The Supreme Court on Friday handed a significant victory to Donald Trump – and future American presidents – when curbing lower courts’ power to block executive orders.

President Trump was beaming as he addressed reporters at the White House briefing room podium, calling it a “big, amazing decision” which the administration is “very happy about”.

He said it was a “monumental victory for the constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law”.

The court’s decision not only impacts Trump’s birthright citizenship order, but also emboldens him to enact many of his other policy actions that have been temporarily thwarted by similar injunctions.

The Supreme Court has opened the door for the Trump administration to no longer grant automatic citizenship to everyone born on American soil – at least for the moment. Now the White House will have to implement its plan, which will be no easy task.

On Friday, the nation’s highest court allowed Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship to go into effect in a month’s time, while leaving room for lower courts to curb the impact on those who have standing to sue.

States traditionally handle processing birth certificates, and many do not record the citizenship of the parents. Democratic-run state governments will be in no rush to do so, no matter what the Trump administration may desire.

And Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, left the door open for states to make the case that a more broad block on Trump’s birthright citizenship action is necessary.

That sets up big legal battles to come.

“As the States see it, their harms — financial injuries and the administrative burdens flowing from citizen-dependent benefits programs — cannot be remedied without a blanket ban on the enforcement of the Executive Order,” Barrett wrote.

“The lower courts should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate, so we leave it to them to consider these and any related arguments.”

President Trump described the court’s decision on Friday as a “giant win”.

He added that the “birthright citizenship hoax” has been “indirectly, hit hard” and that the decision would prevent “scamming of our immigration process”.

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday that the Supreme Court will decide whether the US will end birthright citizenship in October during its next session.

The court’s decision to limit the power of lower court federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions will have immediate, wide-ranging consequences.

Both Democratic and Republican presidents have often criticised what they say are ideological jurists in federal district courts who have been able to singlehandedly block executive actions and even legislation passed by Congress.

While doing away automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants born on US soil is at the centre of this high profile case, there are a number of other actions taken by Trump in recent months that have also been held up by lower-level judges.

From Trump’s inauguration to April 29, the Congressional Research Service counts 25 such instances.

Following the court’s decision on Friday, Trump told journalists, “We can now properly file to proceed with policies that have been wrongly enjoined.”

Lower courts have blocked the president’s cuts to foreign assistance, diversity programmes and other government agencies, limited his ability to terminate government employees, put other immigration reforms on hold and suspended White House issued changes to election processes.

With the Supreme Court’s decision in this case, the administration is in a much stronger position to ask courts to allow it to push forward on many of these efforts.

During the Biden presidency, conservative judges prevented Democrats from enacting new environmental regulations, offering student loan forgiveness, modifying immigration rules. Courts blocked changes to normalised immigration status for some undocumented migrants during Barack Obama’s presidency, as well, and prevented him from making more white collar employees eligible for overtime pay.

In all these types of cases, courts will ultimately be able to step in and halt presidential actions that they deem illegal or unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court in its opinion said, ” The lower courts shall move expeditiously to ensure that, with respect to each plaintiff, the injunctions comport with this rule and otherwise comply with principles of equity.”

But that will come further along in the judicial process, at the appellate and Supreme Court level. In the meantime, presidents – Donald Trump and his successors, whether they are Republicans or Democrats – will have more time and space to act.

US President Donald Trump has said he is cutting off trade talks with Canada “immediately” as the country looks to start enforcing a tax policy targeting big tech companies.

The latest move, which he announced on social media, comes as the neighbouring nations had been working to agree a trade deal by mid-July.

Both countries have imposed tariffs on each other’s goods after Trump sparked a trade war earlier this year and threatened to annex Canada using “economic force”.

On Friday, the US president said he was ending talks due to what he called an “egregious tax” on tech companies and added he would announce new tariffs on goods crossing the border within the next week.

“We are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” he wrote on social media.

“We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”

In brief comments to reporters, Prime Minister Mark Carney suggested that talks would continue.

“We will continue to conduct these complex negotiations in the best interest of Canadians,” he said.

Canada’s 3% digital services tax has been a sticking point in its relationship with the US since the law was enacted last year. The first payments are due on Monday.

Business groups estimate it will cost American companies, such as Amazon, Apple and Google, more than $2bn a year.

Canadian officials had said they expected to address the issue as part of trade talks with the US.

There were hopes that the relatively warm relationship that newly-elected Carney has forged with Trump might help those negotiations.

The president’s latest move casts doubt on a future deal, though Trump has often used social media threats to try to gain leverage in talks or speed up negotiations he sees as stalling.

Last month, for example, he threatened to ramp up tariffs on goods arriving to US shores from the European Union, only to climb down a few days later.

Candace Laing, chief executive of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce which has been critical of the digital services tax, said that “last-minute surprises should be expected” as the deadline for a deal approaches.

“The tone and tenor of talks has improved in recent months, and we hope to see progress continue,” she added.

During Trump’s first term, the White House fought hard as many countries began considering taxes on digital services.

But Inu Malak, fellow for trade policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that the issue was left unresolved in the trade deal the US and the UK reached earlier this year, suggesting some flexibility.

She said Trump’s threat seemed like a move to ramp up pressure out of his typical negotiating “playbook – but was also a sign the president had refocused on Canada, which could open the way for a deal.

“It does provide a bit of an opening – maybe not the one that Prime Minister Carney wanted … but it does provide some space for them to hasten those talks,” she said.

The US is Canada’s top trade partner, buying more than $400bn in goods last year under a longstanding free trade agreement.

But Trump hit that trade with a new 25% tariff earlier this year, citing concerns about drug trafficking at the border.

New US tariffs on cars, steel and aluminium have also scrambled relations. Car parts, for example, cross US, Mexican and Canadian borders multiple times before a vehicle is completely assembled and such import taxes threaten supply chains.

Trump later carved out exemptions for some goods in the face of widespread alarm from businesses in both the US and Canada, which has hit back with tariffs of its own on some US products.

Shares in the US fell on Friday after Trump said he was cutting off talks, but later bounced back with the S&P 500 closing at a record high.

The 1975 emerged from hibernation to headline Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage on Friday, playing their only date of the year, and their first since March 2024.

If they were rusty, it didn’t show. The band delivered a slick, crowd-pleasing show, full of streamlined hits and delightfully wonky stage banter.

Frontman Matty Healy is a fascinating creature. Simultaneously cocksure and anxious, he chain-smoked throughout the set, while delivering verbose lyrics about modern love and digital disconnection.

“This is really scary and I’m really nervous and I thank you so much for coming,” he told the audience as the set kicked off.

The band emerged in a flicker of static and staccato strings, accompanied by a lone saxophone, before breaking into Happiness.

That was followed by heady rush of their biggest songs: If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know), Love Me and She’s American – with Healy adding a few bars of the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way for good measure.

The band were musically tight, mixing the digital textures of modern pop with chunky rock riffs and a healthy dose of 80s yacht rock – but the set often felt a little too safe.

Healy’s wilder excesses – kissing fans in the front row, eating raw meat – were notably absent. And the untamed, punky energy of People was the only number where the band were really allowed to cut loose.

But as a tour through The 1975’s greatest hits, the set was impeccable.

Formed in Cheshire 23 years ago, songs from their self-titled debut album – including Chocolate, Sex, and Robbers – are now old enough now to be considered classics, and they were all met with screams and singalongs.

Love It If We Made It was urgent and bleak and hopeful, as it dissected the overwhelming nature of modern life.

And Give Yourself A Try felt cast Healy as an older brother, dispensing well-meaning advice to young festivalgoers.

“” he sang. “

After Part Of The Band, Healy stepped up to the microphone with an important announcement.

“I have this thing where it’s difficult to tell when I’m being sincere,” he said. “But I want to be sincere.

“What this moment is making me realise is that I, probably, am the best songwriter of my generation.

“The best poet, ladies and gentlemen, is what I am. A generational poet.”

He then cued up Chocolate – a song about fleeing from the police with a stash of marijuana.

I can’t quite decide if that self-deprecation is The 1975’s greatest strength or their Achilles’ heel.

At one point, a big sign flashes up between songs, saying “Matty is changing his trousers”.

It deconstructs the artifice of a rock show, making The 1975 seem more human – but equally, it deflates the excitement of watching a band in full flow.

Or maybe I’m overthinking it. That’s what The 1975 do to you.

Perhaps the most significant moment came towards the end, as Healy explained why the notoriously outspoke band, who’ve been banned from Malaysia for protesting it’s anti-homosexuality laws, had steered clear of politics for the night.

“We don’t want our legacy to be one of politics, we want it to be one of love and friendships. Go out into the world and there’s loads of politics out there, and we need more love and friendship.”

Perhaps they were biting their tongues, aware of unfamiliar audiences watching at home.

Otherwise, it will be interesting to see how that retreat from social commentary affects their forthcoming sixth album.

The 1975 topped the bill in a day that saw several surprise performances across the site – although none of the secrets were particularly well kept.

Lewis Capaldi made a triumphant and emotional comeback, two years after he was unable to make it through a career-making performance on the Pyramid Stage.

After that performance, where a combination of anxiety and Tourette’s conspired to make him lose his voice, the musician took a two year break from the stage.

He laid those ghosts to rest on the Pyramid Stage just before tea-time, emerging to a huge swell of support from the audience.

“I just wanted to come and finish what I couldn’t finish first time around,” he told them, as tears welled in his eyes.

• Read more about Lewis Capaldi’s comeback.

Earlier, festival bosses had to close down the Woodsies field at 11:15am after word spread that pop star Lorde would open the stage.

Fans spilled out of the tent and into the field as she arrived on stage shortly afterwards, to play her new album, Virgin, in full.

It was an interesting ploy. The album had only come out a couple of hours earlier, leaving most people unfamiliar with the material.

While the audience made a concerted effort to grasp the new shapes and sounds, there was a noticeable uplift when Lorde closed her set with Ribs and Green Light.

• Read more about Lorde’s secret set

Other surprise sets came from Jarvis Cocker, who played a DJ set on the Greenpeace stage, and Olivia Dean, who appeared in the Strummerville tent.

Elsewhere, rumours spread that Foo Fighters’ frontman Dave Grohl was handing out programmes at one of the festival gates; and Paul McCartney was spotted watching Irish band Inhaler from the side of the Pyramid Stage.

Highlights of the first day included CMAT, who drew a huge crowd to the Pyramid Stage, making them laugh, dance, cry and sing along to her spirited country-pop songs.

“I’m CMAT, I have middle child syndrome, an amazing ass and the best Irish rock and roll country band in the world!” she declared, not inaccurately.

• CMAT says she still faces abuse after viral song

Over on The Other Stage, Wet Leg proved they deserve higher billing than their mid-afternoon slot, with a set full of shaggy rock riffs and sardonic wit.

Battling the heat, singer Rhian Teasdale poured cans of water over her head between fan favourite songs like Ur Mum and recent single Catch These Fists, but the biggest reception was reserved for their breakout hit Chaise Longue.

Bringing a very different energy was hip-hop legend Busta Rhymes, whose cartoonish energy and breakneck rap flow was guaranteed to get the audience on side.

“We represent that real hip-hop culture,” he boasted, after a run of hits that included Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See, Scenario and Woo Hah!! (Got You All In Check).

“We don’t need no special effects,” Busta continued.

“You know why? Because we are the special effects.”

Loyle Carner followed him, with a more mellow take on rap – based around the tender tracks of his new album, Hopefully!

The Croydon-raised rapper performed many of the early songs with his eyes closed, seemingly overwhelmed by what he called “the biggest show of our lives”.

But as Sampha came out to join him on Desoleil (Brilliant Corners), Carner began to smile, and relaxed into his blissed-out set.

After Lorde’s set, the Woodsies stage continued to draw huge crowds all day, with Lola Young, Myles Smith and Shed Seven all getting a rapturous response.

Indie heroes Blossoms rattled off a mini greatest hits set, before CMAT burst out of a gift-wrapped box and duetted with them on the single I Like Your Look.

PinkPantheress had a moment of vulnerability, telling the audience she’d worried she wasn’t “big enough to do this stage”.

But the response to songs like Illegal and Stateside, from her recent mixtape Fancy That (a career best) put those fears to rest. She even had to ask people to stop cheering after Boy’s A Liar, in case her set overran.

Alanis Morissette made her Glastonbury debut on the Pyramid Stage, running through the highlights of her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill, which somehow turned 30 two weeks ago.

Songs like Right Through You and You Oughta Know have lost none of their caustic edge in the intervening years; while the softer songs (You Learn, Head Over Feet) remain encouraging and optimistic.

“I’m blown away that the songs I wrote when I was 19,” she told BBC News. “I can still stand by them now.”

On stage, Morissette barely spoke to the audience, other than to introduce her band, but they were too busy singing to notice.

The standout moment came during Ironic – a song that, ironically, misunderstands the concept of irony – when 10,000 fans held up spoons.

And all she needed was a knife. Who would have thought? It figures.

Glastonbury continues on Saturday with performances from Charli XCX, Neil Young, Doechii, Kaiser Chiefs, Kneecap, Raye and Scissor Sisters.

The Pyramid Stage also boasts another surprise set, from a band billed only as Patchwork.

You can follow the action on BBC radio, television, iPlayer and BBC Sounds.

I’m on the hunt for a microbial saviour – a type of virus that can treat infections rather than cause them.

We all know the viral bad guys – Covid, flu, norovirus, herpes, chicken pox, measles… the list goes on.

But there’s a type of virus that’s not interested in infiltrating our bodies, instead it preys on bacteria.

They’re known as bacteria eaters, or bacteriophage, or commonly as phage.

Capturing them could give us new ways of treating infections, including superbugs that are becoming incurable.

So, how to catch a killer?

I’ve been promised it’s surprisingly easy. The team at the Phage Collection Project sent me some vials to collect samples, along with a pair of gloves. All I need to do is hunt for some dirty water, the dirtier the better, dip the vials in and screw on the lid.

I tried a couple of ponds, the juice from a worm-composting bin and then I needed my dirtiest sample. I didn’t flush the toilet after a poo and left it for a couple of hours. I pop on a glove and hold my breath as I go in for the final sample. Strict hygiene instructions, including vigorous hand-washing, were followed, at all times.

The vials were packaged up for collection and then three days later I headed off to the University of Southampton to see what was inside.

“They were a bit dirty when I received them,” phage scientist Michelle Lin tells me as we don our blue lab-coats and matching gloves to go into the Containment Level 2 microbiology laboratory.

We grab my samples from the fridge, which look much clearer now they have been filtered of any… debris. “It’s fine, it’s needed,” Michelle, who had the unpleasant job, reassures me.

Filtering is the first step in looking for phage, next they get served dinner – a cocktail of yummy bacteria – to help them grow in number.

Now comes the really cool bit – finding a useful phage. The scientists have been working with the local hospital to collect bacteria from patients with troublesome infections.

Michelle grabs a petri dish that’s growing bacteria from a patient with a painful, urinary tract infection that keeps coming back.

And to my amazement – one of the phage I collected from my toilet was able to kill this infection in the lab.

“The way to see that the phage has infected bacteria is you get these zones where the bacteria are not growing and that’s because they’ve been killed by the phage,” says Michelle.

You can see the leopard print pattern in the petri dish where the phage have been making light work of a bacterial infection that modern medicine was struggling to shift.

“As crazy as it sounds, well done to the toilet sample,” says Michelle with great delight.

And when I was offered the chance to name the phage, well of course it’s the Gallagher-phage.

“Sounds amazing to me,” says Michelle.

So far this is all good fun in the laboratory, but could my phage ever be given to a patient?

“Yes and I hope so,” says associate professor Dr Franklin Nobrega as we look at images of my phage captured with an electron microscope.

“Your phage, already in just 24 hours, we were able to get in a high concentration and able to be a very good killer, which means this is very promising for patients, so thank you,” said Dr Nobrega.

Phage remind me of a moon lander – a big capsule on spindly legs – just instead of landing on the surface of the moon they use their legs to select their victim.

They then hijack the bacteria and transform it into a mass-production factory for more phage, which burst out of their host, killing it in the process.

There are pros and cons to phage. They reproduce as they go along so you don’t need constant doses like you would with drugs.

They are also very picky eaters. You need a precise match between phage and the strain of bacteria you’re trying to treat whereas antibiotics tend to kill everything good and bad. So it is harder to find the right phage, but if you do it comes with fewer side effects.

Dr Nobrega tells me infected wounds are a “very good application” for phage because you can apply them directly to the injury, but they can also be inhaled via a nebuliser to treat lung infections or to target urinary tract infections “which is our target currently”.

Phage science may sound new and exciting, but it is actually a century old idea stemming from the discoveries of Felix d’Hérelle and Frederick Twort in the 1910s.

Bacteriophage therapy was a branch of medicine and the idea was compelling. Even as late as the 1940s there was an active pharmaceutical industry in western countries trying to produce phage-therapy to defeat bacterial infections.

However, it was rapidly eclipsed by the wonder-drug of the 20th century.

“Antibiotics were working so well that most people said ‘why bother’,” says Dr Nobrega.

Work on phage therapy continued in places like Georgia and there are individual accounts of it working wonders; but there hasn’t been the same depth of medical research and clinical trials as there have for drugs.

But just as the initial success of antibiotics suppressed phage research, the failure of antibiotics is reigniting excitement at their potential.

More than a million people a year are already dying from infections caused by microbes that are resistant to treatment – it’s known as the “silent pandemic”. By 2050, that figure is projected to reach 10 million a year.

This “antibiotic apocalypse” would mean common infections could kill again and undermine modern medicine. The drugs are also used to make organ transplants, open surgery and chemotherapy possible.

“The predictions around antibiotic resistance are very frightening, but the reality is we’re seeing it now and it’s only going to get worse,” says Prof Paul Elkington, the director of the institute for medical innovation at the University of Southampton.

He is also a doctor with a speciality in lung medicine and is already at the point where – after a year of treatment and turning to ever more toxic and less effective antibiotics – “in the end you have to have a conversation [and say] ‘we can’t treat this infection, we’re really sorry'”.

He says we can’t rely solely on antibiotics in the future and phage are a potential alternative.

But he warns the steps needed to get from the laboratory and into patients are “uncharted”.

Things are changing. Phage therapy is available in the UK on compassionate grounds when other treatments have failed. And the drugs regulator – The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency – has published its first official rules to support the development of phage therapy.

“If one looks 15-20 years into the future, with the emerging methodologies, it’s going to be possible for them to be much more widely available and for doctors to prescribe phage instead of antibiotics for some infections,” says Prof Elkington.

