Donald Trump’s move to cut most of the US funding towards foreign humanitarian aid could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to research published in The Lancet medical journal.

A third of those at risk of premature deaths are children, the research finds.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March that President Trump’s administration had cancelled over 80% of all programmes at the US Agency for International Development, or USAID.

“For many low- and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict,” Davide Rasella, who co-authored the Lancet report, said in a statement.

The funding cuts “risk abruptly halting – and even reversing – two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations,” added Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.

The report comes as dozens of world leaders are meeting in the Spanish city of Seville this week for a United Nations-led aid conference, the biggest one in a decade.

Looking back over data from 133 nations, the team of researchers estimated that USAID funding had prevented 91 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021.

They also used modelling to project how funding being slashed by 83% – the figure announced by the US government earlier this year – could affect death rates.

The cuts could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030, the projections found. That number included over 4.5 million children under the age of five – or around 700,000 child deaths a year.

The Trump administration, previously led by billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, aimed to shrink the federal workforce. It has also accused USAID of supporting liberal projects.

The US, by far the world’s largest humanitarian aid provider, has operated in more than 60 countries, largely through contractors.

According to Rubio, there were still approximately 1,000 remaining programmes that would be administered “more effectively” under the US State Department and in consultation with Congress.

Still, the situation on the ground has not been improving, according to UN workers.

Last month, a UN official told the BBC that hundreds of thousands of people were “slowly starving” in Kenyan refugee camps after US funding cuts reduced food rations to their lowest ever levels.

At a hospital in Kakuma, in northwestern Kenya, the BBC witnessed a baby who could barely move and was showing signs of malnutrition, including having parts of her skin wrinkled and peeling.

The US Senate is holding a marathon vote on a sprawling budget that is critical to President Donald Trump’s agenda, but the spending plan hangs in the balance after weeks of fraught negotiations.

Republicans – who control both chambers of Congress – are split over how much to cut welfare programmes in order to extend tax breaks in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s former close aid Elon Musk has again attacked the legislation, which the president’s party is sprinting to pass by 4 July.

If measures clear the Senate, it will have to go back for another vote to the House of Representatives, which passed its own version of the bill last month by a single vote.

Senators are currently arguing for or against adding amendments to the nearly 1,000-page bill in a process called “vote-a-rama”, which could entail up to 20 hours of debate.

The session is expected to continue through the night into Tuesday morning and the legislation, if passed, would also reduce some welfare programmes and increase the national debt.

Elon Musk has stepped up his criticism of the US president’s tax and spending bill, condemning it as “insane”.

He vowed to challenge any Republican who “campaigned on reducing government spending” and then “immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history”.

The national debt currently sits at $36 trillion, according to the treasury department. If passed, the bill would add $3.3tn to that debt, according to new estimates.

Musk also, once again, threatened to set up a new political party.

Trump suggested Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency – which Musk used to head – should take a look at cutting the subsidies that Tesla CEO’s companies have received.

“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

On Monday, senators made their way to the Capitol chamber floor for various amendment votes, then back to their private meeting rooms where they hashed out grievances outside the view of reporters.

An amendment to the proposal for Medicaid cuts recently put forward by Florida Senator Rick Scott could cause roughly 20 million Americans to lose their health insurance coverage, according to one estimate.

“The thing that [Scott’s] bill doesn’t do is it doesn’t take effect until 2031. So I’m not sure how you can make the argument that it’s going to kick any people off of health insurance tomorrow,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.

Democrats, who have repeatedly denounced the bill, particularly for cutting health insurance for millions of poorer Americans, are expected to use all 10 of their allotted hours of debate, while Republicans probably won’t.

Democrat Senator Adam Schiff called the bill “terrible” and told the BBC he was unsure if Senate Republicans would meet Trump’s Friday deadline.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is “confident” the bill would be passed and still expects it on his desk by 4 July.

On Sunday, Democrats used a political manoeuvre to stall the bill’s progress, calling on Senate clerks to read all 940 pages of the bill aloud, a process that took 16 hours.

It followed weeks of public discussion and the Senate narrowly moving on the budget bill in a 51-49 vote over the weekend.

Two Republicans sided with Democrats in voting 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 that Trump and Republicans made to 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 White House reacted angrily to Tillis’ comments, with Leavitt saying Tillis was “just wrong”.

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul objected to the debt increase, and cuts to Medicaid.

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

During the full Senate vote on the bill – expected 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 would 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.

Fiscal hawks of the Republican-led House Freedom Caucus have threatened to torpedo the Senate version over budget disagreements.

The Senate proposal adds over $650bn to the national deficit, the group said in a post on social media on Monday.

“That’s not fiscal responsibility,” they said. “It’s not what we agreed to.”

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.

Proposed cuts could strip nearly 12 million Americans of their health insurance coverage and add $3.3tn (£2.4tn) in debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan federal agency.

More than 130 charities and other NGOs are calling for the controversial Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to be shut down.

Over 500 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid since the GHF started operating in late May, following Israel’s three-month blockade of Gaza, the organisations said. Almost 4,000 have been injured.

The organisations, including Oxfam, Save the Children and Amnesty, say Israeli forces and armed groups “routinely” open fire on Palestinians seeking aid.

Israel denies its soldiers deliberately shoot at aid recipients, and has defended the GHF system, saying it provides direct assistance to people who need it, bypassing Hamas interference.

Tuesday’s joint statement from some of the world’s biggest charities says the foundation is violating all norms of humanitarian work, including by forcing two million people into overcrowded and militarized zones where they face daily gunfire.

Since the GHF started operating in Gaza, there have been almost daily reports of Israeli forces killing people seeking aid at these sites, from medics, eyewitnesses and the Hamas-run health ministry.

The GHF aid distribution system replaced 400 aid distribution points that were operating during the temporary Israel-Hamas ceasefire with just four military-controlled distribution sites, three in the far south-west of Gaza and one in central Gaza.

“Today, Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families,” the statement says.

“Orphaned children and caregivers are among the dead, with children harmed in over half of the attacks on civilians at these sites.”

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

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

The Israeli military has said it is examining reports of civilians being “harmed” while approaching GHF aid distribution centres.

According to a report by Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Friday, unnamed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed civilians near aid distribution sites to drive them away or disperse them.

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

The Israeli military also denied allegations of deliberately firing at Palestinians waiting to collect humanitarian aid.

In a statement on Monday, the IDF said it was reorganising access to the sites and this would include new “fencing” and signposting, including directional and warning signs in order to improve the operational response.

But the 130-plus aid organisations said GHF “is not a humanitarian response” for the Gazans.

“Amidst severe hunger and famine-like conditions, many families tell us they are now too weak to compete for food rations,” the groups said.

After his daughter fell from the fourth deck of a 14-deck Disney Cruise ship on Sunday afternoon, a father jumped into the ocean to try to save her, according to witnesses.

Videos on social media showed passengers cheering as the two were safely recovered by a rescue boat. They were picked up after treading water for 10 minutes, according to witnesses.

The girl appeared to fall when her father took her picture against a railing, witnesses said. A man overboard alert was broadcast on the ship, and crew rushed to recover them.

“The ship was moving quickly, so quickly, it’s crazy how quickly the people became tiny dots in the sea, and then you lost sight of them,” passenger Laura Amador said.

“The captain slowed the ship and turned it around, and then they deployed a tender ship with people on it to go get them, and we saw them rescue the dad and daughter,” she told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The 4,000-person capacity Disney Dream, was returning to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after sailing for four days around the Bahamas.

Disney confirmed in a statement that two passengers were rescued, but offered few details about what occurred.

“The Crew aboard the Disney Dream swiftly rescued two guests from the water,” a Disney Cruise Line spokesperson said. “We commend our Crew Members for their exceptional skills and prompt actions, which ensured the safe return of both guests to the ship within minutes.

“We watched it, you could see two little things…it was crazy, it was horrific,” passenger Gar Frantz told NBC News, describing how he witnessed the two enter the ocean and nearly disappear into the horizon.

The incident took place on the last day of the cruise, and the ship returned to port in Florida as normal.

While it is rare for passengers to fall from cruise ships, rescues are not often successful when they do.

According to a Cruise Lines International Association report from 2019, 25 people fell overboard that year from cruise ships and only nine were saved from the water.

There’s a saying that Robert F Kennedy Jr is very fond of. He used it on the day he was confirmed as US health secretary. “A healthy person has a thousand dreams, a sick person only has one,” he said as he stood in the Oval Office. “60% of our population has only one dream – that they get better.”

The most powerful public health official in the US has made it his mission to tackle what he describes as an epidemic of chronic illness in America, a catch-all term that covers everything from obesity and diabetes to heart disease.

His diagnosis that the US is experiencing an epidemic of ill health is a view shared by many healthcare experts in the country.

But Kennedy also has a history of promoting unfounded health conspiracies, from the suggestion that Covid-19 targeted and spared certain ethnic groups to the idea that chemicals in tap water could be making children transgender.

And after taking office, he slashed thousands of jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services and eliminated whole programmes at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

“On the one hand, it’s extraordinarily exciting to have a federal official take on chronic disease,” says Marion Nestle, a retired professor of public health at New York University. “On the other, the dismantling of the federal public health apparatus cannot possibly help with the agenda.”

Kennedy is reviled by parts of the medical and scientific communities. He was described to me as an “evil nihilist” by Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University.

But even some of Kennedy’s critics accept that he is bringing drive and ambition to areas of healthcare that have been neglected. Is it possible that the man who attracts so much criticism – and in some quarters, hate – might actually start making America healthy again?

There’s one industry that Kennedy had set his sights on long before joining the Trump administration: multinational food companies have, he has said, poisoned American children with artificial additives already banned in other countries.

“We have a generation of kids who are swimming around in a toxic soup right now,” he claimed on Fox News last year.

His first target was food colourings, with a promise to phase out the use of petroleum-based dyes by the end of 2026.

Chemicals, with names like ‘Green No. 3’ and ‘Red No. 40’, have been linked to hyperactivity and behavioural issues in children, and cancer in some animal studies.

“What’s happening in this administration is really interesting,” says Vani Hari, a food blogger and former Democrat who is now an influential voice in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. “MAHA is all about how do we get people off processed food, and one way to do that is to regulate the chemicals companies use.”

There are some signs this pressure may be paying off.

The food giant PepsiCo, for example, said in a recent trading update that Lays crisps and Tostitos snacks “will be out of artificial colours by the end of this year”.

Kennedy struck a voluntary agreement with the food industry but it only came after individual states from California to West Virginia had already started introducing their own laws.

“In the case of food dyes, companies will have to act because states are banning them [anyway] and they won’t want to have to formulate separate products for separate states,” says Prof Nestle, an author and longtime critic of the industry.

More recently Kennedy has signalled he backs a radical food bill in Texas that could target additives in some products ranging from sweets, to cereals and fizzy drinks

Packets may soon have to carry a high-contrast label stating, “WARNING: This product contains an ingredient that is not recommended for human consumption by the appropriate authority in Australia, Canada, the European Union, or the United Kingdom.”

The Consumer Brands Association, which represents some of the largest food manufacturers, opposes this, saying the ingredients used in the US food supply are safe and have been rigorously studied.

It’s difficult to imagine that kind of regulation could ever be signed off in a state like Texas without the political backing of Kennedy and President Trump.

“He can’t change everything in a short amount of time, but I think the issue of food dyes will soon be history,” says Ms Hari, who testified before the Senate on this subject last year.

But others worry that the flurry of announcements on additives is tinkering around the edges of what is a much wider problem.

“While some of these individual actions are important, they are a drop in the ocean in the larger context of chronic disease,” argues Nicola Hawley, professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health. “There is a focus on personal choice and access to natural food, but that completely ignores the big, systematic and structural barriers [to healthy eating] like poverty and really aggressive marketing of junk food to children.”

The US government, for example, still heavily subsidises crops including corn and soya beans, key ingredients in processed foods.

Kennedy is now updating the US national dietary guidelines, an important document used to shape everything from school meals to assistance programmes for the elderly. A reduction in added sugars and a switch to more locally sourced whole foods is expected. Plus he has called on states to ban millions of Americans from using food stamps, a welfare benefit, to buy junk food or sugar-sweetened drinks.

He has also backed local officials who want to stop adding fluoride to drinking water, describing it as a “dangerous neurotoxin”. It is used in some countries, including in parts of the US, to prevent tooth decay, and whilst there is still debate about the possible health effects, the NHS says a review of the risks has found “no convincing evidence” to support any concerns. Other fluoride research has found the mineral only has detrimental health effects at extremely high levels.

Prof Hawley also argues there is a tension between Kennedy’s “important message” on food and chronic disease, and what she feels is a lack of policies backed by solid scientific evidence.

“You’ve got this challenge of him drifting into misinformation about the links between additives and chronic disease, or environmental risk factors,” she argues. “And that really just undermines the science.”

That tension is even clearer when it comes to another of Kennedy’s big concerns.

Vaccines are still listed on the CDC website as one of the great public health achievements of the last century, alongside family planning and tobacco control. They prevent countless cases of disease and disability each year, and save millions of lives, according to the American Medical Association.

Kennedy, though, is the best known vaccine sceptic in the country. The activist group he ran for eight years, Children’s Health Defense, repeatedly questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccination.

In 2019 he described the disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield as the “most unfairly maligned person in modern history” and told a crowd in Washington that “any just society” would be building statues of him.

Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register in 2010 after his research falsely linked the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine to autism, leading to a spike in measles cases in England and some other countries.

Over the last year, Kennedy has repeatedly insisted he is not “anti-vax” and will not be “taking away anybody’s vaccines”. Faced with a deadly measles outbreak in unvaccinated children in west Texas, he posted that the MMR was “the most effective way to prevent the spread of the disease”.

In other comments though, he described vaccination as a “personal choice” and emphasised alternative treatments such as vitamin A supplements.

A huge deal with the drugmaker Moderna to develop a vaccine to combat bird flu in humans was scrapped, and new rules were brought in which could mean some vaccines need extra testing before they can be updated each winter.

In May, Kennedy posted a video on social media saying the government would no longer endorse Covid vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.

However, some doctors point out that reducing eligibility would simply bring the US into line with other countries, including the UK, where free Covid boosters are restricted to those over 75 or with weakened immune systems.

“They are really just aligning themselves with everyone else, which is not in any way outrageous,” says Prof Adam Finn, a paediatric doctor and one of the UK’s leading experts on vaccines.

Then in June, Kennedy suddenly sacked all 17 members of the influential expert committee, which advises the CDC on vaccine eligibility. He accused the panel of being “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and rubber-stamping new vaccines without proper scrutiny.

A new, much smaller, committee handpicked by the administration now has the power to change, or even drop, critical recommendations to immunise Americans for certain diseases, as well as shape the childhood vaccination programme.

“It underscores just how much we are backsliding now,” says Dr Amesh Adalja, the infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University. “I think increasingly the panel will become irrelevant if RFK Jr is able to shape it the way he wants to.”

The new panel made its first decision last week, voting to stop recommending a small number of flu vaccines that still contain the preservative thimerosal, something Kennedy wrote a book about in 2015.

His critics say that a new era of vaccine policy has arrived in the US. Whilst his supporters say no subject, including vaccine safety, should be considered off-limits.

“Everything has to be open to discussion and Bobby Kennedy is not anti-vaccine, he’s anti-corruption,” argues Tony Lyons, who co-founded the political action committee that supported his independent presidential campaign.

“It’s about being pro-science, pro-capitalism, and believing you have an obligation to the public to do a thorough job of researching any product that is put in the arms of 40 million children.”

Weeks after Kennedy took office news emerged that the CDC would open a research project into the link between vaccines and autism.

Since Wakefield’s now-discredited Lancet paper in 1998, which linked autism to the MMR vaccine given to children, there have been numerous international studies that have looked at this in detail and found no reputable link.

“There is nothing to debate any more, it has been settled by science,” says Eric Fombonne, an autism researcher and professor emeritus at Oregon Health & Science University.

Kennedy, though, has hired David Geier, a noted vaccine sceptic, to look again at the data.

Today autism is widely understood to be a lifelong spectrum condition. It can include those with high support needs who are non-speaking, and those with above-average intelligence who might struggle with social interaction or communication.

Most researchers believe a rise in cases over decades is down to a broadening in the way children with autism are defined, as well as improved awareness, understanding and screening.

But in April, Kennedy dismissed that idea, describing autism as “preventable”. He blamed a mysterious environmental trigger for the increase in eight-year-olds being diagnosed.

“This is coming from an environmental toxin… [in] our air, our water, our medicines, our food,” he said.

He pledged a massive research effort to find that cause by September and “eliminate those exposures”.

Dr Fombonne strongly disputes this. “It is nonsensical and shows a complete absence of understanding,” he says. “We have known for many years that autism has a strong genetic component.”

In the same speech, Kennedy said that many autistic children will never “pay taxes, never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

Many in the autism community are angry. “What we’re seeing here is a fear-based rhetoric and [a] misleading narrative that is causing harm and perpetuating stigma,” says Kristyn Roth from the Autism Society of America.

But some parents of autistic children are more supportive.

Emily May, a writer who is the mother of a child with autism, wrote in The New York Times that she found herself “nodding along as Mr Kennedy spoke about the grim realities of profound autism”.

“His remarks echo the reality and pain of a subset of parents of children with autism who feel left out of much of the conversation,” she wrote.

The administration has since watered down that promise to find the reasons for autism by September but it is still promising detailed findings of its research by March 2026.

Ultimately, Robert Kennedy has only been in the job a matter of months. Already though he’s asking some big questions – particularly about chronic disease – which have never been asked in the same way by a health secretary before.

For the first time that issue has both political attention and bipartisan support in the US.

He is clearly not afraid to take on what he perceives to be vested interests in the food and drug industries, and he is still firmly supported by President Trump.

Tony Lyons, who has published books by Kennedy, calls him “uniquely qualified” for the most powerful job in US public health. “He’s a corruption fighter. He has seen what all these kinds of companies do, not just pharmaceutical companies but food companies, and he wants them to do a better job,” he says.

Robert Kennedy’s background as an environmental lawyer taking on big business and the establishment has clearly shaped the views he holds today.

But Jerold Mande, a former federal food policy advisor in three administrations, worries that Kennedy’s own views and biases will mean some of the solutions he’s reaching for are predetermined and unsupported by the evidence.

Now a professor of nutrition at Harvard, Prof Mande describes Kennedy as an imperfect messenger and says he has “great concerns” about the administration’s approach to aspects of public health, from tobacco control to vaccination, where there is “no question that what he’s doing is going to result in enormous harm.”

“At a high level, I’m optimistic but you still need to come up with the right answers, and those answers can only be found through science,” says Prof Mande.

“We now have a shot and he’s provided that by making it a priority. But it’s how you use that shot that’s going to determine whether it’s a success or not. And that is where the jury is still out.”

A BBC Hindi investigation reveals that Indian officials quietly paid compensation to the families of more people than they admit died in a deadly crowd crush at the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival which is the world’s largest religious gathering.

The official death toll is 37, but the BBC found 26 additional cases where families received partial compensation in cash, and 18 more deaths where no payment was made.

On 25 March, a team of plain-clothed police officers from India’s northern Uttar Pradesh (UP) state arrived in neighbouring Bihar with bundles of cash.

The team visited Gopalganj city, where they met the family of 62-year-old Tara Devi. They handed over 500,000 rupees ($5,758; £4,291) in cash to her son, Dhananjay Gond, and asked him to record a statement on video.

In the video, Dhananjay introduces himself, saying: “My mother Tara Devi and I went to the Kumbh Mela for a holy dip. My mother died. Officers from UP came and gave us 500,000 rupees. We have received it.”

Dhananjay says his mother was killed in the crowd crush in the city of Prayagraj in UP on 29 January.

The UP government has not yet released an official list of the crush victims. Tara Devi’s son says police told him the money he got was the first instalment of the 2.5m rupees officially promised to victims’ families. Dhananjay says he hasn’t received the remaining 2m rupees.

The UP government says it has paid 2.5m rupees each to the families of 35 victims (of the 37 deaths, one victim remains unidentified, and another does not have a legal heir). A three-member judicial commission set up to investigate the incident and submit a report within a month has had its tenure extended.

The BBC, however, found one more family which was given a cheque of 2.5m rupees. For the other 35 victims, the compensation was transferred to relatives’ bank accounts.

Apart from this, the BBC found 26 cases – including that of Tara Devi – where police paid 500,000 rupees in cash at people’s homes.

In many instances, officials had families sign documents blaming health issues for the deaths, despite them insisting that their relatives died in the crush. (The UP government typically does not compensate for natural deaths during the Kumbh, held every 12 years.)

The BBC also confirmed 18 deaths where no compensation was given (excluding the case mentioned above where there was no legal heir).

It also found evidence of four separate crush incidents in Prayagraj on 29 January, despite Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s claim that only one occurred at what is called the Sangam nose – the point of confluence of three sacred rivers, Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati.

In the weeks after the Kumbh crush, the BBC met over 100 families across 11 states in India, who claimed their relatives died in the tragedy. It verified 82 deaths in total with concrete evidence, excluding cases lacking proof.

• BBC reports from scene of India’s Kumbh Mela crush
• Families mourn loved ones who died in Kumbh Mela crush

Some families hold post-mortems, morgue slips, death certificates, or photos and videos as proof. The BBC cross-checked local newspaper reports and spoke to district reporters to trace where bodies were received, mapped these locations, and then visited the victims’ families.

The BBC interviewed families and eyewitnesses to reconstruct timelines for each case – when the victims left for the holy dip, the time of the crush, nearby landmarks, the distance from the bathing site and the immediate aftermath.

From these detailed accounts, clear patterns emerged, leading to the identification of four crush locations: Sangam Nose, Jhusi side of Samudrakup Chauraha, Airavat Marg, and Mukti Marg Chauraha near Kalpavriksha Gate.

Most of the full 2.5m-rupee compensation cases list the death location as “Ward No. 7, Fort Cantt, Prayagraj”, about 1.5km (0.9 miles) from Sangam Nose.

In contrast, the cases that received 500,000 rupees mostly mention “Sector-20 or Sector-21, Kumbh Mela area, Jhusi”. Some of these families claim their relatives also died near Sangam Nose, but that their certificates wrongly cite Jhusi – possibly to downplay the scale of the tragedy there.

As for the 18 families which did not receive any compensation, there does not seem to be a common thread binding them.

For instance, at one crush location, the BBC identified five bodies through photos and the numbers issued during post-death formalities. Of these, the families of three victims received 500,000 rupees in cash, while the other two received nothing. Some other families have photographs from the day of the crush which show bodies of their relatives, but these deaths have not been acknowledged by the government.

The BBC repeatedly tried to contact UP government officials, emailing the information department and district magistrate. Despite promises by the district magistrate’s office, no call was arranged. Attempts to reach the UP police chief went unanswered, while Prayagraj’s police commissioner at the time of the incident, Tarun Gaba, and Mela officer Vijay Kiran Anand refused to answer questions.

The BBC has also found evidence of deaths in crushes that took place at locations other than the Sangam Nose, which the government has acknowledged through giving some compensation.

In UP’s Jaunpur, Dharmraj Rajbhar received 500,000 rupees each for the deaths of his wife and daughter-in-law in the Airavat Marg crush.

A video shot by the BBC on 29 January shows the family sitting with both bodies at the site. Back home, Rajbhar displayed the cash bundles and said, “The government promised 2.5m rupees, but the police gave only 500,000 rupees each and left.”

The UP police also travelled hundreds of kilometres to Paschim Bardhaman in West Bengal, where they handed over 500,000 rupees to the family of Vinod Ruidas.

Not all families accepted the amount, though. In Bihar, the relatives of Sunaina Devi rejected it. They told the BBC that they refused to “sign false documents”.

• Watch: Belongings strewn aside after India crush
• Thirty killed in crowd crush at India’s Kumbh Mela festival

The BBC also identified at least five families who lost their relatives near Kalpavriksha Gate, about 3-4km from Sangam Nose.

Kusum Devi, the wife of Panne Lal Sahni, says that her husband died around 8am on 29 January. “People were stepping over his body. I sat in the sun with his corpse until 4pm. No-one even gave us water,” she says. The family received 500,000 rupees in cash.

Relatives of all five people who died near the Kalpavriksha Gate, had similar stories to narrate – they sat with the bodies from morning till evening.

Over time, 18 more families came forward claiming their relatives died in the crush but they haven’t received compensation yet.

Among the 18 is Meena Pandey from Sultanpur, UP, who travelled to the Kumbh with her husband, and neighbour Archana Singh. Archana recalls sitting with Meena’s body at the crush site until 3pm – seven hours after the crush.

Despite claims of 2,750 AI-enabled CCTVs, 50,000 security personnel, drones and ambulances, no help arrived, relatives said.

By afternoon the body had begun to decay, says Archana.

“We had no choice but to carry it home in our vehicle.”

Like Meena Pandey’s family, relatives of Shyamlal Gond from UP’s Deoria are still waiting for compensation.

His son, Bhagirathi Gond, works as a daily wage labourer in Bengaluru. After the crush, he travelled to Prayagraj looking for his father, and reached the hospital on 3 February.

According to a slip from the hospital, Shyamlal Gond was brought in dead at 10.02 local time on 29 January.

“My father was listed as unidentified. To maintain records, they [hospital staff] had kept a file. They took a photo of the body in the condition it was found and pasted it into a register.”

He adds, “It was difficult to identify him through the photo. After the fall, his head was bent down, chest pushed upward, and his face had slightly turned.”

Bhagirathi says the hospital staff would not give him a death certificate or any other papers.

“They told me to take the body, but I said I would only do so if some official procedure was followed,” he said.

It took four months before he got the death certificate. But he is still waiting for compensation for his loss.

“The government has still not acknowledged that my father died in the crush.”

Thailand’s Constitutional Court has suspended Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, who has come under mounting pressure to resign over her leaked phone conversation with former Cambodian leader Hun Sen.

The clip, in which Paetongtarn called him “uncle” and criticised a Thai military commander, sparked public anger and a petition for her dismissal, which the court is now considering.

That would make Paetongtarn the third politician in the powerful Shinawatra clan – which has dominated Thai politics for the past two decades – to lose power before completing their term.

Her ruling coalition is already teetering with a slim majority after a key conservative ally abandoned it two weeks ago.

The Constitutional Court voted 7-2 to suspend her while they consider the case for her dismissal and she has 15 days to present her defence.

