US deports eight men to South Sudan after legal battle
The US has deported eight people to South Sudan following a legal battle that saw them diverted to Djibouti for several weeks.
The men – convicted of crimes including murder, sexual assault and robbery – had either completed or were near the end of their prison sentences.
Only one of the eight is from South Sudan. The rest are nationals of Myanmar, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and Mexico. US officials said most of their home countries had refused to accept them.
The Trump administration is working to expand its deportations to third countries.
It has deported people to El Salvador and Costa Rica. Rwanda has confirmed discussions and Benin, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini and Moldova have been named in media reports as potential recipient countries.
A photo provided by the department of homeland security to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, showed the men on the plane, their hands and feet shackled.
Officials did not say whether the South Sudanese government had detained them or what their fate would be.
Edmund Yakani, who runs a civil society organisation in South Sudan, told the BBC World Service he was allowed to briefly see the eight people, but did not get a chance to speak to them.
The eight were in a civilian facility in the capital Juba under the watch of police and the national security service, Mr Yakani said, adding they were not in handcuffs and appeared to be in good condition.
The status of the group was still unclear and he hopes the government provides clarity on Monday, he added.
South Sudan remains unstable and is on the brink of civil war, with the US State Department warning against travel because of “crime, kidnapping and armed conflict”.
The eight had initially been flown out of the US in May, but their plane was diverted to Djibouti after US district judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts blocked the deportation. He had ruled that migrants being deported to third countries must be given notice and a chance to speak with an asylum officer.
But last week, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration and overturned Judge Murphy’s ruling. On Thursday, the Supreme Court confirmed that the judge could no longer require due process hearings, allowing the deportations to proceed.
Lawyers then asked another judge to intervene but he ultimately ruled only Judge Murphy had jurisdiction. Judge Murphy then said he had no authority to stop the removals due to the Supreme Court’s “binding” decision.
Tricia McLaughlin from the US Department of Homeland Security called the South Sudan deportation a victory over “activist judges”.
Earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked all visas for South Sudanese passport holders, citing the country’s past refusal to accept deported nationals.
Elon Musk says he is launching new political party
Elon Musk says he is launching a new political party, weeks after dramatically falling out with US President Donald Trump.
The billionaire announced on his social media platform X that he had set up the America Party, billing it as a challenge to the Republican and Democratic two-party system.
However, it is unclear if the party has been formally registered with US election authorities. Musk, who was born outside of the US and is thus ineligible to run for the US presidency, does not say who will lead it.
He first raised the prospect of forming a party during his public feud with Trump, which saw him leave his role in the administration and engage in a vicious public spat with his former ally.
During that row, Musk posted a poll on X asking users if there should be a new political party in the US.
Referencing that poll in his post on Saturday, Musk wrote: “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!
“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.
“Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”
As of Saturday, the Federal Electoral Commission had not published documents indicating the party had been formally registered.
While there have been high-profile players outside the traditional two-party system in US politics, it is difficult for them to gain strong enough nationwide popularity to pose a real threat.
In the presidential election last year, candidates from the likes of Libertarian Party, the Green Party and the People’s Party all tried in vain to stop Trump or his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, from winning.
Musk was until recently a core supporter of Trump, dancing alongside him during election rallies last year and bringing his four-year-old son to meet Trump in the Oval Office.
He was also Trump’s key financial backer: Musk spent $250m (£187m) to help him regain office.
After the election, he was appointed to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which was tasked with identifying swingeing cuts in the federal budget.
His fallout with Trump began when he left the administration in May and publicly criticised Trump’s tax and spending plans.
The legislation – which Trump has called his “big, beautiful bill” – was narrowly passed by Congress and signed into law by the president this week.
The massive law includes huge spending commitments and tax cuts, and is estimated to add more than $3tn to the US deficit over the next decade.
Crucially for Musk, who owns electric-vehicle giant Tesla, Trump’s bill does not focus on green transition or subsidies for products like Teslas.
“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far,” Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, this week. “Without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa.”
Trump threatened to have Doge look into subsidies in favour of Musk’s companies, alluding also to the billionaire’s other businesses.
Musk also owns SpaceX, which launches rockets for the US government, and Starlink, which provides satellite service for US and European defence forces.
Israel sends negotiators to Gaza talks despite ‘unacceptable’ Hamas demands, PM says
Israel has decided to send a delegation to Qatar on Sunday for proximity talks with Hamas on the latest proposal for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he had accepted the invitation despite what he described as the “unacceptable” changes that Hamas wanted to make to a plan presented by mediators from Qatar, the US and Egypt.
On Friday night, Hamas said it had delivered a “positive response” to the proposal for a 60-day ceasefire and that it was ready for negotiations.
However, a Palestinian official said the group had sought amendments including a guarantee that hostilities would not resume if talks on a permanent truce failed.
In Gaza itself, the Hamas-run health ministry said on Sunday that 80 people killed in Israeli attacks had arrived at hospitals over the previous 24 hours.
Seven people were killed, including a doctor and his three children, when tents in the al-Mawasi area were bombed on Saturday, according to a hospital in the nearby city of Khan Younis.
On Saturday, two American employees of the controversial aid distribution organisation backed by Israel and the US – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – were wounded in what it said was a grenade attack at its site in the Khan Younis area.
The Israeli and US governments both blamed Hamas, which has not commented.
Late on Saturday, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement that “the changes that Hamas is seeking to make” to the ceasefire proposal were “unacceptable to Israel”.
But it added: “In light of an assessment of the situation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has directed that the invitation to proximity talks be accepted and that the contacts for the return of our hostages – on the basis of the Qatari proposal that Israel has agreed to – be continued. The negotiating team will leave tomorrow.”
Earlier, an Israeli official had briefed local media that there was “something to work with” in the way that Hamas had responded.
Mediators are likely to have their work cut out to bridge the remaining gaps at the indirect talks in Doha.
Watching them closely will be US President Donald Trump, who has been talking up the chances of an agreement in recent days.
On Friday, before he was briefed on Hamas’s response, he said it was “good” that the group was positive and that “there could be a Gaza deal next week”.
Trump is due to meet Netanyahu on Monday, and it is clear that he would very much like to be able to announce a significant breakthrough then.
The families of Israeli hostages and Palestinians in Gaza will also once again be holding their breath.
Hostages’ relatives and thousands of their supporters attended a rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday night to call for a comprehensive deal that would bring home all of the hostages.
Among those who spoke was Yechiel Yehoud. His daughter Arbel Yehoud was released from captivity during the last ceasefire, which Trump helped to broker before he took office and which collapsed when Israel resumed its offensive in March.
“President Trump, thank you for bringing our Arbel back to us. We will be indebted to you for the rest of our lives. Please don’t stop, please make a ‘big beautiful hostages deal’,” he said.
On Tuesday, the US president said that Israel had accepted the “necessary conditions” for a 60-day ceasefire, during which the parties would work to end the war.
The plan is believed to include the staggered release of 10 living Israeli hostages by Hamas and the bodies of 18 other hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Fifty hostages are still being held in Gaza, at least 20 of whom are believed to be alive.
The proposal also reportedly says sufficient quantities of aid would enter Gaza immediately with the involvement of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
A senior Palestinian official familiar with the talks told the BBC on Friday that Hamas was demanding aid be distributed exclusively by the UN and its partners, and that the GHF’s operations end immediately.
Another amendment demanded by Hamas was about Israeli troop withdrawals, according to the official.
The US proposal is believed to include phased Israeli pull-outs from parts of Gaza. But the official said Hamas wanted troops to return to the positions they held before the last ceasefire collapsed in March, when Israel resumed its offensive.
The official said Hamas also wanted a US guarantee that Israeli air and ground operations would not resume even if the ceasefire ended without a permanent truce.
The proposal is believed to say mediators will guarantee that serious negotiations will take place from day one, and that they can extend the ceasefire if necessary.
The Israeli prime minister has ruled out ending the war until all of the hostages are released and Hamas’s military and governing capabilities are destroyed.
Far-right members of his cabinet have also expressed their opposition to the proposed deal.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on Saturday that the only way to secure the return of the hostages was the “full conquest of the Gaza Strip, a complete halt to so-called ‘humanitarian’ aid, and the encouragement of emigration” of the Palestinian population.
The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 57,338 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
How Trump is using the ‘Madman Theory’ to try to change the world (and it’s working)
Asked last month whether he was planning to join Israel in attacking Iran, US President Donald Trump said “I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m going to do”.
He let the world believe he had agreed a two-week pause to allow Iran to resume negotiations. And then he bombed anyway.
A pattern is emerging: The most predictable thing about Trump is his unpredictability. He changes his mind. He contradicts himself. He is inconsistent.
“[Trump] has put together a highly centralised policy-making operation, arguably the most centralised, at least in the area of foreign policy, since Richard Nixon,” says Peter Trubowitz, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics.
“And that makes policy decisions more dependent on Trump’s character, his preferences, his temperament.”
Trump has put this to political use; he has made his own unpredictability a key strategic and political asset. He has elevated unpredictability to the status of a doctrine. And now the personality trait he brought to the White House is driving foreign and security policy.
It is changing the shape of the world.
Political scientists call this the Madman Theory, in which a world leader seeks to persuade his adversary that he is temperamentally capable of anything, to extract concessions. Used successfully it can be a form of coercion and Trump believes it is paying dividends, getting the US’s allies where he wants them.
But is it an approach that can work against enemies? And could its flaw be that rather than being a sleight of hand designed to fool adversaries, it is in fact based on well established and clearly documented character traits, with the effect that his behaviour becomes easier to predict?
Attacks, insults and embraces
Trump began his second presidency by embracing Russian President Vladimir Putin and attacking America’s allies. He insulted Canada by saying it should become the 51st state of the US.
He said he was prepared to consider using military force to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of America’s ally Denmark. And he said the US should retake ownership and control of the Panama Canal.
Article 5 of the Nato charter commits each member to come to the defence of all others. Trump threw America’s commitment to that into doubt. “I think Article 5 is on life support” declared Ben Wallace, Britain’s former defence secretary.
Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve said: “For now the trans-Atlantic alliance is over.”
A series of leaked text messages revealed the culture of contempt in Trump’s White House for European allies. “I fully share your loathing of European freeloaders,” US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told his colleagues, adding “PATHETIC”.
In Munich earlier this year, Trump’s Vice-President JD Vance said the US would no longer be the guarantor of European security.
That appeared to turn the page on 80 years of trans-Atlantic solidarity. “What Trump has done is raise serious doubts and questions about the credibility of America’s international commitments,” says Prof Trubowitz.
“Whatever understanding those countries [in Europe] have with the United States, on security, on economic or other matters, they’re now subject to negotiation at a moment’s notice.
“My sense is that most people in Trump’s orbit think that unpredictability is a good thing, because it allows Donald Trump to leverage America’s clout for maximum gain…
“This is one of his takeaways from negotiating in the world of real estate.”
Trump’s approach paid dividends. Only four months ago, Sir Keir Starmer told the House of Commons that Britain would increase defence and security spending from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5%.
Last month, at a Nato summit, that had increased to 5%, a huge increase, now matched by every other member of the Alliance.
The predictability of unpredictability
Trump is not the first American president to deploy an Unpredictability Doctrine. In 1968, when US President Richard Nixon was trying to end the war in Vietnam, he found the North Vietnamese enemy intractable.
“At one point Nixon said to his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, ‘you ought to tell the North Vietnamese negotiators that Nixon’s crazy and you don’t know what he’s going to do, so you better come to an agreement before things get really crazy’,” says Michael Desch, professor of international relations at Notre Dame University. “That’s the madman theory.”
Julie Norman, professor of politics at University College London, agrees that there is now an Unpredictability Doctrine.
“It’s very hard to know what’s coming from day to day,” she argues. “And that has always been Trump’s approach.”
Trump successfully harnessed his reputation for volatility to change the trans-Atlantic defence relationship. And apparently to keep Trump on side, some European leaders have flattered and fawned.
Last month’s Nato summit in The Hague was an exercise in obsequious courtship. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte had earlier sent President Trump (or “Dear Donald”) a text message, which Trump leaked.
“Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, it was truly extraordinary,” he wrote.
On the forthcoming announcement that all Nato members had agreed to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP, he continued: “You will achieve something NO president in decades could get done.”
Anthony Scaramucci, who previously served as Trump’s communications director in his first term, said: “Mr Rutte, he’s trying to embarrass you, sir. He’s literally sitting on Air Force One laughing at you.”
And this may prove to be the weakness at the heart of Trump’s Unpredictability Doctrine: their actions may be based on the idea that Trump craves adulation. Or that he seeks short-term wins, favouring them over long and complicated processes.
If that is the case and their assumption is correct, then it limits Trump’s ability to perform sleights of hand to fool adversaries – rather, he has well established and clearly documented character traits that they have become aware of.
The adversaries impervious to charm and threats
Then there is the question of whether an Unpredictability Doctrine or the Madman Theory can work on adversaries.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an ally who was given a dressing down by Trump and Vance in the Oval Office, later agreed to grant the US lucrative rights to exploit Ukrainian mineral resources.
Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, apparently remains impervious to Trump’s charms and threats alike. On Thursday, following a telephone call, Trump said he was “disappointed” that Putin was not ready to end the war against Ukraine.
And Iran? Trump promised his base that he would end American involvement in Middle Eastern “forever wars”. His decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities was perhaps the most unpredictable policy choice of his second term so far. The question is whether it will have the desired effect.
The former British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has argued that it will do precisely the opposite: it will make Iran more, not less likely, to seek to acquire nuclear weapons.
Prof Desch agrees. “I think it’s now highly likely that Iran will make the decision to pursue a nuclear weapon,” he says. “So I wouldn’t be surprised if they lie low and do everything they can to complete the full fuel cycle and conduct a [nuclear] test.
“I think the lesson of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi is not lost on other dictators facing the US and potential regime change…
“So the Iranians will desperately feel the need for the ultimate deterrent and they’ll look at Saddam and Gaddafi as the negative examples and Kim Jong Un of North Korea as the positive example.”
One of the likely scenarios is the consolidation of the Islamic Republic, according to Mohsen Milani, a professor of politics at the University of South Florida and author of Iran’s Rise and Rivalry with the US in the Middle East.
“In 1980, when Saddam Hussein attacked Iran his aim was the collapse of the Islamic Republic,” he says. “The exact opposite happened.
“That was the Israeli and American calculation too… That if we get rid of the top guys, Iran is going to surrender quickly or the whole system is going to collapse.”
A loss of trust in negotiations?
Looking ahead, unpredictability may not work on foes, but it is unclear whether the recent shifts it has yielded among allies can be sustained.
Whilst possible, this is a process built largely on impulse. And there may be a worry that the US could be seen as an unreliable broker.
“People won’t want to do business with the US if they don’t trust the US in negotiations, if they’re not sure the US will stand by them in defence and security issues,” argues Prof Norman. “So the isolation that many in the MAGA world seek is, I think, going to backfire.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for one has said Europe now needs to become operationally independent of the US.
“The importance of the chancellor’s comment is that it’s a recognition that US strategic priorities are changing,” says Prof Trubowitz. “They’re not going to snap back to the way they were before Trump took office.
“So yes, Europe is going to have to get more operationally independent.”
This would require European nations to develop a much bigger European defence industry, to acquire kit and capabilities that currently only the US has, argues Prof Desch. For example, the Europeans have some sophisticated global intelligence capability, he says, but a lot of it is provided by the US.
“Europe, if it had to go it alone, would also require a significant increase in its independent armaments production capability,” he continues. “Manpower would also be an issue. Western Europe would have to look to Poland to see the level of manpower they would need.”
All of which will take years to build up.
So, have the Europeans really been spooked by Trump’s unpredictability, into making the most dramatic change to the security architecture of the western world since the end of the Cold War?
“It has contributed,” says Prof Trubowitz. “But more fundamentally, Trump has uncorked something… Politics in the United States has changed. Priorities have changed. To the MAGA coalition, China is a bigger problem than Russia. That’s maybe not true for the Europeans.”
And according to Prof Milani, Trump is trying to consolidate American power in the global order.
“It’s very unlikely that he’s going to change the order that was established after World War Two. He wants to consolidate America’s position in that order because China is challenging America’s position in that order.”
But this all means that the defence and security imperatives faced by the US and Europe are diverging.
The European allies may be satisfied that through flattery and real policy shifts, they have kept Trump broadly onside; he did, after all, reaffirm his commitment to Article 5 at the most recent Nato summit. But the unpredictability means this cannot be guaranteed – and they have seemed to accept that they can no longer complacently rely on the US to honour its historic commitment to their defence.
And in that sense, even if the Unpredictability Doctrine comes from a combination of conscious choice and Trump’s very real character traits, it is working, on some at least.
Thousands turn out to mark Dalai Lama’s 90 birthday
Thousands of Tibetan Buddhists streamed into India’s Himalayan town of Dharamshala on Sunday to celebrate the 90th birthday of the Dalai Lama.
Ferocious monsoon rains did not dampen the spirits as the Tibetan spiritual leader appeared in traditional robes and a flowing yellow wrap, smiling and walking with the aid of two monks.
The hilltop temples echoed with chants, while dance troupes performed with clanging cymbals and bagpipes.