If you want to see if you can find a friendly virus too then The Phage Collection Project are launching their new sampling kits at the Summer Science Exhibition taking place this week at the Royal Society and through their website.

“Antimicrobial resistance is something that could affect all of us,” says Esme Brinsden from the Phage Collection Project, “when the public get involved they may just find the next phage that can help treat and save a patient’s life”.

The head of a controversial US and Israeli-backed aid group has defended its work after repeated incidents of killings and injuries of Palestinians seeking aid.

Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) boss Johnnie Moore told the BBC World Service’s Newshour he was not denying deaths near aid sites, but said “100% of those casualties are being attributed to close proximity to GHF” and that was “not true”.

He accused the UN and other international organisations of spreading information they could not verify.

The GHF aid system has been condemned by UN agencies, and on Friday UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres branded it “inherently unsafe”.

“Any operation that channels desperate civilians into militarized zones is inherently unsafe. The search for food must never be a death sentence,” the UN chief said.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 500 Palestinians have been killed and 4,000 injured on their way to get aid since GHF took over aid distribution.

Within days of GHF operations starting in late May, dozens of Palestinians were killed in separate incidents on 1 and 3 June, sparking international condemnation.

Since then, the UN and aid groups have expressed alarm at the near-daily reports of Palestinians being killed near the GHF’s sites, which are inside Israeli military zones.

Eyewitnesses and medics have on several occasions described Israeli forces opening fire on crowds near aid points.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a story on Friday in which unnamed IDF soldiers said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed civilians near aid distribution sites, to drive them away or disperse them.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly rejected the report calling the allegations “malicious falsehoods”.

In a statement to the BBC, the IDF said it “did not instruct the forces to deliberately shoot at civilians, including those approaching the distribution centres”.

It added it was looking to improve “the operational response” in the aid areas and had recently added new fencing and signage, and opened new routes to reach the handout zones.

For his part, the head of the GHF said “100% of the casualties are being attributed to the IDF – as best as we can tell that’s also not true”.

In statements over the past month, the IDF have several times said they fired “warning shots” at individuals who they described as “suspects” or claimed posed a threat.

“We spend an extended period of time trying to understand what actually happened, if anything actually happened and whether there’s a way that we can make it less likely to happen,” Mr Moore said.

“In most circumstances we haven’t been able to identify anything happening.”

“People need to understand that it is disinformation that people going to GHF sites are being killed, we have no evidence of that happening in proximity to our sites,” he added.

Israel does not allow international news organisations, including the BBC, to send journalists into Gaza, which limits our ability to verify what is happening on the ground in the territory.

Mr Moore alleged that prior to GHF’s operations the majority of UN aid trucks were being hijacked at gunpoint.

The UN has said there is no evidence for a large-scale hijacking of its aid trucks. When told this, Mr Moore said the “UN is not being honest”.

The volume of aid entering Gaza is still considered inadequate, despite Israel last month partially easing an 11-week blockade introduced in March. Experts have warned the territory remains on the brink of famine.

The GHF is hoping to reach the milestone of providing 50 million meals in Gaza, which would equate to less than a meal a day per person since operations began.

When pushed on whether food was really getting to the people who needed it most, Mr Moore admitted the operation was “insufficient”, but said 50 million meals was more than had been available a month ago.

He said the GHF needs to scale up and hopefully work with organisations such as the UN.

“The mission is clear. We just want to feed Gazans,” he added.

On Thursday, the US State Department announced $30m (£22m; €26m) in funding for the GHF, which is its first known direct contribution to the group.

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

More than 56,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have signed a peace deal in Washington aimed at ending decades of devastating conflict between the two neighbours, and potentially granting the US lucrative mineral access.

The deal demands the “disengagement, disarmament and conditional integration” of armed groups fighting in eastern DR Congo.

Further details are scant and previous peace deals in the region have failed – yet that has not deterred the US and Congolese presidents from framing this as a generational victory.

“Today, the violence and destruction comes to an end, and the entire region begins a new chapter of hope and opportunity,” US President Donald Trump said on Friday.

Flanked by Vice-President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and delegates from DR Congo and Rwanda in the Oval Office, Trump called the peace treaty “a glorious triumph”.

“This is a tremendous breakthrough,” Trump said, shortly before adding his signature to the peace treaty signed earlier by the respective African delegates.

The deal was signed by the Congolese and Rwandan foreign ministers at the US State Department.

• Ceasefire deal still faces many challenges

“Another diplomatic success for President Félix Tshisekedi – certainly the most important in over 30 years,” .

There has been talk of Tshisekedi and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame going to Washington to meet Trump together, though no date has been fixed.

When tensions between the two countries escalated at the beginning of this year, Qatar intensified de-escalation efforts, according to a diplomat briefed on the negotiations.

Qatar sent envoys to both capitals to urge de-escalation, and after the Congolese and Rwandan presidents met in Doha, a joint committee was established, supported by the US, the diplomat added.

• What’s the fighting in DR Congo all about?
• The evidence that shows Rwanda is backing rebels in DR Congo
• Your phone, a rare metal and the war in DR Congo

Decades of conflict escalated earlier this year when M23 rebels seized control of large parts of eastern DR Congo including the regional capital, Goma, the city of Bukavu and two airports.

Thousands of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians forced from their homes following the recent rebel offensive.

After the loss of territory, the government in Kinshasa turned to the US for help, reportedly offering access to critical minerals in exchange for security guarantees. Eastern DR Congo is rich in coltan and other resources vital to the global electronics industries.

Rwanda denies supporting the M23 despite overwhelming evidence, and insists its military presence in the region is a defensive measure against threats posed by armed groups like the FDLR – a rebel militia composed largely of ethnic Hutus linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Rwanda in turn accuses the Congolese government of backing the FDLR, which is denied by DR Congo. Their presence is of utmost concern to Kigali.

When some information about the deal was released last week, a statement spoke of “provisions on respect for territorial integrity and a prohibition of hostilities”, but there were no specifics.

It also talked about the “facilitation of the return of refugees and internally displaced persons”.

According to a Reuters news agency report, Congolese negotiators had pushed for an immediate withdrawal of Rwandan soldiers, but Rwanda – which has at least 7,000 troops on Congolese soil – refused.

In an angry statement a day before the deal was signed, Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe condemned “the leak of a draft peace agreement” saying Rwanda had “demanded the other parties to respect the confidentiality of the discussions”.

The calls for the total withdrawal of Rwandan troops from DR Congo is major point of contention.

But Nduhungirehe said “the words ‘Rwanda Defense Force’, ‘Rwandan troops’ or ‘withdrawal’ are nowhere to be seen in the document”.

Just hours before the signing ceremony, Tshisekedi’s office said the agreement “does indeed provide for the withdrawal of Rwandan troops… [but] preferred the term disengagement to withdrawal simply because ‘disengagement’ is more comprehensive”.

Unless and until full details of the signed deal are made public, several crucial questions remain unanswered:

• Will the M23 rebel group withdraw from areas they have occupied?

• Does “respect for territorial integrity” mean Rwanda admits having troops in eastern DR Congo and will withdraw them?

• Would the agreed “return of refugees” allow thousands of Congolese back from Rwanda?

• Does “disarmament” mean that the M23 will now lay down their weapons?

• Who will disarm the FDLR, after the failure of several previous attempts?

• Would the agreed humanitarian access allow the reopening of the rebel-held airports for aid supply?

Prior to Friday’s signing, Rwandan government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo told Reuters news agency that the “lifting of defensive measures in our border area” would be contingent upon the FDLR’s “neutralisation”.

One of the main actors in today’s conflict – the M23 rebels – were spawned by a previous peace deal 16 years ago that failed to ensure demobilisation.

Last year, Rwandan and Congolese experts reached an agreement twice under Angolan mediation on the withdrawal of Rwandan troops and joint operations against the FDLR – but ministers from both countries failed to endorse the deal. Angola eventually stepped down as a mediator in March.

• Congolese rebels want peaceful solution to crisis, UN says
• Ex-DR Congo president returns from self-imposed exile, party says
• DR Congo conflict tests China’s diplomatic balancing act
• How DR Congo’s Tutsis become foreigners in their own country
• ‘They took all the women here’: Rape survivors recall horror of DR Congo jailbreak

The son of Norway’s crown princess is suspected of three rapes and 23 other offences, police said on Friday.

Marius Borg Høiby, who is the stepson of Norway’s future king, was arrested three separate times last year, in August, September and November.

After a 10-month investigation, Norwegian police have now handed the case over to prosecutors who will decide whether to press charges, police attorney Andreas Kruszewski said.

Høiby’s lawyer Petar Sekulic said his client was “taking the accusations very seriously, but doesn’t acknowledge any wrongdoing in most of the cases – especially the cases regarding sexual abuse and violence”.

The 28-year-old, who does not have a royal title or official duties, had been under investigation since his arrest on 4 August 2024 on suspicion of assault.

In a statement, Oslo Police District said they carried out a “thorough investigation”, with a “large number of witness interviews, several searches and a review of extensive digital material”.

Høiby was questioned several times during the autumn of 2024 and spring of 2025 and “cooperated with the police”, the statement said.

Amongst the offences police said Høiby was suspected of were four counts of sexually offensive behaviour, one count of abuse in a close relationship and two counts of bodily harm.

Police confirmed that some cases involving sexual offences had been dismissed due to “statute of limitations and evidentiary reasons”.

“I cannot go into further detail about the number of victims in the case beyond confirming that it is a double-digit number,” Mr Kruszewski said.

The Royal House of Norway noted in a statement that the case was proceeding through the legal system and had nothing further to add.

In the four weeks since the launch of a controversial US- and Israeli-backed aid system in Gaza, there have been repeated incidents of killings and injuries of Palestinians seeking aid.

According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, in the past month more than 500 people on their way to get aid have been killed and 4,000 injured.

To get a clearer understanding of how the last month has unfolded, BBC Verify has analysed dozens of videos from across Gaza that offer an insight into what this aid system looked like on the ground. Footage shows a near-daily cycle of chaos, panic, live gunfire and dead or injured Palestinians.

While the videos show an overall picture of danger and chaos, they do not definitively show who is responsible for firing in each incident. However in many cases, eyewitnesses and medics have described Israeli forces opening fire on crowds near aid sites.

In statements over the past month, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have several times said they fired “warning shots” at individuals who they described as “suspects” or said posed a threat.

The IDF has told BBC Verify that Hamas does “everything in its power to prevent the success of food distribution in Gaza, tries to disrupt aid, and directly harms the citizens of the Gaza Strip”.

On 18 May Israel announced it was partially easing its 11-week long blockade of aid into Gaza, which it had said was aimed at putting pressure on Hamas to release hostages.

The IDF built four aid distribution sites – three in the far south-west of Gaza and one in central Gaza by an Israel security zone known as the Netzarim Corridor – which began operations on 26 May.

These sites in IDF-controlled areas – known as SDS 1, 2, 3 and 4 – are operated by security contractors working for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), with the Israeli military securing the routes to them and the perimeters. On Thursday the US State Department announced $30m (£22m; €26m) in funding for the GHF – the first known direct contribution to the group.

From the start the UN condemned the plan, saying it would “militarise” aid, bypass the existing distribution network and force Gazans to make long journeys through dangerous territory to get food.

Within days of the plan starting, dozens of Palestinians were killed in separate incidents on 1 and 3 June, sparking international condemnation. Since then there have been near-daily reports of killings of people travelling to collect aid.

The IDF said that its “forces conduct systematic learning processes aimed at improving the operational response in the area and minimizing possible friction between the population and the IDF forces”.

Israeli government spokesman David Mencer called reports of people killed while getting aid “another untruth”. “There have not been hundreds of people dying.”

The GHF denied there had been any “incident or fatalities at or near” any of its distribution sites.

On Tuesday, the Red Cross said its field hospital in Rafah had had to activate its mass casualty procedures 20 times since 27 May, with the vast majority of patients suffering gunshot wounds and saying they had been on the way to an aid site.

The UN and its World Food Programme as well as other aid providers are continuing to try to distribute aid in Gaza, but they say they are reliant on the Israeli authorities to facilitate their missions.

The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said the killing of Palestinians trying to access aid was a “likely war crime”. International human rights lawyer Sara Elizabeth Dill told BBC Verify that if there had been any intentional targeting of civilians, it could constitute a serious violation of international law.

“Mass shootings during civilian relief access violate core rules against targeting civilians and using starvation against them, potentially rising to war crimes,” she said.

Three videos, the first of which was published on 9 June, showed hundreds of people, some holding what appear to be empty flour sacks, scrambling over mounds of rubble and hiding in ditches. Several bursts of automatic gunfire can be heard.

On that day, the Hamas-run health ministry reported six people had been killed that morning while seeking aid and more than 99 injured. The next day, it reported 36 aid-related deaths and more than 208 injuries.

It’s not possible to verify whether any of these casualties were a result of the gunfire that could be heard in the footage.

We were able to confirm the videos were filmed from about 4km (2.5 miles) north-west of SDS4, on the way to the site in central Gaza.

Audio analysis of the gunfire from Steve Beck, a former FBI consultant who now runs Beck Audio Forensics, said one of the guns sounded like and fired at rates consistent with the FN Minimi machine gun and the M4 assault rifle. The second gun, Mr Beck said, fired at a rate that was “compatible” with the sound of an AK-47. We cannot establish whose weapons were firing but FN Minimis and M4s are commonly used by the IDF, while AK-47s are typically used by Hamas and other groups in Gaza.

In footage published the next day, on 10 June, and filmed nearby, more crowds were seen running in panic as the sound of gunfire, followed by what sounds like an explosion, was heard in the distance. Injured and bloodied people, including children, were then seen being carried away.

GHF has maps showing “safe passages” to its sites and communicates opening times via WhatsApp and social media.

Each passage has a “start point” and a ”stop point” with Palestinians warned that they must not cross the latter until instructed. The GHF has said these corridors are secured by the IDF and warned people that crossing these stop points, unless told to, may be dangerous.

But at SDS4 there was no safe passage planned for people coming from the north.

There have also been killings close to non-GHF related aid sites.

Verified footage from 17 June showed at least 21 bodies and several injured people on a road in which several vehicles, including a heavily damaged flatbed truck, were parked.

Witnesses told the BBC that IDF drones and a tank fired at the crowd as they were waiting to collect aid.

An IDF statement acknowledged that it had identified a “gathering” of people “adjacent to an aid distribution truck that got stuck in the area of Khan Yunis, and in proximity to IDF troops operating in the area”.

It said: “The IDF is aware of reports regarding a number of injured individuals from IDF fire following the crowd’s approach.” It expressed regret for “any harm to uninvolved individuals” and said the details of the incident were under review.

A spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defence agency said at least 50 people were killed at the scene.

The video shows a number of the dead around scorch marks on the ground, including one person with their legs blown off.

Mark Cancian, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, noted the lack of obvious impact crater but told us the extent of damage was likely the result of “a lot of direct fire”.

Another video posted on 16 June, which we’ve verified, shows bodies pulled on a cart by a horse along al-Rashid street in northern Gaza, the main coastal road and often used by aid convoys.

The caption alongside the video claims that these Palestinians were killed while waiting for aid.

The next day, several photos and videos we verified were posted on social media located nearby showing a body carried by several men on a wooden pallet along the same road.

The GHF claimed many of the alleged incidents were linked to convoys and distribution sites for other groups, including the UN. It said those aid supplies were “being looted by criminals and bad actors”.

A GHF spokesperson said it has overall been “pleased” with its first month of operations, with 46 million meals distributed to two million Gazans, but was aiming to scale up its capacity.

The IDF has said that among other changes it is installing fences and signs and opening additional routes.

“We have raised concern [with the IDF] about maintaining safe passage for aid seekers but unfortunately some have attempted to take dangerous short cuts or travel during restricted times,” the GHF spokesperson said.

“Ultimately the solution is more aid, which will create more certainty and less urgency among the population.”

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

US President Donald Trump has said he would “absolutely” consider bombing Iran again.

Responding to a question from the BBC’s Nomia Iqbal at a White House press briefing, he said he would “without question” attack the country if intelligence concluded Iran could enrich uranium to concerning levels.

The US became directly involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran last weekend, striking key nuclear sites with “bunker buster” bombs before Trump rapidly sought a ceasefire.

In a speech on Thursday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the strikes had achieved nothing significant, but on Friday Trump repeated his claim that the country’s nuclear sites had been “obliterated”.

• Iranian foreign minister admits serious damage to nuclear sites
• How a volatile 24 hours edged Iran and Israel to a ceasefire
• US gained nothing from strikes, Iran’s supreme leader says

Posting on his social media platform Truth Social later on Friday, Trump said he knew “EXACTLY” where the ayatollah had been sheltering and that he had personally stopped Israeli and US armed forces from targeting him.

It is understood the Iranian leader was forced into hiding during his country’s two-week war with Israel.

All parties in the conflict have claimed victory, with the ayatollah telling Iranians that Israel and Iran had failed to disrupt the country’s nuclear programme.

However, the country’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi later admitted “excessive and serious” damage was done to the country’s nuclear sites by the recent US and Israeli bombings.

Reacting to the ayatollah’s comments, Trump repeated his assertions that Iran was “decimated”.

“Why would the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of the war-torn country of Iran, say so blatantly and foolishly that he won the war with Israel, when he knows his statement is a lie,” Trump added.

Trump claimed he had been “working on the possible removal of sanctions” against Iran, but had decided to “immediately” drop all work on sanction relief after the ayatollah released his statement of “anger, hatred and disgust”.

Iran has always insisted its nuclear programme is only intended for civilian purposes.

The latest conflict between Israel and Iran started when Israel launched attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and military infrastructure, with a number of nuclear scientists and military commanders killed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time”.

CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, reported the White House had been considering a range of options to entice Iran back to the negotiating table, including facilitating funding for a civilian, non-enrichment, nuclear programme.

But Iran has denied it is set to resume nuclear talks with the US, after Trump said at a Nato summit in the Hague on Wednesday that negotiations were set to begin again next week.

Iran’s health ministry said 610 people were killed during the 12 days of air attacks, while Israeli authorities said 28 were killed in Israel.

By the time polls closed at 10pm on 4 July 2024, the Labour Party knew they were likely to return to government – even if they could not quite bring themselves to believe it.

For Sir Keir Starmer, reminiscing 10 months later in an interview with me, it was an “incredible moment”. Instantly, he said, he was “conscious of the sense of responsibility”. And yes, he confessed, a little annoyed that his landslide victory was not quite as big as Sir Tony Blair’s had been in 1997.

“I’m hugely competitive,” the prime minister said. “Whether it’s on the football pitch, whether it is in politics or any other aspect of life.”

