Donald Trump has said he will visit China after speaking to its leader Xi Jinping over the phone.

The US president said he had reciprocated with an invite to the White House during the “very good talk” – though such a trip has not been confirmed by either side.

Thursday’s call is the first time the two leaders have spoken since Trump launched a trade war with Beijing in February. Chinese state media reported that the call happened at the White House’s request.

Trump wrote on social media that the hour-and-a-half conversation was primarily focused on trade and had “resulted in a very positive conclusion for both countries”.

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“He invited me to China and I invited him here,” Trump said of the call with Xi while meeting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office.

“We both accepted, so I will be going there with the first lady at a certain point and he will be coming here hopefully with the first lady of China.”

The Chinese readout of the conversation mentioned the its invitation but not the reciprocal one to the White House.

According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, Xi reportedly told Trump that the US should “withdraw the negative measures it has taken against China”.

The Chinese leader was also said to have told Trump that China always kept its promises and since a consensus had been reached, both sides should abide by it – a reference to a recent deal between the two nations struck in Geneva.

Both sides have accused the other of breaching the deal aimed at dramatically reducing trade tariffs – a deal Trump touted as a “total reset”.

It came after Trump raised tariffs on imports from a number of countries, but reserved the highest rates for China. Beijing responded with its own higher rates on US imports, sparking tit-for-tat increases that peaked at 145%.

The tentative truce struck in May brought that US tariff on Chinese products down to 30%, while Beijing slashed levies on US imports to 10% and promised to lift barriers on critical mineral exports.

The agreement gave both sides a 90-day deadline to try to reach a trade deal.

But since then, talks have seemed to grind to a halt amid claims on both sides that the deal had been breached.

The US has accused China of failing to restart shipments of critical minerals and rare earth magnets vital to car and computer industries.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce has denied the claims and accused the US of undermining the deal by introducing new restrictions on computer chips.

Trump introduced new export restrictions on semiconductor design software and announced it would revoke the visas of Chinese students.

The US president said following the call that “there should no longer be any questions respecting the complexity of Rare Earth products”.

He told reporters in the White House: “Chinese students can come, no problem, no problem – its an honour to have them frankly. But we want to check them.”

Chinese state media reported that Xi warned Washington that it should handle Taiwan “with caution” to avoid conflict, just days after US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said China posed an “imminent” threat to the self-governed island.

Hegseth told the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singaport that Beijing was “credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power”.

China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be reunified, and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this. The US supports Taiwan militarily but does not officially recognise it due to the “One China” policy.

According to the readout of Thursday’s call given to Chinese media, Xi stressed that the US should handle the “Taiwan issue prudently to prevent a small number of Taiwan Independence separatists from dragging China and the US into a dangerous situation of conflict and confrontation”.

The call between Trump and Xi is long awaited and comes after months of silence between the two leaders.

The White House has touted the possibility they might talk from week one of Trump’s presidency – and earlier this week he finally vented his frustration on social media.

Trump wrote: “I like President Xi of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!”

Trump has made it clear that he likes to be involved in negotiations. But this is not the way China does business.

Beijing prefers to appoint a negotiating team led by a trusted official. Any calls or meeting between heads of state are usually thoroughly planned and highly choreographed.

The Chinese will also not want to be seen to bend to Washington’s demands.

When Shamili left her home in India’s Bengaluru city on Wednesday, it wasn’t to see her favourite cricket team – she isn’t even a fan of the game.

But the buzz around the Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s (RCB’s) Indian Premier League victory parade – the home team won the tournament for the first time – had swept through the city like wildfire.

Wearing an RCB jersey with “18 Virat” on the back – a nod to Virat Kohli, the city’s favourite cricket icon – Shamili joined her sister and friends near the Chinnaswamy Stadium, looking forward to celebrations.

What she didn’t expect was to get caught in a terrifying crush.

The victory parade turned deadly when surging crowds – far beyond what authorities expected – led to a horrific crush that killed 11 people and injured dozens more.

Survivors like Shamili are now grappling with trauma, pain and a sense of disbelief after the celebration spiralled into catastrophe.

“I kept saying, ‘let’s go, let’s go’ – the crowd was getting out of control,” Shamili recalled, sitting on a bed at the government-run Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital. “The next thing I knew, I was on the ground. People were walking over me. I thought I was going to die.”

She is not alone. Many who had come just to soak in the atmosphere – fans, families, curious onlookers – found themselves caught in a tide of bodies as crowds swelled beyond control.

Police had expected no more than 100,000 people. In reality, Karnataka’s chief minister Siddaramaiah said, the crowd surged to 200,000-300,000. The stadium, with a capacity of 32,000, was overwhelmed long before the team arrived.

Videos from before the crush showed people climbing trees and trying to scale the stadium walls.

Haneef Mohammed, an engineering student, told BBC Hindi that he had no intention of going inside because he didn’t have a pass or ticket.

“I was just standing and watching the crowds near the main gate. Suddenly, people started running all around and the police started hitting people with their lathis,” he said.

Police in India often wield lathis – long bamboo sticks – to try and control crowds.

Mr Mohammed got hit on the head with a lathi and started bleeding. He says the police immediately arranged for a vehicle to take him to the hospital.

The ages of the 11 victims range from 13 to 43 years.

The youngest, Divyanshi, was a Class 9 student who had come to the stadium with her mother and other family members. Other victims include college students and a young tech worker who had come to the stadium with her colleagues.

A doctor who spoke on condition of anonymity said that most of them were “brought dead to hospital” due to suffocation or broken ribs. The massive crowds had delayed ambulances getting to the site of the crush.

Even as chaos and panic ensued on the roads around the Chinnaswamy stadium, the RCB team went inside the stadium after being felicitated on the footsteps of the Vidhana Soudha – the seat of power in Karnataka – by the governor, chief minister and other ministers.

“They went on a victory lap around the stadium. Inside the stadium, there was no sign that anything had happened outside,” said a young man who spoke on condition of anonymity.

IPL chairman Arun Dhumal said he did not know who had planned the event in Bengaluru and that RCB officials inside the stadium were not aware of the crush until they got phone calls.

In a statement on X, RCB said it was “deeply anguished by the unfortunate incidents”.

“Immediately upon being made aware of the situation, we promptly amended our programme and followed the guidance and advice of the local administration,” it said.

“At a loss for words. Absolutely gutted,” star player Kohli wrote on Instagram.

But questions still remain over how and why the event was organised.

“Normally, the felicitation of a team should be done in a controlled environment. But here, there appeared to be no preparation,” a relative of an injured person at the Bowring Hospital said.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has announced a magisterial enquiry into the incident.

“A moment of joy has turned into sorrow,” he said on Wednesday.

New Zealand’s parliament has voted to suspend three Māori MPs for their protest haka during a sitting last year.

Opposition MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, who started the traditional dance, was suspended for seven days, while her party’s co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer were banned for 21 days.

The MPs did the haka when asked if their Te Pāti Māori or Māori Party, supported a bill that sought to redefine the country’s founding treaty with Māori people.

The Treaty Principles Bill has since been voted down but it drew nationwide outrage – and more than 40,000 people protested outside parliament during the bill’s first reading in November last year.

We have been “punished for being Māori”, Ngarewa-Packer told the BBC. “We take on the stance of being unapologetically Māori and prioritising what our people need or expect from us.”

There were tense exchanges on Thursday as the house debated penalties, with Foreign Minister Winston Peters being asked to apologise for calling Te Pāti Māori a “bunch of extremists” and saying the country “has had enough of them”.

“We will never be silenced, and we will never be lost,” Maipi-Clarke, who at 22 is the youngest MP, said at one point, holding back tears.

“Are our voices too loud for this house – is that why we are being punished?”

Last month, a parliamentary committee proposed suspending the MPs, It ruled that the haka, which brought parliament to a temporary halt, could have “intimidated” other lawmakers.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had rejected accusations then that the committee’s ruling was “racist”, adding that the issue was “not about haka”, but about “parties not following the rules of parliament”.

Following a heated debate, the suspensions handed out on Thursday are the longest any New Zealand lawmaker has faced. The previous record was three days.

New Zealand has long been lauded for upholding indigenous rights, but relations with the Māori community have been strained recently under the current conservative government Luxon-led government.

His administration has been criticised for cutting funding to programmes benefiting Māori, including plans to disband an organisation that aims to improve health services for the community.

Luxon though has defended his government’s record on Māori issues, citing plans to improve literacy in the community and move children out of emergency housing.

The Treaty Principles Bill that has been at the heart of this tension. It sought to legally define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, the pact the British Crown and Māori leaders signed in 1840 during New Zealand’s colonisation.

The bill’s defenders, such as Act, the right-wing party that tabled it, argue the 1840 treaty needs to be reinterpreted because it had divided the country by race, and does not represent today’s multicultural society.

Critics, however, say it is the proposed bill that would be divisive and lead to the unravelling of much-needed protections for many Māori.

The bill sparked a hīkoi, or peaceful protest march, that lasted nine days, beginning in the far north and culminating in the capital Wellington. It grew to more than 40,000 by the end, becoming one of the country’s biggest marches ever.

The Treaty Principles Bill was eventually voted down by 112 votes to 11 in April, days after a government committee recommended that it should not proceed. The party holds six seats in the 123-member parliament.

What happens when the richest person and the most powerful politician have a knock-down, drag-out fight?

The world may be about to find out.

A disagreement between Elon Musk and Donald Trump started at a simmer last week, began bubbling on Wednesday and is now in full-on boil. And like everything these two men do, it is all spilling out into public view. These two men have two of the world’s biggest megaphones, and they clearly enjoy using them.

In remarks at the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, Trump sounded a bit like a spurned lover. He expressed surprise at Musk’s criticism of his “big, beautiful” tax and spending legislation. He pushed back against the notion that he would have lost last year’s presidential election without Musk’s hundreds of millions of dollars in support. And he said Musk was only changing his tune now because his car company, Tesla, will be hurt by the Republican push to end electric vehicle tax credits.

Musk took to his social media site, X, with a very Generation X response for his 220 million followers: “Whatever”. He said he didn’t care about the car subsidies, he wanted to shrink the national debt, which he says is an existential threat to the nation. He called Trump “ungrateful” for his help last year and insisted that Democrats would have prevailed without him.

Musk and Trump had formed a powerful but unlikely alliance , culminating in the tech billionaire having a key position of budget-slashing authority in the Trump administration. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, became one of the biggest stories of Trump’s first 100 days, as it shuttered entire agencies and dismissed thousands of government workers.

It wasn’t long, however, before speculation began over when – and how – the two outsized personalities would ultimately fall out.

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For a while, it seemed like those predictions were off the mark. Trump stood by Musk even as the latter’s popularity dropped, as he feuded with administration officials and as he became a liability in several key elections earlier this year. Every time it appeared there would be a break, Musk would pop up in the Oval Office, or the Cabinet room or on the president’s Air Force One flight to Mar-a-Lago.

When Musk’s 130 days as a “special government employee” ended last week, the two had a chummy Oval Office send-off, with a golden key to the White House and hints that Musk might someday return.

It’s safe to say that any invitation has been rescinded and the locks have been changed.

“Elon and I had a great relationship,” Trump said on Thursday – a comment notable for its use of the past tense.

There had been some thought that Trump’s surprise announcement on Wednesday night of a new travel ban, additional sanctions on Harvard and a conspiracy-laced administration investigation of former President Joe Biden were all efforts to change the subject from Musk’s criticism. The White House and its allies in Congress seemed careful not to further antagonise him after his earlier comments.

Then Trump spoke out and … so much for that.

Now the question is where the dispute goes next. Congressional Republicans could find it harder to keep their members behind Trump’s bill with Musk providing rhetorical – and, perhaps financial – air for those who break ranks.

Trump, who takes pride in being a devastating counterpuncher, will have plenty of opportunity to lay into Musk. What will happen to Musk’s Doge allies still in the Trump administration or government contracts to Musk-related companies or Biden-era investigations into Musk’s business dealings?

“The easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon’s governmental subsidies and contracts,” Trump posted menacingly on his own social media website.

If Trump turns the machinery of government against Musk, the tech billionaire will feel pain. Tesla’s stock price slipped on Thursday.

But Musk also has near limitless resources to respond, including by funding insurgent challengers to Republicans in next year’s elections and primaries. He may not win a fight against the whole of Trump’s government, but he could exact a high political price.

Meanwhile, Democrats are on the sidelines, wondering how to respond. Few seem willing to welcome Musk, a former donor to their party, back into the fold. But there’s also the old adage that the enemy of an enemy is a friend.

“It’s a zero-sum game,” Liam Kerr, a Democratic strategist, told Politico. “Anything that he does that moves more toward Democrats hurts Republicans.”

At the very least, Democrats seem happy to stand back and let the two men exchange blows. And until they abandon this fight, the din is likely to drown out everything else in American politics.

But don’t expect this spat to end anytime soon.

“Trump has 3.5 years left as president,” Musk wrote on X, “but I will be around for 40-plus years.”

US President Donald Trump has issued a sweeping new travel ban for people from 12 countries, revisiting a hallmark policy of his first term in office.

There are some key differences, however.

The original travel ban suffered a series of legal defeats. This time, the policy appears to have been designed to avoid the same pitfalls.

Its predecessor, which targeted seven predominantly Muslim countries and was dubbed the “Muslim ban” by critics, was ordered just a week after Trump took office in 2017, during his first term in the White House.

The ban was amended twice to overcome court challenges, after opponents argued it was unconstitutional and illegal because it discriminated against travellers based on their religion.

A scaled-back version was eventually upheld by the US Supreme Court in 2018, which this new ban closely resembles.

Legal experts told the BBC that it appeared Trump had learned lessons from his first attempt.

