US President Donald Trump has said he will try to get some territory back for Ukraine during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.

“Russia’s occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They occupied prime territory. We’re going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” he told a news conference at the White House.

He and the Russian president are due to hold talks in Alaska at the end of the week. Trump claimed that he could know within two minutes of meeting Putin whether progress was possible.

He said Friday would be a “feel-out meeting” aimed at urging Putin to end the war – suggesting he may view the summit as just an initial encounter.

• Why are Trump and Putin meeting in Alaska and when will it happen?

Trump again warned that there would be “some swapping, changes in land” between Russia and Ukraine.

It is not the first time he has used the phrase “land-swapping”, though it is unclear what land Russia could cede to Ukraine. Kyiv has never laid claim to any Russian territories.

Trump said he will update European leaders if Putin proposes a “fair deal” during the talks, adding that he would speak to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky first “out of respect”.

“I’ll call him first… I’ll call him after, and I may say, ‘lots of luck, keep fighting,’ or I may say, ‘we can make a deal'”, he said.

Trump also said that while he and Zelensky “get along”, he “very severely disagrees with what [the Ukrainian president] has done”. Trump has previously blamed Zelensky for the war in Ukraine, which was sparked by Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.

He stated that a future meeting could include Zelensky and could be a three-way session including himself and Putin.

Kaja Kallas, vice-president of the European Commission, told the BBC Putin wants to “go for the old fashioned way of…let’s divide the territories and spheres of influence” in his talks with Trump.

But she stressed that Europe has been clear it will not accept a deal Ukraine has not agreed to.

“If Ukraine is not part of the deal, any deal will just not be implemented and that is the reason why Ukraine needs to be around that table,” she said, adding that she hopes Zelensky will be invited to the meeting.

The Kremlin has always played down expectations of a meeting with Zelensky, with Putin reiterating recently the conditions to meet the Ukrainian president were still far off.

Trump announced the meeting with Putin last Friday – the day of his self-imposed deadline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire or face more US sanctions.

In response to news of the Alaska summit, Zelensky said any agreements without input from Kyiv would amount to “dead decisions”.

On Monday, he cited a report from Ukraine’s intelligence service saying there was no sign Russia was preparing to put an end to the fighting in Ukraine.

Zelensky is expected to attend a virtual meeting with Trump, US Vice-President JD Vance, and EU leaders on Wednesday.

A spokesman for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he invited the leaders, as well as EU and Nato chiefs, to discuss how to pressure Moscow ahead of Trump’s meeting with Putin.

During a phone call on Monday, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Canadian counterpart Mark Carney agreed that a peace agreement “must be built with Ukraine – not imposed upon it”, a Downing Street spokesperson said.

The two leaders will “continue to work closely” with both Trump and Zelensky “over the coming days”, they added.

The UN’s human rights office has condemned a targeted Israeli attack that killed six journalists in Gaza, calling it a grave breach of international law.

Five Al Jazeera journalists, including correspondent Anas al-Sharif, were killed in an Israeli air strike on Sunday. Two others were killed, including a freelance journalist, the broadcaster said.

Israel’s military said it targeted Sharif, alleging he had “served as the head of a terrorist cell in Hamas” – something Sharif denied. Israel provided little evidence.

The BBC understands Sharif did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict.

In social media posts before his death, the journalist is heard criticising Hamas.

• Follow live – Israel kills prominent Al Jazeera journalist and four colleagues in targeted attack in Gaza

Media rights groups and countries including Qatar condemned the attack.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s spokesman said the UK government was “gravely concerned” and called for an independent investigation.

Speaking to reporters, Starmer’s official spokesman said Israel should ensure journalists can work safely and report without fear.

The funerals of Sharif, fellow Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa took place on Monday following the targeted missile strike on their tent in Gaza City.

Mohammad al-Khaldi was named by medics at al-Shifa hospital as the sixth journalist who was killed during the strike, Reuters news agency reported. Another person was also killed in the attack, it said.

Streets in Gaza were thronged with crowds gathered for the funerals. Anas al-Sharif was a household name who had millions of followers online.

Reporters Without Borders, a media freedom group, strongly condemned what it called the assassination of Sharif.

The Foreign Press Association said it was outraged by the targeted killing. It said the Israeli military had repeatedly labelled Palestinian journalists “as militants, often without verifiable evidence”.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said it was appalled by the attack and that Israel had failed to provide evidence to back up its allegations against Sharif.

“Israel has a longstanding, documented pattern of accusing journalists of being terrorists without providing any credible proof,” the organisation added.

The Israeli military has suggested it has documents found in Gaza that confirmed Sharif belonged to Hamas.

It said these include “personnel rosters, lists of terrorist training courses, phone directories and salary documents”.

The only materials that have been released for publication are screenshots of spreadsheets apparently listing Hamas operatives from the northern Gaza Strip, noting injuries to Hamas operatives, and a section of what is said to be a phone directory for the armed group’s East Jabalia battalion.

The BBC cannot independently verify these documents, and has seen no evidence of Sharif having involvement in the current war or remaining an active member of Hamas.

No Israeli explanation has so far been given for the killing of the entire Al Jazeera news crew.

CPJ says at least 186 journalists have been killed since the start of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza in October 2023 – the deadliest period for journalists since it began recording such data in 1992.

“Israel must respect & protect all civilians, including journalists,” the UN Human Rights office said in a post on X. “We call for immediate, safe and unhindered access to Gaza for all journalists.”

Last month, the BBC and three other news agencies – Reuters, AP and AFP – issued a joint statement expressing “desperate concern” for journalists in the Gaza Strip, who they say are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.

The Israeli government does not allow international news organisations, including the BBC, into Gaza to report freely, so many outlets rely on Gaza-based reporters for coverage.

Meanwhile in Gaza, five more people have died from malnutrition in the past 24 hours, including one child, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

This brings the total number of malnutrition deaths to 222, including 101 children, the health ministry said.

The UN’s humanitarian agency said on Friday that the amount of aid entering Gaza continues to be “far below the minimum required to meet people’s immense needs”. Last month, UN-backed global food security experts warned the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out”.

Israel has continued to deny there is starvation in Gaza and has accused UN agencies of not picking up aid at the borders and delivering it.

The UN’s humanitarian agency has said it continues to see impediments and delays as it tries to collect aid from Israeli-controlled border zones.

Israel launched its offensive in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

Since then, 61,430 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israel’s military campaign, according to the health ministry.

India’s top court has ordered authorities in Delhi and its suburbs to move all stray dogs from streets to animal shelters.

The court expressed concerns over rising “menace of dog bites leading to rabies” and gave an eight-week deadline to officials to finish the task.

Delhi’s stray dog population is estimated at one million, with suburban Noida, Ghaziabad, and Gurugram also seeing a rise, municipal sources say.

India has millions of stray dogs and the country accounts for 36% of the total rabies-related deaths in the world, according to the World Health Organization.

• Do India’s stray dogs kill more people than terror attacks?

“Infants and young children, not at any cost, should fall prey to rabies. The action should inspire confidence that they can move freely without fear of being bitten by stray dogs,” legal news website Live Law quoted the court as saying on Monday.

The court took up the issue following reports of increasing dog bites in Delhi and other major cities.

The court directed that multiple shelters be established across Delhi and its suburbs, each capable of housing at least 5,000 dogs. These shelters should be equipped with sterilisation and vaccination facilities, as well as CCTV cameras.

The court ruled sterilised dogs must not be released in public areas, despite current rules requiring their return to the capture site.

It also ordered that a helpline should be set up within a week to report dog bites and rabies cases.

Animal welfare groups, however, have voiced strong concerns over the court’s directive. They said that the timeline set up by the court was unrealistic.

“Most Indian cities currently do not have even 1% of the capacity [needed] to rehabilitate stray dogs in shelters,” said Nilesh Bhanage, founder of PAWS, a prominent animal rights group.

“If the court and the authorities actually want to end the menace, they should focus on strengthening the implementation of the existing regulations to control dog population and rabies – they include vaccination, sterilisation and efficient garbage management.”

Government data shows that there were 3.7 million reported cases of dog bites across the country in 2024.

Activists say the true extent of rabies-related deaths is not fully known.

The World Health Organization says that “the true burden of rabies in India is not fully known; although as per available information, it causes 18,000-20,000 deaths every year”.

On the other hand, according to data submitted in the parliament by the Indian government, 54 rabies deaths were recorded in 2024, up from 50 in 2023.

President Donald Trump said he was deploying the National Guard to Washington DC and taking control of the city’s police force as he pledged to crack down on crime and homelessness in the city.

Trump declared a “public safety emergency” on Monday, deploying 800 National Guard troops to bolster hundreds of federal law enforcement officers who were deployed over the weekend.

“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” he told reporters at the White House.

The city’s Mayor Muriel Bowser has rejected the president’s claims about crime, and while there was a spike in 2023, statistics show it has fallen since then. Violent crime in the city is also at a 30-year low.

“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” Trump said during a news conference in which he was flanked by US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who will lead the city’s police force while it is under federal control.

“This is liberation day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back,” he said.

Trump said Washington DC had been “taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” as well as “drugged out maniacs and homeless people”.

According to data from the city’s Metropolitan Police Department, homicides dropped by 32% between 2023 and 2024 and reached their lowest level since 2019.

There has been another substantial drop this year of 12%, the data shows.

Mayor Bowser, a Democrat, acknowledged there had been a “terrible” spike in crime in 2023, which mirrored a national trend, but she pushed back against any claims of a crimewave in the city.

“We are not experiencing a crime spike,” she told MSNBC on Sunday. “The president is very aware of our efforts.”

When asked about White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s comment that Washington is more violent than Baghdad, Bowser said “any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false”.

Of the 800 National Guard troops who will be activated, between 100-200 will be deployed and supporting law enforcement at any given time, the army said in a statement.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said the National Guardsmen would arrive by the end of the week.

As well as that deployment, Trump said he would place the city’s police department under direct federal control using the District of Columbia Home Rule Act.

That act was instituted by former President Richard Nixon to allow residents of Washington DC – which is the only US city that is not in any of the 50 states – to elect a city council and a mayor.

But it also has a caveat that allows the president to take control of the city’s police force if “special conditions of an emergency nature exist”.

If the president intends to take control for longer than 48 hours, they need to provide a written notice to Congress. And even if that notice is provided, they cannot keep control of the police for longer than 30 days.

On Sunday, when asked about the possibility of the president taking control of the city’s police department, Mayor Bowser said: “There are very specific things in our law that would allow [that]. None of those conditions exist in our city right now.”

She said she was “concerned” about the National Guard enforcing local laws.

Bowser gave a news conference later on Monday in which she said the president’s order was “unsettling and unprecedented”.

She said Trump’s view of the city had been “shaped by his Covid-view experience during his first term”, which she acknowledged was “challenging times” for the district.

“It’s true we experienced a crime spike post-Covid,” she said.

“We worked quickly to put laws in place that got violent offenders off our streets,” she added. “We have seen a huge decrease in crime because of those efforts.”

As well as crime, Trump also spoke at length about homelessness in Washington DC.

“We’re getting rid of the slums,” he said, without giving further details. He said homeless people would be sent elsewhere but did not say where.

Trump added that “everything should be perfect” when dignitaries and foreign leaders visit the city.

“It’s a very strong reflection of our country,” he said. “If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty and they don’t respect us.”

Local groups working with homeless people in the capital told the BBC they had actually seen progress in recent years.

Homelessness is down almost 20% for individuals in Washington DC in 2025 compared to five years ago, said Ralph Boyd, the president and chief executive of So Others Might Eat (SOME) – a group that provides people in the city with housing, clothing and other social services.

He also said Trump’s proposal to move people out of the city was not a long-term solution.

“All it will do is transfer the problem somewhere else into communities that are perhaps less equipped to deal with it than we are,” Boyd said.

Meanwhile, outside the White House, protesters concerned about Trump’s actions gathered and chanted “hands off DC” and “protect home rule”.

“Trump does not care about DC’s safety, he cares about control,” a speaker at the event said.

The president’s actions follow a series of social media posts in recent days in which he has criticised the running of Washington DC. Trump has long complained about the city’s Democratic leadership for their handling of crime and homelessness.

He has also expressed concern for a former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) who was attacked in the city last week.

During Monday’s press conference, Trump said the employee was “savagely beaten by a band of roaming thugs” and was “left dripping in blood”.

He also mentioned other federal government employees and elected officials who have been attacked, including a Democratic lawmaker and an intern.

“This is a threat to America,” Trump said.

The first time Trump deployed the National Guard was in June, when he ordered 2,000 National Guardsmen to Los Angeles to deal with unrest over raids on undocumented migrants.

The last time the National Guard was deployed to Washington DC was in response to the Capitol riot in 2021.

What does it mean to live in exile?

“When we were in school, our teachers used to say that there is an ‘R’ on our forehead – meaning refugees,” says Tibetan writer-activist Tenzin Tsundue.

Mr Tsundue is one of around 70,000 Tibetans living in India, spread across 35 designated settlements.

In 1959, thousands of Tibetans fled after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

Following their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, they crossed treacherous Himalayan passes and reached India, where they were accepted as refugees on humanitarian grounds and because of shared religious and cultural ties.

But living, or even being born, in India doesn’t make them Indians, says Mr Tsundue.

Tibetans in India live on renewable registration certificates issued every five years. Those born here can apply for passports if a parent was born in India between 1950 and 1987 – but must surrender the certificate to do so. Many hesitate, as it’s closely tied to their Tibetan identity.

In July, as the Dalai Lama turned 90, thousands of Tibetan Buddhists gathered in Dharamshala – a quiet town nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. The town serves as the headquarters of Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) – the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Even as they prayed for their leader’s long life, many like Mr Tsundue found themselves reflecting on the uncertainty of living in exile.

The emotional weight of displacement, the legal limbo of statelessness and geopolitics around the Dalai Lama hung heavy on the birthday celebrations.

• Thousands turn out to mark Dalai Lama’s 90 birthday

Tibetans continued migrating to India for decades after 1959, fleeing China’s tightening grip on their homeland.

Dawa Sangbo, 85, reached Dharamshala in 1970 after a gruelling seven-day trek through Nepal. “We ran at night and hid by day,” he recalls.

With no place to stay in India, he survived by living in a tent for 12 years and selling spices in villages near Dharamshala. He now lives with his son and wife in a neighbourhood largely inhabited by Tibetans.

For many like Mr Sangbo, fleeing to India may have provided security – but they still yearn for their homeland.

“A home is a home, after all,” says Pasang Gyalpo, who fled Tibet to Nepal before settling in India in 1990.

Five years later, Mr Gyalpo bribed Nepalese guards and slipped into Tibet to bring his family to India. But Chinese police chased him soon after arrival, forcing him to flee. His family remains in Tibet.