Sir Keir watched the exit poll with a small group of advisers as well as his wife, Victoria, and his two teenaged children. Even in that moment of unsurpassable accomplishment, this deeply private prime minister was caught between the jubilation of his aides and the more complex reaction of his children, who knew their lives were about to change forever.

Looking back, the prime minister said, he would tell himself: “Don’t watch it with your family – because it did have a big impact on my family, and I could see that in my children.”

It’s important to remember how sunny the mood in the Labour Party was at that moment – because the weather then turned stormy with remarkable speed.

As the prime minister marks a year in office next week – which he will spend grappling with crises at home and abroad – British politics finds itself at an inflection point, where none of the old rules can be taken for granted.

So, why exactly was Sir Keir’s political honeymoon so short-lived? And can he turn things around?

Many members of the new cabinet had never been to Downing Street until they walked up to the famous black door on 5 July to be appointed. Why would they have been? The 14 turbulent years of opposition for the Labour Party meant that few had any experience of government.

This was a deficiency of which Sir Keir and his team were acutely aware.

As the leader of the opposition, he had spent significant time in ‘Privy Council’ – that’s to say, confidential, meetings with civil servants to understand what was happening in Ukraine and the Middle East.

He also sought knowledge from the White House. Jake Sullivan, then US President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser, told me that he spoke to the future prime minister “every couple of months” to help him “make sense of what was happening”.

“I shared with him our perspective on events in the Middle East, as well as in Ukraine and in other parts of the world,” says Sullivan. “I thought he asked trenchant, focused, sharp questions. I thought he was on point.

“I thought he got to the heart of the matter, the larger issue of where all of these things were going and what was driving them. I was impressed with him.”

Domestic preparations were not as smooth. For some, especially on the left of the Labour Party, this government’s difficulties began with an over-cautious election campaign.

Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the trade union Unite, told me that “everyday people [were] looking for change with a big C. They were not looking for managerialism”.

It’s a criticism with which Pat McFadden, a senior cabinet minister, having run the campaign, is wearily familiar. “We had tried other strategies to varying degrees in 2015, 2017, 2019, many other campaigns previously – and they’d lost.

“I had one job. To win.”

Having made his name as a prominent member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, Sir Keir won the party leadership in 2020 offering Labour members a kind of Corbynism without Corbyn.

But before long he broke decisively with his predecessor.

In the campaign this meant not a long list of promises, but a careful approach. Reassurance was the order of the day: at the campaign’s heart, a focus on what Labour wouldn’t do: no increase in income tax, national insurance or VAT.

Yet a big part of preparing for government was not just the question of what this government would do, but how it would drive the government system.

For that, Sir Keir turned to Sue Gray.

Having led the Partygate investigation into Boris Johnson, Gray was already unusually high-profile for an impartial civil servant. Her close colleagues were stunned when in 2023 she agreed to take up a party political role as Sir Keir’s chief of staff.

“It was a source of enormous controversy within the civil service,” says Simon Case, who until a few months ago as cabinet secretary was head of the civil service.

Sue Gray’s task was to use her decades of experience of the Whitehall machine to bring order to Sir Keir’s longstanding team.

She started work in September 2023, and the grumblings about her work began to reach me weeks, or perhaps even days, later. Those in the team she joined had expected her to bring organisational clarity.

Tensions came when she involved herself in political questions too.

Gray also deliberately re-prioritised the voices of elected politicians in the shadow cabinet over unelected advisers.

Questions about what exactly her role should be were never quite resolved, in part because Rishi Sunak called the general election sooner than Labour had expected.

Gray spent the campaign in a separate office from the main team, working with a small group on plans for the early days in government. Yet those back in Labour HQ fretted that, from what little they gleaned, that work was inadequate.

A few days before the election those rumours reached me. I WhatsApped a confidant of Sir Keir to ask what they had heard of the preparation for government.

“Don’t ask,” came the reply. “I am too worried to discuss it.”

What is unquestionable is that any prime minister would have struggled with the backdrop Sir Keir inherited.

Simon Case described to me how, on 5 July just after Sir Keir had made his first speech on the steps of No 10, he had thwacked a sleepless new prime minister with “the heavy mallet of reality”.

“I don’t think there are many incoming prime ministers who’d faced such challenging circumstances,” he said, referring to both the country’s economic situation and wars around the world.

The King’s Speech on 17 July unveiled a substantial programme, making good on manifesto promises: rail nationalisation, planning reform, clean energy investment. But those hoping for a rabbit out of the hat, a defining surprise, were disappointed.

In so many crucial areas — social care, child poverty, industrial strategy — the government’s instinct was to launch reviews and consultations, rather than to declare a decisive direction.

As cabinet secretary, Case could see what was happening — or not happening — across the whole of government. “There were some elements where not enough thinking had been done,” he said.

“There were areas where, sitting in the centre of government, early in a new regime, the prime minister and his team, including me as his sort of core team, knew what we wanted to do, but we weren’t communicating that effectively across all of government.”

Not just communication within government: for us journalists there were days in that early period where it was utterly unclear what this new government wanted its story to be.

That made those early announcements, which did come, stand out even more: none more so than Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s announcement on 29 July that she would means-test the winter fuel payment.

It came in a speech primarily about the government’s parlous economic inheritance. That is not what it is remembered for.

Some in government admit that they expected a positive response to Reeves’s radical frankness about what the government could and could not afford to do. Yet it sat in isolation – a symbol of this new government’s economic priorities, with the Budget still three months away.

Louise Haigh, then the transport secretary, remembered: “It came so early and it hung on its own as such a defining policy for so long that in so many voters’ minds now, that is the first thing they think about when they think about this Labour government and what it wants to do and the kinds of decisions it wants to make.”

The policy lasted precisely one winter. Sir Keir and his chancellor have argued in recent weeks that they were able to change course because of a stabilising economy.

McFadden was more direct about the U-turn. “If I’m being honest, I think the reaction to it since the decision was announced was probably stronger than we thought,” he admits.

At the same time the chancellor stood up to announce the winter fuel cuts, news was unfolding of a horrific attack in Southport.

Misinformation about who had carried out the attack fuelled the first mass riots in this country since 2011, when Sir Keir had been the director of public prosecutions. Given the nature of the crisis, the prime minister was well placed to respond.

“As a first crisis, it was dealing with a bit of the machinery of government that he instinctively understood – policing, courts, prisons,” Case says.

Sir Keir’s response was practical and pragmatic — making the judicial system flow faster meant that by mid-August at least 200 rioters had already been sentenced, most jailed with an average term of two years.

But in a way that was not quite clear at the time, the riots spawned what has become one of the defining attacks on the prime minister from the right: that of ‘two-tier Keir’.

The idea that some rioters were treated more harshly than other kinds of protesters had been morphed over time into a broader accusation about who and what the prime minister stood for.

Sir Keir had cancelled his family holiday to deal with the riots. Exhausted, he ended the summer dealing with questions about his personal integrity in what became known as ‘freebiegate’.

Most of the gifts for which he was being criticised – clothing, glasses, concert tickets – had been accepted before the election but Sir Keir was prime minister now. Case told me there was a “naivety” about the greater scrutiny that came with leading the country.

Perhaps more than that, there was a naivety in No 10 about how Sir Keir was seen. Here was a man elected in large part because of a crisis of trust in politics. He had presented himself as different.

Telling voters that he had followed the rules was to miss the point — they thought the rules themselves were bust.

By the winter of 2024, the sense of a government failing to get a grip of itself or a handle on the public mood, had grown. A chorus of off-the-record criticism, much of it strikingly personal, threatened to overwhelm the government.

There were personal ambitions and tensions at play, but more and more insiders – some of them fans of Gray initially – were telling me that the way in which Sir Keir’s chief of staff was running government was structurally flawed, with the system simply not working properly.

Gray announced in early October that she had resigned because she risked becoming a “distraction”. In reality, Sir Keir had sacked her after some of his closest aides warned him he risked a mutiny if he did not.

Sue Gray was approached both for an interview and for her response to her critics but declined.

To the end she retained some supporters in the cabinet including Louise Haigh. “I felt desperately sorry for her,” she says.

“It was just a really, really cruel way to treat someone who’d already been so traduced by the Tories – and then [was] traduced by our side as well.”

Sir Keir appointed Gray. He empowered Gray. And he dispensed with Gray. This was the prime minister correcting his own mistakes – an episode which came at a high political price.

Yet on the world stage the prime minister continued to thrive, winning praise across political divides in the UK and abroad.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s adviser, was impressed by Sir Keir’s handling of US President Donald Trump, describing the Oval Office meeting where the prime minister brandished an invitation from the King as “the best I’ve seen in terms of a leader in these early weeks going to sit down with the current president”.

It’s an irony that it is Sir Keir, who made his reputation trying to thwart Brexit, who has found for the UK its most defined diplomatic role of the post-Brexit era — close to the US, closer than before to Europe, at the fore of the pro-Ukraine alliance, striking trade deals with India and others.

And it has provided him with something more elusive too: a story — a narrative of a confident, pragmatic leader stepping up on the world stage, acting as a bridge between other countries in fraught times.

The risk, brought into sharp relief during the Israel-Iran conflict in recent days, is that Trump is too unpredictable for such a role to be a stable one.

The international arena has sharpened Sir Keir’s choices domestically as well. Even while making welfare cuts that have displeased so many in his party, the prime minister has a clearer and more joined-up argument about prioritising security in all its forms: through work, through economic prudence, through defence of the realm.

And yet, for plenty of voters Sir Keir has found definition to his government’s direction too late. Labour’s poor performance last month in the local elections plus defeat at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were a blow to Sir Keir and his team.

It’s far from unheard of for a governing party to lose a by-election, but to lose it to Reform UK on the same night that Nigel Farage’s party hoovered up councils across England made this a distinctively new political moment.

Two days afterwards, Paul Ovenden, Sir Keir’s strategy director, circulated a memo to Downing Street aides, which I’ve obtained.

It called for a “relentless focus on the new centre ground in British politics”.

The crucial swing voters, Ovenden wrote, “are the middle-age, working class, economically squeezed voters that we persuaded in the 2024 election campaign. Many of them voted for us in 2024 thinking we would fix the cost of living, fix the NHS, and reduce migration… we need to become more ruthless in pursuing those outcomes”.

For more than 100 of Starmer’s own MPs, including many of those elected for the first time in that landslide a year ago, the main priority was ruthlessly dismantling the government’s welfare reforms – plunging the prime minister as he approaches his first anniversary into his gravest political crisis yet.

The stakes were beyond high. For the prime minister to have backed down to avoid defeat on this so soon after the winter fuel reversal raises questions about his ability to get his way on plenty else besides.

So, if this first year has done anything, it has clarified the stakes.

This is not just a prime minister and a Labour Party hoping to win a second term. They are trying to prove to a tetchy and volatile country that not only do they get their frustration with politics, but that they can fix it too. None of that will be possible when profound policy disagreements are on public display.

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MI6 has cast distance between its new chief and her grandfather, who was this week revealed to have been a Nazi spy known as “the butcher”.

Blaise Metreweli was announced as the incoming head of the Secret Intelligence Service earlier this month. She will be its first female “C” in its 116-year history.

With little known about her wider backstory, documents show that her grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, who defected from Soviet Russia’s Red Army to become the Nazis’ chief informant in Chernihiv, Ukraine.

However, the Foreign Office, which speaks on behalf of MI6, said Ms Metreweli “neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather”.

A spokesperson added: “Blaise’s ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.

“It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today’s hostile states, as the next chief of MI6.”

The Daily Mail, which first revealed the family link, reports that it found hundreds of pages of documents in an archive in Freiburg, Germany, which showed Mr Dobrowolski was known as “The Butcher” or “Agent No 30” by Wehrmacht commanders.

He reportedly signed off letters to his Nazi superiors with “Heil Hitler” and said he “personally” took part in “the extermination of the Jews”.

The archive documents are said to suggest Mr Dobrowolski looted the bodies of Holocaust victims, was involved in the murdering of local Jews, and laughed while watching the sexual assault of female prisoners.

BBC News has seen evidence to suggest that Mr Dobrowolski was on a most wanted list drawn up by the KGB, the Soviet Union’s spy agency, in 1969, which appears to detail his earlier work and suggests he may have still been alive by the 1960s.

The document, labelled “top secret” and sourced from a researcher, is a 460-page alphabetical list of “foreign intelligence agents, traitors to the motherland, members of anti-Soviet organisations, punishers and other criminals subject to wanting”.

An entry that appears to be for Mr Dobrowolski says he “participated in the executions of Soviet citizens”.

“At the same time, he was a resident of German intelligence,” the document seen by the BBC says. “In September 1943, he escaped with the Germans”.

After the war, Mr Dobrowolski’s wife, Barbara, and two-month-old son Constantine Jr fled to Britain – and she married David Metreweli in 1947. Constantine Jr later took his stepfather’s name of Metreweli, but the BBC has seen existence of a naturalisation certificate, dated July 1966, still held in the National Archives today, where his surname was still Dobrowolski, with Metreweli listed as an “alias”.

Constantine Jr would go on to be a radiologist and UK armed forces veteran, and his daughter, Ms Metreweli, was born in 1977 before joining MI6 22 years later.

She has not responded to the recent reports herself.

Having risen through the ranks, she is currently responsible for technology and innovation at MI6, which gathers intelligence overseas. She will be the agency’s 18th head when she takes over later this year from Sir Richard Moore, a senior civil servant.

Upon her appointment, she said in a statement that she was “proud and honoured” to have been asked to lead.

Ms Metreweli is a Cambridge graduate, a rower and has previously had operational roles in the Middle East and Europe.

The sex trafficking and racketeering case against hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs was “badly, badly exaggerated”, his lawyer told a panel of 12 New York jurors on Friday.

In his closing, Marc Agnifilo argued for four hours that the government was criminalising Combs and his girlfriends’ “swingers lifestyle” in what amounted to a “fake trial”.

His 55-year-old client pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution.

“The government targeted Sean Combs,” Mr Agnifilo told the court, leading to an objection – later sustained – from prosecutors.

Warning: This story contains details some readers may find distressing

Lawyer Christy Slavik spoke to jurors for five-and-a-half hours in the prosecution’s closing arguments on Thursday, telling them that Combs abused his power and business empire to sex traffic women and commit other crimes.

The prosecution claimed Combs plied his ex girlfriends with drugs, and used violence and other means to coerce them into so-called “freak-offs” – Combs’ name for events where he watched and filmed while they had sex with male escorts.

While Ms Slavik was calm and methodical during a guided digital presentation, Mr Agnifilo was animated – pacing back and forth, and frequently cracking jokes.

He began by attacking the credibility of Combs’ ex-girlfriends who testified against him, Casandra Ventura and anonymous witness “Jane”.

He called Combs’ 11-year-relationship with Ms Ventura – in which she alleges he beat her repeatedly – “one of the great modern love stories”. She was a willing participant in their sex lives, he said.

“She’s a woman who actually likes sex – good for her,” Mr Agnifilo said. “She’s beautiful, she should.”

• Who testified in the Diddy trial?
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He argued Ms Ventura was no victim, as Combs was now in jail and she settled a civil lawsuit against him for physical abuse and sexual coercion for millions of dollars.

“If you had to pick a winner in this whole thing, it’s hard not to pick Cassie,” he said.

The problems in their relationship amounted to domestic violence – and not sex trafficking, Mr Agnifilo said. He tried to cast doubt on prosecutors’ argument that the rapper used violence to coerce Ms Ventura into participating in freak-offs.

The government has focused on a 2016 surveillance video of Combs beating Ms Ventura in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel, allegedly after she tried to leave a freak-off.

Playing the video for jurors again, Mr Agnifilo argued it could not have been an instance of sex trafficking because Ms Ventura appeared to gesture Combs back to their room when a security guard arrived on the scene.

There was “nothing scary in the room”, he said, adding that freak-offs were “beautiful evenings” with nice music and well-decorated rooms.

Mr Agnifilo also attempted to chip away at Jane’s testimony, citing one night where she alleges the rapper was violent with her before a freak-off.

“Her story truly makes no sense,” he said.

Combs’ lawyer attacked the government’s racketeering case, the allegation that Combs relied on his loyal employees to help him commit sex trafficking and other crimes, then cover them up.

There was a “gaping lack of evidence” that Combs and his employees ran some sort of criminal enterprise, and that there were any co-conspirators, he said.

Combs’ former chief-of-staff, Kristina Khorram, whom prosecutors have pointed to as a co-conspirator, is a “helpful” woman who everyone loved, Agnifilo told the jury.

A real co-conspirator, he claimed, would have helped kick the door down when Combs is alleged to have tried to break into his ex-girlfriend’s home.

In response to the transportation to engage in prostitution charge, Mr Agnifilo argued that male escorts the hip-hop mogul and his girlfriends hired were paid “for their time” with the couple, and not for sex.

At the end of his arguments, Combs, wearing an off-white sweater, hugged his attorney. His family, including his twin daughters and mother, were seated behind him for the second day in a row.

In a rebuttal to the defence’s closing on Friday, prosecutor Maurene Comey took a more aggressive tone than Ms Slavik’s, slamming Combs’ lawyers for suggesting his ex-girlfriends were lying and that they wanted to engage in freak-offs after being beaten.

“There is no separating the violence from the sex,” Ms Comey said. “They were trapped emotionally, physically and financially.”

She noted Ms Ventura’s lawsuit settlement, asking, “why risk it all by perjuring herself at a federal trial?”

Jurors will reconvene on Monday for the judge’s instructions on how to weigh the case against the hip-hop mogul. Deliberations are expected to begin soon after.

Combs is facing life in prison over the most serious charges of racketeering and sex trafficking.

Reality stars, actors, royals and a whole host of A-listers have travelled to Venice for the lavish wedding between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.

Oprah Winfrey, Orlando Bloom, Kylie Jenner and Ivanka Trump were just some of the celebrities seen on the boats and streets of the Italian city on Thursday and Friday.

The festivities are expected to last three days, ending with a large party for the married couple and their hundreds of guests on Saturday.

The event has attracted protests from a variety of groups in Venice, including locals fighting over-tourism to climate change activists.

Deal or no deal, what Wes Love wants is certainty.

His Toronto-area business, Taurus Craco, imports machinery from overseas and distributes it across North America, mainly to the United States.

But President Donald Trump’s shifting tariffs on Canadian products have left him, like many independent business owners, unable to plan for the future.

“What has been creating indecision in the market is people don’t know which way this is going to go,” Mr Love told the BBC in June.

“And in small businesses, indecision is killer.”