In the meantime deputy PM Suriya Jungrungruangkit will serve as the country’s acting leader.

If she is eventually dismissed, Paetongtarn will be the second prime minister from the Pheu Thai party to be removed from premiership since August last year.

At that time, her predecessor Srettha Thavisin was dismissed for appointing to his cabinet a former lawyer who was once jailed.

Days later Paetongtarn – whose father is Thailand’s deposed leader Thaksin Shinawatra – was sworn in as prime minister.

The 38-year-old remains Thailand’s youngest leader and only the second woman to be PM after her aunt, Yingluck Shinawatra.

Already struggling to revive a weak economy, Paetongtarn saw her approval rating fall to 9.2% last weekend, down from 30.9% in March.

She apologised for what she had said in the leaked call, defending it as a “negotiation technique” over recent border disputes. But conservative lawmakers accused her of bowing down to Cambodia and undermining Thailand’s military.

The court’s decision comes on the same day as Paetongtarn’s father, who was seen as the driving force behind her government, battles his own political troubles.

Thaksin is fighting charges of insulting the monarchy over an interview he gave to a South Korean newspaper nine years ago. His trial started on Tuesday.

The controversial political leader, who returned to Thailand in 2023 after 15 years in exile, is the most high-profile figure to face charges under the country’s notorious lese majeste law.

Thaksin’s return was part of a grand compromise between Pheu Thai and its former conservative foes.

They include the military, which deposed two Shinawatra governments in coups, and groups close to the monarchy.

Four employees of a satirical magazine in Turkey have been arrested for publishing a cartoon that appears to show the Prophet Muhammad – a sacred religious figure whose depiction is forbidden in Islam.

Turkey’s interior minister Ali Yerlikaya condemned LeMan magazine’s drawing as “shameless”, announcing that its editor-in-chief, graphic designer, institutional director and cartoonist had been detained.

In a post on the social media site X, LeMan denied its cartoon was a caricature of Muhammad, saying “the work does not refer to the Prophet Muhammed in any way”.

Riot police were deployed in Istanbul on Monday as hundreds of people protested against the publication.

Protesters gathered outside LeMan’s offices chanting slogans such as “tooth for tooth, blood for blood, revenge, revenge”.

A correspondent for the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency reported seeing rubber bullets and tear gas being fired to disperse the crowd.

Turkey’s minister of justice said an investigation had been initiated by the chief public prosecutor’s office for “publicly insulting religious values”.

“The caricature or any form of visual representation of our Prophet not only harms our religious values but also damages societal peace,” Yilmaz Tunc wrote on X.

“Necessary legal steps will be taken without delay” against LeMan’s journalists, he added.

Yerlikaya also shared videos of the four employees being arrested over the “vile drawing”.

Arrest warrants have also been issued for other members of the magazine’s senior management.

Images of the cartoon have appeared on social media, which show two characters with wings floating in the sky over a city under siege.

One of the characters is pictured saying “Peace be upon you, I’m Muhammed”, and the other replying, “Peace be upon you, I’m Musa”.

LeMan apologised to “well-intentioned readers who feel hurt” but defended its work and rejected allegations that the cartoon was a depiction of Muhammad.

“The cartoonist wanted to portray the righteousness of the oppressed Muslim people by depicting a Muslim killed by Israel, and he never intended to insult religious values,” it said in a statement on X.

“We do not accept the stain that is cast on us because there is no depiction of our Prophet. You have to be very malicious to interpret the cartoon in this way.”

LeMan’s editor-in-chief Tuncay Akgun, who is currently in Paris, told AFP the work had been misinterpreted and the magazine would “never take such a risk”.

He added that the backlash draws “similarities with Charlie Hebdo” which is “very intentional and very worrying”, referencing the 2015 attack on the French satirical magazine after it published a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.

Charlie Hebdo’s offices were stormed by gunmen who killed 12 people and was one of the worst security crises in France’s history.

At least 34 people have been killed in a massive fire at a pharmaceuticals factory in the southern Indian state of Telangana, according to news agencies.

The blast took place during work hours on Monday at a unit of Sigachi Industries, leaving several injured and in critical condition.

“As many as 31 bodies have been extricated from the debris while three died in hospital while undergoing treatment,” senior district police official Paritosh Pankaj told the Press Trust of India.

Police have registered a case against the management of Sigachi Industries, based on a complaint by the son of a victim.

The company has said it is halting operations at the facility for 90 days, because of damage to equipment and structures within the plant.

“The incident has unfortunately resulted in loss of human life, and there may have been individuals who sustained injuries,” Sigachi Industries said in a statement, adding that it was ascertaining the number who are injured.

Authorities say approximately 60 people were in the building when the blast took place, leading to a complete collapse of the building.

Many of the workers were migrants from states like Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal in the north and east of the country.

The unit manufactured microcrystalline cellulose, a binding agent often used in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and food industries.

“Pressure seems to have built up when the workers were operating the spray dryer,” a senior rescue official told the Indian Express newspaper. “Fine dust chemical particles too accelerated the blast and the subsequent fire.”

At least 25 victims were rushed to nearby hospitals with varying degrees of burns and injuries, rescue officials told the newspaper. Many had reportedly inhaled poisonous fumes.

Rescue workers are still clearing the debris at the blast site and have told ANI news agency that they are unsure how many people were still trapped.

“Once we are all done with the clearing, only then we will be able to assess if any other body is still remaining under the debris or if it is all clear,” GV Narayana Rao, director of Telangana fire disaster response emergency, told Reuters.

Officials say DNA testing is being used to identify bodies that were charred beyond recognition.

The ruling Congress government in the state expressed “deep shock over the massive fire accident” and said compensation will be given to the families of the deceased and injured.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also expressed condolences and announced compensation of 200,000 rupees ($2,336; £1,699) for each for the families of the deceased and 50,000 rupees for the injured.

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.

Sixteen French regions, including Paris, have been placed on red alert for Tuesday, the country’s highest, while 68 others are on orange alert.

On Monday, 84 of 96 mainland regions were under an orange alert, which France’s Climate Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher called 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 have warned 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.

France’s red alert will come into effect at 12:00 local time on Tuesday.

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

• 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 were just shy of being one of the hottest June days ever on Monday.

The highest UK temperature of the day was recorded at Heathrow Airport in London at 33.1C. Meanwhile, Wimbledon recorded a temperature of 32.9C, the tennis tournament’s hottest opening day on record.

Meanwhile, heat alerts across Spain, which is on course to record its hottest June on record, remained in place.

“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.

In Germany, the country’s meteorological service warned that temperatures could reach almost 38C on Tuesday and Wednesday – further potentially record-breaking temperatures.

The heatwave 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.

In Turkey, rescuers evacuated more than 50,000 people – mostly from the resort city of Izmir in the country’s west – as firefighters continued to put out hundreds of wildfires that had broken out in recent days.

The fires were fuelled by winds of 120km/h (75 mph) and destroyed at least 20 homes.

Wildfires also broke out in Croatia, where red heat warnings are in place for coastal areas. An extreme temperature alert was issued for neighbouring Montenegro.

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, and the meteorological service warned on Monday that “severe and extreme drought conditions prevail” in much of the country.

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 environment. 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 are the main cause of 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 20-year-old Idaho man who fatally shot firefighters after luring them into an ambush once dreamed of becoming a fireman himself, police say.

Two firefighters, Frank Harwood and John Morrison, were killed and a third, Dave Tysdal, was injured after Wess Roley shot at them as they arrived at a blaze at Canfield Mountain, just north of Coeur d’Alene, on Sunday, officials say.

Authorities say Roley deliberately lit the fire to send emergency services to the area. The motive for the attack remains unclear.

After an hours-long standoff, a police Swat team discovered a dead man – identified as Roley – close to where the attack took place.

Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris told a news conference on Monday that Roley had once aspired to be a fireman.

The suspect’s grandfather also told NBC News his grandson had “actually really respected law enforcement”.

Dale Roley said his grandson “had been in contact to get a job with a fire department”, and “wanted to be part of a team that he sort of idolised”.

“He loved firefighters,” said Mr Roley. “It didn’t make sense that he was shooting firefighters. Maybe he got rejected or something.”

Sheriff Norris said the homeless suspect had attacked fire crews after they asked him to move his vehicle, which he had been living in.

“There was an interaction with the firefighters,” Norris said. “It has something to do with his vehicle being parked where it was.”

Investigators believe Roley used a flint that was found near his body to deliberately start the fire.

“This was a total ambush,” Norris told reporters. “These firefighters did not have a chance.”

One firefighter who was killed worked for the city’s fire service, while another worked for Kootenai County Fire and Rescue.

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

Idaho’s governor ordered flags be flown at half-staff on Monday to honour the firefighters who were killed.

The first report of a fire in the mountainside community was made around 13:21 PDT (20:21 GMT), which was followed 40 minutes later by reports firefighters were being shot at, Norris said.

The so-called Nettleton Gulch Fire grew to 26 acres and continued to burn on Monday, Norris said. No structures are threatened, and officials hope to have the blaze extinguished by Monday night.

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

Norris said authorities believed the suspect used a high-powered rifle to fire rapidly at first responders, with officers initially unsure of the number of assailants involved.

A shotgun has been recovered, and several bullets or fragments possibly from a rifle have been found. Officials say more guns may be hidden on the mountain.

After an hours-long barrage of gunfire, the suspect was found by tracing his mobile phone on the popular hiking trail, which officials said was being used by hundreds on that Sunday afternoon.

“It appears that he shot himself,” Norris told journalists.

The sheriff said the suspect had had five “very minor” interactions with police since moving to Idaho in 2024. He said that in one case, he was found to be trespassing at a restaurant by police.

In order to prevent the suspect from fleeing, officials disabled his vehicle and “pushed it off the mountain”, the sheriff said. They have not yet been able to access the vehicle for a more thorough search.

Several fire department vehicles also had their tyres flattened to prevent the suspect from driving away in one of them during the chaotic manhunt.

Norris ruled out the suspect having “any nexus to Islamic jihad”, which he said had been falsely suggested on social media.

According to a social media post from his mother, the suspect moved from Arizona to Idaho in 2023 to work for his father’s tree-trimming company.

She wrote in October 2024 that her son was “doing great living in Idaho”.

About 1,200 children are being urged to undergo testing for infectious diseases after a Melbourne childcare worker was charged with a string of offences including child rape.

Joshua Dale Brown was arrested in May and faces 70 charges, with police alleging he abused eight children – including a five-month-old – between April 2022 and January 2023.

The 26-year-old has worked at 20 childcare centres since 2017, prompting local health authorities to notify parents of any children who may have been in his care, recommending many be tested as a “precaution”.

Brown, who is yet to enter a plea to the charges, has been remanded in custody and is due to appear at Melbourne Magistrates Court in September.

The eight children – all under the age of two- who police allege were harmed attended the Creative Gardens Early Learning Centre in Point Cook, in Melbourne’s south-west.

Brown is accused of child rape and sexual assault offenses, as well as producing and transmitting child abuse material.

Detectives are also investigating alleged offences by Brown at a childcare centre in Essendon “as a priority”.

At a press conference, authorities said he had a valid working with children check and was employed as a fill-in childcare worker when he was arrested.

Brown was not known to them before the investigation, they said, adding that they believed he acted alone and that the alleged offending only happened in Victoria.

Revealing Mr Brown’s identity was an “unusual decision”, Victoria Police’s Janet Stevenson said, but this is a “unique” case.

“It’s very important to ensure that every parent out there that has a child in childcare knows who he is and where he worked,” she said.

Chief Health Officer Christian McGrath would not say if Mr Brown had tested positive to sexually transmitted infections, but said the manner of the alleged offending meant some children may be asked to undergo screening for infectious diseases.

About 2,600 families had been contacted, with 1,200 children recommended for testing, she said, adding that the infections that the children may have been exposed to can be treated with antibiotics.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan said she was “sickened” by the allegations.

“My heart breaks for the families who are living every parent’s worst nightmare,” she said.

Families across Victoria will be “angry and frightened” by the case, Allan said, adding that a dedicated website has been set up for those impacted.

Millions of fans are bidding farewell to Squid Game, the Emmy award-winning TV series that has topped Netflix’s charts and become a symbol of South Korea’s ascendance in Hollywood.

The fictional show follows cash-strapped players as they battle it out in a series of traditional Korean children’s games – with a gory twist, as losers are killed in every round.

Squid Game has sucked in viewers since 2021 with its candy-coloured sets and bleak messages about capitalism and humanity. And with its third and final season released last Friday, fans across the world are returning to reality.

Some South Koreans, however, have found themselves reflecting on the society that inspired the dystopian series.

“I feel like Squid Game 3 revealed the true feelings and raw inner thoughts of Korean people,” reads one YouTube comment under a clip from season three.

“It reflected reality so well like how in real life, at work, it’s just full of ruthless people ready to crush you. This show nailed it.”

Squid Game was born against the backdrop of cut-throat competition and widening inequality in South Korean society – where people are too stressed to have children and a university placement exam is seen as the defining moment of a person’s life.

The diverse characters of the show – which include a salaryman, a migrant factory worker and a cryptocurrency scammer – are drawn from figures many South Koreans would find familiar.

The backstory of protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a car factory worker who was laid off and later went on strike, was also inspired by a real-life event: a 2009 strike at the SsangYong Motor factory, where workers clashed with riot police over widespread layoffs. It’s remembered today as one of the country’s largest labour confrontations.

