Iran has the capacity to start enriching uranium again – for a possible bomb – in “a matter of months”, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog has said.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the US strikes on three Iranian sites last weekend had caused severe but “not total” damage, contradicting Donald Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear facilities were “totally obliterated”.

“Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there,” Grossi said on Saturday.

Israel attacked nuclear and military sites in Iran on 13 June, claiming Iran was close to building a nuclear weapon.

The US later joined the strikes, dropping bombs on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities: Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan.

Since then, the true extent of the damage has been unclear.

On Saturday, Grossi told CBS News, the BBC’s US media partner, that Tehran could have “in a matter of months… a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium”.

He added that Iran still possessed the “industrial and technological capacities… so if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again.”

The IAEA is not the first body to suggest that Iran’s nuclear abilities could still continue – earlier this week, a leaked preliminary Pentagon assessment found the US strikes probably only set the programme back by months.

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

Trump retorted furiously by declaring that Iran’s nuclear sites were “completely destroyed” and accused the media of “an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history”.

For now, Iran and Israel have agreed to a ceasefire.

But Trump has said he would “absolutely” consider bombing Iran again if intelligence found that it could enrich uranium to concerning levels.

Iran’s armed forces chief of staff Abdolrahim Mousavi said on Sunday that Tehran was not convinced Israel would abide by the ceasefire.

“We did not start the war, but we have responded to the aggressor with all our power, and as we have serious doubts over the enemy’s compliance with its commitments including the ceasefire, we are ready to respond with force” if attacked again, Mousavi was quoted as saying by state TV.

• Tehran is coming back to life, but its residents are deeply shaken
• How a volatile 24 hours edged Iran and Israel to a ceasefire
• US gained nothing from strikes, Iran’s supreme leader says

Iran, on the other hand, has sent conflicting messages on how much damage was caused.

In a speech on Thursday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the strikes had achieved nothing significant. Its foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, however, said “excessive and serious” damage was done.

Iran’s already-strained relationship with the IAEA was further challenged on Wednesday, when its parliament moved to suspend cooperation with the atomic watchdog, accusing the IAEA of siding with Israel and the US.

Tehran has rejected the IAEA’s request to inspect the damaged facilities, and on Friday, Araghchi said on X that “Grossi’s insistence on visiting the bombed sites under the pretext of safeguards is meaningless and possibly even malign in intent”.

Israel and the US attacked Iran after the IAEA last month found Tehran to be in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years.

Iran insists that its nuclear programme is peaceful, and for civilian use only.

Despite the Iranian refusal to work with his organisation, Grossi said that he hoped he could still negotiate with Tehran.

“I have to sit down with Iran and look into this, because at the end of the day, this whole thing, after the military strikes, will have to have a long-lasting solution, which cannot be but a diplomatic one,” he said.

Under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Iran was not permitted to enrich uranium above 3.67% purity – the level required for fuel for commercial nuclear power plants – and was not allowed to carry out any enrichment at its Fordo plant for 15 years.

However, Trump abandoned the agreement during his first term in 2018, saying it did too little to stop a pathway to a bomb, and reinstated US sanctions.

Iran retaliated by increasingly breaching the restrictions – particularly those relating to enrichment. It resumed enrichment at Fordo in 2021 and had amassed enough 60%-enriched uranium to potentially make nine nuclear bombs, according to the IAEA.

Senate Republicans have narrowly advanced a sprawling budget bill that is pivotal to President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda ahead of a self-imposed 4 July deadline.

The Senate moved 51-49 to open debate on the bill. Two Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the move.

Republican party leadership had been twisting arms for the initial vote on what Trump calls his “Big Beautiful Bill” on Saturday, after the release of its latest version – all 940 pages – shortly after midnight.

Republicans were divided over how much to cut welfare programmes in order to extend $3.8tn (£2.8tn) in Trump tax breaks. The proposed cuts would strip millions of America’s poorest of health insurance.

Trump declared the progress a “great victory” in a late-night social media post.

He attacked Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who rejected the bill, writing of Paul: “Did Rand Paul Vote ‘NO’ again tonight? What’s wrong with this guy???”

Paul opposes a provision in the bill that would raise the US debt limit. Tillis says the legislation would cost his state billions of dollars in healthcare funding. He cited the impact on Medicaid, the healthcare programme relied on by millions of elderly, disabled and low-income Americans.

• A look at the key items in Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’
• The woman who could bust Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’

However, the bill did win over some Republicans who had expressed scepticism, including centrist Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin initially voted against it, but changed his vote at the end of the session.

Vice-President JD Vance had travelled to the Capitol on Saturday night to offer a tiebreak vote in the Senate, where the vice-president has the deciding vote in the event of deadlock.

Party leaders were ultimately able to negotiate majority support without his help, but the bill’s fate on the Senate floor remains uncertain and Republicans in the chamber continue to quarrel over its provisions.

A final vote is expected in the coming days.

The bill needs a simple majority to clear the Senate. With Republicans holding 53 seats out of 100, plus Vance’s tiebreaker, the party can only afford three defections.

If passed in the Senate, the bill would go back to the House of Representatives for approval. Republicans can only stand to lose a handful of votes there – but some in the House have concerns over the Senate’s changes to the bill, which was adjusted to appease backbench Republican holdouts.

Democrats have said they will drag out the voting process in protest against the bill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has insisted that Republicans must read out the nearly 1,000 pages of text before the Senate can begin debate and potentially take up a final vote.

“Senate Republicans are scrambling to pass a radical bill released to the public in the dead of night, praying the American people don’t realise what’s in it,” Schumer said. “If Senate Republicans won’t tell the American people what’s in this bill, then Democrats are going to force this chamber to read it from start to finish.”

In a memo sent to Senate offices, the White House endorsed the latest revisions to the bill and called for its passage.

The memo reportedly warned that failure to approve the budget “would be the ultimate betrayal”.

Senator Patty Murray, a Washington state Democrat, took to social media on Saturday to argue that the bill contains “the largest healthcare cuts in history”.

Another critic of the bill is Elon Musk, who wrote on X on Saturday that the latest iteration of the bill “will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harms to our country”.

Musk took issue with taxes the bill proposes on solar and wind energy projects.

The latest draft of the spending bill still contains some of its core components: tax cuts that Trump campaigned on, such as a tax deduction on Social Security benefits, and the elimination of taxes on overtime work and tips.

It would also extend tax cuts passed by Republicans in 2017.

More contentious measures are still in place, including restrictions and requirements on Medicaid. Democrats have heavily criticised this piece of the bill, saying it will limit access to affordable healthcare for millions of Americans.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 7.8 million people would become uninsured under the cuts.

The draft bill incorporates input from the Senate parliamentarian, an official who reviews bills to ensure they comply with the chamber’s procedures.

It includes an increase in funding for rural hospitals, after some Republican moderates argued the original proposal would harm their constituents.

There are also changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which provides food benefits to low-income Americans.

Under the latest bill, Alaska and Hawaii would be temporarily exempt from a proposed requirement for some states to start footing the bill for the programme, which is currently fully funded by the federal government.

The revision comes after Alaska’s two Republican senators pushed for an exemption.

Budapest advertises itself as a party town. On Saturday, the party spilled out onto the streets, and occupied, in the scorching heat of summer, the Elizabeth Bridge and the river banks and downtown areas on both shores of the Danube.

Between 100,000 and 200,000 mostly young people danced and sang their way from Pest to Buda.

A distance that usually takes only 20 minutes on foot stretched to three hours.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ban, many Budapest Pride participants told me, spurred them to attend an event they usually stay away from. Last year, just 35,000 took part.

Many banners mocked the Hungarian prime minister. It was like a peaceful revenge by some of those he has declared war on during his past 15 years in power.

“In my history class, I learnt enough, to recognise a dictatorship. You don’t need to illustrate it – Vik!” read one hand-made banner. “I’m so bored of Fascism,” read another.

T-shirts with Orban’s image, in bright eyeshadow and lipstick, were everywhere.

While the LGBT community with its vivid paraphernalia made up the core of the march, this year’s Pride turned into a celebration of human rights and solidarity.

“We don’t exactly look as though we were banned!” a beaming Budapest mayor, Gergely Karacsony, told the crowd, in a speech in front of the Budapest Technical University.

Saturday’s march could go down as the crowning moment of his political career. A city hall starved of funds and in constant struggle with the central government dared to host an event the government tried to ban, and won – for now at least.

“In fact, we look like we’re peacefully and freely performing a big, fat show to a puffed-up and hateful power. The message is clear: they have no power over us!” Karacsony continued.

Among the attendees was Finnish MEP Li Andersson, who felt Orban was using arguments on family values as a pretext to ban the march.

“It’s important to emphasise that the reason why we are here is not only Pride – this is about the fundamental rights of all of us,” she said.

The ban was based on a new law, passed by the big majority held by Orban’s Fidesz party in parliament, subordinating the freedom of assembly to a 2021 Child Protection law that equated homosexuality with paedophilia, and therefore banned the portrayal or promotion of homosexuality in places where children might see it.

The police justified a ban on Saturday’s march on the grounds children might witness it. In response, the mayor cited a 2001 law stating events organised by councils do not fall under the right of assembly.

In the end, the police officers present at the march kept a discreet presence, looking on mournfully at a party from which they were excluded.

In another part of the city, Orban attended the graduation ceremony of 162 new police and customs officers, and new officials of the National Directorate-General for Policing Aliens.

“Order does not come into being by itself, it must be created, because without it civilised life will be lost,” Orban told the students and their families.

Earlier, he and other prominent Fidesz officials posted pictures of themselves with their children and grandchildren, in an attempt to reclaim the “pride” word.

“Post a picture, to show them what we’re proud of,” Alexandra Szentkiralyi, the head of the Fidesz faction in the Budapest Council, posted on Facebook, alongside a picture of herself in a rather plain “Hungary” T-shirt.

The police presence was restrained in Budapest on Saturday, but temporary cameras installed ahead of the march and mounted on police vehicles recorded the whole event.

The 18 March law that attempted to ban the Pride gave the police new powers to use facial recognition software. Fines of between £14 ($19) and £430 could be imposed on participants.

The pro-government media was scathing in its criticism of the day’s events, echoing remarks by leading Fidesz politicians that the march was a celebration of perversity, with nothing to do with freedom of assembly.

“Chaos at Budapest Pride,” proclaimed Magyar Nemzet, the government flagship.

“The notorious climate activist and more recently terrorist supporter Greta Thunberg posted on her Instagram page that she is also at Budapest Pride,” it continued.

“After the demonstration, this will be a question for the courts,” Zoltan Kiszelly, a political analyst close to the government, told the BBC.

“If the courts decide in favour of the mayor and the (Pride) organisers, then Orban can say, okay, we have to change the legislation again.”

If the courts decide for the government, however, the prime minister can be pleased with the law he pushed through – despite the fact Pride went ahead.

The lavish wedding party of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and TV presenter Lauren Sanchez concludes on Saturday evening in Venice with the main gala event.

But as their celebrity guests were preparing to step into water taxis from their luxury hotels, paparazzi poised, a crowd of some Venetians gathered to protest against the big event.

Their causes are varied, from locals opposed to over-tourism in a delicate city, to activists protesting against climate change and capitalism.

Hundreds marched through the city on Saturday, hanging a “no space for Bezos” banner from the Rialto bridge and setting off multicoloured flares. But plans to launch themselves into the city’s canals with inflatable crocodiles and block the wedding guests’ passage were dropped.

• In pictures: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding

Spotted heading into Harry’s Bar for lunch on Saturday, Bezos blew kisses towards the cameras when a local journalist asked what he made of the protests.

The city’s deputy mayor dismissed the activists as “narcissists” and insisted the wedding was the “high-quality tourism” Venice needs.

Simone Venturini, city councillor for economic developments, said he hoped “a lot of people will want to get married in Venice” now and boost the city’s wedding sector.

“We are not Iran. The city cannot say who can or who cannot get married. We have no moral police going around,” he told the BBC on the bank of the Grand Canal, as gondolas loaded with tourists drifted by.

The activists have already claimed one win, though.

Tonight’s party was moved further from the city centre for security reasons. The new venue, Arsenale, is easier to protect.

“I think the main problem is that Venice is becoming like an amusement park,” argues Paola, an Italian member of the Extinction Rebellion group.

She’s especially incensed that wedding guests arrived here on private jets and argues the world’s elite are the worst polluters.

“Of course, mass tourism is eating the city alive, but the fact that billionaires can come here and use the city as their amusement park is an enormous problem.”

The Italian media have leapt on the glitz and glamour of what they are dubbing the “wedding of the year.”

Their pages and posts are full of pictures of the 200 or so A-list celebrities now in town, including Leonardo di Caprio and Kim Kardashian.

There’s talk of cuttlefish banquets – tonight’s spread will feature cod, cooked regional-style – and photos of the bride’s white lace Dolce and Gabbana gown, apparently inspired by one worn by Sophia Loren in the 1950s.

It seems, however, that talk of this wedding bringing the city to a halt was overblown.

Ivanka Trump has been spotted at an art gallery, as has Bill Gates, and the newly married couple have been photographed and filmed in various locations and outfits.

But most tourists, or Venetians, are more likely to bump into a Bezos look-a-like, who made the journey from Germany specially to pose for photos, than any of the real-life rich and famous.

There are plenty of water taxis and gondolas still free for hire and no crowds of angry tourists, deprived of their magical ride.

Some streets were briefly closed around the main events but disruption appears to have been minimal.

Most of the posters declaring “No Space for Bezos” have been ripped down and just the odd bit of graffiti can be seen. Attempts to project slogans on buildings were quickly stopped by police.

A planned march by protesters on Saturday evening is taking place with official permission.

But fears of Venice becoming a tourist playground, forcing locals out of town, are no exaggeration.

Just down from the main railway station, police check visitors at random for mandatory day passes. It is a new measure to try to control the crowds.

All around, cafes are packed with people shiny-faced from the humidity and pink from the brutally fierce sun.

A short walk away is the pretty piazza where Roberto Zanon has spent all his life but which he now has to leave.

His landlord has sold his home to out-of-town developers and the 77-year old is being evicted soon together with his two dogs.

Finding anything else in his home city is impossible, Roberto says. He can’t compete with higher-paying tourists.

“One, two, three doors – those are locals, but the rest is all for tourism now,” Roberto says, pointing to the wooden doors around his square.

“There are fewer and fewer Venetians here,” he says quietly, deeply upset at the loss of his home. “There is no purpose any more. You lose your friends. You lose piece of your heart. But sadly this situation is unstoppable.”

That doesn’t mean Roberto is fretting about a billionaire choosing Venice for his wedding, mind you.

He worked in tourism himself for many years and calls it “an honour” to have such famous guests in the city he himself loves so much. “I find it positive.”

He’s not alone.

In a souvenir shop selling magnets and T-shirts, Leda is all in favour of the Bezos-Sanchez bonanza.

She is blunt: “I think there should be more people like Bezos here. Right now we get trash tourism and Venice doesn’t deserve that.”

Leda used to have her own store selling quality Italian goods but had to close it to adapt to a low-spending market. “It’s low-cost, hit-and-run tourism,” she says. “People take 20 euro flights, come here and don’t spend a thing. That’s not what Venice needs.”

So what will be left, when the big party jets out of town?

The deputy mayor confirmed tech boss Bezos had donated “around three million euros” to groups working to protect this fragile city-on-the-water, in a gesture of support.

As for the 30 million euros the wedding might net the city in other ways – activists call that a “drop in the lagoon” for one of the richest men on earth.

“It’s around three euros for a normal person, if you put in proportion to Bezos’s wealth,” Lorenzo from Extinction Rebellion said. “It’s a very low amount of money.”

Thousands of protesters have gathered in the Thai capital Bangkok, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra after a phone call she had with the former Cambodian leader Hun Sen was leaked.

In the call, which was about a recent incident on their border, she addressed Hun Sen as “uncle” and said a Thai military commander handling the dispute “just wanted to look cool and said things that are not useful”.

The call has sparked public anger and a key partner in her ruling coalition has quit. Paetongtarn apologised, but defended the call as a “negotiation technique”.

Before leaving to visit flood-hit northern Thailand, Paetongtarn told reporters it is the people’s “right to protest, as long as it’s peaceful”.

Saturday’s rally was the largest of its kind since the ruling Pheu Thai party came to power in 2023.

Thousands braved the monsoon rain and blocked the roads at the Victory Monument war memorial in Bangkok, waving Thai flags and holding placards with slogans such as “PM is enemy of state”.

Protest leader Parnthep Pourpongpan said the prime minister “should step aside because she is the problem”.

Seri Sawangmue, 70, travelled overnight by bus from the country’s north to join the protest.

He told AFP news agency that he was there “to protect Thailand’s sovereignty and to say the PM is unfit”.

“I’ve lived through many political crises and I know where this is going,” he added.

Paetongtarn has said she will no longer hold future calls with the former Cambodian leader, but Parnthep told Reuters that many Thai people felt she and her influential father were being manipulated by Hun Sen.

Paetongtarn, 38, is the daughter of Thaksin Shinawatra, the deposed former prime minister who returned to Thailand last August after 15 years in exile. She has only been in office for 10 months and is the country’s second female prime minister, with the first being her aunt Yingluck Shinawatra.

Protesters are calling for the end of Shinawatra leadership.

The rally was organised by the United Force of the Land, a coalition of largely nationalist activists who have protested against other Shinawatra-led governments for over two decades.

In a statement read to crowds, the group said the executive branch and parliament were not working “in the interest of democracy and constitutional monarchy”.

