Even wars have rules. They don’t stop soldiers killing each other but they’re intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides.

If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan.

That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva Conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again.

At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words “Even Wars Have Rules” are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda.

The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.

Getting information from Gaza is difficult. It is a lethal warzone. At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won’t let international news teams into Gaza.

Since the best way to check controversial and difficult stories is first hand, that means the fog of war, always hard to penetrate, is as thick as I have ever experienced in a lifetime of war reporting.

It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire.

Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.

To find an alternative route through that fog, we decided to approach it through the prism of laws that are supposed to regulate warfare and protect civilians. I went to the ICRC headquarters as it is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions.

I have also spoken to distinguished lawyers; to humanitarians with years of experience of working within the law to bring aid to Gaza and other warzones; and to senior Western diplomats about their governments’ growing nervousness that they might be complicit in future criminal investigations if they do not speak up about the catastrophe inside Gaza.

In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power.

As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail.

Netanyahu rarely gives interviews or news conferences. He prefers direct statements filmed and posted on social media. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declined a request for an interview.

Boaz Bismuth, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party, repeated his leader’s positions: that there is no famine in Gaza, that Israel respects the laws of war and that unwarranted criticism of its conduct by countries including the UK, France and Canada incites antisemitic attacks on Jews, including murder.

Lawyers I have spoken to believe that there is evidence that Israel followed war crimes, committed by Hamas when it attacked Israel, with very many of its own, including the crime of genocide.

It is clear that Israel has hard questions to answer that will not go away.

It also faces a legal process alleging genocide at the International Court of Justice and has a prime minister with limited travel options as he faces a warrant for arrest on war crimes charges issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Rival politicians inside Israel accuse Netanyahu of presiding over war crimes and turning Israel into a pariah state.

He has pushed back hard, comparing himself – when the warrant was issued – to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in an antisemitic scandal that rocked France in the 1890s.

The evidence of what is happening in Gaza starts with the numbers. On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people. More than 800 were Israeli civilians. The others were members of Israel’s security forces, first responders and foreign workers. Around 250 people, including non-Israelis, were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.

Figures vary slightly, but it is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead.

Collating the huge total of Palestinian casualties inside Gaza is much more difficult. Israel restricts movement inside Gaza and much of the north of the strip cannot be reached.

The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups.

According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.

Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry’s figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country’s own intelligence services.

When the work of the ministry’s statisticians was checked after previous wars, it tallied with other estimates.

A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care.

Gaza’s civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year. But when negotiations on a longer-term deal failed, Israel went back to war on 18 March with a series of huge air strikes and since then a new military offensive, which the prime minister says will finally deliver the elusive “total victory” over Hamas that he promised on 7 October 2023.

Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved.

A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”. The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a “main pressure lever” against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat.

Weaponising food is a war crime.

War is always savage. I was in Geneva to see Mirjana Spoljarić, the Swiss diplomat who is president of the ICRC. She believes it can get even worse; that there is no doubt that Israel is flouting the Geneva Conventions in Gaza and this sends a message that the rules of war can be ignored in conflicts across the world.

After we walked past glass cases displaying the ICRC’s three Nobel peace prizes and handwritten copperplate reproductions of the Geneva Conventions, she warned that “we are hollowing out the very rules that protect the fundamental rights of every human being”.

• Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC

We sat down to talk in a room with one of Europe’s most serene views: the tranquillity of Lake Geneva and the magnificent sprawl of the Mont-Blanc massif.

But for Ms Spoljarić, constantly aware of the ICRC’s role as custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the view beyond the Alps and across the Mediterranean to Gaza is alarming. She has been in Gaza twice this year and says that it is worse than hell on earth.

“Humanity is failing in Gaza,” Ms Spoljarić told me. “It is failing. We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It’s surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering.”

More importantly, she says, the world is watching an entire people, the Palestinians, being stripped of their human dignity.

“It should really shock our collective conscience… It will haunt us. We are seeing things happening that will make the world an unhappier place far beyond the region.”

I asked her about Israel’s justification that it is acting in self-defence to destroy a terrorist organisation that attacked and killed its people on 7 October.

“It is no justification for a disrespect or for a hollowing out of the Geneva Conventions,” she said. “Neither party is allowed to break the rules, no matter what, and this is important because, look, the same rules apply to every human being under the Geneva Convention.

“A child in Gaza has exactly the same protections under the Geneva Conventions as a child in Israel.”

Mirjana Spoljarić spoke quietly, with intense moral clarity. The ICRC considers itself a neutral organisation; in wars it tries to work even-handedly with all sides.

She was not neutral about the rights all human beings should enjoy, and is deeply concerned that those rights are being damaged by the disregard of the rules of war in Gaza.

On the evening of 7 October 2023, while Israel’s troops were still fighting to drive Hamas invaders out of its border communities, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a brief video address to the Israeli people and the watching world.

Speaking from Israel’s military command centre in the heart of Tel Aviv, he chose words that would reassure Israelis and induce dread in their enemies. They were also a window into his thinking about the way that the war should be fought, and how Israel would defend its military choices against criticism.

The fate of Hamas was sealed, he promised. “We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens.

“All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.”

Netanyahu praised allies who were rallying around Israel, singling out the US, France and the UK for their “unreserved support”. He had spoken to them, he said, “to ensure freedom of action”.

But in war freedom of action has legal limits. States can fight, but it must be proportionate to the threat that they face, and civilian lives must be protected.

“You’re never entitled to break the law,” says Janina Dill, professor of global security at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School.

“How Israel conducts this war is an entirely separate legal analysis… The same, by the way, is true in terms of resistance to occupation. October 7 was not an appropriate exercise [by Hamas] of the right of resistance to occupation either.

“So, you can have the overall right of self-defence or resistance. And then how you exercise that right is subject to separate rules. And having a really good cause in war legally doesn’t give you additional licence to use additional violence.

“The rules on how wars are conducted are the rules for everybody regardless of why they are in the war.”

What a difference time and death make in war. Twenty months after Netanyahu’s speech, Israel has exhausted a deep reservoir of goodwill and support among many of its friends in Europe and Canada.

Israel always had its critics and enemies. The difference now is that some countries and individuals who consider themselves friends and allies no longer support the way Israel has been fighting the war. In particular, the restrictions on food aid that respected international assessments say have brought Gaza to the brink of famine, as well as a growing stack of evidence of war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

“I’m shaken to my core,” Jan Egeland, the veteran head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former UN humanitarian chief, told me. “I haven’t seen a population like this being so trapped for such a long period of time in such a small, besieged area. Indiscriminate bombardment, denied journalism, denied healthcare.

“It is only comparable to the besieged areas of Syria during the Assad regime, which led to a uniform Western condemnation and massive sanctions. In this case, very little has happened.”

But now the UK, France and Canada want an immediate halt to Israel’s latest offensive.

On 19 May, prime ministers Sir Keir Starmer and Mark Carney, and President Emmanuel Macron, stated, “We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is wholly disproportionate… We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.”

Sanctions may be coming. The UK and France are actively discussing the circumstances in which they would be prepared to recognise Palestine as an independent state.

Netanyahu quoted from a poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s national poet, in his TV speech to the Israeli people on 7 October as they wrestled with fear, anger and trauma.

He chose the line: “Revenge for the blood of a little child has yet to be devised by Satan.”

It comes from In the City of Slaughter, which is widely regarded as the most significant Hebrew poem of the 20th Century. Bialek wrote it as a young man in 1903, after he had visited the scene of a pogrom against Jews in Kishinev, a town then in imperial Russia and now called Chişinǎu, the capital of present-day Moldova. Over three days, Christian mobs murdered 49 Jews and raped at least 600 Jewish women.

Antisemitic brutality and killing in Europe was a major reason why Zionist Jews wanted to settle in Palestine to build their own state, in what they regarded as their historic homeland. Their ambition clashed with the desire of Palestinian Arabs to keep their land. Britain, the colonial power, did much to make their conflict worse.

By 1929 Vincent Sheean, an American journalist, was describing Jerusalem in a way that is grimly familiar to reporters there almost a century later. “The situation here is awful,” he wrote. “Every day I expect the worst.”

He added that violence was in the air, “The temperature rose – you could stick your hand out in the air and feel it rising.”

Sheean’s account of the 1920s illustrates the conflict’s deep root system in the land that Israelis and Palestinians both want and have not found a way, or a will, to share or separate.

Palestinians see a direct line between the Gaza war and the destruction of their society in 1948 when Israel became independent, which they call the Catastrophe. But Netanyahu, and many other Israelis and their supporters abroad connected the October attacks to the centuries of persecution Jews suffered in Europe, which culminated with Nazi Germany killing six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Netanyahu used the same references to hit back when Macron said in May that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was “shameful” and “unacceptable”.

Netanyahu said that Macron had “once again chosen to side with a murderous Islamist terrorist organisation and echo its despicable propaganda, accusing Israel of blood libels”.

The blood libel is a notorious antisemitic trope that goes back to medieval Europe, falsely accusing Jews of killing Christians, especially children, to use their blood in religious rituals.

After a couple who worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington DC were shot dead, the gunman told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” Netanyahu connected the murders with the criticisms of Israel’s conduct made by the leaders of the UK, France and Canada.

In a video posted on X, he declared: “I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer: When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice. You’re on the wrong side of humanity, and you’re on the wrong side of history.

“For 18 years, we had a de facto Palestinian state. It’s called Gaza. And what did we get? Peace? No. We got the most savage slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu has also referred to the long history of antisemitism in Europe when warrants calling for his arrest, along with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, who was defence minister for the first 13 months of the war, were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The court had also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, considered the mastermind behind 7 October. All three have since been killed by Israel.

A panel of ICC judges decided that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility. “As co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

In a defiant statement, Netanyahu rejected “false and absurd charges”. He compared the ICC to the antisemitic conspiracy that sent Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, to the penal colony on Devil’s Island for treason in 1894. Dreyfus, who was innocent, was eventually pardoned but the affair caused a major political crisis.

“The antisemitic decision of the International Criminal Court is a modern Dreyfus trial – and will end the same way,” the statement said.

“No war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza since October 7th 2023, when the Hamas terrorist organisation launched a murderous assault and perpetrated the largest massacre against the Jewish People since the Holocaust.”

British barrister Helena Kennedy KC was on a panel that was asked by the ICC’s chief prosecutor to assess the evidence against Netanyahu and Gallant. Baroness Kennedy and her colleagues, all distinguished jurists, decided that there were reasonable grounds to go ahead with the warrants. She rejects the accusation that the court and the prosecutor were motivated by antisemitism.

“We’ve got to always remember the horrors that the Jewish community have suffered over centuries,” she told me at her chambers in London. “The world is right to feel a great compassion for the Jewish experience.”

But a history of persecution did not, she said, give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza.

“The Holocaust has filled us all with a high sense of guilt, and so it should because we were complicit. But it also teaches us the lesson that we mustn’t be complicit now when we see crimes being committed.

“You have to conduct a war according to law, and I’m a firm believer that the only way that you ever create peace is by behaving in just ways, and justice is fundamental to all of this. And I’m afraid that we’re not seeing that.”

Stronger words came from Danny Blatman, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust and head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Prof Blatman, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, says that Israeli politicians have for many years used the memory of the Holocaust as “a tool to attack governments and public opinion in the world, and warn them that accusing Israel of any atrocities towards the Palestinians is antisemitism”.

The result he says is that potential critics “shut their mouths because they’re afraid of being attacked by Israelis, by politicians as antisemites”.

Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, believes Israel should have learned from its own history.

“The terrible Jewish experience of persecution and mass killing in the past should give Israel a horror of inflicting the same things on other peoples.”

History is inescapable in the Middle East, always present, a storehouse of justification to be plundered.

Israel could not wage war in Gaza using its chosen tactics without American military, financial and diplomatic support. President Donald Trump has shown signs of impatience, forcing Netanyahu to allow a few cracks in the siege that has brought Gaza to the edge of famine.

Netanyahu himself continues to express support for Trump’s widely condemned proposal to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Mediterranean”, by emptying it of Palestinians and turning it over to the Americans for redevelopment. That is code for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, which would be a war crime. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist allies want to replace them with Jewish settlers.

Trump himself seems silent about the plan. But the Trump administration’s support for Israel, and its actions in Gaza, looks undiminished.

On 4 June, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an “unconditional and permanent” ceasefire, the release of all the hostages and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid. The other 14 members voted in favour. The next day the Americans sanctioned four judges from the ICC in retaliation for the decision to issue arrest warrants.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was protecting the sovereignty of the US and Israel against “illegitimate actions”.

“I call on the countries that still support the ICC, many of whose freedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices to fight this disgraceful attack on our nation and Israel.”

Instead the ICC has had statements of support and solidarity from European leaders. A broad and increasingly bitter gap has opened up between the US and Europe over the Gaza war, and over the legitimacy of criticising Israel’s conduct.

Israel and the Trump administration reject the idea that the laws of war apply equally to all sides, because they claim it implies a false and wrong equivalence between Hamas and Israel.

Jan Egeland can see the split between Europe and the US growing.

“I hope now that Europe will grow a spine,” he says. “There have been new tones, finally, coming from London, from Berlin, from Paris, from Brussels, after all these months of industrial-scale hypocrisy where they didn’t see that there was a world record in killed aid workers, in killed nurses, in killed doctors, in killed teachers, in killed children, and all while journalists like yourself have been denied access, denied to be witnessing this.

“It’s something that the West will learn to regret really — that they were so spineless.”