Indian ministers, long-time followers including Hollywood actor Richard Gere and thousands of devotees gathered to honour the exiled leader, revered as an advocate for peace.
Gere took to the podium at the celebrations with a smile on his face to declare what a “joyous, joyous day” it was “to celebrate this extraordinary life.” He then embraced the Dalai Lama, who he said “totally embodies selflessness”, and kissed his hand.
Sunday’s festivities mark the culmination of a week of long-life prayers that began on Monday, aligned with his birthday on the Tibetan lunar calendar.
At a ceremony on Saturday, the Dalai Lama assured followers of his “great physical condition” and said he would live for another 40 years – to 130 – two decades beyond his previous prediction.
Though he said he typically avoided birthday celebrations, the Dalai Lama thanked followers for using the occasion to reflect on peace of mind and compassion. He referred to himself as a “simple Buddhist monk” and said he had no regrets as he looked back on his life at 90.
“While it is important to work for material development, it is vital to focus on achieving peace of mind through cultivating a good heart and by being compassionate, not just toward near and dear ones, but toward everyone,” he said in his birthday message.
This week, the Dalai Lama confirmed plans for a successor, putting to rest long-standing speculation over whether the 600-year-old institution would end with him.
According to Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the Dalai Lama is reincarnated after death – a process deeply rooted in spiritual customs, not political authority.
Living in exile since fleeing Chinese rule in 1959, the Dalai Lama has previously said his reincarnation will take place in the “free world”, meaning outside of China.
But Beijing, which considers him a separatist, swiftly rejected his authority to determine a successor.
Chinese officials insist that any succession must follow Chinese laws, religious rituals and historical conventions – and ultimately be approved by the government in Beijing.
The announcement has reignited fears among Tibetans in exile that China will attempt to name a successor to tighten control over Tibet, the region it occupied in 1950 and has ruled ever since.
The Dalai Lama has long guided the Tibetan diaspora in their struggle for autonomy and resistance to Chinese domination.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended birthday wishes on Sunday, calling him an “enduring symbol of love, compassion, patience and moral discipline”.
Former US President Barack Obama also sent greetings, calling him “the youngest 90-year-old I know” and thanking him for his friendship.
Archaeologists unveil 3,500-year-old city in Peru
Archaeologists have announced the discovery of an ancient city in Peru’s northern Barranca province.
The 3,500-year-old city, named Peñico, is believed to have served as a key trading hub connecting early Pacific coast communities with those living in the Andes mountains and Amazon basin.
Located some 200km north of Lima, the site lies about 600 metres (1,970 feet) above sea level and is thought to have been founded between 1,800 and 1,500 BC – around the same time that early civilisations were flourishing in the Middle East and Asia.
Researchers say the discovery sheds light on what became of the Americas’ oldest civilisation, the Caral.
Drone footage released by researchers shows a circular structure on a hillside terrace at the city’s centre, surrounded by the remains of stone and mud buildings.
Eight years of research at the site unearthed 18 structures, including ceremonial temples and residential complexes.
In buildings at the site, researchers discovered ceremonial objects, clay sculptures of human and animal figures and necklaces made from beads and seashells.
Peñico is situated close to where Caral, recognised as the oldest known civilisation in the Americas, was established 5,000 years ago at around 3,000 BC in the Supe valley of Peru.
Caral features 32 monuments, including large pyramid structures, sophisticated irrigation agriculture and urban settlements. It is believed to have developed in isolation to other comparative early civilisations in India, Egypt, Sumeria and China.
Dr Ruth Shady, the archaeologist who led the recent research into Peñico and the excavation of Caral in the 1990s, said that the discovery was important for understanding what became of the Caral civilisation after it was decimated by climate change.
The Peñico community was “situated in a strategic location for trade, for exchange with societies from the coast, the highlands and the jungle”, Dr Shady told the Reuters news agency.
At a news conference unveiling the findings on Thursday, archaeologist Marco Machacuay, a researcher with the Ministry of Culture, said that Peñico’s significance lies in it being a continuation of the Caral society.
Peru is home to many of the Americas’ most significant archaeological discoveries, including the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in the Andes and the mysterious Nazca Lines etched into the desert along the central coast.
Uganda’s 80-year-old president in bid to extend 40-year rule
Uganda’s long-serving president, Yoweri Museveni, 80, has been declared the governing party’s candidate in next year’s presidential election, opening the way for him to seek to extend his nearly 40 years in power.
In his acceptance speech, Museveni said that he had responded to the call and, if elected, would press ahead with his mission to turn Uganda into a “high middle income country”.
Museveni’s critics say he has ruled with an iron hand since he seized power as a rebel leader in 1986.
He has won every election held since then, and the constitution has been amended twice to remove age and term limits to allow him remain in office.
Pop star-turned-politician Bobi Wine is expected to be Museveni’s main challenger in the election scheduled for next January.
Wine told the BBC in April that he would run against Museveni if he was nominated by his party, the National Unity Platform, but it was getting “tougher” to be in opposition because of growing state repression.
“Being in the opposition in Uganda means being labelled a terrorist,” he said.
Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, lost the last election in 2021 to Museveni by 35% to 59% in a poll marred by allegations of rigging and a crackdown on the opposition.
Another prominent opposition politician, Kizza Besigye, has been in detention since November after being accused of treason. He denies the allegation, saying his arrest is political.
In his acceptance speech at the National Resistance Movement (NRM) conference on Saturday, Museveni said that he had brought about stability and progress in Uganda.
He said it was crucial that Uganda did not “miss the bus of history as happened in the past when Europe transformed and Africa stagnated and was enslaved”.
Museveni added that he wanted Uganda to take a “qualitative leap”, and become a “high upper middle income country”.
“Other countries in Asia with less natural resources, did it. We can do it,” he added.
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Published
Former Chicago White Sox pitcher Bobby Jenks has died at the age of 44 from a rare form of stomach cancer.
Jenks was a two-time All-Star pitcher for the Chicago White Sox and was part of the team that ended their 88-year wait for a World Series title in 2005.
He threw the final pitch of the match in game four of the series as the White Sox beat the Houston Astros.
“We have lost an iconic member of the White Sox family,” White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said in a statement.
“None of us will ever forget all that Bobby did for the 2005 World Series champions and for the entire Sox organisation during his time in Chicago.”
After six seasons with the White Sox, Jenks finished his career in 2011 with the Boston Red Sox, but played only 19 games because of bone spurs on his spine that hampered nearby nerves and tendons.
Jenks moved to Portugal last year and had been receiving treatment for adenocarcinoma, a form of stomach cancer.
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Eurostar train evacuated after four-hour wait in northern France
People have been evacuated from a broken-down Eurostar train in northern France after waiting nearly four hours for help, passengers have told the BBC.
Those on board said they were stranded without air conditioning or working toilets before emergency services and local rescue teams arrived to hand out water.
James Grierson was evacuated alongside a number of “very frustrated” passengers. They are now boarding a new train to complete their journey to London, he said.
Eurostar said the train had come to a standstill due to a power failure and a rescue train had been “promptly dispatched” to carry out a “complex transfer operation”.
Passengers had left Brussels at 08:52 local time (07:52 BST) and were due to arrive at London St Pancras International at 09:57 BST.
But the expected journey time of just over two hours has now stretched to more than eight.
A power failure between Lille and Calais left the train with no onboard electricity, Eurostar said in a statement.
Lidia Aviles, 38, from Brussels, said passengers were not allowed to leave the train for hours due to security concerns regarding people standing near the rails.
“Toilets were not working. This is terrible, especially for babies and elderly people,” she said.
Pictures from the scene showed dozens of people stood outside the stationary train, along with rescuers in high-vis jackets – one carrying an armful of bottled water.
Several passengers messaged Eurostar on X, complaining of no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and a lack of updates.
The rail operator has apologised and offered affected customers a full cash refund.
By 16:45 local time, a replacement train had arrived. Ms Aviles said she had boarded the train, but the “evacuation process” was ongoing.
Mr Grierson said he expected the process to “take a while” as offloading the first train had taken two hours.
Eurostar said the transfer to the new train was “taking longer than anticipated” and thanked customers for their patience and cooperation.
David Lammy first UK minister to visit Syria since 2011 uprising
Foreign Secretary David Lammy has become the first UK minister to visit Syria since the uprising that led to the country’s civil war began 14 years ago.
Lammy met Syria’s interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa eight months after the collapse of the Assad regime and as the new Islamic-led government continues to establish control within the country.
Alongside the visit, the UK government announced an additional £94.5m support package to cover humanitarian aid and support longer-term recovery within Syria and countries helping Syrian refugees.
Lammy told the BBC the purpose of his meeting was to promote inclusivity, transparency and accountability with the new government.
“I’m here to speak to this new government, to urge them to continue to be inclusive, to ensure that there’s transparency and accountability in the way that they govern,” he said.
“But [also] to stand by the Syrian people and Syria as it makes this peaceful transition over the coming months.”
Syria is in a fragile situation with a new Islamic-led government in charge.
In December, rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group which has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK, UN and US, stormed Damascus, toppling the Assad regime which had ruled the country for 54 years.
Since then, Western countries have sought to reset relations with the country.
At the end of June, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending sanctions against the country.
The White House said at the time it would monitor the new Syrian government’s actions including by “addressing foreign terrorists” and “banning Palestinian terrorist groups”.
The UK has also lifted sanctions.
Al-Sharaa met French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris in May while other foreign officials, including Ukraine’s foreign minister, have visited Syria.
Many members of Syria’s new government, including the interim president, were members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Asked how the government deals with a group it had listed on the proscribed terror group as a pseudonym for al-Qaeda, Lammy said he recognised the country has a bloody recent history associated with terrorism and war, but said the UK is looking “to the future” and engaging with the new government.
Various violent attacks against minority groups have been committed in Syria in recent months.
Hundreds have been killed from the Alawite minority, there were violent attacks on the Druze community, and recently a brutal attack on peaceful worshippers inside a church in Damascus.
Internationally, these attacks have prompted concern about how much Syria’s new government can protect minorities but also provide safety and stability.
Almost every day, there are reported cases of killing or kidnapping.
Lammy said: “It’s important that the UK lean in to ensure that the balance is tipped in the right direction, a balance towards accountability, transparency, inclusivity for all of the communities that make up this country, a prosperous one and a peaceful one.”
Within Syria, many people are worried the government is slipping towards a new form of dictatorship.
There are restrictions on social freedoms, the role of women is being marginalised in the government, and there is more and more enforcement of Islamic practices rather than a clear governance based on civic codes representing the whole society.
In these early days of the government there are also fears around how it is being formed.
Only one female minister has been appointed and al-Sharaa has made almost every other appointment – with no election, referendum or opinion polls.
Many appointments in the government are reported to be based on connections rather than qualifications, and most of those in charge have a radical Islamic agenda and are enforcing it.
Lammy said the UK wants Syria to “move in the direction of peace, of prosperity, of stability for the people and an inclusive country” and will use humanitarian aid to help that.
He added the UK would monitor the situation to ensure the new government ruled the population in an inclusive manner.
The UK government is also supporting the Organisation of the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to help dismantle Assad’s chemical weapons in Syria.
A further £2m was committed to the organisation this financial year in addition to around £837,000 provided since the fall of Assad.
Challenges ahead for new government
There are many challenges ahead of Syria – both internally and in the region.
Israel has invaded parts of Syria and carried out hundreds of air strikes, and continues to hold hundreds of square kilometres inside Syrian territory.
Lammy said he “urged the Israeli government to think again about some of their actions” to avoid undermining “the progress that could be made in this new Syria”.
Hundreds of foreign fighters and their families have been held in detention camps in north-west Syria for years, including dozens from the UK.
Asked whether the UK was going to take them back home, Lammy did not give a clear answer.
He said he had discussed the issue of camps with Syria’s president, as well as how to help the country deal with counterterrorism and irregular migration.
The situation in Syria remains precarious, and its security is at risk with threats from the Islamic State group and radical jihadist fighters who have joined the government.
While international support will certainly help the war-torn country recover, it could also help pressure the government to be a representative of a diverse and open society.
Texas flood victims: Girl ‘having time of her life’ and ‘heart and soul’ of camp
An eight-year-old girl and the director of an all-girls’ summer camp are among the victims of flash floods in Texas that have claimed at least 51 lives, including 15 children.
Officials say most of the victims have been identified. Authorities have not yet released any names publicly.
Here’s what we know so far about the victims.
Renee Smajstrla
Eight-year-old Renee Smajstrla was at Camp Mystic when flooding swept through the summer camp for girls, her uncle said in a Facebook post.
“Renee has been found and while not the outcome we prayed for, the social media outreach likely assisted the first responders in helping to identify her so quickly,” wrote Shawn Salta, of Maryland.
“We are thankful she was with her friends and having the time of her life, as evidenced by this picture from yesterday,” he wrote. “She will forever be living her best life at Camp Mystic.”
Camp Mystic, where 27 children are missing, is a nearly century-old Christian summer camp for girls on the banks of the Guadalupe River near Hunt, Texas.
Operated by generations of the same family since the 1930s, the camp’s website bills itself as a place for girls to grow “spiritually” in a “wholesome” Christian atmosphere “to develop outstanding personal qualities and self-esteem”.
Jane Ragsdale
Heart O’ the Hills is another all-girls’ camp that sits along the Guadalupe River and it was right in the path of Friday’s flood.
Jane Ragsdale, described as the “heart and soul” of Heart O’Hills, “did not make it”, a statement shared on the camp’s official website said on Saturday.
Ragsdale, who started off as a camper then a counsellor, became the director and co-owner of the camp in 1976.
“We are mourning the loss of a woman who influenced countless lives and was the definition of strong and powerful,” the statement said.
No campers were residing at the site when the floods hit and and most of those who were there have been accounted for, according to the statement.
Sarah Marsh
Sarah Marsh, a student at Cherokee Bend Elementary School in Alabama, would have entered third grade in August.
She, too, was attending Camp Mystic and her grandmother, Debbie Ford Marsh, asked for prayers in a post on Facebook on Friday.
Just hours later she shared online that her granddaughter was among the girls killed.
“We will always feel blessed to have had this beautiful spunky ray of light in our lives. She will live on in our hearts forever!” she said.
In a post on Facebook, Alabama Senator Katie Britt said she’s “heartbroken over the loss of Sarah Marsh, and we are keeping her family in our thoughts and prayers during this unimaginable time”.
Janie Hunt
Nine-year-old Janie Hunt from Dallas, was also attending Camp Mystic and died in the floods.
Her grandmother Margaret Hunt told The New York Times she went to the camp with six of her cousins, who are all safe.
Margaret said Janie’s parents had to visit a funeral home and identify their daughter.
Janie is a great-granddaughter of the oil baron William Herbert Hunt.
Julian Ryan
As floodwaters tore through their trailer in Ingram, Texas, Julian Ryan turned to his fiancée Christina Wilson and said: “I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it. I love y’all” – Christina told Houston television station KHOU.
His body wasn’t recovered until hours later, after waters had receded.
Julian had just finished a late dishwashing shift at a restaurant when the Guadalupe River overflowed early Friday.
He and Christina woke to ankle-deep water that quickly rose to their waists. She told the station their bedroom door stuck shut and with water rushing in, Ryan punched through a window to get his family out. He severely cut his arm in the process.
Their 13-month-old and 6-year-old sons and his mother survived by floating on a mattress until help could arrive.
“He died a hero, and that will never go unnoticed,” Connie Salas, Ryan’s sister, told KHOU.
Dick Eastland
Richard “Dick” Eastland, the longtime co-owner and co-director of Camp Mystic, died while being flown to a Houston hospital.
His death was confirmed by Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, who attended Bible study with Dick and described him as a pillar of the local community.
Dick’s wife, Tweety, was found safe at their riverside home, according to Texas Public Radio.
The Eastlands had run Camp Mystic, a girls’ summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River, since 1974, becoming the third generation of their family to do so.
According to the Washington Post, the couple have 11 grandchildren and much of the extended family is involved in camp life.
Their eldest son, Richard, manages the camp kitchen and their youngest, Edward, and his wife direct operations at Camp Mystic Guadalupe River.
Katheryn Eads
Katheryn Eads, 52, was swept away by floodwaters in the Kerrville area of Texas, early Friday morning after she and her husband, Brian, who told The New York Times, fled their campervan as rising water surged around them.
Another camper had offered them a ride and they made it across the street before the vehicle stalled in the flood.
Moments later, both were pulled into the current. Brian said he lost sight of his wife after being struck by debris. He survived by clinging onto a tree until he reached dry land.
Katheryn’s body was later recovered.
“God has her now,” her mother, Elizabeth Moss Grover, wrote on Facebook.
Amy Hutchinson, director of Olive Branch Counselling in Texas, where Katheryn had worked, told The Washington Post she was “a hope and a light to all who knew her… a stellar counsellor and professor.”
Blair and Brooke Harber
Two sisters from Dallas – 13-year-old Blair Harber and 11-year-old Brooke Harber – were staying with their grandparents along the Guadalupe River when their cabin was washed away, CBS News, the BBC’s US partner has reported.
Their parents were in a separate cabin and were not harmed.
Their grandparents are still unaccounted for.
The deaths were confirmed by St Rita Catholic Community, where Brooke was due to start sixth grade. Blair was preparing to enter eighth grade.