“They are in their homeland, I am in a foreign land. What else can I feel but pain?” he asks.

For younger Tibetans like Mr Tsunde, who are born in India, the pain is more existential.

“The trauma for us is not that we lost our land,” he says. “It’s that we were not born in Tibet and don’t have the right to live in Tibet. It is also this great sense of deprivation that something so very essential of our land, culture, and language has been taken away from us.”

Lobsang Yangtso, a researcher on Tibet and Himalayan regions, explains that being stateless means lacking a sense of belonging.

“It’s painful,” she says. “I have lived all my life here [in India] but I still feel homeless.”

Tibetans in exile are grateful to India for refuge but lament their lack of rights – they cannot vote, own property or easily travel abroad without an Indian passport.

“We have the IC [an official travel document] which is given by the Indian government as an identity certificate,” says Phurbu Dolma. But airport immigration staff often don’t recognise it.

Dorjee Phuntsok, a Tibetan born in India, pointed out that many corporate jobs in India often require Indian passports. “Without one, we miss out on many opportunities.”

• Who is the Dalai Lama and why does he live in exile?

In recent years, thousands of Tibetans in India have emigrated to Western countries using the IC, which some nations accept for visa applications.

Many have left on student or work visas, resettled in countries like the US and Canada, or gone abroad on sponsorships from religious and humanitarian groups.

Penpa Tsering, the president of the CTA, believes that the reason is mainly economic. “Dollars and euros go further than what’s available here,” he says.

But for some like Thupten Wangchuk, 36, who crossed over to India as an eight-year-old, the motivation is more personal.

“For [almost] 30 long years, I haven’t met my parents and relatives. I’ve no one here,” he says. “The sole reason I want to go to a Western country is that I can become a citizen there. Then I can apply for a visa and go into Tibet to visit my parents.”

Some Tibetans acknowledge the need to be pragmatic given the geopolitical pulls and pressures.

“If you ask any Tibetan, they’ll say they want to go back,” says Kunchok Migmar, a CTA official. “But right now, there is no freedom in Tibet. No one wants to go back just to be beaten by the Chinese.”

The latest flashpoint emerged days before the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday. He said his successor would be chosen by a trust under his office – a move China rejected, insisting it would decide under its law. Beijing called the succession issue a “thorn” in its ties with India.

India’s official stance is that it “does not take any position concerning beliefs and practices of faith and religion”. Notably, two senior ministers of the Indian government shared the stage with Dalai Lama on his birthday.

The Dalai Lama’s announcement that he would have a successor brought relief among Tibetans. But there is uncertainty over what his death could mean for the Tibetan movement.

“If we prepare ourselves well from now, when His Holiness is alive and [if] the future leaders who will follow us can continue the same momentum, then I think it should not affect us as much as people think it could,” says Mr Tsering.

His optimism is not shared by all Tibetans.

“It’s thanks to the current Dalai Lama that we have these opportunities and resources,” says Mr Phuntsok. He adds many Tibetans fear that after his passing, the community may lose the long-standing support that has sustained them.

President Donald Trump has said he will deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington DC and is taking control of its police department to fight crime.

At a press conference, he declared “Liberation Day” for the city and pledged to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse”.

However, Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has said the city has “seen a huge decrease in crime” and that it was “at a 30-year violent crime low”.

BBC Verify looks at what the figures show about violent crime in the capital and how it compares to other cities in the US.

Trump’s executive order declaring “a crime emergency in the District of Columbia” mentions “rising violence in the capital”. In his press conference he made repeated references to crime being “out of control”.

But according to crime figures published by Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police (MPDC), violent offences fell after peaking in 2023 and in 2024 hit their lowest level in 30 years.

They are continuing to fall, according to preliminary data for 2025.

Violent crime overall is down 26% this year compared to the same point in 2024, and robbery is down 28%, according to the MPDC.

Trump and the DC Police Union have questioned the veracity of the city police department’s crime figures.

Violent crime is reported differently by the MPDC and the FBI – another major source of US crime statistics.

MPDC public data showed a 35% fall for 2024, while the FBI data showed a 9% drop.

So the figures agree that crime is falling in DC, but differ on the level of that decline.

The downward trend is “unmistakable and large”, according to Adam Gelb, the CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a legal think tank.

“The numbers shift depending on what time period and what types of crime you examine,” said Mr Gelb.

“But overall there’s an unmistakable and large drop in violence since the summer of 2023, when there were peaks in homicide, gun assaults, robbery, and carjacking.”

Trump also claimed that “murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever” in Washington DC – adding that numbers “just go back 25 years”.

When we asked the White House the source for the figures, they said it was “numbers provided by the FBI”.

The homicide rate did spike in 2023 to around 40 per 100,000 residents – the highest rate in 20 years, according to FBI data.

However, that was not the highest ever recorded – it was significantly higher in the 1990s and in the early 2000s.

The homicide rate dropped in 2024 and this year it is down 12% on the same point last year, according to the MPDC.

Studies have suggested that the capital’s homicide rate is higher than average, when compared to other major US cities.

As of 11 August, there have been 99 homicides so far this year in Washington DC – including a 21-year-old congressional intern shot dead in crossfire, a case Trump referred to in his press conference.

The president also mentioned the case of a 19-year-old former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) who was injured in an alleged attempted carjacking in the capital at the start of August.

Trump claimed “the number of carjackings has more than tripled” over the last five years.

So far this year, the MPDC has recorded 189 carjacking offences, down from 300 in the same period last year.

According to the CCJ, carjacking rose markedly from 2020 onward and spiked to a monthly peak of 140 reported incidents in June 2023.

Since July 2025, a citywide curfew has been in force for people under the age of 17 from 23:00 to 06:00.

It was introduced to combat juvenile crime – including carjacking – which often spikes in the summer months.

“The level of violence in the District remains mostly higher than the average of three dozen cities in our sample,” Mr Gelb from the CCJ told us.

“Although its downward trend is consistent with what we’re seeing in other large cities across the country,” he added.

The CCJ looks at crime rates across 30 large US cities.

Its analysis suggests that the homicide rate in DC fell 19% in the first half of this year (January-June 2025), compared with the same period last year.

This is a slightly larger fall than the 17% average decline across the cities in the CCJ’s study sample.

However, if you take the first six months of 2025 and compare it to the same period in 2019 – before the Covid-19 pandemic – it shows only a 3% fall in homicides.

Across the 30 cities in the study, that decrease was 14% over the same timeframe.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

An explosion has killed one person and and injured 10 others at the US Steel Clairton plant outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Monday, officials say.

A major search and rescue operation is continuing for another person who is unaccounted for and believed to be under rubble.

Officials said they still do not know the cause of the explosion, and have requested locals keep their windows closed with smoke in the area.

The plant is the largest coking operation in North America, and is located about 15 miles (24km) south of Pittsburgh.

Governor Josh Shapiro posted on social media that the state’s emergency management services and police had been deployed to the plant.

US Senator John Fetterman wrote on X that he was also at the scene and witnessed “an active search and rescue underway.”

The plant is a major producer of coke, a coal-based fuel used in the production of steel. About 1,300 employees work at the facility, according to US Steel.

David B Burritt, President and CEO of US Steel, said in a statement that the company was “working closely with relevant authorities to investigate the cause of the incident”.

He later told reporters at the press conference that the plant was “stable” but “it is still an active investigation.”

“It’s just a sad day for Clairton,” Mayor Richard Lattanzi told the BBC’s US news partner, CBS.

Clairton Coke Works has been dogged by pollution concerns throughout its history and has had to pay millions of dollars in fines, penalties, and settlements in recent years.

The plant’s owner, US Steel, was fined nearly $2m (£1.5m) last year by the Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD) for processing and equipment issues with its coking ovens.

The ACHD also fined US Steel $2.2m in 2023 for exceeding Pennsylvania’s standards on hydrogen sulphide emissions from the Clairton plant, and ordered them to provide officials with a plan to comply with state standards.

In 2022, Pennsylvania health officials fined US Steel $4.7m after it found the plant was not using a pollution control device for its coke pushing.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have announced they are extending their deal for films and TV shows with Netflix.

This has been described as a “multi-year, first look deal”, which would give Netflix a first option on proposals from Prince Harry and Meghan’s Archewell production company.

It’s a looser arrangement than their previous deal – but it disproves claims that the Sussexes and Netflix are going to completely part company.

Meghan said that she and Harry were inspired by the partnership with Netflix to “create thoughtful content across genres that resonates globally, and celebrates our shared vision”.

It’s not known how many years the deal is set to last or what financial arrangement is attached. The previous deal, launched in 2020, was believed to be worth about $100m (£75m).

The announcement comes ahead of the second series of the cookery show, With Love, Meghan, being screened later this month.

Audience figures from Netflix showed the first series was not even in the streaming service’s top 300 most popular shows in the first half of 2025.

With Love, Meghan, a lifestyle series which showed Meghan cooking with celebrity friends, had 5.3 million views. In comparison, the most-watched programme on Netflix during that time was the drama Adolescence with 145 million views.

A previous Netflix documentary, Harry & Meghan, recounting the couple’s departure from their lives as “working royals”, had a bigger audience, with 23.4 million views following its launch in December 2022.

Archewell has also announced a special Christmas season edition of With Love, Meghan, which invites viewers to “join Meghan in Montecito for a magical holiday celebration”.

With Love, Meghan has been accompanied by a food and drink range, called As Ever, which includes rosé wine and jams.

And there will be a show on Netflix later this year, with Harry and Meghan as producers, called Masaka Kids, A Rhythm Within, about an orphanage in Uganda being a beacon of hope in a situation “where the shadows of the HIV/Aids crisis linger”.

Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, said: “Harry and Meghan are influential voices whose stories resonate with audiences everywhere.

“The response to their work speaks for itself – Harry & Meghan gave viewers an intimate look into their lives and quickly became one of our most-watched documentary series.”

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A US judge has ruled grand jury materials in Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking case will remain sealed, saying that making them public “would not reveal new information of any consequence”.

The justice department had asked Judge Paul Engelmayer to unseal the documents, in an effort to assauge anger among President Donald Trump’s supporters over the decision not to release all federal files on Maxwell’s associate, deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for crimes tied to Epstein, opposed unsealing the materials.

The judge wrote it was important to protect the secrecy of grand juries, who decide whether to indict people accused of crimes.

There are special circumstances where that secrecy is broken, Judge Engelmayer wrote in his 31-page decision.

But he wrote that “applying the exception casually or promiscuously, as the government’s motion to unseal the summary-witness grand jury testimony here invites” would hurt the grand jury system. It could, he wrote, set a precedent where people do not believe the proceedings will be kept secret, which may discourage witnesses from testifying and jurors from focusing solely on the merits of the case.

He dismissed the government’s argument that much of the information given to the grand jury was made public during her trial, although he agreed that “a member of the public familiar with the Maxwell trial record who reviewed the grand jury materials…would thus learn next to nothing new”.

The materials “do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor” and “do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s,” he wrote.

Maxwell, 63, was convicted in December 2019 and was recently moved from a Florida prison to a new minimum-security facility in Texas.

Last week, one of her accusers said outside the court in New York that she should stay in prison for the rest of her life.

The BBC has reached out to Maxwell’s lawyers for comment.

Last month, she was interviewed by justice department officials under the Trump administration’s directive to gather and release credible evidence relating to the Epstein case.

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to release what are known as “The Epstein Files”. But this summer the justice department and FBI said they had concluded that Epstein did not keep a “client list” and that the justice department would not be making additional files public.

In response to the backlash, Trump said Bondi should release “whatever she thinks is credible”. Meanwhile, a congressional committee has sent a subpoena to the justice department related to federal investigations into the allegations against Epstein and Maxwell, which go back 20 years.

The president, who was friends with Epstein, has denied prior knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has said that he and the financier, who died in federal custody while awaiting trial, fell out in the early 2000s.

Colombian senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe has died two months after being shot in the head in a targeted attack which shocked the South American nation.

The 39-year-old was hit by three bullets – two of them in the head and one in the leg – at a campaign rally on 7 June in the capital, Bogotá.

His wife confirmed his death on social media, paying tribute to “the love of my life”.

A teenager has been arrested on suspicion of carrying out the shooting, but the motive behind the attack is still unclear.

Uribe’s wife, María Claudia Tarazona, thanked her late husband for “a life full of love” and for being “the best father” for their children.

According to a statement published on Saturday by the hospital where Uribe was being treated, the senator had suffered a bleed to his central nervous system and was due to undergo surgery.

He had already had several surgeries since he was first taken to the Santa Fe clinic in June.

His wife had asked people to pray for his recovery and thousands had turned out at vigils and rallies to show their support.

Uribe, who had been a senator since 2022, had been seeking his party’s nomination for the 2026 presidential election.

He was popular in the polls and recognised as an up-and-coming figure in the right-wing Democratic Centre party, known for his outspoken criticism of the current left-wing president, Gustavo Petro.

President Petro’s office released a statement expressing its condolences to the family of the slain politician.

Uribe was attending a political event in a middle-class neighbourhood of the capital when he was shot.

A teenage suspect was arrested as he was fleeing the scene. The 15-year-old has been charged with attempted murder and pleaded not guilty.

Several others have been detained on suspicion of aiding the gunman.

The brazen attack on the senator has brought back memories of the turbulent decades of the 1980s and 90s in Colombia, when several presidential candidates and influential Colombian figures were assassinated.

Uribe’s own mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was kidnapped by Los Extraditables in 1990 – an alliance created by leading drug lords.

She was held hostage by them for five months before being shot dead during a botched rescue attempt.

Uribe often cited her as his inspiration to run for political office “to work for our country”.

Los Extraditables, who said they would prefer a grave in Colombia to a prison cell in the US, abducted and attacked renowned Colombians in an attempt to force the government at the time to overturn its extradition treaty with the US.

In recent decades, Colombia’s security indicators have substantially improved, and in 2016 a historic peace agreement was reached between the government and the leftist guerrilla group, Farc.

In 2024, Colombia recorded a murder rate of 25.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, the lowest in the past four years, according to security research group Insight Crime.

In 1990, the homicide rate exceeded 70 per 100,000 inhabitants.

However, Colombia’s murder rate remains among the highest in the region, alongside those Ecuador, Brazil, and Honduras.

Politicians, members of the security forces, union leaders, environmentalists, and social leaders frequently face death threats, pressure, and attacks.

Various armed groups are engaged in a bloody territorial disputes in the country, often also clashing with the security forces.

Laura Bonilla, deputy director of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation in Colombia (Pares), said that “the political outlook will now depend on who manages to capitalize on the narrative of security”.

Ms Bonilla told BBC News Mundo that the situation in the wake of Senator Uribe’s killing was likely to give more prominence to right-wing politicians and their rhetoric.

