On the surface, Muhammed Asif Hafeez was an upstanding individual.

A global businessman and ambassador of a prestigious London polo club, he rubbed shoulders with the British elite, including members of the Royal Family.

He also regularly passed on detailed information to the authorities in the UK and Middle East that, in some cases, led to the interception of huge shipments of drugs. He was motivated, he said, simply by what he saw as his “moral obligation to curb and highlight criminal activities”.

At least, that is what he would have had people think.

In reality, Hafeez was himself what US officials described as “one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers”.

From his residence in the UK, he was the puppet-master of a vast drugs empire, supplying many tonnes of heroin, methamphetamine and hashish from bases in Pakistan and India that were distributed across the world. The gangs he informed on were his rivals – and his motivation was to rid the market of his competitors.

His status in the underworld earned him the moniker “the Sultan”.

But this criminal power and prestige would not last forever. After a complex joint operation between the British and American authorities, Hafeez, 66, was extradited from the UK in 2023. He pleaded guilty last November.

On Friday, he was sentenced to 16 years in a New York prison for conspiring to import drugs – including enough heroin for “millions of doses” – into the US. Having been in custody since 2017, Hafeez’s sentence will end in 2033.

The BBC has closely followed Hafeez’s case. We have pieced together information from court documents, corporate listings and interviews with people who knew him.

We wanted to find out how he managed to stay under the radar for so long – and how he eventually got caught.

Hafeez was born in September 1958 to a middle-class family in Lahore, Pakistan. One of six children, his upbringing was comfortable. People in Lahore who knew the family told the BBC that his father had owned a factory near the city. Hafeez also later told a US court that he had trained as a commercial pilot.

From the early 1990s to about the mid-2010s, he ran an outwardly legitimate umbrella company called Sarwani International Corporation, with subsidiary businesses in Pakistan, the UAE and the UK.

According to its website – which has since been shut down – it sold technical equipment to militaries, governments and police forces throughout the world, including equipment for drug detection.

Among the other businesses under the Sarwani umbrella were a textiles company registered in various countries, an Italian restaurant in Lahore that was a franchise of a well-known Knightsbridge brand, and a company named Tipmoor, based near Windsor to the west of London, which specialised in “polo and equestrian services”.

These businesses not only afforded him a luxury lifestyle, but secured him access to the UK’s most exclusive circles. He was listed as an international ambassador for the prestigious Ham Polo Club for at least three years, from 2009 to 2011. He and his wife Shahina were also photographed chatting to Prince William, and embracing Prince Harry, at the club in 2009.

Ham Polo Club told the BBC that Hafeez had never been a member of the club, that the club no longer has “ambassadors”, and that the current board “has no ties to him”. It added that the event at which Hafeez and his wife were photographed meeting the princes “was run by a third party”.

Sarwani’s different global arms were dissolved at various stages in the 2010s, according to their listings on Companies House and equivalent global registries.

A former Sarwani employee based in the UAE told the BBC he suspected there had been “something fishy going on” when he worked for the business, because even big projects were “only paid for in cash”. The employee – who has asked not to be identified, for fear of reprisals – said he eventually left the business because he felt uncomfortable with this.

“There were no [bank] transactions, no records, no existence,” he told the BBC.

Hafeez would also periodically write letters to the authorities in the UAE and UK informing on rival cartels, under the guise of being a concerned member of the public.

The BBC has seen these, as well as letters he received in response from the British Embassy in Dubai and the UK Home Office, thanking him and expressing their appreciation for him getting in touch.

The Home Office told the BBC it does not comment on individual correspondence.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Government of Dubai were contacted by the BBC for comment but did not respond.

Members of Hafeez’s family shared these letters with the BBC in 2018, while he was embroiled in a lengthy legal fight against extradition to the US.

They also submitted them to courts in the UK and, later, to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), as evidence that he had been an informant and needed protection. All the courts disagreed and ruled that this was a ploy by Hafeez to rid the market of competitors.

Hafeez, the ECHR said, was “someone who had brought to the attention of the authorities the criminal conduct of others who he knew to be actual or potential rivals to his substantial criminal enterprise”.

While Hafeez was writing these letters, a meeting took place in 2014 that – despite him not being there – would lead to his downfall.

Two of Hafeez’s close associates met a potential buyer from Colombia in a flat in Mombasa, Kenya. They burned a small amount of heroin in order to demonstrate how pure it was, and said they could supply him with any quantity of “100%… white crystal”.

The supplier of this high-quality heroin, they had told the buyer, was a man from Pakistan known as “the Sultan” – that is, Hafeez.

What they would soon learn was that the “buyer” from Colombia was actually working undercover for the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The entire meeting was part of an elaborate sting operation, and had been covertly filmed – footage that has been obtained by the BBC.

US court documents reveal the deal was co-ordinated by Baktash and Ibrahim Akasha, two brothers who led a violent cartel in Kenya. Their father was himself a feared kingpin who had been killed in Amsterdam’s Red Light District in 2000.

The deal also involved Vijaygiri “Vicky” Goswami, an Indian national who managed the Akashas’ operations.

In October 2014, with the Akashas, Goswami and Hafeez still unaware of who the buyers really were, 99kg of heroin and 2kg of crystal meth were delivered to the fake Colombian traffickers. The Akashas promised to provide hundreds of kilograms more of each drug.

A month later, the Akasha brothers and Goswami were arrested in Mombasa. They were released on bail shortly afterwards, and spent over two years fighting extradition to the US.

In the background, American law enforcers were working with counterparts in the UK to piece together their case against Hafeez, partly using evidence gathered from devices they had seized when they arrested Goswami and the Akasha brothers. On those, they had found multiple references to Hafeez as a major supplier, and were able to find enough evidence to identify him as “the Sultan”.

Facing charges in the US didn’t stop one of the men, Goswami, from continuing his illegal enterprise. In 2015, while on bail in Kenya, he hatched a plan with Hafeez to transport several tonnes of a drug called ephedrine from a chemical factory in Solapur, India, to Mozambique.

Ephedrine, a powerful medication that is legal in limited quantities, is used to make methamphetamine. The two men – Goswami and Hafeez – planned to set up a meth factory in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, US court documents show. But their scheme was abandoned in 2016, when police raided the Solapur plant and seized 18 tonnes of ephedrine.

The Akasha brothers and Goswami finally boarded a flight to the US to face trial in January 2017.

Hafeez was arrested eight months later in London, at his flat in the affluent St John’s Wood neighbourhood. He was detained at high security Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, and it was from there that he spent six years fighting extradition to the US.

A big development happened in 2019 in the US. Goswami pleaded guilty, and told a New York court he had agreed to co-operate with prosecutors. The Akasha brothers also pleaded guilty.

Baktash Akasha was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His brother Ibrahim was sentenced to 23 years.

Goswami, who is yet to be sentenced, would have testified against Hafeez in the US had the case gone to trial.

From Belmarsh, Hafeez was running out of options.

He tried to stop extradition to the US – but failed to convince magistrates, the High Court in London and the ECHR that he had, in fact, been an informant to the authorities who was “at risk of ill-treatment from his fellow prisoners” as a result.

He also claimed the conditions in a US prison would be “inhuman and degrading” for him because of his health conditions, including type 2 diabetes and asthma.

He lost all of these arguments at every stage and was extradited in May 2023.

His case did not go to trial. In November last year, Hafeez pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to manufacture and distribute heroin, methamphetamine and hashish and to import them into the US.

Pre-sentencing, prosecutors described the “extremely fortunate circumstances” of Hafeez’s life, which “throw into harsh relief his decision to scheme… and to profit from the distribution of dangerous substances that destroy lives and whole communities”.

“Unlike many traffickers whose drug activities are borne, at least in part, from desperation, poverty, and a lack of educational opportunities,” they said, “the defendant has lived a life replete with privilege and choice.”

As the annual Hajj pilgrimage draws to a close, a long-settled corner of Mecca is stirring up a storm thousands of miles away in India – not for its spiritual significance, but for a 50-year-old inheritance dispute.

At the heart of the controversy is Keyi Rubath, a 19th-Century guest house built in the 1870s by Mayankutty Keyi, a wealthy Indian merchant from Malabar (modern-day Kerala), whose trading empire stretched from Mumbai to Paris.

Located near Islam’s holiest site, Masjid al-Haram, the building was demolished in 1971 to make way for Mecca’s expansion. Saudi authorities deposited 1.4 million riyals (about $373,000 today) in the kingdom’s treasury as compensation, but said no rightful heir could be identified at the time.

Decades later, that sum – still held in Saudi Arabia’s treasury – has sparked a bitter tussle between two sprawling branches of the Keyi family, each trying to prove its lineage and claim what they see as their rightful inheritance.

Neither side has succeeded so far. For decades, successive Indian governments – both at the Centre and in Kerala – have tried and failed to resolve the deadlock.

It remains unclear if Saudi authorities are even willing to release the compensation, let alone adjust it for inflation as some family members now demand – with some claiming it could be worth over $1bn today.

Followers of the case note the property was a waqf – an Islamic charitable endowment – meaning descendants can manage but not own it.

The Saudi department that handles Awqaf (endowed properties) did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment, and the government has made no public statement on the matter.

That hasn’t stopped speculation – about both the money and who it rightfully belongs to.

Little is known about the guest house itself, but descendants claim it stood just steps from the Masjid al-Haram, with 22 rooms and several halls spread over 1.5 acres.

According to family lore, Keyi shipped wood from Malabar to build it and appointed a Malabari manager to run it – an ambitious gesture, though not unusual for the time.

Saudi Arabia was a relatively poor country back then – the discovery of its massive oil fields still a few decades away.

The Hajj pilgrimage and the city’s importance in Islam meant that Indian Muslims often donated money or built infrastructure for Indian pilgrims there.

In his 2014 book, Mecca: The Sacred City, historian Ziauddin Sardar notes that during the second half of the 18th Century, the city had acquired a distinctively Indian character with its economy and financial well-being dependent on Indian Muslims.

“Almost 20% of the city’s inhabitants, the largest single majority, were now of Indian origins – people from Gujarat, Punjab, Kashmir and Deccan, all collectively known locally as the Hindis,” Sardar wrote.

As Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth surged in the 20th century, sweeping development projects reshaped Mecca. Keyi Rubath was demolished three times, the final time in the early 1970s.

That’s when the confusion around compensation appears to have started.

According to BM Jamal, former secretary of India’s Central Waqf Council, the Indian consulate in Jeddah wrote to the government back then, seeking details of Mayankutty Keyi’s legal heir.

“In my understanding, authorities were looking for the descendants to appoint a manager for the property, not to distribute the compensation money,” Mr Jamal said.

Nonetheless, two factions stepped forward: the Keyis – Mayankutty’s paternal family – and the Arakkals, a royal family from Kerala into which he had married.

Both families traditionally followed a matrilineal inheritance system – a custom not recognized under Saudi law, adding further complexity.

The Keyis claim that Mayankutty died childless, making his sister’s children his rightful heirs under matrilineal tradition.

But the Arakkals claim he had a son and a daughter, and therefore, under Indian law, his children would be the legal inheritors.

As the dispute dragged on, the story took on a life of its own. In 2011, after rumours swirled that the compensation could be worth millions, more than 2,500 people flooded a district office in Kannur, claiming to be Keyi’s descendants.

“There were people who claimed that their forefathers had taught Mayankutty in his childhood. Others claimed that their forefathers had provided timber for the guest house,” a senior Keyi family member, who wanted to stay anonymous, told the BBC.

Scams followed. State officials say in 2017 fraudsters posing as Keyi descendants duped locals into handing over money, promising a share of the compensation.

Today, the case remains unresolved.

Some descendants propose the best way to end the dispute would be to ask the Saudi government to use the compensation money to build another guest house for Hajj pilgrims, as Myankutti Keyi had intended.

But others reject this, arguing that the guest house was privately owned, and so any compensation rightfully belongs to the family.

Some argue that even if the family proves lineage to Mayankutty Keyi, without ownership documents, they’re unlikely to gain anything.

For Muhammed Shihad, a Kannur resident who has co-authored a book on the history of the Keyi and Arakkal families, though, the dispute is not just about the money – but about honouring the family’s roots.

“If they don’t get the compensation, it would be worth openly recognising the family’s and the region’s connection to this noble act.”

Matthew’s dad had brown eyes and black hair. His grandparents had piercing blue eyes.

There was a running joke in his family that “dad looked nothing like his parents”, the teacher from southern England says.

It turned out there was a very good reason for this.

Matthew’s father had been swapped at birth in hospital nearly 80 years ago. He died late last year before learning the truth of his family history.

Matthew – not his real name – contacted the BBC after we reported on the case of Susan, who received compensation from an NHS trust after a home DNA test revealed she had been accidentally switched for another baby in the 1950s.

BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.

During the pandemic, Matthew started looking for answers to niggling questions about his family history. He sent off a saliva sample in the post to be analysed.

The genealogy company entered his record into its vast online database, allowing him to view other users whose DNA closely matched his own.

“Half of the names I’d just never heard of,” he says. “I thought, ‘That’s weird’, and called my wife to tell her the old family joke might be true after all.”

Matthew then asked his dad to submit his own DNA sample, which confirmed he was even more closely related to the same group of mysterious family members.

Matthew started exchanging messages with two women who the site suggested were his father’s cousins. All were confused about how they could possibly be related.

Working together, they eventually tracked down birth records from 1946, months after the end of World War Two.

The documents showed that one day after his father was apparently born, another baby boy had been registered at the same hospital in east London.

That boy had the same relatively unusual surname that appeared on the mystery branch of the family tree, a link later confirmed by birth certificates obtained by Matthew.

It was a lightbulb moment.

“I realised straight away what must have happened,” he says. “The only explanation that made sense was that both babies got muddled up in hospital.”

Matthew and the two women managed to construct a brand new family tree based on all of his DNA matches.

“I love a puzzle and I love understanding the past,” he says. “I’m quite obsessive anyway, so I got into trying to reverse engineer what had happened.”

Before World War Two, most babies in the UK were born at home, or in nursing homes, attended by midwives and the family doctor.

That started to change as the country prepared for the launch of the NHS in 1948, and very gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.

“The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife,” says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.

“It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well.”

It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.

To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby’s name, mother’s name, the date and time of birth, and the baby’s weight.

“Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen”, says Ms Coates, who trained as a nurse herself in the 1970s and a midwife in 1981.

“If there were two or more members of staff in the nursery feeding babies, for example, a baby could easily be put down in the wrong cot.”

By 1956, hospital births were becoming more common, and midwifery textbooks were recommending that a “wrist name-tape” or “string of lettered china beads” should be attached directly to the newborn.

A decade later, by the mid-1960s, it was rare for babies to be removed from the delivery room without being individually labelled.

Stories of babies being accidentally switched in hospital were very rare at the time, though more are now coming to light thanks to the boom in genetic testing and ancestry websites.

The day after Jan Daly was born at a hospital in north London in 1951, her mother immediately complained that the baby she had been given was not hers.

“She was really stressed and crying, but the nurses assured her she was wrong and the doctor was called in to try to calm her,” Jan says.

The staff only backed down when her mum told them she’d had a fast, unassisted delivery, and pointed out the clear forceps marks on the baby’s head

“I feel for the other mother who had been happily feeding me for two days and then had to give up one baby for another,” she says.

“There was never any apology, it was just ‘one of those silly errors’, but the trauma affected my mother for a long time.”

Matthew’s father, an insurance agent from the Home Counties, was a keen amateur cyclist who spent his life following the local racing scene.

He lived alone in retirement and over the last decade his health had been deteriorating.

Matthew thought long and hard about telling him the truth about his family history but, in the end, decided against it.

“I just felt my dad doesn’t need this,” he says. “He had lived 78 years in a type of ignorance, so it didn’t feel right to share it with him.”

Matthew’s father died last year without ever knowing he’d been celebrating his birthday a day early for the past eight decades.

Since then, Matthew has driven to the West Country to meet his dad’s genetic first cousin and her daughter for coffee.

They all got on well, he says, sharing old photos and “filling in missing bits of family history”.

But Matthew has decided not to contact the man his father must have been swapped with as a baby, or his children – in part because they have not taken DNA tests themselves.

