US President Donald Trump has issued an executive order hitting India with an additional 25% tariff over its purchases of Russian oil.

That will raise the total tariff on Indian imports to the United States to 50% – among the highest rates imposed by the US.

The new rate will come into effect in 21 days, so on 27 August, according to the executive order.

A response from India’s foreign ministry on Wednesday said New Delhi had already made clear its stance on imports from Russia, and reiterated that the tariff is “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable”.

“It is therefore extremely unfortunate that the US should choose to impose additional tariffs on India for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest,” the brief statement read.

“India will take all actions necessary to protect its national interests,” it added.

The US president had earlier warned he would raise levies, saying India doesn’t “care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine”.

On Wednesday, the White House said in a statement that the “Russian Federation’s actions in Ukraine pose an ongoing threat to US national security and foreign policy, necessitating stronger measures to address the national emergency”.

It said India’s imports of Russian oil undermine US efforts to counter Russia’s activities in Ukraine.

It added that the US will determine which other countries import oil from Russia, and will “recommend further actions to the President as needed”.

Oil and gas are Russia’s biggest exports, and Moscow’s biggest customers include China, India and Turkey.

The threatened tariff hike follows meetings on Wednesday by Trump’s top envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow, aimed at securing peace between Russia and Ukraine.

New Delhi had previously called Trump’s threat to raise tariffs over its purchase of oil from Russia “unjustified and unreasonable”.

In an earlier statement, a spokesperson for India’s foreign ministry, Randhir Jaiswal, said the US had encouraged India to import Russian gas at the start of the conflict, “for strengthening global energy markets stability”.

He said India “began importing from Russia because traditional supplies were diverted to Europe after the outbreak of the conflict”.

The latest threatened tariff demonstrates Trump’s willingness to impose sanctions related to the war in Ukraine even against nations that the US considers to be important allies or trading partners.

This could be a warning that other countries could feel a real bite if Trump ramps up those kind of sanctions once Friday’s deadline passes, when the US president has threatened new sanctions on Russia and to place 100% tariffs on countries that purchase its oil.

This would not be the first time the Trump administration has imposed secondary tariffs, which are also in place to punish buyers of Venezuelan oil.

India has previously criticised the US – its largest trading partner – for introducing the levies, when the US itself is still doing trade with Russia.

Last year, the US traded goods worth an estimated $3.5bn (£2.6bn) with Russia, despite tough sanctions and tariffs.

Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have in the past referred to each other as friends and, during Trump’s first term, attended political rallies in each others’ countries.

But that has not stopped Trump from hitting India with the levies, suggesting diverging interests between New Delhi and Washington.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of the first world leaders to visit Washington weeks after US President Donald Trump started his second term.

He called Modi his “great friend” as the two countries set an ambitious target of doubling their trade to $500bn by 2030.

But less than six months later, the relationship appears to have hit rock bottom.

Trump has now imposed a total of 50% tariffs on goods imported from India, and his earlier threat of levying an extra 10% for the country’s membership in the Brics grouping, which includes China, Russia and South Africa as founding members, still stands.

He initially imposed a 25% tariff, but announced an additional 25% on Wednesday as a penalty for Delhi’s purchase of Russian oil – a move the Indian government called “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable”.

And just last week, Trump called India’s economy “dead”.

This is a stunning reversal in a relationship that has gone from strength to strength over the past two decades, thanks to efforts by successive governments in both countries, bipartisan support and convergence on global issues.

In the past few weeks, there were positive signals from Washington and Delhi about an imminent trade deal. Now that looks increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

So what went wrong?

A series of missteps, grandstanding, geopolitics and domestic political pressure seem to have broken down the negotiations.

Delhi has been restrained in its response so far to Trump’s tirades, hoping that diplomacy might eventually help secure a trade deal. But in Trump’s White House, there are no guarantees.

Trump has commented on many issues that Delhi considers red lines. The biggest among them is Trump repeatedly putting India and its rival Pakistan on an equal footing.

The US president hosted Pakistani army chief Asim Munir at the White House just weeks after a bitter conflict between the two South Asian rivals.

He then signed a trade deal with Pakistan, offering the country a preferential tariff rate of 19%, along with a deal to explore the country’s oil reserves. He went as far as saying that some day, Pakistan might sell oil to India.

Another constant irritant for Delhi is Trump’s repeated assertion that the US brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan.

India sees its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir as its internal affair and has always rejected third-party mediation on the issue. Most world leaders have been sensitive to Delhi’s position, including Trump in his first stint as president.

But that’s no longer the case. The US president has doubled down on his claim even after Modi told India’s parliament that “no country had mediated in the ceasefire”.

Modi didn’t name Trump or the US but domestic political pressure is mounting on him not to “bow down” to the White House.

“The fact that this is happening against the backdrop of heavy and high-level US engagement with Islamabad immediately after an India-Pakistan conflict is even more galling for Delhi and the wider Indian public. This all sharpens concerns harboured by some in India that the US can’t truly be trusted as a partner,” says Washington-based South Asia analyst Michael Kugelman.

He adds that some of the anger in Delhi might “be Cold War-era baggage coming to the fore”, but “this time around it’s intensified by real-time developments as well”.

Modi’s government thrives on nationalist issues, so its supporters would likely expect a firm response to the US.

It’s a Catch-22 situation – Delhi still wants to clinch a deal but also doesn’t want to come across as buckling under Trump’s pressure.

And it appears that Delhi is gradually releasing the restraint. In its response to Washington’s anger over India’s purchase of Russian oil, Delhi vowed to take “all necessary measures” to safeguard its “national interests and economic security”.

But the question is why Trump, who loved India’s hospitality and called it a great country earlier, has gone on a tirade against a trusted ally.

Some analysts see his insults as a pressure tactic to secure a deal that he thinks works for the US.

“Trump is a real estate magnate and a tough negotiator. His style may not be diplomatic, but he seeks the outcomes diplomats would. So, I think what he’s doing is part of a negotiating strategy,” says Jitendra Nath Misra, a former Indian ambassador and now a professor at OP Jindal Global University.

A source in the Indian government said that Delhi gave many concessions to Washington, including no tariffs on industrial goods, and a phased reduction of tariffs on cars and alcohol. It also signed a deal to let Elon Musk’s Starlink start operations in India.

But Washington wanted access to India’s agriculture and dairy sectors to reduce the $45bn trade deficit it runs with Delhi.

But these sectors are a red line for Modi or, for that matter, any Indian prime minister. Agriculture and related sectors account for more than 45% of employment in India and successive governments have fiercely protected farmers.

Mr Kugelman believes giving in to Washington’s demands isn’t an option for India.

“India first needs to assuage public anger and make clear it won’t give in to the pressure. This is critical for domestic political reasons,” he says.

He also believes that Trump’s insistence that India stop importing oil from Moscow has more to do with his growing frustration over Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We’re seeing Trump continuing to ratchet up his pressure tactics, trying to cut Russia off from its most important oil buyers by penalising them for doing business with Moscow,” he says.

But Delhi can’t afford to stop importing oil from Russia overnight.

India is already the world’s third biggest consumer of crude and may surpass China in the top position by 2030 as its energy demand is likely to increase with a fast-growing middle class, according to International Energy Agency (IEA).

Russia now accounts for more than 30% of India’s total oil imports, a significant jump from less than 1% in 2021-22.

Many in the West see this as India indirectly funding Moscow’s war but Delhi denies this, arguing that buying Russian oil at a discount ensures energy security for millions of its citizens.

India also sees Russia as its “all-weather” ally. Moscow has traditionally come to Delhi’s rescue during past crises and still enjoys support among the wider Indian public.

Moscow is also Delhi’s biggest arms supplier, though its share in India’s defence import portfolio dropped to 36% between 2020-25 from 55% between 2016 and 2020, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

This was largely due to Delhi boosting domestic manufacturing and buying more from the US, France and Israel.

But Russia’s role in India’s defence strategy can’t be overstated. This is something the West understood and didn’t challenge – until Trump decided to break from established norms.

So far, India was able to successfully walk the diplomatic tightrope with the West overlooking its strong ties to Russia.

The US has long viewed India as a bulwark against China’s dominance in the Indo-Pacific region, which ensured bipartisan support for Delhi in Washington.

And Moscow (though sometimes reluctantly) didn’t react harshly to its ally forging close ties with Washington and other western countries.

But now Trump has challenged this position. How Delhi reacts will decide the future of the India-US relationship.

India has been measured in its response so far but is not holding back completely. In its statement, it said that the US had encouraged it to keep buying oil from Russia for global energy market stability.

It also said that targeting it was unjustified as the EU continues to buy energy, fertiliser, mining and chemical products from Russia.

While things seem bad, some analysts say that all is not lost. India and the US have close links in many sectors, which can’t be uprooted overnight.

The two countries cooperate closely in the space technology, IT, education and defence sectors.

Many large domestic IT firms have invested heavily in the US, and most big Silicon Valley firms have operations in India.

“I think the fundamentals of the relationship are not weak. It’s a paradox that the day Trump announced 25% tariffs and unspecified penalties, India and the US collaborated in a strategic area when an Indian rocket sent a jointly-developed satellite into space,” says Mr Misra.

It will be interesting to see how India reacts to Trump’s sharp rhetoric.

“Trump is unapologetically transactional and commercial in his approach to foreign policy. He has no compunction about deploying these potentially alienating harsh tactics against a close US partner like India,” says Mr Kugelman.

But he adds that there’s a lot of trust baked into the partnership, given the work that has gone into it over the past two decades.

“So what’s lost can potentially be regained. But because of the extent of the current malaise, it could take a long time.”

The body of a man missing for 28 years has been found in a melting glacier in Pakistan’s remote and mountainous Kohistan region.

A shepherd stumbled upon the body, which was remarkably well-preserved, with its clothing intact, in the so-called Lady Valley in the country’s east.

Along with the body was an ID card with the name Naseeruddin. Police were able to trace it to a man who disappeared in the area in June 1997 after falling into a glacier crack during a snowstorm.

The region has seen decreased snowfall in recent years, exposing glaciers to direct sunlight, making them melt faster. Experts said the body’s discovery shows how changing climate has accelerated glacial melt.

“What I saw was unbelievable,” the shepherd who found the body, Omar Khan, told BBC Urdu. “The body was intact. The clothes were not even torn.”

As soon as police confirmed that it was Naseeruddin, locals began offering more information, Mr Khan added.

Naseeruddin had a wife and two children. He was travelling with his brother, Kathiruddin, on horseback on the day he went missing. Police said a family feud had forced the two men to leave their home.

Kathiruddin told BBC Urdu that they had arrived in the valley that morning, and sometime around afternoon, his brother stepped into a cave. When he did not return, Kathiruddin says he looked for him inside the cave – and went and got help from others in the area to search further. But they never found him.

When a human body falls into a glacier, the extreme cold freezes it fast, preventing decomposition, said Prof Muhammad Bilal, head of the Department of Environment at Comsats University Islamabad.

The body is then mummified due to a lack of moisture and oxygen in the glacier.

An elderly woman has died and another person is missing after a massive wildfire swept through parts of southern France, destroying homes and forcing thousands to flee.

The woman died in her home, seven firefighters have also been treated for smoke inhalation and one person is still missing, authorities said. Two people are in hospital, one of whom is in a critical condition.

The blaze broke out on Tuesday near the village of La Ribaute in the Aude region, and has already burned more than 13,000 hectares (50 sq miles) – an area larger than Paris – making it the largest wildfire in France this year.

More than 1,800 firefighters, supported by 500 vehicles, were deployed to the area.

The main affected villages are Lagrasse, Fabrezan, Tournissan, Coustouge and Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse.

Officials say the fire is advancing rapidly, driven by strong winds, dry vegetation and hot summer weather.

Jacques Piraud, mayor of the village of Jonquières, where at least four houses burned, told Le Monde that around 80% of the village was burnt.

“It’s dramatic. Its black, the trees are completely charred,” he said.

Images show blackened, burnt out cars and people sitting on beaches three hours away where thick black clouds were still visible.

“This is a disaster of unprecedented scale,” firefighter spokesman Eric Brocardi told RTL radio.

At least 25 homes have been destroyed and more than 2,500 households are without electricity. Authorities have closed roads across the region and warned it is still too dangerous for residents who fled on Tuesday night to return home.

President Emmanuel Macron expressed his support for firefighters and local officials on X, saying all government resources were being mobilised. He urged residents to follow evacuation orders and exercise “the utmost caution”.

Prime Minister François Bayrou is expected to visit the affected area later on Wednesday.

Lucie Roesch, secretary general of the Aude area, said firefighters were monitoring the fire’s perimeter to prevent new outbreaks. She said: “The fire is advancing in an area where all the conditions are ripe for it to progress.”

The region has become increasingly vulnerable in recent years due to lower rainfall and the removal of vineyards, which once helped slow the spread of wildfires.

Despite planes dropping water bombs on the flames, Roesch warned the fire “will keep us busy for several days. It’s a long-term operation”.

A combination of low rainfall, high temperatures and the removal of vineyards – which once helped act as natural firebreaks – has made for worsening fire conditions in Aude.

Scientists have long warned that the Mediterranean’s soaring hot and dry summers place the region at high risk of severe wildfires. According to France’s emergency management service, nearly 15,000 hectares (57.9 square miles) have burned nationwide this summer in more than 9,000 separate fires. The Aude blaze now accounts for the vast majority of the damage.

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More than 100 people are missing and at least one has died after devastating flash floods in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

Rescue operations are under way in Uttarkashi district after a massive wave of water surged down the mountains into Dharali village on Tuesday, submerging roads and buildings in its path.

About 190 people have been rescued so far in the affected region, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said.

A cloudburst is an extreme, sudden downpour of rain over a small area in a short period of time, often leading to flash floods.

Damaged roads and heavy rain have hampered rescue teams trying to reach Dharali. Dhami flew in by helicopter on Wednesday and met some of the affected families.

Weeks of heavy rain have pounded Uttarakhand, with Uttarkashi – home to Dharali village – among the worst hit by flooding.

The floods struck on Tuesday around 13:30 India time (08:00 GMT), causing the Kheerganga river to swell dramatically and send tonnes of muddy water crashing down the hills.

Dharali is a summer tourist spot 2km from Harsil, home to a major Indian army base and an Indo-Tibetan Border Police camp. At least 10 soldiers stationed at the army base are also missing, officials said.

Rescue efforts are slow due to heavy sludge and debris, but officials have deployed helicopters to aid operations.

The sludge has also blocked part of the Bhagirathi river – which becomes India’s holiest river Ganges once it travels downstream – forming an artificial lake that has submerged large areas, including a government helipad.

Officials worry that if this water is not drained out quickly, it can pose a serious threat to towns and villages downstream.

India’s weather department has forecast heavy rain ahead and advised avoiding landslide-prone areas. Schools have closed in parts of the state.

In the past few days, officials had issued multiple rain alerts, discouraging tourists from visiting the region.

Dharali sees fewer visitors in monsoon season. The low footfall and warnings likely kept tourists safe during the deluge. Residents warn that a full crowd could have turned the incident into a far worse disaster.

Uttarakhand, located in the western Himalayas, is highly vulnerable to flash floods and landslides.

In 2021, more than 200 people died in flash floods triggered by a cloudburst.

One of the worst disasters to hit Uttarakhand was in 2013, when a cloudburst caused devastating floods and landslides that destroyed several villages and towns. Much of the damage took place in Kedarnath town, which is popular with Hindu pilgrims. Thousands of people were swept away, and many bodies were never recovered.

The Kremlin has issued a vague statement following talks between US envoy Steve Witkoff and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, days before Donald Trump’s deadline to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine.

Foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said the two sides had exchanged “signals” as part of “constructive” talks in Moscow.

He also said Russia and the US had discussed the possibility of strategic cooperation – but refused to share more until Witkoff had briefed the US president.

The US envoy boarded a flight to the US on Wednesday afternoon, according to Russian media.

The talks appeared cordial despite Trump’s mounting irritation with the lack of progress in negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.

In images shared by Russian outlets, Witkoff was seen walking around central Moscow with Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev on Wednesday morning.

Later, images showed Putin and Witkoff – who have met several times before – smiling and shaking hands in a gilded hall at the Kremlin.

There was no immediate comment from the US or Ukraine following the talks, which lasted over three hours.

The US president has said Russia could face hefty sanctions or see secondary sanctions imposed against all those who trade with it if it doesn’t take steps to end the “horrible war” with Ukraine.

Shortly after Witkoff’s departure from Moscow, the White House said Trump had signed an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on India for buying Russian oil.

Earlier this week, the US president accused India of not caring “how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian war machine”.

Before Wednesday’s talks, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, warned that Russia would only make serious moves towards peace if it began to run out of money.

He welcomed the threat of tougher US sanctions and tariffs on nations buying Russian oil.

Expectations are muted for a settlement by Friday, and Russia has continued its large-scale air attacks on Ukraine despite Trump’s threats of sanctions.

Before taking office in January, Trump claimed he would be able to end the war between Russia and Ukraine in a day. He failed, and his rhetoric towards Russia has since hardened.

“We thought we had [the war] settled numerous times, and then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city like Kyiv and kills a lot of people in a nursing home or whatever,” he said last month.

Three rounds of talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul have failed to bring the war closer to and end, three-and-a-half years after Moscow launched its full-invasion.

Moscow’s military and political preconditions for peace remain unacceptable to Kyiv and to its Western partners. The Kremlin has also repeatedly turned down Kyiv’s requests for a meeting between Zelensky and Putin.

Meanwhile, the US administration approved $200m (£150m) of additional military sales to Ukraine on Tuesday following a phone call between Zelensky and Trump, in which the two leaders also discussed defence cooperation and drone production.

Ukraine has been using drones to hit Russia’s refineries and energy facilities, while Moscow has focused its air attacks on Ukraine’s cities.

The Kyiv City Military Administration said the toll of an attack on the city last week rose to 32 after a man died of his injuries. The strike was the deadliest on Kyiv since the start of the invasion.

Ukrainian authorities on Wednesday reported that a Russian attack on a holiday camp in the central region of Zaporizhzhia left two dead and 12 wounded.

