Elon Musk said the Trump administration would close the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as employees were told to stay home on Monday amid uncertainty about its future.

The billionaire Trump adviser’s comments came amid turmoil after two top security officials were placed on leave. The agency’s website has not worked since Saturday.

But President Trump was less definitive about shuttering the agency, telling reporters on Sunday night that USAID was run by “a bunch of radical lunatics”.

“We’re getting them out,” he said, “and then we’ll make a decision.”

Over the last week, Musk railed against USAID as he sought to assert control over the agency.

On X, the social media platform that he owns, he called it “evil” and a “criminal organisation”. In a live stream on X early Monday, he told followers, “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair. … We’re shutting it down.”

Staffers who work at the agency’s Washington DC headquarters were told to stay home on Monday. Hundreds of employees were also locked out of their email, according to CBS, the BBC’s American news partner.

An effort could be underway to bring the agency, which was established by an act of the US Congress, more directly under the control of Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

Republican congressman Brian Mast, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told “Face the Nation” that USAID is “likely going to be rolled more closely under Secretary Rubio.”

Whether the agency is shut down or restructured, the changes sought by Musk and Trump would have far-reaching implications. USAID distributes billions in aid to non-governmental organisations, aid groups and nonprofits around the world.

With its website down, several key information reserves, including an international famine tracker and decades of aid records, appeared to be unavailable.

Top officials have been placed on leave or resigned in the last two days following clashes with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), a team set up within the administration that Trump has given broad leeway to slash government spending.

It is not, however, an official government agency.

Members of Doge clashed with the security officials after requesting access to a highly secure area used for reviewing classified information, the Washington Post and CNN reported this weekend.

USAID director for security John Vorhees and deputy Director for Security Brian McGill, were both placed on administrative leave as a result, CBS reports.

A top political appointee, chief of staff Matt Hopson, also resigned, the Washington Post reported.

Chinese fast fashion app Shein has relaunched in India five years after it was banned by Delhi, under a deal with Indian firm Reliance Retail.

An official from Reliance Retail, who did not wish to be named, told the BBC the firm has entered a long-term licensing deal with the parent company to sell products manufactured and sourced in India on the platform. The group has not yet made an official announcement.

Shein’s re-entry to the Indian market comes with strict terms, which include saving all data within the country, India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said in December.

In 2020 India banned Shein and dozens of other Chinese apps including TikTok.

It said this was in response to data security concerns and it followed a spike in tensions with China after clashes between the two countries’ armies in a disputed Himalayan border area.

The app was launched in India on Friday night and has so far been downloaded by more than 10,000 people. It is offering fashionwear for as little as 199 rupees ($2.30; £1.90).

Shein is currently delivering to consumers only in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, but will soon offer services across India, according to a notification on the app.

Over the last decade, Shein has gone from a little-known brand among older shoppers to one of the biggest fast fashion retailers globally. Today, it ships to customers in 150 countries across the world.

Before the ban it became a big hit in India as it gave people a variety of options to buy trendy designs at an affordable price. The ban initially left a vacuum in the Indian market which was later filled by many local players.

Experts say that with Shein India, Reliance Retail – owned by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani – is diversifying from its existing strategy of selling international brands through its flagship Ajio online retailer.

The revival comes with strict conditions that give Reliance Retail full control over its operations and data while Shein will be a technological partner, Goyal told the Indian parliament in December.

All customer and application data will be stored in India and Shein will not have any access rights, he said.

Goyal also clarified that the app was banned in India, not the “sale of Shein-branded products”.

Shein will use India as a “supply source for its global operations” and will help Reliance Retail in “building the network” and training Indian garment manufacturers, as it aims to promote export of textile and garments from India, an official from Reliance Retail said.

Shein’s comeback under the deal with Reliance Retail is a rare exception to India’s ban on more than 200 Chinese apps over the last five years.

At the time, Indian officials said the ban followed many complaints against the apps for “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorised manner”.

ByteDance’s TikTok and popular combat and survival game PlayerUnknown’s Battleground (PUBG) were also banned.

However PubG was later rebranded and launched for the Indian market under the name Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), which is held by Krafton India.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is set to become the first foreign leader to meet President Donald Trump at the White House in his second term on Tuesday at a critical juncture for the Gaza ceasefire.

After his arrival in Washington, the Israeli ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, who took up his post one week ago, described this as “an historic visit” on X. “The US-Israel friendship is strong and is getting stronger,” he added.

Trump has claimed credit for sealing the initial six-week ceasefire deal halting 15 months of war between Israel and Hamas. So far, this has led to 13 Israeli and five Thai hostages being freed and 583 Palestinian prisoners released in exchange.

However, Netanyahu – facing a struggle for his political survival – has repeatedly stated that the existing Gaza deal is for a temporary ceasefire and that Israel has reserved “the right to return to fighting” against Hamas, saying this would have US backing.

Already one of the veteran Israeli PM’s far-right allies has quit his coalition over what he described as a “reckless” deal. Another has threatened to leave if the military offensive does not resume. If he left, the government would lose its majority.

On Monday, Netanyahu is due to have talks with the US Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who emerged as a key mediator – working with Qatar and Egypt – to secure the truce which began on 19 January.

If all continues to go to plan, a total of 33 hostages held by Hamas and another armed group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are meant to be released by 1 March, in exchange for some 1,900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

Already the agreement has led to a major surge in desperately needed humanitarian aid to the Palestinian territory and the partial withdrawal of Israeli forces.

The sensitive next stage of the ceasefire is supposed to see a more permanent end to the war and the release of the remaining hostages seized in the deadly Hamas assault on 7 October 2023. Some 251 people were taken hostage and about 1,200 others killed in that attack. Israel’s military offensive which followed has killed at least 47,400 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Netanyahu’s office has indicated that it considers the meeting with Witkoff in Washington to mark the scheduled start of negotiations.

The presidential envoy is expected to speak to the Qatari prime minister and Egyptian officials this week, after which it is understood that he and the Israeli leader will discuss sending delegations to join further talks about the second stage of the ceasefire deal.

Trump has made it clear that he wants an end to the wars in the Middle East. He said on Sunday that ceasefire negotiations were “progressing” and that some “big meetings” were scheduled with Netanyahu.

For the Israeli PM, this is a boost on the world stage after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for him on allegations of war crimes. Washington, does not recognise the court – meaning it has no obligation to detain Netanyahu – and has strongly condemned the ICC move.

The two leaders are expected to discuss a range of regional issues, including reviving efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and how to deal with Iran, which twice directly attacked Israel with missiles and drones last year.

Trump pulled out of an international deal to curb Iran’s nuclear programme in 2018, and he and Netanyahu have pledged to stop Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. Iran denies seeking atomic bombs.

Both men are also keen to build on the Abraham Accords, which set up diplomatic ties between Israel and several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, in Trump’s first term.

Riyadh suspended normalization talks with Israel early in the Gaza war and has since hardened its position, insisting that this is “off the table” until the issue of Palestinian statehood is resolved.

Trump’s administration hopes that establishing formal ties between Israel and arguably the most powerful player in the Arab world, could help regional stability and boost efforts to counter Iran with its strategic partners. It could also serve as leverage to extend the Gaza deal.

On this subject, Anna Barsky, writing in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, notes that: “The people who have been pushing that idea in meetings with Trump believe that if the process towards normalisation begins now, it would be a powerful incentive for Israel to prolong the ceasefire so as not to derail the historic peace talks that will already be under way.”

This week, Netanyahu faces a major challenge to balance pressures from the US – Israel’s closest ally – and domestic ones within his own coalition.

While the idea favoured by Saudi Arabia of creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel – the so-called “two-state solution” – has long been the international formula for Middle East peace, the Israeli PM and members of his government have become even more strongly opposed to the idea since the 7 October attacks. They argue this would result in a “terror state”.

The existing ceasefire deal has also been dismissed as “reckless” by Israeli hardliners, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich who say it has endangered Israel’s security by ending fighting before Hamas was fully defeated in line with war goals.

With wide Israeli public support for continuing the ceasefire to free more hostages, other politicians have offered a potential lifeline to Netanyahu.

Visiting Nir Oz, a kibbutz near Gaza among those worst hit by the Hamas-led attacks, opposition leader Yair Lapid said of the talks with Trump: “It’s important to make crystal clear before that meeting: Netanyahu has a political safety net from the opposition for the deal, for every stage. There is no political reason preventing Netanyahu from going to the next phase.”

In his previous term, the US president gave a series of wins to Netanyahu.

As well as securing the signing the Abraham Accords, he notably relocated the US embassy to Jerusalem, a move which was condemned by the Palestinians and others, and recognised Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which is otherwise seen internationally as Syrian territory.

The new Trump administration includes pro-Israel figures expected to push back against pressure from other world powers over the Gaza war and endorse expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. They are considered to be illegal under international law, although Israel disagrees.

