At least 20 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike that hit a popular seafront cafe frequently used by activists, journalists, and local residents in western Gaza on Monday, according to medics and eyewitnesses.

Rescue teams evacuated 20 bodies and dozens wounded from Al-Baqa Cafeteria, an outdoor venue which consisted of tents along the beach, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence told the BBC.

He added that emergency crews were still searching through a deep crater left by the explosion.

“I was on my way to the café to use the internet just a few meters away when a massive explosion hit,” said Aziz Al-Afifi, a cameraman with a local production company, told the BBC.

“I ran to the scene. My colleagues were there, people I meet every day. The scene was horrific – bodies, blood, screaming everywhere.”

Videos posted by activists on social media appeared to show the moment a missile, reportedly fired from an Israeli warplane, struck the area. Footage captured the aftermath of the attack, with bodies scattered across the ground.

Al-Baqa Cafeteria had become a well-known space for journalists, activists, and remote workers, offering internet access, seating, and workspace along Gaza’s Mediterranean coast.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.

The attack came after Israel carried out a wave of air strikes across the Gaza Strip overnight, triggering the mass displacement of hundreds of Palestinian families, witnesses said.

Rescue teams recovered the bodies of five people, while dozens of injured civilians were evacuated to Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, according to local reports.

The bombardment follows one of the largest evacuation orders issued since the war resumed in March.

It comes amid increasing pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to refocus efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement.

On Saturday, US President Donald Trump said on social media that Netanyahu was working on negotiating a deal with Hamas “right now”. That came days after a senior Hamas official said mediators had intensified their efforts to broker a new ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza, but that negotiations with Israel remain stalled.

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

Israel followed this with a total blockade on humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza, which it partially eased after 11 weeks following pressure from US allies and warnings of starvation from global experts.

The partial easing saw the creation of the controversial US- and Israeli-backed aid group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Since GHF took over distribution operations, there have been almost daily incidents of killings and injuries of Palestinians seeking aid.

Eyewitnesses and medics have blamed Israel, though Israel has said it has only fired warning shots towards people it considered a threat.

Residents in Gaza City said dozens of Israeli air raids targeted densely populated eastern neighbourhoods, including Shujaiya, Tuffah, and Zeitoun.

Videos posted by activists on social media captured scenes of chaos and explosions illuminating the night sky, followed by flames and thick plumes of smoke rising above the skyline.

One of the strikes reportedly hit a school in Zeitoun that had been sheltering displaced families.

“Explosions never stopped… it felt like earthquakes,” Salah, 60, from Gaza City told Reuters news agency.

“In the news we hear a ceasefire is near, on the ground we see death and we hear explosions,” the father of five added.

The five fatalities reportedly occurred in a strike at the Al Shati camp, to the west of Gaza City.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had earlier ordered residents to leave large parts of northern Gaza, in anticipation of the attacks. Most of those displaced overnight moved westwards within Gaza City rather than to the southern region as instructed by the IDF.

“We had no choice but to leave everything behind,” said Abeer Talba, a mother of seven who fled Zeitoun with her family.

“We got phone calls recordings in Arabic telling us we were in a combat zone and must evacuate immediately.

“This is the seventh time we’ve been forced to flee,” she added. “We’re in the streets again, no food, no water. My children are starving. Death feels kinder than this.”

Amid the growing humanitarian crisis, fears are mounting that the evacuation orders and sustained air strikes are part of a broader Israeli plan to expand its ground offensive deeper into Gaza.

But there is also speculation in Israeli media that some generals are close to concluding that military operations in Gaza are near to being achieved.

That is also the view of many former army leaders who fear that the descent of the Gaza campaign into more attritional, guerilla-style warfare would lead to more deaths – of hostages, civilians and soldiers.

The Israeli prime minister’s next moves are being closely watched. While Benjamin Netanyahu’s instincts have always been to continue the war and defeat Hamas, he is coming under increasing pressure at home and abroad to pursue a new ceasefire agreement.

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 Air India tragedy, in which at least 270 people died, involved one of Boeing’s most innovative and popular planes. Until now, it was considered one of its safest too.

We still do not know why flight 171 crashed just 30 seconds after take-off. Investigators have now recovered flight recorder data and are working hard to find out. But the incident has drawn attention to the aircraft involved: the 787 Dreamliner, the first of a modern generation of radical, fuel-efficient planes.

Prior to the accident, the 787 had operated for nearly a decade and a half without any major accidents and without a single fatality. During that period, according to Boeing, it carried more than a billion passengers. There are currently more than 1,100 in service worldwide.

However, it has also suffered from a series of quality control problems.

Whistleblowers who worked on the aircraft have raised numerous concerns about production standards. Some have claimed that potentially dangerously flawed aircraft have been allowed into service – allegations the company has consistently denied.

It was on a chilly December morning in 2009 that a brand-new aircraft edged out onto the runway at Paine Field airport near Seattle and, as a cheering crowd looked on, accelerated into a cloudy sky.

The flight was the culmination of years of development and billions of dollars worth of investment.

The 787 was conceived in the early 2000s, at a time of rising oil prices, when the increasing cost of fuel had become a major preoccupation for airlines. Boeing decided to build a long-haul plane for them that would set new standards in efficiency.

“In the late 1990s, Boeing was working on a design called the Sonic Cruiser,” explains aviation historian Shea Oakley.

This was firstly conceived as a plane that would use advanced materials and the latest technology to carry up to 250 passengers at just under the speed of sound. The initial emphasis was on speed and cutting journey times, rather than fuel economy.

“But then the effects of 9/11 hit the world airline industry quite hard,” says Mr Oakley.

“The airlines told Boeing what they really needed was the most fuel-efficient, economical long-range jetliner ever produced. They now wanted an aeroplane with a similar capacity to the Sonic Cruiser, minus the high speed.”

Boeing abandoned its initial concept, and began work on what became the 787. In doing so, it helped create a new business model for airlines.

Instead of using giant planes to transport huge numbers of people between “hub” airports, before placing them on connecting flights to other destinations, they could now fly smaller aircraft on less crowded direct routes between smaller cities which would previously have been unviable.

At the time Boeing’s great rival, the European giant Airbus, was taking precisely the opposite approach. It was developing the gargantuan A380 superjumbo – a machine tailor-made for carrying as many passengers as possible on busy routes between the world’s biggest and busiest airports.

In hindsight, Boeing’s approach was wiser. The fuel-thirsty A380 went out of production in 2021, after only 251 had been built.

“Airbus thought the future was giant hubs where people would always want to change planes in Frankfurt or Heathrow or Narita,” explains aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia, who is a managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory.

“Boeing said ‘no, people want to fly point to point’. And Boeing was extremely right.”

The 787 was a truly radical aircraft. It was the first commercial plane to be built primarily of composites such as carbon fibre, rather than aluminium, in order to reduce weight. It had advanced aerodynamics to reduce drag.

It also used highly efficient modern engines from General Electric and Rolls Royce, and it replaced many mechanical and pneumatic systems with lighter electrical ones.

All of this, Boeing said, would make it 20% more efficient than its predecessor, the Boeing 767. It was also significantly quieter, with a noise footprint (the area on the ground affected by significant noise from the aircraft) that the manufacturer said was up to 60% smaller.

Not long after the aircraft entered service, however, there were serious problems. In January 2013, lithium-ion batteries caught fire aboard a 787 as it waited at a gate at Boston’s Logan International Airport.

A week later, overheating batteries forced another 787 to make an emergency landing during an internal flight in Japan.

The design was grounded worldwide for several months, while Boeing came up with a solution.

Since then, day to day operations have been smoother, but production has been deeply problematic. Analysts say this may, in part, have been due to Boeing’s decision to set up a new assembly line for the 787 in North Charleston, South Carolina – more than 2000 miles from its Seattle heartlands.

This was done to take advantage of the region’s low rates of union membership, as well as generous support from the state.

“There were serious development issues,” says Mr Aboulafia. “Some notable production issues, related especially to the decision to create Boeing’s first ever production line outside of the Puget Sound area.”

In 2019, Boeing discovered the first of a series of manufacturing defects that affected the way in which different parts of the aircraft fitted together. As more problems were found, the company widened its investigations – and uncovered further issues.

Deliveries were heavily disrupted, and halted altogether between May 2021 and July 2022, before being paused again the following year.

However, potentially the most damaging allegations about the 787 programme have come from the company’s own current and former employees.

Among the most prominent was the late John Barnett, a former quality control manager at the 787 factory in South Carolina. He claimed that pressure to produce planes as quickly as possible had seriously undermined safety.

In 2019, he told the BBC that workers at the plant had failed to follow strict procedures intended to track components through the factory, potentially allowing defective parts to go missing. In some cases, he said, workers had even deliberately fitted substandard parts from scrap bins to aircraft in order to avoid delays on the production line.

He also maintained that defective fixings were used to secure aircraft decks. Screwing them into place produced razor-sharp slivers of metal, which in some cases accumulated beneath the deck in areas containing large amounts of aircraft wiring.

His claims had previously been passed to the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, which partially upheld them. After investigating, it concluded that at least 53 “non-conforming” parts had gone missing in the factory.

An audit by the FAA also confirmed that metal shavings were present beneath the floors of a number of aircraft.

Boeing said its board analysed the problem and decided it did not “present a safety of flight issue”, though the fixings were subsequently redesigned. The company later said it had “fully resolved the FAA’s findings regarding part traceability and implemented corrective actions to prevent recurrence”.

Mr Barnett remained concerned that aircraft that had already gone into service could be carrying hidden defects serious enough to cause a major accident. “I believe it’s just a matter of time before something big happens with a 787,” he told me in 2019. “I pray that I am wrong.”

In early 2024, Mr Barnett took his own life. At the time he had been giving evidence in a long-running whistleblower lawsuit against the company – which he maintained had victimised him as a result of his allegations. Boeing denied this.

Much of what he had alleged echoed previous claims by another former quality manager at the plant, Cynthia Kitchens.

In 2011, she had complained to regulators about substandard parts being deliberately removed from quarantine bins and fitted to aircraft, in an attempt to keep the production line moving.

Ms Kitchens, who left Boeing in 2016, also claimed employees had been told to overlook substandard work, and said defective wiring bundles, containing metallic shavings within their coatings, had been deliberately installed on planes – creating a risk of dangerous short-circuits.

Boeing has not responded to these specific allegations but says Ms Kitchens resigned in 2016 “after being informed that she was being placed on a performance improvement plan”. It says that she subsequently filed a lawsuit against Boeing, “alleging claims of discrimination and retaliation unrelated to any quality issues”, which was dismissed.

More recently, a third whistleblower made headlines when testifying before a senate committee last year.

Sam Salehpour, a current Boeing employee, told US lawmakers he had come forward because “the safety problems I have observed at Boeing, if not addressed could result in a catastrophic failure of a commercial aeroplane that would lead to the loss of hundreds of lives”.

The quality engineer said that while working on the 787 in late 2020, he had seen the company introduce shortcuts in assembly processes, in order to speed up production and delivery of the aircraft. These, he said, “had allowed potentially defective parts and defective installations in 787 fleets”.

He also noted that on the majority of aircraft he looked at, tiny gaps in the joints between sections of fuselage had not been properly rectified. This, he said, meant those joints would be prone to “premature fatigue failure over time” and created “extremely unsafe conditions for the aircraft” with “potentially catastrophic” consequences.

He suggested that more than 1,000 aircraft – the bulk of the 787 fleet – could be affected.

Boeing insists that “claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate”. It says: “The issues raised have been subject to rigorous examination under US Federal Aviation Administration oversight. This analysis has validated that the aircraft will maintain its durability and service life over several decades, and these issues do not present any safety concerns.”

There is no question that Boeing has come under huge pressure in recent years over its corporate culture and production standards. In the wake of two fatal accidents involving its bestselling 737 Max, and a further serious incident last year, it has been repeatedly accused of putting the pursuit of profit over passenger safety.

It is a perception that chief executive Kelly Ortberg, who joined the company last year, has been working hard to overturn – overhauling its internal processes and working with regulators on a comprehensive safety and quality control plan.

But has the 787 already been compromised by past failures, that may have created ongoing safety risks?

Richard Aboulafia believes not. “You know. It’s been 16 years of operations, 1,200 jets and over a billion passengers flown, but no crashes until now,” he says. “It’s a stellar safety record.”

He thinks that any major issues would already have become apparent.

“I really think production problems are more of a short-term concern,” he says. “For the past few years, there’s been far greater oversight of 787 production.

“For older planes, I think any serious problems would have shown up by now.”

The Air India plane that crashed in Ahmedabad was more than 11 years old, having first flown in 2013.

But the Foundation for Aviation Safety, a US organisation established by the former Boeing whistleblower Ed Pierson that has previously been highly critical of the company, says it did have concerns about 787s prior to the recent crash.

“Yes, it was a possible safety risk,” claims Mr Pierson. “We monitor incident reports, we monitor regulatory documents. Airworthiness directives come out that describe various issues, and it does make you wonder.”

One such issue, he argues, is water potentially leaking from washroom taps into electrical equipment bays. Last year, the FAA instructed airlines to carry out regular inspections, following reports that leaks were going undetected on certain 787 models.

However, he stresses that the cause of the recent tragedy is still unknown – and that it is vital the investigation moves forward quickly, so that any problems, whether they lie with the aircraft, the airline or elsewhere, can be resolved.

For the moment, however, the 787’s safety record remains strong.

“We don’t know at this point what caused the Air India crash,” says Scott Hamilton, managing director of aviation consulting firm Leeham Company.

“But based on what we do know about the plane, I would not hesitate to get on board a 787.”

The BBC has said it should have cut away from a live broadcast of Bob Vylan’s performance at Glastonbury, during which the band’s singer led the crowd in chants of “death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]”.

In a statement issued on Monday, the BBC said: “The team were dealing with a live situation but with hindsight we should have pulled the stream during the performance. We regret this did not happen.”

It comes after the broadcast regulator Ofcom said the BBC “clearly has questions to answer” over its coverage, and the government questioned why the comments were aired live.