“There’s no military sense in this attack. It’s just cruelty to scare people,” Zelensky said.

A silent prayer was held in Japan on Wednesday morning as it marked 80 years since the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima.

Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba attended the ceremony on Wednesday, along with officials from around the world and the city’s mayor Kazumi Matsui.

Matsui warned of a global “accelerating trend toward military build-up… [and] the idea that nuclear weapons are essential for national defence”, saying this was a “flagrant disregard [of] the lessons the international community should have learned from the tragedies of history”.

World War Two ended with Japan’s surrender after the dropping of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The bombs killed more than 200,000 people – some from the immediate blast and others from radiation sickness and burns.

The legacy of the weapons continues to haunt survivors today.

“My father was badly burned and blinded by the blast. His skin was hanging from his body – he couldn’t even hold my hand,” Hiroshima survivor Shingo Naito told the BBC. He was six years old when the bomb struck his city, killing his father and two younger siblings.

Mr Naito has been sharing his story with a group of students in Hiroshima, who are turning his memories of the tragedy into art.

In 2024, Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

In a speech on Wednesday, mayor Matsui said that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, was “on the brink of dysfunctionality”.

He also called on the Japanese government to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – an international agreement banning nuclear weapons that came into force in 2021.

More than 70 countries have ratified the treaty, but nuclear powers like the US and Russia have opposed it, pointing to the deterrence function of nuclear arsenals.

Japan has also rejected such a ban, arguing that its security is enhanced by US nuclear weapons.

The nuclear issue is a divisive one in Japan. On the streets leading up to the Peace Memorial Park, there were small protests calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Satoshi Tanaka, another atomic bomb survivor who suffered multiple cancers from radiation exposure, said that seeing the bloodshed in Gaza and Ukraine today conjures up his own suffering.

“Seeing the mountains of rubble, the destroyed cities, the children and women fleeing in panic, it all brings back memories of what I went through,” he told the BBC. “We are living alongside nuclear weapons that could wipe out humanity multiple times over.”

“The most urgent priority is to push the leaders of nuclear-armed countries. The people of the world must become even more outraged, raise their voices louder, and take massive action.”

Twenty people have been killed and more than 30 injured in central Gaza after four trucks overturned on a crowd, the Hamas-run civil defence agency says.

Crowds rushed to the vehicles on a road south east of Deir al-Balah on Tuesday evening. They climbed on top of the trucks, causing the drivers to lose control, local journalists told the BBC.

The area was under Israeli military control and the roads were rugged and dangerous, civil defence agency spokesman Mahmoud Basal said.

The private transport association now operating in Gaza said that 26 commercial trucks entered the territory on Tuesday. Six were looted, and four of those overturned, resulting in deaths and injuries.

Israel announced that is would start to allow the gradual entry of goods into Gaza via the private sector to “increase the volume of aid” entering the enclave while reducing reliance on the UN.

The approved supplies include baby food, fruits, vegetables, hygiene products and basic staples.

The BBC has contacted the Israeli ministry of defence for comment.

Hamas said civilians had been waiting for basic supplies to be delivered via road for weeks. “This often results in desperate crowds swarming the trucks,” its media office said.

Aid trucks have been frequently rushed, leading to chaotic scenes.

In a separate incident on Wednesday, Jordan said Israeli settlers attacked a Gaza-bound aid convoy of 30 trucks and accused Israel of failing to prevent such attacks.

The convoy crossed the Jordanian border and was heading towards Gaza’s Zikim crossing. Settlers blocked the road and pelted the trucks with stones, smashing windscreens.

“This requires a serious Israeli intervention and no leniency in dealing with those who obstruct these convoys,” government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said.

He added this was the second attack on a Jordanian aid convoy, following a similar incident on Sunday.

On Wednesday the Hamas-run health ministry reported five new deaths as a result of malnutrition, bringing its total to 193 since the start of the war, including 96 children.

More than 100 international aid organisations and human rights groups have warned of mass starvation in Gaza, and accuse Israel of impeding the distribution of crucial aid.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, denies there is starvation in the territory and insists his country is not blocking aid.

Last week, Israel’s military said it would open humanitarian corridors to allow aid convoys into Gaza following mounting international pressure.

It also announced what it called a “local tactical pause in military activity” for humanitarian purposes in three areas, and permitted foreign aid drops.

About 90% of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced, some repeatedly, and are living in overcrowded and dire conditions.

The UN has repeatedly called for the full and sustained entry of humanitarian supplies, but access remains sporadic and many aid trucks are looted.

Israel insists there are no restrictions on aid deliveries and has repeatedly rejected what it describes as “the false claim of deliberate starvation”.

Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza in response to Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken to Gaza as hostages.

At least 61,020 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since then, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

mRNA vaccines were heralded as a medical marvel that saved lives during the Covid pandemic, but now the US is pulling back from researching them.

US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has cancelled 22 projects – worth $500m (£376m) in funding – for tackling infections such as Covid and flu.

So does Kennedy – probably the country’s most famous vaccine sceptic – have a point, or is he making a monumental miscalculation?

Prof Adam Finn, vaccine researcher at the University of Bristol, says “it’s a bit of both” but ditching mRNA technology is “stupid” and potentially a “catastrophic error”.

Let’s unpick why.

Kennedy says he has reviewed the science on mRNA vaccines, concluding that the “data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu”.

Instead, he says, he would shift funding to “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate”.

So are mRNA vaccines safe? Are they effective? Would other vaccine technologies be better?

And another question is where should mRNA vaccines fit into the pantheon of other vaccine technologies – because there are many:

• Inactivated vaccines use the original virus or bacterium, kill it, and use that to train the immune system – such as the annual flu shot
• Attenuated vaccines do not kill the infectious agent, but make it weaker so it causes a mild infection – such as the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine
• Conjugate vaccines use bits of protein or sugar from a bug, so it triggers an immune response without causing an infection – like for types of meningitis
• mRNA vaccines use a fragment of genetic code that temporarily instructs the body to make parts of a virus, and the immune system reacts to that

Each has advantages and disadvantages, but Prof Finn argues we “overhyped” mRNA vaccines during the pandemic to the exclusion of other approaches, and now there is a process of adjusting.

“But to swing the pendulum so far that mRNA is useless and has no value and should not be developed or understood better is equally stupid, it did do remarkable things,” he says.

• Full story: RFK Jr cancels $500m in funding for mRNA vaccines
• BBC Verify: Fact-checking RFK Jr’s views on health policy

The claim that mRNA vaccines do not protect against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu “just isn’t true”, says Prof Andrew Pollard from the Oxford Vaccine Group, who is soon stepping down as the head of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises the UK government.

The vaccines were shown to provide protection – keeping people alive and out of hospital – in both clinical trials and then during intense monitoring of how the vaccines performed when they were rolled out around the world.

In the first year of vaccination during the Covid pandemic, it was estimated that the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine alone saved nearly 6 million lives.

Against that there were a small number of cases of inflammation of heart tissue – called myocarditis – particularly in young men.

“Very rare side effects should be balanced against the huge benefit of the technology,” says Prof Pollard.

The pandemic was an era when the world was single-mindedly focused on Covid and the rollout of vaccines was monitored intensely. The consensus opinion remains they did overwhelmingly more good than harm.

But that does not mean they are a perfect technology.

The mRNA Covid vaccines train the immune system to target just one protein out of the whole virus. If that protein in the coronavirus changes or mutates then the body’s protection is lessened.

We have seen the consequences of that – immunity wanes and the vaccines need to be updated.

One theoretical argument is that a different vaccine approach – such as using the whole virus – would give better protection, as the immune system would have more to target.

However, Prof Pollard says the mRNA vaccines performed better than the inactivated ones when tackling Covid.

He says that is probably down to the way they are made – and the fact that the process of killing the virus also “changes the viral proteins so there is less stimulation of the immune system” in comparison with mRNA vaccines.

The need to update vaccines is not a failing of mRNA technology that can be easily solved by pivoting from one technology to another – instead, it is down to the fundamental nature of some viruses.

The same measles or HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccines have been effective for decades and show no sign of failing as the virus’s genetic codes are more stable in each case.

But some viruses live in a perpetual state of flux.

Flu, for example, is not one virus – but instead a constantly-shifting target. At any time, one strain will be in the ascendancy and be the most likely to cause trouble in winter.

In flu, the inactivated flu injection that is given to adults is updated every year – as is the live vaccine that is given to children as a nasal spray. A future mRNA form of flu vaccine would work the same way.

“The point about keeping up with variants is about all technologies, not just mRNA,” says Prof Pollard.

There is a legitimate scientific question about which vaccine technology is used for which disease.

What is causing concern among scientists is that pulling mRNA research means we will not have those vaccines at times when we need to do what no other technology can.

Prof Pollard says: “I don’t think there’s the evidence they are hugely better for protection, but where RNA tech is streets ahead of everything else is responding to outbreaks.”

The world is highly drilled at making new flu vaccines each year. But even then, there is a six-month process of deciding on the new flu strains to be targeted, growing the vaccine at scale in chicken eggs and then distributing it. Brand new vaccines take even longer.

But with mRNA, you can have the new vaccine in six to eight weeks, and then tens or hundreds of millions of doses a few months later.

Some of the projects that have had their funding pulled in the US were preparing for a bird flu pandemic. That virus, H5N1, has been devastating bird populations and jumping into a wide range of other animals including American cattle.

“That doesn’t make sense and if we do get a human pandemic of bird flu it could be seen as a catastrophic error,” says Prof Finn.

But the ramifications of the US turning away from mRNA research could be felt more widely.

What impact does this move have on confidence in the current vaccines, mRNA or otherwise? How does it affect the world when the US is one of the most influential countries in medical research? And will it have a knock-on impact on other types of mRNA technology, such as cancer vaccines – or using the approach to treat rare genetic diseases?

Prof Pollard poses another question after RFK Jr’s move: “Does it put us all at risk if a huge market is turning its back on RNA?

“It is one of the most important technologies we’ll see this century in infectious disease, biotherapeutic agents for rare disease and critically for cancer. It’s a message I’m troubled about.”

Two Chinese nationals have been arrested and charged with illegally shipping millions of dollars’ worth of powerful AI chips to China, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Tuesday.

The DOJ alleged that over the last three years ALX Solutions, a company it said was run by Chuan Geng and Shiwei Yang, exported the chips from the US to China without the required licences.

Court documents seen by the BBC allege the shipments included Nvidia’s H100 graphics processing units (GPUs), which have become a key focus of US export controls aimed at stopping China purchasing the cutting-edge technology.

The case shows that smuggling its chips “is a nonstarter,” an Nvidia spokesperson said.

Nvidia sells products to well-known partners who help to ensure that all sales comply with US export control rules, she added.

“Even relatively small exporters and shipments are subject to thorough review and scrutiny, and any diverted products would have no service, support or updates.”

According to court documents, California-based ALX Solutions had three known employees: Mr Geng handled the firm’s finances, Ms Yang was its secretary, while its chief executive was not named in the documents.

The DOJ said the three individuals exercised “full decision-making authority and shipment coordination” for the firm.

Mr Geng was a permanent resident of California, and Ms Yang, was an “illegal alien” who had overstayed her visa, a DOJ statement said.

Business records showed the company sent goods several times from the US to shipping firms in Singapore and Malaysia between October 2022 and July 2025, the DOJ said, noting that both countries are used as transit hubs to “conceal illegal shipments” to China.

ALX never received payments from these shipping firms and would instead be paid by other companies based in Hong Kong and China. These included a $1m (£750,000) payment from a China-based firm in January 2024, said the DOJ.

Last December, ALX sent a shipment with export-restricted computing chips – including Nvidia’s H100 and GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs – which was checked by US customs, according to court documents.

“Neither ALX Solutions nor Geng or Yang applied for or obtained a license from the Commerce Department,” the documents said.

In one 2023 invoice valued at more than $28.4m, ALX allegedly declared to Super Micro Computer, a supplier of Nvidia chips, that the devices were ordered for a Singapore-based customer.

But a US export control officer in Singapore could not verify that the chips arrived in the country and the company named did not exist at the listed location, the court document said.

“It appears that ALX Solutions shipped the Nvidia products to different end users.”

Super Micro told the BBC that it was “firmly committed to compliance with all US export control regulations.”

It added that it would not comment on an ongoing legal case but would cooperate with authorities in any such proceedings.

Ms Yang was arrested on Saturday while Mr Geng surrendered himself to the authorities soon after, the DOJ said.

The pair appeared in federal court in Los Angeles on Monday, the DOJ said. If found guilty they could face up to 20 years in prison.

ALX Solutions does not appear to have a website, according to court documents. A website for ALX-Cloud, which specialises in cloud computing services, states that it is a subsidiary of the company.

The BBC was unable to immediately locate the lawyers for Mr Geng and Ms Yang but has contacted ALX-Cloud to request a statement.

Sometimes I’ll be walking around a supermarket, and a shopper will approach me in the aisle. “I hosted a barbecue on Saturday and you told me it was going to rain,” they will say. “And it didn’t. Why did you get it wrong?”.

Or the opposite: they planned for a day of sunshine, only to be disappointed by grey skies. Or a parent might ask me in March what the weather might be like for their son’s wedding – in September.

Those people are always delightfully friendly, and the conversations are part of what makes presenting the weather – which I’ve been doing for the last three decades – such a joy.

But they also shed light on a strange fact.

Over my career, forecasting has improved almost beyond recognition. We can now predict the weather with much higher accuracy, and in more granular detail, than when I began presenting in the mid 1990s.

Liz Bentley, a professor of meteorology at Reading University and chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, says that a one-day forecast is correct over 90% of the time.

But despite those strides, there are still gaps in public trust.

When YouGov asked British adults last summer whether they trusted the weather forecast, a substantial minority – 37% – said they didn’t trust it “very much” or “at all.” (Reassuringly, 61% said they did trust forecasters like me.)

Jokes about the forecast are widespread. The 2012 Olympics opening ceremony included a clip of the moment from 1987, when the weather forecaster Michael Fish told viewers not to worry because there wouldn’t be a hurricane – only for a storm to hit hours later.

(As it happens, Michael was correct: hurricane-strength winds did strike southeast England that night, but it wasn’t technically a hurricane.) Still, the incident became a byword for forecaster error.

So why, with our wealth of knowledge and our powerful forecasting technology, do some people still perceive the weather as incorrect? And do we really get it wrong or is something more complicated at play around how we share forecasts?

Part of the challenge is around expectations, which have risen in our world of round-the-clock access to information.

We can tweak the temperature of our fridge or identify a problem in our car from our smartphones in a fraction of a second. So why can’t we find out whether it’s going to rain on our street at 2pm on Sunday with 100% accuracy – surely, an easier feat?

Another part of the challenge is how that wealth of information is boiled down and communicated.

Meteorology produces an overwhelming amount of data; it’s difficult to condense it into a snappy, TV or digital app-friendly prediction. It means that even when we are technically correct, some viewers might still end up confused.

But the answer also lies in the tricky nature of meteorology.

It’s a delicate science, and any tiny inaccuracy in the data can skew things – or knock it out of shape.

Every day, across the British Isles, forecasters collect “observations” (or data) on things like temperature and wind speed, through a network of more than 200 “weather stations” run by the Met Office. The data is then plugged into mathematical models run by powerful machines, or “supercomputers”.

Earlier this year the Met Office unveiled a new supercomputer, switching for the first time from a physical machine to cloud-based software.

The new device will deliver “better forecasts and help scientists advance important climate research around the world”, the Met Office says.

But as with any science, there are weaknesses.

The atmosphere is known as a “chaotic system”, meaning that a slight error – even as small as 0.01C – in the initial observations can produce a drastically different result.

“It’s called Chaos Theory,” explains Prof Bentley. “Or the Butterfly Effect. The analogy is that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it could have an impact on the atmosphere across northern Europe, six days later.”

There’s also a particular challenge when predicting the weather over small geographic areas.

In the 1990s, a weather event needed to be larger than about 100 miles (161km) before it could be fully observed – now, the UK-wide weather model used by the Met Office can map weather events as small as 2 miles (3km), Prof Bentley says.

But zooming in beyond that size remains difficult, so predicting weather like heavy fog – which might affect only a 1km space – is particularly tricky.

And even with huge improvements in the science, technology glitches still happen – though these are mercifully rare.

Last autumn, the BBC Weather website briefly showed impossibly fast winds of over 13,000mph in London, as well as temperatures of 404C in Nottingham.

The BBC apologised for “an issue with some of the weather data from our forecast provider”.

The biggest challenge of my job is synthesising this data so it fits into a tight television segment.

“There’s no other science as tested, checked and judged by the general public,” says Scott Hosking, a director of environmental forecasting at the Alan Turing Institute.

“It’s as complex as nuclear fusion physics, but most of us don’t experience that day to day, and so we don’t have to come up with a way to communicate that science to the public.”

It’s also easy to forget that forecasting is just that – predicting.

Over the years, we’ve gotten a lot better at this subtle art of “communicating uncertainty”. Meteorologists now produce “ensemble forecasts”, where they might run 50 different models, all with slight variations.

If all of those scenarios point to a similar outcome, meteorologists can be confident they’ve got it right. If they produce different outcomes, then their confidence is much lower.

This is why, on a weather app, you might see a 10% chance of rain in your area.

Forecasters often think about this tricky issue of communication; how the weather can be more easily explained.

Last week, the BBC announced a new partnership with the Met Office. It came eight years after they officially ended their relationship (since 2018, the Dutch MeteoGroup has provided the BBC’s forecasts).

The new deal aims to combine expertise of the two organisations and “turn science into stories,” explained Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general.

Certainly, some think more creativity is needed in communicating the weather. Dr Hosking of the Alan Turing Institute suggests forecasters could move away from giving a percentage chance of rain, and instead use the “storyline approach”.

In this style, forecasters could say things like, “What we’re seeing now is similar to what we saw at a certain event a few years ago’ – something within memory.”

This is partly why the Met Office, in 2015, decided to name storms.

But Prof Bentley argues that numbers can be powerful – and perhaps it’s better to arm consumers with the hard data they need.