As well as the flags and placards, people carried umbrellas to protect themselves from the rain. When it stopped, a rainbow formed over Victory Monument.

On Tuesday the Constitutional Court will decide whether to take up a petition by senators seeking Paetongtarn’s removal for alleged unprofessionalism over the Hun Sen call.

Hun Sen said he had shared the audio clip with 80 politicians and one of them leaked it. He later shared the entire 17-minute recording on his Facebook page.

The call was about a recent dispute between Cambodia and Thailand, which saw tensions increase in May after a Cambodian soldier was killed in a border clash, plunging ties to their lowest in more than a decade.

But the tension between the two nations dates back more than a century, when the borders were drawn after the French occupation of Cambodia.

Both have imposed border restrictions on each other, while Cambodia has banned Thai imports from food to electricity, as well as Thai television and cinema dramas.

Despite the tensions between their countries, the Shinawatras’ friendship with the Hun family goes back decades, and Hun Sen and Paetongtarn’s father consider each other “godbrothers”.

It seemed like a harmless encounter.

It was the summer of 2021, and Jay Hulme, a volunteer at St Nicholas Church in Leicester, was on the door, welcoming people. That’s when Venessa walked in.

“There was something awkward about her,” he recalls. “But I assumed it was about being in a new church with new people, and we were just coming out of the pandemic. There was no red flag.”

Venessa Pinto, employed by the Leicester diocese of the Church of England as a lay preacher – a non-ordained person who can lead worship – returned a few more times to Jay’s church.

A few weeks later, they both happened to be at a midweek service in Leicester Cathedral. When it was over, she approached him and asked to speak privately. They stepped into the quiet of the old cathedral graveyard.

Then she asked him out.

“I was very taken aback, because I didn’t know her. And I was like, ‘I’m gay, but thank you for asking.’ But she asked me if it was because she was black.”

Jay was startled by the question. He gently reiterated that he could not go out on a date because he was gay – and also not in the right place for a relationship.

“I left it thinking, ‘That was very awkward’, but I think, ‘That’s the end of that.'”

It wasn’t.

In fact, it was the beginning of a devastating campaign of stalking and harassment. And when Jay complained, the highest authority in the Church in Leicester – a top contender to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury – said he didn’t believe him. Instead, he accused Jay of witchcraft.

That summer, Jay Hulme, then in his mid-twenties, was at a very happy juncture in his life. He was a poet and author, an assistant warden at the LGBT-friendly St Nicholas Church and known on social media for his love of church buildings and theology.

He was exploring his Christian faith and considering the possibility of training to become a priest in the coming years.

“I’m also trans, I’d come out a number of years before, and I’d finally come to a place of full and complete happiness with who I was. I saw my future unfurling before me in a way that had felt impossible before,” he reminisces.

After being rejected, Venessa, also then in her mid-twenties, sent Jay a series of “angry and accusatory” messages, saying he was gossiping about her. Though he tried to reassure her he wasn’t, she was adamant.

To try to resolve things, Jay agreed to a demand from her to meet. He had been determined that the meeting happened outside in public but a heavy rainstorm meant they ended up inside, alone together at her place of work.

He says she yelled at him, telling him he was a liar, a racist and an awful person – demanding an apology over and over again without telling him what he was supposed to have done.

Unsettled, Jay stopped interacting with Venessa and avoided her when she continued to come to his church. But then he started to get messages from anonymous online accounts which could be seen by his social media followers.

Jay quickly worked out the author was Venessa. She even sent him an email from her personal account apologising for what she described as the “pain” she’d caused.

But the nastiness online escalated, with Venessa publicly making false allegations and threats.

Jay was concerned for his safety. He reported the harassment to Leicestershire Police. He says he didn’t want Venessa prosecuted at that point – just for the abuse to stop.

But he heard nothing back and the abuse continued relentlessly. Each time he blocked an account, another would spring up. Jay felt he had no way of escaping it.

“I felt like she was in my pocket, and in my house, and in my brain all of the time, saying these horrendous things and I couldn’t get away,” he says.

Jay needed to stay online because of his writing and speaking commitments. But he was beginning to lose contracts. He suspects that was because of the allegations about him online.

Finally, weeks after reporting it, the police did visit Venessa. The outcome was far from satisfactory for Jay.

“She told the officer that it was her friends who were sending the messages, and the officer told her to tell them to stop. I was told by the police that I should just delete my social media,” he says.

Jay says he got the impression the police did not appreciate the seriousness of the abuse because it was online.

The police visit triggered even more angry messages from Venessa.

Jay then started assembling a powerful body of evidence, now on a mission to prove the messages had not been sent by Venessa’s friends, but by Venessa herself.

He compiled a detailed spreadsheet setting out the connections between the numerous anonymous accounts which had sent abuse or posted allegations about him. They all led back to Venessa.

Having lost faith in the police, Jay handed all this evidence to the Church of England, which promised to investigate his formal complaint.

While he waited, he thought he would get some respite by going to a silent Jesuit retreat in rural Wales. Days later, a colleague told him Venessa had booked to go to the very same retreat.

Jay had booked last minute and says there were not many slots left. “It’s in the middle of nowhere. As far as I’m concerned there is no way that could have happened naturally.”

Jay left the retreat just hours before Venessa arrived. It left him terrified, feeling the stalking had now gone beyond the confines of the internet.

Finally, there was some positive news for Jay.

Back in Leicester, the Church HR investigation concluded Venessa had been responsible for the abuse, to Jay’s huge relief. He assumed that would be the end of it.

But almost as soon as that happened, there was an unexpected turn.

He was called into a meeting with the Bishop of Leicester, Martyn Snow – who’s seen as a favourite to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Church of England.

Jay thought Venessa was going to lose her job. But it turned out the bishop had conducted his own investigation.

“I go in and the bishop sits down with this thick folder on his knee. And he begins to question me about my complaint. He actually states that ‘It’s he said, she said’.”

The bishop said he didn’t believe that Venessa had been responsible for the harassment. And he wouldn’t uphold Jay’s complaint against her.

Then he made an extraordinary accusation about Jay.

“Somebody had given a statement that I had been seen in the church, in the darkness, with a candle – and they thought I was conducting a seance. For clarity, I was praying with a candle in the dark, because that’s a thing that Christians do,” says Jay.

It got worse.

Bishop Snow accused him of practising witchcraft – both because of the “seance” and the fact Jay happened to have a close friend who was a tarot card reader.

“It felt like an enormous gut punch. These made-up allegations were being presented to me by a person with the power of a bishop, in a meeting which I suddenly realised I had no control over,” says Jay.

“She [Venessa] had somehow managed to make a bishop become part of her stalking campaign of harassment and threats, and use his power and position, and I couldn’t believe it was happening.”

Jay says he was told Venessa would not lose her licence to preach, but he would be punished.

He says Bishop Snow told him the process to begin his training for priesthood – something he decided he wanted to pursue – would be “slowed down”.

Jay was devastated. He went home feeling trapped. And after the complaint was dismissed, more messages were posted.

“Really horrific things, saying that I raped children, that I stole money, that I was a racist, a bully. She created fake accounts that were me saying really racist things and would then screenshot them and share those things,” he says.

Bishop Snow suggested to Jay that his allegations were not in keeping with Venessa’s character. But Jay soon learned he wasn’t the only person affected by Venessa’s behaviour.

A colleague who worked closely with Venessa, Kat Gibson, had been complaining about her for more than a year before the campaign against Jay began.

Kat says Venessa was unpredictable and adversarial in the extreme. “I was just really scared when I was around her, thinking, ‘what’s she going to explode at me for this time?’ with these explosive angry outbursts that I can’t prevent.”

She adds that as the months went on, “around 30 people” from eight churches approached her to informally complain about Venessa’s behaviour. She calls the issue an “open secret” but one that managers felt unable to tackle.

In a joint statement, Kat’s manager, Lusa Nsenga Ngoy – now a bishop in London – and Leicester Diocese said pastoral support and counselling were offered to those affected. The Church of England says Kat’s complaints were treated with care and seriousness.

She was a lay preacher in Leicester, but Venessa soon gained increasing prominence on a national level.

In 2022, several months into her stalking campaign against Jay Hulme, she was elected onto the Church of England’s national assembly – the General Synod.

Soon after, she was one of just a handful of people from Synod appointed to the Crown Nominations Commission, a panel that selects new bishops and archbishops. But all the while, she was sending countless sinister messages to Jay.

The online harassment from Venessa now included extreme pornographic content posted on his social media. Then she tweeted Jay’s address.

He went to the police a second time, but again felt no sense of urgency.

“There was a period where every night, I would wake up screaming because I dreamed that I was being murdered by Venessa. I had extra locks put on my door,” Jay says.

Though there appeared to be inaction, behind the scenes the Church was clearly starting to realise it had a problem on its hands.

While Jay had been told in summer 2022 that a Leicester Diocese investigation found Venessa had been responsible for Jay’s harassment, he was also told that the Bishop of Leicester decided quite the opposite.

The BBC has now learned that shortly before that, the bishop did tell Venessa to step back from ministry because of “her behaviour”, though it is not known what this refers to.

He also later revoked her licence to preach, after what’s described as “new evidence” coming to light. The diocese also suggested she go on leave.

But none of these things were made public and did not stop the unrelenting stalking of Jay.

All of a sudden, in late 2022, Leicester Diocese announced Venessa would be leaving.

It said she would “pursue other opportunities” and thanked her for the positive contributions she had made.

Again, this appeared to have no impact on the hate-filled barrages coming Jay’s way.

“I wrote my own will because…I felt that I’d been let down by the police, I’d been let down by the diocese and as far as I was concerned, this would continue until one of us died,” he says.

In desperation, in December 2022 he went to the police again.

In March 2023, 21 months after the stalking campaign against Jay began (and eight months after the Bishop of Leicester told Jay he did not believe him) the police finally took action against Venessa.

“I get a phone call from Leicestershire Police [who] basically acknowledged that they made a mess of it. And very soon Venessa was arrested. Her devices were confiscated,” says Jay.

In a statement, Leicestershire Police acknowledged their initial response fell short of the standards expected, adding it continued “to develop its knowledge and training in relation to preventing and detecting stalking offences”.

By the end of 2023, Venessa had been charged. In May 2024 she pleaded guilty to stalking, involving serious distress or harm and was given an 18-month community order and banned from contacting Jay for a year.

After Venessa’s conviction, Jay asked for a meeting with the Bishop of Leicester, Martyn Snow, who now apologised. “He did acknowledge in some way his own part in it and that he should have done better, and I agree,” says Jay.

Leicester Diocese told us it took legal advice and is confident it followed HR practice and due process in handling Jay’s complaint. But wouldn’t say why it did not sack Venessa for months after concluding she had sent the messages to Jay.

A spokesperson for the Church of England says they are “appalled by the serious criminal behaviour that led to Venessa Pinto’s conviction.”

Venessa’s colleague Kat Gibson was recently made redundant from her post in Leicester. She says she’s much better, physically and mentally, and is pleased to be out of Church of England employment.

And what of Venessa Pinto? Having carried out her community service and abided by the restraining order, she is once again preaching – and has also done missionary work in Brazil.

In a statement to the BBC she said one aspect of the court case in particular changed everything for her.

“Reading [Jay’s] victim impact statement brought into sharp focus the pain I caused and strengthened my resolve to take responsibility and make amends,” Venessa says.

“I acknowledge the seriousness of my past conduct and do not seek to diminish its impact. I have moved forward in my life and hope those affected in Leicester and elsewhere can find it in their hearts to allow space for healing and growth,” she says.

But while Venessa admits to the harassment she was convicted of, she denies some other allegations, including the frequent angry outbursts Kat and others reported. In fact she says accusations of aggressive behaviour were never formally raised with her in Leicester.

Venessa says she was going through a difficult period and was struggling with her mental health during her time in Leicester.

Her targeting of Jay has left him scarred. He struggles to open his email for fear of what he’ll find and he says his finances have been destroyed by years of sporadic work.

“I feel that everybody failed to protect me. I almost feel like I was naive that when the police failed to protect me, I thought the Church, which talks about safeguarding, [would],” says Jay.

“It fails because people are scared to do the right thing. In James, my favourite book of the Bible, there’s a bit that says that anybody who knows the right thing and fails to do it, commits sin. And that’s the problem at the heart of this Church.”

Serbian police have clashed with a huge crowd of anti-government protesters demanding an early election and end to President Aleksandar Vucic’s 12-year rule in the capital Belgrade.

A sea of around 140,000 protesters rallied in the city on Saturday, the largest turnout in recent months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government. “We want elections!” the crowd chanted.

Dozens were arrested, with riot police seen firing tear gas and stun grenades.

President Vucic accused protesters calling for an election of being part of a foreign plot trying to usurp his country. “They wanted to topple Serbia, and they have failed,” he wrote on his Instagram page.

On Friday, five people were detained, accused of plotting to overthrow the government, according to a statement from Serbia’s Higher Court in Belgrade.

Following the clashes, the police minister strongly condemned violence by protesters and said those responsible would be arrested.

Months of protests across the country – including university shutdowns – have rattled Mr Vucic, whose second term ends in 2027 when there are also parliamentary elections scheduled.

Sladjana Lojanovic, 37, a farmer from the town of Sid in the north, said on Saturday she came to support students.

“The institutions have been usurped and… there is a lot of corruption. Elections are the solution, but I don’t think he (Vucic) will want to go peacefully,” she told Reuters.

The president has previously refused snap elections. His Progressive Party-led coalition holds 156 of 250 parliamentary seats.

Mr Vucic’s opponents accuse him and his allies of ties to organised crime, corruption, violence against rivals and curbing media freedoms, which they deny.

He has maintained close ties to Russia, and Serbia – a candidate for EU membership – has not joined the Western sanctions regime imposed on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.

Protests by students, opposition, teachers, workers and farmers began last December after 16 people died on 1 November in the collapse of Novi Sad railway station’s roof. Protesters blame corruption for the disaster.

The accident has already forced the former prime minister to resign.

As Saturday’s protest ended, organisers played a statement to the crowd, calling for Serbians to “take freedom into your own hands” and giving them the “green light”.

“The authorities had all the mechanisms and all the time to meet the demands and prevent an escalation,” the organisers said in a statement on Instagram after the rally.

“Instead, they opted for violence and repression against the people. Any radicalisation of the situation is their responsibility.”

At least 81 Palestinians have been killed and more than 400 injured in Israeli strikes across Gaza in the 24 hours until midday on Saturday, the Hamas-run health ministry said.

In one incident, at least 11 people, including children, were killed after a strike near a stadium in Gaza City, Al-Shifa hospital staff and witnesses told news agencies. The stadium was being used to house displaced people, living in tents.

Footage verified by the BBC shows people digging through the sand with their bare hands and spades to find bodies.

The Israeli military said it was “unaware of injuries as a result of the strike” aside from “a suspicious individual who posed a threat” to its forces.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said he was hopeful a ceasefire could be agreed in the next week.

Qatari mediators said they hoped US pressure could achieve a deal, following a truce between Israel and Iran that ended the 12-day conflict between the countries.

In March, a two-month ceasefire collapsed when Israel launched fresh strikes on Gaza. The ceasefire deal – which started on 19 January – was set up to have three stages, but did not make it past the first stage.

Stage two included establishing a permanent ceasefire, the return of remaining living hostages in Gaza in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.

On Thursday, a senior Hamas official told the BBC mediators have intensified their efforts to broker a new ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza, but that negotiations with Israel remain stalled.

A rally was organised on Saturday evening in Tel Aviv calling for a deal to free the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Organisers said “the time has come to end the fighting and bring everyone home in one phase”.

Meanwhile, Israeli attacks in Gaza continue. Friday evening’s strike near the Palestine Stadium in Gaza City killed at least 11 people, hospital staff and witnesses said.

One witness said they were sitting when they “suddenly heard a huge explosion” after a road was hit.

“This area was packed with tents – now the tents are under the sand. We spent hours digging with our bare hands,” Ahmed Qishawi told the Reuters news agency.

He said there are “no wanted people here, nor any terrorists as they [Israelis] claim… [there are] only civilian residents, children, who were targeted with no mercy,” he said.

The BBC has verified footage showing civilians and emergency services digging through the sandy ground with their hands and spades to find bodies.

Fourteen more people were reported killed, some of them children, in strikes on an apartment block and a tent in the al-Mawasi area.

The strike in al-Mawasi killed three children and their parents, who died while they were asleep, relatives told the Associated Press.

“What did these children do to them? What is their fault?” the children’s grandmother, Suad Abu Teima, told the news agency.

More people were reported killed on Saturday afternoon after an air strike on the Tuffah neighbourhood near Jaffa School, where hundreds of displaced Gazans were sheltering.

The strike killed at least eight people, including five children, the Palestinian health ministry said.

One witness Mohammed Haboub told Reuters that his nephews, father and the children of his neighbours were killed in the strike.

“We didn’t do anything to them, why do they harm us? Did we harm them? We are civilians,” he told the news agency.

The health ministry said ambulance and civil defence crews were facing difficulties in reaching a number of victims trapped under the rubble and on the roads, due to the impossibility of movement in some of the affected areas.

Asked about the strike on the Tuffah neighbourhood, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told the BBC that it “struck a suspicious individual who posed a threat to IDF troops operating in the northern Gaza Strip”.

“Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians”, it said, adding that it was “unaware of injuries as a result of the strike, besides the individual struck”.

The IDF released a statement on Saturday evening saying it had killed Hakham Muhammad Issa al-Issa, a senior figure in Hamas’s military wing, in the area of Sabra in Gaza City on Friday.