“The drama may be fictional, but it feels more realistic than reality itself,” Jeong Cheol Sang, a film enthusiast, wrote in his review of Squid Game’s final season.

“Precarious labour, youth unemployment, broken families – these aren’t just plot devices, but the very struggles we face every day.”

Those darker messages seemed to be brushed to the side on Saturday night, as a massive parade celebrated the release of the blockbuster’s final season. A giant killer doll and dozens of faceless guards in tracksuits – among other motifs of the deadly games – marched down central Seoul to much fanfare.

For South Korea’s leaders, Squid Game has become a symbol of K-drama’s success on the global stage. It is also part of a string of successes – along with K-pop act BTS and Oscar-winning film Parasite – on which newly elected president Lee Jae Myung wants to capitalise as he sets his sights on exporting K-culture far and wide.

There are signs the Squid Game hype may even go further: the show’s final scene, where Cate Blanchett plays a Korean game with a man in a Los Angeles alley, has fuelled rumours of an American spinoff.

The series ended on an “open-ended” note, Lee Jung-jae, the star of the series, told the BBC. “So it poses a lot of questions to the audience. I hope people will talk about those questions, ponder upon themselves about the questions and try to find an answer.”

In the show’s later seasons, viewers follow Gi-hun’s quest to bring down the eponymous games, which are packaged as entertainment for a group of wealthy VIPs.

But his rebellion fails, and by the end Gi-hun is forced to sacrifice himself to save another player’s baby – an ending that has polarised viewers.

Some argued that Gi-hun’s actions did not square with the dark portrait of reality that showrunners had developed – one that had so well captured the ruthless elements of human nature.

“The characters’ excessive altruism was disturbing – almost to the point of seeming unhinged,” reads a comment on popular South Korean discussion site Nate Pann. “It felt like a fake, performative kind of kindness, prioritising strangers over their own families for no real reason.”

But others said Gi-hun’s death was in line with the show’s commitment to uncomfortable truths.

“This perfectly describes humanity and the message of the show,” another commented on YouTube.

“As much as we wanted to see Gi-Hun win, kill the frontman and the VIPs, and stop the games once and for all before riding off into the sunset, that’s just not the world we live in and it’s certainly not the one that Gi-Hun lived in.”

Hwang Dong-hyuk, the show’s creator, told reporters on Monday that he understood the “mixed reaction” to the final season.

“In season one there were no expectations, so the shock and freshness worked. But by seasons two and three, expectations were sky high, and that makes all the difference,” Hwang said on Monday.

“Game fans wanted more games, others wanted deeper messages, and some were more invested in the characters. Everyone expected something different.”

For some, at least, Gi-hun’s final choice offered a hopeful reflection of reality: that even in times of adversity, kindness can prevail.

“That paradox – of cruelty and warmth coexisting – is what made the finale so moving,” said Mr Jeong, the film blogger. “Watching the Squid Game made me reflect on myself. As someone who has worked in education and counselling, I’ve questioned whether kindness can really change anything.”

“That’s why I stayed with this story. That’s why I call this ending beautiful.”

Aged just 19, Alawia Babiker Ahmed miscarried as she was fleeing on foot the devastating war that has ravaged Sudan’s western region of Darfur.

“I was bleeding on the way,” she told the BBC, before hastening to add that she saw people who were “worse off” during her traumatic three-day walk of about 70km (45 miles) from the besieged city of el-Fasher to the small town of Tawila.

Dodging air strikes and militiamen after her miscarriage, Alawia said she and her family came across an infant crying for his mother, who lay dead by the roadside.

Alawia said she picked up the child and took him with her: “We covered the mother and kept going.”

Sudan has been wracked by a civil war since fighting broke out between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, causing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises with more than 12 million people forced to flee their homes.

Darfur has been a major flashpoint, with the RSF controlling most of the region – except for the city of el-Fasher that has remained in the hands of the army and its allies.

El-Fasher has come under intense bombardment as the RSF tries to seize it. In April it announced plans to form a government to rival the one established by the army, raising fears that it could lead to Sudan’s partition.

Alawia said that as the bombing intensified last month, she and her family were forced to flee and walk to Tawila, west of el-Fasher.

Her brother, Marwan Mohamed Adam, 21, told the BBC that he was assaulted along the way by RSF-allied gangs – including being “beaten on my neck, arm and leg” and robbed of the few belongings that he was carrying.

Marwan added that his life was spared only because he lied to the gangs about where he had come from.

He said the attackers took away and “executed” young men who revealed they were from el-Fasher, so when he was interrogated he claimed that he was from Shaqra, a stopover on the way to Tawila.

“You feel fear, you feel like you are already dead,” the 21-year-old told the BBC, adding that he saw three bodies on the way.

Another woman, Khadija Ismail Ali, told the BBC that “bodies were scattered all over the streets”.

She said 11 members of her family were killed during the shelling of el-Fasher, and three children died during their four-day journey from the city to Tawila.

“The children died from thirst along the way,” Khadija said.

Her family’s village, el-Tarkuniya, was attacked last September by RSF-allied militias, who stole their harvest.

They fled to the famine-stricken Zamzam camp, and then to el-Fasher and now to Tawila.

Medical charity Alima said the gunmen took the land and farms of most families when attacking villages.

Severe malnutrition, especially among children arriving in Tawila, had reached an alarming level, it added.

Alawia said her sister dropped the little food they were carrying while fleeing the air strikes and shelling that they encountered after passing Shaqra.

“It was leftover beans with a little salt we had carried in our hands to feed the children,” she said.

Without food or water, they trudged on and met a woman who told them they could find water in a nearby village.

The family set off after midnight for the village, but little did they know that they were walking into an area controlled by RSF fighters.

“We greeted them, but they did not answer. They told us to sit on the ground and they searched our belongings,” Alawia recalled.

The fighters took the 20,000 Sudanese pounds ($33; £24) that was all the family still had, along with the clothes and shoes that they were carrying.

“My shoes weren’t good, but they still took them,” Alawia said.

She added that the RSF gunmen refused to give them water, so they all pressed on until they reached el-Koweim village. There, they spotted a well guarded by RSF fighters.

“We asked for water for at least the orphaned child, but they refused,” Alawia said, adding that she tried to push her way to the well, but the men assaulted her and beat her back.

Thirsty and exhausted, the family kept walking until reaching Tawila, where Alawia said she collapsed and was rushed to hospital.

She was discharged after being treated. Marwan was also treated for the injuries he had sustained during the beating.

Alawia said they then searched for relatives of the infant they had rescued, and after finding some of them, handed over the child.

Alawia and her family are now living in Tawila, where a family has welcomed them into its home.

“Life is OK, thank God, but we worry about the future,” Alawia told the BBC.

Marwan said he wanted to go abroad so that he could continue with his education and start a new life.

This is something that millions of Sudanese have done, as their lives have been shattered by a war that shows no sign of ending.

• Sudan in danger of self-destructing
• Fear, loss and hope in Sudan’s ruined capital
• From prized artworks to bullet shells: how war devastated Sudan’s museums

“Your brother is a hero.”

This is what Emad was told after finding out his brother had been killed in a suicide explosion at a church in the Syrian capital of Damascus.

His brother, Milad, and two others had tried to push the suicide attacker out of the church building. He was killed instantly – alongside 24 other members of the congregation.

Another 60 people were injured in the attack at Greek Orthodox Church of the Prophet Elias, in the eastern Damascus suburb of Dweila on 22 June.

It was the first such attack in Damascus since Islamist-led rebel forces overthrew Bashar al- Assad in December, ending 13 years of devastating civil war.

It was also the first targeting of the Christian community in Syria since a massacre in 1860, when a conflict broke out between Druze and Maronite Christians under Ottoman rule.

The Syrian authorities blamed the attack on the Islamic State (IS) group. However, a lesser- known Sunni extremist group, Saraya Ansar al-Sunnah, has said it was behind the attack – though government officials say they do not operate independently of IS.

Milad had been attending a Sunday evening service at the church, when a man opened fire on the congregation before detonating his explosive vest.

Emad heard the explosion from his house and for hours was unable to reach his brother.

“I went to the hospital to see him. I couldn’t recognise him. Half of his face was burnt,” Emad told me, speaking from his small two bedroom-home which he shares with several other relatives.

Emad is a tall, thin man in his 40s with an angular face that bears the lines of a hard life. He, like his brother, had been working as a cleaner in a school in the poor neighbourhood, which is home to many lower to middle class and predominantly Christian families.

During Bashar al-Assad’s rule, members of Syria’s many religious and ethnic minority communities believed the state protected them. Now, many fear the new Islamist-led government, established by the rebels who overthrew him last December, will not do the same.

While interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa and his government have pledged to protect all citizens, recent deadly sectarian violence in Alawite coastal areas and then in Druze communities around Damascus have made people doubt its ability to control the situation.

Many of Emad’s family members echoed this sentiment, saying: “We are not safe here anymore.”

Angie Awabde, 23, was just two months away from graduating university when she got caught up in the church attack.

She heard the gunshots before the blast.

“It all happened in seconds,” she told me, speaking from her hospital bed as she recovers from shrapnel wounds to her face, hand and leg, as well as a broken leg.

Angie is frightened and feels there is no future for Christians in Syria.

“I just want to leave this country. I lived through the crisis, the war, the mortars. I never expected that something would happen to me inside a church,” she said.

“I don’t have a solution. They need to find a solution, this is not my job, if they can’t protect us, we want to leave.”

Before the 13-year civil war, Christians made up about 10% of the 22 million population in Syria – but their numbers have shrunk significantly since then with hundreds of thousands fleeing abroad.

Churches were among the buildings bombed by the Syrian government and allied Russian forces during the war – but not while worshippers were inside.

Thousands of Christians were also forced from their homes due to the threat from hardline Islamist and jihadist groups, such as IS.

Outside the hospital where Angie is being treated, coffins of some of the victims of the church attack were lined up, ready for burial.

People from all walks of life, and representing different parts of Syrian society, attended the service at a nearby church, which took place under a heavy security presence.

In a sermon at the service, the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Syria, John Yazigi, insisted “the government bears responsibility in full”.

He said a phone call from President Ahmed al-Sharaa expressing his condolences was “not enough for us”, drawing applause from the congregation.

“We are grateful for the phone call. But the crime that took place is a little bigger than that.”

Sharaa last week promised that those involved in the “heinous” attack would face justice.

A day after the bombing, two of the suspects were killed and six others arrested in a security operation on an IS cell in Damascus.

But this has done little to allay fears here about the security situation, especially for religious minorities.

Syria has also seen a crack down on social freedoms, including decrees on how women should dress at beaches, attacks on men wearing shorts in public and bars and restaurants closing for serving alcohol.

Many here fear that these are not just random cases but signs of a wider plan to change Syrian society.

Archimandrite Meletius Shattahi, director-general of the charitable arm of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, feels the government is not doing enough.

He refers to videos circulating online showing armed religious preachers advocating for Islam over loud speakers in Christian neighbourhoods, saying these are not “individual incidents”.

“These are taking place in public in front of everybody, and we know very well that our government is not taking any action against [those] who are breaching the laws and the rules.”

This alleged inaction, he says, is what led to the attack at the Church of the Prophet Elias.

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”. And on Monday, Avon and Somerset Police said a criminal investigation has been launched over performances by the band and Irish outfit Kneecap.

The BBC said 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 similar 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.

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

The Irish-language act recently lost their US visa sponsor. Bob Vylan were set to tour the US later this year but US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau has now confirmed that the band will have their visas revoked.

In response, Bobbie Vylan released a video statement on social media on Monday, where he said politicians should be “utterly ashamed” about where their “allegiances lie”.

“First it was Kneecap, now it’s us two,” he said.

“Regardless of how it was said, calling for an end to the slaughter of innocents is never wrong…”

Just like Kneecap, Bob Vylan’s name isn’t going away any time soon.

After 17 years in the US Army, Maj Kara Corcoran, 39, was preparing to graduate from an elite military leadership programme.

But there was a complication.

Two days before the ceremony, Kara was told that she would need to conform to male regulations, which meant wearing male uniform and cutting the long blonde hair she had grown since she told the Army she identified as a woman in 2018.

The directive had come from the Pentagon, and filtered down through her chain of command at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“Nothing about me is a man, but we’re going to force me into male regs just so I can walk across the stage with my peers,” she said in the hours leading up to the ceremony. “It’s not my choice to cut my hair. I’m doing it because I have to.”

Kara is one of several thousand transgender people affected by a ban, announced by President Trump in January, that prevents them from serving in any job in the US military.

A previous ban in his first term focused on new recruits and allowed some exceptions, particularly for those already serving. The 2025 policy removes virtually all of the exceptions.

Official figures say there are about 4,200 transgender service members in the US armed forces, however other estimates are much higher, at about 10,000.

The new policy states that a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria – where a person feels their gender differs from their sex registered at birth – is “incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service”.

An executive order outlined President Trump’s position that “the Armed Forces have been afflicted with radical gender ideology” and that the policy would ensure staff were “free of medical conditions or physical defects that may reasonably be expected to require excessive time lost from duty for necessary treatment or hospitalization”.

The order also stated that “a man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member”.