Already there have been marked changes from US policy under Biden. Trump has lifted sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violence against Palestinians and reportedly approved a shipment of 2,000lb bombs that had previously been blocked.

However, Trump and Netanyahu have had an up-and-down personal relationship and there is extensive speculation in the Israeli media about how the upcoming meeting between the pair will unfold.

Commenting in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Nahum Barnea writes that “Netanyahu will try to sniff out the new Trump and to get a sense of what animates him, what turns him off and what infuriates him.”

The prominent Israeli journalist – using strong language – goes on to warn Netanyahu that as he does so: “He would do well to bear in mind the old American adage: ‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’ Trump is at the pinnacle of his life, at peak strength and at his most euphoric. His ambition is huge, his gratification immediate and his patience thin. You’ve been duly warned.”

Sunk into a camping chair wearing shorts and in his Led Zeppelin T-shirt, John Duric looks relaxed.

In the arm of the seat, a drinks pocket holds an icy bottle of beer. But on the ground next to him, a pile of half a dozen sandbags, ready to go.

Mr Duric lives across the street from the Ross River – overflowing and fast-moving – in Idalia, one of six suburbs labelled “black zones” in Townsville, one of the areas hardest hit by a flooding emergency in Queensland state in Australia.

Authorities have urged people living in those spots to leave. They were given a deadline of noon on Sunday, but like plenty of others, Mr Duric has opted to stay put.

“We’ve only been here 12 months, so I’ve relied on a lot of information from people around us,” he says.

“We were thinking about moving out, but we have pets, we’ve got nowhere to go so have decided to follow the neighbour’s advice and stay.

“We haven’t panicked but we are prepared. Let’s hope for the best and hope we don’t have to use the sand bags.”

The city has been inundated with more than 600mm (23.6in) of rain in the past week. Other parts of the state of Queensland have seen almost 1.3m of rain since Saturday, causing rivers and reservoirs to overflow, with officials suggesting as many as 2,000 homes could be inundated before the water reached its peak.

But by late Monday afternoon, both the cloud and the mood had lifted. The first break in the rain for days bringing smiles, and curiosity, as locals headed out to inspect the waterways.

For Daniel Watts, walking the dog with his family, there’s a glimmer of optimism that their home will not suffer the same fate as during floods here six years ago – when water rose 1.5 metres and his property had to be gutted.

“It’s been on a knife edge as to whether our house will get inundated or not, so there’s been quite a bit of anxiety,” he told the BBC.

“Luckily, it hasn’t yet. And at this stage, the dam levels are retreating, which is good. It’s still wait and see, though. It wouldn’t take much.”

The Townsville Disaster Management Group expects the Ross River to peak between 07:00 and 08:00 on Tuesday (21:00 to 22:00GMT).

“We’re not quite out of the woods yet,” Queensland state Premier David Chrisafulli told ABC News.

But Mr Watts is taking comfort from Monday’s easing weather – a contrast to 2019 when, he says, the rain “just did not stop”.

“Having a bit of a reprieve is from the rain is really good,” he said.

“It gives everything just time. It gives time for the river and the dam, but we’ll see. It’s not over.”

Taiwanese actress Barbie Hsu, who was best-known for starring in the hit 2001 TV series Meteor Garden, has died from pneumonia at the age of 48, according to local media.

One of the biggest stars in the Mandarin-speaking world, Hsu became a familiar face even in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand after Meteor Garden was dubbed in local languages.

“I can’t believe it,” read one comment on Chinese social media platform Weibo, echoing the sentiments of millions of shocked fans who have been paying tribute.

She is believed to have fallen ill while visiting Japan. Her sister, Dee Hsu, confirmed her death to Taiwan’s TVBS News on Monday.

“During the Lunar New Year, our family came to Japan for vacation. My dearest sister Barbie has unfortunately left us after getting pneumonia, triggered by influenza,” Dee Hsu said in a statement shared by her manager.

Hsu, who had a history of epilepsy and heart disease, was hospitalised previously due to seizures.

She leaves behind her husband, South Korean singer DJ Koo, and two children from an earlier marriage.

She and her ex-husband, Chinese businessman Wang Xiaofei, were married for 10 years, before an acrimonious divorce in 2021.

Hsu began her career at 17, as part of a pop duo with her sister Dee. They became famous as TV hosts, known for their animated style and sense of humour.

But it was Meteor Garden, a TV adaptation of a 1990s Japanese comic of the same name, that turned Hsu into a star whose fame stretched beyond Chinese entertainment.

In the drama, Hsu played Shancai, a teen from a middle-class family who attends an elite private school and finds herself entangled in a love web with the heirs of wealthy families.

Her four male co-stars in Meteor Garden would later form the Taiwanese boyband F4, one of the most popular Mandopop groups of the 2000s.

On Monday, F4 member Ken Chu shared a black, empty screen as well as a group photo with Hsu on Instagram. Then on Weibo, he wrote: “What a bolt from the blue.”

After Meteor Garden, Hsu starred in more than a dozen TV shows and movies, including popular romantic dramas like Corner With Love and Summer’s Desire.

She took a break from acting in 2012, but continued to appear in reality shows.

Aya Liu, a host and long-time friend of the Hsu sisters, wrote on Weibo that she had met Hsu at a gathering last month, where they had promised to meet more often.

“I didn’t think that would be our last gathering,” Liu wrote. “Rest in peace, the most beautiful queen.”

Hsu was the top trending topic on Weibo on Monday. “She was only 48 years old… this is too sudden. This is a little difficult to accept,” read one comment.

Posts about influenza in Japan were also trending as fans tried to understand how she had fallen sick.

When Meteor Garden aired in the 2000s, at a time when Taiwanese shows and music dominated pop culture in the region, the modern, high-school take on Cinderella was a hit.

Young women took fashion inspiration from Hsu’s Shancai and swooned over F4. The floppy hairstyles sported by the male leads were plastered on walls in hair salons, as young men across South East Asia and East Asia tried to emulate the look.

In the Philippines, a local broadcaster reportedly aired the entire series eight times to satisfy fan demand. Bootleg copies of the series were also sold at roadside stalls.

Meteor Garden’s theme songs were released in other languages, quickly becoming hits on the radio and on TV.

More than 20 years on, the show’s popularity has endured even as remakes attracted new fans. It has inspired versions in Japan, South Korea, China and India.

On social media, tributes to Hsu have poured in from across the region, from Chinese users on Weibo, to Southeast Asian fans on X, to Meta’s Threads, which is particularly popular in Taiwan.

“Big S has always been a part of my youth,” wrote one fan on Threads, referring to Hsu by her nickname.

An X user wrote: “Meteor Garden raised an entire generation of Asians. Thank you Barbie Hsu for giving life to Shancai.”

Sunday night saw Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar win big at the Grammy Awards, which was dedicated to fundraising for wildfire relief efforts in Los Angeles.

It also saw plenty of memorable performances, impassioned speeches and stunning red carpet looks for everyone to emulate over the course of the next year (leather chaps are back, in case you were wondering).

Let’s take a closer look at some of the other highlights and lowlights from the ceremony.

Well, now we’re in a pickle.

On her eighth solo record, Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé sang about the Grammys’ constant, stubborn refusal to award her album of the year.

“” she sang. ““

But now she won, for the album that contains that very lyric. Will she have to go back and re-record it? At the very least, we expect a rewrite on the tour she just announced.

Joking aside, this victory was long, long overdue.

In 2017, Adele even flirted with the idea of handing back her album of the year trophy, saying the music on her album, 25, couldn’t compare to Beyoncé’s “monumental… beautiful and soul-baring” Lemonade.

Eyebrows were raised again in 2023, when Harry Styles’ fun, but conceptually flimsy, Harry’s House bested Beyoncé’s Renaissance – a meticulous exploration of how oppressed black and queer musicians found salvation through house music.

In the end, it took Beyoncé to approach a genre that conservative Grammy voters could understand – country – in order to secure a victory.

But that’s not to downplay the scale of her achievement. Cowboy Carter is a masterpiece that weaves hundreds of musical threads into a thesis about America’s cultural past, and the futility of gatekeeping musical genres along racial lines.

The arguments it makes are both timely and urgent, without suffocating the songs.

As the second part of a planned trilogy, this surely won’t be Beyoncé’s last trip to the podium.

Sabrina Carpenter has literally been practising for this moment all her life. She made her TV debut in 2011, aged 12 years old, and has been hovering on the fringes of pop superstardom pretty much ever since.

So, after a huge breakthrough in 2024, she was primed and ready for the Grammy stage.

Or was she?

She emerged in a razzle-dazzle showgirl outfit and instantly missed her spotlight. Then she dropped the cane she was supposed to dance with. And, as she descended a grand pearlescent staircase, she suddenly disappeared through a trap door.

Luckily, it was all a humorous ruse! Carpenter skipped back to the stage for a big band version of Espresso, complete with ankle-endangering tap routine.