In the US, she says, the weather forecast has percentages “everywhere”; American consumers are told of everything from chance of rain, to the likely spread in temperature.

“The public are comfortable [with it],” she says. “Because they’ve had that information given to them so often, they kind of get it.”

Weather forecasting could soon change dramatically with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The use of machine learning to predict the weather has developed rapidly in recent months.

It’s often said that forecasters have gained 24 hours of accuracy with each passing decade, meaning the Met Office can now release a weather warning seven days in advance.

But AI models designed by Google DeepMind are already correctly predicting the weather 15 days in advance, Dr Hosking says.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Cambridge University released a fully AI-driven weather programme called Aardvark Weather. The results were written in the Nature journal.

Whilst traditional forecasting requires hours of use on a powerful supercomputer, researchers say, Aardvark can be deployed on a desktop computer in minutes. They claim this uses “thousands of times” less computing power, and that it can predict the weather in more granular detail.

They also claim it will improve forecasts in west Africa and other poor regions (the best traditional forecasting models are mostly designed for Europe and the United States).

“It could be transformational; it’s super exciting,” says Richard Turner, professor of machine learning at Cambridge University, who is one of the designers of the model.

But Prof Bentley identifies a weakness in AI-driven weather models: they are fed with reams of historic data, and trained to spot patterns – which in her view makes it very difficult to predict events that haven’t happened yet.

“With climate change, we’re going to see new records,” she says. “We may see 41C in the UK. But if AI is always looking backwards, it will never see 41 because we’ve not had it yet.”

Prof Turner accepts that this is a challenge with AI models like his and says his team is working on remedies.

In the future, analysts think, forecasts will go into more depth. Rather than just predicting rain, the forecast will increasingly tell you what effect that rain will have – on your travel, or on your garden plans.

Prof Bentley calls this the “so what” factor. “Do you put something on [a weather app] that says, ‘If you’re planning a barbecue, then you might want to do it at lunchtime because the chances are you’re going to get washed out in the afternoon’?”

This chimes with a trend I’ve noticed from my own career: a growing interest in understanding the science behind the weather.

Viewers are no longer just interested in knowing whether there’ll be a heatwave; they want to know why.

That’s the reason we publish more content explaining the physics of the aurora borealis, or why climate change is leading to bigger hailstones.

As for AI, it certainly could improve accuracy – but there’s a risk, also, that viewers become deluged by information. Dr Hosking says that because AI is more nimble and can tweak weather models more quickly, users will soon have access to frequently-changing forecasts. They may also have “much more localised” information, he says (perhaps giving data not just on your town, but on your back garden, other analysts predict).

This could lead to an overwhelming amount of data for those using the app, gluing users to their smartphones. And in that world, it will become even more important for human forecasters to communicate the weather in a clear, understandable way.

But there are upsides too – not least the prospect of much longer-term, more accurate forecasts.

Perhaps one day, when a mother asks me to predict weather at her son’s wedding six months from now, I might be able to give a slightly better answer.

There was no evidence of widespread bullying, harassment or misogyny at the Sentebale charity founded by Prince Harry, the charity regulator has found.

The Charity Commission has published its findings into whistleblower allegations that followed a bitter boardroom dispute that saw Prince Harry resign, along with several trustees, earlier this year.

No sanctions have been imposed on the charity, with the current leadership under Sophie Chandauka remaining in place, but the commission criticised “all parties” for allowing a “damaging” dispute to play out publicly.

Prince Harry’s spokesman criticised parts of the report as falling “troublingly short”, while the charity’s chair said the “adverse media campaign” from those who resigned caused “incalculable damage”.

The commission has given the charity, which supports young people in southern Africa, a regulatory action plan to deal with “governance weaknesses”.

It’s a bittersweet outcome for Prince Harry who has left the charity, which his spokesman said had been “deeply personal” to him.

Much of the criticism from the commission focused on how the internal dispute descended into such a public argument in the media, which it said had damaged the charity’s reputation.

The row had seen Prince Harry accused of being a “toxic” brand by the charity’s chair, Sophie Chandauka – and he had stepped down, saying his and the trustees’ relationship with her was broken “beyond repair” and that they had faced “blatant lies“.

“Sentebale’s problems played out in the public eye, enabling a damaging dispute to harm the charity’s reputation, risk overshadowing its many achievements, and jeopardising the charity’s ability to deliver for the very beneficiaries it was created to serve,” said Charity Commission chief executive David Holdsworth.

Prince Harry’s team welcomed the finding that there had not been evidence of bullying, though a spokesman said the report “falls troublingly short” in that the “consequences of the current chair’s actions will not be borne by her”.

Ms Chandauka remains at the head of the charity, with the watchdog finding no reason for her not to continue.

She said: “We are emerging not just grateful to have survived, but stronger.”

A Sentebale spokesman said that the report confirmed that the new trustees had been validly appointed and could move forward “free from interference”.

The Charity Commission also said that although there was no evidence of widespread or systemic bullying or harassment, including misogyny or misogynoir (discrimination against black women), it acknowledged a “strong perception of ill treatment felt by a number of parties” and said it wasn’t its role as a regulator to adjudicate on individual claims of bullying.

The commission has not sanctioned any individuals, but its regulatory action plan is meant to address problems such as a lack of clarity over roles and a better mechanism for handling internal disputes.

It warned of “weaknesses in the charity’s management” that had added to disagreements.

The report highlighted how tensions had risen around a new fundraising strategy in the United States, with some trustees believed to have raised concerns about the charity’s finances.

The action plan warns of the importance of “sufficient funding to enable the charity to deliver for its beneficiaries”.

The Charity Commission website is still showing Sentebale’s financial position from August 2023 – but sources close to the charity say it is in good financial health.

The charity had been a very personal project for Prince Harry, which made his resignation even more difficult. Sentebale had been co-founded with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, with both honouring the legacies of their mothers.

“For 19 years, its dedicated staff and steadfast supporters have provided vital care to over 100,000 young people across southern Africa, including young people living with HIV/Aids and those facing mental health challenges,” said a spokesman for Prince Harry.

Prince Harry’s spokesman said the charity had grown to become a “flowering force for good” and that he will “now focus on finding new ways to continue supporting the children of Lesotho and Botswana”.

Ms Chandauka said: “Despite the recent turbulence, we will always be inspired by the vision of our founders, Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso.”

The Charity Commission concluded that those running charities should not let disagreements make them forget their initial good intentions and should focus on those they were trying to help.

“Passion for a cause is the bedrock of volunteering and charity, delivering positive impact for millions of people here at home and abroad every day,” said Mr Holdsworth.

“However, in the rare cases when things go wrong, it is often because that very passion has become a weakness rather than a strength.

“Moving forward I urge all parties not to lose sight of those who rely on the charity’s services.

“The current trustees must now make improvements and ensure the charity focuses on delivering for those it exists to serve.”

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Despite being the world’s most sanctioned country, Russia has continued to use its vast energy wealth to bankroll its war in Ukraine.

US President Donald Trump is hoping to change that. He has announced that sweeping new secondary tariffs will impact any country still trading with Russia if a ceasefire with Ukraine is not agreed by Friday 8 August.

Secondary tariffs would see goods from any country that trades with Russia face a 100% tax when they are imported into the US.

Oil and gas are Russia’s biggest exports, and Moscow’s biggest customers include China, India and Turkey.

“I used trade for a lot of things, but it’s great for settling wars”, said Trump last month.

This would not be the first time the Trump administration has imposed secondary tariffs, which are also in place to punish buyers of Venezuelan oil.

However, using them against Russia would have far bigger implications for the global economy.

Russia remains the world’s third biggest oil producer, behind only Saudi Arabia and the US itself. But its shipments have been falling this year, according to a Bloomberg analysis of ship-tracking data.

“The key channel by which secondary tariffs on buyers of Russian energy could impact the global economy would be through the level of energy prices,” says Kieran Tompkins from the consultancy Capital Economics.

If the tariffs work, they will cut the flow of Russian oil and gas to global markets.

And with less supply, prices could go up, just as they did when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That led to a spike in inflation around the world. President Trump says he isn’t worried because of record US oil production.

Mr Tompkins points out that, this time, there are also other reasons to suggest the impact on prices would not be as marked.

He explains that “the current backdrop is one where OPEC+ [the group of major oil producing countries and its allies] have significant spare capacity to draw upon.”

Russia has devised a whole system for avoiding existing sanctions, which could be useful for helping its trading partners avoid the secondary tariffs threatened by Trump.

For example, its so-called “shadow fleet” – consisting of hundreds of tankers with obscure ownership – could be used to conceal the origin of exported Russian oil and gas.

“Sanctions maintenance is as big a task as the imposition of sanctions in the first place,” US sanctions expert Richard Nephew of Columbia University says.

“That’s because the party that is being sanctioned takes steps to evade them.”

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 India has been the second biggest buyer of Russian oil, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

“They’re fuelling the war machine. And if they’re going to do that, then I’m not going to be happy,” President Trump told US outlet CNBC on Tuesday.

If secondary sanctions take effect, US companies buying goods from India will have to pay a 100% import tax – or tariff – when those products reach US shores.

The idea is that it makes these goods so expensive that US businesses will choose to buy them cheaper from elsewhere, resulting in lost revenue for India.

That, in turn, is supposed to deter India from buying Russian oil. And if Russia is left unable to sell its oil elsewhere because other countries face the same predicament, it will have less cash to finance the war in Ukraine.

One way in which Americans could experience higher prices as a result of new secondary tariffs is in their purchase of mobile phones from India.

• India calls Trump’s tariff threat over Russian oil ‘unjustified’

US firm Apple is moving much of its iPhone production to India – in particular the manufacturing of handsets that it wants to sell in the US.

If these products are subject to the new tariffs, prices could double for US consumers. That is because tariffs are paid by the companies that import goods – and those companies tend to pass most, if not all, of their cost increases on to their customers.

Imports to the US from India are already facing a 25% tariff as part of President Trump’s broader trade shake-up, and he told CNBC that number could be raised “very substantially”.

India’s government has accused the US of double standards, pointing to Washington’s own continued trade with Russia.

The vast majority of that trade is made up of US imports from India which amounted to just over $3bn (£2.2bn) last year – although that’s just 10% of 2021 levels.

That trade is dominated by US purchases of raw materials for nuclear energy and fertilizers. Russia is a major global supplier of both.

China is buying the most Russian oil, and a decision by President Trump to impose secondary tariffs on Chinese goods would be much more challenging to fulfil.

That’s because US imports from China are worth five times as much as those from India, and a lot more of those imports are consumer goods such as toys, clothes and electronics.

Secondary tariffs aimed at Beijing would also risk upsetting a much broader renegotiation of trade between the world’s two biggest economies that Trump has been pursuing since his first term in office.

“This type of over-escalation is unlikely to impress the Chinese,” says trade expert Professor Simon Evenett of IMD Business School.

He explains that it would be “very difficult” to peel the Chinese away from the Russians without a good reason, given how closely Presidents Xi and Putin have worked together in recent years.

On top of that, the last time Trump tried using triple-figure tariffs against China, he found it did not work – as it almost cut off all trade between the two countries.

Another move like that could add to inflationary pressures in the US, which Trump has long pledged to tackle.

It could also cost huge amounts of manufacturing jobs in China, at a time when its economy is already struggling on several fronts.

Analysis by the Finland-based Centre for Research and Clean Air shows that the EU and Turkey are also still amongst the biggest buyers of Russian energy.

Before 2022, the EU was the number-one export destination for Russia, although that has been vastly reduced since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Brussels recently agreed to buy a lot more energy from the US, but some imports from Russia remain.

In June, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, acknowledged the problem, saying “Russia has repeatedly attempted to blackmail us by weaponizing its energy supplies” as she laid out plans to end imports by the end of 2027.

The US-EU trade relationship is the biggest in the world, and the pair have just negotiated new trade terms which will see a 15% tariff be applied on most EU exports to the US.

Many in the EU criticised that deal, saying the tariffs would harm European exporters.

Now they also fear that secondary sanctions on the EU could do even more harm. Adding 100% tariffs for buying Russian energy could significantly reduce the amount of goods sold by the EU to the US.

However the biggest sellers include pharmaceuticals and machinery, which may be hard to source from elsewhere – meaning Americans have little choice but to pay more.

Russia’s own economy has so far proven remarkably resilient since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, growing 4.3% last year.

However, Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov recently warned that the country was “on the verge” of recession after a period of “overheating”. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is forecasting growth of just 0.9% this year.

If the secondary sanctions are successful in reducing demand for exports, they will push Russia closer to recession.

The exact impact of the war on Russia’s economy is hard to know, because Moscow has prevented a large amount of economic data from being published since the full-scale invasion – including on oil and gas production.

About a third of Russian government spending is funded by oil and gas money, but exports have been falling.

Meanwhile, Putin is directing a bigger share of spending towards defence than at any time since the Cold War. Defence spending is believed to have reached 6.3% of GDP.

By contrast, Ukraine has been spending a huge 26% of the value of its far-smaller economy on the war. The difference explains why its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has repeatedly asked for external help from his allies.

Trump’s tariffs are intended to help Zelensky by cutting the amount of money flowing into Russia, and he hopes bring an end to the death, suffering and destruction in Ukraine.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of the first world leaders to visit Washington weeks after US President Donald Trump started his second term.

He called Modi his “great friend” as the two countries set an ambitious target of doubling their trade to $500bn by 2030.

But less than six months later, the relationship appears to have hit rock bottom.

Trump has now imposed a total of 50% tariffs on goods imported from India, and his earlier threat of levying an extra 10% for the country’s membership in the Brics grouping, which includes China, Russia and South Africa as founding members, still stands.

He initially imposed a 25% tariff, but announced an additional 25% on Wednesday as a penalty for Delhi’s purchase of Russian oil – a move the Indian government called “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable”.

And just last week, Trump called India’s economy “dead”.

This is a stunning reversal in a relationship that has gone from strength to strength over the past two decades, thanks to efforts by successive governments in both countries, bipartisan support and convergence on global issues.

In the past few weeks, there were positive signals from Washington and Delhi about an imminent trade deal. Now that looks increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

So what went wrong?

A series of missteps, grandstanding, geopolitics and domestic political pressure seem to have broken down the negotiations.

Delhi has been restrained in its response so far to Trump’s tirades, hoping that diplomacy might eventually help secure a trade deal. But in Trump’s White House, there are no guarantees.

Trump has commented on many issues that Delhi considers red lines. The biggest among them is Trump repeatedly putting India and its rival Pakistan on an equal footing.

The US president hosted Pakistani army chief Asim Munir at the White House just weeks after a bitter conflict between the two South Asian rivals.

He then signed a trade deal with Pakistan, offering the country a preferential tariff rate of 19%, along with a deal to explore the country’s oil reserves. He went as far as saying that some day, Pakistan might sell oil to India.

Another constant irritant for Delhi is Trump’s repeated assertion that the US brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan.

India sees its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir as its internal affair and has always rejected third-party mediation on the issue. Most world leaders have been sensitive to Delhi’s position, including Trump in his first stint as president.

But that’s no longer the case. The US president has doubled down on his claim even after Modi told India’s parliament that “no country had mediated in the ceasefire”.

Modi didn’t name Trump or the US but domestic political pressure is mounting on him not to “bow down” to the White House.

“The fact that this is happening against the backdrop of heavy and high-level US engagement with Islamabad immediately after an India-Pakistan conflict is even more galling for Delhi and the wider Indian public. This all sharpens concerns harboured by some in India that the US can’t truly be trusted as a partner,” says Washington-based South Asia analyst Michael Kugelman.

He adds that some of the anger in Delhi might “be Cold War-era baggage coming to the fore”, but “this time around it’s intensified by real-time developments as well”.

Modi’s government thrives on nationalist issues, so its supporters would likely expect a firm response to the US.

It’s a Catch-22 situation – Delhi still wants to clinch a deal but also doesn’t want to come across as buckling under Trump’s pressure.

And it appears that Delhi is gradually releasing the restraint. In its response to Washington’s anger over India’s purchase of Russian oil, Delhi vowed to take “all necessary measures” to safeguard its “national interests and economic security”.

But the question is why Trump, who loved India’s hospitality and called it a great country earlier, has gone on a tirade against a trusted ally.

Some analysts see his insults as a pressure tactic to secure a deal that he thinks works for the US.

“Trump is a real estate magnate and a tough negotiator. His style may not be diplomatic, but he seeks the outcomes diplomats would. So, I think what he’s doing is part of a negotiating strategy,” says Jitendra Nath Misra, a former Indian ambassador and now a professor at OP Jindal Global University.

A source in the Indian government said that Delhi gave many concessions to Washington, including no tariffs on industrial goods, and a phased reduction of tariffs on cars and alcohol. It also signed a deal to let Elon Musk’s Starlink start operations in India.

But Washington wanted access to India’s agriculture and dairy sectors to reduce the $45bn trade deficit it runs with Delhi.

But these sectors are a red line for Modi or, for that matter, any Indian prime minister. Agriculture and related sectors account for more than 45% of employment in India and successive governments have fiercely protected farmers.

Mr Kugelman believes giving in to Washington’s demands isn’t an option for India.

“India first needs to assuage public anger and make clear it won’t give in to the pressure. This is critical for domestic political reasons,” he says.

He also believes that Trump’s insistence that India stop importing oil from Moscow has more to do with his growing frustration over Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We’re seeing Trump continuing to ratchet up his pressure tactics, trying to cut Russia off from its most important oil buyers by penalising them for doing business with Moscow,” he says.

But Delhi can’t afford to stop importing oil from Russia overnight.

India is already the world’s third biggest consumer of crude and may surpass China in the top position by 2030 as its energy demand is likely to increase with a fast-growing middle class, according to International Energy Agency (IEA).

Russia now accounts for more than 30% of India’s total oil imports, a significant jump from less than 1% in 2021-22.

Many in the West see this as India indirectly funding Moscow’s war but Delhi denies this, arguing that buying Russian oil at a discount ensures energy security for millions of its citizens.

India also sees Russia as its “all-weather” ally. Moscow has traditionally come to Delhi’s rescue during past crises and still enjoys support among the wider Indian public.

