Aboard Air Force One en route to the Nato summit in the Netherlands, Trump shared a personal text message from a somewhat unlikely source.

It was sent by Nato boss Mark Rutte who praised the American president for what he had accomplished in using US bombers to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, ” wrote Rutte in a message the president posted to his Truth Social account. “That was truly extraordinary and something no one else dared to do.”

Trump has had his differences with Nato in the past, as he’s called into doubt the alliance’s mutual defence agreement and the military contributions made by other member nations.

Rutte addressed that, as well, telling Trump he was “flying into another big success” at the Nato summit, where member nations had agreed to Trump’s demand to boost defence spending to 5% of their gross domestic product.

“It will be your win,” he concluded.

• Follow latest on ceasefire and reaction

The warm words, and the president’s eagerness to share them to the world, illustrated just how much the diplomatic equation in the Middle East and among US allies has changed for Trump.

Last week he left the G7 summit in Canada a day early, as conflict raged between Israel and Iran and it appeared increasingly likely the US would join the fight.

The Americans attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday night, but by Tuesday morning the president departed Washington for another international trip, this time with a fragile ceasefire established between the two warring parties.

Rutte’s text – which a Nato press officer confirmed to the BBC as authentic – dovetails with the accounts provided on and off the record by White House officials.

Trump’ military strike removed the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. His actions triggered the ceasefire and ended what he calls the “12 Day War”.

His involvement and his pressure – including an angry outburst directed at both sides on Tuesday morning and what the White House called an “exceptionally firm and direct” phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from Air Force One – ensured that the ceasefire would hold.

Last week, America’s allies were anxious. Now, it appears Trump is heading to Europe with the intention of basking in their praise.

The outlook, however, is more complicated than that.

While the administration touts that the US bombing raid “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear research facilities, US military intelligence officials have told American media that the damage is not as severe as the White House has claimed.

The country’s nuclear programme has probably only been set back by months, according to a preliminary Pentagon intelligence assessment. And the Islamic Republic’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not eliminated in the bombings, sources familiar with the report told CBS News.

The White House says the assessment is “flat-out wrong” and is “a clear attempt to demean” President Trump.

• US strikes did not destroy nuclear programme, says Pentagon

Questions remain about the quantity and location of Iran’s enriched uranium supply – a key component of a nuclear weapon. There are also reports of the existence of an undisclosed and undamaged research facility elsewhere in Iran.

While the ceasefire is holding for now, Middle East truces are notoriously tenuous. Iran’s leadership has been weakened through two weeks of devastating Israeli attacks and the nation’s future is uncertain.

One need only look at the long bloody civil war in Syria to see the risks presented when an authoritarian government loses its grip on power. Trump has talked of “love, peace and prosperity” for Iran, but chaos, and regional turmoil, are still a realistic possibility.

And although Trump appears to have stopped the two-week Israel-Iran fighting, the wars that Trump inherited and promised to end, in Gaza and Ukraine, rage on.

For this White house, however, those appear to be concerns for another day.

• ‘We’re exhausted’ – how Iranians feel after fragile ceasefire
• ‘We thought it was the end’ – Israeli town reels

At the moment, the dire warnings of Trump’s domestic critics, particularly within his own party, have proven unfounded. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who had planned to introduce legislation curtailing Trump’s use of military force in Iran, has announced he is abandoning that effort for now.

That has given Trump the political space to herald what his administration is trumpeting as an unqualified success.

Since Trump picked him as his vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance has often sought to add ideological substance to Trump’s America First politics.

On Tuesday morning, the vice-president took to Truth Social to offer his take on what he said were the three parts of Trump’s “foreign policy doctrine”.

“1) clearly define an American interest; 2) negotiate aggressively to achieve that interest; 3) use overwhelming force if necessary,” he wrote.

As doctrines go, however, that’s not much to work with.

Often, the president’s foreign policy seems reactive and contradictory, more tactical than strategic – whether it’s applying and removing tariffs or negotiating with allies and adversaries.

In the past two weeks, Trump has swung between distancing the US from Israel’s attacks on Iran to becoming an active participant in them; from calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” to negotiating a ceasefire with unclear terms; from entertaining the idea of regime change to downplaying it.

It makes for a rollercoaster ride, with the prospect of a catastrophic derailment seemingly around every bend.

But results, as they say, speak for themselves. And this week, Trump’s tumultuous ride has ended in a victory lap.

Nato leaders have arrived in The Hague for a summit hailed by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz as historic and aimed at securing peace in Europe for future generations.

It is US President Donald Trump’s first Nato summit since 2019 and all 32 leaders are set to commit to spending 5% of national output on defence and related infrastructure.

Ahead of his arrival, Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte sent him a pre-summit message, lavishing praise on his handling of Western alliance and the conflict in Iran.

“You are flying into another big success in The Hague this evening. It was not easy but we’ve got them all signed on to five percent,” Rutte wrote, in a message posted by Trump on social media.

He also congratulated Trump on his “decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary and something no one else dared to do. It makes us safer.”

Asked later if it was embarrassing that his private message had been shared, Rutte told the BBC there was “absolutely no problem – there was nothing in it that had to stay secret”.

Western leaders have all had to navigate their relationships with Trump, known for his sometimes unpredictable handling of diplomacy. The two-day Nato summit has already been scaled back, apparently to accommodate his schedule.

Nato leaders gathered for a group photograph before joining King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands for dinner.

The Nato secretary general earlier told his European colleagues to stop worrying about the US commitment to the Western alliance and focus on investing in defence and supporting Ukraine.

He insisted the US president and senior leadership had a “total commitment” to Nato, that came with an expectation of matching American military spending.

Rutte said Europe and Canada had already committed to more than $35bn (£26bn) in military support for Ukraine this year.

Twenty people were killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine on Tuesday, and the German chancellor said every attempt to bring Russia to the negotiating table had so far been unsuccessful.

Missile attacks on the eastern city of Dnipro and the nearby town of Samar killed 17 people and wounded another 160, according to Ukrainian officials. Eighteen children were wounded in the attack on Dnipro, which damaged a kindergarten, schools and a passenger train, they said.

An earlier missile strike on Sumy in the north-east killed three people, including a child.

Zelensky, who has arrived in The Hague, is due to meet Donald Trump on the sidelines of the Nato summit. The Ukrainian leader had a notoriously difficult meeting with the US president at the White House in February, before a more constructive exchange at Pope Francis’s funeral at the Vatican in April.

Nato member states are expected to approve a major new investment plan which will raise the benchmark for defence investment to 5% of GDP.

Many of the allies are far below the commitment to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035, but the German government backed a budget deal on Tuesday to hit that target by 2029.

Some €62.4bn (£53bn) will be spent on defence in 2025, rising to €152.8bn in 2029, partly financed by debt and special funds.

“We’re not doing that as a favour to the US and its president,” the German chancellor told parliament in Berlin on Tuesday. “We’re doing this out of our own view and conviction, because Russia is actively and aggressively endangering the security and freedom of the entire-Euro-Atlantic area.”

During the summit, Merz is due to meet UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and France’s President Emmanuel Macron.

Mark Rutte has spent much of the nine months since becoming Nato Secretary General working to get allies to commit to the 5% target. The figure is more than double Nato members’ current 2% guideline and seemed unthinkable – and unrealistic – to most when President Trump first set it in January.

The two-day Nato summit was to begin with a dinner hosted by the Dutch king, with a working session of under three hours on Wednesday and an expected five-paragraph statement at the end.

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• Who’s in Nato and how much do they spend on defence?

The wording of the commitment in the statement is key.

While 3.5% of of the target spending will cover core defence requirements, 1.5% will be spent on “defence-related expenditure” – a suitably broad expression that encompasses investments in anything from cybersecurity to infrastructure.

Reaching the 3.5% core defence spending target will still require a significant adjustment for the majority of Nato countries. Out of 32 allies, 27 spend under 3%, with eight hovering well below the 2% threshold set by the alliance in 2014.

On Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged that the UK would meet the 5% target by 2035.

He said the UK had to “navigate this era of radical uncertainty with agility, speed and a clear-eyed sense of the national interest”. The UK government said it expected to spend 2.6% of GDP on core defence within two years, alongside 1.5% on defence-related areas.

At the bottom of the rung is Spain, whose defence spending is below 1.3%.

Madrid would need to more than double its funding to meet Rutte’s new target – something that Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has long resisted, arguing it “would not only be unreasonable but also counterproductive”.

It would also, crucially, be unpopular at home – not least among his left-wing governing coalition – at a time when Sánchez’s government is teetering.

On Sunday Sánchez said Spain had reached a deal that would see it exempted from the target – something Rutte swiftly pushed back on. “Nato is absolutely convinced Spain will have to spend 3.5% to get there,” he said on Monday.

Sánchez’s suggestion of a lower spending threshold was enough for Belgium and Slovakia to also express interest in an exemption – denting Rutte’s hard-won image of a united alliance.

“I can assure you that for weeks our diplomats have been working hard to obtain the flexibility mechanisms,” said Belgium’s foreign minister Maxime Prévot. Brussels’ spending is currently at 1.3% – and Slovakia has also said it reserves the right to decide when to meet the new target.

Despite their comments, all 32 states are expected to sign up to the new pledge.

As Nato leaders and the leaders of more than a dozen partner states made their way to The Hague, train travel from Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam was badly disrupted after cables were damaged by fire.

Security Minister David Van Weel said sabotage could not be ruled out. “It could be an activist group, it could be another country. It could be anything,” he told public broadcaster NOS. “The most important thing now is to repair the cables and get the traffic moving again.”

Andrew Cuomo has conceded in the New York City mayoral Democratic primary to state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in a stunning political upset.

Cuomo, the state’s former governor, was attempting to pull off a political comeback after resigning from office in 2021 amid a sexual harassment scandal.

In a speech to supporters, Cuomo said Mamdani – a 33-year-old democratic socialist – had “won” the primary race and that “we are going to take a look and make some decisions”.

“Tonight is his night,” Cuomo, 67, said. If elected, Mamdani would be the first Muslim and Indian American to lead the nation’s largest city.

The primary in staunchly liberal New York is likely to determine who becomes mayor in November’s election.

The contest was being watched as a litmus test for the Democratic Party as it seeks to hone its messaging after election losses last November that saw President Donald Trump’s Republicans win the White House and both chambers in Congress.

Results on Tuesday night showed Mamdani with a commanding lead, but falling short of the 50% threshold needed to win outright.

Cuomo’s concession was unexpected because counting looks likely to continue next week under the ranked choice system, which allowed New Yorkers to pick up to five candidates in order of preference.

The former governor’s loss marks the “biggest upset in modern NYC history,” Trip Yang, a political strategist, told the BBC.

“A massive win for Zohran Mamdani that shows that when Donald Trump is President, New York Democrats want to see their leaders fight with enthusiasm and courage, and that’s what Zohran showed voters.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Cuomo said he was still examining whether he would run in the general election in November on the independent line.

“I said he won the primary election,” Cuomo told the outlet. “I said I wanted to look at the numbers and the ranked-choice voting to decide about what to do in the future, because I’m also on an independent line.”

Cuomo was seen as a moderate and the establishment favourite, known across the country after his governorship during the Covid pandemic.

Mamdani is a millennial outsider who was fairly unknown until recently.

Born in Uganda, his family moved to New York City when he was seven. He has posted one campaign video entirely in Urdu and mixed in Bollywood film clips. In another, he speaks Spanish.

Mamdani’s strong support of Palestinians and criticism of Israel put him at odds with most of the Democratic establishment.

He went viral during his campaign for videos where he questioned NYC voters who swung for Trump in the November election.

He asked what issues led them to cast their ballots for the Republican president and what it would take for them to swing Democrat.

Mamdani’s platform includes free public buses, universal childcare, freezing rent in subsidised units, and city-run grocery stores – all paid for by new taxes on the rich.

“This is a city where one in four of its people are living in poverty, a city where 500,000 kids go to sleep hungry every night,” he told the BBC at a recent event.

“And ultimately, it’s a city that is in danger of losing that which it makes it so special.”

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, also democratic socialists, endorsed Mamdani during his campaign.

At least 46 people waiting for aid have been killed by Israeli fire in two incidents in central and southern Gaza, according to rescuers and hospitals.

UN agencies have condemned the US and Israel-backed food distribution system, with one official calling it “an abomination” and “a death trap”.

Such deadly incidents have recently become a near daily occurrence but have attracted relatively little attention outside Gaza since Israel attacked Iran more than a week ago.

Without including the latest deaths, the UN has said that more than 410 Palestinians are reported to have been killed by Israeli gunfire or shelling since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began work in late May.

“Why are our children’s lives seen as so cheap?” demanded Umm Raed al-Nuaizi, a widow whose son was shot and wounded after he went overnight to collect food for his hungry family in central Gaza.

“My son went to get a grain of flour so that he could eat and feed his siblings, and now he is in the intensive care unit.”

Footage from al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat showed chaotic scenes as young men with gunshot wounds were carried in, groaning in pain and some drenched in blood.

Soon every bed was filled, and casualties covered the floor.

An older man was set down dead as his wife, bereft, cradled his face and wept.

Hospital officials and the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said that at least 21 people were killed and some 150 injured.

Witnesses said that thousands had crowded near a site run by the GHF in an Israeli military zone when soldiers opened fire.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said a gathering had been “identified in an area adjacent to IDF troops operating in the Netzarim corridor”.

“Reports of injured individuals as a result of IDF fire in the area were received. The details are under review,” it stated.

The GHF said there were “no incidents near any of our sites this morning”.

Paramedics and rescuers said that at least 25 people were also killed near a site run by the GHF in southern Gaza on Tuesday morning.

A witness told the BBC that he had gone to a site north of Rafah at 05:00, but shortly before it was due to open at 10:00, Israeli tanks advanced towards them and opened fire with no announcements.

“The shooting was directly on the civilians and blood got everywhere,” Hatem Abu Rjileh said.

“Everyone around us got wounded, there may be more than 30 wounded whom no-one was able to rescue. We only managed to rescue our relative and left with him.”

The IDF told the BBC that “contrary to the reports being spread out, the IDF is not aware of the incident in question at the Rafah aid distribution site”.

Israel eased its total blockade of Gaza just over a month ago, and the GHF began operations a few days later. The group says it has since provided 41 million meals.

While GHF is officially classed as a private organisation, it has opaque funding and is backed by the US and Israel. It uses armed private security contractors.

The UN and major aid groups have refused to co-operate with the foundation, accusing it of co-operating with Israel’s goals in the 20-month-old war against Hamas in a way that violates humanitarian principles.

However, Israel sees the GHF as key to a new aid plan which it says will undermine what remains of Hamas control in Gaza.

As news of the latest incidents broke, a spokesman for the UN human rights office, Thameen al-Kheetan, held a briefing in Geneva condemning the system.

“Israel’s militarised humanitarian assistance mechanism is in contradiction with international standards on aid distribution,” he said.

“The weaponization of food for civilians, in addition to restricting or preventing their access to life-sustaining services constitutes a war crime.”

He added that it was for courts to decide if war crimes had been committed.

Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), said: “The newly created, so-called mechanism is an abomination that humiliates and degrades desperate people. It is a death trap costing more lives than it saves.”

Asked for a response to recent UN criticism, the IDF told the BBC that it allowed the GHF “to operate independently in distributing aid to the residents of Gaza and is working to ensure its safe and continuous distribution, in accordance with international law”.

Israel’s idea for a new phase of war in Gaza, put forward several weeks ago, has not taken place.

This involved the GHF running the only aid distribution points.

For now, Israel is still allowing dozens of lorries carrying aid for the UN and some other aid organisations into Gaza.

On Saturday, World Central Kitchen said aid lorries had reached its teams in Gaza for the first time in over 12 weeks, allowing it to restart cooking at some of its sites.

However, the volume of food is still inadequate, and experts warn that Gaza remains on the brink of famine.

In Gaza City, a father of four daughters told us that his family had resorted to eating bread and salt but that he would not risk his life to go to the GHF aid centres.

“They are called death zones,” Mahmoud al-Ghura said. “My son has already been martyred.”

“I am afraid that if I went to get a bag of flour I would return carried in one. Every day people go there and die. What are we to do?”

Progress in vaccinating children against a variety of life-threatening diseases has stalled in the past two decades – and even gone backwards in some countries – a new global study suggests.

The situation has been made worse by the Covid pandemic, leaving millions of children unprotected from diseases such as measles, tuberculosis and polio.

The researchers are calling for a concerted effort to provide better and more equal access to vaccines.

Child health experts warn that cuts to international aid budgets that fund vaccination programmes, combined with vaccine scepticism, are creating a “perfect storm”.

The global childhood vaccination programme has been a huge success.

Since 1974, more than four billion children have been vaccinated, preventing an estimated 150 million deaths worldwide.

In nearly half a century until 2023, researchers say vaccine coverage doubled.

But since 2010 progress has stagnated, to the extent that there are now wide variations in vaccine coverage around the world.

A study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, says measles vaccinations have declined in nearly 100 countries.

The Covid-19 pandemic made things even worse, because of disruption to vaccine programmes during lockdowns.

By 2023, there were nearly 16 million children who had not had any childhood vaccinations – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.

Study author Dr Jonathan Mosser, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, in the United States, says large numbers of children remain under-vaccinated and un-vaccinated.

“Routine childhood vaccinations are among the most powerful and cost-effective public health interventions available, but persistent global inequalities, challenges from the Covid pandemic, and the growth of vaccine misinformation and hesitancy have all contributed to faltering immunisation progress,” he said.

Dr Mosser said there was now an increased risk of outbreaks of diseases like measles, polio and diphtheria.

All children should benefit from life-saving immunisations, he added.

Wide discrepancies remain between vaccination rates in wealthier and lower-income countries.

But the report’s authors warn that vaccination rates have fallen in Europe, the US and other wealthy countries too.

Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, says the findings present a concerning picture.

“More children will be hospitalised, permanently damaged and die from fully preventable diseases if the trend is not reversed.

“Alas, the cuts in global health funding mean that this situation is set to deteriorate,” Prof Pollard said.

Dr David Elliman, from University College London, says many factors have contributed to the current situation.

“Around the world, the increasing number of countries torn apart by civil unrest and wars, combined with the drastic cuts in foreign aid from rich nations, such as USA and UK, makes it difficult to get vaccines to many populations,” he said.

“Where it appears that policy is being made on the basis of ill-informed opinion, rather than science, we have a perfect storm,” Dr Elliman added.

The researchers recommend that all countries try to strengthen primary healthcare systems and combat misinformation around vaccines to prevent parents being hesitant about getting their children vaccinated.

They also call for a concerted effort to provide better and more equal access to vaccines around the world.

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A Russian warship disguised itself using a fake ID signal while travelling through the English Channel with two sanctioned oil tankers, a BBC Verify investigation has found.

The Boikiy – a corvette armed with guided missiles – broadcast the fake ID code as it passed through the Channel on Saturday.

On tracking sites it wrongly appeared as ships which have previously used that ID. BBC Verify matched the ID to the Boikiy by using satellite imagery, tracking data and a video of it passing under a bridge in Denmark.

It travelled alongside two vessels known to be part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” – a network of tankers whose ownership can be obscured and are used to transport sanctioned oil products.

BBC Verify has approached the Russian embassy in London for comment. But experts told BBC Verify that recent Western moves against the shadow fleet may have prompted Moscow to use its military to protect the tankers.

Last month, a Russian Su-35 fighter jet flew past a shadow fleet vessel and entered Estonian airspace after the country attempted to intercept the ship, which was suspected of carrying sanctioned oil.

