Six Palestinians have been killed and several others wounded by Israeli gunfire in the latest deadly incident close to an aid distribution centre in southern Gaza, the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency says.

People had gathered to collect food supplies on Saturday morning when the shooting started, a spokesman for the agency said. Reports quoting an eyewitness said the Israelis opened fire when people tried to advance towards the site.

The Israeli military said it fired warning shots at suspects who approached them in a threatening manner.

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed and hundreds injured trying to get to the distribution centre this week.

The US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) which runs the centre says it has paused its operations to deal with overcrowding and improve safety.

But people have gathered nearly every day at a roundabout on the edge of an Israeli military zone, through which they have to pass to reach the aid site.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had told Gazans the area was an active combat zone during nighttime hours.

GHF said it had not been able to distribute food on Saturday because of direct threats from Hamas – something the group has denied.

Whatever the case, the new incident will almost certainly strengthen international criticism of the new distribution model.

The United Nations insists it puts Palestinians in danger and does not provide enough food and medicine to deal with Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal said at least 15 people had also been killed by Israeli air strikes on a residential home in Gaza city, with reports that some of the casualties remained trapped in the rubble.

The Israeli army said the strikes had eliminated the head of a Palestinian militant group known as the Mujahideen Brigades.

The Israelis have accused the group of killing and kidnapping some of the victims of the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October, including a Thai national named Nattapong Pinta.

His body was recovered in the Rafah area of southern Gaza in a special operation on Friday.

Israel recently began to allow limited aid into Gaza after a three-month blockade, prioritising distribution through the GHF.

But the foundation has been mired in controversy.

Medics and local health authorities reported more than 60 Palestinians were killed by gunfire over three days shortly after it started operating.

Multiple witnesses blamed Israeli soldiers for the killings.

The Israeli military said it had fired warning shots on the first two days and shot near Palestinian suspects advancing towards their positions on the third, adding that it is investigating the incidents.

The distribution centre is one of four operated in Gaza by the GHF.

It is part of a new aid system – widely condemned by humanitarian groups – aimed at circumventing the UN which Israel has accused of failing to prevent Hamas from diverting supplies to its fighters.

The UN has denied these allegations, stating that it can account for all the aid it hands out and that the GHF’s system is unworkable and unethical.

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

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

Russian has launched a massive drone attack on Ukraine’s second-largest city, the mayor of Kharkiv has said, killing at least three and injuring a further 40.

Ihor Terekhov said that overnight Russia launched 48 drones, two missiles and four gliding bombs in an attack he described as “open terror”.

It comes after a massive wave of drones and missiles struck across Ukraine on Thursday night. Moscow said the strikes were in response to “terrorist attacks by the Kyiv regime”, following Ukraine’s surprise raids on Russian air bases last Sunday.

Meanwhile, Russian and Ukrainian officials released conflicting accounts about when a prisoner swap agreed at earlier talks will take place.

Some 18 apartment buildings and 13 other homes in Kharkiv were hit overnight during Friday’s attack, the city’s mayor said. A baby and a 14 year-old girl were among the injured, he added.

One civilian industrial facility was attacked by 40 drones, one missile and four bombs, Kharkiv governor Oleh Syniehubov said, adding that there may still be people buried under the rubble.

Two people were also killed in Russian strikes on Kherson, in southern Ukraine, local authorities said.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha urged allies to increase pressure on Moscow and to take “more steps to strengthen Ukraine” in response to Russia’s latest attacks.

Six people were killed and 80 injured across Ukraine the previous night, when Russia attacked the country with more than 400 drones and nearly 40 missiles.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes on Kharkiv make “no military sense” and were “pure terrorism”.

He said his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin was “buying himself time to keep waging the war”, and that “pressure must be applied” to stop the attacks.

During the latest round of direct talks in Istanbul earlier this week, the two warring sides agreed to exchange all sick and heavily wounded prisoners of war, those aged under 25, as well as the bodies of 12,000 soldiers.

Moscow’s chief negotiator at the meeting, Vladimir Medinsky, claimed on Saturday that Ukraine had “unexpectedly postponed both the acceptance of bodies and the exchange of prisoners of war for an indefinite period”.

He further claimed that the bodies of more than one thousand slain Ukrainian soldiers had been taken to an agreed exchange point but that Ukrainian officials never arrived.

A list of 640 prisoners of war had also been handed to Ukraine “in order to begin the exchange”, Medinsky wrote on social media.

Ukrainian officials responded angrily to the allegations, telling Russia to “stop playing dirty games”.

• Russia and Ukraine fail again to agree ceasefire but commit to prisoner swap

• Ukraine’s audacious drone attack sends critical message to Russia – and the West

A statement from Ukraine’s Coordination for PoWs office said that the comments “do not correspond to reality or to previous agreements”.

The Coordination HQ said both sides had been working on preparations for the exchange over the past week and alleged that Russia was not sticking to the agreed parameters of the swap.

It added that Ukraine had submitted its PoW lists according to the “clearly defined categories” of the deal, but that Russia had submitted “alternative lists that do not correspond to the agreed-upon approach”.

While an agreement on the repatriation of bodies had been reached, a date had not been set, Ukraine said, with Russia taking “unilateral steps that had not been coordinated”.

The barrages over the past two nights came after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted Russian strategic warplanes at four air bases deep inside Russia.

Ukraine’s security service SBU said at least 40 Russian aircraft were struck during the so-called “Operation Spider’s Web” last Sunday.

Ukraine says it used 117 drones that were first smuggled into Russia, then placed inside wooden cabins mounted on the back of lorries and concealed below remotely operated detachable roofs.

The lorries were then apparently driven to locations near the Russian air bases by drivers who were seemingly unaware of their cargo. The drones were then launched remotely.

On Saturday, Ukraine released more footage from that attack – showing a single drone’s entire flight.

US President Donald Trump said on Friday that the Ukrainians had given Putin “a reason to go in and bomb the hell out of them last night”.

He earlier said that during a phone call, Putin had told him “very strongly” that Moscow would “have to respond” following Ukraine’s airfield attacks.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It currently controls around 20% of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean peninsula it annexed in 2014.

Peace talks between the two sides have so far failed to secure a ceasefire, and both sides remain deeply divided on how to end the war, with Ukraine pushing for an “unconditional ceasefire” as a first step, something Russia has repeatedly rejected.