“Please keep the Harber family in your prayers during this time of profound grief. May our faith, our love, and our St. Rita community be a source of strength and comfort in the days ahead,” said Father Joshua J Whitfield in correspondence with church members.
Lila Bonner
Nine-year-old Lila Bonner, a Dallas native was found dead after flooding near Camp Mystic, according to NBC News.
“In the midst of our unimaginable grief, we ask for privacy and are unable to confirm any details at this time,” her family said in a statement to the news outlet.
“We ache with all who loved her and are praying endlessly.”
A boy saved by barbed wire, a ‘destroyed’ camp and missed warning signs in Texas floods
The warning signs were already flashing as hundreds of young people celebrated the Fourth of July public holiday at Camp Mystic, an all-girls’ Christian summer retreat, nestled on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Texas.
There had not been a drop of rain in the area recently until the inundation, when the river rose 26ft (8m) in less than an hour, according to state officials.
By Saturday evening, at least 51 people were dead, including 15 children.
- Search for missing continues
- Texas flood victims: Girl ‘living her best life’ and ‘heart and soul’ of camp
The first hint of the devastation to come appeared on Thursday morning as rain and thunderstorms soaked a number of central Texas counties.
The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a common warning called a flood watch at 13:18 that afternoon for parts of the region, including Kerr County.
In the early hours of Friday, the outlook became more dire as the NWS issued a series of upgraded warnings. The San Saba river, the Concho River and the Colorado River were rising.
At 04:03, the NWS sent a “particularly dangerous situation” alert, reserved for the most urgent and potentially deadly scenarios such as wildfires.
Another “particularly dangerous situation” warning was issued for the city of Kerrville at 05:34, before dawn on Friday.
“Residents and campers should SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW! Life threatening flash flooding along the river is expected,” forecasters said.
“Automated rain gauges indicate a large and deadly flood wave is moving down the Guadalupe River. Flash flooding is already occurring.”
Such alerts are shared on NWS social media accounts and by broadcast news outlets, but most people were asleep.
Elinor Lester, 13, said younger campers at Camp Mystic were bunked in cabins closer to the riverbank and those were the first to flood.
“The camp was completely destroyed,” Elinor, who was evacuated by helicopter, told the Associated Press news agency. “It was really scary.”
Just outside Kerrville, the BBC met Jonathan and Brittany Rojas as they came to see what was left of a relative’s home. Only the foundations remain.
Five people were in the house the night of the deluge – the mother and her baby are still missing.
The teenage son, Leo, survived after he became snared in barbed wire, preventing him from being swept away. The boy is recovering in hospital.
As the BBC was interviewing the Rojas couple, a neighbour walked up to present them with an item salvaged from the house.
It was the teenager’s money jar. The label on it read, “Leo’s survival kit”.
Desperate Camp Mystic parents took to social media looking for news of their children.
One Facebook group – Kerrville Breaking News – turned into a missing persons page.
Some parents have since updated their social media pleas to say their missing family members did not survive.
Kerr County is in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, a getaway destination because of its scenic rolling hills, countless rivers and lakes and abundance of wineries.
But the region is also known as “Flash Flood Alley”, because of the recurring threat that has devastated local communities over the years.
When asked why the riverside summer camp was not evacuated, officials said the sudden scale of the deluge caught them unawares.
“No-one knew this kind of flood was coming,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said.
I looked into the eyes of a man who blew himself up on the Tube. I still see him everywhere
Two decades have passed since the 2005 London attacks, but the face of the lead suicide bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan, has never left Dan Biddle’s memory.
It feels as real today as the day they looked into each other’s eyes.
“I can be in the kitchen and he is stood in the garden,” says Dan, who has complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
“He’s there, dressed as he was on the day, holding the rucksack, just with his hand above it, about to detonate it again.”
Even if Dan looks away, the bomber is still there when he looks back.
“I saw this guy literally disassemble himself in front of me, and now I’m seeing him again.”
- 7 July London bombings: What happened that day?
Dan was in touching distance of Khan, on a rush-hour London Underground Circle line train on 7 July 2005. How he survived is almost beyond rational explanation.
“As as we pulled out of Edgware Road station, I could feel somebody staring at me. I was just about to turn around and say, ‘What are you looking at?’, and I see him put his hand in the bag.
“And then there was a just a brilliantly white, bright flash – heat like I’ve never experienced before.”
Khan had detonated a homemade bomb – made using an al-Qaeda-devised chemical recipe – that he was carrying in his rucksack.
The device killed David Foulkes, 22, Jennifer Nicholson, 24, Laura Webb, 29, Jonathan Downey, 34, Colin Morley and Michael Brewster, both 52.
In total, 52 people were killed that day, by four bombs detonated by Islamist extremists. Another 770 were injured.
Dan was blown out of the train, hit the tunnel wall and fell into the crawl space between the tunnel wall and the track.
His injuries were catastrophic. His left leg was blown off. His right leg was severed from the knee down. He suffered second and third-degree burns to his arms, hands and face. He lost his left eye – and his hearing on that side too.
He suffered a massive laceration to his forehead. A pole from the tube train’s internal fittings went into his body and he endured punctures and ruptures to his kidneys, lungs, colon and bowel. He later lost his spleen.
Dan was the most severely injured victim of the attacks to survive. And he was conscious throughout.
He initially thought the white flash was an electrical explosion.
Debris had fallen on to him, and his arms and hands were alight. He could see the flames flickering.
“Straight after the explosion, you could have heard a pin drop. It was almost as if everybody had just taken a big breath,” Dan says, “and then it was like opening the gates of hell. Screaming like I’ve never heard before.”
Dan could see some of the dead. He tried to push down to lever himself up from the debris. He realised how profusely he was bleeding.
“The initial feeling was one of total disbelief. It was like, surely God, this is just a nightmare.”
Dan’s mind immediately turned to his father, and how he couldn’t bear for him to witness this.
“My dad cannot be the person that walks into a mortuary and goes, ‘Yeah, that’s my son’,” Dan says. “I couldn’t bear the thought of that.”
He didn’t believe he would get out of the tunnel. But the will to survive instinctively kicked in and he screamed for help.
The first person to respond was fellow passenger Adrian Heili, who had served as a combat medic during the Kosovo war. If it had been anyone else, Dan believes he would have died.
“The first thing he said to me was, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been in this situation before, and never lost anyone.’
“And I’m thinking, ‘How can you have gone through this before?’
“And then he said to me: ‘I’m not going to lie to you. This is really going to hurt.'”
Adrian applied a tourniquet and pinched shut the artery in Dan’s thigh to stop him bleeding to death. Dan’s life was literally in Adrian’s hands until paramedics were able to reach him about half an hour later.
Adrian helped many more in the hours that followed – and in 2009 received the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery.
Dan’s trauma was far from over. He was taken to nearby St Mary’s Hospital where he repeatedly went into cardiac arrest. At one point, a surgeon had to manually massage his heart to bring him back to life. He was given 87 units of blood.
“I think there’s something in all of us – that fundamental desire to live.
“Very few people ever get pushed to the degree where that’s required.
“My survival is down to Adrian and the phenomenal care and just brilliance of the NHS and my wife.”
Physical survival was one thing. But the toll on Dan’s mental health was another.
After eight weeks in an induced coma, Dan began a year-long journey to leaving hospital – and he realised he’d have to navigate the world outside differently.
His nights became consumed with mental torture.
He dreaded having to close his eyes and go to sleep, because he would find himself back in the tunnel.
“I wake up and [the bomber] is standing next to me,” Dan says. “I’ll be driving – he’s in the back seat of my car. I’ll look in the shop window and there’s a reflection of him – on the other side of the street.”
Those flashbacks have led to what Dan describes as survivor’s guilt.
“I’ve replayed that moment a million times over in my head. Was there something about me that made him do it? Should I have seen something about him then tried to stop it?”
By 2013 Dan had reached a dangerous low. He tried to take his own life three times.
But he had also started a relationship with his now-wife Gem – and this was a crucial turning point.
The next time he came close to suicide it was Gem’s face he saw when he closed his eyes, and he realised that if he ended his own life he would inflict appalling trauma on her.
Gem persuaded Dan to take a mental health assessment – and he began to get the expert help he needed.
In 2014 he agreed – as part of his therapy and attempts to manage the condition – to do something he thought he would never do: return to Edgware Road.
When the day came, Dan sat outside the station experiencing flashbacks and hearing the sounds of 7/7 again: screams, shouting and sirens.
He and Gem pressed on. As they entered the ticket hall there were more flashbacks.
The station manager and staff were expecting him and asked if he wanted to go down to the platform. Dan said it was a “bridge too far”. Gem insisted they all go together.
When they reached the platform, a train pulled in. Dan began to feel sick. But the train quietly moved on without incident – and by the time a third train had arrived he found the courage to board it.
“I feel really, really sick. I’m sweating. She’s crying. I’m tensing, waiting for a blast. I’m waiting for that that big heat and that pressure to hit me.”
And then the train stopped at the point in the tunnel where the bomb had gone off – an arrangement between the driver and the station manager.
“They’d stopped the train exactly where I’d been lying. I remember looking down onto the floor and it was a really weird feeling – knowing that my life really came to an end there.”
As the train pulled away, something inside Dan urged him to get off at the next station and move forward with his life.
“I’m going to leave the station, I’m going to do whatever I’m going to do today, and then I’m going to marry this amazing, beautiful woman,” he says. The two tied the knot the following year.
Eleven years on, Dan feels driven to do something positive with his life.
He now runs his own company helping disabled people into work – a professional journey he might never have embarked on had it not been for the bomb.
He still has flashbacks and bad days but he’s finding ways to manage them – and has published a book, , of what he has been through.
“I’m very lucky to still be alive. I’ve paid an immense, enormous price. I’ll just keep fighting every day to make sure that him and his actions never win.”
- Dan Biddle’s story is part of State of Terror, a special series about the UK’s 20-year battle against violence extremism, available on BBC Radio Four and BBC Sounds.
Rare photos capture Afrobeats’ rise to take over the world
Afrobeats has swept the world of music like a tsunami – it dominates playlists and its fans cram into huge stadiums to hear the likes of Nigerian superstars Wizkid, Davido and Burna Boy.
Photographer Oliver Akinfeleye, known professionally as “Drummer”, caught the Afrobeats wave early – and he decided to document it as it grew into a global phenomenon.
Since 2017, the New Yorker of Nigerian descent has had exclusive backstage access to some of the biggest artists of the genre – capturing quieter moments of reflection as well as strutting stage performances.
“I remember my first project with Wizkid like it was yesterday – Echostage Washington DC, 2017,” Drummer told the BBC. “The feeling was exhilarating. It was my job to tell the visual story of how it all went down.”
Drummer has not stopped clicking since – and has now released Eagle Eye, a book of photographs showcasing Afrobeats’ rise from humble beginnings to one of Africa’s largest cultural exports.
Afrobeats has its roots in various West African musical genres that became especially popular in the decades that followed independence as the continent began celebrating its freedom from colonial rule.
Highlife, which flourished along the coast from the late 19th Century, became synonymous with Ghana’s national identity after independence in 1957 – and was in turn hugely influential on Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. His Afrobeat (minus the “s”) movement, which mixed traditional rhythms with funk and jazz, became the sound of the 1970s and 1980s in West Africa.
At the turn of the millennium, this rich cultural heritage fed into Afrobeats, along with a mix of Western pop, rap and dancehall.
It gained further popularity in the UK and North America, where there are large diaspora populations, in particular from Nigeria, where most of the genre’s stars came from.
Afrobeats artists began performing to these communities at first in small venues in the early 2010s.
Then it really take off – between 2017 and 2022 Afrobeats experienced 550% growth in streams on Spotify, according to data from the world’s most popular streaming service.
This resulted in many of the artists becoming household names around the world, and the musical industry taking note.
It has gone on to include African music in mainstream award ceremonies like the Grammys.
Today these artists easily pack out stadiums like Madison Square Garden in New York – pictured below ahead of Wizkid’s performance in 2023.
“Madison Square was a night to remember – the iconic venue illuminated in the colours of the Nigerian flag honouring our homeland,” says Drummer.
Drummer was able to take photographs of the musicians as they started out on their global careers.
“I always felt that I was capturing moments with just my eyes. Walking the streets of New York City, I would frame scenes in my mind – people, light, emotion,” the photographer says.
“I’d ask myself, how do I translate this mental perspective to reality?”
Gradually, the audience grew and became more international with fans in countries such as China, Germany and Brazil.
Now even non-African musicians are taking up the Afrobeats sound and releasing their own versions, including artists such as Chris Brown, who released Blow My Mind with Davido.
The US singer has also performed with Wizkid in London – as the photo below from 2021 shows.
“I love this picture because when Wizkid brought Chris Brown out at The O2 arena, the place exploded. No-one saw it coming – the energy shifted instantly,” says Drummer.
“Shock, excitement and pure electricity. A moment stamped in memory and in history.”
Drummer says one of the aims of the photo book is not to just show people what he saw, but to help them feel what he experienced – through his pictures.
It also sometimes reveals the feelings of the superstars in their private moments.
This final picture shows Wizkid backstage on his phone in 2021.
It was “a rare quiet moment”, but even in the silence and the calm his presence spoke volumes, says Drummer.
More about Afrobeats from the BBC:
- The sounds that has penetrated the world
- Afrobeats megastar Burna Boy is still ‘a work in progress’, his mother says
- Rema, the Afrobeats star who does not intend to calm down
- How Afrobeats made it to the very top of Glastonbury
- Afrobeats is finally getting its own chart
Guru Dutt: The tragic life of an Indian cinematic genius
Iconic Indian director and actor Guru Dutt was just 39 years old when he died in 1964 but he left behind a cinematic legacy that continues to resonate decades later.
Born on 9 July 1925 in the southern state of Karnataka, next week marks his birth centenary. But the man behind the camera, his emotional turmoil and mental health struggles remain largely unexplored.
The maker of classic Hindi films such as Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool – film school staples for their timeless themes – Dutt forged a deeply personal, introspective style of filmmaking that was novel in the post-independence era.
His complex characters often reflected his personal struggles; his plots touched upon universal motifs, inviting the audience to confront uncomfortable realities through hauntingly beautiful cinema.
Dutt’s beginnings were humble and his childhood was marked by financial hardship and a turbulent family life. After his family shifted to Bengal in eastern India for work, a young Dutt became deeply inspired by the region’s culture and it would shape his cinematic vision later in life.
He dropped his surname – Padukone – after entering the Bombay film industry in the 1940s. He made his debut not as a director but as a choreographer, and also worked as a telephone operator to make ends meet. The turbulence and uncertainty of the decade – India’s independence struggle had intensified – impacted the aspiring filmmaker’s prospects.
It was during this phase that he penned Kashmakash, a story rooted in artistic frustration and social disillusionment, ideas that would later shape his cinematic masterpiece Pyaasa.
Dutt’s friendship with fellow struggler Dev Anand – who soon rose to fame as an actor – helped him get the chance to direct his first film in 1951. The noir thriller, Baazi, propelled him into the spotlight.
He soon found love with celebrated singer Geeta Roy, and by many accounts, these early years were his happiest.
After Dutt launched his own film company, he scored back-to-back hits with romantic comedies Aar-Paar and Mr & Mrs 55, both featuring him in lead roles. But yearning for artistic depth, he set out to make what would become his defining film – Pyaasa.
The hard-hitting, haunting film explored an artist’s struggle in a materialistic world and decades later, it would go on to be the only Hindi film in Time magazine’s list of the 20th Century’s 100 greatest movies.
Dutt’s late younger sister, Lalitha Lajmi, who collaborated with me when I wrote his biography, said that Pyaasa was her brother’s “dream project” and that “he wanted it to be perfect”.
As a director, Dutt was fond of ‘creating’ the film as it took shape on the sets, making a lot of changes in the script and dialogues and experimenting with camera techniques. While he was known for scrapping and reshooting scenes, this reached worrying levels during Pyaasa – for instance, he shot 104 takes of the now famous climax sequence.
He would shout and get bad-tempered when things did not go right, Lajmi said.
“Sleep evaded him. The misuse of and dependence on alcohol had begun. At his worst, he started experimenting with sleeping pills, mixing them in his whiskey. Guru Dutt gave his all to make Pyaasa – his sleep, his dreams, and his memories,” she said.
In 1956, as his dream project neared completion, 31-year-old Dutt attempted suicide.
“When the news came, we rushed to Pali Hill [where he lived],” Lajmi said. “I knew he was in turmoil. He often called me, saying we need to talk but wouldn’t say a word when I got there,” she added.
But following his discharge from hospital, no professional support was sought by the family.
Mental health was a “socially stigmatised” topic at the time, and with big money riding on Pyaasa, Lajmi said that the family tried to move on, without fully confronting the reasons behind her brother’s internal struggles.
Released in 1957, Pyaasa was a critical and commercial triumph that catapulted Dutt to stardom. But the filmmaker often expressed a sense of emptiness despite his success.
Pyaasa’s chief cinematographer VK Murthy recalled Dutt saying, “I wanted to be a director, an actor, make good films – I have achieved it all. I have money, I have everything, yet I have nothing.”
There was also a strange paradox between Dutt’s films and his personal life.
His films often portrayed strong, independent women but off screen, as Lajmi recalled, he expected his wife to embrace more traditional roles and wanted her to sing only in films produced by his company.