After changing into a blue, crystal-studded Victoria’s Secret bodysuit, she segued effortlessly into Please, Please, Please… And then the set collapsed on her.

As she leapt into the safety of a dancer’s arms, she couldn’t contain her laughter.

It was a perfect piece of vaudeville, and the audience lapped it up. Host Trevor Noah, however, wasn’t so impressed.

“That was amazing and funny, which I didn’t appreciate,” the comedian said. “Really, Sabrina? You’re just gonna take my job like that?”

Five years ago, people were stunned when The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights – the most-streamed song of all time – failed to pick up a single Grammy nomination.

Among those people were Abel Tesfaye – aka The Weeknd himself.

He declared the awards were “corrupt” and criticised their lack of “transparency”. Since then, he’s refused to submit any of his music for consideration.

So it was something of a coup when he gave an unannounced, unexpected performance in the middle of Sunday’s ceremony.

He was introduced by the Recording Academy’s CEO, Harvey Mason Jr, who acknowledged the star’s criticisms, and described his efforts to revamp the Grammys’ electorate, by boosting the number of women and people of colour.

After that, the star took to the stage with two songs from his brand new album, Cry For Me and Timeless.

It was meant to be a celebration of people’s ability to learn and grow, but the music was so oppressively drab – with the Weeknd constantly shrouded in smoke and shadow – that you wondered whether he’d simply returned to sabotage the Grammys from within.

BBC Sound of 2025 winner Chappell Roan cantered into the Grammys with a theatrical performance of Pink Pony Club – her love letter to LA, as well as a celebration of queer discovery.

Backed by dancers dressed as rodeo clowns, Roan – herself wearing a sequinned cowboy hat and sparkly boots – rode a a giant pink carousel pony, complete with an 80s perm.

“‘My Little Pony’ grew up!” joked host Trevor Noah afterwards.

The performance was part of a segment that raised awareness and funds for wildfire relief.

Roan, real name Kayleigh Amstutz, later received a standing ovation for using her best new artist winning speech to call on record labels to provide up-and-coming artists with liveable wages and healthcare.

Quite a night for the 26-year-old, who might be feeling a little horse in the morning.

Rapper Kanye West arrived on the red carpet dressed in black with his wife Bianca Censori, who was, to all intents and purposes, naked.

As the couple stopped to pose for cameras, the Australian model removed her black fur coat to reveal a sheer body stocking that left little to the imagination.

The pair then made a swift exit, electing to skip the ceremony, driving off into the LA night.

Early reports suggested they had been kicked out, but the BBC understands they left of their own accord, with one source saying that West, “walked the carpet, got in his car and left”.

They may well have been home by the time West’s track Carnival lost out to Kendrick Lamar in the best rap song category.

But he probably won’t mind: He already has 24 Grammy awards, and now he has the headlines he craves, too.

Among the three awards Charli XCX picked up was one of the night’s most obscure: Best artwork.

At first glance, that might seem odd. The album cover is a plain green square, with the word “brat” printed in a deliberately low-resolution Arial font.

But the cover took five months to put together, with designer Brent David Freaney testing around 500 shades of green to produce a garish, nausea-inducing effect.

Charli wanted the artwork to be deliberately off-putting – reflecting the album’s dual themes of partying and self doubt. And she said it was important to challenge the convention of women dressing provocatively to promote their music.

“Why should anyone have that level of ownership over female artists?” she asked Vogue magazine.

She added: “I wanted to go with an offensive, off-trend shade of green to trigger the idea of something being wrong. I’d like for us to question our expectations of pop culture – why are some things considered good and acceptable, and some things deemed bad?

“I’m interested in the narratives behind that and I want to provoke people. I’m not doing things to be nice.”

Towards the end of the ceremony, the star’s live performance of Von Dutch and Guess saw her transform the biggest and glitziest night in music into a packed and sweaty nightclub.

Emerging from a black SUV, she strutted towards the camera, throwing a glass of champagne against the wall of a parking garage, before launching into what appeared to be an underground rave.

As the performance progressed, she appeared on stage with model Julia Fox and hundreds of dancers, who were then showered in underwear (a reference to the song’s lyrics).

The Grammys said all of the unworn garments were donated to domestic violence survivors after the show.

I can’t be the only person desperate to know what Taylor is whispering, right?

Beyoncé’s stunned reaction to winning best country album is a gif that will never stop gif-ing.

The Grammys have a wobbly history with hip-hop. They didn’t introduce a rap category until 1989, a full decade after the Sugarhill Gang introduced the genre to a wide audience with Rapper’s Delight. And no rap act has won album of the year since OutKast in 2001.

So it was a rare victory when Compton-born rapper Kendrick Lamar won all five of the awards in which he was nominated for Not Like Us, a furious takedown of his musical rival, Drake.

Among those awards were the prestigious record and song of the year – categories that have only ever recognised a rap song once before (Childish Gambino’s This Is America in 2019).

Lamar didn’t perform at the ceremony – he plays the Super Bowl halftime show next week instead – but, dressed head to toe in denim, he delivered a powerful message to Grammy voters.

“At the end of the day, nothing is more powerful than rap music. I don’t care what it is. We are the culture… respect the art form”.

Music lost one of its biggest legends in 2024, when Quincy Jones died at the age of 91.

As the producer for everyone from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson, the Grammys gave him a star-studded send-off that lasted almost 20 minutes.

Cynthia Erivo and Herbie Hancock played a beautiful version of Fly Me To The Moon; while Stevie Wonder’s sang We Are The World with choirs from two schools affected by the devastating LA fires.

But it was Janelle Monaé’s performance of Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough that blew the roof off.

Dressed in MJ’s Billie Jean outfit, she pirouetted and moonwalked and jumped on the tables as if she’d been possessed by the man himself.

Towards the end of the performance, she threw off her jacket to reveal a t-shirt bearing the legend “I Love QJ”.

And guess who caught it and wore it for the rest of the night?

Taylor Swift.

Even with 94 awards to consider, some people will get overlooked – but nobody expected two of the Grammys’ biggest darlings to go home empty-handed.

Taylor Swift was blanked despite scoring six nominations. Voters clearly decided that The Tortured Poets Department wasn’t worthy of comparison with her four previous album of the year winners (Fearless, 1989, Folklore and Midnights).

Billie Eilish’s wipeout was even more unexpected. She had been the bookmakers’ favourite for album of the year, for her third release Hit Me Hard And Soft – but she lost all seven of the categories she was nominated for.

Still, there was a lot of competition this year, especially in the pop categories. And Swift has spoken in the past about how losing album of the year for Red inspired her pop opus, and biggest-seller to date, 1989.

Don’t count either of these artists out just yet.

There’s a reason they keep inviting Trevor Noah back to host the Grammys: He’s got the tone right.

He’s relaxed, he’s engaged with the music, and his humour never punches down.

Here are some of his best quips from the night:

• “Yesterday, Beyonce announced her new tour. Everyone saw that. I will say, though, Beyonce, there’s tariffs. We can’t afford a new tour, right? Maple syrup is about to be $50.”
• “Taylor Swift could become the first artist ever to win album of the year five times. Which means she would break the record of four wins, set all the way back in 2024 by Taylor Swift. I’m just gonna say Taylor, if you break Taylor’s record, the Swifties are gonna come for you. And you don’t wanna mess with them.”
• “The Beatles are nominated tonight for Record of the Year. Yes, the legendary band from Liverpool used AI to put out a new song after 53 years. So good luck to the Beatles. I think if they win, this could open up a few doors for them.”
• “And who knows, through the power of AI, one day, we could even get another Rihanna album.”

Daniel Khalife has been jailed for 14 years and three months after escaping from prison while awaiting trial for spying for Iran.

Khalife joined the Army aged 16, and shortly after began passing sensitive information – including the names of special forces soldiers – to Tehran.

Khalife, now 23, was charged in January 2023 and became the subject of a nationwide manhunt eight months later when he fled Wandsworth prison before his trial. He was arrested in London after a 75-hour search.

Sentencing Khalife on Monday, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said he had “the makings of an exemplary soldier” when he joined, but instead showed himself “to be a dangerous fool”.

• Daniel Khalife was a British soldier who spied for Iran and dreamed of fame
• Eighty prison staff absent on day Khalife escaped
• Watch on iPlayer: Manhunt – The Search for Daniel Khalife

“You are an attention seeker and you enjoyed the notoriety you attracted following your escape from prison,” the judge added.

Khalife, wearing a black jumper, showed no reaction as he was led from court following the sentencing.

The former soldier, whose actions breached the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act, was found guilty of spying for Iran after a trial at Woolwich Crown Court in November.

Part way through the trial, he pleaded guilty to escaping from prison by strapping himself to the underside of a food delivery truck.

