Five thousand miles from Alaska, and feeling left out, Ukrainians were bracing themselves on Friday for the outcome of negotiations to which they were not invited.

The talks, between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, will begin later in the day with no seat for the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Trump signalled earlier this week that “land swaps” could be on the table – largely interpreted to mean the surrender of Ukrainian land to Russia.

In Ukraine, where polls consistently show that about 95% of the population distrusts Putin, there is a uneasy mix of deep scepticism about the talks and deep fatigue with the war.

• Live updates as Trump and Putin meet in Alaska
• What do Alaskans make of the geopolitical circus arriving in their city?
• The war-ravaged Ukrainian territories at the heart of the Trump-Putin summit

“This question touches me directly,” said Tetyana Bessonova, 30, from Pokrovsk – one of the eastern cities whose future is in question if land were surrendered to Russia.

“My hometown is on the line of fire. If active fighting stops, would I be able to return?” she said.

Questions of negotiations, of land swaps, of the redrawing of boundaries were deeply painful to those who grew up in the affected regions, Bessonova said.

“This is the place I was born, my homeland,” she said. “These decisions might mean I could never go home again. That I and many others will lose all hope of return.”

The French President, Emmanuel Macron, said on Wednesday that Trump had agreed on a call with European leaders that no territorial concessions would be made without Ukraine’s approval. And Trump has said he intends to hold a second summit with Zelensky present, before anything is agreed.

But Trump can be unpredictable. He is often said to favour the views of the person he spoke to most recently. So there is little faith in Ukraine that he won’t be swayed by Putin, particularly in a one-on-one meeting.

The very fact of the closed door meeting was bad for Ukraine, said Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian MP and chair of the country’s parliamentary committee on foreign affairs. “Knowing Trump, he can change his opinion very quickly. There is great danger in that for us.”

Merezhko said he feared that, such was Trump’s desire to be seen as a dealmaker, he may have privately made advance agreements with the Russians. “Trump doesn’t want embarrassment, and if nothing is achieved, he will be embarrassed,” the MP said. “The question is, what could be in those agreements?”

Various possibilities have been suggested for arrangements that could lead to a ceasefire, from a freezing of the current frontlines – with no formal recognition of the seized territory as Russian – to a maximalist position of Russia annexing four entire regions in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Polls suggest that about 54% of Ukrainians support some form of land compromise in order to hasten the end of the war, but only with security guarantees from Ukraine’s international partners. So deep and widespread is the distrust of Russia, that many believe an agreement to freeze the frontlines without security guarantees would simply be an invitation to Russia to rest, rearm, and reattack.

“If we freeze the frontlines and cede territories it will only serve as a platform for a new offensive,” said Volodymyr, a Ukrainian sniper serving in the east of the country. In accordance with military protocol, he asked to be identified only by his first name.

“Many soldiers gave their lives for these territories, for the protection of our country,” Volodymyr said. “A freeze would mean demobilization would begin, wounded and exhausted soldiers would be discharged, the army would shrink, and during one of these rotations the Russians would strike again. But this time, it would be the end of our country.”

Across Ukraine, people from all walks of life were making very tough decisions about the reality of their future, said Anton Grushetsky, the director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which regularly polls the population about the war.

One of the toughest decisions was whether to accept the idea of giving de facto control of some Ukrainian soil to Russia, he said. “It’s 20% of our land and these are our people. But Ukrainians are showing us that they are flexible, they are telling us that they will accept various forms of security guarantees.”

According to the institute’s polling, 75% of Ukrainians are totally opposed to giving Russia formal ownership of any territory. Among the remaining 25%, there were some people who were pro-Russian, Grushetsky said, and some who were simply so fatigued by the war that they felt hard compromises were necessary.

“My belief is that the war should be stopped in any way possible,” said Luibov Nazarenko, 70, a retired factory worker from Donetsk region, in Ukraine’s east.

“The further it goes, the worse it becomes,” she said. “The Russians have already occupied the Kherson region and they want Odesa. All this must be stopped, so the youth do not die.”

Nazarenko has a son who is not yet fighting but could be called up. She said she believed that three years into the war, with hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded on the Ukrainian side alone, the preservation of life superseded all concerns over land.

“I just don’t want people to die,” she said. “Not the youth, not the old people, not the civilians who live on the frontline.”

On Friday, as the clock ticked down to the beginning of the talks in Alaska, Ukrainians were celebrating a holy day – the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is the day when she is believed to listen to the prayers of all who need her.

At St Michael’s Monastery, a church in central Kyiv, priest Oleksandr Beskrovniy was leading a prayer service for several dozen people. Afterwards, he said it was hard to find words to describe the unfairness of the coming talks, but called it a “great injustice and madness” to leave Zelensky out.

Like others, the priest recognised the grim reality facing Ukraine, he said – that it was not in a position to recapture its stolen territory by force. So some deal needed to be made. But it should be thought of less in terms of land, Beskrovniy said, and more in terms of people.

“If we are forced to cede territory – if the world allows this – the most important thing is that we gather all of our people. The world must help us get our people out.”

In his prayers on Friday, the priest did not refer directly to the talks in Alaska, he said – “no names or places of meetings”.

But he prayed for the future strength of Ukraine, he said. “On the frontline, and in the diplomatic space.”

New footage shared on social media shows the far-right Israeli minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, taunting the most prominent Palestinian prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, in his cell.

The Palestinian Authority has condemned the video. Its Vice-President Hussein al-Sheikh described it as “the epitome of psychological, moral and physical terrorism.”

The 13-second-long video clip is the first time that Barghouti has been publicly seen in years. He appears aged and gaunt.

Israel’s national security minister, Ben Gvir, tells him: “You will not win. He who messes with the people of Israel, he who will murder our children, he who will murder our women, we will wipe him out”.

As Barghouti tries to interject, Ben Gvir adds: “You need to know this, throughout history.”

Marwan Barghouti, 66, was jailed by Israel more than 20 years ago after he was convicted of planning attacks that led to five civilians being killed. He is serving five life sentences plus 40 years.

Opinion polls have consistently indicated that he remains the most popular Palestinian leader, and that Palestinians would vote for him in a presidential election ahead of the current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas or Hamas leaders.

He remains a senior figure in the Fatah faction, which dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA). He was targeted by Israel due to his leading role in the Second Palestinian Intifada or uprising from 2000-05.

The video originally surfaced on messaging groups for Ben Gvir’s supporters on Thursday but has now been reposted on his X account.

The minister says that having read how “all sorts of “senior officials”” in the PA did not like what he said, he will “repeat it again and again without apologising”.

Palestinian prisoner rights organisations say that Barghouti has been placed in solitary confinement since the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023. Last year they accused guards of “brutally assaulting” him in his cell which the Israeli prison service denied.

In response to the new video, the head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, Abdullah al-Zaghari accused Israel of seeking “to eliminate him and assassinate the leaders languishing in its prisons”.

Barghouti is one of the prisoners whose release Hamas is believed to have sought as part of an exchange deal for the remaining hostages it is holding. However, it is thought very unlikely that Israel would free him.

In the video, as Ben Gvir speaks, Barghouti – who is fluent in Hebrew – can be seen nodding and trying to break in, but the short clip ends before he does.

His wife, Fadwa, recommended to her husband’s followers that only one still be used from the video which she believed showed his strength.

Palestinians widely see Barghouti as the leader who could best unify different political factions and negotiate peace with Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and by far the dominant force in its politics, has not budged from what he believes is the essential truth about the war in Gaza.

He has given Israel – and the outside world – a consistent message since Hamas attacked Israel almost two years ago. He stated it clearly when he ordered the first big ground offensive of the war into the Gaza Strip on 28 October 2023, three weeks after the attacks, and since then he has repeated the themes many times.

“We will fight to defend our homeland. We will fight and not retreat. We will fight on land, at sea and in the air. We will destroy the enemy above ground and below ground. We will fight and we will win.

“This will be a victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of life over death. In this war we will stand steadfast, more united than ever, certain in the justice of our cause.”

His speech adopted the cadences of Winston Churchill’s rallying call in June 1940 of “we shall fight on the beaches,” after Britain’s defeat by Germany in northern France and the evacuation of more than 338,000 allied soldiers from Dunkirk.

Before Churchill told the British in his celebrated peroration that “we shall never surrender,” he had not spared them from the truth that they had suffered a “colossal military disaster”.

Hamas inflicted Israel’s worst defeat in a single day on 7 October, and the horror that it could break open the borders, and kill and take so many hostages, is still very real in Israel. It is a big factor shaping attitudes to the war, the way it is being fought, and how it might end.

Very few Israelis have ever doubted that their cause is just, but Netanyahu’s statement that they would be “more united than ever” could not have been further from the condition of Israel almost two years later.

Israel is as divided now as at any time in its history, and Netanyahu, a deeply divisive figure when Hamas attacked, is presiding over fault lines in Israel that have opened into chasms.

On the edge of the anti-Netanyahu demonstration in Tel Aviv, several hundred Israelis stood silently, each holding a placard with the name of a Palestinian child killed by Israel in Gaza.

Many of the signs had a photograph of a smiling girl or boy, next to the day they were born and the day they were killed. Children who did not have a photo were represented by a drawing of a flower.

The silent demonstrations to stop the killing are getting bigger – some are held outside airbases, where they try to catch the eye of pilots arriving for bombing raids into Gaza – but the demonstrators still hold a minority view.

Timina Peretz, one of the organisers, says they started after Israel broke the last ceasefire with Hamas on 18 March and went back to war.

“We realised how many children died just in the same week. I refuse to stay silent while it’s happening, a genocide and starvation of people…

“On the street, we’re getting a lot of good reactions, like people saying, ‘thank you’. And we have many people cursing us and [getting] really offended and upset from these images.”

I asked if they get called traitors. “Of course, they do a lot of them, they say that if we think the way we think, or we act the way we act, we should just go… to live in Gaza.

“They can’t understand how the basic idea of criticising the state is something that is rooted in democracy.”

Opinion polls taken since the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) went back to war in Gaza in March, breaking the last ceasefire, suggest that a large majority of Jewish Israelis are not troubled by Palestinian suffering in Gaza.

A sample recorded in the last three days of July by the Israeli Democracy Institute says that 78% of Jewish Israelis, who make up four-fifths of the population, believe that given the restrictions of the fighting, Israel “is making substantial efforts to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to Palestinians in Gaza”.

The pollsters also chose a more personal question, asking whether individuals were “troubled or not troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza?”

Some 79% of Jewish Israelis surveyed said they were not troubled. Meanwhile 86% of those in Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority who were asked the same question said they were very or somewhat troubled.

Netanyahu, his ministers and spokespeople insist that Hamas, the United Nations, witnesses, aid workers and foreign governments are telling lies about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

In a news conference conducted in English for the international media on 10 August, Netanyahu condemned reports of starvation in Gaza. He wanted “to puncture the lies… the only ones that are being starved in Gaza are our hostages”.

He has, for many years, equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Accounts of hunger, and IDF soldiers killing Palestinians struggling to find food that have been believed and condemned by Israel’s allies, including Britain, France and Germany, should he said be viewed in the context of the long history of the persecution of Jews in Europe.

“We were said to be spreading vermin to Christian society, we were said to be poisoning the wells, we were said to slaughter Christian children for their blood.

“And as these lies spread around the globe, they were followed by horrific, horrific massacres, pogroms, displacements, finally culminating the worst massacre of them all – the Holocaust.

“Today the Jewish state is being maligned in a similar way.”

Ms Peretz blames the Israeli media for not showing the suffering and deaths of Palestinians.

That subject went closer to the heart of the national conversation when it was raised on a popular Saturday evening television talk show hosted by Eyal Berkovic, the former West Ham United football player.

One of the regular guests was an Israeli journalist called Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps. They had been discussing, as they had previously, the suffering of the hostages and their families, and Israeli soldiers who had been killed fighting in Gaza.

Then, she told me, she felt it was her duty as a journalist to mention something that was not often spoken about on Israeli TV.

“I just [said] that the war is also killing a lot of Palestinians in Gaza, which is a very simple statement, no political point of view. There was no patience to listen to it.”

Voices were raised. Eyal Berkovic has made a name for himself as a TV host by not holding back.

Ms Elbaz-Phelps, who also works as a correspondent for French TV, recalled his response. “He said, I do not have to worry about the people in Gaza, they are my enemies. To which I responded, you can let me say that I worry about the horrific images coming out of there.

“And he said, for sure, you can finish your point. This is very representative of the Israeli public opinion.”

She defended the work of Israeli journalists. “I think 95% of what the world knows about Israel’s government and decisions is brought by the Israeli journalists,” she argues.

“But I think there is a huge difference when you talk about something and when you show something, and you will see images of Gaza from above that mainly are going to show the people how IDF is winning the war on the ground.

“You don’t have human stories, you don’t have faces… because Israelis are in pain, and the stories also are happening inside of Israel.”

Ms Elbaz-Phelps believes the reason is that Israelis are still dealing with their trauma, after 7 October.

“The word outside is covering Gaza and talking about the suffering of the population in Gaza. Which is right, but there is not, I think, acknowledgement of how much the Israeli people is living in a trauma.

“We are not in a post-traumatic area. We are in a trauma time. Hostages are dying inside the tunnels of Hamas. [People are] begging the government to find a way and make a hostage deal.

“Only when the hostages will come home, then maybe the healing can start. The pain of the Israeli public, how much they’re still on 7 October, is something that is not completely grasped outside of Israel.”

Around 20 Israeli hostages are still believed to be alive in Gaza. Israelis of all political persuasions were horrified by recent videos posted by their captors showing two badly emaciated young men in tunnels under Gaza.

Their fate is front and centre of the attitudes of most Israelis to the war.

I met the pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, who has often criticised Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in her column in the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz, in “hostage square” next to Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Since October 2023, this has been the centre of the hostage families’ campaign to get their people out of Gaza.

“The reason why the majority of Israelis consistently support ending the war is to get the hostages back,” she says.

Speaking about the lack of concern in Israel for the people in Gaza, she tells me: “It’s because a large portion of Israelis believe that the suffering has been exaggerated or even partly fabricated by Hamas.”

Israelis, she continues, are inclined to believe that the problem is the messaging. “Israelis have been obsessed with PR for a long time. They call it Hasbara.

“That inclination to blame criticism of Israel on poor public communications has gone into overdrive during the war, and [is] on steroids [in] relation to the accusations of starvation.

“The far-right wing calls it the campaign of fabrication. They think [even the way] the Israeli media is starting to cover it is amplifying Hamas’ narrative.

“But I think mainstream Israelis are sort of suppressing it because it’s too hard for them to cope with. This is the kind of thing you hear people say in private conversation.

“They are too consumed with the hostages or their own family members who are fighting in Gaza, and they just can’t handle the sense that Israel might be doing something wrong.”

Outside the secular Israeli mainstream of Tel Aviv and the cities on the Mediterranean coast, I have found few doubts about the justice of Israel’s conduct of the war.

Deep in the occupied West Bank, down a dirt road, is a Jewish settlement called Esh Kodesh, which is part of a complex of small settlements. Just a generation ago these were a collection of caravans on hilltops, but they are now well established.

Aaron Katzoff, a father of seven who is originally from Los Angeles, has created a winery and a bar called “Settlers,” which feels like a small piece of the American west. He labels his wine “liquid prophecy”.

It is a social centre, not just for his community but for an overwhelmingly right-wing and religiously observant clientele who make special journeys there.

Many of the customers were armed when I visited. A soldier with a dusty uniform sat eating a burger and drinking red wine with his M-16 cradled on his lap. Others had left their assault weapons behind the bar. A woman had a 9mm pistol in a holster strapped on over her flowery dress. The young men at the corner table were, Aaron said, decompressing after a stint in Gaza.

Aaron still does reserve duty as an IDF officer and has fought in Gaza. He has no doubts about the justice of Israel’s actions.

“Come down to a tunnel in Gaza,” he told me. “See what it means not to have oxygen and in the humidity and heat try to fight terrorists that are hiding behind women and children and shoot at you…

“It’s very easy to sit in an air conditioning room and judge people who do that, war is not easy.”

What, I asked him, about ending the war now, as so many Israelis want.

“Sometimes you can’t always get there now… You want everything to be Wonderland… but the world’s not like that.

“Things take time, and it’s sad, but that’s reality.”

In the months leading up to 7 October 2023, thousands of Israelis had been demonstrating in the streets against plans to change the judicial system in what they saw as an assault on democracy.

“This has been an unpopular government since well before the war,” argues Ms Scheindlin.

“Once the war began, by contrast to most other countries where you see a rallying of support for the government, there was a complete collapse of support.”

Enough of Netanyahu’s political base on Israel’s right wing accepts his insistence that the war cannot end until total victory over Hamas, for him to have rebuilt his poll ratings from rock bottom. But he is still trailing opposition parties.

They have pointed to evidence that they say shows he is prolonging the war to stay in office. As a private citizen he would face a national inquiry into the security failures that gave Hamas its opening on 7 October 2023.

His long running trial on corruption charges serious enough to carry a potential prison sentence would also accelerate from its current glacial pace.

Ultranationalists in his coalition, the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have threatened to topple his government if he makes any kind of deal with Hamas.

They want not just the defeat of Hamas, but the annexation of Gaza, the removal of Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish settlers.

The families of the hostages, meanwhile, have appealed to Netanyahu to do a deal with Hamas before the men still being held die.

But the prime minister, doubling down on his theme of a fight until total victory, announced a new offensive that has appalled many hostage families and been condemned by many of Israel’s allies.

Netanyahu’s plans were also opposed by the current leadership of the IDF. Its chief of staff General Eyal Zamir made it known that he opposes the Netanyahu plan for a new offensive in Gaza, reportedly telling the cabinet that it would endanger the hostages and worsen the humanitarian crisis.

Zamir was appointed in March when his predecessor resigned after falling out with the prime minister over the conduct of the war.

Now the Israeli media is speculating that Netanyahu will force Zamir to resign. One report says Zamir is convinced he’s been “marked for dismissal” for challenging Netanyahu’s plan.

The war has also widened Israel’s most bitter division, between the secular population and the religious right. Shuttling between demonstrations by secular Israelis in Tel Aviv and their religious fellow citizens in Jerusalem can feel like commuting between two different countries.

War is always painful. But for some in Israel’s hardline religious nationalist right wing, it is also an opportunity, even a time of miracles that heralds the coming of the messiah.

Orit Strock, a minister from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, said last summer that the war had turned events in their direction. “From my point of view, this is like a miracle period,” she said.

Some see an opening granted by God to transform Israel into a state ruled by the Torah, the law of God as revealed to Moses and laid out in the five books of the Hebrew scriptures.

War also can speed up their desire to change the map. They believe God gave all the land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan to the Jews.

No space can be allowed for the shrinking number of Palestinians who still believe it might be possible to make peace with Israel by creating an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in east Jerusalem.