The IDF said he was one of the founding members of Hamas’s military wing, a member of Hamas’s general security council, and played a “significant role in the planning and execution” of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.

The Israeli military launched its bombardment of Gaza in response to the attack, 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.

The first UK concert of rock star Marilyn Manson’s tour has been cancelled after pressure from campaigners and an MP.

The first leg of his One Assassination Under God Tour had been set to kick off at Brighton Centre on 29 October.

On Saturday, fans who went online to contact Ticketmaster received a message saying “this event has been cancelled”.

In January, prosecutors in the US said they would not file charges against Manson, whose legal name is Brian Warner, after a long-running investigation into allegations of sexual assault and domestic violence. The singer has repeatedly denied the accusations.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said the allegations were too old under the law and the evidence not sufficient to charge the 56-year-old.

LA County sheriff’s detectives had said early in 2021 that they were investigating Manson over alleged incidents between 2009 and 2011 in West Hollywood.

Earlier this month in an open letter to the Brighton and Hove City Council, Sian Berry, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, called for the October concert to be cancelled.

In the letter, which was co-signed by some victim support groups and the University of Sussex students’ union, she wrote: “Many survivors in Brighton and Hove, and organisations supporting them, will have serious concerns about this booking and its wider impact on other people visiting the city centre, local residents and the wider community.”

The letter, which was posted online, prompted a flood of responses from the public pointing out that Manson had not been found guilty of allegations against him and that a four-year investigation did not lead to charges.

Others branded the call to cancel the gig as censorship.

The message on Saturday from Ticketmaster read: “Ticket sales have stopped but there may be tickets available for other dates.”

Five other UK gigs in October and November are still listed on ticketing websites.

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The signing of a peace agreement between the governments of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda in Washington has elicited mixed reactions, with the former Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, describing it as “nothing more than a trade agreement”.

The deal signed on Friday demanded the “disengagement, disarmament and conditional integration” of armed groups fighting in eastern DR Congo – but offered few other details.

While some, including Kabila, have been critical, others have hailed the agreement as a turning point in a devastating conflict that has dragged on for decades.

Rwanda has denied allegations it backs an armed group, known as M23, which has been fighting in the eastern DR Congo.

The 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.

The UN says thousands of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians forced from their homes following the recent rebel offensive. The M23 disputes the figures, saying fewer than 1,000 people have died.

After the loss of territory, DR Congo’s government 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.

• What’s the fighting in DR Congo all about?
• Ceasefire deal still faces many challenges

In a post on X following the signing of the agreement on Friday, Kabila questioned the choice of the deal’s participants, saying the DR Congo was not at war with the states depicted in a photo of the signing, which included President Donald Trump and other US officials, as well as Rwanda’s foreign minister.

It is not entirely clear if his comments were an indirect criticism of the absence of M23 representatives in Washington.

“We must stop distorting the facts to disguise a propaganda agenda,” Kabila said, adding “Congolese people deserve the truth, not a diplomatic show”.

The absence of M23 representatives was also noted in the rebel-held city of Goma in eastern DR Congo.

“How can they say they sign for peace, yet they have not involved M23?” a resident questioned, adding the rebels ought to have been included in the talks for “collective peace” to be found.

Another resident, a commercial motorbike rider told the BBC “people are tired, they are not interested in talks”, insisting “all they want is peace”.

He argued previous peace talks and agreements were not endorsed or implemented by the conflicting parties, leaving little hope for a return to normality.

Similarly, Sam Zarifi, executive director at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), an international NGO that has worked in the DRC for more than a decade, said the Washington-brokered agreement is replete with “major omissions”.

“There can be no durable peace without meaningful justice. But the agreement…sidelines human rights and fails survivors,” Mr Zarifi said.

He added: “The agreement overlooks how hostilities can continue through proxy armed groups that our research has shown are responsible for serious violations.”

Stephanie Marungu, head of a humanitarian organisation in Goma, was more positive.

“The signing of the deal…is a momentous and hopeful development for the eastern region,” she told the BBC, adding it could “lead to increased stability and it’s going to make it easier for us to deliver aid and access those in need”. However, she acknowledges there may be challenges in implementing the deal.

“If the agreement is what will bring peace we have no problems,” another Goma resident said.

It remains to be seen what the situation on the ground will be going forward, with concerns the Washington deal may simply enrich a few people with the country’s mineral resources to the detriment of ordinary people.

After 10 years of experimenting, I’ve found there are just two ways to master Glastonbury’s after-dark experience.

The first involves picking one night to really go all in. Your step count will be absolutely astronomical, but with the correct intake of carbohydrates and tinned cocktails, that 18-hour day will pay off.

Or you can take the second approach, which involves going fully nocturnal for the long weekend, but has to involve a few mates who are also willing to emerge from their tents at dinner time each day.

For the sake of my colleagues’ workloads this weekend, I picked the first option and dedicated my Friday night to the famous Glasto “naughty corner”.

The best (and least overwhelming way) to tackle each of the vast dance sites is to avoid too much planning and instead see where the evening takes you.

After warming up with Four Tet’s Woodsies headline slot, I strolled down to Silver Hayes, which is actually Glastonbury’s newest dance corner.

Introduced in 2013, it recently expanded to include two huge stages – Levels and Lonely Hearts Club.

It was at the latter that I caught a bit of Scouse duo CamelPhat, whose unique blend of tech house attracted huge crowds, despite clashing with some of the main stage headliners.

Shortly afterwards, I made my way to perhaps the festival’s most visually alluring site – Arcadia.

It was first built in 2007 and became a permanent stage in 2014, gaining an international reputation as the giant spider where some of the world’s biggest DJs have performed.

Now a huge dragonfly, repurposed from a former Royal Navy helicopter, it was lit up last night by Australian DJ and producer Sonny Fodera, who told the BBC that performing there “was one of the most insane experiences of my life”.

Arcadia is often top of the to-do list for first-time Glasto goers, thanks to its lasers and pyrotechnics, which certainly look great on an Instagram story.

But the stage’s sound system has received criticism over the years for being too quiet for those who aren’t directly under it – so you have to really push your way to the front for the best experience.

However, I stood pretty far away from the main structure and could still hear his hits pretty clearly.

Fodera, 39, who has performed at Worthy Farm twice before, said the stage was “unmatched” this year.

“The production and the sound system were definitely the best I’ve ever had at a festival,” he added.

Glastonbury’s late-night dance music offering has evolved massively in the last 25 years – expanding from one humble tent in 2000 to multiple sites across the festival.

The South East Corner is perhaps the greatest innovation of them all. First formed in 2008, it is so far from the main stages that the walk itself has become legendary.

By the time I began my journey to the site, it was 1am and my legs were beginning to give in.

But luckily I managed to find a friend to join the pilgrimage – beginning with a quick peek in the Cabaret tent, where comedians James Acaster and Nish Kumar were, much to my surprise, going back to back in a DJ set.

This was just a primer for the assault on the senses that is Shangri-La.

It’s one of the most well-known after-dark locations at Glastonbury, mostly due to its intricate installations that often reflect a political topic or environmental issue.

The area, which began to take shape more than 17 years ago, has undergone many changes, but was completely reinvented for this year’s festival to open up the space.

Everywhere you turn there is something weird and wonderful enough to make you stop and look – from a mattress sprouting plant leaves to a phone line that serves to connect you to nature.

The stages have also had a makeover, which is really exciting to dance vocalist Katy B.

She tells the BBC: “I love dance music and I’m definitely someone who loves Glastonbury at night. I’m playing Shangri-La main stage at four in the morning, which is going to be intense”.

Katy says the area being expanded shows that Glastonbury’s organisers have “recognised the demand for dance music”. She remembers coming to the festival when “the dance section was literally just two tents”.

You could describe the experience as like being at a theme park. In fact, part of the South East corner is even designed like a fun fair, which just so happens to have techno blasting from every corner.

Part of the joy of late night Glasto is that it attracts everyone. As I take a walk round Block 9, I see a woman covered in top to toe glitter enjoying some house music next to a man in a Liverpool shirt.

At points through the night, as extreme tiredness truly starts to set in, everything starts to feel like a dream.

We marvel at the never-ending queue for Glasto’s LGBT hotspot NYC Downlow, where it turns out the singer Lorde was enjoying a night out.

There’s a similarly long wait to get into Temple – the home of drum and bass at the festival.

Nights here end at 6am and, with so much to see, its often hard to call off your search for the perfect set.

As we go our separate ways back to camp, feet aching and heads pounding, people are still streaming into the fields.

With a fallow year on the horizon, I realise it may be my last trip to the naughty corner for a while and make a detour to the Greenpeace stage on the way home, where a disco night is taking place.

Because if you can’t allow yourself one last solo dance to some Sister Sledge, then what is the point?

“I don’t think God intended for people in their late 20s to live with their parents,” Hanya Aljamal says.

She’s hanging out on the balcony of the tiny apartment where she lives with her mother, father and five grown-up siblings – because it’s the only place she can get any peace and quiet.

Two years ago, 28-year-old Hanya was working as an English teacher and lived in a flat of her own. She was applying to colleges in the US to do a Master’s in international development, and on course for a scholarship to pay for it. Things were going well – but life is different now.

Like most days, Sunday begins with a morning coffee on the balcony, while Hanya watches her neighbour, a man in his 70s, carefully tending pots of herbs, seedlings and plants in his tidy garden, just across the road from a blown-up building.

“It just looks like the purest form of resistance,” Hanya says. “In the middle of all this horror and uncertainty, he still finds time to grow something – and there’s something absolutely beautiful about that.”

Hanya lives in Deir al-Balah, a town in the middle of Gaza, a 25-mile stretch of land on the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea that’s been a war zone since October 2023. She has recorded an audio diary which she shared with the BBC for a radio documentary about what life is like there.

The school where she taught had to close down when the war started. Hanya has become a teacher with no students and no school, her sense of who she was slipping through her fingers.

“It’s very hard finding purpose in this time, finding some sort of solace or meaning as your entire world falls apart.”

The apartment Hanya shares with her family is her fifth home since the war started. The UN estimates 90% of Gazans have been displaced by the war – many multiple times. Most Gazans now live in temporary shelters.

On Monday, Hanya is jolted awake in bed at 2am.

“There was an explosion really close by that was then followed by a second, and a third,” she says, “it was so loud and very scary. I tried to soothe myself to sleep.”

The Israeli government says its military action in Gaza is intended to destroy the capabilities of Hamas, which describes itself as an Islamist resistance movement. It is designated a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US, Israel, and others.

Israel’s military action began after armed Palestinian groups from Gaza led by Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 251 hostages.

So far, the Israeli military has killed more than 56,000 people in the conflict – the majority civilians – according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas. Israel doesn’t currently allow international journalists to report freely from Gaza.

Hanya is working for an aid organisation called Action for Humanity and spends the day at one of their projects. A group of girls wearing white T-shirts and with keffiyehs tied around their waists perform a dance and then take part in a group therapy session.

One talks about what it means to lose your home, others talk about losing their belongings, their friends, someone they love. And then one suddenly starts crying and everyone else falls silent. A teaching assistant takes the girl away to comfort her in private.

“And then someone tells me that she lost both parents,” Hanya says.

On Tuesday, Hanya is watching five colourful kites soaring in the sky from her balcony.

“I like kites – they’re like an active act of hope,” she says. “Every kite is a couple of kids down there trying to have a normal childhood in the midst of all this.”

Seeing kites flying makes a nice change to the drones, jets and “killing machines” Hanya is used to seeing above her apartment, she says. But later that evening, the “nightly orchestra” of nearby drones buzzing at discordant pitches begins. She describes the sound they make as “psychological torture”.

“Sometimes they’re so loud you can’t even listen to your own thoughts,” she says. “They’re kind of a reminder that they’re there watching, waiting, ready to pounce.”

On Thursday morning, Hanya hears loud, consistent gunfire and wonders what it might be. Maybe theft. Maybe a turf war between families. Maybe someone defending a warehouse.

She spends most of the day in bed. She feels dizzy every time she tries to get up and puts it down to the effect of fasting ahead of Eid al-Adha, when she’s already very malnourished.

Hanya says the lack of control over what she eats – and the rest of her life – is having a big psychological impact.

“You cannot control anything – not even your thoughts, not even your wellbeing, not even who you are,” she says. “It took me a while to accept the fact that I am no longer the person that I identify myself as.”

The school where Hanya used to teach has been destroyed, and the idea of studying abroad now seems very distant.

“I felt like I was gaslit,” Hanya says, “like all of these things were made up. Like none of it was true.”

The next morning, Hanya wakes to the sound of birds chirping and the call to prayer.

It’s the first day of Eid al-Adha, when her dad would usually sacrifice a sheep and they’d share the meat with the needy and their relatives. But her family don’t have the means to travel now and there’s no animal to sacrifice anyway.

“All of Gaza’s population has been not eating any sort of protein, outside canned fava beans, for three months now,” she says.

Hanya’s family discover that one of her cousins has been killed while trying to get aid.

“To be honest, I hadn’t known him very well,” she says, “but it’s the general tragedy of someone hungry, seeking food and getting shot in the process that is quite grotesque.”

There have been multiple shooting incidents and hundreds of deaths reported at or near aid distribution points in recent weeks. The circumstances are disputed and difficult to verify without being able to report freely in Gaza.

Hanya knows at least 10 people who have lost their lives during the war. This number includes several of her students and a colleague who had got engaged a month before the war started. She was the same age as Hanya and shared her ambition.

Hanya is updating her CV to remove her college professor’s name. He was her referee and writing mentor – but he is dead now too.

“It’s a huge thing when someone tells you that they see you, that they believe in you, and that they bet on you,” she says.

Hanya doesn’t think she’s grieved for any of these people properly, and says she feels she has to ration her emotions in case any of her close family are hurt.

“Grieving is a luxury many of us can’t afford.”

Crowing cocks mark the start of another new day, and Hanya is taking in a beautiful pink and blue dawn from the balcony. She says she has developed a habit of looking up to the sky as an escape.

“It’s very hard to find beauty in Gaza anymore. Everything is grey, or soot-covered, or destroyed,” Hanya says.

“The one thing about the sky is that it gives you colours and a respite of beauty that Earth lacks.”

Not much about Sneh Bhargava’s life seems ordinary.

In 1984, she became the first woman to helm the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the capital Delhi – one of the country’s top medical institutions – and in its almost 70-year history, remains the only woman to have done so.

At 90, Dr Bhargava – one of India’s pioneering radiologists – began writing her memoir, which was published earlier this month, and at 95, continues to remain an active member in the medical community.

From choosing radiology when it was still emerging in 1940s India to becoming one of its most well-known practitioners, Dr Bhargava’s legacy is nothing short of extraordinary.

Not unlike her first day on the job as director-to-be of AIIMS, which was nothing short of a trial by fire.

It was the morning of 31 October 1984, and a meeting was under way at the hospital to confirm her appointment after India’s then prime minister Indira Gandhi had selected her for the role.

Dr Bhargava was not part of the meeting, but was in her office reviewing medical cases for the day. She recalls in her memoir hearing a colleague frantically call out to her, asking her to rush to the casualty ward.

There, lying on a gurney was the very woman who had selected Dr Bhargava to head the hospital – Indira Gandhi. Her saffron sari was drenched in blood and she had no pulse.

“At the time, I didn’t focus on it being the prime minister who was lying in front of me,” Dr Bhargava told the BBC. “My first thoughts were that we had to help her and also protect her from further harm,” she said.

Dr Bhargava was worried that a mob would storm the casualty ward, as a large crowd had already begun gathering outside the hospital.

News began to trickle out: Gandhi had been shot by two Sikh bodyguards in revenge for Operation Blue Star, the military raid on Amritsar’s Golden Temple in June to flush out militants.

Gandhi’s assassination sparked one of the deadliest riots India has seen, the beginnings of which Dr Bhargava began hearing about as she hastened to shift the prime minister to one of the building’s top floors.

There, in the operating theatre, a Sikh doctor fled the room the minute he heard how Gandhi had died.

The news of her death had to be kept under wraps until her son, Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister.

“Until then, our job, for the next four hours, was to keep up the charade that we were trying to save her life, when in fact she was dead when she was brought to AIIMS,” Dr Bhargava writes.

She also described the harrowing process of embalming the prime minister’s body, which would lie in state in the capital for two days before cremation.

“The embalming chemical, when we injected it into different main arteries, kept oozing out,” Dr Bhargava writes. A ballistic report would later reveal that over three dozen bullets had punctured Gandhi’s body.

But this wasn’t the only remarkable episode in Dr Bhargava’s long and illustrious career at AIIMS.

In the book she shares fascinating anecdotes of her interactions with other prominent politicians, including India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

She also recalls Sonia Gandhi bringing her son, a young Rahul to AIIMS after an arrow grazed his head while he was playing.

“Sonia Gandhi told me that she had to bring Rahul to us because Rajiv (her husband) was meeting the King of Jordan and the latter had given him a fancy car as a gift, which her husband was keen to drive,” she writes in the book.

Rajiv Gandhi wanted to drive Rahul to AIIMS himself, without security, as a surprise – but Dr Bhargava firmly stopped him, citing safety concerns.

But not every day was as exciting.

Dr Bhargava recalls political pressure, including an MP who threatened her for not selecting his son-in-law for a job at AIIMS.

On another occasion, two top politicians, including the federal health secretary, tried to handpick the AIIMS dean – though the decision was hers alone.

Dr Bhargava says she stood firm against pressure, always prioritising patient care. She worked to establish radiology as a core part of diagnosis and treatment at AIIMS.