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.

Across Washington, large rainbow flags are flying next to the stars and stripes as the city plays host to World Pride, a global celebration of LGBTQ culture and identity.

But getting the world to come has proved challenging this year. Some international travellers are choosing to skip the biennial event over travel fears, while others are protesting President Donald Trump’s policies.

Alice Siregar, a Montreal-based data analyst who is transgender, had planned to attend. But travelling to the US at the moment was unthinkable, she told the BBC.

“It is a risk to now come over and especially as a trans woman,” she said.

The US capital won the bid to host World Pride years before Trump’s re-election. In January, the event’s organisers had projected the celebration, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of Washington’s first Pride march, would attract three million visitors and contribute nearly $800 million to the local economy.

But their expectations have now dropped to about a third of their previous estimates. Hotel occupancy rates are also down compared to last year.

Ms Siregar, 30, holds both Canadian and US citizenship but says she has been unable to renew her US passport because of new rules implemented by the Trump administration that prevents transgender Americans from changing their gender on official documents.

The White House says it is defending “the biological reality of sex”.

She could travel south with her Canadian passport, but she is worried border agents may not accept her gender, which is listed as female on her Canadian documents. Reports of other foreign travellers being detained and taken into custody have raised her concerns, she said.

“It’s too dangerous to risk it,” she said.

A spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection said that a person’s gender identity does not make them inadmissible.

“A foreign traveller’s gender as indicated on their passport and their personal beliefs about sexuality do not render a person inadmissible,” the spokesperson told the BBC in a statement. “Claims to the contrary are false.”

But Ms Siregar is not alone in her concerns. Several European governments including Germany, Finland, and Denmark have issued travel advisories for transgender and non-binary citizens travelling to the US. Equality Australia, an advocacy group, also issued a travel alert for gender non-conforming people and those with a history of LGBTQ activism.

Egale Canada, one of the country’s largest LGBTQ charities, said it was not participating in World Pride because of concerns for the safety of their transgender and non-binary staff. Egale Canada has previously participated in World Pride events in London, Sydney and at home in Toronto.

“We are very concerned about the general tone and hostility towards domestic LGBTI people in the US, but also to those who may be visiting the US from other jurisdictions,” its executive director Helen Kennedy said.

Trump’s repeated comments about making Canada the 51st US state was also a factor, she added. Ms Kennedy said the organisation wasn’t boycotting World Pride itself, but protesting against Trump’s policies on LGBTQ issues.

Since coming into office, Trump has rolled back some LGBTQ protections, including revoking a Biden-era executive order on preventing discrimination “on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation”. He has also banned diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in federal agencies. Supporters say those policies help correct injustices, but others, including Trump, say they are themselves discriminatory.

His administration has also banned transgender people from serving in the military and banned federal funding for gender care for transgender youth. It has also threatened to suspend funding for states that allow transgender athletes to compete.

Trump has defended his actions, saying trans women in sports is “demeaning for women and it’s very bad for our country”.

Some of these policies are currently being challenged in court.

This week, US media reported plans by the navy to rename a ship that had been christened to honour Harvey Milk. The former Navy sailor and activist was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, in 1977.

While former President Joe Biden held a Pride month event on the White House lawn in 2023 and issued a proclamation in support of the community last year, Mr Trump has not spoken in recent days about the celebration. Asked about the president’s position on World Pride, a spokesman for the White House told the BBC that Trump was “fostering a sense of national pride that should be celebrated daily” and that he was “honoured to serve all Americans.”

Capital Pride Alliance, the organisation running this year’s World Pride in DC, told the BBC it has recieved “an unordinary amount of questions and concerns”.

“Our celebration is quite literally in the footsteps of the Capitol Building and a block away from the White House, something that a lot of people are conscious of,” Sahand Miraminy, Capital Pride Alliance’s director of operations, said.

For the first time, Pride in DC will have an enclosed perimeter and weapons detectors, he said, in part because this year’s event will draw larger crowds than usual. World Pride events will also see an elevated presence of the Metropolitan Police Department’s LGBTQ+ liaison unit that will be “first priority” to respond to emergencies, Mr Miraminy said.

Washington’s Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, acknowledged that visitors “feel scared that an environment is developing that is anti-LGBTQ”.

But “we can’t live in fear, we have to live our lives [and] be as best prepared as we can,” she said.

Kelly Laczko, the co-owner of Her Diner in DuPont Circle, one of DC’s most vibrant LGBTQ neighbourhoods, said she’s also increased security for the weekend.

“I feel like normally with Pride we are ready for the celebration,” she said. “And obviously the current administration has put a big damper on that.”

Although she will not be in Washington, Ms Siregar said she hopes others do visit.

“I do think that people in the US should attend and be safe in attending,” she said. “It’s important that people stand up more than ever now.”

Ms Laczko agrees. “Even joy can be an act of defiance,” she said.

US President Donald Trump has said his relationship with Elon Musk is over.

“I would assume so, yeah,” Trump told NBC News on Saturday, when asked if he thought the pair’s close relationship had ended. He replied “No” when asked if he wished to mend the damaged ties.

The comments were Trump’s latest since the epic fallout between him and Musk unravelled on social media.

It came after the tech billionaire – who donated millions to Trump’s election campaign and became a White House aide – publicly criticised the president’s tax and spending bill, a key domestic policy.

A majority of Republicans have fallen in line behind the president. Vice-President JD Vance said that Musk had “gone so nuclear” and may never be welcomed back into the fold.

Vance told podcaster Theo Von that it was a “big mistake” for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO to attack the president.

For weeks, Musk had been criticising Trump’s signature legislation – dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill” – as it made its way through Congress.

He said that, if passed, the bill would add trillions of dollars to the national deficit and “undermine” the work he did as the head of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, and its efforts to cut government spending.

Shortly after leaving Doge after 129 days in the job, Musk posted on his social media site X that the bill was a “disgusting abomination” – but did not criticise Trump directly.

On Thursday, however, Trump told reporters he was “disappointed” with Musk’s behaviour.

Musk responded with a flurry of posts on X, saying that Trump would have lost the election without him and accusing Trump of being implicated in files of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail awaiting sex trafficking charges.