Taurus Craco was hit hard by the tariffs earlier this year when it was forced to shell out nearly C$35,000 ($25,500, £18,700) because a shipment to the US crossed the border a few minutes after one deadline.

“It is totally punitive. From a small business perspective, that’s more than the cost that we spend on hydro and gas for the entire year,” he said.

Even though Trump paused that tariff a few hours later, Taurus Craco still had to pay. Refusing would mean no longer being allowed to transport its products into the US, Mr Love said.

“It’s like dealing with the mob,” he said.

Canada is in a tit-for-tat tariff war with its largest trading partner, faciing a series of levies, in particular on metals and auto.

Since taking office in January, Trump has announced a series of import taxes on goods from other countries – arguing they will boost American manufacturing and protect jobs.

The ensuing uncertainty has hit Canada’s economy and intense talks between the two countries hit a snag on Friday.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has called Trump’s tariffs “unjust”, and said while campaigning for the April election that the “old relationship” with the US is “over”.

Shortly after winning that election, the prime minister visited Washington DC, taking a more conciliatory message to the White House to launch talks on a new trade and security deal.

A 16 July deadline since has been set to hash out that deal, and President Trump said at the recent G7 summit that he was optimistic the two countries could “work something out” on trade.

But on Friday, Trump said he was cutting trade talks over Canada’s digital services tax.

“We are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” he wrote on social media.

Carney has threatened to impose another round of retaliatory tariffs on the US if the talks aren’t successful.

Mr Love welcomes any prospect of a deal.

“Give us a set of rules and leave them alone and let us operate within those rules,” he said.

“It’s like sport, right? Everybody goes onto the field and you play to a set of rules, but you don’t change the rules in the middle of the game.”

• Trade, a sudden exit, Middle East conflict – five takeaways from G7
• ‘A stab in the back’ – car workers in Canada hit out at US over tariffs
• The reality behind Trump’s incredible investment claims
• What tariffs has Trump announced and why?

Gaphel Kongtsa, international policy director at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said businesses are hopeful an agreement will bring stability.

Thus far, they have had to navigate a very fluid landscape, he said, “where seemingly things get increased or decreased or added on without very much clear indication as to why”.

Canada is hugely reliant on trade with the US, with 75% of its exports heading south, according to Statistics Canada.

Its economy has slowed significantly in the first quarter of 2025 as a result of trade war and the ensuing uncertainty – growing only 0.8% between 1 January and 31 March, according to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB).

It shrank 0.1% over a month in April.

A timeline of the tariffs shows what a whirlwind few months it has been.

On 1 February, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on most Canadian imports, then suspended them for a month days later. They were re-imposed when that deadline expired, only to be again delayed.

Not long after, he granted an exemption on all goods that were compliant with the current North American free trade deal, known as the USMCA.

Then in March, the US imposed a global 25% tariff on imported steel and aluminium as well as on imported vehicles.

This month, Trump raised the metals tariff to 50%.

The manufacturing sector has been in the spotlight when it comes to the tariffs, but the service sector also is affected by the uncertainty, if not by the levies directly.

Sam Gupta is the founder and CEO at ElevatIQ, a technology and management consultancy that operates out of Buffalo, New York, and in Toronto.

Mr Gupta said most people don’t think about the service sector during a period of uncertainty, calling it the “unloved stepchild” of the economy.

“The attention goes to all the manufacturing companies and the companies that are directly impacted by the supply chain,” he said.

Still, services – which encompass everything from finance to tourism – make up a huge proportion of Canada’s economy, accounting for the vast majority of its workforce.

Service exporters have not been hit as hard as manufacturing, but their outlook and confidence in the market is at the lowest level in years, according to data from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

And while Ottawa has implemented several measures to provide relief to companies hit by the tariffs – including from funds raised by counter tariffs – the service sector has not received any compensation.

“We are not even in the conversation,” Mr Gupta said. “We don’t exist.”

He said his business is not financially struggling at the moment, but noted that inquiries for his firm’s services were “down by 50%”.

“As far as our understanding goes, not a lot of businesses are thinking about these longterm investments right now. It just, they just are not in the mindset,” he said.

“The biggest fear that we all have right now is, I don’t know how long this is going to go. If it is going to be six months, a year, 18 months, we can still survive. But let’s say this goes on for like two years, three years then oh, my goodness, it will be, really, really hard.”

This has been the toughest period for the industry in his 20-year career, as the sector faces a combination of challenges, he said.

Mr Gupta recalled how easy it was for him to get a well-paying job early in his career.

“Even when I was graduating, we were getting paid like crazy. And we were so arrogant that we would not even pick up calls from recruiters,” he said.

“But now with AI, with tariffs, the economy, everything, everybody that I know is struggling,” he said.

Statistics Canada reports that 56% of all businesses that export to the US have taken measures to mitigate the impact of tariffs.

More than 30% have delayed major investments and expenditures, while 25% sought alternative customers outside the US.

The Bank of Canada said on Wednesday that exports to the US dropped by more than 15% in April. Steel and aluminium exports were down by 25% and 11%, and the export of vehicles had fallen by 25%.

But despite everything, Mr Love remains positive.

He said businesses can navigate the challenges as long as the US does not keep changing its trade policy.

“We’re entrepreneurs. We are full of piss and vinegar, as they would say,” he said.

“And so we are doing everything that we possibly can to keep fighting. And I think we will be successful; we just need to know what the ground rules are.”

In 2023, Doechii announced she was three years into her five-year plan for becoming one of the biggest names in music.

“By year five I want to be at my peak,” she told Billboard magazine.

“I want to be in my Sasha Fierce era, the top of my game with still a long way to go – but I want to reach my prime and never leave it.”

Back then, it felt like a bold claim.

The Florida-born rapper and singer had scored a couple of viral hits – most notably Persuasive, an ode to marijuana that ended up on Barack Obama’s summer playlist – but nothing that had crossed over to the mainstream charts.

But jump-cut to 2025 and Doechii is a Grammy Award-winning “woman of the year“, who’s about to play one of the most hotly-anticipated sets at Glastonbury Festival.

It’s hard to identify the turning point. Some people say it was her mesmerising performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last December.

With her hair carefully braided to her backing dancers, she delivered a meticulously-choreographed performance of Boiled Peanuts and Denial Is a River – a cartoonish character piece, in which she confides to her therapist that her boyfriend’s been cheating on her with another man.

Others pinpoint her Tiny Desk Concert, released on YouTube two days later. The 15-minute set bursts with joie de vivre, simultaneously soulful and fiery, as the star rattles through jazzy, full-band recreations of her mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal.

She won even more fans at the Grammys in March, where she won best rap album, making her just the third female artist to win in the category.

In her speech, she spoke directly to young, black, queer women like her: “Don’t allow anybody to project any stereotypes on you, to tell you that you can’t be here, that you’re too dark or that you’re not smart enough or that you’re too dramatic or you’re too loud.”

She capped off her win with an ultra-physical performance that referenced Michael Jackson, Missy Elliott and Bob Fosse – and ended with her pulling the splits while being held aloft by five male dancers.

With three “star-is-born” performances in just four months, Doechii became the most talked-about new rapper of her generation… just like she planned.

So where did it all start?

Doechii was born Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon in Tampa, Florida and raised in a “heavily Christian” single-parent household by her mother, Celesia Moore.

A studious kid who loved writing poetry, she invented her alter-ego at the age of 11, after being viciously bullied in school.

“I was in a position where I thought about killing myself because the bullying was so bad,” she told Dazed magazine in February.

“Then I had this realisation: I’m not gonna do that, because then they’re gonna all get a chance to live and I’m gonna be the one dead.”

Overnight, her attitude shifted.

“Jaylah might’ve been getting bullied, but I decided Doechii wouldn’t stand for that,” she recalled in an interview with Vulture.

“And then,” she told The Breakfast Club, “I went to school in a tutu and I started doing music.”

As a teenager, she spent four years at Tampa’s Howard W. Blake School of the Arts, after winning a place on the choral programme by performing Etta James’ At Last.

The school unlocked her creativity, allowing her to take classes in everything from nail design and hair, to ballet, tap, cheerleading and stage production. However, it was gymnastics that left the biggest impression.

“The way that gymnasts train is really, really tough. It’s brutal and hard and difficult,” she told Gay Times.

“But at some point in my gymnastic career I learnt how to embrace and really love pain. To view pain as me getting stronger and better. That caused a deep discipline that has never left me.”

The school also helped the teenager accept her sexuality.

“Even though I was aware [that I was queer], I didn’t feel as comfortable until I started surrounding myself with more gay friends at my school.

“Once I had gay friends it was like, ‘OK, I can be myself, I’m good, I can feel safe, this is normal, I’m fine.’ I have those same friends today and will have them for life.”

That’s not all they gave her: Those same friends convinced Doechii to give up her ambitions of becoming a chorister, and start writing and releasing her own music.

Initially called iamdoechii, she uploaded her first song to Soundcloud in 2016, and released her debut single Girls two years later.

It already bore the hallmarks of her best work: Rhythmically and lyrically dextrous, and chock full of personality.

“,” she chided over a mellow electric piano, before the beat switched up and her rapping became more frenetic. By the closing bars, she barely had time catch breath as she listed her accomplishments.

“

The lines were more prophecy than reality. Doechii had a solid following on YouTube, but she was still working at Zara to make ends meet.

In 2019, she was booked for a showcase in New York City and hopped on a bus – without the money for her return trip.

“The night after, I slept at a McDonald’s,” she recalled in a 2022 interview.

“And then I had to call one of my mom’s friends… and, like, beg her to let me sleep at her house. And I ended up living there until I got back on my feet.”

Things started to turn around with the release of 2020’s Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, named after Junie B. Jones’s children’s book, in which Doechii sketched out her own childhood.

According to the lyrics, she was precocious (“”), competitive (“”) and frequently broke (“”).

The song marked a breakthrough in her writing.

“I was lacking this sense of vulnerability and honesty in my music,” she told Billboard, until “I learned accuracy and just saying exactly what it is, like on Lucky Blucky Fruitcake”.

The song went viral, winning her a record deal with Top Dawg Entertainment – the label that launched Kendrick Lamar and SZA.

She followed it up with the effortlessly hooky Persuasive, earning praise from SZA (who jumped on a remix) and former President Barack Obama.

“I can’t imagine Obama just jamming my song,” she exclaimed. “I just don’t believe it, but if he really does – that’s crazy.”

Doechii next collaborated with Kodak Black on the 2023 single What It Is (Block Boy), earning her first Top 40 hit.

Then, everything stalled.

Subsequent singles flopped, and Doechii was, as she later wrote on social media, “drowning in my own vices, battling differences with my label and a creative numbness that broke me”.

Initially, her Alligator Bites Never Heal mixtape looked set to repeat the pattern. Released last August, it entered the US charts at number 117 and vanished a week later.

But reviews were ecstatic.

Critics loved the acerbic, funny lyrics, that saw Doechii unpack the trials and tribulations of the last two years; and heaped praise on bars that recalled greats such as Q-Tip, Lauryn Hill and Slick Rick, while keeping pace with contemporaries like Kendrick Lamar.

After a period dominated by the mumbled bars of Souncloud rap, her precision was a breath of fresh air.

“One of the year’s most fully-realized breakout albums,” wrote Rolling Stone. “If this is the sound of Doechii pushing against constraints, a little friction might not be the worst thing,” added Pitchfork.

As word spread, she was booked to play the Colbert show and Tiny Desk. Those performances lit a rocket under her career. By April, Alligator had chomped into the US Top 10, and the UK Top 40.

Around the same time, she bowed to fan pressure by releasing her 2019 YouTube song, Anxiety, a pop-rap crossover based on a sample of Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know.

With an eye-catching video that recreated a full-on panic attack, it hit number three in the UK, and even earned Doechii a citation in medical journal Psychology Today.

“The song and accompanying video work so well in showing exactly how anxiety feels in our bodies and minds,” wrote Professor Sandra Chafouleas.

“Think about quick and short breaths, racing thoughts, and worrying about things that haven’t happened yet. Anxiety feels like ‘Anxiety’ sounds, with brilliant mirroring of how the experience can hijack us.”

Since then, Doechii’s been hard at work on her debut album. There’d been rumours she’d release it in time for her Glastonbury slot on Saturday night, but perfectionists have got to perfect. At the time of writing, she’s still in the studio.

Speaking to Dazed, she dropped a few hints of what’s in store.

“In Alligator Bites Never Heals, the archetype was a student of hip-hop. For this next project, I’m thinking about how this student develops.

“Who does she develop into? What has she learned? I’m still unpacking how that character develops into this next project.”

Despite the delay, Doechii’s headline set remains one of Glastonbury’s biggest draws.

She might only be performing for 45 minutes, but she’ll make every one of them count.

As the star boasted on her single Nosebleeds: “”

In the heart of the Iranian capital, the Boof cafe serves up refreshing cold drinks on a hot summer’s day.

They must be the most distinctive iced Americano coffees in this city – the cafe sits in a leafy corner of the long-shuttered US embassy.

Its high cement walls have been plastered with anti-American murals ever since Washington severed relations with Tehran in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis – which still cast a long shadow over this tortuous relationship.

Inside the charming Boof cafe, Amir the barista says he’d like relations to improve between America and Iran.

“US sanctions hurt our businesses and make it hard for us to travel around the world,” he reflects as he pours another iced coffee behind a jaunty wooden sign – “Keep calm and drink coffee.”

Only two tables are occupied – one by a woman covered up in a long black veil, another by a woman in blue jeans with long flowing hair, flouting the rules on what women should wear as she cuddles with her boyfriend.

It’s a small snapshot of this capital as it confronts its deeply uncertain future.

A short drive away, at the complex of Iran’s state TV station IRIB, a recorded speech by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was broadcast to the nation on Thursday.

“The Americans have been opposing the Islamic Republic of Iran from the very beginning” he declared.

• Iran carries out wave of arrests and executions in wake of Israel conflict
• ‘We are exhausted’ – how Iranians are feeling after fragile ceasefire

“At its core, it has always been about one thing: they want us to surrender,” went on the 86-year Ayatollah, said to have taken shelter in a bunker aer Israel unleashed its unprecedented wave of strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear and missile sites and assassinating senior commanders and scientists.

We watched his speech, his first since President Donald Trump suddenly announced a ceasefire on Tuesday, on a small TV in the only office still intact in a vast section of the IRIB compound. All that’s le is a charred skeleton of steel.

When an Israeli bomb slammed into this complex on 16 June, a raging fire swept through the main studio which would have aired the supreme leader’s address. Now it’s just ash.

You can still taste its acrid smell; all the TV equipment – cameras, lights, tripods – are tangles of twisted metal. A crunching glass carpet covers the ground.

Israel said it targeted the propaganda arm of the Islamic Republic, accusing it of concealing a military operation within – a charge its journalists rejected.

Its gaping shell seems to symbolise this darkest of times for Iran.

You can also see it in the city’s hospitals, which are still treating Iranians injured in Israel’s 12-day war.

“I am scared they might attack again, ” Ashraf Barghi tells me when we meet in the emergency department of the Taleghani General hospital where she works as head nurse.

“We don’t trust this war has ended” she says, in a remark reflecting the palpable worry we’ve heard from so many people in this city.

When Israel bombed the threshold of the nearby Evin prison on 23 June, the casualties, both soldiers and civilians, were rushed into Nurse Barghi’s emergency ward.

• What we know about the Iran-Israel ceasefire

“The injuries were the worst I’ve treated in my 32 years as nurse,” she recounts, still visibly distressed.

The strike on the notorious prison where Iran detains most of its political prisoners was described by Israel as “symbolic”.

It seemed to reinforce Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s repeated message to Iranians to “stand up for their freedom”.

“Israel says it only hit military and nuclear prison but it’s all lies,” insists Morteza from his hospital bed. He had been at work in the prison’s transport department when the missile slammed into the building. He shows us his injuries in both arms and his backside.

In the ward next door, soldiers are being cared for, but we’re not allowed to enter there.

Across this sprawling metropolis, Iranians are counting the cost of this confrontation. In its latest tally, the government’s health ministry recorded 627 people killed and nearly 5,000 injured.

Tehran is slowly returning to life and resuming its old rhythms, at least on the surface. Its infamous traffic is starting to fill its soaring highways and pretty tree-lined side streets.

Shops in its beautiful bazaars are opening again as people return to a city they fled to escape the bombs. Israel’s intense 12-day military operation, coupled with the US’s attacks on Iran’s main nuclear sites, has le so many shaken.

“They weren’t good days, ” says Mina, a young woman who immediately breaks down as she tries to explain her sadness. “It’s so heart-breaking, ” she tells me through her tears. “We tried so hard to have a better life but we can’t see any future these days.”

We met on the grounds of the soaring white marble Azadi tower, one of Tehran’s most iconic landmarks. A large crowd milling on a warm summer’s evening swayed to the strains of much-loved patriotic songs in an open air concert of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra. It was meant to bring some calm to a city still on edge.

Supporters and critics of Iran’s clerical rulers mingled, drawn together by shared worry about their country’s future.

“They have to hear what people say,” insists Ali Reza when I ask him what advice he would give to his government. “We want greater freedoms, that’s all I will say.”

There’s defiance too. “Attacking our nuclear bases to show off that ‘you have to do as we say’ goes against diplomacy,” says Hamed, an 18-year-old university student.

Despite rules and restrictions which have long governed their lives, Iranians do speak their minds as they wait for the next steps by their rulers, and leaders in Washington and beyond, which carry such consequences for their lives.

“Defender ready?” calls the host.

A thumbs up and moments later, two burly men – with no protective gear – run full speed at each other before they clash, the unmistakable sound of flesh and bone crunching.

The crowd erupts into a collective roar, some cheering, others wincing.

This is the moment they’ve been waiting for – and it’s exactly this adrenaline-fuelled energy that organisers of the Run It Championship League are banking on to help bring what they call the “world’s fiercest, new collision sport” to global audiences.

It is a supercharged version of a one-on-one tackle game which originated in the backyards and school playgrounds of Australia and New Zealand – namely in Pacific Islander communities.

One person carrying a ball must “run it straight” at the defender, who is also sprinting towards them: they are not allowed to duck, hurdle or sidestep the tackler.

Videos of the game have recently gone viral, and the founders of the Run It league have capitalised on the surge of interest – they say they’ve gained millions of views online, won over thousands of fans, attracted big name sponsors, and even inspired rival competitions.

They’ve held jousts in Melbourne and Auckland, and on Saturday another will take place in a Dubai arena, the winner taking away prize money of A$200,000 (£98,000). Next on their agenda, is an expansion to the UK and US.