Smotrich has said the Jewish state should be on both sides of the river Jordan, taking in Jordan and stretching up to Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Extending religious law is not government policy, nor is expanding Israel’s borders across the River Jordan. But blocking a Palestinian state is a cornerstone of the Netanyahu coalition.

And the coalition can only stay in government as long as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir agree to support it. That gives them a disproportionate influence over the prime minister.

On 6 May Smotrich laid out his vision for Gaza and the West Bank, which Palestinians want for a state. Most western governments, including the United Kingdom, see Palestinian statehood alongside Israel as the only way to escape a conflict that has lasted more than a century for control of the land Arabs and Jews both want.

Instead, Smotrich said that within six months Gaza’s population would be confined to a narrow piece of land. The rest of the territory would be “totally destroyed” and “empty”.

Palestinians in Gaza would be “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”.

In the occupied old city of Jerusalem on Sunday 3 August, many Palestinians shut shops and businesses and stayed off the streets as Israeli Jews marked Tisha B’Av.

It is a day of mourning for the destruction by the Babylonians of Jerusalem’s first Jewish Temple and of its second one by the Romans.

The area where the Temples stood later became the third holiest place for Muslims, now dominated by al-Aqsa mosque where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ended his night journey from Mecca, and the golden rotunda of the Dome of the Rock where he ascended to heaven.

To try to keep the peace in an area that is a religious and national symbol for Israelis and Palestinians, a set of laws and customs, known as the status quo, is supposed to be observed.

One rule bans Jewish prayer within al-Aqsa compound, known by Palestinians as the Noble Sanctuary. It has been flouted in recent years with the encouragement of Ben-Gvir.

On Tisha B’Av he went there himself to lead prayers, an action that in the fragile and tense holy city was seen by some as a provocative political move.

Dozens of his followers – and heavily armed police that he commands as national security minister – followed as he strode through the narrow street of the Old City, through the gates of the place Israelis call the Temple Mount.

As well as praying, he made a speech linking his presence and prayers in Jerusalem to the war in Gaza and the way he wants to change Israel.

The videos of the two starving Israeli hostages were, he said, an attempt to put the state of Israel under pressure, which had to be resisted.

“From Temple Mount – the place where we proved that sovereignty and governance can be done – from here of all places we should send a message and make sure that today itself we conquer the whole of Gaza Strip, announce sovereignty of the whole of Gaza Strip, take down every Hamas man and encourage voluntary emigration.

“Only this way will we return the hostages and win the war.”

After Ben-Gvir had left, a big crowd of his young religious supporters stayed on to pray in a long, covered arcade.

The sound of their prayers echoed off the vaulted stone roof. Two young women, Ateret and Tamar, sad about the religious commemoration but seemingly excited by the future, explained why they believed the Temple Mount was the heart of Judaism.

Ateret said the destruction of the Temples meant, “it’s like having a body, but your heart is not there.

“We just want to say that we want our hostages back. We want everybody to have peace. This is the heart of the whole world, not only our hearts. When God will be here the world will have peace.”

They explained they prayed every day for the construction of a third Temple on the site. “This is our house for thousands of years, and now we’re back here, we want our house.”

When I asked what would happen to the Muslim holy places that stand there now, they said they didn’t know.

Ateret and Tamar seemed to be gentle souls, suffused with religious fervour.

According to senior diplomatic sources, the nightmare for security services in both Israel and its Arab neighbours is that a violent Jewish extremist might try to damage al-Aqsa mosque to bring on the third temple, an act that would risk igniting the region.

On the other end of the political spectrum is Avrum Burg, a writer and strong critic of Netanyahu, who used to be one of Israel’s most prominent centre-left politicians. He was speaker of the Knesset, the parliament, from 1999 to 2003 and before that he chaired the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organisation, two venerable Zionist institutions.

Today, he is among those who do not see the war as a miraculous chance to transform the country.

Israelis, Mr Burg reflects, are “somewhere between religious excitement and psychological despair”.

There is no middle ground, he argues. “A few Israelis, a majority of government, believe that we’re living in a miraculous time. It’s an opportunity. It’s God given. It is a once in a lifetime opening in order to realign, reorganise, re-something with history.

“And so many Israelis feel and sense – what for? What does that mean? Why do I have to pay the price? It’s a meaningless war. In between, there is no Israel. Israel is a fragmented, broken, torn apart social fabric.”

That psychological despair – and anger – at Israel’s government can be found at the regular demonstrations calling for Netanyahu’s resignation.

At one, on a hot and humid night in Tel Aviv, secular opponents of the government waved the blue and white Star of David flag, chanted and banged drums until they stood silent for the national anthem.

After, they listened to speeches from retired veteran commanders of the army and the police demanding a ceasefire.

Backstage, Nava Rosalio, the organiser of many mass rallies against the Netanyahu government, spelled out their position.

“We wish to replace Netanyahu’s government, but specifically to bring back all hostages in a deal at once, ending Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, which at this point has become completely political and serving nothing but his own political survival, of Netanyahu and his partners.”

I suggested some might accuse her of repeating the Hamas position. (For more than a year Hamas negotiators have offered to return all the hostages if the IDF pulled out of Gaza and the US and others guaranteed that the Israel would not go back to war once it had its people back. Israel, however, insists that Hamas must be fully disarmed, play no future role in Gaza and that Israel would retain security control in Gaza with the freedom to decide what comes next.)

But Ms Rosalio dismissed the suggestion that a ceasefire deal could be any kind of a win for Hamas. “That’s for propaganda. We have a great army… which can stay outside of the Gaza Strip and just protect the border.

“There is no reason to stay either, unless they imagine or wish to conquer Gaza and to transfer the people of Gaza.

“We just don’t believe the excuse of we’re protecting you, the people of Israel. If you wish to protect us, you would have ended this war to allow the people of Israel to rehabilitate, for society to recover.

“We are torn from inside.”

In the last three weeks I have travelled between the two sides of Israel, from leftists in Tel Aviv silently protesting the killing of Palestinian children, displaying the “psychological despair” described by Avrum Burg, the former speaker of parliament.

But on the other side of Israel, I have witnessed an overwhelming sense that Israel should ignore the mounting pressure and condemnation by some of its allies as well as its enemies, a feeling that its actions are justified by everything Hamas did on 7 October and the continued imprisonment of Israeli hostages in brutal conditions in tunnels.

Israel’s prime minister, still backed in public by US President Donald Trump despite murmurings that he is becoming exasperated by Netanyahu’s refusal to make a hostage deal possible, is planning another offensive and accuses Israel’s allies of deep seated antisemitism.

Messianic religious Zionists who support him believe God is with them and granting miracles.

Deep in the West Bank, overlooking the Jordan Valley, Aaron Katzoff and his friends in the Settlers wine bar believe they are fulfilling the prophecies of the scriptures, as they drink wine from grapes he says proudly were grown using the methods of Biblical times.

His relaxed and happy customers believe the secular liberals protesting against Netanyahu in Tel Aviv are yesterday’s Israelis. Now, the future of their state is in their hands, and in God’s – and they are confident it will all end well.

Washington DC is suing the federal government over its takeover of the police force, after US Attorney General Pam Bondi named the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as the district’s “emergency police commissioner”.

The city’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, wrote on X that the US government had illegally declared a takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and was “abusing its temporary, limited authority under the law”.

The lawsuit asks a judge to void Bondi’s order and stop the DEA head from “assuming any position of command within MPD”.

President Donald Trump on Monday declared he would use federal law enforcement to crack down on crime in Washington.

He has since sent in hundreds of National Guard members and other federal agents to clear homeless encampments, run checkpoints and otherwise bolster law enforcement, citing a 1970s law known as the Home Rule Act that allows him to use MPD for “federal purposes” that he “may deem necessary and appropriate.”

The US Justice Department told the BBC it had no comment on the lawsuit. The case has been assigned to Judge Ana Reyes, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden. A hearing has yet to be set for the case.

Late Thursday, Bondi wrote in an order that DEA Administrator Terry Cole would assume “all of the powers and duties” of local Police Chief Pamela Smith. The chief “must receive approval from Commissioner Cole before issuing any further directives to the MPD”, according to the order.

Almost immediately, Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and Schwalb struck back, saying the order was “unlawful” and telling Smith she did not have to follow it.

In the last few days, armoured vehicles have lined up near monuments and other tourist sites, and drivers have been stopped on a popular nightlife corridor. Officials have said that, altogether, 800 troops are expected to be deployed to the district, as well as 500 federal law enforcement agents, such as the FBI.

Bowser, a Democrat, has said there is no emergency and Trump’s “unnecessary and unprecedented” move is an “authoritarian push”.

Trump is reportedly the first president to federalise the MPD, but the government has sought to intervene in DC policing before.

In 1989, then President George HW Bush provided around 200 National Guard troops to support local police during a period of chronically high crime involving crack cocaine, with the understanding they would not patrol the streets.

More recently, the National Guard was sent to protect the capitol after the 6 January 2021 attack and, before that, in response to the 2020 protests following the killing of George Floyd.

Speaking on Fox News on Thursday to announce her appointment of Cole, Bondi said federal officers had made 156 arrests and seized 27 firearms this week.

Trump has said crime has worsened in Washington DC, but analysis by BBC Verify suggests a different trend.

Violent offences fell after peaking in 2023, and in 2024, they hit their lowest level in 30 years, according to figures published by DC police.

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

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

Since taking office, Trump has also deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles in an effort to quell protests over deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At least 194 people have died in the last 24 hours in heavy monsoon floods and landslides in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Most of the deaths, 180, were recorded by disaster authorities in the mountainous Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in north-west Pakistan. At least 30 homes were destroyed and a rescue helicopter crashed during operations, killing its five crew.

Nine more people were killed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, while five died in the northern Gilgit-Baltistan region, it said.

Government forecasters said heavy rainfall was expected until 21 August in the northwest of the country, where several areas have been declared disaster zones.

In Buner, one survivor told AFP the floods arrived like “doomsday”.

“I heard a loud noise as if the mountain was sliding. I rushed outside and saw the entire area shaking, like it was the end of the world,” said Azizullah.

“The ground was trembling due to the force of the water, and it felt like death was staring me in the face.”

The chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Ali Amin Gadapur, said that the M-17 helicopter crashed due to bad weather while flying to Bajaur, a region bordering Afghanistan.

In Bajaur, a crowd amassed around an excavator trawling a mud-soaked hill, AFP photos showed. Funeral prayers began in a paddock nearby, with people grieving in front of several bodies covered by blankets.

In the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, rescuers pulled bodies from mud and rubble on Friday after a flood crashed through a Himalayan village, killing at least 60 people and washing away dozens more.

Monsoon rains between June and September deliver about three-quarters of South Asia’s annual rainfall. Landslides and flooding are common and than 300 people have died in this year’s season.

In July, Punjab, home to nearly half of Pakistan’s 255 million people, recorded 73% more rainfall than the previous year and more deaths than in the entire previous monsoon.

Scientists say that climate change has made weather events more extreme and more frequent.

An Afghan man, whose details were accidentally leaked by the UK in a major data breach, has been detained in Pakistan for imminent deportation alongside several family members, his son told the BBC.

The BBC has seen documents which appear to confirm the man was part of Afghan special forces units who worked alongside British forces in Afghanistan, known as the Triples.

The threat of deportation comes as Pakistan continues its drive to remove what they say are “illegal foreign nationals” to their countries.

But the Afghan man’s son said their case is particularly urgent, as if they are deported to Afghanistan, he fears they will be killed because of his father’s Triples association.

The Taliban government claims that all Afghans can “live in the country without any fear”. But a UN report titled “No safe haven” that was released last month cast doubt on their assurances about a general amnesty.

The man and his family initially applied to the UK’s Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) – which was set up to relocate and protect Afghans who worked with British forces or the UK government in Afghanistan – shortly after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.

The family were in Pakistan waiting for a final decision on the application – which was endorsed by the Ministry of Defence last year – when Pakistani authorities came to take them away.

The man’s son, Rayan, whose name we are changing for his safety, told the BBC he avoided being rounded up after hiding in a hotel bathroom in the capital Islamabad with his wife and baby son as several of his family members were taken to a holding camp.

“Some of my family are just children, the youngest is only eight months old, we kept begging the police to leave them.”

His brother later called from the camp to say officials informed them they would be deported, Rayan added.

“My brother told me they were kept in a room with about 90 other people, and were then singled out by name and separated,” Rayan said. “I’m so scared they will suddenly be deported.”

Rayan explained the family had been in limbo in Pakistan since October 2024, when the family had their biometrics recorded.

But they are still waiting.

“We have just been waiting with no explanation. They kept telling us to wait, and now it is too late,” Rayan said.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence said it does not comment on individual cases. “We remain fully committed to honouring our commitments to all eligible people who pass their relevant checks for relocation,” the statement added.

The situation is made more worrying by the fact the family’s details were among those of nearly 19,000 Afghans who had applied to resettle in the UK which were inadvertently leaked in February 2022. Families involved in the leak fear it has made them vulnerable.

Rayan is now terrified police will come back to detain him, his wife and their child next, and said he has been pleading with the British High Commission in Islamabad to be relocated to another hotel for protection.

Calvin Bailey, a Labour MP who worked alongside the Afghan Triples as an RAF commander, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme that the situation is “incredibly upsetting”. He said Rayan’s father and the Triples were “people that we need to help and we owe a duty to and we must ensure that they receive more than the minimum protection”.

Bailey went on to add that he hopes the government and the British High Commission is engaged behind the scenes, even though that work is not always public.

Pakistan has a long record of taking in Afghan refugees. But the government has previously said it has been frustrated by the length of time it has taken for Afghans to be relocated to other countries.

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Talal Chaudry, told the BBC it “should ask the UK authorities why they are delaying these resettlements”.

“It’s already been years,” he said. “Do you really think they will give any leniency to Pakistani nationals who are overstaying in the UK?”

Since September 2023, the year Pakistan launched its “Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan”, 1,159,812 individuals have returned to Afghanistan, according to the United Nations migration agency.

The government has maintained its policy is aimed at all illegal foreign nationals.

About three million Afghans are living in Pakistan, according to the UN’s refugee agency – including around 600,000 people who came after the Taliban takeover in 2021. The UN estimates that half are undocumented.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has called on Pakistan to “ensure that any return of Afghans to Afghanistan is voluntary, safe and dignified”.

Amid police raids and deportations this summer, UNHCR has urged the government “to apply measures to exempt Afghans with continued international protection needs from involuntary return”.

Members of Syria’s interim government forces as well as fighters linked to the former regime likely committed war crimes during sectarian violence in March that killed around 1,400 people, mainly civilians, a UN report says.

The UN Syria Commission of Inquiry said it had found no evidence the authorities in Damascus had ordered the attacks.

The violence along the coast, the heartland of the Alawite sect of Islam, exposed divisions after Islamist-led rebels ousted ex-President Bashar al-Assad in December.

It erupted as security forces were ambushed by groups loyal to the former regime, leading to clashes between government forces, largely Sunni Muslim, and Assad loyalists, mostly Alawite.

• Syria’s White Helmets step in after deadly attacks
• Bloodshed heaps pressure on Sharaa and exposes deep Syria fractures
• The civilians caught up in Syria’s complex conflict

The authorities sent reinforcements, who were also joined by thousands of fighters, and the operation turned into revenge killings of a sectarian nature.

After decades of brutality under the Assads in the mainly Sunni country, many associate Alawites, which make up around 10% of Syria’s population, with the old regime.

According to the UN commission, “acts that likely amount to crimes, including war crimes” including murder, torture, abductions, and inhumane acts related to the dead were committed by interim government force members as well as fighters linked to the Assad regime.

The commission called on the government, which launched an inquiry, to expand accountability efforts.

“The scale and brutality of the violence documented in our report is deeply disturbing,” Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, chair of the UN Syria Commission of Inquiry, said in a statement.

“We call on the interim authorities to continue to pursue accountability for all perpetrators, regardless of affiliation or rank. While dozens of alleged perpetrators of violations have reportedly since been arrested, the scale of the violence documented in our report warrants expanding such efforts.”

The report also warned that retaliatory attacks are continuing “amidst a heightened climate of fear and must urgently be addressed by the interim government”.

The commission documented “gross human rights violations” in 16 locations in Latakia, Tartus, Homs and Hama governorates populated primarily by Alawites in early March.

Perpetrators, it said, went door to door asking civilians in a majority of cases whether they were Alawite, before taking men and boys away to be executed.

Most victims were Alawite men between 20 and 50 years old, according to the report, although women and children as young as one were also killed in house raids.

Armed individuals filmed themselves committing “serious human rights violations”, it said, including severe beatings and executions, or walking alongside dead bodies.

Fearing reprisal, families were forced to keep the bodies of their loved ones inside their homes for days, or in the streets to be buried in mass graves later. Hospitals were overwhelmed as corpses piled up.

Thousands fled to neighbouring Lebanon or a Russian airbase for safety. Many survivors and Alawites have since left to other parts of Syria or sought refuge abroad, the report said.

The report concluded that the consistent patterns of targeted violence against civilians “indicates that such acts were not random or isolated”.

The commission conducted more than 200 interviews with witnesses and victims and gained access to coastal areas and affected communities.

Assad was overthrown in December after 14 years of civil war and documented human rights abuses by his regime. An interim government was formed, led by a former rebel, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

The report found the security vacuum after Assad’s ouster as well as disinformation and hate speech spread online about Alawites contributed to retributive attacks.

After clashes escalated between former and pro-government factions, other fighters, including foreigners, joined government forces mobilised to coastal regions.

The government issued statements instructing civilians not to take up arms and warning fighters against harming civilians, the report said.

Curfews were established, and in the city of Tartus, checkpoints to stop fighters entering spared the city from violence seen elsewhere.

A government inquiry, published in July, identified 298 alleged perpetrators among individuals and groups within military factions, and 265 alleged perpetrators linked to former government fighters.

Officials told the commission in June that 42 people had so far been arrested for alleged abuses. The government also said it had created a complaints office for security and police personnel misconduct cases.

The commission recommended the government strengthen its courts system to ensure justice, work on reparations for survivors, and build trust with communities, among other measures.

Sectarian violence has erupted elsewhere in Syria since March.

Last month, hundreds were reported killed in clashes in Suweida in the country’s south. Both Bedouin and Druze fighters as well as the Syrian army have been accused of killing civilians and extra judicial killings.

The government said it was aware of reports of “shocking violations” by people wearing military fatigues and told the BBC any allegations of atrocities committed by all sides would be fully investigated.

Spain is at “extreme risk” of new wildfires, the country’s prime minister has warned, as firefighters continue to battle 14 major blazes.

In a post on X, Pedro Sanchez said he expected Friday’s conditions to be “very tough again” as he posted a graphic from the national weather agency Aemet warning of extreme fire risk in the north and west of the country.