Christi Jackson, an expert in US immigration law at the London firm Laura Devine Immigration, said the new ban was more legally robust as a result.

While the first lacked “clarity”, the new restrictions were “wider in scope” and had “clearly defined” exemptions, she said.

While there are some similarities in the nations chosen by the 2017 ban and the 2025 ban, Muslim-majority states are not the express target of the latest order.

Barbara McQuade, professor of law at the University of Michigan and former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, told the BBC World Service’s Newshour programme that, on this basis, it seemed likely to win the approval of the Supreme Court if it was ever referred up to that level.

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The 12 countries subject to the harshest restrictions from 9 June are mainly in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean, including Afghanistan, Iran and Somalia.

There will be partial restrictions on travellers from another seven countries, including Cuban and Venezuelan nationals.

Trump said the strength of the restrictions would be graded against the severity of the perceived threat, including from terrorism.

But besides Iran, none of the 12 countries hit by the outright ban are named on the US government’s state sponsors of terrorism list.

Trump cited Sunday’s incident in Boulder, Colorado, in which a man was accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at demonstrators attending a march for Israeli hostages, in a video announcing the ban on X.

The alleged attacker was an Egyptian national. However, Egypt does not appear on either list.

Trump also specified high rates of people overstaying their visas as a reason for listing certain countries.

However, Steven D Heller, an immigration lawyer based in the US, said there was a “lack of clarity” over what threshold had to be met by a country’s overstaying rate in order for that country to be placed on Trump’s ban list. That could be the basis for a successful legal challenge, he suggested.

“If they’re relying on this notion of excessive overstay rates… they have to define what that actually means,” he told the BBC.

But he noted that existing US law gave the president broad powers over immigration policy.

Unlike the first ban, which was to last for only 90 to 120 days, today’s order has no end date.

It has been met with dismay in the targeted countries.

Venezuela has described the Trump administration as “supremacists who think they own the world”, though Somalia has pledged to “engage in dialogue to address the concerns raised”.

The original ban spurred mass protests and sowed chaos at US airports.

It was repealed in 2021 by Trump’s successor, President Joe Biden, who called the policy “a stain on our national conscience”.

Immigration lawyer Shabnam Lotfi, who challenged the previous travel ban, said it would be an “uphill battle” to overturn the new one.

“The president does have the authority to determine who is admissible to the US,” she said, adding that because of the way the ban had been written, it was “harder to find a huge group of people that could file a class-action lawsuit”.

“They’ve put more thought into it.”

Ms Lotfi noted that the new restrictions could have consequences for students and other visa applicants abroad.

“Students who are stuck in administrative processing are impacted. So are winners of the diversity visa lottery who paid fees and went to interviews – they’re unlikely to get visas now,” she said.

“Even EB-5 investors – people who’ve put over $1 million into the US economy – are affected. And H-1B visa holders stuck abroad, waiting to return to their US employers, could also be blocked.”

An Australian woman accused of murdering relatives with beef Wellington documented herself using kitchen scales to calculate a lethal dose of toxic mushrooms, prosecutors allege.

Erin Patterson has pleaded not guilty to killing three people and attempting to murder another at her home in regional Victoria in July 2023. The 50-year-old says she never intended to hurt them and it was a tragic accident.

Prosecutors on Thursday suggested photos found on her phone showing wild fungi being weighed depict her measuring the amount required to kill her guests.

Ms Patterson told the court she had likely taken the photos in question but said she didn’t believe the mushrooms in them were death caps.

Ms Patterson’s in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, along with Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, all fell ill and died days after the lunch.

Heather’s husband, local pastor Ian Wilkinson, was also hospitalised but recovered after coming out of a weeks-long induced coma.

The high-profile trial, which started almost six weeks ago, has already heard from more than 50 prosecution witnesses. Ms Patterson became the first defence witness to take the stand on Monday afternoon.

Under cross-examination from the lead prosecutor, Ms Patterson admitted she had foraged for wild mushrooms in the three months before the July lunch, despite telling police and a health official that she hadn’t.

The court was also shown images, taken in late April 2023 and recovered from Ms Patterson’s phone, which depicted mushrooms being weighed.

Ms Patterson previously admitted she had repeatedly deleted electronic data in the days following the lunch because she feared that if officers found such pictures they would blame her for the guests’ deaths.

Pointing to earlier evidence from a fungi expert who said the mushrooms in the images were “highly consistent” with death caps, Dr Rogers alleged Ms Patterson had knowingly foraged them days before.

She had seen a post on iNaturalist – a website for logging plant and animal sightings – and travelled to the Loch area ten days later on 28 April to pick the toxic fungi, Dr Rogers alleged.

Ms Patterson said she couldn’t recall if she went to the town that day, but denied she went there to find death cap mushrooms or that she had seen the iNaturalist post.

“I suggest that you were weighing these mushrooms so that you could calculate the weight required for… a fatal dose,” Dr Rogers put to her.

“Disagree,” Ms Patterson replied.

The mother-of-two also spoke about putting powdered dried mushrooms into a range of foods like spaghetti, brownies and stew, which prosecutors allege was practice for the fatal lunch.

Ms Patterson said this was not true, but rather an attempt to get “extra vegetables into my kids’ bodies”.

Prosecutors repeatedly asked her, with different wording each time, whether she had knowingly used the same food dehydrator to prepare death cap mushrooms for the lunch.

CCTV played at the trial shows Ms Patterson disposing of the appliance at a local dump.

“That’s why you rushed out, the day after your release from [hospital], to get rid of the evidence,” Dr Rogers said.

“No,” replied Ms Patterson.

Earlier, Ms Patterson’s barrister asked her why she repeatedly lied to police about foraging mushrooms and having a food dehydrator.

“It was this stupid knee-jerk reaction to dig deeper and keep lying,” she told the court. “I was just scared, but I shouldn’t have done it.”

Ms Patterson also repeated her claim that she never intentionally put the poisonous fungi in the meal.

She said the mushrooms used in the beef Wellington may have accidentally included dried, foraged varieties that were kept in a container with store-bought ones.

Ms Patterson was also quizzed on evidence given by other witnesses that she had asked her guests to come to the lunch to discuss health issues, namely a cancer diagnosis.

She said she didn’t outright say she had cancer, but still shouldn’t have misled her relatives, saying she’d done so partly because their concern made her feel loved.

“I suggest that you never thought you would have to account for this lie about having cancer because you thought the lunch guests would die,” Dr Rogers said. “Your lie would never be found out.”

“That’s not true,” Ms Patterson said.

She will resume being cross examined on Friday. The trial, initially expected to take six weeks, is now expected to run for at least another fortnight, the judge has told the court.

Israeli forces have recovered the bodies of two Israeli-Americans taken back to Gaza as hostages during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, the Israeli military says.

Judi Weinstein Haggai, 70, who was also a Canadian citizen, and her husband Gadi Haggai, 72, were murdered by gunmen from the Mujahideen Brigades group when they attacked Kibbutz Nir Oz, a statement said.

Their bodies were found in the southern Khan Younis area of Gaza overnight and brought back to Israel for forensic identification.

There are now 56 hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza, at least 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he and his wife sent their condolences to the families of Judi and Gadi Haggai.

“Our hearts grieve over this terrible loss. May their memories be blessed,” he added.

“I would like to thank, and express appreciation to, the fighters and commanders for this determined and successful operation. We will not rest, nor will we be silent, until we return home all of our hostages – the living and the deceased.”

The couple’s families recalled how they “went out for a walk on the morning of that cursed Saturday and never returned”.

“We welcome the closure and their return to a proper burial at home, in Israel,” they said.

Judi, an English teacher, and Gadi Haggai, who used to work in Kibbutz Nir Oz’s kitchen, were last seen alive in a video they shared with a group chat at the start of the 7 October attack. They were seen taking cover in a field as incoming rockets fired from Gaza streaked overhead and the sound of gunfire was heard.

Judi later told friends and relatives they had been wounded, before ceasing contact.

The couple’s daughter Iris Weinstein Haggai said after the attack her mother had told her they had been “shot by terrorists on a motorcycle and that my dad was wounded really bad”. She added: “Paramedics tried to send her an ambulance. The ambulance got hit by a rocket.”

In December 2023, the kibbutz announced that both Judi and Gadi were killed that day and their bodies were being held hostage in Gaza.

On Wednesday, an Israeli military official said the couple’s bodies were recovered from the Khan Younis area following an operation based on “precise intelligence” from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Shin Bet security service.

They said they could not disclose further details due to the sensitivity of the operation. However, Israeli Army Radio reported the intelligence was obtained through the Shin Bet’s interrogation of a Palestinian fighter captured by Israeli troops in Gaza.

“We will keep doing the utmost for the mission of bringing our hostages back – the living, to reunite with their families, and the deceased to dignified burial. We will deploy all the methods and tools in our disposal for this goal,” the military official said.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum urged decision-makers to do everything they could to agree a new ceasefire deal with Hamas to secure the return of all the remaining hostages.

“There is no need to wait another 608 agonising days for this,” it said. “The mission can be completed as early as tomorrow morning. This is what the majority of the Israeli people want.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was “united in prayer” for the Haggai family.

“Hamas must release all remaining hostages, including Omer Neutra and Itay Chen,” he added, referring to two other Israeli-Americans who the Israeli military says were killed on 7 October while serving as soldiers and whose bodies were taken back to Gaza.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said: “The return of their remains is a time to begin to heal and to rest. We mourn with [Judi Haggai’s] family. May her memory be a blessing.”

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented cross-border attack almost 20 months ago, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

Another four people, two of them dead, were already being held captive in Gaza before the conflict.

So far, 199 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive, mostly through two temporary ceasefire deals with Hamas.

At least 54,677 people have been killed in Gaza during the war, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza on 2 March and resumed its military offensive against Hamas two weeks later, collapsing a two-month truce during which 33 Israeli hostages and five Thai hostages were freed. Israel said it wanted to put pressure on Hamas to release the remaining hostages.

On 19 May, the Israeli military launched an expanded offensive that Netanyahu said would see troops “take control of all areas” of Gaza. Israel also partially eased its blockade, allowing some food into the territory amid warnings from experts of a looming famine.

More than 4,400 people have reportedly been killed in Gaza over the past three months, while 640,000 others have been displaced again by Israeli ground operations and evacuation orders.

Hopes of a new ceasefire deal faded last week, with Hamas and Israel remaining at odds over the conditions of the latest US proposal.

Hamas said it was prepared to release 10 living hostages and the bodies of 18 dead ones, which was the number specified in US envoy Steve Witkoff’s proposal, in exchange for a 60-day truce and the release of Palestinian prisoners.

But the group also repeated its demands for guarantees that the truce would lead to a permanent ceasefire, as well as a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and the resumption of unrestricted aid deliveries.

Israel called Hamas’s statement a refusal of the proposal, and Witkoff said it was totally unacceptable. But a Hamas official insisted it had acted positively and responsibly.

Goods brought into the US plunged by 20% in April, recording their largest ever monthly drop in the face of a wave of tariffs unleashed by US President Donald Trump.

The retreat reflects the abrupt hit to trade, after firms had rushed products into the country earlier this year to try to get ahead of new taxes on imports Trump had promised.

US purchases from major trade partners such as Canada and China fell to their lowest levels since 2021 and 2020 respectively, the Commerce Department said.

The collapse helped to cut the US trade deficit – the gap between exports and imports – in goods by almost half, a record decline, according to the report.

“The April trade report indicates the impact from tariffs has well and truly arrived,” said Oxford Economics, while noting that the latest figures should be interpreted with caution, given the surge in activity earlier this year.

Since re-entering office in January, Trump has raised import taxes on specific items such as foreign steel, aluminium and cars and imposed a blanket 10% levy on most goods from trading partners around the world.

He had briefly targeted some countries’ exports with even higher duties, only to suspend those measures for 90 days to allow for talks.

Trump has said the moves are intended to rebuild manufacturing at home and strengthen its hand in trade negotiations.

White House officials are now engaged in intense talks aimed at striking deals before that 90-day deadline expires next month.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Trump spoke by phone on Thursday to try to reach a breakthrough in those negotiations, as the fragile truce between the two sides showed signs of deteriorating.

In a social media post, Trump said it had been a “very good phone call” focused on trade and that teams from the two sides would be meeting again shortly.

State media in China reported that they had agreed to further talks and extended an invitation of a visit to Trump.

Trump’s barrage of tariffs have brought the average effective tariff rate in the US to the highest level since the 1930s, according to analysts.

After a surge in activity earlier this year, the abrupt changes have led to a sharp slowdown in trade as firms weigh how to respond.

In Mexico, the steel industry said its exports to the US had been cut in half last month.

In Canada, the trade deficit hit an all-time high last month, widening to C$7.1bn, as exports to the US shrank for a third month in a row.

Thursday’s report from the US Commerce Department showed few categories of products were unaffected by the changes.

Imports of passenger cars dropped by a third from March to April. Pharmaceutical products were hit and imports of most consumer goods also fell, including cell phones, artwork, furniture, toys and apparel.

But imports surged from Vietnam and Taiwan, which saw their exports briefly targeted with higher rates before Trump suspended those levies, according to the report.

Despite the big monthly decline, overall US goods imports in the first four months of the year are up about 20% compared with the same period in 2024.

Exports so far this year are up about 5% compared with 2024.

The overall goods and services deficit in April was $61.6bn, down from $138.3bn in March.

On the morning of 9 May, I was part of a BBC Arabic team which left the Syrian capital, Damascus, for the southern province of Deraa. From there we planned to go to the frontier with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

We wanted to get close to the Syrian territory that has been seized by the Israeli military since December, when Israel’s prime minister said it was taking control indefinitely of a demilitarised buffer zone and neighbouring areas following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

We were a team of seven – myself (a British citizen), two Iraqi BBC staff, and four Syrians – three freelancers and one BBC cameraman.