Moscow is also Delhi’s biggest arms supplier, though its share in India’s defence import portfolio dropped to 36% between 2020-25 from 55% between 2016 and 2020, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

This was largely due to Delhi boosting domestic manufacturing and buying more from the US, France and Israel.

But Russia’s role in India’s defence strategy can’t be overstated. This is something the West understood and didn’t challenge – until Trump decided to break from established norms.

So far, India was able to successfully walk the diplomatic tightrope with the West overlooking its strong ties to Russia.

The US has long viewed India as a bulwark against China’s dominance in the Indo-Pacific region, which ensured bipartisan support for Delhi in Washington.

And Moscow (though sometimes reluctantly) didn’t react harshly to its ally forging close ties with Washington and other western countries.

But now Trump has challenged this position. How Delhi reacts will decide the future of the India-US relationship.

India has been measured in its response so far but is not holding back completely. In its statement, it said that the US had encouraged it to keep buying oil from Russia for global energy market stability.

It also said that targeting it was unjustified as the EU continues to buy energy, fertiliser, mining and chemical products from Russia.

While things seem bad, some analysts say that all is not lost. India and the US have close links in many sectors, which can’t be uprooted overnight.

The two countries cooperate closely in the space technology, IT, education and defence sectors.

Many large domestic IT firms have invested heavily in the US, and most big Silicon Valley firms have operations in India.

“I think the fundamentals of the relationship are not weak. It’s a paradox that the day Trump announced 25% tariffs and unspecified penalties, India and the US collaborated in a strategic area when an Indian rocket sent a jointly-developed satellite into space,” says Mr Misra.

It will be interesting to see how India reacts to Trump’s sharp rhetoric.

“Trump is unapologetically transactional and commercial in his approach to foreign policy. He has no compunction about deploying these potentially alienating harsh tactics against a close US partner like India,” says Mr Kugelman.

But he adds that there’s a lot of trust baked into the partnership, given the work that has gone into it over the past two decades.

“So what’s lost can potentially be regained. But because of the extent of the current malaise, it could take a long time.”

A Chinese fighter jet plane crashes in the waters off Taiwan’s coast, prompting Chinese warships to blockade the island for a “search and rescue”.

Taiwanese soldiers manning Dadan Island, a rocky outcrop mere kilometres from China’s coast, begin vanishing mysteriously.

Then one night, a fishing boat lands on Dadan. A signal flare arcs into the inky sky – and illuminates Chinese soldiers who have spilled out of the boat and amassed on the beach.

This is the key scenario in Zero Day Attack, a new Taiwanese television show about a fictional Chinese military invasion. Beijing has long viewed self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, vowing to “reunify” with it some day while not ruling out the use of force.

The series, which aired its first episode over the weekend, was partially funded by the Taiwanese government, which hopes to raise awareness about the threat China poses.

But the show has also landed at a highly divisive moment in Taiwan and attracted criticism of fear-mongering.

Zero Day Attack focuses on how various parts of Taiwanese society grapple with the invasion, from the president to rural villagers.

The anthology series features several scenarios on how an invasion could unfold, provided by defence experts consulted by the production team.

These include the disruption of Taiwan’s communication lines; Chinese disinformation campaigns; “fifth column” supporters of China stirring up unrest; and military officials turned collaborators who conspire against Taiwan.

Showrunner Cheng Hsin-mei told the BBC she wanted to make the series to “warn the Taiwanese people that the war is really coming,” citing China’s rising use of “disinformation campaigns and grey zone warfare to put our society in chaos and make us confused about our identity”.

Zero Day Attack’s message echoes the rhetoric of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-led government and its leader President William Lai, who have warned about China’s threat and preached the need to raise the island’s defences.

Taiwan’s culture ministry has partially funded Zero Day Attack, while the military provided support for filming and production. Chunghwa Telecoms, Taiwan’s largest telecommunications company in which the government has a minority stake, also contributed funding.

Other private investors include billionaire Robert Tsao, a well-known supporter of Taiwanese independence who has funded civil defence efforts.

Ms Cheng told the BBC that at no point did the authorities try to influence the show. She also said she was not a member of the DPP or any political party.

But even before a single episode was broadcast, Zero Day Attack has become a political lightning rod, given the charged topic.

A 17-minute trailer posted online last year by the production team swiftly racked up hundreds of thousands of views and comments.

While some praised it for its message, others criticised it for sowing anxiety and discord with China.

This debate has intensified with the series premiere, which was the most-watched show on several platforms on Saturday, according to the production company.

In recent days Wang Hung-wei, a prominent lawmaker from the opposition Kuomintang party, criticised Zero Day Attack as “selling dried mangoes”, a Taiwanese euphemism that means stoking unnecessary fear about the destruction of one’s country.

Pointing to the government’s funding of the show, Ms Wang said the DPP was “using the state apparatus to achieve its political goals”.

A commentary by Wang Kunyi of the Taiwan International Strategic Study Society accused the show of pushing Taiwan independence “so that Taiwan becomes a place that never knows peace”.

He added that it was evidence of Lai’s government “once again using all kinds of channels to play the ‘anti-Communist card’ and stir up anxiety of war”.

The DPP and Lai are often accused by their critics, including the opposition and China, as pushing for Taiwan’s independence. Any formal declaration as such would be considered as an act of war by Beijing.

While Lai has in the past described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan’s independence”, he has also insisted Taiwan has no need to formally declare independence because it is already a sovereign nation.

Zero Day Attack has also garnered positive reviews. One published by the public broadcaster PTS said it “expresses the worries and anxieties of Taiwanese from various political camps in a highly realistic and reasonable way”.

“It’s a good watch,” said one commenter on Zero Day Attack’s Facebook page. “The Taiwanese people can relate to it as it reflects our current situation, the Chinese Communist Party must be repulsed as their tactics have been exposed.”

Some have praised the first episode, which depicts the invasion quietly beginning amid a contentious presidential election marked by violence and political fighting.

They were struck by how uncannily that episode reflected the current fractious mood in Taiwanese politics. Last month the island held a controversial failed recall vote of Kuomintang lawmakers accused of being too friendly with China. Another round will take place later this month.

This has led to questions about the show’s timing and if it was meant to influence the recall votes. Ms Cheng told the BBC that the show’s production had begun long before the recall movement started.

The discussion around the show goes to the heart of one of Taiwan’s most existential questions: how real is the threat of a Chinese invasion?

Taiwan has had its own government since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In the following decades, the island saw largely peaceful relations and stronger economic ties with China.

Polls show that most Taiwanese do not believe Beijing will attack imminently, and prefer the “status quo” in Taiwan’s relationship with China, which means neither unifying with Beijing nor formally declaring independence.

But the question of a Chinese invasion has become sharper and more political in recent years.

Chinese grey zone warfare has spiked, raising fears that Chinese warplanes and ships repeatedly entering Taiwan’s airspace and waters could trigger a conflict.

The US warned this year that China poses an “imminent threat” to Taiwan. American officials have repeatedly claimed that Chinese President Xi Jinping is building up his military to be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027.

Beijing has never confirmed this date. But it is a warning that Lai takes seriously.

He has pledged to increase Taiwan’s military spending, his government has carried out reforms in the army, and last month Taiwan staged its largest and longest ever Han Kuang drills aimed at defending against a possible Chinese attack.

Lai has stressed that these efforts are aimed at protecting Taiwan and not to seek war. His political opponents however say he is antagonising Beijing which reviles Lai as a “separatist”, and that he is leading Taiwan towards greater conflict with China.

Beijing has repeatedly emphasised that it seeks “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan. It has dismissed any talk of a Chinese invasion as a pretext manufactured by those in favour of Taiwan independence to drum up support.

Zero Day Attack has been seen as one such provocation. Last week, Chinese defence ministry spokesman Zhang Xiaogang accused the DPP government of using the show to “peddle anxieties and attempting to provoke war”.

He said Zero Day Attack was “plunging Taiwan into the flames of war and using the Taiwan people as cannon fodder for ‘Taiwan independence’.

Ms Cheng however insisted that her show is “not talking bad about China or depicting it as evil”.

“We are talking about war, and how Taiwanese people struggle and respond to it. And that’s because the terror of war has never stopped, all over the world.”

A BBC investigation has exposed the French and UK operations of a powerful and violent smuggling gang taking people across the English Channel in small boats.

A reporter, posing as a migrant wanting to cross, helped us gain unprecedented access to the smugglers’ notorious forest hideout in northern France – an area plagued by armed battles between rival gangs.

Secret filming at a major UK railway station also captured associates of the gang collecting cash payments to secure migrant places on illegal Channel crossings.

Two men met us on separate occasions on the busy concourse at Birmingham’s New Street Station to collect envelopes containing hundreds of pounds.

Multiple sources have described how gang leaders, who keep one step ahead of the authorities by changing mobile phone numbers and the gang’s name, subjected their henchmen and migrants to violent beatings.

We have managed to identify three men – Jabal, Aram and al-Millah – all Iraqi-Kurds, who are believed to lead the outfit, which is one of the main groups in northern France transporting people to the UK by small boat.

We have also come across other senior figures, including a man called Abdullah, whom we witnessed shepherding groups of migrants towards boats. Another gang member, Besha, who had escorted migrants in France, took a small boat to the UK himself, we learned, ending up in a migrant hostel in West Yorkshire having claimed asylum.

The findings are the culmination of months of undercover fieldwork and the creation of multiple fake identities to engage with the smugglers. We have been able to build a detailed picture of the gang’s tentacle-like structure and the ways it has successfully evaded the police.

Our investigation began in April 2024, after we witnessed French police trying to stop the gang from launching an inflatable boat into the Channel. In the chaos, five people were trampled to death onboard, including a 7-year-old girl named Sarah.

“There’s no danger,” said smuggler Abdullah last week, as he spoke to our undercover colleague and gestured towards a cluster of tents hidden deep within a forest outside the French port of Dunkirk.

“You are welcome to stay here. We’ll get a boat ready nearby and set to sea. We need to move early to avoid the police – it’s a cat and mouse game,” Abdullah continued, with the reassuring smile of an airline official at a check-in counter. “God willing, the weather will be on our side.”

The trip across the Channel would be with “a mixture of Somalis, Sudanese, Kurds and so on”, he explained, boasting about two successful launches the previous week, with 55 people on each.

“Should I bring a lifejacket?” asked our colleague, an Arabic-speaking BBC reporter, posing as a Syrian migrant and wearing a hidden camera.

“That’s really up to you,” the smuggler replied.

Criss-crossed by narrow sandy paths, the forest is beside a main road, a huge canal and a train line, some 4km (2.5 miles) from the French coast. For years, rival gangs and their customers have hidden from the French police here – the gangs’ spotters carefully guarding every possible entrance.

Deadly gun battles and stabbings are not uncommon here, particularly during the summer, as gangs settle scores and compete over the lucrative and highly competitive small-boat people-smuggling industry. The day after our encounter, we heard of another fatal shooting.

Abdullah was, we knew, an increasingly powerful and trusted figure in a gang that has emerged as one of the key players in northern France.

It is one of perhaps four gangs now managing crossings and specific launch areas themselves – rather than simply supplying passengers like many of the smaller gangs.

Abdullah was, we suspected, a close relative of a more senior figure. Well-dressed, friendly, and constantly on the phone with clients, he seemed entirely at ease in the forest.

“No worries,” he smiled, as our undercover colleague declined the offer of an overnight stay in the camp and left.

A few days later we would be following the gang and its paying clients towards the coast, as they tried to hide from the police, through the night, in a different wooded area.

Abdullah would even try to convince our reporting team that he was just another desperate person trying to reach the UK, rather than a smuggler making hundreds of thousands of pounds by risking people’s lives in the Channel.

When we first began to investigate the gang, it was known to those using its services as The Mountain (or Jabal, in Arabic). That was the word customers would use when making payments – and the word we had heard from those who had been on Sarah’s ill-fated boat.

We soon learned that Jabal was also the name of one of the gang’s leaders, all from the same area of Iraqi Kurdistan, near the city of Sulaymaniyah.

Jabal controlled logistics from Belgium and France. Another man, Aram, had spent time in Europe but now appeared to be back in Iraq, possibly more involved in drumming up new customers. The third leader, even more shadowy than the others, was known as al-Millah (The Chief in English). He appeared to take a lead on the gang’s financial operations.

In June 2024, we tracked down Jabal to a migrant reception centre in Luxembourg and confronted him on the street. He denied any involvement and, although we promptly informed the French police, quickly disappeared.

“He fled after your intervention in Luxembourg, and he changed his phone and probably fled abroad,” said Xavier Delrieu, who heads the French police’s anti-smuggling unit. “His whereabouts are now unknown. The investigation is continuing.”

Delrieu later told us there had been “one arrest [of an Iraqi] linked to Sarah’s death”, but declined to give any further information, citing operational secrecy. We do not believe Jabal has been arrested.

“As long as it is profitable, they’re going to continue,” said Delrieu.

Pascal Marconville, lead prosecutor at the regional Court of Appeal for northern France, agreed: “It’s like chess. And they have [the advantage] on the board. So, they’re always one step ahead of us.”

It is a gloomy assessment, backed up by some of our own findings during this investigation, and it shows how difficult it may be for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to deliver on his promise to “smash the gangs”.

The UK-French “one-in, one-out” pilot scheme, now in force, will “deliver real results”, says Sir Keir. The deal will see some of those arriving in small boats detained and returned to France.

After Jabal’s disappearance in Luxembourg, we returned to northern France to continue our investigation. We spoke to more than a dozen people who had used the gang to reach – or to try to reach – the UK by small boat.

With their help, and by analysing other footage we had filmed the night of Sarah’s death, we identified several junior gang members – known as “small hands” or simply “guides” in Kurdish, including some who had helped launch Sarah’s boat.

We tracked the small hands on their social media accounts as they moved around Europe, often seeming to flaunt their wealth.

One middle-ranking smuggler known as Besha, we learned, had left on a small boat with his Iranian girlfriend to claim asylum in the UK. We had first begun following him, undercover, as he escorted groups of migrants from Calais to Boulogne train station, ahead of attempts to cross the Channel.

Months later, we tracked him and his girlfriend to a migrant hostel in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. We staked it out for three days but lost track of them when they left suddenly.

After Sarah’s death, and the extensive publicity it attracted, the gang changed its name from The Mountain, to Ghali Ghali. It is an unusual Arabic and Kurdish phrase that may perhaps be best translated as “Exclusive”.

For a time, we heard lots of talk of Ghali Ghali, both online and at the train and bus stations in Calais and beyond. The gang was known to be cheap and relatively reliable. Some people who had failed to cross the Channel with the group said they had been reimbursed promptly. For plenty of migrants, the gangs are seen primarily not as dangerous criminals but as entrepreneurs offering a valuable service.

Then the gang changed its name twice more – firstly to al-Millah, the nickname of the shadowy third gang leader, and then to Kaka, which means Brother but is also, we believe, another of his nicknames. More recently at least two other names have been used.

Unlike many other gangs – who advertise prominently online, particularly on TikTok, using videos of crossings and other scenes, and seek to appeal to particular ethnic groups – our gang has kept a low profile. It works with a wide range of nationalities, particularly from Iraq and Africa, and seems to rely for business on reputation and word of mouth.

But that reputation has continued to be affected by news of more deaths in the Channel. We discovered at least seven more people – after the initial five on Sarah’s boat – had died in two separate incidents while attempting to cross with the gang.

On land, disturbing evidence of the gang’s violence has also emerged.

Earlier this year, two sources told us the shadowy figure, al-Millah, was running the gang’s operations in the forest near Dunkirk. Independently, our sources both described a scene, one winter’s day, when he ordered his small hands to stand in a line, before tying one of them to a tree and beating him severely. It seems the boss suspected the man of stealing money.

Al-Millah is “the leader” a young woman told us, separately, by text. “No [migrants] meet him. They are all family… they are also theifs [sic].”

We had met the woman at a food distribution point run by local charities outside Dunkirk. She had paid the gang for a crossing, she said, but had waited for two months in the forest camp and been disturbed by the abuse she had encountered.

In her texts, she described how she feared one of al-Millah’s henchmen, whom she called “Abdulah”.

“He put a gun in [sic] my head one night. He is a very dangerous guy he slap me so many times,” she wrote – before sharing a brief video she had secretly filmed of him.

Based on that video, and on other details, we believe this is the same Abdullah our undercover reporter would go on to meet in the forests around Dunkirk.

A few days later, on what she said was her 13th attempt, the woman crossed to the UK with a different gang. She has since broken off contact with us.

It was at this point that we stepped up our investigation – trying to engage more directly with the gang and penetrate its operations.

While its leaders had repeatedly changed phone numbers, we managed to confirm that one mobile number belonging to al-Millah remained in use.

We later learned the phone had been handed over to Abdullah, who had apparently taken over the running of operations in Dunkirk.

Two weeks ago, we made a strategic visit to Brussels – a common transit point for migrants heading to the coast of northern France. Having already used multiple fake identities to contact Abdullah on his mobile, we now rang him again.

We knew it was important to be careful when making such a call. The gang would often ask customers to send a pin to confirm their location, and then to make a video call to back that up and to ensure they were genuine.

Standing on a street near Brussels’ Gare Du Midi, our Arab-speaking colleague, posing as a migrant called “Abu Ahmed”, came straight to the point.

“Hello. Brother, I’m travelling alone. I want to leave quickly, please. Do you have a departure tomorrow, the day after, or this week?”

“Tomorrow, God willing,” Abdullah replied.

“I prefer to pay in the UK if possible. My money is in a safe place there.”

This was not an unusual or suspicious request for us to make. Although some people carry cash with them, many others arrange to pay the smugglers through bank transfers or via intermediaries in a range of countries including Turkey, Germany, Belgium and the UK. The money sometimes goes directly to the gang, or it can be held “in trust” to be handed over only after a successful crossing.

We wanted to expose the gang’s links in the UK, having already tracked one member to Wakefield.

“OK. The price is €1,400,” said Abdullah – over £1,200. He seemed in a rush.

A few hours later in a text, he sent us a UK mobile phone number and indicated his own name “Abdullah” should be used as a payment reference, along with the single word “Birmingham”.