“If you do a test by sending your saliva off, then there’s an implicit understanding that you might find something that’s a bit of a surprise,” Matthew says.

“Whereas with people who haven’t, I’m still not sure if it’s the right thing to reach out to them – I just don’t think it’s right to drop that bombshell.”

Kilmar Ábrego García, a 29-year-old from El Salvador mistakenly deported in March, has been returned to the US to face prosecution on two federal criminal charges.

He has been accused of participating in a trafficking conspiracy over several years to move undocumented migrants from Texas to other parts of the country.

El Salvador agreed to release Mr Ábrego García after the US presented it with an arrest warrant, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday. His lawyer called the charges “preposterous”.

The White House had been resisting a US Supreme Court order from April to “facilitate” his return after he was sent to a jail in El Salvador alongside more than 250 other deportees.

In a two-count grand jury indictment, filed in a Tennessee court last month and unsealed on Friday, Mr Ábrego García was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and a second count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.

Bondi said the grand jury had found that Mr Ábrego García had played a “significant role” in an alien smuggling ring, bringing in thousands of illegal immigrants to the US.

The allegations, which date back to 2016, allege he transported undocumented individuals between Texas and Maryland and other states more than 100 times.

The indictment additionally alleges he transported members of MS-13, designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US.

The Trump administration had previously alleged Mr Ábrego García was a member of the transnational Salvadorian gang, which he has denied.

Bondi also accused Mr Ábrego García of trafficking weapons and narcotics into the US for the gang, though he was not charged with any related offences.

He appeared in court for an initial hearing on Friday in Nashville, Tennessee. An arraignment hearing is scheduled 13 June, where US Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes will determine if there are grounds to keep him detained ahead of his trial.

For now, Mr Ábrego García remains in federal custody.

Mr Ábrego García’s lawyers have previously argued that he has never been convicted of any criminal offence, including gang membership, in the US or in El Salvador.

Simon Sandoval Moshenberg, one of his attorneys, called the charges “preposterous” and the events an “abuse of power” at a Friday news conference.

“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,” Mr Moshenberg said. “Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him.”

He added: “This is an abuse of power, not justice. The government should give him a full and fair trial in front of the same immigration judge who heard the case in 2019.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, President Donald Trump called Mr Ábrego García a “bad guy” and said the Department of Justice had made the right decision to return him to US soil to face trial.

Mr Ábrego García entered the US illegally as a teenager from El Salvador. In 2019, he was arrested with three other men in Maryland and detained by federal immigration authorities.

But an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation on the grounds that he might be at risk of persecution from local gangs in his home country

• What is the 1798 law that Trump used to deport migrants?
• What we know about Kilmar Abrego Garcia and MS-13 allegations

On 15 March, he was deported amid an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law that allows presidents to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy country.

Mr Ábrego García was taken to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador, known for its brutal conditions.

While government lawyers initially said he was taken there as a result of “administrative error”, the Trump administration refused to order his return.

Whether or not the government had to “facilitate” his return to his home in the US state of Maryland became the subject of a weeks-long legal and political battle.

After Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen demanded to see Mr Ábrego García in El Salvador, he was released to a different prison in that country.

On Friday, Van Hollen reiterated that “this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all”.

“The administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”

El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a close ally of Trump, said on social media on Friday that if the administration “request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse”.

Mr Ábrego García is expected to make an initial appearance at a Tennessee court on Friday, where US will request he be held in pretrial custody “because he poses a danger to the community and a serious risk of flight”, according to the detention motion.

They rumble down the highway between Beijing and Tianjin port: big lorries, loaded up and fully able to navigate themselves.

Sure, there is a safety driver in the seat, as per government regulations, but these lorries don’t require them, and many analysts say it won’t take long before they are gone.

When “safety driver” Huo Kangtian, 32, first takes his hands off the wheel, and lets the lorry drive itself, it is somehow impressive and disconcerting in equal measures.

For the initial stages of the journey, he is in full control. Then – at a certain point – he hits a few buttons, and the powerful, heavy machine is driving itself, moving at speed along a public road to Tianjin.

“Of course, I felt a bit scared the first time I drove an autonomous truck,” says Mr Huo. “But, after spending a lot of time observing and testing these machines, I think they are actually pretty good and safe.”

As the lorry veers off the freeway and up a ramp towards the toll gates, the machine is still driving itself. On the other side of the tollgate, Mr Huo again presses a few buttons, and he is back in charge.

“My job as a safety driver is to act as the last line of defence. For example, in the case of an emergency, I would have to take back control of the vehicle immediately to ensure everyone’s safety,” he explains.

In terms of the upsides for a driver, he says that switching to autonomous mode can help combat stress and fatigue, as well as freeing up hands and feet for other tasks. He says it doesn’t make his job boring, but rather more interesting.

When asked if he is worried that this technology may one day render his job obsolete, he says he doesn’t know too much about this.

It’s the diplomatic answer.

Pony AI’s fleet of driverless lorries, currently operating on these test routes, is only the start of what is to come, the company’s vice-president Li Hengyu tells the BBC.

“In the future, with driverless operations, our transportation efficiency will definitely be greatly improved,” he says. “For example, labour costs will be reduced but, more importantly, we can deal better with harsh environments and long hours driving.”

What this all boils down to is saving money, says industry expert Yang Ruigang, a technology professor from Shanghai Jiaotong University, who has extensive experience working on driverless technology in both China and the US.

“Anything that can reduce operating costs is something a company would like to have, so it’s fairly easy to justify the investment in having a fully autonomous, driverless truck,” he tells the BBC.

In short, he says, the goal is simple: “Reduce the driver cost close to zero.”

However, significant hurdles remain before lorries will be allowed to drive themselves on roads around the world – not the least of which is public concern.

In China, self-driving technology suffered a major setback following an accident which killed three university students after their vehicle had been in “auto pilot” mode.

Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Chim Lee says the Chinese public still has quite a way to go before it is won over.

“We know that recent accidents involving passenger cars have caused a huge uproar in China. So, for driverless trucks – even though they tend to be more specific to certain locations for the time being – the public’s image of them is going to be absolutely critical for policy makers, and for the market as well, compared to passenger vehicles.”

Professor Yang agrees that lorry drivers are unlikely to lose their jobs in large numbers just yet.

“We have to discuss the context. Open environment? Probably not. High speed? Definitely no. But, if it is a low-speed situation, like with the last mile delivery trucks, it’s here already.”

In Eastern China’s Anhui Province, hundreds of driverless delivery vans navigate their way through the suburban streets of Hefei – a city with an official population of eight million – as human-driven scooters and cars whizz around them.

It was once one of country’s poorest cities, but these days its government wants it to be known as a place of the future, prepared to give new technology a chance.

Gary Huang, president of autonomous vehicle company, Rino.ai, says they discovered a market niche where driverless delivery vans could send parcels from big distribution hubs run by courier companies to local neighbourhood stations. At that point, scooter drivers take over, dropping off the packages to people’s front doors.

“We’re allowing couriers to stay within community areas to do pickup and drop off while the autonomous vans handle the repetitive, longer-distance trips. This boosts the entire system’s efficiency,” he tells us.

Rino has also been talking to other countries, and the company says the quickest uptake of its vehicles will be in Australia later this year, when a supermarket chain will start using their driverless delivery vehicles.

Meanwhile, in China, they say they’re now running more than 500 vans with road access in over 50 cities.

However, Hefei remains the most advanced.

Apart from Rino, the city has also now given permission for other driverless delivery van companies to operate.

Gary Huang says this is due to a combination of factors.

“Encouragement came from the government, followed by local experimentation, the gaining of experience, the refinement of regulations and eventually allowing a broad implementation.”

And you can see them on the roads, changing lanes, indicating before they turn, pulling up at red lights and avoiding other traffic.

For the courier companies, the numbers tell the story.

According to Rino’s regional director for Anhui Province, Zhang Qichen, deliveries are not only faster, but companies can hire three autonomous electric delivery vans which will run for days without needing a charge for the same cost as one driver.

She says she has been blown away by the pace of change in her industry and adds that she would not be surprised if heavy, long-haul lorries are routinely driving themselves on roads in certain circumstances within five years.

Professor Yang agrees. “Heavy trucks running along a highway unrestricted, at least five years away.”

When asked if it could really happen so soon, he responds: “I’m pretty sure it will happen. In fact, I’m confident that it will happen.”

Industry insiders say that the most immediate applications for driverless lorries – apart from in enclosed industrial zones likes open-cut mines or ports – are probably in remote, harsh terrain with extreme environmental conditions, especially along vast stretches and in a largely straight trajectory.

Significant technical challenges do remain though.

Heavy lorries need better cameras to track well ahead into distance to detect hazards much further down the road, in the same way a person can; more tricky roads may also need to have extra sensors placed along the route; other hurdles could include breakdowns in extreme weather or sudden, unexpected dangers emerging amidst very busy traffic.

On top of all this, the technology – when it comes to heavy lorries – is still not cheap. What’s more, these vehicles are right now modified old style lorries rather than self-driving vehicles straight off the production line.

China wants to be a champion of new tech, but it also has to be careful, not only because of the potential for deadly accidents but also because of how Chinese people might view this shift.

“This is not just about fulfilling regulations. It is not just about building a public image,” says Chim Lee. “But that, over time, the public will see the benefit of this technology, see how it will reduce their costs for buying things, or look at it as a way of imagining that society is improving, rather than viewing this as technology which is potentially destroying, causing car accidents or removing employment opportunities.”

Professor Yang sees another problem. “We humans can tolerate another human driver making mistakes but our tolerance for autonomous trucks is much much lower. Machines are not supposed to make mistakes. So, we have to make sure that the system is extremely reliable.”

A 12-year-old boy fell to his death at Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher after slipping in a puddle close to the edge, an inquest has heard.

Zhihan Zhao and his mother, both Chinese nationals, were with her friends at the beauty spot on the County Clare coast on 23 July last year when he walked ahead of the group.

The coroner embraced Zhihan’s distraught mother after recording a verdict of accidental death.

The accident was the second fatal fall at the Cliffs of Moher within a three-month period last year.

Zhihan and his mother, Xianhong Huang, had arrived in Ireland 12 days before his fatal fall.

In her deposition, Ms Huang said that Zhihan was walking ahead of her on the Cliffs of Moher trail when she lost sight of him.

“My son walked very fast and was ahead of us by 50 metres,” she said.

“As there was only one path, I thought we would meet him along the way.

“When I didn’t, I walked to the visitor centre and I checked the visitor centre.”

Unable to find him at the visitor centre, she returned to the path to search for him and when there was no sign of him, she reported him missing.

Ms Huang said she had last seen Zhihan at 13:00 that day and the court heard she had provided gardaí (Irish police) with a photo of him she had taken earlier on the trail.

Speaking through an interpreter at the inquest in Kilrush, County Clare, Ms Huang, wiping away tears, asked: “What exactly caused Zhihan to fall from the cliffs?”

Clare County Coroner Isobel O’Dea told the grieving mother that the evidence of an eyewitness would help answer that question.

A French tourist who witnessed him fall told Clare Coroner’s Court she had seen him slip and try to pull himself up by grasping at grass, before he disappeared over the edge.

French tourist Marion Tourgon told the inquest she had witnessed the fall at about 13:45 that day.

Ms Tourgon explained she had been at the edge of the cliffs with her husband and two children, taking a selfie at the time.

She describing seeing a young Asian boy, who was alone, come into view.

“I saw him slipping in the puddle that appears in the photo that my husband sent to the police,” the witness said.

“His right foot slipped into the puddle, with him trying to stop himself from falling with his left foot but his left foot ended up in the air.”

Ms Tourgon added: “It was very quick – he found himself in an awkward position with his left foot in a void over the cliff and his right knee on the edge of the cliff.”

She continued: “His right knee eventually fell into the void over the cliff and he was trying to grasp the grass with his hands to pull himself up.

“He didn’t shout and there was no noise.”

The Tourgon family then phoned the emergency services.

An air, land and sea search operation began involving the Irish Coast Guard, gardaí and Irish civil defence volunteers who used boats, drones, divers and a helicopter.

A police witness, Garda Colm Collins, told the inquest he had received a call at 14:00 that day after a male was seen falling off the edge of the Cliffs of Moher.

He said that the Irish Coast Guard had spotted a body floating in the water at the base of the cliffs.

The court heard a lifeboat had been launched but had not been able to access the site where the body was spotted because of the sea conditions.

It was another five days before Zhihan’s body was eventually recovered from the sea.

The boy was found by a fisherman, Matthew O’Halloran, from Corofin, County Clare.

He spotted a body face down with arms extended in the water between Doolin and the Aran Islands shortly after 10:00 on 28 July.

Mr O’Halloran alerted the Irish Coast Guard and its members retrieved Zhihan’s body and brought it ashore at Doolin.

The coroner said post-mortem results had confirmed that Zhihan died from multiple traumatic injuries consistent with a fall from a height.

“It is clear from evidence we heard that Zhihan slipped off the cliffs rather than any other way. His death would have been very quick – instantaneous.”

Addressing the boy’s mother, she said: “I can’t imagine how upsetting this is for you.”

Ms O’Dea also extended her sympathies to Zhihan’s father who was not present at the inquest.

She embraced Ms Huang as she left the coroner’s court.

In May 2024, a student in her 20s lost her footing on the cliffs while walking with friends and fell to her death.

Since August last year, large sections of the Cliffs of Moher trail have been closed due to safety concerns.

At the time, the Clare Local Development Company confirmed that it was taking the action following the two fatal accidents.

When Elon Musk recently announced that he was stepping back from politics, investors hoped that would mean he would step up his involvement in the many tech firms he runs.

His explosive row with President Donald Trump – and the very public airing of his dirty White House laundry – suggests Musk’s changing priorities might not quite be the salve they had been hoping for.

Instead of Musk retreating somewhat from the public eye and focusing on boosting the fortunes of Tesla and his other enterprises, he now finds himself being threatened with a boycott from one of his main customers – Trump’s federal government.

Tesla shares were sent into freefall on Thursday – falling 14% – as he sounded off about President Donald Trump on social media.

They rebounded a little on Friday following some indications tempers were cooling.

Even so, for the investors and analysts who, for months, had made clear they wanted Musk off his phone and back at work, the situation is far from ideal.

Some though argue the problems for Musk’s businesses run much deeper than this spat – and the controversial role in the Trump administration it has brought a spectacular end to.

For veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, that is especially so for Tesla.

“Tesla’s finished,” she told the BBC on the sidelines of the San Francisco Media Summit early this week.

“It was a great car company. They could compete in the autonomous taxi space but they’re way behind.”

Tesla has long attempted to play catch-up against rival Waymo, owned by Google-parent Alphabet, whose driverless taxis have traversed the streets of San Francisco for years – and now operate in several more cities.

This month, Musk is supposed to be overseeing Tesla’s launch of a batch of autonomous robo-taxis in Austin, Texas.

He posted to X last week that the electric vehicle maker had been testing the Model Y with no drivers on board.

“I believe 90% of the future value of Tesla is going to be autonomous and robotics,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told the BBC this week, adding that the Austin launch would be “a watershed moment”.

“The first task at hand is ensuring the autonomous vision gets off to a phenomenal start,” Ives added.

• Who is Elon Musk?
• How the Trump-Musk feud erupted

But with Musk’s attention divided, the project’s odds of success would appear to have lengthened.

And there’s something else to factor in too: Musk’s own motivation.

The talk in Silicon Valley lately centres less on whether Musk can turn things around and more on whether he even cares.

“He’s a really powerful person when he’s focused on something,” said Ross Gerber, President and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management.

“Before, it was about proving to the world that he would make EVs – the tech that nobody else could do. It was about proving he could make rockets. He had a lot to prove.”

A longtime Tesla investor, Gerber has soured on the stock, and has been pairing back his holdings since Musk’s foray into right-wing politics. He called Thursday an “extremely painful day.”

“It’s the dumbest thing you could possibly do to think that you have more power than the president of the United States,” Gerber said, referring to Musk’s social media tirade against Trump.

The BBC reached out to X, Tesla, and SpaceX seeking comment from Mr Musk but did not receive a response.