We were filming near one of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) observation posts, close to the town of al-Rafeed, when an official from the UN told us that the Israeli side had inquired about our identity and had been informed that we were a BBC crew.

We next drove north towards Quneitra city, which has been located inside the buffer zone since a 1974 disengagement agreement between Syria and Israel, which captured the Golan during the 1967 Middle East war.

About 200m (660ft) away from the city, an unguarded checkpoint blocked the road. To the side of the checkpoint we spotted Merkava tanks, one of which was flying an Israeli flag.

From a nearby tower, two Israeli soldiers were watching us – one of them through binoculars – and my colleague held his BBC ID up for them to see.

The BBC has complained to the Israeli military about what happened next to my team, but it has not yet received a response.

A minute after we started filming in the area, a white car approached from the other side of the checkpoint.

Four Israeli soldiers got out of the car and surrounded us. They pointed their rifles at our heads and ordered us to place the camera on the side of the road. I tried to explain that we were a BBC crew, but things escalated unexpectedly quickly.

I was able to send a message to my BBC colleagues in London saying that we had been stopped by the Israeli military before our phones and all equipment were confiscated, more Israeli soldiers arrived in a Humvee military vehicle, and our car was thoroughly searched.

The soldiers escorted us through a barrier into the city of Quneitra and stopped at the crossing point that separates Quneitra from the occupied Golan. There, the soldiers began reviewing the footage as we sat in our car, while one pointed his rifle at my head from metres away. After more than two hours, one of the soldiers asked me to step out of the car and speak on a mobile phone.

I didn’t know who the person on the line was. He spoke broken Arabic. He asked why we were filming Israeli military positions. I told him I was a British BBC journalist and explained to him the nature of our work. I returned to my car, and the rifle was again aimed at my head.

After another hour of waiting, one more vehicle arrived. A group of security personnel got out of the car carrying blindfolds and plastic zip ties and asked me to step out first.

The lead officer, who spoke fluent Palestinian Arabic dialect, took me by the hand towards one of the rooms at the crossing point which were previously used by the Syrian army. The floor was strewn with broken glass and rubbish. He told me that they would treat me differently – no handcuffs, nor blindfold – unlike the rest of my team.

I was in shock. I asked why they were doing this when they knew we were a BBC crew.

He said he wanted to help get us out quickly and that we had to comply with their instructions.

Moments later, another officer entered and told me to take off all my clothes except my underwear. I initially refused, but they insisted, and threatened me, so I complied. He inspected even inside my underwear, both front and back, searched my clothes, then told me to put them back on and started interrogating me – including personal questions about my children and their ages.

When they eventually let me out of the room, I witnessed the horrific scene of my team members, tied up and blindfolded. I pleaded to the officer to release them, and he promised to do so after the interrogations. They were taken one by one to the same room for strip search and questioning.

They returned with their hands still bound but not blindfolded. The team’s interrogation lasted more than two hours, during which all our phones and laptops were examined, and many photos – including personal ones – were deleted.

The officer threatened us with worse consequences if we approached the frontier from the Syrian side again, and said that they know everything about us and would track us down if any hidden or un-deleted photo was ever published.

About seven hours after our detention – it was past 21:00 – we were taken by two vehicles, one in front of our car and the other behind us, to a rural area about 2km (1.2 miles) outside Quneitra. There, the vehicles stopped and a bag containing our phones was thrown towards us before the vehicles left.

Lost in the dark with no signal, no internet and no idea where we were, we kept driving until we reached a small village.

A group of children pointed us to the highway, warning that a wrong turn could draw Israeli fire. Ten tense minutes later, we found the road. Forty-five minutes after that, we were in Damascus.

Zambia’s former President Edgar Lungu has died at the age of 68, his party has said in a statement.

He had “been receiving specialized treatment in South Africa” for an undisclosed illness, the Patriotic Front (PF) added.

Lungu led Zambia for six years from 2015, losing the 2021 election to the current President Hakainde Hichilema by a large margin.

After that defeat he stepped back from politics but later returned to the fray. He had ambitions to vie for the presidency again but at the end of last year the Constitutional Court barred him from running, ruling that he had already served the maximum two terms allowed by law.

Even after being disqualified from running for the presidency again, he remained hugely influential in Zambian politics and did not hold back in his criticism of his successor.

In a short video, Lungu’s daughter Tasila said that the former head of state, who had been “under medical supervision in recent weeks”, died at a clinic in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, at 06:00 (04:00 GMT) on Thursday.

“In this moment of grief, we invoke the spirit of ‘One Zambia, One Nation’ – the timeless creed that guided President Lungu’s service to our country,” she added in an emotional statement.

There was no mention of what his condition was, but a decade ago he underwent throat surgery abroad. At the time his office said he was suffering from a narrowing of the oesophagus.

In his condolence message, President Hichilema called for “solemnity, unity and an outpouring of love and compassion.

“Let us come together as one people, above political affiliation or personal conviction, to honour the life of a man who once held the highest office in our land.”

Lungu first became president in January 2015 after winning a special presidential election triggered by the death in office of Michael Sata.

After completing Sata’s term, he won a further five years in power in 2016 taking just over 50% of the vote.

But after six years at the helm, Lungu, who encouraged Chinese investment and enlisted the country’s help in infrastructure development, was blamed for a struggling economy, high unemployment and rising debt levels.

His time in office was also marred by corruption scandals involving his allies and relatives. Lungu always denied wrongdoing.

His party’s youth wing was accused of harassing opposition supporters, and the population at large.

Lungu lost in 2021 by close to a million votes with Hichilema, seen as more pro-Western, tapping into widespread dissatisfaction among the electorate.

He said he was retiring in the aftermath of the vote, but returned to frontline politics in 2023 as his successor’s popularity waned.

“I am ready to fight from the front, not from the rear, in defence of democracy. Those who are ready for this fight, please come along with me, I am ready for anything,” Mr Lungu told supporters at the time.

After returning to politics, the former president complained of police harassment. At one point last year he said he was “virtually under house arrest”.

“I cannot move out of my house without being accosted and challenged by the police and driving me back home”, Lungu told the BBC’s Newsday programme.

In the interview in May 2024, he alleged that he had been barred from attending a conference abroad and from travelling for medical treatment.

In 2023, the police warned him against jogging in public, describing his weekly workouts as “political activism”.

The government said that Lungu had “never been placed under house arrest” and that he was free to exercise his rights.

Lungu was a lawyer by training but enjoyed a meteoric rise in politics after winning a seat in parliament as a PF MP in 2011.

He entered government as deputy minister in the vice-president’s office in that year and rose to become minister of home affairs in just over 12 months.

He later became minister of defence and then justice. A close friend described Lungu as a “good foot-soldier, lawyer and politician, father, husband and grandparent”.

Born on 11 November 1956, Lungu graduated with a law degree from the University of Zambia in 1981. He also underwent military training at the then Miltez army college in Kabwe.

He later worked at Andre Masiye and Company Advocates, Barclays Bank and Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines.

Five people have been killed in an Israeli strike on al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, according to the Anglican Church, which operates it.

The Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem said three journalists, a father escorting his son to surgery, and another person died on Thursday morning when the hospital’s compound was hit.

It condemned “in the strongest possible terms” the attack, which also injured 30 bystanders, including four hospital staff. The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate accused Israel of a “full-fledged war crime”.

The Israeli military said it “precisely struck” a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighter operating from a command centre inside the hospital’s yard.

It came the same day as more than 130 global news and press freedom organisations – including the BBC – called for international media to be given immediate access to Gaza and for Palestinian journalists to be given full protection.

“For 20 months, the Israeli authorities have refused to grant journalists outside of Gaza independent access to the Palestinian territory – a situation that is without precedent in modern warfare,” they wrote in a letter co-ordinated by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.

“Local journalists, those best positioned to tell the truth, face displacement and starvation. To date, nearly 200 journalists have been killed by the Israeli military.

“Many more have been injured and face constant threats to their lives for doing their jobs: bearing witness. This is a direct attack on press freedom and the right to information.”

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military or government. They have previously denied that Israeli forces have targeted journalists.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate said the Israeli strike on al-Ahli hospital’s compound directly targeted a media tent.

Video footage showed medics and other people rushing to help casualties lying on the ground underneath a tree in a yard and carrying at least four of them into a medical tent.

“The Israeli drone suddenly attacked these colleagues,” Palestinian journalist Mohammed Ahmed told the news agency Reuters at the scene. “Three of them [were] martyred, in addition to a number of martyrs among passersby.”

“The Israeli occupation forces are increasing their attacks on us as journalists, trying to prevent us from doing our work,” he alleged.

The journalists’ syndicate identified the three dead journalists as Ismail Badah, a cameraman for the PIJ-affiliated Palestine Today TV channel, Soliman Hajaj, a Palestine Today editor, and Samir al-Refai of the Shams News network.

Another four journalists were injured, two of whom – Palestine Today correspondent Imad Daloul and Ahmed Qalja, a cameraman for Qatar-based Al-Araby TV – were in a critical condition, it said.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it “precisely struck an Islamic Jihad terrorist who was operating in a command-and-control centre” in the yard of the hospital. It did not name the target or provide any evidence.

The military also accused armed groups of using al-Ahli for “terrorist activity” and “cynically and brutally using the civilian population” inside – an allegation it has denied.

In April, staff at al-Ahli hospital said an Israeli strike destroyed its laboratory and damaged its emergency room. They did not report any direct casualties, but said a child died due to disruption of care. The Israeli military said it hit a Hamas “command-and-control centre”.

Hospitals are specially protected under international humanitarian law. They only lose that protection in certain circumstances, including being used as a base from which to launch an attack, as a weapons depot, or to hide healthy fighters.

The Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said Israeli strikes killed at least 37 people across Gaza on Thursday. As well as Gaza City, local media reported deaths in Jabalia and Beit Lahia in the north, and in Khan Younis in the south.

Also on Thursday, a controversial US and Israeli-backed aid group working in Gaza said it had reopened two of its distribution centres, a day after closing them for “renovation”.

“Over the past 24 hours, we have been fully focused on strengthening our distribution sites to ensure safe and more efficient delivery of life-saving aid to the people of Gaza,” the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s (GHF) interim executive director John Acree said in a statement.

On Wednesday, the GHF announced that it was shutting all of its sites – three out of four of which had been operational – to make them “as safe as possible” following a string of deadly incidents nearby.

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed in recent days while approaching one of the centres in Rafah on a route that runs through an Israeli military zone.

Witnesses have said Israeli forces opened fire at crowds seeking aid.

The Israeli military has denied that it fired at civilians within the centre, but it has said that troops fired at “suspects” who ignored warning shots and approached them.

The GHF has denied that anyone was killed or injured at its centres.

The group, which uses US private security contractors, aims to bypass the UN as the main supplier of aid to Palestinians.

The UN and other aid groups refuse to co-operate with the new system, saying it contravenes the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence.

They also warn that Gaza’s 2.1 million population faces catastrophic levels of hunger after an almost three-month total Israeli blockade that was partially eased two weeks ago.

The US and Israel say the GHF’s system will prevent aid being stolen by Hamas, which the group denies doing.

Separately, the Israeli military said it recovered the bodies of two Israeli-Americans taken back to Gaza as hostages during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 54,677 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Shona Banu still shudders when she thinks of the past few days.

The 58-year-old, a resident of Barpeta district in India’s north-eastern state of Assam, says that she was called to the local police station on 25 May and later taken to a point at the border with neighbouring Bangladesh. From there, she says, she and around 13 other people were forced to cross over to Bangladesh.

She says she was not told why. But it was a scenario she had been dreading – Ms Banu says she has lived in Assam all her life but for the past few years, she has been desperately trying to prove that she is an Indian citizen and not an “illegal immigrant” from Bangladesh.

“They pushed me over at gunpoint. I spent two days without food or water in the middle of a field in knee-deep water teeming with mosquitoes and leeches,” Ms Banu said, wiping away tears. After those two days in no man’s land – between India and Bangladesh – she says she was taken to what appeared to be an old prison on the Bangladeshi side.

After two days there, she and a few others – she is not sure if all of them were from the same group sent with her – were escorted by Bangladeshi officials across the border, where Indian officials allegedly met them and sent them home.

It’s not clear why Ms Banu was abruptly sent to Bangladesh and then brought back. But her case is among a spate of recent instances where officials in Assam have rounded up people declared foreigners by tribunals in the past – on suspicion of being “illegal Bangladeshis” – and sent them across the border. The BBC found at least six cases where people said their family members had been picked up, taken to border towns and just “pushed across”.

Officials from India’s Border Security Force, the Assam police and the state government did not respond to questions from the BBC.

Crackdowns on alleged illegal immigrants from Bangladesh are not new in India – the countries are divided by a 4,096km (2,545 miles) long porous border which can make it relatively easy to cross over, even though many of the sensitive areas are heavily guarded.

But it’s still rare, lawyers working on these cases say, for people to be picked up from their homes abruptly and forced into another country without due process. These efforts seem to have intensified over the past few weeks.

The Indian government has not officially said how many people were sent across in the latest exercise. But top sources in the Bangladesh administration claim that India “illegally pushed in” more than 1,200 people into the country in May alone, not just from Assam but also other states. Out of this, they said on condition of anonymity, Bangladesh identified 100 people as Indian citizens and sent them back.

In a statement, the Border Guard Bangladesh said it had increased patrolling along the border to curb these attempts.

India has not commented on these allegations.