Leaving our colleague Abu Ahmed to make his own way to the French coast, we rushed to Birmingham to arrange payment. Handing money over to criminals is not something we do lightly – but in this instance we decided there was a public interest in doing so as it was the only way we could further expose the gang and its wider network.

A few hours later, having arranged for a separate BBC colleague, who also speaks Arabic, to pose as one of Abu Ahmed’s relatives in the UK and to hand over an envelope containing the cash, we staked out a meeting place in the centre of Birmingham’s New Street. Abdullah had given us a UK phone number for his contact, and we arranged to meet the man beside a giant metal sculpture of a bull.

Our colleague stood, silently, as the crowds flowed around him. We sat on benches nearby, scanning each face, waiting to see if someone would show up, or if the gang had become suspicious of our plan.

Ten minutes later, and on time, someone showed up.

“Greetings, brother.”

“It’s all here,” said our colleague, holding up the money to show to a bearded man with a glass eye. The man said his name was Bahman, and that he had been sent by his uncle.

Bahman appeared relaxed and unsuspecting as the two men briefly chatted in the middle of the busy concourse, as we secretly filmed their encounter.

“Cash is a problem. I swear, it’s a problem,” said Bahman, implying that he was not simply a “runner” sent to collect the cash, but someone with at least a passing knowledge of the broader operation. He did not explain why cash was a “problem” but took the money – an agreed payment of £900, about three-quarters of the total smugglers’ bill – and left.

Small boat passengers can deposit money for their crossing in holding accounts in the UK and elsewhere using “hawala” brokers. It is a global honour system, widely used in the Middle East, in particular, that enables the transfer of money via mutually trusted third parties.

But there is a fee payable to businesses offering such a service. The fact that Bahman did not ask for any extra money strongly suggested he was not simply an agent or middleman, but directly linked to our gang in France.

We then travelled back to Dunkirk, where our colleague Abu Ahmed was finally in a credible position to make direct contact with Abdullah in the forest.

Abdullah told us he had received confirmation from Birmingham that most of the money for a crossing had been handed over. We had deliberately left a sum unpaid to give our colleague a good reason to meet Abdullah in his camp, rather than joining the group later as it headed south along the coast to attempt a crossing.

With two undercover security guards watching his back from a distance, Abu Ahmed walked towards the forest, following the directions that Abdullah handed out, one texted detail at a time, until he was told to leave the road and clamber down a steep bank. There, he handed over another €400 (£348) to Abdullah, as agreed, before making his excuses, explaining he was staying with other friends in Calais who were also seeking to cross to England.

Two days later, our undercover reporter received confirmation from Abdullah that an attempted crossing would be made early the next morning.

“We are waiting for you near the main station in Boulogne,” Abdullah said in one of several brief voice messages.

The weather forecast in the Channel was ideal. Hardly a breath of wind. As we had often observed before, French police were already positioned outside the bus and train stations in Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne – the main gathering points for migrants moving to the beaches. But they made no attempt to stop anyone boarding.

Instead, their aim appeared to be to gather information about numbers of people and locations, to help work out where they might later have the best chance of intercepting and destroying the inflatable boats the gangs would, inevitably, head towards.

Slashing the inflatable boats with knives before they reach the sea has become the police’s main method to prevent launches. As a result, the gangs have begun to change tactics.

Roughly half of all the small boats crossing the Channel are now so-called “taxi-boats” – a police source told us – launched with few or no passengers and in secret. The craft then cruise along the coastline to pick up people waiting in the shallows.

“Forty-three tickets,” said one of the small hands, addressing a bus driver, as he and a crowd of mostly African men and women clustered at the door, alongside our undercover colleague. It was a familiar scene, with different smuggling gangs all arranging for their customers to gather and to travel along the French coastline on public transport towards different launch spots.

Our colleague, Abu Ahmed, initially travelled with the migrants, but – for his own safety – we had agreed he would slip away from the group before nightfall, and before they got close to the beaches.

From a distance, we watched Abdullah walk across a street in Boulogne, having accompanied some of his passengers there from Dunkirk and Calais. He wore black and carried a large backpack. More people arrived, and sat or lay near him, behind some bushes at a bus stop. They waited for several hours, until early evening, before getting on a local bus heading south towards Ecault beach, an area we knew was a favourite launch spot for the gang.

By seven that evening, with our cameras in plain sight, we were openly following Abdullah and perhaps 40 other people, as they walked down a sandy path through the woods and towards the long straight expanse of Ecault beach. Many in the group hid their faces from us but made no move to discourage us from filming, as they moved, suddenly, away from the path and then sat down in a wooded area.

Only one person in the group agreed to talk to us. It was Abdullah himself.

In quiet, halting English, he claims he was an Iranian migrant called Ahmed, and that this was his second, or possibly third, attempt to cross.

Perhaps Abdullah thought that by telling journalists this story, he was building a useful public alias that he might use later – like others in the gang have done – if he ever sought to claim asylum in the UK.

Abruptly, the sound of police radios in the distance brought all conversation to an end. The group of migrants – including many Somalis, some Sudanese, and possibly some Iranian families – sat in total silence for perhaps an hour.

Eventually two French gendarmes spotted them through the undergrowth and walked, slowly, forwards. The younger officer held a canister of pepper spray in his right hand, and it seemed as if all eyes in the group were fixed on it.

“Women?” asked the older office in English.

“Babies?” he continued and walked around the group counting heads. We had heard the police tend to intervene more often when there are babies involved. The officers also checked our team’s press cards as we sat nearby.

“Fifteen women. Forty people in all,” the officer concluded, and then, affably enough, he offered a parting, “good luck”.

A few hours later, as darkness fell, one sombre-looking family left. Their child, a boy of perhaps 10 years old, was coughing heavily. A single policeman remained, leaning on a nearby tree and occasionally shining a torch towards the rest of the group, until about 23:00, when he left.

The tension quickly melted away. Grins flashed in the darkness. For all the weariness and the risk, the younger men in the group seemed buoyed by a collective sense of adventure. By 02:00, the last muttered conversations faded away. It was now a cold, silent night, broken only by snores, the occasional yelp of someone dreaming, and the hoot of a single owl.

At about 06:30 the following morning, word spread through the group. The police had found whatever boat the gang had prepared for them overnight – we had seen Abdullah disappear into the darkness for at least an hour at one point – and destroyed it.

Quietly, people stood up, gathered their lifejackets and blankets and, following Abdullah and his team, began to walk back up the path towards the closest bus stop to head back to their camps and wait for another chance to cross.

Meanwhile, we had another journey to make, and a confrontation.

We had considered seeing if we could get a reimbursement from Abdullah by claiming that our colleague, Abu Ahmed, had changed his mind about the crossing. Instead, we decided it was more important to try to challenge the gang’s UK-based associates. And so, later that same day, our undercover reporter called Abdullah one more time.

Abu Ahmed said his two friends in Calais also wanted to cross, and that he had left Abdullah’s group on the bus because he preferred to travel with his friends. Could they pay in Birmingham too? Just like the last time?

The next day, we were back at New Street Station again. It was a near identical repeat of our earlier visit there, except this time, when a different unnamed man – also young, and bearded – arrived beside the bull sculpture to collect yet more cash for the smuggling gang, we broke cover and walked straight up to him, our cameras rolling.

“We’re from BBC News. We know you’re linked to a people smuggling gang…”

The man looked around, momentarily confused, his eyes darting. Then he turned and broke into a frantic sprint, heading to the station exit and across the street beyond before vanishing into the city.

A few days later, we called Abdullah and by phone and asked him about his smuggling activities. At first, he denied any wrongdoing. Then offered us money. Then he said he needed to call his boss. Then he hung up.

A forecast is just a forecast, but the significance of today’s pessimistic analysis by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (Niesr)is that it does reflect scenarios being considered in the Treasury ahead of the Budget in the autumn.

As I wrote last month, it is not just the accumulation of U-turns, and sluggish economic news which is driving the framing of another important Treasury moment in the autumn.

The Chancellor Rachel Reeves may choose to make a strategic decision to reflect the current global uncertainties by establishing significantly greater room for manoeuvre to hit her borrowing limits.

Currently that buffer is a very tight £10bn.

The Niesr report points to the need to re-establish what it calls “a large buffer” against missing her fiscal rules.

The absence of this has led to what Niesr called “piecemeal policy tinkering” that had given rise to “prolonged economic uncertainty”.

So there could be a move towards getting more bad news out of the way now, to break the doom loop of people constantly expecting policy changes and tax rises.

The borrowing rules stipulate that day-to-day government costs will be paid for by tax income, rather than borrowing and debt should be falling as a share of national income by the end of this parliament in 2029-30.

Niesr does not recommend changing the new borrowing rules, which have only just been established, at this stage.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others have floated the idea that the Treasury should only really make Budget changes once a year to stop the uncertainty.

The IMF also suggested bigger buffers as the best idea.

All this matters because it could mean that earlier estimates of a need to bridge a budget gap of £15-20bn a year with tax rises or spending cuts in the autumn, are a material underestimate.

Niesr’s forecast of a £40-50bn gap is on the pessimistic side, and there are still many moving parts before the Autumn, but it does show that the scale of the challenge is not easing for the chancellor.

With most spending now fixed, and political challenges over welfare cuts, that would leave tax rises as the main lever.

While the government promised not to change the main rates of tax, Niesr points to scope to further raise revenue through changes to the scope of VAT, pensions allowances, council tax and prolonging the freeze in income tax thresholds.

If Niesr are right, it could be all of the above.

Of course, economic news has been mixed in recent weeks.

We’ll get further information on Thursday when the Bank of England is set to decide on a further interest rate cut and issue its new economic forecasts.

And next week, the important GDP figures for the second quarter are due to be released and they’re expected to show the UK is no longer the fastest growing economy of the major G7 economies.

Russia has more than doubled the number of drones and missiles fired towards Ukraine since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, a BBC Verify analysis has found, despite his calls for a ceasefire.

Attacks had already been rising under former President Joe Biden in 2024 but climbed sharply after Trump’s election victory in November. Since he returned to office in January, recorded aerial attacks from Moscow have reached their highest levels of the war.

Throughout his campaign Trump vowed to bring an end to fighting in just one day if returned to office. He claimed during his 2024 campaign that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine could have been averted had a president who the Kremlin “respected” held office.

However, in his efforts to achieve a ceasefire he has been accused at times of favouring Russia by critics, and his administration has paused deliveries of air defence munitions and other military supplies to Ukraine on two separate occasions.

The pauses – announced in March and July and since reversed by the president – came as Russia steadily increased missile and drone production. According to Ukrainian military intelligence, ballistic missile construction in Russia grew by 66% over the past year.

The data reviewed by BBC Verify – based on daily incident reports issued by the Ukrainian Air Force – showed that Russia launched 27,158 munitions between 20 January – when Trump’s presidency began – and 19 July, compared with 11,614 over the final six months of Biden’s term.

“This brutal war was brought on by Joe Biden’s incompetence, and it has gone on for far too long,” White House deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to BBC Verify.

“President Trump wants to stop the killing, which is why he is selling American-made weapons to Nato members and threatening Putin with biting tariffs and sanctions if he does not agree to a ceasefire.”

In the opening weeks of the new administration, the White House issued a series of warm statements seemingly intended to entice President Vladimir Putin towards a settlement. During this period, Russian attacks on Ukraine briefly fell when compared with the final weeks of the Biden administration.

But by February, when US diplomats led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s delegation for a summit in Riyadh, attacks had started to climb again.

The talks, which Rubio said were a starting point to bring an end to the war, have been followed by mediated discussions between Ukrainian and Russian officials in Turkey.

Attacks peaked early last month, when Moscow launched 748 drones and missiles towards Ukraine on 9 July, according to the Ukrainian Air Force data. More than a dozen people were reportedly injured by the barrage and two were killed.

While Trump has expressed anger at the escalating Russian attacks on several occasions, his mounting frustration does not appear to have had an impact on Moscow’s strategy.

On 25 May, Russia launched its then-largest recorded barrage, prompting Trump to angrily ask: “What the hell happened to him [Putin]?”

Since then, Russia has exceeded that number of reported launches on 14 occasions. Trump has responded by demanding that the Kremlin reach a peace deal with Ukraine by 8 August.

The number of Russian munitions penetrating Ukrainian air defences appears to be increasing, with explosions around the capital Kyiv becoming a daily part of life for residents of the city.

“Every time you go to sleep, you don’t know if you’re going to wake up the next morning, and that’s just not a normal way to live,” Dasha Volk, a journalist living in the city, told the BBC’s Ukrainecast programme in June.

“Every time you hear an explosion or a missile flying over your head, lots of thoughts are going through my mind – I’m going to die now, things like that.”

Senator Chris Coons, a senior Democrat on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told BBC Verify that Trump’s decision to suspend weapons supplies on two occasions and his broader approach to Russian relations may have convinced the Kremlin that it had the freedom to increase attacks.

“It’s clear Putin feels emboldened by Trump’s weakness and has increased his vicious assault on the Ukrainian people, repeatedly attacking hospitals and maternity wards, the Ukrainian power grid, and other civilian sites,” he said.

The growing attacks have renewed calls for the US to send fresh supplies of Patriot anti-air batteries to Ukraine. The Patriots are the most capable and expensive air defence systems that Ukraine has. Each Patriot battery costs around $1bn (£800m), and each missile costs nearly $4m.

Trump has overturned the previous supply pauses and agreed to sell weapons to Nato members, who will in turn supply them to Kyiv. Trump appeared to imply that the deal would include fresh supplies of Patriot batteries.

Justin Bronk, an analyst focussing on the Russian military at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said restrictions on the supply of military equipment imposed by the White House had made Ukraine “vulnerable” to missile and drone attacks.

But he also noted that Russia has ramped up the production of missiles and so-called ‘kamikaze’ drones such as the Geran-2 – a domestically produced version of the Iranian Shahed drone. Mr Bronk said that Russia’s increased stockpiles, coupled with “significant reductions” in supply of US interceptor missiles had encouraged Moscow to escalate its air campaign.

Ukraine’s Military Intelligence agency (HUR) recently told domestic media that Russia was now producing up to 85 ballistic missiles per month, up from 44 in April 2024.

Russia is reportedly producing 170 Geran drones per day, having established a massive manufacturing facility at Alabuga in the south of the country.

In a recent interview with Russian military TV, the facility’s director Timur Shagivaleyev boasted that Alabuga had become “the largest combat drone production plant in the world”, adding that his workers were producing nine times more units than initially expected.

Satellite images show the facility has expanded significantly since mid-2024, with a number of new warehouses built on the site.

Other structures, including what appear to be expansions to worker dormitories, remain under construction.

Senator Coons warned that the increase in production meant that Washington must make clear that it is not preparing to walk away from the conflict as some administration officials have threatened he could do, emphasising that peace can only be achieved through “surging security assistance”.

He added that President Trump must make it clear to Russia that it “cannot simply try to outlast the West”.

“In order to do that, he needs to maintain a consistent and sustained position on the war.”

Meanwhile, Ms Volk said that every day the Russian campaign drags on and Ukrainian interceptions fall public morale is hammered.

“People are getting tired because of these attacks, they really affect our lives,” she said.

“We know what we are fighting for, but it becomes more difficult every year because everyone is getting exhausted. That’s the reality.”

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More than 100 people are missing and at least one has died after devastating flash floods in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

Rescue operations are under way in Uttarkashi district after a massive wave of water surged down the mountains into Dharali village on Tuesday, submerging roads and buildings in its path.

About 190 people have been rescued so far in the affected region, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said.

A cloudburst is an extreme, sudden downpour of rain over a small area in a short period of time, often leading to flash floods.

Damaged roads and heavy rain have hampered rescue teams trying to reach Dharali. Dhami flew in by helicopter on Wednesday and met some of the affected families.

Weeks of heavy rain have pounded Uttarakhand, with Uttarkashi – home to Dharali village – among the worst hit by flooding.

The floods struck on Tuesday around 13:30 India time (08:00 GMT), causing the Kheerganga river to swell dramatically and send tonnes of muddy water crashing down the hills.

Dharali is a summer tourist spot 2km from Harsil, home to a major Indian army base and an Indo-Tibetan Border Police camp. At least 10 soldiers stationed at the army base are also missing, officials said.

Rescue efforts are slow due to heavy sludge and debris, but officials have deployed helicopters to aid operations.

The sludge has also blocked part of the Bhagirathi river – which becomes India’s holiest river Ganges once it travels downstream – forming an artificial lake that has submerged large areas, including a government helipad.

Officials worry that if this water is not drained out quickly, it can pose a serious threat to towns and villages downstream.

India’s weather department has forecast heavy rain ahead and advised avoiding landslide-prone areas. Schools have closed in parts of the state.

In the past few days, officials had issued multiple rain alerts, discouraging tourists from visiting the region.

Dharali sees fewer visitors in monsoon season. The low footfall and warnings likely kept tourists safe during the deluge. Residents warn that a full crowd could have turned the incident into a far worse disaster.

Uttarakhand, located in the western Himalayas, is highly vulnerable to flash floods and landslides.

In 2021, more than 200 people died in flash floods triggered by a cloudburst.

One of the worst disasters to hit Uttarakhand was in 2013, when a cloudburst caused devastating floods and landslides that destroyed several villages and towns. Much of the damage took place in Kedarnath town, which is popular with Hindu pilgrims. Thousands of people were swept away, and many bodies were never recovered.

When the Titan submersible went missing during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in 2023, David Lochridge hoped the five people on board – including his former boss – could be rescued.

“I always hoped that what happened wouldn’t happen. But I just knew if they kept carrying on the way they were going and with that deficient equipment, then there would be an incident,” he told the BBC.

The whistleblower had been sacked by the firm behind the sub, Oceangate, after warning about safety issues in 2018.

In June 2023 the sub imploded killing all five people on board – including Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush.

A report from the US Coast Guard (USCG) published on Tuesday found that Oceangate’s failures over safety, testing and maintenance were the main cause of the disaster.

“There is so much that could have been done differently. From the initial design, to the build, to the operations – people were sold a lie,” Lochridge told the BBC.

But he firmly believes the US authorities could – and should – have done more to stop Oceangate.