“The action seems designed to deter the UK and other Nato states from attempting to board and, or, seize these vessels, since the presence of a military escort heightens the risk of confrontation and further escalation,” Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, said.

Attention was first drawn to the Boikiy on social media by independent open-source intelligence analyst Christian Panton on Bluesky.

The ship is known to have left West Africa in June, where it was taking part in a diplomatic mission. Photos posted online showed the ship docked in Guinea’s capital, Conakry.

The corvette left port without activating its Automatic Identification System (AIS). All ships are expected to broadcast the signal, though military vessels often sail without it.

However, a vessel travelling under the generic identification number 400000000 – a code sometimes used by vessels who want to alert others to their presence for safety reasons without identifying themselves – was seen briefly near the Canary Islands.

The location is consistent with the time it could have taken the Boikiy to travel the 200km from Conakry. Satellite imagery reviewed by BBC Verify showed a 100m-long ship, matching the dimensions of the Boikiy and distinguishing it from other vessels which had used the ID.

Frederik Van Lokeren – an analyst and ex-lieutenant in the Belgian navy – noted that the Boikiy’s actions were unusual for a Russian naval vessel.

“Normally, if the Russians want to remain hidden in secret, they just turn off their AIS signal,” he said. “So for them to be camouflaging as something else… it’s very, very uncommon.”

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The Boikiy was later joined by two oil tankers which had made their way from India through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean – the Sierra and the Naxos. Both ships have been sanctioned by the UK.

The three vessels all met at the mouth of the Channel on 20 June. Here, the Russian naval vessel appeared again in radar-based and optical satellite images, allowing us to confirm once again that it was a size and shape which matched the Boikiy.

The Naxos had reached the entrance to the Channel several days earlier than the other ships, and waited for the warship before proceeding into the channel.

A UK defence ministry source confirmed to BBC Verify that the Royal Navy shadowed the Boikiy as it passed through the Channel.

Satellite images reviewed by BBC Verify appeared to show a ship tailing the Boikiy as it transited through the waterway, but we cannot confirm that this is the Royal Navy ship.

All three vessels proceeded towards the Baltic Sea, where the Boikiy – still travelling under the fake AIS marker – was recorded passing underneath the Great Belt Bridge in Denmark.

Webcam footage showed the vessel clearly for the first time as a naval vessel.

Its unclear where the vessels are bound for, though all three have continued sailing through the Baltic and may be moving towards ports in mainland Russia or Kaliningrad – an exclave between Poland and Lithuania.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Oil prices have hit their lowest in two weeks after Israel agreed to US President Donald Trump’s proposal for a ceasefire with Iran.

But business leaders at a key economic meeting in the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin find themselves troubled by the state of the global economy, and the prospect for meaningful growth.

The rapid escalation of the conflict between Iran and Israel – which has now pulled in the United States – temporarily replaced trade, tariffs and inflation at the top of a long list of concerns with far-reaching consequences.

“It is the most complex geopolitical and geo-economic backdrop we’ve seen in decades,” Borge Brende, president and chief executive of the World Economic Forum (WEF), said ahead of the summit, dubbed the “Summer Davos”.

“If we are not able to revive growth again, we can unfortunately see a decade of lower growth.”

WEF has long been a symbol of the merits of free trade and a globalised world – but Trump’s tariff wars have upended supply chains and the ability of businesses to plan for the future.

“We live in an environment of radical uncertainty,” says Jeffry Frieden, professor of international and public affairs and political science at Columbia University.

“Businesses have to figure out what has happened over the past several years as we come to the end of an era, in my view, of international economic and political affairs and move into a new era.”

Geopolitical risks have significant implications for the global economy.

Higher oil prices can push up the operational costs of energy for goods producers – and at some point, those additional costs may be passed onto the consumer.

People may in turn hold back on spending, as increased prices dampen demand. If inflation remains high, central banks will be reluctant to bring down interest rates.

Geopolitical tensions can also lead to losses as the result of other factors, such as the rerouting of flights and disruption to tourism activities.

Investors can get rattled by uncertainty, leading to sell-offs on the market and a rush for safe haven assets like gold and the US dollar.

Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz – one of the world’s most critical transit routes, through which roughly a quarter of the world’s global oil supply passes – would leave China especially vulnerable. It is estimated that Beijing imports 90% of the oil Iran sells.

Chris Torrens, head of China at advisory and advocacy firm APCO, points out that some of the country’s bigger machinery sectors, including the new high technology industries that Beijing is trying to support, still rely on oil.

“So anything that disrupts that oil supply is going to be a worry to Beijing,” he says.

The WEF event comes at a critical moment for China’s economy, which has for years struggled from a protracted property crisis, high unemployment and sluggish domestic spending.

Beijing has unveiled a string of measures to try to stimulate the economy.

Until now, China is still achieving its official growth target of around 5%, and economists say the country could account for almost 30% of global growth this year.

Mr Torrens says Chinese officials detect an opportunity, and suggests that in a sense the country is opening its doors through the WEF event.

“I think the US is giving China a massive PR opportunity to portray itself as a champion of globalisation,” he says. “To say that China is a bastion of free trade is still a work in progress, because there are still market access issues. But China is certainly keen to play its part and step up as a regional and a global player.”

With Trump’s trade war now threatening exports from the manufacturing powerhouse, Beijing is looking to emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) as potential sources of growth.

“Trade has been an important engine of growth for the last decade or two, but it’s clear that certain technologies have a huge potential to help us with new sources of growth and competitiveness,” said Mirek Dusek, managing director at WEF.

Accounting firm PwC says AI could boost global growth by 15% by 2035.

At the WEF event, though, tariffs are never far from the minds of business leaders, as they try to make alliances and navigate an uncertain economic environment.

In the coming weeks, Trump’s pauses on his hefty reciprocal levies are due to expire. And there’s little certainty as to how the global business landscape might look after that.

“It’s very difficult for businesses to make long term plans,” Mr Frieden explains. “If you don’t know what the level of goods on your tariffs are, you can ‘t figure out if it makes sense to relocate in the US or keep your activities overseas – whether you’re an American corporation, or a non-American corporation.”

Dozens of people have been hospitalised for heat-related illnesses as the summer’s first major heat wave descends on eastern North America.

More than 150 people fell ill at an outdoor school graduation ceremony in Paterson, New Jersey on Monday, according to US media, as the city’s mayor declared a state of emergency.

In Washington DC, six people needed hospital treatment during a concert by South Korean band ‘Stray Kids’, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner.

Heat warnings are in effect from the US Midwest to the East Coast, as well as in parts of Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia in Canada, impacting more than 160 million people through the week.

Further south along the US east coast, dozens in North Carolina sought treatment for heat-related injuries.

Local news media reported at least 41 people – including children – had been hospitalized in central North Carolina.

Local authorities in New Jersey called the illnesses at a pair of graduation ceremonies a “mass casualty” incident due to how many were sickened. It led to some graduation ceremonies being cancelled in the area.

Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh declared a state of emergency over the heat, cancelling all recreational activities in the area and opening cooling centres.

Experts warn that the soaring temperatures throughout parts of North America could aggravate the risk of heat-related illness, especially due to high humidity levels.

Compounding the danger is the extended duration of the event, with little nighttime relief – temperatures in some eastern cities may remain above 80F (27C) overnight.

The heatwave arrives less than a week after the official start of summer. Forecasters say several places may experience record highs.

The Mid-Atlantic region is expected to face the most intense conditions by Thursday, followed by the eastern Ohio Valley into Friday. Several consecutive days of oppressive heat in these areas could significantly increase health risks.

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The US National Weather Service (NWS) has warned people to “take action when you see symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke”.

People are advised to stay out of the sun during the hottest times of day, drink plenty of water, and to check on vulnerable individuals, including the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions.

Although spells of extreme heat affect many parts of North America each summer, this heatwave could surpass June records in places.

In New York, highs on Tuesday may reach 101F (38C) which would equal the highest June temperature ever recorded in the city, dating back to 1966.

Energy companies on the east coast have appealed to customers to conserve power, due to fears of blackouts, as millions crank up their air conditioning units to high.

A British man has been charged in connection with organising the “mock wedding” of a nine-year-old Ukrainian girl in Disneyland Paris.

French prosecutors said the 39-year-old man was a convicted sexual offender who is wanted in the UK. His name has not been made public.

He was arrested when police were called to the amusement park on Saturday morning at dawn by a “guest” who said he had been hired by the man to play the father of the bride.

The man said he had been paid €12,000 to play the role and that he only realised at the last minute that the “bride” was a child, according to a statement by Meaux prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier.

The statement also said the Ukrainian girl – who arrived in France two days earlier – had not been a victim of either physical or sexual violence and had not been “forced to play the role” of bride.

A woman who says she was hired to play the role of a guest told BFMTV that when she arrived at Disneyland Paris she saw a “little girl dressed in white with her hair all done up and I saw a woman who picked her up in her arms… and I was shocked, I burst into tears”.

“When I saw [it was a] child – it was horrific.”

Around 100 French extras had been recruited to take part in the fake ceremony, which was to be filmed in a private capacity.

The British man had reportedly hired Disneyland Paris for several hours for the stunt, in which he was to play the role of the groom.

Preliminary findings also stated he had allegedly been “made-up professionally so that his face appeared totally different from his own”, according to the prosecutor.

Three other people – including the 41-year-old mother of the girl, a 24-year-old Latvian woman who was to play the bride’s sister and a 55-year-old Latvian man – were also arrested.

By Tuesday only the British man was still being held by police.

The British man and the Latvian woman appeared in front of a judge in Meaux on 23 June and the man was charged with fraud, breach of trust, money laundering, and identity theft and placed in pretrial detention.

The Latvian remains a witness in the investigation.

The prosecutor’s statement also said that Disneyland Paris had been “deceived” and that the organiser had used a fake Latvian ID to hire the venue. Disneyland Paris can be rented by members of the public outside opening hours.

BFMTV reported that the “mock wedding” may have cost organiser more than €130,000 (£110,000).

Mr Bladier’s statement said that the British man “was reportedly convicted in the past, including for offences of a sexual nature against minors.

“He is, as such, listed in the British database of sexual offenders and is currently wanted nationally by the judicial authorities of his country of origin due to a breach of the requirements deriving from said order.”

It is unclear, at this stage, what the point of the “stunt” was.

The investigation continues.

Protesters in Venice are claiming an “enormous victory” after US tech billionaire Jeff Bezos and his wedding guests were forced to “run away” from the city centre, moving their main celebration to another location.

The venues for the three-day party to mark the wedding of one of the world’s richest men to TV presenter Lauren Sanchez were never officially revealed.

But the lavish celebrations were supposed to culminate in an event on Saturday at the sumptuous Scuola Grande della Misericordia.

A local official in Venice has now confirmed to the BBC that the guests will gather instead at the Arsenale, further from the centre.

Activists are triumphant, even as a city councillor denounced their protests as “ridiculous”.

“We are very proud of this! We are nobodies, we have no money, nothing!” Tommaso Cacciari, from a group calling itself No Space for Bezos, told the BBC.

“We’re just citizens who started organising and we managed to move one of the most powerful people in the world – all the billionaires – out of the city.”

The wedding kicks off later this week, and has a star-studded guest list of the rich and famous that is rumoured to include Kim Kardashian, Mick Jagger and Leonardo diCaprio, as well as several of the Trumps.

Private jets are expected to jam up Venice airport, with private yachts taking over the harbour; five hotels have been booked out in their entirety and there are reports of former US Marines being hired to provide security.

The A-list mega-event has attracted protest from a variety of groups, from locals fighting over-tourism in Venice to climate change activists and those who oppose Bezos’ support for Donald Trump.

As well as “No Space for Bezos” posters plastered across the city in recent days, there have been protest banners strung from bridges over the canals.

On Monday, activists from a group calling itself Everyone Hates Elon unfurled a giant image of Bezos in Piazza San Marco, protesting against the super-rich with the slogan: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding then you can pay more tax.”

“Our protest isn’t about the wedding itself – it’s about what it represents,” Greenpeace campaigner Simona Abbate, who was there, told the BBC.

“This isn’t just a celebration of two people getting married, it’s a display of a lifestyle that’s simply unsustainable. The richest live in excess, while others endure the consequences of a climate emergency they didn’t create.”

The activists have been heavily criticised by city officials, who argue that such high-rolling visitors are an important source of income.

“These protesters behave as if they own Venice but they don’t,” Simone Venturini, a city councillor for economic development told the BBC. “No one gets to decide who gets married here.”

He said the groups were “a tiny minority” and not representative of the city.

“This event involves just 200 carefully selected guests and will bring major economic benefits to the city,” the local politician said, adding that all events were being hosted in privately-owned venues.

But the issue of over-tourism is a serious one in Venice, as it is across southern Europe, where protesters say locals are being priced out of a beautiful city by too many visitors. Climate change is also putting this city-on-the-water at major risk of flooding.

Local authorities introduced a five-euro daily tourist tax to enter the city but activists say it hasn’t stopped a single person from coming.

With the first wedding guests expected to arrive on Thursday, some activists had been planning to launch themselves into canals near the key venues, along with inflatable alligators. They wanted to try to block the path of the rich and famous, stop their fun – and make their point.

That wet protest has been called-off, but No Space for Bezos still plans to project its feelings onto a city building later this week and on Saturday evening they’re calling on people to join a march in a final show of protest.

“Bezos comes to Venice only for the party, that’s the problem: this vision of Venice not as a city anymore but like a big theme park where you can hire pieces or all of it and just do your private thing,” Tommaso Cacciari said.

“He’s sending the message that all the city is a background for a party of billionaires.”

Jubilant Indians have been celebrating the successful launch of the Axiom-4 (Ax-4) mission which has taken off with a multi-country crew, including an Indian astronaut.

Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla, who’s piloting the mission, has become only the second Indian to travel to space.

In just over 26 hours – when the spacecraft docks at the International Space Station (ISS) – Group Captain Shukla will become the first ever Indian to visit Nasa’s orbiting laboratory.

His trip comes 41 years after cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian to fly to space aboard a Russian Soyuz in 1984.

Led by former Nasa astronaut Peggy Whitson – a space veteran who has been commander of ISS twice, has spent more than 675 days in space and done 10 space walks – Ax-4 lifted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 02:31 EDT, (06:31 GMT; 12:01 India time) on Wednesday.

The trip to ISS aboard Ax-4 – a commercial flight operated by Houston-based private company Axiom Space – is a collaboration between Nasa, India’s space agency Isro and European Space Agency (Esa).

Its four-member team also includes Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski from Poland and Tibor Kapu from Hungary. They will also be taking their countries back to space after more than four decades. The astronauts spent weeks in quarantine before Wednesday’s launch.

The flight has generated huge interest in India with Isro saying the experience Group Captain Shukla will gain during his trip to the ISS will help its efforts immensely.

The 39-year-old was among four Indian air force officers shortlisted last year to travel on the country’s first-ever human space flight, scheduled for 2027. India has also announced ambitious plans to set up a space station by 2035 and send an astronaut to the Moon by 2040.

Isro, which has been carrying out a number of tests to prepare for going into space, has paid 5bn rupees ($59m; £43m) to secure a seat for Group Captain Shukla on Ax-4 and his training.

The launch, using the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket, was broadcast live by Axiom Space and Nasa and set off celebrations in India.

In Group Captain Shukla’s home city of Lucknow, his parents joined hundreds of students to watch the lift-off. They were welcomed by a music band on their arrival at the school and were seen breaking out into applause as the rocket lifted off.

Born on 10 October 1985 in the northern city of Lucknow, Group Captain Shukla joined the Indian air force as a fighter pilot in 2006.

He has flown MiGs, Sukhois, Dorniers, Jaguars and Hawks and has more than 2,000 hours of flying experience.

Describing the past year as “nothing short of transformative”, Group Captain Shukla recently told an online press conference that he did not have words to describe his excitement.

“It has been an amazing journey so far, but the best is yet to come,” he said.

“As I go into space, I carry not just instruments and equipment, I carry hopes and dreams of a billion hearts.

“I request all Indians to pray for the success of our mission,” he added.

Besides piloting the mission, the Indian astronaut will have a busy schedule during his two weeks on ISS.

Considering the huge interest in the flight, Isro has said they are organising events for him to interact with Indian students and answer their questions while floating in space. An interaction with Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also on the cards.

But most of the time, the four-member crew will be conducting 60 scientific experiments, seven of which come from India.

Former Nasa scientist Mila Mitra says Isro’s experiments will help improve our understanding of space and its effects on biology and micro-gravity.

One of the key experiments, she explains, will investigate the impact of spaceflight on six varieties of crop seeds.

• Sweets to toy swan – what Indian astronaut will take on historic space voyage
• The Indian pilot set for a historic space journey on Axiom-4

Another Isro experiment involves growing three strains of microalgae which could be used as food, fuel or even in life support systems and this will help identify the most suitable ones for growing in microgravity, she says.

The Isro projects will also investigate how tardigrades – micro-animals on Earth that can survive extreme environments – would fare in space.

The other experiments aim to identify how muscle loss occurs in space and how it can be treated; and the physical and cognitive impact of using computer screens in microgravity.

The US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities did not destroy the country’s nuclear programme and probably only set it back by months, according to an early Pentagon intelligence assessment of the attack.

The Islamic Republic’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not eliminated in Saturday’s bombings, sources familiar with the Defense Intelligence Agency evaluation told the BBC’s US partner CBS.

The White House said the “flat-out wrong” assessment was leaked by “a low-level loser in the intelligence community”.

President Donald Trump again declared the nuclear sites in Iran “completely destroyed” and accused media of “an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history”.

• Live: Follow the latest updates on Iran
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• Watch: How successful have the US strikes on Iran been?

The US struck three nuclear facilities in Iran – Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan – with “bunker buster” bombs capable of penetrating 18m (60ft) of concrete or 61m (200ft) of earth before exploding.

But sources familiar with the Pentagon’s intelligence assessment say Iran’s centrifuges are largely “intact” and the impact was limited to aboveground structures.

Entrances to two nuclear facilities were sealed off, and some infrastructure was destroyed or damaged, but much of the facilities, which are deep underground, escaped the brunt of the blasts.

The anonymous sources told US media it is estimated the attack only set Iran back “a few months, tops”, and that any resumption of its nuclear programme may be based on how long it takes the country to dig out and make repairs.

Sources also confirmed to CBS that some of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was moved before the strikes, according to the intelligence assessment.

The US 30,000lb (14,000kg) Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb was thought to be the only weapon capable of destroying Iran’s underground enrichment facilities. Tehran had always said its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes.

In the hours that followed the Saturday strikes, Gen Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters that it would take time to assess the damage to the facilities.

But he added that “all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction”. Satellite images showed six fresh craters clustered around two entry points at the Fordo nuclear sites, as well as grey dust and debris.

It is unclear from the images, however, how much damage the sites sustained below the surface.

Hassan Abedini, the deputy political director of Iran’s state broadcaster, claimed the three sites targeted by the US had been evacuated a “while ago”, and that Iran “didn’t suffer a major blow because the materials had already been taken out”.

US officials, on the other hand, hailed the mission as a success, as have Israeli officials.

In a statement on Tuesday, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “based on everything we have seen – and I’ve seen it all – our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons”.

“Anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission,” Hegseth said.

US Congressman Brad Sherman, a Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the BBC the Trump administration was using vague terms to declare victory – when it’s still unclear what the bombing mission accomplished.

He said the administration hasn’t said whether the strikes destroyed Iran’s ability to weaponise its uranium, its uranium-enriching centrifuges or depleted its stockpile, which he said would be enough to create nine nuclear weapons.