Temperatures are expected to reach as high as 40C on the Spanish north coast, after more than 1,500 sq km (579 sq miles) were devastated by the flames and seven people died.

A heatwave has scorched swathes of southeastern Europe this week, prompting wildfires in Spain, Portugal, Greece, France and the Balkans.

• Why wildfires are becoming faster and more furious

In Galicia, several fires merged to form a huge blaze, forcing the closure of highways and rail services to the region.

Avincis, the largest operator of emergency aerial services in Europe, said it had registered a 50% increase from last year in flight hours dedicated to firefighting operations in Spain and Portugal so far this season, Reuters reported.

Aemet forecasts the heatwave will continue until Monday, with temperatures of up to 44C in some areas, as well as moderate winds.

Wildfires are a common occurrence across southern Europe in the summer, but their severity can often be exacerbated by heatwave conditions.

Meteorologists say such extremes are becoming more frequent and intense due to human-induced climate change.

EU data shows that around 6,290 sq km (2,429 sq miles) of land has burnt across the bloc since the beginning of the year, with wildfires in Spain comprising about a quarter of the total.

Spain’s Civil Guard said it had arrested two men on suspicion of starting fires in Castille and León – taking the number of arson arrests to 10 since the start of June.

While weather conditions are currently favourable for wildfires, they can be sparked by barbecues, cigarette stubs or discarded bottles. Causing a wildfire is a criminal offence in Spain, even if accidental.

Spain is the fifth European nation to request assistance with fighting wildfires. In Greece, 100 sq km (38 sq miles) of land have burned since Tuesday.

On Friday, firefighters were still tackling an active front on the Greek island of Chios, three days after the blaze began, with repair teams warning it could take more than a week to restore damaged infrastructure. Much of the island is still without electricity, with some water supply issues reported in certain areas.

A very high wildfire risk has been issued for Friday for Attica, the Peloponnese, Central Greece, Thessaly, Central and Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, as well as the North and South Aegean, according to Greece’s Civil Protection agency.

Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Albania have also activated the EU’s civil protection mechanism, which allows any country hit by a disaster – both in Europe and beyond – to request emergency assistance.

Global talks to develop a landmark treaty to end plastic pollution have once again failed.

The UN negotiations, the sixth round of talks in just under three years, were due to end on Thursday but countries continued to negotiate into the night in the hopes of breaking a deadlock.

There remained a split between a group of about 100 nations calling for curbs on production of plastic, and oil states pushing for a focus on recycling.

Speaking in the early hours, Cuban delegates said that countries had “missed a historic opportunity but we have to keep going”.

“I’m hugely disappointed that an agreement wasn’t reached,” said the UK’s Marine Minister Emma Hardy.

“Plastic pollution is a global crisis that no country can solve alone, and the UK is committed to working with others at home and abroad to protect the environment and pave the way to a circular economy,” she added.

The talks were convened in 2022 in response to the mounting scientific evidence of the risks of plastic pollution to human health and the environment.

Despite the benefits of plastic to almost every sector, scientists are particularly concerned about potentially toxic chemicals they contain, which can leach out as plastics break down into smaller pieces.

Microplastics have been detected in soils, rivers, the air and even organs throughout the human body.

Countries had an original deadline to get a deal over the line at the end of December last year, but failed to meet this.

The collapse of the latest talks means they fall further behind.

Speaking on behalf of the island states, the northern Pacific nation of Palau said on Friday: “We are repeatedly returning home with insufficient progress to show our people.”

“It is unjust for us to face the brunt of yet another global environmental crisis we contribute minimally to,” it added.

The core dividing line between countries has remained the same throughout: whether the treaty should tackle plastics at source – by reducing production – or focus on managing the pollution that comes from it.

The largest oil-producing nations view plastics, which are made using fossil fuels, as a vital part of their future economies, particularly as the world begins to move away from petrol and diesel towards electric cars.

The group, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, argue that better waste collection and recycling infrastructure is the best way of solving the problem, a view shared by many of the producers themselves.

“Plastics are fundamental for modern life – they go in everything,” said Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, a trade association for the plastic production industry in the United States.

“Focusing on ending plastic pollution should be the priority here, not ending plastic production,” he added, warning that attempts to substitute plastics with other materials could lead to “unintended consequences”.

But many researchers warn that this approach is fundamentally flawed. Global recycling rates are estimated at only about 10%, with limits on how far that can rise.

“Even if we manage to boost that over the next few decades to 15, 20, 30%, it would remain a substantial amount that is polluting the environment and damaging human health,” said Dr Costas Velis, associate professor in Waste and Resource Engineering at Imperial College London.

“Therefore, we do need to improve recycling… but we cannot really hope that this is going to solve all the aspects of plastic,” he added.

Plastic production has already risen from two million tonnes in 1950 to about 475 million in 2022 – and it is expected to keep rising without extra measures.

About 100 countries, which include the UK and EU bloc, had been pushing for curbs to production in the treaty and more consistent design globally to make recycling easier.

This could be as simple as requiring plastic bottles to be one colour – when dyes are used the products only fetch half the value of clear bottles.

This approach was supported by major plastic packagers, including Nestle and Unilever, who are part of the Business Coalition headed up by the Ellen McArthur Foundation.

The Coalition also said countries should better align their schemes to add a small levy on plastic products to help pay for recycling efforts, known as extended producer responsibility.

The group estimates that could double revenues for countries to $576bn (£425bn) between now and 2040.

Talks were due to end on Thursday but countries continued to negotiate into the night in the hopes of breaking a deadlock.

The chair, Luis Vayas from Ecuador, did produce a new text which seemed to align more closely with the request of the UK group.

The text did not call for curbs to plastic production.

But it did include reference to nations taking their own steps to tackle other issues like dangerous plastic chemicals and the design of plastics to make them easier to recycle.

Speaking at the final meeting, the EU delegation said: “We see the outcome of this session as a good basis of future negotiations.”

However, the oil states remained deeply unhappy. Saudi Arabia said it found the process of negotiating “problematic” whilst Kuwait said its views were “not reflected”.

But many environmental groups, reacting to the collapse, railed against what they see as prioritisation of profit by oil states over the health of the planet.

Graham Forbes, Greenpeace head of delegation to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations, said: “The inability to reach an agreement in Geneva must be a wakeup call for the world: ending plastic pollution means confronting fossil fuel interests head on.

“The vast majority of governments want a strong agreement, yet a handful of bad actors were allowed to use process to drive such ambition into the ground.”

The chair announced that the talks will resume at a later date.

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“Putin is supposed to be in jail, and he just comes to Alaska like that.”

Hanna Correa is amongst a sea of Alaskans waving Ukrainian flags on the road leading into Anchorage.

“When I entered through that parking lot, and I see a lot of Americans, they’re supporting, it made me cry,” she says.

Ms Correa, 40, left Ukraine in 2019 for love, and six years later, the future of her country could be decided in her adopted home town.

US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to touch down at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a 30 minute drive away. Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky is not invited, something Ms Correa says is “pretty sad”.

Among those protesting against their arrival is Christopher Kelliher, a 53-year-old military veteran and Alaskan native.

“It’s gross, it makes you want to take a shower,” he says of the meeting.

“Putin doesn’t need to be in our state, much less our country. We have an idiot in the White House that will kowtow to this guy.”

• Follow live coverage of the meeting here
• Left out of Alaska talks, exhausted Ukrainians fear an unjust peace

This region’s history with Moscow gives Friday’s summit added significance. The US purchased Alaska from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2m.

Critics called the purchase “Seward’s Folly” – referring to William Seward, the US secretary of state at the time – arguing that the territory amounted to little more than a frozen wasteland. But later discoveries of rare earth minerals and abundant oil and gas put paid to that label.

Ornate churches are among the most visible symbols of Alaska’s Russian heritage. The St Tikhon Orthodox Church in Anchorage has been holding three days of prayer ahead of leaders’ arrival.

Priest Nicholas Cragle, an American who recently moved to Alaska after living in Russia for seven years, says the conflict is “particularly painful and close to the hearts” of parishioners.

“We’re hoping that this meeting will lead to something… lead to a culmination of this conflict,” says Mr Cragle.

That feeling is shared by fishermen ankle-deep in creek bed on the outskirts of town, drawn to the area by the allure of some of the world’s finest salmon.

“I think it’s a good idea [the summit], I wish Zelensky would be out here too… get this thing over with,” says Don Cressley, who lives in the Alaskan city of North Pole and is visiting on a fishing trip with his grandson.

He wants an end to the war “because of the destruction they’re doing to all the cities, all the buildings, making everybody more homeless, taking their foods away, their supplies away, their living right away,”.

Donald Trump, he says, is doing an “awesome job” in ceasefire negotiations.

While the US president often talks warmly of his relationship with Vladimir Putin, superpower tensions persist and are more keenly felt here.

Moscow’s military planes are routinely detected flying near the coast of Alaska. And in January, Canadian and American fighter jets were scrambled after multiple Russian jets were spotted in the Arctic, according to the North American Aerospace Defence Command.

That breeds a sense of unease for some Alaskans who live closer to Russia than Washington DC.

“Although the Cold War is over between Russia and the US, they’re constantly patrolling our airways,” Anchorage resident Russell Wilson tells me while fishing.

“If the president doesn’t put the hammer down, we could be the next Ukraine.”

However other Alaskans consider a return to Cold War hostilities are far-fetched fantasy.

I ask Army veteran Christopher Kelliher if he is concerned about a Russian invasion. “Not really, everybody in Alaska owns a gun,” he replies.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

US President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Friday is a blockbuster moment in world politics that calls to mind several memorable previous meetings.

These events have tended to deliver major news headlines, as well as some glimpses into the intriguing, unpredictable and much-scrutinised personal relationship between the two leaders.

Looking back at the images also gives clues as to how they might approach Friday’s head-to-head in Alaska, during which they will discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

The two bring very different approaches to private meetings, according to former officials who have dealt with either or both leaders behind closed doors.

Their first meeting came in July 2017, at a G20 summit in Germany. It was just months after Trump entered the White House, while Putin already had decades of political experience under his belt.

In front of the world’s cameras, the two exchanged warm words, and a businesslike handshake, which set the tone for a generally respectful relationship. In the years to come, the duo went on to express their mutual admiration – although Trump recently told the BBC he was “disappointed” with Putin over the bloodshed in Ukraine.

In fact, Ukraine was raised in that very first meeting, when Trump highlighted Russia’s efforts to destabilise its neighbour. Three years before, Moscow had illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Fast-forward to 2025 – with Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine into its fourth year – and Trump is eager to play the role of peacemaker by negotiating a ceasefire.

Trump said on Wednesday there would be “very severe consequences” if the Russian leader did not agree to end the war. At other times, he has taken a softer tone, and has said he simply envisages the meeting to be a “feel-out” exercise.

Trump and Putin again came face-to-face once more in 2017, at an economic forum in Vietnam. They were pictured chatting among other world leaders, and one snap appeared to show Putin talking directly into his opposite number’s ear.

Trump will be familiar with Putin’s ability to dominate conversations with lengthy, quickly spoken monologues that give his conversant few opportunities to respond, according to diplomats who described the Russian leader’s style to the BBC.

“Everything in all meetings with Putin is about power,” observed Sir Laurie Bristow, the UK ambassador to Russia from 2016 to 2020. “Who is in control of the timing, the substance, the agenda, the tone – the point is that you never quite know what you’re going to get.”

As a result, Sir Laurie said, “the interpreters can find it hard to keep up”, and it was vital from Trump’s perspective that he brought one of his own. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff allegedly relied on Kremlin translators during a meeting of his own earlier this year.

Former Trump aide Fiona Hill agreed with Sir Laurie, recalling in an interview with the Telegraph her own experiences of dealing with Putin: “He does make fun of Trump. He uses the Russian language in a way that can be quite sarcastic and ironic. It’s totally lost in translation.”

Perhaps the most overt public display of friendliness between Trump and Putin came when they met for closed-door talks in Helsinki, Finland, in July 2018.

Trump defended Russia over accusations of interference in the 2016 US presidential election, and sided with Putin over the assessments of his own intelligence agencies. The move earned him cross-party condemnation back home in the US.

The Helsinki meeting also produced a memorably informal image of Putin gifting Trump a football from the recent men’s World Cup, which had been hosted by Russia.

Such gestures on Putin’s part were always carefully calculated, according to Sir Tony Brenton, another former British ambassador to Russia. Sir Tony recalled Putin showing “Russian old-world courtesy” during meetings in which he was present in the mid-2000s, although “there was always a degree of reserve underneath it, and he was never a very spontaneous character”.

He added: “The footballs and the smiles, the jokes and that sort of stuff… he’s not naturally a ‘hail fellow well met’ guy, but he does work at it when he thinks it’s important for the relationship.”

The pair met for further G20 summits in Argentina, in November 2018, and in Japan in June 2019.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser with whom he later fell out, was present on the latter occasion. He told the BBC he was struck by the men’s differing attitudes to detail, which he put down to Putin’s training in the Soviet intelligence service.

Of Putin, he said: “I’ve never seen him any way other than being prepared, very calm, very reasonable in his presentation, and I think that’s part of his KGB training.”

By contrast, Bolton said, Trump’s approach to private meetings was similar to his press conferences in public, in that he was prone to freewheeling statements that could surprise even his own aides. “He doesn’t really prepare for them because he doesn’t really think he needs to; he doesn’t think he needs the background information. I’m sure they’re preparing briefing materials as we always did, and he won’t read them.”

Trump believed that a healthy personal relationship with another leader would mean a healthy state-to-state relationship, Bolton said – and Putin knew this. “He will use his KGB training to try and manipulate Trump. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again.”

Trump himself has downplayed expectations ahead of Friday’s meeting in Alaska, remarking: “I think it’ll be good. But it might be bad.”

• ANALYSIS: What do Putin and Trump each want from summit?
• EXPLAINER: Where in Alaska is Trump meeting Putin and why?
• VISUALS: The war-ravaged Ukrainian territories in maps
• VERIFY: Russian attacks on Ukraine double since Trump inauguration
• GROUND REPORT: Left out of talks, exhausted Ukrainians fear unjust peace

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to Friday’s summit in the US state of Alaska with contrasting priorities as they prepare for talks on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Putin has been consistent on his desire to win Ukrainian territory, while Trump has made no secret of his desire to act as a global peacemaker.

But both men may also sense other opportunities, such as diplomatic rehabilitation on the world stage on the part of Putin. Second-guessing Trump’s aims is harder, as he has recently made vacillating statements about his Russian counterpart.

Here’s a fuller look at what the two leaders might want from the meeting.

The first thing Putin wants from this summit is something he’s already been given.

And that’s recognition.

Recognition from the world’s most powerful country, America, that Western efforts to isolate the Kremlin leader have failed.

The fact that this high-level meeting is happening is testament to that, as is the joint press conference that the Kremlin has announced. The Kremlin can argue that Russia is back at the top table of global politics.

“So much for being isolated,” crowed the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets earlier this week.

Not only has Putin secured a US-Russia summit, but a prime location for it. Alaska has much to offer the Kremlin.

First, security. At its closest point, mainland Alaska is just 90km (55 miles) from Russia’s Chukotka. Vladimir Putin can get there without flying over “hostile” nations.

Second, it’s a long way – a very long way – from Ukraine and Europe. That sits well with the Kremlin’s determination to sideline Kyiv and EU leaders, and deal directly with America.

There’s historical symbolism, too. The fact that Tsarist Russia sold Alaska to America in the 19th Century is being used by Moscow to justify its attempt to change borders by force in the 21st Century.

“Alaska is a clear example that state borders can change, and that large territories can switch ownership,” wrote Moskovsky Komsomolets.

But Putin wants more than just international recognition and symbols.

He wants victory. He’s been insisting that Russia keep all the land it has seized and occupied in four Ukrainian regions (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson) and that Kyiv withdraw from the parts of those regions still under Ukrainian control.

For Ukraine this is unacceptable. “Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,” says the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Kremlin knows that. But if it secures Trump’s support for its territorial demands, the calculation may be that rejection by Ukraine would result in Trump cutting all support for Kyiv. Meanwhile, Russia and the US would get on with boosting relations and developing economic cooperation.

But there is another scenario.

Russia’s economy is under pressure. The budget deficit is rising, income from oil and gas exports falling.

If economic problems are pushing Putin to end the war, the Kremlin may compromise.

For now, there’s no sign of that – with Russian officials continuing to insist that Russia holds the initiative on the battlefield.

• Follow live updates ahead of the Trump-Putin summit
• European leaders tentatively hopeful after call with Trump ahead of summit

Trump famously promised during his 2024 presidential campaign that ending the Ukraine war would be easy and that he could do it in a matter of days.

That promise has hung over the American president’s efforts to resolve the conflict, as he has alternated between frustration with the Ukrainians and the Russians since returning to the White House in January.

He harangued Zelensky at a dramatic White House meeting in February, and later temporarily suspended military aid and intelligence sharing with the war-torn nation.

In recent months, he’s been more critical of Putin’s intransigence and willingness to attack civilian targets, setting a series of deadlines for new sanctions on the Russians and other nations that do business with them. Last Friday was the most recent deadline, and as with all the ones before it, Trump ultimately backed away.

Now he’s hosting the Russian president on American soil and talking about “land-swapping”, which Ukraine fears may consist of land concessions in exchange for peace.

So, any discussion about what Trump wants during his Friday talks with Putin is muddied by the president’s vacillating statements and actions.

This week, Trump has made a concerted effort to lower the expectations for this meeting – perhaps a tacit acknowledgement of the limited possibilities of a breakthrough with only one party in the war present.

On Monday, he said the summit would be a “feel-out” meeting. He suggested that he would know if he could reach a deal with the Russian leader “probably in the first two minutes”.

“I may leave and say good luck, and that’ll be the end,” he added. “I may say this is not going to be settled.”

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reinforced this message, calling the summit a “listening session”. But by midweek, he was once again talking up the prospects of a deal, saying that he thinks both Zelensky and Putin want peace.

With Trump, it’s often best to expect the unexpected. And Zelensky and European leaders spoke to him on Wednesday in an effort to ensure that he doesn’t strike a deal with Putin that Ukraine won’t – or can’t – accept.

One thing has been clear practically all year, however: Trump would welcome the chance to be the man who ends the war.

In his inaugural address, he said he wanted his proudest legacy to be that of a “peacemaker”. It is no secret that he longs for the international recognition of a Nobel Peace Prize.

In the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump boasted of all the global conflicts he feels he has successfully resolved since taking office in January. But when asked about the war in Ukraine, he offered a rare acknowledgement of the challenge he now faces.

“I thought the easiest one would be this one,” he said. “It’s actually the most difficult.”

Trump is not one to get bogged down in details. But if there is an opportunity for him to claim that he has made progress toward peace during the talks in Anchorage, he will take it.

Putin, always a savvy negotiator, may seek a way to let Trump do just that – on Russia’s terms, of course.