The organisers of Glastonbury have previously said they were “appalled” by the comments, which “crossed a line”.

On Monday, a BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC respects freedom of expression but stands firmly against incitement to violence.

“The antisemitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves.”

A statement continued: “In light of this weekend, we will look at our guidance around live events so we can be sure teams are clear on when it is acceptable to keep output on air.”

The BBC has previously said the performance had carried a warning on screen and would not be made available to watch on iPlayer.

• Who are Bob Vylan? – Glastonbury’s controversial act

The controversy surrounds comments made by Bob Vylan’s singer – who goes by the stage name Bobby Vylan – during their performance at the festival on Saturday.

During part of the band’s set, the singer also chanted “free, free Palestine” and used the expression “from the river to sea, Palestine will be free”. Some use the chant as a call for Palestinian control of all land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including Israel.

Critics say the slogan is a call for the destruction of the state of Israel.

That interpretation is disputed by pro-Palestinian activists who say that most people chanting it are calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza, not the destruction of Israel itself.

On Monday, Ofcom said it was in contact with the BBC and had asked for clarification over why the comments were broadcast.

A spokesperson for the regulator said: “We are very concerned about the live stream of this performance, and the BBC clearly has questions to answer.

“We have been speaking to the BBC over the weekend and we are obtaining further information as a matter of urgency, including what procedures were in place to ensure compliance with its own editorial guidelines.”

Elsewhere, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the band, who were due to embark on a US tour, would have their visas revoked.

“Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,” he wrote on X.

Bob Vylan are a London-based English punk-rap duo, who formed in Ipswich in 2017. They have previously performed at Reading and Leeds festivals and toured with the likes of the Offspring, the Hives and Biffy Clyro.

On Sunday, its singer released a statement on Instagram with “I said what I said” as an accompanying message.

In it, he defended political activism in general without referencing Saturday’s performance directly, writing that is important for young people to see campaigners “shouting… on any and every stage that we are offered”.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer branded the on-stage remarks “hate speech” and there has been cross-party condemnation of both the chants and the BBC’s coverage of them.

Shortly after the performance, the government said Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy had pressed BBC director general Tim Davie for an urgent explanation.

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said police should investigate both Bob Vylan and the BBC “for offences under the Public Order act”, adding that “prosecutions in my view should follow”.

Glastonbury’s organisers have also distanced themselves from Bob Vylan’s performance.

They said: “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.”

A record number of heat alerts are in place across France as the country, and other parts of southern and eastern Europe, remain in the grip of soaring temperatures.

Some 84 of 96 of France’s mainland regions – known as departments – are currently under an orange alert – the country’s second highest. France’s Climate Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher has called it an “unprecedented” situation.

Heat warnings are also in place for parts of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, the UK and Balkan countries including Croatia.

Both Spain and Portugal had their hottest June days on record at the weekend.

El Granado in Andalucía saw a temperature of 46C on Saturday, while 46.6C was recorded in the town of Mora in central Portugal on Sunday.

Many countries have emergency medical services on standby and are warning people to stay inside as much as possible.

Nearly 200 schools across France have been closed or partially closed as a result of the heatwave, which has gripped parts of Europe for more than a week now but is expected to peak mid-week.

Education Minister Elisabeth Borne said she was working with regional authorities over the best ways to look after schoolchildren or to allow parents who can to keep their children at home.

Several forest fires broke out in the southern Corbières mountain range on Sunday, leading to evacuations and the closure of a motorway. They have since been contained, fire authorities told French media on Monday.

• Follow our live updates
• Top tips on how to sleep in the heat

Meanwhile, 21 Italian cities are also on the highest alert – including Rome, Milan and Venice, as is Sardinia.

Mario Guarino, vice president of the Italian Society of Emergency Medicine, told AFP news agency that hospital emergency departments across the country had reported a 10% increase in heatstroke cases.

Parts of the UK could see one of the hottest June days ever on Monday, with temperatures of 34C or higher possible in some parts of England.

Much of Spain, which is on course to record its hottest June on record, also continues to be under heat alerts.

“I can’t sleep well and have insomnia. I also get heat strokes, I stop eating and I just can’t focus,” Anabel Sanchez, 21, told Reuters news agency in Seville.

It is a similar situation in Portugal, where seven districts, including the capital, Lisbon, are on the highest alert level.

Meanwhile, the German Meteorological Service has warned that temperatures could reach almost 38C on Tuesday and Wednesday – further potentially record-breaking temperatures.

The heatwave has lowered levels in the Rhine River – a major shipping route – limiting the amount cargo ships can transport and raising freighting costs.

Countries in and around the Balkans have also been struggling with the intense heat, although temperatures have begun to cool slightly.

In Turkey, firefighters continue their efforts to put out hundreds of wildfires that have broken out in recent days.

A fire in the Seferihisar district, 50km (30 miles) south-west of the resort city of Izmir, is being fuelled by winds and has already destroyed around 20 homes and some residential areas have had to be evacuated.

Wildfires have also broken out in Croatia, where severe heat warnings are in place for coastal areas.

Temperatures in Greece have been approaching 40C for several days and coastal towns near the capital Athens last week erupted in flames that destroyed homes – forcing people to evacuate.

On Wednesday, Serbia reported its hottest day since records began, while a record 38.8C was recorded in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina on Thursday. In Slovenia, the hottest-ever June temperature was recorded on Saturday.

The temperature in North Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, reached 42C on Friday – and are expected to continue in that range.

While the heatwave is a potential health issue, it is also impacting the climate. Higher temperatures in the Adriatic Sea are encouraging invasive species such as the poisonous lionfish, while also causing further stress on alpine glaciers that are already shrinking at record rates.

The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Turk, warned on Monday that the heatwave highlighted the need for climate adaptation – moving away from practices and energy sources, such as fossil fuels, which contribute to climate change.

“Rising temperatures, rising seas, floods, droughts, and wildfires threaten our rights to life, to health, to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, and much more,” he told the UN’s Human Rights Council.

Heatwaves are becoming more common due to human-caused climate change, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Extreme hot weather will happen more often – and become even more intense – as the planet continues to warm, it has said.

Richard Allan, Professor of Climate Science at the University of Reading in the UK, explained that rising greenhouse gas levels are making it harder for the planet to lose excess heat.

“The warmer, thirstier atmosphere is more effective at drying soils, meaning heatwaves are intensifying, with moderate heat events now becoming extreme.”

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

The Trump administration says that Harvard University violated civil-rights laws over its treatment of Israeli and Jewish students, potentially further endangering its federal funding.

In a letter sent to Harvard, the administration accused the university of deliberate indifference towards the concerns of Jewish students who felt threatened on campus.

The move is the latest in a series of legal and financial battles between Harvard and the White House – the stakes of which have dramatically escalated over the last few months.

The letter – viewed by the BBC – says that “failure to institute adequate changes immediately will result in the loss of all federal financial resources” for Harvard.

“Harvard may of course continue to operate free of federal privileges, and perhaps such an opportunity will spur a commitment to excellence that will help Harvard thrive once again,” says the letter addressed to Harvard University President Alan Gerber.

The BBC has contacted Harvard for comment.

According to the letter, federal investigators found that a “majority” of Jewish students reported discrimination or bias against them, with one quarter having felt physically threatened.

Among the behaviours detailed in the letter are Jewish students being spat upon or assaulted, and images being widely circulated depicting a dollar sign in the Star of David and antisemitic stickers being distributed, including one showing an Israel flag with a swastika in place of the Star of David.

“Harvard’s inaction in the face of these civil rights violations is a clear example of the demographic hierarchy that has taken hold of the university,” the letter adds. “Harvard’s commitment to racial hierarchies—where individuals are sorted and judged according to their membership in an oppressed group identity and not individual merit—has enabled anti-Semitism to fester.”

The letter is what is known as a “notice of violation” that often precedes a lawsuit or a voluntary resolution if corrective measures are taken.

In April, Harvard released the findings of an internal investigation which found that the university was deeply polarised by the ongoing war in Gaza, with students on both sides feeling unsafe.

In a message from Mr Garber which accompanied the report, Mr Garber apologised for “moments in which we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community”.

The letter is the latest in a series of clashes between Harvard and the Trump administration, which has ramped up its crackdown on universities it claims have failed to tackle antisemitism amid protests against the war in Gaza.

Earlier, in May, the administration directed US federal agencies to review Harvard University’s grants to potentially end or redistribute funding. The administration estimated about 30 contracts, collectively worth $100m (£74m), could be reviewed.

It already had frozen $2.65bn in federal grants and tried to revoke Harvard’s ability to enrol international students.

The Trump administration also issued Columbia University a similar notice last month accusing it of violation of civil-rights law for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from harassment. Columbia is also negotiating with the administration over its federal funding and autonomy.

The US Senate has begun voting on a massive spending plan, dubbed the “big beautiful bill”, on Monday after weeks of contentious negotiations.

Republicans – who control both chambers of Congress – were divided over how much to cut welfare programmes in order to extend tax breaks.

President Donald Trump wants Congress to pass the bill by 4 July.

After the House of Representatives passed its version of the bill last month by a single vote, the legislation went to the Senate. Because of the changes made by the Senate, the bill will go back to the House for another vote.

On Sunday, after weeks of public discussion, the Senate moved to open debate on the budget bill in 51-49 vote.

Two Republicans and all Democrats voted against opening debate, arguing for further changes to the legislation.

One of those Republicans, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, announced his retirement following that vote and said the legislation broke promises Trump and Republicans made to their voters.

“Too many elected officials are motivated by pure raw politics who really don’t give a damn about the people they promised to represent on the campaign trail,” Tillis wrote in his announcement.

The other Republican who voted against moving the bill was Kentucky Senator Rand Paul who objected to debt increases, and cuts to Medicaid, a healthcare programme that is relied on by millions of elderly, disabled and low-income Americans.

There could be up to 20 hours of debate beginning on Monday when senators argue for or against adding amendments to the nearly 1,000-page bill in a process called “vote-a-rama”.

Democrats are expected to use all ten of their allotted hours of debate, while Republicans likely will not.

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

When the bill comes up for a full Senate vote – expected either late on Monday night or early Tuesday morning – Republicans can only afford three defections in order for the bill to pass.

If they lose three votes, Vice President JD Vance will have to cast a tie-breaking vote.

The bill will then return to the House of Representatives, where leadership has advised a full vote on the Senate’s bill could come as early as Wednesday morning.

While Republicans control the House, they can also only lose a handful of votes. There are frustrations with the Senate version of the bill among some Republicans in the House, which could make for another close vote.

Democrats in both chambers have largely objected to the spending cuts and the proposed extension of tax breaks.

Meanwhile, Republican debate has focused on 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.

The version of the bill senators will soon vote on contains 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.

The bill also authorises $5 trillion in new borrowing which will add to a growing US debt load – a move that goes against what many conservatives have argued for and infuriated one-time Trump confidant Elon Musk earlier this summer.

The Senate version of the bill will add $3.3tn (£2.4tn) in debt, according to new estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan federal agency.

The national debt currently sits at $36 trillion, according to the treasury department.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has urged Congress to address the debt limit by mid-July and warned that if they do not, the US could be unable to pay its bills as early as August.

A street vendor shot in the head by police during protests two weeks ago has died a day after being declared brain-dead in hospital, his family says.

“Boniface is no more. We have just viewed his body,” family spokeswoman Emily Wanjira told the BBC.

The family is expected to issue a formal statement about the 22-year-old’s death later on Monday.

Boniface Kariuki was shot as police cracked down on a protest in the capital Nairobi against the death in detention of blogger and teacher Albert Ojwang, 31.

Kariuki, a mask vendor, was shot at close range on 17 June, and later admitted to the main public referral hospital in Nairobi for treatment.

He spent nearly two weeks on a life-support machine, before his family were told by doctors that his heart was still beating but his brain had ceased to function.

Doctors had carried out several operations but some bullet fragments were reportedly still lodged in his brain.

News that he was brain dead had sparked further public anger over alleged police brutality, with increasing demands for justice.

Many Kenyans have also urged the government to settle the hospital bill after Mr Kariuki’s family had appealed for public donations.

Two police officers have appeared in court over his shooting, but have not yet been asked to pleas. They remain in custody pending the outcome of investigations.

Separately on Monday, a Kenyan High Court ordered Police Insp Gen Douglas Kanja to produce missing blogger Ndiangui Kinyagia within 24 hours, or appear in court the next day to explain his whereabouts.

He was reportedly detained by security officers last week but has not been seen since.

• Are East African governments uniting to silence dissent?
• Why the death of a blogger has put Kenya’s police on trial

At least 19 people were killed during nationwide anti-government demonstrations last Wednesday, according to the state-funded rights body.

Kenya’s Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen, however, defended the police, describing the protests as “terrorism disguised as dissent”.

He urged officers to “shoot on sight” civilians who attacked police stations, sparking further criticism from lawyers and rights groups.

On Sunday, Mr Kariuki’s family urged authorities to speed up investigations and ensure that justice takes place.

Six people – including three police officers – have been charged with murder over Mr Ojwang’s death in police custody.

His death forced Kenya’s deputy police chief Eliud Lagat to step aside, but many Kenyans are demanding his resignation.

Mr Ojwang was detained after Mr Lagat filed a complaint, accusing him of defaming him on social media.

An autopsy found that Mr Ojwang died of assault wounds. Mr Lagat has denied any wrongdoing.

• BBC identifies security forces who shot Kenya anti-tax protesters
• Why Kenya’s president has so many nicknames
• Four Kenyan police officers charged over baby’s killing as others freed
• New faces of protest – Kenya’s Gen Z anti-tax revolutionaries

Italian luxury fashion label Prada has said it acknowledges the Indian roots of its new footwear line, days after the design sparked a controversy in India.

The sandals, showcased at the Milan Fashion Week last week, had an open-toe braided pattern that closely resembled the traditional Kolhapuri sandals made in the Indian states of Maharashtra and Karnataka.

Prada described the sandals as “leather footwear” but did not mention its Indian origins, prompting backlash and allegations of cultural appropriation in India.

