harder to develop an atomic bomb.

Trump has previously threatened to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if diplomacy fails to achieve a deal.

Indian singer Diljit Dosanjh’s Met Gala debut last month left a lasting impression on global fashion.

The 41-year-old singer, who is the only Punjabi musician to perform at Coachella, walked the red carpet dressed like an early 20th Century maharajah.

His opulent ivory and gold ensemble – created by designer Prabal Gurung – complete with a feathered bejewelled turban, trended in India for weeks.

He also wore a gorgeous diamond necklace, its design inspired by a Cartier piece worn by an erstwhile king of the northern Indian state of Punjab.

A Panthère de Cartier watch, a lion-headed and a jewel-studded sword completed the ensemble, which had a map of Dosanjh’s home state embroidered on the back of the cape along with letters from Gurmukhi, the script for Punjabi language.

Of course, Dosanjh is no stranger to such style.

Just like his music, he’s carved out a niche in fashion too – a hip hop singer who is known for melding traditional Punjabi styles with Western influences.

Often seen in anti-fit trousers, chunky sneakers, and stacks of necklaces that he matches with his colourful turbans, his unique form of self-expression has captured the imagination of millions, leading to interesting reinventions in the traditional Punjabi attire.

The changes can be felt everywhere. A 16-minute high-intensity bhangra competition in California would be impossible without high performance sneakers. And basement bhangra nights in Berlin are enjoyed in crop tops and deconstructed pants.

Punjabi music itself, high on volume and energy – with lyrics packed with the names of cities and global luxury brands – has become a subculture.

It’s not just Dosanjh – several other Punjabi musicians have also influenced the region’s style game.

Not long ago, Punjabi-Canadian singer Jazzy B’s rings, often the size of a cookie, along with his plus-sized Kanda pendant and silver blonde hair tints, were trending.

More recently, the yellow tinted glasses worn by singer Badshah; the baggy hoodies sported by Yo Yo Honey Singh; and AP Dhillon’s Louis Vuitton bombers and Chanel watches have been hugely popular with Punjabi youth.

But even though their influence was significant, it was restricted to a region. Dosanjh and a few others like him, however, have managed to mount it to a global level, their style speaking to both the Sikh diaspora as well as a broader audience. For instance, the t-shirts, pearls and sneakers Dosanjh wore to his world tour last year were sold out in a matter of hours. Dhillon’s style statements at Paris Couture Week have created aspiration among Punjabi youth.

Cultural experts say that this reinvention, both in music and fashion, has its roots in Western pop-culture as most of the artistes live and perform in the West.

“Punjabi men are inventive. The region has been at the forefront of fusion, it believes in hybridity. This is especially the case with the Punjabi diaspora – even when they live in ghettos, they are the showmen [of their lives],” says art historian, author and museum curator Alka Pande.

Over the years, as the Punjabi diaspora community grew, a new generation of musicians began mixing modern hip-hop sounds with elements of traditional Punjabi aesthetics.

Their distinct style lexicon – of gold chains, faux fur jackets, plus-sized accessories, braids and beards – went on to spawn media articles, books and doctoral theses on South Asian culture.

The coin dropped instantly back home in Punjab, which absorbed logo fashion like a sponge when luxury brands arrived in the 2000s. For Punjabis – who are largely a farming community – it was an aspirational uprising, symbolic of how success and prosperity should look.

“It symbolised the movement of the Punjabi identity from a farmer to a global consumer,” says acclaimed singer Rabbi Shergill.

Arguing that performers, like everyone else, are a product of their times, Shergill says these impulses are “a response to the hyper capitalist world”.

Curiously, the style game of Punjabi musicians – from hip-hop, R&B, bhangra pop, fusion, Punjabi rap, reggae or filmy music – has also remained rooted and androgynous, instead of being hyper masculine.

A pop star may wear Balenciaga or Indian designer Manish Malhotra’s opulent creations; perform anywhere from Ludhiana city to London; dance with Beyonce around Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, atop a luxury car, or in a British mansion – but they always wear their Punjabi identity on their sleeves.

Dosanjh underlined this clearly with his maharajah look at the Met Gala. “It’s like the popularity of his androgynous style was waiting to happen,” Pande says.

The composite impact of this trend on emerging artists is unmissable today in Punjab.

Local Bhangra performances, for instance, are no longer limited to traditional “dhoti-kurta-koti” costume sets paired with juttis (ethnic footwear). Performance attire now includes sneakers, typographic T-shirts, deconstructed bottoms and even denims.

“Such items are highly sought after by customers,” says Harinder Singh, owner of the brand 1469.

The merchandise in Singh’s stores, includes accessories popularised by Punjab’s music stars, such as versions of Phulkari turbans worn by Dosanjh, Kanda pendants that were first popularised by veteran Bhangra artist Pammi Bai. Singh himself owns turbans in more than a 100 shades.

Even overall men’s style in Punjab bears some of this cosmopolitan twang.

Young poet Gurpreet Saini, who performs at cultural festivals across India, says he sources his shawls – printed with ombre Gurmukhi letters – from Hariana, his hometown in Punjab, for a distinctive look. He admits to the influence of music icons, including those like folk singer Gurdas Mann, who he grew up watching.

What began as personal flair in some cases, went on to become fashion statements. Now these choices are cultural signatures. They have recast the Punjabi identity through rhythm, hybridity as well as a rooted sense of self.

Ncuti Gatwa regenerated into Billie Piper in the series finale of Doctor Who on Saturday night.

He left the role after playing the iconic character for two series.

Piper, who previously played the Doctor’s assistant, Rose Tyler, said the opportunity to “step back on that Tardis one more time was just something I couldn’t refuse”.

In a press release, the BBC said: “Just how and why she [Billie Piper] is back remains to be seen…”

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

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.

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

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

Piper added: “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.”

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!”

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 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.

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 on Saturday

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.

Organised by think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies, 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 official explanation has been given, although a state media piece sought to downplay it by quoting an anonymous expert who said China’s decision to not send its defence minister “should not be overinterpreted”.

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 Hegseth’s call to increase defence spending was “pretty standard for the US these days”, and 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.

William Choong, senior fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, said with few exceptions, “the perceptions of the threat from China among Asian countries is not parallel to European perceptions of Russia”.

Many countries in Asia have “a more sanguine take of China” where “they recognise the challenge posed by China in the South China Sea but otherwise they are willing to work with China on almost everything else”, said Dr Choong.

Hegseth’s call “at best is ignorance, at worse is hubris”.