A particular problem for Musk is that, before he seemingly created an enemy in Donald Trump, he already had one in the grassroots social media campaign against his car-maker.

Protests, dubbed #TeslaTakedown, have played out across the country every weekend since Trump took office.

In April, Tesla reported a 20% drop in car sales for the first three months of the year. Profits plunged more than 70%, and the share price went down with it.

“He should not be deciding the fate of our democracy by disassembling our government piece by piece. It’s not right,” protestor Linda Koistinen told me at a demonstration outside a Berkeley, California Tesla dealership in February.

Koistinen said she wanted to make a “visible stand” against Musk personally.

“Ultimately it’s not about the tech or the Tesla corporation,” said Joan Donovan, a prominent disinformation researcher who co-organized the #TeslaTakedown protests on social media.

“It’s about the way in which the stock of Tesla has been able to be weaponized against the people and it has put Musk in such a position to have an incredible amount of power with no transparency,” Donovan added.

Another aspect of Musk’s empire that has raised the ire of his detractors is X, the social media platform once known as Twitter.

“He bought Twitter so that he had clout and would be able to – at the drop of a hat – reach hundreds of millions of people,” Donovan said.

There is another possibility here though.

Could Musk’s high-profile falling out with Trump help rehabilitate him in the eyes of people who turned against him because of his previous closeness to the president?

Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, thinks it could.

“We’re a very forgiving country,” Moorhead says in a telephone interview.

“These things take time,” he acknowledges, but “it’s not unprecedented”.

Swisher likened Musk’s personal brand to that of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates more than two decades ago.

She said Gates was once regarded as “the Darth Vader of Silicon Valley” because of his “arrogant and rude” personality.

Today, despite his flaws, Gates has largely rehabilitated his image.

“He learned. He grew up. People can change,” Swisher told me, even though Musk is “clearly troubled.”

The problem for Musk is the future for him and his companies is not just about what he does – but what Trump decides too.

And while Trump needed Musk in the past, not least to help fund his presidential race, it’s not so clear he does now.

Noah Smith, writer of the Noahpinion Substack, said Trump’s highly lucrative foray into cryptocurrencies – as unseemly as it has been – may have freed him from depending on Musk to carry out his will.

“My guess is that this was so he could get out from under Elon,” Smith said.

In Trump’s most menacing comment of the day, he suggested cutting Musk’s government contracts, which have an estimated value of $38 billion.

A significant chunk of that goes to Musk’s rocket company SpaceX – seemingly threatening its future.

However, despite the bluster, Trump’s warning may be a little more hollow than it seems.

That’s because SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft ferries people and cargo to the International Space Station where three NASA astronauts are currently posted.

It demonstrates that SpaceX has so entrenched itself in the US space and national security apparatus, that Trump’s threat could be difficult to carry out.

You could make a similar argument about Musk’s internet satellite company, Starlink. Finding an alternative could be easier said than done.

But, if there are limits on what Trump can do, the same is also true of Musk.

In the middle of his row with Trump, he threatened to decommission the Dragon – but it wasn’t long before he was rowing back.

Responding to an X user’s suggestion he that he “cool down” he wrote, “Good advice. Ok, we won’t decommission Dragon.”

It’s clear Musk and Trump’s friendship is over. It’s less certain their reliance on each other is.

Whatever the future for Musk’s businesses is then, it seems Trump – and his administration’s actions – will continue to have a big say in them.

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After the full Glastonbury timetable was published this week, one band’s name was on everybody’s lips. Except no-one knows who they actually are.

Patchwork have a prime place on the festival’s line-up – third from the top of the bill on the main Pyramid Stage on the Saturday night. The only thing is, there’s no band called Patchwork.

It’s a fake name for a mystery guest – just as an unknown band called The ChurnUps were on the Pyramid bill in 2023, and turned out to be the Foo Fighters.

Fans immediately went into overdrive to try to work out Patchwork’s identity – part of the frenzied guessing game surrounding the festival’s “surprise” sets.

The main theories include:

• Pulp – The Britpop heroes, who stepped in to headline in 1995 (and did a secret set in 2011), have just released their first album for 24 years and have a gaping hole in their tour schedule around Glastonbury. Plus, eagle-eared fans noticed that keyboardist Candida Doyle talked in a BBC Radio 2 interview this week about her patchwork hobby. Their spokesman has said it’s not them. But is that a bluff?? Likelihood rating: 9/10 but because of the official denial, actually 3/10
• Haim – The singing US sisters also have a new album and have a UK show in Margate on the Friday of Glastonbury weekend – so it would make sense. Plus fans have discovered that Patchwork is the name of an obscure 2011 German novel by author Sylvia Haim (no relation) and an obscure 2015 film about three young women. Conclusive?! 7/10
• Mumford and Sons – The 2013 headliners are also on the comeback trail, but if they’re Patchwork some might think it a bit underwhelming. 6/10

• Oasis – It would be a bit overwhelming if the Gallagher brothers returned to Glastonbury to reunite a week before their first official gig. But they have categorically ruled it out. 0.5/10
• Robbie Williams – He has a new album called Britpop with artwork using a photo him at Glastonbury in 1995. 5/10
• Oasis and Robbie Williams – The name Patchwork could suggest a supergroup, so how about the real reunion we’ve all been waiting for, after they famously partied together in 95? 1/10 that Robbie plays and Liam rocks up to shake a tambourine for one song.

In conclusion: I don’t know.

“Radiohead also are in the mix of rumours because they’ve been teasing some tour action,” suggests music journalist and broadcaster Georgie Rogers, who was a judge for Glastonbury’s emerging talent competition this year and is DJing at the festival.

“Or could Elton John be returning to do something with Brandi Carlile?”

Sir Elton headlined in 2023, and Carlile, his collaborator on his last album, is on the Pyramid Stage bill on the same day as Patchwork.

The Patchwork slot is just one of several tantalising gaps in this year’s schedule.

Another mystery Pyramid performer is listed as “TBA” for Friday afternoon, while the smaller Park and Woodsies stages – which have hosted secret sets by big names in the past – each have an empty space on the line-up.

“They’re quite prominent sets, and they do tend to put in massive artists,” says Rogers.

One group of fans think they know who will fill those gaps.

“Of the four main slots, I think we’ve got three of them, maybe four, nailed down,” says Ad, one of the people behind the Secretglasto social media account.

“I think it’s definitely people who have got relationships with the festival who will be doing the big slots. An emotional return for one or two, I think. Some unfinished business.”

Ad doesn’t say any more, but that could point to Lewis Capaldi, who struggled to finish his set in 2023 before announcing a break from touring to get his “mental and physical health in order”. He made a tentative comeback last month, and would be a popular choice.

Lana Del Rey also has unfinished business – her 2023 set was cut short after she breached the curfew. She’s back on tour in the UK, with free days on the Friday and Sunday of Glastonbury weekend.

Other stars who have been rumoured include Lady Gaga, who hasn’t played Glastonbury since 2009.

Asked earlier this year what it would take for her to return to the festival, she replied: “Not much”. Gaga has already played Coachella and been on tour this year.

Lorde isn’t on the bill either, but told BBC Radio 2’s Jo Whiley this week she’s “pretty keen” to be.

“The album’s gonna be coming out right around that time,” she said. “I am quite tempted by what’s going on because I’ve got lots of friends playing as well. We’ll see if I can pull some strings and get there.”

The Secretglasto team have gathered and posted information about surprise sets for more than a decade, and interest in their tips has gone “a bit crazy” in recent years.

Ad – who doesn’t want to give his full name – says they have built up a network of reliable sources. “We’ve got loads of contacts at different stages and record labels and whatever else. And people trust us to be sensible with the information,” he says.

“And the bands themselves don’t want empty secret sets do they? So we have had occasions where they have come to us.”

The six people who work on the account aren’t music industry insiders themselves. Another team member, JB, says they sometimes approach acts directly to seek confirmation.

“Now that we’ve been around for 10 years and have a decent bit of clout, we will contact some of the artists via their inboxes, and quite often they’re happy to confirm.

“Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they block us. But generally we’re able to piece all that together fairly quickly.”

He adds: “By the time the gates open, there aren’t many things we don’t know.”

In the past couple of years, some acts have begun harnessing the buzz about secret sets for PR purposes for their album or tour, Ad believes.

“It used to just be friends of the festival, whereas now people are like, ‘If we do the secret set we’re going to get loads of hype and media attention’.”

Ad was among the lucky few to see Lady Gaga play an after-hours set in Club Dada following her main appearance as her career was taking off in 2009.

“She did three or four hits and then disappeared,” he recalls.

“Because the phone signal was so bad, you couldn’t ring or text your mate to let them know. So only the people who happened to be there got to experience it, which was a few hundred.

“I’m surprised she hasn’t come back. Yet.”

That was one of the more exclusive secret sets in Glastonbury history. Others draw huge crowds when the word gets out – which it usually does.

Rogers was in the right place when she a rumour swept the site that Radiohead would play in 2011.

“We were over that side of the festival anyway, so on a wing and a prayer, just in case it was true, we dashed over to the Park Stage in good time, and we got pretty close to the stage,” she says.

“There are reports that it was the biggest crowd on the Park Stage for a secret set ever. I’d waited my whole life to see Radiohead live, and then suddenly here we are, and they did this amazing set.

“As my first ever time seeing them, and being in prime position, and it being a genuine surprise – it was just pure glee. I was just so happy, and I couldn’t believe it.”

Secret sets have been a feature of the festival for decades.

In 1992, the line-up poster wasn’t topped by a star name but the promise of “a special guest that we can’t announce”. That turned out to be Welsh pop stallion Tom Jones.

But Glastonbury’s greatest ever secret set didn’t happen at the festival at all.

In 1995, indie gods The Stone Roses pulled out of headlining after guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone.

But by the time organiser Michael Eavis threw his annual low-key autumn gig in the local village to thank residents for putting up with the main event, Squire was back in action.

So the band made an unannounced live comeback after a five-year absence in a marquee on a Somerset playing field to a couple of thousand lucky people.

They still haven’t appeared at the festival itself, however.

Unfinished business? Tick. Emotional return? Tick! Could Patchwork in fact be The Stone Roses making a long-awaited and triumphant appearance?

Who cares if the likelihood rating is -100/10. Add them to the list!

Sir Rod Stewart has cancelled a string of concerts in the US as he recovers from flu, ahead of his Glastonbury legends set later this month.

The 80-year-old rock star is due to play the coveted teatime slot on Sunday, 29 June – 23 years after he last appeared at the Somerset festival.

Sir Rod announced on Instagram he was scrapping four dates and rescheduling another two that were due to take place over the next eight days.

“So sorry my friends,” he said. “I’m devastated and sincerely apologise for any inconvenience to my fans. I’ll be back on stage and will see you soon.”

He signed off “Sir Rod”, along with a heartbreak emoji.

He also listed the four shows he was cancelling – in Las Vegas and Stateline, Nevada – as well as two he plans to reschedule in California.

Sir Rod previously said he intended to stop playing “large-scale world tours” at the end of 2025 and instead perform at more intimate venues.

But he said he was “proud, ready and more than able to pleasure and titillate my friends at Glastonbury” when he became the first act to be confirmed for this year’s festival.

He told That Peter Crouch Podcast he was only due to play for an hour and a quarter on the Pyramid Stage.

“But I’ve asked them ‘Please, another 15 minutes’ because I play for over two hours every night and it’s nothing,” he said.

He also told the podcast he would be performing at Glastonbury with his former Faces bandmate Ronnie Wood.

Sir Rod’s best known solo songs include Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?, Every Beat Of My Heart, and Maggie May.

One of the best-selling artists of all time, he will follow in the footsteps of Dolly Parton, Barry Gibb, Shania Twain and Kylie Minogue by playing the coveted Sunday afternoon slot.

The slot always draws one of the biggest crowds of the festival, and Sir Rod will become the first person to have been given legends billing and to have headlined the festival, following his previous appearance there in 2002 alongside Coldplay and Stereophonics.

The headliners this year at Worthy Farm are The 1975, Neil Young, and Olivia Rodrigo.

In the early 2010s, two ornate chairs said to have once belonged on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles appeared on the French antiques market.

Thought to be the most expensive chairs made for the last queen of France, Marie Antoinette, they were stamped with the seal of Nicolas-Quinibert Foliot, a celebrated – or carpenter – who worked in Paris in the 1700s.

A significant find, the pair were declared “national treasures” by the French government in 2013, at the request of Versailles.

The palace, which displays such items in its vast museum collection, expressed an interest in buying the chairs but the price was deemed too dear.

They were instead sold to Qatari Prince Mohammed bin Hamad Al Thani for an eye-watering €2m (£1.67m).

The chairs made up a remarkable number of 18th-Century royal furniture that had appeared on the antiques market in the past few years.

Other items included another set of chairs purported to have sat in one of Marie Antoinette’s chambers in Versailles; a separate pair said to have belonged to Madame du Barry, King Louis XV’s mistress; the armchair of King Louis XVI’s sister, Princess Élisabeth; and a pair of – or stools – that belonged to the daughter of King Louis XV, Princess Louise Élisabeth.

Most of these were bought by Versailles to display in its museum collection, while one chair was sold to the wealthy Guerrand-Hermès family.

But in 2016, this assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.

The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.

The scandal saw one of France’s leading antiques experts, Georges “Bill” Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.

Galerie Kraemer and its director, Laurent Kraemer, were also accused of deception by gross negligence for selling on some of the chairs – something they both deny.

All three defendants are set to appear at a court in Pontoise, near Paris on Wednesday following a trial in March. Mr Pallot and Mr Desnoues have admitted to their crimes, while Mr Kraemer and his gallery dispute the charge of deception by gross negligence.

Considered the top scholar on French 18th-Century chairs, having written the authoritative book on the subject, Mr Pallot was often called upon by Versailles, among others, to give his expert opinion on whether historical items were the real deal. He was even called as an expert witness in French courts when there were doubts about an item’s authenticity.

His accomplice, Mr Desnoues, was a decorated cabinetmaker and sculptor who had won a number of prestigious awards, including best sculptor in France in 1984, and had been employed as the main restorer of furniture at Versailles.

Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a “joke” with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, belonging to Madame du Barry.

Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.

And buoyed by their success, they started making more.

Describing how they went about constructing the chairs, the two described in court how Mr Pallot sourced wood frames at various auctions for low prices, while Mr Desnoues aged wood at his workshop to make others.

They were then sent for gilding and upholstery, before Mr Desnoues added designs and a wood finish. He added stamps from some of the great furniture-workers of the 18th Century, which were either faked or taken from real furniture of the period.

Once they were finished, Mr Pallot sold them through middlemen to galleries like Kraemer and one he himself worked at, Didier Aaron. They would then get sold onto auction houses such as Sotheby’s of London and Drouot of Paris.

“I was the head and Desnoues was the hands,” Mr Pallot told the court smilingly.

“It went like a breeze,” he added. “Everything was fake but the money.”

Prosecutors allege the two men made an estimated profit of more than €3m off the forged chairs – though Mr Pallot and Mr Desnoues estimated their profits to be a lower amount of €700,000. The income was deposited in foreign bank accounts, prosecutors said.

Lawyers representing Versailles told the BBC that Mr Pallot, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, managed to deceive the institution because of his “privileged access to the documentation and archives of Versailles and the Louvre Museum as part of his academic research”.

A statement from lawyer Corinne Hershkovitch’s team said that thanks to Mr Pallot’s “thorough knowledge” of the inventories of royal furniture recorded as having existed at Versailles in the 18th Century, he was able to determine which items were missing from collections and to then make them with the help of Mr Desnoues.

Mr Desnoues also had access to original chairs he had made copies of, they added, “enabling him to produce fakes that had all the visual appearance of an authentic, up to the inventory numbers and period labels”.

“The fraudulent association between these two professionally accomplished men, recognised by their peers, made it possible to deceive the French institutions that regarded them as partners and to betray their trust, thereby damaging the reputation of Versailles and its curators,” they said.

Prosecutor Pascal Rayer said the trial highlighted the need for more robust regulation of the art market, and also shone a light on the standards antiques dealers should abide by.

The court heard authorities were alerted to the scheme when the lavish lifestyle of a Portuguese man and his partner caught the attention of French authorities.