But the groundswell of support for the league is increasingly being rivalled by critical voices. Medical experts and sporting figures are worried about the physical and mental health impacts of the game – which has also become a wider social media craze, that is already accused of claiming one life.

“It’s like shaking a baby,” says Peter Satterthwaite, whose teenage nephew died after copying the game at a party.

The objective of the game is simple: be the person who “dominates” the contact, as deemed by a panel of three judges.

Two of the league’s seven co-founders, Brandon Taua’a and Stephen Hancock, tell the BBC they have fond memories of playing the game as teenagers in Melbourne.

“I used to ‘run it straight’ at Brandon all the time,” Hancock says, joking that the pair would usually try to avoid hitting each other straight on.

There’ll be none of that this weekend, when the eight finalists compete for that giant cash prize in United Arab Emirates.

Hancock insists Run It is a “game of skill” – “[It’s] all about the footwork” – but there’s no denying the violent nature of it.

A quick scroll of the league’s social media accounts shows dozens of quick-burst videos, all honing in on the explosive action of two men colliding.

In other videos circulating from the events, several competitors are knocked out and require immediate medical attention.

Taua’a acknowledges the sport comes with risks, but says the league has safety protocols to minimise them.

Competitors are screened, undergoing medical assessments – such as blood tests and a physical exam – and they must also send a recent video of themselves playing a sport that features tackling. Medical staff are also on the sidelines of the events.

“There’s an element of danger with surfing, with boxing, and many other sports as well,” Taua’a argues.

For Champ Betham – who won NZ$20,000 earlier this month at the competition in Auckland and is gunning for the title in Dubai on Saturday – the element of danger is a secondary consideration.

“This is a massive blessing to a whole heap of us to pretty much try and win 20K or whatever for a couple hours’ work,” he told Radio New Zealand at the time.

“We got to pay off some debts and stock up the fridges and the cupboards, food for our little ones, especially with the economy and stuff like that here in New Zealand. Nothing’s cheap these days.”

The money involved, for a league which has only been around for six months, is impressive. Along with the prize fund, competitors’ travel and accommodation expenses are being paid. A 1,600-seat arena has been booked. The league has a slick social media account, a PR representative, and a bunch of promoters – including antipodean sports stars.

Its initial financial backers have been described only as “a group of local investors who believe in the product”, but bigger names are emerging: days before the Dubai event, the league announced it had secured a major sponsor in online gambling platform Stake.com, which is banned in key markets like Australia and the UK.

There are also ongoing talks with potential US investors, including a contact linked to American podcaster and UFC heavyweight Joe Rogan, which Taua’a says “will definitely help” the league build a presence in the US.

They will need big backers to match their ambitions for the contest, which they argue is more than just a fleeting social media trend.

“This could actually eventuate into a sport that could sit [in a class] with MMA and boxing,” Hancock says.

But as Taua’a and Hancock focus on the competition’s future ambitions, more and more voices are questioning its safety.

“They might as well set up smoking as a legitimate sport,” says neuroscientist Alan Pearce.

Speaking to the BBC from the New Zealand city of Palmerston North, Peter Satterthwaite is unequivocal.

“It’s not a sport,” he says. It’s “a dangerous activity” designed purely “to hurt the guy in front of you”.

His 19-year-old nephew Ryan was celebrating a 21st birthday with friends at a local park when they decided to try the game they’d seen all over their social media feeds.

Ryan did two tackles. Neither he or his friend fell down or clashed heads. But as he walked away, he told his mates he didn’t feel well, his uncle recounts.

“[Ryan] was coherent for a bit, then he lay down and his eyes just rolled back in his head.”

Friends rushed him to hospital where doctors had to “cut a sizable chunk out of his skull” to alleviate pressure caused by brain swelling, Satterthwaite says.

“I saw him on the ventilator, his chest going up and down as he was breathing, and it was like ‘Get up! Open your eyes’.”

On Monday evening, just a day after he was playing with his mates, Ryan’s life support was turned off in a hospital room filled with loved ones.

“It was just an innocuous clash,” Ryan’s uncle says, “and it just shows you how fragile life is and how fragile your brain is.”

Run It says it understands the dangers of contact sports and takes safety seriously. Weeks after Ryan’s death, the league posted a video saying the game is “not for the backyard, not for the street”.

“Do not try this at home,” they said.

But Satterthwaite doubts that warning will have much impact.

“I don’t think there’s a sport in the world that people don’t do at the beach, or in their backyard, or at the park.”

It’s not just the physical impacts that worry Shenei Panaia.

As a Samoan growing up in Australia, she would often see schoolkids playing the game as a bit of fun. But the mental health worker fears it reinforces “a version of masculinity where silence is strength, and violence is proof of pride”.

“It sends a dangerous message to young men that their worth is based on how much pain they can take. That if you’re not tough, you don’t belong.”

And the league’s attempt to turn this into a lucrative spectator sport contradicts the values of many in the Pacific Islander community, Penaia says.

“We are taught to look out for one another… and to make decisions that serve more than just ourselves.”

Their concerns are echoed by a pack of concussion experts and sporting figures.

For more than a decade, the world of high-impact sports has been introducing safety measures as the research into brain injuries develops.

Official bodies including Rugby Australia, New Zealand Rugby have warned people not to take part, with the New Zealand Prime Minister also weighing in, saying it’s a “dumb thing to do”.

Neuroscientist Pearce argues Run It magnifies “the most violent aspects of our established sport”, while the safety protocols do little to minimise any risk. Blood tests and physical exams cannot predict a brain injury, and catastrophic damage can occur even without a direct hit to the head, he says.

“I can’t see how running at 25km an hour straight at each other without stopping is safe,” he tells the BBC. “It’s as simple as that.”

There’s the risk of immediate concussion, Dr Pearce says, delayed onset brain injuries like Ryan Satterthwaite’s, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a degenerative disease caused by repetitive head trauma. They can lead to cognitive impairments, movement disorders, dementia, depression.

“[They’re] basically using the collision as the entertainment value, which is, in effect, commercialising concussion,” he concludes.

But a spokesperson for the league – who argues it is “not about masculinity” but “strength and skill” – say organisers have no intention of slowing down, and aren’t too worried about their critics.

Taua’a says what happens at their competitions is “not too much different” to what you see on televised rugby matches, and – with their protocols – it is far safer than many of the games played in backyards the world over.

“It’s quite new for viewers and it might take some time for them to get used to seeing what we’ve put together.”

In Manhattan’s West Village, where culinary trends can change with the seasons, Chef Vijay Kumar is shaping a quiet revolution.

His 2025 James Beard Award win for Best Chef: New York State this month is more than just personal recognition – it marks a cultural inflection point.

Chennai-based culinary historian Rakesh Raghunathan says: “Following in the footsteps of fellow Tamil-origin recipients like Raghavan Iyer and Padma Lakshmi, Vijay Kumar’s recognition reflects a growing momentum for south Indian voices on the global culinary stage”.

“Tamil cuisine – along with Sri Lankan Tamil and other south Indian regional traditions – is increasingly being embraced by global diners as something refined, rich, and deeply rooted in culture.”

Born in the small farming village of Arasampatti, Madurai in southern Tamil Nadu, the 44-year-old Kumar has always cooked from memory – of forests and foraging, firewood stoves and his mother and grandmother serving meals made from scratch for the family.

When he took the stage at the JB awards ceremony, he said “the food I grew up on, the food made with care, with fire, with soul is now taking the main stage”. It was a moment of deep emotion and cultural pride for Kumar.

“There is no such thing as a poor person’s food, or a rich person’s food. It’s food. It’s powerful. And the real luxury is to be able to connect with each other around the dinner table.”

For Kumar, the win is a personal milestone but also a powerful act of visibility.

“When I started cooking, I never thought a dark-skinned boy from Tamil Nadu could make it to a room like this,” he said in his acceptance speech. It was therefore important for him to wear veshti, the traditional Tamil attire for men, for the black-tie James Beard ceremony as a nod to his roots.

Recently, Kumar was trolled by a pair of influencers in New York. Quick to rise to his defence was Padma Lakshmi, cookbook author and culinary ambassador, who called the influencers out for their cultural insensitivity.

Speaking to the BBC, Lakshmi said “Vijay’s story is important not just for south Indian food but also as a story of someone who grew up with humble means and cooked with limited resources.”

“This resourcefulness has not only propelled his work ethic but enhanced his sense of flavour, ingredients and sense of the world. He is a beacon of hope to young people all over the world that if you trust and develop your senses and skills, you can go far in a creative career.”

Kumar’s journey wasn’t smooth to start with.

Unable to afford engineering school in the big city, he chose culinary school instead – beginning his journey at Taj Connemara hotel in Chennai, cooking his way through cruise ships and kitchens, and eventually finding his promised land in America, working at Dosa in San Francisco.

His real breakthrough came when he partnered with Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya of Unapologetic Foods, a New York restaurant group, to open Semma – a Tamil slang word for “fantastic” in 2021.

The trio found a “shared sense of wanting to honour our heritage, to tell the world who we really are through our cuisine”.

“At that moment, it wasn’t just about food, it was about identity,” Mazumdar told the BBC. “For too long, Indian food in the US has lived under the veil of a manufactured, watered-down north-western lens. With Semma, we set out to pull back that curtain and share something more honest.”

Kumar jumped at the opportunity to share his cuisine with the world. “His eyes lit up when we started talking about the food we grew up eating, and that kind of food rarely makes it to restaurant menus,” recalls Mazumdar.

Kumar’s strength lies in serving authentic village food that is seasonal, hyper-local, and built entirely from scratch. His farm-to-table approach, he says, was to cook the way “my mother and grandmother did”. Semma, he adds, is a celebration of that simplicity.

That simplicity resonates.

Semma’s menu defies the clichés that often define Indian food abroad. There’s no butter chicken or naan here and Kumar’s epiphany came with an unlikely encounter: French escargot.

As a child, on days when rice was scarce, he would forage with his family for snails in the paddy fields, which would be cooked in a savoury tamarind sauce. Kumar admitted that he was ashamed of it as a boy as it “felt like food born of poverty – until I saw the pride with which the French serve escargot”.

Today, the dish, nathai pirattal, sits proudly on Semma’s menu, reimagined not as a memory of scarcity, but as a symbol of resilience and cultural pride.

Semma’s menu – pepper rasam, tamarind crab, banana flower vadai, the ubiquitous dosa – offer an emotional connection for many diaspora diners, and a revelation for first-timers.

Kumar’s intention to bring village-style Tamil food and showcase it in upscale spots and in the cut-throat New York restaurant space has won a long line of admirers.

There’s depth, regionality and a powerful emotional connection in this food.

The cocktails are a nod to Tamil film stars like Rajnikanth and Silk Smitha, and the décor channels Chennai’s warmth. Even the kitchen is a space of intention – cooks are asked to prepare food with “gratitude and mindfulness”.

“I invited him to curate a black-tie gala dinner for 650 guests at the Gold Gala in Los Angeles, and he made us all proud. A year later, people still talk about how incredible the food was,” says Lakshmi, applauding Kumar’s gift for bringing regional Indian cuisine to the most glamorous platforms.

The awards and accolades feel like a natural progression of his journey. Semma is the first New York restaurant serving only south Indian cuisine to win a Michelin star and topped The New York Times’s list for top 100 restaurants. And now the JBA for Kumar.

In many ways, Kumar is not just serving food – he is serving memory, pride and a quiet revolution.

His James Beard win is a recognition of his talent, but also an affirmation that regional Indian cuisine, with its bold spices and soulful simplicity, belongs at the centre of the global table.

Kumar’s win has piqued the “curiosity of young people from all over the Indian diaspora and instilled a greater pride in our food ways”, says Lakshmi. “This will be his greatest legacy.”

Adds Mazumdar, “This win is a signal that regionality matters, and that our stories and our roots have value on the world stage.”

Both sides of the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have committed to disarming and disengaging their alleged proxies.

But there are dozens of non-state armed groups active in the region and it’s not clear whether all of them will adhere to the ceasefire.

Just hours before the deal was signed, one of them, the Codeco militia, attacked a displaced persons camp in Ituri province, killing 10 people.

Keeping these non-state actors in line will be a tall order. Part of the peace deal involves creating the conditions to allow the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the conflict to return home.

That won’t be possible without a complete cessation of hostilities.

Due to the eastern DRC’s vast mineral resources, critical to modern technology including electric car and mobile phone batteries, the economic incentives for rebel groups are incredibly tempting, and this deal does not mention alternatives which may convince these groups to stop fighting over valuable territory. Integrating them into an under-resourced Congolese armed force is unlikely to prove enough of a deterrent.

It’s also still not clear what preferential access, if any, the US has been offered to the DRC’s minerals.

President Donald Trump has made it clear that this is one of his key incentives for agreeing to support the peace process. But granting the US unfettered access to the country’s mineral wealth is unpopular with many in the DRC, upset that the country’s resources have failed to provide a better life for its citizens.

As to the key questions of whether Rwandan forces will withdraw from eastern DRC, the US position is that once the Hutu-led FDLR, which Rwanda says is backed by the DRC and aims to overthrow the Rwandan government, is dismantled, then Rwanda will also row back on its “defensive measure”.

This appears to be an oblique reference to the presence of Rwandan armed forces in eastern DRC.

If the US is able to convince the Rwandans to do this in earnest, it would be a big victory for Washington and Kinshasa.

Rwanda has repeatedly denied its troops are on the ground in eastern DRC, despite credible reports they’ve actively supported groups like M23 in the region.

• Congolese rebels want peaceful solution to crisis, UN says
• Ex-DR Congo president returns from self-imposed exile, party says
• DR Congo conflict tests China’s diplomatic balancing act
• How DR Congo’s Tutsis become foreigners in their own country
• ‘They took all the women here’: Rape survivors recall horror of DR Congo jailbreak

Strawberries and cream – an iconic British combo since the 1800s. But do they belong together in a sandwich?

M&S has rolled out a limited-edition strawberries and cream sandwich, made with strawberries, whipped cream cheese and sweetened bread, which it says is inspired by the “viral Japanese fruit sando”. The supermarket chain says it was its top-selling sandwich the two days after its launch.

Strawberry sandwiches are available at some Japanese bakeries in the UK, but M&S’s offering appears to be the first time they have been widely available on supermarket shelves.

The idea of serving fruit in a sandwich might sound unusual but it’s nothing new in Japan. Known as “furutsu sando”, they became popular after Japanese fruit shops opened parlours selling desserts for customers to sample their wares.

They recently became sought-after around the world after going viral on social media, with Western tourists on TikTok scrambling to get their hands on the version sold in Japanese convenience store chain 7-Eleven.

Fruit sandwiches are typically made of sweetened, soft, spongy white bread filled with whipped cream and fruit, typically strawberries or clementine, says Shuko Oda, chef at Koya restaurant in London. They’re usually cut into triangles so that the fruit is on display.

“It looks quite pretty,” Shuko says, adding that the sandwiches are a “fun play on texture”.

Some people in Japan make them at home, but they’re more commonly bought from convenience stores, food halls or dedicated fruit sando stores, she says. People often enjoy them as a snack with tea or coffee or served on a plate alongside savoury sandwiches.

In the UK, it’s not as uncommon as you might think to pair fruit with slices of bread for a sandwich. Think of banana sandwiches, served with the fruit sliced or mashed, or the nostalgia of childhood jam sandwiches. Coronation chicken sandwiches are made with dried apricots or sultanas, too.

What is a sandwich, at its core? Does it have to be savoury? And does it have to even be made with typical wheat bread – take the jibarito, for example, which is made with fried plantain instead.

What about Scandinavian open sandwiches? And if they count as sandwiches, then what about French toast topped with fruit and sauce?

The Oxford English Dictionary says sandwiches are made of two thin slices of bread, usually buttered, “with a savoury… or other filling”.

Though humans have been making bread for thousands of years, the sandwich as we know it today is said to owe its popularity to John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich. The story goes that he asked his staff to bring him meat between two slices of bread so he could continue playing cards without stopping to eat.

Some of the sandwiches we eat in the UK would raise eyebrows around the world. Take crisp sarnies, coronation chicken sandwiches, or the humble chip butty. But if you’re feeling inspired by Japan’s strawberry sandos and want to up your sandwich game, here are some more sandwiches from around the world.

Bánh mì is a Vietnamese sandwich served in a baguette, typically filled with meat, pate, pickles and spicy sauces. It’s usually eaten for breakfast. BBC Food has a recipe made with sweet and spicy pork belly and chilli sauce.

Croque monsieur is a French sandwich served hot with gooey, melted cheese. It’s made with white sauce, cheese, ham and mustard, cooked under the grill. To mix it up, served with a fried egg on top and – voila – you have a croque madame.

A po’ boy, which comes from “poor boy”, is a New Orleans street food sandwich that celebrates Louisiana’s seafood. A huge variety of fillings are available, but the most popular include fried shrimp, crab or lobster nestled among lettuce, remoulade and pickles. BBC Food has a simplified version you can make at home more easily using frozen scampi.

Rather than using bread made from typical wheat flour, arepas are made using corn flour. They’re also popular in Colombia, but it’s Venezuela where they’re most often made into sandwiches. One popular filling is Reina Pepiada, which combines chicken, avocado and coriander.

We’re no strangers to doubling up on carbs in the UK – and the Australian spaghetti jaffle draws on the same principle. It is made by serving leftover spaghetti in tomato sauce inside a toastie. At convenience stores across Japan, you can also pick up a yakisoba pan – noodles served in a hot dog bun.

Francesinha, a Portuguese sandwich originating in Porto, is a cheese and meat lover’s heaven. The impressive structure is made by filling a lightly toasted bread with a steak, sausage, cheese and ham.

More cheese is then placed on top, and the whole sandwich is typically baked in the oven until the cheese melts and then served with an egg on top. A spicy sauce made with Port, beer and tomato is then poured over the whole thing. If that wasn’t filling enough already, it’s usually served with chips on the side.

At his 1,200-person cleaning business in Maryland, chief executive Victor Moran carefully screens new recruits to make sure they are authorised to work in the US.

Even so, President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants is starting to chip away at his workforce.

About 15 people have left his company, Total Quality, since Trump won a fight to strip immigrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua from temporary protections shielding them from deportation, he says.

If the White House expands its efforts, it could cost him hundreds more of his workers, who rely on similar work permits and would be difficult to replace.

Similar kinds of concerns are reverberating at businesses across the US, as Trump’s deportation drive appears to pick up pace, threatening to choke off a supply of workers that is increasingly critical to the US economy.

Nearly one in five workers in the US was an immigrant last year, according to census data. That marked a record high in data going back decades, up from less than 10% in 1994.