The question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza outrages Israel and its supporters, led by the United States. Lawyers who believe the evidence does not support the accusation have stood up to oppose the case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging genocide against Palestinians.

But it will not go away.

The Netanyahu loyalist Boaz Bismuth answered the genocide question like this.

“How can you accuse us of genocide when the Palestinian population grew, I don’t know how many times more? How can you accuse me of ethnic cleansing when I’m moving [the] population inside Gaza to protect them? How can you accuse me when I lose soldiers in order to protect my enemies?”

It is hard to prove genocide has happened; the legal bar prosecutors have to clear has been set deliberately high. But leading lawyers who have spent decades assessing matters of legal fact to see if there is a case to answer believe it is not necessary to wait for the process started in January last year by South Africa to make a years-long progress through the ICJ.

We asked Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, for his opinion.

“Genocide is a question of intent,” he wrote. “It means killing, maiming or imposing intolerable conditions on a national or ethnic group with intent to destroy them in whole or in part.

“Statements by Netanyahu and his ministers suggest that the object of current operations is to force the Arab population of Gaza to leave by killing and starving them if they stay. These things make genocide the most plausible explanation for what is now happening.”

South Africa based much of its genocide case against Israel on inflammatory language used by Israeli leaders. One example was the biblical reference Netanyahu used when Israel sent troops into Gaza, comparing Hamas to Amalek. In the Bible God commands the Israelites to destroy their persecutors, the Amalekites.

Another was Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration just after the Hamas attacks when he ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Ralph Wilde, UCL professor of law, also believes there is proof of genocide. “Unfortunately, yes, and there is now no doubt legally as to that, and indeed that has been the case for some time.”

He points out that an advisory opinion of the ICJ has already determined that Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank was illegal. Prof Wilde compares Western governments’ responses to the war in Gaza to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“There has been no court decision as to the illegality of Russia’s action in Ukraine. Nonetheless, states have found it possible already to make public proclamations determining the illegality of that action. There is nothing stopping them doing that in this case.

“And so, if they are suggesting that they are going to wait, the question to ask them is, why are you waiting for a court to tell you what you already know?”

Helena Kennedy KC is “very anxious about the casual use of the word genocide and I avoid it myself because I do think that there has to be a very high level in law, a very level of intent necessary to prove it”.

“Are we saying that it’s not genocide but it is crimes against humanity? You think that makes it sound okay? Terrible crimes against humanity? I think we’re in the process of seeing the most grievous kind of crimes taking place.

“I do think we’re on a trajectory that could very easily be towards genocide, and as a lawyer I think that there’s certainly an argument that is being made strongly for that.”

Baroness Kennedy says her advice to the British government if it was asked for would be, “We’ve got to be very careful about being complicit in grievous crimes ourselves.”

Eventually, a ceasefire will come. It will not end the conflict, or head off the certainty of a long and bitter epilogue. The genocide case at the ICJ guarantees that. So do the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

Once journalists and war crimes investigators can get into the Gaza Strip, they will emerge with more hard facts about what has happened.

Those who have been into Gaza with the UN or medical teams say that even people who have seen many wars find it hard to grasp the extent of the damage; so many islands of human misery in an ocean of rubble.

I keep thinking about something an Israeli officer said the only time I’ve been into Gaza since the war started. I spent a few hours in the ruins with the Israeli army, one month into the war, when it had already made northern Gaza into a wasteland

He started telling me how they did their best to not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.

Sonny Olumati was born in Rome and has lived in Italy all his life but the country he calls home does not recognise him as its own.

To Italy, Sonny is Nigerian, like his passport, and the 39-year-old is only welcome as long as his latest residence permit.

“I’ve been born here. I will live here. I will die here,” the dancer and activist tells me in what he calls “macaroni” Italian-English beneath the palm trees of a scruffy Roman park.

“But not having citizenship is like… being rejected from your country. And I don’t think this is a feeling we should have”.

That is why Sonny and others have been campaigning for a “Yes” vote in a national referendum on Sunday and Monday that proposes halving the time required to apply for Italian citizenship.

Cutting the wait from 10 years to five would bring this country in line with most others in Europe.

The referendum was initiated by a citizens’ initative and is supported by civil society groups. But for such a referendum to be valid, 50% of all voters in Italy have to turn up.

Giorgia Meloni, the country’s hard-right prime minister, has announced she will boycott the vote, declaring the citizenship law already “excellent” and “very open”.

Other parties allied to her are calling on Italians to go to the beach instead of the polling station.

Sonny will not be taking part either. Without citizenship, he is not entitled to vote.

The question of who gets to be Italian is a sensitive one.

Large numbers of migrants and refugees arrive in the country each year helped across the Mediterranean from North Africa by smuggling gangs.

Meloni’s populist government has made a big deal about cutting the number of arrivals.

But this referendum is aimed at those who have travelled legally for work to a country with a rapidly shrinking and ageing population.

The aim is limited: to speed up the process for getting citizenship, not ease the strict criteria.

“Knowledge of the Italian language, not having criminal charges, continuous residence et cetera – all the various requirements remain the same,” explains Carla Taibi of the liberal party More Europe, one of several backers of the referendum.

The reform would affect long-term foreign residents already employed in Italy: from those on factory production lines in the north to those caring for pensioners in plush Rome neighbourhoods.

Their children aged under 18 would also be naturalised.

Up to 1.4 million people could qualify for citizenship immediately, with some estimates ranging higher.

“These people live in Italy, study and work and contribute. This is about changing the perception of them so they are not strangers anymore – but Italian,” argues Taibi.

The reform would also have practical implications.

As a non-Italian, Sonny cannot apply for a public sector job, and even struggled to get a driving licence.

When he was booked for hit reality TV show Fame Island last year, he ended up arriving two weeks late on set in Honduras because he had had so many problems getting the right paperwork.

For a long time, Meloni ignored the referendum entirely. Italy’s publicly owned media, run by a close Meloni ally, have also paid scant attention to the vote.

There is no substantive “No” campaign, making it hard to have a balanced debate.

But the real reason appears strategic.

“They don’t want to raise awareness of the significance of the referendum,” Professor Roberto D’Alimonte of Luiss University in Rome explains. “That’s rational, to make sure that the 50% threshold won’t be reached.”

The prime minister eventually announced she would turn up at a polling station “to show respect for the ballot box” – but refuse to cast a vote.

“When you disagree, you also have the option of abstaining,” Meloni told a TV chat show this week, after critics accused her of disrespecting democracy.

Italy’s citizenship system was “excellent”, she argued, already granting citizenship to more foreign nationals than most countries in Europe: 217,000 last year, according to the national statistics agency, Istat.

But about 30,000 of those were Argentines with Italian ancestry on the other side of the world, unlikely even to visit.

Meanwhile, Meloni’s coalition partner, Roberto Vannacci of the far-right League, accused those behind the referendum of “selling off our citizenship and erasing our identity”.

I ask Sonny why he thinks his own application for citizenship has taken over two decades.

“It’s racism,” he replies immediately.

At one point his file was lost completely, and he has now been told his case is “pending”.

“We have ministers who talk about white supremacy – racial replacement of Italy,” the activist recalls a 2023 comment by the agriculture minister from Meloni’s own party.

“They don’t want black immigration and we know it. I was born here 39 years ago so I know what I say.”

It is an accusation the prime minister has denied repeatedly.

Insaf Dimassi defines herself as “Italian without citizenship”.

“Italy let me grow up and become the person I am today, so not being seen as a citizen is extremely painful and frustrating,” she explains from the northern city of Bologna where she is studying for a PhD.

Insaf’s father travelled to Italy for work when she was a baby, and she and her mother then joined him. Her parents finally got Italian citizenship 20 days after Insaf turned 18. That meant she had to apply for herself from scratch, including proving a steady income.

Insaf chose to study instead.

“I arrived here at nine months old, and maybe at 33 or 34 – if all goes well – I can finally be an Italian citizen,” she says, exasperated.

She remembers exactly when the significance of her “outsider” status hit home: it was when she was asked to run for election alongside a candidate for mayor in her hometown.

When she shared the news with her parents, full of excitement, they had to remind her she was not Italian and was not eligible.

“They say it’s a matter of meritocracy to be a citizen, that you have to earn it. But more than being myself, what do I have to demonstrate?” Insaf wants to know.

“Not being allowed to vote, or be represented, is being invisible.”

On the eve of the referendum, students in Rome wrote a call to the polls on the cobbles of a city square.

“Vote ‘YES’ on the 8th and 9th [of June],” they spelled out in giant cardboard letters.

With a government boycott and such meagre publicity, the chances of hitting the 50% turnout threshold seem slim.

But Sonny argues that this vote is just the beginning.

“Even if they vote ‘No’, we will stay here – and think about the next step,” he says. “We have to start to talk about the place of our community in this country.”

Russia has hit Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, with a massive drone and bomber attack, killing four people and injuring nearly 60, officials say.

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

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said 48 drones, two missiles and four glide bombs had been used against his city on Friday night, while more glide bombs were reportedly dropped on Saturday.

Earlier, Moscow said a massive wave of drone and missile attacks across Ukraine on Thursday night was in response to “terrorist attacks by the Kyiv regime”, after attacks on Russian railway infrastructure and air bases last weekend.

In another development, Russian and Ukrainian officials released conflicting accounts about when a prisoner swap agreed at earlier talks would happen.

In Kharkiv, some 18 apartment buildings and 13 other homes were hit on Friday night, the 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 might still be people buried under the rubble.

In the later Russian attack using glide bombs on Kharkiv on Saturday evening, one more person was killed and at least another 18 people injured, the city’s mayor 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 on Thursday night, when Russia attacked the country with more than 400 drones and nearly 40 missiles.

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

He accused his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, of “buying himself time to keep waging the war”, and said “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, said 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 said that the bodies of more than 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been taken to an agreed exchange point but that Ukrainian officials had 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 Co-ordination for PoWs office said that the comments did “not correspond to reality or to previous agreements”.

The Co-ordination 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 co-ordinated”.

Russian air strikes over the past two nights came after bomb attacks on railways in western Russia reportedly killed seven people and injured more than 100, and Ukrainian drone strikes targeted strategic warplanes at four air bases deep inside Russia.

Ukraine’s security service SBU said at least 40 Russian aircraft had been struck during “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 after the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president.

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 Colombian presidential candidate has been shot three times – reportedly twice in the head – at a campaign event in the capital, Bogota.

Miguel Uribe Turbay, 39, was attacked while addressing a small crowd in a park on Saturday. Police arrested a 15-year-old suspect at the scene, local media say.

Uribe’s wife, Maria Claudia Tarazona, called on the nation to pray for his survival. “Miguel is currently fighting for his life. Let us ask God to guide the hands of the doctors who are treating him,” she said.

Uribe’s Centro Democratico party condemned the attack, saying it endangered “democracy and freedom in Colombia”.

Phone footage shared online appears to show the moment when he was shot in the head mid-speech, prompting those gathered to flee in panic.

Paramedics said he had been shot in the knee and twice in the head, AFP news agency reported. He was airlifted to Sante Fe clinic where supporters have gathered outside to hold vigil.

The government of left wing President Gustavo Petro said it “categorically and forcefully” condemned the attack as an “act of violence not only against his person, but also against democracy.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also condemned the shooting as a “direct threat to democracy”.

Uribe announced his candidacy for next year’s presidential election in October.

He is from a prominent political family in Colombia, with links to the country’s Liberal Party. His father was a union leader and businessman.

His mother was Diana Turbay, a journalist who was killed in 1991 in a rescue attempt after she had been kidnapped by the Medellin drugs cartel run at the time by Pablo Escobar.

Nearly two dozen paintings by one of the world’s most celebrated modern artists – once part of a record-breaking art deal – are set to hit the auction block for the first time next week.

On 12 June, 25 rare MF Husain paintings will go under the hammer at an art gallery in Mumbai city, more than two decades after he painted them.

This will be the first public glimpse of the paintings, locked away in bank vaults since 2008 after authorities seized them from a prominent businessman over an alleged loan default.

“It’s like the paintings have come full circle,” says Dadiba Pundole, director of Pundole Art Gallery, where the auction is set to be held.

Husain used the gallery as his studio for many of these works, part of an ambitious 100-painting series he never finished. Often called the “Picasso of India,” he was one of the country’s most celebrated – and controversial – artists. His works have fetched millions, but his bold themes often drew criticism. He died in 2011, aged 95.

Titled MF Husain: An Artist’s Vision of the XX Century, the 25 paintings at Pundole’a gallery offer a glimpse into his take on a transformative century shaped by leaps in technology, politics, and culture. Pundole has estimated that the auction could fetch up to $29m (£21m).

This comes months after another Husain painting, Untitled (Gram Yatra), sold for an unprecedented $13.8m at a Christie’s auction in New York, becoming the most expensive Indian artwork to be auctioned.

The oil-on-canvas masterpiece had adorned the walls of a Norwegian hospital for almost five decades, forgotten by the art world, until the auction house was alerted about its presence in 2013.

The latest paintings to be auctioned seem to follow a similar trajectory.

Husain began working on them in the early 2000s, with great excitement and vigour, recalls Pundole.

“When he was painting, nothing could disturb him. It didn’t matter what was happening around him,” he adds.

In 2004, Husain sold 25 paintings to a Mumbai businessman as the first instalment of a billion-rupee deal.

Kishore Singh, author of , wrote about this agreement in the Indian Express newspaper.

“He [Husain] wasn’t jealous of fellow artists, but he was competitive,” Singh writes, noting that Husain struck the deal soon after Tyeb Mehta’s Kali [an Indian goddess] set a new record for India’s most expensive painting in 2002, selling for 15 million rupees.