When Dr Bhargava joined in the 1960s, AIIMS had only basic imaging tools. She trained colleagues to read subtle signs in black-and-white X-rays, always in context with the patient’s history. She later pushed for better equipment, helping build one of India’s leading radiology departments.

Dr Bhargava was always drawn to making a difference.

Born in 1930 into an affluent family in Lahore in undivided India, as a child she loved playing doctor to her dolls and siblings. During the partition of India and Pakistan, Dr Bhargava’s family fled to India and later, she would visit refugee camps with her father to help people.

At a time when few Indian women pursued higher education, Dr Bhargava studied radiology in London – the only woman in both her class and hospital department.

She returned to India in the 1950s after hearing from her mentor that the country was in need of skilled radiologists.

Dr Bhargava often credits her family, and her husband’s liberal-mindedness for helping her achieve her dreams, and she hopes other Indian women find the same support.

“It starts from childhood,” she says.

“Parents should support their daughters the same way they support their sons. Only then will they be able to break glass ceilings and reach for the stars.”

Bain was halfway through his band’s Los Angeles concert on a crisp April night when the music stopped.

In an oversized fur coat and black sunglasses, the 24-year-old K-pop star told thousands of fans: “Before I start the next song – I want to share something with you guys.”

A brief pause and then: “I’m [expletive] proud to be part of the LGBTQ community!”

The crowd erupted in applause and screams as Bain broke into Lady Gaga’s pride anthem: “Just put your paws up, ‘Cause you were born this way, baby”.

In that moment, as he came out to the world, he was not nervous, he tells the BBC in an interview at his studio in Seoul – rather, he had been trying to “sound cool”.

A handful of K-pop artists have come out as gay in recent years – but none as publicly as Bain.

Even in 2025, that is a bold move in South Korea’s entertainment industry, where stars are held to impossible standards. Admitting to even a heterosexual relationship is scandalous.

“There were some people in the industry who knew [I was thinking of coming out] and warned me against it, saying it would be a risk,” Bain says. “And of course I thought about the risk – that we might lose fans.

“But then I thought, society is changing… I might gain more than I might lose.”

That’s the big question: has he thrown open the door to change in an industry that has become global but remains deeply rooted in a conservative South Korea?

Bain, whose real name is Song Byeonghee, says he was in secondary school, about 12 years old, when he realised he was gay.

Shortly afterwards, he decided to become a K-pop trainee but he kept his sexuality a secret – he felt like being gay was “not allowed”.

“It wasn’t something I questioned… I just thought I had no choice,” he says. “There was no-one else [around me that was gay]. I thought I could just pretend and keep going.”

Wealthy, modern South Korea is still traditional in many ways. Powerful yet conservative churches often see homosexuality as a disability or sin. And same-sex marriage is not legally recognised.

In 2021, Bain made his debut as part of a six-member boyband, Just B. They have released several albums and have taken part in reality shows, earning a dedicated audience.

But through it all, the years of hiding a part of himself took a toll on Bain.

“I was so overwhelmed, I thought maybe I can’t be an idol at all. I felt I’d been hiding so much. I decided to talk to Mom.”

That was about three years ago. His mother was the first person in his family to find out: “We talked for an hour, and I finally said, ‘I like men more than women.’ That’s when she knew.”

Her reaction was difficult for him. “Honestly, she didn’t like it – not at first. She said she thought I could overcome it, that maybe I’d someday like women. She felt sad… that I’d now face bad reactions from others. But [she] said, ‘You’re my son, so I love you, I support you, I love you.’ It was mixed. I was sad, but in the end grateful she said she loves me.”

Then his team members and company began encouraging him to take the leap – and tell the world.

Earlier this year the band began a world tour, and on the last stop of their US tour, Bain decided to come out on stage.

Since then, the band has been thrust into the spotlight – with Bain giving countless interviews as he quickly became the new face of the Korean LGBTQ community.

“I feel like I’ve changed a lot since coming out. I feel more confident. When I meet someone new, I show who I am immediately,” he says. “But I also feel sad that my identity is such a big deal now.”

Over time, he hopes, people will stop saying “oh, he’s gay, but rather, oh, that’s just who he is”.

When South Korean actor Hong Seok-Cheon came out as gay in 2000, LGBTQ representation truly entered the country’s mainstream.

He was the first Korean celebrity to open up about his sexuality – and it came at a cost. He was dropped from TV shows and advertisements.

Attitudes have certainly changed since then. A Pew survey from 2019 showed that the number of people who accepted homosexuality has risen to 44% from 25% in 2002.

And yet, only a handful of other celebrities have come out. In 2018, Holland became the country’s first openly gay K-pop artist and, in 2020, Jiae, a former member of girl group Wassup, came out as bisexual. Both have said they found it hard to sign with a record label as a result.

Bain’s announcement, however, has been celebrated by both fans and South Korea’s LGBTQ community.

“When someone like an idol comes out, it gives people like me a sense that we are not alone,” says a 26-year-old Korean transgender woman, who does not want to be named.

“It brings comfort…makes me think, maybe I’m ok the way I am.”

Online too, a majority of the comments have been positive. One gay fan in a YouTube comment wrote how he was encouraged by Bain, after feeling “so much despair” over “the hateful comments” and discrimination.

“But thanks to Bain, I’ve found the courage to keep going.”

International fans have especially cheered him on: “After the initial shock, I started to cry,” said Lia, a K-pop fan from the US who identifies as lesbian.

“Knowing that Korea still has some repression against LGBTQ people, the bravery and courage he displayed by coming out…[was] admirable.”

South Korea’s cultural footprint has been growing globally, and that has brought fans from everywhere, with their own perspectives and beliefs. They may well reshape the K-pop industry.

But that will take time. And that is evident in the range of comments in response to Bain’s announcement – disapproval to apathy.

For one, the country has seen a rise in right-wing, often avowed anti-feminist beliefs in young men, who seem to oppose any challenge to traditional gender roles.

And those roles remain strong in South Korea. The government and the church champion conventional family values, encouraging young people to marry and have children so they can boost birth rates, currently the lowest in the world.

Given all that, it may not be a surprise that homosexuality is still a taboo, even in a global industry like K-pop.

This is a world where even straight couples don’t talk about their private lives, says critic Lim Hee-yun.

“K-pop has spent nearly 25 years avoiding the topic of sexuality [altogether]. Even heterosexual relationships are hidden to protect fan fantasies.”

Bain, he adds, has “challenged that silence in a symbolic and powerful way. I believe it marks a major moment”.

But he believes fans may have reacted very differently – “it might have been explosive” – if a member of a global boyband had come out as gay.

“Bain’s case was significant, but his group isn’t as famous [so] it didn’t cause as much stir domestically,” Mr Lim says.

Bain has certainly helped raise awareness, he agrees. “It’s a slow process but we’re seeing more public figures speaking up or content being created around these LGBTQ issues.”

But any immediate change in K-pop or the entertainment industry is unlikely, according to him.

“It’s not just a social issue – it’s a market issue. Male idols usually have a much larger female fanbase… [and] if you find out your favourite male idol is gay, that can shatter the illusion that you could one day be the object of his affection,” said Min Yong-Jun, a pop culture columnist.

“So if they do [come out] they risk shaking the foundation their fandom is built on.”

Bain, however, says his decision would be worth it if even “one person in K-pop gains strength or interest” from it.

“I’ve spent so long pretending… I realised that because I came out, others felt safe to do so too.”

The day he came out, he recalls, several fans approached him, saying they were gay or lesbian, talking about their own identity.

“They thanked me and I thought to myself ‘I should have done this sooner’.”

When it emerged that last weekend a convicted paedophile had organised a fake wedding to a nine-year-old at Disneyland Paris, many people were perplexed.

Who would do such a thing? How was it even possible? The BBC understands it was the latest bizarre stunt by Jacky Jhaj – a British man I have been investigating for two years.

He first came to my attention after a tip off from a teenage girl came out of the blue in 2023.

She was horrified that she had come face to face with a paedophile who she had been hired to fawn over.

She was too terrified of him to go on the record – but I tracked down a number of aspiring actors who had also been directed to scream at Jhaj while he was parading down a red carpet, and reach out to try and touch him.

In all, 200 children and young women had been recruited by reputable casting agencies to play Jhaj’s fans at a fake film premiere in London’s Leicester Square that year. Some were as young as six.

Towards the end of the event someone recognised Jhaj – who had previously been found guilty of sexual activity with two 15-year-olds in 2016 and sent to prison.

The fake red carpet was one of a litany of stunts he has organised since his release which often involve casting girls as his fans.

All have been organised at great expense, while he was on the Sex Offenders Register and subject to restrictions on his activities.

For the mock-wedding at Disneyland Paris a nine-year-old Ukrainian girl was flown in to play his bride.

The theme park can be privately rented outside of its opening hours and actors had been booked at great cost to be there – one received £10,000.

The BBC understands that Jacky Jhaj, 39, who is from west London, has now been charged by French authorities in connection with organising the event.

Over the past two years I’ve set out to try and understand how he has been able to carry out these stunts and why there are not more stringent rules preventing them.

Many have taken place at high profile British landmarks – including the British Museum, the Royal Exchange in London and the University of Oxford.

They also typically involve young people being hired to act as his fans in elaborate productions.

Videos of some of them were uploaded to a YouTube channel which was watched more than six million times and had 12 million subscribers.

Many remained on YouTube for years until last September, when the BBC alerted Google, which owns the platform.

A video on a separate channel showed him next to one of the victims he was convicted of sexual activity with – with her face anonymised. It had remained on YouTube for four years with more than a million views.

Google told the BBC at the time that it takes users’ safety seriously but offered no explanation as to how an account featuring a man with almost no profile or success had 12 million subscribers, or why the videos had not been previously removed.

Clips on social media sites appear to cast Jhaj as a successful writer and singer and are often styled as music videos.

Many are highly concerning – some feature him posing with young children and weapons. It is not clear if the guns are real or fake.

Others revel in his infamy. In one, he is greeted by fans apparently celebrating his release from Wormwood Scrubs prison.

I wanted to know how he had organised the stunts – and if he had received help.

Over the past two years, I have spoken to videographers, production assistants and technicians who were hired for some of the events before they discovered Jhaj’s real identity.

One man repeatedly appears in videos they shared with me.

We have been sent images and footage of him at three of the stunts by people who described him as assisting the choreographer hired for dance auditions, and apparently filming.

At a different event last year, he was confronted by duped cast members who recognised Jhaj from our reports and showed him the online article.

The cast members filmed him acknowledging that Jhaj is a convicted sex offender but he says he is his “friend” and is now “free”.

At this event Jhaj was filmed posing naked in front of a mocked-up BBC News lorry in London which had been set on fire.

Jhaj had initially appeared there disguised by prosthetics – before he removed them and was identified as the man from our story.

Preliminary findings from the French prosecutor also said that make-up artists had allegedly changed the organiser’s facial features dramatically at the Disneyland event.

How Jhaj funds his stunts – which involve extraordinary costs on venue hire, casts and props – is a mystery.

One production hired a tank, while in another a mock police car was set on fire.

The booking of Disneyland Paris alone would have cost more than €130,000 (£110,000), according to the French broadcaster BFMTV.

I was also told that hiring the red carpet space that is the home of movie premieres in Leicester Square would have required tens of thousands of pounds.

Jhaj was listed as a director of a business that was wound up in 2016 – but there is no other obvious source of money.

I also wanted to know how he had been able to carry out these events while subject to a sexual harm prevention order.

We have seen a copy of it. It lists ten restrictions on his activities – but does not appear to explicitly prohibit the stunts he had organised.

The order restricts Jhaj from contacting his previous victims, entering public places for the use of children and deliberately contacting any girl under the age of 16.

However, there is no blanket ban on hosting events with children under 16 if they are supervised – as was the case with the Leicester Square stunt, where some adults attended as chaperones.

I also wanted to know who, if anyone, was responsible for monitoring convicted paedophiles.

Following my first report, a police officer who helped monitor Jhaj rang me, asking for information on his movements.

He said he was responsible for managing the whereabouts of dozens of offenders – and it was challenging work.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council advise that the minimum safe staffing levels at which paedophiles should be monitored is one officer to every 50 offenders.

The Metropolitan Police’s average offender management ratio was one officer to 40 offenders – well within the benchmark.

I asked other forces what their ratios were and some never replied. But 10 out of 26 forces failed to meet this benchmark, according to Freedom of Information requests received last year.

At one force, officers were responsible for monitoring 85 offenders each on average.

Some forces defended their resourcing – arguing that these are advisory levels only and also dependent on risk assessments of offenders.

But successfully managing 50 sex offenders is “impossible” according to Jonathan Taylor, a safeguarding expert and former child abuse investigator.

“I feel so sorry for the officers”, he says. “It’s a poisoned chalice – one of the paedophiles will re-offend. This case also highlights concerns about a lack of safeguarding in entertainment and tech companies enabling these types of offenders.”

The BBC understands that Jhaj is currently detained in French custody. The local prosecutor there says the Ukrainian girl involved in Saturday’s stunt had not been a victim of either physical or sexual violence and had not been forced to play the role of a bride.

His statement also said Disneyland Paris had been “deceived” and that the organiser had used a fake Latvian ID to hire the venue.

The BBC approached Disneyland Paris for comment – they did not respond.

The Metropolitan Police said that a 39-year-old man is wanted by them for breaching restrictions placed on his activities, and is also separately being investigated for “any possible” fraud offences.

Love Island USA – a spinoff of the UK reality series – is having its most-watched season yet. But its newfound popularity has come with a dark side.

Contestants have been relentlessly cyberbullied on social media, so much so that the show aired a statement during a recent episode with a plea for viewers to halt the harassment. Its host Ariana Madix echoed the sentiment, asking viewers to rethink their posts and how they could impact the cast.

The show – which places everyday men and women in a villa in Fiji to compete and find love – often helps contestants secure millions of social media followers, brand deals and appearance requests.

But the downsides of overnight fame have been well-documented since the show’s start 10 years ago in the UK, with some contestants complaining about depression, anxiety and relentless scrutiny. Two contestants died by suicide after appearing on the show, prompting the British government to launch an inquiry into reality television.

The show’s producers say they’ve learned from the reality franchise’s years of success how to better support cast and crew. But psychology experts who have worked with reality TV shows say it’s an uphill battle.

Behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings, who has worked with reality TV productions including Big Brother, said the last five years have seen a lot of positive changes in the UK to address welfare concerns – but those strides haven’t been as evident in the US.

“I don’t think duty of care has evolved as far in the US as it has in the UK,” she told the BBC. “Maybe there isn’t the same level of welfare, support or transparency. I also wonder that with increased political polarisation in the US, the cyber-bullying and threats may be more intense and widespread.”

She said it’s about achieving a balance when working on a reality show. The core of many of these shows is outrageous emotional outbursts, sexual behaviour, aggressive insults and confrontations.

“Producers want excitement and jeopardy,” she said, but on-set psychologists are ensuring “stability and healthy behaviours”.

Love Island, which has run iterations in more than 20 countries, says it offers contestants support before, during and after production, and continues to adjust its mental health offerings to meet changing needs.

On the USA version, ITV America, which produces the show, employs a duty of care representative, two on-site psychologists and a welfare manager that helps islanders as a “non-producer voice” in the villa. Throughout filming, all cast members have an appointed psychologist at the villa – and check ins can be initiated by an islander, as cast members are called on the series, or the doctor.

Before they are cast on the show, each contestant goes through a lengthy vetting by a psychologist. Contestants are also briefed about negative press, social media interactions and public perceptions.

But this mental health awareness has come from some hard lessons. As the show gained popularity in the UK, some complained about depression or anxiety after appearing as part of the cast. Several have spoken out about thoughts about taking their own lives in the aftermath.

The suicides of former Love Island UK contestants Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis in 2018 and 2019 prompted questions about how and how well participants are helped.

• ITV boss says Love Island aftercare ‘can’t be forever’
• Love Island: ITV announces new contestant welfare measures

“You can earn a lot of money if that’s what you want to do, but really you need to look at the bigger picture and think in five, six, 10 years’ time, you’re always going to be pretty much known for being on a reality TV show,” said Zara Holland, who competed on Love Island in 2016 in the UK.

“It was a really hard time for me. And if I could turn back time, I really wish I’d never gone on the show,” she told BBC’s Newsbeat.

Social media can act as a double-edged sword for contestants. Dr Jamie Huysman, who has advised productions on mental health care for more than 20 years, noted it has “made it hell” for some. “It has truly disassociated us from the impact of our words.”

Contestants want fame – but they’re not the only ones who feel a rush by getting likes and followers online. Average viewers on social media are also chasing that same gratification when they make memes or posts that become popular, and they are often incentivised to be critical, he says.

Ms Hemmings said psychologists can encourage people to ignore those criticising them online, but it’s difficult.

“The public can be fickle and harsh,” she said. “They need to remember that contributors are young and ambitious, but could be their siblings, brothers, sisters or children.”

She noted that overnight fame can lead to a cascade of issues for contestants, which can be overwhelming.

“They yearn for it, but it brings unwelcome scrutiny,” she said. “Their pasts are dissected. Exes come out of the woodwork to sell their stories, and everything they do or say is open to criticism.”

Another complication is that “very few reality stars go onto successful media careers – most struggle or fade away”. But having a taste of popularity can make it difficult to go back to their old lives.

• Love Island: Secrets from a former contestant
• What are the legal rights of reality TV stars, really?