While media reports indicate that the recent crackdown includes Rohingya Muslims living in other states too, the situation is particularly tense and complex in Assam, where issues of citizenship and ethnic identity have long dominated politics.

The state, which shares a nearly 300km-long border with Muslim-majority Bangladesh, has seen waves of migration from the neighbouring country as people moved in search of opportunities or fled religious persecution.

This has sparked the anxieties of Assamese people, many of whom fear this is bringing in demographic change and taking away resources from locals.

The Bharatiya Janata Party – in power in Assam and nationally – has repeatedly promised to end the problem of illegal immigration, making the state’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) a priority in recent years.

The register is a list of people who can prove they came to Assam by 24 March 1971, the day before neighbouring Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan. The list went through several iterations, with people whose names were missing given chances to prove their Indian citizenship by showing official documents to quasi-judicial forums called Foreigners Tribunals.

After a chaotic process, the final draft published in 2019 excluded nearly two million residents of Assam – many of them were put in detention camps while others have appealed in higher courts against their exclusion.

Ms Banu said her case is pending in the Supreme Court but that authorities still forced her to leave.

The BBC heard similar stories from at least six others in Assam – all Muslims – who say their family members were sent to Bangladesh around the same time as Ms Banu, despite having necessary documents and living in India for generations. At least four of them have now come back home, with no answers still about why they were picked up.

A third of Assam’s 32 million residents are Muslims and many of them are descendants of immigrants who settled there during British rule.

Maleka Khatun, a 67-year-old from Assam’s Barpeta who is still in Bangladesh, says she has temporarily been given shelter by a local family.

“I have no-one here,” she laments. Her family has managed to speak to her but don’t know if and when she can return. She lost her case in the foreigners’ tribunal and in the state’s high court and hadn’t appealed in the Supreme Court.

Days after the recent round of action began, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma cited a February Supreme Court direction which ordered the government to start deportation proceedings for people who had been “declared foreigners” but were still held in detention centres.

“The people who are declared foreigners but haven’t even appealed in court, we are pushing them back,” Sarma said. He also claimed that people with pending court appeals were not being “troubled”.

But Abdur Razzaque Bhuyan, a lawyer working on many citizenship cases in Assam, alleged that in many of the recent instances, due process – which would, among other things, require India and Bangladesh to cooperate on the action – was not followed.

“What is happening is a wilful and deliberate misinterpretation of the court order,” he said.

Mr Bhuyan recently filed a petition on behalf of a student organisation seeking the Supreme Court’s intervention in stopping what they said was a “forceful and illegal pushback policy” but was asked to first approach the Assam high court.

In Morigaon, around 167km from Barpeta, Reeta Khanum sat near a table which had a pile of papers on it.

Her husband Khairul Islam, a 51-year-old school teacher, was in the same group as Ms Banu that was allegedly picked up by authorities.

A tribunal had declared him a foreigner in 2016, after which he spent two years in a detention centre before being released. Like Ms Banu, his case is also being heard in the Supreme Court.

“Every document is proof that my husband is Indian,” Ms Khanum said, leafing through what she said was Mr Islam’s high school graduation certificate and some land records. “But that wasn’t enough to prove his nationality to authorities.”

She says her husband, his father and grandfather were all born in India.

But on 23 May, she says that policemen arrived at their home and took Mr Islam away without any explanation.

It was only a few days later – when a viral video surfaced of a Bangladeshi journalist interviewing Mr Islam in no man’s land – that the family learnt where he was.

Like Ms Banu, Mr Islam has now been sent back to India.

While his family confirmed his return, the police told the BBC they had “no information” about his arrival.

Sanjima Begum says she is sure her father was declared a foreigner due to a case of mistaken identity – he was also taken on the same night as Mr Islam.

“My father’s name is Abdul Latif, my grandfather was Abdul Subhan. The notice that came [years ago, from the foreigners’ tribunal] said Abdul Latif, son of Shukur Ali. That’s not my grandfather, I don’t even know him,” Ms Begum said, adding that she had all the necessary documents to prove her father’s citizenship.

The family has now heard that Mr Latif is back in Assam, but he hasn’t reached home yet.

While some of these people are back home now, they fear they might be picked up again abruptly.

“We are not playthings,” Ms Begum said.

“These are human beings, you can’t toss them around as per your whims.”

With Air Canada and Southwest the latest airlines to charge passengers for check-in luggage, the ballooning cost of such ancillary or “junk fees” is provoking anger among politicians and consumer groups. At the same time, sales of suitcases small enough for passengers to take on the plane as hand luggage are booming.

Standing outside Toronto’s downtown airport, Lauren Alexander has flown over from Boston for the weekend. She describes such additional charges as “ridiculous”.

“It feels like a trick,” says the 24-year-old. “You buy the ticket, you think it’s going to be less expensive, then you have to pay $200 (£148) extra [to bring a suitcase].”

To avoid the fee, Ms Alexander instead travelled with a small backpack as hand luggage.

Sage Riley, who is 27, agrees, telling the BBC, “It can be pricey.”

There was a time when checked bags, seat selection and your meals all came as standard on commercial flights. But that all changed with the rise of the budget airlines, says Jay Sorensen of US aviation consultancy IdeaWorks.

It was in 2006 when UK low-cost carrier FlyBe became what is believed to be the world’s first airline to start charging passengers to check in bags. It charged £2 for a pre-booked item of luggage, and £4 if the customer hadn’t paid in advance.

Other budget carriers then quickly followed suit, with the so-called flag carriers or established airlines then also doing so, at least on shorter flights.

In 2008 American Airlines became the first US airline to charge a fee, $15, for the first checked bag on its domestic routes.

Mr Sorenson says such traditional airlines felt they had no choice when they “began to realise that the low-cost carriers were providing very significant competition”. He adds: “They felt they had to do something to meet that.”

Fast forward to today, and US airlines alone made $7.27bn from check-in baggage fees last year, according to federal figures. That is up from $7bn in 2023, and $5.76bn in 2019.

Little wonder then that more of us are trying to just take carry-on. Kirsty Glenn, managing director of UK luggage firm Antler, confirms that there is an ongoing surge in demand for small suitcases that meet airline dimension limits for carry-on luggage.

“We have seen huge spikes in searches online and on our website,” she says. Describing a new small-dimension case her company launched in April, Ms Glenn adds: “Testament to the trend of only travelling with hand luggage, it’s sold like crazy.”

At the same time, social media content about travel packing “hacks” and luggage that meets airlines’ carry-on size measurements, have soared according to travel journalist Chelsea Dickenson. She makes this content for TikTok.

“Social media has really propelled this idea of needing a bag that fits the baggage allowance requirements, says Ms Dickenson. “It’s become a core part of the content that I create and post on social media.”

Ms Dickenson, whose social media following has ballooned to close to a million followers, adds that her luggage videos have become a “core part of the content” she creates.

“It blows my mind,” she says. “I could spend weeks and weeks researching a big trip, and the resulting videos will not come close to doing as well as me going and buying a cheap suitcase, taking it to the airport, testing it in one of those baggage sizes and reporting back.”

The overall global cost of all airline extra fees, from luggage to seat selection, buying wifi access, lounge access, upgrades, and food and drink, is expected to reach $145bn this year, 14% of the sector’s total revenues. That’s according to the International Air Transport Association, which represents the industry. This compares with $137bn last year.

These numbers have caught the attention of some politicians in Washington, and last December airline bosses were grilled before a senate committee. It was a Democrat senator who used the term “junk fees”.

He wants the federal government to review such costs and potentially fine airlines. We asked the US Department of Transportation for a comment, but did not get a response.

But if having to pay for check-in wasn’t enough, a growing number of airlines are now charging for hand luggage. For example, Irish budget airline Ryanair will only allow you to carry a small bag that fits under the seat in front of you for free. If you want to take a bigger bag or suitcase to go in the overhead locker that will cost you from £6.

Other European airlines that now have similar charges for hand luggage are Easyjet, Norwegian Airlines, Transavia, Volotea, Vueling, and Wizzair.

This has annoyed pan-European consumer group Becu (The European Consumer Organisation), which last month filed a complaint with the European Commission.

Becu cites a 2014 EU Court of Justice ruling, which said “carriage of hand baggage cannot be made subject to a price supplement, provided that it meets reasonable requirements in terms of its weight and dimensions, and complies with applicable security requirements”.

However, what determines “reasonable requirements” continues to be a grey area in need of an official ruling.

There can, however, be a different way of doing things, as shown by Indian airline IndiGo. Its boss Pieter Eibers says that it does not charge for check-in luggage.

“The entire philosophy here is different,” he says. “We don’t want long lines, and endless debates at gates about the weight of luggage. We don’t have any of that. We turn our planes around in 35 minutes.”

When Shamili left her home in India’s Bengaluru city on Wednesday, it wasn’t to see her favourite cricket team – she isn’t even a fan of the game.

But the buzz around the Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s (RCB’s) Indian Premier League victory parade – the home team won the tournament for the first time – had swept through the city like wildfire.

Wearing an RCB jersey with “18 Virat” on the back – a nod to Virat Kohli, the city’s favourite cricket icon – Shamili joined her sister and friends near the Chinnaswamy Stadium, looking forward to celebrations.

What she didn’t expect was to get caught in a terrifying crush.

The victory parade turned deadly when surging crowds – far beyond what authorities expected – led to a horrific crush that killed 11 people and injured dozens more.

Survivors like Shamili are now grappling with trauma, pain and a sense of disbelief after the celebration spiralled into catastrophe.

“I kept saying, ‘let’s go, let’s go’ – the crowd was getting out of control,” Shamili recalled, sitting on a bed at the government-run Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital. “The next thing I knew, I was on the ground. People were walking over me. I thought I was going to die.”

She is not alone. Many who had come just to soak in the atmosphere – fans, families, curious onlookers – found themselves caught in a tide of bodies as crowds swelled beyond control.

Police had expected no more than 100,000 people. In reality, Karnataka’s chief minister Siddaramaiah said, the crowd surged to 200,000-300,000. The stadium, with a capacity of 32,000, was overwhelmed long before the team arrived.

Videos from before the crush showed people climbing trees and trying to scale the stadium walls.

Haneef Mohammed, an engineering student, told BBC Hindi that he had no intention of going inside because he didn’t have a pass or ticket.

“I was just standing and watching the crowds near the main gate. Suddenly, people started running all around and the police started hitting people with their lathis,” he said.

Police in India often wield lathis – long bamboo sticks – to try and control crowds.

Mr Mohammed got hit on the head with a lathi and started bleeding. He says the police immediately arranged for a vehicle to take him to the hospital.

The ages of the 11 victims range from 13 to 43 years.

The youngest, Divyanshi, was a Class 9 student who had come to the stadium with her mother and other family members. Other victims include college students and a young tech worker who had come to the stadium with her colleagues.

A doctor who spoke on condition of anonymity said that most of them were “brought dead to hospital” due to suffocation or broken ribs. The massive crowds had delayed ambulances getting to the site of the crush.

Even as chaos and panic ensued on the roads around the Chinnaswamy stadium, the RCB team went inside the stadium after being felicitated on the footsteps of the Vidhana Soudha – the seat of power in Karnataka – by the governor, chief minister and other ministers.

“They went on a victory lap around the stadium. Inside the stadium, there was no sign that anything had happened outside,” said a young man who spoke on condition of anonymity.

IPL chairman Arun Dhumal said he did not know who had planned the event in Bengaluru and that RCB officials inside the stadium were not aware of the crush until they got phone calls.

In a statement on X, RCB said it was “deeply anguished by the unfortunate incidents”.

“Immediately upon being made aware of the situation, we promptly amended our programme and followed the guidance and advice of the local administration,” it said.

“At a loss for words. Absolutely gutted,” star player Kohli wrote on Instagram.

But questions still remain over how and why the event was organised.

“Normally, the felicitation of a team should be done in a controlled environment. But here, there appeared to be no preparation,” a relative of an injured person at the Bowring Hospital said.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has announced a magisterial enquiry into the incident.

“A moment of joy has turned into sorrow,” he said on Wednesday.

Think, Denmark. Images of sleek, impossibly chic Copenhagen, the capital, might spring to mind. As well as a sense of a liberal, open society. That is the Scandinavian cliché.

But when it comes to migration, Denmark has taken a dramatically different turn. The country is now “a pioneer in restrictive migration policies” in Europe, according to Marie Sandberg, Director of the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS) at the University of Copenhagen – both when it comes to asylum-seekers and economic migrants looking to work in Denmark.

Even more surprising, perhaps, is who is behind this drive. It’s generally assumed ‘far right’ politicians are gaining in strength across Europe on the back of migration fears, but that’s far from the full picture.

In Denmark – and in Spain, which is tackling the issue in a very different but no less radical way by pushing for more, not less immigration – the politicians taking the migration bull by the horns, now come from the centre left of politics.

How come? And can the rest of Europe – including the UK’s Labour government – learn from them?

Migration is a top voter priority, right across Europe. We live in really unsettling times. As war rages in Ukraine, Russia is waging hybrid warfare, such as cyber attacks across much of the continent. Governments talk about spending more on defence, while most European economies are spluttering. Voters worry about the cost of living and into this maelstrom of anxieties comes concern about migration.

But in Denmark, the issue has run deeper, and for longer.

Immigration began to grow apace following World War Two, increasing further – and rapidly – in recent decades. The proportion of Danish residents who are immigrants, or who have two immigrant parents, has increased more than fivefold since 1985, according to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI).

A turning point was ten years ago, during the 2015 European migration and refugee crisis, when well over a million migrants came to Europe, mostly heading to the wealthier north, to countries like Denmark, Sweden and Germany.