Vice-President Francia Márquez urged Colombians to unite and reject all violent acts, telling them that “violence cannot continue to mark our democracy”.

“Democracy is not built with bullets or blood; it is built with respect, dialogue and recognizing our differences, regardless of political position.”

Uribe’s death also made waves beyond Colombia with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio among the first to post following the announcement of his death to demand that those responsible be brought to justice.

The death of a one-month-old baby girl who was the victim of female genital mutilation (FGM) in The Gambia has sparked widespread outrage.

The baby was rushed to a hospital in the capital, Banjul, after she developed severe bleeding, but was pronounced dead on arrival, police said.

Although an autopsy is still being conducted to establish the cause of her death, many people have linked it to FGM, or female circumcision, a cultural practice outlawed in the West African state.

“Culture is no excuse, tradition is no shield, this is violence, pure and simple,” a leading non-governmental organisation, Women In Leadership and Liberation (WILL), said in a statement.

Two women had been arrested for their alleged involvement in the baby’s death, police said.

The MP for the Kombo North District where the incident happened emphasised the need to protect children from harmful practices that rob them of their health, dignity, and life.

“The loss of this innocent child must not be forgotten. Let it mark a turning-point and a moment for our nation to renew its unwavering commitment to protecting every child’s right to life, safety, and dignity,” Abdoulie Ceesay said.

FGM is the deliberate cutting or removal of a female’s external genitalia.

The most frequently cited reasons for carrying it out are social acceptance, religious beliefs, misconceptions about hygiene, a means of preserving a girl or woman’s virginity, making her “marriageable”, and enhancing male sexual pleasure.

The Gambia is among the 10 countries with the highest rates of FGM, with 73% of women and girls aged 15 to 49 having undergone the procedure, with many doing so before the age of six years.

• ‘I wanted my clitoris back’ – FGM survivor

WILL founder Fatou Baldeh told the BBC that there was an increase in FGM procedures being performed on babies in The Gambia.

“Parents feel that if they cut their girls when they’re babies, they heal quicker, but also, because of the law, they feel that if they perform it at such a young age, it’s much easier to disguise, so that people don’t know,” she said.

FGM has been outlawed in The Gambia since 2015, with fines and jail terms of up to three years for perpetrators, and life sentences if a girl dies as a result.

However, there have only been two prosecutions and one conviction, in 2023.

A strong lobby group has emerged to demand the decriminalisation of FGM, but legislation aimed at repealing the ban was voted down in parliament last year.

FGM is banned in more than 70 countries globally but continues to be practised particularly in Africa’s Muslim-majority countries, such as The Gambia.

• What is FGM, where does it happen and why?
• FGM survivor refuses to let mutilation define her life
• ‘Why I broke the law to be circumcised aged 26’

Five Al Jazeera journalists were killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza City on Sunday – among them 28-year-old correspondent Anas al-Sharif, who had reported prominently on the war since its outset.

The other four Al Jazeera journalists killed were correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, Al Jazeera said.

Two others were also killed, the broadcaster said. Hospital officials named Mohammed al-Khaldi, a local freelance journalist, as one of them.

The targeted attack on a tent used by journalists has drawn strong international condemnation including from the UN, Qatar where Al Jazeera is based, and media freedom groups.

Israel says Sharif was “the head of a Hamas terrorist cell” but has produced little evidence to support that. Sharif previously denied it, and Al Jazeera and media rights groups have rejected the allegation.

The BBC understands Sharif worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict.

In some of his social media posts before his death, the journalist can be heard criticising Hamas.

Committee for the Protection of Journalists CEO Jodie Ginsberg told the BBC there was no justification for Sharif’s killing.

“International law is very clear on this point that the only individuals who are legitimate targets during a war are active combatants. Having worked as a media advisor for Hamas, or indeed for Hamas currently, does not make you an active combatant”, she said.

“And nothing that the Israeli forces has produced so far in terms of evidence gives us any kind of assurance that he was even an active member of Hamas.”

Anas al-Sharif became one of Al Jazeera’s most prominent reporters in Gaza during the war.

Born in the densely populated Jabalia area in the north of the Strip, he worked for Al Jazeera for about two years, the broadcaster said.

“He worked for the whole length of the war inside Gaza reporting daily on the situation of people and the attacks which are committed in Gaza,” Salah Negm, director of news at Al Jazeera English, told the BBC.

Married with a four-year-old daughter, Sham, and a one-year-old son, Salah, he was separated from them for long stretches during the war while he continued to report from the north of the territory after refusing to follow Israeli evacuation orders.

A joint Instagram post on his official account along with his wife’s in January this year showed a picture of Sharif smiling with his two children. The caption said it was the first time he was meeting Salah, after 15 months of war.

Sharif appeared frequently in live broadcasts, reporting extensively on the situation in Gaza.

He reported on the targeting of his colleagues, including prominent Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifi, who were killed in 2024 in an air strike in Gaza City.

His father had already been killed in December 2023 when the family home was targeted in an Israeli strike. Hours before he himself was killed, he posted about an intense Israeli bombardment of Gaza City.

Mohamed Moawad, Al Jazeera’s managing editor, described him as the “only voice left in Gaza City” – which Israel now plans to militarily occupy.

Raed Fakih, input manager at Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language channel, told the BBC Sharif was “courageous, dedicated, and honest – that’s what made him successful as a journalist with hundreds of thousands of social media followers from all over the world”.

Fakih, who is in charge of the channel’s bureaux and correspondents, added: “His dedication took him to areas where no other reporter ventured to go, especially those that witnessed the worst massacres. His integrity kept him true to his message as a journalist.”

Fakih said he spoke to Sharif many times on the phone throughout the war.

“In our last conversations, he told me about the famine and starvation he was enduring, about how hard it is to survive with so little food,” he said.

“He felt he had no choice but to amplify the voice of the Gazans. He was living the same hardships they are living now, suffering from famine, mourning loved ones.

“His father was killed in an Israeli bombing. In that way, he was like all Gazans: carrying loss, pain, and resilience. And even in the face of death, he persisted, because this is a story that must be told.”

Mohammed Qreieh, 33, was a father of two from Gaza City, the Associated Press news agency reported. Like Sharif, he was separated from his family for months during the war as he reported from the front lines in northern Gaza, AP added.

Qreieh’s last live broadcast was on Sunday evening, minutes before he was targeted, Al Jazeera Arabic reported.

The Israeli military accused Sharif of posing as a journalist, saying he had “served as the head of a terrorist cell in Hamas” and was responsible for launching rocket attacks at Israelis – but it has produced little evidence to support these claims.

In a statement, the IDF said it had documents which “unequivocally prove” his “military affiliation” with Hamas, including “personnel rosters, lists of terrorist training courses, phone directories, and salary documents”.

It has publicly released some screenshots of spreadsheets apparently listing Hamas operatives from the northern Gaza Strip, noting injuries to Hamas operatives and a section of what is said to be a phone directory for the armed group’s East Jabalia battalion.

Israel had previously accused Sharif of being a member of Hamas’s military wing – something he and his employer strongly denied.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a media freedom group, said the allegations against him were “baseless” and called on the international community to intervene.

“Without strong action from the international community to stop the Israeli army… we’re likely to witness more such extrajudicial murders of media professionals,” RSF said.

Nearly 200 journalists have been killed in the war Israel launched in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 assault, according to RSF.

Fakih from Al Jazeera accused the Israeli military of fabricating stories about journalists before killing them, to “hide what [it] is committing in Gaza”. Israel has previously denied targeting journalists.

He described this as a “longstanding pattern” and referred to the Israeli military’s killing of veteran Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Aqla, who was shot in the head during an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank in 2022.

The Israeli military concluded that one of its soldiers probably killed her, but called her death unintentional. Al Jazeera said its evidence showed it was a “deliberate killing”.

“Here is a crucial fact: had Israel been held accountable for Shireen’s assassination, it would not have dared to kill 200 journalists in Gaza,” said Fakih.

Sharif knew he risked being targeted by Israel after its Arabic-language spokesman posted a video of him in July and accused him of being a member of Hamas’ military wing.

In a post published on his X account, which was prewritten in the event of his death, Sharif said he “gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people… Do not forget Gaza.”

Unusual. Quid pro quo. Unprecedented.

That is some of the reaction to news that two of the world’s tech giants will pay the US government 15% of their revenue from selling certain advanced chips to China. Industry watchers, former government advisers, policy makers and trade experts have been giving their views on the deal.

The news comes mere months after the Trump administration banned the sale of these chips to China, citing national security concerns.

That ban was lifted in mid-July. And now it seems the US government will go a step further – becoming a part of these American firms’ business with China.

And critics argue that is both confusing and worrying.

These advanced chips are largely used for artificial intelligence (AI) applications at a time when investors are betting that AI will transform the global economy.

Last month, Nvidia – which is the world’s leading chip firm – became the first company ever to hit $4tn (£3tn) in market value.

Nvidia developed the H20 chip, and AMD developed the MI308 chip, especially for the Chinese market.

They are less powerful and therefore cheaper than both companies’ flagship chips.

But developing them was the only option for accessing the significant Chinese market after the previous administration of President Joe Biden banned US companies from exporting the most advanced chips to China because of national security concerns.

Under Trump, even the less powerful, made-for-China chips were banned.

The resumption of sales to China is a boon for both Nvidia and AMD because China is such a big market. China’s investment in AI is expanding so rapidly that analysts expect it to grow to roughly $100bn this year – a nearly 50% jump compared with last year.

“Unprecedented… I don’t know what the word is, but it’s bad,” says trade expert Deborah Elms.

Other experts say no US company has ever done anything like this before.

But Trump did do something similar in June when he approved the takeover of US Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel. That included a so-called “golden share”, a rare practice in which the government takes a stake in a business.

In this case, the White House has not said how the agreement will be implemented – such as where this money would go, or how it would be used.

More importantly, what message does it send to other US companies that see China as a key market or supplier – from Apple and Tesla to the small furniture and toymakers? Is this a tax that firms will now face for doing business with China?

The 15% cut that Nvidia and AMD have agreed to is likely to hurt their bottom line, even if they earn substantial profits from sales to China.

Chip-makers plan their operations years in advance so this could dampen investor sentiment, which depends heavily on earnings and revenue projections.

But this deal may be a part of Trump’s ongoing tariff negotiations. Just last week, he threatened 100% tariffs on foreign-made chips unless those companies invested in the US.

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick even said chips exports were being used in negotiations with China in return for access to rare-earth elements.

That part is still unclear.

A US official told Reuters that the White House did not believe the sale of H20 and equivalent chips would compromise national security – despite the fact they were previously banned on these grounds.

National security experts and some lawmakers have long voiced concerns about the US selling AI chips to China, saying that Beijing could use them to gain an advantage in AI, as well as in military applications.

But others have argued that restricting chip sales to China does not help because it spurs Chinese innovation and greater competition. Rather, they want China to rely on US tech.

The latter argument seems to have won – for now.

That may well be the result of intense lobbying from Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang. He met Trump at the White House last Wednesday, and it is thought that is when they agreed to this deal.

It was also Mr Huang’s efforts that led to the reversal of the April ban on H20 sales to China.

The agreement is something of a win for China because it does want these chips.

Analysts say leading tech companies including ByteDance, Tencent and DeepSeek bought H20s before the US cut off access in April.

And it is a win for the US government, with analysts Bernstein Research telling the BBC it could make up to $2bn from chip sales to China.

There could be a further victory for Washington, if this leads to a deal on rare-earth elements with Beijing, which currently has a monopoly over the critical minerals.

But critics of the deal say they are alarmed about how this reflects on the White House.

This “is a very different US environment from the one that we’ve had in the past,” says Ms Elms, the trade expert.

“I suppose, generously, you could call it the flexibility of the Trump White House in responding to requests.”

Vineet Sawant has spent the last two years navigating the streets of Mumbai on a scooter as a delivery driver.

“Being on the road is always very stressful and especially in cities like Mumbai,” he says.

But when he started out language barriers were an additional problem.

His first language is Marathi and Mr Sawant speaks “very little” English. “I can understand but it’s very difficult to read,” he explains.

That caused problems at his new job.

He said: “At first, it was difficult. Everything was in English, and I can understand some of it, but I’m more comfortable in Marathi. I used to ask other delivery guys to help me figure out what to do.”

His employer, Zepto, promises “India’s Fastest Online Grocery Delivery”. So having drivers struggling with delivery instructions was not ideal.

To smooth this process a year ago, Zepto partnered with Reverie Language Technologies to introduce an AI translation service for its drivers.

Since then its delivery drivers have been able to choose between six languages on the Zepto app.

“I don’t have to guess anymore,” says Mr Sawant.

“Earlier I would take more time to read and sometimes even made mistakes. Now if the customer writes ‘ring bell’, I get that instruction in Marathi. So, I don’t have to ask or check again. It’s all clear.”

Mr Sawant’s difficulties are common.

“India has 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects,” says Professor Pushpak Bhattacharyya, from IIT Mumbai, one of India’s leading experts in the use of AI in Indian languages.

“Without tech, that understands and speaks these languages, millions are excluded from the digital revolution – especially in education, governance, healthcare, and banking,” he points out.

The rollout of new generative AI systems, like ChatGPT, has made the task more urgent.

Vast amounts of data, like web pages, books or video transcripts are used to train an AI.

In widely spoken languages like Hindi and English that is relatively easy to get, but for others it is more difficult.

“The main challenge to create Indian language models is the availability of data. I’m talking about refined data. Coarse quality data, is available. But that data is not of very high quality, it needs filtering,” says Professor Bhattacharyya.

“The issue in India is for many Indian languages, especially tribal and regional dialects, this data simply doesn’t exist or is not digitised.”

Reverie Language Technologies is now deploying its AI-driven translation technology for a range of Indian companies.

Co-founder Vivekananda Pani says that while translation technology will make communication easier, there is “potential for less common dialects to be pushed aside”.

“The challenge will be to make sure that the amazing benefits of AI-driven language advancements don’t accidentally shrink the rich variety of human language.”

To help tackle the problem Professor Bhattacharyya has contributed to Bhashini, a government project to develop those high quality datasets needed to train an AI.

As well as the datasets, Bhashini has built AI language models and translation services in 22 languages.

Started in 2022, it’s a huge undertaking, but has already made a lot of progress.

Bhashini currently hosts 350 AI-based language models that have processed more than a billion tasks.

More than 50 government departments work with Bhashini, as well as 25 state governments.

For example Bhashini tech is used in multi-lingual chatbots for public services and to translate government schemes into local languages.

“Bhashini ensures India’s linguistic and cultural representation by building India-specific AI models rather than relying on global platforms,” says Amitabh Nag, CEO of Digital India, Bhashini Division.