• EXPLAINER: Where in Alaska is Trump meeting Putin and why?
• VISUALS: The war-ravaged Ukrainian territories in maps
• VERIFY: Russian attacks on Ukraine double since Trump inauguration
• GROUND REPORT: Left out of Alaska talks, Ukrainians fear an unjust peace

US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Anchorage on Friday to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine.

The venue for the high-profile meeting is Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson – a US military installation on the northern edge of Alaska’s most-populated city.

White House officials have said the base satisfied security requirements for hosting two world leaders. And, during the height of summer tourism, there were few other options for the hastily arranged meeting.

Three rounds of talks between Russia and Ukraine this summer, held at Trump’s behest, have yet to bring the two sides any closer to peace.

Here is what we know about the base, and what we can expect from the meeting – as well as the key timings.

The White House has issued a schedule, although nothing has been released by the Kremlin.

At 06:45 EDT (11:45 BST) the US president is expected to depart the White House for Anchorage.

Trump and Putin are due to start discussions around 11:00 local time (20:00 BST). They will meet face-to-face joined only by their translators.

The US president is then scheduled to leave Anchorage and head back to the White House around 17:45 Alaska time (02:45 BST on Saturday).

With roots tracing back to the Cold War, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson is Alaska’s largest military base. The 64,000 acre installation is a key US site for Arctic military readiness.

Snow-capped mountains, icy lakes and picturesque glaciers frame the base, which regularly shivers through temperatures as low as -12C (15F) in winter. However the leaders can expect comparatively pleasant temperatures of around 16C (61F) on Friday.

When Trump visited the base during his first term, in 2019, he said the troops there “serve in our country’s last frontier as America’s first line of defence”.

More than 30,000 people live on the site, accounting for approximately 10% of the population of Anchorage.

Built in 1940, the base was a critical air defence site and central command point to ward off threats from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

At its peak in 1957, it hosted 200 fighter jets, and multiple air traffic control and early warning radar systems, earning it the nickname of “Top Cover for North America”.

The base continues to grow today due to its strategic location and training facilities.

• Follow live coverage of the build-up to the meeting here

The US purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, lending a historical resonance to the meeting. It became a US state in 1959.

Russian presidential assistant Yuri Ushakov pointed out that the two countries are neighbours, with only the Bering Strait separating them.

“It seems quite logical for our delegation simply to fly over the Bering Strait and for such an important and anticipated summit of the leaders of the two countries to be held in Alaska,” Ushakov said.

The last time Alaska took centre-stage in an American diplomatic event was in March 2021, when Joe Biden’s newly minted diplomatic and national security team met their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage.

The sit-down turned acrimonious, with the Chinese accusing the Americans of “condescension and hypocrisy”.

In Anchorage there are few signs of the impending high-stakes meeting, except for the international media that have descended on the area.

Journalists are rubbing elbows with holidaymakers from the “lower 48” states on visits to the Alaskan wilderness during the height of the tourist season.

Trump has been pushing hard – without much success – to end the war in Ukraine.

As a presidential candidate, he pledged that he could end the war within 24 hours of taking office. He has also repeatedly argued that the war “never would have happened” if he had been president at the time of Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Last month, Trump told the BBC that he was “disappointed” by Putin.

Frustrations grew and Trump set an 8 August deadline for Putin to agree to an immediate ceasefire or face more severe US sanctions.

As the deadline hit, Trump instead announced he and Putin would meet in person on 15 August.

The meeting comes after US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff held “highly productive” talks with Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, according to Trump.

Ahead of the meeting, the White House sought to play down speculation that the bilateral could yield a ceasefire. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described it as a “listening exercise”.

Speaking to Fox News Radio on Thursday, Trump said there is a “25% chance that this meeting will not be a successful meeting”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump would enter the meeting with the goal of reaching a ceasefire deal, but a wider peace agreement would take more time.

“To achieve a peace, I think we all recognise that there’ll have to be some conversation about security guarantees,” he told reporters at the state department on Thursday. “There’ll have to be some conversation about… territorial disputes and claims, and what they’re fighting over.”

• Trump says he will try to get back territory for Ukraine in talks with Putin
• Zelensky could still join Trump and Putin, but rest of Europe is shut out

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not expected to attend. Trump said on Monday: “I would say he could go, but he’s been to a lot of meetings.”

Trump did, however, say that Zelensky would be the first person he would call afterwards.

Trump and Zelensky met virtually on Wednesday and were joined by several European leaders.

Putin had requested that Zelensky be excluded, although the White House has previously said that Trump was willing to hold a trilateral in which all three leaders were present.

On Thursday, Trump reiterated that his meeting with Putin could lead to a second meeting which could include Zelensky.

Zelensky has said any agreements without input from Ukraine would amount to “dead decisions”.

While both Russia and Ukraine have long said that they want the war to end, both countries want things that the other harshly opposes.

Trump said on Monday he was “going to try to get some of that [Russian-occupied] territory back for Ukraine”. But he also warned that there might have to be “some swapping, changes in land”.

Ukraine, however, has been adamant that it will not accept Russian control of regions that Moscow has seized, including Crimea.

Zelensky pushed back this week against any idea of “swapping” territories.

“We will not reward Russia for what it has perpetrated,” the Ukrainian president said.

Meanwhile, Putin has not budged from his territorial demands, Ukraine’s neutrality and the future size of its army.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in part, over Putin’s belief the Western defensive alliance, Nato, was using the neighbouring country to gain a foothold to bring its troops closer to Russia’s borders.

Ultimately, Putin’s “central objective lies in obtaining… the geopolitical ‘neutralisation’ of Ukraine,” according to analyst Tatyana Stanovaya.

“It is extremely difficult to convey what is truly at stake… as people often simply cannot accept that Putin might want so much – and be serious about it. Unfortunately, he can.”

The Trump administration has been attempting to sway European leaders on a ceasefire deal that would hand over swathes of Ukrainian territory to Russia, the BBC’s US partner CBS News has reported.

The agreement would allow Russia to keep control of the Crimean peninsula, and take the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which is made up of Donetsk and Luhansk, according to sources familiar with the talks.

Russia illegally occupied Crimea in 2014 and its forces control the majority of the Donbas region.

Under the deal, Russia would have to give up the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where it currently has some military control.

• ANALYSIS: What do Putin and Trump each want?
• EXPLAINER: Where in Alaska are they meeting and why?
• VISUALS: The war-ravaged Ukrainian territories in maps
• VERIFY: Russian attacks on Ukraine double since Trump inauguration
• GROUND REPORT: Left out of Alaska talks, Ukrainians fear an unjust peace

They call it “dronocide”: new training to deal with what is now the greatest threat to a Ukrainian soldier’s life on the battlefield – drones.

These machines saturate the front line and cause the largest number of casualties, according to Ukraine. If Donald Trump can’t make Vladimir Putin agree to a ceasefire at their meeting in Alaska on Friday, then this training in eastern Ukraine might be essential to saving lives on the front.

The continuing preparation for battle suggests few in Ukraine are expecting this war to stop any time soon. The training is not especially sophisticated: their defence is a shotgun. The soldiers go through drills to hit fast-moving targets – shooting first from the ground, and then while on the move. Ihor, their experienced instructor, tells the men a shotgun is currently their most effective means to bring down a drone at close range.

Ihor has been fighting on Ukraine’s eastern front since 2014, the year Russia illegally annexed Crimea and sent troops into the Donbas region. His call sign is “The Knifer”. He also trains troops in hand-to-hand combat.

Ihor’s been trying to help stop the Russian advance for the past ten years. He bristles at any suggestion that Ukraine will have to give up territory as part of any “land swap”.

“Neither me nor my comrades are ready for this,” he tells me. He says they’d rather continue fighting until “we liberate our territories”.

That doesn’t seem likely, with some Ukrainian front line units now well below strength. One soldier told us renewed efforts to mobilise more troops had been a “disaster”. They know they’re still outgunned and outnumbered.

Ukrainian troops also admit they’re tired and losing ground. It’s an undeniable fact. But this training shows they’re not giving up.

Oleksii, one of the soldiers honing his skill with a shotgun, says he’s already lost his father and friends in the war.

He admits “the war must be stopped one way or another”. But as for the suggestion that Ukraine hands over more territory to Russia, he says: “It wouldn’t be my suggestion, I don’t like this idea.”

Ukrainian troops point out that Russia is also taking heavy losses, suffering around 1,000 casualties – dead or injured – every day. Russia’s resources are slowly being exhausted too.

The views from the front are reflected in Ukraine’s towns and cities. Civilians are also suffering the consequences of this war more directly, not least with the recent ramping up of Russian missile and drone attacks across the country. Last month Russia launched more than 6,000 drones at Ukraine. In July 2024 that figure was much lower – just over 400.

In the streets of the capital Kyiv there’s no doubt they want to see an end to the war. “If we don’t stop, we will lose even more territory and people,” Oleksandr says. He uses the analogy of gambling in a casino: “The more you play, the more you lose.”

Volodymyr, another passer-by, is downbeat about the prospect of the talks between Presidents Trump and Putin. He believes Ukraine will probably have to give up more territory in return for a ceasefire. “We don’t have the resources,” he says. “All our boys are in heaven or in hospital.”

President Zelensky has already expressed his frustration that Ukraine’s voice will not be heard in Alaska. He’s also made clear he won’t be surrendering Ukrainian territory. “It’s not my private property,” he said earlier this week. But some recent polls suggest that more Ukrainians are resigned to the fact that they might have to sacrifice land for peace.

The bottom line though is that few believe Russia really wants peace. Oleksandr Merezhko, an MP and Chairman of Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Committee, thinks the Alaska meeting is just a PR stunt for President Putin.

“Putin doesn’t have any desire to reach a compromise,” Merezhko says. “He thinks he’s winning the war. He is not going to back down.”

Merezhko also dismisses President Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine will have to “sign something”.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “I don’t believe any agreement which leads to our destruction can be imposed on Ukraine.” He says it’s both morally and legally wrong to sacrifice people’s homes for peace.

But many Ukrainians have already lost their homes and lives. According to the UN, more than 13,000 civilians have been killed in the country, while 3.5 million Ukrainians have been forced to leave their homes.

More than 500 of those displaced people are now living in a temporary village, just outside the capital. Their new homes are metal containers, rather than bricks and mortar. Many are the elderly who fled the fighting in the East. There’s a small play area for children who’ll probably never see the towns and villages they were born in. Their old homes are now in occupied territory.

The face of 78-year-old Hennadii wells up with tears when he tells me doesn’t think he’ll ever see the grave of his mother again. He tells me he still misses what he had to leave behind. “I liked fishing there, I had a small plot of land, my grapes and my walnut tree,” he says. “And now it doesn’t exist.”

No one we talk to here expresses much confidence about the talks between Presidents Trump and Putin. “I really hope there will be something good after those talks but I don’t have much hope,” says Valeria, an 18-year-old student whose family lost their home.

But 78-year-old Valentina is more defiant. Her husband was killed by a Russian missile. “This is our land and our people are dying for it,” she says. “How can we give it up? No way.”

In Alaska Presidents Trump and Putin will be talking about Ukraine’s future – without Ukrainian representation, and over their heads.

Ukraine may gradually be losing this war, but it’s not yet been defeated. That makes it harder for anyone else to force through a peace it cannot accept.

Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato’s 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years.

But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one.

“I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre,” he said, referring to the Japanese army’s six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped.

Dead To Rights, or Nanjing Photo Studio, is a star-studded tale about a group of civilians who hide from Japanese troops in a photo studio. Already a box office hit, it is the first of a wave of Chinese movies about the horrors of Japanese occupation that are being released to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. But a sense of unfinished history – often amplified by Beijing – persists, fuelling both memory and anger.

Speaking in Chinese on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, Kato recounted scenes from the film: “People were lined up along the river and then the shootings began… A baby, the same age as my daughter, was crying in her mother’s arms. A Japanese soldier rushed forward, grabbed her, and smashed her into the ground.”

He said he had seen many people on the Japanese internet denying the Nanjing Massacre had happened, including public figures, even politicians. “If we deny it, this will happen again,” he continued, urging Japanese people to watch the movies and “Iearn about the dark side of their history”.

The video quickly became one of his most popular, with more than 670,000 likes in just two weeks.

But the comments are less positive. The top-liked one quotes what has already become an iconic line from the movie, uttered by a Chinese civilian to a Japanese soldier: “We are not friends. We never were.”

For China, Japan’s brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound.

What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves “comfort women” – the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation.

In his video, Kato seems to acknowledge that it’s not a subject of conversation in Japan: “Unfortunately these anti-Japanese war movies are not shown in Japan publicly, and Japanese people are not interested to watch them.”

When the Japanese Emperor announced on 15 August that he would surrender, his country had already paid a terrible cost – more than 100,000 had been killed in bombing raids on Tokyo, before two atom bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japan’s defeat, however, was welcomed in large parts of Asia, where the Imperial Japanese Army had claimed millions of lives. For them, 15 August carries both freedom and lingering trauma – in Korea the day is called ‘gwangbokjeol’, which translates to the return of light.

“While the military war has ended, the history war continues,” says Professor Gi-Wook Shin, of Stanford University, explaining the two sides remember those years differently, and those differences add to the tension. While the Chinese see Japanese aggression as a defining, and devastating, moment in their past, Japanese history focuses on its own victimhood – the destruction caused by the atom bombs and post-war recovery.

“People I know in Japan don’t really talk about it,” says a Chinese man who has been living in Japan for 15 years, and wished to remain anonymous.

“They see it as something in the past, and the country doesn’t really commemorate it – because they also view themselves as victims.”

He calls himself a patriot, but he says that hasn’t made things difficult for him personally because their reluctance to talk about it means they “avoid such sensitive topics”.

“Some believe the Japanese army went to help China build a new order – with conflicts occurring in that process. Of course, there are also those who acknowledge that it was, in fact, an invasion.”

China fought Japan for eight years, from Manchuria in the north-east to Chongqing in the south-west. Estimates of the Chinese who died range from 10 to 20 million. The Japanese government says around 480,000 of its soldiers died in that time.

Those years have been well-documented in award-winning literature and films – they were also the subject of Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s work.

That period is now being revisited under a regime that holds patriotism as central to its ambitions: “national rejuvenation” is how Xi Jinping describes his Chinese dream. While the Party heavily censors its own history, from the Tiananmen Square massacre to more recent crackdowns, it encourages remembering a more distant past – with an outside enemy.

Xi even revised the date the war with Japan started – the Chinese government now counts the first incursions into Manchuria in 1931, which makes it a 14-year war, rather than eight years of full-fledged conflict.

Under him, Beijing has also been commemorating the end of World War Two on a bigger scale. On 3 September, the day Japan formally surrendered, there will be a major military parade in Tiananmen Square.

Also in September, a highly-anticipated new release will focus on the notorious Unit 731, a branch of the Japanese Army that conducted lethal human experiments in occupied Manchuria. The date of release – 18 September – is the day Japan attempted its first invasion of Manchuria.

That is apart from Dongji Rescue, a film inspired by the real-life efforts of Chinese fishermen who saved hundreds of British prisoners of war during Japanese raids; and Mountains and Rivers Bearing Witness, a documentary from a state-owned studio about Chinese resistance.

And they seem to be striking a nerve.

“That one generation fought a war on behalf of three, and endured suffering for three. Salute to the martyrs,” a popular RedNote post on Nanjing Photo Studio reads.

“We are not friends…”, the now-famous line from the movie, “is not just a line” between the two main characters, says a popular review that has been liked by more than 10,000 users on Weibo.

It is “also from millions of ordinary Chinese people to Japan. They’ve never issued a sincere apology, they are still worshipping [the war criminals], they are rewriting history – no-one will treat them as friends”, the comment says, referring to some Japanese right-wing figures’ dismissive remarks.

Tokyo has issued apologies, but many Chinese people believe they are not profuse enough.

“Japan keeps sending a conflicting message,” Prof Shin says, referring to instances where leaders have contradicted each other in their statements on Japan’s wartime history.

For years, in Chinese history classes, students have been shown a photo of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970. The Chinese expect a similar gesture from Japan.

This wasn’t always the case, though.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, the turbulence in China did not end. For the next three years, the Nationalist Kuomintang – then the ruling government and the main source of Chinese resistance against Japan – fought a civil war against Mao Zedong’s Communist Party forces.

That war ended with Mao’s victory and the Kuomintang’s retreat to Taiwan. Mao, whose priority was to build a communist nation, avoided focusing on Japanese war crimes. Commemorations celebrated the Party’s victory and criticised the Kuomintang. He also needed Japan’s support on the international stage. Tokyo, in fact, was one of the first major powers to recognise his regime.

It wasn’t until the 1980s – after Mao’s death – that the Japanese occupation returned to haunt the relationship between Beijing and Tokyo. By then, Japan was a wealthy Western ally with a booming economy. Revisions to Japanese textbooks began to spark controversy, with China and South Korea accusing Japan of whitewashing its wartime atrocities. China had just begun to open up, and South Korea was in transition from military rule to democracy.

As Chinese leaders moved away from Mao – and his destructive legacy – the trauma of what happened under Japanese attack became a unifying narrative for the Communist Party, says Yinan He, associate professor of international relations at Lehigh University in the US.

“After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese people for the large part were disillusioned by communism,” she told the BBC. “Since communism lost its appeal, you need nationalism. And Japan is [an] easy target because that’s the most recent external [aggressor].”

She describes a “choreographed representation of the past”, where commemorations of 1945 often downplay the contributions of the US and the Kuomintang, and are accompanied by growing scrutiny of Japan’s official stance on its wartime actions.

What hasn’t helped is the denial of war crimes – prominent right-wing Japanese don’t accept the Nanjing massacre ever happened, or that Japanese soldiers forced so many women into sexual slavery – and recent visits by officials to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals.

This hostility between China and Japan has spilled over into everyday lives as nationalism online peaks – Chinese and Japanese people have been attacked in each other’s countries. A Japanese schoolboy was killed in Shenzhen last year.

China’s economic rise and assertiveness in the region and beyond has changed the dynamic between the two countries again. It has surpassed Japan as a global power. The best time to seek closure – the 1970s, when the countries were closer – has passed, Prof He says.

“They simply said, let’s forget about that, let’s set that aside. They’ve never dealt with the history – and now the problem has come back to haunt them again.”

Longevity in show business is a tricky milestone.

For Indian superstar Rajinikanth, 50 years in films isn’t just about survival – it’s about an unbroken reign, turning cinemas into temples and audiences into devotees. Most of his work has been in the thriving Tamil-language film industry, where his films have defined generations.

In 1975, a young Shivaji Rao Gaekwad – soon to be known to the world as Rajinikanth – walked on to a Madras (now Chennai) film set for Apoorva Raagangal, debuting in a brief but memorable role as a swaggering rake.