Questioned by police about the acquisition of properties in France and Portugal worth €1.2m while on an income of about €2,500 a month, the man – who it turned out worked as a handyman in Parisian galleries – confessed to his part in working as a middleman who collaborated in the furniture fraud, AFP news agency reported. The money trail then led investigators to Mr Desnoues and Mr Pallot.

Some of those originally indicted in the case, including middlemen, later had charges against them dropped.

But charges against both Laurent Kraemer and Galerie Kraemer, which sold on some of the forged chairs to collectors such as Versailles and Qatar’s Prince al-Thani, were upheld.

Prosecutors allege that while the gallery itself may have been duped into first buying the fake pieces, Mr Kraemer and the gallery were “grossly negligent” in failing to sufficiently check the items’ authenticity before selling them on to collectors at high prices.

In his closing arguments, prosecutor Mr Rayer said that based on Galerie Kraemer’s “reputation and contacts, they could have taken the furniture to Versailles or the Louvre to compare them.

“They could also have hired other experts given the amounts at stake and considering the opacity on the origin of the chairs.”

Speaking in court, a lawyer representing Mr Kraemer and the gallery insisted his client “is victim of the fraud, not an accomplice”, stating Mr Kraemer never had direct contact with the forgers.

In a statement to the BBC, lawyers Martin Reynaud and Mauricia Courrégé added: “The gallery was not an accomplice of the counterfeiters, the gallery did not know the furniture was fake, and it could not have detected it”.

“Like the Château de Versailles and the specialists who classified the furniture as national treasures, the Kraemer gallery was a victim of the forgers,” they added.

“We are waiting for the judgement to recognise this.”

The BBC has contacted Mr Pallot’s lawyer for comment. The BBC was unable to reach Mr Desnoues or his lawyer.

From the moment I arrived in Praia da Luz on Monday the word on everyone’s lips was “closure”.

All the long-term residents of the sleepy Atlantic resort told me closure was what they were hoping for. From the English woman who lived at the time above the apartment from which Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007, to the former neighbour of the main suspect in the case.

They all said: “We hope her family get closure”.

Of course, any chance of a really positive outcome disappeared years ago. Closure now would mean either finding Madeleine McCann’s body, or finding her living with another family, unable to remember her parents or her younger twin siblings.

But, frustrated as residents are when the world’s media return to Praia da Luz – year after year at the same time that purple flowers appear on the jacaranda trees – they do understand the unbearable pain that Kate and Gerry McCann must feel.

How that shock of realisation that Madeleine was not in her bed turned into minutes, then hours, and then days of panic. Then tortuous, unending months and years of uncertainty.

For 13 years there was no single theory as to what happened to Madeleine McCann. Did she wake up in the middle of an opportunistic burglary and have to be silenced? Was she abducted on behalf of a couple desperate for a child of their own? Had her own parents covered up her accidental death? (A theory given sufficient weight by Portuguese prosecutors that for a while Kate and Gerry McCann were officially under suspicion.)

The initial Portuguese investigation failed to preserve the scene adequately, so the opportunity to gather forensic evidence from Madeline McCann’s room at the Ocean Club was lost. Long-term residents remember joining in uncoordinated and ad-hoc searches of the town.

The Metropolitan Police investigation that began in 2011 built to a peak in 2014, with substantial searches near Praia da Luz – but they did not appear to have any identifiable suspects.

They had 60 people of interest, 38 of whom they were investigating. Portuguese prosecutors had allowed them to search only one of three sites they had asked for access to.

Everything changed in June 2020 when, out of the blue, the head prosecutor in Braunschweig in Germany, Hans Christian Wolters, said he had evidence that Madeleine McCann was dead.

Working with the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German equivalent of the FBI, he said he had identified a suspect, later identified as Christian Brückner.

“The evidence is strong enough to say that the girl is dead, and to accuse a specific individual of murder,” Hans Christian Wolter said.

Brückner, who spent many years of his life in the Algarve, was a drifter, a petty criminal and a convicted sex offender. It all fitted neatly into place and it seemed that the mystery might finally be solved. Brückner’s long list of previous convictions includes ones for sexually abusing children in 1994 and 2016.

The Braunschweig prosecution team have never disclosed the extent of any evidence they have, but we do know their suspicions are partly based on a conversation an old acquaintance of Brückner’s claims they had at a festival in 2008.

Helge Busching says the topic of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance came up, and Brückner said she “didn’t scream”. Mr Busching says it was clear to him what Brückner meant.

Since 2019, Brückner has been in prison in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz in 2005. But he is due for release in September, or in January if he does not pay an outstanding fine.

Brückner told an RTL reporter earlier this year that he was looking forward to a “decent steak and a beer”. The concern is that he will leave the country and head somewhere with no extradition treaty with Germany, though he appears to have no money.

The Braunschweig prosecutors’ confidence was dealt a severe blow last year when they put Brückner on trial for rape and unconnected attempted child abductions.

Mr Busching gave evidence, but the court in Braunschweig acquitted Brückner and suddenly time was very short.

Mr Wolters has made no secret of the fact that he wants more evidence to charge Brückner. That is why the BKA footed the bill for the search this week in ruined farm buildings on merciless, shadeless scrubland in the rising heat of an Algarve summer.

The buildings are frequented at night by the kind of drifters and petty criminals that Brückner once was. Nearby residents told us they sometimes find looted suitcases among the ruins that have been stolen from holidaymakers.

But this week’s searches were not targeted on one specific building, so any intelligence they were based on was clearly quite vague.

It all felt a bit like a last desperate attempt to back Mr Busching’s statements with concrete, physical evidence.

In some ways this search was similar to those I have seen on previous trips. The use of shovels in the heat, digging up stone-hard ground.

But the German team were mostly targeting old farm buildings. This meant they needed a large, yellow mechanical digger to break up the concrete floors and sift through the resulting rubble.

They also made extensive use of a ground-penetrating radar, slowly pushing the device across the buildings’ floors, looking for anomalies and cavities underneath.

The Portuguese fire brigade helped on the first day, pumping out an old well so it could be safely searched. The officers were looking for traces of Madeleine McCann, or some of her clothing.

Every time I travel to Portugal for a new search it always begins optimistically. Could police find something this time? But on every occasion it quickly becomes apparent the searches are not tightly targeted. The police work always clearly based on quite vague intelligence – or just an investigator’s hunch.

Luis Neves, the National Director of the Polícia Judiciária, the Portuguese equivalent of the FBI, said at the end of the week that, “nothing is in vain, not least because doors are being closed”.

As we watched the German detectives packing away it felt like the spring of hope of a resolution that had bubbled up in June 2020 was evaporating in the thankless heat.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has inaugurated the world’s highest single- arch railway bridge in Indian-administered Kashmir. The term “single-arch bridge” typically refers to a bridge with a single, continuous arch spanning between two supports.

The bridge will connect the valley region of Kashmir with the rest of the country by train for the very first time.

The showpiece infrastructure project, which is built over the Chenab river, is 35m (114ft) taller than the Eiffel Tower and took the Indian Railways more the 20 years to build.

It is part of a 272km (169 miles) all-weather railway line that will pass through Jammu, ultimately going all the way to the Kashmir valley.

The Israeli military has admitted to BBC Verify that it conducted a previously unacknowledged strike on the al-Mawasi area of southern Gaza, which reportedly killed at least one Palestinian and injured 30 others.

The strike took place on Sunday – hours after 31 Palestinians were killed in an incident near a new aid distribution centre in the city of Rafah, according to the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency.

While reviewing footage purporting to show the incident near the aid distribution centre, BBC Verify identified a separate strike in the nearby city of Khan Younis.

The blast was not previously announced by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which regularly publishes operational updates online.

It was only when approached by BBC Verify that the IDF admitted it had carried out an artillery strike and said the incident was the result of “technical and operational errors”.

They said troops had fired towards a “target” but the artillery had “deviated” and “wrongfully hit the Mawasi area” – a coastal strip of Khan Younis. The IDF did not provide evidence for these assertions.

The IDF rarely acknowledges such “errors”. A BBC Verify analysis of statements on the IDF’s official Telegram account could only find four previous instances of it admitting to making a “mistake”, “technical” or “operational” error relating to the war in Gaza since it began in October 2023.

The footage we reviewed from the Khan Younis blast first began to emerge late on Sunday evening. It showed bloodied bodies surrounded by dust clouds in an area where Palestinians were living in tents. Women and children could be seen running and screaming as they watched injured people carried away.

The Israeli strike hit an area where a number of displaced Palestinians had been sheltering. The UN has estimated that 90% of the strip’s population of 2.1 million people have been forced to flee their homes.

Ambulances arrived on the scene to collect the injured shortly after the incident. BBC Verify identified a number of the same injured Palestinians in both the footage from the scene and later images from the hospital where they were treated.

One Palestinian was killed and 30 others were injured by the strike, according to the Kuwaiti Field Hospital.

The footage was initially falsely linked to killings near a controversial new aid distribution site in Rafah.

But BBC Verify geolocated the footage to a location in Khan Younis – 4.5km (2.8 miles) away from the distribution site.

The Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said “Israeli gunfire” had killed 31 Palestinians near the aid distribution centre. The Israeli army at first said it did not fire on Palestinians near the site, but a military source later told BBC Verify that troops had fired warning shots.

We used the position of the sun to ascertain that the footage was filmed in the evening, shortly before sunset. A local journalist who filmed footage of the scene also told BBC Verify that the incident occurred around 19:00 local time on Sunday – hours after the killings near the aid site.

The IDF statement did not offer a figure for those killed in the Khan Younis blast and said that “the incident is under review”.

The footage showing the strike has been at the heart of a dispute between the BBC and the White House.

On Monday, BBC Verify reviewed the footage and debunked claims that it was connected to the killings near the distribution centre in Rafah.

Our debunk post was then picked up by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who wrongly claimed that it showed the BBC had retracted its coverage of the aid centre killings.

In a statement, the BBC said her comments were “misleading”, adding that she had been “conflating” the two stories.

“We did not remove any story and we stand by our journalism,” the BBC statement said.

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

At least 54,607 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 4,335 since Israel resumed its offensive on 18 March, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

The mystery of a maritime disaster has been solved after experts found a vessel that sank almost 140 years ago.

Diver and explorer Dom Robinson identified the SS Nantes, off Plymouth, after examining the wreck site and finding crockery.

Dr Harry Bennett, an expert in maritime history, said the dive team had found “the underwater archaeological equivalent of a needle in a haystack”.

Mr Robinson said solving the mystery ensured those who died were not forgotten.

In November 1888, the SS Nantes, which was operated by the Cunard Steamship Company, collided with a German sailing vessel, the Theodor Ruger, said Dr Bennett.

The crew spent “several hours” trying to save their ship, the honorary associate professor in history at the University of Plymouth said.

“They used mattresses to plug the gap which had opened up in the hull of the SS Nantes,” he said.

“[The ship sank] with the loss of a substantial number of the crew. There were some 23-odd fatalities. There were three survivors.”

Bodies from the wreckage washed ashore at Talland Bay and Looe, in Cornwall, and “locals were confronted by this picture of horror, pieces of ship together with bodies,” he said.

Afterwards the “wreck was essentially lost, obviously you’re dealing in a period with no satellite navigation,” said Dr Bennett.

He added while the crew tried to save the ship it “drifted for several hours, before it finally made its way to the bottom, sadly, with many of its crewmen on board”.

He said the wreck was lost until a local dive team identified it in 2024.

Mr Robinson, who has been diving for about 35 years, said he heard about the unidentified wreck from the UK Hydrographic Office.

He said the wreck “was clearly an early steamship when we got down there” but “at the end of my dive I found a broken piece of plate… I decided to bring it up to the surface [and] we found that had the Cunard Steamship crest on it”.

“It was then bingo, we’ve found it,” he said.

Dr Bennett said it was identified by the build and dimensions of the wreck, the technology on board, the cargo and “lastly and most telling, they find a plate on the back of which is stamped Cunard – this is a Cunard ship”.

“[It was] very methodical, very, very dedicated detective work,” he said.

Mr Robinson said: “This was an awful tragedy. One of the things I like to think is by solving mysteries and telling those stories I’m ensuring that those people aren’t forgotten.”

Since the initial find, Mr Robinson said he had dived the wreck again and found a second piece of Cunard crockery, providing “even more confirmation”.

“There are very few mysteries left to explore in this world,” he said.

“As a normal human being like me, going in exploring shipwrecks and identifying shipwrecks, that is just something different to my normal life, and it’s a fantastic feeling.”

Dr Bennett said “all the pieces fit and I think the local dive team are to be congratulated on a splendid piece of detective work which reveals this maritime disaster”.

He said he had looked at the footage and methodology and had confirmed they were right “beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt, this is the SS Nantes”.

XX

They rumble down the highway between Beijing and Tianjin port: big lorries, loaded up and fully able to navigate themselves.

Sure, there is a safety driver in the seat, as per government regulations, but these lorries don’t require them, and many analysts say it won’t take long before they are gone.

When “safety driver” Huo Kangtian, 32, first takes his hands off the wheel, and lets the lorry drive itself, it is somehow impressive and disconcerting in equal measures.

For the initial stages of the journey, he is in full control. Then – at a certain point – he hits a few buttons, and the powerful, heavy machine is driving itself, moving at speed along a public road to Tianjin.

“Of course, I felt a bit scared the first time I drove an autonomous truck,” says Mr Huo. “But, after spending a lot of time observing and testing these machines, I think they are actually pretty good and safe.”

As the lorry veers off the freeway and up a ramp towards the toll gates, the machine is still driving itself. On the other side of the tollgate, Mr Huo again presses a few buttons, and he is back in charge.

“My job as a safety driver is to act as the last line of defence. For example, in the case of an emergency, I would have to take back control of the vehicle immediately to ensure everyone’s safety,” he explains.

In terms of the upsides for a driver, he says that switching to autonomous mode can help combat stress and fatigue, as well as freeing up hands and feet for other tasks. He says it doesn’t make his job boring, but rather more interesting.

When asked if he is worried that this technology may one day render his job obsolete, he says he doesn’t know too much about this.

It’s the diplomatic answer.

Pony AI’s fleet of driverless lorries, currently operating on these test routes, is only the start of what is to come, the company’s vice-president Li Hengyu tells the BBC.

“In the future, with driverless operations, our transportation efficiency will definitely be greatly improved,” he says. “For example, labour costs will be reduced but, more importantly, we can deal better with harsh environments and long hours driving.”

What this all boils down to is saving money, says industry expert Yang Ruigang, a technology professor from Shanghai Jiaotong University, who has extensive experience working on driverless technology in both China and the US.

“Anything that can reduce operating costs is something a company would like to have, so it’s fairly easy to justify the investment in having a fully autonomous, driverless truck,” he tells the BBC.

In short, he says, the goal is simple: “Reduce the driver cost close to zero.”

However, significant hurdles remain before lorries will be allowed to drive themselves on roads around the world – not the least of which is public concern.

In China, self-driving technology suffered a major setback following an accident which killed three university students after their vehicle had been in “auto pilot” mode.

Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Chim Lee says the Chinese public still has quite a way to go before it is won over.

“We know that recent accidents involving passenger cars have caused a huge uproar in China. So, for driverless trucks – even though they tend to be more specific to certain locations for the time being – the public’s image of them is going to be absolutely critical for policy makers, and for the market as well, compared to passenger vehicles.”

Professor Yang agrees that lorry drivers are unlikely to lose their jobs in large numbers just yet.

“We have to discuss the context. Open environment? Probably not. High speed? Definitely no. But, if it is a low-speed situation, like with the last mile delivery trucks, it’s here already.”

In Eastern China’s Anhui Province, hundreds of driverless delivery vans navigate their way through the suburban streets of Hefei – a city with an official population of eight million – as human-driven scooters and cars whizz around them.

It was once one of country’s poorest cities, but these days its government wants it to be known as a place of the future, prepared to give new technology a chance.

Gary Huang, president of autonomous vehicle company, Rino.ai, says they discovered a market niche where driverless delivery vans could send parcels from big distribution hubs run by courier companies to local neighbourhood stations. At that point, scooter drivers take over, dropping off the packages to people’s front doors.