To keep his company thriving, Dutt had a simple rule: each artistic gamble should be followed by a bankable commercial film.
But buoyed by the success of Pyaasa, he ignored his own rule and dived straight into making his most personal, expensive and semi-autobiographical film: Kaagaz Ke Phool.
It tells the story of a filmmaker’s unhappy marriage and confused relationship with his muse. It eerily ends with the death of the filmmaker after he fails to come to terms with his acute loneliness and doomed relationships.
Though now hailed as a classic, it was a commercial failure at the time, a blow Dutt reportedly never overcame.
In the Channel 4 documentary In Search of Guru Dutt, his co-star Waheeda Rehman remembered him saying, “. (There are only two things in life: success and failure) There is nothing in between.”
After Kagaz Ke Phool, he never directed a film again.
But his company recovered over time, and he made a strong comeback as a producer with Chaudhvin Ka Chand, the most commercially successful film of his career.
He then launched Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam directed by his trusted screenwriter Abrar Alvi. By this time, Lajmi said, his personal life was in severe turmoil, marked by mood swings.
The film delved into the loneliness of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a philandering, often tyrannical landlord in an opulent yet feudal world.
Writer Bimal Mitra recalls that Dutt told him about his struggle with sleeplessness and reliance on sleeping pills during this time. By then, his marriage had collapsed and mental health had worsened. Mitra recalled many conversations with Guru Dutt’s constant refrain: “I think I will go crazy.”
One night, Dutt attempted to take his own life again. He was unconscious for three days.
Lajmi says that after this, on the doctor’s advice, his family called a psychiatrist to inquire about treatment for Dutt but they never followed up. “We never called the psychiatrist again,” she added with regret.
For years, she believed her brother was silently crying for help, perhaps feeling trapped in a dark space where no one could see his pain, so dark that even he could not find a way out of it.
A few days after Dutt was discharged, the shooting for Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam resumed as if nothing had happened.
When Mitra asked him about the incident, Dutt said, “Nowadays, I often wonder what unrest was this, what was the restlessness that I was hell-bent on committing suicide? When I think about this, I get terrorised with fear. But that day, I felt no dilemma in swallowing those sleeping pills.”
The film was a success, became India’s official entry to the 1963 Berlin Film Festival and also won a national award.
But Dutt’s personal struggles continued to mount. He separated from his wife and even though he continued acting in films, he battled profound loneliness, often turning to alcohol and sleeping pills for respite.
On 10 October 1964, Dutt, 39, was found dead in his room.
“I know that he had always wished for it [death], longed for it… and he got it,’ his co-star Waheeda Rehman wrote in the Journal of Film Industry, 1967.
Like the protagonist of Pyaasa, true acclaim came to Dutt only after he was gone.
Cinema enthusiasts often wonder what might have been had he lived longer; perhaps he would have continued to reshape India’s cinematic landscape with his visionary, poetic works.
How MI5 piled falsehood on falsehood in the case of neo-Nazi spy who abused women
When the BBC revealed that MI5 had lied to three courts, the Security Service apologised for giving false evidence – vowing to investigate and explain how such a serious failure had occurred.
But on Wednesday, the High Court ruled that these inquiries were “deficient”, ordering a new “robust” investigation. A panel of judges said they would consider the issue of contempt of court proceedings against individuals once that was complete.
Now we can detail how, over the past few months leading up to the judgment, MI5 continued to provide misleading evidence and tried to keep damning material secret.
The material gives an unprecedented insight into the internal chaos at MI5 as it responded to what has become a major crisis and test of its credibility.
At the heart of the case is the violent abuse of a woman by a state agent under MI5’s control. After the BBC began investigating, MI5 attempted to cover its tracks – scattering a trail of false and misleading evidence.
The case started very simply: I was investigating a neo-Nazi, who I came to understand was also an abusive misogynist and MI5 agent.
After I contacted this man – known publicly as X – in 2020 to challenge him on his extremism, a senior MI5 officer called me up and tried to stop me running a story.
The officer said X had been working for MI5 and informing on extremists, and so it was wrong for me to say he was an extremist himself.
It was this disclosure, repeated in a series of phone calls, which the Security Service would later lie about to three courts as it attempted to keep X’s role and identity shrouded in secrecy.
During the phone calls with me, MI5 denied information I had about X’s violence, but I decided to spend more time investigating. What I learned was that X was a violent misogynist abuser with paedophilic tendencies who had used his MI5 role as a tool of coercion.
He had attacked his girlfriend – known publicly as “Beth” – with a machete, and abused an earlier partner, whose child he had threatened to kill. He even had cannibal fantasies about eating children.
When I challenged both X and MI5 with our evidence, the government took me and the BBC to court in early 2022. They failed to stop the story but did win legal anonymity for X.
Arguing for secrecy in a succession of court proceedings, the Security Service told judges it had stuck to its core policy of neither confirming nor denying (NCND) informants’ identities, including during conversations with me. Crucially, this stance allowed it to keep evidence secret from “Beth”, who had taken MI5 to court.
The service aggressively maintained its position until I produced evidence proving it was untrue – including a recording of one of the calls with a senior MI5 officer.
Finally accepting it had provided false evidence, MI5’s director general Sir Ken McCallum said: “We take our duty to provide truthful, accurate and complete information very seriously, and have offered an unreserved apology to the court.”
Two investigations were commissioned: an internal MI5 disciplinary inquiry, and an external review by Sir Jonathan Jones KC, who was once the government’s chief lawyer. This latter review was personally commissioned by the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and MI5’s director general.
Both of these concluded that the original false evidence was not due to dishonesty by MI5 or any of its officers. They effectively put it down to mistakes, both personal and systemic.
But these two inquiries quickly began to fall apart.
Not fair or accurate
The government initially refused to provide both reports in full to the court.
Like many cases involving MI5, this one was held partly in secret to allow the government to use evidence which it says is too sensitive to be discussed in open hearings.
Access to the secret, closed part of the case was only available to the government, the judge and security-cleared barristers known as special advocates who were representing the BBC – but who were not allowed to communicate directly with us.
The government said it would not be providing any closed evidence about the two inquiries to the judge or the special advocates.
Instead, it provided an “open” version of Sir Jonathan’s external review, with apparently sensitive material edited out, and it purported to provide a full account of the internal inquiry in a witness statement by MI5’s director general of strategy – known as Witness B.
Sir Jonathan wrote that he was “satisfied” that the open version was a “fair and accurate” account of his full review. Witness B, third-in-command at the Security Service, said in his statement: “I am satisfied that there is nothing in the closed material that has been excluded from the open report which prevents MI5 from providing the court with a frank and accurate account.”
During hearings, the government argued against disclosing secret material to the court. It eventually agreed to hand over the secret version of Sir Jonathan’s review, and then was ordered to disclose the internal investigation report described by Witness B, along with policy documents and notes of interviews with MI5 officers.
When the disclosure came, it was clear why MI5 was so keen to keep it secret: the summaries, including the one from MI5’s third-in-command, were not fair or accurate. Key information had been withheld, which undermined their conclusions.
In short, the court was still being misled.
At the same time, in response to the inquiries, I was submitting new evidence which proved that some of the claims made by the two reviews were false.
Neither the internal investigation nor Sir Jonathan Jones contacted me, despite the fact I was the only other person who really knew what had been said in all the phone calls at the centre of the case.
‘The fallibility of memory’
The two official reviews concluded that the senior officer who called me – Officer 2 – failed to recall telling me that X was an agent.
“There is nothing surprising in this narrative, which is ultimately about the fallibility of memory in the absence of a written record,” as the Security Service put it in legal submissions.
The Jones review said that, because no formal record was made of the calls, by the time MI5 was preparing evidence the “only first-hand evidence available was Officer 2’s personal recollection”.
Sir Jonathan said the officer’s recollection was “uncertain”, although it had hardened over time into a position that he had not departed from NCND.
But material that MI5 and the government sought to keep secret shows that Officer 2 gave a detailed recollection of the conversation with me – until I exposed it as false.
His recollection was contained in a note of an internal MI5 meeting, arranged to discuss what to tell the special advocates and the court about the conversations with me. In it, the officer insisted he did not depart from NCND and gave a melodramatic account of my “long pauses” as I said I needed the story, before I eventually became cooperative and said I had “seen the light”.
This was all untrue. He also falsely claimed I had revealed that I had spoken to X’s former girlfriend, when I had done no such thing.
The note also showed that Officer 2 had told colleagues that he persuaded me to drop the story by implying that agent X was being investigated by MI5 as an extremist. This was the exact opposite of what he had in fact told me, which was that X was an MI5 agent rather than a real extremist.
Sir Jonathan was aware of the full version of this elaborate false account, but it was absent from the unclassified version given to the court and the BBC.
The MI5 internal review also claimed that Officer 2 had a lapse of memory.
It said that Officer 2 had told another officer – a key figure involved in preparing the Security Service’s false evidence for the court, known as Officer 3 – that he could not remember whether he had departed from NCND.
In his statement to court, Witness B – MI5’s director general of strategy – said Officer 2 had said “they could not recall the details” of the conversations with me but “did not think they had departed from NCND” and believed “they would have remembered if they had done so”.
But an internal note by Officer 3, written after his discussion with Officer 2, contained a very different account.
It stated unequivocally that “we did not breach NCND” and that the contact with me “was prefaced with confirmation that this conversation was not on the record”.
It also stated that, “after being initially fairly bullish, De Simone said that he acknowledged the strength of the argument, and agreed to remove those references”.
All three claims were false, including about the conversations being off the record, something now accepted by MI5.
The evidence showed specific false claims being presented as memories – not the absence of memory the two inquiries said they found.
The written records MI5 said did not exist
The question of memory was so important because the court was told that written records were not available.
Witness B – MI5’s third-in-command – said the internal investigation established that Officer 2 had “updated colleagues within MI5” about the conversations with me, but that “there was no evidence identified of any written record being made, by Officer 2 or anyone else”.
“The fact of the matter was that Officer 2 was reliant on personal recollection alone which inevitably carries a degree of inherent uncertainty,” Witness B said in his statement to court.
Sir Jonathan gave the same impression in his review.
But the secret material MI5 was forced to hand over proved this was false. There were several written records consistent with what had really happened – that MI5 had chosen to depart from NCND and that several people were aware of it.
There was a decision log.
There were notes of conversations with Agent X himself.
There were emails.
The decision log showed that, just after the authorisation took place, a formal record was created saying the plan was to call the BBC and “reveal the MI5 link to X”. The log then noted: “This was discussed with Officer 2 who subsequently approached the BBC to begin this conversation.”
In an internal email, after I had said I would not include X in an initial story, one of X’s handling team reported this development to other MI5 officers and accurately described the approach to me, namely that Officer 2 had claimed my proposed story was “incorrect” and the rationale for this was that most of the material was as a “direct result of his tasking” as an MI5 agent.
Notes of calls and meeting with Agent X show he approved the plan to reveal his MI5 role and was kept updated about the calls. In a later meeting with him, MI5 recorded that he was “happy” to meet with me, which was an offer MI5 had made and I ignored.
But it showed that MI5 and X were well aware of the NCND departure, because the Security Service would obviously only try to arrange a meeting with someone like X if they an agent.
In a telling note, MI5 said X thought that a meeting with me would “hopefully serve to counter some of the conclusions that the journalist had reached about X”. This is a violent, misogynistic neo-Nazi, a danger to women and children, yet MI5 wanted to do PR for him with a journalist.
‘Back in the box’
These records and others show that the handling team for agent X understood there had been an NCND departure. This was unsurprising as the calls with me at the time made it clear that his case officers knew what was happening.
But the internal investigation report records how, as MI5 was preparing to take the BBC to court to block our story on X, one officer went around convincing colleagues that no such departure had ever taken place.
Officer 3 spoke several times to a member of the agent-handling team within MI5 – known as Officer 4 – regarding what had been said to me about X.
“We have already named him pal,” said Officer 4, according to Officer 4’s evidence to the investigation and Officer 3 replied: “I can categorically tell you we didn’t”.
After these conversations, Officer 4 said he felt the other officer had put him “back in his box”. Other members of the handling team thought what Officer 3 was saying was “odd” and “weird”.
MI5 has given completely contradictory explanations for how the false claim about not departing from NCND had got into its witness statement.
The claim was given to court by an officer known as Witness A, acting as a corporate witness – meaning he was representing the organisation rather than appearing as someone necessarily involved personally in the events.
When the government was trying to stop the BBC publishing its story about X in 2022, the BBC’s special advocates asked how Witness A could be so sure that NCND had not been breached.
The government’s lawyers said “Witness A spoke to the MI5 officer who had contact with the BBC” – meaning Officer 2 – and the officer had said he neither confirmed nor denied agent X’s role. The lawyers’ answers strongly appeared to suggest that the pair had even spoken at the time of the calls with me.
After we exposed Witness A’s false evidence, the lawyers’ answers created a problem for MI5 as it either suggested Officer 2 had lied all along – or that he and Witness A were both lying.
It has since been claimed that the men did not speak to each other at the time of the calls with me.
Despite not reconciling these contradictory accounts, the investigation concluded “the parties were collectively doing their best to prepare a witness statement that was accurate”.
Five times MI5 abandoned ‘neither confirm nor deny’
Officer 2 claimed that he had never departed from NCND before and said that was a key reason why he would have recalled doing so.
But new evidence I submitted to court showed he had also told me whether or not five other people I was investigating were working with the Security Service. One of them was an undercover MI5 officer – one of the most sensitive and memorable details an officer could disclose.
Officer 2 had invited me to meet this undercover officer, just as he had offered me the chance to meet Agent X. I had not pursued either offer, which I thought were a crude attempt at pulling me into MI5’s orbit.
Indeed, the internal MI5 material suggests that its officers wrongly believe that the role of journalists is to be cheerleaders for the Security Service. I was variously described as “bullish”, “stubborn”, “awkward”, and not “as on board as other journalists”.
They said, before their involvement with me, the BBC was seen as “friendly” and “supportive” of MI5. In reality, journalists like me are here to scrutinise and challenge the organisation.
The five other NCND departures were not apparently uncovered by MI5’s internal investigators, nor by Sir Jonathan Jones.
Disclosing agent X’s role would have been memorable and unusual on its own.
But the fact there were also departures on NCND relating to five other people made the chain of events even more extraordinary, and made any claimed loss of memory by Officer 2 – and in MI5 more widely – simply unbelievable.
The missing interviews
Both inquiries failed to speak to key people who were on the calls they were supposed to be investigating. Neither of them spoke to me – but there were other omissions too.
Sir Jonathan’s review wrongly claimed that “only Officer 2 had been party to the calls” with me. In fact, Officer 2 had invited another senior officer to join one of the calls. He introduced himself by saying: “I head up all counter-terrorism investigations here.”
He referred to my earlier “conversations” with Officer 2 and was plainly aware of their content – he even made a specific pun about something connected to X.
While MI5’s internal investigation was aware that the head of counter-terror investigations had joined one of the calls and mentioned it in their secret report, investigators never bothered interviewing him.
After I submitted new evidence, MI5 was forced to speak to him – but the internal investigators concluded there was nothing to show he knew about NCND departures.
Sir Jonathan had also failed to speak to the MI5 officer at the centre of the case, Officer 2. He had simply adopted the conclusions of the internal inquiry – in which MI5 was investigating itself.
It emerged during the court case that Sir Jonathan did speak to MI5 director general Sir Ken McCallum for his investigation. But when the BBC’s special advocates requested any notes of the interview, they were told that none existed.
‘Maintaining trust’
“MI5’s job is to keep the country safe,” Sir Ken said after the High Court judgement. “Maintaining the trust of the courts is essential to that mission.”
Because of this case, the courts have made plain that MI5’s practices should change. The government says it is reviewing how the service prepares and gives evidence.
Because NCND has been abandoned in relation to Agent X, Beth will now have a fairer trial of her legal claim against MI5. The monolithically consistent way in which the policy has been presented, including in a string of important cases, has been shown to be untrue.
This has become a story about whether MI5 can be believed, and about how it uses its privileged position to conceal and lie.
But in the beginning – and in the end – it is a story about violence against women and girls, about the importance placed on that crucial issue by the state, and about how covering up for abusive misogynists never ends well.
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Published
Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon and Beatrice Chebet broke world records in spectacular style at the Diamond League meeting in Eugene, Oregon.
Kipyegon stormed to victory the women’s 1500m with a time of three minutes 48.68 seconds – breaking her own world record by 0.36 seconds.
The achievement comes just over a week after the three-time Olympic 1500m champion, 31, failed in her bid to become the first woman in history to run a sub-four-minute mile.
Her compatriot Chebet set a new women’s 5,000m record with a time of 13:58.06, shaving more than two seconds off the previous record set by Ethiopia’s Gudaf Tsegay in Eugene two years ago.
Chebet, 25, now holds both world records and Olympic titles in the 5,000m and 10,000m.
“When I was coming here to Eugene, I was coming to prepare to run a world record,” she said. “I’m so happy.”
The pair were among 17 individual champions from the Paris Olympics and 14 world-record holders in action in a star-studded event, also known as the Prefontaine Classic.