He was cleared of perpetrating a bomb hoax at his army barracks at RAF Stafford in 2023, after three wired cannisters were left at the base where he lived and worked.

Khalife began to foster a relationship with Tehran shortly after he was employed by the British Army as a teenager in September 2018.

He used Facebook to contact a man with links to Iranian intelligence, and from there built a relationship with various contacts from Iran.

By August 2019, having been in the Army for less than a year, he was sent to collect $2,000 (£1,600) in a dog poo bag in Mill Hill Park, north London.

Khalife also travelled to Turkey in August 2020, where he left a package for Iranian intelligence agents.

During his trial, the court heard Khalife had anonymously contacted MI6 twice offering to work as a double agent for them.

Following the calls, police launched an investigation into him in November 2021. He was arrested in January 2022, and charged one year later.

He escaped from Wandsworth prison later in 2023 while awaiting trial, only to be found and arrested three days later.

Prosecutors said Khalife had been “entrusted to uphold and protect the national security of this country”, but had instead “used his employment to undermine” it.

However, Khalife’s lawyer claimed twice during the trial that this plot was “hapless” and more “Scooby-Doo” than “007”.

In her sentencing remarks, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said: “What a shame shortly after basic training you spent more than two years in contact with agents of Iran, a country whose interests do not align with UK”.

She added that by the time Khalife had initiated a relationship with Iran, he had been vetted and cleared and thereby had access to a “sea of sensitive material”.

“The duty of confidentiality you owed would have been drilled into you,” she added.

The judge said it was not possible to know the details of all the information Khalife had passed on to his handlers.

The court also heard a number of mitigating factors, including Khalife’s age and a psychological report from 2023 diagnosing him with Antisocial Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

During his time in the Army, including while on a military exercise in the US, Khalife accumulated numerous pictures of secret communications equipment on his iPhone – including computer screens showing IP addresses. It is unclear how many of the photos he actually sent to Iran.

Khalife gathered the names of 15 serving soldiers – including some from the special forces.

Initially he only had surnames and initials, but he found a flaw in the Army’s holiday-booking system that allowed him to look up and photograph soldiers’ first names too. These pictures were later found on his phone.

Prosecutors believe he sent the list of names of soldiers to Iran before deleting the evidence.

However, Khalife denied ever sending it and claimed the information he did pass on was “fake” or “useless”. However, he seemingly sent at least two classified documents – one on drones and another on “Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance”.

The UK will never know the full scale of what Khalife handed over, as most of the messages he exchanged with contacts were sent on the encrypted communication app Telegram.

Speaking after the verdict, Commander Dominic Murphy, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: “The threat to the UK from states such as Iran is very serious, so for a soldier in the army to be sharing sensitive military material and information with them is extremely reckless and dangerous.”

After his prison escape, Khalife was arrested by plain-clothes officers while riding a stolen bike on a canal towpath in north-west London – just 11 miles from Wandsworth.

While on the run, he had made an attempt to contact the Iranians, sending a Telegram message which said simply: “I wait.” He received no response.

It was revealed at the sentencing hearing that Khalife’s escape cost police over £250,000 in overtime, with over 150 officers at one point helping with the manhunt.

In his first interview in January 2022, Khalife told police he had an ambition to work in military intelligence or for an elite signals unit.

He said he had been informed by an officer that his ancestry meant he was unlikely to qualify for the high-level security vetting – called “developed vetting” – that would allow him to work in sensitive roles.

“After this I decided to start my own intel operation to prove that I was able to do this,” he wrote in an electronic note in 2021.

Khalife told the jury that he escaped because he was being held on the vulnerable prisoners unit where most inmates are sex offenders, and because he had been warned that “terrorists” in Wandsworth prison would try to attack him.

He said he believed that if he escaped he would be put in the high security unit at Belmarsh prison.

After the escape, an audit found 81 security failings at the prison. It also resulted in “long overdue” upgrades being made to CCTV cameras which had not worked for more than a year, the prison’s Independent Monitoring Board said.

It emerged that on the day of Khalife’s escape, nearly 40% of prison officers did not turn up for their shift at Wandsworth prison. However, the Ministry of Justice insisted the prison had been adequately staffed.

Jenni Hermoso has told the trial of Spain’s former football chief Luis Rubiales that the kiss he gave her at the 2023 World Cup “stained one of the happiest days of my life”.

The Spanish world champion footballer was the first witness in Rubiales’ trial over the kiss, where he is accused of sexual assault and coercion.

She told the court in Madrid: “My boss was kissing me, and this shouldn’t happen in any social or work setting.”

Rubiales sparked major controversy when he kissed the athlete on the lips during the medal ceremony for the side’s World Cup victory in Australia, triggering protests and calls for his resignation. He denies any wrongdoing.

Hermoso told the court that she had never given permission to be kissed and felt “disrespected” as a woman.

“I greeted the queen, I greeted her daughter. The next thing was meeting Rubiales.”

Hermoso said she and the then-president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation hugged and celebrated.

“The next thing he did was to grab me by the ears and kiss me on the mouth.”

“I didn’t hear or understand anything,” she said.

She went on: “A kiss on the lips is only given when I decide so”.

“No one came to ask me how I was” after the kiss, she told the trial on Monday.

The footballer said she felt “completely abandoned by the federation”.

She continued to celebrate “the greatest achievement” of her life with her teammates, Hermoso explained.

“There was no place for me to be crying or lying in the corner of the dressing room.”

The other players initially made fun of the incident before one, Irene Paredes, intervened to say: “Stop, this is serious.”

Hermoso said she was pulled aside soon after the kiss and asked to consent to a statement minimising the incident, which she refused to do.

She added that Rubiales asked her to record a video with him on the flight home because he was being accused of assault on social media.

“I said no, that I was not going to do anything, that I was not the cause of this.”

She said people were huddled around Rubiales during the flight, and that she saw his daughters crying.

The footballer said her life had been “on stand-by” until the trial began on Monday.

She said she had received death threats that prompted her to leave Madrid with her family. She now plays club football in Mexico, as well as for Spain’s national team.

Prosecutors are calling for Rubiales, 47, to receive a one-year prison sentence for sexual assault.

They are also calling for him to be given a sentence of a year-and-a-half for coercion, for allegedly trying to pressure Hermoso into saying publicly that the kiss was consensual.

Rubiales denies the charges.

At the time, Rubiales said the kiss had been consensual and denounced a so-called witch-hunt by “fake feminism,” before resigning from his position.

Three of his former colleagues are also on trial accused of coercing Hermoso into saying the kiss was consensual.

Jorge Vilda, coach of the World Cup-winning side, Rubén Rivera, the federation’s former head of marketing, and former sporting director, Albert Luque all deny the charges.

Spain’s Equality Minister Ana Redondo thanked Hermoso for her “bravery” in a post on X, shortly before the trial started.

The trial runs until 19 February.

The leader of a pro-Russian paramilitary group in eastern Ukraine has died in hospital after being injured in an explosion in Moscow on Monday morning, Russian media have said.

Armen Sargsyan, the leader of the “Arbat” battalion, was severely injured following a blast in the entrance hall of a residential building in north-west Moscow, 12km (7 miles) from the Kremlin.

He was evacuated to a hospital by helicopter and placed in intensive care after the explosion, but eventually succumbed to his injuries, according to usually reliable Telegram sources.

Others – including one of Armen Sargsyan’s bodyguards – were also reportedly seriously injured, with some sources saying one other person had died.

In December, the Ukrainian security service SBU said “crime boss” Mr Sargsyan was a suspect in “recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine” and added that he had been on an international wanted list since May 2014 for his involvement in murders carried out in the centre of Kyiv.

The SBU added that Mr Sargsyan was part of the inner circle of fugitive former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

“The assassination attempt on Sarkisyan was carefully planned and was ordered. Investigators are currently identifying those who ordered the crime,” TASS quoted a law enforcement official as saying.

Images shared on social media show rubble and plaster strewn across a heavily damaged entrance hall with blown-out windows and doorways.

Olga Voronova, a 36-year-old mother of three who lived in the building next door to the explosion, told AFP news agency that she was “very scared” and did not understand how the blast could’ve happened.

“We have quite serious security guards, they ask every car at the checkpoints, we order passes for guests, even for family members,” she said.

Mr Sargsyan was born in Horlivka, a city in Ukraine’s Donetsk region which has been occupied by Russia since 2014.

In a Telegram post confirming his death, the town’s mayor, Ivan Prikhodko, said Mr Sargsyan’s “most significant achievement was the creation and leadership of a separate special forces battalion”.

Mr Prikhodko said Mr Sargsyan was also the head of the Boxing Federation of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.

The “Arbat” battalion has been known to operate in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops are still present after they launched a surprise offensive in August.

There have been a number of attacks on high profile supporters of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in Moscow and in occupied areas.

Senior Russian naval officer Valery Trankovsky and Russian prison boss Sergei Yevsyukov died after car bombs exploded in Russian-occupied Ukraine in late 2024.