Slogans like “Danskerne Først” (Danes First) resonated with the electorate. When I interviewed supporters of the hard-right nationalist, anti-immigration, Danish People’s Party (DPP) that year they told me, “We don’t see ourselves as racists but we do feel we are losing our country.”

Denmark came under glaring international attention for its hardline refugee stance, after it allowed the authorities to confiscate asylum seekers’ jewellery and other valuables, saying this was to pay towards their stay in Denmark.

The Danish immigration minister put up a photo of herself on Facebook having a cake decorated with the number 50 and a Danish flag to celebrate passing her 50th amendment to tighten immigration controls.

And Danish law has only tightened further since then.

Mayors from towns outside Copenhagen had long been sounding the alarm about the effects of the speedy influx of migrants.

Migrant workers and their families had tended to move just outside the capital, to avoid high living costs. Denmark’s famous welfare system was perceived to be under strain. Infant schools were said to be full of children who didn’t speak Danish. Some unemployed migrants reportedly received resettlement payments that made their welfare benefits larger than those of unemployed Danes, and government statistics suggested immigrants were committing more crimes than others. Local resentment was growing, mayors warned.

Today Denmark’s has become one of the loudest voices in Europe calling for asylum seekers and other migrants turning up without legal papers to be processed outside the continent.

The country had first looked at detaining migrants without papers on a Danish island that used to house a centre for contagious animals. That plan was shelved.

Then Copenhagen passed a law in 2021 allowing asylum claims to be processed and refugees to be resettled in partner countries, like Rwanda. The UK’s former Conservative government attempted a not dissimilar plan that was later annulled.

Copenhagen’s Kigali plan hasn’t progressed much either but it’s tightened rules on family reunions, which not long ago, was seen as a refugee’s right. It has also made all refugees’ stay in Denmark temporary by law, whatever their need for protection.

But many of Denmark’s harsh measures seemed targeted as much at making headlines, as taking action. The Danish authorities intentionally created a “hostile environment” for migrants”, says Alberto Horst Neidhardt, senior analyst at the European Policy Centre.

And Denmark has been keen for the word to spread.

It put advertisements in Lebanese newspapers at the height of the migrant crisis, for example, warning how tough Danish migration policies were.

“The goal has been to reduce all incentives to come to Denmark,” says ⁠Susi Dennison, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“The Danes have gone further than most European governments,” she explains. Not just honing in on politically sensitive issues like crime and access to benefits but with explicit talk about a zero asylum seekers policy.

And yet “before the 2015 refugee crisis, there was a stereotype of Nordic countries being very internationalist… and having a welcoming culture for asylum seekers,” says Ms Dennison.

Then suddenly the reaction was, “No. Our first goal is to provide responsibly for Danish people.”

The turning-point was, she argues, also triggered by Denmark’s neighbour, Germany, allowing a million refugees and others to stay in the country, during the migrant crisis.

“That was a political choice that had repercussions across Europe.”

By 2015 the anti-migration Danish People’s Party was the second biggest power in Denmark’s parliament. But at the same time, the Social Democrats – under new leader Mette Frederiksen – decided to fight back, making a clear, public break with the party’s past reputation of openness to migration.

“My party should have listened,” Frederiksen said.

Under her leadership, the party tacked towards what’s generally seen as the political “far right” in terms of migration and made hardline DPP-associated asylum policies, their own. But they also doubled down on issues more traditionally associated with the left: public services.

Danes pay the highest tax rates in Europe across all household types. They expect top notch public services in return. Frederiksen argued that migration levels threatened social cohesion and social welfare, with the poorest Danes losing out the most.

That is how her party justify their tough migration rules.

Frederiksen’s critics see her ‘rightwards swing’ as a cynical ploy to get into, and then stay in, power. She insists her party’s convictions are sincere. Whatever the case, it worked in winning votes.

Federiksen has been Denmark’s prime minister since 2019, and in last year’s election to the European Parliament, the populist nationalist Danish People’s Party scrambled to hold on to a single seat.

The political labels of old are blurring. It’s not just Denmark. Across Europe, parties of the centre – right and left – are increasingly using language traditionally associated with the “far right” when it comes to migration to claw back, or hold on to votes.

Sir Keir Starmer recently came under fire when, during a speech on immigration, he spoke of the danger of his country becoming ‘an island of strangers’.

At the same time in Europe, right-wing parties are adopting social policies traditionally linked to the left to broaden their appeal.

In the UK, the leader of the anti-migration, opposition Reform Party Nigel Farage has been under attack for generous shadow budget proposals that critics say don’t add up.

In France, centrist Emmanuel Macron has sounded increasingly hardline on immigration in recent years, while his political nemesis the National Rally Party leader Marine Le Pen has been heavily mixing social welfare policies into her nationalist agenda to attract more mainstream voters.

But can Danish – and in particular, Danish Social Democrat – tough immigration policies be deemed a success?

The answer depends on which criteria you use to judge them.

Asylum claim applications are certainly down in Denmark, in stark contrast to much of the rest of Europe. The number, as of May 2025, is the lowest in 40 years, according to immigration.dk, an online information site for refugees in Denmark.

But Nordic Denmark is certainly not what’s seen as a frontline state – like Italy – where people smugglers’ boats frequently wash up along its shores.

“Frederiksen is in a favourable geographical position,” argues Europe professor, Timothy Garton Ash, from Oxford University. But he also praises Denmark’s prime minister for addressing the problem of migration, without adopting “hysterical rhetoric”.

But others say new legislation has damaged Denmark’s reputation for respecting international humanitarian law and the rights of asylum-seekers. Michelle Pace of Chatham House says it has become hard to protect refugees in Denmark, where “the legal goalposts keep moving.”

Danish citizens with a migrant background have also been made to feel like outsiders, she notes.

She cites the Social Democrats’ “parallel societies” law, which allows the state to sell off or demolish apartment blocks in troubled areas where at least half of residents have a “non-Western” background.

The Social Democrats say the law is aimed at improving integration but Ms Pace insists it is alienating. The children of immigrants are told they aren’t Danish or a “pure Dane,” she argues.

In February this year, a senior advisor to the EU’s top court described the non-Western provision of the Danish law as discriminatory on the basis of ethnic origin.

Whereas once a number of European leaders dismissed Denmark’s Social Democrats as becoming far right, now “the Danish position has become the new normal – it was the head of the curve,” says Alberto Horst Neidhardt.

“What’s considered ‘good’ migration policies these days has moved to the right, even for centre left governments, like the UK.”

Before Germany’s general election this year, then centre-left Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, pledged to tighten asylum regulations, including reducing family reunification.

And earlier this month, Frederiksen teamed up with eight other European leaders – not including the UK – to call for a reinterpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights, whose tight constraints, they claim, prevent them from expelling foreign nationals with criminal records.

Contesting international laws on asylum is a trend Denmark is establishing at a more European level, says Sarah Wolff, Professor of International Studies and Global Politics at Leiden University.

“With the topic of migration now politicised, you increasingly see supposedly liberal countries that are signatories to international conventions, like human rights law, coming back on those conventions because the legislation no longer fits the political agenda of the moment,” says Ms Wolff.

Despite the restrictive migrant legislation, Denmark continued to admit migrant workers through legal channels. But not enough, considering the rapidly aging population, say critics like Michelle Pace.

She predicts Denmark will face a serious labour shortage in the future.

Spain’s centre-left government, meanwhile, is taking a very different road. Its Social Democrat prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, loves pointing out the Spanish economy was the fastest growing amongst rich nations last year.

Its 3.2% GDP growth was higher than America’s, three times the UK’s and four times the EU average.

Sanchez wants to legalise nearly a million migrants, already working in Spain but currently without legal papers. That extra tax revenue plus the much-needed extra workers to plug gaps in the labour market will maintain economic growth and ensure future pension payments are covered, he says.

Spain has one of the lowest birth rates in the EU. Spanish society is getting old, fast.

“Almost half of our towns are at risk of depopulation,” he said in autumn 2024. “We have elderly people who need a caregiver, companies looking for programmers, technicians and bricklayers… The key to migration is in managing it well.”

Critics accuse Sanchez of encouraging illegal migration to Spain, and question the country’s record of integrating migrants. Opinion polls show that Sanchez is taking a gamble: 57% of Spaniards say there are already too many migrants in the country, according to public pollster 40dB.

In less than 30 years, the number of foreign-born inhabitants in Spain has jumped almost nine fold from 1.6% to 14% of the population. But so far, migration concerns haven’t translated into widespread support for the immigration sceptic nationalist Vox party.

The Sanchez government is setting up what Ms Pace calls a “national dialogue”, involving NGOs and private business. The aim is to balance plugging labour market gaps with avoiding strains on public services, by using extra tax revenue from new migrant workers, to build housing and extra classrooms, for example.

Right now the plan is aspirational. It’s too early to judge, if successful, or not.

“Successful” migration policy depends on what governments, regardless of their political stripe, set as their priority, says Ms Dennison.

In Denmark, the first priority is preserving the Danish social system. Italy prioritises offshoring the processing of migrants. While Hungary’s prime minister Victor Orban wants strict migrant limits to protect Europe’s “Christian roots”, he claims.

Overstaying visas is thought to be the most common way migrants enter and stay in Europe without legal papers.

But recent UK governments have focused on high profile issues like people smugglers’ boats crossing the Channel.

Ms Dennison thinks that’s a tactical move. It’s taking aim at visible challenges, to “neutralise public anger” she says, in the hope most voters will then support offering asylum to those who need it, and allow some foreign workers into the UK.

It would be hard for Starmer to pursue the Denmark approach, she adds. After taking over from previous Conservative governments, he made a point of recommitting the UK to international institutions and international law.

So, does the ‘ideal’ migration plan exist, that balances voter concerns, economic needs and humanitarian values?

Martin Ruhs, deputy director of the Migration Policy Centre, spends a lot of time asking this question to voters across the UK and the rest of Europe, and thinks the public is often more sophisticated than their politicians.

Most prefer a balance, he says: migration limits to protect themselves and their families, but once they feel that’s in place, they also favour fair legislation to protect refugees and foreign workers.

Three days on, and Ukraine is still digesting the full implications of Operation Spider’s Web, Sunday’s massive assault on Russia’s strategic aviation.

On Wednesday, the agency which orchestrated the attack, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), released additional, vivid footage of the attacks in progress, as well as tantalising glimpses into how the whole complex operation was conducted.

Satellite images that have emerged since Sunday, showing the wrecked outlines of planes sitting on the tarmac at the Olenya, Ivanovo, Dyagilevo and Belaya airbases, also help tell the story of the operation’s unprecedented success.

For Ukrainian observers, the whole operation, a year-and-a-half in the making, remains a marvel.

“This can be considered one of the most brilliant operations in our history,” Roman Pohorlyi, founder of the DeepState, a group of Ukrainian military analysts, told me.

“We’ve shown that we can be strong, we can be creative and we can destroy our enemies no matter how far away they are.”

It’s important to note that almost all the information that has emerged since Sunday has been released by the SBU itself.

Flushed with its own success, it is keen to cast the operation in the best possible light. Its information campaign has been helped by the fact that the Kremlin has said almost nothing.

Speaking to the media on Wednesday after handing out medals to SBU officers involved in the operation, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky repeated the claim that 41 aircraft had been damaged or destroyed.

“Half of them cannot be restored,” he said, “and some will take years to repair, if they can be restored at all.”

Had a ceasefire been in place, he added, Operation Spider’s Web would not have happened.

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The latest four-minute compilation released by the SBU shows a number of key details.

Shot from the perspective of some of the 117 drones involved, we see Russian strategic bombers, transport aircraft and airborne warning and control (AWACS) being hunted down.

Fires can be seen raging on a number of stricken planes.

For the first time, we get glimpses under the wings of some of the bombers, revealing that they were already armed with cruise missiles, which Russia has used to devastating effect in its air raids on Ukraine.

The drones, many flown remotely by a separate pilot, sitting far away in Ukraine, are carefully and precisely aimed at vulnerable points, including fuel tanks located in the wings.

Some of the resulting fireballs also suggest the tanks were full of fuel, ready for take off.

One significant section of the video shows drones homing in on two Ilyushin A-50s, giant AWACS aircraft first produced in the Soviet Union.

Of all the aircraft targeted by Operation Spider’s Web, the A-50, with its radar capable of seeing targets and threats more than 600km (372 miles) away, is arguably the most important.

Before the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia was thought to operate around nine A-50s. Before last Sunday, as many as three had been shot down or damaged in an earlier drone attack.

The latest footage strongly implies that drones hit the circular radar domes of the two A-50s parked at the Ivanovo Severny airbase, north-east of Moscow.

However, since the video feed cuts out at the moment of impact, this is hard to completely verify.

Satellite imagery, which clearly displays the wreckage of numerous bombers, is inconclusive when it comes to the A-50.

But Russia’s fleet of these crucial aircraft could now be down to as few as four.

“Restarting production of the A-50 is presently highly unlikely, due to difficulties with import substitution and the destruction of production facilities,” defence analyst Serhii Kuzan told me.

“As such, every loss of this type of aircraft constitutes a strategic problem for Russia, one it cannot quickly compensate for.”

Earlier on Wednesday, the SBU offered a brief glimpse into another of Sunday’s remarkable features: the use of specially constructed containers, mounted on flatbed trucks, to transport armed drones to sites close to the four Russian airbases.

Two videos show a truck carrying what appear to be two wooden mobile homes, complete with windows and doors.

In one video, roof panels are clearly visible. Reports suggest these were retracted or otherwise removed shortly before the attacks began, allowing dozens of drones stored inside to take off.

It’s not known when or where the videos were filmed, although snow visible beside the road in one suggests it could have been weeks or months ago.

In another video, posted on a Russian Telegram channel on Sunday, a police officer was seen entering the back of one of the containers in the wake of the attack.