Season 7, which is still airing, has become the series’ most-watched season since it was launched in the US in 2019. Sports bars are hosting watch parties, celebrities are spoofing viral moments online – Grammy-winner Megan Thee Stallion even appeared on an episode this season and gushed over her obsession with the show.

The show’s popularity in the US has spurred a spin-off dubbed “Beyond the Villa”, which is set to air next month and follow Season 6 Islanders as they navigate life in Los Angeles after the show.

But that success has also led to a rise in negative comments about the cast this season, who have been relentlessly criticised over their appearances and actions. The show broadcast a message this week in the middle of an episode: “The keyword in Love Island is… Love. We love our fans. We love our Islanders. We don’t love cyberbullying, harassment or hate.”

It followed a public plea from host Ariana Madix: “Don’t be contacting people’s families. Don’t be doxing people. Don’t be going on Islanders’ pages and saying rude things.”

Love Island USA’s producers did not say whether added mental health precautions would be taken after this season – but noted they review and reassess such measures continually.

Members of the cast do not have access to their cell phones or social media while on the island, but their friends and family have been responding to some of the harassment – including those who know contestant Huda Mustafa, a mother whose relationship with fellow Islander Jeremiah Brown has been heavily scrutinised online this season.

The show has routinely defended itself and its cohesive psychological support system. Similar critiques have been made toward reality TV production broadly, boiling over in 2023 when reality star Bethenny Frankel of the Housewives franchise sounded off on the treatment of reality stars, dubbing it a “reality reckoning”.

“Networks and streamers have been exploiting people for too long,” she said, arguing those who appear on reality programmes should be unionised.

The calls were followed by several lawsuits challenging “Love Is Blind,” the “Real Housewives” franchise and “Vanderpump Rules” – where Ms Madix rose to fame – over the treatment of the shows’ casts.

Suzie Gibson, a senior lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University, compared reality TV stars to “modern-day gladiators, battling for love, fame and Instagram followers”.

“Audiences can live vicariously through their favourites, while hoping for others’ dismissal or ridicule.”

A famous chess club in a slum of Uganda’s capital that became the focus of the Hollywood movie Queen of Katwe is still producing champions – but faces a daily struggle to survive.

Run by chess coach Robert Katende, played by actor David Oyelowo in the Disney film released in 2016, he still believes that despite financial struggles he is managing to change children’s lives for the better through chess.

“We use chess as a teaching tool. To identify the potential of the learners and guide them to their destiny,” Mr Katende told the BBC on a visit to his SomChess Academy in Katwe, a poor neighbourhood of Kampala.

Shortly after graduating as a civil engineer, he first began volunteering in Katwe as a football coach before deciding on chess – starting up with a single chessboard in 2004 and a determination to help.

Within a year nine-year-old Phiona Mutesi, who had dropped out of school, joined up – and went on to become a chess prodigy.

She took the title of national women’s junior champion three times, competed in several prestigious international chess Olympiads and by the age of 16 was given the title Woman Candidate Master by the World Chess Federation.

It was her remarkable story that was told in the film, with Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o playing her mother.

Mr Katende says her success came from resilience and determination – and shows the truly transformative power of chess.

She also continues to be an inspiration for many of Mr Katende’s players, including 18-year-old Patricia Kawuma.

“Apart from winning school scholarships, this game has taught me how to strategise and plan ahead, and it instils discipline and patience,” the two-time national junior chess champion told the BBC.

She has also represented Uganda in two international tournaments and has earned money by winning chess competitions.

Prize money and sponsorships have enabled her to pay for her own school fees as well as those of her siblings.

Mr Katende says more than 4,000 children have gone through his programmes over the last two decades, with some of them ending up becoming doctors, engineers and lawyers.

His big boost came after a book published in 2012 by journalist Tim Crothers about Ms Mutesi caught the eye of Disney.

When the film company decided to go ahead and make the book into a movie, it gave him a one-time grant of $50,000 (£36,000).

This allowed him buy a property in Katwe to headquarter his academy and from where he also runs the Robert Katende Initiative.

He was able to extend his chess club from Katwe to sessions within Ugandan prisons – and to slums in neighbouring Kenya and Rwanda, and those in countries as far as Angola, Botswana, Cameroon and Malawi.

Currently, more than 2,500 children and about 800 inmates are in his programmes, which help them to develop and make critical decisions, he says.

“Chess is a metaphor for life. There are challenges and surprises everywhere but if you look closely you can find opportunities, you can find your way through,” the 43-year-old told me.

“A bad move in chess means you will lose, just the same with life.”

There is one move the coach, who worked on the Queen of Katwe film as a senior story consultant and who trained the actors in their chess scenes, did not predict.

The Walt Disney Company made a loss on the film – and this has had repercussions for his burgeoning chess projects.

He, Ms Mutesi and the chess champion’s mother had been promised a sizable share of any Disney profits – 67%, he says.

But he was told by the corporation that after investing about $15m (£11m) into the drama, directed by Mira Nair, it had only made back $10m.

“The loss put me in a bad spot because people think that I have hidden some money,” Mr Katende said.

“Many people think I’m a wealthy Hollywood chess coach after the film but the hard truth is that we are yet to benefit from its profits.”

However, he says he is not bitter as the film publicised his chess programmes, attracting both local and international partners.

“If Disney had not done the film, we wouldn’t be where we are; I don’t think we would be known – and many other people have come on board to support our philosophy,” he said.

Ms Mutesi’s fame helped her win a scholarship to Northwest University in the US in 2017 and she now works in Canada as a business analyst and is able to support her mother, who has moved back to their home village outside Kampala.

But Mr Katende’s mission faces huge financial challenges as most of his partners have fallen off since the coronavirus pandemic.

“We had to scale down operations and close down some training centres. Before Covid I had 14 staff, but now we have eight. I fear we might let go of more staff due to financial constraints,” he said.

Thousands of his players in Uganda have to scramble for only 120 chess boards due to a lack of funds.

Uganda’s current junior chess champion, 19-year-old Jovan Kasozi – one of Mr Katende’s protégés – has also been hit.

The Katende chess initiative pays towards his schooling and the teenager has been able to occasionally crowdfund from some well wishers for extra chess training sessions – but last year he missed out an international tournament because he could not raise $400 for his air ticket.

“But I’m not giving up on chess, the game stimulates my mind and it has made me to be very good at mathematics. It makes me think like a computer,” the young man told the BBC.

Mr Katunde is equally upbeat, saying that it may well be a long game when it comes to Disney.

“Hopefully they will reach out to me if they break even,” he said, adding that then the profits could start coming in.

• From pawn to teenage chess queen – Uganda’s Phiona Mutesi
• Listen: Can chess help children displaced by conflict to rebuild their lives?
• Tunde Onakoya: Nigerian breaks chess marathon record
• Kenya chess: Male player dons disguise to compete as woman

Euro 2025 will bring a summer of fierce competition and fantastic football.

Sixteen teams are set to play across eight venues in Switzerland from 2 to 27 July. In the group stages, defending champions England take on Wales – who are playing in their first international tournament.

Tickets are still available for a range of matches and there’s a host of activities outside the games – including fan zones in Switzerland and the UK.

Whether you fancy a last-minute trip or want to watch the games at home, here’s a complete guide to all the action.

Yes, but secure your spot quickly.

Tickets for high-demand matches go on sale daily at 10:00 BST via UEFA’s ticketing site, with a limit of 10 tickets per person per game. Prices start at 25 CHF (about £22) and go up to 90 CHF (about £81) for the final.

You can access your tickets via the UEFA Mobile Tickets app, which can be downloaded for free by Android and iPhone users. There’s also a resale platform where fans can safely resell any tickets purchased – but it’s best not to rely on this for the big games.

The tournament will take place across eight Swiss cities: Basel, Bern, Geneva, Zurich, St Gallen, Lucerne, Sion, and Thun. The action kicks off in Thun on Wednesday 2 July at 17:00 BST. Expect a breathtaking backdrop of idyllic lakes and mountains.

England matches in the group stages will be held across two cities – Zurich and St Gallen. The Lionesses take on France in Zurich on Saturday 5 July and the Netherlands in Zurich on Wednesday 9 July.

Then we’re off to St Gallen for the crunch England v Wales match on Sunday 13 July.

Wales’ first game will be in Lucerne against the Netherlands on Saturday 5 July, followed by their second game against France in St Gallen on Wednesday 9 July.

Flights from London to Zurich start at around £50 to £70 for one person on a one-way ticket on 2 July. Tickets get more expensive over the weekend rising to about £150 plus for a direct one-way flight. From Manchester prices for the most direct flights on 5 July start at about £200. For Cardiff, the cost is even higher.

Zurich is the best destination for England and Wales fans heading to the games, because Lucerne and St Gallen are a short train ride away. There’s also the option of going to Bern or Geneva and travelling on from there.

In the car, it’s about an 11-hour drive from London to Zurich. The car ferry from Dover to Calais for two people starts at about £85 on 2 July and £100 on 5 July for a one-way trip. If you take the Eurotunnel from Folkestone to Calais, prices range from about £140 to £270 on 2 and 5 July.

Trains via Paris or Brussels cost about £310 to £530 and take between seven-and-a-half and 10 hours. Coaches are cheaper, with some routes starting at about £70. But the journey takes more than 20 hours.

A very long bike ride from London to Zurich takes about 52 to 60 hours. It costs about £23 to £30 to take your bike on the ferry, not counting the toll it will take on your legs.

British citizens can travel to Switzerland without a visa for up to 90 days in any 180-day period if the visit is for tourism and sporting events. But double check that the expiry date on your passport is dated at least three months after the day you plan to leave.

Switzerland is known for being a pricey holiday pick. But there’s a range of accommodation options for different budgets.

As one of the tournament’s main hubs, Zurich is in high demand. Hotel prices start around £210 to £300 per night for two people on key match nights like Saturday 5 July. If you’re on a tighter budget, Airbnb prices start from £70 to £200 per night although lots of options involve staying in a room rather than renting a whole flat.

In St Gallen, hotels for Sunday 13 July range from about £200 to £600. Lots of places are already booked up. The town also offers a variety of Airbnb accommodation, with prices ranging from £50 to £800 for the same dates. Accommodation is still available slightly outside the town, so it’s worth checking these spots too.

If hotels and Airbnbs stretch your budget, camping is one alternative. Campsites near Zurich and St Gallen offer scenic views and you could look into renting a car or bike to get around. The average cost for an overnight stay at a Swiss campsite is about £20 – £35, though prices vary between locations.

Switzerland has good public transport networks, with fast and reliable services between major cities. On match days, public transport is free for ticket holders. Every ticket will be valid on the match day for a second-class round trip between any Swiss locality and the stadium.

Switzerland’s vast network of trains offer an efficient and scenic way to travel. The SBB (Swiss Federal Railways) has a range of different tickets on their website. There’s also Postbus, a bus service connecting rural areas to urban centres, which offers hundreds of journeys via several apps or you can purchase tickets from stations and drivers.

If you’re planning on staying for a longer break, a Swiss Travel Pass offers unlimited travel by train, bus and boat, and is available for three, four, six, eight or 15 consecutive days.

If you’re feeling more adventurous, there are also plenty of iconic cycle routes across Switzerland.

There will be city centre fan zones across the eight cities where Euro 2025 games are taking place. Organisers have planned a “packed schedule of activities for all ages” with live screenings of matches, concerts, workshops and child-friendly football pitches.

In Zurich, the ZüriFanzone will be right by the main station – with screenings of all the matches, concerts, and workshops. In St Gallen, Marktgasse in the old town will host the fan zone with lunchtime panel talks, street football and live music. In Lucerne, the fan zone is located at Europaplatz next to Lake Lucerne and will offer a range of music, concerts and football entertainment.

Fan zones open on 2 July, the day of the first game. Double check their closing dates on the UEFA event guides.

The Swiss Franc (CHF) is the official currency in Switzerland. For every pound, it’s roughly 1.10 Swiss Francs. In most cases, you can also pay in Euros. A pound is worth roughly €1.17.

Switzerland has four official languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. German is the most widely spoken but English is a common second language for many Swiss people.

Switzerland is not part of the EU so mobile roaming charges could differ from rates in European countries. Check with your network provider before you travel. One solution is buying a local eSIM to cover you for the tournament.

For fans at home there are events taking place across England and Wales.

There will be watch parties of each England match in the group stages in Birmingham, London and Brighton.

In Wales, there will also be lots of watch parties and concerts, including in Swansea, Newport and Wrexham.

Look out for events on social media in your local area as the tournament goes on.

Every match in the UK will be shown either on BBC or ITV, with the final available on both channels.

There will be live coverage of 16 matches on BBC One, BBC Two and iPlayer with Gabby Logan, Alex Scott and Jeanette Kwakye presenting across the tournament. This includes Wales v Netherlands and England v Netherlands on BBC One. France v England, France v Wales and England v Wales will be on ITV.

On Radio, there will be 25 live match commentaries on Radio 5 Live, Radio 5 Sports Extra and BBC Sounds across the tournament. BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio Cymru are covering Wales’ games, providing commentary in English and Welsh.

The BBC Sport website, app and social media will cover every moment with live match reports, clips, highlights, interviews and analysis.

And there are lots of podcasts to help you get your football fix including Football Daily, featuring interviews with players and managers, and Feast of Football, bringing you all the latest news from Euro 2025.

Belfast rap group Kneecap filled Glastonbury’s West Holts stage for a highly-charged performance that hit back at Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer with expletive-laden chants.

The Irish-language band have been in the headlines after rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs under the name Mo Chara, was charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying the flag of proscribed terrorist organisation Hezbollah at a gig last year. He has denied the charge.

Last week, Sir Keir said Kneecap’s appearance at the festival was “not appropriate“.

On stage, the band thanked Glastonbury for keeping them on the bill and told the crowd the “prime minister of your country, not mine, said he didn’t want us to play”.

• Follow the latest updates from the Glastonbury festival

Mr Ó hAnnaidh is on bail after a court hearing in London two weeks ago.

Towards the start of their set, the rapper – who was wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh – held his arms out to the crowd and announced, “Glastonbury, I am a free man!”

His bandmate Naoise Ó Cairealláin, who performs under the name Móglaí Bap, called the case “a trumped up terrorism charge”, adding that it was “not the first time there was a miscarriage of justice for an Irish person in the British justice system”.

Glastonbury organisers had to fence off the West Holts field 45 minutes before the band’s appearance, as thousands turned up to show their support – or see what all the fuss was about.

They were treated to a set of raucous, rabble-rousing electro-rap, and responded by setting off smoke flares and moshing in giant rippling circles of bodies.

The hedonism of the music, rooted in club and drug culture, was often at odds with the band’s pronouncements between songs.

The trio, who are vocal critics of Israel’s military action in Gaza, addressed that topic again during their Glastonbury set.

“We understand colonialism and we understand how important it is to support each other internationally,” Mr Ó hAnnaidh said.

Accusing Israel of genocide, he then led the crowd in a chant of “free, free Palestine”.

Israel has strongly denied allegations of genocide relating to the ongoing war in Gaza.

Kneecap also voiced support for Palestine Action, a protest group that the UK government intends to proscribe under anti-terror laws, after some of its activists broke into an RAF base and spray-painted two military planes red.

This led to a further chant against Sir Keir, as the band criticised the UK’s sale of arms to Israel.

Formed in 2017, Kneecap rose to fame after starring a semi-autobiographical film alongside Oscar-nominated actor Michael Fassbender last year.

Their vocal support for Palestinians put them under an intense media and political spotlight earlier this year, after an appearance at Coachella Festival in California.

Shortly after, video footage emerged of Mr Ó hAnnaidh allegedly holding a Hezbollah flag at a gig in November 2024.

The video was investigated by anti-terrorism police which resulted in Mr Ó hAnnaidh being charged, under the name Liam O’Hanna.

Amid the row, Sir Keir and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy were among those who said Kneecap’s appearance at Glastonbury was “not appropriate”.

However, the band’s set was backed by Glastonbury founder Sir Michael Eavis and his daughter Emily, who runs the festival.

She told the BBC: “There have been a lot of really heated topics this year, but we remain a platform for many, many artists from all over the world and, you know, everyone is welcome here.”

Sir Michael added that “people that don’t agree with the politics of the event can go somewhere else”, in an interview with Glastonbury’s on-site newspaper.

On stage, Kneecap thanked the festival for their support.

“The pressure that that family was under and they stood strong,” said Mr Ó hAnnaidh. “Fair play to them.”

The band’s Glastonbury appearance caused problems for the BBC, which had to decide whether it could broadcast their set while meeting its obligations to impartiality and offensive language.

Although there was no live stream, the broadcaster later uploaded a largely unedited version of the performance to its Glastonbury highlights page on BBC iPlayer.

“Whilst the BBC doesn’t ban artists, our plans ensure that our programming meets our editorial guideline,” a spokesperson said on Saturday.

“We don’t always live stream every act from the main stages and look to make an on-demand version of Kneecap’s performance available on our digital platforms, alongside more than 90 other sets.”

During the set, Mr Ó hAnnaidh observed the sea of Palestinian flags in the audience and joked that “the BBC editor is going to have some job”.

Health and fire warnings have been issued in countries across southern Europe, with temperatures expected to exceed 40C in some places over the weekend.

Italy, Greece, France, Spain and Portugal are among the countries affected – with the Spanish city of Seville forecast to hit 42C on Sunday.

Hot air from North Africa, which is spreading across the Balkans to holiday destinations such as Croatia, is contributing to the soaring temperatures.

BBC Weather says the heatwave is “very intense” for this time of the year – with the continent normally experiencing such high temperatures in July and early August.