Responding to the controversy, Prada told the BBC in a statement that it recognises that the sandals are inspired by traditional Indian footwear.

A Prada spokesperson said that the company has “always celebrated craftsmanship, heritage and design traditions”, adding that it was “in contact with the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, Industry & Agriculture on this topic”. This is a prominent industry trade body in the state.

Last week, its chief had written to the brand, saying the design was commercialised without crediting the artisans who have preserved its heritage for generations.

Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada’s head of Corporate Social Responsibility, responded to his letter saying that the sandals were “at an early stage of design”, according to Reuters.

He also said that Prada was open to a “dialogue for meaningful exchange with local Indian artisans” and the company would organise follow-up meetings to discuss this further.

Named after a city in Maharashtra where they are made, Kolhapuri sandals trace their roots back to the 12th Century.

Made from leather and sometimes dyed in natural colours, the traditional handcrafted sandals are sturdy and well-suited to India’s hot climate.

They were awarded the Geographical Indication (GI) status by the Indian government in 2019.

According to the World Trade Organisation, a geographical indication tag credits a good or product as having originated from a certain region or place, and is considered a mark of authenticity.

Following the controversy, many artisans in Kolhapur said they were saddened by Prada’s use of the design without giving due credit.

“These sandals are made with the hard work of leather workers in Kolhapur. They should be named after Kolhapur. Don’t take advantage of others’ labour,” Prabha Satpute, a Kolhapuri artisan, told BBC Marathi.

The sandals cost a few hundreds rupees in India but Prada’s reported premium pricing angered some, though the brand’s website does not mention the price tag. Most other sandals sold by the fashion house, retail at between £600 to £1,000 in the UK.

Industrialist Harsh Goenka highlighted this, saying the local artisans barely make any money for the same hand-made products. “They lose, while global brands cash in on our culture,” he said.

This is not the first time that global brands have been accused to appropriating Indian traditional products without crediting their roots.

At the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Gucci described a sari worn by Bollywood star Alia Bhatt as a gown, sparking backlash.

Earlier in May, a popular TikTok trend was criticised for calling dupatta, a traditional South Asian scarf, a Scandinavian scarf.

In Kolhapur, however, some said the move had instilled a sense of pride in them.

“Artisans are happy that someone is recognising their work,” Kolhapur-based businessman Dileep More told Reuters.

Two US firefighters have been killed and a third wounded after a man intentionally started a fire and began shooting at first responders in a “total ambush” which lasted several hours, authorities said.

The gunman, who investigators said acted alone, began shooting after crews responded to a fire at Canfield Mountain, just north of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on Sunday afternoon.

Law enforcement officers and firefighters came under sniper fire during the incident and a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team later “located a deceased male” close to where the attack took place.

The fire grew to 20 acres after it was first reported and continued to burn into Sunday night, Sheriff Bob Norris said.

“We do believe that the suspect started the fire,” Norris told a late night news conference.

“This was a total ambush. These firefighters did not have a chance.

“We did lose a Coeur d’Alene firefighter, and we did lose a firefighter from the Kootenai County Fire and Rescue.”

A third was “fighting for his life, but is in stable condition”, he said.

Firefighters received the first report of a fire in the mountainside community at around 13:21 PST (20:21 GMT) and reports that they were being shot at emerged about 40 minutes later, Norris said.

More than 300 law enforcement officers from the city, county, state and federal levels responded to the scene of the shooting, including two helicopters with snipers on board.

Video showed smoke billowing from heavily wooded hillsides.

Norris said the shooter used a high-powered sporting rifle to fire rapidly at first responders, with officers initially unsure of the number of perpetrators involved.

After an hours-long barrage of gunfire, the suspect was found using mobile phone location information. It was unclear whether the suspect had killed himself or been hit by an officer, Norris said.

Authorities would not provide more details on weapons recovered, but said that officers would likely find more guns at the scene on Monday, once the fire was extinguished.

The motive for the shooting was not known and Norris did not provide any details on the suspect.

The two firefighters killed and the third wounded have not been identified.

A shelter-in-place notice – which alerts people to stay inside their properties or in their current locations during an emergency, rather than evacuating to a different area – was lifted some seven hours later.

Canfield Mountain is an area popular with hikers about 260 miles (420 km) east of Seattle.

Norris said that a preliminary investigation had determined that there was only one gunman, after it was earlier thought that there could have been as many as four.

He said the gunman appeared to have run while shooting and may have stashed weapons in different places.

Helicopters with heat-seeking technology flew over the area in an attempt to pinpoint the suspect, but teams experienced difficulty because of smoke from the wildfire which was still burning, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Norris added that investigators had to search the scene quickly, due to the encroaching fire, and that the information they had was still “very, very preliminary”.

“A fire was rapidly approaching that body. And we had to scoop up that body and transport that body to another location,” he said.

Officials have appealed to the public to stay away and not to fly drones over the site.

A firefighters’ union boss confirmed two of its members had been killed in the attack.

Edward Kelly, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) union, posted on X: “While responding to a fire earlier today in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, IAFF members were ambushed in a heinous act of violence.

Local fire chief Pat Riley told TV station KHQ he was “heartbroken” by the attack.

The case was a big shock to those living in Coeur d’Alene, a city of around 56,000 people that is near the border with Washington state.

Coeur d’Alene resident Linda Tiger, 80, told the BBC she was shocked by the shooting.

“This has never happened here,” said Mrs Tiger, who has lived in the city for nearly 30 years.

“But it goes to show that that no-one is safe from this kind of mental sadness.”

A 92-year-old man has been found guilty of the rape and murder of a Bristol woman in a case that remained unsolved for nearly six decades.

Louisa Dunne, 75, was found strangled on her living room floor by a neighbour on Britannia Road in Easton, Bristol, on 28 June 1967.

Convicted rapist Ryland Headley, of Clarence Road in Ipswich, has now been found guilty of Mrs Dunne’s murder following a trial at Bristol Crown Court.

Senior investigating officer Det Insp Dave Marchant said Headley, who was in his 30s when he killed Mrs Dunne, had left “a legacy of misery and pain”.

Despite the efforts of police investigating Mrs Dunne’s death 58 years ago, no key suspect was identified.

Police collected about 19,000 prints from men and boys at the time with no success. They also made about 8,000 house-to-house inquiries and took 2,000 statements.

It was only when the case was re-examined by Avon and Somerset Police decades later, that DNA testing of a swab that contained semen was linked to Headley.

Det Insp Marchant called him a “dangerous serial offender” with a “shocking and abhorrent history” and said there was a sense of “gravity” when police were told of the positive result.

“This is a marrying of old school and new school policing techniques,” he said.

Det Insp Marchant added it was believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the UK.

Mrs Dunne had been twice widowed and lived alone, but was well-known in the local area.

Headley was accused of forcing entry into her home before sexually attacking her and then strangling her.

The night of her death, neighbours reported hearing a woman’s “frightening scream”.

Det Insp Marchant said a neighbour was first alerted to something unusual happening when the paper they left for Mrs Dunne was not taken in on the morning of 28 June 1967.

After Headley’s arrest, fingerprint experts compared his palm print to one collected from the rear window of Mrs Dunne’s home, which matched Headley’s.

He previously admitted breaking into the homes of two widows, aged 84 and 79, and raping them in Suffolk in October 1977, in crimes police described as “eerily similar”.

Trevor Mason, a Special Branch detective in Suffolk drafted in to assist in the 1977 cases, described Headley as “worse than an animal”.

Speaking to Channel 4 News, Mr Mason said what the women had suffered was “absolutely horrendous”, adding Headley’s victims were “obviously frail” and “didn’t stand a chance”.

Headley had denied both the rape and murder of Mrs Dunne after being charged in November 2024. He is set to be sentenced for both crimes on Tuesday.

Ipswich punk-rap duo Bob Vylan grabbed the headlines at Glastonbury Festival over the weekend, but for many readers, the name might be a new one.

Organisers of the festival said they were “appalled” after frontman Bobby Vylan led a crowd in chants of “death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]”.

The prime minister condemned them for using what he called “appalling hate speech”.

The BBC said on Monday it should have cut away from the live broadcast of Bob Vylan’s performance and a spokesperson for media watchdog Ofcom said: “We are very concerned about the live stream of this performance, and the BBC clearly has questions to answer.”

Posting on Instagram on Sunday evening, Bobby – real name Pascal Robinson-Foster – appeared to stand by his on-stage comments, with the caption: “I said what I said.” He told fans he had been “inundated” with messages of both “support and hatred” and also called for “a change in foreign policy”.

The provocative band were formed in Suffolk in 2017 by the singer, guitarist and poet alongside drummer Bobbie Vylan.

Collectively known as “the Bobs”, they perform under their stage names.

The pair blend elements of punk rock and UK grime/hip-hop, drawing influence from the likes of the Sex Pistols, Dizzee Rascal and Stormzy as well as reggae dancehall, reflecting Robinson-Foster’s Jamaican heritage.

Their lyrics tackle themes around racism, police violence, capitalism and fatherhood; as well as the ills of homophobia and toxic masculinity.

After a string of early singles, they released their debut album, We Live Here, in 2020.

They then went on to tour with the likes of the Offspring, the Hives and Biffy Clyro and performed at the Reading and Leeds Festivals in 2021.

Their second (of five) studio albums, Bob Vylan Presents the Price of Life, entered the UK album chart at number 18, winning the Kerrang! magazine award for best album in 2022.

The same year, they bagged the inaugural award for best alternative music act at the Mobo Awards.

Robinson-Foster, 34, initially started writing verse as a teenager around 2004, becoming an established performance poet under the name Nee Hi, as well as being part of a grime outfit called Ear 2 da Street.

He was invited to perform at the Black and Asian Police Association conference in Manchester in 2005, and served as a mentor for young people in his home town Ipswich.

He once said in an interview with Tribune magazine that he started the band Bob Vylan in a bid to “wind people up”, score some victories and alleviate boredom.

Speaking to the BBC’s Newsbeat at the Download Festival in 2023, the stage-diving provocateur explained their high-energy and highly politicised approach to music.

“I suppose it’s a life of experience under certain power structures that have kept us at a certain place within the hierarchy of this country,” he explained.

“When I’m recounting those lyrics, it can be quite cathartic to play these songs in front of crowds of people, and tell them about my experience.

“It’s also a very, I suppose at certain points, emotional experience and emotional ride talking about these things in front of a crowd of people.”

He added: “You’re vulnerable… we put ourselves up there and we we talk about our life and the lives of people living in our communities, and people are free to enjoy it but they’re also free to disagree with it and they’re also free to heckle us or throw something at us or whatever it might be.

“So it’s quite a vulnerable position to be in, but you just have to have trust.”

In the past he has appeared to take aim at members of the crowd, verbally, and also swung a baseball bat on stage; as well as wearing football shirts of the rivals of the town or city in which they were playing.

The band previously performed at Glastonbury in 2022 for the BBC, playing a rendition of their track Wicked and Bad, which denigrates former UK PM Margaret Thatcher and includes the line “eat the rich”.

During their Glastonbury set this year, the rapper – whose band have also played Coachella and collaborated with Amyl And The Sniffers singer Amy Taylor, Soft Play guitarist Laurie Vincent and rock band Kid Kapichi – brought out his daughter to sing with him on the track Dream Bigger.

The performance took place on the West Holts stage on Saturday afternoon, just ahead of another controversial rap group, Kneecap.

The Irish-language act recently lost their US visa sponsor. Bob Vylan are set to tour the US later this year and it remains to be seen if their entry visas will now be examined.

Whatever happens, as with Kneecap, more people now know their name for sure.

Sergei Tikhanovsky has barely spoken for more than five years.

All that time he was held in solitary confinement in a high security Belarusian prison for daring to stand up to a dictator.

Now the former opposition blogger is free, and words stream out of him so quickly that his thoughts sometimes struggle to keep up.

“The restriction on speaking was the hardest thing,” Sergei confided when we met in Vilnius very soon after his surprise release.

“When you can’t say or write anything, you can’t talk to anyone and you’re just trapped in a cell – that’s the toughest thing – not the restriction on movement.”

Sergei is now in enforced exile, freed along with 13 other political prisoners after a senior US delegation paid a rare visit to the authoritarian ruler of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko.

When I ask about the reunion with his family, Sergei lifts a hand to his face and weeps.

His daughter was only four when he was arrested.

“She didn’t recognise me,” he manages eventually, after a long pause. “Then she threw herself into my arms and we hugged for a long time.”

Sergei’s transformation since his arrest is shocking.

Back in 2020 he was stocky and bearded. Now the face beneath his close-shaven head is gaunt. He says he’s lost almost 60kg (132 pounds) in jail, where he spent endless weeks in punishment cells.

“Physically I’m half the size and half the weight,” Sergei says. “But my spirit is not broken. Maybe it’s even stronger.”

“Before I’d only heard of the crimes of this regime, but now I’ve seen them first-hand and we have to fight that.”

Until last week, Sergei Tikhanovsky was one of the most prominent political prisoners in Belarus.

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election he developed a big YouTube following by filming candid interviews about people’s complaints and problems.

Then he tried to register to run himself, waving a giant slipper and calling on Belarusians to “Stop the Cockroach!”.

“I was using the chance to show that it’s impossible to win democratically in Belarus,” Sergei explains. “I wanted to show that the elections are fake, and they arrested me.”

When his wife, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, went on to run in his place she attracted huge crowds. After Lukashenko claimed another implausible victory, those crowds became a mass protest which soon became mass arrests.

In prison, Sergei was constantly singled out for ill treatment like the other high-profile figures – “the ones they think are most dangerous, or who they want to destroy”, as he puts it.

“For the last two-and-a-half years I was in total isolation. I didn’t get a single letter in almost three years. For almost three years they didn’t let me have any phone calls,” he says.

He wasn’t even allowed to see a priest.

“They’d say: you will die in prison. We are going to keep extending your time and you won’t get out.”

To make matters worse, Sergei was frequently sent to a punishment cell – for a mark on the wall or a stray cobweb.

“Those cells could be three-by-two metres, including a hole in the floor for a toilet,” he recalls. “No mattress, no sheet and no pillows.”