Matt Hudson-Smith was the highlight on a mixed evening for British athletes, posting a season’s best 44.10 to win the men’s 400m ahead of American duo Christopher Bailey and Jacory Patterson.
British record holder Zharnel Hughes also ran a season’s best of 9.91 to finish second in the men’s 100m, behind Olympic silver medallist Kishane Thompson of Jamaica, who posted a time of 9.85.
Jemma Reekie equalled her season’s best of 1:58.66 to finish seventh in the women’s 800m. Paris gold medallist Keely Hodgkinson, whose return from a hamstring injury was delayed by a setback in April, did not compete.
Ethiopa’s Tsige Duguma, silver medallist behind Hodgkinson in Paris, won in a time of 1:57.10.
Dina Asher-Smith finished seventh in the women’s 100m, with American Melissa Jefferson-Wooden surging to victory in 10.75 and ahead of Olympic champion Julien Alfred.
Jake Wightman finished eighth and Neil Gourley 12th in the Bowerman Mile. The race was won in stunning fashion by Dutchman Niels Laros, who reeled in American Yared Nuguse in the final 10 metres and pipped him on the line by 0.01 seconds.
Elsewhere, Sweden’s world record holder Armand Duplantis comfortably won the men’s pole vault with a height of 6.00m.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone equalled a season’s best 49.43 to hold off fellow Americans Aaliyah Butler and Isabella Whittaker in the women’s 400m, with Ireland’s Rhasidat Adeleke finishing fourth.
The Diamond League will move to Monaco next before the series visits the UK for a sold-out London Athletics Meet on 19 July.
The finals will take place in Zurich on 27 and 28 August – just over a fortnight before the start of the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, Japan.
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Sabrina Carpenter tones down headline show – but she’s still at her best
Sabrina Carpenter brought her signature sugary pop sound to a crowd of 65,000 at London’s BST Festival on Saturday night.
The 26-year-old has built a brand around sexual confidence and racy lyrics, which were noticeably toned down as the US singer embraced a more family friendly show in London’s Hyde Park.
At one point a graphic flashed up on screen advising “parental discretion” as Carpenter launched into album track Bed Chem. She ditched her usual sexually suggestive performance on song Juno and instead used a cannon to fire t-shirts into the crowd.
Despite these changes she was still at her best, storming through a 17-song tracklist that comprised her biggest hits, charming the crowd with her Hollywood smile and incredibly bouncy hair.
Carpenter writes music for women of the dating app generation and her songs are filled with the type of anecdotes you’ve heard over Friday night drinks with the girls – from the anger over not getting closure to the fear of a man embarrassing you when they meet all your friends.
Perhaps that is what makes her so relatable. She’s a talented singer and dancer who shot to fame on the Disney Channel, but she could also so easily be your mate who brings over ice cream when you’re going through a break-up.
Her ability to switch from a sassy upbeat dance number to a vulnerable, acoustic solo performance is also impressive.
She’s an accomplished performer for someone whose breakout hit, Espresso, is little over a year old. But much to the surprise of many, she’s been in this game for a very long time.
The Pennsylvania-born star began posting videos of herself on YouTube at the age of 10 and came third in a competition to find the next Miley Cyrus a year later.
After starring in a few small acting roles, the singer became a bona fide Disney star in 2013 when she was cast in TV series Girl Meets World.
She began releasing music the following year and has released six albums to date, but has only recently received global recognition.
Carpenter became the first female artist to hold both the number one and number two positions on the UK singles chart for three consecutive weeks in 2024 and she also became the first artist in 71 years to spend 20 weeks at the top of the charts with Espresso.
From watching her live, it appears she’s been waiting patiently for this moment for quite some time, to perform on the biggest stages around the world and to thousands of fans – something she references a few times between songs.
She told the crowd she was “so, so grateful” that the audience had chosen to spend their Saturday evening with her, gushing that “London is so fun and there’s so much to do here”.
Much of the cheekiness she has built her brand on was weaved in throughout her performance, including 1950s style infomercials advertising sprays that erase no-good men from your life and mattresses that are perfect for “activities”.
But aside from a racy rendition of Bed Chem and a snippet of Pony by Ginuine (one for the Magic Mike fans) the show was more PG than expected.
Perhaps it was due to the large volume of young children stood in the crowd amongst us Gen Zs and millennials.
Or perhaps the pop princess needs a break from making headlines.
The first was back in March, when her Brit Awards opening performance was criticised for being too racy for pre-watershed television.
Media watchdog Ofcom received more than 800 complaints, with the majority relating to Carpenter’s choreography with dancers dressed in Beefeater outfits.
Then in June this year she was once again under fire for sharing artwork for her new album, Man’s Best Friend, which showed her on her hands and knees in a short dress whilst an anonymous man in a suit grabbed her hair.
Carpenter then revealed alternative artwork she said was “approved by God” and shows her holding the arm of a suited man.
Criticism for the original artwork came from charities including Glasgow Women’s Aid which supports victims of domestic abuse. It said Carpenter’s album cover was “regressive” and “promotes an element of violence and control”.
Heather Binning of Women’s Rights Network, also told the BBC that violence against women should “never be used as satire”.
But what Saturday’s performance showed is that Carpenter is a true professional, someone who can easily adapt both her style and setlist to cater to different audiences.
She ended the show perfectly, taking to a crane that panned across the huge mass of people, thrilling fans and giving them the opportunity for a close-up video to post on their social media.
“Damn nobody showed up,” she joked, adding: “London thank you so much for having us tonight, this has to be one of the biggest shows I’ve played in my entire life.”
She wrapped up with Espresso, marking the end of the show by downing some in martini-form from a crystal glass.
There were a few mutters from the crowd, who perhaps were expecting a special guest or two, but it was clear from the offset that this would be a defining moment in the popstar’s career and one where she only wants the spotlight on her.
Iran supreme leader in first public appearance since Israel war
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has made his first public appearance since the start of Iran’s conflict with Israel, according to state media.
State television footage showed him greeting worshippers at a mosque on Saturday during a ceremony a day before the Shia festival of Ashura.
Khamenei’s last non-public appearance was in a recorded address after the ceasefire that ended the 12-day war, which began on 13 June and during which top Iranian commanders and nuclear scientists were killed.
Israel launched a surprise attack on nuclear and military sites in Iran, after which Iran retaliated with aerial attacks targeting Israel.
- When Iran’s supreme leader emerges from hiding he will find a very different nation
During the 12-day war with Israel, Khamenei appeared on TV in three video messages and there was speculation that he was hiding in a bunker.
On 26 June, two days after agreeing to a ceasefire with Israel, he delivered a video address in which he claimed “victory” and said the US had “gained no achievements” from strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
US President Donald Trump accused Khamenei of lying, saying Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated” and that he had saved the supreme leader from “a very ugly and ignominious death”.
On Saturday Iranian media coverage was dominated by Khamenei’s appearance, with footage of supporters expressing joy at seeing him on television.
Khamenei is seen turning to senior cleric Mahmoud Karimi, encouraging him to “sing the anthem, O Iran”. The patriotic song became particularly popular during the recent conflict with Israel.
State TV said the clip was filmed at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Mosque, named after the founder of the Islamic republic.
Iranian TV has invited people to send in videos sharing their reactions to Khamenei’s return to the public eye.
His appearance comes as the predominantly Shia Muslim country observes a period of mourning during the month of Muharram, traditionally attended by the supreme leader.
Ashura is held on the 10th day of Muharram – this year falling on 6 July – during which Shia Muslims commemorate the death of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hossein.
The US joined the war with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on 22 June.
The operation involved 125 US military aircraft and targeted three nuclear facilities: Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan.
Iran’s judiciary said more than 900 people were killed during the 12-day war.
Australian actor Julian McMahon dies aged 56
Australian actor Julian McMahon, famed for roles in popular series like Nip/Tuck and Charmed, has died aged 56.
His wife said the actor passed away in Clearwater, Florida, on Wednesday. He had been diagnosed with cancer.
“Julian loved life. He loved his family. He loved his friends. He loved his work, and he loved his fans. His deepest wish was to bring joy into as many lives as possible,” Kelly Paniagua said in a statement carried by Deadline.
McMahon’s career took off with the hit supernatural television series Charmed before he gained wider recognition with Nip/Tuck, the medical drama in which he played the role of plastic surgeon Dr Christian Troy.
Running for six seasons from 2003 to 2010, the show earned him a Golden Globe nomination.
Co-star Dylan Walsh told Deadline he was “stunned”.
“We rode this wave together and I loved him.
“Jules! I know you’d want me to say something to make you smile — all the inside jokes. All those years you had my back, and my god, we laughed. My heart is with you. Rest in peace.”
McMahon also played Doctor Doom in two Fantastic Four films in 2005 and 2007 and later appeared in three seasons of FBI: Most Wanted.
Dick Wolf, the producer of FBI: Most Wanted, said McMahon’s death was “shocking news”.
McMahon was the son of a former Australian prime minister and went on to play an Australian prime minister’s role in Netflix’s The Residence – one of his recent appearances.
McMahon married three times – the first to Australian singer-actress Dannii Minogue, sister of Kylie Minogue.
Australian PM vows ‘full force of law’ after arson attack at synagogue
Australia’s prime minister has promised to take strong action following an apparent arson attack on a synagogue in Melbourne.
Pictures showed a man pouring liquid on the synagogue’s front door before setting it on fire on Friday night. Some 20 people having dinner inside at the time were evacuated without any injuries. A man has been charged and is due to appear in court.
Police are also trying to determine if the incident is linked to an attack against a Jewish-owned restaurant in the city on the same night.
A string of antisemitic attacks have occurred in Australia in the past few months, sparked by tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.
The Australian government has appointed a special envoy to combat antisemitism, and passed tougher laws against hate crimes following a wave of high-profile attacks.
“Antisemitism has no place in Australia,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said following the attack on the East Melbourne synagogue.
“Those responsible for these shocking acts must face the full force of the law and my government will provide all necessary support toward this effort,” Albanese said.
Angelo Loras, 34, from Toongabbie on the outskirts of Sydney, was arrested in Melbourne on Saturday and has been charged with arson and reckless conduct endangering life.
It is not clear if the incident was linked to the attack on the Miznon restaurant in the city’s business district during which rioters broke in, throwing chairs and other objects while chanting “death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]”. Some of the attackers were led away in handcuffs.
“These events are a severe escalation directed towards our community,” said Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
“There have been too many antisemitic attacks in Australia,” Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said.
“The Australian government must do more to fight this toxic disease.”
The ongoing conflict in the Middle East has become a volatile political issue in Australia.
It has resulted in protests from both Jewish and Muslim communities, as well as a sharp uptick in Islamophobia and antisemitism.
The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 57,268 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Why I kick down Peak District stone stacks
Stone stacks are a common sight along hiking trails up and down the UK.
But one walker is on a mission to highlight the damage they can do to the environment – by kicking them over.
Stuart Cox says some people have been building the stacks – some as tall as 6ft (1.8m) – using stones taken from an old wall near Mam Tor in the Peak District in Derbyshire.
A recent video he filmed of himself kicking down the stacks has been watched more than a million times on social media.
And the Peak District National Park Authority says the structures are “detrimental” to the area, and have become more prevalent in recent years.
“Look at this,” Stuart says, before swearing in frustration during his Facebook video on 20 May.
“Destroy the lot of them.” He then proceeds to kick down a stone stack.
The 57-year-old, who works as a chartered engineer, lives in the Derbyshire village of Castleton, a short drive from Mam Tor.
He’s passionate about the area, and regularly documents his hikes on his Peak District Viking page.
But his post about the dozens of stacks, built next to the busy Great Ridge footpath – about a 15-minute hike from the summit of Mam Tor – has received the most engagement.
“The majority of people have been quite supportive saying: ‘Yeah, I hate them. We reduce them back to their natural state if we see them. Totally agree with you’,” he said.
“Then I had the opposite reaction which was: ‘Don’t tell me what to do. I’ll build them if I want and I’ll carry on regardless’.
“I even had a couple of threats by private message, but I don’t worry about those.”
The Peak District is far from the only location where stone stacks have proven problematic. For example, campaigners said towers of stones on a Scottish beach were a worrying trend.
Stuart says the stacks in his video have been built using stones taken from a former boundary wall, which ran alongside the popular Great Ridge walk.
He is concerned this has damaged the habitats of the small creatures – such as frogs, toads and insects – that lived inside the wall.
It is a view shared by the National Trust.
“The majority of the stone stacks featured in this video are not on National Trust land,” a spokesperson said.
“However, there have been stacks created on parts of Mam Tor, and staff and volunteers will infrequently disassemble any found.”
The trust says stone stacks have also been an issue on land it is responsible for.
It added rangers had carried out extensive work to protect and preserve the hillfort at Mam Tor, which is a “scheduled monument and is of great archaeological importance”.
“The Peak Forest Wall is also historically significant, itself dating back to 1579,” a spokesperson added.
“Sadly, the stone stacks are not only impacting the history of the site, but they are also affecting the natural habitats of wildlife that live and feed within these ancient walls.
“In the longer-term, it will disrupt the delicate balance of the landscape.”
Stuart says there is evidence of stones being removed from paths, which he says could lead to further erosion at an already popular walking spot.
According to The Countryside Code, visitors should “leave rocks, stone, plants and trees as you find them and take care not to disturb wildlife including birds that nest on the ground”.
Anna Badcock, cultural heritage manager at the national park authority, says the stacks damage the “special qualities” of the national park and that the problem has got worse in recent years.
“[Stone stacks] are created by stone removed from historic features,” she said.
“They are very detrimental to the historic environment which we have a statutory duty to conserve.
“Like walkers’ cairns [a marker along a trail], once one is created, it encourages more.”
The authority says its rangers generally do not remove the stacks “unless they are dangerous or causing an obstruction on a right of way”.
“We’re aware that the National Trust rangers have removed some at Mam Tor for this very reason,” a spokesperson added.
Stuart said he had tried to make contact with the owner of the land on which the stacks are located, and had offered to help rebuild the wall.
And while his video has attracted some debate on social media, he hopes it might make a small difference to the place he loves.
He added: “I’m very passionate about the area, it’s an area people live and work in, and to see it being trashed, you know, it does rile you a bit.
“The more important element [of reaction to his video] was: ‘I thought you were a bit of a fool when I first watched the start of the video but by the time I got to the end of it I realised, actually I didn’t know that and from now on I will not build the stacks’.
“That’s the important bit for me. Even if a handful of people have realised the error of their ways, then that made it all the more worthwhile.”
River Seine reopens to swimmers in Paris after century-long ban
The River Seine in Paris has reopened publicly to swimmers for the first time since 1923 after a century-long ban.
The seasonal opening of the Seine for swimming is viewed as a key legacy of the Paris 2024 Olympics, when open water swimmers and triathletes competed in its waters which were specially cleaned for the event.
On Saturday morning at 08:00 local time (07:00 BST) a few dozen swimmers arrived ahead of the opening and dived into the water when they were able to do so.
There are three designated areas for public swimming in the Seine – one near the Eiffel Tower, another close to Notre Dame Cathedral and a third in eastern Paris.
Zones have changing rooms, showers, and beach-style furniture, which allow for up to 300 people to lay out their towels.
Until the end of August, the three swimming sites will be open for free at scheduled times to anyone with a minimum age of 10 or 14 years, depending on the location.
Lifeguards will also be present keeping an eye on those in the river.
The promise to lift the swimming ban dates back to 1988, when then-mayor of Paris and future president Jacques Chirac first advocated for its reversal.
Improvements over the last 20 years have already led to a sharp reduction in faecal bacteria entering the river.
- Paris to bring back swimming in Seine after 100 years
- Would you swim in the Seine?
For 100 years swimming was banned in the river because of the levels of water pollution that could make people ill.
Ahead of last summer’s Olympics more than €1.4bn (£1.2bn; $1.6bn) was invested into cleaning up the Seine.
But, in the lead up to the games there were doubts as to whether the River Seine would be ready for the Olympics after it was revealed it failed water quality tests.
Organisers blamed rainfall for the increased pollution which limited athletes’ abilities to train for the triathlon, marathon swimming and paratriathlon.
Last July, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and other members of the Olympic committee went into the Seine to prove that it was safe to swim in.
How Trump is using the ‘Madman Theory’ to try to change the world (and it’s working)
Asked last month whether he was planning to join Israel in attacking Iran, US President Donald Trump said “I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m going to do”.
He let the world believe he had agreed a two-week pause to allow Iran to resume negotiations. And then he bombed anyway.
A pattern is emerging: The most predictable thing about Trump is his unpredictability. He changes his mind. He contradicts himself. He is inconsistent.
“[Trump] has put together a highly centralised policy-making operation, arguably the most centralised, at least in the area of foreign policy, since Richard Nixon,” says Peter Trubowitz, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics.
“And that makes policy decisions more dependent on Trump’s character, his preferences, his temperament.”
Trump has put this to political use; he has made his own unpredictability a key strategic and political asset. He has elevated unpredictability to the status of a doctrine. And now the personality trait he brought to the White House is driving foreign and security policy.
It is changing the shape of the world.
Political scientists call this the Madman Theory, in which a world leader seeks to persuade his adversary that he is temperamentally capable of anything, to extract concessions. Used successfully it can be a form of coercion and Trump believes it is paying dividends, getting the US’s allies where he wants them.