“We’re allowing couriers to stay within community areas to do pickup and drop off while the autonomous vans handle the repetitive, longer-distance trips. This boosts the entire system’s efficiency,” he tells us.

Rino has also been talking to other countries, and the company says the quickest uptake of its vehicles will be in Australia later this year, when a supermarket chain will start using their driverless delivery vehicles.

Meanwhile, in China, they say they’re now running more than 500 vans with road access in over 50 cities.

However, Hefei remains the most advanced.

Apart from Rino, the city has also now given permission for other driverless delivery van companies to operate.

Gary Huang says this is due to a combination of factors.

“Encouragement came from the government, followed by local experimentation, the gaining of experience, the refinement of regulations and eventually allowing a broad implementation.”

And you can see them on the roads, changing lanes, indicating before they turn, pulling up at red lights and avoiding other traffic.

For the courier companies, the numbers tell the story.

According to Rino’s regional director for Anhui Province, Zhang Qichen, deliveries are not only faster, but companies can hire three autonomous electric delivery vans which will run for days without needing a charge for the same cost as one driver.

She says she has been blown away by the pace of change in her industry and adds that she would not be surprised if heavy, long-haul lorries are routinely driving themselves on roads in certain circumstances within five years.

Professor Yang agrees. “Heavy trucks running along a highway unrestricted, at least five years away.”

When asked if it could really happen so soon, he responds: “I’m pretty sure it will happen. In fact, I’m confident that it will happen.”

Industry insiders say that the most immediate applications for driverless lorries – apart from in enclosed industrial zones likes open-cut mines or ports – are probably in remote, harsh terrain with extreme environmental conditions, especially along vast stretches and in a largely straight trajectory.

Significant technical challenges do remain though.

Heavy lorries need better cameras to track well ahead into distance to detect hazards much further down the road, in the same way a person can; more tricky roads may also need to have extra sensors placed along the route; other hurdles could include breakdowns in extreme weather or sudden, unexpected dangers emerging amidst very busy traffic.

On top of all this, the technology – when it comes to heavy lorries – is still not cheap. What’s more, these vehicles are right now modified old style lorries rather than self-driving vehicles straight off the production line.

China wants to be a champion of new tech, but it also has to be careful, not only because of the potential for deadly accidents but also because of how Chinese people might view this shift.

“This is not just about fulfilling regulations. It is not just about building a public image,” says Chim Lee. “But that, over time, the public will see the benefit of this technology, see how it will reduce their costs for buying things, or look at it as a way of imagining that society is improving, rather than viewing this as technology which is potentially destroying, causing car accidents or removing employment opportunities.”

Professor Yang sees another problem. “We humans can tolerate another human driver making mistakes but our tolerance for autonomous trucks is much much lower. Machines are not supposed to make mistakes. So, we have to make sure that the system is extremely reliable.”

The Prince of Wales will travel to the South of France this weekend to call for more to be done to protect the world’s oceans.

In what his team describes as a “landmark speech” in Monaco on Sunday – World Oceans Day – he will address environmentalists and, crucially, investors, to urge them to work together to protect our oceans

Prince William will attend the Blue Economy and Finance Forum as founder of the Earthshot environmental prize which looks for solutions to the world’s climate challenges.

The forum is the curtain-raiser to the UN Oceans Conference in Nice next week.

“The Prince of Wales feels passionately about action being taken to protect and restore our oceans,” a Kensington Palace spokesperson told the BBC. “Tomorrow, he’s going to be calling for swift, immediate global action. The time is now.”

Rising temperatures, pollution and overfishing are causing huge damage to the world’s oceans and the communities that rely on them.

Events this weekend will look at the role oceans play in global trade, food security and sustainable energy.

The meeting will be held at the Grimaldi Forum, an eye-catching steel and glass venue, named after Monaco’s own royal family.

Prince Albert II of Monaco is a supporter of many oceans projects and is a key player at the forum.

“This event will be more than a forum. It will provide an unique opportunity to bring together decision makers, finance professionals, philanthropists, NGOs and players from the private sector to turn ambition into action,” he says.

Last month, Sir David Attenborough’s new film, Oceans, was released in cinemas.

It gave his lifelong perspective on the value of oceans.

“After living for nearly 100 years on this planet,” he says “I now understand that the most important place on earth is not on land but at sea and today we are living in the greatest age of ocean discovery.”

The film places the oceans as being at a crossroads, needing more action to help them continue as the “planet’s support system”.

Prince William shares that view.

He has made his admiration for Sir David, who was an inspiration for the creation of the Earthshot Prize, clear.

Sir David’s storytelling around the environment is a powerful asset in getting public attention and buy in – something the prince is acutely aware of.

The visit to France is an insight into how Prince William sees his role in the environmental space and part of his development as a global statesman.

Also attending the forum in Monaco will be France’s President Emmanuel Macron and President Rodrigo Roblez of Costa Rica.

Why Monaco?

Because, over the coming days, gathered in this wealthy, tax haven, amid the super yachts and holidaying multi-millionaires, is some serious cash and investors willing to spend it on protecting marine life and the oceans they live in.

The prince’s speech and meetings will largely be in public on Sunday.

But he will also hold a closed, private session with experts and the investor community.

It’s a pragmatic approach to using his royal soft power to draw in people who have the resources to help generate change.

Throughout his life, the King has used his platform to bring the conversation about the environment into the mainstream.

His son is now building on that, in his own way, to try to show that environmental solutions are worth the investment.

And the oceans can be a difficult sell.

The sheer scale of the work that needs to be done can make it less attractive to investors.

“I have a job that should not exist” is how Sam Teicher, the co-founder and chief reef officer of CoralVita often begins his pitches.

His business was the first winner of the million-pound Earthshot prize in 2021 for solutions to repair and protect oceans.

CoralVita grows corals to restore dying reefs.

Of this year’s Earthshot nominations, only 9% have entered the “Revive Our Oceans” category.

“We are land creatures, it is out of sight and out of mind for a lot of people,” says Sam Teicher.

He will be in Monaco this weekend and describes his approach to raising money for his business as “trying to harness capitalism for good”, stressing that “you need to be genuine and maintain integrity, you don’t want to blue wash or green wash”.

And that strategy is working.

The BBC has learnt that CoralVita has just won funding of about £6m ($8.1m) with investors led by Builders Vision – a philanthropic organisation created by Lukas Walton, whose grandparents founded the Walmart chain in the United States.

It is one of the biggest funding offers for oceans work and will mean CoralVita can scale up and accelerate its restoration projects to help preserve the ocean’s biodiversity.

The investment power of Builders Vision will now also support the Earthshot Prize in a newly announced partnership. It again highlights the impact Prince William can have in linking up environmental solutions with investors.

The Prince William factor has been a huge benefit to CoralVita as it works to scale up its business.

“He helps getting in front of people who would normally not think it was investible or that it mattered,” says Mr Teicher.

“We need to expand out to bankers, government leaders, tech specialists. He gets more people around the table.”

And ultimately this is an event where money matters.

For Mr Teicher the target is always the right type of investor.

“We aren’t looking for people wanting a traditional five to seven year return,” he says. “This is a long-haul problem. We need people in it for the long haul.”

An Australian woman accused of intentionally cooking a fatal mushroom lunch has told her trial she had wanted the beef Wellington meal to be “special”.

Erin Patterson has pleaded not guilty to murdering three people and attempting to kill another at her home in regional Victoria in July 2023.

The 50-year-old says it was a tragic accident, and that she never intended to hurt family members she loved. But prosecutors argue Ms Patterson put poisonous fungi into their food in a carefully crafted plot to kill them.

On Friday, the court heard it was “unusual” for Ms Patterson to host such an event at her house, and she was quizzed about her relationships with her guests.

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. Simon Patterson, the accused’s estranged spouse, had been invited too, but pulled out the day before.

More than 50 prosecution witnesses have given evidence at the trial, which began six weeks ago, but Ms Patterson became the first for the defence when she took to the stand on Monday.

On her second day of cross-examination on Friday, Ms Patterson told the court she accepted that invites to her house were rare, but said she’d arranged the occasion to discuss a health issue and wanted to make a nice meal for her relatives to thank them for their support.

“I wanted it to be special,” Ms Patterson said.

She has previously admitted she misled her guests into believing she may need cancer treatment, telling the jury she did so as a cover for weight-loss surgery she was planning to have but was too embarrassed to disclose.

Prosecutor Nanette Rogers, however, put to her that there was no health issue to discuss, and that she had invited Simon and his relatives over to kill them. She had even prepared a spare toxic meal in case Mr Patterson changed his mind and came over, Dr Rogers suggested.

Over and over this week, Ms Patterson has denied these allegations, often becoming emotional as she told the court she loved the lunch guests like her own family.

She has also repeatedly told the court that she realised, in the days after the lunch, that the beef Wellington may have accidentally included dried mushrooms she had foraged, which were kept in a container with store-bought ones.

Lies to the police and health authorities about the source of the mushrooms and her decision to dispose of a food dehydrator were both because she was scared of being blamed for the guests’ dire illnesses, she said.

“Surely if you had loved them, then you would have immediately notified the medical authorities?” Dr Rogers asked.

Ms Patterson said she didn’t tell doctors about the possibility that wild mushrooms had been unintentionally included because the lunch guests were already getting treatment for death cap mushroom poisoning.

“Even after you were discharged from hospital you did not tell a single person that there may have been foraged mushroom used in the meal,” Dr Rogers said.

“Instead you got up, you drove your children to school… and drove home. And then you got rid of the dehydrator.”

“Correct,” Ms Patterson said.

The court heard there’d been conflict between Ms Patterson and her husband, and Dr Rogers suggested the accused was still angry at her in-laws for taking their son’s side.

“You had two faces,” Dr Rogers said, after making Ms Patterson read aloud messages in which she is critical of both Simon Patterson and his parents.

There was her “public face” of appearing to have a good relationship with Don and Gail, Dr Rogers said, and a “private face” which she showed in the messages.

“How you truly felt about Don and Gail was how you expressed it [there],” she said.

“And that is how you really felt about Simon Patterson… you did not regard him as being a decent human being at his core, correct or incorrect?”

That was “incorrect”, Ms Patterson replied, her head shaking and voice faltering.

Ms Patterson’s use of the iNaturalist website – which listed locations of death cap mushrooms in areas close to her home – was also scrutinised, with the accused repeatedly saying she couldn’t clearly recall ever using the site.

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

Ghana’s former finance minister Ken Ofori-Atta has been placed on Interpol’s red notice list for allegedly using public office for personal gain.

This comes after Ghanaian prosecutors declared him a wanted person as well as a fugitive from justice, as he was outside the country, over his alleged involvement in several corruption cases when he was in government.

A red notice is not an arrest warrant but a request to police worldwide to detain someone pending extradition.

Ofori-Atta, who is said to be out of the country for medical reasons, has not commented on the allegations, but he has said he has been unlawfully treated.

The AFP news agency is quoting Frank Davies, on Ofori-Atta’s legal team, criticising the prosecutor’s approach.

“We submitted medical records in good faith, and the office has chosen to ignore them,” Mr Davies told AFP.

“The special prosecutor is not being sensitive to the issues at hand, especially knowing that Mr Ofori-Atta is unwell and receiving treatment.”

The 65-year-old has been accused of causing financial losses to the state.

The allegations include questions over procurement procedures in the building of a controversial national cathedral, which remains a hole in the ground despite the alleged spending of $58m (£46.6m) of government money.

Ofori-Atta’s lawyers had offered to represent him but the state prosecutor said they could not respond to criminal charges on behalf of their client.

• Reporter who sued MP and won $18m hopeful he will pocket the money

In February, Ofori-Atta appealed to the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) to remove his name from the wanted list and provided a definite return date in May.

State prosecutor Kissi Agyabeng accepted Ofori-Atta’s assurance and subsequently took his name off the wanted list.

But in March Ofori-Atta filed a lawsuit, claiming unlawful treatment and requesting removal of related content from the OSP’s social media platforms.

Early this month, Ofori-Atta was re-declared a wanted person and a fugitive from justice after failing to appear before an investigative panel.

Agyebeng subsequently formally initiated the Red Notice request, seeking international help in tracking down the former official, local media reported.

“We want him here physically, and we insist on it. A suspect in a criminal investigation does not pick and choose how the investigative body conducts its investigations,” Agyebeng said.

In the Red Notice released on late Thursday, Interpol said Ofori-Atta is wanted on charges of “using public office for profit”.

He was finance minister from January 2017 to February 2024, when the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was in power.

The NPP lost last December’s elections to the National Democratic Congress.

President John Mahama, who was inaugurated in January, went on to establish an investigative committee known as Operation Recover All Loot.

The committee has received over 200 complaints of corruption, amounting to more than $20bn in recoverable funds.

Mahama has directed the attorney general and minister of justice to launch investigations into these allegations, stating that Ghana will no longer be a safe haven for corruption.

However, some Ghanaians have criticised him for discontinuing cases against his former allies on trial.

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Police are still looking for a Washington man they believe murdered his three young daughters one week ago.

Travis Decker, 32, is wanted on kidnapping and first-degree murder charges for killing his daughters, aged nine, eight and five, according to the Wenatchee Police Department in Washington state.

Officials believe Mr Decker, who they say is an outdoorsman and may have gone to mountain survival school as part of his military training, is hiding in a remote part of the mountainous and wooded state, making the search for him difficult.

He has been said to “pose a significant risk, if approached”. Police have not provided a possible motive.

The girls – Paityn, Evelyn and Olivia – died from apparent suffocation in a remote campground earlier this week, according to police.

Their mother reported them missing on 30 May, after Mr Decker failed to return his daughters to her following a visit. He also did not take her phone calls.

A few days later, on 2 June, police found the girls’ bodies near the campground.

Police also found Mr Decker’s cell phone at the campground, but he was no longer there. His truck, which he was believed to have been living in, was also found nearby.

“I don’t think any motive would be acceptable. And clearly it’s not the decision of a sound mind,” Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison said at a press conference on Wednesday, where he made a public plea to Mr Decker to turn himself in.

Mr Decker’s outdoor survival skills may be helping him evade the authorities searching for him, which includes the FBI, Sheriff Morrison said.

“It sounds like at times he would go out and would be off-grid for sometimes up to two and a half months,” Sheriff Morrison said after speaking to Mr Decker’s family.

Mr Decker may have scoped out the area and hidden supplies there before allegedly killing his children, and he has “the knowledge to survive for a long period of time”, the sheriff added.

“We want a peaceful resolution to this, but we’re not going to relinquish our efforts,” Sheriff Morrison said while asking Mr Decker to come forward. “Let’s wrap this up and do what’s right for your kids.”

The US Marshals Service on Wednesday announced a $20,000 (£14,780) reward for information leading to Mr Decker’s capture.

The search has caused widespread closures of national forests popular among hikers in the area.

Beyoncé signed off the first night of her London residency by telling fans she was “blessed” to get to do what she loves by performing on stage.

She stormed through a seven-act set at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, treating the audience to a spectacle that lasted just shy of three hours.

But despite this being the first opportunity for fans to enjoy the singer’s country era in person, slow ticket sales and high prices have been the hot topic around the tour.

Promoters slashed some ticket prices in the run-up to shows in a bid to fill the stadium, prompting some of those who bought seats in advance to feel short-changed.

Beyoncé’s rodeo rumbled into London, bringing with it every country cliché you could think of – cowboy hats, horseshoes, tassels and even a gold mechanical bull.

The 40-song setlist relied heavily on tracks from 2024’s Cowboy Carter, which was met with critical acclaim, including taking the top album prize at this year’s Grammy Awards.

Every element of the performance was flawless, from the 43-year-old superstar’s stunning array of costume changes (each one featuring more rhinestones than the last) to the seamless transitions between songs and musical themes.

Much of the talk around the US leg of this tour, which took place in April and May, was the inclusion of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s 13-year-old daughter Blue Ivy.

She made several appearances throughout the show, earning thunderous applause whilst dancing to an instrumental performance of her mum’s 2006 hit Deja Vu.

The teenager certainly seemed to enjoy her moment in the spotlight, unlike her younger sister, Rumi, who came on stage during Protector, shyly mouthing the words whilst being held by Beyoncé.