“When they say obliterate the programme, they’re not even saying whether it’s obliterated the centrifuges and the ability to create uranium in the future or whether it is obliterating the stockpile,” Sherman told BBC.

“All indications, including Vice-President Vance’s statement, indicate that we don’t think we got the stockpile,” he said, noting images that show trucks going to one of the facilities days before the strikes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that since hostilities with Iran began on 13 June, Israel has been successful in curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as well as destroying its missiles arsenal.

“We have removed two immediate existential threats to us – the threat of nuclear annihilation and the threat of annihilation by 20,000 ballistic missiles,” Netanyahu said in video remarks issued by his office.

A report in Saudi news outlet Al Hadath, citing an unnamed Israeli source, said that Israel believes most of Iran’s enriched uranium is buried under the rubble.

The US has 18 intelligence agencies, which sometimes produce conflicting reports based on their mission and area expertise. For example, the American intelligence community is still not in agreement over the origins of Covid-19.

It is possible future intelligence reports will include more information showing a different level of damage to the facilities.

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and an expert on secret nuclear weapons development, said the damage Iran sustained by the US attacks will mean “it will take significant time, investment and energy” for it to restore its nuclear programme.

In a post on X, Albright added that Iran is “under intense scrutiny and observation from the United States and Israel”, and it risks further attacks if it tries to rebuild.

On Monday, Iran retaliated against the US airstrikes by launching a missile attack on Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which is home to thousands of US troops.

That attack was largely intercepted, and no casualties or injuries were reported.

Since Iran’s retaliation, an Iran-Israel ceasefire – brokered by President Trump and Qatari mediators – is in place.

Since 13 June, Israel has inflicted widespread damage on Iran’s military infrastructure, Iranian missiles have pierced Israel’s defence systems and the US has conducted strikes against Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Then, over the course of a dizzying 24 hours beginning on Monday, events moved even faster: a US air base came under attack, the White House mediated a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, and that deal came close to unravelling.

This is how that volatile day unfolded.

The first signs that the conflict gripping the Middle East was about to spread to the Gulf was a calmly worded warning to US citizens in Qatar.

“Shelter in place” was the recommendation from the US government – with an attached reassurance that this was “out of an abundance of caution”.

The UK issued similar advice shortly after.

It was always feasible Iran would strike back at America in Qatar. The country is home to the al-Udeid military base, a sprawling installation outside the capital, Doha, which houses thousands of troops and is where US air operations in the Middle East are orchestrated.

Leaders in Tehran had threatened retaliation for unprecedented US strikes over the weekend against three nuclear facilities in Iran, including its prized Fordo enrichment site, buried deep below a mountain.

From the bunker where he has reportedly been sheltering since Israel launched its military operation against Iran, it seemed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had issued an order: to hit back against the US at one of its most strategically important assets in the region.

• Follow the latest Middle East updates on our live page

The airspace above Qatar is closed, its government announced.

Air traffic controllers in Doha hurriedly started turning passenger planes back, and flights bound for one of the world’s busiest airports began to land elsewhere in the Gulf.

The BBC then learned of a “credible threat” from an Iranian missile attack against the al-Udeid air base.

Unnamed US officials briefed American media that missile launchers had been sighted pointing in the direction of Qatar.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and his most senior general headed for the White House to monitor the situation.

Within the hour, explosions were heard over Doha and the sky above its lavish skyscrapers was streaked with trails left behind by air defence missiles as they hunted down Iranian weapons in the air.

Iran’s state-controlled media began to report its retaliation was under way. Shortly after, the Iran’s revolutionary guards confirmed as much.

“US bases in the region are not strengths but vulnerabilities,” it said – but the attack was over soon after.

Qatar reacted before the US. Though the target was the US base on its soil, its sovereignty had been violated by “brazen aggression”, a furious government statement read.

But crucially, it confirmed the missiles had been intercepted. The base had been evacuated before the attack began and no one had been killed or injured.

At around the same time, an inflammatory illustration appeared on the supreme leader’s X account, depicting missiles reigning down on a US military base as a tattered American flag burned.

However, rather than heralding any destruction, he wrote: “We didn’t harm anyone.”

It was beginning to appear that the US and Qatar had known about the planned Iranian attack in advance.

To outside analysts, it looked as though it had been designed to allow Iran’s leaders to save face but avoid escalation.

They could tell their public they had retaliated against the Americans – but they did so without inflicting the sort of loss that would risk dragging it into a direct war against a far more powerful adversary.

A de-escalation was in sight – and the world waited for the president of the United States to log on to social media.

“Weak.” “Expected.” “Effectively countered.”

That was how Donald Trump described Iran’s attack – but as his message continued, the tone was more conciliatory.

The president thanked Iran “for giving us early notice” and said they had “gotten it all out of their ‘system’.”

He went on: “Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same.”

Two hours earlier, Iran had attacked a US air base. Two days earlier, Trump had ordered unprecedented strikes against Iran, a country he has deemed evil and a mortal danger to the world in the past.

Now he was offering its leaders an olive branch.

Concluding a series of posts which sent observers into a tailspin, he wrote: “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!”

It has since emerged that frantic talks were under way behind the scenes involving the US, Iran, Israel and Qatar.

Donald Trump spoke directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close ally whose war on Iran the president had briefly joined. The call took place in private but the message was apparent: it was time to end the fighting.

Meanwhile, Trump’s deputy JD Vance and his chief international negotiator Steve Witkoff were reaching out to the Iranians directly and via diplomatic backchannels.

From Washington, Trump’s team was attempting to hastily piece together something prized above all else by the US president, but which has proven so elusive in the Middle East: a deal.

Reports of success and competing denials began to swirl – but slowly and surely, momentum appeared to build as reports of progress emerged.

Then, just after 11:00 BST, the president took to social media again. His message to began: “CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE”.

A complete and total ceasefire had been agreed between Iran and Israel, the president wrote. There would be a grace period for “in progress, final missions”, and it would come into force six hours later.

The conflict should henceforth be known as “the 12 Day War”, Trump wrote.

Six thousands miles away in the Middle East, another day was dawning.

Across Israel, sirens began to sound and people were ordered to shelters: Iranian missiles were incoming, the Israel Defense Forces warned.

Across a period of less than 60 minutes, Israel said Iran had launched three waves of missiles. Several more would follow as the morning wore on, the Israeli military said.

In Beersheba, there was a direct hit on a multi-storey residential building. Four people – at least three of whom were hiding in a safe room – were killed when a missile tore through it.

Israel’s prime minister accused Iran of deploying one of the largest missiles in its arsenal against the homes.

At the same time, Iranian media reported it had sustained heavy strikes by Israel overnight, killing nine in the northern town of Astaneh-ye Ashrafiyeh. Mohammad Reza Seddiqi Saberi, a nuclear scientist, was reportedly among them.

The region’s deputy governor said four apartments “were completely destroyed, and many surrounding houses were damaged due to the explosion”. Pictures from the scene showed debris scattered across a street surrounded by houses.

Iran accused Israel of firing “a last round of missiles” to beat the ceasefire deadline.

The Israeli military later confirmed it had carried out operations overnight, while the Iraqi government claimed drones had targeted bases on its territory. Pro-Iranian armed militias operate in Iraq but it is not clear what was targeted.

What was clear was that the fighting was continuing until the very last moment.

Trump declared the beginning of the ceasefire in a social media post, writing: “THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!”

Shortly after, the Israeli government formally accepted the ceasefire arrangements.

A statement said Israel had achieved its war objectives of eliminating Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, and had taken its place among “world powers” as a result.

Iran’s foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi had already indicated overnight that Tehran was open to the ceasefire put forward by Trump. He said that if Israel stopped its attacks before 04:00 local time, then “we have no intention to continue our response afterwards”.

But it would not take long until it looked as though that ceasefire was in peril.

Air defences were activated when a missile was launched from Iran, the Israeli military said.

Iran issued denials, but Israel’s defence minister said he had ordered “intense strikes against regime targets in the heart of Tehran”, while Bezalel Smotrich – a far-right government minister – warned: “Tehran will shake.”

It looked as thought Trump’s rapidly assembled deal might be unravelling a couple of hours after it came into force.

With Israeli jets on their way to the Iranian capital, Trump posted again: “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!”

As morning broke in Washington DC, the US president stepped onto the White House lawn, where a helicopter was waiting to take him to a Nato summit.

Reporters were also waiting, eager to hear what he had to say after a dizzying night of announcements, claims and denials.

Both Israel and Iran had violated the ceasefire, Trump told them – but he insisted the deal was still in place.

Referencing the Israeli jets he had urged Netanyahu to turn back, he said: “There was one [Iranian] rocket that I guess was fired overboard after the time limit and now Israel is going out. These guys [have] got to calm down.”

Trump said the Iranian missile was fired “perhaps by mistake” and “didn’t land”.

The president appeared angry. He said he was “not happy with Israel” for launching strikes “the likes of which I’ve never seen before” just as the deal was agreed.

“I’m not happy with Iran either,” he added.

As Trump turned to walk away, he vented his frustration with Israel and Iran, using an expletive as he said they had been fighting so long that they don’t know what they’re doing.

The helicopter took him to a military base in Maryland, where he was to board Air Force One and fly to the Netherlands for the summit.

Once in the air, he called Netanyahu, a conversation which appears to have been a tense one.

A White House source told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, that the president was “exceptionally firm and direct” with the Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu “understood the severity of the situation and the concerns President Trump expressed”.

Trump reportedly confirmed to reporters on board that he had told Netanyahu to bring back the military aircraft, which he indicated were on the verge of attacking Iran.

As for leaders in Tehran, Trump said that developing a nuclear weapon would be the “last thing” on their minds.

“Ordinary people suffered the most,” says Sirous, an Iranian who requested his name be changed for his safety.

Speaking to the BBC from his home city of Tehran, he says: “I believe the whole war was orchestrated.

“Israel and the US came in and destroyed military and nuclear sites, Iran launched a few missiles, hit a US base, and both sides are satisfied,” he says – but adds it is the Iranian people who are left to suffer.

Sirous is one of millions of Iranians whose emotions are conflicted since a ceasefire was announced between Iran and Israel.

It comes after 12 days of strikes between the two sides. Iran’s health minister said on Tuesday that 606 people have been killed, although independent groups estimate the death toll to be twice this.

The war has stirred within Iranians a mix of fear, despair, and – among some – flickers of hope. Some fear for their safety and the future of their country, while others speculate whether the conflict might usher in real political change.

Like Sirous, Minoo – not her real name – fears the impact on the Iranian people.

“What truly frightens me,” she says, “is the devastation of war combined with sanctions and a dead economy, all brought on by the regime’s greed.

“We’ve paid the price, with our money and with our lives, and we will keep paying.

“We, the Iranian people, are exhausted. We don’t want war, we don’t want sanctions, and we don’t even want a ceasefire. We just want to live in peace in the country we love.”

She adds: “What scares me more than the war or even the ceasefire is the wounded and humiliated Islamic Republic. They couldn’t prevail [over] the US and now the Iranian people are within their reach, they’ll multiply executions and torture.”

The Iranian authorities have long cracked down on dissent, a crackdown that intensified after widespread protests in 2022. At least 901 people were reportedly executed in Iran last year, according to the UN human rights chief.

BBC journalists are unable to report from inside Iran due to restrictions by the country’s government. BBC Persian does not have an office there and speaks to Iranians through WhatsApp and Telegram.

Mehdi also tells the BBC he feels concerned the costs of war will be borne by the people, not the regime.

“The government will prioritise rebuilding its military and nuclear capabilities over investing in public infrastructure.

“And they know how to exploit the dead better than anything else, using their deaths to silence dissent.”

He adds: “They may offer people temporary freedoms, but it won’t last.”

The ceasefire – announced by Donald Trump – came into effect on Tuesday morning, but was quickly put under pressure as both sides accused the other of violating the agreement.

Explosions were heard in Iran’s northern Mazandaran province on Tuesday.

Sara, also not her real name, says she felt a mix of anxiety and confusion as the truce began.

“I did not believe the ceasefire, it’s not likely of them,” she says.

Others who spoke to the BBC are similarly cynical about the ceasefire’s viability.

“This ceasefire will definitely collapse,” says Arman, not his real name. “Israel hasn’t achieved all its goals… the regime must fall.”

Kian, also a pseudonym, added: “This ceasefire is just a trap to lure [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei out of his hole.

“Israel and the US never make moves without purpose.”

He adds that he does not think that this truce will last and that it will end sooner or later: “This war won’t end with a ceasefire, it will end with the fall of this regime. And the regime does not stand a chance.”

Just hours after the truce was announced, the Israeli army claimed to have intercepted missiles fired from inside Iran, a claim Iran denied.

Israel said it hit an Iranian radar array but then “refrained from further attacks” after PM Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Donald Trump.

As the truce remains precarious, all eyes are now on the skies to see whether calm will last.

• Follow live updates
• Analysis: If Iran and Israel do stop firing, Trump’s high-risk strikes may pay off
• What we know about Iran-Israel ceasefire
• Did Trump have the legal authority to strike Iran?

Shortly before a ceasefire between Iran and Israel was due to take effect, residents in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba were woken early on Tuesday by the sound of missile alarms on their phones.

“Extreme alert,” the message read, warning of an imminent strike. Then the sirens sounded in the streets.

Like others, Merav Manay and her family headed into their safe room – a secure part of their apartment built of reinforced concrete with a heavy metal door and designed to protect against rocket attacks.

When the Iranian missile hit, they felt the building move and covered their heads with their arms.

“It was so strong that we thought it was the end,” she said.

When they emerged, the windows at the front of their flat had shattered across the floor from the missile blast. But they were safe.

Merav stayed in the flat for several hours, frightened of what she would see outside.

Just across the road, a block not dissimilar to hers had been directly hit and partially collapsed.

• Follow the latest Middle East updates on our live page

Four people were killed there. The spokesman for the southern Home Front Command told the BBC that they too were inside safe rooms when their building took a direct hit.

After the strike, Israeli medics and military personnel rushed to Beersheba to rescue survivors and recover remains. Volunteers and local residents swept the shattered glass from the streets.

“I hope this is the end,” one man told the BBC as he surveyed the damage.

Israel and Iran both confirmed after the Beersheba strike that they had agreed to a ceasefire, but then accused each other of violating it.

As Beersheba’s residents dealt with the shock and the damage to their community, they also questioned whether the fragile truce would hold.

On Tuesday afternoon, Oren Cohen, 45, stood among debris in his garden, overlooked by the block that was struck. He said he could not bring himself to look at it.

“I was worried about my kids so only now am I starting to realise what happened here,” he said.

Oren was with his wife and three children – aged eight, 12 and 15 – when the strike hit, and said the reinforced window flew open on the impact of the blast.

As he spoke, a group of volunteers in fluorescent vests arrived to help with the clean-up.

Even after being directly affected, Oren said he supported Israel’s strikes on Iran that marked the beginning of the 12-day conflict.

“I think that we had no other choice,” he said. “We do what we have to do to protect ourselves.”

He said he didn’t know if he could “count on” the ceasefire but trusted the Israeli government to know when it had achieved its goals.

As Merav left her home on Tuesday for the first time to assess the damage in her community, she too said she believed Israel had had no choice but to strike Iran.

“It would have happened sooner or later. We were prepared for this,” she said.

One afternoon, as Isabella left school for the day, someone thrust a leaflet into her hand. “Do you want to make money with your beauty?” it asked.

She says a studio looking for models seemed to be targeting teenage pupils in her area in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital.

At 17, with a two-year-old son to support, she desperately needed money, so went along to find out more.

She says when she got there, it was a sexcam studio, run by a couple in a house in a run-down neighbourhood – it had eight rooms decorated like bedrooms.

Studios range from small, low-budget operations to large businesses with individual rooms set up with lights, computers, webcams and an internet connection. Models perform sexual acts which are streamed to viewers around the world, who message them and make requests via intermediaries, also known as monitors.

The next day Isabella, whose real name we are not using, says she started work – even though it is illegal in Colombia for studios to employ webcam models under 18.

She told the BBC World Service there was no written contract detailing how much she would be paid or what her rights were. “They had me streaming without teaching me anything. They said, ’Here’s the camera, let’s go.'”

Isabella says the studio soon suggested she do a livestream from school, so as classmates around her were learning English, she quietly took out her phone and started to film herself at her desk.

She describes how viewers began to ask her to perform specific sexual acts, so she asked her teacher for permission to go to the toilet and, locked in a cubicle, did what the customers had requested.

Her teacher had no idea what was happening, “so I started doing it from other classes”, says Isabella. “I  kept thinking, ‘It’s for my child. I’m doing it for him.’ That gave me the strength.”

The global sexcam industry is booming.

The number of monthly views of webcam platforms globally has more than tripled since 2017, reaching nearly 1.3 billion, in April 2025, according to analytics firm Semrush.

Colombia is now estimated to have more models than any other country – 400,000 – and 12,000 sexcam studios, according to Fenalweb, an organisation representing the country’s adult webcam sector.

These studios film performers and feed the content to global webcam platforms, which broadcast to millions of paying viewers around the world who make requests of models, give tips and buy them gifts.

Many of the models who work in studios do so because they lack privacy, equipment or a stable internet connection at home – often if they’re poor or young and still living with parents.

Performers told the BBC that studios often try to attract people with the promise of making easy money in a country where a third of the population lives in poverty.

• Listen to Colombia’s webcam women on BBC Sounds and watch the documentary on YouTube

Models explained that while some studios are well run and offer performers technical and other support, abuse is rife at unscrupulous operators.

And Colombia’s President, Gustavo Petro, has described studio owners as “slave masters” who trick women and girls, like Isabella, into believing they can earn good money.

The four biggest webcam platforms that stream material from the studios, BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin and StripChat, which are based in Europe and the United States, have checks that are supposed to ensure performers are 18 or older. EU and US laws prohibit the distribution of sexually explicit material involving anyone under 18.

But models told the BBC these checks are too easily sidestepped if a studio wants to employ under-age girls.

They say one way of doing this is to “recycle” old accounts of models who are of legal age but no longer perform, and give them to under-age girls.

Isabella says this is how she was able to appear on both Chaturbate and StripChat when she was 17.

“The studio owner said it was no problem that I was under-age,” Isabella, now 18, says.  “She used the account of another woman, and then I started working under that identity.”

Other models the BBC spoke to say they were given fake IDs by studios. One, Keiny, says this enabled her to appear on BongaCams when she was 17.

Milley Achinte, a BongaCams representative in Colombia, told the BBC they do not allow under-18s to perform and they shut accounts that break this rule. She added that the platform checks IDs on a Colombian government website and if a “model contacts us and we are aware that the model left the studio, we give them their password so they can close their account”.

In a statement, Chaturbate said it has “categorically” stopped the use of fake IDs, and models must regularly submit live images of themselves standing next to government-issued photo IDs, which are checked digitally and manually. It said it has “an average of one reviewer to fewer than 10 broadcasters” and any attempt to recycle accounts “would be unsuccessful” because “the age verification process continues as each and every broadcast is constantly reviewed and checked”.

StripChat also sent a statement saying it has a “zero-tolerance policy regarding under-age models” and that performers “must undergo a thorough age verification process”, adding that its in-house moderation team works with third-party verification services to “validate models’ identities”.

It said that recycled accounts cannot be used on its platform, and recent changes to its rules mean that the account holder must be present on every stream. “So, if a model moves to a new account to work independently, the original account tied to them becomes inactive and unusable by the studio.”

LiveJasmin did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.

Keiny is now 20 and works from her bedroom at home in Medellín – streaming through another studio which provides a route to big international platforms.

And if it wasn’t for the high-tech equipment – several ring lights, a camera, and a large screen – this could pass for a child’s room. There are about a dozen stuffed animals, pink unicorns and teddy bears.