Nearly five decades and 170 films on, Rajinikanth’s new film, Coolie, released on 14 August. It celebrates his journey with a story that, in parts, mirrors his own life. He plays a working-class hero taking on a wealthy, oppressive villain.

The 74-year-old superstar is a phenomenon – worshipped in temples built for him, his image carried on airplanes during film promotions, and adored in distant Japan with the passion usually reserved for local idols.

Rajinikanth’s story is that of an outsider who became Indian cinema’s most beloved insider – a working-class hero whose appeal cuts across language, class, and geography. His life is an extraordinary rags-to-riches journey – from crippling poverty to unmatched superstardom – earning him the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India’s highest cinematic honour, and the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award.

For millions of fans and some 50,000 fan clubs, this anniversary is another occasion to celebrate their hero.

To them, he is a demigod, his idolisation of mythical proportions. “Gods have to appear in somebody’s form,” says A Rajendran, an ardent fan.

“Rajinikanth has the power that makes us look up at him.”

Naman Ramachandran, author of Rajinikanth: A Definitive Biography, notes that Rajinikanth’s fans range from Wall Street bankers to washerwomen in Tamil Nadu. His on-screen magic lies in portraying the underdog’s dream: to beat the odds without losing one’s humanity, writes Ramachandran.

A 2015 documentary on the superstar called For the Love of a Man by Rinku Kalsy and Joyojeet Pal captured the depth of this fervour – of fans mortgaging homes, selling family gold, and treating film releases as once-in-a-lifetime festivals.

“This isn’t fandom,” Kalsy explained, “it’s identity. He represents what they aspire to be – humble, moral, yet powerful when it matters.”

His home in Chennai has become a shrine for thousands of fans seeking a glimpse, a blessing, or the naming of a newborn. In 2016, AirAsia airline unveiled an aircraft emblazoned with his face to mark his film, Kabali’s release; a symbol that his image could carry a film across the skies.

Devotion often spills into social work by his fan clubs organising blood donation camps, relief drives, community events in his name. As Aishwarya Rajinikanth writes in her book Standing on an Apple Box: “My father never ever behaves like a superstar at home… except in his movies.”

Rajinikanth’s fan culture also blurs cinema and life.

Each film release becomes a ritualised spectacle. As a rookie reporter, I often witnessed the frenzied brotherhood at first day, first-show screenings: coins tossed at the screen, camphor burnt, flowers showered, cut-outs doused in milk, fans screaming his name.

Watching a Rajinikanth movie is less a screening than a carnival that is a heady mix of street cred, working-class pride, communal revelry and delirious joy.

After three hours of superhuman justice, humour, romance, and vengeance, cinemas are littered with popcorn like confetti, and fans spill into the streets, whooping with cathartic delight.

This year, celebrations have reached fever pitch: in Madurai district, a fan has built a temple adorned with over 5,500 posters and photos, offering prayers to an idol of the star.

One of four children, Rajinikanth grew up in poverty; his father was a police constable. “When I dropped out of college, my father sent me to work as a coolie [porter],” he recalled. A relative later helped him become a bus conductor.

A friend, noticing his passion for theatre, pooled funds to send him to the Madras Film Institute, a state-run film school. At the institute, he was talent spotted by the Tamil filmmaker K Balachander who gave him his first role in 1975.

Rajinikanth stood apart from the fair-skinned, soft-spoken hero archetype of Tamil cinema legends like MG Ramachandran. His dark complexion, rustic drawl and streetwise swagger became integral to his cinematic identity.

Part of Rajinikanth’s enduring appeal lies in his choice of stories and the range of roles he has played.

He began with anti-heroes and villainous roles that won acclaim in films like Apoorva Raagangal, Moondru Mudichu and Pathinaru Vayathinile, and took on morally complex characters in Avargal, Johnny, Mullum Malarum, as well as tragic roles in Bhuvana Oru Kelvikuri.

With the 1980 blockbuster Billa, Rajinikanth cemented his status as an action hero.

He went on to star in hit Tamil films, popular Bollywood films, and even a cameo in the American film Bloodstone.

From the 1990s, he became known for larger-than-life vigilante roles and portrayals of spiritual figures like Sri Raghavendrar and Baba. In 1998, Muthu unexpectedly became a sensation in Japan.

Films like Sivaji and Enthiran, where he played a robot, were massive blockbusters, and despite health challenges, his films continued to achieve huge commercial success.

Critics once dismissed Rajinikanth as a mere “Style King,” known for his cigarette flicks, sunglass twirls, and punchy dialogues laced with wry humour. Yet the values his characters embody – loyalty, courage, humour, and justice – are timeless and universal.

Filmmaker SP Muthuraman, who worked with him in 25 films, attributes his success to “hard work, dedication, goodwill, and responsible behaviour towards co-stars, producers, and distributors”.

In Tamil Nadu, where many of his film peers have entered politics, Rajinikanth dabbled in the arena but has never launched a party or contested elections. He thus occupies a unique space – never fully a politician, yet always a moral beacon for his fans.

Film historian Theodore Baskaran says that Tamil cinema’s greatest stars occupy a space once held by folk deities.

More than a celebrity, Rajinikanth’s influence shapes the devotion of fans who line up at dawn with milk and garlands. They believe that their swashbuckling hero can add colour to their dreams and magic to their lives.

A football team has said they “made history” of playing its first ever international match for its country.

The Marshall Islands’ first faced off the US Virgin Islands on Thursday in Springdale, Arkansas.

Despite a 4-0 loss to the recognised FIFA nation, the Marshall Islands Soccer Federation posted on Facebook to say it was “so proud of what was accomplished”.

Head coach Lloyd Owers, from Banbury in Oxfordshire, previously said it was “definitely surreal” and that even the team “thought it wouldn’t happen”.

The Pacific Island nation is home to about 40,000 people and had previously been the self-proclaimed “last country on Earth without a football team”.

Its first match formed part of the 2025 Outrigger Challenge Cup – the Marshall Islands Soccer Federation annual competition to create more opportunities for nations in our region to play competitive soccer and raise awareness of the sport.

The team’s group shot after the game has an inscription “Whatever the score, so proud of what was accomplished. Tonight, we made history”.

They will also be playing against Turks and Caicos.

The four team tournament in the US was organised by the Marshall Islands Soccer Federation, and is seen as first step towards the team joining FIFA and competing in World Cup qualifying matches.

“We’ve got players that are coming from all different parts of the world, we’ve got a lot of US-based players that are experienced but we’re also combining them with players from the Marshall Islands,” Mr Owers said of the playing squad.

The son of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has praised US President Donald Trump for imposing huge tariffs on his home country – and warned more measures could be on the way.

Eduardo Bolsonaro – who is an elected Congressman in Brazil – spoke to the BBC in Washington, where he has been on a months-long lobbying campaign to convince the Trump administration to punish the Brazilian authorities for putting his father on trial on coup charges.

The congressman said there could be more sanctions on individuals.

“There’s a very significant possibility regarding the application of sanctions and the extension of Magnitsky sanctions to other people. You have on Secretary Marco Rubio’s desk, for example, the possibility of withdrawing visas, among other pressure mechanisms, to try to get Brazil out of this institutional crisis we’re experiencing.”

At the White House Thursday, President Trump doubled down accusing Brazil of being a bad trade partner. He wrongly claimed the US runs a trade deficit with Brazil. Last year, it ran a $7.4 billion trade surplus with Brazil

He went onto defend Jair Bolsonaro:

“It’s really a political execution that they’re trying to do with Bolsonaro. I think that’s terrible.”

The former president is accused of plotting a coup to prevent the man who beat him in the 2022 presidential election, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office. Jair Bolsonaro has denied that he led an attempt to overthrow the government but acknowledged taking part in meetings aimed at reversing his election loss.

A verdict in the case is expected in the coming weeks. If found guilty, Jair Bolsonaro could face decades in prison.

Trump likened the case against Bolsonaro, who has been dubbed “Trump of the Tropics” for his similarities to the US president, to a “witch hunt” and drew parallels with his own legal battles following his refusal to accept defeat in 2020. It has left the two largest democracies in the Americas in a huge confrontation.

• Trump accuses Brazil of ‘witch hunt’ against Bolsonaro
• Trump threatens Brazil with 50% tariff and demands Bolsonaro’s trial end

In July, Trump announced he would raise tariffs on Brazilian imports to 50%, citing Brazil’s treatment of Jair Bolsonaro as a trigger for the hike.

In addition to that, the US state department banned eight Brazilian supreme court justices from travelling to the US, including Alexandre de Moraes, the judge overseeing Bolsonaro’s trial.

Brazil’s President Lula said the move constituted an unacceptable interference in his country’s justice system and refused to budge, so the 50%-levy came into effect last week.

In an interview with the BBC in Washington, Eduardo Bolsonaro would not be drawn on the closeness of his relationship with President Trump or if he influenced the tariff action.

“I admire President Trump, we’ve met several times in his first and second term. We fought first to sanction Alexandre de Moraes. But if President Trump starts with tariffs, I do believe that he is right and I do support him because of that.”

Eduardo Bolsonaro, 41, has been in the US since March – saying he is living in “exile” out of fear of arrest should he return to Brazil.

He rejects criticism that he is being unpatriotic by lobbying for sanctions which will see his country suffer economically: “I believe freedom comes first, before the economy.”

When challenged, he cites a recent poll by the Quaest institute saying that one day after Trump announced the 50%-levy, “four in every 10 Brazilians were in support of the tariffs”.

We put it to him that the poll actually suggests that 79% of Brazilians believe the tariffs will harm their lives, and among voters who say they have got no political position, 77% believe their imposition is wrong.

• What tariffs has Trump announced and why?
• Bolsonaro denies involvement in alleged coup plot

So how worried is he that this could blow back on his family, and boost support for the current president, Lula?

“I’m not thinking about the next election, I’m thinking about the next generation,” he says before conceding that he knows it is something “people are really concerned about, for sure”.

He often refers to Brazil as a dictatorship in his answers, despite the fact that major institutions like Freedom House cite the country as having free and fair elections.

Eduardo Bolsonaro himself was one of the members of Congress to gain most votes in 2022.

He has also said that his father may stand again for president despite being barred from running for public office until 2030 under a ban which predates the coup charges that the older Bolsonaro is currently facing.

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s anger is very focussed on Alexandre de Moraes, the judge who presided over the electoral court which issued the ban in 2023, and who is also overseeing the current trial on coup charges against Jair Bolsonaro.

He is confident that “in the next election … we will have new judges in the electoral court”, which he thinks will mean that the restrictions preventing his father from running for office will be lifted.

“The new judges in the electoral court, they can do a better system. They can improve the system. And I hope this is going to happen,” he says.

But he adds that in order for that to happen “you need Alexandre de Moraes to be isolated”.

The BBC asked the supreme court and Mr Moraes for a response but has not received a reply.

Mr Moraes, meanwhile, has doubled down despite the US sanctions. He has placed Jair Bolsonaro under house arrest for breaching an order banning him from social media and ordered him to wear an electronic ankle tag.

He has also ordered that the finances of Eduardo Bolsonaro be frozen on suspicion that he was using them to bankroll his lobbying on behalf of his father in the US.

Son and father have also been banned from seeing each other, accused of trying to get the US to intervene to obstruct the case.

Eduardo Bolsonaro argues that what he is doing in the US is shining a light on what he says are wrongdoings committed by “dictators” in his home country: “They think that is an anti-democratic act when you denounce the human rights violations of the abusers in Brazil.”

He goes on to compare himself to women from Iran who have been critical of their government and face persecution upon their return.

While no arrest warrant has been issued for him, Eduardo Bolsonaro has repeatedly expressed fear he would be detained if he were to return to Brazil.

“What is going to happen with me if I go back to my country because I’m denouncing these dictators? I’m going to jail, it’s pretty much the same situation. In Iran, they are a little bit more violent,” he told the BBC.

While he decries the current Brazilian government as a “dictatorship”, in 2019 – when his father was in power – Eduardo Bolsonaro himself proposed passing a new Institutional Act Number 5 (AI-5), a decree passed under Brazil’s military rule to suppress dissent.

AI-5 closed down Brazil’s Congress and indefinitely outlawed freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.

Eduardo Bolsonaro said at the time that if protesters took to the streets against his father’s administration, the government could adopt similar measures – thereby invoking one of the darkest moments in the country’s history.

He told the BBC he now regrets those remarks: “It was a mistake to say that. It was a mistake. I would not do that again.”

He also condemns the events of 8 January 2023, when hundreds of his father’s supporters stormed the buildings in Brasilia that symbolize the country’s democracy, a week after Lula had taken office.

They vandalized the supreme court, congress and the presidential palace and urged the military to take over.

Jair Bolsonaro was in the United States when the storming in Brasilia happened, having left Brazil two days before his presidential term ended. He did not attend his successor’s swearing-in and remained in Florida for months before returning to his home country in March 2023. He has always denied having incited his followers and according to his son, he even denounced it.

“January 8th was a protest that did go too far. I do agree, I do condemn it,” he says, adding that “my father condemned it the very first day when it was happening”.

About 2,000 people were arrested over the Brasilia attack. Most were released but many were convicted by the supreme court on charges of an attempted coup, among other crimes, following ongoing police investigations. Eduardo Bolsonaro thinks the rioters should be granted an amnesty because, he says, the sentences are too long.

But we put to him that plenty of people would argue that if you commit a crime to overturn democracy you should be punished for it.

He in turn argued that vandalising buildings did not amount to a coup attempt:

“Even with the heart angry because of the result of the elections, these people would never bring a dictatorship to Brazil. They would never accomplish a coup d’etat”

He says he misses his home country but has no plans to return soon.

Is this all just simple, pure revenge by an aggrieved son?

“For sure, he is my father, we have a relationship, but this is way bigger than only him. And if we do the right thing and rescue freedom in Brazil, everybody’s going to receive the benefits, even him.”

Shares in Intel jumped by more than 7% on Thursday, following reports that the Trump administration is in talks to take a stake in the chipmaker.

The reported deal would support the technology firm’s plans to build a manufacturing hub in Ohio, according to Bloomberg, which said the size of the potential stake is not clear.

White House spokesman Kush Desai said “discussion about hypothetical deals should be regarded as speculation unless officially announced by the administration.”

The article comes days after a meeting between Intel boss Lip-Bu Tan and US President Donald Trump, who had earlier accused Mr Tan of being “highly conflicted” due to his earlier ties to China.

The BBC has contacted Intel for comment.

According to Bloomberg, the firm’s spokesperson declined to comment on the discussions and said that Intel is “deeply committed to supporting President Trump’s efforts to strengthen US technology and manufacturing leadership”.

The details of the stake and price are still being discussed, the report said.

The reported move would be a “lifeline” for Intel, offering the company funding and government support, said tech analyst David Nicholson from The Futurum Group, a market research firm.

The storied chipmaker has struggled in recent years after falling behind in the AI race, with rival Nvidia leaping ahead. Intel’s stock market value has more than halved to $104 billion (£77bn) since 2020.

The deal would signal a deeper “intertwining” of the government and private businesses in the US, following a trend seen elsewhere in places like China, Mr Nicholson told the BBC.

This week, chip giants Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the US government 15% of Chinese revenues, in another instance of the Trump administration’s direct intervention in private enterprise.

“Some folks will think that this is unfair that Intel is being propped up, but most will agree that it is strategically vital for the US,” said Mr Nicholson.

Intel is among only a few American chip manufacturers capable of producing high-end semiconductors at scale.

Its planned Ohio factory, which is reported to be a key part of talks with Washington, had been touted as a key part of the company’s future.

The firm had a goal to make the factory the world’s largest chip manufacturing facility, but its development has since faced numerous delays.

Though it is uncommon for the US government to directly support a single company, backing Intel could be a “special case” because the stakes are high for America’s chipmaking edge, said tech analyst Austin Lyons.

Intel is the US’ best shot at competing with global rivals like TSMC and Samsung, and the Ohio plant would ensure that the country is able to make high-end semiconductors at home, he explained.

Washington is unlikely to seek a majority stake, but just enough to ensure it has influence over the nation’s primary chipmaking company, said Raymond Woo from Kyoto University Innovation Capital, the school’s investment arm.

Backing Intel in the interest of national security is risky as the company has fallen behind many rivals, he said.

Mr Woo said the government could also consider backing other US semiconductor players including smaller-scale ones, or to provide them with other incentives.

Mr Tan, an American venture capitalist who took over as Intel’s chief executive in March, has focused on getting the firm’s finances in check and catching up in the booming AI chip industry.

In a social media post last week, Trump called for Mr Tan’s resignation, apparently referring to his alleged investments in companies that the US says are tied to the Chinese military.

Two planes have collided on the airfield at Manchester Airport.

The EasyJet aircraft clipped wings during taxiing at about 06:30 BST, an airport spokesman said. There have been no reports of injuries.

Passengers have since disembarked from both planes which had been due to take off for Paris and Gibraltar respectively.

Flights have resumed at the airport following a brief suspension for a safety assessment which found minor damage to the planes.

Tynisha Chaudhry, who was on the Gibraltar-bound flight with her partner, compared the collision to a car crash.

“We felt the whole plane shudder – it was a massive hit.”

The 21-year-old said “a lot of fire engines” and other safety staff attended the scene, as passengers waited onboard during inspections.

The atmosphere among passengers was “okay” but some children and their parents became “tense” before they were allowed to return to the terminal, she added.

An EasyJet spokesperson said: “EasyJet can confirm that the wing tips of two aircraft came into contact whilst taxiing to the runway at Manchester Airport this morning.

“The aircraft returned to stand to disembark customers who have been provided with refreshment vouchers whilst replacement aircraft are arranged to operate the flights.

“We apologise to customers for the delay to their flights.

“The safety of our passengers and crew is our highest priority.”

Joshua Brandwood, from Lancashire, said passengers at Charles De Gaulle airport waiting to return after the incoming Paris flight had been delayed until this afternoon.

He said gate staff did not initially know the cause and he only found out after another passenger told him.

“I’m already a nervous flier and now I’m scared of even getting that plane if it does manage to get here,” he told BBC Verify.

JK Rowling has hit back at Nicola Sturgeon after the former Scottish first minister’s memoir reignited their long-running row over gender.

In the book, Sturgeon said she had endured a surge of “vile” abuse after Rowling posted a selfie in a T-shirt with the slogan: “Nicola Sturgeon, destroyer of women’s rights”.

Sturgeon said it had made her feel “more at risk of possible physical harm”.

Defending her actions, Rowling accused Sturgeon of a shameless denial of reality over transgender issues.

In a review of the book, published on her own website, Rowling said her intention had been to encourage journalists to “confront” Sturgeon on the topic.

Sturgeon, the MSP for Glasgow Southside, had previously told the BBC’s Newscast podcast that the Harry Potter author had every right to disagree with her but that the T-shirt “seemed to me quite incendiary”.