He would get up every hour through the night to keep warm with sets of squats and sit-ups, then lie on the wooden bunk until his arms and legs seized up, and he had to start the exercises all over again.

To cope, he had to empty his brain of all thoughts of family and friends.

“You have to put that to one side,” he says. “Because if you think about how they are and what’s happening to them, you won’t survive.”

It was last August when Sergei started to think he might be getting out.

That’s when the deputy prosecutor began touring prisons and “seriously recommending” that political detainees “write to the dictator and request his pardon” as Sergei puts it.

Lukashenko was suddenly keen on looking merciful and several dozen were released.

Sergei and the other big names, like Viktor Babaryka and Maria Kolesnikova, were never on any lists.

But he never entertained the idea of confessing, even to get back to his children.

“I am no criminal,” he explains. “So that would be a betrayal of all who support me.”

Then last week the United States stepped in.

When special envoy Keith Kellogg travelled to Minsk to intercede for American citizens in prison, he emerged with Sergei, too.

For Lukashenko, the meeting with Kellogg was a big win diplomatically.

He has been ostracised by Western countries since he suppressed the peaceful protests in 2020.

His active support for Russia in invading Ukraine has isolated him still further.

“Now Lukashenko could show some co-operation was starting, a dialogue with the US,” Sergei says, explaining what Lukashenko got for freeing some prisoners.

“That was the price: the start of contact with him. Because no-one had been engaging.”

Sergei wants nothing more than for all the other political prisoners to be released, too. There are more than 1,000 in total.

In tears, he describes meeting an “old man” recently who turned out to be a young friend, aged beyond recognition by prison.

“I’d give anything to get them all out,” Sergei says. “I think we should pay any price. But I don’t want them to drop all sanctions.”

Sergei’s wife, now the leader of the opposition, is overjoyed to have him back with her and their children. But Svetlana tells me she is wary of the next US move.

“We cannot soften the sanctions until repressions fully stop,” she argues. “For 14 people released, 28 more were detained immediately in Belarus. For Lukashenko, there is no change in policy.”

Sergei’s first week of freedom has passed in a whirl of activity. He has met politicians, made speeches and written to Donald Trump with his thanks. He has also been catching up on lost time with his children – as well as all the news he has missed in isolation.

But what about his ambitions? The last time he and Svetlana were together she was a housewife and he was the political one. So could there be tensions?

“I don’t have any claims to her role,” Sergei insists. “I don’t need that. I just need a democratic Belarus.”

“What they’re showing on Russian TV are fairy tales for fools. Most of Mariupol still lies in ruins,” says John, a Ukrainian living in Russian-occupied Mariupol. We’ve changed his name as he fears reprisal from Russian authorities.

“They are repairing the facades of the buildings on the main streets, where they bring cameras to shoot. But around the corner, there is rubble and emptiness. Many people still live in half-destroyed apartments with their walls barely standing,” he says.

It’s been just over three years since Mariupol was taken by Russian forces after a brutal siege and indiscriminate bombardment – a key moment in the early months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Thousands were killed, and the UN estimated 90% of residential buildings were damaged or destroyed.

In recent months, videos and reels from several pro-Russia influencers have been painting a picture of a glossy city where damaged structures have been repaired and where life has gone back to normal.

But the BBC has spoken to more than half a dozen people – some still living in Mariupol, others who escaped after spending time under occupation – to piece together a real picture of what life is like in the city.

“There are a lot of lies floating around,” says 66-year-old Olha Onyshko who escaped from Mariupol late last year and now lives in Ukraine’s Ternopil.

“We had a beautiful city but now it’s diseased. I wouldn’t say they [Russian authorities] have repaired a lot of things. There’s a central square – only the buildings there have been reconstructed. And there are also empty spaces where buildings stood. They cleared the debris, but they didn’t even separate out the dead bodies, they were just loaded on to trucks with the rubble and carried out of the city,” she adds.

Mariupol is also facing severe water shortages.

“Water flows for a day or two, then it doesn’t come for three days. We keep buckets and cans of water at home. The colour of the water is so yellow that even after boiling it, it’s scary to drink it,” says James, another Mariupol resident whose name has been changed.

Some have even said the water looks like “coca cola”.

Serhii Orlov, who calls himself Mariupol’s deputy mayor in exile, says the Siverskyi Donets–Donbas Canal which supplied water to the city was damaged during the fighting.

“Only one reservoir was left supplying water to Mariupol. For the current population, that would’ve lasted for about a year and a half. Since occupation has lasted longer than that, it means there is no drinking water at all. The water people are using doesn’t even meet the minimum drinking water standard,” says Serhii.

There are frequent power cuts, food is expensive, and medicines are scarce, residents tell us.

“Basic medicines are not available. Diabetics struggle to get insulin on time, and it is crazy expensive,” says James.

The BBC has reached out to Mariupol’s Russian administration for a response to the allegations about shortages and whether they had found an alternative source for water. We have not got a response so far.

Despite the hardships the most difficult part of living in the city, residents say, is watching what Ukrainian children are being taught at school.

Andrii Kozhushyna studied at a university in Mariupol for a year after it was occupied. Now he’s escaped to Dnipro.

“They are teaching children false information and propaganda. For example, school textbooks state that Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Odesa, Crimea and even Dnipropetrovsk regions are all already part of Russia,” says Andrii.

He also described special lessons called “Conversations about Important Things” in which students are taught about how Russia liberated the Russian-speaking population of these regions from Nazis in 2022.

“Teachers who refuse to take these lessons are intimidated or fired. It’s like they are reprogramming the minds of our children,” says John, a Mariupol resident.

During World War Two Victory Day celebrations in May, images from Mariupol’s central square showed children and adults dressed up in military costumes participating in parades and performances – Soviet-era traditions that Ukraine had increasingly shunned are now being imposed in occupied territories. Mariupol was bathed in the colours of the Russian flag – red, blue and white.

But some Ukrainians are waging a secret resistance against Russia, and in the dead of the night, they spray paint Ukrainian blue and yellow colours on walls, and also paste leaflets with messages like “Liberate Mariupol” and “Mariupol is Ukraine”.

James and John are both members of resistance groups, as was Andrii when he lived in the city.

“The messages are meant as moral support for our people, to let them know that the resistance is alive,” says James.

Their main objective is collecting intelligence for the Ukrainian military.

“I document information about Russian military movements. I analyse where they are transporting weapons, how many soldiers are entering and leaving the city, and what equipment is being repaired in our industrial areas. I take photos secretly, and keep them hidden until I can transmit them to Ukrainian intelligence through secure channels,” says James.

Occasionally, the resistance groups also try to sabotage civil or military operations. On at least two occasions, the railway line into Mariupol was disrupted because the signalling box was set on fire by activists.

It’s risky work. Andrii said he was forced to leave when he realised that he had been exposed.

“Perhaps a neighbour snitched on me. But once when I was at a store buying bread, I saw a soldier showing my photo to the cashier asking if they knew who the person was,” he said.

He left immediately, slipping past Mariupol’s checkposts and then travelling through numerous cities in Russia, and through Belarus, before entering Ukraine from the north.

For those still in the city, each day is a challenge.

“Every day you delete your messages because your phone can be checked at checkpoints. You’re afraid to call your friends in Ukraine in case your phone is being tapped,” says James.

“A person from a neighbouring house was arrested right off the street because someone reported that he was allegedly passing information to the Ukrainian military. Your life is like a movie – a constant tension, fear, distrust,” he adds.

As talks continue between Ukraine and Russia, there have been suggestions from within and outside Ukraine that it would need to concede land in exchange for a peace deal.

“Giving away territory for a ‘deal with Russia’ will be a betrayal. Dozens risk their lives every day to pass information to Ukraine, not so that some diplomat in a suit will sign a paper that will ‘hand us over’,” says John.

“We don’t want ‘peace at any cost’. We want liberation.”

“I’ve been warned not to talk about it,” the woman wrote, before revealing snippets of the day she says she was arrested for publishing gay erotica.

“I’ll never forget it – being escorted to the car in full view, enduring the humiliation of stripping naked for examination in front of strangers, putting on a vest for photos, sitting in the chair, shaking with fear, my heart pounding.”

The handle, Pingping Anan Yongfu, is among at least eight in recent months which have shared accounts on Chinese social media platform Weibo of being arrested for publishing gay erotic fiction. As authors recounted their experiences, dozens of lawyers offered pro bono help.

At least 30 writers, nearly all of them women in their 20s, have been arrested across the country since February, a lawyer defending one told the BBC. Many are out on bail or awaiting trial, but some are still in custody. Another lawyer told the BBC that many more contributors were summoned for questioning.

They had published their work on Haitang Literature City, a Taiwan-hosted platform known for its “danmei”, the genre of so-called boys’ love and erotic fiction.

Think of it as a gay version of Fifty Shades of Grey: a BDSM relationship that leads to a happily-ever-after. That’s a frequent trope, across historical, fantasy or sci-fi settings. Over the years it has cultivated a fiercely devoted following, especially among young Chinese women.

These authors are being accused of breaking China’s pornography law for “producing and distributing obscene material”. Writers who earn a profit could be jailed for more than 10 years.

The law targets “explicit descriptions of gay sex or other sexual perversions”. Heterosexual depictions often have more leeway – works by acclaimed Chinese authors, including Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, have graphic sexual scenes, but are widely available.

Although authors of heterosexual erotica have been jailed in China, observers say the genre is subjected to far less censorship. Gay erotica, which is more subversive, seems to bother authorities more. Volunteers in a support group for the Haitang writers told the BBC police even questioned some readers.

Those who reported being arrested declined to be interviewed, fearing repercussions. Police in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, who are accused of driving this crackdown, have not responded to the BBC.

Online, the crackdown has unleashed a debate – and a rarer pushback against the law.

“Is sex really something to be ashamed of?” a Weibo user asked, arguing that China’s anti-obscenity laws are out of touch. Another wrote that women never get to decide what is obscene because they don’t control the narrative. Even legal scholars have expressed concern that just 5,000 views for anything deemed “obscene” qualifies as criminal “distribution”, lowering the bar to arrest creators.

It made Beijing uneasy enough that discussions have been vanishing: #HaitangAuthorsArrested drew more than 30 million views on Weibo before it was censored. Posts offering legal advice are gone. A prominent Chinese news site’s story has been taken down. Writers’ accounts, and some of the handles, are also disappearing.

After Pingping Anan Yongfu’s post went viral, she deleted it and wrote another, thanking supporters and admitting her writing had violated the law. She then deleted her handle.

Before that last post, she had written: “I was always the good girl in my parents’ eyes. But that day, I brought them nothing but shame. They’ll never hold their heads up again.”

These women have long worked in the shadows in China, where homosexuality and eroticism are stigmatised. Now outed by police investigations, they face social consequences that are as brutal as the legal ones.

“In that moment, all I felt was shame,” posted a writer whose Weibo handle translates to “the world is a huge psychiatric hospital”. She said the police pulled her out of class in college – and her classmates watched as they followed her to search her dorm.

“I earned my money word by word at a keyboard. But once it went south, it was as if none of that mattered. People treated me like I’d made money without ever working for it.”

Another wrote the police had been kind, advising her to speak to a lawyer and return her “illegal earnings” to reduce her sentence. “I’m only 20. So young, and I’ve already ruined my life so early.”

A third said: “I never imagined a day would come when every word I once wrote would come back to haunt me.”

One author who has been writing danmei novels for 20 years was not questioned but she says the crackdown won’t stop her. “This is how I find happiness. And I can’t let go of the connections I have made with the community.”

Inspired by Japanese boys’ love manga, danmei emerged as a sub-genre online in the 1990s. It has become hugely successful, with some of the novels appearing on international bestseller lists.

In 2021, 60 of them were optioned for film and TV adaptations. The most expensive IP reportedly sold for 40 million yuan ($5.6 million; £4.1 million). Some of China’s biggest stars, such as Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, began their careers on streaming shows based on danmei novels.

In short, it’s the rebellious royal of pop culture – too popular to ignore, too controversial to honour.

And it is a signature offering on Haitang, which, in Mandarin, is a flower that blooms in every shade of pink.

Fittingly, Haitang and danmei have flourished as uniquely female spaces, although they centre male protagonists. In a culture where female sexual desire is routinely policed, danmei became a coded, creative outlet – a space where women can write about female desire for other women.

That is exactly what makes danmei so “subversive”, says Dr Liang Ge, who teaches digital sociology at University College London. It allows women to “detach from gendered realities”, which they often associate with marriage and motherhood.

For instance, in danmei stories, men can get pregnant and are at ease with being vulnerable – a stark contrast from the often unequal relationships many Chinese women struggle with in real life.

“Danmei frees me from thinking about all those potential dangers in relationships in traditional heterosexual romance,” explains one writer who has been active in the danmei world for a decade.

Danmei novels are not without their critics, because some do contain extreme and violent scenes. “As a parent, how many of us can accept our children reading novels like this, let alone writing them?” asked one Weibo user.

The age of authors has also been a concern: a handful of those the BBC spoke to said they all started reading and writing gay erotica before they turned 18, some as young as 11.

It’s a problem the community should acknowledge and address, said Ma, a danmei writer who only shared her surname, adding that this is a problem for all adult content because China does not restrict content by age.

But danmei in particular has increasingly come under attack in the last decade as Beijing launched a series of campaigns to “clean up” the internet. In 2018 a danmei author was jailed for 10 years for selling 7,000 copies of her book titled Occupy.

As marriage and birth rates plummet, and China’s leader Xi Jinping encourages a national rejuvenation, so state scrutiny of danmei has ratcheted up, Dr Ge says.

“The Chinese government wants to promote traditional family values and liking danmei novels is seen as a factor in making women less willing to have children,” Dr Ge explains.

This is the second wave of mass arrests in less than a year – late last year, some 50 Haitang writers were prosecuted. A famous author who earned about 1.85 million yuan was jailed for nearly five years.

The two crackdowns are similar, according to a lawyer who had represented some of the defendants last year, “but this time, even those with minor involvement weren’t spared”.