The show, which is called The Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour as a way of referencing black performers that were segregated from the country scene, often paid homage in its interludes to these artists.

Beyoncé herself previously hinted about being rejected from the country music world in the past and throughout the performance it felt like she was wrestling with this idea.

She blended some of her biggest hits into Cowboy Carter tracks, such as Freedom and Diva, almost to prove that she belonged in this space.

Thursday night’s performance certainly showed she is more than qualified to be a country singer, but perhaps that a 60,000 seater stadium is not the best arena for it.

As the night drew darker, Beyoncé delivered an act comprised of tracks from her house-inspired album Renaissance, which immediately lifted the crowd into a party mood.

LED wristbands lit up in array of colours as she belted out Alien Superstar and I’m That Girl – which certainly got the best reaction from fans of the night.

Similarly a section of old classics such as Crazy In Love and Irreplaceable had the crowd singing every word, proving perhaps that a few more classics wouldn’t have gone amiss.

With crowds on their feet, it was difficult to see how sold out the stadium actually was, but with just hours to go until the show there were still thousands of tickets available for sale online.

Despite the tour only stopping in two European cities – London and Paris – the remaining eight dates are not sold out.

Beyoncé’s tour has the highest top-priced ticket of any artist visiting the UK in 2025 at £950, with the cheapest costing £71.

Some seats that were sold in the Beyhive fan presale for £620 excluding fees are next to seats that were available this week for £141.60, also without fees.

Zulkarnain Sadali flew from Singapore to London to watch Beyoncé perform live and bought a ticket in the pre-sale, which he said cost him “more than £700”.

“A couple of weeks ago I checked my ticket and then curiosity got the best of me and I checked the same ticket, or same category, and the price was around £300,” he told the BBC.

“I’m really excited for [the show] but I will say the dynamic pricing really left a sour taste in my mouth.”

Another fan, Holly Whiteman, said she “panic bought” Beyoncé tickets in a fan pre-sale on Ticketmaster, which were “way up in the nosebleeds” and cost £170 each, when she had initially set a budget of £100.

“Fast forward a few days later, the tickets went on general sale through Tottenham Hotspur and I found tickets for the same show in both the same row and the same section for a much cheaper price,” she told the BBC.

“I believe they were at least £50-£70 cheaper per ticket.”

Sadali said that despite feeling short-changed, it had not dented his excitement for the tour.

“It’s really about the Beyoncé experience, you’re not gonna get it anywhere else and I know this sounds like a contradiction, it’s worth every cent,” he said.

Whiteman said the process had left her a bit “disappointed”, but she was still looking forward to the tour.

A Ticketmaster spokesperson told the BBC they do “not use surge pricing or dynamic algorithms to adjust ticket prices”, adding that event organisers are responsible for the pricing structures.

“Since tickets typically go on sale at least 3-6 months before the event, organisers may review prices at key points leading up to the show, but they make any adjustments, not an algorithm,” they also added.

The BBC also contacted tour promoter Live Nation for comment.

Ticketing expert Reg Walker put the lack of sold-out shows down to several factors, including “overexposure” after her last UK stadium tour, which played five nights at the same venue in 2023.

And the ticket prices are “eye-watering”, he told the BBC.

“You might be able to afford to go to one of her concerts where you’re effectively paying, in some categories, the same amount of money as a small holiday, but you can’t do that on consecutive years.

“The pricing strategy on tickets was clearly far too high,” he added.

Walker said there were a lot of “affordably priced” tours coming up – but with so many artists visiting the UK this summer, fans may be picking and choosing who they pay to go and see.

Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, Dua Lipa, Kendrick Lamar and SZA are all embarking on stadium tours over the coming months, with Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Chapell Roan and Drake headlining festivals.

Police in India have arrested at least four people in connection with the fatal crowd crush that took place in the southern city of Bengaluru earlier this week.

On Wednesday, 11 people were killed when tens of thousands gathered outside a cricket stadium to celebrate the cricket league Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s (RCB) historic Indian Premier League (IPL) victory.

Those arrested include personnel of RCB and the event management company which organised the celebrations.

Five senior police officers, including the city’s police chief, have been suspended for “negligence and irresponsibility” by the government.

A police official told BBC Hindi that more arrests are expected as the investigation continues.

According to police, the people arrested were responsible for posting about the victory parade – from the state legislature building to the Chinnaswamy Stadium – on RCB’s social media handles and website.

On Thursday, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said that a police complaint had been filed and legal action taken against the franchise, the event management company, and the Karnataka State Cricket Association.

More than 200,000 people reportedly turned up for the parade, although police had anticipated only half that number. The stadium, where the celebrations were held, has a capacity of 32,000 and was overwhelmed long before the team arrived.

The Karnataka High Court has also ordered a status report on the incident.

Separately, India cricket coach Gautam Gambhir has criticised the decision to host the victory parade and said his “heart goes out” to those affected.

“If we are not ready to hold a road show we should not have done that,” former India batter and IPL-winning captain Gambhir said.

On Thursday, RCB said they would give 1,000,000 rupees (£9,000) to the families of those killed.

“We need to be responsible. We need to be responsible citizens and responsible in every aspect, because every life matters…You cannot at any point in time lose 11 people. We can be more responsible,” Gambhir added.

On the surface, Muhammed Asif Hafeez was an upstanding individual.

A global businessman and ambassador of a prestigious London polo club, he rubbed shoulders with the British elite, including members of the Royal Family.

He also regularly passed on detailed information to the authorities in the UK and Middle East that, in some cases, led to the interception of huge shipments of drugs. He was motivated, he said, simply by what he saw as his “moral obligation to curb and highlight criminal activities”.

At least, that is what he would have had people think.

In reality, Hafeez was himself what US officials described as “one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers”.

From his residence in the UK, he was the puppet-master of a vast drugs empire, supplying many tonnes of heroin, methamphetamine and hashish from bases in Pakistan and India that were distributed across the world. The gangs he informed on were his rivals – and his motivation was to rid the market of his competitors.

His status in the underworld earned him the moniker “the Sultan”.

But this criminal power and prestige would not last forever. After a complex joint operation between the British and American authorities, Hafeez, 66, was extradited from the UK in 2023. He pleaded guilty last November.

On Friday, he was sentenced to 16 years in a New York prison for conspiring to import drugs – including enough heroin for “millions of doses” – into the US. Having been in custody since 2017, Hafeez’s sentence will end in 2033.

The BBC has closely followed Hafeez’s case. We have pieced together information from court documents, corporate listings and interviews with people who knew him.

We wanted to find out how he managed to stay under the radar for so long – and how he eventually got caught.

Hafeez was born in September 1958 to a middle-class family in Lahore, Pakistan. One of six children, his upbringing was comfortable. People in Lahore who knew the family told the BBC that his father had owned a factory near the city. Hafeez also later told a US court that he had trained as a commercial pilot.

From the early 1990s to about the mid-2010s, he ran an outwardly legitimate umbrella company called Sarwani International Corporation, with subsidiary businesses in Pakistan, the UAE and the UK.

According to its website – which has since been shut down – it sold technical equipment to militaries, governments and police forces throughout the world, including equipment for drug detection.

Among the other businesses under the Sarwani umbrella were a textiles company registered in various countries, an Italian restaurant in Lahore that was a franchise of a well-known Knightsbridge brand, and a company named Tipmoor, based near Windsor to the west of London, which specialised in “polo and equestrian services”.

These businesses not only afforded him a luxury lifestyle, but secured him access to the UK’s most exclusive circles. He was listed as an international ambassador for the prestigious Ham Polo Club for at least three years, from 2009 to 2011. He and his wife Shahina were also photographed chatting to Prince William, and embracing Prince Harry, at the club in 2009.

Ham Polo Club told the BBC that Hafeez had never been a member of the club, that the club no longer has “ambassadors”, and that the current board “has no ties to him”. It added that the event at which Hafeez and his wife were photographed meeting the princes “was run by a third party”.

Sarwani’s different global arms were dissolved at various stages in the 2010s, according to their listings on Companies House and equivalent global registries.

A former Sarwani employee based in the UAE told the BBC he suspected there had been “something fishy going on” when he worked for the business, because even big projects were “only paid for in cash”. The employee – who has asked not to be identified, for fear of reprisals – said he eventually left the business because he felt uncomfortable with this.

“There were no [bank] transactions, no records, no existence,” he told the BBC.

Hafeez would also periodically write letters to the authorities in the UAE and UK informing on rival cartels, under the guise of being a concerned member of the public.

The BBC has seen these, as well as letters he received in response from the British Embassy in Dubai and the UK Home Office, thanking him and expressing their appreciation for him getting in touch.

The Home Office told the BBC it does not comment on individual correspondence.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Government of Dubai were contacted by the BBC for comment but did not respond.

Members of Hafeez’s family shared these letters with the BBC in 2018, while he was embroiled in a lengthy legal fight against extradition to the US.

They also submitted them to courts in the UK and, later, to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), as evidence that he had been an informant and needed protection. All the courts disagreed and ruled that this was a ploy by Hafeez to rid the market of competitors.

Hafeez, the ECHR said, was “someone who had brought to the attention of the authorities the criminal conduct of others who he knew to be actual or potential rivals to his substantial criminal enterprise”.

While Hafeez was writing these letters, a meeting took place in 2014 that – despite him not being there – would lead to his downfall.

Two of Hafeez’s close associates met a potential buyer from Colombia in a flat in Mombasa, Kenya. They burned a small amount of heroin in order to demonstrate how pure it was, and said they could supply him with any quantity of “100%… white crystal”.

The supplier of this high-quality heroin, they had told the buyer, was a man from Pakistan known as “the Sultan” – that is, Hafeez.

What they would soon learn was that the “buyer” from Colombia was actually working undercover for the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The entire meeting was part of an elaborate sting operation, and had been covertly filmed – footage that has been obtained by the BBC.

US court documents reveal the deal was co-ordinated by Baktash and Ibrahim Akasha, two brothers who led a violent cartel in Kenya. Their father was himself a feared kingpin who had been killed in Amsterdam’s Red Light District in 2000.

The deal also involved Vijaygiri “Vicky” Goswami, an Indian national who managed the Akashas’ operations.

In October 2014, with the Akashas, Goswami and Hafeez still unaware of who the buyers really were, 99kg of heroin and 2kg of crystal meth were delivered to the fake Colombian traffickers. The Akashas promised to provide hundreds of kilograms more of each drug.

A month later, the Akasha brothers and Goswami were arrested in Mombasa. They were released on bail shortly afterwards, and spent over two years fighting extradition to the US.

In the background, American law enforcers were working with counterparts in the UK to piece together their case against Hafeez, partly using evidence gathered from devices they had seized when they arrested Goswami and the Akasha brothers. On those, they had found multiple references to Hafeez as a major supplier, and were able to find enough evidence to identify him as “the Sultan”.

Facing charges in the US didn’t stop one of the men, Goswami, from continuing his illegal enterprise. In 2015, while on bail in Kenya, he hatched a plan with Hafeez to transport several tonnes of a drug called ephedrine from a chemical factory in Solapur, India, to Mozambique.

Ephedrine, a powerful medication that is legal in limited quantities, is used to make methamphetamine. The two men – Goswami and Hafeez – planned to set up a meth factory in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, US court documents show. But their scheme was abandoned in 2016, when police raided the Solapur plant and seized 18 tonnes of ephedrine.

The Akasha brothers and Goswami finally boarded a flight to the US to face trial in January 2017.

Hafeez was arrested eight months later in London, at his flat in the affluent St John’s Wood neighbourhood. He was detained at high security Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, and it was from there that he spent six years fighting extradition to the US.

A big development happened in 2019 in the US. Goswami pleaded guilty, and told a New York court he had agreed to co-operate with prosecutors. The Akasha brothers also pleaded guilty.

Baktash Akasha was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His brother Ibrahim was sentenced to 23 years.

Goswami, who is yet to be sentenced, would have testified against Hafeez in the US had the case gone to trial.

From Belmarsh, Hafeez was running out of options.

He tried to stop extradition to the US – but failed to convince magistrates, the High Court in London and the ECHR that he had, in fact, been an informant to the authorities who was “at risk of ill-treatment from his fellow prisoners” as a result.

He also claimed the conditions in a US prison would be “inhuman and degrading” for him because of his health conditions, including type 2 diabetes and asthma.

He lost all of these arguments at every stage and was extradited in May 2023.

His case did not go to trial. In November last year, Hafeez pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to manufacture and distribute heroin, methamphetamine and hashish and to import them into the US.

Pre-sentencing, prosecutors described the “extremely fortunate circumstances” of Hafeez’s life, which “throw into harsh relief his decision to scheme… and to profit from the distribution of dangerous substances that destroy lives and whole communities”.

“Unlike many traffickers whose drug activities are borne, at least in part, from desperation, poverty, and a lack of educational opportunities,” they said, “the defendant has lived a life replete with privilege and choice.”

A 12-year-old boy fell to his death at Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher after slipping in a puddle close to the edge, an inquest has heard.

Zhihan Zhao and his mother, both Chinese nationals, were with her friends at the beauty spot on the County Clare coast on 23 July last year when he walked ahead of the group.

The coroner embraced Zhihan’s distraught mother after recording a verdict of accidental death.

The accident was the second fatal fall at the Cliffs of Moher within a three-month period last year.

Zhihan and his mother, Xianhong Huang, had arrived in Ireland 12 days before his fatal fall.

In her deposition, Ms Huang said that Zhihan was walking ahead of her on the Cliffs of Moher trail when she lost sight of him.

“My son walked very fast and was ahead of us by 50 metres,” she said.

“As there was only one path, I thought we would meet him along the way.

“When I didn’t, I walked to the visitor centre and I checked the visitor centre.”

Unable to find him at the visitor centre, she returned to the path to search for him and when there was no sign of him, she reported him missing.

Ms Huang said she had last seen Zhihan at 13:00 that day and the court heard she had provided gardaí (Irish police) with a photo of him she had taken earlier on the trail.

Speaking through an interpreter at the inquest in Kilrush, County Clare, Ms Huang, wiping away tears, asked: “What exactly caused Zhihan to fall from the cliffs?”

Clare County Coroner Isobel O’Dea told the grieving mother that the evidence of an eyewitness would help answer that question.

A French tourist who witnessed him fall told Clare Coroner’s Court she had seen him slip and try to pull himself up by grasping at grass, before he disappeared over the edge.

French tourist Marion Tourgon told the inquest she had witnessed the fall at about 13:45 that day.

Ms Tourgon explained she had been at the edge of the cliffs with her husband and two children, taking a selfie at the time.

She describing seeing a young Asian boy, who was alone, come into view.

“I saw him slipping in the puddle that appears in the photo that my husband sent to the police,” the witness said.

“His right foot slipped into the puddle, with him trying to stop himself from falling with his left foot but his left foot ended up in the air.”

Ms Tourgon added: “It was very quick – he found himself in an awkward position with his left foot in a void over the cliff and his right knee on the edge of the cliff.”

She continued: “His right knee eventually fell into the void over the cliff and he was trying to grasp the grass with his hands to pull himself up.

“He didn’t shout and there was no noise.”

The Tourgon family then phoned the emergency services.

An air, land and sea search operation began involving the Irish Coast Guard, gardaí and Irish civil defence volunteers who used boats, drones, divers and a helicopter.

A police witness, Garda Colm Collins, told the inquest he had received a call at 14:00 that day after a male was seen falling off the edge of the Cliffs of Moher.

He said that the Irish Coast Guard had spotted a body floating in the water at the base of the cliffs.

The court heard a lifeboat had been launched but had not been able to access the site where the body was spotted because of the sea conditions.

It was another five days before Zhihan’s body was eventually recovered from the sea.

The boy was found by a fisherman, Matthew O’Halloran, from Corofin, County Clare.

He spotted a body face down with arms extended in the water between Doolin and the Aran Islands shortly after 10:00 on 28 July.

Mr O’Halloran alerted the Irish Coast Guard and its members retrieved Zhihan’s body and brought it ashore at Doolin.

The coroner said post-mortem results had confirmed that Zhihan died from multiple traumatic injuries consistent with a fall from a height.

“It is clear from evidence we heard that Zhihan slipped off the cliffs rather than any other way. His death would have been very quick – instantaneous.”