In Spain, emergency staff have been placed on standby to deal with a surge in heatstroke cases especially among vulnerable people, including children, the elderly and those with chronic illnesses.

“It always gets super hot in Madrid, what surprises me is how early it’s happening – we’re still in June,” Marina, 22, told the Reuters news agency in the Spanish capital.

“This year is extreme. Last year, at least you could go out at this hour, but now? No way. It’s intense, and people are drinking more water,” Janeth, 47, said.

Italian authorities are advising residents in several cities, including Rome, Milan and Venice – where several A-list celebrities have gathered for the wedding of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and TV presenter Lauren Sanchez – to stay indoors between 11:00 and 18:00 local time.

“There is no wind, a lot of humidity, we are sweating, and I’m suffocating at night,” Alejandra Echeverria, a 40-year-old Mexican tourist in Venice, told AFP.

France, meanwhile, has been experiencing a heatwave for more than a week. Orange heat alerts, the country’s second-highest warning, were issued for southern regions on Friday.

In the city of Marseille, municipal swimming pools are being opened free of charge until the end of the heatwave, while there have been calls in some places for schools to close to protect the health of students.

Yellow and amber alerts are also in place for parts of England this weekend, and temperatures in London may reach 35C on Monday. The heatwave is forecast to last until Tuesday evening.

Wildfires have already struck some parts of Europe, including Greece, where coastal towns near the capital Athens erupted in flames that destroyed homes – forcing people to evacuate.

While it is hard to link individual extreme weather events to climate change, heatwaves are becoming more common and more intense due to climate change.

Scientists at World Weather Attribution, who analyse the influence of climate change on extreme weather events, say June heatwaves with three consecutive days above 28C are about 10 times more likely to occur now compared to pre-industrial times.

Donald Trump’s week began with an on-air expletive as he lost his cool over his mounting frustrations with Iran and Israel’s shaky ceasefire.

It ended with a beaming US president holding court at the White House – not once, but twice – as he celebrated a series of significant political victories at home and abroad.

Trump was in a triumphant mood, answering questions for more than an hour at a news conference that turned into a checklist of his accomplishments.

Here’s a look at four big wins from this week, as well as a reminder of some things that didn’t go entirely the president’s way.

The successful US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities on 21 June was followed just three days later by Trump’s announcement of a “complete and total” ceasefire in what he termed the “12-day war” between Israel and Iran.

It had a rocky start. Not long before the announcement, Iran fired off ballistic missiles at a US airbase in Qatar, sparking fears of a wider war across the Persian Gulf.

Even after the ceasefire, things seemed tenuous. Both sides were quickly accused of breaking it, prompting an angry, expletive-laden tirade to reporters on the White House lawn.

By his own admission, Trump only narrowly managed to convince Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call off further attacks on Iran.

But ultimately the ceasefire held, allowing the president to proudly claim that his military gamble of an “unbelievable” strike on Iran worked, and point to evidence that he is a “peacemaker” – a sorely needed win as peace continues to elude him in both Gaza and Ukraine.

• Hegseth talks up strikes in Iran in push for public approval

Trump was on his way to the Netherlands for the Nato summit when he got a text from Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, lavishing praise on him for the strikes on Iran – texts the president was more than happy to make public.

During his whirlwind visit to the summit, US allies committed to 5% defence spending, something the president had repeatedly and vocally called for.

Then during a joint press conference, Rutte jokingly referred to Trump as “Daddy”, a reference to the president being able to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.

Trump has seemed to embrace the moniker.

“I think he likes me. If he doesn’t… I’ll come back and hit him hard,” Trump said at a news conference, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio laughing beside him. “He did it very affectionately.”

Soon afterwards, the White House posted various videos of a victorious-looking Trump with the caption “daddy’s home”.

• Trump takes victory lap at Nato – but questions remain

Trump’s week ended on a high note with the news that the Supreme Court issued a ruling that will curb judges’ power to block his orders nationwide.

While the ruling stems from a case regarding Trump’s ability to end birthright citizenship for children of some immigrants, it has sweeping implications. It will be harder for lower courts to challenge Trump’s domestic agenda through what Attorney General Pam Bondi described as an “endless barrage” of injunctions.

At an impromptu news conference, the president hailed the ruling as a “monumental victory for the constitution, the separation of powers, and the rule of law”.

The decision allows him to pursue a number of other policy items that had been thwarted by injunctions, including freezing funds to so-called “sanctuary cities” that stand in the way of his mass deportation drive, suspending refugee resettlement, and preventing tax money being used to fund gender surgeries.

The president smiled and cracked jokes, inviting reporters to ask more and more questions, as his aides – including Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt – sat smiling beside him.

“This was a tremendous win, and we’ve had tremendous wins,” he said at the end. “But this was a tremendous win today.”

• Court ruling expands Trump’s power – he intends to use it

On Friday afternoon, Trump met with the foreign ministers of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who earlier in the day signed a peace deal aimed at ending decades of fighting between the two neighbours.

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,” Trump said.

The deal also helps the US government and American companies gain access to critical minerals in the region.

“I was able to get them together and sell it,” Trump said. “And not only that, we’re getting for the United States a lot of the mineral rights from the Congo.”

At his earlier news conference Trump had admitted he knew few details about the conflict, which is far from the minds of most Americans.

“I’m a little bit out of my league… because I don’t know too much about it,” he said. “I know one thing. They were going at it for many years, and with machetes.”

• Find out more about the peace deal signed in Washington

The week hasn’t been all victories and roses for Trump.

The president’s biggest legislative priority – a massive tax bill he’s dubbed the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” – has hit some roadblocks.

Trump has repeatedly urged lawmakers to get it on to his desk to sign into law by 4 July, Independence Day in the US.

But earlier this week, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough said that certain provisions violated Senate rules, throwing billions of dollars of cuts into doubt.

“This is part of the process. This part is part of the workings of the United States Senate,” Karoline Leavitt said earlier this week. “But the president is adamant about seeing this bill on his desk here at the White House by Independence Day.”

And while Trump has hailed the ceasefires in Iran – as well as those in central Africa and last month between Pakistan and India – as victories, he has so far faltered on two of his biggest promises for peace: in Gaza and Ukraine.

“We’re working on that one,” Trump said of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine at Friday’s news conference, where he did not mention Gaza.

Even the end of US military involvement in Iran is not guaranteed.

During the news conference, Trump was asked by the BBC if he would consider bombing Iran again if he believed they were re-starting their nuclear programme.

“Sure, without question, absolutely,” he responded.

Back in March, as he turned his back on a ceasefire process that was delivering results, the Israeli prime minister took a decision described by some commentators as akin to “political suicide”.

The Gaza ceasefire deal, brokered by Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff even before the US president was inaugurated to his second term, had led to the release of dozens of hostages from Hamas captivity, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

The next stage was due to see more hostages return home and a gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, before a negotiated end to the war.

Tired of conflict, Israelis and Palestinians contemplated the end of the most destructive war in a common history too frequently punctuated by fighting.

But Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t want the war to end.

As he ordered the resumption of attacks across Gaza, the prime minister declared that fighting would continue until Hamas had been “completely destroyed”.

The safe return of the remaining hostages in Gaza seemed to be a secondary consideration. (The civilian consequences in Gaza itself didn’t merit a mention.)

Many Israelis, especially the hostage families, were outraged.

They accused Netanyahu of putting his own political survival ahead of their relatives’ safety and the greater good of the nation.

“Bibi’s” popularity in the polls plummeted and he struggled to keep together a disjointed government, propped up by hardline ministers from the far right and orthodox religious parties.

Three months on, Netanyahu is basking in the glory of a spectacular military victory over his nemesis, Iran. He is now said to be contemplating early elections and yet another term as prime minister.

At a press conference earlier this week, the 75-year-old, who is already Israel’s longest-serving leader, said he still had “many missions” to complete and would seek to do so for as long as “the people” of Israel want him to.

Later in the week, and presenting the presumed destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme as a “window of opportunity” that “must not be missed”, Netanyahu suggested only he could secure the “freeing of hostages and defeat of Hamas” after which he would strike wider regional agreements.

But calling early elections would be a big risk and, according to the latest polls, Netanyahu hasn’t enjoyed as big a “bounce” from the 12-day conflict with Iran as he might have hoped for.

In a fractured political system where coalition building is key in the 120-seat Knesset, Netanyahu’s Likud Party would fall well short of a majority by itself and could struggle to pull together support from smaller parties on the right, suggests latest polling in the Ma’ariv newspaper.

The same polling suggested a significant majority, 59% of Israelis, want the fighting in Gaza to stop now, in exchange for the hostages.

Almost half of those asked, some 49%, also thought the only reason Netanyahu is continuing the war is for his own political considerations.

“The guy is a very skilful political actor,” says Professor Tamar Hermann, a senior Research Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. “There is no more skilled politician in Israel.”

But, he says, “trust” is a big problem for Netanyahu.

A political leader who has changed his spots so many times to cling to the reins of power is simply no longer believed by a majority of Israelis.

According to new polling, soon to be released by Prof Hermann’s Israel Democracy Institute, Netanyahu “doesn’t cross the 50% line in terms of Israelis expressing full or even partial trust in him”.

In some ways, says Prof Hermann, deciding to call early elections “is an even greater risk [for Netanyahu] than attacking Iran because in the Middle East you really don’t know where you will be in six months”.

That’s because, despite his military gamble in Iran seemingly paying off, there’s an elephant in the corner of Benjamin Netanyahu’s living room.

Indeed, you could say a small herd of elephants is threatening to disrupt the prime minister’s hopes of yet another term in office.

Next week, he is due to testify in a high-profile criminal case in which he’s facing charges of political corruption, including bribery and fraud.

The prime minister’s attempts to, again, delay the High Court hearings on account of his busy schedule and the special state of emergency (over the Iran war) were rejected at the end of last week.

Netanyahu and his supporters have repeatedly tried to portray the legal case against him as part of a “politically driven witch hunt” but in an increasingly polarised society, his opponents are equally determined he should face justice.

Appearing to belatedly learn about “Bibi’s” legal troubles, President Trump said Netanyahu was a “great hero” and “warrior” whose trial should be “cancelled immediately” or, at the very least, he should be given a pardon.

This, remember, is the same US president who only days earlier had publicly castigated the Israeli prime minister – with expletives – as the Iran ceasefire deal threatened to unravel before it had begun.

But Trump’s latest intervention has been described as unwise and unhelpful by many in Israel.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said he should not “intervene in a legal process of an independent state”.

His apparently contradictory stance on Israel and attempted intervention in Netanyahu’s legal case was akin to “treating us like a banana republic”, says Prof Hermann.

On the international stage, many Israelis accuse Netanyahu of having harmed Israel’s global standing and its economic prospects by needlessly prolonging the war in Gaza, even though many former generals have said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has achieved as much as is militarily possible in Gaza.

It should not be forgotten, either, that the International Criminal Court still has warrants issued against the prime minister – and former defence minister Yoav Gallant – over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, where more than 55,000 people have been killed in Israel’s war against Hamas.

Israel’s government, along with Netanyahu and Gallant, strongly reject the accusations.

Ultimately, say most commentators, it would be difficult to imagine new elections being called in Israel while the war in Gaza continues and while Israeli hostages remain captive.

But many of Netanyahu’s critics and opponents have prematurely written him off over the years and have certainly learned never to second-guess what his next move might be.

It seemed like a harmless encounter.

It was the summer of 2021, and Jay Hulme, a volunteer at St Nicholas Church in Leicester, was on the door, welcoming people. That’s when Venessa walked in.

“There was something awkward about her,” he recalls. “But I assumed it was about being in a new church with new people, and we were just coming out of the pandemic. There was no red flag.”

Venessa Pinto, employed by the Leicester diocese of the Church of England as a lay preacher – a non-ordained person who can lead worship – returned a few more times to Jay’s church.

A few weeks later, they both happened to be at a midweek service in Leicester Cathedral. When it was over, she approached him and asked to speak privately. They stepped into the quiet of the old cathedral graveyard.

Then she asked him out.

“I was very taken aback, because I didn’t know her. And I was like, ‘I’m gay, but thank you for asking.’ But she asked me if it was because she was black.”

Jay was startled by the question. He gently reiterated that he could not go out on a date because he was gay – and also not in the right place for a relationship.

“I left it thinking, ‘That was very awkward’, but I think, ‘That’s the end of that.'”

It wasn’t.

In fact, it was the beginning of a devastating campaign of stalking and harassment. And when Jay complained, the highest authority in the Church in Leicester – a top contender to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury – said he didn’t believe him. Instead, he accused Jay of witchcraft.

That summer, Jay Hulme, then in his mid-twenties, was at a very happy juncture in his life. He was a poet and author, an assistant warden at the LGBT-friendly St Nicholas Church and known on social media for his love of church buildings and theology.

He was exploring his Christian faith and considering the possibility of training to become a priest in the coming years.

“I’m also trans, I’d come out a number of years before, and I’d finally come to a place of full and complete happiness with who I was. I saw my future unfurling before me in a way that had felt impossible before,” he reminisces.

After being rejected, Venessa, also then in her mid-twenties, sent Jay a series of “angry and accusatory” messages, saying he was gossiping about her. Though he tried to reassure her he wasn’t, she was adamant.

To try to resolve things, Jay agreed to a demand from her to meet. He had been determined that the meeting happened outside in public but a heavy rainstorm meant they ended up inside, alone together at her place of work.

He says she yelled at him, telling him he was a liar, a racist and an awful person – demanding an apology over and over again without telling him what he was supposed to have done.

Unsettled, Jay stopped interacting with Venessa and avoided her when she continued to come to his church. But then he started to get messages from anonymous online accounts which could be seen by his social media followers.

Jay quickly worked out the author was Venessa. She even sent him an email from her personal account apologising for what she described as the “pain” she’d caused.

But the nastiness online escalated, with Venessa publicly making false allegations and threats.

Jay was concerned for his safety. He reported the harassment to Leicestershire Police. He says he didn’t want Venessa prosecuted at that point – just for the abuse to stop.

But he heard nothing back and the abuse continued relentlessly. Each time he blocked an account, another would spring up. Jay felt he had no way of escaping it.

“I felt like she was in my pocket, and in my house, and in my brain all of the time, saying these horrendous things and I couldn’t get away,” he says.

Jay needed to stay online because of his writing and speaking commitments. But he was beginning to lose contracts. He suspects that was because of the allegations about him online.

Finally, weeks after reporting it, the police did visit Venessa. The outcome was far from satisfactory for Jay.

“She told the officer that it was her friends who were sending the messages, and the officer told her to tell them to stop. I was told by the police that I should just delete my social media,” he says.

Jay says he got the impression the police did not appreciate the seriousness of the abuse because it was online.

The police visit triggered even more angry messages from Venessa.

Jay then started assembling a powerful body of evidence, now on a mission to prove the messages had not been sent by Venessa’s friends, but by Venessa herself.

He compiled a detailed spreadsheet setting out the connections between the numerous anonymous accounts which had sent abuse or posted allegations about him. They all led back to Venessa.

Having lost faith in the police, Jay handed all this evidence to the Church of England, which promised to investigate his formal complaint.

While he waited, he thought he would get some respite by going to a silent Jesuit retreat in rural Wales. Days later, a colleague told him Venessa had booked to go to the very same retreat.

Jay had booked last minute and says there were not many slots left. “It’s in the middle of nowhere. As far as I’m concerned there is no way that could have happened naturally.”

Jay left the retreat just hours before Venessa arrived. It left him terrified, feeling the stalking had now gone beyond the confines of the internet.

Finally, there was some positive news for Jay.

Back in Leicester, the Church HR investigation concluded Venessa had been responsible for the abuse, to Jay’s huge relief. He assumed that would be the end of it.

But almost as soon as that happened, there was an unexpected turn.

He was called into a meeting with the Bishop of Leicester, Martyn Snow – who’s seen as a favourite to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Church of England.

Jay thought Venessa was going to lose her job. But it turned out the bishop had conducted his own investigation.

“I go in and the bishop sits down with this thick folder on his knee. And he begins to question me about my complaint. He actually states that ‘It’s he said, she said’.”

The bishop said he didn’t believe that Venessa had been responsible for the harassment. And he wouldn’t uphold Jay’s complaint against her.

Then he made an extraordinary accusation about Jay.

“Somebody had given a statement that I had been seen in the church, in the darkness, with a candle – and they thought I was conducting a seance. For clarity, I was praying with a candle in the dark, because that’s a thing that Christians do,” says Jay.

It got worse.

Bishop Snow accused him of practising witchcraft – both because of the “seance” and the fact Jay happened to have a close friend who was a tarot card reader.

“It felt like an enormous gut punch. These made-up allegations were being presented to me by a person with the power of a bishop, in a meeting which I suddenly realised I had no control over,” says Jay.

“She [Venessa] had somehow managed to make a bishop become part of her stalking campaign of harassment and threats, and use his power and position, and I couldn’t believe it was happening.”

Jay says he was told Venessa would not lose her licence to preach, but he would be punished.

He says Bishop Snow told him the process to begin his training for priesthood – something he decided he wanted to pursue – would be “slowed down”.

Jay was devastated. He went home feeling trapped. And after the complaint was dismissed, more messages were posted.

“Really horrific things, saying that I raped children, that I stole money, that I was a racist, a bully. She created fake accounts that were me saying really racist things and would then screenshot them and share those things,” he says.

Bishop Snow suggested to Jay that his allegations were not in keeping with Venessa’s character. But Jay soon learned he wasn’t the only person affected by Venessa’s behaviour.