Husain struck a billion rupees deal with businessman Guru Swarup Srivastava for this series of paintings. Media dubbed it “India’s biggest art deal,” catapulting the little-known Srivastava into overnight fame as a celebrity collector.

But two years later, India’s top crime agency, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), began investigating Srivastava’s business, alleging he and associates had misused a loan from a government-backed agricultural body.

The CBI alleged Srivastava diverted the funds into real estate, mutual funds, and Husain paintings. He and his company deny all charges; the case remains in court.

In 2008, a tribunal allowed the government-backed agricultural body to seize one billion rupees in assets from Srivastava, including the 25 Husain paintings.

In February this year, a court cleared the way for the paintings to be auctioned to recover part of the loan. And so, after years locked away in bank vaults, the 25 paintings are finally stepping into the spotlight.

In a 2018 interview to author and journalist Tara Kaushal, Srivastava spoke about his stalled deal with the artist.

“I had planned to pay Husain for the rest of the paintings by selling the first 25. But legal complications meant that, when Husain called me in 2008 saying the paintings were ready in London and Paris, and to pick them up at the agreed price, my funds were not ready. He understood,” he said.

Asked why Husain had chosen to sell his paintings to a person who almost nobody knew in India’s elite art circles, Pundole says, “He didn’t care. As long as his paintings were sold.”

There’s no way to know how Husain felt about the failed deal or his unfinished 20th Century series – but the episode remains a striking footnote in his bold, eventful career.

The 25 paintings in this series, vibrant acrylics on canvas, showcase Husain’s bold style while reflecting key 20th-century events and social attitudes.

One painting shows an unlikely group chatting on a bench, symbolising Husain’s call for peaceful dialogue and coexistence among global powers.

Another painting honours Charlie Chaplin while juxtaposing a rocket launch to highlight the contrast between social and economic disparities and massive state spending.

Other paintings depict a world battling poverty, soldiers in trenches, and humanity confronting tragedies like World War Two, the Partition, and the Holocaust.

The row between Donald Trump and Elon Musk over a major spending bill has exacerbated uncertainty over the future of Nasa’s budget, which is facing deep cuts.

The space agency has published its budget request to Congress, which would see funding for science projects cut by nearly a half.

Forty science missions, which are in development or in space already, are in line to be stood down.

The president has threatened to withdraw federal contracts with Musk’s company, Space X. Nasa relies on the firm’s Falcon 9 rocket fleet to resupply the International Space Station with crew and supplies. The space agency also expects to use its Starship rocket to send astronauts to the Moon and eventually to Mars once it has been developed.

Dr Simeon Barber, a space scientist at the Open University said that the uncertainty was having a “chilling impact” on the human space programme.

“The astonishing exchanges, snap decisions and U turns we’ve witnessed in the last week undermine the very foundations that we build our ambitions on.

“Space science and exploration relies upon long term planning and cooperation between government, companies and academic institutions.”

Aside from the feud between the President and Mr Musk, there is also concern about deep cuts requested by the White House to Nasa’s budget.

All sectors have been earmarked for savings, apart from an effort to send astronauts to Mars, which has received a $100m (£74m) boost.

According to Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, which promotes space exploration, the potential cuts represent “the biggest crisis ever to face the US space programme”.

Nasa has said that its request to reduce its overall budget by nearly a quarter “aligns (its) science and technology portfolios to missions essential for the exploration of the Moon and Mars”.

Dr Adam Baker, a space analyst at Cranfield University told BBC News that if these proposals are approved by Congress, it would fundamentally shift the agency’s focus.

“President Trump is repurposing Nasa for two things: to land astronauts on the Moon before the Chinese and to have astronauts plant a US flag on Mars. Everything else is secondary.”

Those who back the proposals say the White House’s budget has given Nasa a clear purpose, for the first time since the days of the Apollo Moon landings of the 1960s and 70s, when the aim was to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. Nasa’s critics say that since then the space agency has become a bloated, unfocussed bureaucracy which routinely goes massively over budget in its space missions and wastes taxpayer’s money.

One of the most egregious examples of this is Nasa’s new rocket for its plans to return American astronauts to the Moon, the Space Launch System (SLS). Its development has been delayed, and costs have spiralled such that it costs $4.1bn (£3.3bn) for each and every launch. By contrast, SpaceX’s equivalent rocket system, Starship, is estimated to cost around $100m (£80m) per launch because it is designed to be reusable. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space company promises similar savings for its proposed New Glenn rocket.

To no one’s surprise, SLS will be phased out under the White House proposals, in the hope that Starship and New Glenn can take its place. But the past three development launches of Starship have been unsuccessful, and Blue Origin has only recently begun to test its Moon rocket.

“The worry is that Nasa may be jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire,” says Dr Barber.

“The development of these alternatives to SLS is being bankrolled by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

“If they lose their appetite for this endeavor and SpaceX or Blue Origin say they need more money to develop their systems, Congress will have to give it to them,” says Dr Barber.

Of greater concern, says Dr Barber, is the potential loss of 40 missions to explore other planets and to monitor the impact of climate change on Earth from space, many of which involve collaborations with international partners.

“I think it is very sad that what has taken so long to build can be knocked down with a wrecking ball so quickly with no plan to rebuild it afterwards.”

The projects facing the axe include dozens of planetary missions already in space for which most of the development and launch costs have already been paid for, with relatively small savings proposed on their operating costs.

Also under threat are two collaborations with the European Space Agency: An ambitious plan to bring martian rocks collected by Nasa’s Perseverance Rover back to Earth and a mission to send Europe’s Rosalind Franklin Rover to the red planet to search for signs of past life.

Prof Sir Martin Sweeting, head of the UK space firm Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, and co-author of a Royal Society report on the future of space says that while the development was “unwelcome”, there may be an upside for Europe as it takes greater responsibility for its own space exploration programme.

“Maybe we have been too reliant on Nasa the big player to carry a lot of the emphasis in space,” he told BBC News.

“It is an opportunity to think about how Europe wants to get a better balance in its space activities.”

But there is much more downside for Europe in the short term. As well as the return of Mars samples and its Rover, ESA risks reduced access to the International Space Station if it is wound down, and the budget cuts cancel Nasa’s extensive contributions to its successor, the Lunar Gateway, a multinational space station planned for orbit around the Moon.

In its recently published strategy ESA stated it “will be seeking to build a more autonomous space capability, and to continue being a reliable, strong and desirable partner with space agencies from around the globe,” with the implication that it would do so with or without Nasa.

Also facing cuts are numerous current and proposed Earth Observation programmes according to Dr Baker.

“These Earth observation programmes are our canary in the coal mine,” he told BBC News.

“Our ability to predict the impact of climate change and mitigate against it could be drastically reduced. If we turn off this early warning system it is a frightening prospect”.

The budget proposals have yet to be approved by Congress. The planetary Society’s Casey Dreier has told BBC News that many Republicans have told lobbyists privately that they are prepared to vote against the cuts.

But, Mr Dreier worries that there is a strong possibility that political gridlock might mean that no budget will be agreed. It is likely that the reduced White House budget would be put in place as an interim measure, which could then not easily be reversed, because once space missions are turned off it is hard, if not impossible, to start them up again.

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.

UK doctors are attempting to clear dangerous superbug infections using “poo pills” containing freeze-dried faeces.

The stool samples come from healthy donors and are packed with good bacteria.

Early data suggests superbugs can be flushed out of the dark murky depths of the bowel and replaced with a mix of healthy gut bacteria.

It is a new approach to tackling infections that resist antibiotics, which are thought to kill a million people each year.

The focus is on the bowels which are “the biggest reservoir of antibiotic resistance in humans” says Dr Blair Merrick, who has been testing the pills at Guys and St Thomas’ hospitals.

Drug-resistant superbugs can escape their intestinal home and cause trouble elsewhere in the body – such as urinary tract or bloodstream infections.

“So there’s a lot of interest in ‘can you get rid of them from the gut?’,” says Dr Merrick.

The idea of poo-pills isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Faecal transplants – also known as a trans-poo-tion – are already approved for treating severe diarrhoea caused by bacteria.

But scientists noticed hints that faecal transplants for also seemed to get rid of superbugs.

New research has focused on patients who had an infection caused by drug-resistant bacteria in the past six months.

They were given pills made from faeces which people had donated to a stool bank.

Each stool sample is tested to ensure it does not contain any harmful bugs, undigested food is removed and then it is freeze dried into a powder.

This is stored inside a pill that can pass through the stomach unscathed and reach the intestines where it dissolves to release its poopy powdery payload.

The trial has taken place on 41 patients at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals in London to lay the groundwork for a large-scale study.

It showed patients were up for taking a poo pill and the donated bacteria were still being detected in the bowels at least a month later.

Dr Merrick says there are “really promising signals” that poo pills could help tackle the rising scourge of superbugs and that donor bacteria could be going to microbial war with the superbugs as they compete over food and space on the lining of the gut and either rid the body of them completely or “reduce them down to a level that doesn’t cause problems”.

The study also suggests the array of gut bacteria becomes more varied after the therapy. This is a sign of good health and “may well be promoting colonisation resistance” so it is harder for new infectious bugs to get in.

“It’s very exciting. There’s a real shift from 20 years ago where all bacteria and viruses were assumed to do you harm; to now where we realise they are completely necessary to our overall health,” says Dr Merrick.

Earlier this week scientists showed the good bacteria our bodies meet – in the hours after we are born – seem to halve the risk of young children being admitted to hospital with lung infections.

Our body’s own human cells are outnumbered by the bacteria, fungi and others that live inside us – known as the microbiome.

This has led to research implicating the microbiome in everything from Crohn’s disease to cancer to mental health.

If poo pills are proven to work against superbugs in larger studies then the researchers think they could be used for both treatment and prevention in people at risk.

Medical procedures that suppress the immune system – including cancer therapies and organ transplants – can make the body more vulnerable.

“A lot of these individuals come to a lot of harm from drug resistant organisms,” Dr Merrick.

The UK’s drugs regulator – the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) – said there were more than 450 microbiome medicines currently in development.

“Some of them will succeed, so I do think we will seem them coming through quite soon,” said Dr Chrysi Sergaki, the head of microbiome research at the MHRA.

“We could potentially, in the future, replace antibiotics with microbiome [therapies] – that’s the big picture, so there’s a lot of potential.”

Tatyana Popovytch had contacted every agency she could think of. She had walked every step her son Vladislav could have taken after the Russians opened fire at his car, leaving him to flee with a bullet in his leg. She had looked in mass graves, reviewed pictures of the dead, watched exhumations. And after a month, she knew no more than when she had started.

Then a stranger called.

Serhii had just been released from a Russian prison in Kursk. At morning roll call, the prisoners could not see one another, but they could hear each person state their full name and home village. Serhii memorised as many names and places as he could – 10 in total, he said – and on 9 May 2022 he called Tatyana to say that he had heard her son’s voice.

Like Vladislav, Serhii was a civilian captured from Bucha at the start of the war, when hundreds of civilians were taken from this area. Vladislav was 29 at the time. Now 32, he is still in the prison in Kursk. Serhii couldn’t explain to Tatyana why he had been released and Vladislav hadn’t. Tatyana was just glad to hear that her son was alive. “I was so overjoyed I lost the stutter I’d had since he was taken,” she said.

Three years later, to the day, Tatyana was sitting in a café in Bucha, not far from where her son was abducted, looking over the scant evidence that he was still alive: two letters from him – short, boilerplate texts, written in Russian, telling her he was well fed and well looked after. Each letter had taken around three months to reach Tatyana, making it hard for her to feel very connected to her son at any point in time.

“My son is very gentle and sensitive,” she said, with the pained expression of a parent who cannot protect their child. She was looking at pictures of Vlad ballroom dancing – a hobby from a young age. “He is so vulnerable,” she said. “I worry that he will lose his sanity there.”

According to Ukrainian authorities, nearly 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are still in captivity in Russian prisons after being abducted by the invading army – not counting the more than 20,000 Ukrainian children estimated to have been taken to Russia.

There are growing fears now among their many thousands of loved ones, amid the apparent progress towards peace talks, that they could be forgotten or lost in the process. And those fears appear to be justified.

Under the Geneva Convention, there is a recognised mechanism for exchanging prisoners of war, but no such mechanism exists for the return of captured civilians, leaving even top Ukrainian and international officials searching for an explanation as to how they might be brought home.

“When I attend official meetings, at the ombudsman’s office or elsewhere, no one talks about getting the civilians back in the event of a ceasefire,” said Yulia Hripun, 23, whose father was kidnapped early on in the war from a village just west of Kyiv.

In the weeks after learning of her father’s captivity, Yulia used Facebook to contact another daughter of an imprisoned Ukrainian and the pair launched a new organisation to campaign for all the civilians’ release.

The group has met representatives from the UN, the European Parliament, the governments of several EU countries and the US embassy in Ukraine.

“We spoke with them but it came down to the fact that they honestly don’t understand what’s going to happen,” Yulia said, of meeting the Americans.

“The only thing they said is that Trump is interested in the issue of deported children and that maybe civilians could somehow fit into that category. But they are actually different categories that can’t be combined.”

Worryingly for Yulia and other relatives of the captured civilians, top Ukrainian officials are not pretending to have a stronger idea.

“I do not see the real, effective approach to returning the civilian detainees to Ukraine,” said Dmytro Lubinets, the country’s human rights ombudsman. “We do not have a legal basis or the mechanisms for returning them,” he said, frankly.