Viewers “really like it when you look young”, she says.

“Sometimes I think that’s problematic. Some clients ask that you act like an actual child, and that’s not OK.”

She says she got into the business to help her family financially after her parents decided to divorce.

Her father knows what she’s doing and she says he’s supportive.

Looking back, Keiny thinks she was too young when she started at the age of 17, but even so, she isn’t critical of her former employers.

Instead, she believes they helped her into a job which she says now earns her about $2,000 (£1,500) a month – far more than the minimum wage in Colombia, which is about $300 (£225) a month.

“Thanks to this job, I’m helping my mum, my dad, and my sister – my whole family,” she says.

That point of view is echoed by the studios – some of which are keen to demonstrate they look after their performers.

We visited one of the biggest, AJ Studios, where we were introduced to an in-house psychologist, employed to support models’ mental health. We were also shown a spa which offers pedicures, massages, botox and lip fillers at a “discount” or as prizes for “employees of the month” who may be high earners or people who are collaborative and support fellow models.

But as the country’s president has pointed out, not every performer is treated well or makes good money. And the industry is waiting to see if his new labour law will pave the way for tighter regulations.

Models and studios told the BBC that streaming platforms typically take 50% of the fees paid by viewers, studios take 20-30%, and the models get what’s left. This means that if a show makes $100 (£75), the model would usually get between $20 (£15) and $30 (£22). They explained that unscrupulous studios often take much more.

Models say there have been times when they logged on for sessions of up to eight hours and made as little as $5 (£4) – which can happen if a performance doesn’t have many viewers.

Others say they have been pressured into streaming for up to 18 hours without breaks and fined for stopping to eat or go to the toilet.

These accounts are supported by a report from the campaign group Human Rights Watch, published in December 2024. The author, Erin Kilbride, who did additional research on this story for the BBC, found some people were being filmed in cramped, dirty cubicles infested with bedbugs and cockroaches and were being coerced into performing sexual acts they found painful and degrading.

Sofi, a mother-of-two from Medellín, had been a waitress in a nightclub but, fed up with being insulted by customers, moved into webcam modelling.

But the 26-year-old says a studio she worked for pressured her into carrying out painful and degrading sexual acts, including performing with three other girls.

She explains that these requests were made by customers and agreed to by studio monitors – the staff employed to act as intermediaries between models and viewers.

Sofi says she told the studio she didn’t want to perform these acts, “but they said I had no choice”.

“In the end, I had to do it because it was either that, or they would ban my account,” she adds, explaining that means her account would effectively be closed down.

Sofi continues working in webcam studios because she says a typical salary in Colombia would not be enough to support her and her two children. She is now saving to start a law degree.

It’s not just Colombia that is facing these issues, says Erin Kilbride.

She found that between them, the big four streaming platforms also broadcast material from studios in 10 more countries – Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, and the US.

And she says she identified “gaps in platform policies and protocols that facilitate or exacerbate human rights abuses”.

When we asked platforms about conditions at the studios they stream, Milley Achinte from BongaCams said she is part of a team of eight women who visit some studios in Colombia “making sure that the models are getting paid, that the rooms are clean, that models are not getting violated”.

StripChat and Chaturbate do not visit studios and said they are not direct employers of performers and therefore do not intervene in the terms set between studios and models. But they both told us they are committed to a safe working environment. StripChat also said it expects studios to ensure “respectful and comfortable working conditions”.

BongaCams, StripChat and Chaturbate all said they have teams to intervene if they believe a model is being forced or coerced to do something.

After two months of waking up at 05:00 to juggle webcamming, secondary school, and caring for her son, Isabella says she was eager to receive her first payment.

But after the platform and the studio took their cut, Isabella explains she was paid just 174,000 Colombian pesos ($42; £31) – far less than she expected. She believes that the studio paid her a much lower percentage than agreed and also stole most of her earnings.

The money was a pittance, she says, adding that she used some of it to buy milk and nappies.  “They deceived me.”

Isabella, who is still at school, only worked as a webcam model for a few months before quitting.

The way she says she was treated at such a young age left her deeply traumatised. She couldn’t stop crying, so her mother arranged for her to see a psychologist.

She and six other former employees of the studio have got together to file an official complaint with the state prosecutor’s office. Collectively, they have accused the studio of exploitation of minors, labour exploitation and economic abuse.

“There are video recordings of me still online, under-age,” she says, explaining she feels powerless when it comes to trying to get them removed. “It’s affected me a lot and I don’t want to think about it any more.”

Nato leaders including President Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer are meeting to agree a big increase in defence spending, but nearly a third of the alliance’s members have not reached the existing spending target.

The new target will be to spend 5% of the size of their economies, measured by GDP, on “core defence” along with defence-related areas such as security.

But the latest Nato estimates show nine members spent less than the existing target of 2% of GDP.

Trump has been critical of the lowest spender, Spain which he called “notorious” for its “low spending”.

Rachel Ellehuus, director of the defence think tank Rusi sees evidence of a spending split within Nato, along geographical lines.

“It’s the allies who are closer to the threat from Russia in the north and the east of the alliance who are spending more and as we get down to southern allies, the spending tends to go to 2%, if not lower,” she told BBC News.

The 2% target is not legally binding. There is not an international court that defaulting nations can be taken to.

That means it is mainly down to political pressure, which has come strongly from President Trump, who claimed to have told a Nato leader he would not protect a nation behind on its payments, and would “encourage” the aggressors to “do whatever the hell they want”.

“Nobody wants to be called a bad ally for failing to meet the target,” Jamie Shea, a former Nato official now working for the Chatham House think tank told BBC Verify.

There are signs that the pressure is working. Even though not all countries have met the 2% level, all of them still managed to increase their spending between 2014 and 2024.

And because some Nato countries ended up below the target and some above it, the overall spending for Nato members, excluding the US, has increased from 1.4% of GDP in 2014 to 2% in 2024.

Spain was the lowest spender in Nato last year, with spending of 1.2%, according to the alliance’s estimates.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has said his country will pass 2% in 2025 but there have been demonstrations against higher defence spending.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years we felt we didn’t need armed forces – we saw their role as more about natural disaster response, but didn’t see the point of having a lot of fighter jets,” Mario Saavedra, diplomatic correspondent for El Periódico told BBC Verify.

“But things are now changing very fast. Pedro Sanchez said by the end of the year he will get to 2.1% and he didn’t pay a political price for that.”

Now Sánchez claims to have been granted an exemption from increasing spending to the proposed 5% Nato target, which he has described as “incompatible with our worldview”.

“Analysts and diplomats say 2% is acceptable and 5% is crazy,” Mr Saavedra said.

“We can spend more on military spending and there is some sort of acceptance in the political arena and in the public, but we won’t go that far and that fast.”

Trump has described Spain as “a very low payer” and said Spain “has to pay what everybody else has to pay”.

Spain is now arguing that there should be more focus on smart procurement instead of the amount of money spent.

“What the Spanish have said is that there’s been too much talk about money and not enough about capabilities,” Jamie Shea said.

Spain suggested that by wasting less money they could achieve what the alliance wants without such a big increase in spending, he added.

While nine countries failed to achieve defence spending of 2% of GDP by the 2024 deadline, many of them including Spain have claimed they will meet it soon.

In Canada, Mark Carney pledged during his successful election campaign that he would hit 2% by 2030 – Canada spent 1.5% in 2024.

But Carney has now said he will meet the target by March next year.

In Belgium, where they spent 1.3% last year, the government said in March that it would spend an extra €4bn (£3.4bn) this year to take the total up to 2%.

Portugal has also announced that it plans to spend 2% this year, four years earlier than it had previously planned. It spent 1.5% last year.

And Italy has said it expects to reach 2% this year, up from 1.5% in 2024.

Nato secretary general Mark Rutte praised Trump for encouraging Nato members to spend more in a message that the president shared on his Truth Social Account.

“Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win,” the message reads.

In cash terms, the US is by far the biggest spender on defence in Nato, spending $935bn (£686bn) in 2024, which was 3.2% of its GDP and nearly double the defence spending of the rest of Nato put together.

US spending as a share of its economy has fallen since 2014, when it was 3.7%.

On that measure, Poland was the biggest spender at 4.1% in 2024, followed by Estonia and Latvia on 3.4%.

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After applying for more than 600 jobs, university graduate Caitlin Morgan almost felt like giving up hope of finding employment.

Just as she was becoming demotivated, the 23-year-old’s persistence was rewarded as she was offered a job as a trainee accountant after her 647th application.

But after 18 months of job hunting, Caitlin was left wondering if going to university for four years and getting a degree was worth it.

Latest research from the Institute of Student Employers shows competition for graduate roles is at a “record high” as estimates suggested there were 1.2 million applications for 17,000 graduate vacancies last year.

Setting herself a target of sending two applications a day, Caitlin was immediately rejected 150 times without feedback and did not hear back from 271 other applications.

She said: “I put so much effort into my applications and so much time that when I didn’t hear back from them that I just wondered what made my application not worthy of feedback?”

Caitlin completed a year in industry as part of her finance and accounting degree at Swansea University and hoped it would help her stand out when applying for roles.

Instead, she has a spreadsheet filled with rejections dating back to September 2023.

“I worked hard for my degree and had experience so was thinking, was it worth it?

“There was a period where I was feeling completely demotivated and didn’t believe in going to university or getting degrees.”

Caitlin thinks the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by companies as part of their filtering process could be a reason why she did not get very far in some applications.

She said initially her CV was not written in a way that could be read by some resume screening programmes where AI is used to read CVs.

“I was just getting straight rejections whereas after adjusting it, sometimes you’d be invited to an assessment after you’ve applied,” said Caitlin.

“Had I have known that from the get go, that would’ve helped me with my other applications.”

She reached the assessment stages for 221 of the roles she applied for and had five final interviews before getting a job.

Latest data estimates an average of 140 applications were received for each available graduate job in 2024.

The Institute of Student Employers spoke to 145 companies that hired almost 40,000 new students and the body said applications were the highest for 30 years – a more than 50% rise from 2023.

The figures showed that for finance roles like the ones Caitlin applied for, an average of 188 applications were submitted for each role.

Following months of uncertainty after graduating last year, Caitlin has been offered her first degree-level job and will move from her home in Tintern, Monmouthshire, to London to become a trainee accountant in September.

“It was exactly what I wanted and is offering all the courses I want to do in finance,” she said.

“I just wished it would’ve happened a bit quicker.”

Despite Wales having the lowest proportion of graduates in the UK workforce, the group that represents universities believes the demand for graduate-level skills will grow by 2035.

“While we recognise that today’s job market presents real challenges for many people, research shows that a degree continues to boost lifetime earnings, career prospects and personal development,” said a Universities Wales spokesperson.

“University offers a transformative experience that not only benefits individuals but also strengthens our communities and economy.”

Thousands more students are now preparing to follow in Caitlin’s footsteps this summer.

Huw Williams is getting ready to start his role as Bangor University Student Union’s Welsh officer for 12 months, before returning to education next year.

“I think I’ll apply to be on a teachers’ training course in history, a career pathway I’ve always been interested in,” said the 21-year-old.

While Huw knows what the next year looks like for him, the future is not so clear for fellow Bangor graduate Alaw Simpson.

The 21-year-old is returning home to nearby Anglesey where she hopes to find her first graduate-level job.

She said: “I want to move on from education and try something different.

“It is a worry because it can be very difficult to find professional jobs these days.”

Recruitment experts have said many employers now focus on attitude and personal behaviour.

“Getting your first job post-education is the biggest step because you might not necessarily have a lot of experience,” said James Fortnam of Robert Half Recruitment.

“I think there’s a lot of noise with employers with a sheer number of applicants for an opportunity, so it’s really difficult for clients to whittle that down.

“It’s really important applicants tailor their CV to the opportunity.”

Mr Fortnam has said some firms use technology to help assess applicants’ skills.

“Companies will use software tools to match somebody’s CV to the job,” he said.

“Because they won’t have had huge volumes of experience, typically a lot of graduates sometimes appear lower on that matching capacity.”

Indian wildlife photographer Sachin Rai still remembers tigress “Arrowhead” pouncing on a crocodile and tearing away its leathery flesh with her teeth.

Mr Rai had been photographing the iconic tigress in western Rajasthan state’s Ranthambore National Park since she was a cub.

Last week, Arrowhead, also known as T-84, died at the age of 11 near a stretch of lakes in the scenic park, the very territory she had gloriously ruled over in her prime.

Her death, caused by an illness, was mourned by hundreds of wildlife enthusiasts, photographers and tour guides who had flocked to the park to get a glimpse of her.

Arrowhead’s legendary status comes partly from her lineage; she is the daughter of Krishna and granddaughter of Machli – majestic tigresses who, once upon a time, dominated vast home ranges in Ranthambore with ferocity.

They were also skilled crocodile-killers, known to incapacitate the massive creatures by crushing their skulls in their powerful jaws.

Mr Rai says that Arrowhead – named such by another wildlife photographer after the distinct arrow-shaped stripes on her cheek – took to killing crocodiles after her health began failing her.

“But even though she was weak and frail, the crocodiles were no match for her,” Mr Rai says.

Her kills earned her the nickname “crocodile-hunter” by her fans, he adds. In fact, she killed a crocodile just days before her death.

Though graceful and fierce, Arrowhead had a difficult life, Mr Rai says. She was chased out of her territory by her own daughter, Riddhi, and had to mate multiple times in order to find a place she could call home. (A male tiger shares his territory with his mate, offering her a space to bring up their cubs.)

Arrowhead gave birth to four litters in her lifetime, but not all of her children survived.

She grew weak after developing a tumour and park official’s would have to bring her food when she couldn’t hunt for days. However, this was stopped after some of her cubs attacked and killed people.

Mr Rai, who was around when Arrowhead was nearing her end, says that it was heart-breaking to see a powerful, majestic creature become so weak and powerless.

“I saw her struggling to walk. Every step seemed like an effort and she kept falling down,” he says.

Interestingly, Arrowhead ventured into her daughter Riddhi’s territory – which was once her own – in her last days.

“Riddhi didn’t put up a fight. She just gave her mother space to lie down and rest,” Mr Rai says, tearing up.

When he isn’t preaching the word of God, Reverend Joo Yeong-bong is raising dogs for slaughter.

Business is not going well though. In fact, it’s on the brink of becoming illegal.

“Since last summer we’ve been trying to sell our dogs, but the traders just keep hesitating,” Mr Joo, 60, tells the BBC. “Not a single one has shown up.”

In 2024, the South Korean government implemented a nationwide ban on the sale of dog meat for consumption. The landmark legislation, which was passed last January, gives farmers like Mr Joo until February 2027 to shutter their operations and sell off their remaining animals.

But many say that isn’t enough time to phase out an industry which has propped up livelihoods for generations – and that authorities still haven’t come up with adequate safeguards for farmers or the estimated half a million dogs in captivity.

Even those who support the ban, including experts and animal rights advocates, have flagged issues around its enforcement – including the difficulty of rehoming dogs that, having been saved from the kill floor, now face the increasingly likely threat of euthanasia.

Midway through the grace period, dog farmers are finding themselves with hundreds of virtually unsellable animals, farms that can’t be closed, and little means of putting food on the table.

“People are suffering,” says Mr Joo, who is also president of the Korean Association of Edible Dogs, a group representing the industry. “We’re drowning in debt, can’t pay it off, and some can’t even… find new work.

“It’s a hopeless situation.”

Chan-woo has 18 months to get rid of 600 dogs.

After that, the 33-year-old meat farmer – who we agreed to anonymise for fear of backlash – faces a penalty of up to two years in prison.

“Realistically, even just on my farm, I can’t process the number of dogs I have in that time,” he says. “At this point I’ve invested all of my assets [into the farm] – and yet they are not even taking the dogs.”

By “they”, Chan-woo doesn’t just mean the traders and butchers who, prior to the ban, would buy an average of half a dozen dogs per week.

He’s also referring to the animal rights activists and authorities who in his view, having fought so hard to outlaw the dog meat trade, have no clear plan for what to do with the leftover animals – of which there are close to 500,000, according to government estimates.

“They [the authorities] passed the law without any real plan, and now they’re saying they can’t even take the dogs.”

Lee Sangkyung, a campaign manager at Humane World for Animals Korea (Hwak), echoes these concerns.

“Although the dog meat ban has passed, both the government and civic groups are still grappling with how to rescue the remaining dogs,” he says. “One area that still feels lacking is the discussion around the dogs that have been left behind.”

A foreign press spokesperson from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (Mafra) told the BBC that if farm owners gave up their dogs, local governments would assume ownership and manage them in shelters.

Rehoming them, however, has proven challenging.

Since weight equals profit in the dog meat industry, farms tend to favour larger breeds. But in South Korea’s highly urbanised society, where many people live in apartment complexes, aspiring pet owners often want the opposite.

There is also a social stigma associated with dogs that come from meat farms, Mr Lee explains, due to concerns of disease and trauma. The issue is further complicated by the fact that many are either pure or mixed tosa-inu, a breed that is classified as “dangerous” in South Korea and requires government approval to keep as a pet.

Meanwhile, rescue shelters are already overcrowded.

This perfect storm of obstacles points to a perverse irony: that countless so-called rescue dogs, with nowhere else to go, now face the prospect of being euthanised.

“It’s just unbelievable,” says Chan-woo.

“Since the law was made according to the demands of these groups, I assumed they had also worked out a solution for the dogs – like they would take responsibility for them. But now I hear that even the animal rights groups say euthanasia is the only option.”

Cho Hee-kyung, head of the Korean Animal Welfare Association, conceded in September 2024 that while rights groups would try to rescue as many animals as possible, there would “be dogs left over”.

“If remaining dogs become ‘lost and abandoned animals’ then it’s heartbreaking but they will be euthanised,” she said.

The government sought to temper these concerns weeks later, saying that euthanising animals was “certainly” not part of their plan.

More recently, Mafra told the BBC it was investing about 6bn Korean won ($4.3m; £3.2m) annually to expand animal shelters and support private facilities, and would offer up to 600,000 Korean won per dog ($450; £324) to farmers who shut their businesses early.

Hwak, however, says they have lobbied Mafra “hard” to have a clear rescue component in its phase-out plan.

They also point out that, while Hwak has rehomed almost 2,800 dogs from South Korean meat farms since 2015, animal welfare charities shouldn’t be expected to absorb the huge number that have proliferated over the years.

Chun Myung-Sun, director of the Office of Veterinary Medical Education at Seoul National University, agrees that the government’s plan for leftover dogs is largely lacking.

“There needs to be a concrete discussion about how to ‘dispose’ of the dogs,” she says.

“Both adoption and euthanasia should be on the table. [But] if we’ve gone to the effort of rescuing dogs from cruel slaughter only to euthanise them, it’s understandable that people would feel heartbroken and angry.”

Some have looked for solutions further afield, sending the animals overseas to more willing adopters in countries like Canada, United Kingdom and the United States.

In 2023, a team from Hwak rescued some 200 dogs from a farm in Asan city – all of which have since been sent to Canada and the US.

The former owner of that farm, 74-year-old Yang Jong-tae, told the BBC that as he watched the rescuers loading his dogs into their trucks, he was astonished by the level of compassion they showed.

“When I saw how they handled the animals – like they were handling people, so gently and lovingly – it really moved me,” he said.

“We don’t treat them like that. For us, raising dogs was just a way to make a living. But those people from the animal group treated the dogs like they were individuals with dignity, and that really touched my heart.”

Mr Yang hastened to add, however, that he disapproves of the ban on dog meat farming.