Addressing the boy’s mother, she said: “I can’t imagine how upsetting this is for you.”

Ms O’Dea also extended her sympathies to Zhihan’s father who was not present at the inquest.

She embraced Ms Huang as she left the coroner’s court.

In May 2024, a student in her 20s lost her footing on the cliffs while walking with friends and fell to her death.

Since August last year, large sections of the Cliffs of Moher trail have been closed due to safety concerns.

At the time, the Clare Local Development Company confirmed that it was taking the action following the two fatal accidents.

After the full Glastonbury timetable was published this week, one band’s name was on everybody’s lips. Except no-one knows who they actually are.

Patchwork have a prime place on the festival’s line-up – third from the top of the bill on the main Pyramid Stage on the Saturday night. The only thing is, there’s no band called Patchwork.

It’s a fake name for a mystery guest – just as an unknown band called The ChurnUps were on the Pyramid bill in 2023, and turned out to be the Foo Fighters.

Fans immediately went into overdrive to try to work out Patchwork’s identity – part of the frenzied guessing game surrounding the festival’s “surprise” sets.

The main theories include:

• Pulp – The Britpop heroes, who stepped in to headline in 1995 (and did a secret set in 2011), have just released their first album for 24 years and have a gaping hole in their tour schedule around Glastonbury. Plus, eagle-eared fans noticed that keyboardist Candida Doyle talked in a BBC Radio 2 interview this week about her patchwork hobby. Their spokesman has said it’s not them. But is that a bluff?? Likelihood rating: 9/10 but because of the official denial, actually 3/10
• Haim – The singing US sisters also have a new album and have a UK show in Margate on the Friday of Glastonbury weekend – so it would make sense. Plus fans have discovered that Patchwork is the name of an obscure 2011 German novel by author Sylvia Haim (no relation) and an obscure 2015 film about three young women. Conclusive?! 7/10
• Mumford and Sons – The 2013 headliners are also on the comeback trail, but if they’re Patchwork some might think it a bit underwhelming. 6/10

• Oasis – It would be a bit overwhelming if the Gallagher brothers returned to Glastonbury to reunite a week before their first official gig. But they have categorically ruled it out. 0.5/10
• Robbie Williams – He has a new album called Britpop with artwork using a photo him at Glastonbury in 1995. 5/10
• Oasis and Robbie Williams – The name Patchwork could suggest a supergroup, so how about the real reunion we’ve all been waiting for, after they famously partied together in 95? 1/10 that Robbie plays and Liam rocks up to shake a tambourine for one song.

In conclusion: I don’t know.

“Radiohead also are in the mix of rumours because they’ve been teasing some tour action,” suggests music journalist and broadcaster Georgie Rogers, who was a judge for Glastonbury’s emerging talent competition this year and is DJing at the festival.

“Or could Elton John be returning to do something with Brandi Carlile?”

Sir Elton headlined in 2023, and Carlile, his collaborator on his last album, is on the Pyramid Stage bill on the same day as Patchwork.

The Patchwork slot is just one of several tantalising gaps in this year’s schedule.

Another mystery Pyramid performer is listed as “TBA” for Friday afternoon, while the smaller Park and Woodsies stages – which have hosted secret sets by big names in the past – each have an empty space on the line-up.

“They’re quite prominent sets, and they do tend to put in massive artists,” says Rogers.

One group of fans think they know who will fill those gaps.

“Of the four main slots, I think we’ve got three of them, maybe four, nailed down,” says Ad, one of the people behind the Secretglasto social media account.

“I think it’s definitely people who have got relationships with the festival who will be doing the big slots. An emotional return for one or two, I think. Some unfinished business.”

Ad doesn’t say any more, but that could point to Lewis Capaldi, who struggled to finish his set in 2023 before announcing a break from touring to get his “mental and physical health in order”. He made a tentative comeback last month, and would be a popular choice.

Lana Del Rey also has unfinished business – her 2023 set was cut short after she breached the curfew. She’s back on tour in the UK, with free days on the Friday and Sunday of Glastonbury weekend.

Other stars who have been rumoured include Lady Gaga, who hasn’t played Glastonbury since 2009.

Asked earlier this year what it would take for her to return to the festival, she replied: “Not much”. Gaga has already played Coachella and been on tour this year.

Lorde isn’t on the bill either, but told BBC Radio 2’s Jo Whiley this week she’s “pretty keen” to be.

“The album’s gonna be coming out right around that time,” she said. “I am quite tempted by what’s going on because I’ve got lots of friends playing as well. We’ll see if I can pull some strings and get there.”

The Secretglasto team have gathered and posted information about surprise sets for more than a decade, and interest in their tips has gone “a bit crazy” in recent years.

Ad – who doesn’t want to give his full name – says they have built up a network of reliable sources. “We’ve got loads of contacts at different stages and record labels and whatever else. And people trust us to be sensible with the information,” he says.

“And the bands themselves don’t want empty secret sets do they? So we have had occasions where they have come to us.”

The six people who work on the account aren’t music industry insiders themselves. Another team member, JB, says they sometimes approach acts directly to seek confirmation.

“Now that we’ve been around for 10 years and have a decent bit of clout, we will contact some of the artists via their inboxes, and quite often they’re happy to confirm.

“Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they block us. But generally we’re able to piece all that together fairly quickly.”

He adds: “By the time the gates open, there aren’t many things we don’t know.”

In the past couple of years, some acts have begun harnessing the buzz about secret sets for PR purposes for their album or tour, Ad believes.

“It used to just be friends of the festival, whereas now people are like, ‘If we do the secret set we’re going to get loads of hype and media attention’.”

Ad was among the lucky few to see Lady Gaga play an after-hours set in Club Dada following her main appearance as her career was taking off in 2009.

“She did three or four hits and then disappeared,” he recalls.

“Because the phone signal was so bad, you couldn’t ring or text your mate to let them know. So only the people who happened to be there got to experience it, which was a few hundred.

“I’m surprised she hasn’t come back. Yet.”

That was one of the more exclusive secret sets in Glastonbury history. Others draw huge crowds when the word gets out – which it usually does.

Rogers was in the right place when she a rumour swept the site that Radiohead would play in 2011.

“We were over that side of the festival anyway, so on a wing and a prayer, just in case it was true, we dashed over to the Park Stage in good time, and we got pretty close to the stage,” she says.

“There are reports that it was the biggest crowd on the Park Stage for a secret set ever. I’d waited my whole life to see Radiohead live, and then suddenly here we are, and they did this amazing set.

“As my first ever time seeing them, and being in prime position, and it being a genuine surprise – it was just pure glee. I was just so happy, and I couldn’t believe it.”

Secret sets have been a feature of the festival for decades.

In 1992, the line-up poster wasn’t topped by a star name but the promise of “a special guest that we can’t announce”. That turned out to be Welsh pop stallion Tom Jones.

But Glastonbury’s greatest ever secret set didn’t happen at the festival at all.

In 1995, indie gods The Stone Roses pulled out of headlining after guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone.

But by the time organiser Michael Eavis threw his annual low-key autumn gig in the local village to thank residents for putting up with the main event, Squire was back in action.

So the band made an unannounced live comeback after a five-year absence in a marquee on a Somerset playing field to a couple of thousand lucky people.

They still haven’t appeared at the festival itself, however.

Unfinished business? Tick. Emotional return? Tick! Could Patchwork in fact be The Stone Roses making a long-awaited and triumphant appearance?

Who cares if the likelihood rating is -100/10. Add them to the list!

A British backpacker has been found dead in Malaysia, the Foreign Office has confirmed.

Jordan Johnson-Doyle, 25, from Southport, was last seen in Kuala Lumpur on the evening of 27 May, his mother Leanne Burnett said.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was assisting the family of a British man who died in Malaysia and was in contact with local authorities.

In a social media appeal for assistance in the search for her son, Ms Burnett said Mr Johnson-Doyle’s family had been working with Malaysian police to try and find him.

Police in Kuala Lumpur reportedly found a body at a construction site in Bangsar on Wednesday, according to Malaysian media.

Ms Burnett previously told the BBC she had flown out to Malaysia earlier this week to try and help in the search.

Merseyside Police said it was aware that a body had now been found after it received a report on 30 May that Mr Johnson-Doyle had gone missing in Malaysia.

A spokesperson said: “We are in contact with the family of Jordan Johnson-Doyle and supporting them whilst enquiries continue.

“On behalf of the family we would ask their privacy is respected at this time.”

Matthew’s dad had brown eyes and black hair. His grandparents had piercing blue eyes.

There was a running joke in his family that “dad looked nothing like his parents”, the teacher from southern England says.

It turned out there was a very good reason for this.

Matthew’s father had been swapped at birth in hospital nearly 80 years ago. He died late last year before learning the truth of his family history.

Matthew – not his real name – contacted the BBC after we reported on the case of Susan, who received compensation from an NHS trust after a home DNA test revealed she had been accidentally switched for another baby in the 1950s.

BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.

During the pandemic, Matthew started looking for answers to niggling questions about his family history. He sent off a saliva sample in the post to be analysed.

The genealogy company entered his record into its vast online database, allowing him to view other users whose DNA closely matched his own.

“Half of the names I’d just never heard of,” he says. “I thought, ‘That’s weird’, and called my wife to tell her the old family joke might be true after all.”

Matthew then asked his dad to submit his own DNA sample, which confirmed he was even more closely related to the same group of mysterious family members.

Matthew started exchanging messages with two women who the site suggested were his father’s cousins. All were confused about how they could possibly be related.

Working together, they eventually tracked down birth records from 1946, months after the end of World War Two.

The documents showed that one day after his father was apparently born, another baby boy had been registered at the same hospital in east London.

That boy had the same relatively unusual surname that appeared on the mystery branch of the family tree, a link later confirmed by birth certificates obtained by Matthew.

It was a lightbulb moment.

“I realised straight away what must have happened,” he says. “The only explanation that made sense was that both babies got muddled up in hospital.”

Matthew and the two women managed to construct a brand new family tree based on all of his DNA matches.

“I love a puzzle and I love understanding the past,” he says. “I’m quite obsessive anyway, so I got into trying to reverse engineer what had happened.”

Before World War Two, most babies in the UK were born at home, or in nursing homes, attended by midwives and the family doctor.

That started to change as the country prepared for the launch of the NHS in 1948, and very gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.

“The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife,” says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.

“It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well.”

It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.

To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby’s name, mother’s name, the date and time of birth, and the baby’s weight.

“Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen”, says Ms Coates, who trained as a nurse herself in the 1970s and a midwife in 1981.

“If there were two or more members of staff in the nursery feeding babies, for example, a baby could easily be put down in the wrong cot.”

By 1956, hospital births were becoming more common, and midwifery textbooks were recommending that a “wrist name-tape” or “string of lettered china beads” should be attached directly to the newborn.

A decade later, by the mid-1960s, it was rare for babies to be removed from the delivery room without being individually labelled.

Stories of babies being accidentally switched in hospital were very rare at the time, though more are now coming to light thanks to the boom in genetic testing and ancestry websites.

The day after Jan Daly was born at a hospital in north London in 1951, her mother immediately complained that the baby she had been given was not hers.

“She was really stressed and crying, but the nurses assured her she was wrong and the doctor was called in to try to calm her,” Jan says.

The staff only backed down when her mum told them she’d had a fast, unassisted delivery, and pointed out the clear forceps marks on the baby’s head

“I feel for the other mother who had been happily feeding me for two days and then had to give up one baby for another,” she says.

“There was never any apology, it was just ‘one of those silly errors’, but the trauma affected my mother for a long time.”

Matthew’s father, an insurance agent from the Home Counties, was a keen amateur cyclist who spent his life following the local racing scene.

He lived alone in retirement and over the last decade his health had been deteriorating.

Matthew thought long and hard about telling him the truth about his family history but, in the end, decided against it.

“I just felt my dad doesn’t need this,” he says. “He had lived 78 years in a type of ignorance, so it didn’t feel right to share it with him.”

Matthew’s father died last year without ever knowing he’d been celebrating his birthday a day early for the past eight decades.

Since then, Matthew has driven to the West Country to meet his dad’s genetic first cousin and her daughter for coffee.

They all got on well, he says, sharing old photos and “filling in missing bits of family history”.

But Matthew has decided not to contact the man his father must have been swapped with as a baby, or his children – in part because they have not taken DNA tests themselves.

“If you do a test by sending your saliva off, then there’s an implicit understanding that you might find something that’s a bit of a surprise,” Matthew says.

“Whereas with people who haven’t, I’m still not sure if it’s the right thing to reach out to them – I just don’t think it’s right to drop that bombshell.”

When Elon Musk recently announced that he was stepping back from politics, investors hoped that would mean he would step up his involvement in the many tech firms he runs.

His explosive row with President Donald Trump – and the very public airing of his dirty White House laundry – suggests Musk’s changing priorities might not quite be the salve they had been hoping for.

Instead of Musk retreating somewhat from the public eye and focusing on boosting the fortunes of Tesla and his other enterprises, he now finds himself being threatened with a boycott from one of his main customers – Trump’s federal government.

Tesla shares were sent into freefall on Thursday – falling 14% – as he sounded off about President Donald Trump on social media.

They rebounded a little on Friday following some indications tempers were cooling.

Even so, for the investors and analysts who, for months, had made clear they wanted Musk off his phone and back at work, the situation is far from ideal.

Some though argue the problems for Musk’s businesses run much deeper than this spat – and the controversial role in the Trump administration it has brought a spectacular end to.

For veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, that is especially so for Tesla.

“Tesla’s finished,” she told the BBC on the sidelines of the San Francisco Media Summit early this week.

“It was a great car company. They could compete in the autonomous taxi space but they’re way behind.”

Tesla has long attempted to play catch-up against rival Waymo, owned by Google-parent Alphabet, whose driverless taxis have traversed the streets of San Francisco for years – and now operate in several more cities.

This month, Musk is supposed to be overseeing Tesla’s launch of a batch of autonomous robo-taxis in Austin, Texas.

He posted to X last week that the electric vehicle maker had been testing the Model Y with no drivers on board.

“I believe 90% of the future value of Tesla is going to be autonomous and robotics,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told the BBC this week, adding that the Austin launch would be “a watershed moment”.

“The first task at hand is ensuring the autonomous vision gets off to a phenomenal start,” Ives added.

• Who is Elon Musk?
• How the Trump-Musk feud erupted

But with Musk’s attention divided, the project’s odds of success would appear to have lengthened.

And there’s something else to factor in too: Musk’s own motivation.

The talk in Silicon Valley lately centres less on whether Musk can turn things around and more on whether he even cares.

“He’s a really powerful person when he’s focused on something,” said Ross Gerber, President and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management.

“Before, it was about proving to the world that he would make EVs – the tech that nobody else could do. It was about proving he could make rockets. He had a lot to prove.”

A longtime Tesla investor, Gerber has soured on the stock, and has been pairing back his holdings since Musk’s foray into right-wing politics. He called Thursday an “extremely painful day.”

“It’s the dumbest thing you could possibly do to think that you have more power than the president of the United States,” Gerber said, referring to Musk’s social media tirade against Trump.

The BBC reached out to X, Tesla, and SpaceX seeking comment from Mr Musk but did not receive a response.

A particular problem for Musk is that, before he seemingly created an enemy in Donald Trump, he already had one in the grassroots social media campaign against his car-maker.

Protests, dubbed #TeslaTakedown, have played out across the country every weekend since Trump took office.

In April, Tesla reported a 20% drop in car sales for the first three months of the year. Profits plunged more than 70%, and the share price went down with it.

“He should not be deciding the fate of our democracy by disassembling our government piece by piece. It’s not right,” protestor Linda Koistinen told me at a demonstration outside a Berkeley, California Tesla dealership in February.

Koistinen said she wanted to make a “visible stand” against Musk personally.

“Ultimately it’s not about the tech or the Tesla corporation,” said Joan Donovan, a prominent disinformation researcher who co-organized the #TeslaTakedown protests on social media.

“It’s about the way in which the stock of Tesla has been able to be weaponized against the people and it has put Musk in such a position to have an incredible amount of power with no transparency,” Donovan added.

Another aspect of Musk’s empire that has raised the ire of his detractors is X, the social media platform once known as Twitter.