Trump has said he is targeting people in the US illegally, who account for an estimated 4% of the US workforce. His pledge to conduct mass deportations was a centrepiece of his campaign and an issue on which he drew widespread support, including many Hispanic voters.

His administration has resumed raids at workplaces, a tactic that had been suspended under Biden.

But White House efforts have been much broader in scope, taking aim at people in the US on student visas; suspending admissions of refugees; and moving to revoke temporary work permits and other protections that had been granted to immigrants by previous presidents.

The actions threaten disruption to millions of people, many of whom have lived and worked in the US for years.

“We are terrified,” says Justino Gomez, who is originally from El Salvador and has lived in the US for three decades.

The 73-year-old is authorised to work under a programme known as TPS, which grants temporary work permits and protection from deportation, based on conditions in immigrants’ home countries.

His employment, first as a dishwasher and line cook in a restaurant and now as a cleaner, helped him send an adopted daughter in El Salvador to school to become a teacher.

But Trump has already taken steps to end the programme for people from Haiti and Venezuela. Mr Gomez, who lives in Maryland, fears El Salvador could be next.

“Every time I leave home, I have this stress on my mind,” he tells the BBC, through a translator provided by his labour union, 32BJ SEIU. “Even when I go to the metro, I’m afraid that ICE will be there waiting to abduct us.”

Many of Trump’s actions have been subject to legal challenge, including a lawsuit over TPS brought by the SEIU.

But even if the White House does not successfully ramp up arrests and deportations, analysts say his crackdown could weigh on the economy in the near term, as it scares people like Mr Gomez into hiding and slows arrivals.

Growth in the workforce, which has been powered by immigrants, has already flattened since January, when Trump took office.

As firms have a harder time finding workers, it will limit their ability to grow, slowing the economy, warns economist Giovanni Peri of University of California, Davis.

A smaller workforce could also feed inflation, by forcing firms to pay more to recruit staff.

If the policies are sustained, they could have far-reaching economic consequences, Prof Peri adds. He points to the example of Japan, which has seen its economy shrink as it keeps a lid on immigration and the population ages.

“The undocumented raids are a piece of a policy that really wants to transform the United States from one of the places where immigrants come, are integrated and part of the success of society to a closed country,” he says.

“Instead of an engine of growth, it will become a more stagnant and slow growing and less dynamic economy.”

Many firms say it is already hard to find people to fill the jobs available.

Adam Lampert, the chief executive of Texas-based Cambridge Caregivers and Manchester Care Homes, which provides assisted living and in-home care, says about 80% of his 350 staff are foreign-born.

“I don’t go out and place ads for non-citizens to fill our roles,” he says. “It is the immigrants who are answering the call.”

Like Mr Moran, he said Trump’s moves had already cost him some workers, who had been authorised to work on temporary permits.

He said he was also worried about the ripple effects of Trump’s crackdown on his business, which in some ways competes with undocumented workers employed directly by families to provide care.

He said if those workers are forced out, it will drive up demand for his own staff – forcing him to pay more, and ultimately raise his rates.

“We’re going to have incredible inflation if you scrape all these people out of the economy,” he warned. “We can’t do without these people in the workforce.”

At Harris Health System, a major hospital network in Texas, Trump’s policy changes have already led to the loss of some workers, says chief executive Esmail Porsa.

He says training American workers to fill the jobs available in his sector would take years, given the rising needs.

“As the population is getting older and we are clamping down on one viable source of current and future workforce, this issue will come to a head,” he says.

Trump last week acknowledged the disruption his policies were creating for sectors that rely heavily on undocumented labour, such as hospitality and agriculture, even reportedly pausing workplace raids in some industries temporarily after receiving blowback from fellow Republicans.

But despite the concerns about the economic impact, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the BBC that such raids remain a “cornerstone” of their efforts.

In the homebuilding industry, firms across the country are reporting seeing some work crews stop showing up for work, which will slow construction and raise costs in a sector where prices are already a concern, says Jim Tobin, president of the National Association of Homebuilders, which represents businesses in the sector.

The industry has called on Congress to reform immigration laws, including creating a special visa programme for construction workers.

But Mr Tobin says he was not expecting big changes to immigration policy anytime soon.

“I think it’s going to take a signal from the president about when it’s time to engage,” he says. “Right now it’s all about enforcement.”

Dame Anna Wintour had just sent off her first edition of US Vogue in October 1988 when the magazine received a phone call from the printers. They had seen the issue’s front cover, and had one question: “Has there been a mistake?”

The cover, Dame Anna’s first as editor-in-chief, featured a lesser-known model, Michaela Bercu, smiling at the camera in a stylish Christian Lacroix couture jacket.

But two things were notably different from usual: the model was standing outside, in the street, and wearing a pair of jeans. The printers half-assumed there had been some kind of error.

“I couldn’t blame them,” Dame Anna later recalled. “It was so unlike the studied and elegant close-ups that were typical of Vogue’s covers back then, with tons of makeup and major jewellery. This one broke all the rules.”

The jeans had, in fact, been a last-minute addition, after the skirt which Bercu was supposed to wear didn’t fit properly. But the intended message was clear: the cover star was a regular, everyday girl – and this was a new era for Vogue.

Dame Anna’s arrival, and desire to defy convention, “signalled a revolution” at the magazine, according to CNN Style’s Oscar Holland, who praised her debut issue as “warm and easygoing”.

After two years in charge of British Vogue, Dame Anna had been hired for the US edition precisely to shake things up. She was tasked with making sure the magazine didn’t lose its edge as it headed towards the 1990s.

In the decades since, Dame Anna has “steered the title from glossy print editions featuring first supermodels then grunge, via Noughties celebrity culture and reality TV stars, into an online era of social media and digital publishing,” noted the Times’ fashion editor Harriet Walker.

But this week, Dame Anna announced she would be stepping back as Vogue’s editor-in-chief after 37 years.

She will remain publisher Condé Nast’s chief content officer, a role she was appointed to in 2020, which means she will still oversee Vogue’s content, along with the company’s other titles such as GQ, Wired and Tatler.

But while she may be staying with the company, her departure as editor-in-chief marks the end of an extraordinary era for the magazine, which helped to define pop culture.

Dame Anna will be remembered for “the greater sense of informality that she brought to her early Vogue covers” and the tone they set, says Dr Kate Strasdin, senior lecturer at the Falmouth University’s Fashion and Textile Institute.

“She also pioneered the celebrity cover image, positioning popular culture beneath the famous Vogue banner.”

In her first year as editor-in-chief, Dame Anna put Madonna on the cover, the first celebrity to have featured, as part of her wider mission to merge the words of fashion and entertainment.

“She was the first to make fashion a global, cultural industry,” Marian Kwei, a stylist and contributor to Vogue, told BBC Radio 4’s Today. But, she adds, Dame Anna “also showed that fashion could be more approachable”.

“She took away the elitism that was in fashion, and brought a democratisation, and made fashion this party that everybody else was invited to.”

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, however. In 1993, animal rights group Peta occupied her office in protest over Dame Anna’s decision to wear fur, something she no longer does.

There were arguably occasional cultural missteps, too. The LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen cover in April 2008 sparked a debate, Dr Strasdin recalls, about whether it reinforced old stereotypes of race and power.

More recently, Dame Anna faced a much more existential challenge – how to move Vogue into the digital age with hugely increased competition.

In 2018, designer Philip Plein compared the number of Vogue’s readers with the number of Instagram followers Kim Kardashian had.

“So what is more important nowadays for a brand?” he asked. “This is an interesting question.”

In a fast-moving media landscape, some industry watchers may wonder whether Dame Anna was quietly asked to step down by Conde Nast to make way for fresh blood.

But Alexandra Shulman, former editor of British Vogue, said she doubted this, telling BBC News: “I don’t think there’s any view that a new vision is needed.

“Anna’s made it perfectly clear that she’s remaining in control at American Vogue… so I think she will still have the final say.”

Shulman added that it was likely Dame Anna herself would choose her successor at Vogue.

Dame Anna is as known for her own image as much as the aesthetic she has created in her magazines. Her trademark sunglasses and bobbed haircut are partly what helped her become such an instantly recognisable figure.

She told the BBC’s Katie Razzall last year, somewhat cryptically, that her sunglasses “help me see and they help me not see… they help me be seen and not be seen”.

The editor has always been something of an enigma, and will be well aware that the conversation and speculation that surrounds her just fuels the interest further.

But she played down the focus on her image, saying: “I don’t really think about it. What I’m really interested in is the creative aspect of my job.”

Her reputation as an editor has, of course, been widely debated, Dr Strasdin notes.

“The fashion industry has traditionally been a space where egos and creativity can clash spectacularly,” she says, adding that documentaries such as The September Issue and First Monday in May “offer some insight into the strangeness of that world”.

Over time, Dame Anna gradually became a significant figure not just in fashion, but western culture. She is regularly referenced in hip-hop lyrics, with Nicki Minaj, Jay-Z and Ye (formerly Kanye West) among the artists who have name-checked her.

“I believe what she has done,” reflected Kwei, “is carved a space in fashion, culture, time, history that we will never be able to outdo”.

Dame Anna was the loose inspiration for Miranda Priestly, the demon magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada, portrayed on screen by Meryl Streep.

The editor has appeared to enjoy occasionally leaning in to the comparison, and last year attended the gala night for the stage adaptation.

But asked if she thought people were frightened of her in real life, Dame Anna replied: “I hope not.”

Dame Anna’s impact can be seen in all kinds of ways, including, for example, at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wedding to Lauren Sánchez in Venice this weekend.

“She created that moment, and almost created that brand,” the former Sun editor David Yelland told the BBC. “It was when she put Lauren Sancehz on the front of Vogue in 2023, that the Bezos/Sanchez brand started.

“She did the same with Kim Kardashian and she did the same with the Trumps. When she put Ivana on the front in 1990 it was incredibly controversial, people called it tacky, but that was the beginning of the Trump brand in the higher end of global society. So she’s not just an editor, she’s the high priestess of our time.”

The question of Dame Anna’s successor is complicated. “This is a challenging era for print media,” explains Dr Strasdin. “Vogue’s social media platforms are frequently under fire for the seemingly relentless celebrity content which critics decry as diluting the mission of Vogue.

“But a strong digital presence is vital. Eva Chen, as director of fashion partnerships for Instagram, brings that expertise. She has long been a Met Gala regular and has to be on the longlist I should think.”

“Chioma Nnadi must also be in the running,” she continues. “She hails from London, and has spent the last two years heading up editorial content at British Vogue. She is Wintour’s protege and it does feel as if she has been waiting in the wings.”

Other possible candidates, according to the Daily Mail’s fashion editor Margaret Abrams, include former head of Teen Vogue Amy Astley, who still works for Condé Nast editing another magazine.

Vogue’s senior editor Chloe Schama, her namesake Chloe Malle, editor of Vogue’s website, or even Dame Anna’s own daughter, film producer Bee Shaffer Carrozzini, could also be in the frame.

“As ever fashion is regarded as both superficial and economically valuable,” says Dr Strasdin.

“Anna Wintour has had to tread the tightrope of maintaining relevance as far as style is concerned at the very same time that fashion has had to undergo re-evaluation in relation to sustainability, plagiarism and labour conditions.

“I think these are the very real concerns that her successor will have to navigate.”

Georgian opposition leader Nika Melia has become the latest opposition figure to be sent to jail this week in a crackdown described by observers as an unprecedented attack on the country’s democracy.

The South Caucausus state has seen months of political turmoil since the government halted its path to join the EU in the wake of disputed elections.

Six prominent politicians have been given jail terms, and another two are in pre-trial detention, so that most of the leaders of the pro-Western opposition are now behind bars.

On Friday, Nika Melia, one of the leaders of Coalition for Change, was jailed for eight months by a court in Tbilisi and former opposition MP Givi Targamadze was given seven months.

The scale and speed of the crackdown has come as a shock, and Nika Melia accused the government of trying to break the courage of Georgians.

All of the jailed politicians have been convicted of refusing to testify before a parliamentary commission and barred from holding public office for two years.

In what it called “the most severe democratic collapse in Georgia’s post-Soviet history”, anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International said the governing Georgian Dream party, led by billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, had launched “a full-scale authoritarian offensive”.

In a matter of days, jail terms have also been handed down to four other opposition leaders: Giorgi Vashadze and Zurab Japaridze, as well as Badri Japaridze and Mamuka Khazaradze, two former bank executives. Another prominent opposition leader, Nika Gvaramia, is in pre-trial detention as well as a former defence minister.

“The Soviet Union has returned to our present and wants our minds to cling to the past,” Nika Melia wrote on Facebook. Georgia regained its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Norway said this week that the arrest of opposition leaders was an “unprecedented attack on Georgia’s democracy” and it called for an end to “repressive actions”.

After last October’s elections, the opposition accused Ivanishvili’s party of stealing the vote.

Opposition parties then boycotted parliament and, when the European Parliament denounced the election as neither free nor fair, the ruling party halted Georgia’s bid to join the European Union.

Georgians have since protested in central Tbilisi every night for more than 200 nights, demanding new elections and the release of all prisoners arrested during pro-EU rallies.

The government then set up an investigative parliamentary commission into the “alleged crimes” of the previous government before Georgian Dream came to power in 2012, specifically the period covering Georgia’s war with Russia in 2008.

Failing to comply with a “lawful request” by a parliamentary commission is a criminal offence under Georgia’s criminal code. Opposition politicians have refused to testify, partly because of their boycott of parliament, but also because they reject it as a politically motivated attack on government critics.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze told parliament on Friday that the commission was doing very important work exposing a previous government that was “entirely built on crime”.

“Everyone must understand once and for all that there is no place for criminals in Georgian politics.”

Human rights groups say 500 people have been arrested during the recent street protests and that 300 of them were subjected to torture. As many as 60 people are being held as political prisoners, they say.

Respected journalist Mzia Amaglobeli remains imprisoned, and independent TV stations face censorship and financial ruin.

Earlier this week 40 civil society groups said that Bidzina Ivanishvili had “chosen to maintain power through dictatorship, and fundamental human rights are violated every day”.

Ivanishvili, who is under US sanctions, accumulated his wealth in Russia during the 1990s. He formally retired from politics but is widely believed to have control over all branches of government.

Last month, a former confidant of Ivanishvili who went on the run said he was “kidnapped from abroad” and flown back to Georgia by force as a political prisoner.

Giorgi Bachiashvili had been on trial in Georgia accused of misappropriating millions of dollars in a case he said was politically motivated.

Georgian authorities say Bachiashvili, 39, was convicted of a crime while in absentia and will serve his jail sentence.

His lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, told the BBC he was deeply concerned for his safety: “Too many people see him as a highly competent political figure.”

The Supreme Court gave President Donald Trump a major win on Friday, ruling that a single judge cannot block a presidential order from taking effect nationwide.

The case stemmed from President Donald Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship for some children, which has been frozen by multiple lower courts. With Friday’s decision, that order can now begin to go ahead.

The six conservative members of the Supreme Court sided with the president, finding that injunctions can only apply to those who have sued.

Trump appointed three of the justices in his first term.

The liberal justices, meanwhile, said the ruling went too far in lessening courts’ powers and strengthening the president’s.

Today’s ruling was about these courts’ uses of injunctions – not Trump’s birthright citizenship order itself – meaning it could apply to several other cases involving nationwide injunctions as well.

LIVE: Follow BBC’s coverage of the Supreme Court decision

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at ending automatic citizenship rights for nearly anyone born on US territory – commonly known as “birthright citizenship”.

The move was instantly met by a series of lawsuits filed by five pregnant women, 22 states, two cities, the Maryland immigrant advocacy group CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project.

They are arguing the order goes against the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which established that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside”.

However, the Trump administration’s says the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means the amendment excludes children of people not in the country permanently or lawfully.

Judges in district courts in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state issued nationwide injunctions that blocked the order from taking effect.

In Washington, US District Court Judge John Coughenour called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional”.

Trump’s Department of Justice responded by saying the case did not warrant the “extraordinary measure” of a temporary restraining order and appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

Injunctions have served as a check on Trump during his second term, amid a flurry of executive orders signed by the president.

Roughly 40 different court injunctions have been filed this year. This includes two lower courts that blocked the Trump administration from banning most transgender people from the military, although the Supreme Court eventually intervened and allowed the policy to be enforced.

The most junior conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, wrote the opinion, saying that lower courts were taking too much power in freezing Trump’s orders. Under the constitution, the executive (president), judicial (courts) and legislative (Congress) branches of government are supposed to be equal.

“Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” Justice Barrett wrote. “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that if lower courts do not apply “historical equitable limits” in issuing injunctions the Supreme Court will continue to intervene.

The Supreme Court did not do away with injunctions entirely. Judges can block the orders from taking effect for the people who sue against them while their lawsuits proceed. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that people challenging an order can band together “statewide, region-wide or even nationwide” in a class action lawsuit.

The issue of nationwide injunctions had long troubled Supreme Court justices across the ideological spectrum.

Liberal Justice Elena Kagan said in remarks in 2022: “It can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process.”

Nationwide injunctions have also been criticised for enabling what is known as forum shopping – the practice of filing a lawsuit in a jurisdiction where a more favourable ruling is likely.

Another critique of injunctions is the speed at which they are delivered versus their far-reaching impact.

The Trump administration had argued that judges were making high stakes decisions with little time to consider the case and “low information”.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s most senior liberal, wrote a passionate dissent from the ruling, which she read from the bench.

She wrote the ruling took too much power from the courts so that the three branches of government were no longer equal, while arguing that the government had played games in asking the court to make a decision on injunctions instead of on birthright citizenship. She also wrote extensively about birthright citizenship itself.

“By stripping all federal courts, including itself, of that power, the Court kneecaps the Judiciary’s authority to stop the Executive from enforcing even the most unconstitutional policies,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had said earlier that the Trump administration’s argument advocated for a “catch me if you can” justice system.

“Your argument says ‘we get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, etc,'” Jackson had said.

On Friday she wrote that the decision “to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law”.

In general, the liberal justices, along with those arguing against the Trump administration, were concerned about consistency, saying there would be “chaos” in the absence of a nationwide injunction, creating a patchwork system of citizenship.

The order will go into effect for anyone not a party to the lawsuit in 30 days.

The injunctions will only remain in place for “each plaintiff with standing to sue”, according to the opinion.

When the state itself is a plaintiff, the lower court could still decide a nationwide injunction is warranted, said University of Michigan legal scholar Margo Schlanger. But that interpretation would likely also be appealed by the federal government, she noted.

“It narrowed the path for an injunction, but it didn’t cut it off completely,” she told the BBC.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the merits of the birthright citizenship order itself at some date in the future.