A Gallup poll in February this year suggested that 58% of Americans “favor allowing openly transgender men and women to serve in the US military, but support has declined from 71% in 2019 and 66% in 2021”.

Critics have called the ban discriminatory and legal challenges have been filed from serving transgender officers and human rights groups.

Since February, the BBC has followed the lives of Maj Kara Corcoran and an officer in the Navy, Lt Rae Timberlake, as they navigate the uncertainty of their military careers. They have shared their thoughts and feelings in a personal capacity, not as spokespeople for the US military or other colleagues.

Kara has spent most of her adult life in the US Army. Her combat deployments included time in Afghanistan where she was both a platoon leader and a company commander, when she was living as a man, before she transitioned. Since then, she says she has legally changed her name and gender and uses female pronouns.

Transgender people were disqualified from all jobs in the military until 2016, but over the past decade, as governments have changed, US policy has flip-flopped.

• 2016: Obama lifts ban on trans people serving, allowing them access to funding through the military for gender-related treatment
• 2017: Trump announces ban on trans people serving, citing medical costs and potential disruptions
• 2021: Biden signs order restoring the right of trans people to serve
• 2025: Trump announces new ban and bases are told to initiate separation proceedings against personnel with gender dysphoria

“For a long time, I stayed silent,” says Kara. When she joined up in 2008, women were not allowed in combat positions either.

Kara married a woman and had children, although the relationship broke down and ended as she grappled with her identity.

Kara came out as a transgender woman in 2018 and began her hormonal and surgical transition. She says she had the support of her commanding officers, who were still working to the previous set of guidelines, despite Trump’s 2017 ban. She tells the BBC that the transition improved her ability to serve.

“It’s made me more focused, more resilient,” she says. “There’s a common misconception that transitioning is a liability. For me, it’s been the opposite.”

Now, with Trump’s latest policy in effect, Kara has been told that unless she leaves voluntarily, she may be forced out of the service against her will through a process called involuntary separation.

Involuntary separation happens when someone is discharged and they do not choose to leave of their own accord. It can affect any service member, not just people in combat roles.

As well as losing their jobs, people can also potentially lose benefits, such as pensions, healthcare and disability provisions.

The Department of Defense said that if someone went involuntarily they may get half what they would get if they left voluntarily – the difference could be tens of thousands of dollars.

Despite this, Maj Kara Corcoran says she does not want to walk away.

“I’m not going to get voluntarily separated,” she says. “I’ll go through the involuntary separation and what that looks like and how horrific they want to make that for me and other service members.”

Others such as former US Navy Seal, Carl Higbie, support Trump’s ban, though. Carl now hosts a TV show on the conservative network Newsmax.

He believes that transgender people are not fit for service in the US military, arguing that gender dysphoria may require ongoing medical care and accommodations that could affect deployability.

“You can’t take Ritalin [which is used to treat ADHD] or certain types of prescription medications and be an eligible service member in combat. Why should you be on hormone therapy, which we know has sometimes emotional effects?” he asks.

When asked if he thought that biological women, who may be on other medications containing hormones, such as treatment for the menopause, are fit to serve in the armed forces, he said: “I think there are certain times where we should be more concerned about killing bad guys than making sure that we have gender quotas on a combat operation.”

• Listen to Inside the US trans military ban on BBC Sounds

The ban on transgender service members is part of a broader shift in US military policy – Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Trump appointee and former army officer, has moved to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes.

“I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength’,” Hegseth said at a Pentagon event in February.

And in April, he posted on X that he “proudly ended” the Women, Peace and Security programme, an initiative to invite more women and girls to be part of conflict resolution. He called it a distraction from the core task of “war-fighting”.

Many had seen the policy shift coming. In the early hours of 6 November, when Donald Trump secured his victory in the 2024 US presidential election, Lt Rae Timberlake made a decision.

A non-binary navy officer, Rae joined the Navy aged 17 and has served aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and in the Middle East.

Rae falls under the trans umbrella because, although they were registered female at birth, they identify as neither male nor female and use they/them pronouns.

Rae says that coming out as non-binary in 2020 and transitioning brought clarity to their identity. “The moment I heard the word ‘non-binary’, I knew it fit,” they told the BBC.

But with the 2024 Trump victory, Rae felt the clock was ticking on their career. They requested to transfer from their West Coast base, to a base closer to family in the east, who could give them support.

Rae, their wife and daughter moved in the middle of a school term, in the anticipation that a possible separation from the Navy was imminent.

“It felt like the safest move for us, in case I was forced to leave the service,” says Rae.

They add that they weren’t surprised by President Donald Trump’s executive order in January, or a memorandum from the Department of Defense the following month.

The memo specified that military bases must identify service members diagnosed with or exhibiting symptoms of gender dysphoria. The final deadlines to come forward voluntarily were eventually set as 6 June for active-duty personnel and 7 July for reserve and National Guard members.

In May, the Department of Defense said 1,000 service personnel had self-identified as trans, but there has been no update of the number since then.

The military has 30 days from a deadline to start involuntary separation proceedings.

The memo includes a provision for people to be considered for a waiver on a case-by-case basis. There are a few conditions including that staff must have “never attempted to transition to any sex other than their sex”.

By the time the memorandum was published, Rae had taken a new post in Maryland, and the family was adjusting to their new home.

“Watching Rae lose their career, it’s painful,” their wife, Lindsay, says. “We’re in survival mode. We haven’t had time to connect as a family. We just keep making hard choices.”

For Rae, the emotional cost has been high. They have decided they want more control over the future, so have requested to retire from the Navy, and believe that in doing so have self-identified for voluntary separation. The application hasn’t been accepted yet, but Rae believes it will be.

They expect the financial implications to be substantial. Without completing 20 years of service, Rae says they will likely forfeit eligibility for a military pension. They estimate pension payments could have added up to about $2.5m (£1.8m) over the course of their retirement.

While the Department of Defense says the ban will maintain consistent medical and readiness standards across the forces, opponents, argue that the policy targets a vulnerable group unfairly.

Three lawsuits have been filed challenging its legality.

In one high-profile ruling, a federal judge blocked the ban temporarily, citing concerns over its constitutionality and suggesting it discriminated based on gender identity. However, in April, the Supreme Court lifted the injunction, allowing the policy to move forward while litigation continues.

The legal back-and-forth has left transgender service members in limbo.

Rae has found job hunting in the civilian sector tough. “I applied for a position that had over 800 applicants in one day,” they say, adding that civilian life will offer less security than the Navy. “It’s competitive and daunting out there.”

But they say the next chapter is about not feeling “under threat for who I am”.

Kara didn’t self-identify by the 6 June deadline, so is waiting to see if the military flags her for separation – the 30-day window means that should happen by 6 July. She will see what unfolds from there.

The US Department of Defense declined to give a statement to the BBC but pointed to previous statements saying it was committed to treating all service members impacted by the policy with dignity and respect. A US defence official said that “characterization of service will be honorable except where the Service member’s record otherwise warrants a lower characterization”.

For now Kara remains at her base in Fort Leavenworth but is prepared to leave with little notice if she has to. She has turned her car into a mobile home with a chunky power bank, cooking equipment, and a fold-out mattress. “On top I’ve got an eight-gallon water tank. I fill it up, pump it with an air compressor, and I can take a shower out in the wild. At least I have somewhere to live.”

When she graduated from the leadership programme with distinction, after complying with male uniform and grooming standards, she said it “meant a lot, but how I had to do it felt like erasing my identity”.

“This is about people who’ve dedicated their lives to service, now being told they’re no longer fit, not because of performance, but because of who they are.”

A criminal investigation has been launched over performances by Bob Vylan and Kneecap at Glastonbury on Saturday, Avon and Somerset Police has said.

The force said it had appointed a senior detective to investigate whether comments made by either act amounted to a criminal offence after reviewing footage.

A statement added: “This has been recorded as a public order incident at this time while our enquiries are at an early stage.”

Speaking in Parliament on Monday after the announcement, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy called the scenes broadcast “appalling and unacceptable”.

Police have not specified which part of Bob Vylan’s or Kneecap’s set would be subject to the criminal investigation.

It comes after the BBC said it should have cut away from a live broadcast of Bob Vylan’s performance, during which the band’s singer Pascal Robinson-Foster, who performs under the name Bobby Vylan, led a chant of “death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]”.

Those comments drew criticism of both the English punk-rap duo and the BBC for its live coverage of their performance.

The corporation said it would “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”, and labelled remarks made during the performance antisemitic.

Lisa Nandy told MPs that she immediately called the BBC’s director general after the set was broadcast.

She said outstanding questions remain, including why the feed “wasn’t immediately cut”, why it was broadcast live “given the concerns regarding other acts in the weeks preceding the festival” and what due diligence had been done ahead of deciding to put Bob Vylan on TV.

“When the rights and safety of people and communities are at risk, and when the national broadcaster fails to uphold its own standards, we will intervene,” she added, and said she will continue to speak to the BBC in the coming days.

Earlier, 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 Sunday, Robinson-Foster responded to the controversy on Instagram, writing “I said what I said” and a statement in defence of political activism, without addressing his on-stage comments in more detail.

Since then, both members of Bob Vylan – who were due to embark on a tour of America later this year – have had their US visas revoked, it is understood.

US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau wrote on X: “Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country.”

In response, Bobby Vylan released a video statement on social media on Monday, where he said politicians should be “utterly ashamed” about where their “allegiances lie”.

“First it was Kneecap, now it’s us two,” he said.

“Regardless of how it was said, calling for an end to the slaughter of innocents is never wrong. To civilians of Israel, understand this anger is not directed at you, and don’t let your government persuade you that a call against an army is a call against the people.

“To Keir, Kemi and the rest of you, I’ll get you at a later date.”

Avon and Somerset Police also confirmed the criminal investigation would assess Kneecap’s Glastonbury performance.

The Irish-language rap band are known for making pro-Palestinian and political comments during their live performances and have attracted controversy in the past.

Band member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs under the name Mo Chara, was charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying the flag of proscribed terrorist organisation Hezbollah at a gig. He has denied the charge.

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

A 30-year-old man who is due to stand trial for the fatal stabbings of four roommates in a small Idaho college town will plead guilty as part of a deal with state prosecutors to avoid the death penalty, according to US media.

Latah County prosecutor’s office refused to confirm to the BBC that a plea deal had been reached with Bryan Kohberger.

But relatives of one victim, Kaylee Goncalves, apparently confirmed the agreement on Facebook. “It’s true! We are beyond furious at the State of Idaho,” the post said. “They have failed us.”

Ms Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen were knifed in their off-campus home in Moscow, Idaho, days before Thanksgiving in 2022.

Mr Kohberger, who was a graduate criminology student at nearby Washington State University, is currently due to stand trial in August.

Also on Monday, a judge in the defendant’s home state of Pennsylvania ruled that three people who knew him must travel to Idaho to testify for the defence.

Local media reported that a hearing for the plea deal was set for Wednesday. The BBC has contacted the defendant’s legal team for comment.

Mr Kohberger is expected to plead guilty on all four murder charges and waive his rights to any future appeals, local media reported.

If accepted by a judge, the deal would reportedly see the defendant sentenced to life without the possibility of parole and prosecutors would not seek capital punishment.

“We cannot fathom the toll that this case has taken on your family,” Moscow Prosecuting Attorney Bill Thompson told families in a letter, according to the Idaho Statesman newspaper, which said it had seen a copy.

“This resolution is our sincere attempt to seek justice for your family.

“This agreement ensures that the defendant will be convicted, will spend the rest of his life in prison, and will not be able to put you and the other families through the uncertainty of decades of post-conviction appeals.”

The defendant was arrested at his Pennsylvania family home weeks following the stabbings, after investigators said they found DNA evidence on a “leather knife sheath” at the crime scene. He was indicted by a grand jury in May 2023.

Court documents revealed police recovered a knife, a Glock pistol, black gloves, a black hat and a black face mask during a search of Mr Kohberger’s family home.

His defence team questioned the accuracy of the DNA evidence and succeeded in its bid to move the trial location, after arguing their client would not receive a fair hearing from local jurors.

But they had failed to remove the death penalty as a sentencing option, after citing an autism diagnosis for Mr Kohberger.

Idaho is one of 27 US states that allows for capital punishment, but there have been no executions since 2012, according to a database by the Death Penalty Information Center.

The royal train is going to be taken out of service by 2027, in a cost-saving measure announced by Buckingham Palace.

There have been dedicated trains for monarchs since Queen Victoria’s reign, but as part of a “drive to ensure we deliver value for money” it’s been decided to decommission the historic rolling stock.

The announcement came alongside the annual publication of royal finances, which showed that a journey on the royal train, from Gloucestershire to Staffordshire and then London, over two days in February, had cost more than £44,000.

The Royal Family will still travel on regular train services – and the annual report showed 141 helicopter trips were taken last year, costing £475,000.

James Chalmers, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, responsible for the royal finances, said the decision to stop the royal train would mean “the fondest of farewells”, but “in moving forwards we must not be bound by the past”.

The royal train will be taken around the UK before it is removed from service, after which it could be put on public display. The royal train consists of nine carriages, with different locomotives hired to pull them.

The idea of a royal train goes back to Queen Victoria commissioning special coaches in 1869, with the service being used to take the Royal Family around the country.

“The royal train, of course, has been part of national life for many decades, loved and cared for by all those involved,” said Mr Chalmers.