“If dog meat is banned because dogs are animals, then why is it okay to eat other animals like cows, pigs or chicken?” he said. “It’s the same thing. These things exist in nature for people to live on.”

Eating dog is not the same as eating other meats, according to Ms Chun. She points out that dog meat carries more risk from a food safety and hygiene perspective – especially in South Korea, where it has not been integrated into the formal, regulated meat production system.

The meat is also consumed in countries such as China, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Thailand and parts of India, according to Humane World for Animals.

But while consumption rates have fluctuated throughout Korea’s history, it has become increasingly taboo in South Korea in recent years.

A government poll from 2024 found only 8% of respondents said they had tried dog meat in the previous 12 months – down from 27% in 2015. About 7% said they would keep eating it up until February 2027, and about 3.3% said they would continue after the ban came into full effect.

Since the ban was announced, 623 of South Korea’s 1,537 dog farms have closed.

“As society and culture have evolved, South Korean society has now made the decision to stop producing dog meat,” Ms Chun says.

And yet for many it remains the cornerstone of an industry on which they’ve built their lives.

Every member of the dog meat trade the BBC spoke to expressed uncertainty about how they would support themselves now that their longtime livelihood has been deemed illegal.

Some say they have resigned themselves to lives of poverty, noting that they were born during the Korean War and knew how to live hungry. Others suggested that the trade could go underground.

Many agree, however, that for younger farmers the crackdown is particularly worrying.

“Young people in this industry are really facing a bleak reality,” Mr Joo says. “Since they can’t sell the dogs, they can’t shut down quickly either. They’re stuck, with no way forward or back.”

Chan-woo recalls that when he started working in the industry a decade ago, at 23, “The perception of dog meat wasn’t that negative”.

“Still,” he adds, “There were some comments from people around me, so even back then I was aware that it wasn’t something I could do for the rest of my life.”

The ban came quicker than he expected – and since its announcement, he says, “Making a living has become incredibly uncertain”.

“All we’re hoping for now is that the grace period can be extended so that the process [of dealing with the remaining dogs] can happen more gradually.”

Many others are hoping for the same. But as the dog meat industry is pulled out from under the feet of those who’ve come to depend upon it, Mr Joo can’t help but speculate on a grim thought: that some farmers may not be able to endure the uncertainty for much longer.

“Right now, people are still holding on, hoping something might change – maybe the grace period will be extended,” he says. “But by 2027, I truly believe something terrible will happen.

“There are so many people whose lives have completely unravelled.”

Inside an anonymous building in Oxford, Riley Jackson is frying a steak. The perfectly red fillet cut sizzles in the pan, its juices releasing a meaty aroma. But this is no ordinary steak. It was grown in the lab next door.

What’s strangest of all is just how real it looks. The texture, when cut, is indistinguishable from the real thing.

“That’s our goal,” says Ms Jackson of Ivy Farm Technologies, the food tech start-up that created it. “We want it to be as close to a normal steak as possible.”

Lab-grown meat is already sold in many parts of the world and in a couple of years, pending being granted regulatory approval, it could also be sold in the UK too – in burgers, pies and sausages.

Unlike so-called vegetarian meat, which is already available in UK supermarkets – from fake bacon rashers made from pea protein to steaks made of soy, and dyed bright red to resemble the real thing – lab-grown meat is biologically real meat, grown from cow cells.

To some, this could be a smart technological fix for a growing environmental problem: the rise in planet-heating gases caused, in part, by the rapid and growing demand for meat.

But others argue that the environmental benefits of lab-grown meat, officially known as cultivated meat, have been oversold. Some critics say that more effort should instead be expended on reducing meat consumption, instead of looking to a technology fix.

Then there are questions around the ultra-processed nature of this meat, which some also worry will be produced by a handful of multinational companies.

So now, with dog food made from meat that was grown in factory vats having already gone on sale in the UK earlier this year and with the possibility of lab-grown food for humans becoming available sooner than expected – the debate has never been more prescient.

Nor has the question: to grow or not to grow?

Global demand for meat is growing. According the the UK’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, meat production has increased fivefold since the 1960s and reached around 364 million tonnes in 2023.

Producing 1kg of beef can generate planet-heating greenhouse gases, equivalent to roughly 40kg of carbon dioxide, though estimates can vary depending on the type of production.

A study published in Nature Food in 2021 concluded that food production was responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Cattle also burp planet-heating methane gas, plus they require water and land.

Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City St George’s, University of London argues that the issue is a ticking environmental time bomb. “The situation is absolutely dire,” he says.

“Politicians are fearful of engaging with the issue. They don’t want to take on the meat and farming industry, nor do they wish to risk unpopularity by enacting policies that would reduce meat consumption.”

Lab-grown meat has been marketed as part of a solution. Its advocates claim that it can meet the growing demand for meat with much less carbon emissions and land use, plus it can help governments hit certain targets.

In the UK, for example, a 2021 independent review for the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has called for a 30% reduction in meat consumption by 2032 to meet the country’s net zero target.

The science behind lab-grown meat is also relatively straightforward. Researchers take cells from a farm animal and grow more of them in a dish. When they have enough, they are put into ever larger vats until they have enough to produce a meat product.

Turning this into something that people want to eat is trickier. Each company has its own closely guarded secret sauce. But in the main, the cells are developed in a cocktail of nutrients, which encourage them to grow in the right way, after which other ingredients are sometimes added to boost the nutritional values.

The result is a paste, which is then processed and mixed with other foods such as soy to make it look, feel and taste more like meat. There are also plans to produce fish-like products this way, including eel and even caviar.

Ivy Farm Technologies is currently the only UK business that has applied for approval. If granted, its first products won’t be steaks but burgers and sausages.

It plans to combine cultivated mince, (which is cheaper and easier to produce than trying to replicate the taste of a real steak) with regular mince to create a blended cow-cultivated beef burger.

“If you want to make a sustainable difference, you have to go for mass production and burgers are where the masses are,” says the firm’s CEO Dr Harsh Amin. “If you blend our cultivated meat with animal derived meat, you are [still] reducing the carbon footprint.”

Ivy Farm claims this type of meat can lead to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental benefits. Other companies make similar claims, but these are based more on hope than hard evidence, according to Dr John Lynch, of Oxford University, who has carried out a comprehensive, independent assessment of the climate impact of lab-grown meat.

“There have not been any accurate climate assessment studies because production is not happening at large scale at the moment,” he adds.

The problem with comparing the climate impact of lab-grown meat with agricultural production is that there is little data and many variables.

Growing cells in vats requires energy, as does producing the chemicals that are added. Businesses keep the details of their processes secret, for perfectly legitimate reasons, so it is hard to produce a single figure for the climate cost of cultivated meat.

Dr Lynch has assessed the data available in scientific papers and found that the best-case cultivated meat carbon footprints were as low as 1.65 kg of CO2 per kg, which is better for the climate than traditional beef production.

However, if a lab-grown meat process needs a lot of energy, some estimates put the figure as high as 22kg of CO2 per kg, making its climate advantage less certain.

Then there is the fact that the cows’ methane gas burps disappear from the atmosphere after 12 years or so, whereas the CO2 produced to grow the lab meat continues to do its damage for much longer.

So, in the long run, it may be a bad idea to replace cows with high energy lab-grown production, according to Dr Lynch’s assessment. Yet that may be counter-balanced by the fact that cultivated meat production would require far less land.

The bottom line is that the environmental advantages of lab-grown beef over cattle farming is a closer run thing than its advocates argue – but it is likely to have the edge as production methods scale up and become more efficient, according to Dr Lynch.

“For beef, it is quite viable for cultured meat to come out on top,” he argues. “But I don’t think it is the same story for chicken and pork, which convert their feed into meat more efficiently than cattle.”

Singapore became the first country to allow the sale of cell-cultivated meat for human consumption in 2020. This was followed by the United States three years later and Israel in 2024.

UK firms have complained that the regulatory approvals process is too slow for them to keep up with overseas competitors. But sales in those countries have in the main been peripatetic, with many firms only offering tastings or serving it in upmarket restaurants for short periods.

This is largely because manufacturers are not able to mass-produce their products in sufficient quantities or as cheaply as traditional meat.

In the US, four companies have received some form of regulatory approval for their lab-grown chicken, pork fat and salmon. Salmon from Wildtype, for example, is now served at Kann, a fine-dining restaurant in Oregon, while Good Meat’s chicken was introduced at a restaurant in Washington, DC.

The response from consumers so far has been “optimistic and curious”, according to Suzi Gerber who is the executive director of the US Association for Meat, Poultry and Seafood Innovation.

Some parts of the US cattle industry have, however, expressed opposition to the technology and lobbied for it to be banned, though other livestock firms have remained neutral or been supportive.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and several state-level organisations publicly oppose bans, perhaps in case it sets a precedent for banning other scientific advances, such as bio-engineered food stock for cattle.

The cultivated meat industry says that their products should have no effect on the livestock industry – people will always prefer real meat over artificial. The role of the new technology is, they say, to meet the demand that livestock production is unable to.

The seafood industry has also shown openness: for example, the US National Fisheries Institute recognises cultivated seafood as part of a broader domestic production of on-land fish, like aquaculture.

Ellen Dinsmoor is chief operating officer of Vow, a Sydney-based firm that sells cultivated Japanese quail products in Singapore. It recently received approval to sell in Australia too.

Unlike some cultivated meat firms, Vow is not trying to copy normal meats. Instead, the firm has chosen quail because fewer people know what it is supposed to taste like.

“What we have to do is produce a really delicious product that people want,” she explains. “A little later we can sell it on nutrition, for example we can add healthy omega-3 oils found only in salmon into chicken. And then if we can do all that at a fraction of the price, this is where it becomes interesting to consumers.”

This is all part of a strategy to create a stable high-end market, which could in time enable investment in producing food that is less posh and in larger quantities.

But for some critics, the potential benefits of this technology for the environment, or indeed for the poorest communities in the world, are being lost.

Some of the start-up companies involved are driven by delivering swift returns to their investors, argues Dr Chris van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People, which can be more easily done by producing high-priced products in high-income countries.

A simpler, cheaper and easier option, he argues, would be to persuade people in both developed and emerging countries to eat less meat.

“It is all very well to propose to people that they should eat a high-protein slurry to keep themselves well,” he argues, “but… I don’t think it is something we should impose on already marginalised groups of people.”

He also worries that the emergence of cultivated food is an acceleration of a long-term trend away from environmentally sustainable, locally sourced, whole foods and toward factory mass-produced fare. “And at the moment the process is pretty energy intensive.”

But like it or not, lab-grown meat is here. To some, it’s a healthier option with less cholesterol, no animal suffering – and a clever solution to a pressing environmental problem. To others, those benefits may have been overblown.

For all the promises and potential about helping the world, however, most people choose food for more personal reasons, namely how it tastes and how affordable it is. That, more than anything, may well decide its future.

At midnight on 25 June 1975, India – a young democracy and the world’s largest – froze.

Then prime minister Indira Gandhi had just declared a nationwide Emergency. Civil liberties were suspended, opposition leaders jailed, the press gagged, and the constitution turned into a tool of absolute executive power. For the next 21 months, India was technically still a democracy but functioned like anything but.

The trigger? A bombshell verdict by the Allahabad High Court had found Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice and invalidated her 1971 election win. Facing political disqualification and a rising wave of street protests led by veteran socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan, Gandhi chose to declare an “internal emergency” under Article 352 of the constitution, citing threats to national stability.

As historian Srinath Raghavan notes in his new book on Indira Gandhi, the constitution did allow wide-ranging powers during an Emergency. But what followed was “extraordinary and unprecedented strengthening of executive power… untrammelled by judicial scrutiny”.

Over 110,000 people were arrested, including major opposition political figures such as Morarji Desai, Jyoti Basu and LK Advani. Bans were slapped on groups from the right-wing to the far-left. Prisons were overcrowded and torture was routine.

The courts, stripped of independence, offered little resistance. In Uttar Pradesh, which jailed the highest number of detainees, not a single detention order was overturned. “No citizen could move the courts for enforcement of their fundamental rights,” writes Raghavan.

During a controversial family planning campaign, an estimated 11 million Indians were sterilised – many by coercion. Though officially state-run, the programme was widely believed to be orchestrated by Sanjay Gandhi, the unelected son of Indira Gandhi. Many believe a shadowy second government, led by Sanjay, wielded unchecked power behind the scenes.

The poor were hit hardest. Cash incentives for surgery often equalled a month’s income or more. In one Delhi neighbourhood near the Uttar Pradesh border – derisively dubbed “Castration Colony” (places where forced sterilisation programmes took place) – women reportedly said they’d been made (widows) by the state as “our men are no longer men”. Police in Uttar Pradesh alone recorded over 240 violent incidents tied to the programme.

In their book on Delhi under Emergency, civil-rights activist John Dayal and journalist Ajoy Bose wrote that officials were under intense pressure to meet sterilisation quotas. Junior officers enforced the order ruthlessly – contract labourers were told, “No advances, no jobs, unless you get vasectomies.”

Parallel to this, a massive urban “clean-up” demolished nearly 120,000 slums, displacing some 700,000 people in Delhi alone, as part of a gentrification campaign described by critics as social cleansing. These people were dumped into new “resettlement colonies” far away from their workplaces.

One of the worst episodes of slum demolitions occurred in Delhi’s Turkman Gate, a Muslim-majority neighbourhood, where police fired on protesters resisting demolition, killing at least six and displacing thousands.

The press was silenced overnight. On the eve of the Emergency, power to newspaper presses in Delhi was cut. By morning, censorship was law.

When The Indian Express newspaper finally published its 28 June edition – delayed by a power outage – it left a blank space where its editorial should have been. The Statesman followed suit, printing blank columns to signal censorship. Even The National Herald, founded by India’s first prime minister and Indira Gandhi’s father Jawaharlal Nehru, quietly dropped its masthead slogan: “Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might.” Shankar’s Weekly, a satirical magazine known for its cartoons, shut down entirely.

In her book – a personal history of the Emergency – journalist Coomi Kapoor reveals the extent of media censorship through detailed examples of blackout orders.

These included bans on reporting or photographing slum demolitions in Delhi, conditions in a maximum-security Tihar Jail, and developments in opposition-ruled states like Tamil Nadu. Coverage of the family planning drive was tightly controlled – no “adverse comments or editorials” were permitted. Even stories deemed trivial or embarrassing were scrubbed: no “sensational” reporting on a notorious bandit and no mention of a Bollywood actress caught shoplifting in London.

Kapoor also notes that BBC’s Mark Tully, along with journalists from The Times, Newsweek and The Daily Telegraph, were given 24 hours to leave India for refusing to sign a “censorship agreement”. (Years after the Emergency, when Gandhi was back in power, Tully introduced her to the BBC’s chief. He asked how it felt to lose public support. She smiled and said, “I never lost the support of the people, only the people were misled by rumours, many of which were spread by the BBC.”)

Some judges pushed back. The Bombay and Gujarat high courts warned that censorship couldn’t be used to “brainwash the public”. But that resistance was quickly drowned out.

That wasn’t all. In July 1976, Sanjay Gandhi pushed the Youth Congress – the governing Congress party’s youth wing – to adopt his personal five-point programme, including family planning, tree plantation, refusal of dowry, promotion of adult literacy and abolition of caste.

Congress president DK Barooah instructed all state and local committees to implement Sanjay’s five points alongside the government’s official 20-point programme, effectively merging state policy with Sanjay’s personal crusade.

Anthropologist Emma Tarlo, author of a richly detailed ethnographic work of the period, wrote that during the Emergency, the poor were subjected to “forced choices”. It was also a turning point for industrial relations.

“The last vestiges of working-class politics were imperiously wiped out,” wrote Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil in their book on the period they call “India’s first dictatorship”. Around 2,000 trade union leaders and members were jailed, strikes were banned and worker benefits were slashed.

The number of man-days lost to stoppages plunged – from 33.6 million in 1974 to just 2.8 million in 1976. Strikers dropped from 2.7 million to half a million. The government also loosened its grip on the private sector, helping the economy rebound after years of stagnation. Industrialist JRD Tata praised the regime’s “refreshingly pragmatic and result-oriented approach”.

Despite its heavy-handedness, the Emergency was seen by some as a period of order and efficiency. Inder Malhotra, a journalist, wrote that in “its initial months at least, the Emergency restored to India a kind of calm it had not known for years”.

Trains ran on time, strikes vanished, production rose, crime fell, and prices dropped after a good 1975 monsoon – bringing much-needed stability. “One fact is conclusive proof of the quiescence of the middle class – that hardly any officials resigned in protest against the Emergency,” writes historian Ramachandra Guha in his book India After Gandhi.

Scholars believe the Emergency’s harshest measures were largely confined to northern India because southern states had stronger regional parties and more resilient civil societies that limited central overreach. Gandhi’s Congress party, which ruled federally, had weaker control in the south, giving regional leaders greater autonomy to resist or moderate draconian policies.

The Emergency formally ended in March 1977 after Gandhi called elections – and lost. The new Janata government – a rag-tag coalition of parties – rolled back many of the laws she’d passed. But the deeper damage was done. As many historians have written, the Emergency revealed how easily democratic structures could be hollowed out from within – even legally.

“It is no wonder that the Emergency is remembered emotively in India… Indira’s suspension of constitutional rights appears as an abrupt disavowal of the liberal-democratic spirit that animated Nehru and other nationalist leaders who founded India as a constitutional republic in 1950,” historian Gyan Prakash wrote in his book on the Emergency.

Today, the Emergency is remembered in India as a brief authoritarian interlude – an aberration. But that framing, warns Prakash, breeds “a smug confidence in the present”.

“It tells us that the past is really past, it is over, it is history. The present is free from its burdens. India’s democracy, we are told, heroically recovered from Indira’s brief misadventure with no lasting damage and with no enduring, unaddressed problems in its functioning,” Prakash writes.

“Underlying it is an impoverished conception of democracy, one that regards it only in terms of certain forms and procedures.”

In other words, this perception ignores how fragile democracy can be when institutions fail to hold power to account.

The Emergency was also a stark warning against the perils of hero worship – something embodied in the towering political persona of Indira Gandhi.

Back in 1949, BR Ambedkar, architect of the constitution, cautioned Indians against surrendering their freedoms to a “great leader”.

Bhakti (devotion), he said, was acceptable in religion – but in politics, it was “a sure road to degradation and eventual dictatorship”.

The UK government is to purchase 12 new fighter jets which can be equipped with nuclear bombs, and join Nato’s airborne nuclear mission.

Downing Street says the move is “the biggest strengthening of the UK’s nuclear posture in a generation”.

The new F-35 A jets can still carry conventional weapons, but have the option of being equipped with US-made nuclear bombs.

The decision will be announced by the prime minister at the Nato summit taking place this week in the Netherlands.

Nato’s airborne nuclear mission involves allied aircraft being equipped with American B61 bombs stockpiled in Europe.

Seven other countries, including the US, Germany and Italy, already use the dual-capability jets.

The use of nuclear weapons would require the authorisation of Nato’s nuclear planning group as well as the US president and British prime minister.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “In an era of radical uncertainty we can no longer take peace for granted, which is why my government is investing in our national security”.

He added that the move would support 100 businesses and 20,000 jobs across the country, welcoming a “new era for our world-leading Royal Air Force”.

Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte called the announcement “yet another robust British contribution to Nato”.

The new fast jets will be based at RAF Marham in Norfolk.

The decision to buy F-35 A jets will be seen as a victory for the RAF – which has long been lobbying for a longer range fighter that can fire a larger variety of bombs and missiles.

The F-35 B variant, currently operated by the RAF and the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, has a shorter range and can carry fewer weapons.