Most legal scholars believe it would likely be found unconstitutional.

Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that birthright citizenship is the “law of the land” and the order is “patently unconstitutional”.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Friday, though, the administration expects the Supreme Court to agree with it and uphold the order in October.

The US Supreme Court has sided with parents in the state of Maryland who wanted to opt their children out of reading books with LGBTQ themes.

The justices voted 6-3 in support of the group of parents who said a curriculum adopted in 2022 by the Montgomery County Public Schools for elementary age children violated their religious rights.

The court’s majority said the parents who brought the case are entitled to a preliminary injunction while it proceeds.

The introduction of the books “along with its decision to withhold opt-outs, places an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion”, Justice Samuel Alito wrote.

The ruling allowed the preliminary relief, arguing the parents showed their case is likely to succeed on its merits, they are likely to suffer irreparable harm in its absence and that an injunction would be in the public interest.

The three liberal justices dissented.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion that the result of the case will be “chaos for this nation’s public schools”.

“Given the great diversity of religious beliefs in this country, countless interactions that occur every day in public schools might expose children to messages that conflict with a parents’ beliefs,” she added.

The parents involved represent several different faiths, but all oppose their children being introduced to LGBTQ themes.

The US Constitution’s First Amendment protects the right to freely exercise one’s religious beliefs, which the parents argued includes the right to pull their children out of lessons they find offensive.

They also pointed to school rules that allow parents to opt older children out of sex education.

The books include Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, which tells the story of a girl being told about her uncle’s planned gay wedding, and Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, about a transgender boy.

The parents argued they have no objection to the books being on the shelf or available in the library.

Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, added the books in an effort to provide greater diversity in the stories children read. In 2023, it removed the opt-out option because it caused classroom disruption and could expose LGBTQ students to social stigma and isolation.

In a statement on Friday, Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said the “ruling not only tells LGBTQ+ students that they don’t belong, but that their experiences and existence are less worthy of respect”.

Eric Baxter, the attorney representing the group of parents, said the court’s ruling was “a win-win situation for parents everywhere”.

At a hearing for the case earlier this year, the justices appeared split along ideological lines. The court’s conservative majority expressed sympathy for the group’s argument.

Iran’s foreign minister has admitted that “excessive and serious” damage was done to the country’s nuclear sites in the recent US and Israeli bombings.

Abbas Araghchi told a state broadcaster on Thursday evening that an assessment of the damage is being carried out by the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran.

But, just hours earlier, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the strikes did not disrupt the country’s nuclear programme. Khamenei was responding to US President Donald Trump’s assertion that the bombs had “totally obliterated” three nuclear sites.

Khamenei said the US attacks had failed to “accomplish anything significant”.

The supreme leader, who has been in hiding since the war with Israel began on 13 June, insisted that Trump had “exaggerated” the impact of the bombs, and declared victory over the US and Israel.

But Araghchi’s remarks create a different impression.

The foreign minister also said there were no plans to resume nuclear talks with the US. Iran cancelled a scheduled sixth round of talks when Israel began its attacks.

• When Iran’s supreme leader emerges from hiding he will find a very different nation

“I would like to state clearly that no agreement, arrangement or conversation has been made to start new negotiations,” he said.

He added that the government was examining what was in the “interest of the Iranian people”, saying its approach to diplomacy will take a “new form”.

He did not explain what he meant.

In an attempt to bring Iran back to the negotiating table, the Trump administration has discussed the possibility of helping Iran access $30bn to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear programme, easing sanctions and freeing up billions of dollars in restricted Iranian funds, CNN has reported.

But developments in Iran might obstruct such a move.

On Wednesday, Iran’s parliament approved a bill to stop co-operation with the global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). If it is implemented, it would mean Iran is no longer committed to allowing nuclear inspectors into its sites.

Israel has said its offensive against Iran was necessary to thwart what it claims are Iranian plans to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran has always insisted its nuclear programme is only intended for civilian purposes.

The US became directly involved in the conflict last weekend, striking facilities in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan, before Trump sought to rapidly mediate a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said intelligence gathered by the US and Israel indicated the strikes “significantly damaged the nuclear programme, setting it back by years”.

A leaked preliminary Pentagon assessment downplayed the significance of the damage and said the US strikes only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by a few months. The leak has been dismissed by the administration.

Iran’s health ministry said 610 people were killed during the 12 days of Israel air strikes, while Israeli authorities said 28 were killed in Israel.

US President Donald Trump has said he is cutting off trade talks with Canada “immediately” as the country looks to start enforcing a tax policy targeting big tech companies.

The latest move, which he announced on social media, comes as the neighbouring nations had been working to agree a trade deal by mid-July.

Both countries have imposed tariffs on each other’s goods after Trump sparked a trade war earlier this year and threatened to annex Canada using “economic force”.

On Friday, the US president said he was ending talks due to what he called an “egregious tax” on tech companies and added he would announce new tariffs on goods crossing the border within the next week.

“We are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” he wrote on social media.

“We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”

In brief comments to reporters, Prime Minister Mark Carney suggested that talks would continue.

“We will continue to conduct these complex negotiations in the best interest of Canadians,” he said.

Canada’s 3% digital services tax has been a sticking point in its relationship with the US since the law was enacted last year. The first payments are due on Monday.

Business groups estimate it will cost American companies, such as Amazon, Apple and Google, more than $2bn a year.

Canadian officials had said they expected to address the issue as part of trade talks with the US.

There were hopes that the relatively warm relationship that newly-elected Carney has forged with Trump might help those negotiations.

The president’s latest move casts doubt on a future deal, though Trump has often used social media threats to try to gain leverage in talks or speed up negotiations he sees as stalling.

Last month, for example, he threatened to ramp up tariffs on goods arriving to US shores from the European Union, only to climb down a few days later.

Candace Laing, chief executive of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce which has been critical of the digital services tax, said that “last-minute surprises should be expected” as the deadline for a deal approaches.

“The tone and tenor of talks has improved in recent months, and we hope to see progress continue,” she added.

During Trump’s first term, the White House fought hard as many countries began considering taxes on digital services.

But Inu Malak, fellow for trade policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that the issue was left unresolved in the trade deal the US and the UK reached earlier this year, suggesting some flexibility.

She said Trump’s threat seemed like a move to ramp up pressure out of his typical negotiating “playbook – but was also a sign the president had refocused on Canada, which could open the way for a deal.

“It does provide a bit of an opening – maybe not the one that Prime Minister Carney wanted … but it does provide some space for them to hasten those talks,” she said.

The US is Canada’s top trade partner, buying more than $400bn in goods last year under a longstanding free trade agreement.

But Trump hit that trade with a new 25% tariff earlier this year, citing concerns about drug trafficking at the border.

New US tariffs on cars, steel and aluminium have also scrambled relations. Car parts, for example, cross US, Mexican and Canadian borders multiple times before a vehicle is completely assembled and such import taxes threaten supply chains.

Trump later carved out exemptions for some goods in the face of widespread alarm from businesses in both the US and Canada, which has hit back with tariffs of its own on some US products.

Shares in the US fell on Friday after Trump said he was cutting off talks, but later bounced back with the S&P 500 closing at a record high.

Reality stars, actors, royals and a whole host of A-listers have travelled to Venice for the lavish wedding between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.

Oprah Winfrey, Orlando Bloom, Kylie Jenner and Ivanka Trump were just some of the celebrities seen on the boats and streets of the Italian city on Thursday and Friday.

The festivities are expected to last three days, ending with a large party for the married couple and their hundreds of guests on Saturday.

The event has attracted protests from a variety of groups in Venice, including locals fighting over-tourism to climate change activists.

The Supreme Court on Friday handed a significant victory to Donald Trump – and future American presidents – when curbing lower courts’ power to block executive orders.

President Trump was beaming as he addressed reporters at the White House briefing room podium, calling it a “big, amazing decision” which the administration is “very happy about”.

He said it was a “monumental victory for the constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law”.

The court’s decision not only impacts Trump’s birthright citizenship order, but also emboldens him to enact many of his other policy actions that have been temporarily thwarted by similar injunctions.

The Supreme Court has opened the door for the Trump administration to no longer grant automatic citizenship to everyone born on American soil – at least for the moment. Now the White House will have to implement its plan, which will be no easy task.

On Friday, the nation’s highest court allowed Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship to go into effect in a month’s time, while leaving room for lower courts to curb the impact on those who have standing to sue.

States traditionally handle processing birth certificates, and many do not record the citizenship of the parents. Democratic-run state governments will be in no rush to do so, no matter what the Trump administration may desire.

And Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, left the door open for states to make the case that a more broad block on Trump’s birthright citizenship action is necessary.

That sets up big legal battles to come.

“As the States see it, their harms — financial injuries and the administrative burdens flowing from citizen-dependent benefits programs — cannot be remedied without a blanket ban on the enforcement of the Executive Order,” Barrett wrote.

“The lower courts should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate, so we leave it to them to consider these and any related arguments.”

President Trump described the court’s decision on Friday as a “giant win”.

He added that the “birthright citizenship hoax” has been “indirectly, hit hard” and that the decision would prevent “scamming of our immigration process”.

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday that the Supreme Court will decide whether the US will end birthright citizenship in October during its next session.

The court’s decision to limit the power of lower court federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions will have immediate, wide-ranging consequences.

Both Democratic and Republican presidents have often criticised what they say are ideological jurists in federal district courts who have been able to singlehandedly block executive actions and even legislation passed by Congress.

While doing away automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants born on US soil is at the centre of this high profile case, there are a number of other actions taken by Trump in recent months that have also been held up by lower-level judges.

From Trump’s inauguration to April 29, the Congressional Research Service counts 25 such instances.

Following the court’s decision on Friday, Trump told journalists, “We can now properly file to proceed with policies that have been wrongly enjoined.”

Lower courts have blocked the president’s cuts to foreign assistance, diversity programmes and other government agencies, limited his ability to terminate government employees, put other immigration reforms on hold and suspended White House issued changes to election processes.

With the Supreme Court’s decision in this case, the administration is in a much stronger position to ask courts to allow it to push forward on many of these efforts.

During the Biden presidency, conservative judges prevented Democrats from enacting new environmental regulations, offering student loan forgiveness, modifying immigration rules. Courts blocked changes to normalised immigration status for some undocumented migrants during Barack Obama’s presidency, as well, and prevented him from making more white collar employees eligible for overtime pay.

In all these types of cases, courts will ultimately be able to step in and halt presidential actions that they deem illegal or unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court in its opinion said, ” The lower courts shall move expeditiously to ensure that, with respect to each plaintiff, the injunctions comport with this rule and otherwise comply with principles of equity.”

But that will come further along in the judicial process, at the appellate and Supreme Court level. In the meantime, presidents – Donald Trump and his successors, whether they are Republicans or Democrats – will have more time and space to act.

Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have signed a peace deal in Washington aimed at ending decades of devastating conflict between the two neighbours, and potentially granting the US lucrative mineral access.

The deal demands the “disengagement, disarmament and conditional integration” of armed groups fighting in eastern DR Congo.

Further details are scant and previous peace deals in the region have failed – yet that has not deterred the US and Congolese presidents from framing this as a generational victory.

“Today, the violence and destruction comes to an end, and the entire region begins a new chapter of hope and opportunity,” US President Donald Trump said on Friday.

Flanked by Vice-President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and delegates from DR Congo and Rwanda in the Oval Office, Trump called the peace treaty “a glorious triumph”.

“This is a tremendous breakthrough,” Trump said, shortly before adding his signature to the peace treaty signed earlier by the respective African delegates.

The deal was signed by the Congolese and Rwandan foreign ministers at the US State Department.

• Ceasefire deal still faces many challenges

“Another diplomatic success for President Félix Tshisekedi – certainly the most important in over 30 years,” .

There has been talk of Tshisekedi and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame going to Washington to meet Trump together, though no date has been fixed.

When tensions between the two countries escalated at the beginning of this year, Qatar intensified de-escalation efforts, according to a diplomat briefed on the negotiations.

Qatar sent envoys to both capitals to urge de-escalation, and after the Congolese and Rwandan presidents met in Doha, a joint committee was established, supported by the US, the diplomat added.

• What’s the fighting in DR Congo all about?
• The evidence that shows Rwanda is backing rebels in DR Congo
• Your phone, a rare metal and the war in DR Congo

Decades of conflict escalated earlier this year when M23 rebels seized control of large parts of eastern DR Congo including the regional capital, Goma, the city of Bukavu and two airports.

Thousands of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians forced from their homes following the recent rebel offensive.

After the loss of territory, the government in Kinshasa turned to the US for help, reportedly offering access to critical minerals in exchange for security guarantees. Eastern DR Congo is rich in coltan and other resources vital to the global electronics industries.

Rwanda denies supporting the M23 despite overwhelming evidence, and insists its military presence in the region is a defensive measure against threats posed by armed groups like the FDLR – a rebel militia composed largely of ethnic Hutus linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Rwanda in turn accuses the Congolese government of backing the FDLR, which is denied by DR Congo. Their presence is of utmost concern to Kigali.

When some information about the deal was released last week, a statement spoke of “provisions on respect for territorial integrity and a prohibition of hostilities”, but there were no specifics.

It also talked about the “facilitation of the return of refugees and internally displaced persons”.

According to a Reuters news agency report, Congolese negotiators had pushed for an immediate withdrawal of Rwandan soldiers, but Rwanda – which has at least 7,000 troops on Congolese soil – refused.

In an angry statement a day before the deal was signed, Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe condemned “the leak of a draft peace agreement” saying Rwanda had “demanded the other parties to respect the confidentiality of the discussions”.

The calls for the total withdrawal of Rwandan troops from DR Congo is major point of contention.

But Nduhungirehe said “the words ‘Rwanda Defense Force’, ‘Rwandan troops’ or ‘withdrawal’ are nowhere to be seen in the document”.

Just hours before the signing ceremony, Tshisekedi’s office said the agreement “does indeed provide for the withdrawal of Rwandan troops… [but] preferred the term disengagement to withdrawal simply because ‘disengagement’ is more comprehensive”.

Unless and until full details of the signed deal are made public, several crucial questions remain unanswered:

• Will the M23 rebel group withdraw from areas they have occupied?

• Does “respect for territorial integrity” mean Rwanda admits having troops in eastern DR Congo and will withdraw them?

• Would the agreed “return of refugees” allow thousands of Congolese back from Rwanda?

• Does “disarmament” mean that the M23 will now lay down their weapons?

• Who will disarm the FDLR, after the failure of several previous attempts?

• Would the agreed humanitarian access allow the reopening of the rebel-held airports for aid supply?

Prior to Friday’s signing, Rwandan government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo told Reuters news agency that the “lifting of defensive measures in our border area” would be contingent upon the FDLR’s “neutralisation”.

One of the main actors in today’s conflict – the M23 rebels – were spawned by a previous peace deal 16 years ago that failed to ensure demobilisation.

Last year, Rwandan and Congolese experts reached an agreement twice under Angolan mediation on the withdrawal of Rwandan troops and joint operations against the FDLR – but ministers from both countries failed to endorse the deal. Angola eventually stepped down as a mediator in March.

• Congolese rebels want peaceful solution to crisis, UN says
• Ex-DR Congo president returns from self-imposed exile, party says
• DR Congo conflict tests China’s diplomatic balancing act
• How DR Congo’s Tutsis become foreigners in their own country
• ‘They took all the women here’: Rape survivors recall horror of DR Congo jailbreak

The son of Norway’s crown princess is suspected of three rapes and 23 other offences, police said on Friday.

Marius Borg Høiby, who is the stepson of Norway’s future king, was arrested three separate times last year, in August, September and November.

After a 10-month investigation, Norwegian police have now handed the case over to prosecutors who will decide whether to press charges, police attorney Andreas Kruszewski said.

Høiby’s lawyer Petar Sekulic said his client was “taking the accusations very seriously, but doesn’t acknowledge any wrongdoing in most of the cases – especially the cases regarding sexual abuse and violence”.

The 28-year-old, who does not have a royal title or official duties, had been under investigation since his arrest on 4 August 2024 on suspicion of assault.

In a statement, Oslo Police District said they carried out a “thorough investigation”, with a “large number of witness interviews, several searches and a review of extensive digital material”.

Høiby was questioned several times during the autumn of 2024 and spring of 2025 and “cooperated with the police”, the statement said.

Amongst the offences police said Høiby was suspected of were four counts of sexually offensive behaviour, one count of abuse in a close relationship and two counts of bodily harm.

Police confirmed that some cases involving sexual offences had been dismissed due to “statute of limitations and evidentiary reasons”.

“I cannot go into further detail about the number of victims in the case beyond confirming that it is a double-digit number,” Mr Kruszewski said.

The Royal House of Norway noted in a statement that the case was proceeding through the legal system and had nothing further to add.

The 1975 emerged from hibernation to headline Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage on Friday, playing their only date of the year, and their first since March 2024.

If they were rusty, it didn’t show. The band delivered a slick, crowd-pleasing show, full of streamlined hits and delightfully wonky stage banter.

Frontman Matty Healy is a fascinating creature. Simultaneously cocksure and anxious, he chain-smoked throughout the set, while delivering verbose lyrics about modern love and digital disconnection.

“This is really scary and I’m really nervous and I thank you so much for coming,” he told the audience as the set kicked off.

The band emerged in a flicker of static and staccato strings, accompanied by a lone saxophone, before breaking into Happiness.

That was followed by heady rush of their biggest songs: If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know), Love Me and She’s American – with Healy adding a few bars of the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way for good measure.

The band were musically tight, mixing the digital textures of modern pop with chunky rock riffs and a healthy dose of 80s yacht rock – but the set often felt a little too safe.

Healy’s wilder excesses – kissing fans in the front row, eating raw meat – were notably absent. And the untamed, punky energy of People was the only number where the band were really allowed to cut loose.

But as a tour through The 1975’s greatest hits, the set was impeccable.

Formed in Cheshire 23 years ago, songs from their self-titled debut album – including Chocolate, Sex, and Robbers – are now old enough now to be considered classics, and they were all met with screams and singalongs.

Love It If We Made It was urgent and bleak and hopeful, as it dissected the overwhelming nature of modern life.

And Give Yourself A Try felt cast Healy as an older brother, dispensing well-meaning advice to young festivalgoers.

“” he sang. “

After Part Of The Band, Healy stepped up to the microphone with an important announcement.

“I have this thing where it’s difficult to tell when I’m being sincere,” he said. “But I want to be sincere.

“What this moment is making me realise is that I, probably, am the best songwriter of my generation.