The train had been used extensively for events during the late Queen Elizabeth’s golden and diamond jubilees – with the most recent update to the carriages taking place in the mid-1980s.

But the latest accounts, for 2024-25, show the train only being used on two occasions, raising questions about maintenance and storage costs.

That’s alongside other travel costs such as 55 private charter flights costing almost £600,000 and scheduled flights costing £126,000. The total cost of royal travel is £4.7 million, a rise of £500,000 from the previous year.

The single biggest travel item was £400,000 for the King and Queen’s trip to Australia and Samoa.

The latest financial report for 2024-25 shows the Sovereign Grant remaining at £86.3m. This grant is the public funding for the running costs of the monarchy, such as travel for official duties, staffing and the maintenance of royal buildings.

The level of funding for 2025-26 is rising to £132.1m – with this higher level of funding staying for two years to complete renovation work at Buckingham Palace.

The cost of this 10-year, £369m building scheme at Buckingham Palace has pushed up the Sovereign Grant – which in real terms, taking into account inflation, is now about three times higher than when the Sovereign Grant funding was introduced in 2012.

Funding comes from the Treasury, with the amount based on a percentage of the profits of the Crown Estate.

This year’s annual report shows the Royal Family carried out over 1,900 engagements, with almost 94,000 guests attending events at royal residences.

There were also diplomatic occasions, such as hosting Qatar’s state visit to the UK.

A financial report for the Duchy of Cornwall, the estates which provide an income for the Prince of Wales, showed a profit of £22.9m, slightly down on the previous year.

There had been media criticism of the duchy’s finances – and in response Kensington Palace has said that the emphasis will be on a positive social impact.

Will Bax, the duchy’s new secretary, said there would be a “modern, socially minded” approach, which could see some charitable organisations and community groups having their rents waived and others with 50% reductions.

This would cost “significant sums”, said Mr Bax, but it was part of a focus on turning the duchy into a social enterprise, supporting communities and reflecting Prince William’s interest in projects such as reducing homelessness and tackling climate change.

Anti-monarchy campaigners Republic criticised the levels of royal income at a time when there were debates about “cutting welfare for people with disabilities”.

Republic’s chief executive Graham Smith described royal funding as a “scandalous abuse of public money”, with published figures not including costs such as security.

Sign up here to get the latest royal stories and analysis every week with our Royal Watch newsletter. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

The UK’s High Court has rejected a case brought by campaigners trying to stop the transfer to Israel of all British-made spare parts for US-produced F-35 fighter jets, saying it didn’t have the constitutional authority to intervene.

The government suspended about 30 arms export licences to Israel last September because of a risk of UK-made weapons being used in violations of international law in the Gaza Strip.

But the UK supplies components to a global pool of F-35s which Israel can access. The government had argued it could not pull out of the defence programme without endangering international peace.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch expressed their dismay at the ruling.

Both groups had intervened in the case.

“The horrifying reality in Gaza is unfolding in full view of the world: entire families obliterated, civilians killed in so-called safe zones, hospitals reduced to rubble, and a population driven into starvation by a cruel blockade and forced displacement,” said Sacha Deshmukh, chief executive of Amnesty International UK.

“This judgment does not change the facts on the ground, nor does it absolve the UK government of its responsibilities under international law.”

The two judges said the case was not about whether the UK should supply arms and other military equipment to Israel – because the government had decided it should not.

They were being asked to decide on a particular issue: whether the UK “must withdraw from a specific multilateral defence collaboration” because of the prospect that some UK-manufactured parts may be supplied to Israel and used in contravention of international law in the conflict in Gaza.

“Under our constitution, that acutely sensitive and political issue is a matter for the executive which is democratically accountable to parliament and ultimately to the electorate, not for the courts,” they ruled.

UK industry makes 15% of every F-35, according to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.

Oxfam, which provided evidence to the court, said: “It is unconscionable that the government would continue to license the sale of components for F-35 jets knowing that they are used to deliberately attack civilians in Gaza and destroy their means of survival, including vital water supplies.”

The case was brought by al-Haq, a group based in the Israel-occupied West Bank, and the Global Legal Action Network against the Department for Business and Trade.

The court said that Business Minister Jonathan Reynolds was “faced with the blunt choice of accepting the F-35 carve out or withdrawing from the F-35 programme and accepting all the defence and diplomatic consequences which would ensue”.

The government also argued pulling out of the defence programme could undermine US confidence in the UK and Nato.

But human rights groups argue that the global rule of law is under threat over Gaza.

“The atrocities we are witnessing in Gaza are precisely because governments don’t think the rules should apply to them,” said Yasmine Ahmed, UK director of Human Rights Watch.

“Judicial deference to the executive in this case has left the Palestinians in Gaza without access to the protections of international law, despite the government and the court acknowledging that there is a serious risk that UK equipment might be used to facilitate or carry out atrocities against them.”

The government says it will continue to keep its defence export licensing under review.

“The court has upheld this government’s thorough and lawful decision-making on this matter,” a spokesman said.

Lawyers for the human rights groups are considering if they can find grounds to appeal.

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.

Harvard says it has made “significant strides” to combat discrimination and “strongly disagrees” with the government’s findings.

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.

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 a statement, Harvard said that it had taken “substantive, proactive steps” to combat antisemitism on campus, and had made “significant strides to combat bigotry, hate and bias”.

“We are not alone in confronting this challenge and recognise that this work is ongoing,” the statement added.

Speaking at the White House on Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that negotiations between the administration and Harvard are taking place “behind closed doors”, without elaborating.

Leavitt added that incidents of antisemitism on campus are “facts that Harvard cannot dispute”.

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, the university president apologised for “moments in which we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community”.

The university has also taken a number of steps to address the issue, including facilitating dialogue problems, expanding non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies and enhancing antisemitism training.

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.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order to end US sanctions against Syria, which the White House said was a move to support the country’s “path to stability and peace”.

The sanctions, which blocked any foreign financing, were imposed on the government of Bashar al-Assad, who was overthrown by rebels in December.

The White House said it would monitor the new Syrian government’s actions including “taking concrete steps toward normalising ties with Israel” as well as “addressing foreign terrorists” and “banning Palestinian terrorist groups”.

Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani said the move would “lift the obstacle” to economic recovery and open the country to the international community.

However the US has maintained sanctions on Assad and his associates as well as the Islamic State group and Iranian proxies.

Trump said he would lift sanctions on Syria in May, before he met the country’s new president, former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in Riyadh. The announcement sparked celebrations in the streets of Damascus.

Sharaa’s Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – which led the overthrow of Assad – was al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria until he severed ties in 2016. HTS is still designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN, US and UK.

Monday’s executive order directs Secretary of State Marco Rubio “to review” HTS’s designation. It also says that the US wants the new Syrian government to take over responsibility for detention camps in north-eastern Syria where Islamic State prisoners are being held.

Earlier this year, Rubio called for Syria’s transitional authorities to be supported, warning that a failure to achieve economic progress could lead to a “full-scale civil war of epic proportions”.

Ninety percent of Syria’s population were left under the poverty line when the Assad regime was ousted at the end of 13 years of devastating civil war.

Syria’s new leader has promised to protect the country’s ethnic minorities. However, the mass killings of hundreds of civilians from Assad’s minority Alawite sect in the western coastal region in March, during clashes between the new security forces and Assad loyalists, has hardened fears among minority communities.

There have also been deadly clashes between Islamist armed factions, security forces and fighters from the Druze religious minority. And in June at least 25 people were killed in a suicide attack on a church in Damascus.

• ‘We’re not safe here anymore’ – Syria’s Christians fear for future after devastating church attack

Ahead of Monday’s signing, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters it Trump was making good on his commitment to support Syria’s stability and peace.

“This is another promise made and promise kept by this president to promote peace and stability in the region,” she added.

The US Special Envoy for Syria Thomas Barrack told reporters that cancelling the sanctions regime had been the “culmination of a very tedious, detailed, excruciating process of, how do you unwrap these sanctions.”

“Syria needs to be given a chance, and that’s what’s happened,” he added.

More than 600,000 people were killed and 12 million others forced from their homes during former president Assad’s rule.

After his daughter fell from the fourth deck of a 14-deck Disney Cruise ship on Sunday afternoon, a father jumped into the ocean to try to save her, according to witnesses.

Videos on social media showed passengers cheering as the two were safely recovered by a rescue boat. They were picked up after treading water for 10 minutes, according to witnesses.

The girl appeared to fall when her father took her picture against a railing, witnesses said. A man overboard alert was broadcast on the ship, and crew rushed to recover them.

“The ship was moving quickly, so quickly, it’s crazy how quickly the people became tiny dots in the sea, and then you lost sight of them,” passenger Laura Amador said.

“The captain slowed the ship and turned it around, and then they deployed a tender ship with people on it to go get them, and we saw them rescue the dad and daughter,” she told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The 4,000-person capacity Disney Dream, was returning to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after sailing for four days around the Bahamas.

Disney confirmed in a statement that two passengers were rescued, but offered few details about what occurred.

“The Crew aboard the Disney Dream swiftly rescued two guests from the water,” a Disney Cruise Line spokesperson said. “We commend our Crew Members for their exceptional skills and prompt actions, which ensured the safe return of both guests to the ship within minutes.

“We watched it, you could see two little things…it was crazy, it was horrific,” passenger Gar Frantz told NBC News, describing how he witnessed the two enter the ocean and nearly disappear into the horizon.

The incident took place on the last day of the cruise, and the ship returned to port in Florida as normal.

While it is rare for passengers to fall from cruise ships, rescues are not often successful when they do.

According to a Cruise Lines International Association report from 2019, 25 people fell overboard that year from cruise ships and only nine were saved from the water.

There’s a saying that Robert F Kennedy Jr is very fond of. He used it on the day he was confirmed as US health secretary. “A healthy person has a thousand dreams, a sick person only has one,” he said as he stood in the Oval Office. “60% of our population has only one dream – that they get better.”

The most powerful public health official in the US has made it his mission to tackle what he describes as an epidemic of chronic illness in America, a catch-all term that covers everything from obesity and diabetes to heart disease.

His diagnosis that the US is experiencing an epidemic of ill health is a view shared by many healthcare experts in the country.

But Kennedy also has a history of promoting unfounded health conspiracies, from the suggestion that Covid-19 targeted and spared certain ethnic groups to the idea that chemicals in tap water could be making children transgender.

And after taking office, he slashed thousands of jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services and eliminated whole programmes at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

“On the one hand, it’s extraordinarily exciting to have a federal official take on chronic disease,” says Marion Nestle, a retired professor of public health at New York University. “On the other, the dismantling of the federal public health apparatus cannot possibly help with the agenda.”

Kennedy is reviled by parts of the medical and scientific communities. He was described to me as an “evil nihilist” by Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University.

But even some of Kennedy’s critics accept that he is bringing drive and ambition to areas of healthcare that have been neglected. Is it possible that the man who attracts so much criticism – and in some quarters, hate – might actually start making America healthy again?

There’s one industry that Kennedy had set his sights on long before joining the Trump administration: multinational food companies have, he has said, poisoned American children with artificial additives already banned in other countries.

“We have a generation of kids who are swimming around in a toxic soup right now,” he claimed on Fox News last year.

His first target was food colourings, with a promise to phase out the use of petroleum-based dyes by the end of 2026.

Chemicals, with names like ‘Green No. 3’ and ‘Red No. 40’, have been linked to hyperactivity and behavioural issues in children, and cancer in some animal studies.

“What’s happening in this administration is really interesting,” says Vani Hari, a food blogger and former Democrat who is now an influential voice in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. “MAHA is all about how do we get people off processed food, and one way to do that is to regulate the chemicals companies use.”

There are some signs this pressure may be paying off.

The food giant PepsiCo, for example, said in a recent trading update that Lays crisps and Tostitos snacks “will be out of artificial colours by the end of this year”.

Kennedy struck a voluntary agreement with the food industry but it only came after individual states from California to West Virginia had already started introducing their own laws.

“In the case of food dyes, companies will have to act because states are banning them [anyway] and they won’t want to have to formulate separate products for separate states,” says Prof Nestle, an author and longtime critic of the industry.

More recently Kennedy has signalled he backs a radical food bill in Texas that could target additives in some products ranging from sweets, to cereals and fizzy drinks

Packets may soon have to carry a high-contrast label stating, “WARNING: This product contains an ingredient that is not recommended for human consumption by the appropriate authority in Australia, Canada, the European Union, or the United Kingdom.”

The Consumer Brands Association, which represents some of the largest food manufacturers, opposes this, saying the ingredients used in the US food supply are safe and have been rigorously studied.

It’s difficult to imagine that kind of regulation could ever be signed off in a state like Texas without the political backing of Kennedy and President Trump.

“He can’t change everything in a short amount of time, but I think the issue of food dyes will soon be history,” says Ms Hari, who testified before the Senate on this subject last year.

But others worry that the flurry of announcements on additives is tinkering around the edges of what is a much wider problem.

“While some of these individual actions are important, they are a drop in the ocean in the larger context of chronic disease,” argues Nicola Hawley, professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health. “There is a focus on personal choice and access to natural food, but that completely ignores the big, systematic and structural barriers [to healthy eating] like poverty and really aggressive marketing of junk food to children.”

The US government, for example, still heavily subsidises crops including corn and soya beans, key ingredients in processed foods.