The pair – arguably the most prominent public figures in Scotland – have long disagreed about politics, with Rowling critical of the former Scottish National Party leader’s attempt to legislate to make it easier to legally change gender.

The Scottish Parliament passed the legislation but it was blocked by Westminster before it could be enacted because of its potential impact on GB-wide equality law.

Opponents of the proposed new law were delighted, having argued that it would have threatened women by giving biological males access to female spaces.

The campaigners, supported by Rowling, have since won a landmark case in London when the UK Supreme Court ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act.

Sturgeon says she stands by the principle that an individual has the right to self-identify in the gender of their choosing.

However she has also expressed regret that she did not pause the Holyrood gender self-ID bill, in order to seek common ground between supporters and critics, when the issue became mired in “rancour and division”.

“We’d lost all sense of rationality in this debate. I’m partly responsible for that,” she told ITV News.

Rowling is unimpressed, writing on her website that Sturgeon “caused real, lasting harm” by presiding over a culture in which women who did not subscribe to her “luxury beliefs” were “silenced, shamed, persecuted” and placed in degrading and unsafe situations.

“She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts,” adds the Edinburgh-based author.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast this week Sturgeon said she believed “forces on the far right” had sought to “weaponise” the trans issue to “push back on rights more generally”.

The comments echoed language she had used in an interview with The News Agents podcast in 2023 when she said that some opponents of the SNP’s gender reforms were “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”.

Rowling describes that as Sturgeon’s “basket of deplorables” moment, a reference to Hillary Clinton’s disastrous dismissal of half of her rival Donald Trump’s supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.

With those comments, Rowling claims, Sturgeon “demonised and stigmatised” survivors of sexual trauma, lesbians, women with disabilities and “everyone concerned about safety, privacy, fairness and dignity for girls”.

In her memoir, Sturgeon also discusses double rapist Adam Graham – who was initially sent to a female prison after self-identifying as a woman called Isla Bryson – admitting she had struggled to answer questions about whether the rapist was a man or a woman.

“I seemed weak and evasive. Worst of all, I sounded like I didn’t have the courage to stand behind the logical conclusion of the self-identification system we had just legislated for,” she writes.

“If you’re prepared to accept the foundational falsehood that some men are women, you’ll inevitably find yourself panicking like a pheasant caught in headlights one day,” writes Rowling in response.

The author, who in 2014 donated £1m to the campaign to keep Scotland in the UK, also accuses Sturgeon of omitting or playing down important matters in her memoirs, such as the deletion of government WhatsApp messages during Covid; “tanking” educational outcomes; failures in procuring new ferries; and a police investigation into the SNP’s finances.

“Perhaps the most disgraceful omission,” she continues, “is the fact that Scotland continues to lead the whole of Europe in drug deaths.”

In a series of media interviews to publicise her book Sturgeon has predicted that Scotland will be independent in 20 years or less and has defended her record as first minister from 2014 to 2023.

She has insisted that she acted in the best interests of the nation during Covid and that reforms in Scotland designed to reduce poverty are now leading to progress in narrowing the attainment gap between the richest and poorest students.

Sturgeon, who will stand down as an MSP next year, also points out that she was exonerated by police investigating the finances of the SNP in an inquiry which is codenamed Operation Branchform.

Her husband, former party chief executive, Peter Murrell, faces a charge of embezzlement. The couple have since separated.

The number of data centres in the UK is set to increase by almost a fifth, according to figures shared with BBC News.

Data centres are giant warehouses full of powerful computers used to run digital services from movie streaming to online banking – there are currently an estimated 477 of them in the UK.

Construction researchers Barbour ABI have analysed planning documents and say that number is set to jump by almost 100, as the growth in artificial intelligence (AI) increases the need for processing power.

The majority are due to be built in the next five years. However, there are concerns about the huge amount of energy and water the new data centres will consume.

Some experts have warned it could drive up prices paid by consumers.

More than half of the new data centres would be in London and neighbouring counties.

Many are privately funded by US tech giants such as Google and Microsoft and major investment firms.

A further nine are planned in Wales, one in Scotland, five in Greater Manchester and a handful in other parts of the UK, the data shows.

While the new data centres are mostly due for completion by 2030, the biggest single one planned would come later – a £10bn AI data centre in Blyth, near Newcastle, for the American private investment and wealth management company Blackstone Group.

It would involve building 10 giant buildings covering 540,000 square metres – the size of several large shopping centres – on the site of the former Blyth Power Station.

Work is set to begin in 2031 and last for more than three years.

Microsoft is planning four new data centres in the UK at a total cost of £330m, with an estimated completion between 2027 and 2029 – two in the Leeds area, one near Newport in Wales, and a five-storey site in Acton, north-west London.

And Google is building a data centre in Hertfordshire, an investment worth £740m, which it says will use air to cool its servers rather than water.

By some analyses, the UK is already the third-largest nation for data centres behind the US and Germany.

The government has made clear it believes data centres are central to the UK’s economic future – designating them critical national infrastructure.

But there are concerns about their impact, including the potential knock-on effect on people’s energy bills.

It is not known what the energy consumption of the new centres will be as this data is not included in the planning applications, but US data suggests they can be considerably more powerful than older ones.

Dr Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at machine learning firm Hugging Face, explains that in the US “average citizens in places like Ohio are seeing their monthly bills go up by $20 (£15) because of data centres”.

She said the timeline for the new data centres in the UK was “aggressive” and called for “mechanisms for companies to pay the price for extra energy to power data centres – not consumers”.

According to the National Energy System Operator, NESO, the projected growth of data centres in Great Britain could “add up to 71 TWh of electricity demand” in the next 25 years, which it says redoubles the need for clean power – such as offshore wind.

Bruce Owen, regional president of data centre operator Equinix, said the UK’s high energy costs, as well as concerns around lengthy planning processes, were prompting some operators to consider building elsewhere.

“If I want to build a new data centre here within the UK, we’re talking five to seven years before I even have planning permission or access to power in order to do that,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“So you’re starting to see some of these AI workloads move into other countries, where the UK has always been a very important hub.”

UK deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has overturned some local councils’ rejection of planning permission for data centres, citing their importance to the country’s infrastructure and the government’s growth push.

There are also growing concerns about the environmental impact of these enormous buildings.

Many existing data centre plants require large quantities of water to prevent them from overheating – and most current owners do not share data about their water consumption.

Stephen Hone, chief executive of industry body the Data Centre Alliance, says “ensuring there is enough water and electricity powering data centres isn’t something the industry can solve on its own”.

But he insisted “data centres are fixated with becoming as sustainable as possible”, such as through dry-cooling methods.

Such promises of future solutions have failed to appease some.

In Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, residents are objecting to the construction of a £3.8bn cloud and AI centre on greenbelt land, describing the area as the “lungs” of their home.

And in Dublin there is currently a moratorium on the building of any new data centres because of the strain existing ones have placed on Ireland’s national electricity provider.

In 2023 they accounted for one fifth of the country’s energy demand.

Last month, Anglian Water objected to plans for a 435-acre data centre site in North Lincolnshire. The developer says it aims to deploy “closed loop” cooling systems which would not place a strain on the water supply.

The planning documents suggest that 28 of the new data centres would be likely to be serviced by troubled Thames Water, including 14 more in Slough, which has already been described as having Europe’s largest cluster of the buildings.

The BBC understands Thames Water was talking to the government earlier this year about the challenge of water demand in relation to data centres and how it can be mitigated.

Water UK, the trade body for all water firms, said it “desperately” wants to supply the centres but “planning hurdles” need to be cleared more quickly.

Ten new reservoirs are being built in Lincolnshire, the West Midlands and south-east England.

A spokesperson for the UK government said data centres were “essential” and an AI Energy Council had been established to make sure supply can meet demand, alongside £104bn in water infrastructure investment.

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South Africa’s army chief has been criticised after he reportedly pledged military and political support to Iran during a recent visit to the country.

Members of South Africa’s governing coalition have accused General Rudzani Maphwanya of “reckless grandstanding”, while President Cyril Ramaphosa confirmed he would meet the general to discuss his “ill-advised” trip.

The row comes as South Africa navigates tense relations with the US, which has taken exception to the country’s ties with Iran, among other issues.

The Democratic Alliance, part of South Africa government, called for Gen Maphwanya to be “court-martialled”.

It said his comments had gone “beyond military-to-military discussions and entered the realm of foreign policy”.

Gen Maphwenya’s trip was aimed at strengthening military cooperation but during his meeting with his Iranian counterparts, he said that the two countries had common goals, and always stood “alongside the oppressed and defenceless people of the world”, according to Iranian publication Tehran Times.

He also took aim at Israel over the continued war in Gaza as he reiterated support for the Palestinian people and told officials his visit “carries a political message” from Ramaphosa’s administration.

The South African government has distanced itself from these comments.

The defence department labelled them “unfortunate”, while the foreign affairs ministry said they “do not represent the government’s official foreign policy stance”.

Ramaphosa’s spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said the president didn’t know about the trip or sanction it.

“The visit was ill-advised and more so, the expectation is that the general should have been a lot more circumspect with the comments he makes,” Mr Magwenya told reporters during a briefing on Thursday.

Gen Maphwanya has since returned home, Mr Magwenya confirmed.

South Africa’s strong ties with Iran have been a bone of contention with the US and was one of the reasons relations between the two nations soured earlier this year.

US President Donald Trump, in an executive order cutting off aid to South Africa, accused Africa’s largest economy of “reinvigorating” relations with Iran – an implacable foe of the US.

Trump also falsely accused Ramaphosa’s government of persecuting white people and condemned it for bringing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

According to think-tank the Institute for Security Studies, South Africa’s relationship with Iran dates back to 1995, when a joint commission of cooperation was formed.

• What’s really driving Trump’s fury with South Africa?
• Top policeman shakes SA with explosive allegations about his boss
• Ramaphosa struggles to mend fences with Trump

New footage shared on social media shows the far-right Israeli minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, taunting the most prominent Palestinian prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, in his cell.

The Palestinian Authority has condemned the video. Its Vice-President Hussein al-Sheikh described it as “the epitome of psychological, moral and physical terrorism.”

The 13-second-long video clip is the first time that Barghouti has been publicly seen in years. He appears aged and gaunt.

Israel’s national security minister, Ben Gvir, tells him: “You will not win. He who messes with the people of Israel, he who will murder our children, he who will murder our women, we will wipe him out”.

As Barghouti tries to interject, Ben Gvir adds: “You need to know this, throughout history.”

Marwan Barghouti, 66, was jailed by Israel more than 20 years ago after he was convicted of planning attacks that led to five civilians being killed. He is serving five life sentences plus 40 years.

Opinion polls have consistently indicated that he remains the most popular Palestinian leader, and that Palestinians would vote for him in a presidential election ahead of the current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas or Hamas leaders.

He remains a senior figure in the Fatah faction, which dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA). He was targeted by Israel due to his leading role in the Second Palestinian Intifada or uprising from 2000-05.

The video originally surfaced on messaging groups for Ben Gvir’s supporters on Thursday but has now been reposted on his X account.

The minister says that having read how “all sorts of “senior officials”” in the PA did not like what he said, he will “repeat it again and again without apologising”.

Palestinian prisoner rights organisations say that Barghouti has been placed in solitary confinement since the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023. Last year they accused guards of “brutally assaulting” him in his cell which the Israeli prison service denied.

In response to the new video, the head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, Abdullah al-Zaghari accused Israel of seeking “to eliminate him and assassinate the leaders languishing in its prisons”.

Barghouti is one of the prisoners whose release Hamas is believed to have sought as part of an exchange deal for the remaining hostages it is holding. However, it is thought very unlikely that Israel would free him.

In the video, as Ben Gvir speaks, Barghouti – who is fluent in Hebrew – can be seen nodding and trying to break in, but the short clip ends before he does.

His wife, Fadwa, recommended to her husband’s followers that only one still be used from the video which she believed showed his strength.

Palestinians widely see Barghouti as the leader who could best unify different political factions and negotiate peace with Israel.

“Putin is supposed to be in jail, and he just comes to Alaska like that.”

Hanna Correa is amongst a sea of Alaskans waving Ukrainian flags on the road leading into Anchorage.

“When I entered through that parking lot, and I see a lot of Americans, they’re supporting, it made me cry,” she says.

Ms Correa, 40, left Ukraine in 2019 for love, and six years later, the future of her country could be decided in her adopted home town.

US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to touch down at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a 30 minute drive away. Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky is not invited, something Ms Correa says is “pretty sad”.

Among those protesting against their arrival is Christopher Kelliher, a 53-year-old military veteran and Alaskan native.

“It’s gross, it makes you want to take a shower,” he says of the meeting.

“Putin doesn’t need to be in our state, much less our country. We have an idiot in the White House that will kowtow to this guy.”

• Follow live coverage of the meeting here
• Left out of Alaska talks, exhausted Ukrainians fear an unjust peace

This region’s history with Moscow gives Friday’s summit added significance. The US purchased Alaska from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2m.

Critics called the purchase “Seward’s Folly” – referring to William Seward, the US secretary of state at the time – arguing that the territory amounted to little more than a frozen wasteland. But later discoveries of rare earth minerals and abundant oil and gas put paid to that label.

Ornate churches are among the most visible symbols of Alaska’s Russian heritage. The St Tikhon Orthodox Church in Anchorage has been holding three days of prayer ahead of leaders’ arrival.

Priest Nicholas Cragle, an American who recently moved to Alaska after living in Russia for seven years, says the conflict is “particularly painful and close to the hearts” of parishioners.

“We’re hoping that this meeting will lead to something… lead to a culmination of this conflict,” says Mr Cragle.

That feeling is shared by fishermen ankle-deep in creek bed on the outskirts of town, drawn to the area by the allure of some of the world’s finest salmon.

“I think it’s a good idea [the summit], I wish Zelensky would be out here too… get this thing over with,” says Don Cressley, who lives in the Alaskan city of North Pole and is visiting on a fishing trip with his grandson.

He wants an end to the war “because of the destruction they’re doing to all the cities, all the buildings, making everybody more homeless, taking their foods away, their supplies away, their living right away,”.

Donald Trump, he says, is doing an “awesome job” in ceasefire negotiations.

While the US president often talks warmly of his relationship with Vladimir Putin, superpower tensions persist and are more keenly felt here.

Moscow’s military planes are routinely detected flying near the coast of Alaska. And in January, Canadian and American fighter jets were scrambled after multiple Russian jets were spotted in the Arctic, according to the North American Aerospace Defence Command.

That breeds a sense of unease for some Alaskans who live closer to Russia than Washington DC.

“Although the Cold War is over between Russia and the US, they’re constantly patrolling our airways,” Anchorage resident Russell Wilson tells me while fishing.

“If the president doesn’t put the hammer down, we could be the next Ukraine.”

However other Alaskans consider a return to Cold War hostilities are far-fetched fantasy.

I ask Army veteran Christopher Kelliher if he is concerned about a Russian invasion. “Not really, everybody in Alaska owns a gun,” he replies.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Washington DC is suing the federal government over its takeover of the police force, after US Attorney General Pam Bondi named the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as the district’s “emergency police commissioner”.

The city’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, wrote on X that the US government had illegally declared a takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and was “abusing its temporary, limited authority under the law”.

The lawsuit asks a judge to void Bondi’s order and stop the DEA head from “assuming any position of command within MPD”.

President Donald Trump on Monday declared he would use federal law enforcement to crack down on crime in Washington.

He has since sent in hundreds of National Guard members and other federal agents to clear homeless encampments, run checkpoints and otherwise bolster law enforcement, citing a 1970s law known as the Home Rule Act that allows him to use MPD for “federal purposes” that he “may deem necessary and appropriate.”

The US Justice Department told the BBC it had no comment on the lawsuit. The case has been assigned to Judge Ana Reyes, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden. A hearing has yet to be set for the case.

Late Thursday, Bondi wrote in an order that DEA Administrator Terry Cole would assume “all of the powers and duties” of local Police Chief Pamela Smith. The chief “must receive approval from Commissioner Cole before issuing any further directives to the MPD”, according to the order.

Almost immediately, Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and Schwalb struck back, saying the order was “unlawful” and telling Smith she did not have to follow it.

In the last few days, armoured vehicles have lined up near monuments and other tourist sites, and drivers have been stopped on a popular nightlife corridor. Officials have said that, altogether, 800 troops are expected to be deployed to the district, as well as 500 federal law enforcement agents, such as the FBI.

Bowser, a Democrat, has said there is no emergency and Trump’s “unnecessary and unprecedented” move is an “authoritarian push”.

Trump is reportedly the first president to federalise the MPD, but the government has sought to intervene in DC policing before.

In 1989, then President George HW Bush provided around 200 National Guard troops to support local police during a period of chronically high crime involving crack cocaine, with the understanding they would not patrol the streets.

More recently, the National Guard was sent to protect the capitol after the 6 January 2021 attack and, before that, in response to the 2020 protests following the killing of George Floyd.

Speaking on Fox News on Thursday to announce her appointment of Cole, Bondi said federal officers had made 156 arrests and seized 27 firearms this week.

Trump has said crime has worsened in Washington DC, but analysis by BBC Verify suggests a different trend.

Violent offences fell after peaking in 2023, and in 2024, they hit their lowest level in 30 years, according to figures published by DC police.

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

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

Since taking office, Trump has also deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles in an effort to quell protests over deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

JK Rowling has hit back at Nicola Sturgeon after the former Scottish first minister’s memoir reignited their long-running row over gender.

In the book, Sturgeon said she had endured a surge of “vile” abuse after Rowling posted a selfie in a T-shirt with the slogan: “Nicola Sturgeon, destroyer of women’s rights”.

Sturgeon said it had made her feel “more at risk of possible physical harm”.

Defending her actions, Rowling accused Sturgeon of a shameless denial of reality over transgender issues.

In a review of the book, published on her own website, Rowling said her intention had been to encourage journalists to “confront” Sturgeon on the topic.

Sturgeon, the MSP for Glasgow Southside, had previously told the BBC’s Newscast podcast that the Harry Potter author had every right to disagree with her but that the T-shirt “seemed to me quite incendiary”.

The pair – arguably the most prominent public figures in Scotland – have long disagreed about politics, with Rowling critical of the former Scottish National Party leader’s attempt to legislate to make it easier to legally change gender.

The Scottish Parliament passed the legislation but it was blocked by Westminster before it could be enacted because of its potential impact on GB-wide equality law.

Opponents of the proposed new law were delighted, having argued that it would have threatened women by giving biological males access to female spaces.

The campaigners, supported by Rowling, have since won a landmark case in London when the UK Supreme Court ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act.

Sturgeon says she stands by the principle that an individual has the right to self-identify in the gender of their choosing.

However she has also expressed regret that she did not pause the Holyrood gender self-ID bill, in order to seek common ground between supporters and critics, when the issue became mired in “rancour and division”.