He hopes that within the next two or three years rural users will have voice-enabled access to government services, financial tools and information systems in their native languages.

These India-focused datasets will hopefully one day give people developing AI-based models the tools to make it much easier to adapt them for the entire population.

Currently, designing any AI programme to deal with complex processes such as healthcare can be extremely challenging.

Kshitij Jadhav, an associate professor at the Koita Centre for Digital Health at IIT Mumbai, is working on an AI programme which would help people quit smoking.

He explains that people at different stages of the process need different advice and they usually need a well-trained human to make that assessment.

But there are a limited number of practitioners who can help, particularly those that can operate in multiple languages, so Professor Jadhav is hoping his AI model can bridge the gap.

The AI “will first identify the kind of conversation the person needs and accordingly will frame questions, show empathy, emotions,” says Professor Jadhav.

And all that, hopefully, will eventually be done in 22 languages. Initial experiments are underway in English and Hindi.

“It will be very customized, it will not be something just off the shelf,” he says.

Back on the streets of the city, Vineet Sawant has increased the number of parcels he delivers from ten to around 30 a day, helped in part by the translation function in the delivery app.

He thinks it will help more people like him.

“It makes us feel like we belong. Not everyone understands English. When the app speaks our language, we feel more confident, and we work better.”

Listen to Jonathan read this article.

When it comes to the Lucy Letby case, there are two parallel universes. In one, the question of her guilt is settled. She is a monster who murdered seven babies and attempted to murder seven more while she was a nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.

In the other universe, Letby is the victim of a flawed criminal justice system in which unreliable medical evidence was used to condemn and imprison an innocent woman.

This is what Letby’s barrister Mark McDonald argues. He says he has the backing of a panel of the best experts in the world who say there is no evidence any babies were deliberately harmed.

These extremes are both disturbing and bewildering. One of them is wrong – but which? Who should we believe?

The families of the infants say there is no doubt. Letby was convicted after a 10-month trial by a jury that had considered a vast range of evidence. They say Letby’s defenders are picking on small bits of evidence out of context and that the constant questioning of her guilt is deeply distressing.

I have spent almost three years investigating the Letby case – in that time I have made three Panorama documentaries and cowritten a book on the subject with my colleague Judith Moritz. Yet, if true, the new evidence, presented by Mark McDonald in a series of high-profile press conferences and media releases, is shocking.

According to his experts, the prosecution expert medical case is unreliable.

Mark McDonald has not released the panel’s full reports, which are currently with the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body he needs to persuade to reopen Letby’s case, but he has released summaries of the panel’s findings.

Letby was found guilty of 15 counts of murder and attempted murder, and the jury in her original trial reached unanimous verdicts on three of those cases. That is a good indication of where the strongest medical evidence might lie.

To get a sense of the imperfections woven through both the prosecution and the defence arguments, it’s worth looking at one of those cases in which the guilty verdict was unanimous: that of Baby O.

Baby O was born in June 2016, one of triplet brothers. At Letby’s trial, the jury was told that his death was in part the result of liver injuries, which the prosecution pathologist described as impact-type injuries – similar to those in a car accident.

As in other cases for which Letby was convicted, the prosecution said circumstantial evidence also tied her to the crime.

However, a paediatric pathologist who was not involved in the case but has seen Baby O’s post-mortem report, says it was “unlikely” Baby O’s liver injuries were caused by impact – as the prosecution claims.

“You can’t completely rule out the possibility,” says the pathologist, who does not want to be identified. “But in my view, the location of the injuries and the condition of the liver tissue itself don’t fit with that explanation.”

Which raises the obvious question – if the prosecution were wrong about Baby O’s liver injuries, then why did he die?

Letby was accused of injecting air into the blood of Baby O as well as that of other babies. This, the prosecution said, caused an air bubble and a blockage in the circulation known as air embolism.

During the trial the prosecution pointed to several pieces of evidence to make their case, including a 1989 academic study of air embolism in newborn babies, which noted skin discolouration as one possible feature of it.

Prosecutors argued that these same skin colour changes were observed in several babies in the Letby case.

However, Dr Shoo Lee, a Canadian neonatologist and one of the authors of that 1989 study, is now part of Letby’s team of defence experts working with Mark McDonald. He argues that his study was misused.

He says skin discolouration has not featured in any reported cases of air embolism in babies where the air has entered the circulation via a vein – which is what the prosecution alleged happened in the Letby case.

In other words, the prosecution was wrong to use skin discolouration as evidence of air embolism.

It sounds significant. But is it enough to defeat the air embolism allegations?

As with many aspects of the Letby case, the answer is not clear-cut.

The prosecution did not rely on skin discolouration alone to make their case for air embolism. And although there have not been any reported cases of skin discolouration in babies where air has entered the circulation via a vein, some critics have argued that the number of reported air embolism cases is small and that the theory is still possible.

To muddy the waters further, another of Mark McDonald’s panel of experts has said that in fact there was post-mortem evidence of air embolism in the babies.

“We know these babies suffered air embolism because of the post-mortem imaging in some of them,” says Neena Modi, a professor of neonatal medicine.

She believes this is highly likely to have occurred during resuscitation, and that there are much more plausible explanations for the collapses and deaths of the babies in the Letby case than air embolism.

The air embolism theory, she said, was “highly speculative”. But her remarks show the debate is far from settled.

There has been another explanation for Baby O’s death.

In December 2024, Mark McDonald called a press conference in which one of his experts, Dr Richard Taylor, claimed that a doctor had accidentally pierced the baby’s liver with a needle during resuscitation. This, he argued, had led to the baby’s death.

Dr Taylor added: “I think the doctor knows who they are. I have to say from a personal point of view that if this had happened to me, I’d be unable to sleep at night knowing that what I had done had led to the death of a baby, and now there is a nurse in jail, convicted of murder.”

The doctor accused of causing the baby’s death was subsequently identified as Stephen Brearey – one of Letby’s principal accusers at the Countess of Chester Hospital.

Mr Brearey says: “Given the ongoing investigations and inquiries, and to respect the confidentiality of those involved, I will not be making any further comment at this time.”

It was a bombshell claim. But does the evidence support it?

One indication that the needle theory might be shaky was that Dr Taylor, by his own admission, had not seen Baby O’s medical notes and was relying on a report that had been written by two other experts.

Another obvious problem with the needle theory is that it had already been examined at length during Letby’s trial.

The prosecution pathologist concluded that there was no evidence that a needle had pierced Baby O’s liver while he was alive and the paediatric pathologist we spoke to agrees.

They told us: “These injuries weren’t caused by a needle. They were in different parts of the liver and there was no sign of any needle injury on the liver.”

Even if the needle had penetrated the baby’s liver, it cannot explain why Baby O collapsed in the first place or why he died – the needle was inserted after the baby’s final and fatal collapse towards the end of the resuscitation.

When asked if he still stood by his comments about the doctor’s needle, Dr Taylor told us that while the needle may not have been the primary cause of death, his “opinion has not substantially changed”.

He said the “needle probably penetrated the liver” of Baby O, and “probably accelerated his demise”.

The question of where this leaves the case presented by Mark McDonald’s panel of experts when it comes to the needle theory is a difficult one to answer.

It would appear that among Letby’s defenders, there is not consensus.

Consultant neonatologist Dr Neil Aiton is one of the authors of the original report on which Dr Taylor based his comments. Dr Aiton says that he has examined the evidence independently and has concluded that Baby O’s liver injuries were caused by inappropriate resuscitation attempts, including hyperinflation of the baby’s lungs.

However, he also says it was “pretty clear” a needle had punctured the liver during resuscitation.

When Dr Aiton was told that other experts, including the paediatric pathologist who spoke to the BBC, have examined the case of Baby O and said that it is implausible to conclude this happened, he said that there were two possibilities. Either the liver ruptured because of a needle or it ruptured spontaneously.

Dr Aiton’s position appears to be that poor resuscitation caused the baby’s liver injuries and whether it was a needle or not is “not important”.

That is a contrast from what Dr Taylor said in that December press conference. And critics say Dr Aiton’s account still does not explain why Baby O collapsed in the first place and why he needed such desperate resuscitation.

A summary report from Letby’s expert panel appears to back further away from the needle theory. It says a needle “may have” punctured the liver.

Other experts, including the paediatric pathologist, said that Dr Aiton’s observation of hyper-inflated lungs would not explain Baby O’s liver injuries.

Once again, the case illustrates how difficult it is to distinguish between plausible and implausible claims.

Since that press conference, other experts working for Letby’s defence team have put forward another theory for Baby O’s death. They say his liver injuries were the result of traumatic delivery at the time of birth.

Professor Modi says this was a “highly plausible cause”.

But that has been contested from a surprising direction. Dr Mike Hall, a neonatologist, was Lucy Letby’s original defence expert and attended court throughout her trial.

He has been a staunch critic of her conviction, arguing her trial wasn’t fair and that there is no definitive medical evidence that babies were deliberately harmed.

However, Dr Hall’s view is that evidence for the birth trauma theory is simply not there. He notes that Baby O was born in good condition by caesarean section and there is no record of a traumatic delivery in the baby’s medical notes.

“There’s still no evidence that anyone did anything deliberately to harm Baby O,” he adds. “However, something was going on with Baby O, which we haven’t explained.

“We don’t know what the cause of this is. But that doesn’t mean that we therefore have to pretend that we know.”

For the jury, Baby O was one of the clearest cases that proved Letby was a killer. And yet there appears to be flawed expert evidence on both sides.

There were two other cases where the jury returned unanimous verdicts – the cases of Babies F and L.

The prosecution argued that both babies had been poisoned with insulin and highlighted blood tests that it said were clear evidence of this. For the prosecution, the insulin cases proved that someone at the Countess of Chester Hospital was harming babies.

Letby’s defence have, meanwhile, marshalled numerous arguments against the insulin theory. One is that the blood test used – an immunoassay – is inaccurate and should have been verified. But even Letby’s experts accept the test is accurate around 98% of the time.

Another argument is that premature babies can process insulin differently and that the blood test results are “within the expected range for pre-term infants”. But the medical specialists we’ve spoken to are baffled by this claim and say it goes against mainstream scientific understanding.

Of course, mainstream opinion can be wrong. But it is difficult to tell because Letby’s defence team have not shared the scientific evidence.

One of the experts behind the report – a mechanical engineer who carries out biomedical research – clarified that his analysis says the blood test results were “not uncommon”. However, Letby’s defence declined to show the BBC the published studies that support this claim.

Once again, the claims of both the prosecution and defence are not clear-cut.

Ultimately, the question of whether Letby’s case should be re-examined by the Court of Appeal now lies with CCRC. They have the task of studying Mark McDonald’s expert reports.

If he is successful and Lucy Letby’s case is referred back to the Court of Appeal – that is ultimately where the expert evidence on both sides will face a true reckoning.

It’s the bilateral summit every European leader wants to be at.

And for good reason. On Friday, Donald Trump is scheduled to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

Territorial concessions will likely be discussed, and Europe (not least Ukraine) doesn’t want its borders to be redrawn through force.

But, as things stand, there are no invites for the country being invaded, nor the continent it sits in.

“Brace ourselves for some pretty outrageous Russian demands,” warns Lord Simon McDonald, a former head of the UK Foreign Office.

“It will be theatrical,” he adds. “Putin is going to ask for things that nobody else would concede – with the possible exception of Donald Trump.”

• Trump says he will try to get back territory for Ukraine in talks with Putin

President Zelensky has said he won’t agree to the giving up of any land, or even freezing the conflict along the current front lines.

His argument is that it won’t slow a Russian war machine that has waged a full-scale war for more than three and a half years. Concessions, he claims, would only speed it up.

“It’s clear Putin wants a photo with the most influential people on Earth, which is President Trump, and he wants sanctions to be postponed, which he’ll probably get,” the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, tells me.

“The question is, what is success for the US in the meeting?” she asks. “If President Zelensky is there, it would be a clear success.”

But if Ukraine’s leader isn’t at the Alaskan table, how might the Kremlin’s proposals be challenged?

“He could go,” said the US president on that possibility. But Kyiv and Europe want it to go from a “maybe” to a “yes”.

Adding to their anxiety is the one-on-one format being a Kremlin idea the White House agreed to.

Brussels’ European Quarter isn’t its usual flurry of political activity during August, but these US-Russia talks have changed that.

On Monday, Kallas hosted a virtual meeting of foreign ministers where they called for an unconditional ceasefire before any deal. New sanctions for Moscow were announced as well.

I asked Kallas what she thought Donald Trump meant by suggesting some land could be swapped.

“We have to ask President Trump,” she says. “But it is clear an aggressor can’t be awarded for aggression. Otherwise, we will just see more aggression around the world because it pays off.”

Europe is trying to do two things: rally around Ukraine, as well as muscle in on this American-led peace process.

Whether or not Zelensky does make the trip, the door for Europe has firmly remained shut since Trump retook office at the start of the year.

At the time his envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said the bloc wouldn’t be involved in any peace talks. It’s a position the Europeans have been unable to change through diplomacy.

Their relationship with the US has still improved, not least with significant increases in their defence spending. But Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, believes they need a more central role.

“This is a matter of existential European security interest,” he explains.

“We appreciate Trump’s efforts but we’ll be taking our own decision in Europe too.

“A simple ceasefire would not resolve the problem.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has secured a remote sit down between European leaders, as well as Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump, this Wednesday.

They hope to be consulted on America’s plan to end Russia’s invasion, but ex-UK Foreign Office head Lord McDonald would be surprised to see a last-minute European invite for Friday.

“The end will be as protracted as the war has been long,” he warned.

“The meeting is a milestone, but it doesn’t actually mean it will lead anywhere.”

No-one would want to work without getting a salary, or even worse – having to pay to be there.

Yet paying companies so you can pretend to work for them has become popular among young, unemployed adults in China. It has led to a growing number of such providers.

The development comes amid China’s sluggish economy and jobs market. Chinese youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, at more than 14%.

With real jobs increasingly hard to come by, some young adults would rather pay to go into an office than be just stuck at home.

Shui Zhou, 30, had a food business venture that failed in 2024. In April of this year, he started to pay 30 yuan ($4.20; £3.10) per day to go into a mock-up office run by a business called Pretend To Work Company, in the city of Dongguan, 114 km (71 miles) north of Hong Kong.

There he joins five “colleagues” who are doing the same thing.

“I feel very happy,” says Mr Zhou. “It’s like we’re working together as a group.”

Such operations are now appearing in major cities across China, including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Kunming. More often they look like fully-functional offices, and are equipped with computers, internet access, meeting rooms, and tea rooms.

And rather than attendees just sitting around, they can use the computers to search for jobs, or to try to launch their own start-up businesses. Sometimes the daily fee, usually between 30 and 50 yuan, includes lunch, snacks and drinks.