Seconds later, the container exploded, suggesting it may have been booby-trapped.

How to assess the impact of such a spectacular operation?

“From a military point of view, this is a turning point in the war,” aviation expert Anatolii Khrapchynskyi told me.

“Because we have dealt a significant blow to Russia’s image and the capabilities of the Russian Federation.”

A little over three months after Donald Trump berated Volodymyr Zelensky, telling him he had “no cards,” Ukraine has offered an emphatic riposte.

“Ukraine has shown the whole world that Russia is actually weak and cannot defend itself internally,” Khrapchynskyi said.

But that doesn’t mean that Russia is about to change course.

After his latest conversation with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump said the two leaders had discussed Ukraine’s attacks.

“It was a good conversation,” President Trump posted on Truth Social, “but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace.”

“President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.”

After a six-year delay, India is finally set to count its population in a two-phase census that will conclude in 2027, the government has announced.

India’s decennial census is one of the world’s largest administrative exercises and provides critical data for planning welfare schemes, allocating federal funds, drawing electoral boundaries and making key policy decisions.

It was originally due in 2021, but has been delayed several times since. The last census was conducted in 2011.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had initially cited the Covid-19 pandemic as the main reason but critics have questioned what has taken so long to resume the exercise.

On Wednesday, India’s home ministry said in a statement that the much-awaited census will be conducted in two phases, with 1 March 2027 as the reference date.

For the snow-bound Himalayan regions, which includes the states of Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh, and the region of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir, the reference date will be 1 October 2026.

It did not, however, specify when the survey would actually begin.

For the first time, the government will also collect the caste details – a politically and socially sensitive issue in India – of all its citizens, the statement added.

The last time caste was officially counted as part of a national census was in 1931, during British colonial rule.

India’s census is conducted under the Census Act, 1948, which provides a legal framework for conducting the exercise, but does not specify a fixed schedule for when the census must be conducted or when its results must be published.

In 2020, India was set to begin the first phase of the census – in which housing data is collected – when the pandemic hit, following which the government postponed the exercise.

In the years since, the government further delayed the exercise several times without any explanation, even as life returned to normal.

Experts have spoken of the consequences this could have on the world’s most populous country – such as people being excluded from welfare schemes, and the incorrect allocation of resources.

“The census is not simply a count of the number of people in a country. It provides invaluable data needed to make decisions at a micro level,” Professor KP Kannan, a development economist, had told the BBC in 2023.

The World Bank says it is lifting a ban on loans to Uganda that it had put in place two years ago when the country passed a draconian new law against LGBTQ people.

In 2023, Uganda voted in some of the world’s harshest anti-homosexual legislation meaning that anybody engaging in certain same-sex acts can be sentenced to death.

Since then, hundreds of people have been evicted from their homes, subjected to violence or arrested because of their sexuality, according to Uganda’s Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum.

But the World Bank says it is confident that new “mitigation measures” will allow it to roll out funding in such a way that does not harm or discriminate against LGBTQ people.

The BBC has asked the Ugandan government and the World Bank for further comment.

“The World Bank cannot deliver on its mission to end poverty and boost shared prosperity on a liveable planet unless all people can participate in, and benefit from, the projects we finance, ” a spokesman told the AFP news agency on Thursday, adding that the organisation had “worked with the [Ugandan] government and other stakeholders in the country to introduce, implement and test” anti-discrimination measures.

New projects in “social protection, education, and forced displacement and refugees” have also been approved, an unnamed World Bank spokesperson told the Reuters news agency.

Analysts say the World Bank is one of Uganda’s biggest sources of external financing, playing an important role in infrastructure development. Road upgrades and widened electricity access are among the projects the organisation is backing in the East African country.

But some economists criticise the funding model used by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in general, saying it perpetuates dependency and undermines sustainable growth in the world’s poorest nations by tying them to restrictive loan conditions.

Uganda is among several African nations – including Ghana and Kenya – that in recent years have witnessed moves to curtail the rights of LGBTQ people.

News of Uganda’s draconian Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2023 prompted international condemnation.

It cost the country somewhere between $470m and $1.7bn (£347m and £1.2bn) in the year that followed, mainly because of frozen financing, according to estimates by the UK-based charity Open for Business.

Uganda’s government says its anti-gay law reflects the conservative values of its people, but its critics say the law is little more than a distraction from real issues such as high unemployment and ongoing attacks on the opposition.

“It’s low-hanging fruit,” Oryem Nyeko, a researcher working at Human Rights Watch in Uganda, told CBC at the time.

“It’s being framed as something that’s foreign and threatening to people’s children.”

Victims of beatings, evictions and worse say that Uganda’s new law has emboldened people to attack them based on their perceived sexuality.

The fact that the law also stipulates a 20-year prison sentence for “promoting” homosexuality has also been seen as an attack on anybody who defends LGBTQ rights, but the government denies this.

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A member of New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s staff has resigned after being accused of secretly taking photos and videos of women, and recording audio of sex workers.

Michael Forbes, Luxon’s deputy chief press secretary, offered his “sincerest apologies to the women I have harmed”.

The allegations came to light after a sex worker said she noticed that Forbes’ phone had been recording audio while he was in the shower, local news website Stuff reported earlier this week.

His phone was later found to contain more photos and videos of women as well as audio recordings of his sexual encounters.

There were images of women at the gym and in the supermarket, Stuff NZ reported, as well as four videos of women in their homes, with the footage apparently taken from a window.

Luxon said Forbes’ case came as an “absolute shock” and that he had “zero tolerance for any behaviour that makes women or anyone feel unsafe”.

“My sympathy is with the women who raised these allegations and who were made to feel unsafe due to the actions of this person,” he said on Thursday, a day after Forbes resigned.

Luxon, along with other political leaders, have signalled an openness to changing privacy laws to better protect targets of voyeurism.

Police said they received a complaint from a Wellington brothel last July about photos found on a client’s phone, but ultimately decided the case did not meet the threshold for prosecution.

According to the Stuff report, Forbes’ encounter with the sex worker in Wellington happened in July 2024.

Forbes reportedly gave the sex worker his phone password after being confronted with the secret audio recording. The woman, together with other sex workers, then found multiple audio recordings of similar sessions, as well as photos and video in the device.

At that time, Forbes was the press secretary to social development minister Louise Upston. He became the acting deputy press secretary to Luxon in February.

Upston and Luxon said they had not known about the complaint against Forbes, who said in a statement he was “was in a downward spiral due to unresolved trauma and stress” at the time of the incident. He said he has since sought professional help, but acknowledged what he had “failed to do then was make a genuine attempt to apologise”.

Luxon on Thursday called for a review of “inter-agency processes” after police chief Richard Chambers said the authorities had known about an investigation into Forbes last July but did not flag it to ministers.

“We have to take this incident and understand what has happened here and how it happened, and what more can we do about it,” Luxon said.

A Cartier turquoise and diamond tiara owned by the first woman to take a seat in the House of Commons has been sold for £889,400.

American-born Nancy Astor was elected in 1919 to represent Plymouth Sutton in Parliament and held the seat until she stood down in 1945.

London Auctioneers Bonhams said it was the first time the tiara had been on the market since it was bought by her husband Lord Waldorf Astor in 1930.

The auction house said it was worn by Lady Astor to the film premiere of City Lights at the Dominion Theatre in London in 1931.

Jean Ghika, Global head of jewellery at Bonhams, said the “exceptionally rare” tiara with “impeccable provenance” dates from when Cartier London was at the “height of its creative prowess”.

The tiara has single, rose-cut and brilliant-cut diamonds and three fluted turquoise plumes set with diamond stems.

The auction house had estimated a sale price of between £250,000 and £350,000.

During her time in government Astor successfully campaigned for the drinking age to rise from 14 to 18 in 1923 and advocated for the rights of women including the lowering of the voting age for women from 30 to 21 in 1928.

While she was the first woman to take up a seat in the House of Commons another woman was elected to the Commons a year before.

Constance Markievicz was successful in the 1918 general election, but as a member of Sinn Féin she did not take her seat, according to the House of Commons Information Office.

X

The US Supreme Court has blocked a lawsuit brought by Mexico that sought to hold American gunmakers accountable for playing a role in country’s struggle with drug cartels.

The court voted 9-0 to reject the suit, in the process upholding a 2005 law that shields gun manufacturers from liability if weapons they produce are misused.

Mexico’s government had argued that the “flood” of illegal guns across the border is a result of “deliberate” practices by US firms that they say appealed to cartel members with their products.

The decision overturns a lower court’s ruling that allowed the suit, brought against manufacturer Smith & Wesson and wholesaler Interstate Arms, to proceed.

Mexico’s original lawsuit was filed in 2021 against eight gun manufacturers, but the cases against six of them were dismissed by a district court.

The Supreme Court has now rejected the suit in its entirety, agreeing the case satisfied an exception to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which limits the liability of gun manufactures.

In its complaint, the Mexican government argued that the gun manufacturers “supply firearms to retail dealers whom they know illegally sell to Mexican gun traffickers”.

It also claimed that the manufacturers did not impose any controls on their distribution networks to prevent the sale of these weapons to traffickers in Mexico.

The Supreme Court said Mexico’s complaint “does not plausibly allege that the defendant manufacturers aided and abetted gun dealers’ unlawful sales of firearms to Mexican traffickers”.

The court said it has “little doubt” some guns are sold to Mexican firearm traffickers. However, it added that the government had been unable to prove that the manufacturers “participate in” those sales, as its complaint did not identify any specific criminal transactions.

Mexico’s accusation was more general, the court said – that the manufacturers help a number of unidentified “rogue gun dealers” sell firearms illegally.

This case is the first time the court has taken up the PLCAA shield law, which limits the ability of victims of gun violence to sue firearms manufacturers and dealers for the misuse of their products.

At a hearing in March, the court appeared sceptical of Mexico’s challenge, with justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum questioning the validity of the suit.

An investigation by the BBC’s US partner CBS News revealed that between 200,000 and 500,000 US-made firearms are trafficked to Mexico each year.

Almost half the guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico are manufactured in the US, CBS reported citing data from the US’ Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

What happens when the richest person and the most powerful politician have a knock-down, drag-out fight?

The world may be about to find out.

A disagreement between Elon Musk and Donald Trump started at a simmer last week, began bubbling on Wednesday and is now in full-on boil. And like everything these two men do, it is all spilling out into public view. These two men have two of the world’s biggest megaphones, and they clearly enjoy using them.

In remarks at the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, Trump sounded a bit like a spurned lover. He expressed surprise at Musk’s criticism of his “big, beautiful” tax and spending legislation. He pushed back against the notion that he would have lost last year’s presidential election without Musk’s hundreds of millions of dollars in support. And he said Musk was only changing his tune now because his car company, Tesla, will be hurt by the Republican push to end electric vehicle tax credits.

Musk took to his social media site, X, with a very Generation X response for his 220 million followers: “Whatever”. He said he didn’t care about the car subsidies, he wanted to shrink the national debt, which he says is an existential threat to the nation. He called Trump “ungrateful” for his help last year and insisted that Democrats would have prevailed without him.

Musk and Trump had formed a powerful but unlikely alliance , culminating in the tech billionaire having a key position of budget-slashing authority in the Trump administration. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, became one of the biggest stories of Trump’s first 100 days, as it shuttered entire agencies and dismissed thousands of government workers.

It wasn’t long, however, before speculation began over when – and how – the two outsized personalities would ultimately fall out.

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For a while, it seemed like those predictions were off the mark. Trump stood by Musk even as the latter’s popularity dropped, as he feuded with administration officials and as he became a liability in several key elections earlier this year. Every time it appeared there would be a break, Musk would pop up in the Oval Office, or the Cabinet room or on the president’s Air Force One flight to Mar-a-Lago.

When Musk’s 130 days as a “special government employee” ended last week, the two had a chummy Oval Office send-off, with a golden key to the White House and hints that Musk might someday return.

It’s safe to say that any invitation has been rescinded and the locks have been changed.

“Elon and I had a great relationship,” Trump said on Thursday – a comment notable for its use of the past tense.

There had been some thought that Trump’s surprise announcement on Wednesday night of a new travel ban, additional sanctions on Harvard and a conspiracy-laced administration investigation of former President Joe Biden were all efforts to change the subject from Musk’s criticism. The White House and its allies in Congress seemed careful not to further antagonise him after his earlier comments.

Then Trump spoke out and … so much for that.

Now the question is where the dispute goes next. Congressional Republicans could find it harder to keep their members behind Trump’s bill with Musk providing rhetorical – and, perhaps financial – air for those who break ranks.

Trump, who takes pride in being a devastating counterpuncher, will have plenty of opportunity to lay into Musk. What will happen to Musk’s Doge allies still in the Trump administration or government contracts to Musk-related companies or Biden-era investigations into Musk’s business dealings?

“The easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon’s governmental subsidies and contracts,” Trump posted menacingly on his own social media website.

If Trump turns the machinery of government against Musk, the tech billionaire will feel pain. Tesla’s stock price slipped on Thursday.

But Musk also has near limitless resources to respond, including by funding insurgent challengers to Republicans in next year’s elections and primaries. He may not win a fight against the whole of Trump’s government, but he could exact a high political price.

Meanwhile, Democrats are on the sidelines, wondering how to respond. Few seem willing to welcome Musk, a former donor to their party, back into the fold. But there’s also the old adage that the enemy of an enemy is a friend.

“It’s a zero-sum game,” Liam Kerr, a Democratic strategist, told Politico. “Anything that he does that moves more toward Democrats hurts Republicans.”

At the very least, Democrats seem happy to stand back and let the two men exchange blows. And until they abandon this fight, the din is likely to drown out everything else in American politics.