Further complicating the problem is Russia levelling criminal charges against some of those captured during the invasion.

“And when you see these charges, it is often ‘actions against the special military operation’,” Lubinets said. “Can you imagine opening an investigation against a Ukrainian civilian for simply resisting the invading Russian army, on Ukrainian territory?”

In May, Russia released 120 civilian detainees as part of a larger swap of prisoners of war, and further exchanges are expected. But the numbers are still vanishingly small compared to the tens of thousands said to have been seized – adults and children. And great uncertainty remains over the path towards a negotiated peace.

“You want to believe he is coming home, at the same time you can’t believe it,” said Petro Sereda, 61, a bus driver from Irpin, near Kyiv, whose son Artym was taken prisoner more than three years ago. “It is extremely difficult.”

Petro and his wife live in shipping container-style temporary accommodation in Irpin, because their home was destroyed in the invasion. Even three years on, every time the phone rings Petro thinks it might be Artym.

“It is one thing to have a letter saying he is alive, but to hear his voice… That would be the joy that he is really alive.”

The families live like this, in desperate hope. The dream is that they get to see their loved ones again. It is not a straightforward dream, though – some fear that Russian captivity will have caused lasting damage.

Tatyana, whose ballroom-dancing son Vladislav was abducted from Bucha, said she shuddered to hear the Russian language now “because it is the language my son is being tortured in.”

There is also the issue of what is missed. During Vladislav’s detention, his father passed away unexpectedly at just 50, carrying a well of guilt that he was not able to protect his son.

All Tatyana can do is prepare mentally for Vladislav’s return. She expected to “feel every possible emotion,” she said. “It is all I think about. All the time, every day.”

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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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. It 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. And it has 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 US 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, 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.

Determined to avoid baggage fees for his holiday to Pisa, Benjamin Till trawled several different shops armed with a tape measure in search of the right suitcase.

Eventually, he found a case within the dimensions EasyJet allows for a free underseat bag – or so he thought.

When Mr Till arrived at London Gatwick Airport in December 2023, he discovered those measurements included wheels, meaning his bag was deemed slightly too big.

He protested, but eventually paid £48 to bring the bag on board. He says he was told to remove the wheels for the way back – which he did.

But at the gate on his way home, he was told the suitcase was still too large, so he sat on the floor, unpacking his dirty underwear and souvenirs into a bin bag.

“I don’t mind admitting that I actually burst into tears because it was so humiliating,” he says.

An EasyJet spokesperson told the BBC its ground crew had to ensure non-checked bags were within maximum dimensions “to safely and securely fit”, and that rules were made clear to customers when they booked.

Stories of passengers caught out by baggage rules they feel are inconsistent or confusing are common, with many customers complaining or seeking clarity from budget airlines on social media.

Different airlines have varying rules on the acceptable size and weight of an underseat personal item or an overhead cabin bag, with some charging customers to bring the latter.

For people who fall foul of these rules, some airlines charge hefty fees to upgrade a bag from a free personal item to an overhead cabin bag at the airport gate, or to stow an oversized cabin bag in the hold.

Passenger confusion has prompted the European Union’s largest consumer group to push for fairer and more consistent hand luggage rules, and caused one government to start cracking down on airlines over bag charges.

The EU is now looking at changing its laws – changes which would also affect UK passengers who are travelling to or from an EU destination using an EU-based airline.

On Thursday, EU transport ministers proposed standardised sizing for free underseat baggage on EU airlines, among other air travel and passenger rights’ changes – meaning this could become EU law if their position is accepted by the European Parliament.

Budget airlines say their baggage policies comply with the law while keeping fares low, but they have been facing mounting pressure and calls for change.

EU transport ministers proposed that passengers should be guaranteed one free personal item, measuring up to 40x30x15cm (including wheels and handles) – or which could reasonably fit under a plane seat.

These rules would apply to EU-based airlines (such as Ryanair, Wizz Air and EasyJet), including when they are carrying passengers from a non-EU country like the UK to an EU country and vice-versa, but not third-party airlines.

New rules would add clarity to an EU court ruling from 11 years ago, which stated hand baggage should not be subject to an extra fee, provided it met “reasonable” weight and dimensions, but did not say what reasonable was.

Currently, Ryanair allows a free carry-on bag of 40x20x25cm, while EasyJet’s dimensions for a free bag are a more generous 45x36x20 cm, including wheels and handles.

The ministers’ proposal was silent, however, on the issue of whether airlines could charge for overhead cabin bags – meaning that if their proposal was adopted into law, the current situation would not change and airlines could keep charging for that kind of hand baggage, which some in Europe have lobbied to stop.

The European Consumer Organisation, BEUC, an umbrella group for 45 independent consumer organisations from 32 countries, believes Thursday’s proposals do not go far enough, and legitimise “charging for reasonably sized hand luggage”.

In November, five airlines were fined a total of €179m (£150m) in Spain for “abusive” practices, including charging for hand luggage. Spain’s Consumer Rights Ministry said at the time that it planned to ban charging extra for carry-on luggage and other policies.

The airlines had said they would appeal the decision.

Regarding charges for overheard cabin bags, Ryanair said it fully complied with EU law in its policy, which allows one small bag on board free of charge.

“If airlines were forced to include additional carry-on bags as part of the basic fare, it would reduce choice and drive up air fares for all passengers, which would harm consumers,” the airline said.

Industry group Airlines For Europe said charging different amounts depending on baggage “allows passengers to choose the exact services that best suits their needs”.

Hand luggage dimensions should be universal, says Jane Hawkes, a consumer expert specialising in travel.

“I don’t really see why it can’t be, and why they can’t come to a voluntary agreement as to what those requirements should be for your baggage,” she tells the BBC.

“There have to be restrictions, obviously, but a one-size-fits-all kind of approach would make it a lot simpler for passengers,” she says.

BEUC said policymakers should define what “reasonable” size and weight was “to avoid surprises at the airport and ultimately reduce the number of disputes costing consumers and airlines time and money”.

Ms Hawkes suggests passengers make sure they measure their bag after it is packed, as it may expand when it is full and go over the limit.

She adds that consumers should not just be swayed by the fare price, as “if you’ve got an airline that encompasses [baggage] without you having to pay extra costs to start with, then that might be more of a better option for you”.

Mr Till would welcome a one-size-fits-all approach to underseat bags.

“It’s just really, really unfair and ridiculous and there should be one size that goes across all of the airlines,” he says.

He also criticises the permitted size of underseat cabin bags, saying “it was such a tiny, tiny size of luggage that you were allowed that it had taken me so long to find something that was so small”.

Still, he was grateful for the inexpensive air fare, and the place he had to stay in Italy, because “otherwise I wouldn’t be able to come to this beautiful country”.

Two sisters whose mother went from being their best friend to stealing their £50,000 inheritance say they have been left feeling anxious and unable to trust anyone.

Katherine Hill, 53, from Alltwen in Pontardawe, Neath Port Talbot, and her 93-year-old father Gerald Hill from Fairwood in Swansea were found guilty of fraud by abuse of power after a trial last year.

They were sentenced to 30 months in prison and a 12-month sentence, suspended for 18 months, respectively. On Monday, [Katherine]Hill was ordered to repay the money, which was left to her daughters Gemma and Jessica Thomas by their grandmother Margaret Hill.

“I’ll never have a relationship with my mother now,” said Jessica.

Swansea Crown Court previously heard, due to inflation, the sum stolen by the “greedy and spiteful” Hills was now worth about £65,000.

Katherine Hill put the money in an instant access Barclays Everyday Saver account, despite being advised not to, and both she and her dad had cards to access it – draining the contents within a year.

Between March 2016 and March 2017, the account where the money was held was emptied in 10 withdrawals, with £35,000 withdrawn in three transactions alone, the court heard.

Gemma and Jessica grew up in Neath Port Talbot with their parents, and said Hill was a “good mother”.

“She was like my best friend,” said Gemma, now 26, adding “no-one saw this coming.”

She said Hill did not have a good relationship with her own mother Margaret Hill – who split from her father when Hill was a teenager – though the girls did not know why.

Margaret Hill died in 2014, while [Katherine] Hill was divorcing the girls’ father, Chris Thomas.

At the time Jessica was just 12 and not told about the inheritance, but Gemma, who was 15 “understood a little bit more”.

The £50,000 was placed in a trust fund with their mother as a trustee – to be accessed when they were 25.

Following the divorce, the girls stayed living with their mother for about six months, but say she would often leave them alone for long periods of time while she visited her new boyfriend.

“It would start where she was going on dates and stuff. And I think I was at that perfect age of ‘my mother’s going out for the night, I can have friends over’, and I was kind of loving it for a while,” said Gemma.

“But it got to the point where it was happening every weekend and people expected that I wasn’t going to have a parent at home, and I would be like, ‘please will you stay home this one time?’.”

Mr Thomas decided his daughters would be better living with him, so the girls moved out of their family home and with him, while Hill moved in with her current partner, Phillip Lloyd.

The sisters said their mum would sometimes take them out at the weekend, to a pub or McDonalds, but the conversation would often centre around their father and her upset that they left.

“I think she just could never get over the fact that we were choosing to live with him over her,” said Gemma.

Jessica said it was “clear from then that we weren’t really a very important thing to her”.

“I remember when she came to see me on my 13th birthday, and took me out for the day, saying she had to leave early because she was going out with [her boyfriend] and his family.

“It wasn’t like she’d spend a lot of money on us… not 50 grand’s worth, anyway.”

They said, looking back, there were signs of extravagance from Hill and her partner, such as building a back garden pub and hot tub, and going on holidays.

But nothing set off alarm bells, as Hill had also received her own money from her late mother.

Now, the girls said, they know it was really them paying for their mum’s lifestyle.

It was when Gemma phoned her mum to ask about accessing the money early, as she planned to buy their childhood home from their dad, that the claims the inheritance never existed began.

She said her mum told her “the money’s not yours” and blocked her number, before later claiming in court it had been posted through the girls’ letterboxes.

Jessica, who is now a nurse, recalled the shock of discovering the money existed, and then immediately that it was gone.

“How can you grieve something you never had? But [also] she’s robbed me of an opportunity not a lot of people get.”

She and her boyfriend currently live with his parents, and she said saving up to move out without her inheritance would take a very long time.

Gemma said she was angry, adding she found it frustrating the more time went on and the more Hill lied.

She said the initial confusion and hurt was hard, given their happy memories of their mum, and the woman she saw in court did not seem like the same person.

“I’d sit there and be like, ‘What if we’re all wrong? What if she hasn’t done it?’

“But I have to accept that she has.”

Gemma said giving evidence in court was stressful, but the relief came more from feeling validated, than from money or the sentences.

“When it actually was the case that she was being sent down… it was like we were being told that we’re not crazy,” she said.

The girls said they saw people on social media claiming they were in prison with their mum and she “was still saying that she was innocent”.

“And people would believe in her… that’s the most shocking thing to me,” said Jessica.

“Even though the relationship had started to break down before this, it could have possibly been fixed, whereas we’re at that point now that we’ll never go back to how we used to be.”

She added their mum had “showed no remorse for anything she did”.

“She would look at me while we were standing up giving evidence, and she was shaking her head as if I was the one telling lies,” she said.

“It’s like she’ll never take responsibility for what she’s done.”

Jessica said she had been going to counselling for many years, to address “massive issues with trust”, while Gemma said she became “very needy in friendships”.

“[I thought] ‘if my mother doesn’t love me, who the hell is going to love me?'”

Now a mother herself to a two-month-old boy, she said she saw the betrayal on a new level.

“I came home [after court] on Monday and I was feeding my son. I was looking at him, and I was like, I could not go 10 days, not even 10 hours really, without knowing how he was or what was going on in his life. Never mind the past 10 years.

“It doesn’t make any sense, she’s missing out on all of that.”

Jessica said still living and working in the same area as her mum brought her anxiety and she lived with a tic, which a doctor told her had been triggered by trauma.

“The whole thing has just had a massive effect on me, mentally and physically.”

She added she did not know how they would have coped without each other, or their father, who supported them emotionally and financially through the long legal process.

Now, with the result they wanted, they hope they will eventually see the money and “let go of this part of our lives”.

They say they want to forget their mother, and the end of court proceedings has brought a kind of closure, allowing them to “finally breathe”.

Nearly two dozen paintings by one of the world’s most celebrated modern artists – once part of a record-breaking art deal – are set to hit the auction block for the first time next week.

On 12 June, 25 rare MF Husain paintings will go under the hammer at an art gallery in Mumbai city, more than two decades after he painted them.

This will be the first public glimpse of the paintings, locked away in bank vaults since 2008 after authorities seized them from a prominent businessman over an alleged loan default.

“It’s like the paintings have come full circle,” says Dadiba Pundole, director of Pundole Art Gallery, where the auction is set to be held.

Husain used the gallery as his studio for many of these works, part of an ambitious 100-painting series he never finished. Often called the “Picasso of India,” he was one of the country’s most celebrated – and controversial – artists. His works have fetched millions, but his bold themes often drew criticism. He died in 2011, aged 95.

Titled MF Husain: An Artist’s Vision of the XX Century, the 25 paintings at Pundole’a gallery offer a glimpse into his take on a transformative century shaped by leaps in technology, politics, and culture. Pundole has estimated that the auction could fetch up to $29m (£21m).

This comes months after another Husain painting, Untitled (Gram Yatra), sold for an unprecedented $13.8m at a Christie’s auction in New York, becoming the most expensive Indian artwork to be auctioned.

The oil-on-canvas masterpiece had adorned the walls of a Norwegian hospital for almost five decades, forgotten by the art world, until the auction house was alerted about its presence in 2013.