Dr Christian Yao, a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Management in New Zealand, is an expert on the Chinese economy.

“The phenomenon of pretending to work is now very common,” he says. “Due to economic transformation and the mismatch between education and the job market, young people need these places to think about their next steps, or to do odd jobs as a transition.

“Pretend office companies are one of the transitional solutions.”

Mr Zhou came across the Pretend To Work Company while browsing social media site Xiaohongshu. He says he felt that the office environment would improve his self-discipline. He has now been there for more than three months.

Mr Zhou sent photos of the office to his parents, and he says they feel much more at ease about his lack of employment.

While attendees can arrive and leave whenever they want, Mr Zhou usually gets to the office between 8am and 9am. Sometimes he doesn’t leave until 11pm, only departing after the manager of the business has left.

He adds that the other people there are now like friends. He says that when someone is busy, such as job hunting, they work hard, but when they have free time they chat, joke about, and play games. And they often have dinner together after work.

Mr Zhou says that he likes this team building, and that he is much happier than before he joined.

In Shanghai, Xiaowen Tang rented a workstation at a pretend work company in Shanghai for a month earlier this year. The 23-year-old graduated from university last year and hasn’t found a full-time job yet.

Her university has an unwritten rule that students must sign an employment contract or provide proof of internship within one year of graduation; otherwise, they won’t receive a diploma.

She sent the office scene to the school as proof of her internship. In reality, she paid the daily fee, and sat in the office writing online novels to earn some pocket money.

“If you’re going to fake it, just fake it to the end,” says Ms Tang.

Dr Biao Xiang, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, says that China’s pretending to work trend comes from a “sense of frustration and powerlessness” regarding a lack of job opportunities.

“Pretending to work is a shell that young people find for themselves, creating a slight distance from mainstream society and giving themselves a little space.”

The owner of the Pretend To Work Company in the city of Dongguan is 30-year-old Feiyu (a pseudonym). “What I’m selling isn’t a workstation, but the dignity of not being a useless person,” he says.

He himself has been unemployed in the past, after a previous retail business that he owned had to close during the Covid pandemic. “I was very depressed and a bit self-destructive,” he recalls. “You wanted to turn the tide, but you were powerless.”

In April of this year he started to advertise Pretend To Work, and within a month all the workstations were full. Would-be new joiners have to apply.

Feiyu say that 40% of customers are recent university graduates who come to take photos to prove their internship experience to their former tutors. While a small number of them come to help deal with pressure from their parents.

The other 60% are freelancers, many of whom are digital nomads, including those working for big ecommerce firms, and cyberspace writers. The average age is around 30, with the youngest being 25.

Officially, these workers are referred to as “flexible employment professionals”, a grouping that also includes ride-hailing and trucker drivers.

Over the longer term Feiyu says it is questionable whether the business will remain profitable. Instead he likes to view it more as a social experiment.

“It uses lies to maintain respectability, but it allows some people to find the truth,” he says. “If we only help users prolong their acting skills we are complicit in a gentle deception.

“Only by helping them transform their fake workplace into a real starting point can this social experiment truly live up to its promise.”

Mr Zhou is now spending most of his time improving his AI skills. He says he’s noticed that some companies are specifying proficiency in AI tools when recruiting. So he thinks gaining such AI skills “will make it easier” for him to find a full-time job.

Meir Simcha agreed to talk, but he wanted to do it somewhere special, because for him, this is a special time. In a place where nation, religion and war are linked inextricably with politics and the possession of land, Simcha chose a patch of shade under a fig tree next to a spring of fresh water.

From his dusty car, a small Toyota fitted with off road tyres, he produced a bottle of juice made from fruit and vegetables.

“Don’t worry, there’s no extra sugar,” he said as he poured it into plastic cups.

Simcha is the leader of a group of Jewish settlers steadily transforming a big stretch of the rolling terrain south of Hebron in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since it was captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

He moved two large flat stones into the shade as seats, and we sat down in a patch of lush grass, kept alive in the harsh summer heat by water dripping from a pipe coming out of the spring. It was a small oasis at the foot of a steep, arid, rocky slope and the location, if not our conversation, felt peaceful in a way that the West Bank rarely does these days.

The conflict between Arabs and Jews for control of the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea started well over a century ago when Zionists from Europe began to buy land to set up communities in Palestine.

It has been shaped by significant turning points.

The latest has come from the deadly 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s devastating response.

The consequences of the last 22 months of war, and however many more months are left before a ceasefire, threaten to spread across years and generations, just like the Middle East war in 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan.

The scale of destruction and killing in the Gaza war obscures what is happening in the West Bank, which smoulders with tension and violence.

Since October 2023, Israel’s pressure on West Bank Palestinians has increased sharply, justified as legitimate security measures.

Evidence based on statements by ministers, influential local leaders like Simcha and accounts by witnesses on the ground reveal that the pressure is part of a wider agenda, to accelerate the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and to extinguish any lingering hopes of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Palestinians and human rights groups also accuse the Israeli security forces of failing in their legal duty as occupiers to protect Palestinians as well as their own citizens – not just turning a blind eye to settler attacks, but even joining in.

Violence by ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers in the West Bank has risen sharply since 7 October 2023.

Ocha, the UN’s humanitarian office, estimates an average of four settler attacks every day.

The International Court of Justice has issued an advisory opinion that the entire occupation of Palestinian territory captured in 1967 is illegal.

Israel rejects the ICJ’s view and claims that the Geneva Conventions forbidding settlement in occupied territories do not apply – a view disputed by many of its own allies as well as international lawyers.

In the shade of the fig tree, Simcha denied all suggestions he had attacked Palestinians, as he celebrated the fact that most of the Arab farmers who used to graze their animals on the hills he has seized and tend their olives in the valleys had gone.

He looks back to the Hamas October attacks, and Israel’s response ever since, as a turning point.

“I think that a lot has changed, that the enemy in our land lost hope. He’s beginning to understand that he’s on his way out; that’s what has changed in the last year or year and a half.

“Today you can walk around here in the land in the desert, and nobody will jump on you and try to kill you. There are still attempts to oppose our presence here in this land, but the enemy is starting to understand this slowly. They have no future here.

“The reality has changed. I ask you and the people of the world, why are you so interested in those Palestinians so much? Why do you care about them? It’s just another small nation.

“The Palestinians don’t interest me. I care about my people.”

Simcha says the Palestinians who left villages and farms near the hilltops he has claimed simply realised that God intended the land for Jews, not for them.

On 24 July this year, a panel of UN experts came to a different conclusion. A statement issued by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said: “We are deeply troubled by alleged widespread intimidation, violence, land dispossession, destruction of livelihoods and the resulting forcible displacement of communities, and we fear this is severing Palestinians from their land and undermining their food security.

“The alleged acts of violence, destruction of property, and denial of access to land and resources appear to constitute a systemic pattern of human rights violations.”

Simcha has a plan to dig a swimming pool at the base of the spring where we sat to talk. Like many others who are leading the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, he is full of plans. When I met him first, not long after Hamas burst through Israel’s border defences on 7 October 2023, he lived in a small group of isolated caravans on a hilltop overlooking the Judean desert as it sweeps down to the Dead Sea.

Since then, Simcha says his community has expanded into around 200 people on three hilltops. He was part of the faction of the settler movement known as hilltop youth, a radical fringe that became notorious for the violent harassment of Palestinians. Most Israelis who have settled in the occupied territories are not like Simcha. They went there not for ideological and religious reasons, but because property was cheaper.

But now men like Simcha are at the centre of events, with their leaders in the cabinet, leading the charge, married, older, thinking not just about swimming pools for their children but of victory over the Palestinians, once and for all, and everlasting Jewish possession of the land.

Simcha comes across as a happy man. He believes his mission – to implement the will of God by turning the West Bank into a land for Jews, and not for Palestinians – is progressing nicely.

Israel’s project to settle Jewish citizens in the newly occupied territories started within days of its victory in 1967. Over the last almost 60 years, successive Israeli governments and some wealthy sympathisers have invested vast amounts of money and energy to get to the point where around 700,000 Israeli Jews live in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

I have been watching the settlements grow for about half of the lifetime of the project, since I first reported from the occupied Palestinian territories in 1991. In that time, the terrain of much of the West Bank has been transformed. The bigger settlements look like small towns, and the West Bank is carved into sections by a network of roads and tunnels built by Israel that are as much about staking an immovable claim to the land as they are about traffic management.

On remote hilltops at night, you can see the lights coming from the caravans of settlers who see themselves as Jewish pioneers. Olive groves, orchards and vineyards owned by Palestinian farmers along the road network are often overgrown, sometimes dotted with piles of rubble left from buildings Israel has demolished.

Controlling the land around the roads is necessary, Israel says, to stop attacks on Jews in the West Bank.

Farmers in areas under settler pressure often need military permission to visit their land, sometimes just once a year.

Palestinian farmers going about their business in vans or on donkeys used to be a common sight. In many parts of the West Bank, you just do not see them anymore, especially in places like the settlements east of Shiloh on the road to Nablus, where small groups of shacks and caravans on hilltops have connected up into sprawling residential hubs linked by sinuous road networks.

When first I reported on settlements, Israeli leaders would often say that national security depended on them. Enemies lurked across the Jordan valley, and pushing out the frontier, building the land, was a Zionist imperative.

Just like the kibbutz movement of collective farms in the 1920s and 1930s inside present-day Israel, settlements in the occupied territories after 1967 were strategically placed as a first line of defence.

In this conflict, land is a vital commodity.

Trading land taken by Israel in 1967 for peace with Palestinians who wanted it for a state was at the heart of the Oslo peace process that ended in violence but provided a false dawn of hope in the 1990s.

There were headlines around the world when, after months of secret negotiations in Norway in 1993, there was a handshake on the White House lawn between Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. They had signed a declaration of principles that was hoped would lead to the end of the conflict. Israel would relinquish occupied land to Palestinians. In return, they would drop their claim to territory they had lost when Israel declared independence in 1948.

The argument at the heart of their conflict across the 20th Century, about who controlled land they both wanted, would be solved by splitting it.

After a final disastrous summit at Camp David in 2000, the hopes of 1993 were replaced by the deadly violence of a Palestinian uprising and a massive military response from Israel.

Part of the reason why the peace process failed was that other forces, outside the talks, were at work.

Hamas never dropped its belief that the entire land of Palestine was an Islamic possession and used suicide attacks to discredit the notion that peace was possible.

Among religious Zionists in Israel, the victory in 1967 had supercharged a wave of messianism – the belief that a divine being was coming who would redeem the Jewish people.

It electrified the settler movement.

Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish extremist brought up in Herzliya on the Mediterranean coast who spent weekends at settlements in the West Bank. During his first interrogation by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, he asked for a drink so he could toast the fact that he had saved the Jewish people from a disastrous path that denied the will of God.

Today, the messianic idea grips settlers like Simcha more powerfully than ever.

They believe the victory in 1967 was a miracle granted by God, that restored to the Jewish people the ancestral lands that he had given them in the mountain heartland of Judea and Samaria – the area that much of the rest of the world calls the West Bank. Some believe events since 7 October have extended the miracle.

Last summer, the Minister for Settlements and National Missions, Orit Strock, put it like this to a sympathetic audience at an outpost in the Hebron hills, the area where Simcha operates.

“From my point of view, this is like a miracle period,” she said. “I feel like someone standing at a traffic light, and then it turns green.”

Minister Strock was speaking a few days before the ICJ issued its opinion.

She made her remarks at a settlement in the Hebron hills that the government had just “legalised”.

Israeli law distinguishes between “legal” settlements and “illegal” outposts – a distinction that is in practice being blurred by the government’s actions.

Outposts rebranded as “young settlements” are being retrospectively legalised as the government directs funds towards them.

At a ceremony in one of them in the south Hebron Hills in April this year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose powers over the running of the occupation also make him something like the governor of the West Bank, donated 19 all-terrain vehicles to the settlers. He praised them for “grabbing massive territories”.

A sharp-eyed reporter at the Times of Israel pointed out that one of the settlers at the ceremony, Yinon Levi, had been filmed harassing Palestinians from an all-terrain vehicle. Levi is sanctioned by the UK and the European Union for using violence to drive Palestinians off their land, though President Trump lifted similar sanctions imposed by Joe Biden.

Levi is radical settler royalty, married to the daughter of Noam Federman – a notorious extremist. Federman is a former leader of the Kach party, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the European Union and others.

On 28 July this year, Yinon Levi fired a bullet that killed Odeh Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist, during a disturbance in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair. Levi pleaded self-defence and was released after three days of house arrest.

When we went to Umm al-Khair, Hathaleen’s dried blood was still at the place where he was killed.

His brother, Khalil, told me the dead man was holding his five-year-old son, Watan, and filming the violent scenes on his phone when he was killed.

The settlement movement in the West Bank has powered ahead since 7 October, under the direction of hardline Jewish nationalists in the cabinet, men like Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, who is Strock’s leader in the Religious Zionist Party.

Ben Gvir was not drafted by the IDF when he turned 18, because of his extreme beliefs. He claims he campaigned to serve.

The two ministers are very different people to the secular politicians – retired generals like Yigal Allon from the Israeli left and Ariel Sharon from the right – two men who drove the settlement movement forward in its first two decades after 1967.

Just like Allon and Sharon, they believe that security requires power.

But for Smotrich, Ben Gvir and their followers, that is underpinned by the certainty of religious belief.

The influence they have acquired in return for supporting Netanyahu and keeping him in power continues to frustrate and enrage secular Israel.

Smotrich’s Israeli opponents use the word “messianic” as term of abuse when they talk about him.

Allon and Sharon could be ruthless. After the 1967 war, Allon advocated the annexation of large parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Neither man believed they were doing the will of God.

Hamas uses religion to justify its violent opposition to the existence of Israel. Religious Zionists in the settler movement believe they are doing God’s will.

Belief in a direct connection with God does not guarantee war. But it makes the compromises necessary for peace hard to achieve.

We arranged to meet Yehuda Shaul at the road junction next to Sinjel. He is one of Israel’s most prominent opponents of the occupation.

Shaul founded an organisation called Breaking the Silence after, as a soldier, he saw first-hand the inherently brutal realities of a military occupation that has lasted almost 60 years.

Fellow Israelis have branded supporters of Breaking the Silence, which he no longer leads, as traitors many times.

Israeli military crackdowns since the October attacks have reduced Palestinian violence against settlers, while settler attacks on Palestinians have grown sharply.

Shaul says that the line between settlers and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has become blurred.

The war in Gaza has required the longest mobilisation of military reservists – the backbone of the IDF – in Israel’s history. To get more Israelis into uniform, brigades in the West Bank have formed regional defence units made up of settlers.