But is it an approach that can work against enemies? And could its flaw be that rather than being a sleight of hand designed to fool adversaries, it is in fact based on well established and clearly documented character traits, with the effect that his behaviour becomes easier to predict?
Attacks, insults and embraces
Trump began his second presidency by embracing Russian President Vladimir Putin and attacking America’s allies. He insulted Canada by saying it should become the 51st state of the US.
He said he was prepared to consider using military force to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of America’s ally Denmark. And he said the US should retake ownership and control of the Panama Canal.
Article 5 of the Nato charter commits each member to come to the defence of all others. Trump threw America’s commitment to that into doubt. “I think Article 5 is on life support” declared Ben Wallace, Britain’s former defence secretary.
Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve said: “For now the trans-Atlantic alliance is over.”
A series of leaked text messages revealed the culture of contempt in Trump’s White House for European allies. “I fully share your loathing of European freeloaders,” US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told his colleagues, adding “PATHETIC”.
In Munich earlier this year, Trump’s Vice-President JD Vance said the US would no longer be the guarantor of European security.
That appeared to turn the page on 80 years of trans-Atlantic solidarity. “What Trump has done is raise serious doubts and questions about the credibility of America’s international commitments,” says Prof Trubowitz.
“Whatever understanding those countries [in Europe] have with the United States, on security, on economic or other matters, they’re now subject to negotiation at a moment’s notice.
“My sense is that most people in Trump’s orbit think that unpredictability is a good thing, because it allows Donald Trump to leverage America’s clout for maximum gain…
“This is one of his takeaways from negotiating in the world of real estate.”
Trump’s approach paid dividends. Only four months ago, Sir Keir Starmer told the House of Commons that Britain would increase defence and security spending from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5%.
Last month, at a Nato summit, that had increased to 5%, a huge increase, now matched by every other member of the Alliance.
The predictability of unpredictability
Trump is not the first American president to deploy an Unpredictability Doctrine. In 1968, when US President Richard Nixon was trying to end the war in Vietnam, he found the North Vietnamese enemy intractable.
“At one point Nixon said to his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, ‘you ought to tell the North Vietnamese negotiators that Nixon’s crazy and you don’t know what he’s going to do, so you better come to an agreement before things get really crazy’,” says Michael Desch, professor of international relations at Notre Dame University. “That’s the madman theory.”
Julie Norman, professor of politics at University College London, agrees that there is now an Unpredictability Doctrine.
“It’s very hard to know what’s coming from day to day,” she argues. “And that has always been Trump’s approach.”
Trump successfully harnessed his reputation for volatility to change the trans-Atlantic defence relationship. And apparently to keep Trump on side, some European leaders have flattered and fawned.
Last month’s Nato summit in The Hague was an exercise in obsequious courtship. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte had earlier sent President Trump (or “Dear Donald”) a text message, which Trump leaked.
“Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, it was truly extraordinary,” he wrote.
On the forthcoming announcement that all Nato members had agreed to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP, he continued: “You will achieve something NO president in decades could get done.”
Anthony Scaramucci, who previously served as Trump’s communications director in his first term, said: “Mr Rutte, he’s trying to embarrass you, sir. He’s literally sitting on Air Force One laughing at you.”
And this may prove to be the weakness at the heart of Trump’s Unpredictability Doctrine: their actions may be based on the idea that Trump craves adulation. Or that he seeks short-term wins, favouring them over long and complicated processes.
If that is the case and their assumption is correct, then it limits Trump’s ability to perform sleights of hand to fool adversaries – rather, he has well established and clearly documented character traits that they have become aware of.
The adversaries impervious to charm and threats
Then there is the question of whether an Unpredictability Doctrine or the Madman Theory can work on adversaries.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an ally who was given a dressing down by Trump and Vance in the Oval Office, later agreed to grant the US lucrative rights to exploit Ukrainian mineral resources.
Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, apparently remains impervious to Trump’s charms and threats alike. On Thursday, following a telephone call, Trump said he was “disappointed” that Putin was not ready to end the war against Ukraine.
And Iran? Trump promised his base that he would end American involvement in Middle Eastern “forever wars”. His decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities was perhaps the most unpredictable policy choice of his second term so far. The question is whether it will have the desired effect.
The former British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has argued that it will do precisely the opposite: it will make Iran more, not less likely, to seek to acquire nuclear weapons.
Prof Desch agrees. “I think it’s now highly likely that Iran will make the decision to pursue a nuclear weapon,” he says. “So I wouldn’t be surprised if they lie low and do everything they can to complete the full fuel cycle and conduct a [nuclear] test.
“I think the lesson of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi is not lost on other dictators facing the US and potential regime change…
“So the Iranians will desperately feel the need for the ultimate deterrent and they’ll look at Saddam and Gaddafi as the negative examples and Kim Jong Un of North Korea as the positive example.”
One of the likely scenarios is the consolidation of the Islamic Republic, according to Mohsen Milani, a professor of politics at the University of South Florida and author of Iran’s Rise and Rivalry with the US in the Middle East.
“In 1980, when Saddam Hussein attacked Iran his aim was the collapse of the Islamic Republic,” he says. “The exact opposite happened.
“That was the Israeli and American calculation too… That if we get rid of the top guys, Iran is going to surrender quickly or the whole system is going to collapse.”
A loss of trust in negotiations?
Looking ahead, unpredictability may not work on foes, but it is unclear whether the recent shifts it has yielded among allies can be sustained.
Whilst possible, this is a process built largely on impulse. And there may be a worry that the US could be seen as an unreliable broker.
“People won’t want to do business with the US if they don’t trust the US in negotiations, if they’re not sure the US will stand by them in defence and security issues,” argues Prof Norman. “So the isolation that many in the MAGA world seek is, I think, going to backfire.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for one has said Europe now needs to become operationally independent of the US.
“The importance of the chancellor’s comment is that it’s a recognition that US strategic priorities are changing,” says Prof Trubowitz. “They’re not going to snap back to the way they were before Trump took office.
“So yes, Europe is going to have to get more operationally independent.”
This would require European nations to develop a much bigger European defence industry, to acquire kit and capabilities that currently only the US has, argues Prof Desch. For example, the Europeans have some sophisticated global intelligence capability, he says, but a lot of it is provided by the US.
“Europe, if it had to go it alone, would also require a significant increase in its independent armaments production capability,” he continues. “Manpower would also be an issue. Western Europe would have to look to Poland to see the level of manpower they would need.”
All of which will take years to build up.
So, have the Europeans really been spooked by Trump’s unpredictability, into making the most dramatic change to the security architecture of the western world since the end of the Cold War?
“It has contributed,” says Prof Trubowitz. “But more fundamentally, Trump has uncorked something… Politics in the United States has changed. Priorities have changed. To the MAGA coalition, China is a bigger problem than Russia. That’s maybe not true for the Europeans.”
And according to Prof Milani, Trump is trying to consolidate American power in the global order.
“It’s very unlikely that he’s going to change the order that was established after World War Two. He wants to consolidate America’s position in that order because China is challenging America’s position in that order.”
But this all means that the defence and security imperatives faced by the US and Europe are diverging.
The European allies may be satisfied that through flattery and real policy shifts, they have kept Trump broadly onside; he did, after all, reaffirm his commitment to Article 5 at the most recent Nato summit. But the unpredictability means this cannot be guaranteed – and they have seemed to accept that they can no longer complacently rely on the US to honour its historic commitment to their defence.
And in that sense, even if the Unpredictability Doctrine comes from a combination of conscious choice and Trump’s very real character traits, it is working, on some at least.
A boy saved by barbed wire, a ‘destroyed’ camp and missed warning signs in Texas floods
The warning signs were already flashing as hundreds of young people celebrated the Fourth of July public holiday at Camp Mystic, an all-girls’ Christian summer retreat, nestled on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Texas.
There had not been a drop of rain in the area recently until the inundation, when the river rose 26ft (8m) in less than an hour, according to state officials.
By Saturday evening, at least 51 people were dead, including 15 children.
- Search for missing continues
- Texas flood victims: Girl ‘living her best life’ and ‘heart and soul’ of camp
The first hint of the devastation to come appeared on Thursday morning as rain and thunderstorms soaked a number of central Texas counties.
The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a common warning called a flood watch at 13:18 that afternoon for parts of the region, including Kerr County.
In the early hours of Friday, the outlook became more dire as the NWS issued a series of upgraded warnings. The San Saba river, the Concho River and the Colorado River were rising.
At 04:03, the NWS sent a “particularly dangerous situation” alert, reserved for the most urgent and potentially deadly scenarios such as wildfires.
Another “particularly dangerous situation” warning was issued for the city of Kerrville at 05:34, before dawn on Friday.
“Residents and campers should SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW! Life threatening flash flooding along the river is expected,” forecasters said.
“Automated rain gauges indicate a large and deadly flood wave is moving down the Guadalupe River. Flash flooding is already occurring.”
Such alerts are shared on NWS social media accounts and by broadcast news outlets, but most people were asleep.
Elinor Lester, 13, said younger campers at Camp Mystic were bunked in cabins closer to the riverbank and those were the first to flood.
“The camp was completely destroyed,” Elinor, who was evacuated by helicopter, told the Associated Press news agency. “It was really scary.”
Just outside Kerrville, the BBC met Jonathan and Brittany Rojas as they came to see what was left of a relative’s home. Only the foundations remain.
Five people were in the house the night of the deluge – the mother and her baby are still missing.
The teenage son, Leo, survived after he became snared in barbed wire, preventing him from being swept away. The boy is recovering in hospital.
As the BBC was interviewing the Rojas couple, a neighbour walked up to present them with an item salvaged from the house.
It was the teenager’s money jar. The label on it read, “Leo’s survival kit”.
Desperate Camp Mystic parents took to social media looking for news of their children.
One Facebook group – Kerrville Breaking News – turned into a missing persons page.
Some parents have since updated their social media pleas to say their missing family members did not survive.
Kerr County is in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, a getaway destination because of its scenic rolling hills, countless rivers and lakes and abundance of wineries.
But the region is also known as “Flash Flood Alley”, because of the recurring threat that has devastated local communities over the years.
When asked why the riverside summer camp was not evacuated, officials said the sudden scale of the deluge caught them unawares.
“No-one knew this kind of flood was coming,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said.
Eurostar train evacuated after four-hour wait in northern France
People have been evacuated from a broken-down Eurostar train in northern France after waiting nearly four hours for help, passengers have told the BBC.
Those on board said they were stranded without air conditioning or working toilets before emergency services and local rescue teams arrived to hand out water.
James Grierson was evacuated alongside a number of “very frustrated” passengers. They are now boarding a new train to complete their journey to London, he said.
Eurostar said the train had come to a standstill due to a power failure and a rescue train had been “promptly dispatched” to carry out a “complex transfer operation”.
Passengers had left Brussels at 08:52 local time (07:52 BST) and were due to arrive at London St Pancras International at 09:57 BST.
But the expected journey time of just over two hours has now stretched to more than eight.
A power failure between Lille and Calais left the train with no onboard electricity, Eurostar said in a statement.
Lidia Aviles, 38, from Brussels, said passengers were not allowed to leave the train for hours due to security concerns regarding people standing near the rails.
“Toilets were not working. This is terrible, especially for babies and elderly people,” she said.
Pictures from the scene showed dozens of people stood outside the stationary train, along with rescuers in high-vis jackets – one carrying an armful of bottled water.
Several passengers messaged Eurostar on X, complaining of no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and a lack of updates.
The rail operator has apologised and offered affected customers a full cash refund.
By 16:45 local time, a replacement train had arrived. Ms Aviles said she had boarded the train, but the “evacuation process” was ongoing.
Mr Grierson said he expected the process to “take a while” as offloading the first train had taken two hours.
Eurostar said the transfer to the new train was “taking longer than anticipated” and thanked customers for their patience and cooperation.
Elon Musk says he is launching new political party
Elon Musk says he is launching a new political party, weeks after dramatically falling out with US President Donald Trump.
The billionaire announced on his social media platform X that he had set up the America Party, billing it as a challenge to the Republican and Democratic two-party system.
However, it is unclear if the party has been formally registered with US election authorities. Musk, who was born outside of the US and is thus ineligible to run for the US presidency, does not say who will lead it.
He first raised the prospect of forming a party during his public feud with Trump, which saw him leave his role in the administration and engage in a vicious public spat with his former ally.
During that row, Musk posted a poll on X asking users if there should be a new political party in the US.
Referencing that poll in his post on Saturday, Musk wrote: “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!
“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.
“Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”
As of Saturday, the Federal Electoral Commission had not published documents indicating the party had been formally registered.
While there have been high-profile players outside the traditional two-party system in US politics, it is difficult for them to gain strong enough nationwide popularity to pose a real threat.
In the presidential election last year, candidates from the likes of Libertarian Party, the Green Party and the People’s Party all tried in vain to stop Trump or his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, from winning.
Musk was until recently a core supporter of Trump, dancing alongside him during election rallies last year and bringing his four-year-old son to meet Trump in the Oval Office.
He was also Trump’s key financial backer: Musk spent $250m (£187m) to help him regain office.
After the election, he was appointed to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which was tasked with identifying swingeing cuts in the federal budget.
His fallout with Trump began when he left the administration in May and publicly criticised Trump’s tax and spending plans.
The legislation – which Trump has called his “big, beautiful bill” – was narrowly passed by Congress and signed into law by the president this week.
The massive law includes huge spending commitments and tax cuts, and is estimated to add more than $3tn to the US deficit over the next decade.
Crucially for Musk, who owns electric-vehicle giant Tesla, Trump’s bill does not focus on green transition or subsidies for products like Teslas.
“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far,” Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, this week. “Without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa.”
Trump threatened to have Doge look into subsidies in favour of Musk’s companies, alluding also to the billionaire’s other businesses.
Musk also owns SpaceX, which launches rockets for the US government, and Starlink, which provides satellite service for US and European defence forces.
Why I kick down Peak District stone stacks
Stone stacks are a common sight along hiking trails up and down the UK.
But one walker is on a mission to highlight the damage they can do to the environment – by kicking them over.
Stuart Cox says some people have been building the stacks – some as tall as 6ft (1.8m) – using stones taken from an old wall near Mam Tor in the Peak District in Derbyshire.
A recent video he filmed of himself kicking down the stacks has been watched more than a million times on social media.
And the Peak District National Park Authority says the structures are “detrimental” to the area, and have become more prevalent in recent years.
“Look at this,” Stuart says, before swearing in frustration during his Facebook video on 20 May.
“Destroy the lot of them.” He then proceeds to kick down a stone stack.
The 57-year-old, who works as a chartered engineer, lives in the Derbyshire village of Castleton, a short drive from Mam Tor.
He’s passionate about the area, and regularly documents his hikes on his Peak District Viking page.
But his post about the dozens of stacks, built next to the busy Great Ridge footpath – about a 15-minute hike from the summit of Mam Tor – has received the most engagement.
“The majority of people have been quite supportive saying: ‘Yeah, I hate them. We reduce them back to their natural state if we see them. Totally agree with you’,” he said.
“Then I had the opposite reaction which was: ‘Don’t tell me what to do. I’ll build them if I want and I’ll carry on regardless’.
“I even had a couple of threats by private message, but I don’t worry about those.”
The Peak District is far from the only location where stone stacks have proven problematic. For example, campaigners said towers of stones on a Scottish beach were a worrying trend.
Stuart says the stacks in his video have been built using stones taken from a former boundary wall, which ran alongside the popular Great Ridge walk.
He is concerned this has damaged the habitats of the small creatures – such as frogs, toads and insects – that lived inside the wall.
It is a view shared by the National Trust.
“The majority of the stone stacks featured in this video are not on National Trust land,” a spokesperson said.
“However, there have been stacks created on parts of Mam Tor, and staff and volunteers will infrequently disassemble any found.”
The trust says stone stacks have also been an issue on land it is responsible for.
It added rangers had carried out extensive work to protect and preserve the hillfort at Mam Tor, which is a “scheduled monument and is of great archaeological importance”.
“The Peak Forest Wall is also historically significant, itself dating back to 1579,” a spokesperson added.
“Sadly, the stone stacks are not only impacting the history of the site, but they are also affecting the natural habitats of wildlife that live and feed within these ancient walls.
“In the longer-term, it will disrupt the delicate balance of the landscape.”
Stuart says there is evidence of stones being removed from paths, which he says could lead to further erosion at an already popular walking spot.
According to The Countryside Code, visitors should “leave rocks, stone, plants and trees as you find them and take care not to disturb wildlife including birds that nest on the ground”.
Anna Badcock, cultural heritage manager at the national park authority, says the stacks damage the “special qualities” of the national park and that the problem has got worse in recent years.
“[Stone stacks] are created by stone removed from historic features,” she said.
“They are very detrimental to the historic environment which we have a statutory duty to conserve.
“Like walkers’ cairns [a marker along a trail], once one is created, it encourages more.”
The authority says its rangers generally do not remove the stacks “unless they are dangerous or causing an obstruction on a right of way”.
“We’re aware that the National Trust rangers have removed some at Mam Tor for this very reason,” a spokesperson added.
Stuart said he had tried to make contact with the owner of the land on which the stacks are located, and had offered to help rebuild the wall.
And while his video has attracted some debate on social media, he hopes it might make a small difference to the place he loves.