He has since deleted the post and Epstein’s lawyer has come out denying the accusations.

Trump responded on his social media platform Truth Social, saying that Musk had gone “crazy”. In one post, he threatened to cut Musk’s contracts with the federal government.

In his interview with NBC News on Saturday, Trump said Musk had been “disrespectful to the office of the president”.

“I think it’s a very bad thing, because he’s very disrespectful. You could not disrespect the office of the president,” Trump said.

Musk, the world’s richest man, who donated roughly $250m to Trump’s presidential campaign, suggested during the social media feud that he might back some of Trump’s opponents during next year’s midterm elections, throwing his support behind challengers to the lawmakers who supported Trump’s tax bill.

When asked about the prospect of Musk backing Democratic candidates that run against Republicans, Trump said he would face “serious consequences”.

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.”

Sir David Attenborough has told Prince William he is “appalled” by the damage certain fishing methods are wreaking on the world’s oceans.

The Prince of Wales interviewed the TV naturalist ahead of a key UN Oceans conference which kicks off on Monday.

The world’s countries are gathering for the first time in three years to discuss how to better protect the oceans, which are facing growing threats from plastic pollution, climate change and over-exploitation.

The UN’s key aim is to get the High Seas Treaty – an agreement signed two years ago to put 30% of the ocean into protected areas – ratified by 60 countries to bring it into force.

“What we have done to the deep ocean floor is just unspeakably awful,” said Sir David.

“If you did anything remotely like it on land, everybody would be up in arms,” he said in the interview released on Saturday. It was conducted at the premiere of his new documentary, Ocean, last month.

The documentary draws attention to the potential damage from some fishing practices, like bottom trawling, for marine life and the ability of the ocean to lock up planet-warming carbon.

Governments, charities and scientists will come together at the UN Oceans Conference (UNOC) in Nice to try and agree how to accelerate action on the issues most affecting the world’s seas.

Sir David said he hopes the leaders gathering for the UN conference will “realise how much the oceans matter to all of us, the citizens of the world”.

The ocean is crucial for the survival of all organisms on the planet – it is the largest ecosystem, is estimated to contribute $2.5 trillion to world economies and provides up to 80% of the oxygen we breath.

The key aim for the UN is to galvanise enough support to bring the High Seas Treaty into force – including commitment from the UK.

Three years ago countries agreed to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, across national and international waters.

International waters – or high seas – are a common resource with no ruling country so nations signed the High Seas Treaty in 2023 agreeing to work together to put a third of them into Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

Since then only 32 countries have ratified the treaty – 60 are needed to bring it into force.

But many scientists and NGOs are worried MPAs will not be effective whilst practices like bottom trawling are still allowed within them.

“Our ocean is 99% of our living space on the globe, we have huge dependency on the ocean in every possible way, but bottom trawling does a lot of damage,” Dr Amanda Vincent, Professor in Marine Conservation at The University of British Columbia told BBC’s Inside Science.

Bottom trawling or dredging is currently allowed in 90% of the UK’s MPAs, according to environmental campaigners Oceana, and the Environment Audit Committee (EAC) has called for a ban on it within them.

• What is the UN High Seas Treaty and why is it needed?

But some fishing communities have pushed back on the assertion that certain fishing practices need to be banned in these areas.

“Bottom trawling is only a destructive process if it’s taking place in the wrong place, otherwise, it is an efficient way to produce food from our seas,” Elspeth Macdonald, CEO of Scottish Fisherman’s Association told the BBC.

Scientists point to evidence that restricting the practice in some areas allows fish stocks to recover and be better in the long term for the industry.

The conference had been called after concern by the UN that oceans were facing irreparable damage, particularly from climate change.

The oceans are a crucial buffer against the worst impacts of a warming planet, absorbing excess heat and greenhouse gases, said Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Exeter.

“If the sea had not absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat that has been added to the planet as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, then the world wouldn’t just be one and a half degrees warmer it would be about 36 degrees warmer.

“Those of us who were left would be struggling with Death Valley temperatures everywhere,” he said.

This excess heat is having significant impacts on marine life, warn scientists.

“Coral reefs, for the past 20 years, have been subject to mass bleaching and mass mortality and that is due to extreme temperatures,” said Dr Jean-Pierre Gattuso, senior research scientist at Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche and co-chair of the One Ocean Science Congress (OOSC).

“This really is the first marine ecosystem and perhaps the first ecosystem which is potentially subject to disappearance.”

The OOSC is a gathering of 2,000 of the world’s scientists, prior to the UN conference, where the latest data on ocean health is assessed and recommendations put forward to governments.

Alongside efforts on climate change the scientists recommended an end to deep sea activities.

The most controversial issue to be discussed is perhaps deep sea mining.

For more than a decade countries have been trying to agree how deep sea mining in international waters could work – how resources could be shared and environmental damage could be minimised.

But in April President Trump bypassed those discussions and signed an executive order saying he would permit mining within international waters.

China and France called it a breach of international law, although no formal legal proceedings have yet been started.

Scientists have warned that too little is understood about the ecosystems in the deep sea and therefore no commercial activities should go forward without more research.

“Deep sea biology is the most threatened of global biology, and of what we know the least. We must act with precaution where we don’t have the science,” said Prof Peter Haugan, Co-chair of the International Science Council Expert Group on the Ocean.

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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.”

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!

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.”

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 US 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 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 argue, though, that 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, this 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’s 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 on 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,” he 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, Mr Gerber has soured on the stock and has been paring 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,” Mr Gerber said, referring to Musk’s social media tirade against Trump.

The BBC contacted X, Tesla, and SpaceX seeking comment but did not receive a response.

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

Protests, collectively 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.

Ms 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-organised the #TeslaTakedown protests on social media.

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

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,” Ms 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,” he said.

“These things take time,” Mr Moorhead acknowledged, but “it’s not unprecedented”.

Ms 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,” Ms Swisher said, 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,” he said.

In Trump’s most menacing comment of the day, he suggested cutting Musk’s government contracts, which have an estimated value of $38bn (£28bn).

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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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.”

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.”

Wearing an understated but chic outfit, flowing braids and a dewy, make-up free face, Arop Akol looks like your typical off-duty model.

She sinks into the sofa at the offices of her UK agency, First Model Management, and details the burgeoning career that has seen her walk runways for luxury brands in London and Paris.