“We’d lost all sense of rationality in this debate. I’m partly responsible for that,” she told ITV News.

Rowling is unimpressed, writing on her website that Sturgeon “caused real, lasting harm” by presiding over a culture in which women who did not subscribe to her “luxury beliefs” were “silenced, shamed, persecuted” and placed in degrading and unsafe situations.

“She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts,” adds the Edinburgh-based author.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast this week Sturgeon said she believed “forces on the far right” had sought to “weaponise” the trans issue to “push back on rights more generally”.

The comments echoed language she had used in an interview with The News Agents podcast in 2023 when she said that some opponents of the SNP’s gender reforms were “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”.

Rowling describes that as Sturgeon’s “basket of deplorables” moment, a reference to Hillary Clinton’s disastrous dismissal of half of her rival Donald Trump’s supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.

With those comments, Rowling claims, Sturgeon “demonised and stigmatised” survivors of sexual trauma, lesbians, women with disabilities and “everyone concerned about safety, privacy, fairness and dignity for girls”.

In her memoir, Sturgeon also discusses double rapist Adam Graham – who was initially sent to a female prison after self-identifying as a woman called Isla Bryson – admitting she had struggled to answer questions about whether the rapist was a man or a woman.

“I seemed weak and evasive. Worst of all, I sounded like I didn’t have the courage to stand behind the logical conclusion of the self-identification system we had just legislated for,” she writes.

“If you’re prepared to accept the foundational falsehood that some men are women, you’ll inevitably find yourself panicking like a pheasant caught in headlights one day,” writes Rowling in response.

The author, who in 2014 donated £1m to the campaign to keep Scotland in the UK, also accuses Sturgeon of omitting or playing down important matters in her memoirs, such as the deletion of government WhatsApp messages during Covid; “tanking” educational outcomes; failures in procuring new ferries; and a police investigation into the SNP’s finances.

“Perhaps the most disgraceful omission,” she continues, “is the fact that Scotland continues to lead the whole of Europe in drug deaths.”

In a series of media interviews to publicise her book Sturgeon has predicted that Scotland will be independent in 20 years or less and has defended her record as first minister from 2014 to 2023.

She has insisted that she acted in the best interests of the nation during Covid and that reforms in Scotland designed to reduce poverty are now leading to progress in narrowing the attainment gap between the richest and poorest students.

Sturgeon, who will stand down as an MSP next year, also points out that she was exonerated by police investigating the finances of the SNP in an inquiry which is codenamed Operation Branchform.

Her husband, former party chief executive, Peter Murrell, faces a charge of embezzlement. The couple have since separated.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and by far the dominant force in its politics, has not budged from what he believes is the essential truth about the war in Gaza.

He has given Israel – and the outside world – a consistent message since Hamas attacked Israel almost two years ago. He stated it clearly when he ordered the first big ground offensive of the war into the Gaza Strip on 28 October 2023, three weeks after the attacks, and since then he has repeated the themes many times.

“We will fight to defend our homeland. We will fight and not retreat. We will fight on land, at sea and in the air. We will destroy the enemy above ground and below ground. We will fight and we will win.

“This will be a victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of life over death. In this war we will stand steadfast, more united than ever, certain in the justice of our cause.”

His speech adopted the cadences of Winston Churchill’s rallying call in June 1940 of “we shall fight on the beaches,” after Britain’s defeat by Germany in northern France and the evacuation of more than 338,000 allied soldiers from Dunkirk.

Before Churchill told the British in his celebrated peroration that “we shall never surrender,” he had not spared them from the truth that they had suffered a “colossal military disaster”.

Hamas inflicted Israel’s worst defeat in a single day on 7 October, and the horror that it could break open the borders, and kill and take so many hostages, is still very real in Israel. It is a big factor shaping attitudes to the war, the way it is being fought, and how it might end.

Very few Israelis have ever doubted that their cause is just, but Netanyahu’s statement that they would be “more united than ever” could not have been further from the condition of Israel almost two years later.

Israel is as divided now as at any time in its history, and Netanyahu, a deeply divisive figure when Hamas attacked, is presiding over fault lines in Israel that have opened into chasms.

On the edge of the anti-Netanyahu demonstration in Tel Aviv, several hundred Israelis stood silently, each holding a placard with the name of a Palestinian child killed by Israel in Gaza.

Many of the signs had a photograph of a smiling girl or boy, next to the day they were born and the day they were killed. Children who did not have a photo were represented by a drawing of a flower.

The silent demonstrations to stop the killing are getting bigger – some are held outside airbases, where they try to catch the eye of pilots arriving for bombing raids into Gaza – but the demonstrators still hold a minority view.

Timina Peretz, one of the organisers, says they started after Israel broke the last ceasefire with Hamas on 18 March and went back to war.

“We realised how many children died just in the same week. I refuse to stay silent while it’s happening, a genocide and starvation of people…

“On the street, we’re getting a lot of good reactions, like people saying, ‘thank you’. And we have many people cursing us and [getting] really offended and upset from these images.”

I asked if they get called traitors. “Of course, they do a lot of them, they say that if we think the way we think, or we act the way we act, we should just go… to live in Gaza.

“They can’t understand how the basic idea of criticising the state is something that is rooted in democracy.”

Opinion polls taken since the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) went back to war in Gaza in March, breaking the last ceasefire, suggest that a large majority of Jewish Israelis are not troubled by Palestinian suffering in Gaza.

A sample recorded in the last three days of July by the Israeli Democracy Institute says that 78% of Jewish Israelis, who make up four-fifths of the population, believe that given the restrictions of the fighting, Israel “is making substantial efforts to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to Palestinians in Gaza”.

The pollsters also chose a more personal question, asking whether individuals were “troubled or not troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza?”

Some 79% of Jewish Israelis surveyed said they were not troubled. Meanwhile 86% of those in Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority who were asked the same question said they were very or somewhat troubled.

Netanyahu, his ministers and spokespeople insist that Hamas, the United Nations, witnesses, aid workers and foreign governments are telling lies about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

In a news conference conducted in English for the international media on 10 August, Netanyahu condemned reports of starvation in Gaza. He wanted “to puncture the lies… the only ones that are being starved in Gaza are our hostages”.

He has, for many years, equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Accounts of hunger, and IDF soldiers killing Palestinians struggling to find food that have been believed and condemned by Israel’s allies, including Britain, France and Germany, should he said be viewed in the context of the long history of the persecution of Jews in Europe.

“We were said to be spreading vermin to Christian society, we were said to be poisoning the wells, we were said to slaughter Christian children for their blood.

“And as these lies spread around the globe, they were followed by horrific, horrific massacres, pogroms, displacements, finally culminating the worst massacre of them all – the Holocaust.

“Today the Jewish state is being maligned in a similar way.”

Ms Peretz blames the Israeli media for not showing the suffering and deaths of Palestinians.

That subject went closer to the heart of the national conversation when it was raised on a popular Saturday evening television talk show hosted by Eyal Berkovic, the former West Ham United football player.

One of the regular guests was an Israeli journalist called Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps. They had been discussing, as they had previously, the suffering of the hostages and their families, and Israeli soldiers who had been killed fighting in Gaza.

Then, she told me, she felt it was her duty as a journalist to mention something that was not often spoken about on Israeli TV.

“I just [said] that the war is also killing a lot of Palestinians in Gaza, which is a very simple statement, no political point of view. There was no patience to listen to it.”

Voices were raised. Eyal Berkovic has made a name for himself as a TV host by not holding back.

Ms Elbaz-Phelps, who also works as a correspondent for French TV, recalled his response. “He said, I do not have to worry about the people in Gaza, they are my enemies. To which I responded, you can let me say that I worry about the horrific images coming out of there.

“And he said, for sure, you can finish your point. This is very representative of the Israeli public opinion.”

She defended the work of Israeli journalists. “I think 95% of what the world knows about Israel’s government and decisions is brought by the Israeli journalists,” she argues.

“But I think there is a huge difference when you talk about something and when you show something, and you will see images of Gaza from above that mainly are going to show the people how IDF is winning the war on the ground.

“You don’t have human stories, you don’t have faces… because Israelis are in pain, and the stories also are happening inside of Israel.”

Ms Elbaz-Phelps believes the reason is that Israelis are still dealing with their trauma, after 7 October.

“The word outside is covering Gaza and talking about the suffering of the population in Gaza. Which is right, but there is not, I think, acknowledgement of how much the Israeli people is living in a trauma.

“We are not in a post-traumatic area. We are in a trauma time. Hostages are dying inside the tunnels of Hamas. [People are] begging the government to find a way and make a hostage deal.

“Only when the hostages will come home, then maybe the healing can start. The pain of the Israeli public, how much they’re still on 7 October, is something that is not completely grasped outside of Israel.”

Around 20 Israeli hostages are still believed to be alive in Gaza. Israelis of all political persuasions were horrified by recent videos posted by their captors showing two badly emaciated young men in tunnels under Gaza.

Their fate is front and centre of the attitudes of most Israelis to the war.

I met the pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, who has often criticised Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in her column in the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz, in “hostage square” next to Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Since October 2023, this has been the centre of the hostage families’ campaign to get their people out of Gaza.

“The reason why the majority of Israelis consistently support ending the war is to get the hostages back,” she says.

Speaking about the lack of concern in Israel for the people in Gaza, she tells me: “It’s because a large portion of Israelis believe that the suffering has been exaggerated or even partly fabricated by Hamas.”

Israelis, she continues, are inclined to believe that the problem is the messaging. “Israelis have been obsessed with PR for a long time. They call it Hasbara.

“That inclination to blame criticism of Israel on poor public communications has gone into overdrive during the war, and [is] on steroids [in] relation to the accusations of starvation.

“The far-right wing calls it the campaign of fabrication. They think [even the way] the Israeli media is starting to cover it is amplifying Hamas’ narrative.

“But I think mainstream Israelis are sort of suppressing it because it’s too hard for them to cope with. This is the kind of thing you hear people say in private conversation.

“They are too consumed with the hostages or their own family members who are fighting in Gaza, and they just can’t handle the sense that Israel might be doing something wrong.”

Outside the secular Israeli mainstream of Tel Aviv and the cities on the Mediterranean coast, I have found few doubts about the justice of Israel’s conduct of the war.

Deep in the occupied West Bank, down a dirt road, is a Jewish settlement called Esh Kodesh, which is part of a complex of small settlements. Just a generation ago these were a collection of caravans on hilltops, but they are now well established.

Aaron Katzoff, a father of seven who is originally from Los Angeles, has created a winery and a bar called “Settlers,” which feels like a small piece of the American west. He labels his wine “liquid prophecy”.

It is a social centre, not just for his community but for an overwhelmingly right-wing and religiously observant clientele who make special journeys there.

Many of the customers were armed when I visited. A soldier with a dusty uniform sat eating a burger and drinking red wine with his M-16 cradled on his lap. Others had left their assault weapons behind the bar. A woman had a 9mm pistol in a holster strapped on over her flowery dress. The young men at the corner table were, Aaron said, decompressing after a stint in Gaza.

Aaron still does reserve duty as an IDF officer and has fought in Gaza. He has no doubts about the justice of Israel’s actions.

“Come down to a tunnel in Gaza,” he told me. “See what it means not to have oxygen and in the humidity and heat try to fight terrorists that are hiding behind women and children and shoot at you…

“It’s very easy to sit in an air conditioning room and judge people who do that, war is not easy.”

What, I asked him, about ending the war now, as so many Israelis want.

“Sometimes you can’t always get there now… You want everything to be Wonderland… but the world’s not like that.

“Things take time, and it’s sad, but that’s reality.”

In the months leading up to 7 October 2023, thousands of Israelis had been demonstrating in the streets against plans to change the judicial system in what they saw as an assault on democracy.

“This has been an unpopular government since well before the war,” argues Ms Scheindlin.

“Once the war began, by contrast to most other countries where you see a rallying of support for the government, there was a complete collapse of support.”

Enough of Netanyahu’s political base on Israel’s right wing accepts his insistence that the war cannot end until total victory over Hamas, for him to have rebuilt his poll ratings from rock bottom. But he is still trailing opposition parties.

They have pointed to evidence that they say shows he is prolonging the war to stay in office. As a private citizen he would face a national inquiry into the security failures that gave Hamas its opening on 7 October 2023.

His long running trial on corruption charges serious enough to carry a potential prison sentence would also accelerate from its current glacial pace.

Ultranationalists in his coalition, the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have threatened to topple his government if he makes any kind of deal with Hamas.

They want not just the defeat of Hamas, but the annexation of Gaza, the removal of Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish settlers.

The families of the hostages, meanwhile, have appealed to Netanyahu to do a deal with Hamas before the men still being held die.

But the prime minister, doubling down on his theme of a fight until total victory, announced a new offensive that has appalled many hostage families and been condemned by many of Israel’s allies.

Netanyahu’s plans were also opposed by the current leadership of the IDF. Its chief of staff General Eyal Zamir made it known that he opposes the Netanyahu plan for a new offensive in Gaza, reportedly telling the cabinet that it would endanger the hostages and worsen the humanitarian crisis.

Zamir was appointed in March when his predecessor resigned after falling out with the prime minister over the conduct of the war.

Now the Israeli media is speculating that Netanyahu will force Zamir to resign. One report says Zamir is convinced he’s been “marked for dismissal” for challenging Netanyahu’s plan.

The war has also widened Israel’s most bitter division, between the secular population and the religious right. Shuttling between demonstrations by secular Israelis in Tel Aviv and their religious fellow citizens in Jerusalem can feel like commuting between two different countries.

War is always painful. But for some in Israel’s hardline religious nationalist right wing, it is also an opportunity, even a time of miracles that heralds the coming of the messiah.

Orit Strock, a minister from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, said last summer that the war had turned events in their direction. “From my point of view, this is like a miracle period,” she said.

Some see an opening granted by God to transform Israel into a state ruled by the Torah, the law of God as revealed to Moses and laid out in the five books of the Hebrew scriptures.

War also can speed up their desire to change the map. They believe God gave all the land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan to the Jews.

No space can be allowed for the shrinking number of Palestinians who still believe it might be possible to make peace with Israel by creating an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in east Jerusalem.

Smotrich has said the Jewish state should be on both sides of the river Jordan, taking in Jordan and stretching up to Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Extending religious law is not government policy, nor is expanding Israel’s borders across the River Jordan. But blocking a Palestinian state is a cornerstone of the Netanyahu coalition.

And the coalition can only stay in government as long as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir agree to support it. That gives them a disproportionate influence over the prime minister.

On 6 May Smotrich laid out his vision for Gaza and the West Bank, which Palestinians want for a state. Most western governments, including the United Kingdom, see Palestinian statehood alongside Israel as the only way to escape a conflict that has lasted more than a century for control of the land Arabs and Jews both want.

Instead, Smotrich said that within six months Gaza’s population would be confined to a narrow piece of land. The rest of the territory would be “totally destroyed” and “empty”.

Palestinians in Gaza would be “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”.

In the occupied old city of Jerusalem on Sunday 3 August, many Palestinians shut shops and businesses and stayed off the streets as Israeli Jews marked Tisha B’Av.

It is a day of mourning for the destruction by the Babylonians of Jerusalem’s first Jewish Temple and of its second one by the Romans.

The area where the Temples stood later became the third holiest place for Muslims, now dominated by al-Aqsa mosque where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ended his night journey from Mecca, and the golden rotunda of the Dome of the Rock where he ascended to heaven.

To try to keep the peace in an area that is a religious and national symbol for Israelis and Palestinians, a set of laws and customs, known as the status quo, is supposed to be observed.

One rule bans Jewish prayer within al-Aqsa compound, known by Palestinians as the Noble Sanctuary. It has been flouted in recent years with the encouragement of Ben-Gvir.

On Tisha B’Av he went there himself to lead prayers, an action that in the fragile and tense holy city was seen by some as a provocative political move.

Dozens of his followers – and heavily armed police that he commands as national security minister – followed as he strode through the narrow street of the Old City, through the gates of the place Israelis call the Temple Mount.

As well as praying, he made a speech linking his presence and prayers in Jerusalem to the war in Gaza and the way he wants to change Israel.

The videos of the two starving Israeli hostages were, he said, an attempt to put the state of Israel under pressure, which had to be resisted.

“From Temple Mount – the place where we proved that sovereignty and governance can be done – from here of all places we should send a message and make sure that today itself we conquer the whole of Gaza Strip, announce sovereignty of the whole of Gaza Strip, take down every Hamas man and encourage voluntary emigration.

“Only this way will we return the hostages and win the war.”

After Ben-Gvir had left, a big crowd of his young religious supporters stayed on to pray in a long, covered arcade.

The sound of their prayers echoed off the vaulted stone roof. Two young women, Ateret and Tamar, sad about the religious commemoration but seemingly excited by the future, explained why they believed the Temple Mount was the heart of Judaism.

Ateret said the destruction of the Temples meant, “it’s like having a body, but your heart is not there.

“We just want to say that we want our hostages back. We want everybody to have peace. This is the heart of the whole world, not only our hearts. When God will be here the world will have peace.”

They explained they prayed every day for the construction of a third Temple on the site. “This is our house for thousands of years, and now we’re back here, we want our house.”

When I asked what would happen to the Muslim holy places that stand there now, they said they didn’t know.

Ateret and Tamar seemed to be gentle souls, suffused with religious fervour.

According to senior diplomatic sources, the nightmare for security services in both Israel and its Arab neighbours is that a violent Jewish extremist might try to damage al-Aqsa mosque to bring on the third temple, an act that would risk igniting the region.

On the other end of the political spectrum is Avrum Burg, a writer and strong critic of Netanyahu, who used to be one of Israel’s most prominent centre-left politicians. He was speaker of the Knesset, the parliament, from 1999 to 2003 and before that he chaired the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organisation, two venerable Zionist institutions.

Today, he is among those who do not see the war as a miraculous chance to transform the country.

Israelis, Mr Burg reflects, are “somewhere between religious excitement and psychological despair”.

There is no middle ground, he argues. “A few Israelis, a majority of government, believe that we’re living in a miraculous time. It’s an opportunity. It’s God given. It is a once in a lifetime opening in order to realign, reorganise, re-something with history.

“And so many Israelis feel and sense – what for? What does that mean? Why do I have to pay the price? It’s a meaningless war. In between, there is no Israel. Israel is a fragmented, broken, torn apart social fabric.”

That psychological despair – and anger – at Israel’s government can be found at the regular demonstrations calling for Netanyahu’s resignation.

At one, on a hot and humid night in Tel Aviv, secular opponents of the government waved the blue and white Star of David flag, chanted and banged drums until they stood silent for the national anthem.

After, they listened to speeches from retired veteran commanders of the army and the police demanding a ceasefire.

Backstage, Nava Rosalio, the organiser of many mass rallies against the Netanyahu government, spelled out their position.