Kennedy is now updating the US national dietary guidelines, an important document used to shape everything from school meals to assistance programmes for the elderly. A reduction in added sugars and a switch to more locally sourced whole foods is expected. Plus he has called on states to ban millions of Americans from using food stamps, a welfare benefit, to buy junk food or sugar-sweetened drinks.

He has also backed local officials who want to stop adding fluoride to drinking water, describing it as a “dangerous neurotoxin”. It is used in some countries, including in parts of the US, to prevent tooth decay, and whilst there is still debate about the possible health effects, the NHS says a review of the risks has found “no convincing evidence” to support any concerns. Other fluoride research has found the mineral only has detrimental health effects at extremely high levels.

Prof Hawley also argues there is a tension between Kennedy’s “important message” on food and chronic disease, and what she feels is a lack of policies backed by solid scientific evidence.

“You’ve got this challenge of him drifting into misinformation about the links between additives and chronic disease, or environmental risk factors,” she argues. “And that really just undermines the science.”

That tension is even clearer when it comes to another of Kennedy’s big concerns.

Vaccines are still listed on the CDC website as one of the great public health achievements of the last century, alongside family planning and tobacco control. They prevent countless cases of disease and disability each year, and save millions of lives, according to the American Medical Association.

Kennedy, though, is the best known vaccine sceptic in the country. The activist group he ran for eight years, Children’s Health Defense, repeatedly questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccination.

In 2019 he described the disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield as the “most unfairly maligned person in modern history” and told a crowd in Washington that “any just society” would be building statues of him.

Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register in 2010 after his research falsely linked the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine to autism, leading to a spike in measles cases in England and some other countries.

Over the last year, Kennedy has repeatedly insisted he is not “anti-vax” and will not be “taking away anybody’s vaccines”. Faced with a deadly measles outbreak in unvaccinated children in west Texas, he posted that the MMR was “the most effective way to prevent the spread of the disease”.

In other comments though, he described vaccination as a “personal choice” and emphasised alternative treatments such as vitamin A supplements.

A huge deal with the drugmaker Moderna to develop a vaccine to combat bird flu in humans was scrapped, and new rules were brought in which could mean some vaccines need extra testing before they can be updated each winter.

In May, Kennedy posted a video on social media saying the government would no longer endorse Covid vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.

However, some doctors point out that reducing eligibility would simply bring the US into line with other countries, including the UK, where free Covid boosters are restricted to those over 75 or with weakened immune systems.

“They are really just aligning themselves with everyone else, which is not in any way outrageous,” says Prof Adam Finn, a paediatric doctor and one of the UK’s leading experts on vaccines.

Then in June, Kennedy suddenly sacked all 17 members of the influential expert committee, which advises the CDC on vaccine eligibility. He accused the panel of being “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and rubber-stamping new vaccines without proper scrutiny.

A new, much smaller, committee handpicked by the administration now has the power to change, or even drop, critical recommendations to immunise Americans for certain diseases, as well as shape the childhood vaccination programme.

“It underscores just how much we are backsliding now,” says Dr Amesh Adalja, the infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University. “I think increasingly the panel will become irrelevant if RFK Jr is able to shape it the way he wants to.”

The new panel made its first decision last week, voting to stop recommending a small number of flu vaccines that still contain the preservative thimerosal, something Kennedy wrote a book about in 2015.

His critics say that a new era of vaccine policy has arrived in the US. Whilst his supporters say no subject, including vaccine safety, should be considered off-limits.

“Everything has to be open to discussion and Bobby Kennedy is not anti-vaccine, he’s anti-corruption,” argues Tony Lyons, who co-founded the political action committee that supported his independent presidential campaign.

“It’s about being pro-science, pro-capitalism, and believing you have an obligation to the public to do a thorough job of researching any product that is put in the arms of 40 million children.”

Weeks after Kennedy took office news emerged that the CDC would open a research project into the link between vaccines and autism.

Since Wakefield’s now-discredited Lancet paper in 1998, which linked autism to the MMR vaccine given to children, there have been numerous international studies that have looked at this in detail and found no reputable link.

“There is nothing to debate any more, it has been settled by science,” says Eric Fombonne, an autism researcher and professor emeritus at Oregon Health & Science University.

Kennedy, though, has hired David Geier, a noted vaccine sceptic, to look again at the data.

Today autism is widely understood to be a lifelong spectrum condition. It can include those with high support needs who are non-speaking, and those with above-average intelligence who might struggle with social interaction or communication.

Most researchers believe a rise in cases over decades is down to a broadening in the way children with autism are defined, as well as improved awareness, understanding and screening.

But in April, Kennedy dismissed that idea, describing autism as “preventable”. He blamed a mysterious environmental trigger for the increase in eight-year-olds being diagnosed.

“This is coming from an environmental toxin… [in] our air, our water, our medicines, our food,” he said.

He pledged a massive research effort to find that cause by September and “eliminate those exposures”.

Dr Fombonne strongly disputes this. “It is nonsensical and shows a complete absence of understanding,” he says. “We have known for many years that autism has a strong genetic component.”

In the same speech, Kennedy said that many autistic children will never “pay taxes, never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

Many in the autism community are angry. “What we’re seeing here is a fear-based rhetoric and [a] misleading narrative that is causing harm and perpetuating stigma,” says Kristyn Roth from the Autism Society of America.

But some parents of autistic children are more supportive.

Emily May, a writer who is the mother of a child with autism, wrote in The New York Times that she found herself “nodding along as Mr Kennedy spoke about the grim realities of profound autism”.

“His remarks echo the reality and pain of a subset of parents of children with autism who feel left out of much of the conversation,” she wrote.

The administration has since watered down that promise to find the reasons for autism by September but it is still promising detailed findings of its research by March 2026.

Ultimately, Robert Kennedy has only been in the job a matter of months. Already though he’s asking some big questions – particularly about chronic disease – which have never been asked in the same way by a health secretary before.

For the first time that issue has both political attention and bipartisan support in the US.

He is clearly not afraid to take on what he perceives to be vested interests in the food and drug industries, and he is still firmly supported by President Trump.

Tony Lyons, who has published books by Kennedy, calls him “uniquely qualified” for the most powerful job in US public health. “He’s a corruption fighter. He has seen what all these kinds of companies do, not just pharmaceutical companies but food companies, and he wants them to do a better job,” he says.

Robert Kennedy’s background as an environmental lawyer taking on big business and the establishment has clearly shaped the views he holds today.

But Jerold Mande, a former federal food policy advisor in three administrations, worries that Kennedy’s own views and biases will mean some of the solutions he’s reaching for are predetermined and unsupported by the evidence.

Now a professor of nutrition at Harvard, Prof Mande describes Kennedy as an imperfect messenger and says he has “great concerns” about the administration’s approach to aspects of public health, from tobacco control to vaccination, where there is “no question that what he’s doing is going to result in enormous harm.”

“At a high level, I’m optimistic but you still need to come up with the right answers, and those answers can only be found through science,” says Prof Mande.

“We now have a shot and he’s provided that by making it a priority. But it’s how you use that shot that’s going to determine whether it’s a success or not. And that is where the jury is still out.”

The US Senate is holding a marathon vote on a sprawling budget that is critical to President Donald Trump’s agenda, but the spending plan hangs in the balance after weeks of fraught negotiations.

Republicans – who control both chambers of Congress – are split over how much to cut welfare programmes in order to extend tax breaks in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s former close aid Elon Musk has again attacked the legislation, which the president’s party is sprinting to pass by 4 July.

If measures clear the Senate, it will have to go back for another vote to the House of Representatives, which passed its own version of the bill last month by a single vote.

Senators are currently arguing for or against adding amendments to the nearly 1,000-page bill in a process called “vote-a-rama”, which could entail up to 20 hours of debate.

The session is expected to continue through the night into Tuesday morning and the legislation, if passed, would also reduce some welfare programmes and increase the national debt.

Elon Musk has stepped up his criticism of the US president’s tax and spending bill, condemning it as “insane”.

He vowed to challenge any Republican who “campaigned on reducing government spending” and then “immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history”.

The national debt currently sits at $36 trillion, according to the treasury department. If passed, the bill would add $3.3tn to that debt, according to new estimates.

Musk also, once again, threatened to set up a new political party.

Trump suggested Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency – which Musk used to head – should take a look at cutting the subsidies that Tesla CEO’s companies have received.

“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

On Monday, senators made their way to the Capitol chamber floor for various amendment votes, then back to their private meeting rooms where they hashed out grievances outside the view of reporters.

An amendment to the proposal for Medicaid cuts recently put forward by Florida Senator Rick Scott could cause roughly 20 million Americans to lose their health insurance coverage, according to one estimate.

“The thing that [Scott’s] bill doesn’t do is it doesn’t take effect until 2031. So I’m not sure how you can make the argument that it’s going to kick any people off of health insurance tomorrow,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.

Democrats, who have repeatedly denounced the bill, particularly for cutting health insurance for millions of poorer Americans, are expected to use all 10 of their allotted hours of debate, while Republicans probably won’t.

Democrat Senator Adam Schiff called the bill “terrible” and told the BBC he was unsure if Senate Republicans would meet Trump’s Friday deadline.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is “confident” the bill would be passed and still expects it on his desk by 4 July.

On Sunday, Democrats used a political manoeuvre to stall the bill’s progress, calling on Senate clerks to read all 940 pages of the bill aloud, a process that took 16 hours.

It followed weeks of public discussion and the Senate narrowly moving on the budget bill in a 51-49 vote over the weekend.

Two Republicans sided with Democrats in voting 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 that Trump and Republicans made to 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 White House reacted angrily to Tillis’ comments, with Leavitt saying Tillis was “just wrong”.

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul objected to the debt increase, and cuts to Medicaid.

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

During the full Senate vote on the bill – expected 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 would 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.

Fiscal hawks of the Republican-led House Freedom Caucus have threatened to torpedo the Senate version over budget disagreements.

The Senate proposal adds over $650bn to the national deficit, the group said in a post on social media on Monday.

“That’s not fiscal responsibility,” they said. “It’s not what we agreed to.”

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.

Proposed cuts could strip nearly 12 million Americans of their health insurance coverage and add $3.3tn (£2.4tn) in debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan federal agency.

About 1,200 children are being urged to undergo testing for infectious diseases after a Melbourne childcare worker was charged with a string of offences including child rape.

Joshua Dale Brown was arrested in May and faces 70 charges, with police alleging he abused eight children – including a five-month-old – between April 2022 and January 2023.

The 26-year-old has worked at 20 childcare centres since 2017, prompting local health authorities to notify parents of any children who may have been in his care, recommending many be tested as a “precaution”.

Brown, who is yet to enter a plea to the charges, has been remanded in custody and is due to appear at Melbourne Magistrates Court in September.

The eight children – all under the age of two- who police allege were harmed attended the Creative Gardens Early Learning Centre in Point Cook, in Melbourne’s south-west.

Brown is accused of child rape and sexual assault offenses, as well as producing and transmitting child abuse material.

Detectives are also investigating alleged offences by Brown at a childcare centre in Essendon “as a priority”.

At a press conference, authorities said he had a valid working with children check and was employed as a fill-in childcare worker when he was arrested.

Brown was not known to them before the investigation, they said, adding that they believed he acted alone and that the alleged offending only happened in Victoria.

Revealing Mr Brown’s identity was an “unusual decision”, Victoria Police’s Janet Stevenson said, but this is a “unique” case.

“It’s very important to ensure that every parent out there that has a child in childcare knows who he is and where he worked,” she said.

Chief Health Officer Christian McGrath would not say if Mr Brown had tested positive to sexually transmitted infections, but said the manner of the alleged offending meant some children may be asked to undergo screening for infectious diseases.

About 2,600 families had been contacted, with 1,200 children recommended for testing, she said, adding that the infections that the children may have been exposed to can be treated with antibiotics.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan said she was “sickened” by the allegations.

“My heart breaks for the families who are living every parent’s worst nightmare,” she said.

Families across Victoria will be “angry and frightened” by the case, Allan said, adding that a dedicated website has been set up for those impacted.

Donald Trump’s move to cut most of the US funding towards foreign humanitarian aid could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to research published in The Lancet medical journal.

A third of those at risk of premature deaths are children, the research finds.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March that President Trump’s administration had cancelled over 80% of all programmes at the US Agency for International Development, or USAID.

“For many low- and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict,” Davide Rasella, who co-authored the Lancet report, said in a statement.

The funding cuts “risk abruptly halting – and even reversing – two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations,” added Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.

The report comes as dozens of world leaders are meeting in the Spanish city of Seville this week for a United Nations-led aid conference, the biggest one in a decade.

Looking back over data from 133 nations, the team of researchers estimated that USAID funding had prevented 91 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021.

They also used modelling to project how funding being slashed by 83% – the figure announced by the US government earlier this year – could affect death rates.

The cuts could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030, the projections found. That number included over 4.5 million children under the age of five – or around 700,000 child deaths a year.

The Trump administration, previously led by billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, aimed to shrink the federal workforce. It has also accused USAID of supporting liberal projects.

The US, by far the world’s largest humanitarian aid provider, has operated in more than 60 countries, largely through contractors.

According to Rubio, there were still approximately 1,000 remaining programmes that would be administered “more effectively” under the US State Department and in consultation with Congress.

Still, the situation on the ground has not been improving, according to UN workers.