“I had been watching modelling online since I was a child at the age of 11,” Akol, now in her early twenties, tells the BBC.

In the last three years, she has been streamed across the world while modelling, even sharing a runway with Naomi Campbell at an Off-White show.

Travelling for work can get lonely, but Akol is constantly bumping into models from her birth country – the lush, but troubled South Sudan.

“South Sudanese people have become very well known for their beauty,” says Akol, who has high cheekbones, rich, dark skin and stands 5ft 10in tall.

Flick through a fashion magazine or scan footage of a runway show and you will see Akol’s point – models born and raised in South Sudan, or those from the country’s sizable diaspora, are everywhere.

They range from up-and-comers, like Akol, to supermodels like Anok Yai, Adut Akech and Alek Wek.

After being scouted in a London car park in 1995, Wek was one of the very first South Sudanese models to find global success . She has since appeared on numerous Vogue covers and modelled for the likes of Dior and Louis Vuitton.

And the popularity of South Sudanese models shows no signs of waning – leading industry platform Models.com compiles an annual list of modelling’s top 50 “future stars” and in its latest selection, one in five models have South Sudanese heritage.

Elsewhere, Vogue featured four South Sudanese models in its article about the “11 young models set to storm the catwalks in 2025”.

“The expectation of what a model should be – most of the South Sudanese models have it,” says Dawson Deng, who runs South Sudan Fashion Week in the country’s capital, Juba, with fellow ex-model Trisha Nyachak.

“They have the perfect, dark skin. They have the melanin. They have the height.”

Lucia Janosova, a casting agent at First Model Management, tells the BBC: “Of course they are beautiful… beautiful skin, the height.”

However, she says she is unsure exactly why fashion brands seek out South Sudanese models over other nationalities.

“I’m not able to tell you because there are lots of girls who are also beautiful and they are from Mozambique, or Nigeria, or different countries, right?” Ms Janosova adds.

Akur Goi, a South Sudanese model who has worked with designers like Givenchy and Armani, has a theory.

She believes South Sudanese models are in demand not just for their physical beauty, but for their “resilience” too.

Goi was born in Juba but as a child she moved to neighbouring Uganda, like Akol and hundreds of thousands of other South Sudanese.

Many fled in the years after 2011, when South Sudan became independent from Sudan.

There were high hopes for the world’s newest nation, but just two years later a civil war erupted, during which 400,000 people were killed and 2.5 million fled their homes for places like Uganda.

Although the civil war ended after five years, further waves of violence, natural disasters and poverty mean people continue to leave.

Recently, fighting between government and opposition forces has escalated – sparking fears the country will return to civil war.

After leaving a war-weary South Sudan for Uganda, Goi’s “biggest dream” was to become a model.

Fantasy became reality just last year, when she was scouted by agents via Facebook. For her very first job, she walked for Italian fashion giant Roberto Cavalli.

“I was super excited and ready for my first season… I was really nervous and scared but I said to myself: ‘I can make it’ – because it was a dream,” Goi says, speaking to the BBC from Milan, having flown out for a job at the last minute.

But some South Sudanese models have had more tumultuous journeys.

An investigation by British newspaper the Times found that two refugees living in a camp in Kenya were flown to Europe only to be told they were too malnourished to appear on the runway.

After completing modelling jobs, several others were informed that they owed their agencies thousands of euros – as some contracts specify that visas and flights are to be repaid, usually once the models start earning money.

Akol says she encountered a similar issue. When she was scouted in 2019, the agency in question asked her to fork out for numerous fees – fees which she now knows agencies do not normally request.

“I was asked for money for registration, money for this, for that. I couldn’t manage all that. I’m struggling, my family is struggling, so I can’t manage all that,” she says.

Three years later, while living in Uganda, she was eventually scouted by a more reputable agency.

Deng, who helps fledgling South Sudanese models produce portfolios, tells the BBC that some have complained about being paid for jobs in clothes, rather than money.

Many models also come up against another challenge – their family’s perception of their career choice.

“They didn’t want it and they don’t want it now,” Akol, who now lives in London, says of her own relatives.

“But we [models] managed to come up and say: ‘We are [a] young country. We need to go out there and meet people. We need to do things that everyone else is doing.'”

Deng says those living in urban areas have become more open-minded, but some South Sudanese liken modelling to prostitution.

Parents question the whole concept – wondering why their daughters would be “walking in front of people”, he says.

Deng recalls a young woman he was assisting who was about to fly out for her first international job. Unhappy that she would be modelling, the woman’s family followed her to the airport and prevented her from getting on the plane.

But, Deng says, the woman’s relatives eventually came around and she has since modelled for a top lingerie brand.

“This girl is actually the breadwinner of the family. She’s taking all her siblings to school and nobody talks about it as a bad thing any more,” he says.

He is “proud” to see this model – and others from South Sudan – on the global stage and although the industry cycles through trends, Deng does not believe South Sudanese models will go out of fashion.

Goi agrees, saying there is an “increasing demand for diversity” in fashion.

Akol too believes South Sudan is here to stay, stating: “Alek Wek has been doing it before I was born and she is still doing it now.

“South Sudanese models are going to go a long way.”

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• No wigs please – the new rules shaking up beauty pageants
• Inside the beauty pageant in one of the world’s worst places to be a woman
• The ‘peacock of Savile Row’ on dressing stars for the Met Gala
• WATCH: Model Alek Wek on her unique career

It is fitting that we meet a woman once described as a “wrecker of civilisation” in the grounds of a ruined priory.

Cosey Fanni Tutti, a founding member of the influential band Throbbing Gristle and radical performance artist, was given the title by Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn in 1976 after an art exhibition, Prostitution, led to a tabloid furore and a House of Commons debate.

Prostitution, created by Tutti and her colleagues at the collective COUM Transmissions, showed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and included pornographic images of her alongside used bandages and tampons.

“It has taken 50 years for [the exhibition] to be revisited and understood for what it was really trying to say,” says the 73-year-old who lives near King’s Lynn, Norfolk.

Tutti modelled for pornographic magazines in her work as a performance artist and pages from these publications featured in Prostitution, but were hidden away in a back room.

She says she “infiltrated” the porn industry to turn the tables on the consumers of these magazines and subvert the male gaze – the watcher now being watched.