And in December, a high-ranking general in the Russian armed forces and his assistant were killed in Moscow by Ukraine’s security service, a Ukrainian source told the BBC.

Karla Sofía Gascón has said she will not withdraw from the Oscars race for best actress, despite controversy over past social media posts which showed her criticising Islam.

Gascón made history last month as the first transgender person to be nominated in an Oscars acting category, after making the shortlist for best actress for her role in the Netflix musical Emilia Pérez.

In an interview with CNN, Gascón apologised to anyone who “may have felt offended” by her posts, but said she was not racist.

She added: “I cannot step down from an Oscar nomination because I have not committed any crime, nor have I harmed anyone.”

Gascón stars opposite Zoe Saldana, who is also in the running for best supporting actress, in the film about a Mexican drug lord who changes gender.

The film leads the way with 13 Oscar nominations.

However, Gascón has since been embroiled in a storm over the old posts, which also touched on subjects including the death of George Floyd and diversity at the Oscars.

• Musical about trans drug boss leads Oscar nominations

The posts from X, largely from 2020 and 2021 when it was known as Twitter, were unearthed by journalist Sarah Hagi, and subsequently reported in Variety.

Gascón subsequently deactivated her account on X and apologised for the posts.

“As someone in a marginalised community, I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain,” the actress said in a statement last week via Netflix, which is quoted in the Associated Press.

“All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”

Gascón told CNN she offered her “most sincere apologies to all the people who may have felt offended”.

However, she added: “I am neither racist nor anything that all these people have tried to make others believe I am.”

Gascón said she did not “recognise” some of the posts that have been found, and said she had not been given an opportunity to defend herself.

She also denied writing a derogatory post about Emilia Pérez co-star Selena Gomez.

“It’s not mine, of course, I have never said anything about my colleague, I would never refer to her that way,” Gascón said.

Emilia Pérez is the most-nominated non-English language film of all time. It is a French production set mostly in Mexico and mostly acted in Spanish.

Gascón is nominated for best actress for the film’s lead role, making her the first trans person to be nominated in an acting category (although Elliot Page was nominated for Juno in 2008, before the actor transitioned).

The film has not set Netflix alight so far and has divided opinion among those who have watched it. It has also caused controversy in Mexico, because of its depiction of the country.

Despite this, Oscar voters have given it a resounding seal of approval.

However, film critics have warned that the controversy over Gascón’s tweets may threaten the film’s overall chances at this year’s Academy Awards, which take place overnight Sunday 2 March into Monday 3 March UK time.

BBC News has approached Gascón’s representatives and Netflix for a comment.

Most of us would admit we’ve said something in the heat of the moment and regretted it.

But what about putting your foot in it when millions of people around the world are watching?

That’s the high-pressure scrutiny football managers face every week – and one that has thrown up more than a few viral moments down the years.

Think Kevin Keegan’s “I’d love it” rant, Chris Wilder’s sandwich snap or Jose Mourinho preferring “not to speak”.

More recently we’ve seen Tottenham Hotspur boss Ange Postecoglou fume with a BBC reporter’s opening question and Manchester United’s Ruben Amorim call his side the “worst team” in history.

And this weekend Leyton Orient manager Richie Wellens took the trend meta when he said he wouldn’t “make excuses” for his side’s 1-0 loss because he’s “not Ange Postecoglou”.

So what is the art behind nailing the post-match chat?

Put yourself in a manager’s shoes.

“The adrenaline’s absolutely pumping at this stage, but you’re expected to give an interview,” sports broadcaster and media trainer Bryn Law tells BBC Newsbeat.

“And that can be a challenge for people because you’ve got to control your emotions.

“But you’ve also got to come up with something that sounds credible – particularly difficult off the back of a defeat.”

Bryn has worked in broadcasting for several years and coaches managers on dealing with the media.

He says Postecoglou and Amorim’s outbursts are examples he plans to use in future courses.

“So what we talk about is creating a message in your mind that you’re then going to deliver to the audience.

“The audience isn’t the reporter, it’s whoever is on the other side.

“That could be the fan base, the owners, your players and that could be potential future employers as well.”

In the hands of a skilled operator the post-match interview can also be a chance to steer the narrative.

“Somebody like Jose Mourinho was an absolute master at doing that,” says Bryn.

“Diverting attention away from what might have been a poor result and a bad performance.”

Bryn feels that is what Amorim has tried to do, along with sending a message to his players.

“In a sense take the pressure off the players by saying: ‘Yeah, not very good at the moment, but obviously we’ll work to try and get things better’.

“Maybe rile the players. For them to say: ‘Well, actually no, we’re not the worst team ever.'”

From the point of view of the person asking the questions, BBC commentator and interviewer Robyn Cowen tells Newsbeat she “absolutely hates it”.

She explains managers are contractually obliged to give those interviews within a certain time period.

If they don’t, they get fined.

“So they’re kind of pushed into this situation,” says Robyn. “They might not have had time to calm down or to collect their thoughts.”

Those factors are how you end up with comments like Postecoglou’s, Robyn says.

She adds the Spurs boss is “a tough nut to crack”.

“That’s his right. But as a paid-up member of the commentators and reporters union I’m very much: ‘Give us something’.”

And while interviews might lead to confrontations, Robyn says it’s “very important” to do them.

“Whether they win or lose they explain how it happened.”

But Robyn does reflect after a tricky moment.

“You look at yourself and think could I have phrased things differently? And usually the answer is yes.

“It is really important how you phrase things because if it doesn’t go quite as you would like, then you do get the occasional: Sorry, what did you just say?

“And when that happens your stomach drops and it’s not a nice feeling.”

Bryn adds there is another consideration for managers who have English as their second language, like Amorim.

He says managers are trying to translate the English into the home language and then craft a response under time pressure.

“And that can be an issue in terms of the way you phrase things with nuance.

“Humour can be difficult as well.”

But sometimes with all the training and plans, managers will end up doing their own thing.

Like bringing up an assistant referee and their sandwich.

Bryn says the infamous moment Sheffield United boss Chris Wilder singled out the official over a post-match munch is always a risk when a manager is “a bit of a maverick”.

“We’ve had him on one of our courses,” says Bryn.

“But Chris is going to do his own thing and that was a clear example. Would I ever advise that? No, I wouldn’t.”

“Because the problem these days with coming out with something like that is that you become a kind of meme effectively.”

But Bryn feels generally managers are doing a good job “at messaging”.

“Far better than most modern politicians. Occasionally, they slip up.

“But most of the time I think they really hit the mark.”

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

US President Donald Trump has sparked a trade war by declaring he will impose tariffs on imports from his country’s neighbours Canada and Mexico.

Canada has said it will retaliate in kind, and Mexico also pledged to hit back, although it has since been announced that tariffs on the country have been paused for a month.

The three countries have deeply integrated economies and supply chains, with an estimated $2bn (£1.6bn) worth of manufactured goods crossing the borders daily.

Trump says he wants to protect American industry, but many economists warn the taxes, which are due to come into force on Canadian imports on Tuesday, could lead to prices rising for consumers in the US.

That’s because tariffs are paid by the domestic company importing the goods, who may choose to pass the cost on to customers directly, or to reduce imports which would mean fewer products available.

So what could get more expensive?

Cars are likely to go up in price – by about $3,000 according to TD Economics.

That’s because parts cross the US, Canadian and Mexican borders multiple times before a vehicle is assembled.

As a result of higher taxes paid on the importing of parts to build the cars, it is likely the costs will be passed on to customers.

“Suffice it to say that disrupting these trends through tariffs… would come with significant costs,” said Andrew Foran, an economist at TD Economics.

He added “uninterrupted free trade” in the car-making sector had “existed for decades”, which had led to lower prices for consumers.

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Popular Mexican beers Modelo and Corona could get more expensive for US customers if the American companies importing them pass on the increased import taxes.

However, it’s also possible that rather than passing on the cost increase, firms could just import less.

Modelo became the number one beer brand in the US in 2023, and remains in the top spot, for now.

It’s more complex when it comes to spirits. The sector has been largely free of tariffs since the 1990s. Industry bodies from the US, Canada and Mexico issued a joint statement in advance of the tariffs being announced saying they were “deeply concerned”.

They say that certain brands, such as Bourbon, Tennessee whiskey, tequila and Canadian whisky are “recognized as distinctive products and can only be produced in their designated countries”.

So given the production of these drinks cannot simply be moved, supplies might be impacted, leading to price rises. The trade bodies also highlighted that many companies own different spirit brands in all three countries.

Imports of Canadian lumber are set to be hit by import tariffs to the US. Trump has said the US has “more lumber than we ever use”.

However, the National Association of Home Builders has urged the president to exempt building materials from the proposed tariffs “because of their harmful effect on housing affordability”.