Last month, a UN official told the BBC that hundreds of thousands of people were “slowly starving” in Kenyan refugee camps after US funding cuts reduced food rations to their lowest ever levels.

At a hospital in Kakuma, in northwestern Kenya, the BBC witnessed a baby who could barely move and was showing signs of malnutrition, including having parts of her skin wrinkled and peeling.

More than 130 charities and other NGOs are calling for the controversial Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to be shut down.

Over 500 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid since the GHF started operating in late May, following Israel’s three-month blockade of Gaza, the organisations said. Almost 4,000 have been injured.

The organisations, including Oxfam, Save the Children and Amnesty, say Israeli forces and armed groups “routinely” open fire on Palestinians seeking aid.

Israel denies its soldiers deliberately shoot at aid recipients, and has defended the GHF system, saying it provides direct assistance to people who need it, bypassing Hamas interference.

Tuesday’s joint statement from some of the world’s biggest charities says the foundation is violating all norms of humanitarian work, including by forcing two million people into overcrowded and militarized zones where they face daily gunfire.

Since the GHF started operating in Gaza, there have been almost daily reports of Israeli forces killing people seeking aid at these sites, from medics, eyewitnesses and the Hamas-run health ministry.

The GHF aid distribution system replaced 400 aid distribution points that were operating during the temporary Israel-Hamas ceasefire with just four military-controlled distribution sites, three in the far south-west of Gaza and one in central Gaza.

“Today, Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families,” the statement says.

“Orphaned children and caregivers are among the dead, with children harmed in over half of the attacks on civilians at these sites.”

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

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

The Israeli military has said it is examining reports of civilians being “harmed” while approaching GHF aid distribution centres.

According to a report by Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Friday, unnamed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed civilians near aid distribution sites to drive them away or disperse them.

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

The Israeli military also denied allegations of deliberately firing at Palestinians waiting to collect humanitarian aid.

In a statement on Monday, the IDF said it was reorganising access to the sites and this would include new “fencing” and signposting, including directional and warning signs in order to improve the operational response.

But the 130-plus aid organisations said GHF “is not a humanitarian response” for the Gazans.

“Amidst severe hunger and famine-like conditions, many families tell us they are now too weak to compete for food rations,” the groups said.

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.

Sixteen French regions, including Paris, have been placed on red alert for Tuesday, the country’s highest, while 68 others are on orange alert.

On Monday, 84 of 96 mainland regions were under an orange alert, which France’s Climate Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher called 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 have warned 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.

France’s red alert will come into effect at 12:00 local time on Tuesday.

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

• 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 were just shy of being one of the hottest June days ever on Monday.

The highest UK temperature of the day was recorded at Heathrow Airport in London at 33.1C. Meanwhile, Wimbledon recorded a temperature of 32.9C, the tennis tournament’s hottest opening day on record.

Meanwhile, heat alerts across Spain, which is on course to record its hottest June on record, remained in place.

“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.

In Germany, the country’s meteorological service warned that temperatures could reach almost 38C on Tuesday and Wednesday – further potentially record-breaking temperatures.

The heatwave 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.

In Turkey, rescuers evacuated more than 50,000 people – mostly from the resort city of Izmir in the country’s west – as firefighters continued to put out hundreds of wildfires that had broken out in recent days.

The fires were fuelled by winds of 120km/h (75 mph) and destroyed at least 20 homes.

Wildfires also broke out in Croatia, where red heat warnings are in place for coastal areas. An extreme temperature alert was issued for neighbouring Montenegro.

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, and the meteorological service warned on Monday that “severe and extreme drought conditions prevail” in much of the country.

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 environment. 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 are the main cause of 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.

Millions of fans are bidding farewell to Squid Game, the Emmy award-winning TV series that has topped Netflix’s charts and become a symbol of South Korea’s ascendance in Hollywood.

The fictional show follows cash-strapped players as they battle it out in a series of traditional Korean children’s games – with a gory twist, as losers are killed in every round.

Squid Game has sucked in viewers since 2021 with its candy-coloured sets and bleak messages about capitalism and humanity. And with its third and final season released last Friday, fans across the world are returning to reality.

Some South Koreans, however, have found themselves reflecting on the society that inspired the dystopian series.

“I feel like Squid Game 3 revealed the true feelings and raw inner thoughts of Korean people,” reads one YouTube comment under a clip from season three.

“It reflected reality so well like how in real life, at work, it’s just full of ruthless people ready to crush you. This show nailed it.”

Squid Game was born against the backdrop of cut-throat competition and widening inequality in South Korean society – where people are too stressed to have children and a university placement exam is seen as the defining moment of a person’s life.

The diverse characters of the show – which include a salaryman, a migrant factory worker and a cryptocurrency scammer – are drawn from figures many South Koreans would find familiar.

The backstory of protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a car factory worker who was laid off and later went on strike, was also inspired by a real-life event: a 2009 strike at the SsangYong Motor factory, where workers clashed with riot police over widespread layoffs. It’s remembered today as one of the country’s largest labour confrontations.

“The drama may be fictional, but it feels more realistic than reality itself,” Jeong Cheol Sang, a film enthusiast, wrote in his review of Squid Game’s final season.

“Precarious labour, youth unemployment, broken families – these aren’t just plot devices, but the very struggles we face every day.”

Those darker messages seemed to be brushed to the side on Saturday night, as a massive parade celebrated the release of the blockbuster’s final season. A giant killer doll and dozens of faceless guards in tracksuits – among other motifs of the deadly games – marched down central Seoul to much fanfare.

For South Korea’s leaders, Squid Game has become a symbol of K-drama’s success on the global stage. It is also part of a string of successes – along with K-pop act BTS and Oscar-winning film Parasite – on which newly elected president Lee Jae Myung wants to capitalise as he sets his sights on exporting K-culture far and wide.

There are signs the Squid Game hype may even go further: the show’s final scene, where Cate Blanchett plays a Korean game with a man in a Los Angeles alley, has fuelled rumours of an American spinoff.

The series ended on an “open-ended” note, Lee Jung-jae, the star of the series, told the BBC. “So it poses a lot of questions to the audience. I hope people will talk about those questions, ponder upon themselves about the questions and try to find an answer.”

In the show’s later seasons, viewers follow Gi-hun’s quest to bring down the eponymous games, which are packaged as entertainment for a group of wealthy VIPs.

But his rebellion fails, and by the end Gi-hun is forced to sacrifice himself to save another player’s baby – an ending that has polarised viewers.

Some argued that Gi-hun’s actions did not square with the dark portrait of reality that showrunners had developed – one that had so well captured the ruthless elements of human nature.

“The characters’ excessive altruism was disturbing – almost to the point of seeming unhinged,” reads a comment on popular South Korean discussion site Nate Pann. “It felt like a fake, performative kind of kindness, prioritising strangers over their own families for no real reason.”

But others said Gi-hun’s death was in line with the show’s commitment to uncomfortable truths.

“This perfectly describes humanity and the message of the show,” another commented on YouTube.

“As much as we wanted to see Gi-Hun win, kill the frontman and the VIPs, and stop the games once and for all before riding off into the sunset, that’s just not the world we live in and it’s certainly not the one that Gi-Hun lived in.”

Hwang Dong-hyuk, the show’s creator, told reporters on Monday that he understood the “mixed reaction” to the final season.

“In season one there were no expectations, so the shock and freshness worked. But by seasons two and three, expectations were sky high, and that makes all the difference,” Hwang said on Monday.

“Game fans wanted more games, others wanted deeper messages, and some were more invested in the characters. Everyone expected something different.”

For some, at least, Gi-hun’s final choice offered a hopeful reflection of reality: that even in times of adversity, kindness can prevail.

“That paradox – of cruelty and warmth coexisting – is what made the finale so moving,” said Mr Jeong, the film blogger. “Watching the Squid Game made me reflect on myself. As someone who has worked in education and counselling, I’ve questioned whether kindness can really change anything.”

“That’s why I stayed with this story. That’s why I call this ending beautiful.”

Four employees of a satirical magazine in Turkey have been arrested for publishing a cartoon that appears to show the Prophet Muhammad – a sacred religious figure whose depiction is forbidden in Islam.

Turkey’s interior minister Ali Yerlikaya condemned LeMan magazine’s drawing as “shameless”, announcing that its editor-in-chief, graphic designer, institutional director and cartoonist had been detained.

In a post on the social media site X, LeMan denied its cartoon was a caricature of Muhammad, saying “the work does not refer to the Prophet Muhammed in any way”.

Riot police were deployed in Istanbul on Monday as hundreds of people protested against the publication.

Protesters gathered outside LeMan’s offices chanting slogans such as “tooth for tooth, blood for blood, revenge, revenge”.

A correspondent for the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency reported seeing rubber bullets and tear gas being fired to disperse the crowd.

Turkey’s minister of justice said an investigation had been initiated by the chief public prosecutor’s office for “publicly insulting religious values”.

“The caricature or any form of visual representation of our Prophet not only harms our religious values but also damages societal peace,” Yilmaz Tunc wrote on X.

“Necessary legal steps will be taken without delay” against LeMan’s journalists, he added.

Yerlikaya also shared videos of the four employees being arrested over the “vile drawing”.

Arrest warrants have also been issued for other members of the magazine’s senior management.

Images of the cartoon have appeared on social media, which show two characters with wings floating in the sky over a city under siege.

One of the characters is pictured saying “Peace be upon you, I’m Muhammed”, and the other replying, “Peace be upon you, I’m Musa”.

LeMan apologised to “well-intentioned readers who feel hurt” but defended its work and rejected allegations that the cartoon was a depiction of Muhammad.

“The cartoonist wanted to portray the righteousness of the oppressed Muslim people by depicting a Muslim killed by Israel, and he never intended to insult religious values,” it said in a statement on X.

“We do not accept the stain that is cast on us because there is no depiction of our Prophet. You have to be very malicious to interpret the cartoon in this way.”

LeMan’s editor-in-chief Tuncay Akgun, who is currently in Paris, told AFP the work had been misinterpreted and the magazine would “never take such a risk”.

He added that the backlash draws “similarities with Charlie Hebdo” which is “very intentional and very worrying”, referencing the 2015 attack on the French satirical magazine after it published a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.

Charlie Hebdo’s offices were stormed by gunmen who killed 12 people and was one of the worst security crises in France’s history.

A 20-year-old Idaho man who fatally shot firefighters after luring them into an ambush once dreamed of becoming a fireman himself, police say.

Two firefighters, Frank Harwood and John Morrison, were killed and a third, Dave Tysdal, was injured after Wess Roley shot at them as they arrived at a blaze at Canfield Mountain, just north of Coeur d’Alene, on Sunday, officials say.

Authorities say Roley deliberately lit the fire to send emergency services to the area. The motive for the attack remains unclear.

After an hours-long standoff, a police Swat team discovered a dead man – identified as Roley – close to where the attack took place.

Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris told a news conference on Monday that Roley had once aspired to be a fireman.

The suspect’s grandfather also told NBC News his grandson had “actually really respected law enforcement”.

Dale Roley said his grandson “had been in contact to get a job with a fire department”, and “wanted to be part of a team that he sort of idolised”.

“He loved firefighters,” said Mr Roley. “It didn’t make sense that he was shooting firefighters. Maybe he got rejected or something.”

Sheriff Norris said the homeless suspect had attacked fire crews after they asked him to move his vehicle, which he had been living in.

“There was an interaction with the firefighters,” Norris said. “It has something to do with his vehicle being parked where it was.”

Investigators believe Roley used a flint that was found near his body to deliberately start the fire.

“This was a total ambush,” Norris told reporters. “These firefighters did not have a chance.”

One firefighter who was killed worked for the city’s fire service, while another worked for Kootenai County Fire and Rescue.

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

Idaho’s governor ordered flags be flown at half-staff on Monday to honour the firefighters who were killed.

The first report of a fire in the mountainside community was made around 13:21 PDT (20:21 GMT), which was followed 40 minutes later by reports firefighters were being shot at, Norris said.

The so-called Nettleton Gulch Fire grew to 26 acres and continued to burn on Monday, Norris said. No structures are threatened, and officials hope to have the blaze extinguished by Monday night.

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

Norris said authorities believed the suspect used a high-powered rifle to fire rapidly at first responders, with officers initially unsure of the number of assailants involved.

A shotgun has been recovered, and several bullets or fragments possibly from a rifle have been found. Officials say more guns may be hidden on the mountain.

After an hours-long barrage of gunfire, the suspect was found by tracing his mobile phone on the popular hiking trail, which officials said was being used by hundreds on that Sunday afternoon.

“It appears that he shot himself,” Norris told journalists.

The sheriff said the suspect had had five “very minor” interactions with police since moving to Idaho in 2024. He said that in one case, he was found to be trespassing at a restaurant by police.

In order to prevent the suspect from fleeing, officials disabled his vehicle and “pushed it off the mountain”, the sheriff said. They have not yet been able to access the vehicle for a more thorough search.

Several fire department vehicles also had their tyres flattened to prevent the suspect from driving away in one of them during the chaotic manhunt.

Norris ruled out the suspect having “any nexus to Islamic jihad”, which he said had been falsely suggested on social media.

According to a social media post from his mother, the suspect moved from Arizona to Idaho in 2023 to work for his father’s tree-trimming company.

She wrote in October 2024 that her son was “doing great living in Idaho”.