“We wish to replace Netanyahu’s government, but specifically to bring back all hostages in a deal at once, ending Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, which at this point has become completely political and serving nothing but his own political survival, of Netanyahu and his partners.”

I suggested some might accuse her of repeating the Hamas position. (For more than a year Hamas negotiators have offered to return all the hostages if the IDF pulled out of Gaza and the US and others guaranteed that the Israel would not go back to war once it had its people back. Israel, however, insists that Hamas must be fully disarmed, play no future role in Gaza and that Israel would retain security control in Gaza with the freedom to decide what comes next.)

But Ms Rosalio dismissed the suggestion that a ceasefire deal could be any kind of a win for Hamas. “That’s for propaganda. We have a great army… which can stay outside of the Gaza Strip and just protect the border.

“There is no reason to stay either, unless they imagine or wish to conquer Gaza and to transfer the people of Gaza.

“We just don’t believe the excuse of we’re protecting you, the people of Israel. If you wish to protect us, you would have ended this war to allow the people of Israel to rehabilitate, for society to recover.

“We are torn from inside.”

In the last three weeks I have travelled between the two sides of Israel, from leftists in Tel Aviv silently protesting the killing of Palestinian children, displaying the “psychological despair” described by Avrum Burg, the former speaker of parliament.

But on the other side of Israel, I have witnessed an overwhelming sense that Israel should ignore the mounting pressure and condemnation by some of its allies as well as its enemies, a feeling that its actions are justified by everything Hamas did on 7 October and the continued imprisonment of Israeli hostages in brutal conditions in tunnels.

Israel’s prime minister, still backed in public by US President Donald Trump despite murmurings that he is becoming exasperated by Netanyahu’s refusal to make a hostage deal possible, is planning another offensive and accuses Israel’s allies of deep seated antisemitism.

Messianic religious Zionists who support him believe God is with them and granting miracles.

Deep in the West Bank, overlooking the Jordan Valley, Aaron Katzoff and his friends in the Settlers wine bar believe they are fulfilling the prophecies of the scriptures, as they drink wine from grapes he says proudly were grown using the methods of Biblical times.

His relaxed and happy customers believe the secular liberals protesting against Netanyahu in Tel Aviv are yesterday’s Israelis. Now, the future of their state is in their hands, and in God’s – and they are confident it will all end well.

A sonic boom has been reported across parts of the East and South East of England.

The loud bang was heard in Essex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Kent and parts of London at about 11:40 BST.

The RAF confirmed three Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) Typhoon fighter aircraft from RAF Coningsby were launched to escort a civilian plane that had lost contact with air traffic control.

A spokesperson said: “Communications were re-established and the aircraft was safely escorted to Stansted. The Typhoons are returning to base.”

An Essex Police spokesperson said: “A flight has been escorted into Stansted Airport after it lost contact with the ground.

“Contact was re-established with the plane, which had been travelling from Nice, and was escorted into the airport by RAF aircraft.

“On the ground, our officers determined there was nothing of concern.”

A sonic boom occurs when an aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound, generating shockwaves that rapidly compress and decompress the air, producing an explosive noise.

While the speed of sound varies depending on the altitude, it is about 660mph (1,060km/h) at 60,000ft (18,300m).

The sound, often described as an explosion or thunderclap, can be heard over a large area because it moves with the plane, similar to the wake of a boat spreading out behind a vessel.

The boom has been widely reported across social media.

One person in Chelmsford in Essex said: “It made the whole of the upper part of the house shake.”

A woman in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk said it “rattled” her back door, while in north Kent one person described how it “shook the whole house – we thought there had been an explosion”.

In Burwell, Cambridgeshire, another woman wrote: “Thought something blew up in my loft”.

In Bexley, London, Bryony Percival was grooming her mother’s horse, Dixie, at a stable when she heard what she initially thought was thunder.

She told the BBC: “I actually felt the ground shake, so I thought, was it an explosion?

“My heart dropped a bit. The horse reacted – she was very alert.

“It was just weird. It sounded a bit like a gas explosion.”

Conor Kehoe, 33, was watching television with his fiancee Manisha Dev, 32, in Braintree when they heard “a very loud bang that shook the room”.

He told the BBC he initially thought his brother had fallen in the shower but then they realised it was coming from outside.

“So, we went outside and my neighbours were coming out as well, wondering what it was,” he said.

“I could hear the jet itself and thought jets can’t do a sonic boom unless it’s overland – and unless it’s absolutely necessary.

“It just sounded something like a bowling ball landing in a bath – like a thunderous clap but very echoey.”

Ms Dev, who was visiting from Singapore, said: “I was really shocked because, I mean, I’ve never experienced that in Singapore, so I thought it was like… a bomb.”

Global talks to develop a landmark treaty to end plastic pollution have once again failed.

The UN negotiations, the sixth round of talks in just under three years, were due to end on Thursday but countries continued to negotiate into the night in the hopes of breaking a deadlock.

There remained a split between a group of about 100 nations calling for curbs on production of plastic, and oil states pushing for a focus on recycling.

Speaking in the early hours, Cuban delegates said that countries had “missed a historic opportunity but we have to keep going”.

“I’m hugely disappointed that an agreement wasn’t reached,” said the UK’s Marine Minister Emma Hardy.

“Plastic pollution is a global crisis that no country can solve alone, and the UK is committed to working with others at home and abroad to protect the environment and pave the way to a circular economy,” she added.

The talks were convened in 2022 in response to the mounting scientific evidence of the risks of plastic pollution to human health and the environment.

Despite the benefits of plastic to almost every sector, scientists are particularly concerned about potentially toxic chemicals they contain, which can leach out as plastics break down into smaller pieces.

Microplastics have been detected in soils, rivers, the air and even organs throughout the human body.

Countries had an original deadline to get a deal over the line at the end of December last year, but failed to meet this.

The collapse of the latest talks means they fall further behind.

Speaking on behalf of the island states, the northern Pacific nation of Palau said on Friday: “We are repeatedly returning home with insufficient progress to show our people.”

“It is unjust for us to face the brunt of yet another global environmental crisis we contribute minimally to,” it added.

The core dividing line between countries has remained the same throughout: whether the treaty should tackle plastics at source – by reducing production – or focus on managing the pollution that comes from it.

The largest oil-producing nations view plastics, which are made using fossil fuels, as a vital part of their future economies, particularly as the world begins to move away from petrol and diesel towards electric cars.

The group, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, argue that better waste collection and recycling infrastructure is the best way of solving the problem, a view shared by many of the producers themselves.

“Plastics are fundamental for modern life – they go in everything,” said Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, a trade association for the plastic production industry in the United States.

“Focusing on ending plastic pollution should be the priority here, not ending plastic production,” he added, warning that attempts to substitute plastics with other materials could lead to “unintended consequences”.

But many researchers warn that this approach is fundamentally flawed. Global recycling rates are estimated at only about 10%, with limits on how far that can rise.

“Even if we manage to boost that over the next few decades to 15, 20, 30%, it would remain a substantial amount that is polluting the environment and damaging human health,” said Dr Costas Velis, associate professor in Waste and Resource Engineering at Imperial College London.

“Therefore, we do need to improve recycling… but we cannot really hope that this is going to solve all the aspects of plastic,” he added.

Plastic production has already risen from two million tonnes in 1950 to about 475 million in 2022 – and it is expected to keep rising without extra measures.

About 100 countries, which include the UK and EU bloc, had been pushing for curbs to production in the treaty and more consistent design globally to make recycling easier.

This could be as simple as requiring plastic bottles to be one colour – when dyes are used the products only fetch half the value of clear bottles.

This approach was supported by major plastic packagers, including Nestle and Unilever, who are part of the Business Coalition headed up by the Ellen McArthur Foundation.

The Coalition also said countries should better align their schemes to add a small levy on plastic products to help pay for recycling efforts, known as extended producer responsibility.

The group estimates that could double revenues for countries to $576bn (£425bn) between now and 2040.

Talks were due to end on Thursday but countries continued to negotiate into the night in the hopes of breaking a deadlock.

The chair, Luis Vayas from Ecuador, did produce a new text which seemed to align more closely with the request of the UK group.

The text did not call for curbs to plastic production.

But it did include reference to nations taking their own steps to tackle other issues like dangerous plastic chemicals and the design of plastics to make them easier to recycle.

Speaking at the final meeting, the EU delegation said: “We see the outcome of this session as a good basis of future negotiations.”

However, the oil states remained deeply unhappy. Saudi Arabia said it found the process of negotiating “problematic” whilst Kuwait said its views were “not reflected”.

But many environmental groups, reacting to the collapse, railed against what they see as prioritisation of profit by oil states over the health of the planet.

Graham Forbes, Greenpeace head of delegation to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations, said: “The inability to reach an agreement in Geneva must be a wakeup call for the world: ending plastic pollution means confronting fossil fuel interests head on.

“The vast majority of governments want a strong agreement, yet a handful of bad actors were allowed to use process to drive such ambition into the ground.”

The chair announced that the talks will resume at a later date.

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German car making giant Volkswagen (VW) has introduced a subscription for UK customers wanting to increase the power of some of its electric cars.

Those who buy an eligible car in its ID.3 range can choose to pay extra if they want to unlock the full power of the engine inside the vehicle.

VW says the “optional power upgrade” will cost £16.50 per month or £165 annually – or people can choose to pay £649 for a lifetime subscription.

The firm said it was “offering customers choice” with the feature.

Auto Express, who first reported the story, said a lifetime subscription would be for the car rather than the individual – meaning the upgrade would remain on the car if it was sold on.

A VW spokesperson told the BBC they believed giving people the option to purchase more power for their car is “nothing new”.

“Historically many petrol and diesel vehicles have been offered with engines of the same size, but with the possibility of choosing one with more potency,” they said.

They added that the power upgrades would allow customers to opt for a “sportier” driving experience at any time, “rather than committing from the outset with a higher initial purchase price”.

Such offers have proved controversial for some customers in the past, who are displeased they may have to pay to access features which – in some cases – are already present inside the car they own.

Other vehicle manufacturers such as BMW have introduced similar subscription-based add-ons in the past, such as for heated seats and steering wheels.

And Mercedes introduced an online subscription service in the US in 2022 which allowed customers to pay to make its electric cars speed up quicker.

According to a survey from S&P Global, some customers may be put off by the cost of in-car subscriptions for features such as connectivity, or by basic functions being split into paid tiers.

It said the number of respondents who said they would pay for connected services had fallen from 86% in 2024 to 68% in 2025.

This is despite a wider embrace of subscriptions in general, with market research firm Juniper Research estimating in 2024 the global subscription economy would reach nearly $1tn (£740bn) in value by 2028.

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Five thousand miles from Alaska, and feeling left out, Ukrainians were bracing themselves on Friday for the outcome of negotiations to which they were not invited.

The talks, between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, will begin later in the day with no seat for the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Trump signalled earlier this week that “land swaps” could be on the table – largely interpreted to mean the surrender of Ukrainian land to Russia.

In Ukraine, where polls consistently show that about 95% of the population distrusts Putin, there is a uneasy mix of deep scepticism about the talks and deep fatigue with the war.

• Live updates as Trump and Putin meet in Alaska
• What do Alaskans make of the geopolitical circus arriving in their city?
• The war-ravaged Ukrainian territories at the heart of the Trump-Putin summit

“This question touches me directly,” said Tetyana Bessonova, 30, from Pokrovsk – one of the eastern cities whose future is in question if land were surrendered to Russia.

“My hometown is on the line of fire. If active fighting stops, would I be able to return?” she said.

Questions of negotiations, of land swaps, of the redrawing of boundaries were deeply painful to those who grew up in the affected regions, Bessonova said.

“This is the place I was born, my homeland,” she said. “These decisions might mean I could never go home again. That I and many others will lose all hope of return.”

The French President, Emmanuel Macron, said on Wednesday that Trump had agreed on a call with European leaders that no territorial concessions would be made without Ukraine’s approval. And Trump has said he intends to hold a second summit with Zelensky present, before anything is agreed.

But Trump can be unpredictable. He is often said to favour the views of the person he spoke to most recently. So there is little faith in Ukraine that he won’t be swayed by Putin, particularly in a one-on-one meeting.

The very fact of the closed door meeting was bad for Ukraine, said Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian MP and chair of the country’s parliamentary committee on foreign affairs. “Knowing Trump, he can change his opinion very quickly. There is great danger in that for us.”

Merezhko said he feared that, such was Trump’s desire to be seen as a dealmaker, he may have privately made advance agreements with the Russians. “Trump doesn’t want embarrassment, and if nothing is achieved, he will be embarrassed,” the MP said. “The question is, what could be in those agreements?”

Various possibilities have been suggested for arrangements that could lead to a ceasefire, from a freezing of the current frontlines – with no formal recognition of the seized territory as Russian – to a maximalist position of Russia annexing four entire regions in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Polls suggest that about 54% of Ukrainians support some form of land compromise in order to hasten the end of the war, but only with security guarantees from Ukraine’s international partners. So deep and widespread is the distrust of Russia, that many believe an agreement to freeze the frontlines without security guarantees would simply be an invitation to Russia to rest, rearm, and reattack.

“If we freeze the frontlines and cede territories it will only serve as a platform for a new offensive,” said Volodymyr, a Ukrainian sniper serving in the east of the country. In accordance with military protocol, he asked to be identified only by his first name.

“Many soldiers gave their lives for these territories, for the protection of our country,” Volodymyr said. “A freeze would mean demobilization would begin, wounded and exhausted soldiers would be discharged, the army would shrink, and during one of these rotations the Russians would strike again. But this time, it would be the end of our country.”

Across Ukraine, people from all walks of life were making very tough decisions about the reality of their future, said Anton Grushetsky, the director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which regularly polls the population about the war.

One of the toughest decisions was whether to accept the idea of giving de facto control of some Ukrainian soil to Russia, he said. “It’s 20% of our land and these are our people. But Ukrainians are showing us that they are flexible, they are telling us that they will accept various forms of security guarantees.”

According to the institute’s polling, 75% of Ukrainians are totally opposed to giving Russia formal ownership of any territory. Among the remaining 25%, there were some people who were pro-Russian, Grushetsky said, and some who were simply so fatigued by the war that they felt hard compromises were necessary.

“My belief is that the war should be stopped in any way possible,” said Luibov Nazarenko, 70, a retired factory worker from Donetsk region, in Ukraine’s east.

“The further it goes, the worse it becomes,” she said. “The Russians have already occupied the Kherson region and they want Odesa. All this must be stopped, so the youth do not die.”

Nazarenko has a son who is not yet fighting but could be called up. She said she believed that three years into the war, with hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded on the Ukrainian side alone, the preservation of life superseded all concerns over land.

“I just don’t want people to die,” she said. “Not the youth, not the old people, not the civilians who live on the frontline.”

On Friday, as the clock ticked down to the beginning of the talks in Alaska, Ukrainians were celebrating a holy day – the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is the day when she is believed to listen to the prayers of all who need her.

At St Michael’s Monastery, a church in central Kyiv, priest Oleksandr Beskrovniy was leading a prayer service for several dozen people. Afterwards, he said it was hard to find words to describe the unfairness of the coming talks, but called it a “great injustice and madness” to leave Zelensky out.

Like others, the priest recognised the grim reality facing Ukraine, he said – that it was not in a position to recapture its stolen territory by force. So some deal needed to be made. But it should be thought of less in terms of land, Beskrovniy said, and more in terms of people.

“If we are forced to cede territory – if the world allows this – the most important thing is that we gather all of our people. The world must help us get our people out.”

In his prayers on Friday, the priest did not refer directly to the talks in Alaska, he said – “no names or places of meetings”.

But he prayed for the future strength of Ukraine, he said. “On the frontline, and in the diplomatic space.”

First Lady Melania Trump has threatened to sue Hunter Biden for more than $1bn after he said she was introduced to her husband by sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Lawyers acting on behalf of the first lady, who married President Donald Trump in 2005, described his claim as “false, disparaging, defamatory and inflammatory”.

Biden, son of former US President Joe Biden, made the comments during an interview this month. He defended them on Thursday and did not seem willing to back down in the face of the lawsuit threat.

Donald Trump was a friend of Epstein, but has said they fell out in the early 2000s because the financier poached employees from the spa in Trump’s Florida golf club.

A letter from the first lady’s lawyers and addressed to an attorney for Hunter Biden demands he retract the claim and apologise, or face legal action for “over $1bn in damages”.

It says the first lady has suffered “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” because of the claim he repeated.

It also accuses the youngest Biden son of having a “vast history of trading on the names of others”, and repeating the claim “to draw attention to yourself”.

During a wide-ranging interview with filmmaker Andrew Callaghan published earlier this month, Hunter Biden claimed unreleased documents relating to Epstein would “implicate” President Trump.

He said: “Epstein introduced Melania to Trump – the connections are so wide and deep.” The first lady’s legal letter notes the claim was partially attributed to Michael Wolff, a journalist who authored a critical biography of the president.

In a recent interview with US outlet the Daily Beast, Wolff reportedly claimed that the first lady was known to an associate of Epstein and Trump when she met her now-husband.

The outlet later retracted the story after receiving a letter from the first lady’s attorney that challenged the contents and framing of the story.

When asked during an interview on the YouTube show Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan if he would apologise, Biden said “not going to happen”.

Biden said in the interview posted on Thursday that he did not think “these threats of a lawsuit add up to anything other than a designed distraction”. But he noted that if the lawsuit was filed, he would be able to collect testimony from both Trumps through depositions and he was “more than happy to provide them the platform”.

There is no evidence the Trumps were introduced to each other by Epstein, who took his own life in prison while awaiting trial in 2019.

In the first lady’s legal letter, Hunter Biden is accused of relying on a since-removed article as the basis of his claims, which it describes as “false and defamatory”.

A message on the archived version of the Daily Beast online story reads: “After this story was published, The Beast received a letter from First Lady Melania Trump’s attorney challenging the headline and framing of the article.

“After reviewing the matter, the Beast has taken down the article and apologizes for any confusion or misunderstanding.”

Asked about the legal threat, the first lady’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, referred BBC News to a statement issued by her aide, Nick Clemens.

It read: “First Lady Melania Trump’s attorneys are actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies by those who spread malicious, defamatory falsehoods.”

A January 2016 profile by Harper’s Bazaar reported the first lady met her husband in November 1998, at a party hosted by the founder of a modelling agency.

Melania Trump, 55, told the publication she declined to give him her phone number because he was “with a date”.

The profile said Trump had recently separated from his second wife, Marla Maples, whom he divorced in 1999. He was previously married to Ivana Trump between 1977 and 1990.

The BBC has contacted Hunter Biden’s attorney.

The legal letter comes after weeks of pressure on the White House to release the so-called Epstein files, previously undisclosed documents relating to the criminal investigation against the convicted paedophile.

Before being re-elected, Trump said he would release the records if he returned to office, but the FBI and justice department said in July that no “incriminating” client list of Epstein associates existed.

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