Lochridge had joined Oceangate seven years earlier as the company’s Director of Marine Operations. He moved his family from Scotland to the US, and was full of excitement about the company’s ambitions.

Oceangate was building a new submersible to take paying passengers down to the most famous wreck in the world – the Titanic.

And he was going to be involved in the project from the very start, working alongside the team designing the sub.

The straight-talking Glaswegian has worked at sea for more than 25 years, first with the Royal Navy and later as a submersible pilot. He also led submarine rescue operations, responding to distress calls from people trapped underwater. He knows about the risks involved in deep dives.

His responsibilities included planning dives and, as chief pilot, he would be the one taking the sub and its passengers 3,800m beneath the waves to see the Titanic. Safety was at the heart of his role.

“As the director of marine operations, I’m the one responsible for everybody,” he told BBC News. “I was responsible for the safety of all Oceangate personnel and all of the passengers that were going to be coming in the sub.”

A prototype for the new submersible, which would eventually be called Titan, was being developed with the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). The plan was to build its hull – the part where the passengers would sit – out of carbon fibre.

No deep diving sub had been made out of this material before – most have hulls constructed from titanium or steel. But Lochridge had confidence in the APL team.

He said he was told by Oceangate’s CEO Stockton Rush that the craft would undergo a safety assessment by an independent marine organisation, known as certification.

Lochridge was adamant that this third-party oversight was essential – especially because Titan was to be made of experimental materials.

But by the summer of 2016 he was starting to have doubts about the project.

Oceangate stopped working with APL and decided to bring the design and construction of Titan in-house.

Lochridge was worried. He didn’t have the same confidence in Oceangate’s engineers. He told the BBC he didn’t think they had experience of building subs able to withstand the immense pressures found at the depth of the Titanic.

“At that point, I started asking questions… and I felt I had a duty of care to keep asking them,” he said.

As the parts for Titan began to arrive, and the craft started to take shape, Lochridge said he was spotting problem after problem.

“When the carbon hull came in, it was an absolute mess,” he said.

He saw visible gaps in the material, areas where the layers of carbon fibre were coming apart – known as delamination.

And he identified issues with other key components.

The carbon fibre hull had titanium domes fitted on each end, but he said the metal had been machined incorrectly. He was also worried that the sub’s view port had not been designed to work at extreme depths.

Most concerning, he learnt that Titan was not going to be independently certified for safety.

He told the BBC that he had always been outspoken on safety issues – so he wasn’t going to stay silent.

“I brought up all the issues that I was seeing… but I was just met with resistance all the way,” he said.

In January 2018, he outlined his concerns again to Stockton Rush. This time Rush asked him to complete an inspection of the vessel.

Titan was at a crucial point of its development. Passengers had already paid deposits for dives to the Titanic planned for later that year. Test dives were about to start in the Bahamas before those expeditions got underway.

Lochridge wanted Oceangate to delay these plans.

“I formulated a report and I sent it out to all the directors in the company.”

The following day he was summoned to a meeting with Rush and several other Oceangate employees.

A transcript from the two-hour-long meeting, where the itemised report was picked over, reveals a heated exchange between Lochridge and Rush.

Towards the end of the meeting, in response to Lochridge’s safety concerns, Rush says: “I have no desire to die. I’ve got a nice granddaughter. I’m going to be around. I understand this kind of risk, and I’m going into it with eyes open, and I think this is one of the safest things I will ever do.”

To Lochridge’s surprise, immediately after this meeting he was fired.

But he was so concerned about Titan that he got in touch with the US government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration – OSHA.

OSHA told him his case was urgent because it involved public safety and that he would be placed under the whistleblower protection scheme, designed to protect employees from retaliation by employers if they’ve reported concerns about workplace safety.

As part of this process, OSHA passed Lochridge’s concerns about Titan to the US Coast Guard (USCG) in February 2018.

But Lochridge says after OSHA wrote to Oceangate to tell them it was starting an investigation, everything changed.

In March, Oceangate asked Lochridge to drop the OSHA complaint – and demanded he pay $10,000 for legal costs. Lochridge declined.

Then in July 2018, Oceangate sued Lochridge – and his wife Carole – for breach of contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, fraud and theft, amongst other allegations. The following month, Lochridge countersued for unfair dismissal.

Lochridge maintains that throughout the process OSHA was slow and failed to protect him from the ongoing retaliation he was receiving from Oceangate.

“I provided all the documentation to OSHA, I was on the phone to OSHA every few weeks.” he said. “OSHA did nothing.”

In December 2018, under increasing pressure from Oceangate’s lawyers, Lochridge and his wife took the decision to drop the case.

This meant the legal proceedings were settled, and as part of this agreement Lochridge withdrew his complaint at OSHA. OSHA stopped its investigation and also notified the US Coast guard that the complaint had been suspended. Lochridge also signed a non-disclosure agreement.

“Carole and I did everything we physically could, we just got to the point that we were completely burned… We had nothing left to give to it. They beat us down.”

Oceangate continued at pace with its plans to reach the Titanic.

In 2018 and 2019, the prototype sub made its first test dives in the Bahamas – including one, piloted by Stockton Rush, that reached a depth of 3,939m.

A crack was later found in the sub’s carbon fibre hull, and in 2020 that damaged hull was swapped out for a new one, in what became the second version of Titan.

In 2021, the company started taking passengers to the Titanic, and over the next two summers made 13 dives to the famous wreck.

But in June 2023, the sub went missing with five people on board – including Stockton Rush. After days of anxious waiting, the sub’s wreckage was found littered across the ocean floor.

At the US Coast Guard’s public hearings held last year, Lochridge criticised OSHA for its lack of action. “I believe that if OSHA had attempted to investigate the seriousness of the concerns I raised on multiple occasions, this tragedy may have been prevented.”

“It didn’t need to happen. It didn’t – and it should have been stopped.”

In response to Mr Lochridge, a spokesperson for OSHA said its whistleblower protection programme was limited to protecting individuals against employer retaliation. They said their investigation had “followed the normal process and timeline for a retaliation case”.

OSHA said it does not investigate whistleblowers’ underlying allegations about public safety… but instead refers those to the appropriate agency – in this case, the US Coast Guard.

The spokesperson said: “The Coast Guard, not OSHA, had jurisdiction to investigate Mr. Lochridge’s allegations regarding the safe design and construction of marine vessels.”

But the US Coast Guard’s report into the disaster agrees with Lochridge and says that OSHA’s slow handling of the investigation was a missed opportunity for early government intervention.

The report also criticises a lack of effective communication and coordination between OSHA and the USCG.

The investigation found that the email from OSHA to the coast guard about Mr Lochridge’s complaint was not received. It had been sent to a staff member who had responsibility for monitoring OSHA cases – but the employee had moved on to a new job within the agency.

Jason Neubauer, the chair of the USCG’s Marine Board of Investigation, told the BBC that the coast guard could have done more.

“The system did not work for the whistleblower in this case, and that’s why we just need to get better – and we have.”

Oceangate said that in the wake of the accident, it had permanently wound down operations and directed its resources towards cooperating with the inquiry.

A 24-year-old British woman has been given a two-year suspended sentence at a court in Germany for trafficking drugs from Thailand.

Cameron Bradford, from Knebworth, Hertfordshire, was arrested at Munich airport on 22 April while while travelling from Bangkok.

Munich District Court heard how Bradford had worked as an escort for a man in the UK who had threatened her, telling her to go to Thailand to pick something up for him.

On her way back to the UK, customs officials in Munich found 20kg (about 45lb) of marijuana in her suitcase.

Bradford, who is a mother, said she did not know what was in the case, which was locked.

Judge Wilfried Dudek said Bradford’s life had not gone well. She had been through an early pregnancy and had mixed with the wrong people.

He said he found it strange that she had not guessed what was in the case, but she had been put under pressure by the man.

More than 7,000 cases of a mosquito-borne virus have been reported across China’s Guangdong province since July, prompting measures similar to those taken during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Foshan city, which has been hit the hardest, chikungunya patients must stay in hospital, where their beds will protected with mosquito nets. They can only be discharged after they test negative or at the end of a week-long stay.

Spread through the bite of an infected mosquito, the virus causes fever and severe joint pain, which sometimes can last for years, but is not usually deadly.

Here is what you need to know about the disease.

Although rare in China, chikungunya virus outbreaks are common in South and South East Asia and parts of Africa.

Most people bitten by an infected mosquito will develop symptoms of chikungunya within three to seven days.

Apart from fever and joint pain, other symptoms include rash, headache, muscle pain and swollen joints.

In most cases, patients will feel better within a week. In severe cases however, the joint pain can last for months or even years.

Those at risk for more severe disease include newborn babies, the elderly, and people with underlying medical conditions, such as heart disease or diabetes.

There is no cure, but deaths from chikungunya are rare.

The virus was first identified in Tanzania in 1952. It then spread to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia.

To date, it has been reported in more than 110 countries.

The best way to prevent the virus from spreading is to reduce pools of stagnant water that allow the mosquitoes to breed, according to the World Health Organization.

Aside from Foshan, at least 12 other cities in the southern Guangdong province have reported infections. Nearly 3,000 cases were reported in the last week alone.

On Monday, Hong Kong reported its first case – a 12-year-old boy who developed fever, rash and joint pain after travelling to Foshan in July.

The virus is not contagious, and only spreads when an infected person is bitten by a mosquito that then goes on to bite others.

Officials say all the reported cases have been mild so far, with 95% of the patients discharged within seven days.

Still, the cases have led to some panic, given the virus is not widely known in the country.

“This is scary. The prolonged consequences sound very painful,” one user wrote on Chinese social media platform Weibo.

The US has urged travellers to China to exercise “increased caution” following the outbreak.

Authorities across Guangdong province have vowed to take “decisive and forceful measures” to stop the spread of the disease.

Those with symptoms, such as fever, joint pain or rashes, are being urged to visit the nearest hospital so they can be tested for the virus.

Authorities have instructed residents to remove stagnant water in their homes, such as in flowerpots, coffee machines or spare bottles – and warned of fines up to 10,000 yuan ($1,400) if they don’t do this.

They are also releasing giant “elephant mosquitoes” that can devour smaller, chikungunya-spreading bugs; and an army of mosquito-eating fish.

Last week, officials in Foshan released 5,000 of these larvae-eating fish into the city’s lakes. In parts of the city, they are even flying drones to detect sources of stagnant water.

Some neighbouring cities had ordered travellers from Foshan to undergo a 14-day home quarantine, but that has since been withdrawn.

Some people have compared these measures to those imposed during the pandemic, and questioned their necessity.

A user on Weibo wrote, “These feel so familiar… But are they really necessary?”

Another wrote: “What’s the point of the quarantine? It’s not as though an infected patient will then go around biting other people?”

China implemented severe restrictions during the pandemic, including forcing people into quarantine camps and sealing residential buildings and whole neighbourhoods on short notice for days or even weeks.

Singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran has surprised fans by playing a number of original songs and Irish tunes during a music and arts festival in Wexford town.

The hitmaker played alongside Irish bands Amble, BIIRD, Beoga and Aaron Rowe in The Sky and The Ground pub on Tuesday night, as part of Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann.

Brought up in Suffolk, the Galway Girl singer’s dad hails from Belfast, and in June Sheeran announced that he identifies culturally as Irish.

Sheeran also made sure fans who couldn’t get make inside the pub didn’t miss out, as he made his way outside to perform an acoustic rendition of his hit single Perfect.

Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann – the All-Ireland Fleadh – is held for a week during August and, in the past, has welcomed up to 600,000 visitors to the host town or city.

The festival will be held in Belfast in 2026.

Beoga have been Ed Sheeran’s Irish trad band of choice over the years.

Most of the members hail from County Antrim. They have been at the heart of plenty of gigs with the singer previously and have worked with Sheeran to produce some of his most famous releases including Galway Girl in 2017.

Eamon Murray of Beoga described what it was like being on stage with the popstar once again.

“We’ve been over to Coachella with Ed and a few other places, but yesterday was by far and away the most hectic as it was in a public bar so it was a lot harder to keep a lid on it… but we’ve been doing a few of them now and they’re good fun,” he said.

Murray described how performing in this setting comes naturally to the global popstar.

“Both sets of his grandparents are Irish so whenever we are doing anything with him, he wants it to be very much an Irish-centric thing.

“He loves that impromptu session vibe, that’s why we get on so well.”

On the Fleadh arriving in Belfast next summer, Murray said: “The fact that it’s coming to Belfast is unbelievable, I honestly didn’t think in all our years that it would ever be a thing.

“It’s a really significant moment in the island’s history and in Irish musical history, that can’t be stressed enough.

“Belfast unbeknownst to itself is a really well-placed city to have it. There’s such good connections to music and culture and art, I think it will really thrive there.”

On Tuesday night, Sheeran and all-female trad supergroup BIIRD performed traditional folk song Wild Mountain Thyme together.

The crowd sang along as Sheeran played the guitar, accompanied by the other artists on violin and the bodhrán – a traditional Irish frame drum.

Wild Mountain Thyme is a Scottish and Irish folk song which was first recorded in 1957 and has been performed by many people.

Aaron Rowe and Irish folk band Amble joined BIIRD and Sheeran to perform folk song Raglan Road to the crowd of enthusiastic Fleadh-goers.

The performance of Raglan Road was no different, with everyone singing together as the violin, accordion and guitar were played while the musicians stood in a circle at the pub.

On Raglan Road was originally written by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh and it was brought to musical life and made famous by The Dubliners.

Vocals and instrumentals from Irish folk band Beoga, Aaron Rowe, BIIRD, and Sheeran came together for a rendition of The Parting Glass.

The origins of the song can be found in Scotland with it being first printed along with its familiar melody in Colm O Lochlainn’s Irish Street Ballads in 1939.

Cork poet Patrick Galvin recorded the song in 1956 and The Clancy Brothers popularised it when they included it on their 1959 album.

It is the world’s largest annual festival of Irish music and hosts street performers, intimate concerts, big-name acts and more 150 competitions showcasing the best of traditional music talent.

Fleadh Cheoil is run by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann – the society of the musicians of Ireland.

The organisation was founded in 1951 by traditional musicians and Gaelic culture advocates from across Ireland.

Each year Comhaltas hosts numerous fleadhanna (festivals) across the island at county and provincial level.

Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann is the best known of the festivals, often simply known as the Fleadh.

Fashion accessories chain Claire’s has filed for bankruptcy in the US for the second time as it struggles with fewer people buying its products, and from online competition eating into profits.

It confirmed it had already been in discussions “with other partners” about its future. The BBC understands there will be no immediate impact on the firm’s UK stores.

The US-based firm said it was in discussion “with our vendors and landlords” about its North American stores, but shops there would remain open while it explored “alternatives”.

The US-based firm first filed for bankruptcy in 2018. It currently operates 2,750 stores in 17 countries throughout North America and Europe.

It has about 280 stores in the UK, down from 370 in 2018 when it filed for bankruptcy because it was unable to repay a loan.

Claire’s is known for selling jewellery, colourful accessories such as necklaces and bracelets, and is part of millions of young people’s memories for its ear piercing services.

The firm operates under two brand names, Claire’s and Icing, and is the latest casualty of consumers shifting away from physical stores.

Claire’s is owned by a group of firms, including investment giant Elliott Management.

“This decision is difficult,” wrote Claire’s chief executive Chris Cramer, “but a necessary one”.

He blamed “increased competition, consumer spending trends and the ongoing shift away from brick-and-mortar retail” for the declaration of bankruptcy, as well as “debt obligations” and wider economic turmoil.

The firm’s global supply chain means it is likely to suffer as a result of tariffs imposed on goods, part of US President Trump’s escalating trade war with several countries, including China and Canada.

The company has a $500m (£375m) loan due in December next year, said Julie Palmer, partner at Begbies Traynor, which would be “looming heavily over management’s minds”.

Tariffs “have added to the strain”, she said.

According to retail analyst Catherine Shuttleworth, it is “fair to assume they’re exposed to the same pressures many accessories retailers are.

“A lot of that category is sourced from Asia, and any increase in import costs hits hard when your price points are low and margins are tight,” she added.

Mr Cramer said the firm remained in active discussions with potential “strategic and financial partners”, which did not exclude the possibility that it was still looking for a buyer.

The Claire’s bankruptcy was a “clear signal” that some parts of retail across the world were “failing to keep up with how people want to shop right now”, said Ms Shuttleworth.

She said young people didn’t just browse on the High Street for cheap accessories like they used to, with online competitors such as Shein targeting young shoppers with “super cheap” accessories.

Younger people were now “far more likely” to discover new brands through TikTok than in a shopping centre – and with footfall still well below pre-Covid levels, it had hit Claire’s very hard.

Ms Palmer said Claire’s “reliance on physical stores – once a key strength – has become a major liability”.

Outside of its European and American stores, Claire’s says it has a further 300 franchised stores located primarily in the Middle East and South Africa. It also sells its products in thousands of concessions stores in Europe and the US.

Its lavender-hued storefronts attracted young people particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s, who rifled through its neon and glitter accessories racks for good-value buys. It was often a usual stop for a Saturday shopping trip by families and tweens at malls across the world.

It also occasionally makes a foray into selling toys including slime, headphones or fluffy toys.

WhatsApp has taken down 6.8 million accounts linked to scammers targeting people around the world in the first half of this year, its parent company Meta says.

Many were tied to scam centres run by organised criminals in South East Asia, who often used forced labour in their operations, according to the social media giant.

Meta made the announcement as WhatsApp rolled out new anti-scam measures to alert users to potential fraudulent activity, such as a user being added to a group chat by someone not in their contacts list.

The crackdown targets an increasingly common tactic in which criminals hijack WhatsApp accounts or add users to group chats promoting fake investment schemes and other scams.

Meta said WhatsApp “proactively detected and took down accounts before scam centres were able to operationalise them.”

In one case, WhatsApp worked with Meta and ChatGPT-developer OpenAI to disrupt scams linked to a Cambodian criminal group that offered cash for likes on social media posts to promote a fake rent-a-scooter pyramid scheme.

It said scammers had used ChatGPT to create the instructions issued to potential victims.