“He bought Twitter so that he had clout and would be able to – at the drop of a hat – reach hundreds of millions of people,” Donovan said.

There is another possibility here though.

Could Musk’s high-profile falling out with Trump help rehabilitate him in the eyes of people who turned against him because of his previous closeness to the president?

Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, thinks it could.

“We’re a very forgiving country,” Moorhead says in a telephone interview.

“These things take time,” he acknowledges, but “it’s not unprecedented”.

Swisher likened Musk’s personal brand to that of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates more than two decades ago.

She said Gates was once regarded as “the Darth Vader of Silicon Valley” because of his “arrogant and rude” personality.

Today, despite his flaws, Gates has largely rehabilitated his image.

“He learned. He grew up. People can change,” Swisher told me, even though Musk is “clearly troubled.”

The problem for Musk is the future for him and his companies is not just about what he does – but what Trump decides too.

And while Trump needed Musk in the past, not least to help fund his presidential race, it’s not so clear he does now.

Noah Smith, writer of the Noahpinion Substack, said Trump’s highly lucrative foray into cryptocurrencies – as unseemly as it has been – may have freed him from depending on Musk to carry out his will.

“My guess is that this was so he could get out from under Elon,” Smith said.

In Trump’s most menacing comment of the day, he suggested cutting Musk’s government contracts, which have an estimated value of $38 billion.

A significant chunk of that goes to Musk’s rocket company SpaceX – seemingly threatening its future.

However, despite the bluster, Trump’s warning may be a little more hollow than it seems.

That’s because SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft ferries people and cargo to the International Space Station where three NASA astronauts are currently posted.

It demonstrates that SpaceX has so entrenched itself in the US space and national security apparatus, that Trump’s threat could be difficult to carry out.

You could make a similar argument about Musk’s internet satellite company, Starlink. Finding an alternative could be easier said than done.

But, if there are limits on what Trump can do, the same is also true of Musk.

In the middle of his row with Trump, he threatened to decommission the Dragon – but it wasn’t long before he was rowing back.

Responding to an X user’s suggestion he that he “cool down” he wrote, “Good advice. Ok, we won’t decommission Dragon.”

It’s clear Musk and Trump’s friendship is over. It’s less certain their reliance on each other is.

Whatever the future for Musk’s businesses is then, it seems Trump – and his administration’s actions – will continue to have a big say in them.

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Kilmar Ábrego García, a 29-year-old from El Salvador mistakenly deported in March, has been returned to the US to face prosecution on two federal criminal charges.

He has been accused of participating in a trafficking conspiracy over several years to move undocumented migrants from Texas to other parts of the country.

El Salvador agreed to release Mr Ábrego García after the US presented it with an arrest warrant, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday. His lawyer called the charges “preposterous”.

The White House had been resisting a US Supreme Court order from April to “facilitate” his return after he was sent to a jail in El Salvador alongside more than 250 other deportees.

In a two-count grand jury indictment, filed in a Tennessee court last month and unsealed on Friday, Mr Ábrego García was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and a second count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.

Bondi said the grand jury had found that Mr Ábrego García had played a “significant role” in an alien smuggling ring, bringing in thousands of illegal immigrants to the US.

The allegations, which date back to 2016, allege he transported undocumented individuals between Texas and Maryland and other states more than 100 times.

The indictment additionally alleges he transported members of MS-13, designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US.

The Trump administration had previously alleged Mr Ábrego García was a member of the transnational Salvadorian gang, which he has denied.

Bondi also accused Mr Ábrego García of trafficking weapons and narcotics into the US for the gang, though he was not charged with any related offences.

He appeared in court for an initial hearing on Friday in Nashville, Tennessee. An arraignment hearing is scheduled 13 June, where US Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes will determine if there are grounds to keep him detained ahead of his trial.

For now, Mr Ábrego García remains in federal custody.

Mr Ábrego García’s lawyers have previously argued that he has never been convicted of any criminal offence, including gang membership, in the US or in El Salvador.

Simon Sandoval Moshenberg, one of his attorneys, called the charges “preposterous” and the events an “abuse of power” at a Friday news conference.

“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,” Mr Moshenberg said. “Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him.”

He added: “This is an abuse of power, not justice. The government should give him a full and fair trial in front of the same immigration judge who heard the case in 2019.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, President Donald Trump called Mr Ábrego García a “bad guy” and said the Department of Justice had made the right decision to return him to US soil to face trial.

Mr Ábrego García entered the US illegally as a teenager from El Salvador. In 2019, he was arrested with three other men in Maryland and detained by federal immigration authorities.

But an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation on the grounds that he might be at risk of persecution from local gangs in his home country

• What is the 1798 law that Trump used to deport migrants?
• What we know about Kilmar Abrego Garcia and MS-13 allegations

On 15 March, he was deported amid an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law that allows presidents to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy country.

Mr Ábrego García was taken to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador, known for its brutal conditions.

While government lawyers initially said he was taken there as a result of “administrative error”, the Trump administration refused to order his return.

Whether or not the government had to “facilitate” his return to his home in the US state of Maryland became the subject of a weeks-long legal and political battle.

After Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen demanded to see Mr Ábrego García in El Salvador, he was released to a different prison in that country.

On Friday, Van Hollen reiterated that “this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all”.

“The administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”

El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a close ally of Trump, said on social media on Friday that if the administration “request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse”.

Mr Ábrego García is expected to make an initial appearance at a Tennessee court on Friday, where US will request he be held in pretrial custody “because he poses a danger to the community and a serious risk of flight”, according to the detention motion.

As the annual Hajj pilgrimage draws to a close, a long-settled corner of Mecca is stirring up a storm thousands of miles away in India – not for its spiritual significance, but for a 50-year-old inheritance dispute.

At the heart of the controversy is Keyi Rubath, a 19th-Century guest house built in the 1870s by Mayankutty Keyi, a wealthy Indian merchant from Malabar (modern-day Kerala), whose trading empire stretched from Mumbai to Paris.

Located near Islam’s holiest site, Masjid al-Haram, the building was demolished in 1971 to make way for Mecca’s expansion. Saudi authorities deposited 1.4 million riyals (about $373,000 today) in the kingdom’s treasury as compensation, but said no rightful heir could be identified at the time.

Decades later, that sum – still held in Saudi Arabia’s treasury – has sparked a bitter tussle between two sprawling branches of the Keyi family, each trying to prove its lineage and claim what they see as their rightful inheritance.

Neither side has succeeded so far. For decades, successive Indian governments – both at the Centre and in Kerala – have tried and failed to resolve the deadlock.

It remains unclear if Saudi authorities are even willing to release the compensation, let alone adjust it for inflation as some family members now demand – with some claiming it could be worth over $1bn today.

Followers of the case note the property was a waqf – an Islamic charitable endowment – meaning descendants can manage but not own it.

The Saudi department that handles Awqaf (endowed properties) did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment, and the government has made no public statement on the matter.

That hasn’t stopped speculation – about both the money and who it rightfully belongs to.

Little is known about the guest house itself, but descendants claim it stood just steps from the Masjid al-Haram, with 22 rooms and several halls spread over 1.5 acres.

According to family lore, Keyi shipped wood from Malabar to build it and appointed a Malabari manager to run it – an ambitious gesture, though not unusual for the time.

Saudi Arabia was a relatively poor country back then – the discovery of its massive oil fields still a few decades away.

The Hajj pilgrimage and the city’s importance in Islam meant that Indian Muslims often donated money or built infrastructure for Indian pilgrims there.

In his 2014 book, Mecca: The Sacred City, historian Ziauddin Sardar notes that during the second half of the 18th Century, the city had acquired a distinctively Indian character with its economy and financial well-being dependent on Indian Muslims.

“Almost 20% of the city’s inhabitants, the largest single majority, were now of Indian origins – people from Gujarat, Punjab, Kashmir and Deccan, all collectively known locally as the Hindis,” Sardar wrote.

As Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth surged in the 20th century, sweeping development projects reshaped Mecca. Keyi Rubath was demolished three times, the final time in the early 1970s.

That’s when the confusion around compensation appears to have started.

According to BM Jamal, former secretary of India’s Central Waqf Council, the Indian consulate in Jeddah wrote to the government back then, seeking details of Mayankutty Keyi’s legal heir.

“In my understanding, authorities were looking for the descendants to appoint a manager for the property, not to distribute the compensation money,” Mr Jamal said.

Nonetheless, two factions stepped forward: the Keyis – Mayankutty’s paternal family – and the Arakkals, a royal family from Kerala into which he had married.

Both families traditionally followed a matrilineal inheritance system – a custom not recognized under Saudi law, adding further complexity.

The Keyis claim that Mayankutty died childless, making his sister’s children his rightful heirs under matrilineal tradition.

But the Arakkals claim he had a son and a daughter, and therefore, under Indian law, his children would be the legal inheritors.

As the dispute dragged on, the story took on a life of its own. In 2011, after rumours swirled that the compensation could be worth millions, more than 2,500 people flooded a district office in Kannur, claiming to be Keyi’s descendants.

“There were people who claimed that their forefathers had taught Mayankutty in his childhood. Others claimed that their forefathers had provided timber for the guest house,” a senior Keyi family member, who wanted to stay anonymous, told the BBC.

Scams followed. State officials say in 2017 fraudsters posing as Keyi descendants duped locals into handing over money, promising a share of the compensation.

Today, the case remains unresolved.

Some descendants propose the best way to end the dispute would be to ask the Saudi government to use the compensation money to build another guest house for Hajj pilgrims, as Myankutti Keyi had intended.

But others reject this, arguing that the guest house was privately owned, and so any compensation rightfully belongs to the family.

Some argue that even if the family proves lineage to Mayankutty Keyi, without ownership documents, they’re unlikely to gain anything.

For Muhammed Shihad, a Kannur resident who has co-authored a book on the history of the Keyi and Arakkal families, though, the dispute is not just about the money – but about honouring the family’s roots.

“If they don’t get the compensation, it would be worth openly recognising the family’s and the region’s connection to this noble act.”

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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They rumble down the highway between Beijing and Tianjin port: big lorries, loaded up and fully able to navigate themselves.

Sure, there is a safety driver in the seat, as per government regulations, but these lorries don’t require them, and many analysts say it won’t take long before they are gone.

When “safety driver” Huo Kangtian, 32, first takes his hands off the wheel, and lets the lorry drive itself, it is somehow impressive and disconcerting in equal measures.

For the initial stages of the journey, he is in full control. Then – at a certain point – he hits a few buttons, and the powerful, heavy machine is driving itself, moving at speed along a public road to Tianjin.

“Of course, I felt a bit scared the first time I drove an autonomous truck,” says Mr Huo. “But, after spending a lot of time observing and testing these machines, I think they are actually pretty good and safe.”

As the lorry veers off the freeway and up a ramp towards the toll gates, the machine is still driving itself. On the other side of the tollgate, Mr Huo again presses a few buttons, and he is back in charge.

“My job as a safety driver is to act as the last line of defence. For example, in the case of an emergency, I would have to take back control of the vehicle immediately to ensure everyone’s safety,” he explains.

In terms of the upsides for a driver, he says that switching to autonomous mode can help combat stress and fatigue, as well as freeing up hands and feet for other tasks. He says it doesn’t make his job boring, but rather more interesting.

When asked if he is worried that this technology may one day render his job obsolete, he says he doesn’t know too much about this.

It’s the diplomatic answer.

Pony AI’s fleet of driverless lorries, currently operating on these test routes, is only the start of what is to come, the company’s vice-president Li Hengyu tells the BBC.

“In the future, with driverless operations, our transportation efficiency will definitely be greatly improved,” he says. “For example, labour costs will be reduced but, more importantly, we can deal better with harsh environments and long hours driving.”

What this all boils down to is saving money, says industry expert Yang Ruigang, a technology professor from Shanghai Jiaotong University, who has extensive experience working on driverless technology in both China and the US.

“Anything that can reduce operating costs is something a company would like to have, so it’s fairly easy to justify the investment in having a fully autonomous, driverless truck,” he tells the BBC.

In short, he says, the goal is simple: “Reduce the driver cost close to zero.”

However, significant hurdles remain before lorries will be allowed to drive themselves on roads around the world – not the least of which is public concern.

In China, self-driving technology suffered a major setback following an accident which killed three university students after their vehicle had been in “auto pilot” mode.

Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Chim Lee says the Chinese public still has quite a way to go before it is won over.

“We know that recent accidents involving passenger cars have caused a huge uproar in China. So, for driverless trucks – even though they tend to be more specific to certain locations for the time being – the public’s image of them is going to be absolutely critical for policy makers, and for the market as well, compared to passenger vehicles.”

Professor Yang agrees that lorry drivers are unlikely to lose their jobs in large numbers just yet.

“We have to discuss the context. Open environment? Probably not. High speed? Definitely no. But, if it is a low-speed situation, like with the last mile delivery trucks, it’s here already.”

In Eastern China’s Anhui Province, hundreds of driverless delivery vans navigate their way through the suburban streets of Hefei – a city with an official population of eight million – as human-driven scooters and cars whizz around them.

It was once one of country’s poorest cities, but these days its government wants it to be known as a place of the future, prepared to give new technology a chance.

Gary Huang, president of autonomous vehicle company, Rino.ai, says they discovered a market niche where driverless delivery vans could send parcels from big distribution hubs run by courier companies to local neighbourhood stations. At that point, scooter drivers take over, dropping off the packages to people’s front doors.

“We’re allowing couriers to stay within community areas to do pickup and drop off while the autonomous vans handle the repetitive, longer-distance trips. This boosts the entire system’s efficiency,” he tells us.

Rino has also been talking to other countries, and the company says the quickest uptake of its vehicles will be in Australia later this year, when a supermarket chain will start using their driverless delivery vehicles.

Meanwhile, in China, they say they’re now running more than 500 vans with road access in over 50 cities.

However, Hefei remains the most advanced.

Apart from Rino, the city has also now given permission for other driverless delivery van companies to operate.

Gary Huang says this is due to a combination of factors.

“Encouragement came from the government, followed by local experimentation, the gaining of experience, the refinement of regulations and eventually allowing a broad implementation.”

And you can see them on the roads, changing lanes, indicating before they turn, pulling up at red lights and avoiding other traffic.

For the courier companies, the numbers tell the story.

According to Rino’s regional director for Anhui Province, Zhang Qichen, deliveries are not only faster, but companies can hire three autonomous electric delivery vans which will run for days without needing a charge for the same cost as one driver.

She says she has been blown away by the pace of change in her industry and adds that she would not be surprised if heavy, long-haul lorries are routinely driving themselves on roads in certain circumstances within five years.

Professor Yang agrees. “Heavy trucks running along a highway unrestricted, at least five years away.”

When asked if it could really happen so soon, he responds: “I’m pretty sure it will happen. In fact, I’m confident that it will happen.”

Industry insiders say that the most immediate applications for driverless lorries – apart from in enclosed industrial zones likes open-cut mines or ports – are probably in remote, harsh terrain with extreme environmental conditions, especially along vast stretches and in a largely straight trajectory.

Significant technical challenges do remain though.

Heavy lorries need better cameras to track well ahead into distance to detect hazards much further down the road, in the same way a person can; more tricky roads may also need to have extra sensors placed along the route; other hurdles could include breakdowns in extreme weather or sudden, unexpected dangers emerging amidst very busy traffic.

On top of all this, the technology – when it comes to heavy lorries – is still not cheap. What’s more, these vehicles are right now modified old style lorries rather than self-driving vehicles straight off the production line.

China wants to be a champion of new tech, but it also has to be careful, not only because of the potential for deadly accidents but also because of how Chinese people might view this shift.

“This is not just about fulfilling regulations. It is not just about building a public image,” says Chim Lee. “But that, over time, the public will see the benefit of this technology, see how it will reduce their costs for buying things, or look at it as a way of imagining that society is improving, rather than viewing this as technology which is potentially destroying, causing car accidents or removing employment opportunities.”

Professor Yang sees another problem. “We humans can tolerate another human driver making mistakes but our tolerance for autonomous trucks is much much lower. Machines are not supposed to make mistakes. So, we have to make sure that the system is extremely reliable.”