A lawyer offering free legal advice said more than 150 people requested consultations in just two days. Many of those contacting her had not been charged yet – they were terrified about the possibility though.

“This is classic offshore fishing,” says a lawyer who authored a “practical guide” to assist Haitang writers. The term refers to overreach by local police – those in Lanzhou summoned writers in various places, arguably beyond their jurisdiction.

Several reported paying out of pocket to fly to Lanzhou. One posted that the 2,000 yuan earned from two books on Haitang paid for the flight.

Last year too all the arrests were by police in Jixi County in eastern China.

Indebted local governments have done this before to earn revenue through fines, sometimes forcing a warning from the central government. Cyber crimes are particularly prone to this “as long as they claim a local reader was corrupted”, the lawyer says.

Danmei writers know tolerance can be fickle. It’s why they skirt censorship with metaphors. “Making dinner” means sex; “kitchen tool” is code for male genitals.

Still, the recent crackdown stunned them. “A phone call shattered my dreams,” is how one writer described the call from police.

They accused police of searching their phone without a warrant. They said their crime was assessed by adding up the views for each chapter – a method they argued was misleading, as it likely exaggerated the readership.

Another danmei author posted: “I wrote on Haitang for years, with only a handful of readers. Then, those overlooked stories accumulated over 300,000 clicks, and the 4,000 yuan in royalties sitting in my account became evidence of my crime.”

It’s hard to know if this spells the end of their careers on Haitang.

“If I could go back, I’d still choose to write. And I will keep writing,” wrote the handle Sijin de Sijin.

“Right now, I can only hope the law will see beyond the words on the page – and see the girl who skipped meals to save money, the girl who sold her hair to buy a pen, the girl who believed her mind could carve a way through fate. I hope it gives all of us a fair chance.”

As a guide dog handler of 26 years, my heart falls every time I hear the fatigued pants of dogs in heatwave weather.

Animal welfare charity the RSPCA says that dogs are 10 times more likely to suffer heat-related illnesses from exercising in hot weather than from overheating in cars. Both are tremendously bad for your dog.

This is because canines have a very limited ability to regulate their temperature.

They do not sweat like humans – only perspiring a small amount through the pads on their paws, with their often thick fur coats meaning their core temperature can rise quickly in high temperatures.

Heavy panting, difficulty breathing, excessive drooling, lethargy and drowsiness are all key signs that your dog is too hot.

In extreme cases, dogs vomit and finally lose consciousness. If your dog is in trouble, the RSPCA says you should move the dog to a shaded and cool area and immediately pour cool, but not very cold, water over the dog, avoiding their head.

The charity says wet towels should not be placed over the animal because it could cause heat to become trapped. If possible , allow the dog to drink small amounts of cool water and continue to pour cool water over them, but not so much that they begin to shiver. When breathing settles, head straight to the vets.

My plea to dog owners is not to walk or exercise your dog in hot weather. Please understand that this is not fear-mongering. Your dog can overheat in moments and it is totally avoidable in most cases.

• How to sleep in the heat
• When is a heatwave ‘really’ a heatwave?
• What are the heat exhaustion and heatstroke symptoms?
• How to keep your home cool in hot weather

It struck me as unbelievable frankly this weekend that while I, as a blind person was being sighted guided by my girlfriend in 30C (86F) weather because it was too hot for my working dog to be out, we passed nearly a dozen dog walkers obliviously walking their best friends into danger at around 1pm.

I know not everyone is an experienced dog handler – but I can’t begin to imagine how anyone could fail to notice the obvious discomfort, the heavy panting, the foot-dragging and laboured breathing in direct sunlight that had us reaching for our iced-water bottles.

So what can we do to protect our animals in hot weather?

For starters, when the mercury hits 20C, I place the back of my hand on the pavement to check I can comfortably keep it there. It’s a great indicator that your dog’s pads will be ok too.

I always pack a folding water travel bowl and carry chilled or iced water. In addition, when the temperature hits 24C or above, I start asking whether it’s safe to be out at all and usually decide at 25C and above that it’s too hot to walk my dog more than a few feet from my front door to an air-conditioned cab.

But what about exercise?

Your dog needs life more than it needs a walk. On super-hot days, keep your dog indoors and ideally air-conditioned or in a cool room with a fan.

Your dog will be fine without a walk for a few days but you could provide playtime at home by throwing a toy.

If you are planning to walk your dog, do it in the very early morning or very late evenings. If you walk your dog in extreme heat you are literally putting their lives at risk. They’re too important – keep them safe, cool and inside.

The US must rule out any further strikes on Iran if it wants to resume diplomatic talks, Tehran’s deputy foreign minister has told the BBC.

Majid Takht-Ravanchi said the Trump administration told Iran through mediators that it wanted to return to negotiations this week, but had not made its position clear on the “very important question” of further attacks while talks are taking place.

The US and Iran were involved in talks over Iran’s nuclear programme when Israel struck Iranian nuclear sites and military infrastructure earlier this month and Iran responded with missiles.

The US became directly involved in the conflict on 21 June when it bombed three of Iran’s nuclear sites.

Takht-Ravanchi also said Iran would “insist” on being able to enrich uranium for what it says are peaceful purposes, rejecting accusations that it is secretly moving towards developing a nuclear bomb.

He said Iran had been “denied access to nuclear material” for its research programme so they needed “to rely on ourselves”.

“The level of that can be discussed, the capacity can be discussed, but to say that you should not have enrichment, you should have zero enrichment, and if do you not agree, we will bomb you – that is the law of the jungle,” the deputy foreign minister said.

Israel began its attacks, targeting nuclear and military sites as well as assassinating commanders and scientists, in Iran on 13 June, saying Tehran was close to building a nuclear weapon.

On Monday, Iran said that, based on the latest forensics data, 935 people had been killed by the Israeli strikes.

According to the latest data reported by Israel’s health ministry, 28 people have been killed in Israel since 13 June when Iran responded by attacking Israel.

On 21 June, the US became involved in the conflict, dropping bombs on three of Iran’s nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan.

The extent of the damage caused to Iran’s nuclear programme has been unclear, and Takht-Ravanchi said he could not give an exact assessment.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the strikes caused severe but “not total” damage, while US President Donald Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear facilities were “totally obliterated”.

Grossi also said Iran had the capacity to start enriching uranium again in “a matter of months”. In response, Takht-Ravanchi said he did not know if that would be the case.

Iran’s relationship with the IAEA has become increasingly strained. On Wednesday, its parliament moved to suspend cooperation with the atomic watchdog, accusing the IAEA of siding with Israel and the US.

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

Takht-Ravanchi said no date had been agreed upon for a possible return to talks and he did not know what would be on the agenda, after Trump suggested discussions could take place this week.

Iran’s deputy foreign minister said: “Right now we are seeking an answer to this question – are we going to see a repetition of an act of aggression while we are engaging in dialogue?”

He said the US had to be “quite clear on this very important question” and “what they are going to offer us in order to make the necessary confidence required for such a dialogue”.

Asked if Iran could consider rethinking its nuclear programme as part of any deal, possibly in return for sanctions relief and investment in the country, Takht-Ravanchi said: “Why should we agree to such a proposal?”

He reiterated that Iran’s programme, including enriching uranium to 60%, was “for peaceful purposes”.

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 in 2018 during his first term as president, saying it did too little to stop a pathway to a bomb, and reinstated US sanctions.

Iran retaliated by increasingly breaching the restrictions. The IAEA said it resumed enrichment at Fordo in 2021 and had reached about 60% enrichment – a short, technical step away from weapons grade, or 90% – to potentially make nine nuclear bombs.

Pressed on European and Western leaders having a lack of trust towards Iran, Takht-Ravanchi accused some European leaders of a “ridiculous” endorsement of US and Israeli strikes.

He said those who are criticising Iran over its nuclear programme “should criticise the way that we have been treated” and criticise the US and Israel.

He added: “And if they do not have the guts to criticise America, they should keep silent, not try to justify the aggression.”

Takht-Ravanchi also said Iran had received messages through mediators that the US did “not want to engage in regime change in Iran” by targeting the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on Iranians to “rise for their freedom” to bring down the clerical rule of Khamenei, but, after last week’s ceasefire was reached, Trump said he did not want the same.

Takht-Ravanchi insisted it would not happen and the idea was “tantamount to a futile exercise”.

He said that although some Iranians “might have criticism of some actions by the government, when it comes to foreign aggression they would be united to confront it”.

The deputy foreign minister said it was “not quite clear” if the ceasefire with Israel would last, but Iran would continue to observe it “as long as there is no military attack against us”.

He said Iran’s Arab allies in the Persian Gulf were “doing their best to try to prepare the necessary atmosphere for a dialogue”. Qatar is known to have played a key role in brokering the current ceasefire.

He added: “We do not want war. We want to engage in dialogue and diplomacy, but we have to be prepared, we have to be cautious, not to be surprised again.”

The jury in the high-profile murder trial of an Australian woman accused of cooking a deadly mushroom lunch for relatives has retired to decide her fate.

Erin Patterson, 50, has pleaded not guilty to four charges – three of murder and one of attempted murder – over the beef Wellington lunch at her regional Victorian house in July 2023.

The prosecution have claimed Ms Patterson knowingly put toxic death cap mushrooms into the home-cooked meal, before lying to police and disposing of evidence.

But the defence argue Ms Patterson accidentally included the poisonous fungi in the dish and only lied because she panicked after hurting people she loved.

Ms Patterson’s in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, along with Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, all fell ill and died days after the lunch in Leongatha.

Heather’s husband, local pastor Ian Wilkinson, recovered after weeks in an induced coma. Simon Patterson, the accused’s estranged husband, had been invited to the lunch too, but pulled out the day before.

On Monday, Justice Christopher Beale gave his final instructions to the 14-member jury, summing up evidence from the prosecution and the sole defence witness, Ms Patterson.

After almost two months and more than 50 witnesses, the final 12 jurors were decided by a ballot before the group retired for deliberations.

In her closing arguments, prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC said Ms Patterson has “told so many lies it’s hard to keep track of them”.

The prosecution alleged Ms Patterson lied to her relatives about a cancer diagnosis to convince them to attend the fatal lunch, poisoned them and then faked an illness to cover her tracks.

Ms Patterson’s further lies to police and medical staff about foraging for wild mushrooms, as well as her decision to dump a food dehydrator used to prepare the meal, were evidence of her guilt, they argued.

“She has told lies upon lies because she knew the truth would implicate her,” Nanette Rogers said.

“When she knew her lies had been uncovered, she came up with a carefully constructed narrative to fit with the evidence – almost.”

There was no “particular motive” for the alleged crime, Dr Rogers told the court, but the jury should still have “no difficulty” in rejecting the argument “this was all a horrible foraging accident”.

However, the defence argued the lack of motive was key. Ms Patterson had no reason to kill her guests, they said.

During Ms Patterson’s evidence, she told the jury she was very close to her in-laws and never intended to harm them.

As she was preparing the lunch, Ms Patterson claimed she added mushrooms from a container in her pantry that she now realised may have included both store-bought and foraged mushrooms.

She also told the court she had suffered from bulimia for years, and had made herself throw up after the beef Wellington meal – something her defence team says explains why she did not become as sick as the others who ate it.

The lie about having cancer was because she was embarrassed about plans to get weight-loss surgery, Ms Patterson said, and she didn’t tell authorities the truth about her mushroom foraging hobby because she feared they might blame her for making her relatives sick.

“She’s not on trial for lying,” defence lawyer Colin Mandy SC, “this is not a court of moral judgment”.

He accused the prosecution of trying to force “puzzle pieces” of evidence together, “stretching interpretations, ignoring alternative explanations because they don’t align perfectly with the narrative”.

In his final instructions, Justice Beale told the jury members they alone are the “judges of the facts in this case”.

He said they should not convict Ms Patterson simply for lying, as there are “all sorts of reasons why a person might behave in a way that makes the person look guilty”.

He added that while “any reasonable person would feel great sympathy” for the Patterson and Wilkinson families, jurors also must not allow themselves to be swayed by emotions.

The jury has now been sequestered, which means that while they deliberate, they will stay in supervised accommodation where they will have little to no contact with the outside world until they have reached a decision.

Canada will rescind a tax on big US technology firms, just hours before first payments were due, to allow trade talks between the two countries to restart.

On Friday, US President Donald Trump called off negotiations over a trade deal, describing the tax as a “blatant attack”, and threatened higher tariffs on imports from Canada.

In response, Canada has said it will introduce legislation to remove the tax and would halt the collection of payments, which were due on Monday.

The digital services tax (DST) would have meant US tech giants including Amazon, Meta, Google and Apple, facing a 3% charge on Canadian revenue above $20m.

Canada’s finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, issued a statement saying the tax would be rescinded.

“The DST was announced in 2020 to address the fact that many large technology companies operating in Canada may not otherwise pay tax on revenues generated from Canadians,” it said.

“Canada’s preference has always been a multilateral agreement related to digital services taxation,” the statement added.

Many countries, including the UK, are changing how they tax large multinational technology firms, which have millions of customers and advertisers around the world, but high corporation tax bills due to the way their businesses are structured.

It was estimated that Canada’s tax would cost the tech giants more than C$2bn ($1.5bn; £1.06bn) in its first year as the tax was being applied retroactively to January 2022.

• ‘In business, indecision is killer’ – Canadian firms seek certainty in tariff war

Last year’s federal budget estimated the tax would bring in C$5.9bn in total over the next five years.

Trump, who has forged a close relationship with tech company owners in his second term in office, has pushed back against such taxes.

He described Canada’s policy as “egregious” adding “economically we have such power over Canada”.

In a social media post on Monday, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick thanked Canada for removing the tax, saying it would have “been a deal breaker for any trade deal with America”.

Three quarters of Canada’s goods exports go to the US, worth more than $400bn a year, while Canada takes just 17% of US production.

In a statement, the American Chamber of Commerce hailed the move to rescind the tax.

“This is a constructive decision that allows both countries to focus on strengthening their economic partnership,” said chamber president Rick Tachuk.