He added: “I’m very passionate about the area, it’s an area people live and work in, and to see it being trashed, you know, it does rile you a bit.
“The more important element [of reaction to his video] was: ‘I thought you were a bit of a fool when I first watched the start of the video but by the time I got to the end of it I realised, actually I didn’t know that and from now on I will not build the stacks’.
“That’s the important bit for me. Even if a handful of people have realised the error of their ways, then that made it all the more worthwhile.”
Archaeologists unveil 3,500-year-old city in Peru
Archaeologists have announced the discovery of an ancient city in Peru’s northern Barranca province.
The 3,500-year-old city, named Peñico, is believed to have served as a key trading hub connecting early Pacific coast communities with those living in the Andes mountains and Amazon basin.
Located some 200km north of Lima, the site lies about 600 metres (1,970 feet) above sea level and is thought to have been founded between 1,800 and 1,500 BC – around the same time that early civilisations were flourishing in the Middle East and Asia.
Researchers say the discovery sheds light on what became of the Americas’ oldest civilisation, the Caral.
Drone footage released by researchers shows a circular structure on a hillside terrace at the city’s centre, surrounded by the remains of stone and mud buildings.
Eight years of research at the site unearthed 18 structures, including ceremonial temples and residential complexes.
In buildings at the site, researchers discovered ceremonial objects, clay sculptures of human and animal figures and necklaces made from beads and seashells.
Peñico is situated close to where Caral, recognised as the oldest known civilisation in the Americas, was established 5,000 years ago at around 3,000 BC in the Supe valley of Peru.
Caral features 32 monuments, including large pyramid structures, sophisticated irrigation agriculture and urban settlements. It is believed to have developed in isolation to other comparative early civilisations in India, Egypt, Sumeria and China.
Dr Ruth Shady, the archaeologist who led the recent research into Peñico and the excavation of Caral in the 1990s, said that the discovery was important for understanding what became of the Caral civilisation after it was decimated by climate change.
The Peñico community was “situated in a strategic location for trade, for exchange with societies from the coast, the highlands and the jungle”, Dr Shady told the Reuters news agency.
At a news conference unveiling the findings on Thursday, archaeologist Marco Machacuay, a researcher with the Ministry of Culture, said that Peñico’s significance lies in it being a continuation of the Caral society.
Peru is home to many of the Americas’ most significant archaeological discoveries, including the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in the Andes and the mysterious Nazca Lines etched into the desert along the central coast.
US deports eight men to South Sudan after legal battle
The US has deported eight people to South Sudan following a legal battle that saw them diverted to Djibouti for several weeks.
The men – convicted of crimes including murder, sexual assault and robbery – had either completed or were near the end of their prison sentences.
Only one of the eight is from South Sudan. The rest are nationals of Myanmar, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and Mexico. US officials said most of their home countries had refused to accept them.
The Trump administration is working to expand its deportations to third countries.
It has deported people to El Salvador and Costa Rica. Rwanda has confirmed discussions and Benin, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini and Moldova have been named in media reports as potential recipient countries.
A photo provided by the department of homeland security to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, showed the men on the plane, their hands and feet shackled.
Officials did not say whether the South Sudanese government had detained them or what their fate would be.
Edmund Yakani, who runs a civil society organisation in South Sudan, told the BBC World Service he was allowed to briefly see the eight people, but did not get a chance to speak to them.
The eight were in a civilian facility in the capital Juba under the watch of police and the national security service, Mr Yakani said, adding they were not in handcuffs and appeared to be in good condition.
The status of the group was still unclear and he hopes the government provides clarity on Monday, he added.
South Sudan remains unstable and is on the brink of civil war, with the US State Department warning against travel because of “crime, kidnapping and armed conflict”.
The eight had initially been flown out of the US in May, but their plane was diverted to Djibouti after US district judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts blocked the deportation. He had ruled that migrants being deported to third countries must be given notice and a chance to speak with an asylum officer.
But last week, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration and overturned Judge Murphy’s ruling. On Thursday, the Supreme Court confirmed that the judge could no longer require due process hearings, allowing the deportations to proceed.
Lawyers then asked another judge to intervene but he ultimately ruled only Judge Murphy had jurisdiction. Judge Murphy then said he had no authority to stop the removals due to the Supreme Court’s “binding” decision.
Tricia McLaughlin from the US Department of Homeland Security called the South Sudan deportation a victory over “activist judges”.
Earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked all visas for South Sudanese passport holders, citing the country’s past refusal to accept deported nationals.
How MI5 piled falsehood on falsehood in the case of neo-Nazi spy who abused women
When the BBC revealed that MI5 had lied to three courts, the Security Service apologised for giving false evidence – vowing to investigate and explain how such a serious failure had occurred.
But on Wednesday, the High Court ruled that these inquiries were “deficient”, ordering a new “robust” investigation. A panel of judges said they would consider the issue of contempt of court proceedings against individuals once that was complete.
Now we can detail how, over the past few months leading up to the judgment, MI5 continued to provide misleading evidence and tried to keep damning material secret.
The material gives an unprecedented insight into the internal chaos at MI5 as it responded to what has become a major crisis and test of its credibility.
At the heart of the case is the violent abuse of a woman by a state agent under MI5’s control. After the BBC began investigating, MI5 attempted to cover its tracks – scattering a trail of false and misleading evidence.
The case started very simply: I was investigating a neo-Nazi, who I came to understand was also an abusive misogynist and MI5 agent.
After I contacted this man – known publicly as X – in 2020 to challenge him on his extremism, a senior MI5 officer called me up and tried to stop me running a story.
The officer said X had been working for MI5 and informing on extremists, and so it was wrong for me to say he was an extremist himself.
It was this disclosure, repeated in a series of phone calls, which the Security Service would later lie about to three courts as it attempted to keep X’s role and identity shrouded in secrecy.
During the phone calls with me, MI5 denied information I had about X’s violence, but I decided to spend more time investigating. What I learned was that X was a violent misogynist abuser with paedophilic tendencies who had used his MI5 role as a tool of coercion.
He had attacked his girlfriend – known publicly as “Beth” – with a machete, and abused an earlier partner, whose child he had threatened to kill. He even had cannibal fantasies about eating children.
When I challenged both X and MI5 with our evidence, the government took me and the BBC to court in early 2022. They failed to stop the story but did win legal anonymity for X.
Arguing for secrecy in a succession of court proceedings, the Security Service told judges it had stuck to its core policy of neither confirming nor denying (NCND) informants’ identities, including during conversations with me. Crucially, this stance allowed it to keep evidence secret from “Beth”, who had taken MI5 to court.
The service aggressively maintained its position until I produced evidence proving it was untrue – including a recording of one of the calls with a senior MI5 officer.
Finally accepting it had provided false evidence, MI5’s director general Sir Ken McCallum said: “We take our duty to provide truthful, accurate and complete information very seriously, and have offered an unreserved apology to the court.”
Two investigations were commissioned: an internal MI5 disciplinary inquiry, and an external review by Sir Jonathan Jones KC, who was once the government’s chief lawyer. This latter review was personally commissioned by the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and MI5’s director general.
Both of these concluded that the original false evidence was not due to dishonesty by MI5 or any of its officers. They effectively put it down to mistakes, both personal and systemic.
But these two inquiries quickly began to fall apart.
Not fair or accurate
The government initially refused to provide both reports in full to the court.
Like many cases involving MI5, this one was held partly in secret to allow the government to use evidence which it says is too sensitive to be discussed in open hearings.
Access to the secret, closed part of the case was only available to the government, the judge and security-cleared barristers known as special advocates who were representing the BBC – but who were not allowed to communicate directly with us.
The government said it would not be providing any closed evidence about the two inquiries to the judge or the special advocates.
Instead, it provided an “open” version of Sir Jonathan’s external review, with apparently sensitive material edited out, and it purported to provide a full account of the internal inquiry in a witness statement by MI5’s director general of strategy – known as Witness B.
Sir Jonathan wrote that he was “satisfied” that the open version was a “fair and accurate” account of his full review. Witness B, third-in-command at the Security Service, said in his statement: “I am satisfied that there is nothing in the closed material that has been excluded from the open report which prevents MI5 from providing the court with a frank and accurate account.”
During hearings, the government argued against disclosing secret material to the court. It eventually agreed to hand over the secret version of Sir Jonathan’s review, and then was ordered to disclose the internal investigation report described by Witness B, along with policy documents and notes of interviews with MI5 officers.
When the disclosure came, it was clear why MI5 was so keen to keep it secret: the summaries, including the one from MI5’s third-in-command, were not fair or accurate. Key information had been withheld, which undermined their conclusions.
In short, the court was still being misled.
At the same time, in response to the inquiries, I was submitting new evidence which proved that some of the claims made by the two reviews were false.
Neither the internal investigation nor Sir Jonathan Jones contacted me, despite the fact I was the only other person who really knew what had been said in all the phone calls at the centre of the case.
‘The fallibility of memory’
The two official reviews concluded that the senior officer who called me – Officer 2 – failed to recall telling me that X was an agent.
“There is nothing surprising in this narrative, which is ultimately about the fallibility of memory in the absence of a written record,” as the Security Service put it in legal submissions.
The Jones review said that, because no formal record was made of the calls, by the time MI5 was preparing evidence the “only first-hand evidence available was Officer 2’s personal recollection”.
Sir Jonathan said the officer’s recollection was “uncertain”, although it had hardened over time into a position that he had not departed from NCND.
But material that MI5 and the government sought to keep secret shows that Officer 2 gave a detailed recollection of the conversation with me – until I exposed it as false.
His recollection was contained in a note of an internal MI5 meeting, arranged to discuss what to tell the special advocates and the court about the conversations with me. In it, the officer insisted he did not depart from NCND and gave a melodramatic account of my “long pauses” as I said I needed the story, before I eventually became cooperative and said I had “seen the light”.
This was all untrue. He also falsely claimed I had revealed that I had spoken to X’s former girlfriend, when I had done no such thing.
The note also showed that Officer 2 had told colleagues that he persuaded me to drop the story by implying that agent X was being investigated by MI5 as an extremist. This was the exact opposite of what he had in fact told me, which was that X was an MI5 agent rather than a real extremist.
Sir Jonathan was aware of the full version of this elaborate false account, but it was absent from the unclassified version given to the court and the BBC.
The MI5 internal review also claimed that Officer 2 had a lapse of memory.
It said that Officer 2 had told another officer – a key figure involved in preparing the Security Service’s false evidence for the court, known as Officer 3 – that he could not remember whether he had departed from NCND.
In his statement to court, Witness B – MI5’s director general of strategy – said Officer 2 had said “they could not recall the details” of the conversations with me but “did not think they had departed from NCND” and believed “they would have remembered if they had done so”.
But an internal note by Officer 3, written after his discussion with Officer 2, contained a very different account.
It stated unequivocally that “we did not breach NCND” and that the contact with me “was prefaced with confirmation that this conversation was not on the record”.
It also stated that, “after being initially fairly bullish, De Simone said that he acknowledged the strength of the argument, and agreed to remove those references”.
All three claims were false, including about the conversations being off the record, something now accepted by MI5.
The evidence showed specific false claims being presented as memories – not the absence of memory the two inquiries said they found.
The written records MI5 said did not exist
The question of memory was so important because the court was told that written records were not available.
Witness B – MI5’s third-in-command – said the internal investigation established that Officer 2 had “updated colleagues within MI5” about the conversations with me, but that “there was no evidence identified of any written record being made, by Officer 2 or anyone else”.
“The fact of the matter was that Officer 2 was reliant on personal recollection alone which inevitably carries a degree of inherent uncertainty,” Witness B said in his statement to court.
Sir Jonathan gave the same impression in his review.
But the secret material MI5 was forced to hand over proved this was false. There were several written records consistent with what had really happened – that MI5 had chosen to depart from NCND and that several people were aware of it.
There was a decision log.
There were notes of conversations with Agent X himself.
There were emails.
The decision log showed that, just after the authorisation took place, a formal record was created saying the plan was to call the BBC and “reveal the MI5 link to X”. The log then noted: “This was discussed with Officer 2 who subsequently approached the BBC to begin this conversation.”
In an internal email, after I had said I would not include X in an initial story, one of X’s handling team reported this development to other MI5 officers and accurately described the approach to me, namely that Officer 2 had claimed my proposed story was “incorrect” and the rationale for this was that most of the material was as a “direct result of his tasking” as an MI5 agent.
Notes of calls and meeting with Agent X show he approved the plan to reveal his MI5 role and was kept updated about the calls. In a later meeting with him, MI5 recorded that he was “happy” to meet with me, which was an offer MI5 had made and I ignored.
But it showed that MI5 and X were well aware of the NCND departure, because the Security Service would obviously only try to arrange a meeting with someone like X if they an agent.
In a telling note, MI5 said X thought that a meeting with me would “hopefully serve to counter some of the conclusions that the journalist had reached about X”. This is a violent, misogynistic neo-Nazi, a danger to women and children, yet MI5 wanted to do PR for him with a journalist.
‘Back in the box’
These records and others show that the handling team for agent X understood there had been an NCND departure. This was unsurprising as the calls with me at the time made it clear that his case officers knew what was happening.
But the internal investigation report records how, as MI5 was preparing to take the BBC to court to block our story on X, one officer went around convincing colleagues that no such departure had ever taken place.
Officer 3 spoke several times to a member of the agent-handling team within MI5 – known as Officer 4 – regarding what had been said to me about X.
“We have already named him pal,” said Officer 4, according to Officer 4’s evidence to the investigation and Officer 3 replied: “I can categorically tell you we didn’t”.
After these conversations, Officer 4 said he felt the other officer had put him “back in his box”. Other members of the handling team thought what Officer 3 was saying was “odd” and “weird”.
MI5 has given completely contradictory explanations for how the false claim about not departing from NCND had got into its witness statement.
The claim was given to court by an officer known as Witness A, acting as a corporate witness – meaning he was representing the organisation rather than appearing as someone necessarily involved personally in the events.
When the government was trying to stop the BBC publishing its story about X in 2022, the BBC’s special advocates asked how Witness A could be so sure that NCND had not been breached.
The government’s lawyers said “Witness A spoke to the MI5 officer who had contact with the BBC” – meaning Officer 2 – and the officer had said he neither confirmed nor denied agent X’s role. The lawyers’ answers strongly appeared to suggest that the pair had even spoken at the time of the calls with me.
After we exposed Witness A’s false evidence, the lawyers’ answers created a problem for MI5 as it either suggested Officer 2 had lied all along – or that he and Witness A were both lying.
It has since been claimed that the men did not speak to each other at the time of the calls with me.
Despite not reconciling these contradictory accounts, the investigation concluded “the parties were collectively doing their best to prepare a witness statement that was accurate”.
Five times MI5 abandoned ‘neither confirm nor deny’
Officer 2 claimed that he had never departed from NCND before and said that was a key reason why he would have recalled doing so.
But new evidence I submitted to court showed he had also told me whether or not five other people I was investigating were working with the Security Service. One of them was an undercover MI5 officer – one of the most sensitive and memorable details an officer could disclose.
Officer 2 had invited me to meet this undercover officer, just as he had offered me the chance to meet Agent X. I had not pursued either offer, which I thought were a crude attempt at pulling me into MI5’s orbit.
Indeed, the internal MI5 material suggests that its officers wrongly believe that the role of journalists is to be cheerleaders for the Security Service. I was variously described as “bullish”, “stubborn”, “awkward”, and not “as on board as other journalists”.
They said, before their involvement with me, the BBC was seen as “friendly” and “supportive” of MI5. In reality, journalists like me are here to scrutinise and challenge the organisation.
The five other NCND departures were not apparently uncovered by MI5’s internal investigators, nor by Sir Jonathan Jones.
Disclosing agent X’s role would have been memorable and unusual on its own.
But the fact there were also departures on NCND relating to five other people made the chain of events even more extraordinary, and made any claimed loss of memory by Officer 2 – and in MI5 more widely – simply unbelievable.
The missing interviews
Both inquiries failed to speak to key people who were on the calls they were supposed to be investigating. Neither of them spoke to me – but there were other omissions too.
Sir Jonathan’s review wrongly claimed that “only Officer 2 had been party to the calls” with me. In fact, Officer 2 had invited another senior officer to join one of the calls. He introduced himself by saying: “I head up all counter-terrorism investigations here.”
He referred to my earlier “conversations” with Officer 2 and was plainly aware of their content – he even made a specific pun about something connected to X.
While MI5’s internal investigation was aware that the head of counter-terror investigations had joined one of the calls and mentioned it in their secret report, investigators never bothered interviewing him.
After I submitted new evidence, MI5 was forced to speak to him – but the internal investigators concluded there was nothing to show he knew about NCND departures.
Sir Jonathan had also failed to speak to the MI5 officer at the centre of the case, Officer 2. He had simply adopted the conclusions of the internal inquiry – in which MI5 was investigating itself.
It emerged during the court case that Sir Jonathan did speak to MI5 director general Sir Ken McCallum for his investigation. But when the BBC’s special advocates requested any notes of the interview, they were told that none existed.
‘Maintaining trust’
“MI5’s job is to keep the country safe,” Sir Ken said after the High Court judgement. “Maintaining the trust of the courts is essential to that mission.”