Typically, fraudsters would first contact potential targets with a text message before moving the conversation to social media or private messaging apps, said Meta.

These scams were usually completed on payment or cryptocurrency platforms, it added.

“There is always a catch and it should be a red flag for everyone: you have to pay upfront to get promised returns or earnings.”

UK consumer rights organisation Which? welcomed the announcement, but said: “Meta must do much more to stop these criminals across all its platforms.”

Consumer law expert Lisa Webb added: “Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users are being inundated with fraudulent ads for everything from fake investment opportunities to dodgy products and non-existent job offers.

“Meta needs to ensure that scams are prevented from ever appearing on its platforms in the first place.”

“Meta needs to ensure that scams are prevented from ever appearing on its platforms in the first place. Ofcom must now take action to enforce the parts of the Online Safety Act already in effect, and to issue robust rules governing fraudulent paid-for ads, so that tech firms are forced to take full responsibility for the content on their sites.”

Scam centres that cheat people out of billions of dollars are known to operate from South East Asian countries like Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand.

These centres are also known to recruit people who are then forced to carry out the scams.

Authorities in the region have urged people to be wary of potential fraud and use anti-scam measures such as WhatsApp’s two-step verification feature to help protect their accounts from being hijacked.

In Singapore, for example, users have also been told by police to be wary of any unusual requests they receive on messaging apps.

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US President Donald Trump has issued an executive order hitting India with an additional 25% tariff over its purchases of Russian oil.

That will raise the total tariff on Indian imports to the United States to 50% – among the highest rates imposed by the US.

The new rate will come into effect in 21 days, so on 27 August, according to the executive order.

A response from India’s foreign ministry on Wednesday said New Delhi had already made clear its stance on imports from Russia, and reiterated that the tariff is “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable”.

“It is therefore extremely unfortunate that the US should choose to impose additional tariffs on India for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest,” the brief statement read.

“India will take all actions necessary to protect its national interests,” it added.

The US president had earlier warned he would raise levies, saying India doesn’t “care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine”.

On Wednesday, the White House said in a statement that the “Russian Federation’s actions in Ukraine pose an ongoing threat to US national security and foreign policy, necessitating stronger measures to address the national emergency”.

It said India’s imports of Russian oil undermine US efforts to counter Russia’s activities in Ukraine.

It added that the US will determine which other countries import oil from Russia, and will “recommend further actions to the President as needed”.

Oil and gas are Russia’s biggest exports, and Moscow’s biggest customers include China, India and Turkey.

The threatened tariff hike follows meetings on Wednesday by Trump’s top envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow, aimed at securing peace between Russia and Ukraine.

New Delhi had previously called Trump’s threat to raise tariffs over its purchase of oil from Russia “unjustified and unreasonable”.

In an earlier statement, a spokesperson for India’s foreign ministry, Randhir Jaiswal, said the US had encouraged India to import Russian gas at the start of the conflict, “for strengthening global energy markets stability”.

He said India “began importing from Russia because traditional supplies were diverted to Europe after the outbreak of the conflict”.

The latest threatened tariff demonstrates Trump’s willingness to impose sanctions related to the war in Ukraine even against nations that the US considers to be important allies or trading partners.

This could be a warning that other countries could feel a real bite if Trump ramps up those kind of sanctions once Friday’s deadline passes, when the US president has threatened new sanctions on Russia and to place 100% tariffs on countries that purchase its oil.

This would not be the first time the Trump administration has imposed secondary tariffs, which are also in place to punish buyers of Venezuelan oil.

India has previously criticised the US – its largest trading partner – for introducing the levies, when the US itself is still doing trade with Russia.

Last year, the US traded goods worth an estimated $3.5bn (£2.6bn) with Russia, despite tough sanctions and tariffs.

Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have in the past referred to each other as friends and, during Trump’s first term, attended political rallies in each others’ countries.

But that has not stopped Trump from hitting India with the levies, suggesting diverging interests between New Delhi and Washington.

The body of a man missing for 28 years has been found in a melting glacier in Pakistan’s remote and mountainous Kohistan region.

A shepherd stumbled upon the body, which was remarkably well-preserved, with its clothing intact, in the so-called Lady Valley in the country’s east.

Along with the body was an ID card with the name Naseeruddin. Police were able to trace it to a man who disappeared in the area in June 1997 after falling into a glacier crack during a snowstorm.

The region has seen decreased snowfall in recent years, exposing glaciers to direct sunlight, making them melt faster. Experts said the body’s discovery shows how changing climate has accelerated glacial melt.

“What I saw was unbelievable,” the shepherd who found the body, Omar Khan, told BBC Urdu. “The body was intact. The clothes were not even torn.”

As soon as police confirmed that it was Naseeruddin, locals began offering more information, Mr Khan added.

Naseeruddin had a wife and two children. He was travelling with his brother, Kathiruddin, on horseback on the day he went missing. Police said a family feud had forced the two men to leave their home.

Kathiruddin told BBC Urdu that they had arrived in the valley that morning, and sometime around afternoon, his brother stepped into a cave. When he did not return, Kathiruddin says he looked for him inside the cave – and went and got help from others in the area to search further. But they never found him.

When a human body falls into a glacier, the extreme cold freezes it fast, preventing decomposition, said Prof Muhammad Bilal, head of the Department of Environment at Comsats University Islamabad.

The body is then mummified due to a lack of moisture and oxygen in the glacier.

The US will require citizens from Malawi and Zambia to pay a $15,000 (£11,300) deposit for a tourist or business visa, according to the US state department.

The 12-month pilot programme aims to curb visa overstays “or where screening and vetting information is considered deficient“, according to a notice published by the state department.

Officials say that citizens of countries other than Malawi and Zambia may soon also need to pay a similar deposit, which will be returned at the end of their visit to the US.

The US administration has taken several steps to further President Donald Trump’s agenda of stemming illegal immigration.

Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term to this effect.

The state department notice, published on Tuesday, says: “Aliens applying for visas as temporary visitors for business or pleasure (B-1/B-2) and who are nationals of countries identified by the Department as having high visa overstay rates, where screening and vetting information is deemed deficient, or offering Citizenship by Investment, if the alien obtained citizenship with no residency requirement, may be subject to the pilot program.

“Consular officers may require covered non-immigrant visa applicants to post a bond of up to $15,000 as a condition of visa issuance, as determined by the consular officers.”

Figures published in 2023 by the US Department of Homeland Security show that about 14% of visitors from Malawi overstay their visas, compared to 11% of Zambian visitors.

Other countries with high overstay rates include Haiti (31%), Myanmar (27%) and Yemen (20%).

Zambia Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe told the BBC that the government was “engaging our counterparts to get a full understanding of the implications and what can be done, if anything, to address the underlying issues”.

Since coming to office in January, Trump has signed orders to roll back humanitarian programmes for migrants from certain countries who are already in the US.

The Republican president has also banned foreign nationals from 12 countries from travelling to the US, and imposed partial restrictions on another seven.

His administration has revoked visas for hundreds of international students and detained several others on college campuses across the US, often without any warning or recourse for appeals.

The state department has said it is targeting those who were involved in activities that “run counter” to US national interests.

Many of those targeted have participated in some form of pro-Palestinian activity.

But there have been other cases where cancellations appear to be connected to those with some sort of criminal record, or legal infractions like driving over the speed limit, immigration lawyers have said.

More than 100 people are missing and at least one has died after devastating flash floods in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

Rescue operations are under way in Uttarkashi district after a massive wave of water surged down the mountains into Dharali village on Tuesday, submerging roads and buildings in its path.

About 190 people have been rescued so far in the affected region, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said.

A cloudburst is an extreme, sudden downpour of rain over a small area in a short period of time, often leading to flash floods.

Damaged roads and heavy rain have hampered rescue teams trying to reach Dharali. Dhami flew in by helicopter on Wednesday and met some of the affected families.

Weeks of heavy rain have pounded Uttarakhand, with Uttarkashi – home to Dharali village – among the worst hit by flooding.

The floods struck on Tuesday around 13:30 India time (08:00 GMT), causing the Kheerganga river to swell dramatically and send tonnes of muddy water crashing down the hills.

Dharali is a summer tourist spot 2km from Harsil, home to a major Indian army base and an Indo-Tibetan Border Police camp. At least 10 soldiers stationed at the army base are also missing, officials said.

Rescue efforts are slow due to heavy sludge and debris, but officials have deployed helicopters to aid operations.

The sludge has also blocked part of the Bhagirathi river – which becomes India’s holiest river Ganges once it travels downstream – forming an artificial lake that has submerged large areas, including a government helipad.

Officials worry that if this water is not drained out quickly, it can pose a serious threat to towns and villages downstream.

India’s weather department has forecast heavy rain ahead and advised avoiding landslide-prone areas. Schools have closed in parts of the state.

In the past few days, officials had issued multiple rain alerts, discouraging tourists from visiting the region.

Dharali sees fewer visitors in monsoon season. The low footfall and warnings likely kept tourists safe during the deluge. Residents warn that a full crowd could have turned the incident into a far worse disaster.

Uttarakhand, located in the western Himalayas, is highly vulnerable to flash floods and landslides.

In 2021, more than 200 people died in flash floods triggered by a cloudburst.

One of the worst disasters to hit Uttarakhand was in 2013, when a cloudburst caused devastating floods and landslides that destroyed several villages and towns. Much of the damage took place in Kedarnath town, which is popular with Hindu pilgrims. Thousands of people were swept away, and many bodies were never recovered.

The Kremlin has issued a vague statement following talks between US envoy Steve Witkoff and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, days before Donald Trump’s deadline to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine.

Foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said the two sides had exchanged “signals” as part of “constructive” talks in Moscow.

He also said Russia and the US had discussed the possibility of strategic cooperation – but refused to share more until Witkoff had briefed the US president.

The US envoy boarded a flight to the US on Wednesday afternoon, according to Russian media.

The talks appeared cordial despite Trump’s mounting irritation with the lack of progress in negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.

In images shared by Russian outlets, Witkoff was seen walking around central Moscow with Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev on Wednesday morning.

Later, images showed Putin and Witkoff – who have met several times before – smiling and shaking hands in a gilded hall at the Kremlin.

There was no immediate comment from the US or Ukraine following the talks, which lasted over three hours.

The US president has said Russia could face hefty sanctions or see secondary sanctions imposed against all those who trade with it if it doesn’t take steps to end the “horrible war” with Ukraine.

Shortly after Witkoff’s departure from Moscow, the White House said Trump had signed an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on India for buying Russian oil.

Earlier this week, the US president accused India of not caring “how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian war machine”.

Before Wednesday’s talks, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, warned that Russia would only make serious moves towards peace if it began to run out of money.

He welcomed the threat of tougher US sanctions and tariffs on nations buying Russian oil.

Expectations are muted for a settlement by Friday, and Russia has continued its large-scale air attacks on Ukraine despite Trump’s threats of sanctions.

Before taking office in January, Trump claimed he would be able to end the war between Russia and Ukraine in a day. He failed, and his rhetoric towards Russia has since hardened.

“We thought we had [the war] settled numerous times, and then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city like Kyiv and kills a lot of people in a nursing home or whatever,” he said last month.

Three rounds of talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul have failed to bring the war closer to and end, three-and-a-half years after Moscow launched its full-invasion.

Moscow’s military and political preconditions for peace remain unacceptable to Kyiv and to its Western partners. The Kremlin has also repeatedly turned down Kyiv’s requests for a meeting between Zelensky and Putin.

Meanwhile, the US administration approved $200m (£150m) of additional military sales to Ukraine on Tuesday following a phone call between Zelensky and Trump, in which the two leaders also discussed defence cooperation and drone production.

Ukraine has been using drones to hit Russia’s refineries and energy facilities, while Moscow has focused its air attacks on Ukraine’s cities.

The Kyiv City Military Administration said the toll of an attack on the city last week rose to 32 after a man died of his injuries. The strike was the deadliest on Kyiv since the start of the invasion.

Ukrainian authorities on Wednesday reported that a Russian attack on a holiday camp in the central region of Zaporizhzhia left two dead and 12 wounded.

“There’s no military sense in this attack. It’s just cruelty to scare people,” Zelensky said.

US President Donald Trump has announced a 35% tariff on Canada from 1 August. He also announced new tariff rates for dozens of countries that will come into effect on 7 August.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has introduced a series of these import taxes, and threatened many more.

He argues that the tariffs boost American manufacturing and protect jobs.

However, his volatile international trade policy has thrown the world economy into chaos, and a number of firms have increased prices for US consumers as a result.

Tariffs are taxes charged on goods bought from other countries.

Typically, they are a percentage of a product’s value.

A 10% tariff means a $10 product has a $1 tax on top – taking the total cost to the importer $11 (£8.35).

Companies that bring foreign goods into the US have to pay the tax to the government.

They may pass some or all of the extra cost on to customers. Firms may also decide to import fewer goods.

At the end of May, a US trade court ruled that Trump did not have the authority to impose some of the tariffs he has announced, because he did so under national emergency powers.

But the following day, an appeals court said the relevant taxes could stay in place while the case continued.

Trump says tariffs will encourage US consumers to buy more American-made goods, increase the amount of tax raised and boost investment.

He wants to reduce the gap between the value of goods the US buys from other countries and those it sells to them – known as the trade deficit. He argues that America has been taken advantage of by “cheaters”, and “pillaged” by foreigners.

The president has announced different tariffs against specific goods, and imports from individual countries.

Many of these have been subsequently amended, delayed or cancelled altogether.

Critics accuse Trump of making dramatic and sometimes contradictory policy statements as a negotiating tactic to encourage trade partners to agree deals that benefit the US.

Trump has made other demands alongside the tariffs.

Setting out the first tariffs of his current term against China, Mexico and Canada, he said all three countries must do more to stop migrants and illegal drugs reaching the US.

Separately, on 14 July, Trump threatened to introduce significant tariffs against companies trading with Russia, if a deal to end the war in Ukraine was not reached within 50 days.

The taxes on goods imported to the US include:

• 50% tariff on steel and aluminium imports
• 50% tariff on copper imports from 1 August
• 25% tariff on foreign-made cars and imported engines and other car parts

On 8 July, Trump threatened to impose a 200% tariff on pharmaceutical imports but no further details have been confirmed.

Trump has also said the global tariff exemption covering goods valued at $800 or less will end on 29 August.

He had already removed the so-called “de minimis” exemption for products from China and Hong Kong, to restrict American’s purchase of cheap clothes and household items from commerce sites like Shein and Temu.

Some of the first tariffs targeting China, Canada and Mexico were subsequently amended, increased or postponed.

On 2 April, Trump announced that a “baseline tariff” of 10% would apply to all other imports from all countries.

He said goods from about 60 other trade partners which the White House described as the “worst offenders” – including the EU and China – would face higher rates, as payback for unfair trade policies.

Thesereciprocal” tariffswere later postponed for 90 days to allow time to negotiate individual trade deals, and the deadline was then extended until 1 August.

Days before the 1 August deadline, the US and EU agreed that European goods would face 15% tariffs – including cars. Under the deal – which needs to be approved by all 27 EU members – the trading bloc will charge US firms 0% duty on certain products.

Other tariff rates which will now apply from 7 August include:

• 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods
• 30% tariffs on South African goods

• 25% plus “an unspecified penalty” on Indian goods
• 20% tariffs on Vietnamese goods
• 19% tariffs on Indonesian goods
• 19% tariffs on Filipino goods
• 15% tariffs on Japanese goods
• 15% tariffs on South Korean goods

A 35% tariff will also apply to all Canadian goods on top of existing duties. This excludes products covered by the existing North American free trade agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the US and Mexico.

However, Trump has delayed imposing higher tariffs on all Mexican goods – for another 90 days to strike a deal. Earlier, Trump had threated 30% or a higher rate to match any retaliatory duties introduced on US imports.

US-Chinese trade negotiations are ongoing.

The two countries had raised tariffs on each other’s goods to more than 100% before temporarily lowering rates for a 90-day period.

That pause is set to end on 12 August.

Top officials from the US and China held talks earlier this week in a bid to extend the truce deadline.

China’s trade negotiator Li Chenggang said Beijing and Washington had agreed to push to preserve the truce, under which both sides temporarily suspended some measures against each other.

But US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said any extension would be up to Trump.

• How are trade deals actually negotiated?

At 10%, the UK has negotiated the lowest US tariff rate so far.

The UK exported about £58bn of goods to the US in 2024, mainly cars, machinery and pharmaceuticals.

The 10% rate applies to the first 100,000 UK vehicles exported to the US every year, which is roughly the number of cars sold in 2024. Each vehicle above the quota would face the standard 25% car tariff.

The agreement also lets the two countries sell beef to each other – although the government insists there will be no change to the UK’s higher food safety standards.

Some US ethanol will face 0% tariffs, compared to the previous rate of 19%.

The two countries agreed an initial framework in May. Trump announced “the deal was done” at the G7 summit in Canada in June.

However, he did not confirm the expected removal of charges on steel imports from the UK which was outlined in May. Although the UK is the only country which does not have to pay 50% tariffs on steel and aluminium, a 25% tariff remains.

• Chris Mason: Tariffs deal a triumph for Starmer – up to a point
• What is in the UK-US tariff deal?

Trump’s various announcements have caused volatility on global stock markets, where firms sell shares in their business. However markets have recently been more stable.

Many people are affected by stock market price changes, even if they don’t invest in shares directly, because of the knock-on effect on pensions, jobs and interest rates.

The value of the US dollar, usually considered a safe asset, has also fallen sharply at times.

• How does it affect me if share prices fall?
• Why does it matter if the US dollar falls?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the influential Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) both downgraded their predictions for global economic growth in 2025 as a result of the tariffs.

Both organisations expect the US economy to be badly affected.

The latest figures show the US economy grew at an annual rate of 3% between April and June 2025, after shrinking in the first three months of the year.

The president insists his trade policy is working, but influential voices within his own Republican Party have joined opposition Democrats and foreign leaders in attacking the measures.

Analysts say tariffs are already feeding into the overall US inflation rate, as businesses pass on some or all of their higher costs.

Prices rose by 2.7% in the year to June, up from 2.4% the previous month reflecting increases in items including clothing, coffee, toys and appliances.