Canada’s climbdown comes after a rollercoaster few months for US-Canada relations.

Shortly after taking office Trump threatened to impose sweeping new tariffs and even to annex the US’s northern neighbour.

The antagonism helped propel Canada’s Liberal Party, led by former central banker, Mark Carney, back into power.

Since then there appeared to be a rapprochement, with Canada and the US saying they aimed to agree new trade terms by 21 July.

Canada’s digital services tax has been a long-time irritant for the US dating back to the previous Biden administration.

Ottawa had received repeated warnings that it could undermine the trading relationship and lead to retaliation.

But earlier this month, Champagne said Canada would move ahead with collecting the scheduled payments from big tech companies regardless of ongoing talks with the US.

“It is hard to overstate how badly the government managed the DST issue over the past five years,” Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who has written extensively on the policy, wrote on his blog on Monday.

He pointed to, among other factors, making the tax retroactive and downplaying bipartisan concerns from US lawmakers.

There has been Canadian opposition to the tax as well, with business groups warning costs will be passed along to consumers.

Thirty-two people have been arrested in an operation targeting one of the main criminal organisations responsible for fuel theft in central Mexico, authorities said.

The gang stole fuel by drilling into pipelines and then storing it in warehouses, according to the security and civilian protection secretary.

Omar García Harfuch said gang members would then sell the fuel illegally across Mexico City and the states of Hidalgo and Querétaro.

In a press conference on Sunday, García Harfuch said some gang members had also forged documents and maintained connections with local authorities to facilitate operations.

He identified suspects Cirio Sergio “N” and Luis Miguel “N” as two of the main alleged leaders of the criminal organisation tasked with coordinating the extraction and distribution of the fuel.

Another man, named as Aurelio N, was identified as a leading “logistic and financial operator of the criminal cell,” García Harfuch alleged.

The operation was the result of six months of investigative work to identify and locate gang members, authorities said.

García Harfuch also said 12 properties that served as the gang’s operation centres were seized, alongside nearly 50 vehicles, 36 firearms and 16 million pesos (£619,464) in cash.

Various animals and exotic species – including a lion cub, a jaguar cub and two spider monkeys – were also found at the properties.

In an update on X on Sunday evening, he said “these animals were in risky conditions” and were now being taken care of by the federal attorney for environmental protection’s office.

A family have won a six-month fight for a refund on their £3,500 dream holiday to Lapland which was hit by a series of weather-related cancellations.

Lisa O’Neil from Cumbria complained after tour operator Tui said her family’s four-day trip could go ahead last December despite there being no snow forecast and the firm having a “no snow you don’t have to go” policy in place.

It meant none of the snow activities part of the package – a husky ride, reindeer encounter and snowmobile trip – could go ahead.

Tui, which has been approached for comment, initially only offered a 50% refund, but Mrs O’Neil’s successful appeal means she has received full compensation, including legal fees.

“We were absolutely elated,” said Mrs O’Neil, 40, from Gosforth.

“You think all of the time have you done the right thing, is it worth the hassle to push through.

“But when you know that you’re in the right and you’re just being forced into a situation by a corporate company, [the outcome] just validated all of the hard work that we put in.”

Mrs O’Neil and her husband Wayne had spent their savings on the Lapland trip for their son Finn, who is now eight.

A couple of days before departure they contacted Tui to raise concerns about the forecast of rain, but were reassured there was snow at their resort and were told if they chose to cancel the holiday they would lose the money.

On arrival they were greeted with a “magical” winter wonderland scene, but overnight rainfall melted all the snow.

As they had feared, all snow activities for their trip were cancelled, leaving them to arrange and pay for alternatives.

When they first complained to Tui they were offered 50% of their money back, which they refused.

ABTA, an association of travel companies which helps mediate disputes, referred the case to an independent adjudicator who found in favour of the O’Neils.

“The family’s essential purpose in taking the trip, to enjoy snow-based activities, was defeated,” the final adjudication read.

It added Tui had not complied with its own “no snow” policy and the family would not have set off for their trip had Tui let them cancel or reschedule it.

Mrs O’Neil said the family’s fight for a refund seemed daunting at times but, after their experience was featured in a BBC News article, a couple contacted them to help with the claim.

“This couple had been on a cruise that cost them £20,000,” Mrs O’Neil explained.

“It was for a big anniversary but, because of the weather, they couldn’t do all the stops that they were supposed to do.”

The couple had been successful in securing their claim after a six-year legal battle and shared their knowledge with the O’Neils.

Mrs O’Neil said: “They gave me loads of advice and the inspiration to keep going, so I am really grateful to them.”

Civic rights groups say at least seven people have been killed during a crackdown on protesters who are calling for Togo’s leader, Faure Gnassingbé, to step down and release political prisoners.

Seven bodies were recovered from rivers in the capital city Lomé, according to a coalition called Le Front Citoyen Togo Debout which accuses security forces and militias of committing abuses.

The Togolese government has denied these deaths were linked to last week’s demonstrations.

It is now threatening legal action against the protest organisers, calling the protests a “campaign of disinformation and hatred” that was orchestrated from abroad.

There is growing anger in Togo due to a crackdown on critical voices, and changes to the constitution labelled by labelled by critics and opposition figures as an “institutional coup d’état”.

These protests comes weeks after Gnassingbé – who was president for two decades and whose family has ruled the country for 58 years – was sworn into a new post of President of the Council of Ministers, which has no official term limits.

Demonstrations have been banned in the West African country since 2022, with the authorities citing “security reasons”.

Three days of demonstrations by online activists and youth-led movements began in Lomé on Thursday, before taking a violent turn on Friday and Saturday.

Tear gas was fired by anti-riot police at protesters, who pelted them with stones and other missiles.

Some determined anti-government protesters engaged security forces in street battles in several areas considered to be opposition strongholds, including Bè, where police chased demonstrators into their hideouts.

A coalition of 23 Togolese civil rights groups – known as the National Platform for Civic Space and Development Effectiveness – has since asked the authorities to carry out investigations into the bloody police repression.

They condemned what they described as “the use of disproportionate force against peaceful demonstrators”, adding that “peaceful protest is a fundamental right, recognized both by the Togolese Constitution and by international instruments ratified by our country”.

By Sunday calm had returned to most of Lomé, with shops reopened at the main central market at Assigamé and businesses operating as usual.

The recent change of regime orchestrated by the Togolese leader continues to fuel resentment. In addition to the new post which he can keep for life, constitutional reform in Togo has ended presidential elections, and introduced a parliamentary system.

Last month’s arrest and psychiatric detention of the Togolese rapper Narcisse Essowè Tchalla, also known as Aamron, acted as a catalyst for public outrage, culminating in over 50 arrests during protests earlier this month.

Though most have been released, at least three people remain in custody.

• New post for Togo leader could see him rule for life
• Kenya protests are ‘coup attempt’, says minister
• Disbelief as Nigeria urges prayer to end food shortages

A record number of heat alerts are in place across France as the country, and other parts of southern and eastern Europe, remain in the grip of soaring temperatures.

Some 84 of 96 of France’s mainland regions – known as departments – are currently under an orange alert – the country’s second highest. France’s Climate Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher has called it an “unprecedented” situation.

Heat warnings are also in place for parts of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, the UK and Balkan countries including Croatia.

Both Spain and Portugal had their hottest June days on record at the weekend.

El Granado in Andalucía saw a temperature of 46C on Saturday, while 46.6C was recorded in the town of Mora in central Portugal on Sunday.

Many countries have emergency medical services on standby and are warning people to stay inside as much as possible.

Nearly 200 schools across France have been closed or partially closed as a result of the heatwave, which has gripped parts of Europe for more than a week now but is expected to peak mid-week.

Education Minister Elisabeth Borne said she was working with regional authorities over the best ways to look after schoolchildren or to allow parents who can to keep their children at home.

Several forest fires broke out in the southern Corbières mountain range on Sunday, leading to evacuations and the closure of a motorway. They have since been contained, fire authorities told French media on Monday.

• Follow our live updates
• Top tips on how to sleep in the heat

Meanwhile, 21 Italian cities are also on the highest alert – including Rome, Milan and Venice, as is Sardinia.

Mario Guarino, vice president of the Italian Society of Emergency Medicine, told AFP news agency that hospital emergency departments across the country had reported a 10% increase in heatstroke cases.

Parts of the UK could see one of the hottest June days ever on Monday, with temperatures of 34C or higher possible in some parts of England.

Much of Spain, which is on course to record its hottest June on record, also continues to be under heat alerts.

“I can’t sleep well and have insomnia. I also get heat strokes, I stop eating and I just can’t focus,” Anabel Sanchez, 21, told Reuters news agency in Seville.

It is a similar situation in Portugal, where seven districts, including the capital, Lisbon, are on the highest alert level.

Meanwhile, the German Meteorological Service has warned that temperatures could reach almost 38C on Tuesday and Wednesday – further potentially record-breaking temperatures.

The heatwave has lowered levels in the Rhine River – a major shipping route – limiting the amount cargo ships can transport and raising freighting costs.

Countries in and around the Balkans have also been struggling with the intense heat, although temperatures have begun to cool slightly.

In Turkey, firefighters continue their efforts to put out hundreds of wildfires that have broken out in recent days.

A fire in the Seferihisar district, 50km (30 miles) south-west of the resort city of Izmir, is being fuelled by winds and has already destroyed around 20 homes and some residential areas have had to be evacuated.

Wildfires have also broken out in Croatia, where severe heat warnings are in place for coastal areas.

Temperatures in Greece have been approaching 40C for several days and coastal towns near the capital Athens last week erupted in flames that destroyed homes – forcing people to evacuate.

On Wednesday, Serbia reported its hottest day since records began, while a record 38.8C was recorded in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina on Thursday. In Slovenia, the hottest-ever June temperature was recorded on Saturday.

The temperature in North Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, reached 42C on Friday – and are expected to continue in that range.

While the heatwave is a potential health issue, it is also impacting the climate. Higher temperatures in the Adriatic Sea are encouraging invasive species such as the poisonous lionfish, while also causing further stress on alpine glaciers that are already shrinking at record rates.

The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Turk, warned on Monday that the heatwave highlighted the need for climate adaptation – moving away from practices and energy sources, such as fossil fuels, which contribute to climate change.

“Rising temperatures, rising seas, floods, droughts, and wildfires threaten our rights to life, to health, to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, and much more,” he told the UN’s Human Rights Council.

Heatwaves are becoming more common due to human-caused climate change, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Extreme hot weather will happen more often – and become even more intense – as the planet continues to warm, it has said.

Richard Allan, Professor of Climate Science at the University of Reading in the UK, explained that rising greenhouse gas levels are making it harder for the planet to lose excess heat.

“The warmer, thirstier atmosphere is more effective at drying soils, meaning heatwaves are intensifying, with moderate heat events now becoming extreme.”

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

A 92-year-old man has been found guilty of the rape and murder of a Bristol woman in a case that remained unsolved for nearly six decades.

Louisa Dunne, 75, was found strangled on her living room floor by a neighbour on Britannia Road in Easton, Bristol, on 28 June 1967.

Convicted rapist Ryland Headley, of Clarence Road in Ipswich, has now been found guilty of Mrs Dunne’s murder following a trial at Bristol Crown Court.

Senior investigating officer Det Insp Dave Marchant said Headley, who was in his 30s when he killed Mrs Dunne, had left “a legacy of misery and pain”.

Despite the efforts of police investigating Mrs Dunne’s death 58 years ago, no key suspect was identified.

Police collected about 19,000 prints from men and boys at the time with no success. They also made about 8,000 house-to-house inquiries and took 2,000 statements.

It was only when the case was re-examined by Avon and Somerset Police decades later, that DNA testing of a swab that contained semen was linked to Headley.

Det Insp Marchant called him a “dangerous serial offender” with a “shocking and abhorrent history” and said there was a sense of “gravity” when police were told of the positive result.

“This is a marrying of old school and new school policing techniques,” he said.

Det Insp Marchant added it was believed to be the oldest cold case solved in the UK.

Mrs Dunne had been twice widowed and lived alone, but was well-known in the local area.

Headley was accused of forcing entry into her home before sexually attacking her and then strangling her.

The night of her death, neighbours reported hearing a woman’s “frightening scream”.

Det Insp Marchant said a neighbour was first alerted to something unusual happening when the paper they left for Mrs Dunne was not taken in on the morning of 28 June 1967.

After Headley’s arrest, fingerprint experts compared his palm print to one collected from the rear window of Mrs Dunne’s home, which matched Headley’s.

He previously admitted breaking into the homes of two widows, aged 84 and 79, and raping them in Suffolk in October 1977, in crimes police described as “eerily similar”.

Trevor Mason, a Special Branch detective in Suffolk drafted in to assist in the 1977 cases, described Headley as “worse than an animal”.

Speaking to Channel 4 News, Mr Mason said what the women had suffered was “absolutely horrendous”, adding Headley’s victims were “obviously frail” and “didn’t stand a chance”.

Headley had denied both the rape and murder of Mrs Dunne after being charged in November 2024. He is set to be sentenced for both crimes on Tuesday.

At least 20 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike that hit a popular seafront cafe frequently used by activists, journalists, and local residents in western Gaza on Monday, according to medics and eyewitnesses.

Rescue teams evacuated 20 bodies and dozens wounded from Al-Baqa Cafeteria, an outdoor venue which consisted of tents along the beach, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence told the BBC.

He added that emergency crews were still searching through a deep crater left by the explosion.

“I was on my way to the café to use the internet just a few meters away when a massive explosion hit,” said Aziz Al-Afifi, a cameraman with a local production company, told the BBC.

“I ran to the scene. My colleagues were there, people I meet every day. The scene was horrific – bodies, blood, screaming everywhere.”

Videos posted by activists on social media appeared to show the moment a missile, reportedly fired from an Israeli warplane, struck the area. Footage captured the aftermath of the attack, with bodies scattered across the ground.

Al-Baqa Cafeteria had become a well-known space for journalists, activists, and remote workers, offering internet access, seating, and workspace along Gaza’s Mediterranean coast.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.