Because of this case, the courts have made plain that MI5’s practices should change. The government says it is reviewing how the service prepares and gives evidence.
Because NCND has been abandoned in relation to Agent X, Beth will now have a fairer trial of her legal claim against MI5. The monolithically consistent way in which the policy has been presented, including in a string of important cases, has been shown to be untrue.
This has become a story about whether MI5 can be believed, and about how it uses its privileged position to conceal and lie.
But in the beginning – and in the end – it is a story about violence against women and girls, about the importance placed on that crucial issue by the state, and about how covering up for abusive misogynists never ends well.
Israel sends negotiators to Gaza talks despite ‘unacceptable’ Hamas demands, PM says
Israel has decided to send a delegation to Qatar on Sunday for proximity talks with Hamas on the latest proposal for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he had accepted the invitation despite what he described as the “unacceptable” changes that Hamas wanted to make to a plan presented by mediators from Qatar, the US and Egypt.
On Friday night, Hamas said it had delivered a “positive response” to the proposal for a 60-day ceasefire and that it was ready for negotiations.
However, a Palestinian official said the group had sought amendments including a guarantee that hostilities would not resume if talks on a permanent truce failed.
In Gaza itself, the Hamas-run health ministry said on Sunday that 80 people killed in Israeli attacks had arrived at hospitals over the previous 24 hours.
Seven people were killed, including a doctor and his three children, when tents in the al-Mawasi area were bombed on Saturday, according to a hospital in the nearby city of Khan Younis.
On Saturday, two American employees of the controversial aid distribution organisation backed by Israel and the US – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – were wounded in what it said was a grenade attack at its site in the Khan Younis area.
The Israeli and US governments both blamed Hamas, which has not commented.
Late on Saturday, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement that “the changes that Hamas is seeking to make” to the ceasefire proposal were “unacceptable to Israel”.
But it added: “In light of an assessment of the situation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has directed that the invitation to proximity talks be accepted and that the contacts for the return of our hostages – on the basis of the Qatari proposal that Israel has agreed to – be continued. The negotiating team will leave tomorrow.”
Earlier, an Israeli official had briefed local media that there was “something to work with” in the way that Hamas had responded.
Mediators are likely to have their work cut out to bridge the remaining gaps at the indirect talks in Doha.
Watching them closely will be US President Donald Trump, who has been talking up the chances of an agreement in recent days.
On Friday, before he was briefed on Hamas’s response, he said it was “good” that the group was positive and that “there could be a Gaza deal next week”.
Trump is due to meet Netanyahu on Monday, and it is clear that he would very much like to be able to announce a significant breakthrough then.
The families of Israeli hostages and Palestinians in Gaza will also once again be holding their breath.
Hostages’ relatives and thousands of their supporters attended a rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday night to call for a comprehensive deal that would bring home all of the hostages.
Among those who spoke was Yechiel Yehoud. His daughter Arbel Yehoud was released from captivity during the last ceasefire, which Trump helped to broker before he took office and which collapsed when Israel resumed its offensive in March.
“President Trump, thank you for bringing our Arbel back to us. We will be indebted to you for the rest of our lives. Please don’t stop, please make a ‘big beautiful hostages deal’,” he said.
On Tuesday, the US president said that Israel had accepted the “necessary conditions” for a 60-day ceasefire, during which the parties would work to end the war.
The plan is believed to include the staggered release of 10 living Israeli hostages by Hamas and the bodies of 18 other hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Fifty hostages are still being held in Gaza, at least 20 of whom are believed to be alive.
The proposal also reportedly says sufficient quantities of aid would enter Gaza immediately with the involvement of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
A senior Palestinian official familiar with the talks told the BBC on Friday that Hamas was demanding aid be distributed exclusively by the UN and its partners, and that the GHF’s operations end immediately.
Another amendment demanded by Hamas was about Israeli troop withdrawals, according to the official.
The US proposal is believed to include phased Israeli pull-outs from parts of Gaza. But the official said Hamas wanted troops to return to the positions they held before the last ceasefire collapsed in March, when Israel resumed its offensive.
The official said Hamas also wanted a US guarantee that Israeli air and ground operations would not resume even if the ceasefire ended without a permanent truce.
The proposal is believed to say mediators will guarantee that serious negotiations will take place from day one, and that they can extend the ceasefire if necessary.
The Israeli prime minister has ruled out ending the war until all of the hostages are released and Hamas’s military and governing capabilities are destroyed.
Far-right members of his cabinet have also expressed their opposition to the proposed deal.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on Saturday that the only way to secure the return of the hostages was the “full conquest of the Gaza Strip, a complete halt to so-called ‘humanitarian’ aid, and the encouragement of emigration” of the Palestinian population.
The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 57,338 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
Texas flood victims: Girl ‘having time of her life’ and ‘heart and soul’ of camp
An eight-year-old girl and the director of an all-girls’ summer camp are among the victims of flash floods in Texas that have claimed at least 51 lives, including 15 children.
Officials say most of the victims have been identified. Authorities have not yet released any names publicly.
Here’s what we know so far about the victims.
Renee Smajstrla
Eight-year-old Renee Smajstrla was at Camp Mystic when flooding swept through the summer camp for girls, her uncle said in a Facebook post.
“Renee has been found and while not the outcome we prayed for, the social media outreach likely assisted the first responders in helping to identify her so quickly,” wrote Shawn Salta, of Maryland.
“We are thankful she was with her friends and having the time of her life, as evidenced by this picture from yesterday,” he wrote. “She will forever be living her best life at Camp Mystic.”
Camp Mystic, where 27 children are missing, is a nearly century-old Christian summer camp for girls on the banks of the Guadalupe River near Hunt, Texas.
Operated by generations of the same family since the 1930s, the camp’s website bills itself as a place for girls to grow “spiritually” in a “wholesome” Christian atmosphere “to develop outstanding personal qualities and self-esteem”.
Jane Ragsdale
Heart O’ the Hills is another all-girls’ camp that sits along the Guadalupe River and it was right in the path of Friday’s flood.
Jane Ragsdale, described as the “heart and soul” of Heart O’Hills, “did not make it”, a statement shared on the camp’s official website said on Saturday.
Ragsdale, who started off as a camper then a counsellor, became the director and co-owner of the camp in 1976.
“We are mourning the loss of a woman who influenced countless lives and was the definition of strong and powerful,” the statement said.
No campers were residing at the site when the floods hit and and most of those who were there have been accounted for, according to the statement.
Sarah Marsh
Sarah Marsh, a student at Cherokee Bend Elementary School in Alabama, would have entered third grade in August.
She, too, was attending Camp Mystic and her grandmother, Debbie Ford Marsh, asked for prayers in a post on Facebook on Friday.
Just hours later she shared online that her granddaughter was among the girls killed.
“We will always feel blessed to have had this beautiful spunky ray of light in our lives. She will live on in our hearts forever!” she said.
In a post on Facebook, Alabama Senator Katie Britt said she’s “heartbroken over the loss of Sarah Marsh, and we are keeping her family in our thoughts and prayers during this unimaginable time”.
Janie Hunt
Nine-year-old Janie Hunt from Dallas, was also attending Camp Mystic and died in the floods.
Her grandmother Margaret Hunt told The New York Times she went to the camp with six of her cousins, who are all safe.
Margaret said Janie’s parents had to visit a funeral home and identify their daughter.
Janie is a great-granddaughter of the oil baron William Herbert Hunt.
Julian Ryan
As floodwaters tore through their trailer in Ingram, Texas, Julian Ryan turned to his fiancée Christina Wilson and said: “I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it. I love y’all” – Christina told Houston television station KHOU.
His body wasn’t recovered until hours later, after waters had receded.
Julian had just finished a late dishwashing shift at a restaurant when the Guadalupe River overflowed early Friday.
He and Christina woke to ankle-deep water that quickly rose to their waists. She told the station their bedroom door stuck shut and with water rushing in, Ryan punched through a window to get his family out. He severely cut his arm in the process.
Their 13-month-old and 6-year-old sons and his mother survived by floating on a mattress until help could arrive.
“He died a hero, and that will never go unnoticed,” Connie Salas, Ryan’s sister, told KHOU.
Dick Eastland
Richard “Dick” Eastland, the longtime co-owner and co-director of Camp Mystic, died while being flown to a Houston hospital.
His death was confirmed by Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, who attended Bible study with Dick and described him as a pillar of the local community.
Dick’s wife, Tweety, was found safe at their riverside home, according to Texas Public Radio.
The Eastlands had run Camp Mystic, a girls’ summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River, since 1974, becoming the third generation of their family to do so.
According to the Washington Post, the couple have 11 grandchildren and much of the extended family is involved in camp life.
Their eldest son, Richard, manages the camp kitchen and their youngest, Edward, and his wife direct operations at Camp Mystic Guadalupe River.
Katheryn Eads
Katheryn Eads, 52, was swept away by floodwaters in the Kerrville area of Texas, early Friday morning after she and her husband, Brian, who told The New York Times, fled their campervan as rising water surged around them.
Another camper had offered them a ride and they made it across the street before the vehicle stalled in the flood.
Moments later, both were pulled into the current. Brian said he lost sight of his wife after being struck by debris. He survived by clinging onto a tree until he reached dry land.
Katheryn’s body was later recovered.
“God has her now,” her mother, Elizabeth Moss Grover, wrote on Facebook.
Amy Hutchinson, director of Olive Branch Counselling in Texas, where Katheryn had worked, told The Washington Post she was “a hope and a light to all who knew her… a stellar counsellor and professor.”
Blair and Brooke Harber
Two sisters from Dallas – 13-year-old Blair Harber and 11-year-old Brooke Harber – were staying with their grandparents along the Guadalupe River when their cabin was washed away, CBS News, the BBC’s US partner has reported.
Their parents were in a separate cabin and were not harmed.
Their grandparents are still unaccounted for.
The deaths were confirmed by St Rita Catholic Community, where Brooke was due to start sixth grade. Blair was preparing to enter eighth grade.
“Please keep the Harber family in your prayers during this time of profound grief. May our faith, our love, and our St. Rita community be a source of strength and comfort in the days ahead,” said Father Joshua J Whitfield in correspondence with church members.
Lila Bonner
Nine-year-old Lila Bonner, a Dallas native was found dead after flooding near Camp Mystic, according to NBC News.
“In the midst of our unimaginable grief, we ask for privacy and are unable to confirm any details at this time,” her family said in a statement to the news outlet.
“We ache with all who loved her and are praying endlessly.”
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Published
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova said a game was ‘stolen’ from her when Wimbledon’s electronic line-calling system failed during her fourth-round match against Britain’s Sonay Kartal.
There was no ‘out’ call when a Kartal backhand went long at 4-4 in the first set, with chair umpire Nico Helwerth shouting “stop, stop” to halt play.
Russian Pavlyuchenkova had seen the ball was out – and a TV replay showed that was the case by some distance.
Addressing the crowd, Helwerth said: “We’re just going to check if the system was up and running, because there was no audio call.”
After a telephone call, he announced the electronic system “was unfortunately unable to track the last point” and ordered the point to be replayed.
Had the ball been called out, Pavlyuchenkova would have won the point and taken the lead.
Instead, it was replayed, Kartal won the point and went on to break for a 5-4 lead.
The fact Pavlyuchenkova went on to win the match meant the malfunction was not as costly as it could have been.
‘You took the game away from me’
Pavlyuchenkova was clearly frustrated when she returned to her chair at the end of the game.
She told the umpire: “I don’t know if it’s in or out. How do I know? How can you prove it?
“Because she is local, they can say whatever. You took the game away from me.
“They stole the game from me. They stole it.”
A spokesperson for the All England Club said: “Due to operator error the system was deactivated on the point in question.
“The chair umpire followed the established process.”
The automated line-calling system was introduced at Wimbledon for the first time this year.
Debbie Jevans – chair of the All England Club – said on Friday she was confident in its accuracy and the decision to bring it in.
Call fails on big stage after week of scrutiny
Electronic line-calling technology has been under scrutiny this week at Wimbledon, with a number of players saying they do not trust it.
Such an obvious failure on the biggest stage – on Centre Court, in a match featuring a British player – has ensured this topic will not go away.
Britain’s Emma Raducanu has been one of those to voice concerns, saying some of the calls had been “dodgy”, while former Olympic champion Belinda Bencic said the technology was a topic of discussion among players in the locker room.
Bencic said she was usually a fan of the technology but “it is not correct” at this tournament.
Line judges have been replaced by technology at many top-level tournaments, including the US Open and Australian Open.
Jevans previously said the technology was brought in because “the players wanted it” and some have backed the system, with former world number one Iga Swiatek saying she has had doubts but “has to trust” the calls.
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‘Hopefully we don’t see mistakes like this again’
Britain’s Billie Jean King Cup captain Anne Keothavong said the error was something the tournament referee and organisers would have to “reflect on” and see “what could have been done better”.
“If there is uncertainty, that creates anxiety,” she said on BBC TV. “They [players] just need to feel reassured that the technology is working and the person who is pressing the buttons is doing the job they are meant to do.
“Hopefully we don’t see mistakes like this again.”
Former world number one Tracy Austin said the fault had been a “one-off”.
“An interesting, dramatic situation that I’m sure we will fix in the future but it was tough to watch for those few minutes,” the American added.
Men’s fifth seed Taylor Fritz, who said a similar thing happened to him in Cincinnati last year, said it would be better if umpires were able to make the call if the technology failed rather than replaying the point.
When there were line judges, players could challenge the calls by using an electronic review. There are no challenges under the current system and video replays are not used.
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Bayern Munich’s Jamal Musiala will be out for a “long period” after suffering a broken leg and dislocated ankle during Saturday’s Club World Cup defeat by Paris St-Germain.
The 22-year-old was injured in the first half when he was caught by keeper Gianluigi Donnarumma while chasing down a ball near the byeline.
Musiala, who screamed in agony as he clutched his left ankle, covered his face with his shirt when he was taken off on a stretcher.
The attacking midfielder was taken to hospital for assessment and has now flown back to Munich for surgery.
“This serious injury and the long absence are a real shock for Jamal and all of us. This hits FC Bayern hard,” said Bayern’s sporting director Max Eberl.
“Everyone knows how immensely important Jamal is for our game and what a central role he plays for our team. Furthermore, the human impact is incredibly bitter; we all feel for him: Jamal has just recovered from an injury and will now be out for another long period.
“He will get everything he needs from us. We will support him intensively and be by his side, and we are already looking forward to him being back on the pitch.”
Donnarumma averted his eyes after looking over at Musiala’s injury, while Bayern’s players were distraught as the Germany international was attended to by club physios.
Bayern keeper Manuel Neuer called Donnarumma’s challenge “risky” and criticised the Italy international’s conduct.
“You just accept that your opponent might get injured. It could even be a team-mate,” said Neuer.
“So I went over to him and said: ‘Don’t you want’ – because it was half-time anyway – ‘don’t you want to go over there? Jamal is lying there, he’ll probably stay in the hospital, he has a serious injury, and I think it’s only right to go over there out of respect and wish him well and just say a little sorry.’
“After that, he went over to Jamal. Fairness is always important, and I would have reacted differently.”
Following the match, Donnarumma said “all my prayers and well wishes are with you Jamal” in a social media post.
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McLaren’s Lando Norris took his first home victory in a chaotic, dramatic, rain-affected British Grand Prix.
Norris benefited from a 10-second penalty handed to team-mate Oscar Piastri, who was found to have driven erratically during a restart after one of two safety-car periods at Silverstone.
Piastri had led the race calmly through a heavy shower of rain and a series of incidents but was passed by Norris when he served his penalty at his final pit stop in the closing laps.
Norris’ win, which he described as “beautiful”, reduces his deficit to Piastri in the championship to eight points.
Veteran German Nico Hulkenberg took his first podium finish at the 239th attempt – setting a new record for the longest time before finishing in the top three – after a strong race for Sauber.
Hulkenberg managed to keep Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari at bay in the closing laps as Red Bull’s Max Verstappen came home fifth.
The all-time F1 record crowd – 168,000 on the day and 500,000 over the weekend – witnessed an extraordinary moment when Verstappen spun before racing had resumed at the restart after the second safety car period.
Verstappen appeared to have been distracted by what had happened a few seconds before in the incident that earned Piastri his penalty.
As Piastri prepared for the final restart on lap 22, he slowed on the Hangar Straight. Verstappen, partially unsighted in the wet conditions, briefly passed the Australian, and then complained over the radio that he had suddenly braked.
It carried echoes of an incident at the Canadian Grand Prix two races ago, when Red Bull protested against a similar action by race winner George Russell of Mercedes, but had it rejected.
This time, the stewards decided Piastri had contravened a regulation that demands drivers “proceed at a pace which involved no erratic braking nor any other manoeuvre which is likely to endanger other drivers from the point at which the lights on the safety car are turned off”.
Piastri was angry, but said he was “not going to say much because I’ll get myself into trouble”, a reference to the rules that say drivers can be penalised for criticising officials.
“Apparently you can’t break behind the safety car any more, I did it for five laps before that,” he said.
As the field rounded Stowe, Verstappen lost control and spun, dropping down to 10th place.
He recovered to fifth place but is now 69 points behind Piastri and his championship hopes are dimmer than ever, especially in the face of McLaren’s consistently strong form.
More to follow
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