“The best poet, ladies and gentlemen, is what I am. A generational poet.”

He then cued up Chocolate – a song about fleeing from the police with a stash of marijuana.

I can’t quite decide if that self-deprecation is The 1975’s greatest strength or their Achilles’ heel.

At one point, a big sign flashes up between songs, saying “Matty is changing his trousers”.

It deconstructs the artifice of a rock show, making The 1975 seem more human – but equally, it deflates the excitement of watching a band in full flow.

Or maybe I’m overthinking it. That’s what The 1975 do to you.

Perhaps the most significant moment came towards the end, as Healy explained why the notoriously outspoke band, who’ve been banned from Malaysia for protesting it’s anti-homosexuality laws, had steered clear of politics for the night.

“We don’t want our legacy to be one of politics, we want it to be one of love and friendships. Go out into the world and there’s loads of politics out there, and we need more love and friendship.”

Perhaps they were biting their tongues, aware of unfamiliar audiences watching at home.

Otherwise, it will be interesting to see how that retreat from social commentary affects their forthcoming sixth album.

The 1975 topped the bill in a day that saw several surprise performances across the site – although none of the secrets were particularly well kept.

Lewis Capaldi made a triumphant and emotional comeback, two years after he was unable to make it through a career-making performance on the Pyramid Stage.

After that performance, where a combination of anxiety and Tourette’s conspired to make him lose his voice, the musician took a two year break from the stage.

He laid those ghosts to rest on the Pyramid Stage just before tea-time, emerging to a huge swell of support from the audience.

“I just wanted to come and finish what I couldn’t finish first time around,” he told them, as tears welled in his eyes.

• Read more about Lewis Capaldi’s comeback.

Earlier, festival bosses had to close down the Woodsies field at 11:15am after word spread that pop star Lorde would open the stage.

Fans spilled out of the tent and into the field as she arrived on stage shortly afterwards, to play her new album, Virgin, in full.

It was an interesting ploy. The album had only come out a couple of hours earlier, leaving most people unfamiliar with the material.

While the audience made a concerted effort to grasp the new shapes and sounds, there was a noticeable uplift when Lorde closed her set with Ribs and Green Light.

• Read more about Lorde’s secret set

Other surprise sets came from Jarvis Cocker, who played a DJ set on the Greenpeace stage, and Olivia Dean, who appeared in the Strummerville tent.

Elsewhere, rumours spread that Foo Fighters’ frontman Dave Grohl was handing out programmes at one of the festival gates; and Paul McCartney was spotted watching Irish band Inhaler from the side of the Pyramid Stage.

Highlights of the first day included CMAT, who drew a huge crowd to the Pyramid Stage, making them laugh, dance, cry and sing along to her spirited country-pop songs.

“I’m CMAT, I have middle child syndrome, an amazing ass and the best Irish rock and roll country band in the world!” she declared, not inaccurately.

• CMAT says she still faces abuse after viral song

Over on The Other Stage, Wet Leg proved they deserve higher billing than their mid-afternoon slot, with a set full of shaggy rock riffs and sardonic wit.

Battling the heat, singer Rhian Teasdale poured cans of water over her head between fan favourite songs like Ur Mum and recent single Catch These Fists, but the biggest reception was reserved for their breakout hit Chaise Longue.

Bringing a very different energy was hip-hop legend Busta Rhymes, whose cartoonish energy and breakneck rap flow was guaranteed to get the audience on side.

“We represent that real hip-hop culture,” he boasted, after a run of hits that included Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See, Scenario and Woo Hah!! (Got You All In Check).

“We don’t need no special effects,” Busta continued.

“You know why? Because we are the special effects.”

Loyle Carner followed him, with a more mellow take on rap – based around the tender tracks of his new album, Hopefully!

The Croydon-raised rapper performed many of the early songs with his eyes closed, seemingly overwhelmed by what he called “the biggest show of our lives”.

But as Sampha came out to join him on Desoleil (Brilliant Corners), Carner began to smile, and relaxed into his blissed-out set.

After Lorde’s set, the Woodsies stage continued to draw huge crowds all day, with Lola Young, Myles Smith and Shed Seven all getting a rapturous response.

Indie heroes Blossoms rattled off a mini greatest hits set, before CMAT burst out of a gift-wrapped box and duetted with them on the single I Like Your Look.

PinkPantheress had a moment of vulnerability, telling the audience she’d worried she wasn’t “big enough to do this stage”.

But the response to songs like Illegal and Stateside, from her recent mixtape Fancy That (a career best) put those fears to rest. She even had to ask people to stop cheering after Boy’s A Liar, in case her set overran.

Alanis Morissette made her Glastonbury debut on the Pyramid Stage, running through the highlights of her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill, which somehow turned 30 two weeks ago.

Songs like Right Through You and You Oughta Know have lost none of their caustic edge in the intervening years; while the softer songs (You Learn, Head Over Feet) remain encouraging and optimistic.

“I’m blown away that the songs I wrote when I was 19,” she told BBC News. “I can still stand by them now.”

On stage, Morissette barely spoke to the audience, other than to introduce her band, but they were too busy singing to notice.

The standout moment came during Ironic – a song that, ironically, misunderstands the concept of irony – when 10,000 fans held up spoons.

And all she needed was a knife. Who would have thought? It figures.

Glastonbury continues on Saturday with performances from Charli XCX, Neil Young, Doechii, Kaiser Chiefs, Kneecap, Raye and Scissor Sisters.

The Pyramid Stage also boasts another surprise set, from a band billed only as Patchwork.

You can follow the action on BBC radio, television, iPlayer and BBC Sounds.

“Defender ready?” calls the host.

A thumbs up and moments later, two burly men – with no protective gear – run full speed at each other before they clash, the unmistakable sound of flesh and bone crunching.

The crowd erupts into a collective roar, some cheering, others wincing.

This is the moment they’ve been waiting for – and it’s exactly this adrenaline-fuelled energy that organisers of the Run It Championship League are banking on to help bring what they call the “world’s fiercest, new collision sport” to global audiences.

It is a supercharged version of a one-on-one tackle game which originated in the backyards and school playgrounds of Australia and New Zealand – namely in Pacific Islander communities.

One person carrying a ball must “run it straight” at the defender, who is also sprinting towards them: they are not allowed to duck, hurdle or sidestep the tackler.

Videos of the game have recently gone viral, and the founders of the Run It league have capitalised on the surge of interest – they say they’ve gained millions of views online, won over thousands of fans, attracted big name sponsors, and even inspired rival competitions.

They’ve held jousts in Melbourne and Auckland, and on Saturday another will take place in a Dubai arena, the winner taking away prize money of A$200,000 (£98,000). Next on their agenda, is an expansion to the UK and US.

But the groundswell of support for the league is increasingly being rivalled by critical voices. Medical experts and sporting figures are worried about the physical and mental health impacts of the game – which has also become a wider social media craze, that is already accused of claiming one life.

“It’s like shaking a baby,” says Peter Satterthwaite, whose teenage nephew died after copying the game at a party.

The objective of the game is simple: be the person who “dominates” the contact, as deemed by a panel of three judges.

Two of the league’s seven co-founders, Brandon Taua’a and Stephen Hancock, tell the BBC they have fond memories of playing the game as teenagers in Melbourne.

“I used to ‘run it straight’ at Brandon all the time,” Hancock says, joking that the pair would usually try to avoid hitting each other straight on.

There’ll be none of that this weekend, when the eight finalists compete for that giant cash prize in United Arab Emirates.

Hancock insists Run It is a “game of skill” – “[It’s] all about the footwork” – but there’s no denying the violent nature of it.

A quick scroll of the league’s social media accounts shows dozens of quick-burst videos, all honing in on the explosive action of two men colliding.

In other videos circulating from the events, several competitors are knocked out and require immediate medical attention.

Taua’a acknowledges the sport comes with risks, but says the league has safety protocols to minimise them.

Competitors are screened, undergoing medical assessments – such as blood tests and a physical exam – and they must also send a recent video of themselves playing a sport that features tackling. Medical staff are also on the sidelines of the events.

“There’s an element of danger with surfing, with boxing, and many other sports as well,” Taua’a argues.

For Champ Betham – who won NZ$20,000 earlier this month at the competition in Auckland and is gunning for the title in Dubai on Saturday – the element of danger is a secondary consideration.

“This is a massive blessing to a whole heap of us to pretty much try and win 20K or whatever for a couple hours’ work,” he told Radio New Zealand at the time.

“We got to pay off some debts and stock up the fridges and the cupboards, food for our little ones, especially with the economy and stuff like that here in New Zealand. Nothing’s cheap these days.”

The money involved, for a league which has only been around for six months, is impressive. Along with the prize fund, competitors’ travel and accommodation expenses are being paid. A 1,600-seat arena has been booked. The league has a slick social media account, a PR representative, and a bunch of promoters – including antipodean sports stars.

Its initial financial backers have been described only as “a group of local investors who believe in the product”, but bigger names are emerging: days before the Dubai event, the league announced it had secured a major sponsor in online gambling platform Stake.com, which is banned in key markets like Australia and the UK.

There are also ongoing talks with potential US investors, including a contact linked to American podcaster and UFC heavyweight Joe Rogan, which Taua’a says “will definitely help” the league build a presence in the US.

They will need big backers to match their ambitions for the contest, which they argue is more than just a fleeting social media trend.

“This could actually eventuate into a sport that could sit [in a class] with MMA and boxing,” Hancock says.

But as Taua’a and Hancock focus on the competition’s future ambitions, more and more voices are questioning its safety.

“They might as well set up smoking as a legitimate sport,” says neuroscientist Alan Pearce.

Speaking to the BBC from the New Zealand city of Palmerston North, Peter Satterthwaite is unequivocal.

“It’s not a sport,” he says. It’s “a dangerous activity” designed purely “to hurt the guy in front of you”.

His 19-year-old nephew Ryan was celebrating a 21st birthday with friends at a local park when they decided to try the game they’d seen all over their social media feeds.

Ryan did two tackles. Neither he or his friend fell down or clashed heads. But as he walked away, he told his mates he didn’t feel well, his uncle recounts.

“[Ryan] was coherent for a bit, then he lay down and his eyes just rolled back in his head.”

Friends rushed him to hospital where doctors had to “cut a sizable chunk out of his skull” to alleviate pressure caused by brain swelling, Satterthwaite says.

“I saw him on the ventilator, his chest going up and down as he was breathing, and it was like ‘Get up! Open your eyes’.”

On Monday evening, just a day after he was playing with his mates, Ryan’s life support was turned off in a hospital room filled with loved ones.

“It was just an innocuous clash,” Ryan’s uncle says, “and it just shows you how fragile life is and how fragile your brain is.”

Run It says it understands the dangers of contact sports and takes safety seriously. Weeks after Ryan’s death, the league posted a video saying the game is “not for the backyard, not for the street”.

“Do not try this at home,” they said.

But Satterthwaite doubts that warning will have much impact.

“I don’t think there’s a sport in the world that people don’t do at the beach, or in their backyard, or at the park.”

It’s not just the physical impacts that worry Shenei Panaia.

As a Samoan growing up in Australia, she would often see schoolkids playing the game as a bit of fun. But the mental health worker fears it reinforces “a version of masculinity where silence is strength, and violence is proof of pride”.

“It sends a dangerous message to young men that their worth is based on how much pain they can take. That if you’re not tough, you don’t belong.”

And the league’s attempt to turn this into a lucrative spectator sport contradicts the values of many in the Pacific Islander community, Penaia says.

“We are taught to look out for one another… and to make decisions that serve more than just ourselves.”

Their concerns are echoed by a pack of concussion experts and sporting figures.

For more than a decade, the world of high-impact sports has been introducing safety measures as the research into brain injuries develops.

Official bodies including Rugby Australia, New Zealand Rugby have warned people not to take part, with the New Zealand Prime Minister also weighing in, saying it’s a “dumb thing to do”.

Neuroscientist Pearce argues Run It magnifies “the most violent aspects of our established sport”, while the safety protocols do little to minimise any risk. Blood tests and physical exams cannot predict a brain injury, and catastrophic damage can occur even without a direct hit to the head, he says.

“I can’t see how running at 25km an hour straight at each other without stopping is safe,” he tells the BBC. “It’s as simple as that.”

There’s the risk of immediate concussion, Dr Pearce says, delayed onset brain injuries like Ryan Satterthwaite’s, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a degenerative disease caused by repetitive head trauma. They can lead to cognitive impairments, movement disorders, dementia, depression.

“[They’re] basically using the collision as the entertainment value, which is, in effect, commercialising concussion,” he concludes.

But a spokesperson for the league – who argues it is “not about masculinity” but “strength and skill” – say organisers have no intention of slowing down, and aren’t too worried about their critics.

Taua’a says what happens at their competitions is “not too much different” to what you see on televised rugby matches, and – with their protocols – it is far safer than many of the games played in backyards the world over.

“It’s quite new for viewers and it might take some time for them to get used to seeing what we’ve put together.”

Iran’s foreign minister has admitted that “excessive and serious” damage was done to the country’s nuclear sites in the recent US and Israeli bombings.

Abbas Araghchi told a state broadcaster on Thursday evening that an assessment of the damage is being carried out by the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran.

But, just hours earlier, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the strikes did not disrupt the country’s nuclear programme. Khamenei was responding to US President Donald Trump’s assertion that the bombs had “totally obliterated” three nuclear sites.

Khamenei said the US attacks had failed to “accomplish anything significant”.

The supreme leader, who has been in hiding since the war with Israel began on 13 June, insisted that Trump had “exaggerated” the impact of the bombs, and declared victory over the US and Israel.

But Araghchi’s remarks create a different impression.

The foreign minister also said there were no plans to resume nuclear talks with the US. Iran cancelled a scheduled sixth round of talks when Israel began its attacks.

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“I would like to state clearly that no agreement, arrangement or conversation has been made to start new negotiations,” he said.

He added that the government was examining what was in the “interest of the Iranian people”, saying its approach to diplomacy will take a “new form”.

He did not explain what he meant.

In an attempt to bring Iran back to the negotiating table, the Trump administration has discussed the possibility of helping Iran access $30bn to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear programme, easing sanctions and freeing up billions of dollars in restricted Iranian funds, CNN has reported.

But developments in Iran might obstruct such a move.

On Wednesday, Iran’s parliament approved a bill to stop co-operation with the global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). If it is implemented, it would mean Iran is no longer committed to allowing nuclear inspectors into its sites.

Israel has said its offensive against Iran was necessary to thwart what it claims are Iranian plans to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran has always insisted its nuclear programme is only intended for civilian purposes.

The US became directly involved in the conflict last weekend, striking facilities in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan, before Trump sought to rapidly mediate a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said intelligence gathered by the US and Israel indicated the strikes “significantly damaged the nuclear programme, setting it back by years”.

A leaked preliminary Pentagon assessment downplayed the significance of the damage and said the US strikes only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by a few months. The leak has been dismissed by the administration.

Iran’s health ministry said 610 people were killed during the 12 days of Israel air strikes, while Israeli authorities said 28 were killed in Israel.

US President Donald Trump has said he would “absolutely” consider bombing Iran again.

Responding to a question from the BBC’s Nomia Iqbal at a White House press briefing, he said he would “without question” attack the country if intelligence concluded Iran could enrich uranium to concerning levels.

The US became directly involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran last weekend, striking key nuclear sites with “bunker buster” bombs before Trump rapidly sought a ceasefire.

In a speech on Thursday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the strikes had achieved nothing significant, but on Friday Trump repeated his claim that the country’s nuclear sites had been “obliterated”.

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Posting on his social media platform Truth Social later on Friday, Trump said he knew “EXACTLY” where the ayatollah had been sheltering and that he had personally stopped Israeli and US armed forces from targeting him.

It is understood the Iranian leader was forced into hiding during his country’s two-week war with Israel.

All parties in the conflict have claimed victory, with the ayatollah telling Iranians that Israel and Iran had failed to disrupt the country’s nuclear programme.

However, the country’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi later admitted “excessive and serious” damage was done to the country’s nuclear sites by the recent US and Israeli bombings.

Reacting to the ayatollah’s comments, Trump repeated his assertions that Iran was “decimated”.

“Why would the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of the war-torn country of Iran, say so blatantly and foolishly that he won the war with Israel, when he knows his statement is a lie,” Trump added.

Trump claimed he had been “working on the possible removal of sanctions” against Iran, but had decided to “immediately” drop all work on sanction relief after the ayatollah released his statement of “anger, hatred and disgust”.

Iran has always insisted its nuclear programme is only intended for civilian purposes.

The latest conflict between Israel and Iran started when Israel launched attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and military infrastructure, with a number of nuclear scientists and military commanders killed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time”.

CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, reported the White House had been considering a range of options to entice Iran back to the negotiating table, including facilitating funding for a civilian, non-enrichment, nuclear programme.

But Iran has denied it is set to resume nuclear talks with the US, after Trump said at a Nato summit in the Hague on Wednesday that negotiations were set to begin again next week.

Iran’s health ministry said 610 people were killed during the 12 days of air attacks, while Israeli authorities said 28 were killed in Israel.

South Africa’s criminal intelligence chief Lt-Gen Dumisani Khumalo has been arrested and has appeared in court on allegations of fraud and corruption.

Gen Khumalo was picked up on Thursday evening after landing at the main international airport in Johannesburg by members of anti-corruption unit, local media reported.

He made his court appearance in the capital, Pretoria, on Friday, alongside six co-accused, all senior police officers.

Their lawyer said they intended to plead not guilty to any charges laid against them.

Details of the charges are not yet clear but local media say Gen Khumalo and the other six had been linked to an ongoing investigation into alleged abuse of intelligence funds and potentially unlawful appointments within the South African Police Service (SAPS).

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It marks the second wave of arrests within two weeks targeting the SAPS’ Crime Intelligence unit.

Three other top officials are facing corruption and other charges.

The arrests have raised questions about the integrity of the unit, which is meant to be actively preventing crime and cracking down on criminals.

The Democratic Alliance, the second-biggest party in the coalition government, welcomed the arrests, saying it was a right “step in rescuing an organisation on the brink of collapse”.

“This points to yet another serious breach of trust within a critical state institution tasked with performing our nation’s policing functions and mandate,” the party said in a statement.

The Economic Freedom Fighters party said the arrest of Gen Khumalo was not an isolated scandal, but the “latest symptom of a sick, and hollowed-out policing system, which urgently requires structural overhaul”.

Gen Khumalo became the head of the Crime Intelligence unit in 2022.

Up until then, he had served in different police units for more than two decades.

Numerous corruption cases against senior police officers over the years have tainted their reputation in the country.

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