The attack came after Israel carried out a wave of air strikes across the Gaza Strip overnight, triggering the mass displacement of hundreds of Palestinian families, witnesses said.

Rescue teams recovered the bodies of five people, while dozens of injured civilians were evacuated to Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, according to local reports.

The bombardment follows one of the largest evacuation orders issued since the war resumed in March.

It comes amid increasing pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to refocus efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement.

On Saturday, US President Donald Trump said on social media that Netanyahu was working on negotiating a deal with Hamas “right now”. That came days after a senior Hamas official said mediators had intensified their efforts to broker a new ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza, but that negotiations with Israel remain stalled.

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

Israel followed this with a total blockade on humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza, which it partially eased after 11 weeks following pressure from US allies and warnings of starvation from global experts.

The partial easing saw the creation of the controversial US- and Israeli-backed aid group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Since GHF took over distribution operations, there have been almost daily incidents of killings and injuries of Palestinians seeking aid.

Eyewitnesses and medics have blamed Israel, though Israel has said it has only fired warning shots towards people it considered a threat.

Residents in Gaza City said dozens of Israeli air raids targeted densely populated eastern neighbourhoods, including Shujaiya, Tuffah, and Zeitoun.

Videos posted by activists on social media captured scenes of chaos and explosions illuminating the night sky, followed by flames and thick plumes of smoke rising above the skyline.

One of the strikes reportedly hit a school in Zeitoun that had been sheltering displaced families.

“Explosions never stopped… it felt like earthquakes,” Salah, 60, from Gaza City told Reuters news agency.

“In the news we hear a ceasefire is near, on the ground we see death and we hear explosions,” the father of five added.

The five fatalities reportedly occurred in a strike at the Al Shati camp, to the west of Gaza City.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had earlier ordered residents to leave large parts of northern Gaza, in anticipation of the attacks. Most of those displaced overnight moved westwards within Gaza City rather than to the southern region as instructed by the IDF.

“We had no choice but to leave everything behind,” said Abeer Talba, a mother of seven who fled Zeitoun with her family.

“We got phone calls recordings in Arabic telling us we were in a combat zone and must evacuate immediately.

“This is the seventh time we’ve been forced to flee,” she added. “We’re in the streets again, no food, no water. My children are starving. Death feels kinder than this.”

Amid the growing humanitarian crisis, fears are mounting that the evacuation orders and sustained air strikes are part of a broader Israeli plan to expand its ground offensive deeper into Gaza.

But there is also speculation in Israeli media that some generals are close to concluding that military operations in Gaza are near to being achieved.

That is also the view of many former army leaders who fear that the descent of the Gaza campaign into more attritional, guerilla-style warfare would lead to more deaths – of hostages, civilians and soldiers.

The Israeli prime minister’s next moves are being closely watched. While Benjamin Netanyahu’s instincts have always been to continue the war and defeat Hamas, he is coming under increasing pressure at home and abroad to pursue a new ceasefire agreement.

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 Air India tragedy, in which at least 270 people died, involved one of Boeing’s most innovative and popular planes. Until now, it was considered one of its safest too.

We still do not know why flight 171 crashed just 30 seconds after take-off. Investigators have now recovered flight recorder data and are working hard to find out. But the incident has drawn attention to the aircraft involved: the 787 Dreamliner, the first of a modern generation of radical, fuel-efficient planes.

Prior to the accident, the 787 had operated for nearly a decade and a half without any major accidents and without a single fatality. During that period, according to Boeing, it carried more than a billion passengers. There are currently more than 1,100 in service worldwide.

However, it has also suffered from a series of quality control problems.

Whistleblowers who worked on the aircraft have raised numerous concerns about production standards. Some have claimed that potentially dangerously flawed aircraft have been allowed into service – allegations the company has consistently denied.

It was on a chilly December morning in 2009 that a brand-new aircraft edged out onto the runway at Paine Field airport near Seattle and, as a cheering crowd looked on, accelerated into a cloudy sky.

The flight was the culmination of years of development and billions of dollars worth of investment.

The 787 was conceived in the early 2000s, at a time of rising oil prices, when the increasing cost of fuel had become a major preoccupation for airlines. Boeing decided to build a long-haul plane for them that would set new standards in efficiency.

“In the late 1990s, Boeing was working on a design called the Sonic Cruiser,” explains aviation historian Shea Oakley.

This was firstly conceived as a plane that would use advanced materials and the latest technology to carry up to 250 passengers at just under the speed of sound. The initial emphasis was on speed and cutting journey times, rather than fuel economy.

“But then the effects of 9/11 hit the world airline industry quite hard,” says Mr Oakley.

“The airlines told Boeing what they really needed was the most fuel-efficient, economical long-range jetliner ever produced. They now wanted an aeroplane with a similar capacity to the Sonic Cruiser, minus the high speed.”

Boeing abandoned its initial concept, and began work on what became the 787. In doing so, it helped create a new business model for airlines.

Instead of using giant planes to transport huge numbers of people between “hub” airports, before placing them on connecting flights to other destinations, they could now fly smaller aircraft on less crowded direct routes between smaller cities which would previously have been unviable.

At the time Boeing’s great rival, the European giant Airbus, was taking precisely the opposite approach. It was developing the gargantuan A380 superjumbo – a machine tailor-made for carrying as many passengers as possible on busy routes between the world’s biggest and busiest airports.

In hindsight, Boeing’s approach was wiser. The fuel-thirsty A380 went out of production in 2021, after only 251 had been built.

“Airbus thought the future was giant hubs where people would always want to change planes in Frankfurt or Heathrow or Narita,” explains aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia, who is a managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory.

“Boeing said ‘no, people want to fly point to point’. And Boeing was extremely right.”

The 787 was a truly radical aircraft. It was the first commercial plane to be built primarily of composites such as carbon fibre, rather than aluminium, in order to reduce weight. It had advanced aerodynamics to reduce drag.

It also used highly efficient modern engines from General Electric and Rolls Royce, and it replaced many mechanical and pneumatic systems with lighter electrical ones.

All of this, Boeing said, would make it 20% more efficient than its predecessor, the Boeing 767. It was also significantly quieter, with a noise footprint (the area on the ground affected by significant noise from the aircraft) that the manufacturer said was up to 60% smaller.

Not long after the aircraft entered service, however, there were serious problems. In January 2013, lithium-ion batteries caught fire aboard a 787 as it waited at a gate at Boston’s Logan International Airport.

A week later, overheating batteries forced another 787 to make an emergency landing during an internal flight in Japan.

The design was grounded worldwide for several months, while Boeing came up with a solution.

Since then, day to day operations have been smoother, but production has been deeply problematic. Analysts say this may, in part, have been due to Boeing’s decision to set up a new assembly line for the 787 in North Charleston, South Carolina – more than 2000 miles from its Seattle heartlands.

This was done to take advantage of the region’s low rates of union membership, as well as generous support from the state.

“There were serious development issues,” says Mr Aboulafia. “Some notable production issues, related especially to the decision to create Boeing’s first ever production line outside of the Puget Sound area.”

In 2019, Boeing discovered the first of a series of manufacturing defects that affected the way in which different parts of the aircraft fitted together. As more problems were found, the company widened its investigations – and uncovered further issues.

Deliveries were heavily disrupted, and halted altogether between May 2021 and July 2022, before being paused again the following year.

However, potentially the most damaging allegations about the 787 programme have come from the company’s own current and former employees.

Among the most prominent was the late John Barnett, a former quality control manager at the 787 factory in South Carolina. He claimed that pressure to produce planes as quickly as possible had seriously undermined safety.

In 2019, he told the BBC that workers at the plant had failed to follow strict procedures intended to track components through the factory, potentially allowing defective parts to go missing. In some cases, he said, workers had even deliberately fitted substandard parts from scrap bins to aircraft in order to avoid delays on the production line.

He also maintained that defective fixings were used to secure aircraft decks. Screwing them into place produced razor-sharp slivers of metal, which in some cases accumulated beneath the deck in areas containing large amounts of aircraft wiring.

His claims had previously been passed to the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, which partially upheld them. After investigating, it concluded that at least 53 “non-conforming” parts had gone missing in the factory.

An audit by the FAA also confirmed that metal shavings were present beneath the floors of a number of aircraft.

Boeing said its board analysed the problem and decided it did not “present a safety of flight issue”, though the fixings were subsequently redesigned. The company later said it had “fully resolved the FAA’s findings regarding part traceability and implemented corrective actions to prevent recurrence”.

Mr Barnett remained concerned that aircraft that had already gone into service could be carrying hidden defects serious enough to cause a major accident. “I believe it’s just a matter of time before something big happens with a 787,” he told me in 2019. “I pray that I am wrong.”

In early 2024, Mr Barnett took his own life. At the time he had been giving evidence in a long-running whistleblower lawsuit against the company – which he maintained had victimised him as a result of his allegations. Boeing denied this.

Much of what he had alleged echoed previous claims by another former quality manager at the plant, Cynthia Kitchens.

In 2011, she had complained to regulators about substandard parts being deliberately removed from quarantine bins and fitted to aircraft, in an attempt to keep the production line moving.

Ms Kitchens, who left Boeing in 2016, also claimed employees had been told to overlook substandard work, and said defective wiring bundles, containing metallic shavings within their coatings, had been deliberately installed on planes – creating a risk of dangerous short-circuits.

Boeing has not responded to these specific allegations but says Ms Kitchens resigned in 2016 “after being informed that she was being placed on a performance improvement plan”. It says that she subsequently filed a lawsuit against Boeing, “alleging claims of discrimination and retaliation unrelated to any quality issues”, which was dismissed.

More recently, a third whistleblower made headlines when testifying before a senate committee last year.

Sam Salehpour, a current Boeing employee, told US lawmakers he had come forward because “the safety problems I have observed at Boeing, if not addressed could result in a catastrophic failure of a commercial aeroplane that would lead to the loss of hundreds of lives”.

The quality engineer said that while working on the 787 in late 2020, he had seen the company introduce shortcuts in assembly processes, in order to speed up production and delivery of the aircraft. These, he said, “had allowed potentially defective parts and defective installations in 787 fleets”.

He also noted that on the majority of aircraft he looked at, tiny gaps in the joints between sections of fuselage had not been properly rectified. This, he said, meant those joints would be prone to “premature fatigue failure over time” and created “extremely unsafe conditions for the aircraft” with “potentially catastrophic” consequences.

He suggested that more than 1,000 aircraft – the bulk of the 787 fleet – could be affected.

Boeing insists that “claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate”. It says: “The issues raised have been subject to rigorous examination under US Federal Aviation Administration oversight. This analysis has validated that the aircraft will maintain its durability and service life over several decades, and these issues do not present any safety concerns.”

There is no question that Boeing has come under huge pressure in recent years over its corporate culture and production standards. In the wake of two fatal accidents involving its bestselling 737 Max, and a further serious incident last year, it has been repeatedly accused of putting the pursuit of profit over passenger safety.

It is a perception that chief executive Kelly Ortberg, who joined the company last year, has been working hard to overturn – overhauling its internal processes and working with regulators on a comprehensive safety and quality control plan.

But has the 787 already been compromised by past failures, that may have created ongoing safety risks?

Richard Aboulafia believes not. “You know. It’s been 16 years of operations, 1,200 jets and over a billion passengers flown, but no crashes until now,” he says. “It’s a stellar safety record.”

He thinks that any major issues would already have become apparent.

“I really think production problems are more of a short-term concern,” he says. “For the past few years, there’s been far greater oversight of 787 production.

“For older planes, I think any serious problems would have shown up by now.”

The Air India plane that crashed in Ahmedabad was more than 11 years old, having first flown in 2013.

But the Foundation for Aviation Safety, a US organisation established by the former Boeing whistleblower Ed Pierson that has previously been highly critical of the company, says it did have concerns about 787s prior to the recent crash.

“Yes, it was a possible safety risk,” claims Mr Pierson. “We monitor incident reports, we monitor regulatory documents. Airworthiness directives come out that describe various issues, and it does make you wonder.”

One such issue, he argues, is water potentially leaking from washroom taps into electrical equipment bays. Last year, the FAA instructed airlines to carry out regular inspections, following reports that leaks were going undetected on certain 787 models.

However, he stresses that the cause of the recent tragedy is still unknown – and that it is vital the investigation moves forward quickly, so that any problems, whether they lie with the aircraft, the airline or elsewhere, can be resolved.

For the moment, however, the 787’s safety record remains strong.

“We don’t know at this point what caused the Air India crash,” says Scott Hamilton, managing director of aviation consulting firm Leeham Company.

“But based on what we do know about the plane, I would not hesitate to get on board a 787.”

A family have won a six-month fight for a refund on their £3,500 dream holiday to Lapland which was hit by a series of weather-related cancellations.

Lisa O’Neil from Cumbria complained after tour operator Tui said her family’s four-day trip could go ahead last December despite there being no snow forecast and the firm having a “no snow you don’t have to go” policy in place.

It meant none of the snow activities part of the package – a husky ride, reindeer encounter and snowmobile trip – could go ahead.

Tui, which has been approached for comment, initially only offered a 50% refund, but Mrs O’Neil’s successful appeal means she has received full compensation, including legal fees.

“We were absolutely elated,” said Mrs O’Neil, 40, from Gosforth.

“You think all of the time have you done the right thing, is it worth the hassle to push through.

“But when you know that you’re in the right and you’re just being forced into a situation by a corporate company, [the outcome] just validated all of the hard work that we put in.”

Mrs O’Neil and her husband Wayne had spent their savings on the Lapland trip for their son Finn, who is now eight.

A couple of days before departure they contacted Tui to raise concerns about the forecast of rain, but were reassured there was snow at their resort and were told if they chose to cancel the holiday they would lose the money.

On arrival they were greeted with a “magical” winter wonderland scene, but overnight rainfall melted all the snow.

As they had feared, all snow activities for their trip were cancelled, leaving them to arrange and pay for alternatives.

When they first complained to Tui they were offered 50% of their money back, which they refused.

ABTA, an association of travel companies which helps mediate disputes, referred the case to an independent adjudicator who found in favour of the O’Neils.