“Now the settlers are the military. In the military are the settlers. So that settler on the hilltop nearby a Palestinian herding community that was beating them up and throwing stones for the past two three or four years, trying to get him out, now is the soldier or the officer in uniform with a gun responsible for the area.

“So when he comes to a Palestinian and says, ‘you have 24 hours to pack up and leave or I’m going to shoot you,’ the Palestinian knows there is nothing to protect him.”

Shaul believes Israel has two choices left. One direction, he argues, is “the vector that this government is writing, displacement, abuse, killing, destroying Palestinian life, ultimately, writing a vector to mass population transfer”.

“Or, it is two states where Palestine resides besides Israel and both peoples here have rights and dignity. These are the only two options in our cards. Now you and anyone who watches us, need to choose which one you support.”

He uses language about Netanyahu’s conduct of the Gaza war since 7 October that is rare in Israel but common among Palestinians and increasingly heard among Israel’s critics in Europe.

This is part of our conversation, in the shadow of the steel and razor wire between the village of Sinjel and Road 60 – the West Bank’s main highway.

He says: “I think while we see a war of extermination in Gaza… we see a massive campaign by the state and the settlers… to basically ethnically cleanse as much land of the West Bank from Palestinians.”

I reply: “Of course, if Netanyahu was here, any of his supporters, they’d say, ‘what a load of rubbish. This is about Israeli security against terrorism and attacks on Jews.’ What do you make of that?”

He responds: “I actually believe that if 7 October taught us one thing it is, if you really care about protecting Israelis and Palestinian life, you need to take care of the root causes of the violence: decades of brutal military occupation, displacement of Palestinians and a conflict that is going on for about 100 years.

“Ultimately, the security protection, the sustainability of Jewish self-determination in this land, is interlinked and intertwined with achieving self-determination rights and equality for Palestinians.”

A man in Austria has jumped on to a high-speed train after apparently being left behind at a station stop.

According to local media reports, the man, an Algerian aged 24, is reported to have decided to take advantage of a scheduled stop a St Poelten, 64km (60 miles) west of the capital Vienna, for a cigarette break.

It was too late by the time he realised the train had started pulling out of the station, but he took the decision to climb on to the space between two carriages, anyway.

He started banging on the windows to alert fellow passengers before an emergency stop was performed to allow him on board.

He had a heated argument with the train conductor, Austrian tabloid Heute said.

The service from Zurich, Switzerland, to Vienna arrived with a seven minute delay, a spokesman for Austrian rail (OBB) told AFP news agency.

“It is irresponsible, this kind of thing usually ends up with someone dying,” he said.

The man has been arrested.

A similar incident occurred in January in Germany when a passenger – this time a fare-dodger – clung to the outside of a German high-speed train.

The man, a Hungarian national, told police he had left his luggage on the train during his cigarette break and did not want to be parted from it.

A British backpacker has pleaded guilty to killing a man in Australia after hitting him while riding an e-scooter with an alcohol level more than three times the legal limit.

Alicia Kemp, 25, from Redditch, Worcestershire, had been drinking with a friend on a Saturday afternoon in May when she was kicked out of a bar because the two of them were drunk, the court heard earlier.

The pair hired an e-scooter in the evening, and Kemp was driving at speeds of 20 to 25km/h (12 to 15mph) when she hit 51-year-old Thanh Phan from behind on a pavement in Perth’s city centre.

The father-of-two hit his head on the pavement and died in hospital from a brain bleed two days later.

Kemp’s passenger was also hurt in the crash – sustaining a fractured skull and broken nose – but her injuries were not life-threatening.

In Perth’s Magistrates Court on Monday, Kemp – appearing via video link – pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death while intoxicated. The charge carries a maximum 20-year prison term.

Prosecutors dropped a second charge of dangerous driving causing bodily harm to her passenger.

Earlier, the court heard that Kemp’s blood alcohol content level was 0.158 after the crash, more than three times the legal limit of 0.05 in Australia.

Prosecutors said CCTV footage showed Kemp’s “inexplicably dangerous” riding before she struck Mr Phan, who was waiting to cross the road.

In a statement from Mr Phan’s family earlier this year, the structural engineer was described as a beloved husband, father, brother and dear friend.

Kemp’s lawyer Michael Tudori said she was relieved after pleading guilty and hoped to be sentenced before Christmas, according to local media.

“You could see she was ready to say those words, you know, she’s obviously done something stupid,” Mr Tudori told the ABC.

Kemp, who was in Western Australia on a working holiday visa, will remain in custody until her sentencing.

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A man missing for more than a week in the vast wilderness of Canada’s province of British Columbia has been found after etching the word “help” on a rock and drawing “SOS” in the mud.

Andrew Barber was rescued by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on 8 August – nine days after the 39-year-old was reported missing – after a helicopter spotted his truck on a forest road, which helped narrow the search.

Police say he was severely dehydrated and had a leg injury but used a number of tactics to survive, including building a shelter and drinking pond water.

Staff Sgt Brad McKinnon of the Williams Lake RCMP said Mr Barber is doing “quite well”.

He was reported missing on 31 July near McLeese Lake, some 365 miles (587km) north of Vancouver, where his truck had broken down.

A police helicopter spotted Mr Garber near his makeshift shelter on Friday after catching a glimpse of the truck.

“After over a week in the wilderness, our subject has been located alive during today’s search from the air,” Quesnel Search & Rescue, an area volunteer search and rescue group posted on Facebook.

“This outcome is the result of countless hours on the ground and in the air, using every resource and piece of technology available to us.”

An image shared by the rescue group shows the shelter Mr Barber built for himself out of sticks and mud. It was propped up against the rock where he used dirt to write “help”.

He was taken to hospital for treatment and has since been released.

Mr McKinnon told the Canadian Press news agency that Mr Barber “munched on whatever he could find” while he was in the woods.

“He was literally slurping unclean pond water to stay hydrated,” he said. “The human body can go a long time without food, but water is a different situation.”

Bob Zimmerman, president of Quesnel Search and Rescue, told CBC News that he wasn’t sure Mr Barber “would have made it another 24 hours without us recovering him”.

South Korea’s military has shrunk to about 450,000 people – a decline of 20% over the last six years, according to a defence ministry report released by a ruling party lawmaker on Sunday.

Authorities say the main reason behind the decline is the country’s dismal birth rate, which at 0.75 babies per woman is the world’s lowest.

South Korea retains compulsory military service mainly because the country is still technically at war with its nuclear-armed neighbour North Korea.

A study published by South Korean researchers in July had suggested that the country would need at least 500,000 soldiers to defend against an attack from the North, which is believed to have 1.3 million active-duty members.

The difference in military sizes put South Korea in a “structurally difficult position to succeed in defence”, the study said.

It also noted that South Korea needed “decisive action at the national level” to maintain at least 500,000 troops.

The number of divisions in South Korea’s military has dropped from 59 to 42 since 2006 – with units having either disbanded or merged with one another – according to the defence ministry report sent to Democratic Party lawmaker Choo Mi-ae, who made it public on Sunday.

South Korea has been increasing its defence budget in response to rising geopolitical tensions in the region. Its defence budget for 2025 stands at more than 60 trillion won ($43bn; £32bn) – more than North Korea’s GDP.

In South Korea, all able-bodied men are required to serve 18 months of military service, although rare exceptions are made – and deferments are sometimes granted.

Military service is unpopular with many men in the country, with some critics arguing that the system disrupts the careers of young men. The debate surrounding the issue has also become inextricably linked to conversations around gender equality.

Some conservatives have argued that female citizens should also be conscripted amid the country’s looming demographic crisis.

The country has repeatedly broken its own record for having the world’s lowest birth rate: 0.98 babies per woman in 2018, 0.84 in 2020, 0.72 in 2023 and 0.75 in 2024. If this trend continues, experts warn the country’s population of 50 million could halve in 60 years.

A French nuclear plant temporarily shut down on Monday due to a “massive and unpredictable presence of jellyfish” in its filters, its operator said.

The swarm clogged up the cooling system and caused four units at the Gravelines nuclear power plant to automatically switch off, energy group EDF said.

The site in northern France was shut after the incident, with its remaining two units already down for maintenance.

EDF said there had been “no impact on the safety of the facilities, the safety of personnel, or the environment”.

It added that the fish were found “in the non-nuclear part of the facilities”.

“The plant teams are mobilised and are currently carrying out the necessary diagnostics and interventions to be able to restart the production units safely,” EDF said in a statement.

About 70% of France’s electricity comes from nuclear energy, according to the World Nuclear Association (WNA), and Gravelines is one of the country’s largest power plants.

Situated between Dunkirk and Calais, its six units each produce 900 megawatts of power.

It is cooled from a canal connected to the North Sea – where several species of jellyfish are native and can be seen around the coast when the waters are warm.

According to nuclear engineer Ronan Tanguy, the marine animals managed to slip through systems designed to keep them out because of their “gelatinous” bodies.

“They were able to evade the first set of filters then get caught in the secondary drum system,” he told the BBC.

Mr Tanguy, who works at the WNA, said this will have created a blockage which reduced the amount of water being drawn in, prompting the units to shut down automatically as a precaution.

He stressed that the incident was a “non-nuclear event” and more a “nuisance” for the on-site team to clean up.

For local people, there would be no impact on their safety or how much energy they could access: “They wouldn’t perceive it as any different to any other shut-down of the system for maintenance.”

Jellyfish have caused similar problems at power stations in the past, including at the Torness nuclear plant in 2011 and Sweden’s Oskarshamn plant in 2013, but such cases are rare.

Jellyfish expert Ruth Chamberlain said the incident was unsurprising given the scorching temperatures western Europe has seen this summer.

Not only are jellyfish at their most active in the warmer months, she said, but hot weather increases plankton levels at the water’s surface, drawing the fish “up from the depths”.

The marine biologist added that most jellyfish are “very weak swimmers”, meaning they would have struggled to steer clear of the plant’s cooling system.

“They rely on the flow of water, the current… it’s not like if they get stuck on something they can swim off.”

US President Donald Trump has picked an economist at a conservative think tank to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), after firing its previous commissioner this month following weaker-than-expected jobs data.

The president said he was nominating EJ Antoni, a federal budget analyst with the Heritage Foundation, to be commissioner of one of America’s most important economic institutions.

“Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” he posted on Truth Social.

Earlier in August Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, claiming she “rigged” jobs figures to make him look bad – an accusation rejected by several other economists.

The US Senate, which is controlled by Trump’s fellow Republicans, needs to confirm the appointment.

Antoni has previously criticised the BLS, questioning its methodology and calling its statistics “phoney baloney”.

Last November, he said in a post on X that the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) “needs to take a chainsaw to the BLS”.

The bureau is currently led by Acting Commissioner Commissioner William Watrowski, who has worked there for decades.

McEntarfer was fired after BLS figures this month showing that employers in the US added just 73,000 jobs in July, far below forecasts of 109,000 new roles, stoked alarm about Trump’s tariff policy.

The agency also revised down employment growth in May and June, reporting 250,000 fewer jobs than previously thought. It was the largest downward revision in employment figures – apart from the Covid-era – since 1979.

Although the revisions were bigger than usual, it is normal for the initial monthly number to be changed as more data comes to light.

The unprecedented move sparked accusations that Trump was politicising economic data.

McEntarfer worked for the government for more than 20 years before being nominated by Biden to lead the BLS in 2023.

President Donald Trump has said he will deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington DC and is taking control of its police department to fight crime.

At a press conference, he declared “Liberation Day” for the city and pledged to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse”.

However, Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has said the city has “seen a huge decrease in crime” and that it was “at a 30-year violent crime low”.

BBC Verify looks at what the figures show about violent crime in the capital and how it compares to other cities in the US.

Trump’s executive order declaring “a crime emergency in the District of Columbia” mentions “rising violence in the capital”. In his press conference he made repeated references to crime being “out of control”.

But according to crime figures published by Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police (MPDC), violent offences fell after peaking in 2023 and in 2024 hit their lowest level in 30 years.

They are continuing to fall, according to preliminary data for 2025.

Violent crime overall is down 26% this year compared to the same point in 2024, and robbery is down 28%, according to the MPDC.

Trump and the DC Police Union have questioned the veracity of the city police department’s crime figures.

Violent crime is reported differently by the MPDC and the FBI – another major source of US crime statistics.

MPDC public data showed a 35% fall for 2024, while the FBI data showed a 9% drop.

So the figures agree that crime is falling in DC, but differ on the level of that decline.

The downward trend is “unmistakable and large”, according to Adam Gelb, the CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), a legal think tank.

“The numbers shift depending on what time period and what types of crime you examine,” said Mr Gelb.

“But overall there’s an unmistakable and large drop in violence since the summer of 2023, when there were peaks in homicide, gun assaults, robbery, and carjacking.”

Trump also claimed that “murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever” in Washington DC – adding that numbers “just go back 25 years”.

When we asked the White House the source for the figures, they said it was “numbers provided by the FBI”.

The homicide rate did spike in 2023 to around 40 per 100,000 residents – the highest rate in 20 years, according to FBI data.

However, that was not the highest ever recorded – it was significantly higher in the 1990s and in the early 2000s.

The homicide rate dropped in 2024 and this year it is down 12% on the same point last year, according to the MPDC.

Studies have suggested that the capital’s homicide rate is higher than average, when compared to other major US cities.

As of 11 August, there have been 99 homicides so far this year in Washington DC – including a 21-year-old congressional intern shot dead in crossfire, a case Trump referred to in his press conference.

The president also mentioned the case of a 19-year-old former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) who was injured in an alleged attempted carjacking in the capital at the start of August.

Trump claimed “the number of carjackings has more than tripled” over the last five years.

So far this year, the MPDC has recorded 189 carjacking offences, down from 300 in the same period last year.

According to the CCJ, carjacking rose markedly from 2020 onward and spiked to a monthly peak of 140 reported incidents in June 2023.

Since July 2025, a citywide curfew has been in force for people under the age of 17 from 23:00 to 06:00.

It was introduced to combat juvenile crime – including carjacking – which often spikes in the summer months.

“The level of violence in the District remains mostly higher than the average of three dozen cities in our sample,” Mr Gelb from the CCJ told us.

“Although its downward trend is consistent with what we’re seeing in other large cities across the country,” he added.

The CCJ looks at crime rates across 30 large US cities.

Its analysis suggests that the homicide rate in DC fell 19% in the first half of this year (January-June 2025), compared with the same period last year.

This is a slightly larger fall than the 17% average decline across the cities in the CCJ’s study sample.

However, if you take the first six months of 2025 and compare it to the same period in 2019 – before the Covid-19 pandemic – it shows only a 3% fall in homicides.