Adidas has confirmed it will raise prices for American customers as a result of the tariffs. Almost half of the company’s products are made in Vietnam and Indonesia which are facing levies of 20% and 19% respectively.

Nike has also said US prices will increase, warning the tariffs could add $1bn (£730m) to its costs.

Barbie maker Mattel also plans to charge more in the US.

Some companies are choosing to import fewer foreign goods, which can make those which are available more expensive.

The costs of goods manufactured in the US using imported components are also expected to rise.

For example, car parts typically cross the US, Mexican and Canadian borders multiple times before a vehicle is completely assembled.

The new tariffs have also resulted in tighter customs checks at the US border, leading to delays at the border.

• Six things that could cost Americans more
• How Trump’s tariffs are already impacting Americans

Twenty people have been killed and more than 30 injured in central Gaza after four trucks overturned on a crowd, the Hamas-run civil defence agency says.

Crowds rushed to the vehicles on a road south east of Deir al-Balah on Tuesday evening. They climbed on top of the trucks, causing the drivers to lose control, local journalists told the BBC.

The area was under Israeli military control and the roads were rugged and dangerous, civil defence agency spokesman Mahmoud Basal said.

The private transport association now operating in Gaza said that 26 commercial trucks entered the territory on Tuesday. Six were looted, and four of those overturned, resulting in deaths and injuries.

Israel announced that is would start to allow the gradual entry of goods into Gaza via the private sector to “increase the volume of aid” entering the enclave while reducing reliance on the UN.

The approved supplies include baby food, fruits, vegetables, hygiene products and basic staples.

The BBC has contacted the Israeli ministry of defence for comment.

Hamas said civilians had been waiting for basic supplies to be delivered via road for weeks. “This often results in desperate crowds swarming the trucks,” its media office said.

Aid trucks have been frequently rushed, leading to chaotic scenes.

In a separate incident on Wednesday, Jordan said Israeli settlers attacked a Gaza-bound aid convoy of 30 trucks and accused Israel of failing to prevent such attacks.

The convoy crossed the Jordanian border and was heading towards Gaza’s Zikim crossing. Settlers blocked the road and pelted the trucks with stones, smashing windscreens.

“This requires a serious Israeli intervention and no leniency in dealing with those who obstruct these convoys,” government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said.

He added this was the second attack on a Jordanian aid convoy, following a similar incident on Sunday.

On Wednesday the Hamas-run health ministry reported five new deaths as a result of malnutrition, bringing its total to 193 since the start of the war, including 96 children.

More than 100 international aid organisations and human rights groups have warned of mass starvation in Gaza, and accuse Israel of impeding the distribution of crucial aid.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, denies there is starvation in the territory and insists his country is not blocking aid.

Last week, Israel’s military said it would open humanitarian corridors to allow aid convoys into Gaza following mounting international pressure.

It also announced what it called a “local tactical pause in military activity” for humanitarian purposes in three areas, and permitted foreign aid drops.

About 90% of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced, some repeatedly, and are living in overcrowded and dire conditions.

The UN has repeatedly called for the full and sustained entry of humanitarian supplies, but access remains sporadic and many aid trucks are looted.

Israel insists there are no restrictions on aid deliveries and has repeatedly rejected what it describes as “the false claim of deliberate starvation”.

Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza in response to Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken to Gaza as hostages.

At least 61,020 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since then, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

mRNA vaccines were heralded as a medical marvel that saved lives during the Covid pandemic, but now the US is pulling back from researching them.

US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has cancelled 22 projects – worth $500m (£376m) in funding – for tackling infections such as Covid and flu.

So does Kennedy – probably the country’s most famous vaccine sceptic – have a point, or is he making a monumental miscalculation?

Prof Adam Finn, vaccine researcher at the University of Bristol, says “it’s a bit of both” but ditching mRNA technology is “stupid” and potentially a “catastrophic error”.

Let’s unpick why.

Kennedy says he has reviewed the science on mRNA vaccines, concluding that the “data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu”.

Instead, he says, he would shift funding to “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate”.

So are mRNA vaccines safe? Are they effective? Would other vaccine technologies be better?

And another question is where should mRNA vaccines fit into the pantheon of other vaccine technologies – because there are many:

• Inactivated vaccines use the original virus or bacterium, kill it, and use that to train the immune system – such as the annual flu shot
• Attenuated vaccines do not kill the infectious agent, but make it weaker so it causes a mild infection – such as the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine
• Conjugate vaccines use bits of protein or sugar from a bug, so it triggers an immune response without causing an infection – like for types of meningitis
• mRNA vaccines use a fragment of genetic code that temporarily instructs the body to make parts of a virus, and the immune system reacts to that

Each has advantages and disadvantages, but Prof Finn argues we “overhyped” mRNA vaccines during the pandemic to the exclusion of other approaches, and now there is a process of adjusting.

“But to swing the pendulum so far that mRNA is useless and has no value and should not be developed or understood better is equally stupid, it did do remarkable things,” he says.

• Full story: RFK Jr cancels $500m in funding for mRNA vaccines
• BBC Verify: Fact-checking RFK Jr’s views on health policy

The claim that mRNA vaccines do not protect against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu “just isn’t true”, says Prof Andrew Pollard from the Oxford Vaccine Group, who is soon stepping down as the head of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises the UK government.

The vaccines were shown to provide protection – keeping people alive and out of hospital – in both clinical trials and then during intense monitoring of how the vaccines performed when they were rolled out around the world.

In the first year of vaccination during the Covid pandemic, it was estimated that the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine alone saved nearly 6 million lives.

Against that there were a small number of cases of inflammation of heart tissue – called myocarditis – particularly in young men.

“Very rare side effects should be balanced against the huge benefit of the technology,” says Prof Pollard.

The pandemic was an era when the world was single-mindedly focused on Covid and the rollout of vaccines was monitored intensely. The consensus opinion remains they did overwhelmingly more good than harm.

But that does not mean they are a perfect technology.

The mRNA Covid vaccines train the immune system to target just one protein out of the whole virus. If that protein in the coronavirus changes or mutates then the body’s protection is lessened.

We have seen the consequences of that – immunity wanes and the vaccines need to be updated.

One theoretical argument is that a different vaccine approach – such as using the whole virus – would give better protection, as the immune system would have more to target.

However, Prof Pollard says the mRNA vaccines performed better than the inactivated ones when tackling Covid.

He says that is probably down to the way they are made – and the fact that the process of killing the virus also “changes the viral proteins so there is less stimulation of the immune system” in comparison with mRNA vaccines.

The need to update vaccines is not a failing of mRNA technology that can be easily solved by pivoting from one technology to another – instead, it is down to the fundamental nature of some viruses.

The same measles or HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccines have been effective for decades and show no sign of failing as the virus’s genetic codes are more stable in each case.

But some viruses live in a perpetual state of flux.

Flu, for example, is not one virus – but instead a constantly-shifting target. At any time, one strain will be in the ascendancy and be the most likely to cause trouble in winter.

In flu, the inactivated flu injection that is given to adults is updated every year – as is the live vaccine that is given to children as a nasal spray. A future mRNA form of flu vaccine would work the same way.

“The point about keeping up with variants is about all technologies, not just mRNA,” says Prof Pollard.

There is a legitimate scientific question about which vaccine technology is used for which disease.

What is causing concern among scientists is that pulling mRNA research means we will not have those vaccines at times when we need to do what no other technology can.

Prof Pollard says: “I don’t think there’s the evidence they are hugely better for protection, but where RNA tech is streets ahead of everything else is responding to outbreaks.”

The world is highly drilled at making new flu vaccines each year. But even then, there is a six-month process of deciding on the new flu strains to be targeted, growing the vaccine at scale in chicken eggs and then distributing it. Brand new vaccines take even longer.

But with mRNA, you can have the new vaccine in six to eight weeks, and then tens or hundreds of millions of doses a few months later.

Some of the projects that have had their funding pulled in the US were preparing for a bird flu pandemic. That virus, H5N1, has been devastating bird populations and jumping into a wide range of other animals including American cattle.

“That doesn’t make sense and if we do get a human pandemic of bird flu it could be seen as a catastrophic error,” says Prof Finn.

But the ramifications of the US turning away from mRNA research could be felt more widely.

What impact does this move have on confidence in the current vaccines, mRNA or otherwise? How does it affect the world when the US is one of the most influential countries in medical research? And will it have a knock-on impact on other types of mRNA technology, such as cancer vaccines – or using the approach to treat rare genetic diseases?

Prof Pollard poses another question after RFK Jr’s move: “Does it put us all at risk if a huge market is turning its back on RNA?

“It is one of the most important technologies we’ll see this century in infectious disease, biotherapeutic agents for rare disease and critically for cancer. It’s a message I’m troubled about.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of the first world leaders to visit Washington weeks after US President Donald Trump started his second term.

He called Modi his “great friend” as the two countries set an ambitious target of doubling their trade to $500bn by 2030.

But less than six months later, the relationship appears to have hit rock bottom.

Trump has now imposed a total of 50% tariffs on goods imported from India, and his earlier threat of levying an extra 10% for the country’s membership in the Brics grouping, which includes China, Russia and South Africa as founding members, still stands.

He initially imposed a 25% tariff, but announced an additional 25% on Wednesday as a penalty for Delhi’s purchase of Russian oil – a move the Indian government called “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable”.

And just last week, Trump called India’s economy “dead”.

This is a stunning reversal in a relationship that has gone from strength to strength over the past two decades, thanks to efforts by successive governments in both countries, bipartisan support and convergence on global issues.

In the past few weeks, there were positive signals from Washington and Delhi about an imminent trade deal. Now that looks increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

So what went wrong?

A series of missteps, grandstanding, geopolitics and domestic political pressure seem to have broken down the negotiations.

Delhi has been restrained in its response so far to Trump’s tirades, hoping that diplomacy might eventually help secure a trade deal. But in Trump’s White House, there are no guarantees.

Trump has commented on many issues that Delhi considers red lines. The biggest among them is Trump repeatedly putting India and its rival Pakistan on an equal footing.

The US president hosted Pakistani army chief Asim Munir at the White House just weeks after a bitter conflict between the two South Asian rivals.

He then signed a trade deal with Pakistan, offering the country a preferential tariff rate of 19%, along with a deal to explore the country’s oil reserves. He went as far as saying that some day, Pakistan might sell oil to India.

Another constant irritant for Delhi is Trump’s repeated assertion that the US brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan.

India sees its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir as its internal affair and has always rejected third-party mediation on the issue. Most world leaders have been sensitive to Delhi’s position, including Trump in his first stint as president.

But that’s no longer the case. The US president has doubled down on his claim even after Modi told India’s parliament that “no country had mediated in the ceasefire”.

Modi didn’t name Trump or the US but domestic political pressure is mounting on him not to “bow down” to the White House.

“The fact that this is happening against the backdrop of heavy and high-level US engagement with Islamabad immediately after an India-Pakistan conflict is even more galling for Delhi and the wider Indian public. This all sharpens concerns harboured by some in India that the US can’t truly be trusted as a partner,” says Washington-based South Asia analyst Michael Kugelman.

He adds that some of the anger in Delhi might “be Cold War-era baggage coming to the fore”, but “this time around it’s intensified by real-time developments as well”.

Modi’s government thrives on nationalist issues, so its supporters would likely expect a firm response to the US.

It’s a Catch-22 situation – Delhi still wants to clinch a deal but also doesn’t want to come across as buckling under Trump’s pressure.

And it appears that Delhi is gradually releasing the restraint. In its response to Washington’s anger over India’s purchase of Russian oil, Delhi vowed to take “all necessary measures” to safeguard its “national interests and economic security”.

But the question is why Trump, who loved India’s hospitality and called it a great country earlier, has gone on a tirade against a trusted ally.

Some analysts see his insults as a pressure tactic to secure a deal that he thinks works for the US.

“Trump is a real estate magnate and a tough negotiator. His style may not be diplomatic, but he seeks the outcomes diplomats would. So, I think what he’s doing is part of a negotiating strategy,” says Jitendra Nath Misra, a former Indian ambassador and now a professor at OP Jindal Global University.

A source in the Indian government said that Delhi gave many concessions to Washington, including no tariffs on industrial goods, and a phased reduction of tariffs on cars and alcohol. It also signed a deal to let Elon Musk’s Starlink start operations in India.

But Washington wanted access to India’s agriculture and dairy sectors to reduce the $45bn trade deficit it runs with Delhi.

But these sectors are a red line for Modi or, for that matter, any Indian prime minister. Agriculture and related sectors account for more than 45% of employment in India and successive governments have fiercely protected farmers.

Mr Kugelman believes giving in to Washington’s demands isn’t an option for India.

“India first needs to assuage public anger and make clear it won’t give in to the pressure. This is critical for domestic political reasons,” he says.

He also believes that Trump’s insistence that India stop importing oil from Moscow has more to do with his growing frustration over Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We’re seeing Trump continuing to ratchet up his pressure tactics, trying to cut Russia off from its most important oil buyers by penalising them for doing business with Moscow,” he says.

But Delhi can’t afford to stop importing oil from Russia overnight.

India is already the world’s third biggest consumer of crude and may surpass China in the top position by 2030 as its energy demand is likely to increase with a fast-growing middle class, according to International Energy Agency (IEA).

Russia now accounts for more than 30% of India’s total oil imports, a significant jump from less than 1% in 2021-22.

Many in the West see this as India indirectly funding Moscow’s war but Delhi denies this, arguing that buying Russian oil at a discount ensures energy security for millions of its citizens.

India also sees Russia as its “all-weather” ally. Moscow has traditionally come to Delhi’s rescue during past crises and still enjoys support among the wider Indian public.

Moscow is also Delhi’s biggest arms supplier, though its share in India’s defence import portfolio dropped to 36% between 2020-25 from 55% between 2016 and 2020, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

This was largely due to Delhi boosting domestic manufacturing and buying more from the US, France and Israel.

But Russia’s role in India’s defence strategy can’t be overstated. This is something the West understood and didn’t challenge – until Trump decided to break from established norms.

So far, India was able to successfully walk the diplomatic tightrope with the West overlooking its strong ties to Russia.

The US has long viewed India as a bulwark against China’s dominance in the Indo-Pacific region, which ensured bipartisan support for Delhi in Washington.

And Moscow (though sometimes reluctantly) didn’t react harshly to its ally forging close ties with Washington and other western countries.

But now Trump has challenged this position. How Delhi reacts will decide the future of the India-US relationship.

India has been measured in its response so far but is not holding back completely. In its statement, it said that the US had encouraged it to keep buying oil from Russia for global energy market stability.

It also said that targeting it was unjustified as the EU continues to buy energy, fertiliser, mining and chemical products from Russia.

While things seem bad, some analysts say that all is not lost. India and the US have close links in many sectors, which can’t be uprooted overnight.

The two countries cooperate closely in the space technology, IT, education and defence sectors.

Many large domestic IT firms have invested heavily in the US, and most big Silicon Valley firms have operations in India.

“I think the fundamentals of the relationship are not weak. It’s a paradox that the day Trump announced 25% tariffs and unspecified penalties, India and the US collaborated in a strategic area when an Indian rocket sent a jointly-developed satellite into space,” says Mr Misra.

It will be interesting to see how India reacts to Trump’s sharp rhetoric.

“Trump is unapologetically transactional and commercial in his approach to foreign policy. He has no compunction about deploying these potentially alienating harsh tactics against a close US partner like India,” says Mr Kugelman.

But he adds that there’s a lot of trust baked into the partnership, given the work that has gone into it over the past two decades.

“So what’s lost can potentially be regained. But because of the extent of the current malaise, it could take a long time.”

An elderly woman has died and another person is missing after a massive wildfire swept through parts of southern France, destroying homes and forcing thousands to flee.

The woman died in her home, seven firefighters have also been treated for smoke inhalation and one person is still missing, authorities said. Two people are in hospital, one of whom is in a critical condition.

The blaze broke out on Tuesday near the village of La Ribaute in the Aude region, and has already burned more than 13,000 hectares (50 sq miles) – an area larger than Paris – making it the largest wildfire in France this year.

More than 1,800 firefighters, supported by 500 vehicles, were deployed to the area.

The main affected villages are Lagrasse, Fabrezan, Tournissan, Coustouge and Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse.

Officials say the fire is advancing rapidly, driven by strong winds, dry vegetation and hot summer weather.

Jacques Piraud, mayor of the village of Jonquières, where at least four houses burned, told Le Monde that around 80% of the village was burnt.

“It’s dramatic. Its black, the trees are completely charred,” he said.

Images show blackened, burnt out cars and people sitting on beaches three hours away where thick black clouds were still visible.

“This is a disaster of unprecedented scale,” firefighter spokesman Eric Brocardi told RTL radio.

At least 25 homes have been destroyed and more than 2,500 households are without electricity. Authorities have closed roads across the region and warned it is still too dangerous for residents who fled on Tuesday night to return home.

President Emmanuel Macron expressed his support for firefighters and local officials on X, saying all government resources were being mobilised. He urged residents to follow evacuation orders and exercise “the utmost caution”.

Prime Minister François Bayrou is expected to visit the affected area later on Wednesday.

Lucie Roesch, secretary general of the Aude area, said firefighters were monitoring the fire’s perimeter to prevent new outbreaks. She said: “The fire is advancing in an area where all the conditions are ripe for it to progress.”

The region has become increasingly vulnerable in recent years due to lower rainfall and the removal of vineyards, which once helped slow the spread of wildfires.

Despite planes dropping water bombs on the flames, Roesch warned the fire “will keep us busy for several days. It’s a long-term operation”.

A combination of low rainfall, high temperatures and the removal of vineyards – which once helped act as natural firebreaks – has made for worsening fire conditions in Aude.

Scientists have long warned that the Mediterranean’s soaring hot and dry summers place the region at high risk of severe wildfires. According to France’s emergency management service, nearly 15,000 hectares (57.9 square miles) have burned nationwide this summer in more than 9,000 separate fires. The Aude blaze now accounts for the vast majority of the damage.

Have you been affected by the wildfires in France? If it safe to do so get in touch here.

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