A colleague who worked closely with Venessa, Kat Gibson, had been complaining about her for more than a year before the campaign against Jay began.

Kat says Venessa was unpredictable and adversarial in the extreme. “I was just really scared when I was around her, thinking, ‘what’s she going to explode at me for this time?’ with these explosive angry outbursts that I can’t prevent.”

She adds that as the months went on, “around 30 people” from eight churches approached her to informally complain about Venessa’s behaviour. She calls the issue an “open secret” but one that managers felt unable to tackle.

In a joint statement, Kat’s manager, Lusa Nsenga Ngoy – now a bishop in London – and Leicester Diocese said pastoral support and counselling were offered to those affected. The Church of England says Kat’s complaints were treated with care and seriousness.

She was a lay preacher in Leicester, but Venessa soon gained increasing prominence on a national level.

In 2022, several months into her stalking campaign against Jay Hulme, she was elected onto the Church of England’s national assembly – the General Synod.

Soon after, she was one of just a handful of people from Synod appointed to the Crown Nominations Commission, a panel that selects new bishops and archbishops. But all the while, she was sending countless sinister messages to Jay.

The online harassment from Venessa now included extreme pornographic content posted on his social media. Then she tweeted Jay’s address.

He went to the police a second time, but again felt no sense of urgency.

“There was a period where every night, I would wake up screaming because I dreamed that I was being murdered by Venessa. I had extra locks put on my door,” Jay says.

Though there appeared to be inaction, behind the scenes the Church was clearly starting to realise it had a problem on its hands.

While Jay had been told in summer 2022 that a Leicester Diocese investigation found Venessa had been responsible for Jay’s harassment, he was also told that the Bishop of Leicester decided quite the opposite.

The BBC has now learned that shortly before that, the bishop did tell Venessa to step back from ministry because of “her behaviour”, though it is not known what this refers to.

He also later revoked her licence to preach, after what’s described as “new evidence” coming to light. The diocese also suggested she go on leave.

But none of these things were made public and did not stop the unrelenting stalking of Jay.

All of a sudden, in late 2022, Leicester Diocese announced Venessa would be leaving.

It said she would “pursue other opportunities” and thanked her for the positive contributions she had made.

Again, this appeared to have no impact on the hate-filled barrages coming Jay’s way.

“I wrote my own will because…I felt that I’d been let down by the police, I’d been let down by the diocese and as far as I was concerned, this would continue until one of us died,” he says.

In desperation, in December 2022 he went to the police again.

In March 2023, 21 months after the stalking campaign against Jay began (and eight months after the Bishop of Leicester told Jay he did not believe him) the police finally took action against Venessa.

“I get a phone call from Leicestershire Police [who] basically acknowledged that they made a mess of it. And very soon Venessa was arrested. Her devices were confiscated,” says Jay.

In a statement, Leicestershire Police acknowledged their initial response fell short of the standards expected, adding it continued “to develop its knowledge and training in relation to preventing and detecting stalking offences”.

By the end of 2023, Venessa had been charged. In May 2024 she pleaded guilty to stalking, involving serious distress or harm and was given an 18-month community order and banned from contacting Jay for a year.

After Venessa’s conviction, Jay asked for a meeting with the Bishop of Leicester, Martyn Snow, who now apologised. “He did acknowledge in some way his own part in it and that he should have done better, and I agree,” says Jay.

Leicester Diocese told us it took legal advice and is confident it followed HR practice and due process in handling Jay’s complaint. But wouldn’t say why it did not sack Venessa for months after concluding she had sent the messages to Jay.

A spokesperson for the Church of England says they are “appalled by the serious criminal behaviour that led to Venessa Pinto’s conviction.”

Venessa’s colleague Kat Gibson was recently made redundant from her post in Leicester. She says she’s much better, physically and mentally, and is pleased to be out of Church of England employment.

And what of Venessa Pinto? Having carried out her community service and abided by the restraining order, she is once again preaching – and has also done missionary work in Brazil.

In a statement to the BBC she said one aspect of the court case in particular changed everything for her.

“Reading [Jay’s] victim impact statement brought into sharp focus the pain I caused and strengthened my resolve to take responsibility and make amends,” Venessa says.

“I acknowledge the seriousness of my past conduct and do not seek to diminish its impact. I have moved forward in my life and hope those affected in Leicester and elsewhere can find it in their hearts to allow space for healing and growth,” she says.

But while Venessa admits to the harassment she was convicted of, she denies some other allegations, including the frequent angry outbursts Kat and others reported. In fact she says accusations of aggressive behaviour were never formally raised with her in Leicester.

Venessa says she was going through a difficult period and was struggling with her mental health during her time in Leicester.

Her targeting of Jay has left him scarred. He struggles to open his email for fear of what he’ll find and he says his finances have been destroyed by years of sporadic work.

“I feel that everybody failed to protect me. I almost feel like I was naive that when the police failed to protect me, I thought the Church, which talks about safeguarding, [would],” says Jay.

“It fails because people are scared to do the right thing. In James, my favourite book of the Bible, there’s a bit that says that anybody who knows the right thing and fails to do it, commits sin. And that’s the problem at the heart of this Church.”

Iran has the capacity to start enriching uranium again – for a possible bomb – in “a matter of months”, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog has said.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the US strikes on three Iranian sites last weekend had caused severe but “not total” damage, contradicting Donald Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear facilities were “totally obliterated”.

“Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there,” Grossi said on Saturday.

Israel attacked nuclear and military sites in Iran on 13 June, claiming Iran was close to building a nuclear weapon.

The US later joined the strikes, dropping bombs on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities: Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan.

Since then, the true extent of the damage has been unclear.

On Saturday, Grossi told CBS News, the BBC’s US media partner, that Tehran could have “in a matter of months… a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium”.

He added that Iran still possessed the “industrial and technological capacities… so if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again.”

The IAEA is not the first body to suggest that Iran’s nuclear abilities could still continue – earlier this week, a leaked preliminary Pentagon assessment found the US strikes probably only set the programme back by months.

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

Trump retorted furiously by declaring that Iran’s nuclear sites were “completely destroyed” and accused the media of “an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history”.

For now, Iran and Israel have agreed to a ceasefire.

But Trump has said he would “absolutely” consider bombing Iran again if intelligence found that it could enrich uranium to concerning levels.

Iran’s armed forces chief of staff Abdolrahim Mousavi said on Sunday that Tehran was not convinced Israel would abide by the ceasefire.

“We did not start the war, but we have responded to the aggressor with all our power, and as we have serious doubts over the enemy’s compliance with its commitments including the ceasefire, we are ready to respond with force” if attacked again, Mousavi was quoted as saying by state TV.

• Tehran is coming back to life, but its residents are deeply shaken
• How a volatile 24 hours edged Iran and Israel to a ceasefire
• US gained nothing from strikes, Iran’s supreme leader says

Iran, on the other hand, has sent conflicting messages on how much damage was caused.

In a speech on Thursday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the strikes had achieved nothing significant. Its foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, however, said “excessive and serious” damage was done.

Iran’s already-strained relationship with the IAEA was further challenged on Wednesday, when its parliament moved to suspend cooperation with the atomic watchdog, accusing the IAEA of siding with Israel and the US.

Tehran has rejected the IAEA’s request to inspect the damaged facilities, and on Friday, Araghchi said on X that “Grossi’s insistence on visiting the bombed sites under the pretext of safeguards is meaningless and possibly even malign in intent”.

Israel and the US attacked Iran after the IAEA last month found Tehran to be in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years.

Iran insists that its nuclear programme is peaceful, and for civilian use only.

Despite the Iranian refusal to work with his organisation, Grossi said that he hoped he could still negotiate with Tehran.

“I have to sit down with Iran and look into this, because at the end of the day, this whole thing, after the military strikes, will have to have a long-lasting solution, which cannot be but a diplomatic one,” he said.

Under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Iran was not permitted to enrich uranium above 3.67% purity – the level required for fuel for commercial nuclear power plants – and was not allowed to carry out any enrichment at its Fordo plant for 15 years.

However, Trump abandoned the agreement during his first term in 2018, saying it did too little to stop a pathway to a bomb, and reinstated US sanctions.

Iran retaliated by increasingly breaching the restrictions – particularly those relating to enrichment. It resumed enrichment at Fordo in 2021 and had amassed enough 60%-enriched uranium to potentially make nine nuclear bombs, according to the IAEA.

Glastonbury organisers say they are “appalled” by comments made by rap punk duo Bob Vylan which called for “death” to the Israeli military during a performance on Saturday.

Rapper Bobby Vylan led chants of “free, free Palestine” and “death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]”.

The festival said the statements “very much crossed a line”, while antisemitism campaigners said they will formally complain to the BBC over its “outrageous decision” to broadcast the act.

A BBC spokesperson previously said some of the comments were “deeply offensive”, adding it had issued a warning on screen about “very strong and discriminatory language”. The set will not be available to rewatch on BBC iPlayer.

A joint Instagram post from Glastonbury and organiser Emily Eavis posted on Sunday said the festival stood “against all forms of war and terrorism”, and that with almost 4,000 performances on site “there will inevitably be artists and speakers appearing on our stages whose views we do not share”.

“However, we are appalled by the statements made from the West Holts stage by Bob Vylan yesterday,” it continued.

“Their chants very much crossed a line and we are urgently reminding everyone involved in the production of the festival that there is no place at Glastonbury for antisemitism, hate speech or incitement to violence.”

Speaking to the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting said Bob Vylan’s comments were “revolting”.

“If I think about the war in Ukraine, no doubt I want Ukraine to win but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be cheering on the deaths of Russians, I don’t think anyone wins from that,” Streeting said.

He said the “irony of that music festival is that Israelis were taken from a music festival, killed raped and in some cases are still being held captive.”

And he added, “whether you are Israeli or Palestinian, whether you are Christian, Jewish or Muslim, all life is precious and we’re not going to solve one of the most intractable conflicts on earth with those sorts of stunts.”

Streeting was also asked whether he agreed with the Israeli Embassy, who said the comments raise “concerns about the glorification of violence”.

He said “that is a challenge”, before adding that the embassy should also get its “own house in order”, referencing reports this week of Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank after dozens of Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian village.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism group said in a post on X that Glastonbury had “continued its headlong descent into a pit of extremism and hatred, but it is the behaviour of the BBC that is even more dangerous”.

It said it would formally complain to the BBC for broadcasting the performance, as well as that of Irish-language rap group Kneecap, who have previously described Israel’s military action in Gaza as a genocide.

Kneecap have made headlines in recent months after rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs under the name Mo Chara, was charged with a terrorism offence.

He is accused of displaying the flag of proscribed terrorist organisation Hezbollah at a gig last year. He has denied the charge.

Following sets from both groups, Avon and Somerset Police said it would review footage of comments made by acts on the West Holts stage.

The force said footage “will be assessed by officers to determine whether any offences may have been committed that would require a criminal investigation”.

After Bob Vylan’s performance, a government spokesperson said UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy had spoken to BBC director general Tim Davie to seek an “urgent explanation about what due diligence” the broadcaster carried out ahead of airing the act.

The government added that it welcomed the decision not to re-broadcast the performance on BBC iPlayer.

Kneecap’s highly-charged performance on Saturday was watched by thousands and hit back at Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer with expletive-laden chants, after he previously called the band’s Glastonbury appearance “not appropriate”.

Mr Ó hAnnaidh is on bail after a court hearing in London two weeks ago.

On Sunday the Met Police said it will not pursue prosecution after videos emerged in May appearing to show Kneecap calling for the death of British MPs.

“A range of offences were considered as part of the investigation. However, given the time elapsed between the events in the video and the video being brought to police attention, any potential summary only offences were beyond the statutory time limit for prosecution,” the force said.

The first UK concert of rock star Marilyn Manson’s tour has been cancelled after pressure from campaigners and an MP.

The first leg of his One Assassination Under God Tour had been set to kick off at Brighton Centre on 29 October.

On Saturday, fans who went online to contact Ticketmaster received a message saying “this event has been cancelled”.

In January, prosecutors in the US said they would not file charges against Manson, whose legal name is Brian Warner, after a long-running investigation into allegations of sexual assault and domestic violence. The singer has repeatedly denied the accusations.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said the allegations were too old under the law and the evidence not sufficient to charge the 56-year-old.

LA County sheriff’s detectives had said early in 2021 that they were investigating Manson over alleged incidents between 2009 and 2011 in West Hollywood.

Earlier this month in an open letter to the Brighton and Hove City Council, Sian Berry, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, called for the October concert to be cancelled.

In the letter, which was co-signed by some victim support groups and the University of Sussex students’ union, she wrote: “Many survivors in Brighton and Hove, and organisations supporting them, will have serious concerns about this booking and its wider impact on other people visiting the city centre, local residents and the wider community.”

The letter, which was posted online, prompted a flood of responses from the public pointing out that Manson had not been found guilty of allegations against him and that a four-year investigation did not lead to charges.

Others branded the call to cancel the gig as censorship.

The message on Saturday from Ticketmaster read: “Ticket sales have stopped but there may be tickets available for other dates.”

Five other UK gigs in October and November are still listed on ticketing websites.

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Senate Republicans have narrowly advanced a sprawling budget bill that is pivotal to President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda ahead of a self-imposed 4 July deadline.

The Senate moved 51-49 to open debate on the bill. Two Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the move.

Republican party leadership had been twisting arms for the initial vote on what Trump calls his “Big Beautiful Bill” on Saturday, after the release of its latest version – all 940 pages – shortly after midnight.

Republicans were divided over how much to cut welfare programmes in order to extend $3.8tn (£2.8tn) in Trump tax breaks. The proposed cuts would strip millions of America’s poorest of health insurance.

Trump declared the progress a “great victory” in a late-night social media post.

He attacked Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who rejected the bill, writing of Paul: “Did Rand Paul Vote ‘NO’ again tonight? What’s wrong with this guy???”

Paul opposes a provision in the bill that would raise the US debt limit. Tillis says the legislation would cost his state billions of dollars in healthcare funding. He cited the impact on Medicaid, the healthcare programme relied on by millions of elderly, disabled and low-income Americans.

• A look at the key items in Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’
• The woman who could bust Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’

However, the bill did win over some Republicans who had expressed scepticism, including centrist Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin initially voted against it, but changed his vote at the end of the session.

Vice-President JD Vance had travelled to the Capitol on Saturday night to offer a tiebreak vote in the Senate, where the vice-president has the deciding vote in the event of deadlock.

Party leaders were ultimately able to negotiate majority support without his help, but the bill’s fate on the Senate floor remains uncertain and Republicans in the chamber continue to quarrel over its provisions.

A final vote is expected in the coming days.

The bill needs a simple majority to clear the Senate. With Republicans holding 53 seats out of 100, plus Vance’s tiebreaker, the party can only afford three defections.

If passed in the Senate, the bill would go back to the House of Representatives for approval. Republicans can only stand to lose a handful of votes there – but some in the House have concerns over the Senate’s changes to the bill, which was adjusted to appease backbench Republican holdouts.

Democrats have said they will drag out the voting process in protest against the bill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has insisted that Republicans must read out the nearly 1,000 pages of text before the Senate can begin debate and potentially take up a final vote.

“Senate Republicans are scrambling to pass a radical bill released to the public in the dead of night, praying the American people don’t realise what’s in it,” Schumer said. “If Senate Republicans won’t tell the American people what’s in this bill, then Democrats are going to force this chamber to read it from start to finish.”

In a memo sent to Senate offices, the White House endorsed the latest revisions to the bill and called for its passage.

The memo reportedly warned that failure to approve the budget “would be the ultimate betrayal”.

Senator Patty Murray, a Washington state Democrat, took to social media on Saturday to argue that the bill contains “the largest healthcare cuts in history”.

Another critic of the bill is Elon Musk, who wrote on X on Saturday that the latest iteration of the bill “will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harms to our country”.

Musk took issue with taxes the bill proposes on solar and wind energy projects.

The latest draft of the spending bill still contains some of its core components: tax cuts that Trump campaigned on, such as a tax deduction on Social Security benefits, and the elimination of taxes on overtime work and tips.

It would also extend tax cuts passed by Republicans in 2017.

More contentious measures are still in place, including restrictions and requirements on Medicaid. Democrats have heavily criticised this piece of the bill, saying it will limit access to affordable healthcare for millions of Americans.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 7.8 million people would become uninsured under the cuts.

The draft bill incorporates input from the Senate parliamentarian, an official who reviews bills to ensure they comply with the chamber’s procedures.

It includes an increase in funding for rural hospitals, after some Republican moderates argued the original proposal would harm their constituents.

There are also changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which provides food benefits to low-income Americans.

Under the latest bill, Alaska and Hawaii would be temporarily exempt from a proposed requirement for some states to start footing the bill for the programme, which is currently fully funded by the federal government.

The revision comes after Alaska’s two Republican senators pushed for an exemption.

A seven-year-old child has died and a six-year-old is critically injured after a tree collapsed in a park in Southend-on-Sea.

Essex Police said investigations were continuing at Chalkwell Park after part of the tree fell shortly before 15:00 BST on Saturday.

A witness who was playing cricket nearby described how “40 to 50 people” including his team tried to lift the tree off the trapped children.

Ishan Madan, 39, said: “The tree had snapped and I think there were four children, the fifth one was slightly further away. Two were rescued easily but unfortunately the other two girls were stuck under this massive tree.”

Five children were taken to hospital, three with minor injuries, but a seven-year-old girl died in hospital.

Ch Supt Leighton Hammett said last night: “Families are facing unimaginable hardship this evening and all of our thoughts are with them at this time.”