The industry body has “serious concerns” that the tariffs on lumber could increase the cost of building homes – which are mostly made out of wood in the US – and also put off developers building new homes.

“Consumers end up paying for the tariffs in the form of higher home prices,” the NAHB said.

When it comes to the trade war with Canada, the “most obvious” household impact is on the price of Canadian maple syrup, according to Thomas Sampson, associate professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

Canada’s billion-dollar maple syrup industry accounts for 75% of the world’s entire maple syrup production.

The majority of the sweet staple – around 90% – is produced in the province of Quebec, where the world’s sole strategic reserve of maple syrup was set up 24 years ago.

“That maple syrup is going to become more expensive. And that’s a direct price increase that households will face,” Mr Sampson said.

“If I buy goods that are domestically produced in the US, but that are produced using inputs from Canada, the price of those goods is also going to go up,” he added.

Canada is America’s largest foreign supplier of crude oil. According to the most recent official trade figures, 61% of oil imported into the US between January and November last year came from Canada.

While 25% has been slapped on Canadian goods imported to the US, its energy faces a lower 10% tariff.

Now the US doesn’t have a shortage of oil, but the type its refineries are designed to process means it depends on so-called “heavier” – i.e. thicker – crude oil from mostly Canada and some from Mexico.

“Many refineries need heavier crude oil to maximize flexibility of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel production,” according to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.

That means if Canada decided in its retaliation to the US tariffs to reduce crude oil exports, that could lead to prices rising at the gas pumps.

One food import that American consumers may see a significant price increase in is avocados. Grown primarily in Mexico due to its warm, humid climate, Mexican avocados make up nearly 90% of the US avocado market each year.

However, with the introduction of new tariffs, the US Agriculture Department has warned that the cost of avocados – along with popular avocado-based dishes like guacamole – could surge, especially by Super Bowl Sunday on 9 February.

US President Donald Trump has hinted the European Union (EU) could be next to face tariffs, after he slapped 25% levies on goods from Mexico and Canada along with an additional 10% tax on imports from China.

While arriving in Maryland from Florida, Trump told the BBC that tariffs on EU goods imported into the US could happen “pretty soon”.

“They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products, they take almost nothing and we take everything from them. Millions of cars, tremendous amounts of food and farm products,” he told journalists.

The US President added he enjoyed good relations with British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and that trade issues with the UK could be worked out.

When asked by the BBC if there was a timeline for announcing tariffs on the EU, Trump said: “I wouldn’t say there’s a timeline, but it’s going to be pretty soon.”

For its part, the 27-member bloc has condemned Trump’s decision to move ahead with tariffs against Canada, Mexico and China, and warned that it will “respond firmly” if it also becomes a target.

China said it could take “corresponding counter measures”.

Mexico and Canada have also vowed to take retaliatory measures, although Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said after meeting Trump that he had agreed to delay tariffs against her country for a month.

On trade with the UK, the US President said the country has been “out of line” but added that the issues could be resolved.

“The UK is out of line. But I’m sure that one, I think that one, can be worked out,” Trump said.

The US President also discussed his relationship with the British Prime Minister who he said has been “very nice”.

“We’ve had a couple of meetings. We’ve had numerous phone calls. We’re getting along very well,” he added.

Tariffs are taxes charged on goods imported from other countries. The charges are seen as a tool to protect domestic industries from foreign competition.

Increasing the price of imported goods is aimed at encouraging consumers to buy cheaper domestic products instead to help boost their own economy’s growth.

Most tariffs are set as a percentage of the value of the goods and in general the importer pays it.

But given countries often respond to tariffs by matching measures of their own, businesses and consumers in both countries can be impacted.

Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on goods imported from the EU to the US to address his country’s long-standing trade deficit with the bloc, which occurs when a country imports more than it exports.

Some 20 EU member states exported more to the US than they imported in 2023, according to Eurostat. The country with the largest surplus was Germany, driven by car and machinery exports, followed by Italy and Ireland.

Trump has repeatedly complained about the EU’s car exports to the US, with fewer vehicles being shipped the other way.

Last week, British business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, told the BBC that the UK should be exempt from any tariffs, noting that the US does not have a goods trade deficit with the UK.

Following Trump’s comments, the main European stock markets all fell back.

Shares in some of the biggest European carmakers also slumped following concerns over potential import duties to the US.

Volkswagen, BMW, Porsche, Volvo Cars, Stellantis, and truckmaker Daimler Truck all fell between around 5% and 6%. French car parts supplier Valeo slumped 8%.

“We believe around 8 billion euros ($8.18 billion) of VW’s revenues are impacted by tariffs and around 16 billion euros of Stellantis revenues,” analysts at investment bank Stifel wrote in a note.

US shares also fell when trading started, although the main indexes pulled back some of the losses following the news that tariffs on Mexico were being delayed.

The prospect of higher taxes being introduced on imports to the US is concerning many world leaders, because it will make it more difficult for companies to sell goods in the world’s largest economy.

But tariffs are a central part of Trump’s economic policy. He sees them as a way of growing the US economy, protecting jobs and raising tax revenue.

US shares have fallen after US President Donald Trump’s decision to move forward with tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, and pledge that tariffs on the EU would “definitely happen”, sparked a global sell-off.

The three major indexes in the US were all down more than 1% in the first moments of trade in New York, with the Nasdaq index off roughly 2%.

It followed downturns in Asia and Europe, where the German and French stock markets fell more than 1.5%, with shares in carmakers among the worst hit. In London, the FTSE 100 dropped about 1.4%.

Investors are bracing for a turbulent period that could hit the earnings of major companies and dent global growth.

The US dollar strengthened on the currency markets amid the uncertainty, rising to a record high against China’s yuan, while the Canadian dollar plunged to its lowest level since 2003.

“Investors are rattled at the prospects of a full-blown trade war breaking out,” said Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown.

Trump ordered tariffs of 25% on exports from Canada and Mexico to the US. Chinese-made goods will face a 10% levy, in addition to existing tariffs.

The moves, which Trump has tied to concerns about the flow of illegal drugs and migrants, into the US, target the United States’ three largest trading partners and are expected to lead to major disruption in some of the world’s biggest economies.

Canada and Mexico have said they will hit back with retaliatory tariffs while China promised “corresponding countermeasures” and vowed to challenge Trump’s move at the World Trade Organization.

Many are bracing for wider tensions, after Trump said on Sunday that he would “definitely” impose tariffs on the EU, although he said while the UK was “out of line”, a deal could be worked out.

Trump has said he will speak to Canada and Mexico’s leaders on Monday about the tariffs, which are due to come into effect at midnight on Tuesday.

On the Dow, which tracks 30 high-profile companies meant to be representative of the economy, Nike and Apple, which both rely on China for manufacturing, were among the hardest hit, falling about 3%.

Elsewhere, carmakers such as Tesla and General Motors also saw share prices drop.

In Japan, Toyota shares fell 5% and Honda sank 7.2%, while in Europe shares in Stellantis – whose brands include Chrysler, Citroen, Fiat, Jeep and Peugeot – were down 7% and VW dropped roughly 6%.

Shares in drinks maker Diageo – which exports tequila from Mexico to the US – fell 3.8%.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said there was a “sea of red flashing on the markets”.

Tariffs could lead to “higher inflation and put a stop to further interest rate cuts for the time being – exactly the opposite of what equity investors want to happen”, he added.

“Higher prices could hurt demand, and there might be a trickle-down effect that knocks business and consumer confidence and feeds into weaker economic activity.”

The prospect of interest rates staying higher for longer helped to strengthen the dollar.

As well as the dollar rising against China’s yuan and the Canadian dollar, the euro fell to more than a two-year low against the US currency.

Oil prices also rose following news of the tariffs, as traders tried to analyse how tariffs on Canada and Mexico – the two biggest sources of oil imports to the US – would affect the market.

Chief investment strategist at investment bank Saxo, Charu Chanana, warned that while tariffs could be beneficial for the US economy in the short term, in the long run they pose significant risks.

“Repeated use of tariffs would incentivise other countries to reduce reliance on the US, weakening the dollar’s global role,” she added.

You may not have heard of the first woman to be named best songwriter at the Grammys before – but you may well have sung along to one of her hits.

Amy Allen is behind a string of pop chart-toppers including Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso and Please Please Please, and was also nominated for co-writing tracks with Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Timberlake and Tate McRae.

Allen was one of four women nominated for songwriter of the year, non-classical, in the third year since it was launched as a standalone category.

In her acceptance speech, she highlighted the prior lack of recognition for songwriters, adding: “Without us, there would be no songs for anyone to win awards for.”

She was previously nominated for the same award in 2023, its inaugural year.

While she did not win then, she took home her first Grammy for her work on Harry Styles’ Harry’s House, which won album of the year.

“The child in me that was starting writing songs when I was little in Maine is screaming and crying and laughing at the absurdity of this moment,” she said as she picked up the golden gramophone on Sunday night.