The F-35 B, with its short take-off and vertical landing, was originally chosen because it can operate off the Royal Navy’s two Aircraft Carriers – HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.

The US has already pre-positioned stocks of B61 bombs in Europe. Justin Bronk of the defence think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) says the US would still control their release and use in the event of a war. That may prove contentious with the UK being reliant on the US.

Britain currently only has one delivery system for larger strategic nuclear weapons – launched from its Vanguard class submarines via Trident ballistic missiles.

While the Trident missiles are made and maintained in the US, the warheads on the missiles are made and maintained in the UK. Successive governments have insisted that their use would not be dependent on the US – hence it is described as Britain’s “independent deterrent”.

RAF jets were capable of carrying smaller tactical nuclear weapons until 1998 – when the UK-designed and made WE177 bombs were retired from service.

Mr Bronk says it will take time for the RAF “to get back in the nuclear game”. He says the most obvious benefit for the UK buying F-35 As will be their longer range and the fact they can carry a wider range of conventional weapons.

The decision follows the Strategic Defence Review, which Defence Secretary John Healey said “confirmed we face new nuclear risks, with other states increasing, modernising and diversifying their nuclear arsenals”.

And on Tuesday, the government published a national security strategy in which it said the UK should “actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario”.

Sir Keir has pledged to meet a new Nato target to spend 5% of the UK’s GDP on national security by 2035.

At the Nato summit, 32 member counties are expected to agree on the goal, which sees 3.5% going to core defence, with the rest on defence-related areas.

A labrador-sized dinosaur was wrongly categorised when it was found and is actually a new species, scientists have discovered.

Its new name is Enigmacursor – meaning puzzling runner – and it lived about 150 million years ago, running around the feet of famous giants like the Stegosaurus.

It was originally classified as a Nanosaurus but scientists now conclude it is a different animal.

On Thursday it will become the first new dinosaur to go on display at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London since 2014.

BBC News went behind the scenes to see the dinosaur before it will be revealed to the public.

The discovery promises to shed light on the evolutionary history that saw early small dinosaurs become very large and “bizarre” animals, according to Professor Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist at the museum.

When we visit, the designer of a special glass display case for the Enigmacursor is making last-minute checks.

The dinosaur’s new home is a balcony in the museum’s impressive Earth Hall. Below it is Steph the Stegosaurus who also lived in the Morrison Formation in the Western United States.

Enigmacursor is tiny by comparison. At 64 cm tall and 180 cm long it is about the height of a labrador, but with much bigger feet and a tail that was “probably longer than the rest of the dinosaur,” says Professor Susannah Maidment.

“It also had a relatively small head, so it was probably not the brightest,” she adds, adding that it was probably a teenager when it died.

With the fossilised remains of its bones in their hands, conservators Lu Allington-Jones and Kieran Miles expertly assemble the skeleton on to a metal frame.

“I don’t want to damage it at this stage before its revealed to everybody,” says Ms Allington-Jones, head of conservation.

“Here you can see the solid dense hips showing you it was a fast-running dinosaur. But the front arms are much smaller and off the ground – perhaps it used them to shovel plants in its mouth with hands,” says Mr Miles.

It was clues in the bones that led scientists at NHM to conclude the creature was a new species.

“When we’re trying to identify if something is a new species, we’re looking for small differences with all of the other closely-related dinosaurs. The leg bones are really important in this one,” says Prof Maidment, holding the right hind limb of the Enigmacursor.

When the dinosaur was donated to the museum it was named Nanosaurus, like many other small dinosaurs named since the 1870s.

But the scientists suspected that categorisation was false.

To find out more, they travelled to the United States with scans of the skeleton and detailed photographs to see the original Nanosaurus that is considered the archtype specimen.

“But it didn’t have any bones. It’s just a rock with some impressions of bone in it. It could be any number of dinosaurs,” Professor Maidment said.

In contrast, the NHM’s specimen was a sophisticated and near-to-complete skeleton with unique features including its leg bones.

Untangling this mystery around the names and categorisation is essential, the palaeontologists say.

“It’s absolutely foundational to our work to understand how many species we actually have. If we’ve got that wrong, everything else falls apart,” says Prof Maidment.

The scientists have now formally erased the whole category of Nanosaurus.

They believe that other small dinosaur specimens from this period are probably also distinct species.

The discovery should help the scientists understand the diversity of dinosaurs in the Late Jurassic period.

Smaller dinosaurs are “very close to the origins of the large groups of dinosaurs that become much more prominent later on,” says Prof Barrett.

“Specimens like this help fill in some of those gaps in our knowledge, showing us how those changes occur gradually over time,” he adds.

Looking at these early creatures helps them identify “the pressures that finally led to the evolution of their more bizarre, gigantic descendants,” says Prof Barrett.

The scientists are excited to have such a rare complete skeleton of a small dinosaur.

Traditionally, big dinosaur bones have been the biggest prize, so there has been less interest in digging out smaller fossils.

“When you’re looking for those very big dinosaurs, sometimes it’s easy to overlook the smaller ones living alongside them. But now I hope people will keep their eyes close to the ground looking for these little ones,” says Prof Barrett.

The findings about Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae are published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

A journalist has won her case against Australia’s national broadcaster, with a court ruling she was unfairly sacked over a social media post about the war in Gaza.

Antoinette Lattouf said the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) cut short her stint as a fill-in radio presenter in December 2023 due to her political views, her race and after lobbying from pro-Israel groups.

Hours before her sacking, Lattouf shared a post from Human Rights Watch (HRW) that accused Israel of war crimes, which Israel denies.

The ABC argued her post breached its editorial policy, but after the ruling apologised to Lattouf, saying that it had “let down our staff and audiences” in its handling of the matter.

On Wednesday, Justice Darryl Rangiah found that the ABC sacked Lattouf for reasons including her opinions on the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. He rejected allegations the presenter – who is of Lebanese heritage – was fired because of her race.

She was awarded damages of A$70,000 (£33,400, $45,400), but Justice Rangiah said he would hear arguments from both sides on further penalties.

Speaking outside court, Lattouf said she was “punished for my political opinion”.

Her dismissal triggered a wave of public outrage and created turmoil at the public broadcaster – raising questions over its independence and reviving concerns over how it supports staff, particularly those who are culturally diverse.

Lattouf has been a regular contributor in Australian media for years, but also made a name for herself as an activist on issues like racism, discrimination in media and mental health.

The ABC disputed that she was fired, because they had paid her contract in full, and said she had been removed from her duties not as punishment, but to protect the broadcaster’s reputation.

When opening his remarks, Justice Rangiah said the Israel-Gaza war has become the “most covered, contested and controversial news story in the world”.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 55,706 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including more than 15,000 children, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

During the case, the ABC argued Lattouf was instructed not to post anything about the conflict but Justice Rangiah found Lattouf had been “merely advised not to post anything controversial”, rather than being given a “direction”.

He said there was a clear “orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists to have Lattouf taken off air” right from the outset of her employment, which was causing consternation among senior ABC managers.

When she re-shared the HRW post – which said Israel was using starvation as a tool of war, a claim the country denies – it was “bound to be controversial”, Justice Rangiah said.

Describing her decision as “ill-advised and inconsiderate of her employer”, he said it turned the “consternation” of her bosses into “what can be described as a state of panic”.

“Within the hour, a decision was made that Lattouf would be taken off air,” he said.

He said former ABC chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor had “no more than a suspicion” that Lattouf “may” have breached some policy or guideline – but wanted to “mitigate the anticipated deluge of complaints and criticism” by firing her.

And so, shortly after she finished her third morning as a presenter, Lattouf was told to pack up her things and leave. The policies she was alleged to have breached were not identified, nor was she given any opportunity to defend herself, the judge said.

The decision to remove her from the airwaves was promptly leaked to the media, something Lattouf says left her reputation in tatters.

She took her case to Australia’s Fair Work Commission last year, and after a win there, to the Federal Court.

There, Lattouf’s team argued the ABC had been influenced by external pressure about her appointment.

The court heard that ABC’s former chair Ita Buttrose and former managing direction David Anderson had forwarded several emails complaining about Lattouf to Oliver-Taylor.

Justice Rangiah said the decision to sack Lattouf was Oliver-Taylor’s alone, but Anderson’s opinion of her had influenced him.

In a statement, new ABC Managing Director Hugh Marks said it was clear the matter “was not handled in line with our values and expectations”.

“[It] has caused concerns to be expressed about the ABC’s independence and integrity, which are critical to the great trust the Australian public places in us.”

There was “much to consider” in the wake of the decision, he said, adding that the company’s social media guidelines have already been reviewed and replaced.

Surrounded by supporters outside court, Ms Lattouf said: “Deliberately starving and killing children is a war crime.”

“Today, the court has found that punishing someone for sharing facts about these war crimes is also illegal.”

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.

A panel of International Criminal Court judges decided that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant bore “criminal responsibility” for using “starvation as a method of warfare”.

But Israel denies that it has used starvation as a tool of war, with Netanyahu calling the claims “false and absurd charges”.

Police in Australia have announced a new reward of up to A$500,000 (£240,000; $325,000) for information leading to the discovery of the remains of British backpacker Peter Falconio, 24 years after his murder.

Mr Falconio was shot dead on a remote stretch of highway about 300km (190miles) north of Alice Springs in July 2001.

The 28-year-old from Huddersfield was travelling around Australia with his girlfriend, Joanne Lees, who was also from the West Yorkshire town.

In 2005, Bradley Murdoch was convicted of murdering Mr Falconio, but has never revealed the location of his body.

Murdoch was also convicted of the attempted kidnap and assault of Ms Lees, who managed to escape by hiding in the surrounding bushland.

Acting Commander Mark Grieve of Northern Territory Police told a press conference on Tuesday investigators wanted to “bring some sliver of resolution to Peter’s family by bringing home his remains”.

“Police still hold out hope that someone might be able to provide some vital information to assist in this search.”

Appealing to potential witnesses, he said it is never to late to speak to investigators.

“You never know how beneficial that information you may hold may be. Sometimes you do not know what you know,” Mr Grieve said.

He added that police had “made numerous approaches” to Mr Murdoch, including this week, but said that “unfortunately… on all occasions he has chosen not to engage with police”.

Police have previously made renewed calls for information on the 15th and 20th anniversaries of Mr Falconio’s death.

Murdoch, 67, was sentenced to 28 years in an Alice Springs prison, and was due to be eligible for parole in 2032.

However, the Northern Territory’s “no body, no parole” legislation mean Murdoch will not be eligible for parole if he refuses to help police locate Mr Falconio’s remains.

Media reports this week have suggested that Murdoch is suffering from terminal cancer and has been transferred to palliative care, but police have said they cannot comment.

The skies were as blue as the famous waters of Lake Tahoe when Gloria Brigantino and her friends decided to anchor and get a rum cocktail. It was starting to feel chilly, and winds were picking up.

On shore, a band was playing, and people were swimming – children running around in their swimsuits as the first official weekend of summer kicked off in this popular California holiday spot.

It seemed that within minutes on Saturday that everything changed. A storm moved in, sending tents and canopies flying. White-capped water and 8ft (2.5m) swells caused multiple boats to capsize, including a 27ft vessel filled with tourists.

On Monday, officials confirmed two more people aboard that boat were found dead – bringing the death toll to eight.

The victims were identified by the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, their ages ranging from 37 to 73 years old.

They are Paula Bozinovich, 71, Terry Pickles, 73, Joshua Antony Pickles, 37, Peter Bayes, 72, Timothy O’Leary, 71, Theresa Giullari, 66, James Guck, 69, and Stephen Lindsay, 63.

The victims included four members of a family and their friends who were visiting the area.

“We are devastated by this tragedy. We lost my loving husband Josh Pickles, his parents Terry Pickles and Paula Bozinovich, and Uncle Peter Bayes, as well as friends in this tragedy,” Jordan Sugar-Carlsgaard said in a statement to BBC News.

“No words can express the pain and anguish we feel knowing their lives were lost during what was meant to be a joyful time on the lake.”

Ms Brigantino, who was visiting the popular alpine lake between California and Nevada with friends from Texas and California, watched as boats crashed into each other, ripping from their anchors and smashing on to shore. The howling winds that reached 35mph (56km/h) even brought in a brief snow.

She watched safely on land as the boat she and her friends had been aboard capsized, sinking some of her group’s personal belongings.

“Some owners of the boats were crying as their boats were wrecked,” she told the BBC, adding that people risked their lives to help charter boats unload passengers as people were frantically trying to get off the water amid the worsening conditions.

By then the band had packed up and fled. Their stage was now underwater, she said.

“I could smell gas leaking, some gentlemen helped take passengers off a pontoon boat that got stuck in the shore,” Ms Brigantino said. “The waves just bashed it so rapidly they ran off, fell off, many were crying.”

Within 35 minutes of coming ashore, she says she counted nine boats piled in front of them.

Ms Brigantino is a self-described cowgirl and was away with her friends who all work in the Western industry with horses. They were there to have fun and help a friend make Western-themed social media content. Photos and videos from their trip showed the group dancing with drinks and posing in festive hats on the boat before the storm.

Ms Brigantino said she grew up in Lake Tahoe and knows the weather can change fast.

“It happened suddenly. The water was just screaming toward the shore,” she said. “It was bad.”

The poor weather was forecast, Ms Brigantino says, but no-one expected a squall of such force. She and others lamented they hadn’t seen a storm like that in the normally serene Lake Tahoe in decades, if ever.

Authorities on Monday announced they had found two additional bodies after a gold 27ft tourist boat capsized.

Ten people from that vessel fell into the water around 15:00 local time on Saturday and only two were found alive, according to the Coast Guard.

The accident happened in the south-western corner of Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America. The area is known for its sunshine – an alpine lake surrounded by mountains in the Sierra Nevada.

The storm was gone almost as quickly as it arrived.

Ms Brigantino’s photos and videos show the grey skies and massive swells disappearing by 16:30, with sunshine and clear sapphire waters returning to Lake Tahoe.

A Brazilian tourist who fell while hiking near the crater of an active volcano in Indonesia has been found dead, her family and rescuers said.

Juliana Marins survived the initial fall from a cliff during an early morning group hike along a steep trail on Mount Rinjani, with rescuers reporting hearing her screams for help on Saturday.

But efforts to reach the 26-year-old over the following days were hampered by the extreme terrain and foggy weather, according to Indonesian authorities.

After a complex rescue operation, teams finally reached her body on Tuesday, her family said in a statement on social media.

“With great sadness, we inform you that she did not survive,” Marins’ family said. “We remain very grateful for all the prayers, messages of affection and support that we have received.”

Marins had been backpacking around Thailand and Vietnam before arriving in Lombok Island, Indonesia.

She was hiking up Indonesia’s second-tallest volcano with five friends and a guide on Saturday at about 06:30 local time (23:30 GMT Friday), when authorities said she fell from “a cliff that surrounds the trail next to the volcano’s crater”.

One group member told Brazilian TV that the terrain was slippery, the climb “very hard,” and visibility poor.

Drone footage and other clips filmed by hikers that have been circulating online and carried by Brazilian media also appear to show her distressed but alive and moving on Saturday. She was seen sitting and moving around in grey soil, far below a hiking path.

But rescuers could not find her when they descended 300m (984ft) to where they believed she was located, nor did she respond when they called out to her.

By Sunday morning, drone footage showed that she was no longer in the same place, said park authorities, who added that thick fog had hampered rescue efforts and affected the use of a thermal drone.

On Monday rescuers were able to locate Marins again, who appeared to have had fallen even further, but they had to stop work because of “climate conditions”, according to the family.

The search resumed on Tuesday, and rescuers finally reached her body after descending 600m down a ravine, Indonesia’s search and rescue agency said in a statement.

However, bad weather has meant they have yet to retrieve her body. Efforts are due to resume early on Wednesday morning.

In total, 50 people have been involved in the rescue operation, search and rescue head Mohammad Syaffi said in a statement.

The 3,726m volcano attracts thousands of visitors each year.

However, several people have died trying to climb it in recent years – including a Malaysian tourist last month, Reuters news agency reported. Marins family have expressed concern over the fact the trail was not closed after she fell.

“To fix our national pride, the solution is obvious: herpes.”

That was the pitch made by the charity New Zealand Herpes Foundation last October, when it launched a campaign to make the country the “best place” to have the infection.

That campaign has been a roaring success, winning a top prize at this year’s Cannes Lions awards, which recognise excellence in the creative industry.

The campaign, which aimed to destigmatise herpes via a faux tourism advertisement video, was awarded the Grand Prix for Good – a category that seeks to highlight work by non-profit organisations and charities.

The video starred Sir Graham Henry, the former head coach of the national rugby union team.

In it, he touted the past successes of New Zealand and lamented its diminishing sources of national pride – such as an “embarrassingly low” sheep-to-human ratio and pies that are “pushing seven bucks”.

“We need something new to be proud of; something big and brave to put us back on the map,” Mr Henry said as he scrawled the word “HERPES” – in all caps – on a chalk board.

“It’s time for New Zealand to become the best place in the world to have herpes.”

What followed was another old-school video packaged as a “herpes destigmatisation course”, featuring other national icons like former health ministry chief Sir Ashley Bloomfield and professional boxer Mea Motu.

The irreverent humour running through the campaign – which was developed with agencies Motion Sickness and FINCH – has struck a chord with audiences.

“Forget doom and gloom, there’s enough of that already to go around,” said David Ohana, communications chief at the United Nations Foundation and a jury president at this year’s Cannes Lions.

“Our 2025 awardee took a taboo topic and turned it on its head – showing that with a great strategy, a big, bold, crazy idea … and humour for days, that anything is possible.”

Around one in three sexually active adults in New Zealand has the virus that causes genital herpes, though most have mild or no symptoms and can lead ordinary lives, according to the New Zealand Herpes Foundation.

“Popular media, misinformation, and New Zealanders’ awkwardness talking about sex – has led to huge stigmatisation for those living normal lives with the virus,” reads a press release from when the campaign was launched last October.

Alaina Luxmoore, from the New Zealand Herpes Foundation, told local TV programme Breakfast that millions had seen the campaign, which had “massive cut-through”.

“The campaign was so funny, I think that’s why it worked,” Luxmore said.

Andrew Cuomo has conceded in the New York City mayoral Democratic primary to state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in a stunning political upset.

Cuomo, the state’s former governor, was attempting to pull off a political comeback after resigning from office in 2021 amid a sexual harassment scandal.

In a speech to supporters, Cuomo said Mamdani – a 33-year-old democratic socialist – had “won” the primary race and that “we are going to take a look and make some decisions”.

“Tonight is his night,” Cuomo, 67, said. If elected, Mamdani would be the first Muslim and Indian American to lead the nation’s largest city.

The primary in staunchly liberal New York is likely to determine who becomes mayor in November’s election.

The contest was being watched as a litmus test for the Democratic Party as it seeks to hone its messaging after election losses last November that saw President Donald Trump’s Republicans win the White House and both chambers in Congress.

Results on Tuesday night showed Mamdani with a commanding lead, but falling short of the 50% threshold needed to win outright.

Cuomo’s concession was unexpected because counting looks likely to continue next week under the ranked choice system, which allowed New Yorkers to pick up to five candidates in order of preference.

The former governor’s loss marks the “biggest upset in modern NYC history,” Trip Yang, a political strategist, told the BBC.

“A massive win for Zohran Mamdani that shows that when Donald Trump is President, New York Democrats want to see their leaders fight with enthusiasm and courage, and that’s what Zohran showed voters.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Cuomo said he was still examining whether he would run in the general election in November on the independent line.