“It’s my point of view. It was my action,” she says in the grounds of Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk.

She wanted the exhibition to “bring [porn] into a different kind of viewpoint and interpretation” and to “empower women to think that [the porn industry] is something we have to discuss, regarding how you think of it, as either subverting it or going along [with it]”.

The porn industry in the 1970s involved “some of the most unlikely people”, she says.

“I won’t say who they are, but they were well known at the time. Famous names.”

Exhibits from Prostitution are now on display at the Maxwell Graham Gallery in New York City until 28 June, which coincides with the release of her new album 2T2.

“I haven’t been to see the exhibition because of the situation in America. I’ve no desire to go to America at the moment,” she says.

Throbbing Gristle produced extraordinary – sometimes terrifying – music and are regarded as founders of the genre known as industrial, named after the record label they founded.

Active between 1975 and 1981, and again between 2004 and 2010, they have influenced acts including Soft Cell, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry.

Today, Tutti shares a converted chapel with her partner, frequent collaborator and former bandmate, Chris Carter.

The couple left London with their son in the early 1980s and bought the chapel at auction after spotting it in a local newspaper.

They had previously been living in squats, a culture that has declined to Tutti’s regret.

“It’s not just the people that want to live an alternative lifestyle and be creative and do music and art and so on, but it’s also just impacting people that just want to live, have a family, just work and have a decent life,” she says.

“What do you do when you can’t afford the rent?”

The musicians now have a home studio where her new album was recorded.

She says 2T2 is infused with emotion; bereavement and illness informing tracks such as Stound, with its beats and spectral chanting.

“The last five years have been really difficult. I mean, personally, through illness and loss,” she says.

Carter became seriously unwell with Covid which “refocused our world completely”, she says, “and then I got ill with something else, which was indirectly related to Covid”.

Carter built some of the first sampling machines for the band to use, years before the technology became mainstream.

On 2T2 “there’s some tracks on that that express that anger I felt about what had happened to [Carter and I] and to the world, actually”, she says.

“It’s a war zone isn’t it?”

As she speaks, roaring jet fighters from a nearby airbase circle low overhead.

Following the publication of her memoir Art Sex Music in 2017, a documentary about Tutti’s life is now in the works.

It will be directed by Caroline Catz , with whom she previously collaborated on the film Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes.

Derbyshire was a British electronic music pioneer who only belatedly received acclaim and acknowledgement after her death, such as for her arrangement of the Dr Who theme.

Sexism was the reason, says Tutti, that “she wasn’t given the credit for what she had done”.

“A bit like me with the Throbbing Gristle records, actually.”

It was this identification with Derbyshire that led Tutti to write Re-Sisters in 2002, which also focused on another non-conformist woman, the medieval Norfolk mystic Margery Kempe.

Tutti says Kempe’s story left her “gobsmacked”.

“A woman from the 1300s who was resisting everything that was expected of a woman back then, and the more I looked into her, the more relevant her story was to both me and Delia.”

Gardening and reading is how this provocateur prefers to spend her time these days.

After giving up touring, the pioneer of avant-garde noise and electronica now enjoys the Norfolk countryside.

“I like peace and quiet,” she says.

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 most recent big performance came on 26 May at the American Music Awards (AMAs) in Las Vegas, where he was also presented with the lifetime achievement award by his children.

The father-of-eight seemed shocked to be introduced to the stage by five of his own grown-up children, before he later performed his 1988 track Forever Young.

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 Glastonbury’s 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.

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

The indictment also 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 had 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 events an “abuse of power” at a news conference on Friday.

“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.”

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

Van Hollen reiterated on Friday 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, wrote 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”.

At Mr Ábrego García’s court appearance in Tennessee next Friday, the 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.

Israel has retrieved the body of a Thai national taken hostage during the Hamas-led attack in October 2023, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz says.

He said the body of Nattapong Pinta was retrieved during a special operation in the Rafah area of southern Gaza on Friday. The 35-year-old was working as an agricultural labourer in southern Israel when he was kidnapped.

Mr Nattapong is likely to have been killed during his first months of captivity, an Israeli military official said. Before the operation, it was not known whether he was dead or alive.

It comes after the Israeli army recovered the bodies of two Israeli Americans in Gaza earlier this week.

Mr Nattapong was the married father of a young son, the military official said. He had been working at Kibbutz Nir Oz to support his family in Thailand when he was captured by a militant group called the Mujahideen Brigades.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that the mission to recover his body was launched following information from the interrogation of a “captured terrorist”.

After reports of his recovery on Saturday, the BBC tried to reach out to Mr Nattapong’s wife. She did not answer the call but texted back with a picture of her son crying.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum campaign group said the recovery comes after “20 terrible and agonising months of devastating uncertainty”.

The group urged the Israeli government to reach an agreement with Hamas to free the remaining captives.

Mr Nattapong is believed to be the last remaining Thai national abducted during the 7 October 2023 attack. Five Thai hostages were released during a ceasefire earlier this year – all of them alive.

The Israeli army retrieved the bodies of an elderly couple, Judy and Gadi Haggai, in the Gazan city of Khan Younis on Thursday.

The couple were killed at the same kibbutz and their bodies were also held by the Mujahideen Brigades, according to the IDF.

Meanwhile, there has been another shooting incident near a US-backed aid distribution centre in the southern Gaza Strip.

Six Palestinians were killed and several wounded by Israeli gunfire while gathering to collect food supplies on Saturday, according to the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency.

The Israeli military said it fired warning shots at suspects who approached them in a threatening manner.

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed and hundreds injured trying to approach the distribution centre this week.

The organisation running it, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, said it had paused operations to deal with overcrowding and improve safety.

Following a three-month blockade, Israel began to allow limited aid into Gaza in the last week or so.

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

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

Some 54 of those captured during the attack by Hamas on 7 October, 2023 remain in captivity, including 31 the Israeli military says are dead.

Kyrgyzstan has taken down a huge statue of the revolutionary Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, which was thought to be the tallest in Central Asia.

First erected when Kyrgyzstan was part of the Soviet Union, the 23m-tall monument towered over the city of Osh for 50 years before it was quietly removed this week.

Photos emerged on Saturday showing the communist revolutionary – who features prominently in Soviet iconography – lying on his back on the ground, having been lowered by crane.