The latest paintings to be auctioned seem to follow a similar trajectory.

Husain began working on them in the early 2000s, with great excitement and vigour, recalls Pundole.

“When he was painting, nothing could disturb him. It didn’t matter what was happening around him,” he adds.

In 2004, Husain sold 25 paintings to a Mumbai businessman as the first instalment of a billion-rupee deal.

Kishore Singh, author of , wrote about this agreement in the Indian Express newspaper.

“He [Husain] wasn’t jealous of fellow artists, but he was competitive,” Singh writes, noting that Husain struck the deal soon after Tyeb Mehta’s Kali [an Indian goddess] set a new record for India’s most expensive painting in 2002, selling for 15 million rupees.

Husain struck a billion rupees deal with businessman Guru Swarup Srivastava for this series of paintings. Media dubbed it “India’s biggest art deal,” catapulting the little-known Srivastava into overnight fame as a celebrity collector.

But two years later, India’s top crime agency, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), began investigating Srivastava’s business, alleging he and associates had misused a loan from a government-backed agricultural body.

The CBI alleged Srivastava diverted the funds into real estate, mutual funds, and Husain paintings. He and his company deny all charges; the case remains in court.

In 2008, a tribunal allowed the government-backed agricultural body to seize one billion rupees in assets from Srivastava, including the 25 Husain paintings.

In February this year, a court cleared the way for the paintings to be auctioned to recover part of the loan. And so, after years locked away in bank vaults, the 25 paintings are finally stepping into the spotlight.

In a 2018 interview to author and journalist Tara Kaushal, Srivastava spoke about his stalled deal with the artist.

“I had planned to pay Husain for the rest of the paintings by selling the first 25. But legal complications meant that, when Husain called me in 2008 saying the paintings were ready in London and Paris, and to pick them up at the agreed price, my funds were not ready. He understood,” he said.

Asked why Husain had chosen to sell his paintings to a person who almost nobody knew in India’s elite art circles, Pundole says, “He didn’t care. As long as his paintings were sold.”

There’s no way to know how Husain felt about the failed deal or his unfinished 20th Century series – but the episode remains a striking footnote in his bold, eventful career.

The 25 paintings in this series, vibrant acrylics on canvas, showcase Husain’s bold style while reflecting key 20th-century events and social attitudes.

One painting shows an unlikely group chatting on a bench, symbolising Husain’s call for peaceful dialogue and coexistence among global powers.

Another painting honours Charlie Chaplin while juxtaposing a rocket launch to highlight the contrast between social and economic disparities and massive state spending.

Other paintings depict a world battling poverty, soldiers in trenches, and humanity confronting tragedies like World War Two, the Partition, and the Holocaust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the diplomatic answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, Hefei remains the most advanced.

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

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

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

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

For the courier companies, the numbers tell the story.

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

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

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

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

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

Significant technical challenges do remain though.

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

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

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

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

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

A wooden hunters’ toolbox inscribed with an ancient writing system from Zambia has been making waves on social media.

“We’ve grown up being told that Africans didn’t know how to read and write,” says Samba Yonga, one of the founders of the virtual Women’s History Museum of Zambia.

“But we had our own way of writing and transmitting knowledge that has been completely side-lined and overlooked,” she tells the BBC.

It was one of the artefacts that launched an online campaign to highlight women’s roles in pre-colonial communities – and revive cultural heritages almost erased by colonialism.

Another intriguing object is an intricately decorated leather cloak not seen in Zambia for more than 100 years.

“The artefacts signify a history that matters – and a history that is largely unknown,” says Yonga.

“Our relationship with our cultural heritage has been disrupted and obscured by the colonial experience.

“It’s also shocking just how much the role of women has been deliberately removed.”

But, says Yonga, “there’s a resurgence, a need and a hunger to connect with our cultural heritage – and reclaim who we are, whether through fashion, music or academic studies”.

“We had our own language of love, of beauty,” she says. “We had ways that we took care of our health and our environment. We had prosperity, union, respect, intellect.”

A total of 50 objects have been posted on social media – alongside information about their significance and purpose that shows that women were often at the heart of a society’s belief systems and understanding of the natural world.

The images of the objects are presented inside a frame – playing on the idea that a surround can influence how you look at and perceive a picture. In the same way that British colonialism distorted Zambian histories – through the systematic silencing and destruction of local wisdom and practices.

The Frame project is using social media to push back against the still-common idea that African societies did not have their own knowledge systems.

The objects were mostly collected during the colonial era and kept in storage in museums all over the world, including Sweden – where the journey for this current social media project began in 2019.

Yonga was visiting the capital, Stockholm, and a friend suggested that she meet Michael Barrett, one of the curators of the National Museums of World Cultures in Sweden.

She did – and when he asked her what country she was from, Yonga was surprised to hear him say that the museum had a lot of Zambian artefacts.

“It really blew my mind, so I asked: ‘How come a country that did not have a colonial past in Zambia had so many artefacts from Zambia in its collection?'”

In the 19th and early 20th Centuries Swedish explorers, ethnographers and botanists would pay to travel on British ships to Cape Town and then make their way inland by rail and foot.

There are close to 650 Zambian cultural objects in the museum, collected over the course of a century – as well as about 300 historical photographs.

When Yonga and her virtual museum co-founder Mulenga Kapwepwe explored the archives, they were astonished to find the Swedish collectors had travelled far and wide – some of the artefacts come from areas of Zambia that are still remote and hard to reach.

The collection includes reed fishing baskets, ceremonial masks, pots, a waist belt of cowry shells – and 20 leather cloaks in pristine condition collected during a 1911-1912 expedition.

They are made from the skin of a lechwe antelope by the Batwa men and worn by the women or used by the women to protect their babies from the elements.

On the fur outside are “geometric patterns, meticulously, delicately and beautifully designed”, Yonga says.

There are pictures of the women wearing the cloaks, and a 300-page notebook written by the person who brought the cloaks to Sweden – ethnographer Eric Van Rosen.

He also drew illustrations showing how the cloaks were designed and took photographs of women wearing the cloaks in different ways.

“He took great pains to show the cloak being designed, all the angles and the tools that were used, and [the] geography and location of the region where it came from.”

The Swedish museum had not done any research on the cloaks – and the National Museums Board of Zambia was not even aware they existed.

So Yonga and Kapwepwe went to find out more from the community in the Bengweulu region in north-east of the country where the cloaks came from.

“There’s no memory of it,” says Yonga. “Everybody who held that knowledge of creating that particular textile – that leather cloak – or understood that history was no longer there.

“So it only existed in this frozen time, in this Swedish museum.”

One of Yonga’s personal favourites in the Frame project is Sona or Tusona, an ancient, sophisticated and now rarely used writing system.

It comes from the Chokwe, Luchazi and Luvale people, who live in the borderlands of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yonga’s own north-western region of Zambia.

Geometric patterns were made in the sand, on cloth and on people’s bodies. Or carved into furniture, wooden masks used in the Makishi ancestral masquerade – and a wooden box used to store tools when people were out hunting.

The patterns and symbols carry mathematical principles, references to the cosmos, messages about nature and the environment – as well as instructions on community life.

The original custodians and teachers of Sona were women – and there are still community elders alive who remember how it works.

They are a huge source of knowledge for Yonga’s ongoing corroboration of research done on Sona by scholars like Marcus Matthe and Paulus Gerdes.

“Sona’s been one of the most popular social media posts – with people expressing surprise and huge excitement, exclaiming: ‘Like, what, what? How is this possible?'”

The Queens in Code: Symbols of Women’s Power post includes a photograph of a woman from the Tonga community in southern Zambia.

She has her hands on a mealie grinder, a stone used to grind grain.

Researchers from the Women’s History Museum of Zambia discovered during a field trip that the grinding stone was more than just a kitchen tool.

It belonged only to the woman who used it – it was not passed down to her daughters. Instead, it was placed on her grave as a tombstone out of respect for the contribution the woman had made to the community’s food security.

“What might look like just a grinding stone is in fact a symbol of women’s power,” Yonga says.

The Women’s History Museum of Zambia was set up in 2016 to document and archive women’s histories and indigenous knowledge.

It is conducting research in communities and creating an online archive of items that have been taken out of Zambia.

“We’re trying to put together a jigsaw without even having all the pieces yet – we’re on a treasure hunt.”

A treasure hunt that has changed Yonga’s life – in a way that she hopes the Frame social media project will also do for other people.

“Having a sense of my community and understanding the context of who I am historically, politically, socially, emotionally – that has changed the way I interact in the world.”

• Grandma with chunky sunglasses becomes unlikely fashion icon
• How a mega dam has caused a mega power crisis
• Zambia made education free, now classrooms are crammed
• The $5m cash and fake gold that no-one is claiming

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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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.”

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.

A Colombian presidential candidate has been shot three times – reportedly twice in the head – at a campaign event in the capital, Bogota.

Miguel Uribe Turbay, 39, was attacked while addressing a small crowd in a park on Saturday. Police arrested a 15-year-old suspect at the scene, local media say.

Uribe’s wife, Maria Claudia Tarazona, called on the nation to pray for his survival. “Miguel is currently fighting for his life. Let us ask God to guide the hands of the doctors who are treating him,” she said.

Uribe’s Centro Democratico party condemned the attack, saying it endangered “democracy and freedom in Colombia”.

Phone footage shared online appears to show the moment when he was shot in the head mid-speech, prompting those gathered to flee in panic.

Paramedics said he had been shot in the knee and twice in the head, AFP news agency reported. He was airlifted to Sante Fe clinic where supporters have gathered outside to hold vigil.

The government of left wing President Gustavo Petro said it “categorically and forcefully” condemned the attack as an “act of violence not only against his person, but also against democracy.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also condemned the shooting as a “direct threat to democracy”.

Uribe announced his candidacy for next year’s presidential election in October.

He is from a prominent political family in Colombia, with links to the country’s Liberal Party. His father was a union leader and businessman.

His mother was Diana Turbay, a journalist who was killed in 1991 in a rescue attempt after she had been kidnapped by the Medellin drugs cartel run at the time by Pablo Escobar.

Even wars have rules. They don’t stop soldiers killing each other but they’re intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides.

If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan.

That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva Conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again.

At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words “Even Wars Have Rules” are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda.

The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.

Getting information from Gaza is difficult. It is a lethal warzone. At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won’t let international news teams into Gaza.

Since the best way to check controversial and difficult stories is first hand, that means the fog of war, always hard to penetrate, is as thick as I have ever experienced in a lifetime of war reporting.

It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire.

Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.

To find an alternative route through that fog, we decided to approach it through the prism of laws that are supposed to regulate warfare and protect civilians. I went to the ICRC headquarters as it is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions.

I have also spoken to distinguished lawyers; to humanitarians with years of experience of working within the law to bring aid to Gaza and other warzones; and to senior Western diplomats about their governments’ growing impatience with Israel and nervousness that they might be seen as complicit in future criminal investigations if they do not speak up about the catastrophe inside Gaza.

In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power.

As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail.

Netanyahu rarely gives interviews or news conferences. He prefers direct statements filmed and posted on social media. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declined a request for an interview.

Boaz Bismuth, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party, repeated his leader’s positions: that there is no famine in Gaza, that Israel respects the laws of war and that unwarranted criticism of its conduct by countries including the UK, France and Canada incites antisemitic attacks on Jews, including murder.

Lawyers I have spoken to believe that there is evidence that Israel followed war crimes, committed by Hamas when it attacked Israel, with very many of its own, including the crime of genocide.

It is clear that Israel has hard questions to answer that will not go away.

It also faces a legal process alleging genocide at the International Court of Justice and has a prime minister with limited travel options as he faces a warrant for arrest on war crimes charges issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Rival politicians inside Israel accuse Netanyahu of presiding over war crimes and turning Israel into a pariah state.

He has pushed back hard, comparing himself – when the warrant was issued – to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in an antisemitic scandal that rocked France in the 1890s.

The evidence of what is happening in Gaza starts with the numbers. On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people. More than 800 were Israeli civilians. The others were members of Israel’s security forces, first responders and foreign workers. Around 250 people, including non-Israelis, were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.

Figures vary slightly, but it is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead.

Collating the huge total of Palestinian casualties inside Gaza is much more difficult. Israel restricts movement inside Gaza and much of the north of the strip cannot be reached.

The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups.

According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.

Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry’s figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country’s own intelligence services.

When the work of the ministry’s statisticians was checked after previous wars, it tallied with other estimates.

A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care.

Gaza’s civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year. But when negotiations on a longer-term deal failed, Israel went back to war on 18 March with a series of huge air strikes and since then a new military offensive, which the prime minister says will finally deliver the elusive “total victory” over Hamas that he promised on 7 October 2023.

Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved.

A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”. The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a “main pressure lever” against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat.

Weaponising food is a war crime.

War is always savage. I was in Geneva to see Mirjana Spoljarić, the Swiss diplomat who is president of the ICRC. She believes it can get even worse; that there is no doubt that Israel is flouting the Geneva Conventions in Gaza and this sends a message that the rules of war can be ignored in conflicts across the world.

After we walked past glass cases displaying the ICRC’s three Nobel peace prizes and handwritten copperplate reproductions of the Geneva Conventions, she warned that “we are hollowing out the very rules that protect the fundamental rights of every human being”.

• Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC

We sat down to talk in a room with one of Europe’s most serene views: the tranquillity of Lake Geneva and the magnificent sprawl of the Mont-Blanc massif.