Across the 30 cities in the study, that decrease was 14% over the same timeframe.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

President Donald Trump said he was deploying the National Guard to Washington DC and taking control of the city’s police force as he pledged to crack down on crime and homelessness in the city.

Trump declared a “public safety emergency” on Monday, deploying 800 National Guard troops to bolster hundreds of federal law enforcement officers who were deployed over the weekend.

“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” he told reporters at the White House.

The city’s Mayor Muriel Bowser has rejected the president’s claims about crime, and while there was a spike in 2023, statistics show it has fallen since then. Violent crime in the city is also at a 30-year low.

“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” Trump said during a news conference in which he was flanked by US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who will lead the city’s police force while it is under federal control.

“This is liberation day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back,” he said.

Trump said Washington DC had been “taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” as well as “drugged out maniacs and homeless people”.

According to data from the city’s Metropolitan Police Department, homicides dropped by 32% between 2023 and 2024 and reached their lowest level since 2019.

There has been another substantial drop this year of 12%, the data shows.

Mayor Bowser, a Democrat, acknowledged there had been a “terrible” spike in crime in 2023, which mirrored a national trend, but she pushed back against any claims of a crimewave in the city.

“We are not experiencing a crime spike,” she told MSNBC on Sunday. “The president is very aware of our efforts.”

When asked about White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s comment that Washington is more violent than Baghdad, Bowser said “any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false”.

Of the 800 National Guard troops who will be activated, between 100-200 will be deployed and supporting law enforcement at any given time, the army said in a statement.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said the National Guardsmen would arrive by the end of the week.

As well as that deployment, Trump said he would place the city’s police department under direct federal control using the District of Columbia Home Rule Act.

That act was instituted by former President Richard Nixon to allow residents of Washington DC – which is the only US city that is not in any of the 50 states – to elect a city council and a mayor.

But it also has a caveat that allows the president to take control of the city’s police force if “special conditions of an emergency nature exist”.

If the president intends to take control for longer than 48 hours, they need to provide a written notice to Congress. And even if that notice is provided, they cannot keep control of the police for longer than 30 days.

On Sunday, when asked about the possibility of the president taking control of the city’s police department, Mayor Bowser said: “There are very specific things in our law that would allow [that]. None of those conditions exist in our city right now.”

She said she was “concerned” about the National Guard enforcing local laws.

Bowser gave a news conference later on Monday in which she said the president’s order was “unsettling and unprecedented”.

She said Trump’s view of the city had been “shaped by his Covid-view experience during his first term”, which she acknowledged was “challenging times” for the district.

“It’s true we experienced a crime spike post-Covid,” she said.

“We worked quickly to put laws in place that got violent offenders off our streets,” she added. “We have seen a huge decrease in crime because of those efforts.”

As well as crime, Trump also spoke at length about homelessness in Washington DC.

“We’re getting rid of the slums,” he said, without giving further details. He said homeless people would be sent elsewhere but did not say where.

Trump added that “everything should be perfect” when dignitaries and foreign leaders visit the city.

“It’s a very strong reflection of our country,” he said. “If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty and they don’t respect us.”

Local groups working with homeless people in the capital told the BBC they had actually seen progress in recent years.

Homelessness is down almost 20% for individuals in Washington DC in 2025 compared to five years ago, said Ralph Boyd, the president and chief executive of So Others Might Eat (SOME) – a group that provides people in the city with housing, clothing and other social services.

He also said Trump’s proposal to move people out of the city was not a long-term solution.

“All it will do is transfer the problem somewhere else into communities that are perhaps less equipped to deal with it than we are,” Boyd said.

Meanwhile, outside the White House, protesters concerned about Trump’s actions gathered and chanted “hands off DC” and “protect home rule”.

“Trump does not care about DC’s safety, he cares about control,” a speaker at the event said.

The president’s actions follow a series of social media posts in recent days in which he has criticised the running of Washington DC. Trump has long complained about the city’s Democratic leadership for their handling of crime and homelessness.

He has also expressed concern for a former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) who was attacked in the city last week.

During Monday’s press conference, Trump said the employee was “savagely beaten by a band of roaming thugs” and was “left dripping in blood”.

He also mentioned other federal government employees and elected officials who have been attacked, including a Democratic lawmaker and an intern.

“This is a threat to America,” Trump said.

The first time Trump deployed the National Guard was in June, when he ordered 2,000 National Guardsmen to Los Angeles to deal with unrest over raids on undocumented migrants.

The last time the National Guard was deployed to Washington DC was in response to the Capitol riot in 2021.

US President Donald Trump has said he will try to get some territory back for Ukraine during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.

“Russia’s occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They occupied prime territory. We’re going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” he told a news conference at the White House.

He and the Russian president are due to hold talks in Alaska at the end of the week. Trump claimed that he could know within two minutes of meeting Putin whether progress was possible.

He said Friday would be a “feel-out meeting” aimed at urging Putin to end the war – suggesting he may view the summit as just an initial encounter.

• Why are Trump and Putin meeting in Alaska and when will it happen?

Trump again warned that there would be “some swapping, changes in land” between Russia and Ukraine.

It is not the first time he has used the phrase “land-swapping”, though it is unclear what land Russia could cede to Ukraine. Kyiv has never laid claim to any Russian territories.

Trump said he will update European leaders if Putin proposes a “fair deal” during the talks, adding that he would speak to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky first “out of respect”.

“I’ll call him first… I’ll call him after, and I may say, ‘lots of luck, keep fighting,’ or I may say, ‘we can make a deal'”, he said.

Trump also said that while he and Zelensky “get along”, he “very severely disagrees with what [the Ukrainian president] has done”. Trump has previously blamed Zelensky for the war in Ukraine, which was sparked by Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.

He stated that a future meeting could include Zelensky and could be a three-way session including himself and Putin.

Kaja Kallas, vice-president of the European Commission, told the BBC Putin wants to “go for the old fashioned way of…let’s divide the territories and spheres of influence” in his talks with Trump.

But she stressed that Europe has been clear it will not accept a deal Ukraine has not agreed to.

“If Ukraine is not part of the deal, any deal will just not be implemented and that is the reason why Ukraine needs to be around that table,” she said, adding that she hopes Zelensky will be invited to the meeting.

The Kremlin has always played down expectations of a meeting with Zelensky, with Putin reiterating recently the conditions to meet the Ukrainian president were still far off.

Trump announced the meeting with Putin last Friday – the day of his self-imposed deadline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire or face more US sanctions.

In response to news of the Alaska summit, Zelensky said any agreements without input from Kyiv would amount to “dead decisions”.

On Monday, he cited a report from Ukraine’s intelligence service saying there was no sign Russia was preparing to put an end to the fighting in Ukraine.

Zelensky is expected to attend a virtual meeting with Trump, US Vice-President JD Vance, and EU leaders on Wednesday.

A spokesman for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he invited the leaders, as well as EU and Nato chiefs, to discuss how to pressure Moscow ahead of Trump’s meeting with Putin.

During a phone call on Monday, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Canadian counterpart Mark Carney agreed that a peace agreement “must be built with Ukraine – not imposed upon it”, a Downing Street spokesperson said.

The two leaders will “continue to work closely” with both Trump and Zelensky “over the coming days”, they added.

No-one would want to work without getting a salary, or even worse – having to pay to be there.

Yet paying companies so you can pretend to work for them has become popular among young, unemployed adults in China. It has led to a growing number of such providers.

The development comes amid China’s sluggish economy and jobs market. Chinese youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, at more than 14%.

With real jobs increasingly hard to come by, some young adults would rather pay to go into an office than be just stuck at home.

Shui Zhou, 30, had a food business venture that failed in 2024. In April of this year, he started to pay 30 yuan ($4.20; £3.10) per day to go into a mock-up office run by a business called Pretend To Work Company, in the city of Dongguan, 114 km (71 miles) north of Hong Kong.

There he joins five “colleagues” who are doing the same thing.

“I feel very happy,” says Mr Zhou. “It’s like we’re working together as a group.”

Such operations are now appearing in major cities across China, including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Kunming. More often they look like fully-functional offices, and are equipped with computers, internet access, meeting rooms, and tea rooms.

And rather than attendees just sitting around, they can use the computers to search for jobs, or to try to launch their own start-up businesses. Sometimes the daily fee, usually between 30 and 50 yuan, includes lunch, snacks and drinks.

Dr Christian Yao, a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Management in New Zealand, is an expert on the Chinese economy.

“The phenomenon of pretending to work is now very common,” he says. “Due to economic transformation and the mismatch between education and the job market, young people need these places to think about their next steps, or to do odd jobs as a transition.

“Pretend office companies are one of the transitional solutions.”

Mr Zhou came across the Pretend To Work Company while browsing social media site Xiaohongshu. He says he felt that the office environment would improve his self-discipline. He has now been there for more than three months.

Mr Zhou sent photos of the office to his parents, and he says they feel much more at ease about his lack of employment.

While attendees can arrive and leave whenever they want, Mr Zhou usually gets to the office between 8am and 9am. Sometimes he doesn’t leave until 11pm, only departing after the manager of the business has left.

He adds that the other people there are now like friends. He says that when someone is busy, such as job hunting, they work hard, but when they have free time they chat, joke about, and play games. And they often have dinner together after work.

Mr Zhou says that he likes this team building, and that he is much happier than before he joined.

In Shanghai, Xiaowen Tang rented a workstation at a pretend work company in Shanghai for a month earlier this year. The 23-year-old graduated from university last year and hasn’t found a full-time job yet.

Her university has an unwritten rule that students must sign an employment contract or provide proof of internship within one year of graduation; otherwise, they won’t receive a diploma.

She sent the office scene to the school as proof of her internship. In reality, she paid the daily fee, and sat in the office writing online novels to earn some pocket money.

“If you’re going to fake it, just fake it to the end,” says Ms Tang.

Dr Biao Xiang, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, says that China’s pretending to work trend comes from a “sense of frustration and powerlessness” regarding a lack of job opportunities.

“Pretending to work is a shell that young people find for themselves, creating a slight distance from mainstream society and giving themselves a little space.”

The owner of the Pretend To Work Company in the city of Dongguan is 30-year-old Feiyu (a pseudonym). “What I’m selling isn’t a workstation, but the dignity of not being a useless person,” he says.

He himself has been unemployed in the past, after a previous retail business that he owned had to close during the Covid pandemic. “I was very depressed and a bit self-destructive,” he recalls. “You wanted to turn the tide, but you were powerless.”

In April of this year he started to advertise Pretend To Work, and within a month all the workstations were full. Would-be new joiners have to apply.

Feiyu say that 40% of customers are recent university graduates who come to take photos to prove their internship experience to their former tutors. While a small number of them come to help deal with pressure from their parents.

The other 60% are freelancers, many of whom are digital nomads, including those working for big ecommerce firms, and cyberspace writers. The average age is around 30, with the youngest being 25.

Officially, these workers are referred to as “flexible employment professionals”, a grouping that also includes ride-hailing and trucker drivers.

Over the longer term Feiyu says it is questionable whether the business will remain profitable. Instead he likes to view it more as a social experiment.

“It uses lies to maintain respectability, but it allows some people to find the truth,” he says. “If we only help users prolong their acting skills we are complicit in a gentle deception.

“Only by helping them transform their fake workplace into a real starting point can this social experiment truly live up to its promise.”

Mr Zhou is now spending most of his time improving his AI skills. He says he’s noticed that some companies are specifying proficiency in AI tools when recruiting. So he thinks gaining such AI skills “will make it easier” for him to find a full-time job.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have announced they are extending their deal for films and TV shows with Netflix.

This has been described as a “multi-year, first look deal”, which would give Netflix a first option on proposals from Prince Harry and Meghan’s Archewell production company.

It’s a looser arrangement than their previous deal – but it disproves claims that the Sussexes and Netflix are going to completely part company.

Meghan said that she and Harry were inspired by the partnership with Netflix to “create thoughtful content across genres that resonates globally, and celebrates our shared vision”.

It’s not known how many years the deal is set to last or what financial arrangement is attached. The previous deal, launched in 2020, was believed to be worth about $100m (£75m).

The announcement comes ahead of the second series of the cookery show, With Love, Meghan, being screened later this month.

Audience figures from Netflix showed the first series was not even in the streaming service’s top 300 most popular shows in the first half of 2025.

With Love, Meghan, a lifestyle series which showed Meghan cooking with celebrity friends, had 5.3 million views. In comparison, the most-watched programme on Netflix during that time was the drama Adolescence with 145 million views.

A previous Netflix documentary, Harry & Meghan, recounting the couple’s departure from their lives as “working royals”, had a bigger audience, with 23.4 million views following its launch in December 2022.

Archewell has also announced a special Christmas season edition of With Love, Meghan, which invites viewers to “join Meghan in Montecito for a magical holiday celebration”.

With Love, Meghan has been accompanied by a food and drink range, called As Ever, which includes rosé wine and jams.

And there will be a show on Netflix later this year, with Harry and Meghan as producers, called Masaka Kids, A Rhythm Within, about an orphanage in Uganda being a beacon of hope in a situation “where the shadows of the HIV/Aids crisis linger”.

Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, said: “Harry and Meghan are influential voices whose stories resonate with audiences everywhere.

“The response to their work speaks for itself – Harry & Meghan gave viewers an intimate look into their lives and quickly became one of our most-watched documentary series.”

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India’s top court has ordered authorities in Delhi and its suburbs to move all stray dogs from streets to animal shelters.

The court expressed concerns over rising “menace of dog bites leading to rabies” and gave an eight-week deadline to officials to finish the task.

Delhi’s stray dog population is estimated at one million, with suburban Noida, Ghaziabad, and Gurugram also seeing a rise, municipal sources say.

India has millions of stray dogs and the country accounts for 36% of the total rabies-related deaths in the world, according to the World Health Organization.

• Do India’s stray dogs kill more people than terror attacks?

“Infants and young children, not at any cost, should fall prey to rabies. The action should inspire confidence that they can move freely without fear of being bitten by stray dogs,” legal news website Live Law quoted the court as saying on Monday.

The court took up the issue following reports of increasing dog bites in Delhi and other major cities.

The court directed that multiple shelters be established across Delhi and its suburbs, each capable of housing at least 5,000 dogs. These shelters should be equipped with sterilisation and vaccination facilities, as well as CCTV cameras.

The court ruled sterilised dogs must not be released in public areas, despite current rules requiring their return to the capture site.

It also ordered that a helpline should be set up within a week to report dog bites and rabies cases.

Animal welfare groups, however, have voiced strong concerns over the court’s directive. They said that the timeline set up by the court was unrealistic.

“Most Indian cities currently do not have even 1% of the capacity [needed] to rehabilitate stray dogs in shelters,” said Nilesh Bhanage, founder of PAWS, a prominent animal rights group.