“This is the third year that songwriter of the year has even been a category, so this award goes out to all the legends who soundtracked the lives and generations with all of our stories.

“You should have been able to receive your flowers back then.”

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Allen, a singer herself who released her debut album last September, entered the music world at the age of eight – playing bass in her sister’s band.

She stayed in the band until high school and then went to nursing school, before deciding to change course and join Berklee School of Music. Her first project was as Amy and the Engine, and she was the support act for singers like Kacey Musgraves and Vance Joy.

Allen’s first hit for another artist came when she penned Selena Gomez’s Back to You – something she said “propelled” her career in pop song-writing. She then paired up with Gomez to write My Mind & Me, which was nominated for a best original song Oscar in 2023.

She went on to work with Halsey and with Styles, including writing his hit Adore You, as well as with Lizzo. Her first Grammy nomination was in 2022 for Justin Bieber album Justice.

Allen has since picked up a total of eight nominations, including four this year.

She helped Carpenter write every track on chart-topping album Short n’Sweet, with the singer telling Variety she was a “once-in-a-lifetime writer and friend”, adding: “It all comes to her very naturally and effortlessly.”

This year, Allen’s co-nominees were the singer Raye, alongside writers Jessi Alexander, Jessie Jo Dillon and Edgar Barrera.

She said the award also belonged to them, saying they were “fighting the good fight”.

“We are the engine that fuels the music industry,” she said. “And have been so long overlooked and under-appreciated.

“It goes without saying, we have a long way to go.”

In 2010, IP Yadev, a surgeon from the southern Indian state of Kerala, was confronted with one of the hardest decisions of his life.

He had to decide between keeping his father – a terminal cancer patient – alive, and honouring his wish, expressed verbally, to stop all treatments and put an end to his suffering.

“As a son, I felt it was my duty to do whatever I could to prolong my father’s life. This made him unhappy and he ended up dying alone in an intensive-care unit. The doctor’s last efforts to revive him using CPR crushed his ribs. It was a horrible death,” Dr Yadev says.

The experience, he says, deeply impacted him and helped him realise the importance of advance medical directives (AMDs), also known as living wills.

A living will is a legal document that allows a person over 18 years to choose the medical care they would want to receive if they develop a terminal illness or condition with no hope of recovery and are unable to make decisions by themselves.

For example, they could specify that they don’t want to be put on life-support machines or insist that they want to be given adequate pain-relieving medication.

In 2018, India’s Supreme Court allowed people to draw up living wills and thereby choose passive euthanasia, where medical treatment can be withdrawn under strict guidelines to hasten a person’s death. Active euthanasia – any act that intentionally helps a person kill themselves – is illegal in the country.

But despite the legal go-ahead, the concept of living wills hasn’t really taken off in India. Experts say that this has much to do with the way Indians talk, or rather, don’t talk about death. Death is often considered to be a taboo subject and any mention of it is thought to bring bad luck.

But there are now efforts underway to change this.

In November, Dr Yadev and his team launched India’s first programme – at the Government Medical College in Kerala’s Kollam district – to educate people about living wills, offering information in person and over the phone. Volunteers also conduct awareness campaigns and distribute will templates.

Creating a living will requires family members to have open and honest conversations about death. Despite some resistance, activists and institutions are taking steps to raise awareness, and there’s a growing, though cautious, interest.

Kerala leads the way in these conversations. Currently, it has the country’s best palliative care network, and organisations that offer end-of-life care have also started awareness campaigns around living wills.

In March, around 30 people from the Pain and Palliative Care society in Thrissur city signed living wills. Dr E Divakaran, founder of the society, says that the gesture is aimed at make the idea more popular among people.

“Most people have never heard of the term so they have many questions, like whether such a directive can be misused or if they can make changes to their wills later on,” Mr Yadev says, adding that most inquiries have come from people in their 50s and 60s.

“Right now, it’s the educated, upper-middle class that’s making use of the facility. But with grassroot awareness campaigns, we’re expecting the demographic to widen,” he says.

According to the Supreme Court order, a person must draft the will, sign it in the presence of two witnesses, and have it attested by a notary or gazetted officer. A copy of the will must then be submitted to a state government-appointed custodian.

While the guidelines exist on paper, many state governments are yet to set up mechanisms to implement them. This is what Dr Nikhil Datar, a gynaecologist from Mumbai city, realised when he made his living will two years ago as there was no custodian to whom he could submit it.

So he went to court and it resulted in the Maharashtra government appointing about 400 officials across local bodies in the state to serve as custodians of living wills.

In June, Goa state implemented the Supreme Court’s orders around living wills and a high court judge became the first person in the state to register one.

On Saturday, Karnataka state ordered district health officers to nominate people to serve on a key medical board required to certify living wills. [Two medical boards have to certify that a patient meets necessary criteria for the implementation of a living will before medical practitioners can act on it.]

Mr Datar is also advocating for a centralised digital repository for living wills, accessible nationwide. He has also made his own will available for free on his website as a template. He believes a will helps prevent problems for both families and doctors when a patient is in a vegetative state and beyond recovery.

“Very often, family members don’t want the person to endure more treatment but because they can’t care for the patient at home, they keep them in the hospital. Doctors, bound by medical ethics, can’t withhold treatment, so the patient ends up suffering with no way to express their wishes,” Mr Datar says.

Living wills aren’t just about choosing passive euthanasia. Dr Yadev recalls a case where a person wanted his will to specify that he should be placed on life support if his condition ever required it.

“He explained that his only child was living abroad and that he didn’t want to die until his son got to meet him,” Mr Yadev says. “You have the freedom to choose how you want to die. It is one of the greatest rights available to us, so why not exercise it?” he says.

Healthcare advocates say that conversations around palliative care are slowly growing in the country, giving an impetus to living wills.

Dr Sushma Bhatnagar of Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences says the hospital is launching a department to educate patients about living wills. “Ideally, doctors should discuss living wills with patients, but there’s a communication gap,” she says, adding that training doctors for these conversations can help ensure a person dies with dignity.

“Throughout our lives, our choices are coloured by our loved ones’ wishes or by what society thinks is right,” Mr Yadev says.

“At least in death, let us make choices that are in our interest and fully our own.”

A hiss and puff of compressed air shapes the smooth leather, bringing to life an all-American cowboy boot in a factory on China’s eastern coast.

Then comes another one as the assembly line continues, the sounds of sewing, stitching, cutting and soldering echoing off the high ceilings.

“We used to sell around a million pairs of boots a year,” says the 45-year-old sales manager, Mr Peng, who did not wish to reveal his first name.

That is, until Donald Trump came along.

A slew of tariffs in his first presidential term triggered a trade war between the world’s two largest economies. Six years on, Chinese businesses are bracing themselves for a sequel now that he is back in the White House.

“What direction should we take in the future?” Mr Peng asks, uncertain of what Trump 2.0 means for him, his colleagues – and China.

For Western markets that are increasingly wary of Beijing’s ambitions, trade has become a powerful bargaining chip – especially as a sluggish Chinese economy relies ever more on exports. Trump returned on a campaign promise that included crushing tariffs against Chinese-made goods, and has since announced a 10% levy – on top of existing sanctions.

He has also ordered a review of US-China trade – which buys Beijing time and Washington, negotiating room. And for now, harsher rhetoric (and higher tariffs) seems to be directed against US allies such as Canada and Mexico.

Trump may have pressed pause on the looming battle with Beijing. But many believe it’s still coming. It’s hard to find an exact figure on how many businesses are fleeing China, but major firms such as Nike, Adidas and Puma have already relocated to Vietnam. Chinese businesses too have been moving, reshaping supply chains, although Beijing remains a key player.

Mr Peng says his boss, who owns the factory, has considered moving production to South East Asia, along with many of their competitors.

It would save the firm, but they would lose their workforce. Most of the staff are from the nearby city of Nantong and have worked here for more than 20 years.

Mr Peng, whose wife died when their son was young, says the factory has been his family: “Our boss is determined not to abandon these employees.”

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He is aware of the geopolitics at play, but he says he and his workers are just trying to make a living. They are still reeling from the impact of 2019, when a fourth round of Trump tariffs – 15% – hit Chinese-made consumer goods, such as clothes and shoes.

Orders have since dwindled and staff numbers, once more than 500, have dropped to just over 200. The evidence is in the empty work stations, as Mr Peng shows us around.

All around him, workers are cutting the leather into the right shape to hand it to the machinist. They have to be precise because mistakes will ruin the expensive leather, most of which has been imported from the US.

The factory is trying to keep costs low as some of their American buyers are already considering moving business away from China and the threat of tariffs.

But that would mean losing skilled workers: it can take up to a week to make one pair of boots, from flattening the leather to giving the finished boots a final polish and packing them for export.

This is what turned China into the world’s top manufacturer – labour-intensive production which is also cheap when it’s scaled up and supported by an unrivalled supply chain. And this has been years in the making.