But for Ms Spoljarić, constantly aware of the ICRC’s role as custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the view beyond the Alps and across the Mediterranean to Gaza is alarming. She has been in Gaza twice this year and says that it is worse than hell on earth.

“Humanity is failing in Gaza,” Ms Spoljarić told me. “It is failing. We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It’s surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering.”

More importantly, she says, the world is watching an entire people, the Palestinians, being stripped of their human dignity.

“It should really shock our collective conscience… It will haunt us. We are seeing things happening that will make the world an unhappier place far beyond the region.”

I asked her about Israel’s justification that it is acting in self-defence to destroy a terrorist organisation that attacked and killed its people on 7 October.

“It is no justification for a disrespect or for a hollowing out of the Geneva Conventions,” she said. “Neither party is allowed to break the rules, no matter what, and this is important because, look, the same rules apply to every human being under the Geneva Convention.

“A child in Gaza has exactly the same protections under the Geneva Conventions as a child in Israel.”

Mirjana Spoljarić spoke quietly, with intense moral clarity. The ICRC considers itself a neutral organisation; in wars it tries to work even-handedly with all sides.

She was not neutral about the rights all human beings should enjoy, and is deeply concerned that those rights are being damaged by the disregard of the rules of war in Gaza.

On the evening of 7 October 2023, while Israel’s troops were still fighting to drive Hamas invaders out of its border communities, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a brief video address to the Israeli people and the watching world.

Speaking from Israel’s military command centre in the heart of Tel Aviv, he chose words that would reassure Israelis and induce dread in their enemies. They were also a window into his thinking about the way that the war should be fought, and how Israel would defend its military choices against criticism.

The fate of Hamas was sealed, he promised. “We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens.

“All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.”

Netanyahu praised allies who were rallying around Israel, singling out the US, France and the UK for their “unreserved support”. He had spoken to them, he said, “to ensure freedom of action”.

But in war freedom of action has legal limits. States can fight, but it must be proportionate to the threat that they face, and civilian lives must be protected.

“You’re never entitled to break the law,” says Janina Dill, professor of global security at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School.

“How Israel conducts this war is an entirely separate legal analysis… The same, by the way, is true in terms of resistance to occupation. October 7 was not an appropriate exercise [by Hamas] of the right of resistance to occupation either.

“So, you can have the overall right of self-defence or resistance. And then how you exercise that right is subject to separate rules. And having a really good cause in war legally doesn’t give you additional licence to use additional violence.

“The rules on how wars are conducted are the rules for everybody regardless of why they are in the war.”

What a difference time and death make in war. Twenty months after Netanyahu’s speech, Israel has exhausted a deep reservoir of goodwill and support among many of its friends in Europe and Canada.

Israel always had its critics and enemies. The difference now is that some countries and individuals who consider themselves friends and allies no longer support the way Israel has been fighting the war. In particular, the restrictions on food aid that respected international assessments say have brought Gaza to the brink of famine, as well as a growing stack of evidence of war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

“I’m shaken to my core,” Jan Egeland, the veteran head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former UN humanitarian chief, told me. “I haven’t seen a population like this being so trapped for such a long period of time in such a small, besieged area. Indiscriminate bombardment, denied journalism, denied healthcare.

“It is only comparable to the besieged areas of Syria during the Assad regime, which led to a uniform Western condemnation and massive sanctions. In this case, very little has happened.”

But now the UK, France and Canada want an immediate halt to Israel’s latest offensive.

On 19 May, prime ministers Sir Keir Starmer and Mark Carney, and President Emmanuel Macron, stated, “We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is wholly disproportionate… We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.”

Sanctions may be coming. The UK and France are actively discussing the circumstances in which they would be prepared to recognise Palestine as an independent state.

Netanyahu quoted from a poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s national poet, in his TV speech to the Israeli people on 7 October as they wrestled with fear, anger and trauma.

He chose the line: “Revenge for the blood of a little child has yet to be devised by Satan.”

It comes from In the City of Slaughter, which is widely regarded as the most significant Hebrew poem of the 20th Century. Bialek wrote it as a young man in 1903, after he had visited the scene of a pogrom against Jews in Kishinev, a town then in imperial Russia and now called Chişinǎu, the capital of present-day Moldova. Over three days, Christian mobs murdered 49 Jews and raped at least 600 Jewish women.

Antisemitic brutality and killing in Europe was a major reason why Zionist Jews wanted to settle in Palestine to build their own state, in what they regarded as their historic homeland. Their ambition clashed with the desire of Palestinian Arabs to keep their land. Britain, the colonial power, did much to make their conflict worse.

By 1929 Vincent Sheean, an American journalist, was describing Jerusalem in a way that is grimly familiar to reporters there almost a century later. “The situation here is awful,” he wrote. “Every day I expect the worst.”

He added that violence was in the air, “The temperature rose – you could stick your hand out in the air and feel it rising.”

Sheean’s account of the 1920s illustrates the conflict’s deep root system in the land that Israelis and Palestinians both want and have not found a way, or a will, to share or separate.

Palestinians see a direct line between the Gaza war and the destruction of their society in 1948 when Israel became independent, which they call the Catastrophe. But Netanyahu, and many other Israelis and their supporters abroad connected the October attacks to the centuries of persecution Jews suffered in Europe, which culminated with Nazi Germany killing six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Netanyahu used the same references to hit back when Macron said in May that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was “shameful” and “unacceptable”.

Netanyahu said that Macron had “once again chosen to side with a murderous Islamist terrorist organisation and echo its despicable propaganda, accusing Israel of blood libels”.

The blood libel is a notorious antisemitic trope that goes back to medieval Europe, falsely accusing Jews of killing Christians, especially children, to use their blood in religious rituals.

After a couple who worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington DC were shot dead, the gunman told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” Netanyahu connected the murders with the criticisms of Israel’s conduct made by the leaders of the UK, France and Canada.

In a video posted on X, he declared: “I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer: When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice. You’re on the wrong side of humanity, and you’re on the wrong side of history.

“For 18 years, we had a de facto Palestinian state. It’s called Gaza. And what did we get? Peace? No. We got the most savage slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu has also referred to the long history of antisemitism in Europe when warrants calling for his arrest, along with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, who was defence minister for the first 13 months of the war, were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The court had also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, considered the mastermind behind 7 October. All three have since been killed by Israel.

A panel of ICC judges decided that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility. “As co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

In a defiant statement, Netanyahu rejected “false and absurd charges”. He compared the ICC to the antisemitic conspiracy that sent Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, to the penal colony on Devil’s Island for treason in 1894. Dreyfus, who was innocent, was eventually pardoned but the affair caused a major political crisis.

“The antisemitic decision of the International Criminal Court is a modern Dreyfus trial – and will end the same way,” the statement said.

“No war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza since October 7th 2023, when the Hamas terrorist organisation launched a murderous assault and perpetrated the largest massacre against the Jewish People since the Holocaust.”

British barrister Helena Kennedy KC was on a panel that was asked by the ICC’s chief prosecutor to assess the evidence against Netanyahu and Gallant. Baroness Kennedy and her colleagues, all distinguished jurists, decided that there were reasonable grounds to go ahead with the warrants. She rejects the accusation that the court and the prosecutor were motivated by antisemitism.

“We’ve got to always remember the horrors that the Jewish community have suffered over centuries,” she told me at her chambers in London. “The world is right to feel a great compassion for the Jewish experience.”

But a history of persecution did not, she said, give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza.

“The Holocaust has filled us all with a high sense of guilt, and so it should because we were complicit. But it also teaches us the lesson that we mustn’t be complicit now when we see crimes being committed.

“You have to conduct a war according to law, and I’m a firm believer that the only way that you ever create peace is by behaving in just ways, and justice is fundamental to all of this. And I’m afraid that we’re not seeing that.”

Stronger words came from Danny Blatman, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust and head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Prof Blatman, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, says that Israeli politicians have for many years used the memory of the Holocaust as “a tool to attack governments and public opinion in the world, and warn them that accusing Israel of any atrocities towards the Palestinians is antisemitism”.

The result he says is that potential critics “shut their mouths because they’re afraid of being attacked by Israelis, by politicians as antisemites”.

Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, believes Israel should have learned from its own history.

“The terrible Jewish experience of persecution and mass killing in the past should give Israel a horror of inflicting the same things on other peoples.”

History is inescapable in the Middle East, always present, a storehouse of justification to be plundered.

Israel could not wage war in Gaza using its chosen tactics without American military, financial and diplomatic support. President Donald Trump has shown signs of impatience, forcing Netanyahu to allow a few cracks in the siege that has brought Gaza to the edge of famine.

Netanyahu himself continues to express support for Trump’s widely condemned proposal to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Mediterranean”, by emptying it of Palestinians and turning it over to the Americans for redevelopment. That is code for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, which would be a war crime. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist allies want to replace them with Jewish settlers.

Trump himself seems silent about the plan. But the Trump administration’s support for Israel, and its actions in Gaza, looks undiminished.

On 4 June, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an “unconditional and permanent” ceasefire, the release of all the hostages and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid. The other 14 members voted in favour. The next day the Americans sanctioned four judges from the ICC in retaliation for the decision to issue arrest warrants.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was protecting the sovereignty of the US and Israel against “illegitimate actions”.

“I call on the countries that still support the ICC, many of whose freedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices to fight this disgraceful attack on our nation and Israel.”

Instead the ICC has had statements of support and solidarity from European leaders. A broad and increasingly bitter gap has opened up between the US and Europe over the Gaza war, and over the legitimacy of criticising Israel’s conduct.

Israel and the Trump administration reject the idea that the laws of war apply equally to all sides, because they claim it implies a false and wrong equivalence between Hamas and Israel.

Jan Egeland can see the split between Europe and the US growing.

“I hope now that Europe will grow a spine,” he says. “There have been new tones, finally, coming from London, from Berlin, from Paris, from Brussels, after all these months of industrial-scale hypocrisy where they didn’t see that there was a world record in killed aid workers, in killed nurses, in killed doctors, in killed teachers, in killed children, and all while journalists like yourself have been denied access, denied to be witnessing this.

“It’s something that the West will learn to regret really — that they were so spineless.”

The question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza outrages Israel and its supporters, led by the United States. Lawyers who believe the evidence does not support the accusation have stood up to oppose the case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging genocide against Palestinians.

But it will not go away.

The Netanyahu loyalist Boaz Bismuth answered the genocide question like this.

“How can you accuse us of genocide when the Palestinian population grew, I don’t know how many times more? How can you accuse me of ethnic cleansing when I’m moving [the] population inside Gaza to protect them? How can you accuse me when I lose soldiers in order to protect my enemies?”

It is hard to prove genocide has happened; the legal bar prosecutors have to clear has been set deliberately high. But leading lawyers who have spent decades assessing matters of legal fact to see if there is a case to answer believe it is not necessary to wait for the process started in January last year by South Africa to make a years-long progress through the ICJ.

We asked Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, for his opinion.

“Genocide is a question of intent,” he wrote. “It means killing, maiming or imposing intolerable conditions on a national or ethnic group with intent to destroy them in whole or in part.

“Statements by Netanyahu and his ministers suggest that the object of current operations is to force the Arab population of Gaza to leave by killing and starving them if they stay. These things make genocide the most plausible explanation for what is now happening.”

South Africa based much of its genocide case against Israel on inflammatory language used by Israeli leaders. One example was the biblical reference Netanyahu used when Israel sent troops into Gaza, comparing Hamas to Amalek. In the Bible God commands the Israelites to destroy their persecutors, the Amalekites.

Another was Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration just after the Hamas attacks when he ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Ralph Wilde, UCL professor of law, also believes there is proof of genocide. “Unfortunately, yes, and there is now no doubt legally as to that, and indeed that has been the case for some time.”

He points out that an advisory opinion of the ICJ has already determined that Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank was illegal. Prof Wilde compares Western governments’ responses to the war in Gaza to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“There has been no court decision as to the illegality of Russia’s action in Ukraine. Nonetheless, states have found it possible already to make public proclamations determining the illegality of that action. There is nothing stopping them doing that in this case.

“And so, if they are suggesting that they are going to wait, the question to ask them is, why are you waiting for a court to tell you what you already know?”

Helena Kennedy KC is “very anxious about the casual use of the word genocide and I avoid it myself because I do think that there has to be a very high level in law, a very level of intent necessary to prove it”.

“Are we saying that it’s not genocide but it is crimes against humanity? You think that makes it sound okay? Terrible crimes against humanity? I think we’re in the process of seeing the most grievous kind of crimes taking place.

“I do think we’re on a trajectory that could very easily be towards genocide, and as a lawyer I think that there’s certainly an argument that is being made strongly for that.”

Baroness Kennedy says her advice to the British government if it was asked for would be, “We’ve got to be very careful about being complicit in grievous crimes ourselves.”

Eventually, a ceasefire will come. It will not end the conflict, or head off the certainty of a long and bitter epilogue. The genocide case at the ICJ guarantees that. So do the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

Once journalists and war crimes investigators can get into the Gaza Strip, they will emerge with more hard facts about what has happened.

Those who have been into Gaza with the UN or medical teams say that even people who have seen many wars find it hard to grasp the extent of the damage; so many islands of human misery in an ocean of rubble.

I keep thinking about something an Israeli officer said the only time I’ve been into Gaza since the war started. I spent a few hours in the ruins with the Israeli army, one month into the war, when it had already made northern Gaza into a wasteland

He started telling me how they did their best to not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.

The row between Donald Trump and Elon Musk over a major spending bill has exacerbated uncertainty over the future of Nasa’s budget, which is facing deep cuts.