Specialist officers are supporting the families of those affected, while support is also being provided to emergency service responders.

Mr Madan, an accountant from Westcliffe-on-Sea, said on hearing a scream everyone ran towards the tree.

“So we got bystanders to help, it must have been 40 to 50 people who then tried to lift the fallen tree up and to our horror, these two little girls, poor girls, were stuck underneath it.”

“Their mother was on the corner. It was horrendous.”

Mr Madan said he was told the children had been walking on a path when the tree fell.

Captain of Westcliff Cricket Club Joe Robbins praised “the unbelievable heroism of the members at the club and our First XI who sprinted off the field to do their best to help” and assisted the emergency services.

“All of us are heartbroken by what’s happened and we pass on our regards to the families involved,” he said.

Steve Ives, 68, has lived in the neighbourhood since 2016 and comes to the park almost every day.

“The park is busy all the time with people taking their dogs out and families having picnics. It’s fantastically maintained by the council,” he said.

“The tree has been propped up by the metal props ever since I can remember.

“The boughs are just so huge. It always looked healthy and people stood under it and chatted. It’s such an awful thing to happen.”

Ch Supt Hammett added: “I cannot begin to put into words how difficult today’s events have been, and continue to be, for them [the families].

“It’s also not lost on me how traumatic it must have been for the members of the public who witnessed this awful incident.

“Many of them went from enjoying the warm summer weather to rushing to the aid of strangers without a second thought.”

He continued: “They showed the best of Southend today, and I’m sorry this update does not bring them more positive news.”

“My officers, and our partners with the ambulance and fire service, did all they could to help the two injured children.

“Today’s loss is one they will all take personally.”

Chalkwell Park is run by Southend-on-Sea City Council. Its leader Daniel Cowan said: “The death of a child is devastating, and my deepest, most heartfelt condolences are with the child’s family and friends.

“My thoughts are also with the injured children and those on the scene. I hope the other children make a full and speedy recovery.

“This was a traumatic event for those involved, those who witnessed the incident, and the emergency services. I encourage those affected to seek support.”

David Burton-Sampson, MP for Southend West and Leigh, said the news was “truly devastating”.

“I am sure I reflect the thoughts of all our residents here in Southend in sending my deepest condolences to the child’s family and friends.”

Thousands of protesters have gathered in the Thai capital Bangkok, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra after a phone call she had with the former Cambodian leader Hun Sen was leaked.

In the call, which was about a recent incident on their border, she addressed Hun Sen as “uncle” and said a Thai military commander handling the dispute “just wanted to look cool and said things that are not useful”.

The call has sparked public anger and a key partner in her ruling coalition has quit. Paetongtarn apologised, but defended the call as a “negotiation technique”.

Before leaving to visit flood-hit northern Thailand, Paetongtarn told reporters it is the people’s “right to protest, as long as it’s peaceful”.

Saturday’s rally was the largest of its kind since the ruling Pheu Thai party came to power in 2023.

Thousands braved the monsoon rain and blocked the roads at the Victory Monument war memorial in Bangkok, waving Thai flags and holding placards with slogans such as “PM is enemy of state”.

Protest leader Parnthep Pourpongpan said the prime minister “should step aside because she is the problem”.

Seri Sawangmue, 70, travelled overnight by bus from the country’s north to join the protest.

He told AFP news agency that he was there “to protect Thailand’s sovereignty and to say the PM is unfit”.

“I’ve lived through many political crises and I know where this is going,” he added.

Paetongtarn has said she will no longer hold future calls with the former Cambodian leader, but Parnthep told Reuters that many Thai people felt she and her influential father were being manipulated by Hun Sen.

Paetongtarn, 38, is the daughter of Thaksin Shinawatra, the deposed former prime minister who returned to Thailand last August after 15 years in exile. She has only been in office for 10 months and is the country’s second female prime minister, with the first being her aunt Yingluck Shinawatra.

Protesters are calling for the end of Shinawatra leadership.

The rally was organised by the United Force of the Land, a coalition of largely nationalist activists who have protested against other Shinawatra-led governments for over two decades.

In a statement read to crowds, the group said the executive branch and parliament were not working “in the interest of democracy and constitutional monarchy”.

As well as the flags and placards, people carried umbrellas to protect themselves from the rain. When it stopped, a rainbow formed over Victory Monument.

On Tuesday the Constitutional Court will decide whether to take up a petition by senators seeking Paetongtarn’s removal for alleged unprofessionalism over the Hun Sen call.

Hun Sen said he had shared the audio clip with 80 politicians and one of them leaked it. He later shared the entire 17-minute recording on his Facebook page.

The call was about a recent dispute between Cambodia and Thailand, which saw tensions increase in May after a Cambodian soldier was killed in a border clash, plunging ties to their lowest in more than a decade.

But the tension between the two nations dates back more than a century, when the borders were drawn after the French occupation of Cambodia.

Both have imposed border restrictions on each other, while Cambodia has banned Thai imports from food to electricity, as well as Thai television and cinema dramas.

Despite the tensions between their countries, the Shinawatras’ friendship with the Hun family goes back decades, and Hun Sen and Paetongtarn’s father consider each other “godbrothers”.

Belfast rap group Kneecap filled Glastonbury’s West Holts stage for a highly-charged performance that hit back at Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer with expletive-laden chants.

The Irish-language band have been in the headlines after rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs under the name Mo Chara, was charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying the flag of proscribed terrorist organisation Hezbollah at a gig last year. He has denied the charge.

Last week, Sir Keir said Kneecap’s appearance at the festival was “not appropriate“.

On stage, the band thanked Glastonbury for keeping them on the bill and told the crowd the “prime minister of your country, not mine, said he didn’t want us to play”.

• Follow the latest updates from the Glastonbury festival

Mr Ó hAnnaidh is on bail after a court hearing in London two weeks ago.

Towards the start of their set, the rapper – who was wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh – held his arms out to the crowd and announced, “Glastonbury, I am a free man!”

His bandmate Naoise Ó Cairealláin, who performs under the name Móglaí Bap, called the case “a trumped up terrorism charge”, adding that it was “not the first time there was a miscarriage of justice for an Irish person in the British justice system”.

Glastonbury organisers had to fence off the West Holts field 45 minutes before the band’s appearance, as thousands turned up to show their support – or see what all the fuss was about.

They were treated to a set of raucous, rabble-rousing electro-rap, and responded by setting off smoke flares and moshing in giant rippling circles of bodies.

The hedonism of the music, rooted in club and drug culture, was often at odds with the band’s pronouncements between songs.

The trio, who are vocal critics of Israel’s military action in Gaza, addressed that topic again during their Glastonbury set.

“We understand colonialism and we understand how important it is to support each other internationally,” Mr Ó hAnnaidh said.

Accusing Israel of genocide, he then led the crowd in a chant of “free, free Palestine”.

Israel has strongly denied allegations of genocide relating to the ongoing war in Gaza.

Kneecap also voiced support for Palestine Action, a protest group that the UK government intends to proscribe under anti-terror laws, after some of its activists broke into an RAF base and spray-painted two military planes red.

This led to a further chant against Sir Keir, as the band criticised the UK’s sale of arms to Israel.

Formed in 2017, Kneecap rose to fame after starring a semi-autobiographical film alongside Oscar-nominated actor Michael Fassbender last year.

Their vocal support for Palestinians put them under an intense media and political spotlight earlier this year, after an appearance at Coachella Festival in California.

Shortly after, video footage emerged of Mr Ó hAnnaidh allegedly holding a Hezbollah flag at a gig in November 2024.

The video was investigated by anti-terrorism police which resulted in Mr Ó hAnnaidh being charged, under the name Liam O’Hanna.

Amid the row, Sir Keir and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy were among those who said Kneecap’s appearance at Glastonbury was “not appropriate”.

However, the band’s set was backed by Glastonbury founder Sir Michael Eavis and his daughter Emily, who runs the festival.

She told the BBC: “There have been a lot of really heated topics this year, but we remain a platform for many, many artists from all over the world and, you know, everyone is welcome here.”

Sir Michael added that “people that don’t agree with the politics of the event can go somewhere else”, in an interview with Glastonbury’s on-site newspaper.

On stage, Kneecap thanked the festival for their support.

“The pressure that that family was under and they stood strong,” said Mr Ó hAnnaidh. “Fair play to them.”

The band’s Glastonbury appearance caused problems for the BBC, which had to decide whether it could broadcast their set while meeting its obligations to impartiality and offensive language.

Although there was no live stream, the broadcaster later uploaded a largely unedited version of the performance to its Glastonbury highlights page on BBC iPlayer.

“Whilst the BBC doesn’t ban artists, our plans ensure that our programming meets our editorial guideline,” a spokesperson said on Saturday.

“We don’t always live stream every act from the main stages and look to make an on-demand version of Kneecap’s performance available on our digital platforms, alongside more than 90 other sets.”

During the set, Mr Ó hAnnaidh observed the sea of Palestinian flags in the audience and joked that “the BBC editor is going to have some job”.

The lavish wedding party of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and TV presenter Lauren Sanchez concludes on Saturday evening in Venice with the main gala event.

But as their celebrity guests were preparing to step into water taxis from their luxury hotels, paparazzi poised, a crowd of some Venetians gathered to protest against the big event.

Their causes are varied, from locals opposed to over-tourism in a delicate city, to activists protesting against climate change and capitalism.

Hundreds marched through the city on Saturday, hanging a “no space for Bezos” banner from the Rialto bridge and setting off multicoloured flares. But plans to launch themselves into the city’s canals with inflatable crocodiles and block the wedding guests’ passage were dropped.

• In pictures: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding

Spotted heading into Harry’s Bar for lunch on Saturday, Bezos blew kisses towards the cameras when a local journalist asked what he made of the protests.

The city’s deputy mayor dismissed the activists as “narcissists” and insisted the wedding was the “high-quality tourism” Venice needs.

Simone Venturini, city councillor for economic developments, said he hoped “a lot of people will want to get married in Venice” now and boost the city’s wedding sector.

“We are not Iran. The city cannot say who can or who cannot get married. We have no moral police going around,” he told the BBC on the bank of the Grand Canal, as gondolas loaded with tourists drifted by.

The activists have already claimed one win, though.

Tonight’s party was moved further from the city centre for security reasons. The new venue, Arsenale, is easier to protect.

“I think the main problem is that Venice is becoming like an amusement park,” argues Paola, an Italian member of the Extinction Rebellion group.

She’s especially incensed that wedding guests arrived here on private jets and argues the world’s elite are the worst polluters.

“Of course, mass tourism is eating the city alive, but the fact that billionaires can come here and use the city as their amusement park is an enormous problem.”

The Italian media have leapt on the glitz and glamour of what they are dubbing the “wedding of the year.”

Their pages and posts are full of pictures of the 200 or so A-list celebrities now in town, including Leonardo di Caprio and Kim Kardashian.

There’s talk of cuttlefish banquets – tonight’s spread will feature cod, cooked regional-style – and photos of the bride’s white lace Dolce and Gabbana gown, apparently inspired by one worn by Sophia Loren in the 1950s.

It seems, however, that talk of this wedding bringing the city to a halt was overblown.

Ivanka Trump has been spotted at an art gallery, as has Bill Gates, and the newly married couple have been photographed and filmed in various locations and outfits.

But most tourists, or Venetians, are more likely to bump into a Bezos look-a-like, who made the journey from Germany specially to pose for photos, than any of the real-life rich and famous.

There are plenty of water taxis and gondolas still free for hire and no crowds of angry tourists, deprived of their magical ride.

Some streets were briefly closed around the main events but disruption appears to have been minimal.

Most of the posters declaring “No Space for Bezos” have been ripped down and just the odd bit of graffiti can be seen. Attempts to project slogans on buildings were quickly stopped by police.

A planned march by protesters on Saturday evening is taking place with official permission.

But fears of Venice becoming a tourist playground, forcing locals out of town, are no exaggeration.

Just down from the main railway station, police check visitors at random for mandatory day passes. It is a new measure to try to control the crowds.

All around, cafes are packed with people shiny-faced from the humidity and pink from the brutally fierce sun.

A short walk away is the pretty piazza where Roberto Zanon has spent all his life but which he now has to leave.

His landlord has sold his home to out-of-town developers and the 77-year old is being evicted soon together with his two dogs.

Finding anything else in his home city is impossible, Roberto says. He can’t compete with higher-paying tourists.

“One, two, three doors – those are locals, but the rest is all for tourism now,” Roberto says, pointing to the wooden doors around his square.

“There are fewer and fewer Venetians here,” he says quietly, deeply upset at the loss of his home. “There is no purpose any more. You lose your friends. You lose piece of your heart. But sadly this situation is unstoppable.”

That doesn’t mean Roberto is fretting about a billionaire choosing Venice for his wedding, mind you.

He worked in tourism himself for many years and calls it “an honour” to have such famous guests in the city he himself loves so much. “I find it positive.”

He’s not alone.

In a souvenir shop selling magnets and T-shirts, Leda is all in favour of the Bezos-Sanchez bonanza.

She is blunt: “I think there should be more people like Bezos here. Right now we get trash tourism and Venice doesn’t deserve that.”

Leda used to have her own store selling quality Italian goods but had to close it to adapt to a low-spending market. “It’s low-cost, hit-and-run tourism,” she says. “People take 20 euro flights, come here and don’t spend a thing. That’s not what Venice needs.”

So what will be left, when the big party jets out of town?

The deputy mayor confirmed tech boss Bezos had donated “around three million euros” to groups working to protect this fragile city-on-the-water, in a gesture of support.

As for the 30 million euros the wedding might net the city in other ways – activists call that a “drop in the lagoon” for one of the richest men on earth.

“It’s around three euros for a normal person, if you put in proportion to Bezos’s wealth,” Lorenzo from Extinction Rebellion said. “It’s a very low amount of money.”

Budapest advertises itself as a party town. On Saturday, the party spilled out onto the streets, and occupied, in the scorching heat of summer, the Elizabeth Bridge and the river banks and downtown areas on both shores of the Danube.

Between 100,000 and 200,000 mostly young people danced and sang their way from Pest to Buda.

A distance that usually takes only 20 minutes on foot stretched to three hours.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ban, many Budapest Pride participants told me, spurred them to attend an event they usually stay away from. Last year, just 35,000 took part.

Many banners mocked the Hungarian prime minister. It was like a peaceful revenge by some of those he has declared war on during his past 15 years in power.

“In my history class, I learnt enough, to recognise a dictatorship. You don’t need to illustrate it – Vik!” read one hand-made banner. “I’m so bored of Fascism,” read another.

T-shirts with Orban’s image, in bright eyeshadow and lipstick, were everywhere.

While the LGBT community with its vivid paraphernalia made up the core of the march, this year’s Pride turned into a celebration of human rights and solidarity.

“We don’t exactly look as though we were banned!” a beaming Budapest mayor, Gergely Karacsony, told the crowd, in a speech in front of the Budapest Technical University.

Saturday’s march could go down as the crowning moment of his political career. A city hall starved of funds and in constant struggle with the central government dared to host an event the government tried to ban, and won – for now at least.

“In fact, we look like we’re peacefully and freely performing a big, fat show to a puffed-up and hateful power. The message is clear: they have no power over us!” Karacsony continued.

Among the attendees was Finnish MEP Li Andersson, who felt Orban was using arguments on family values as a pretext to ban the march.

“It’s important to emphasise that the reason why we are here is not only Pride – this is about the fundamental rights of all of us,” she said.

The ban was based on a new law, passed by the big majority held by Orban’s Fidesz party in parliament, subordinating the freedom of assembly to a 2021 Child Protection law that equated homosexuality with paedophilia, and therefore banned the portrayal or promotion of homosexuality in places where children might see it.

The police justified a ban on Saturday’s march on the grounds children might witness it. In response, the mayor cited a 2001 law stating events organised by councils do not fall under the right of assembly.

In the end, the police officers present at the march kept a discreet presence, looking on mournfully at a party from which they were excluded.

In another part of the city, Orban attended the graduation ceremony of 162 new police and customs officers, and new officials of the National Directorate-General for Policing Aliens.

“Order does not come into being by itself, it must be created, because without it civilised life will be lost,” Orban told the students and their families.

Earlier, he and other prominent Fidesz officials posted pictures of themselves with their children and grandchildren, in an attempt to reclaim the “pride” word.

“Post a picture, to show them what we’re proud of,” Alexandra Szentkiralyi, the head of the Fidesz faction in the Budapest Council, posted on Facebook, alongside a picture of herself in a rather plain “Hungary” T-shirt.

The police presence was restrained in Budapest on Saturday, but temporary cameras installed ahead of the march and mounted on police vehicles recorded the whole event.

The 18 March law that attempted to ban the Pride gave the police new powers to use facial recognition software. Fines of between £14 ($19) and £430 could be imposed on participants.

The pro-government media was scathing in its criticism of the day’s events, echoing remarks by leading Fidesz politicians that the march was a celebration of perversity, with nothing to do with freedom of assembly.

“Chaos at Budapest Pride,” proclaimed Magyar Nemzet, the government flagship.

“The notorious climate activist and more recently terrorist supporter Greta Thunberg posted on her Instagram page that she is also at Budapest Pride,” it continued.

“After the demonstration, this will be a question for the courts,” Zoltan Kiszelly, a political analyst close to the government, told the BBC.

“If the courts decide in favour of the mayor and the (Pride) organisers, then Orban can say, okay, we have to change the legislation again.”

If the courts decide for the government, however, the prime minister can be pleased with the law he pushed through – despite the fact Pride went ahead.