“I said he won the primary election,” Cuomo told the outlet. “I said I wanted to look at the numbers and the ranked-choice voting to decide about what to do in the future, because I’m also on an independent line.”

Cuomo was seen as a moderate and the establishment favourite, known across the country after his governorship during the Covid pandemic.

Mamdani is a millennial outsider who was fairly unknown until recently.

Born in Uganda, his family moved to New York City when he was seven. He has posted one campaign video entirely in Urdu and mixed in Bollywood film clips. In another, he speaks Spanish.

Mamdani’s strong support of Palestinians and criticism of Israel put him at odds with most of the Democratic establishment.

He went viral during his campaign for videos where he questioned NYC voters who swung for Trump in the November election.

He asked what issues led them to cast their ballots for the Republican president and what it would take for them to swing Democrat.

Mamdani’s platform includes free public buses, universal childcare, freezing rent in subsidised units, and city-run grocery stores – all paid for by new taxes on the rich.

“This is a city where one in four of its people are living in poverty, a city where 500,000 kids go to sleep hungry every night,” he told the BBC at a recent event.

“And ultimately, it’s a city that is in danger of losing that which it makes it so special.”

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, also democratic socialists, endorsed Mamdani during his campaign.

Aboard Air Force One en route to the Nato summit in the Netherlands, Trump shared a personal text message from a somewhat unlikely source.

It was sent by Nato boss Mark Rutte who praised the American president for what he had accomplished in using US bombers to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, ” wrote Rutte in a message the president posted to his Truth Social account. “That was truly extraordinary and something no one else dared to do.”

Trump has had his differences with Nato in the past, as he’s called into doubt the alliance’s mutual defence agreement and the military contributions made by other member nations.

Rutte addressed that, as well, telling Trump he was “flying into another big success” at the Nato summit, where member nations had agreed to Trump’s demand to boost defence spending to 5% of their gross domestic product.

“It will be your win,” he concluded.

• Follow latest on ceasefire and reaction

The warm words, and the president’s eagerness to share them to the world, illustrated just how much the diplomatic equation in the Middle East and among US allies has changed for Trump.

Last week he left the G7 summit in Canada a day early, as conflict raged between Israel and Iran and it appeared increasingly likely the US would join the fight.

The Americans attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday night, but by Tuesday morning the president departed Washington for another international trip, this time with a fragile ceasefire established between the two warring parties.

Rutte’s text – which a Nato press officer confirmed to the BBC as authentic – dovetails with the accounts provided on and off the record by White House officials.

Trump’ military strike removed the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. His actions triggered the ceasefire and ended what he calls the “12 Day War”.

His involvement and his pressure – including an angry outburst directed at both sides on Tuesday morning and what the White House called an “exceptionally firm and direct” phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from Air Force One – ensured that the ceasefire would hold.

Last week, America’s allies were anxious. Now, it appears Trump is heading to Europe with the intention of basking in their praise.

The outlook, however, is more complicated than that.

While the administration touts that the US bombing raid “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear research facilities, US military intelligence officials have told American media that the damage is not as severe as the White House has claimed.

The country’s nuclear programme has probably only been set back by months, according to a preliminary Pentagon intelligence assessment. And the Islamic Republic’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not eliminated in the bombings, sources familiar with the report told CBS News.

The White House says the assessment is “flat-out wrong” and is “a clear attempt to demean” President Trump.

• US strikes did not destroy nuclear programme, says Pentagon

Questions remain about the quantity and location of Iran’s enriched uranium supply – a key component of a nuclear weapon. There are also reports of the existence of an undisclosed and undamaged research facility elsewhere in Iran.

While the ceasefire is holding for now, Middle East truces are notoriously tenuous. Iran’s leadership has been weakened through two weeks of devastating Israeli attacks and the nation’s future is uncertain.

One need only look at the long bloody civil war in Syria to see the risks presented when an authoritarian government loses its grip on power. Trump has talked of “love, peace and prosperity” for Iran, but chaos, and regional turmoil, are still a realistic possibility.

And although Trump appears to have stopped the two-week Israel-Iran fighting, the wars that Trump inherited and promised to end, in Gaza and Ukraine, rage on.

For this White house, however, those appear to be concerns for another day.

• ‘We’re exhausted’ – how Iranians feel after fragile ceasefire
• ‘We thought it was the end’ – Israeli town reels

At the moment, the dire warnings of Trump’s domestic critics, particularly within his own party, have proven unfounded. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who had planned to introduce legislation curtailing Trump’s use of military force in Iran, has announced he is abandoning that effort for now.

That has given Trump the political space to herald what his administration is trumpeting as an unqualified success.

Since Trump picked him as his vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance has often sought to add ideological substance to Trump’s America First politics.

On Tuesday morning, the vice-president took to Truth Social to offer his take on what he said were the three parts of Trump’s “foreign policy doctrine”.

“1) clearly define an American interest; 2) negotiate aggressively to achieve that interest; 3) use overwhelming force if necessary,” he wrote.

As doctrines go, however, that’s not much to work with.

Often, the president’s foreign policy seems reactive and contradictory, more tactical than strategic – whether it’s applying and removing tariffs or negotiating with allies and adversaries.

In the past two weeks, Trump has swung between distancing the US from Israel’s attacks on Iran to becoming an active participant in them; from calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” to negotiating a ceasefire with unclear terms; from entertaining the idea of regime change to downplaying it.

It makes for a rollercoaster ride, with the prospect of a catastrophic derailment seemingly around every bend.

But results, as they say, speak for themselves. And this week, Trump’s tumultuous ride has ended in a victory lap.

Sean “Diddy” Combs’ legal team rested their case in his sex trafficking trial on Tuesday after making arguments for only about 20 minutes.

Their short presentation followed nearly seven weeks of arguments and witness testimony brought by federal prosecutors in New York. The prosecution finished making their case Tuesday afternoon.

His defence attorneys argued that the government has failed to meet the burden in proving any of the charges against him, which he’s vehemently denied, and the judge should drop the case against him.

Mr Combs also confirmed to the court that he would not take the stand in his own trial. “It’s my decision with my lawyers” not to testify, he told the judge.

Mr Combs has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution. He faces up to life in prison if convicted in the scheme.

Speaking for the first time in court in weeks on Tuesday, Mr Combs told Judge Arun Subramanian that he was “doing an excellent job”.

“I want to tell you thank you,” the rapper told the judge.

Prosecutors have alleged Mr Combs used his celebratory status and business empire to run a criminal enterprise to sex traffic women and conceal his crimes. During their arguments, the government called more than 30 witnesses to the stand.

• As Diddy prosecution rests, how compelling is the case against him?
• How ex Cassie’s testimony builds the sex trafficking case against him
• What is Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs charged with and how long will his trial last?

The defence called none, instead submitting into evidence several text messages between Mr Combs and his ex-girlfriends, singer Casandra Ventura, and another victim who testified under the pseudonym Jane.

It is always difficult for defence teams to decide whether to call any fact witnesses to the stand, said Mitchell Epner, a New York-based lawyer and former prosecutor.

Calling new witnesses can introduce more problems for the defence – and having Mr Combs take the stand would have been an even riskier move, hanging the case mostly on his testimony, Mr Epner said.

Instead, Mr Combs’ lawyers gave a quick presentation, showing messages in an attempt to bolster their argument that Mr Combs’ girlfriends were willing participants in sexual encounters with him and male escorts, which were called freak-offs.

In one text message to Mr Combs that his attorneys read aloud, Jane told him “I always have fun” during their freak-offs, or what she called “hotel nights”.

The quick defence case came after Mr Combs’ legal team filed a motion asking the court to acquit their client, claiming the government had not met their burden in proving any of the charges, including sex trafficking and racketeering.

His attorney Alexandra Shapiro argued that the victims in the case were capable women who could have left on their own accord, giving a hint of the points the legal team is likely to present during closing arguments scheduled later this week on Thursday and Friday.

Mr Combs was “regrettably violent, but domestic violence is not sex trafficking”, Ms Shapiro said.

Prosecutors have argued Mr Combs’ ex-girlfriends were coerced into unwanted sex acts with drugs, violence and other means.

A British man has been charged in connection with organising the “mock wedding” of a nine-year-old Ukrainian girl in Disneyland Paris.

French prosecutors said the 39-year-old man was a convicted sexual offender who is wanted in the UK. His name has not been made public.

He was arrested when police were called to the amusement park on Saturday morning at dawn by a “guest” who said he had been hired by the man to play the father of the bride.

The man said he had been paid €12,000 to play the role and that he only realised at the last minute that the “bride” was a child, according to a statement by Meaux prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier.

The statement also said the Ukrainian girl – who arrived in France two days earlier – had not been a victim of either physical or sexual violence and had not been “forced to play the role” of bride.

A woman who says she was hired to play the role of a guest told BFMTV that when she arrived at Disneyland Paris she saw a “little girl dressed in white with her hair all done up and I saw a woman who picked her up in her arms… and I was shocked, I burst into tears”.

“When I saw [it was a] child – it was horrific.”

Around 100 French extras had been recruited to take part in the fake ceremony, which was to be filmed in a private capacity.

The British man had reportedly hired Disneyland Paris for several hours for the stunt, in which he was to play the role of the groom.

Preliminary findings also stated he had allegedly been “made-up professionally so that his face appeared totally different from his own”, according to the prosecutor.

Three other people – including the 41-year-old mother of the girl, a 24-year-old Latvian woman who was to play the bride’s sister and a 55-year-old Latvian man – were also arrested.

By Tuesday only the British man was still being held by police.

The British man and the Latvian woman appeared in front of a judge in Meaux on 23 June and the man was charged with fraud, breach of trust, money laundering, and identity theft and placed in pretrial detention.

The Latvian remains a witness in the investigation.

The prosecutor’s statement also said that Disneyland Paris had been “deceived” and that the organiser had used a fake Latvian ID to hire the venue. Disneyland Paris can be rented by members of the public outside opening hours.

BFMTV reported that the “mock wedding” may have cost organiser more than €130,000 (£110,000).

Mr Bladier’s statement said that the British man “was reportedly convicted in the past, including for offences of a sexual nature against minors.

“He is, as such, listed in the British database of sexual offenders and is currently wanted nationally by the judicial authorities of his country of origin due to a breach of the requirements deriving from said order.”

It is unclear, at this stage, what the point of the “stunt” was.

The investigation continues.

One afternoon, as Isabella left school for the day, someone thrust a leaflet into her hand. “Do you want to make money with your beauty?” it asked.

She says a studio looking for models seemed to be targeting teenage pupils in her area in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital.

At 17, with a two-year-old son to support, she desperately needed money, so went along to find out more.

She says when she got there, it was a sexcam studio, run by a couple in a house in a run-down neighbourhood – it had eight rooms decorated like bedrooms.

Studios range from small, low-budget operations to large businesses with individual rooms set up with lights, computers, webcams and an internet connection. Models perform sexual acts which are streamed to viewers around the world, who message them and make requests via intermediaries, also known as monitors.

The next day Isabella, whose real name we are not using, says she started work – even though it is illegal in Colombia for studios to employ webcam models under 18.

She told the BBC World Service there was no written contract detailing how much she would be paid or what her rights were. “They had me streaming without teaching me anything. They said, ’Here’s the camera, let’s go.'”

Isabella says the studio soon suggested she do a livestream from school, so as classmates around her were learning English, she quietly took out her phone and started to film herself at her desk.

She describes how viewers began to ask her to perform specific sexual acts, so she asked her teacher for permission to go to the toilet and, locked in a cubicle, did what the customers had requested.

Her teacher had no idea what was happening, “so I started doing it from other classes”, says Isabella. “I  kept thinking, ‘It’s for my child. I’m doing it for him.’ That gave me the strength.”

The global sexcam industry is booming.

The number of monthly views of webcam platforms globally has more than tripled since 2017, reaching nearly 1.3 billion, in April 2025, according to analytics firm Semrush.

Colombia is now estimated to have more models than any other country – 400,000 – and 12,000 sexcam studios, according to Fenalweb, an organisation representing the country’s adult webcam sector.

These studios film performers and feed the content to global webcam platforms, which broadcast to millions of paying viewers around the world who make requests of models, give tips and buy them gifts.

Many of the models who work in studios do so because they lack privacy, equipment or a stable internet connection at home – often if they’re poor or young and still living with parents.

Performers told the BBC that studios often try to attract people with the promise of making easy money in a country where a third of the population lives in poverty.

• Listen to Colombia’s webcam women on BBC Sounds and watch the documentary on YouTube

Models explained that while some studios are well run and offer performers technical and other support, abuse is rife at unscrupulous operators.

And Colombia’s President, Gustavo Petro, has described studio owners as “slave masters” who trick women and girls, like Isabella, into believing they can earn good money.

The four biggest webcam platforms that stream material from the studios, BongaCams, Chaturbate, LiveJasmin and StripChat, which are based in Europe and the United States, have checks that are supposed to ensure performers are 18 or older. EU and US laws prohibit the distribution of sexually explicit material involving anyone under 18.

But models told the BBC these checks are too easily sidestepped if a studio wants to employ under-age girls.

They say one way of doing this is to “recycle” old accounts of models who are of legal age but no longer perform, and give them to under-age girls.

Isabella says this is how she was able to appear on both Chaturbate and StripChat when she was 17.

“The studio owner said it was no problem that I was under-age,” Isabella, now 18, says.  “She used the account of another woman, and then I started working under that identity.”

Other models the BBC spoke to say they were given fake IDs by studios. One, Keiny, says this enabled her to appear on BongaCams when she was 17.

Milley Achinte, a BongaCams representative in Colombia, told the BBC they do not allow under-18s to perform and they shut accounts that break this rule. She added that the platform checks IDs on a Colombian government website and if a “model contacts us and we are aware that the model left the studio, we give them their password so they can close their account”.

In a statement, Chaturbate said it has “categorically” stopped the use of fake IDs, and models must regularly submit live images of themselves standing next to government-issued photo IDs, which are checked digitally and manually. It said it has “an average of one reviewer to fewer than 10 broadcasters” and any attempt to recycle accounts “would be unsuccessful” because “the age verification process continues as each and every broadcast is constantly reviewed and checked”.

StripChat also sent a statement saying it has a “zero-tolerance policy regarding under-age models” and that performers “must undergo a thorough age verification process”, adding that its in-house moderation team works with third-party verification services to “validate models’ identities”.

It said that recycled accounts cannot be used on its platform, and recent changes to its rules mean that the account holder must be present on every stream. “So, if a model moves to a new account to work independently, the original account tied to them becomes inactive and unusable by the studio.”

LiveJasmin did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.

Keiny is now 20 and works from her bedroom at home in Medellín – streaming through another studio which provides a route to big international platforms.

And if it wasn’t for the high-tech equipment – several ring lights, a camera, and a large screen – this could pass for a child’s room. There are about a dozen stuffed animals, pink unicorns and teddy bears.

Viewers “really like it when you look young”, she says.

“Sometimes I think that’s problematic. Some clients ask that you act like an actual child, and that’s not OK.”

She says she got into the business to help her family financially after her parents decided to divorce.

Her father knows what she’s doing and she says he’s supportive.

Looking back, Keiny thinks she was too young when she started at the age of 17, but even so, she isn’t critical of her former employers.

Instead, she believes they helped her into a job which she says now earns her about $2,000 (£1,500) a month – far more than the minimum wage in Colombia, which is about $300 (£225) a month.

“Thanks to this job, I’m helping my mum, my dad, and my sister – my whole family,” she says.

That point of view is echoed by the studios – some of which are keen to demonstrate they look after their performers.

We visited one of the biggest, AJ Studios, where we were introduced to an in-house psychologist, employed to support models’ mental health. We were also shown a spa which offers pedicures, massages, botox and lip fillers at a “discount” or as prizes for “employees of the month” who may be high earners or people who are collaborative and support fellow models.

But as the country’s president has pointed out, not every performer is treated well or makes good money. And the industry is waiting to see if his new labour law will pave the way for tighter regulations.

Models and studios told the BBC that streaming platforms typically take 50% of the fees paid by viewers, studios take 20-30%, and the models get what’s left. This means that if a show makes $100 (£75), the model would usually get between $20 (£15) and $30 (£22). They explained that unscrupulous studios often take much more.

Models say there have been times when they logged on for sessions of up to eight hours and made as little as $5 (£4) – which can happen if a performance doesn’t have many viewers.

Others say they have been pressured into streaming for up to 18 hours without breaks and fined for stopping to eat or go to the toilet.

These accounts are supported by a report from the campaign group Human Rights Watch, published in December 2024. The author, Erin Kilbride, who did additional research on this story for the BBC, found some people were being filmed in cramped, dirty cubicles infested with bedbugs and cockroaches and were being coerced into performing sexual acts they found painful and degrading.

Sofi, a mother-of-two from Medellín, had been a waitress in a nightclub but, fed up with being insulted by customers, moved into webcam modelling.

But the 26-year-old says a studio she worked for pressured her into carrying out painful and degrading sexual acts, including performing with three other girls.

She explains that these requests were made by customers and agreed to by studio monitors – the staff employed to act as intermediaries between models and viewers.

Sofi says she told the studio she didn’t want to perform these acts, “but they said I had no choice”.

“In the end, I had to do it because it was either that, or they would ban my account,” she adds, explaining that means her account would effectively be closed down.

Sofi continues working in webcam studios because she says a typical salary in Colombia would not be enough to support her and her two children. She is now saving to start a law degree.

It’s not just Colombia that is facing these issues, says Erin Kilbride.

She found that between them, the big four streaming platforms also broadcast material from studios in 10 more countries – Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, and the US.

And she says she identified “gaps in platform policies and protocols that facilitate or exacerbate human rights abuses”.

When we asked platforms about conditions at the studios they stream, Milley Achinte from BongaCams said she is part of a team of eight women who visit some studios in Colombia “making sure that the models are getting paid, that the rooms are clean, that models are not getting violated”.

StripChat and Chaturbate do not visit studios and said they are not direct employers of performers and therefore do not intervene in the terms set between studios and models. But they both told us they are committed to a safe working environment. StripChat also said it expects studios to ensure “respectful and comfortable working conditions”.

BongaCams, StripChat and Chaturbate all said they have teams to intervene if they believe a model is being forced or coerced to do something.

After two months of waking up at 05:00 to juggle webcamming, secondary school, and caring for her son, Isabella says she was eager to receive her first payment.

But after the platform and the studio took their cut, Isabella explains she was paid just 174,000 Colombian pesos ($42; £31) – far less than she expected. She believes that the studio paid her a much lower percentage than agreed and also stole most of her earnings.

The money was a pittance, she says, adding that she used some of it to buy milk and nappies.  “They deceived me.”

Isabella, who is still at school, only worked as a webcam model for a few months before quitting.

The way she says she was treated at such a young age left her deeply traumatised. She couldn’t stop crying, so her mother arranged for her to see a psychologist.

She and six other former employees of the studio have got together to file an official complaint with the state prosecutor’s office. Collectively, they have accused the studio of exploitation of minors, labour exploitation and economic abuse.

“There are video recordings of me still online, under-age,” she says, explaining she feels powerless when it comes to trying to get them removed. “It’s affected me a lot and I don’t want to think about it any more.”

A Russian warship disguised itself using a fake ID signal while travelling through the English Channel with two sanctioned oil tankers, a BBC Verify investigation has found.

The Boikiy – a corvette armed with guided missiles – broadcast the fake ID code as it passed through the Channel on Saturday.

On tracking sites it wrongly appeared as ships which have previously used that ID. BBC Verify matched the ID to the Boikiy by using satellite imagery, tracking data and a video of it passing under a bridge in Denmark.

It travelled alongside two vessels known to be part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” – a network of tankers whose ownership can be obscured and are used to transport sanctioned oil products.