“If the court and the authorities actually want to end the menace, they should focus on strengthening the implementation of the existing regulations to control dog population and rabies – they include vaccination, sterilisation and efficient garbage management.”

Government data shows that there were 3.7 million reported cases of dog bites across the country in 2024.

Activists say the true extent of rabies-related deaths is not fully known.

The World Health Organization says that “the true burden of rabies in India is not fully known; although as per available information, it causes 18,000-20,000 deaths every year”.

On the other hand, according to data submitted in the parliament by the Indian government, 54 rabies deaths were recorded in 2024, up from 50 in 2023.

US President Donald Trump has picked an economist at a conservative think tank to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), after firing its previous commissioner this month following weaker-than-expected jobs data.

The president said he was nominating EJ Antoni, a federal budget analyst with the Heritage Foundation, to be commissioner of one of America’s most important economic institutions.

“Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” he posted on Truth Social.

Earlier in August Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, claiming she “rigged” jobs figures to make him look bad – an accusation rejected by several other economists.

The US Senate, which is controlled by Trump’s fellow Republicans, needs to confirm the appointment.

Antoni has previously criticised the BLS, questioning its methodology and calling its statistics “phoney baloney”.

Last November, he said in a post on X that the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) “needs to take a chainsaw to the BLS”.

The bureau is currently led by Acting Commissioner Commissioner William Watrowski, who has worked there for decades.

McEntarfer was fired after BLS figures this month showing that employers in the US added just 73,000 jobs in July, far below forecasts of 109,000 new roles, stoked alarm about Trump’s tariff policy.

The agency also revised down employment growth in May and June, reporting 250,000 fewer jobs than previously thought. It was the largest downward revision in employment figures – apart from the Covid-era – since 1979.

Although the revisions were bigger than usual, it is normal for the initial monthly number to be changed as more data comes to light.

The unprecedented move sparked accusations that Trump was politicising economic data.

McEntarfer worked for the government for more than 20 years before being nominated by Biden to lead the BLS in 2023.

A Chinese warship ploughed into its own coast guard vessel on Monday while the latter was chasing a Philippine vessel in the South China Sea, Manila said.

Philippine coast guard officials were distributing aid to fishermen in the disputed Scarborough Shoal, Commodore Jay Tarriela said, when the Chinese coast guard “performed a risky manoeuvre” which inflicted “substantial damage” on the Chinese warship’s forward deck.

China confirmed that a confrontation took place and accused the Philippines of “forcibly intruding” into Chinese waters, but did not mention the collision.

The South China Sea is at the centre of a territorial dispute between China, the Philippines and other countries.

Tensions between Beijing and Manila have sharply escalated in recent years, with each side accusing the other of provocations and altercations at sea, including some involving weapons such as swords, spears and knives.

The Scarborough Shoal, a triangular chain of reefs and rocks, has been a flashpoint between the two countries since China seized it in 2012.

Video released by Manila showed a Chinese coast guard vessel firing water cannons as it chased the Philippine coast guard ship, before slamming loudly into a much larger Chinese ship after making a sudden turn.

The collision rendered the Chinese warship “unseaworthy”, Tarriela said. It is unclear if anyone was injured in the incident.

The Philippines Coast Guard has “consistently urged” the Chinese authorities to respect international conventions in handling territorial disputes, “especially considering their role in enforcing maritime laws”, Tarriela said.

“We have also emphasised that such reckless behaviour at sea could ultimately lead to accidents,” he added.

China’s coast guard, however, said it was acting “in accordance with the law” and took “all necessary measures” to drive the Philippine vessels away.

This is the latest in a string of dangerous encounters over the last two years as Beijing and Manila seek to enforce their claims on disputed reefs and outcrops in the South China Sea.

In December last year, the Philippines said China’s coast guard fired water cannons and “sideswiped” a government vessel during a maritime patrol near the Scarborough Shoal.

Beijing initially said Philippine ships “came dangerously close” and that its crew’s actions had been “in accordance with the law”. It later accused Manila of making “bogus accusations in an attempt to mislead international understanding”.

In June 2024, Filipino soldiers used their “bare hands” to fight off Chinese coast guard personnel armed with swords, spears and knives in the area. The skirmish led to one Filipino soldier losing his thumb, Manila said.

The bones of a British man who died in a terrible accident in Antarctica in 1959 have been discovered in a melting glacier.

The remains were found in January by a Polish Antarctic expedition, alongside a wristwatch, a radio, and a pipe.

He has now been formally identified as Dennis “Tink” Bell, who fell into a crevasse aged 25 when working for the organisation that became the British Antarctic Survey.

“I had long given up on finding my brother. It is just remarkable, astonishing. I can’t get over it,” David Bell, 86, tells BBC News.

“Dennis was one of the many brave personnel who contributed to the early science and exploration of Antarctica under extraordinarily harsh conditions,” says Professor Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey .

“Even though he was lost in 1959, his memory lived on among colleagues and in the legacy of polar research,” she adds.

It was David who answered the door in his family home in Harrow, London, in July 1959.

“The telegram boy said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but this is bad news’,” he says. He went upstairs to tell his parents.

“It was a horrendous moment,” he adds.

Talking to me from his home in Australia and sitting next to his wife Yvonne, David smiles as stories from his childhood in 1940s England spill out.

They are the memories of a younger sibling admiring a charming, adventurous big brother.

“Dennis was fantastic company. He was very amusing. The life and soul of wherever he happened to be,” David says.

“I still can’t get over this, but one evening when me, my mother and father came home from the cinema,” he says.

“And I have to say this in fairness to Dennis, he had put a newspaper down on the kitchen table, but on top of it, he’d taken a motorbike engine apart and it was all over the table,” he says.

“I can remember his style of dress, he always used to wear duffel coats. He was just an average sort of fellow who enjoyed life,” he adds.

Dennis Bell, nickednamed “Tink”, was born in 1934. He worked with the RAF and trained as a meteorologist, before joining the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey to work in Antarctica.

“He was obsessed with Scott’s diaries,” David says, referring to Captain Robert Scott who was one of the first men to reach the South Pole and died on an expedition in 1912.

Dennis went to Antarctica in 1958. He was stationed for a two-year assignment at Admiralty Bay, a small UK base with about 12 men on King George Island, which is roughly 120 kilometres (75 miles) off the northern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The British Antarctic Survey keeps meticulous records and its archivist Ieuan Hopkins has dug out detailed base camp reports about Dennis’s work and antics on the harsh and “ridiculously isolated” island.

Reading aloud, Mr Hopkins says: “He’s cheerful and industrious, with a mischievous sense of humour and fondness for practical jokes.”

Dennis’s job was to send up meteorological weather balloons and radio the reports to the UK every three hours, which involved firing up a generator in sub-zero conditions.

Described as the best cook in the hut, he was in charge of the food store over the winter when no supplies could reach them.

Antarctica felt even more cut off than it is today, with extremely limited contact with home. David recalls recording a Christmas message at BBC studios with his parents and sister Valerie to be sent to his brother.

He was best known for his love of the husky dogs used to pull sledges around the island, and he raised two litters of dogs.

He was also involved in surveying King George Island to produce some of the first mapping of the largely unexplored place.

It was on a surveying trip that the accident happened, a few weeks after his 25th birthday.

On 26 July 1959, in the deep Antarctic winter, Dennis and a man called Jeff Stokes left the base to climb and survey a glacier.

Accounts in the British Antarctic Survey records explain what happened next and the desperate attempts to rescue him.

The snow was deep and the dogs had started to show signs of tiredness. Dennis went on ahead alone to encourage them, but he wasn’t wearing his skis. Suddenly he disappeared into a crevasse, leaving a hole behind him.

According to the accounts, Jeff Stokes called into the depths and Dennis was able to shout back. He grabbed onto a rope that was lowered down. The dogs pulled on the rope and Dennis was hitched up to the lip of the hole.

But he had tied the rope onto his belt, perhaps because of the angle he lay in. As he reached the lip, the belt broke and he fell again. His friend called again, but this time Dennis didn’t reply.

“That’s a story I shall never get over,” says David.

The base camp reports about the accident are business-like.

“We heard from Jeff […] that yesterday Tink fell down a crevasse and was killed. We hope to return tomorrow, sea ice permitting,” it continues.

Mr Hopkins explains that another man, called Alan Sharman, had died weeks earlier, and the morale was very low.

“The sledge has got back. We heard the sad details. Jeff has badly bitten frostbitten hands. We are not taking any more risks to recover,” the report reads the day after the accident.

Reading the reports again, Mr Hopkins discovered that earlier in the season, it had been Dennis who’d made the coffin for Alan Sharman.

“My mother never really got over it. She couldn’t handle photographs of him and couldn’t talk about him,” David says.

He recalls that two men on Dennis’s base visited the family, bringing a sheepskin as a gesture.

“But there was no conclusion. There was no service; there was no anything. Just Dennis gone,” David says.

About 15 years ago, David was contacted by Rod Rhys Jones, chair of the British Antarctic Monument Trust.

Since 1944, 29 people have died working on British Antarctic Territory on scientific missions, according to the trust.

Rod was organising a voyage for relatives of some of the 29 to see the spectacular and remote place where their loved ones had lived and died.

David joined the expedition, called South 2015.

“The captain stopped at the locations and give four or five hoots of the siren,” he says.

The sea-ice was too thick for David to reach his brother’s hut on King George Island.

“But it was very, very moving. It lifted the pressure, a weight off my head, as it were,” he says.

It gave him a sense of closure.

“And I thought that would be it,” he says.

But on 29 January this year, a team of Polish researchers working from the Henryk Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station stumbled across something practically on their doorstep.

Dennis had been found.

Some bones were in the loose ice and rocks deposited at the foot of Ecology Glacier on King George Island. Others were found on the glacier surface.

The scientists explain that fresh snowfall was imminent, and they put down a GPS marker so their “fellow polar colleague” would not be lost again.

A team of scientists made up of Piotr Kittel, Paulina Borówka and Artur Ginter at University of Lodz, Dariusz Puczko at the Polish Academy of Sciences and fellow researcher Artur Adamek carefully rescued the remains in four trips.

It is a dangerous and unstable place, “criss-crossed with crevasses”, and with slopes of up to 45 degrees, according to the Polish team.

Climate change is causing dramatic changes to many Antarctic glaciers, including Ecology Glacier, which is undergoing intense melting.

“The place where Dennis was found is not the same as the place where he went missing,” the team explains.

“Glaciers, under the influence of gravity, move their mass of ice, and with it, Dennis made his journey,” they say.

Fragments of bamboo ski poles, remains of an oil lamp, glass containers for cosmetics, and fragments from military tents were also collected.

“Every effort was made to ensure that Dennis could return home,” the team say.

“It’s an opportunity to reassess the contribution these men made, and an opportunity to promote science and what we’ve done in the Antarctic over many decades,” adds Rod Rhys Jones.

David still seems overwhelmed by the news, and repeats how grateful he is to the Polish scientists.

“I’m just sad my parents never got to see this day,” he says.

David will soon visit England where he and his sister, Valerie, plan to finally put Dennis to rest.

“It’s wonderful; I’m going to meet my brother. You might say we shouldn’t be thrilled, but we are. He’s been found – he’s come home now.”

Unusual. Quid pro quo. Unprecedented.

That is some of the reaction to news that two of the world’s tech giants will pay the US government 15% of their revenue from selling certain advanced chips to China. Industry watchers, former government advisers, policy makers and trade experts have been giving their views on the deal.

The news comes mere months after the Trump administration banned the sale of these chips to China, citing national security concerns.

That ban was lifted in mid-July. And now it seems the US government will go a step further – becoming a part of these American firms’ business with China.

And critics argue that is both confusing and worrying.

These advanced chips are largely used for artificial intelligence (AI) applications at a time when investors are betting that AI will transform the global economy.

Last month, Nvidia – which is the world’s leading chip firm – became the first company ever to hit $4tn (£3tn) in market value.

Nvidia developed the H20 chip, and AMD developed the MI308 chip, especially for the Chinese market.

They are less powerful and therefore cheaper than both companies’ flagship chips.

But developing them was the only option for accessing the significant Chinese market after the previous administration of President Joe Biden banned US companies from exporting the most advanced chips to China because of national security concerns.

Under Trump, even the less powerful, made-for-China chips were banned.

The resumption of sales to China is a boon for both Nvidia and AMD because China is such a big market. China’s investment in AI is expanding so rapidly that analysts expect it to grow to roughly $100bn this year – a nearly 50% jump compared with last year.

“Unprecedented… I don’t know what the word is, but it’s bad,” says trade expert Deborah Elms.

Other experts say no US company has ever done anything like this before.

But Trump did do something similar in June when he approved the takeover of US Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel. That included a so-called “golden share”, a rare practice in which the government takes a stake in a business.

In this case, the White House has not said how the agreement will be implemented – such as where this money would go, or how it would be used.

More importantly, what message does it send to other US companies that see China as a key market or supplier – from Apple and Tesla to the small furniture and toymakers? Is this a tax that firms will now face for doing business with China?

The 15% cut that Nvidia and AMD have agreed to is likely to hurt their bottom line, even if they earn substantial profits from sales to China.

Chip-makers plan their operations years in advance so this could dampen investor sentiment, which depends heavily on earnings and revenue projections.

But this deal may be a part of Trump’s ongoing tariff negotiations. Just last week, he threatened 100% tariffs on foreign-made chips unless those companies invested in the US.

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick even said chips exports were being used in negotiations with China in return for access to rare-earth elements.

That part is still unclear.

A US official told Reuters that the White House did not believe the sale of H20 and equivalent chips would compromise national security – despite the fact they were previously banned on these grounds.

National security experts and some lawmakers have long voiced concerns about the US selling AI chips to China, saying that Beijing could use them to gain an advantage in AI, as well as in military applications.

But others have argued that restricting chip sales to China does not help because it spurs Chinese innovation and greater competition. Rather, they want China to rely on US tech.

The latter argument seems to have won – for now.

That may well be the result of intense lobbying from Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang. He met Trump at the White House last Wednesday, and it is thought that is when they agreed to this deal.

It was also Mr Huang’s efforts that led to the reversal of the April ban on H20 sales to China.

The agreement is something of a win for China because it does want these chips.

Analysts say leading tech companies including ByteDance, Tencent and DeepSeek bought H20s before the US cut off access in April.

And it is a win for the US government, with analysts Bernstein Research telling the BBC it could make up to $2bn from chip sales to China.

There could be a further victory for Washington, if this leads to a deal on rare-earth elements with Beijing, which currently has a monopoly over the critical minerals.

But critics of the deal say they are alarmed about how this reflects on the White House.

This “is a very different US environment from the one that we’ve had in the past,” says Ms Elms, the trade expert.

“I suppose, generously, you could call it the flexibility of the Trump White House in responding to requests.”