But don’t expect this spat to end anytime soon.

“Trump has 3.5 years left as president,” Musk wrote on X, “but I will be around for 40-plus years.”

US President Donald Trump has issued a sweeping new travel ban for people from 12 countries, revisiting a hallmark policy of his first term in office.

There are some key differences, however.

The original travel ban suffered a series of legal defeats. This time, the policy appears to have been designed to avoid the same pitfalls.

Its predecessor, which targeted seven predominantly Muslim countries and was dubbed the “Muslim ban” by critics, was ordered just a week after Trump took office in 2017, during his first term in the White House.

The ban was amended twice to overcome court challenges, after opponents argued it was unconstitutional and illegal because it discriminated against travellers based on their religion.

A scaled-back version was eventually upheld by the US Supreme Court in 2018, which this new ban closely resembles.

Legal experts told the BBC that it appeared Trump had learned lessons from his first attempt.

Christi Jackson, an expert in US immigration law at the London firm Laura Devine Immigration, said the new ban was more legally robust as a result.

While the first lacked “clarity”, the new restrictions were “wider in scope” and had “clearly defined” exemptions, she said.

While there are some similarities in the nations chosen by the 2017 ban and the 2025 ban, Muslim-majority states are not the express target of the latest order.

Barbara McQuade, professor of law at the University of Michigan and former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, told the BBC World Service’s Newshour programme that, on this basis, it seemed likely to win the approval of the Supreme Court if it was ever referred up to that level.

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The 12 countries subject to the harshest restrictions from 9 June are mainly in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean, including Afghanistan, Iran and Somalia.

There will be partial restrictions on travellers from another seven countries, including Cuban and Venezuelan nationals.

Trump said the strength of the restrictions would be graded against the severity of the perceived threat, including from terrorism.

But besides Iran, none of the 12 countries hit by the outright ban are named on the US government’s state sponsors of terrorism list.

Trump cited Sunday’s incident in Boulder, Colorado, in which a man was accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at demonstrators attending a march for Israeli hostages, in a video announcing the ban on X.

The alleged attacker was an Egyptian national. However, Egypt does not appear on either list.

Trump also specified high rates of people overstaying their visas as a reason for listing certain countries.

However, Steven D Heller, an immigration lawyer based in the US, said there was a “lack of clarity” over what threshold had to be met by a country’s overstaying rate in order for that country to be placed on Trump’s ban list. That could be the basis for a successful legal challenge, he suggested.

“If they’re relying on this notion of excessive overstay rates… they have to define what that actually means,” he told the BBC.

But he noted that existing US law gave the president broad powers over immigration policy.

Unlike the first ban, which was to last for only 90 to 120 days, today’s order has no end date.

It has been met with dismay in the targeted countries.

Venezuela has described the Trump administration as “supremacists who think they own the world”, though Somalia has pledged to “engage in dialogue to address the concerns raised”.

The original ban spurred mass protests and sowed chaos at US airports.

It was repealed in 2021 by Trump’s successor, President Joe Biden, who called the policy “a stain on our national conscience”.

Immigration lawyer Shabnam Lotfi, who challenged the previous travel ban, said it would be an “uphill battle” to overturn the new one.

“The president does have the authority to determine who is admissible to the US,” she said, adding that because of the way the ban had been written, it was “harder to find a huge group of people that could file a class-action lawsuit”.

“They’ve put more thought into it.”

Ms Lotfi noted that the new restrictions could have consequences for students and other visa applicants abroad.

“Students who are stuck in administrative processing are impacted. So are winners of the diversity visa lottery who paid fees and went to interviews – they’re unlikely to get visas now,” she said.

“Even EB-5 investors – people who’ve put over $1 million into the US economy – are affected. And H-1B visa holders stuck abroad, waiting to return to their US employers, could also be blocked.”

The US Supreme Court has sided with an Ohio woman who alleged she was discriminated against at her job because she was heterosexual.

The justices voted unanimously in a ruling focused on evidence standards that could make it easier to file similar “reverse discrimination” cases.

Marlean Ames said that despite working for the Ohio Department of Youth Services for more than 20 years, she was denied a promotion and then demoted. She had appealed to the court to challenge the standards required to prove her case.

The decision effectively lowers the burden of proof required for people who are members of a majority group – such as white or heterosexual people – to make discrimination claims.

US court precedent covering some states, including Ohio, had required that members of majority groups show additional “background circumstances” to prove their case or evidence showing a pattern of discrimination.

The court has now ruled that the standard of evidence for a discrimination claim should be the same, regardless of a person’s identity.

Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson, one of the court’s liberals, wrote the official opinion, with concurring opinions from conservatives Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The court concluded that anti-discrimination and equal protection laws were meant to apply to all Americans.

“By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’—without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group—Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” she wrote.

The court did not consider Ms Ames’ original discrimination suit. The justices said it was up to lower courts that had initially ruled against her to evaluate the case under the clarified evidence standards.

Legal experts say employment discrimination and bias cases can be difficult to demonstrate, regardless of the burden of proof.

Ms Ames had said she had positive performance reviews, but a promotion she sought was given to a lesbian. She was then demoted and her job was given to a gay man.

In a lawsuit, she argued her employer had a preference for LGBTQ staff members and denied her opportunities because she identifies as straight. Lower courts ruled that she had failed to provide sufficient evidence of her claim, propelling the burden of proof question to the Supreme Court.

At a February hearing, justices on both sides ideologically appeared sympathetic to her argument.

US President Donald Trump says he was “very surprised” and “disappointed” with former ally Elon Musk’s criticisms of his centrepiece budget bill.

“Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore,” Trump told reporters in the White House on Thursday.

It was the president’s most direct criticism of Musk’s lobbying efforts against the proposals to cut taxes and slash government spending – a plan that has drawn outrage from the tycoon and some Republicans. And it set off an online war of words between the two men.

In response, Musk doubled down on X and accused the president of “ingratitude”, adding: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election”.

Musk left his post at the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) last week after 129 days on the job, and Trump presented him with a golden key during a congratulatory news conference on 30 May.

But in the days since, he has repeatedly criticised Trump’s budget bill currently working its way through Congress, calling it a “disgusting abomination” and posting: “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong.”

He encouraged his followers to phone their representatives to express opposition to the spending plan.

The bill passed the US House with the backing of most Republicans, with a handful of representatives from Trump’s party and all Democrats opposed. It still needs approval of the Senate and a merging of the two versions before it can be signed by Trump and become law.

• Follow live updates here
• Trump and Musk enter bitter feud – and Washington buckles up

Speaking to reporters during a news conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Thursday, Trump said: “We are doing things in that bill that are unbelievable.

“I’m very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here. All of a sudden he had a problem.”

Trump suggested that Musk was upset about the removal of subsidies and mandates for electric vehicles, which could affect his Tesla business.

Musk denied this was the case and wrote: “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill.”

“Pork” is a term used in US politics to describe wasteful government spending, particularly on things meant to curry favour with particular groups or local areas.

Musk endorsed Trump last July after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, and the Tesla boss reportedly funnelled $250m into getting him back into the White House.

In a flurry of posts on X after Thursday’s news conference, Musk denied that he had seen a copy of the budget bill and reposted old tweets from Trump where the president promoted a balanced budget.

Musk also took credit for the sweeping Republican victory in November’s election, writing: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”

“Such ingratitude,” he added.

Musk went on to post a poll asking his followers “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”

He also suggested without evidence in a new post on X that Trump appears in unreleased files held by the government related to late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Last year, court documents released by a judge named numerous public figures connected to Epstein. Trump was named in one document. Being named in the documents does not carry any inference of wrongdoing, and there were no allegations made against Trump.

While running for the White House, Trump had promised to release more files on Epstein. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi released newly declassified files which contained no major new allegations about Epstein nor revelations about his associates.

Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on charges of sex trafficking and died by suicide while awaiting trial. Trump was president at the time. He said he knew Epstein “like everybody in Palm Beach knew him” but had a “falling out with him a long time ago”.

The BBC has contacted the White House and the FBI for comment.

Trump responded by writing on his Truth Social network later on Thursday that Musk “just went CRAZY” and went on to post: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

Musk’s companies including Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink have direct contacts with the US government and like many other businesses also benefit from subsidies and tax breaks.

Telsa stock dropped by 14% within hours of the row bursting out into public on Thursday.

According to the most recent analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the budget bill will increase the US national debt by $2.4 trillion over 10 years and leave nearly 11 million people without government-backed health insurance.

The White House disputes those figures, saying they don’t account for revenues brought in by increased tariffs.

Put in charge of radically slashing government spending, Musk initiated mass sackings and wholesale elimination of departments such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Doge claims to have saved $180bn, although that number has been disputed, and is well short of Musk’s initial aim to cut spending by up to $2tn.

Goods brought into the US plunged by 20% in April, recording their largest ever monthly drop in the face of a wave of tariffs unleashed by US President Donald Trump.

The retreat reflects the abrupt hit to trade, after firms had rushed products into the country earlier this year to try to get ahead of new taxes on imports Trump had promised.

US purchases from major trade partners such as Canada and China fell to their lowest levels since 2021 and 2020 respectively, the Commerce Department said.

The collapse helped to cut the US trade deficit – the gap between exports and imports – in goods by almost half, a record decline, according to the report.

“The April trade report indicates the impact from tariffs has well and truly arrived,” said Oxford Economics, while noting that the latest figures should be interpreted with caution, given the surge in activity earlier this year.

Since re-entering office in January, Trump has raised import taxes on specific items such as foreign steel, aluminium and cars and imposed a blanket 10% levy on most goods from trading partners around the world.

He had briefly targeted some countries’ exports with even higher duties, only to suspend those measures for 90 days to allow for talks.

Trump has said the moves are intended to rebuild manufacturing at home and strengthen its hand in trade negotiations.

White House officials are now engaged in intense talks aimed at striking deals before that 90-day deadline expires next month.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Trump spoke by phone on Thursday to try to reach a breakthrough in those negotiations, as the fragile truce between the two sides showed signs of deteriorating.

In a social media post, Trump said it had been a “very good phone call” focused on trade and that teams from the two sides would be meeting again shortly.

State media in China reported that they had agreed to further talks and extended an invitation of a visit to Trump.

Trump’s barrage of tariffs have brought the average effective tariff rate in the US to the highest level since the 1930s, according to analysts.

After a surge in activity earlier this year, the abrupt changes have led to a sharp slowdown in trade as firms weigh how to respond.

In Mexico, the steel industry said its exports to the US had been cut in half last month.

In Canada, the trade deficit hit an all-time high last month, widening to C$7.1bn, as exports to the US shrank for a third month in a row.

Thursday’s report from the US Commerce Department showed few categories of products were unaffected by the changes.

Imports of passenger cars dropped by a third from March to April. Pharmaceutical products were hit and imports of most consumer goods also fell, including cell phones, artwork, furniture, toys and apparel.

But imports surged from Vietnam and Taiwan, which saw their exports briefly targeted with higher rates before Trump suspended those levies, according to the report.

Despite the big monthly decline, overall US goods imports in the first four months of the year are up about 20% compared with the same period in 2024.

Exports so far this year are up about 5% compared with 2024.

The overall goods and services deficit in April was $61.6bn, down from $138.3bn in March.

Donald Trump has said he will visit China after speaking to its leader Xi Jinping over the phone.

The US president said he had reciprocated with an invite to the White House during the “very good talk” – though such a trip has not been confirmed by either side.

Thursday’s call is the first time the two leaders have spoken since Trump launched a trade war with Beijing in February. Chinese state media reported that the call happened at the White House’s request.

Trump wrote on social media that the hour-and-a-half conversation was primarily focused on trade and had “resulted in a very positive conclusion for both countries”.

• China says US has ‘severely violated’ tariffs truce
• China hits back after Trump claims it is ‘violating’ tariff truce

“He invited me to China and I invited him here,” Trump said of the call with Xi while meeting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office.

“We both accepted, so I will be going there with the first lady at a certain point and he will be coming here hopefully with the first lady of China.”

The Chinese readout of the conversation mentioned the its invitation but not the reciprocal one to the White House.

According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, Xi reportedly told Trump that the US should “withdraw the negative measures it has taken against China”.

The Chinese leader was also said to have told Trump that China always kept its promises and since a consensus had been reached, both sides should abide by it – a reference to a recent deal between the two nations struck in Geneva.

Both sides have accused the other of breaching the deal aimed at dramatically reducing trade tariffs – a deal Trump touted as a “total reset”.

It came after Trump raised tariffs on imports from a number of countries, but reserved the highest rates for China. Beijing responded with its own higher rates on US imports, sparking tit-for-tat increases that peaked at 145%.

The tentative truce struck in May brought that US tariff on Chinese products down to 30%, while Beijing slashed levies on US imports to 10% and promised to lift barriers on critical mineral exports.

The agreement gave both sides a 90-day deadline to try to reach a trade deal.

But since then, talks have seemed to grind to a halt amid claims on both sides that the deal had been breached.

The US has accused China of failing to restart shipments of critical minerals and rare earth magnets vital to car and computer industries.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce has denied the claims and accused the US of undermining the deal by introducing new restrictions on computer chips.

Trump introduced new export restrictions on semiconductor design software and announced it would revoke the visas of Chinese students.

The US president said following the call that “there should no longer be any questions respecting the complexity of Rare Earth products”.

He told reporters in the White House: “Chinese students can come, no problem, no problem – its an honour to have them frankly. But we want to check them.”

Chinese state media reported that Xi warned Washington that it should handle Taiwan “with caution” to avoid conflict, just days after US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said China posed an “imminent” threat to the self-governed island.

Hegseth told the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singaport that Beijing was “credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power”.