“The family’s essential purpose in taking the trip, to enjoy snow-based activities, was defeated,” the final adjudication read.

It added Tui had not complied with its own “no snow” policy and the family would not have set off for their trip had Tui let them cancel or reschedule it.

Mrs O’Neil said the family’s fight for a refund seemed daunting at times but, after their experience was featured in a BBC News article, a couple contacted them to help with the claim.

“This couple had been on a cruise that cost them £20,000,” Mrs O’Neil explained.

“It was for a big anniversary but, because of the weather, they couldn’t do all the stops that they were supposed to do.”

The couple had been successful in securing their claim after a six-year legal battle and shared their knowledge with the O’Neils.

Mrs O’Neil said: “They gave me loads of advice and the inspiration to keep going, so I am really grateful to them.”

A tree that collapsed and killed a seven-year-old girl had been propped up by supports for decades, a senior councillor has said.

Hundreds of bunches of flowers and other tributes have been left in Chalkwell Park in Southend-on-Sea following Saturday’s incident, which also seriously injured a girl aged six.

City councillor and Conservative group leader, James Courtenay, said he had memories of playing near the tree as a child in the 1990s, with the wooden supports being eventually upgraded to metal ones.

An investigation is under way into what happened, with inspections of the tree taking place on Monday.

Up to 50 people tried to lift the tree when it trapped five children underneath it shortly before 15:00 BST, witnesses told the BBC.

Assistant Chief Constable Lucy Morris said the six-year-old girl was receiving “around-the-clock care” in hospital, surrounded by her family.

The remaining three youngsters have been treated for minor injuries.

Speaking to the BBC, Courtenay shared his condolences and well-wishes for the little girl in hospital.

He said he had been visiting the park for 40 years and had memories of playing there.

“When I was a child I remember it having wooden supports back in the 1990s,” he said.

He added it had since had metal bars holding it up for many years.

Players from Westcliff Cricket Club were some of the first to attempt to lift the tree after it fell.

Mr Courtenay said: “It really must have taken half the cricket team with others to move it.

“It’s absolutely huge branches for a tree that’s hundreds of years old.”

Jessie Huggins, 31, lives in the area and said she wanted to pay her respects.

“I’ve got children myself and I think that it could have been anyone’s little one that day,” she said.

“You can see the tree from here and it must have been absolutely terrifying, what people must have been going through at the time.

“We could have been here that day playing in the park. I send my love to the families who were involved.”

Another local resident Carol Sheil, 66, brought her two-year-old granddaughter to lay flowers.

She said she has been born and raised in the area and had seen generations of her family play under the tree.

“It’s just heartbreaking, it could have happened to anybody, anyone could’ve been in that position,” she said.

“We just feel sorry for the families.”

Another local man, Stephen Goodsell, left flowers at the scene on Sunday.

“As a father and a grandfather, you ache for the parents of the children involved,” said the 67-year-old.

“I’ve not been able to sleep since hearing the news.

“This is just a tiny gesture to show the love we feel for the children, the family and everyone that’s suffering, because we’re suffering too.”

Bev Noakes, who has also left a floral tribute, said: “There’s lots of people who witnessed it, young children who witnessed it and it must be awful.”

David Burton-Sampson, Labour MP for Southend West and Leigh, said: “For somebody so young to lose their life in such a tragic situation is really heartbreaking.

“Both myself and the rest of the community are devastated.”

The park, west of the city centre, is run by Southend-on-Sea City Council.

Labour leader of the council Daniel Cowan said: “This was a traumatic event for those involved, those who witnessed the incident and the emergency services.

“I encourage those affected to seek support.

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to see floral tributes surrounded by teddy bears.

“It really reminds you what exactly was lost here.”

He said the council would be co-operating with police as their investigation continued.

A spokesperson from the Health and Safety Executive said: “Our inspectors will be visiting the site as we continue to support Essex Police.”

Italian luxury fashion label Prada has said it acknowledges the Indian roots of its new footwear line, days after the design sparked a controversy in India.

The sandals, showcased at the Milan Fashion Week last week, had an open-toe braided pattern that closely resembled the traditional Kolhapuri sandals made in the Indian states of Maharashtra and Karnataka.

Prada described the sandals as “leather footwear” but did not mention its Indian origins, prompting backlash and allegations of cultural appropriation in India.

Responding to the controversy, Prada told the BBC in a statement that it recognises that the sandals are inspired by traditional Indian footwear.

A Prada spokesperson said that the company has “always celebrated craftsmanship, heritage and design traditions”, adding that it was “in contact with the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, Industry & Agriculture on this topic”. This is a prominent industry trade body in the state.

Last week, its chief had written to the brand, saying the design was commercialised without crediting the artisans who have preserved its heritage for generations.

Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada’s head of Corporate Social Responsibility, responded to his letter saying that the sandals were “at an early stage of design”, according to Reuters.

He also said that Prada was open to a “dialogue for meaningful exchange with local Indian artisans” and the company would organise follow-up meetings to discuss this further.

Named after a city in Maharashtra where they are made, Kolhapuri sandals trace their roots back to the 12th Century.

Made from leather and sometimes dyed in natural colours, the traditional handcrafted sandals are sturdy and well-suited to India’s hot climate.

They were awarded the Geographical Indication (GI) status by the Indian government in 2019.

According to the World Trade Organisation, a geographical indication tag credits a good or product as having originated from a certain region or place, and is considered a mark of authenticity.

Following the controversy, many artisans in Kolhapur said they were saddened by Prada’s use of the design without giving due credit.

“These sandals are made with the hard work of leather workers in Kolhapur. They should be named after Kolhapur. Don’t take advantage of others’ labour,” Prabha Satpute, a Kolhapuri artisan, told BBC Marathi.

The sandals cost a few hundreds rupees in India but Prada’s reported premium pricing angered some, though the brand’s website does not mention the price tag. Most other sandals sold by the fashion house, retail at between £600 to £1,000 in the UK.

Industrialist Harsh Goenka highlighted this, saying the local artisans barely make any money for the same hand-made products. “They lose, while global brands cash in on our culture,” he said.

This is not the first time that global brands have been accused to appropriating Indian traditional products without crediting their roots.

At the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Gucci described a sari worn by Bollywood star Alia Bhatt as a gown, sparking backlash.

Earlier in May, a popular TikTok trend was criticised for calling dupatta, a traditional South Asian scarf, a Scandinavian scarf.

In Kolhapur, however, some said the move had instilled a sense of pride in them.

“Artisans are happy that someone is recognising their work,” Kolhapur-based businessman Dileep More told Reuters.

The US Senate has begun voting on a massive spending plan, dubbed the “big beautiful bill”, on Monday after weeks of contentious negotiations.

Republicans – who control both chambers of Congress – were divided over how much to cut welfare programmes in order to extend tax breaks.

President Donald Trump wants Congress to pass the bill by 4 July.

After the House of Representatives passed its version of the bill last month by a single vote, the legislation went to the Senate. Because of the changes made by the Senate, the bill will go back to the House for another vote.

On Sunday, after weeks of public discussion, the Senate moved to open debate on the budget bill in 51-49 vote.

Two Republicans and all Democrats voted against opening debate, arguing for further changes to the legislation.

One of those Republicans, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, announced his retirement following that vote and said the legislation broke promises Trump and Republicans made to their voters.

“Too many elected officials are motivated by pure raw politics who really don’t give a damn about the people they promised to represent on the campaign trail,” Tillis wrote in his announcement.

The other Republican who voted against moving the bill was Kentucky Senator Rand Paul who objected to debt increases, and cuts to Medicaid, a healthcare programme that is relied on by millions of elderly, disabled and low-income Americans.

There could be up to 20 hours of debate beginning on Monday when senators argue for or against adding amendments to the nearly 1,000-page bill in a process called “vote-a-rama”.

Democrats are expected to use all ten of their allotted hours of debate, while Republicans likely will not.

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

When the bill comes up for a full Senate vote – expected either late on Monday night or early Tuesday morning – Republicans can only afford three defections in order for the bill to pass.

If they lose three votes, Vice President JD Vance will have to cast a tie-breaking vote.

The bill will then return to the House of Representatives, where leadership has advised a full vote on the Senate’s bill could come as early as Wednesday morning.

While Republicans control the House, they can also only lose a handful of votes. There are frustrations with the Senate version of the bill among some Republicans in the House, which could make for another close vote.

Democrats in both chambers have largely objected to the spending cuts and the proposed extension of tax breaks.

Meanwhile, Republican debate has focused on 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.

The version of the bill senators will soon vote on contains 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.

The bill also authorises $5 trillion in new borrowing which will add to a growing US debt load – a move that goes against what many conservatives have argued for and infuriated one-time Trump confidant Elon Musk earlier this summer.

The Senate version of the bill will add $3.3tn (£2.4tn) in debt, according to new estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan federal agency.

The national debt currently sits at $36 trillion, according to the treasury department.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has urged Congress to address the debt limit by mid-July and warned that if they do not, the US could be unable to pay its bills as early as August.

Two US firefighters have been killed and a third wounded after a man intentionally started a fire and began shooting at first responders in a “total ambush” which lasted several hours, authorities said.

The gunman, who investigators said acted alone, began shooting after crews responded to a fire at Canfield Mountain, just north of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on Sunday afternoon.

Law enforcement officers and firefighters came under sniper fire during the incident and a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team later “located a deceased male” close to where the attack took place.

The fire grew to 20 acres after it was first reported and continued to burn into Sunday night, Sheriff Bob Norris said.

“We do believe that the suspect started the fire,” Norris told a late night news conference.

“This was a total ambush. These firefighters did not have a chance.

“We did lose a Coeur d’Alene firefighter, and we did lose a firefighter from the Kootenai County Fire and Rescue.”

A third was “fighting for his life, but is in stable condition”, he said.

Firefighters received the first report of a fire in the mountainside community at around 13:21 PST (20:21 GMT) and reports that they were being shot at emerged about 40 minutes later, Norris said.

More than 300 law enforcement officers from the city, county, state and federal levels responded to the scene of the shooting, including two helicopters with snipers on board.

Video showed smoke billowing from heavily wooded hillsides.

Norris said the shooter used a high-powered sporting rifle to fire rapidly at first responders, with officers initially unsure of the number of perpetrators involved.

After an hours-long barrage of gunfire, the suspect was found using mobile phone location information. It was unclear whether the suspect had killed himself or been hit by an officer, Norris said.

Authorities would not provide more details on weapons recovered, but said that officers would likely find more guns at the scene on Monday, once the fire was extinguished.

The motive for the shooting was not known and Norris did not provide any details on the suspect.

The two firefighters killed and the third wounded have not been identified.

A shelter-in-place notice – which alerts people to stay inside their properties or in their current locations during an emergency, rather than evacuating to a different area – was lifted some seven hours later.

Canfield Mountain is an area popular with hikers about 260 miles (420 km) east of Seattle.

Norris said that a preliminary investigation had determined that there was only one gunman, after it was earlier thought that there could have been as many as four.

He said the gunman appeared to have run while shooting and may have stashed weapons in different places.

Helicopters with heat-seeking technology flew over the area in an attempt to pinpoint the suspect, but teams experienced difficulty because of smoke from the wildfire which was still burning, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Norris added that investigators had to search the scene quickly, due to the encroaching fire, and that the information they had was still “very, very preliminary”.

“A fire was rapidly approaching that body. And we had to scoop up that body and transport that body to another location,” he said.

Officials have appealed to the public to stay away and not to fly drones over the site.

A firefighters’ union boss confirmed two of its members had been killed in the attack.

Edward Kelly, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) union, posted on X: “While responding to a fire earlier today in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, IAFF members were ambushed in a heinous act of violence.

Local fire chief Pat Riley told TV station KHQ he was “heartbroken” by the attack.

The case was a big shock to those living in Coeur d’Alene, a city of around 56,000 people that is near the border with Washington state.

Coeur d’Alene resident Linda Tiger, 80, told the BBC she was shocked by the shooting.

“This has never happened here,” said Mrs Tiger, who has lived in the city for nearly 30 years.

“But it goes to show that that no-one is safe from this kind of mental sadness.”

One of Nigeria’s wealthiest businessmen, Aminu Dantata, is set to be buried in Saudi Arabia later after he died on Saturday in the United Arab Emirates.

Business mogul Dantata, 94, an uncle of Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote, leaves three wives, 21 children and 121 grandchildren.

His body was transferred from Abu Dhabi where he died to the holy city of Medina after Saudi authorities approved his burial in their country.

It was his wish to be buried in a city he adored and where Islam’s prophet Muhammad lived and died.

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu described Dantata’s death as a “monumental national loss” in a statement.

He said Dantata had made “sterling contributions to Nigeria’s growth and development” through decades of enterprise, service, and philanthropy.

He was known across Nigeria for his philanthropic activities. Last year, he donated 1.5 billion naira ($972,000; £710,000) to victims of the devastating floods in north-eastern Borno state.

His business interests cut across agriculture, real estate, construction and manufacturing.

He first made his name in agriculture, starting trading kola nuts and groundnuts in the 1940s.

He came from a business family – his father Alhassan Dantata was once considered to be the richest man in West Africa.

Despite his riches, Dantata lived in one of the poorest areas of the northern city of Kano, like his parents before him.

His influence was also felt in politics, with politicians eager to seek his blessings before elections.

A video of President Tinubu bowing to greet him before the 2023 elections went viral on social media.

A special prayer was held for him in Kano, where he lived all his life.

Two Nigerian state governors and four government ministers have gone to Medina for his funeral.

Dantata studied Islamic education, before going to a secondary school built by his father in Kano.

“In our family, a child starts learning how to earn money from as early as five, six or seven years old,” he said in one of his most popular interviews, with Trust TV last year.

“Our father would tell us: ‘You see how people bring groundnuts on donkeys and in sacks – you should also know how to start earning money.’ During school breaks, our father would use the time to teach us how to do business,” he said.

He began venturing fully into business at 17, taking over from his brother Ahmadu Dantata as head of the business his father established in Bichi in the 1950s.

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