BBC Verify has approached the Russian embassy in London for comment. But experts told BBC Verify that recent Western moves against the shadow fleet may have prompted Moscow to use its military to protect the tankers.

Last month, a Russian Su-35 fighter jet flew past a shadow fleet vessel and entered Estonian airspace after the country attempted to intercept the ship, which was suspected of carrying sanctioned oil.

“The action seems designed to deter the UK and other Nato states from attempting to board and, or, seize these vessels, since the presence of a military escort heightens the risk of confrontation and further escalation,” Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, said.

Attention was first drawn to the Boikiy on social media by independent open-source intelligence analyst Christian Panton on Bluesky.

The ship is known to have left West Africa in June, where it was taking part in a diplomatic mission. Photos posted online showed the ship docked in Guinea’s capital, Conakry.

The corvette left port without activating its Automatic Identification System (AIS). All ships are expected to broadcast the signal, though military vessels often sail without it.

However, a vessel travelling under the generic identification number 400000000 – a code sometimes used by vessels who want to alert others to their presence for safety reasons without identifying themselves – was seen briefly near the Canary Islands.

The location is consistent with the time it could have taken the Boikiy to travel the 200km from Conakry. Satellite imagery reviewed by BBC Verify showed a 100m-long ship, matching the dimensions of the Boikiy and distinguishing it from other vessels which had used the ID.

Frederik Van Lokeren – an analyst and ex-lieutenant in the Belgian navy – noted that the Boikiy’s actions were unusual for a Russian naval vessel.

“Normally, if the Russians want to remain hidden in secret, they just turn off their AIS signal,” he said. “So for them to be camouflaging as something else… it’s very, very uncommon.”

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The Boikiy was later joined by two oil tankers which had made their way from India through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean – the Sierra and the Naxos. Both ships have been sanctioned by the UK.

The three vessels all met at the mouth of the Channel on 20 June. Here, the Russian naval vessel appeared again in radar-based and optical satellite images, allowing us to confirm once again that it was a size and shape which matched the Boikiy.

The Naxos had reached the entrance to the Channel several days earlier than the other ships, and waited for the warship before proceeding into the channel.

A UK defence ministry source confirmed to BBC Verify that the Royal Navy shadowed the Boikiy as it passed through the Channel.

Satellite images reviewed by BBC Verify appeared to show a ship tailing the Boikiy as it transited through the waterway, but we cannot confirm that this is the Royal Navy ship.

All three vessels proceeded towards the Baltic Sea, where the Boikiy – still travelling under the fake AIS marker – was recorded passing underneath the Great Belt Bridge in Denmark.

Webcam footage showed the vessel clearly for the first time as a naval vessel.

Its unclear where the vessels are bound for, though all three have continued sailing through the Baltic and may be moving towards ports in mainland Russia or Kaliningrad – an exclave between Poland and Lithuania.

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The US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities did not destroy the country’s nuclear programme and probably only set it back by months, according to an early Pentagon intelligence assessment of the attack.

The Islamic Republic’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not eliminated in Saturday’s bombings, sources familiar with the Defense Intelligence Agency evaluation told the BBC’s US partner CBS.

The White House said the “flat-out wrong” assessment was leaked by “a low-level loser in the intelligence community”.

President Donald Trump again declared the nuclear sites in Iran “completely destroyed” and accused media of “an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history”.

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The US struck three nuclear facilities in Iran – Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan – with “bunker buster” bombs capable of penetrating 18m (60ft) of concrete or 61m (200ft) of earth before exploding.

But sources familiar with the Pentagon’s intelligence assessment say Iran’s centrifuges are largely “intact” and the impact was limited to aboveground structures.

Entrances to two nuclear facilities were sealed off, and some infrastructure was destroyed or damaged, but much of the facilities, which are deep underground, escaped the brunt of the blasts.

The anonymous sources told US media it is estimated the attack only set Iran back “a few months, tops”, and that any resumption of its nuclear programme may be based on how long it takes the country to dig out and make repairs.

Sources also confirmed to CBS that some of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was moved before the strikes, according to the intelligence assessment.

The US 30,000lb (14,000kg) Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb was thought to be the only weapon capable of destroying Iran’s underground enrichment facilities. Tehran had always said its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes.

In the hours that followed the Saturday strikes, Gen Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters that it would take time to assess the damage to the facilities.

But he added that “all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction”. Satellite images showed six fresh craters clustered around two entry points at the Fordo nuclear sites, as well as grey dust and debris.

It is unclear from the images, however, how much damage the sites sustained below the surface.

Hassan Abedini, the deputy political director of Iran’s state broadcaster, claimed the three sites targeted by the US had been evacuated a “while ago”, and that Iran “didn’t suffer a major blow because the materials had already been taken out”.

US officials, on the other hand, hailed the mission as a success, as have Israeli officials.

In a statement on Tuesday, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “based on everything we have seen – and I’ve seen it all – our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons”.

“Anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission,” Hegseth said.

US Congressman Brad Sherman, a Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the BBC the Trump administration was using vague terms to declare victory – when it’s still unclear what the bombing mission accomplished.

He said the administration hasn’t said whether the strikes destroyed Iran’s ability to weaponise its uranium, its uranium-enriching centrifuges or depleted its stockpile, which he said would be enough to create nine nuclear weapons.

“When they say obliterate the programme, they’re not even saying whether it’s obliterated the centrifuges and the ability to create uranium in the future or whether it is obliterating the stockpile,” Sherman told BBC.

“All indications, including Vice-President Vance’s statement, indicate that we don’t think we got the stockpile,” he said, noting images that show trucks going to one of the facilities days before the strikes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that since hostilities with Iran began on 13 June, Israel has been successful in curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as well as destroying its missiles arsenal.

“We have removed two immediate existential threats to us – the threat of nuclear annihilation and the threat of annihilation by 20,000 ballistic missiles,” Netanyahu said in video remarks issued by his office.

A report in Saudi news outlet Al Hadath, citing an unnamed Israeli source, said that Israel believes most of Iran’s enriched uranium is buried under the rubble.

The US has 18 intelligence agencies, which sometimes produce conflicting reports based on their mission and area expertise. For example, the American intelligence community is still not in agreement over the origins of Covid-19.

It is possible future intelligence reports will include more information showing a different level of damage to the facilities.

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and an expert on secret nuclear weapons development, said the damage Iran sustained by the US attacks will mean “it will take significant time, investment and energy” for it to restore its nuclear programme.

In a post on X, Albright added that Iran is “under intense scrutiny and observation from the United States and Israel”, and it risks further attacks if it tries to rebuild.

On Monday, Iran retaliated against the US airstrikes by launching a missile attack on Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which is home to thousands of US troops.

That attack was largely intercepted, and no casualties or injuries were reported.

Since Iran’s retaliation, an Iran-Israel ceasefire – brokered by President Trump and Qatari mediators – is in place.

Protesters in Venice are claiming an “enormous victory” after US tech billionaire Jeff Bezos and his wedding guests were forced to “run away” from the city centre, moving their main celebration to another location.

The venues for the three-day party to mark the wedding of one of the world’s richest men to TV presenter Lauren Sanchez were never officially revealed.

But the lavish celebrations were supposed to culminate in an event on Saturday at the sumptuous Scuola Grande della Misericordia.

A local official in Venice has now confirmed to the BBC that the guests will gather instead at the Arsenale, further from the centre.

Activists are triumphant, even as a city councillor denounced their protests as “ridiculous”.

“We are very proud of this! We are nobodies, we have no money, nothing!” Tommaso Cacciari, from a group calling itself No Space for Bezos, told the BBC.

“We’re just citizens who started organising and we managed to move one of the most powerful people in the world – all the billionaires – out of the city.”

The wedding kicks off later this week, and has a star-studded guest list of the rich and famous that is rumoured to include Kim Kardashian, Mick Jagger and Leonardo diCaprio, as well as several of the Trumps.

Private jets are expected to jam up Venice airport, with private yachts taking over the harbour; five hotels have been booked out in their entirety and there are reports of former US Marines being hired to provide security.

The A-list mega-event has attracted protest from a variety of groups, from locals fighting over-tourism in Venice to climate change activists and those who oppose Bezos’ support for Donald Trump.

As well as “No Space for Bezos” posters plastered across the city in recent days, there have been protest banners strung from bridges over the canals.

On Monday, activists from a group calling itself Everyone Hates Elon unfurled a giant image of Bezos in Piazza San Marco, protesting against the super-rich with the slogan: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding then you can pay more tax.”

“Our protest isn’t about the wedding itself – it’s about what it represents,” Greenpeace campaigner Simona Abbate, who was there, told the BBC.

“This isn’t just a celebration of two people getting married, it’s a display of a lifestyle that’s simply unsustainable. The richest live in excess, while others endure the consequences of a climate emergency they didn’t create.”

The activists have been heavily criticised by city officials, who argue that such high-rolling visitors are an important source of income.

“These protesters behave as if they own Venice but they don’t,” Simone Venturini, a city councillor for economic development told the BBC. “No one gets to decide who gets married here.”

He said the groups were “a tiny minority” and not representative of the city.

“This event involves just 200 carefully selected guests and will bring major economic benefits to the city,” the local politician said, adding that all events were being hosted in privately-owned venues.

But the issue of over-tourism is a serious one in Venice, as it is across southern Europe, where protesters say locals are being priced out of a beautiful city by too many visitors. Climate change is also putting this city-on-the-water at major risk of flooding.

Local authorities introduced a five-euro daily tourist tax to enter the city but activists say it hasn’t stopped a single person from coming.

With the first wedding guests expected to arrive on Thursday, some activists had been planning to launch themselves into canals near the key venues, along with inflatable alligators. They wanted to try to block the path of the rich and famous, stop their fun – and make their point.

That wet protest has been called-off, but No Space for Bezos still plans to project its feelings onto a city building later this week and on Saturday evening they’re calling on people to join a march in a final show of protest.

“Bezos comes to Venice only for the party, that’s the problem: this vision of Venice not as a city anymore but like a big theme park where you can hire pieces or all of it and just do your private thing,” Tommaso Cacciari said.

“He’s sending the message that all the city is a background for a party of billionaires.”

When he isn’t preaching the word of God, Reverend Joo Yeong-bong is raising dogs for slaughter.

Business is not going well though. In fact, it’s on the brink of becoming illegal.

“Since last summer we’ve been trying to sell our dogs, but the traders just keep hesitating,” Mr Joo, 60, tells the BBC. “Not a single one has shown up.”

In 2024, the South Korean government implemented a nationwide ban on the sale of dog meat for consumption. The landmark legislation, which was passed last January, gives farmers like Mr Joo until February 2027 to shutter their operations and sell off their remaining animals.

But many say that isn’t enough time to phase out an industry which has propped up livelihoods for generations – and that authorities still haven’t come up with adequate safeguards for farmers or the estimated half a million dogs in captivity.

Even those who support the ban, including experts and animal rights advocates, have flagged issues around its enforcement – including the difficulty of rehoming dogs that, having been saved from the kill floor, now face the increasingly likely threat of euthanasia.

Midway through the grace period, dog farmers are finding themselves with hundreds of virtually unsellable animals, farms that can’t be closed, and little means of putting food on the table.

“People are suffering,” says Mr Joo, who is also president of the Korean Association of Edible Dogs, a group representing the industry. “We’re drowning in debt, can’t pay it off, and some can’t even… find new work.

“It’s a hopeless situation.”

Chan-woo has 18 months to get rid of 600 dogs.

After that, the 33-year-old meat farmer – who we agreed to anonymise for fear of backlash – faces a penalty of up to two years in prison.

“Realistically, even just on my farm, I can’t process the number of dogs I have in that time,” he says. “At this point I’ve invested all of my assets [into the farm] – and yet they are not even taking the dogs.”

By “they”, Chan-woo doesn’t just mean the traders and butchers who, prior to the ban, would buy an average of half a dozen dogs per week.

He’s also referring to the animal rights activists and authorities who in his view, having fought so hard to outlaw the dog meat trade, have no clear plan for what to do with the leftover animals – of which there are close to 500,000, according to government estimates.

“They [the authorities] passed the law without any real plan, and now they’re saying they can’t even take the dogs.”

Lee Sangkyung, a campaign manager at Humane World for Animals Korea (Hwak), echoes these concerns.

“Although the dog meat ban has passed, both the government and civic groups are still grappling with how to rescue the remaining dogs,” he says. “One area that still feels lacking is the discussion around the dogs that have been left behind.”

A foreign press spokesperson from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (Mafra) told the BBC that if farm owners gave up their dogs, local governments would assume ownership and manage them in shelters.

Rehoming them, however, has proven challenging.

Since weight equals profit in the dog meat industry, farms tend to favour larger breeds. But in South Korea’s highly urbanised society, where many people live in apartment complexes, aspiring pet owners often want the opposite.

There is also a social stigma associated with dogs that come from meat farms, Mr Lee explains, due to concerns of disease and trauma. The issue is further complicated by the fact that many are either pure or mixed tosa-inu, a breed that is classified as “dangerous” in South Korea and requires government approval to keep as a pet.

Meanwhile, rescue shelters are already overcrowded.

This perfect storm of obstacles points to a perverse irony: that countless so-called rescue dogs, with nowhere else to go, now face the prospect of being euthanised.

“It’s just unbelievable,” says Chan-woo.

“Since the law was made according to the demands of these groups, I assumed they had also worked out a solution for the dogs – like they would take responsibility for them. But now I hear that even the animal rights groups say euthanasia is the only option.”

Cho Hee-kyung, head of the Korean Animal Welfare Association, conceded in September 2024 that while rights groups would try to rescue as many animals as possible, there would “be dogs left over”.

“If remaining dogs become ‘lost and abandoned animals’ then it’s heartbreaking but they will be euthanised,” she said.

The government sought to temper these concerns weeks later, saying that euthanising animals was “certainly” not part of their plan.

More recently, Mafra told the BBC it was investing about 6bn Korean won ($4.3m; £3.2m) annually to expand animal shelters and support private facilities, and would offer up to 600,000 Korean won per dog ($450; £324) to farmers who shut their businesses early.

Hwak, however, says they have lobbied Mafra “hard” to have a clear rescue component in its phase-out plan.

They also point out that, while Hwak has rehomed almost 2,800 dogs from South Korean meat farms since 2015, animal welfare charities shouldn’t be expected to absorb the huge number that have proliferated over the years.

Chun Myung-Sun, director of the Office of Veterinary Medical Education at Seoul National University, agrees that the government’s plan for leftover dogs is largely lacking.

“There needs to be a concrete discussion about how to ‘dispose’ of the dogs,” she says.

“Both adoption and euthanasia should be on the table. [But] if we’ve gone to the effort of rescuing dogs from cruel slaughter only to euthanise them, it’s understandable that people would feel heartbroken and angry.”

Some have looked for solutions further afield, sending the animals overseas to more willing adopters in countries like Canada, United Kingdom and the United States.

In 2023, a team from Hwak rescued some 200 dogs from a farm in Asan city – all of which have since been sent to Canada and the US.

The former owner of that farm, 74-year-old Yang Jong-tae, told the BBC that as he watched the rescuers loading his dogs into their trucks, he was astonished by the level of compassion they showed.

“When I saw how they handled the animals – like they were handling people, so gently and lovingly – it really moved me,” he said.

“We don’t treat them like that. For us, raising dogs was just a way to make a living. But those people from the animal group treated the dogs like they were individuals with dignity, and that really touched my heart.”

Mr Yang hastened to add, however, that he disapproves of the ban on dog meat farming.

“If dog meat is banned because dogs are animals, then why is it okay to eat other animals like cows, pigs or chicken?” he said. “It’s the same thing. These things exist in nature for people to live on.”

Eating dog is not the same as eating other meats, according to Ms Chun. She points out that dog meat carries more risk from a food safety and hygiene perspective – especially in South Korea, where it has not been integrated into the formal, regulated meat production system.

The meat is also consumed in countries such as China, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Thailand and parts of India, according to Humane World for Animals.

But while consumption rates have fluctuated throughout Korea’s history, it has become increasingly taboo in South Korea in recent years.

A government poll from 2024 found only 8% of respondents said they had tried dog meat in the previous 12 months – down from 27% in 2015. About 7% said they would keep eating it up until February 2027, and about 3.3% said they would continue after the ban came into full effect.

Since the ban was announced, 623 of South Korea’s 1,537 dog farms have closed.

“As society and culture have evolved, South Korean society has now made the decision to stop producing dog meat,” Ms Chun says.

And yet for many it remains the cornerstone of an industry on which they’ve built their lives.

Every member of the dog meat trade the BBC spoke to expressed uncertainty about how they would support themselves now that their longtime livelihood has been deemed illegal.

Some say they have resigned themselves to lives of poverty, noting that they were born during the Korean War and knew how to live hungry. Others suggested that the trade could go underground.

Many agree, however, that for younger farmers the crackdown is particularly worrying.

“Young people in this industry are really facing a bleak reality,” Mr Joo says. “Since they can’t sell the dogs, they can’t shut down quickly either. They’re stuck, with no way forward or back.”

Chan-woo recalls that when he started working in the industry a decade ago, at 23, “The perception of dog meat wasn’t that negative”.

“Still,” he adds, “There were some comments from people around me, so even back then I was aware that it wasn’t something I could do for the rest of my life.”

The ban came quicker than he expected – and since its announcement, he says, “Making a living has become incredibly uncertain”.

“All we’re hoping for now is that the grace period can be extended so that the process [of dealing with the remaining dogs] can happen more gradually.”

Many others are hoping for the same. But as the dog meat industry is pulled out from under the feet of those who’ve come to depend upon it, Mr Joo can’t help but speculate on a grim thought: that some farmers may not be able to endure the uncertainty for much longer.

“Right now, people are still holding on, hoping something might change – maybe the grace period will be extended,” he says. “But by 2027, I truly believe something terrible will happen.

“There are so many people whose lives have completely unravelled.”

Police in Australia have announced a new reward of up to A$500,000 (£240,000; $325,000) for information leading to the discovery of the remains of British backpacker Peter Falconio, 24 years after his murder.

Mr Falconio was shot dead on a remote stretch of highway about 300km (190miles) north of Alice Springs in July 2001.

The 28-year-old from Huddersfield was travelling around Australia with his girlfriend, Joanne Lees, who was also from the West Yorkshire town.

In 2005, Bradley Murdoch was convicted of murdering Mr Falconio, but has never revealed the location of his body.

Murdoch was also convicted of the attempted kidnap and assault of Ms Lees, who managed to escape by hiding in the surrounding bushland.

Acting Commander Mark Grieve of Northern Territory Police told a press conference on Tuesday investigators wanted to “bring some sliver of resolution to Peter’s family by bringing home his remains”.

“Police still hold out hope that someone might be able to provide some vital information to assist in this search.”

Appealing to potential witnesses, he said it is never to late to speak to investigators.

“You never know how beneficial that information you may hold may be. Sometimes you do not know what you know,” Mr Grieve said.

He added that police had “made numerous approaches” to Mr Murdoch, including this week, but said that “unfortunately… on all occasions he has chosen not to engage with police”.

Police have previously made renewed calls for information on the 15th and 20th anniversaries of Mr Falconio’s death.

Murdoch, 67, was sentenced to 28 years in an Alice Springs prison, and was due to be eligible for parole in 2032.

However, the Northern Territory’s “no body, no parole” legislation mean Murdoch will not be eligible for parole if he refuses to help police locate Mr Falconio’s remains.

Media reports this week have suggested that Murdoch is suffering from terminal cancer and has been transferred to palliative care, but police have said they cannot comment.