The space agency has published its budget request to Congress, which would see funding for science projects cut by nearly a half.

Forty science missions, which are in development or in space already, are in line to be stood down.

The president has threatened to withdraw federal contracts with Musk’s company, Space X. Nasa relies on the firm’s Falcon 9 rocket fleet to resupply the International Space Station with crew and supplies. The space agency also expects to use its Starship rocket to send astronauts to the Moon and eventually to Mars once it has been developed.

Dr Simeon Barber, a space scientist at the Open University said that the uncertainty was having a “chilling impact” on the human space programme.

“The astonishing exchanges, snap decisions and U turns we’ve witnessed in the last week undermine the very foundations that we build our ambitions on.

“Space science and exploration relies upon long term planning and cooperation between government, companies and academic institutions.”

Aside from the feud between the President and Mr Musk, there is also concern about deep cuts requested by the White House to Nasa’s budget.

All sectors have been earmarked for savings, apart from an effort to send astronauts to Mars, which has received a $100m (£74m) boost.

According to Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Pasadena-based Planetary Society, which promotes space exploration, the potential cuts represent “the biggest crisis ever to face the US space programme”.

Nasa has said that its request to reduce its overall budget by nearly a quarter “aligns (its) science and technology portfolios to missions essential for the exploration of the Moon and Mars”.

Dr Adam Baker, a space analyst at Cranfield University told BBC News that if these proposals are approved by Congress, it would fundamentally shift the agency’s focus.

“President Trump is repurposing Nasa for two things: to land astronauts on the Moon before the Chinese and to have astronauts plant a US flag on Mars. Everything else is secondary.”

Those who back the proposals say the White House’s budget has given Nasa a clear purpose, for the first time since the days of the Apollo Moon landings of the 1960s and 70s, when the aim was to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. Nasa’s critics say that since then the space agency has become a bloated, unfocussed bureaucracy which routinely goes massively over budget in its space missions and wastes taxpayer’s money.

One of the most egregious examples of this is Nasa’s new rocket for its plans to return American astronauts to the Moon, the Space Launch System (SLS). Its development has been delayed, and costs have spiralled such that it costs $4.1bn (£3.3bn) for each and every launch. By contrast, SpaceX’s equivalent rocket system, Starship, is estimated to cost around $100m (£80m) per launch because it is designed to be reusable. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space company promises similar savings for its proposed New Glenn rocket.

To no one’s surprise, SLS will be phased out under the White House proposals, in the hope that Starship and New Glenn can take its place. But the past three development launches of Starship have been unsuccessful, and Blue Origin has only recently begun to test its Moon rocket.

“The worry is that Nasa may be jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire,” says Dr Barber.

“The development of these alternatives to SLS is being bankrolled by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

“If they lose their appetite for this endeavor and SpaceX or Blue Origin say they need more money to develop their systems, Congress will have to give it to them,” says Dr Barber.

Of greater concern, says Dr Barber, is the potential loss of 40 missions to explore other planets and to monitor the impact of climate change on Earth from space, many of which involve collaborations with international partners.

“I think it is very sad that what has taken so long to build can be knocked down with a wrecking ball so quickly with no plan to rebuild it afterwards.”

The projects facing the axe include dozens of planetary missions already in space for which most of the development and launch costs have already been paid for, with relatively small savings proposed on their operating costs.

Also under threat are two collaborations with the European Space Agency: An ambitious plan to bring martian rocks collected by Nasa’s Perseverance Rover back to Earth and a mission to send Europe’s Rosalind Franklin Rover to the red planet to search for signs of past life.

Prof Sir Martin Sweeting, head of the UK space firm Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, and co-author of a Royal Society report on the future of space says that while the development was “unwelcome”, there may be an upside for Europe as it takes greater responsibility for its own space exploration programme.

“Maybe we have been too reliant on Nasa the big player to carry a lot of the emphasis in space,” he told BBC News.

“It is an opportunity to think about how Europe wants to get a better balance in its space activities.”

But there is much more downside for Europe in the short term. As well as the return of Mars samples and its Rover, ESA risks reduced access to the International Space Station if it is wound down, and the budget cuts cancel Nasa’s extensive contributions to its successor, the Lunar Gateway, a multinational space station planned for orbit around the Moon.

In its recently published strategy ESA stated it “will be seeking to build a more autonomous space capability, and to continue being a reliable, strong and desirable partner with space agencies from around the globe,” with the implication that it would do so with or without Nasa.

Also facing cuts are numerous current and proposed Earth Observation programmes according to Dr Baker.

“These Earth observation programmes are our canary in the coal mine,” he told BBC News.

“Our ability to predict the impact of climate change and mitigate against it could be drastically reduced. If we turn off this early warning system it is a frightening prospect”.

The budget proposals have yet to be approved by Congress. The planetary Society’s Casey Dreier has told BBC News that many Republicans have told lobbyists privately that they are prepared to vote against the cuts.

But, Mr Dreier worries that there is a strong possibility that political gridlock might mean that no budget will be agreed. It is likely that the reduced White House budget would be put in place as an interim measure, which could then not easily be reversed, because once space missions are turned off it is hard, if not impossible, to start them up again.

US President Donald Trump has ordered 2,000 National Guardsmen to Los Angeles to deal with unrest over raids on undocumented migrants.

Trump said the federal government would “step in and solve the problem”, after the Californian city saw a second day of clashes between protesters and federal agents. It was unclear when the troops would arrive.

Tear gas was used to disperse crowds as residents of the predominantly Latino Paramount district clashed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents earlier on Saturday.

As many as 118 arrests were made in LA this week as a result of ICE operations, including 44 on Friday. California Governor Gavin Newsom has condemned the raids as “cruel”.

Newsom said the federal government’s move to “take over the California National Guard and deploy 2,000 soldiers” was “purposefully inflammatory” and would “only escalate tensions”.

The National Guard is usually called by a state’s governor, but Trump has used a provision that allows him to take control himself, Newsom’s office told the AP news agency.

Trump hit out at the governor on his Truth Social platform, saying that if he and LA Mayor Karen Bass could not do their jobs, “then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”

Newsom called Trump on Saturday and they spoke for about 40 minutes, a spokesperson for Newsome told CBS News, the BBC’s media partner in the US. No other details of the conversation were immediately known.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth later threatened to mobilise active-duty marines if violence continued, saying troops at nearby Camp Pendleton were on “high alert”. Newsom described this threat as “deranged behaviour”.

The Paramount district had calmed considerably late on Saturday evening, but clashes between protesters and law enforcement were still happening.

Outside the Home Depot hardware store where the protests first erupted, the air was thick with tear gas and smoke.

LA county sheriffs fired flash bangs and tear gas every few minutes to try to clear protesters away.

Neighbours and protesters said migrants were locked inside local businesses afraid to come out.

Paramount’s population is more than 80% Hispanic.

A White House press release said: “In recent days, violent mobs have attacked ICE Officers and Federal Law Enforcement Agents carrying out basic deportation operations in Los Angeles, California.”

The statement added that “California’s feckless Democrat leaders” had “abdicated their responsibility” to protect citizens, why was “why President Trump has signed a Presidential Memorandum deploying 2,000 National Guardsmen”.

Speaking in Los Angeles, where he had travelled to personally supervise the continuing ICE operations, Trump’s “border tsar” Tom Homan warned that there would be “zero tolerance” of any violence or damage to private property.

In a post on X, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino also issued a warning to protesters: “You bring chaos, and we’ll bring handcuffs. Law and order will prevail.”

Governor Newsom, a Democrat, said the federal government “wants a spectacle” and urged people not to give them one by becoming violent.

In a statement on Friday, he said: “Continued chaotic federal sweeps, across California, to meet an arbitrary arrest quota are as reckless as they are cruel”.

Earlier, Mayor Bass accused ICE agents of “sowing terror” in Los Angeles.

Angelica Salas, who leads the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, told a recent rally: “Our community is under attack and is being terrorised. These are workers. These are fathers. These are mothers. And this has to stop.”

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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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”.

Sonny Olumati was born in Rome and has lived in Italy all his life but the country he calls home does not recognise him as its own.

To Italy, Sonny is Nigerian, like his passport, and the 39-year-old is only welcome as long as his latest residence permit.

“I’ve been born here. I will live here. I will die here,” the dancer and activist tells me in what he calls “macaroni” Italian-English beneath the palm trees of a scruffy Roman park.

“But not having citizenship is like… being rejected from your country. And I don’t think this is a feeling we should have”.

That is why Sonny and others have been campaigning for a “Yes” vote in a national referendum on Sunday and Monday that proposes halving the time required to apply for Italian citizenship.

Cutting the wait from 10 years to five would bring this country in line with most others in Europe.

The referendum was initiated by a citizens’ initative and is supported by civil society groups. But for such a referendum to be valid, 50% of all voters in Italy have to turn up.

Giorgia Meloni, the country’s hard-right prime minister, has announced she will boycott the vote, declaring the citizenship law already “excellent” and “very open”.

Other parties allied to her are calling on Italians to go to the beach instead of the polling station.

Sonny will not be taking part either. Without citizenship, he is not entitled to vote.

The question of who gets to be Italian is a sensitive one.

Large numbers of migrants and refugees arrive in the country each year helped across the Mediterranean from North Africa by smuggling gangs.

Meloni’s populist government has made a big deal about cutting the number of arrivals.

But this referendum is aimed at those who have travelled legally for work to a country with a rapidly shrinking and ageing population.

The aim is limited: to speed up the process for getting citizenship, not ease the strict criteria.

“Knowledge of the Italian language, not having criminal charges, continuous residence et cetera – all the various requirements remain the same,” explains Carla Taibi of the liberal party More Europe, one of several backers of the referendum.

The reform would affect long-term foreign residents already employed in Italy: from those on factory production lines in the north to those caring for pensioners in plush Rome neighbourhoods.

Their children aged under 18 would also be naturalised.

Up to 1.4 million people could qualify for citizenship immediately, with some estimates ranging higher.

“These people live in Italy, study and work and contribute. This is about changing the perception of them so they are not strangers anymore – but Italian,” argues Taibi.

The reform would also have practical implications.

As a non-Italian, Sonny cannot apply for a public sector job, and even struggled to get a driving licence.

When he was booked for hit reality TV show Fame Island last year, he ended up arriving two weeks late on set in Honduras because he had had so many problems getting the right paperwork.

For a long time, Meloni ignored the referendum entirely. Italy’s publicly owned media, run by a close Meloni ally, have also paid scant attention to the vote.

There is no substantive “No” campaign, making it hard to have a balanced debate.

But the real reason appears strategic.

“They don’t want to raise awareness of the significance of the referendum,” Professor Roberto D’Alimonte of Luiss University in Rome explains. “That’s rational, to make sure that the 50% threshold won’t be reached.”

The prime minister eventually announced she would turn up at a polling station “to show respect for the ballot box” – but refuse to cast a vote.

“When you disagree, you also have the option of abstaining,” Meloni told a TV chat show this week, after critics accused her of disrespecting democracy.

Italy’s citizenship system was “excellent”, she argued, already granting citizenship to more foreign nationals than most countries in Europe: 217,000 last year, according to the national statistics agency, Istat.

But about 30,000 of those were Argentines with Italian ancestry on the other side of the world, unlikely even to visit.

Meanwhile, Meloni’s coalition partner, Roberto Vannacci of the far-right League, accused those behind the referendum of “selling off our citizenship and erasing our identity”.

I ask Sonny why he thinks his own application for citizenship has taken over two decades.

“It’s racism,” he replies immediately.

At one point his file was lost completely, and he has now been told his case is “pending”.

“We have ministers who talk about white supremacy – racial replacement of Italy,” the activist recalls a 2023 comment by the agriculture minister from Meloni’s own party.

“They don’t want black immigration and we know it. I was born here 39 years ago so I know what I say.”

It is an accusation the prime minister has denied repeatedly.

Insaf Dimassi defines herself as “Italian without citizenship”.

“Italy let me grow up and become the person I am today, so not being seen as a citizen is extremely painful and frustrating,” she explains from the northern city of Bologna where she is studying for a PhD.

Insaf’s father travelled to Italy for work when she was a baby, and she and her mother then joined him. Her parents finally got Italian citizenship 20 days after Insaf turned 18. That meant she had to apply for herself from scratch, including proving a steady income.

Insaf chose to study instead.

“I arrived here at nine months old, and maybe at 33 or 34 – if all goes well – I can finally be an Italian citizen,” she says, exasperated.

She remembers exactly when the significance of her “outsider” status hit home: it was when she was asked to run for election alongside a candidate for mayor in her hometown.

When she shared the news with her parents, full of excitement, they had to remind her she was not Italian and was not eligible.

“They say it’s a matter of meritocracy to be a citizen, that you have to earn it. But more than being myself, what do I have to demonstrate?” Insaf wants to know.

“Not being allowed to vote, or be represented, is being invisible.”

On the eve of the referendum, students in Rome wrote a call to the polls on the cobbles of a city square.

“Vote ‘YES’ on the 8th and 9th [of June],” they spelled out in giant cardboard letters.

With a government boycott and such meagre publicity, the chances of hitting the 50% turnout threshold seem slim.

But Sonny argues that this vote is just the beginning.

“Even if they vote ‘No’, we will stay here – and think about the next step,” he says. “We have to start to talk about the place of our community in this country.”

Two sisters whose mother went from being their best friend to stealing their £50,000 inheritance say they have been left feeling anxious and unable to trust anyone.