China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be reunified, and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this. The US supports Taiwan militarily but does not officially recognise it due to the “One China” policy.

According to the readout of Thursday’s call given to Chinese media, Xi stressed that the US should handle the “Taiwan issue prudently to prevent a small number of Taiwan Independence separatists from dragging China and the US into a dangerous situation of conflict and confrontation”.

The call between Trump and Xi is long awaited and comes after months of silence between the two leaders.

The White House has touted the possibility they might talk from week one of Trump’s presidency – and earlier this week he finally vented his frustration on social media.

Trump wrote: “I like President Xi of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!”

Trump has made it clear that he likes to be involved in negotiations. But this is not the way China does business.

Beijing prefers to appoint a negotiating team led by a trusted official. Any calls or meeting between heads of state are usually thoroughly planned and highly choreographed.

The Chinese will also not want to be seen to bend to Washington’s demands.

New Zealand’s parliament has voted to suspend three Māori MPs for their protest haka during a sitting last year.

Opposition MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, who started the traditional dance, was suspended for seven days, while her party’s co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer were banned for 21 days.

The MPs did the haka when asked if their Te Pāti Māori or Māori Party, supported a bill that sought to redefine the country’s founding treaty with Māori people.

The Treaty Principles Bill has since been voted down but it drew nationwide outrage – and more than 40,000 people protested outside parliament during the bill’s first reading in November last year.

We have been “punished for being Māori”, Ngarewa-Packer told the BBC. “We take on the stance of being unapologetically Māori and prioritising what our people need or expect from us.”

There were tense exchanges on Thursday as the house debated penalties, with Foreign Minister Winston Peters being asked to apologise for calling Te Pāti Māori a “bunch of extremists” and saying the country “has had enough of them”.

“We will never be silenced, and we will never be lost,” Maipi-Clarke, who at 22 is the youngest MP, said at one point, holding back tears.

“Are our voices too loud for this house – is that why we are being punished?”

Last month, a parliamentary committee proposed suspending the MPs, It ruled that the haka, which brought parliament to a temporary halt, could have “intimidated” other lawmakers.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had rejected accusations then that the committee’s ruling was “racist”, adding that the issue was “not about haka”, but about “parties not following the rules of parliament”.

Following a heated debate, the suspensions handed out on Thursday are the longest any New Zealand lawmaker has faced. The previous record was three days.

New Zealand has long been lauded for upholding indigenous rights, but relations with the Māori community have been strained recently under the current conservative government Luxon-led government.

His administration has been criticised for cutting funding to programmes benefiting Māori, including plans to disband an organisation that aims to improve health services for the community.

Luxon though has defended his government’s record on Māori issues, citing plans to improve literacy in the community and move children out of emergency housing.

The Treaty Principles Bill that has been at the heart of this tension. It sought to legally define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, the pact the British Crown and Māori leaders signed in 1840 during New Zealand’s colonisation.

The bill’s defenders, such as Act, the right-wing party that tabled it, argue the 1840 treaty needs to be reinterpreted because it had divided the country by race, and does not represent today’s multicultural society.

Critics, however, say it is the proposed bill that would be divisive and lead to the unravelling of much-needed protections for many Māori.

The bill sparked a hīkoi, or peaceful protest march, that lasted nine days, beginning in the far north and culminating in the capital Wellington. It grew to more than 40,000 by the end, becoming one of the country’s biggest marches ever.

The Treaty Principles Bill was eventually voted down by 112 votes to 11 in April, days after a government committee recommended that it should not proceed. The party holds six seats in the 123-member parliament.

Aylo, the company which runs a number of pornographic websites, including Pornhub, is to stop operating in France from Wednesday.

It is in reaction to a French law requiring porn sites to take extra steps to verify their users’ ages.

An Aylo spokesperson said the law was a privacy risk and assessing people’s ages should be done at a device level.

Pornhub is the most visited porn site in the world – with France its second biggest market, after the US.

Aylo – and other providers of sexually explicit material – find themselves under increasing regulatory pressure worldwide.

The EU recently announced an investigation into whether Pornhub and other sites were doing enough to protect children.

Aylo has also pulled out of a number of US states, again over the issue of checking the ages of its users.

All sites offering sexually explicit material in the UK will soon also have to offer more robust “age assurance.”

Aylo, formerly Mindgeek, also runs sites such as Youporn and RedTube, which will also become unavailable to French customers.

It is owned by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners.

Their vice president for compliance, Solomon Friedman, called the French law “dangerous,” “potentially privacy-infringing” and “ineffective”.

“Google, Apple and Microsoft all have the capability built into their operating system to verify the age of the user at the operating system or device level,” he said on a video call reported by Agence France-Presse.

Another executive, Alex Kekesi, said the company was pro-age verification, but there were concerns over the privacy of users.

In some cases, users may have to enter credit cards or government ID details in order to prove their age.

French minister for gender equality, Aurore Bergé, wrote “au revoir” in response to the news that Pornhub was pulling out of France.

In a post on X [in French], she wrote: “There will be less violent, degrading and humiliating content accessible to minors in France.”

The UK has its own age verification law, with platforms required to have “robust” age checks by July, according to media regulator Ofcom.

These may include facial detection software which estimates a user’s age.

In April – in response to messaging platform Discord testing face scanning software – experts predicted it would be “the start of a bigger shift” in age checks in the UK, in which facial recognition tech played a bigger role.

BBC News has asked Aylo whether it will block its sites in the UK too when the laws come in.

In May, Ofcom announced it was investigating two pornography websites which had failed to detail how they were preventing children from accessing their platforms.

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With Air Canada and Southwest the latest airlines to charge passengers for check-in luggage, the ballooning cost of such ancillary or “junk fees” is provoking anger among politicians and consumer groups. At the same time, sales of suitcases small enough for passengers to take on the plane as hand luggage are booming.

Standing outside Toronto’s downtown airport, Lauren Alexander has flown over from Boston for the weekend. She describes such additional charges as “ridiculous”.

“It feels like a trick,” says the 24-year-old. “You buy the ticket, you think it’s going to be less expensive, then you have to pay $200 (£148) extra [to bring a suitcase].”

To avoid the fee, Ms Alexander instead travelled with a small backpack as hand luggage.

Sage Riley, who is 27, agrees, telling the BBC, “It can be pricey.”

There was a time when checked bags, seat selection and your meals all came as standard on commercial flights. But that all changed with the rise of the budget airlines, says Jay Sorensen of US aviation consultancy IdeaWorks.

It was in 2006 when UK low-cost carrier FlyBe became what is believed to be the world’s first airline to start charging passengers to check in bags. It charged £2 for a pre-booked item of luggage, and £4 if the customer hadn’t paid in advance.

Other budget carriers then quickly followed suit, with the so-called flag carriers or established airlines then also doing so, at least on shorter flights.

In 2008 American Airlines became the first US airline to charge a fee, $15, for the first checked bag on its domestic routes.

Mr Sorenson says such traditional airlines felt they had no choice when they “began to realise that the low-cost carriers were providing very significant competition”. He adds: “They felt they had to do something to meet that.”

Fast forward to today, and US airlines alone made $7.27bn from check-in baggage fees last year, according to federal figures. That is up from $7bn in 2023, and $5.76bn in 2019.

Little wonder then that more of us are trying to just take carry-on. Kirsty Glenn, managing director of UK luggage firm Antler, confirms that there is an ongoing surge in demand for small suitcases that meet airline dimension limits for carry-on luggage.

“We have seen huge spikes in searches online and on our website,” she says. Describing a new small-dimension case her company launched in April, Ms Glenn adds: “Testament to the trend of only travelling with hand luggage, it’s sold like crazy.”

At the same time, social media content about travel packing “hacks” and luggage that meets airlines’ carry-on size measurements, have soared according to travel journalist Chelsea Dickenson. She makes this content for TikTok.

“Social media has really propelled this idea of needing a bag that fits the baggage allowance requirements, says Ms Dickenson. “It’s become a core part of the content that I create and post on social media.”

Ms Dickenson, whose social media following has ballooned to close to a million followers, adds that her luggage videos have become a “core part of the content” she creates.

“It blows my mind,” she says. “I could spend weeks and weeks researching a big trip, and the resulting videos will not come close to doing as well as me going and buying a cheap suitcase, taking it to the airport, testing it in one of those baggage sizes and reporting back.”

The overall global cost of all airline extra fees, from luggage to seat selection, buying wifi access, lounge access, upgrades, and food and drink, is expected to reach $145bn this year, 14% of the sector’s total revenues. That’s according to the International Air Transport Association, which represents the industry. This compares with $137bn last year.

These numbers have caught the attention of some politicians in Washington, and last December airline bosses were grilled before a senate committee. It was a Democrat senator who used the term “junk fees”.

He wants the federal government to review such costs and potentially fine airlines. We asked the US Department of Transportation for a comment, but did not get a response.

But if having to pay for check-in wasn’t enough, a growing number of airlines are now charging for hand luggage. For example, Irish budget airline Ryanair will only allow you to carry a small bag that fits under the seat in front of you for free. If you want to take a bigger bag or suitcase to go in the overhead locker that will cost you from £6.

Other European airlines that now have similar charges for hand luggage are Easyjet, Norwegian Airlines, Transavia, Volotea, Vueling, and Wizzair.

This has annoyed pan-European consumer group Becu (The European Consumer Organisation), which last month filed a complaint with the European Commission.

Becu cites a 2014 EU Court of Justice ruling, which said “carriage of hand baggage cannot be made subject to a price supplement, provided that it meets reasonable requirements in terms of its weight and dimensions, and complies with applicable security requirements”.

However, what determines “reasonable requirements” continues to be a grey area in need of an official ruling.

There can, however, be a different way of doing things, as shown by Indian airline IndiGo. Its boss Pieter Eibers says that it does not charge for check-in luggage.

“The entire philosophy here is different,” he says. “We don’t want long lines, and endless debates at gates about the weight of luggage. We don’t have any of that. We turn our planes around in 35 minutes.”

An Australian woman accused of murdering relatives with beef Wellington documented herself using kitchen scales to calculate a lethal dose of toxic mushrooms, prosecutors allege.

Erin Patterson has pleaded not guilty to killing three people and attempting to murder another at her home in regional Victoria in July 2023. The 50-year-old says she never intended to hurt them and it was a tragic accident.

Prosecutors on Thursday suggested photos found on her phone showing wild fungi being weighed depict her measuring the amount required to kill her guests.

Ms Patterson told the court she had likely taken the photos in question but said she didn’t believe the mushrooms in them were death caps.

Ms Patterson’s in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, along with Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, all fell ill and died days after the lunch.

Heather’s husband, local pastor Ian Wilkinson, was also hospitalised but recovered after coming out of a weeks-long induced coma.

The high-profile trial, which started almost six weeks ago, has already heard from more than 50 prosecution witnesses. Ms Patterson became the first defence witness to take the stand on Monday afternoon.

Under cross-examination from the lead prosecutor, Ms Patterson admitted she had foraged for wild mushrooms in the three months before the July lunch, despite telling police and a health official that she hadn’t.

The court was also shown images, taken in late April 2023 and recovered from Ms Patterson’s phone, which depicted mushrooms being weighed.

Ms Patterson previously admitted she had repeatedly deleted electronic data in the days following the lunch because she feared that if officers found such pictures they would blame her for the guests’ deaths.

Pointing to earlier evidence from a fungi expert who said the mushrooms in the images were “highly consistent” with death caps, Dr Rogers alleged Ms Patterson had knowingly foraged them days before.

She had seen a post on iNaturalist – a website for logging plant and animal sightings – and travelled to the Loch area ten days later on 28 April to pick the toxic fungi, Dr Rogers alleged.

Ms Patterson said she couldn’t recall if she went to the town that day, but denied she went there to find death cap mushrooms or that she had seen the iNaturalist post.

“I suggest that you were weighing these mushrooms so that you could calculate the weight required for… a fatal dose,” Dr Rogers put to her.

“Disagree,” Ms Patterson replied.

The mother-of-two also spoke about putting powdered dried mushrooms into a range of foods like spaghetti, brownies and stew, which prosecutors allege was practice for the fatal lunch.

Ms Patterson said this was not true, but rather an attempt to get “extra vegetables into my kids’ bodies”.

Prosecutors repeatedly asked her, with different wording each time, whether she had knowingly used the same food dehydrator to prepare death cap mushrooms for the lunch.

CCTV played at the trial shows Ms Patterson disposing of the appliance at a local dump.

“That’s why you rushed out, the day after your release from [hospital], to get rid of the evidence,” Dr Rogers said.

“No,” replied Ms Patterson.

Earlier, Ms Patterson’s barrister asked her why she repeatedly lied to police about foraging mushrooms and having a food dehydrator.

“It was this stupid knee-jerk reaction to dig deeper and keep lying,” she told the court. “I was just scared, but I shouldn’t have done it.”

Ms Patterson also repeated her claim that she never intentionally put the poisonous fungi in the meal.

She said the mushrooms used in the beef Wellington may have accidentally included dried, foraged varieties that were kept in a container with store-bought ones.

Ms Patterson was also quizzed on evidence given by other witnesses that she had asked her guests to come to the lunch to discuss health issues, namely a cancer diagnosis.

She said she didn’t outright say she had cancer, but still shouldn’t have misled her relatives, saying she’d done so partly because their concern made her feel loved.

“I suggest that you never thought you would have to account for this lie about having cancer because you thought the lunch guests would die,” Dr Rogers said. “Your lie would never be found out.”

“That’s not true,” Ms Patterson said.

She will resume being cross examined on Friday. The trial, initially expected to take six weeks, is now expected to run for at least another fortnight, the judge has told the court.