Many former Soviet republics have recently sought to recast their national identities with less emphasis on their previous ties to Russia, though local officials downplayed the decision to move the statue.

Authorities in Kyrgyzstan will be aware of the risk of offending its ally, Russia, a week after the latter unveiled a brand new statue of another Soviet figurehead, Josef Stalin, in Moscow.

A statement from City Hall in Osh – the landlocked nation’s second-largest city after the capital, Bishkek – said the figure would be relocated as part of “common practice” aimed at improving the “architectural and aesthetic appearance” of the city.

It pointed to examples of Lenin statues previously being taken down in Russia.

The statue will be replaced by a flagpole, as was the case when a different Lenin statue was relocated in Bishek, according to local media.

Kyrgyzstan gained its independence 34 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed.

But reminders of its Soviet history can be found across the country, even where there are no statues. For instance, its second-tallest mountain is named Lenin Peak.

US President Donald Trump has said his relationship with Elon Musk is over.

“I would assume so, yeah,” Trump told NBC News on Saturday, when asked if he thought the pair’s close relationship had ended. He replied “No” when asked if he wished to mend the damaged ties.

The comments were Trump’s latest since the epic fallout between him and Musk unravelled on social media.

It came after the tech billionaire – who donated millions to Trump’s election campaign and became a White House aide – publicly criticised the president’s tax and spending bill, a key domestic policy.

A majority of Republicans have fallen in line behind the president. Vice-President JD Vance said that Musk had “gone so nuclear” and may never be welcomed back into the fold.

Vance told podcaster Theo Von that it was a “big mistake” for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO to attack the president.

For weeks, Musk had been criticising Trump’s signature legislation – dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill” – as it made its way through Congress.

He said that, if passed, the bill would add trillions of dollars to the national deficit and “undermine” the work he did as the head of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, and its efforts to cut government spending.

Shortly after leaving Doge after 129 days in the job, Musk posted on his social media site X that the bill was a “disgusting abomination” – but did not criticise Trump directly.

On Thursday, however, Trump told reporters he was “disappointed” with Musk’s behaviour.

Musk responded with a flurry of posts on X, saying that Trump would have lost the election without him and accusing Trump of being implicated in files of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail awaiting sex trafficking charges.

He has since deleted the post and Epstein’s lawyer has come out denying the accusations.

Trump responded on his social media platform Truth Social, saying that Musk had gone “crazy”. In one post, he threatened to cut Musk’s contracts with the federal government.

In his interview with NBC News on Saturday, Trump said Musk had been “disrespectful to the office of the president”.

“I think it’s a very bad thing, because he’s very disrespectful. You could not disrespect the office of the president,” Trump said.

Musk, the world’s richest man, who donated roughly $250m to Trump’s presidential campaign, suggested during the social media feud that he might back some of Trump’s opponents during next year’s midterm elections, throwing his support behind challengers to the lawmakers who supported Trump’s tax bill.

When asked about the prospect of Musk backing Democratic candidates that run against Republicans, Trump said he would face “serious consequences”.

Sir David Attenborough has told Prince William he is “appalled” by the damage certain fishing methods are wreaking on the world’s oceans.

The Prince of Wales interviewed the TV naturalist ahead of a key UN Oceans conference which kicks off on Monday.

The world’s countries are gathering for the first time in three years to discuss how to better protect the oceans, which are facing growing threats from plastic pollution, climate change and over-exploitation.

The UN’s key aim is to get the High Seas Treaty – an agreement signed two years ago to put 30% of the ocean into protected areas – ratified by 60 countries to bring it into force.

“What we have done to the deep ocean floor is just unspeakably awful,” said Sir David.

“If you did anything remotely like it on land, everybody would be up in arms,” he said in the interview released on Saturday. It was conducted at the premiere of his new documentary, Ocean, last month.

The documentary draws attention to the potential damage from some fishing practices, like bottom trawling, for marine life and the ability of the ocean to lock up planet-warming carbon.

Governments, charities and scientists will come together at the UN Oceans Conference (UNOC) in Nice to try and agree how to accelerate action on the issues most affecting the world’s seas.

Sir David said he hopes the leaders gathering for the UN conference will “realise how much the oceans matter to all of us, the citizens of the world”.

The ocean is crucial for the survival of all organisms on the planet – it is the largest ecosystem, is estimated to contribute $2.5 trillion to world economies and provides up to 80% of the oxygen we breath.

The key aim for the UN is to galvanise enough support to bring the High Seas Treaty into force – including commitment from the UK.

Three years ago countries agreed to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, across national and international waters.

International waters – or high seas – are a common resource with no ruling country so nations signed the High Seas Treaty in 2023 agreeing to work together to put a third of them into Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

Since then only 32 countries have ratified the treaty – 60 are needed to bring it into force.

But many scientists and NGOs are worried MPAs will not be effective whilst practices like bottom trawling are still allowed within them.

“Our ocean is 99% of our living space on the globe, we have huge dependency on the ocean in every possible way, but bottom trawling does a lot of damage,” Dr Amanda Vincent, Professor in Marine Conservation at The University of British Columbia told BBC’s Inside Science.

Bottom trawling or dredging is currently allowed in 90% of the UK’s MPAs, according to environmental campaigners Oceana, and the Environment Audit Committee (EAC) has called for a ban on it within them.

• What is the UN High Seas Treaty and why is it needed?

But some fishing communities have pushed back on the assertion that certain fishing practices need to be banned in these areas.

“Bottom trawling is only a destructive process if it’s taking place in the wrong place, otherwise, it is an efficient way to produce food from our seas,” Elspeth Macdonald, CEO of Scottish Fisherman’s Association told the BBC.

Scientists point to evidence that restricting the practice in some areas allows fish stocks to recover and be better in the long term for the industry.

The conference had been called after concern by the UN that oceans were facing irreparable damage, particularly from climate change.

The oceans are a crucial buffer against the worst impacts of a warming planet, absorbing excess heat and greenhouse gases, said Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Exeter.

“If the sea had not absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat that has been added to the planet as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, then the world wouldn’t just be one and a half degrees warmer it would be about 36 degrees warmer.

“Those of us who were left would be struggling with Death Valley temperatures everywhere,” he said.