Katherine Hill, 53, from Alltwen in Pontardawe, Neath Port Talbot, and her 93-year-old father Gerald Hill from Fairwood in Swansea were found guilty of fraud by abuse of power after a trial last year.

They were sentenced to 30 months in prison and a 12-month sentence, suspended for 18 months, respectively. On Monday, [Katherine]Hill was ordered to repay the money, which was left to her daughters Gemma and Jessica Thomas by their grandmother Margaret Hill.

“I’ll never have a relationship with my mother now,” said Jessica.

Swansea Crown Court previously heard, due to inflation, the sum stolen by the “greedy and spiteful” Hills was now worth about £65,000.

Katherine Hill put the money in an instant access Barclays Everyday Saver account, despite being advised not to, and both she and her dad had cards to access it – draining the contents within a year.

Between March 2016 and March 2017, the account where the money was held was emptied in 10 withdrawals, with £35,000 withdrawn in three transactions alone, the court heard.

Gemma and Jessica grew up in Neath Port Talbot with their parents, and said Hill was a “good mother”.

“She was like my best friend,” said Gemma, now 26, adding “no-one saw this coming.”

She said Hill did not have a good relationship with her own mother Margaret Hill – who split from her father when Hill was a teenager – though the girls did not know why.

Margaret Hill died in 2014, while [Katherine] Hill was divorcing the girls’ father, Chris Thomas.

At the time Jessica was just 12 and not told about the inheritance, but Gemma, who was 15 “understood a little bit more”.

The £50,000 was placed in a trust fund with their mother as a trustee – to be accessed when they were 25.

Following the divorce, the girls stayed living with their mother for about six months, but say she would often leave them alone for long periods of time while she visited her new boyfriend.

“It would start where she was going on dates and stuff. And I think I was at that perfect age of ‘my mother’s going out for the night, I can have friends over’, and I was kind of loving it for a while,” said Gemma.

“But it got to the point where it was happening every weekend and people expected that I wasn’t going to have a parent at home, and I would be like, ‘please will you stay home this one time?’.”

Mr Thomas decided his daughters would be better living with him, so the girls moved out of their family home and with him, while Hill moved in with her current partner, Phillip Lloyd.

The sisters said their mum would sometimes take them out at the weekend, to a pub or McDonalds, but the conversation would often centre around their father and her upset that they left.

“I think she just could never get over the fact that we were choosing to live with him over her,” said Gemma.

Jessica said it was “clear from then that we weren’t really a very important thing to her”.

“I remember when she came to see me on my 13th birthday, and took me out for the day, saying she had to leave early because she was going out with [her boyfriend] and his family.

“It wasn’t like she’d spend a lot of money on us… not 50 grand’s worth, anyway.”

They said, looking back, there were signs of extravagance from Hill and her partner, such as building a back garden pub and hot tub, and going on holidays.

But nothing set off alarm bells, as Hill had also received her own money from her late mother.

Now, the girls said, they know it was really them paying for their mum’s lifestyle.

It was when Gemma phoned her mum to ask about accessing the money early, as she planned to buy their childhood home from their dad, that the claims the inheritance never existed began.

She said her mum told her “the money’s not yours” and blocked her number, before later claiming in court it had been posted through the girls’ letterboxes.

Jessica, who is now a nurse, recalled the shock of discovering the money existed, and then immediately that it was gone.

“How can you grieve something you never had? But [also] she’s robbed me of an opportunity not a lot of people get.”

She and her boyfriend currently live with his parents, and she said saving up to move out without her inheritance would take a very long time.

Gemma said she was angry, adding she found it frustrating the more time went on and the more Hill lied.

She said the initial confusion and hurt was hard, given their happy memories of their mum, and the woman she saw in court did not seem like the same person.

“I’d sit there and be like, ‘What if we’re all wrong? What if she hasn’t done it?’

“But I have to accept that she has.”

Gemma said giving evidence in court was stressful, but the relief came more from feeling validated, than from money or the sentences.

“When it actually was the case that she was being sent down… it was like we were being told that we’re not crazy,” she said.

The girls said they saw people on social media claiming they were in prison with their mum and she “was still saying that she was innocent”.

“And people would believe in her… that’s the most shocking thing to me,” said Jessica.

“Even though the relationship had started to break down before this, it could have possibly been fixed, whereas we’re at that point now that we’ll never go back to how we used to be.”

She added their mum had “showed no remorse for anything she did”.

“She would look at me while we were standing up giving evidence, and she was shaking her head as if I was the one telling lies,” she said.

“It’s like she’ll never take responsibility for what she’s done.”

Jessica said she had been going to counselling for many years, to address “massive issues with trust”, while Gemma said she became “very needy in friendships”.

“[I thought] ‘if my mother doesn’t love me, who the hell is going to love me?'”

Now a mother herself to a two-month-old boy, she said she saw the betrayal on a new level.

“I came home [after court] on Monday and I was feeding my son. I was looking at him, and I was like, I could not go 10 days, not even 10 hours really, without knowing how he was or what was going on in his life. Never mind the past 10 years.

“It doesn’t make any sense, she’s missing out on all of that.”

Jessica said still living and working in the same area as her mum brought her anxiety and she lived with a tic, which a doctor told her had been triggered by trauma.

“The whole thing has just had a massive effect on me, mentally and physically.”

She added she did not know how they would have coped without each other, or their father, who supported them emotionally and financially through the long legal process.

Now, with the result they wanted, they hope they will eventually see the money and “let go of this part of our lives”.

They say they want to forget their mother, and the end of court proceedings has brought a kind of closure, allowing them to “finally breathe”.

Determined to avoid baggage fees for his holiday to Pisa, Benjamin Till trawled several different shops armed with a tape measure in search of the right suitcase.

Eventually, he found a case within the dimensions EasyJet allows for a free underseat bag – or so he thought.

When Mr Till arrived at London Gatwick Airport in December 2023, he discovered those measurements included wheels, meaning his bag was deemed slightly too big.

He protested, but eventually paid £48 to bring the bag on board. He says he was told to remove the wheels for the way back – which he did.

But at the gate on his way home, he was told the suitcase was still too large, so he sat on the floor, unpacking his dirty underwear and souvenirs into a bin bag.

“I don’t mind admitting that I actually burst into tears because it was so humiliating,” he says.

An EasyJet spokesperson told the BBC its ground crew had to ensure non-checked bags were within maximum dimensions “to safely and securely fit”, and that rules were made clear to customers when they booked.

Stories of passengers caught out by baggage rules they feel are inconsistent or confusing are common, with many customers complaining or seeking clarity from budget airlines on social media.

Different airlines have varying rules on the acceptable size and weight of an underseat personal item or an overhead cabin bag, with some charging customers to bring the latter.

For people who fall foul of these rules, some airlines charge hefty fees to upgrade a bag from a free personal item to an overhead cabin bag at the airport gate, or to stow an oversized cabin bag in the hold.

Passenger confusion has prompted the European Union’s largest consumer group to push for fairer and more consistent hand luggage rules, and caused one government to start cracking down on airlines over bag charges.

The EU is now looking at changing its laws – changes which would also affect UK passengers who are travelling to or from an EU destination using an EU-based airline.

On Thursday, EU transport ministers proposed standardised sizing for free underseat baggage on EU airlines, among other air travel and passenger rights’ changes – meaning this could become EU law if their position is accepted by the European Parliament.

Budget airlines say their baggage policies comply with the law while keeping fares low, but they have been facing mounting pressure and calls for change.

EU transport ministers proposed that passengers should be guaranteed one free personal item, measuring up to 40x30x15cm (including wheels and handles) – or which could reasonably fit under a plane seat.

These rules would apply to EU-based airlines (such as Ryanair, Wizz Air and EasyJet), including when they are carrying passengers from a non-EU country like the UK to an EU country and vice-versa, but not third-party airlines.

New rules would add clarity to an EU court ruling from 11 years ago, which stated hand baggage should not be subject to an extra fee, provided it met “reasonable” weight and dimensions, but did not say what reasonable was.

Currently, Ryanair allows a free carry-on bag of 40x20x25cm, while EasyJet’s dimensions for a free bag are a more generous 45x36x20 cm, including wheels and handles.

The ministers’ proposal was silent, however, on the issue of whether airlines could charge for overhead cabin bags – meaning that if their proposal was adopted into law, the current situation would not change and airlines could keep charging for that kind of hand baggage, which some in Europe have lobbied to stop.

The European Consumer Organisation, BEUC, an umbrella group for 45 independent consumer organisations from 32 countries, believes Thursday’s proposals do not go far enough, and legitimise “charging for reasonably sized hand luggage”.

In November, five airlines were fined a total of €179m (£150m) in Spain for “abusive” practices, including charging for hand luggage. Spain’s Consumer Rights Ministry said at the time that it planned to ban charging extra for carry-on luggage and other policies.

The airlines had said they would appeal the decision.

Regarding charges for overheard cabin bags, Ryanair said it fully complied with EU law in its policy, which allows one small bag on board free of charge.

“If airlines were forced to include additional carry-on bags as part of the basic fare, it would reduce choice and drive up air fares for all passengers, which would harm consumers,” the airline said.

Industry group Airlines For Europe said charging different amounts depending on baggage “allows passengers to choose the exact services that best suits their needs”.

Hand luggage dimensions should be universal, says Jane Hawkes, a consumer expert specialising in travel.

“I don’t really see why it can’t be, and why they can’t come to a voluntary agreement as to what those requirements should be for your baggage,” she tells the BBC.

“There have to be restrictions, obviously, but a one-size-fits-all kind of approach would make it a lot simpler for passengers,” she says.

BEUC said policymakers should define what “reasonable” size and weight was “to avoid surprises at the airport and ultimately reduce the number of disputes costing consumers and airlines time and money”.

Ms Hawkes suggests passengers make sure they measure their bag after it is packed, as it may expand when it is full and go over the limit.

She adds that consumers should not just be swayed by the fare price, as “if you’ve got an airline that encompasses [baggage] without you having to pay extra costs to start with, then that might be more of a better option for you”.

Mr Till would welcome a one-size-fits-all approach to underseat bags.

“It’s just really, really unfair and ridiculous and there should be one size that goes across all of the airlines,” he says.

He also criticises the permitted size of underseat cabin bags, saying “it was such a tiny, tiny size of luggage that you were allowed that it had taken me so long to find something that was so small”.

Still, he was grateful for the inexpensive air fare, and the place he had to stay in Italy, because “otherwise I wouldn’t be able to come to this beautiful country”.

UK doctors are attempting to clear dangerous superbug infections using “poo pills” containing freeze-dried faeces.

The stool samples come from healthy donors and are packed with good bacteria.

Early data suggests superbugs can be flushed out of the dark murky depths of the bowel and replaced with a mix of healthy gut bacteria.

It is a new approach to tackling infections that resist antibiotics, which are thought to kill a million people each year.

The focus is on the bowels which are “the biggest reservoir of antibiotic resistance in humans” says Dr Blair Merrick, who has been testing the pills at Guys and St Thomas’ hospitals.

Drug-resistant superbugs can escape their intestinal home and cause trouble elsewhere in the body – such as urinary tract or bloodstream infections.

“So there’s a lot of interest in ‘can you get rid of them from the gut?’,” says Dr Merrick.

The idea of poo-pills isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Faecal transplants – also known as a trans-poo-tion – are already approved for treating severe diarrhoea caused by bacteria.

But scientists noticed hints that faecal transplants for also seemed to get rid of superbugs.

New research has focused on patients who had an infection caused by drug-resistant bacteria in the past six months.

They were given pills made from faeces which people had donated to a stool bank.

Each stool sample is tested to ensure it does not contain any harmful bugs, undigested food is removed and then it is freeze dried into a powder.

This is stored inside a pill that can pass through the stomach unscathed and reach the intestines where it dissolves to release its poopy powdery payload.

The trial has taken place on 41 patients at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals in London to lay the groundwork for a large-scale study.

It showed patients were up for taking a poo pill and the donated bacteria were still being detected in the bowels at least a month later.

Dr Merrick says there are “really promising signals” that poo pills could help tackle the rising scourge of superbugs and that donor bacteria could be going to microbial war with the superbugs as they compete over food and space on the lining of the gut and either rid the body of them completely or “reduce them down to a level that doesn’t cause problems”.

The study also suggests the array of gut bacteria becomes more varied after the therapy. This is a sign of good health and “may well be promoting colonisation resistance” so it is harder for new infectious bugs to get in.

“It’s very exciting. There’s a real shift from 20 years ago where all bacteria and viruses were assumed to do you harm; to now where we realise they are completely necessary to our overall health,” says Dr Merrick.

Earlier this week scientists showed the good bacteria our bodies meet – in the hours after we are born – seem to halve the risk of young children being admitted to hospital with lung infections.

Our body’s own human cells are outnumbered by the bacteria, fungi and others that live inside us – known as the microbiome.

This has led to research implicating the microbiome in everything from Crohn’s disease to cancer to mental health.

If poo pills are proven to work against superbugs in larger studies then the researchers think they could be used for both treatment and prevention in people at risk.

Medical procedures that suppress the immune system – including cancer therapies and organ transplants – can make the body more vulnerable.

“A lot of these individuals come to a lot of harm from drug resistant organisms,” Dr Merrick.

The UK’s drugs regulator – the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) – said there were more than 450 microbiome medicines currently in development.

“Some of them will succeed, so I do think we will seem them coming through quite soon,” said Dr Chrysi Sergaki, the head of microbiome research at the MHRA.

“We could potentially, in the future, replace antibiotics with microbiome [therapies] – that’s the big picture, so there’s a lot of potential.”