This excess heat is having significant impacts on marine life, warn scientists.

“Coral reefs, for the past 20 years, have been subject to mass bleaching and mass mortality and that is due to extreme temperatures,” said Dr Jean-Pierre Gattuso, senior research scientist at Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche and co-chair of the One Ocean Science Congress (OOSC).

“This really is the first marine ecosystem and perhaps the first ecosystem which is potentially subject to disappearance.”

The OOSC is a gathering of 2,000 of the world’s scientists, prior to the UN conference, where the latest data on ocean health is assessed and recommendations put forward to governments.

Alongside efforts on climate change the scientists recommended an end to deep sea activities.

The most controversial issue to be discussed is perhaps deep sea mining.

For more than a decade countries have been trying to agree how deep sea mining in international waters could work – how resources could be shared and environmental damage could be minimised.

But in April President Trump bypassed those discussions and signed an executive order saying he would permit mining within international waters.

China and France called it a breach of international law, although no formal legal proceedings have yet been started.

Scientists have warned that too little is understood about the ecosystems in the deep sea and therefore no commercial activities should go forward without more research.

“Deep sea biology is the most threatened of global biology, and of what we know the least. We must act with precaution where we don’t have the science,” said Prof Peter Haugan, Co-chair of the International Science Council Expert Group on the Ocean.

Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to keep up with the latest climate and environment stories with the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.

Russian has launched a massive drone attack on Ukraine’s second-largest city, the mayor of Kharkiv has said, killing at least three and injuring a further 40.

Ihor Terekhov said that overnight Russia launched 48 drones, two missiles and four gliding bombs in an attack he described as “open terror”.

It comes after a massive wave of drones and missiles struck across Ukraine on Thursday night. Moscow said the strikes were in response to “terrorist attacks by the Kyiv regime”, following Ukraine’s surprise raids on Russian air bases last Sunday.

Meanwhile, Russian and Ukrainian officials released conflicting accounts about when a prisoner swap agreed at earlier talks will take place.

Some 18 apartment buildings and 13 other homes in Kharkiv were hit overnight during Friday’s attack, the city’s mayor said. A baby and a 14 year-old girl were among the injured, he added.

One civilian industrial facility was attacked by 40 drones, one missile and four bombs, Kharkiv governor Oleh Syniehubov said, adding that there may still be people buried under the rubble.

Two people were also killed in Russian strikes on Kherson, in southern Ukraine, local authorities said.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha urged allies to increase pressure on Moscow and to take “more steps to strengthen Ukraine” in response to Russia’s latest attacks.

Six people were killed and 80 injured across Ukraine the previous night, when Russia attacked the country with more than 400 drones and nearly 40 missiles.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes on Kharkiv make “no military sense” and were “pure terrorism”.

He said his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin was “buying himself time to keep waging the war”, and that “pressure must be applied” to stop the attacks.

During the latest round of direct talks in Istanbul earlier this week, the two warring sides agreed to exchange all sick and heavily wounded prisoners of war, those aged under 25, as well as the bodies of 12,000 soldiers.

Moscow’s chief negotiator at the meeting, Vladimir Medinsky, claimed on Saturday that Ukraine had “unexpectedly postponed both the acceptance of bodies and the exchange of prisoners of war for an indefinite period”.

He further claimed that the bodies of more than one thousand slain Ukrainian soldiers had been taken to an agreed exchange point but that Ukrainian officials never arrived.

A list of 640 prisoners of war had also been handed to Ukraine “in order to begin the exchange”, Medinsky wrote on social media.

Ukrainian officials responded angrily to the allegations, telling Russia to “stop playing dirty games”.

• Russia and Ukraine fail again to agree ceasefire but commit to prisoner swap

• Ukraine’s audacious drone attack sends critical message to Russia – and the West

A statement from Ukraine’s Coordination for PoWs office said that the comments “do not correspond to reality or to previous agreements”.

The Coordination HQ said both sides had been working on preparations for the exchange over the past week and alleged that Russia was not sticking to the agreed parameters of the swap.

It added that Ukraine had submitted its PoW lists according to the “clearly defined categories” of the deal, but that Russia had submitted “alternative lists that do not correspond to the agreed-upon approach”.

While an agreement on the repatriation of bodies had been reached, a date had not been set, Ukraine said, with Russia taking “unilateral steps that had not been coordinated”.

The barrages over the past two nights came after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted Russian strategic warplanes at four air bases deep inside Russia.

Ukraine’s security service SBU said at least 40 Russian aircraft were struck during the so-called “Operation Spider’s Web” last Sunday.

Ukraine says it used 117 drones that were first smuggled into Russia, then placed inside wooden cabins mounted on the back of lorries and concealed below remotely operated detachable roofs.

The lorries were then apparently driven to locations near the Russian air bases by drivers who were seemingly unaware of their cargo. The drones were then launched remotely.

On Saturday, Ukraine released more footage from that attack – showing a single drone’s entire flight.

US President Donald Trump said on Friday that the Ukrainians had given Putin “a reason to go in and bomb the hell out of them last night”.

He earlier said that during a phone call, Putin had told him “very strongly” that Moscow would “have to respond” following Ukraine’s airfield attacks.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It currently controls around 20% of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean peninsula it annexed in 2014.

Peace talks between the two sides have so far failed to secure a ceasefire, and both sides remain deeply divided on how to end the war, with Ukraine pushing for an “unconditional ceasefire” as a first step, something Russia has repeatedly rejected.

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.”

Across Washington, large rainbow flags are flying next to the stars and stripes as the city plays host to World Pride, a global celebration of LGBTQ culture and identity.

But getting the world to come has proved challenging this year. Some international travellers are choosing to skip the biennial event over travel fears, while others are protesting President Donald Trump’s policies.

Alice Siregar, a Montreal-based data analyst who is transgender, had planned to attend. But travelling to the US at the moment was unthinkable, she told the BBC.

“It is a risk to now come over and especially as a trans woman,” she said.

The US capital won the bid to host World Pride years before Trump’s re-election. In January, the event’s organisers had projected the celebration, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of Washington’s first Pride march, would attract three million visitors and contribute nearly $800 million to the local economy.

But their expectations have now dropped to about a third of their previous estimates. Hotel occupancy rates are also down compared to last year.

Ms Siregar, 30, holds both Canadian and US citizenship but says she has been unable to renew her US passport because of new rules implemented by the Trump administration that prevents transgender Americans from changing their gender on official documents.

The White House says it is defending “the biological reality of sex”.

She could travel south with her Canadian passport, but she is worried border agents may not accept her gender, which is listed as female on her Canadian documents. Reports of other foreign travellers being detained and taken into custody have raised her concerns, she said.

“It’s too dangerous to risk it,” she said.

A spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection said that a person’s gender identity does not make them inadmissible.

“A foreign traveller’s gender as indicated on their passport and their personal beliefs about sexuality do not render a person inadmissible,” the spokesperson told the BBC in a statement. “Claims to the contrary are false.”

But Ms Siregar is not alone in her concerns. Several European governments including Germany, Finland, and Denmark have issued travel advisories for transgender and non-binary citizens travelling to the US. Equality Australia, an advocacy group, also issued a travel alert for gender non-conforming people and those with a history of LGBTQ activism.

Egale Canada, one of the country’s largest LGBTQ charities, said it was not participating in World Pride because of concerns for the safety of their transgender and non-binary staff. Egale Canada has previously participated in World Pride events in London, Sydney and at home in Toronto.

“We are very concerned about the general tone and hostility towards domestic LGBTI people in the US, but also to those who may be visiting the US from other jurisdictions,” its executive director Helen Kennedy said.

Trump’s repeated comments about making Canada the 51st US state was also a factor, she added. Ms Kennedy said the organisation wasn’t boycotting World Pride itself, but protesting against Trump’s policies on LGBTQ issues.

Since coming into office, Trump has rolled back some LGBTQ protections, including revoking a Biden-era executive order on preventing discrimination “on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation”. He has also banned diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in federal agencies. Supporters say those policies help correct injustices, but others, including Trump, say they are themselves discriminatory.

His administration has also banned transgender people from serving in the military and banned federal funding for gender care for transgender youth. It has also threatened to suspend funding for states that allow transgender athletes to compete.

Trump has defended his actions, saying trans women in sports is “demeaning for women and it’s very bad for our country”.

Some of these policies are currently being challenged in court.

This week, US media reported plans by the navy to rename a ship that had been christened to honour Harvey Milk. The former Navy sailor and activist was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, in 1977.

While former President Joe Biden held a Pride month event on the White House lawn in 2023 and issued a proclamation in support of the community last year, Mr Trump has not spoken in recent days about the celebration. Asked about the president’s position on World Pride, a spokesman for the White House told the BBC that Trump was “fostering a sense of national pride that should be celebrated daily” and that he was “honoured to serve all Americans.”

Capital Pride Alliance, the organisation running this year’s World Pride in DC, told the BBC it has recieved “an unordinary amount of questions and concerns”.

“Our celebration is quite literally in the footsteps of the Capitol Building and a block away from the White House, something that a lot of people are conscious of,” Sahand Miraminy, Capital Pride Alliance’s director of operations, said.

For the first time, Pride in DC will have an enclosed perimeter and weapons detectors, he said, in part because this year’s event will draw larger crowds than usual. World Pride events will also see an elevated presence of the Metropolitan Police Department’s LGBTQ+ liaison unit that will be “first priority” to respond to emergencies, Mr Miraminy said.

Washington’s Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, acknowledged that visitors “feel scared that an environment is developing that is anti-LGBTQ”.

But “we can’t live in fear, we have to live our lives [and] be as best prepared as we can,” she said.

Kelly Laczko, the co-owner of Her Diner in DuPont Circle, one of DC’s most vibrant LGBTQ neighbourhoods, said she’s also increased security for the weekend.

“I feel like normally with Pride we are ready for the celebration,” she said. “And obviously the current administration has put a big damper on that.”

Although she will not be in Washington, Ms Siregar said she hopes others do visit.

“I do think that people in the US should attend and be safe in attending,” she said. “It’s important that people stand up more than ever now.”

Ms Laczko agrees. “Even joy can be an act of defiance,” she said.

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!

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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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.”

Israel has retrieved the body of a Thai national taken hostage during the Hamas-led attack in October 2023, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz says.

He said the body of Nattapong Pinta was retrieved during a special operation in the Rafah area of southern Gaza on Friday. The 35-year-old was working as an agricultural labourer in southern Israel when he was kidnapped.

Mr Nattapong is likely to have been killed during his first months of captivity, an Israeli military official said. Before the operation, it was not known whether he was dead or alive.

It comes after the Israeli army recovered the bodies of two Israeli Americans in Gaza earlier this week.

Mr Nattapong was the married father of a young son, the military official said. He had been working at Kibbutz Nir Oz to support his family in Thailand when he was captured by a militant group called the Mujahideen Brigades.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that the mission to recover his body was launched following information from the interrogation of a “captured terrorist”.

After reports of his recovery on Saturday, the BBC tried to reach out to Mr Nattapong’s wife. She did not answer the call but texted back with a picture of her son crying.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum campaign group said the recovery comes after “20 terrible and agonising months of devastating uncertainty”.

The group urged the Israeli government to reach an agreement with Hamas to free the remaining captives.

Mr Nattapong is believed to be the last remaining Thai national abducted during the 7 October 2023 attack. Five Thai hostages were released during a ceasefire earlier this year – all of them alive.

The Israeli army retrieved the bodies of an elderly couple, Judy and Gadi Haggai, in the Gazan city of Khan Younis on Thursday.

The couple were killed at the same kibbutz and their bodies were also held by the Mujahideen Brigades, according to the IDF.

Meanwhile, there has been another shooting incident near a US-backed aid distribution centre in the southern Gaza Strip.

Six Palestinians were killed and several wounded by Israeli gunfire while gathering to collect food supplies on Saturday, according to the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency.

The Israeli military said it fired warning shots at suspects who approached them in a threatening manner.

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed and hundreds injured trying to approach the distribution centre this week.

The organisation running it, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, said it had paused operations to deal with overcrowding and improve safety.

Following a three-month blockade, Israel began to allow limited aid into Gaza in the last week or so.

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

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

Some 54 of those captured during the attack by Hamas on 7 October, 2023 remain in captivity, including 31 the Israeli military says are dead.

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.”