“It was once a constant cycle of inspecting goods and shipping them out – I felt fulfilled,” says Mr Peng, who has worked here since 2015. “But orders have decreased, which makes me feel quite lost and anxious.”

Once crafted to conquer the Wild West, these cowboy boots have been made here for more than a decade. And this is a familiar story in the south of Jiangsu province, a manufacturing hub along the Yangtze River that produces just about everything, from textiles to electric vehicles.

These are among the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods that China ships to the United States every year – a number that steadily ballooned as Washington became its biggest trading partner.

That status slipped under Trump. But it was not restored under his successor Joe Biden, who kept most Trump-era tariffs in place, as ties with Beijing frayed.

In fact, the European Union too has imposed tariffs on electric vehicle imports, accusing China of making too much, often with the support of state subsidies. Trump has echoed this – that China’s “unfair” trade practices disadvantage foreign comeptitors.

Beijing sees such rhetoric as Western attempts to stifle its growth, and it has repeatedly warned Washington that there will be no winners in a trade war. But it has also said it’s ready to talk and “properly handle differences”.

And President Trump, who has described tariffs as his “one big power” over China, certainly wants to talk.

It’s unclear as yet what he might want in return. During Trump’s honeymoon period with China in his first term he came to Beijing to ask for Xi’s help in meeting North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un. This time it is believed he might need Xi’s support to make a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. He recently said that China had “a great deal of power over that situation”.

The threat of a 10% tariff is driven by the belief that China is “sending fentanyl to Mexico and Canada”. So he could demand that it do more to end that flow.

Or, given he welcomed a bidding war over TikTok, he may want to negotiate its ownership – or the prized technology that powers the app – because Beijing would need to agree to any such sale.

Whatever the deal may be, it could help reset US-China ties. However, the absence of one could abruptly end the chance of a second honeymoon, setting up Trump and Xi for a far more confrontational relationship.

Already business sentiment is nervous: an annual survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China showed just over half of them were concerned about the US-China relationship deteriorating further.

Trump’s seemingly softer stance on China offers some relief. But his hope is still that the threat of tariffs will help drive buyers away from China and move manufacturing back to the US.

Some Chinese businesses are indeed on the move – but not to America.

An hour outside Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, businessman Huang Zhaodong has built a new factory to cater to a flood of orders from US giants Walmart and Costco.

This is his second factory in Cambodia, and together they produce half a million garments a month, from shirts to underwear. Hangers carrying cotton trousers roll past us on an automated line, moving from one station to the next as the elastic waist is inserted and hemlines are finished.

Now, when prospective US customers lob the first question, which he has come to expect – where is he based – Mr Huang has the right answer. Not in China.

“In the case of some Chinese firms, their customers have told them: ‘If you don’t move production overseas, I’ll cancel your orders’.”

The tariffs raise tough choices for suppliers and retailers, but it’s not always clear who will bear the brunt of the cost. Sometimes it will be the customer, Mr Huang says.

“Take Walmart as an example. I sell them clothes at $5, but they usually mark it up 3.5 times. If the cost increases due to higher tariffs, the price I sell to them might rise to $6. If they mark it up by 3.5 times, the retail price would increase.”

But usually, he says, it is the supplier. If his production line was in China, he estimates an extra 10% tariff could take an extra $800,000 (£644,000) from his earnings.

“That’s more than what I make as profit. It’s huge and we can’t afford it. If you’re making clothes in China under such tariff conditions, it’s unsustainable,” he says.

Current US tariffs on Chinese goods vary from 100% on electric vehicles to 25% on steel and aluminium. Until now, several top-selling items have been exempt, including electronics, such as TVs and iPhones.

But the 10% blanket tariff Trump is proposing could affect the price of everything that is made in China and exported to the US. That applies to a lot of things – from toys and tea cups to laptops.

Mr Huang says this would encourage more factories to move elsewhere. Several new workshops have sprung up around him and Chinese companies from textile production heartlands such as Shandong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Guangdong are moving in to make winter jackets and woollen clothing.

Around 90% of clothing factories in Cambodia are now Chinese-run or Chinese-owned, according to a report by insight and analysis group Research and Markets.

Half of the country’s foreign investment flows from China. Seventy percent of roads and bridges were built using loans Beijing dispensed, according to Chinese state media.

Many of the signs on restaurants and shops are in Chinese as well as Khmer, the local language. There’s even a ring road named Xi Jinping Boulevard in honour of the Chinese president.

Cambodia is not a lone recipient. China has invested heavily in different parts of the world under President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative – a trade and infrastructure project that also increases Beijing’s influence.

That means China has choices.

Chinese state media claims that more than half of China’s imports and exports now come from Belt and Road countries, most of them in South East Asia.

This has not happened overnight, says Kenny Yao from AlixPartners, who advises Chinese firms on how to deal with tariffs.

During Trump’s first term, many Chinese firms doubted his tariff threat, he told the BBC. Now they ask if he will follow the supply chain and slap tariffs on other countries.

Just in case he does, Mr Yao says, it would be wise for Chinese businesses to look further afield: “For example, Africa or Latin America. This is more difficult, but it is good to look at areas you have not explored before.”

As America pledges to look after itself first, Beijing is doing its best to appear a stable business partner, and there is some evidence it is working.

China has edged past the US to become the prevailing choice for countries in South East Asia, according to a survey by the Iseas Yusof-Ishak think tank in Singapore.

Even though production has moved abroad, money still flows to China – 60% of the materials being made into clothes at Mr Huang’s factories in Phnom Penh come from China.

And exports are thriving, with Beijing investing more heavily in high-end manufacturing, from solar panels to artificial intelligence. Last year’s trade surplus with the world – on the back of a nearly 6% year-on-year jump in exports – was a record $992bn.

Still, Chinese businesses – in Jiangsu and Phnom Penh – are preparing themselves for an uncertain spell, if not a turbulent one.

Mr Peng hopes the US and China can have an “amicable and calm” discussion to keep the tariffs “within a reasonable range” and avoid a trade war.

“Americans still need to purchase these products,” he said, before driving off to meet new customers.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s coalition government has unveiled its first full-year budget after his party lost an outright majority in parliament last year.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced measures to counter slowing growth, rising prices and flagging consumption among the middle class in Asia’s third-largest economy.

After a period of world-beating growth of more than 8%, India is set for its slowest economic expansion in four years as stagnant wages and high food prices hit consumer spending and corporate profits.

Here are five key takeaways from India’s union budget:

In a major relief to millions of taxpayers, the government has raised income tax exemption limits, making earnings of up to 1.2m rupees ($13,841; £11,165) – excluding special rate income like capital gains – entirely tax free.

The finance minister has also announced tweaks to other income tax slabs which is likely to leave more money in the hands of the middle class.

The income tax concessions to the middle class “seems aimed at addressing the slump in urban consumption”, said Nomura’s India Economist Aurodeep Nandi.

The impact, however, could be limited since a tiny fraction of Indians pay direct taxes. In 2023, 1.6% of Indians (22.4 million people) actually paid income taxes, according to data presented in parliament.

The market cheered the announcements with stocks of automobiles, consumer goods and online grocery companies rallying.

State-funded capital expenditure on major road, port and railway projects has been a key driver of India’s growth engine since 2020.

Despite an unexpected contraction in actual spending in the first nine months of this year, the government has modestly increased its infrastructure expenditure target for this year from 11.1 trillion to 11.2 trillion rupees ($129.18bn; £104.21bn).

The government has also proposed offering interest-free loans to states to enable them to spend more on infrastructure development.

The budget has set a goal to generate 100GW of nuclear energy by 2047. As part of this plan, a Nuclear Energy Mission has been launched with a budget of 200bn rupees ($2.3bn, £1.86bn). The plan is to deploy five indigenous reactors by 2033 and amend laws, like the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, to realise goals and get more private sector participation in the sector.

Meanwhile, foreign direct investment limits for the insurance sector have been increased from 74% to 100%.

“This will aid foreign insurers’ interest in investing in the growing Indian insurance market, where we expect strong premium growth to boost profitability,” said Mohammed Ali Londe, Senior analyst at Moody’s Ratings.

In order to ease the climate for doing business, which has been a major concern among investors, a high-level committee has been announced to undertake regulatory reforms in the non-financial sectors and reduce the compliance burden on corporations. The panel will make recommendations within a year.

Small and micro industries, that account for 35% of India’s manufacturing and create millions of jobs, also got a boost through fiscal support of 1.5 trillion rupees ($17.31bn; £13.96bn) over the next five years.

The government has also raised production-linked subsidies and slashed import duties for local manufacturing units across sectors like textiles, mobile telephones and electronics. This could promote private investments, which have not picked up post the Covid-19 pandemic.

Even with slightly higher budget outlays for infrastructure creation, India has had to continue a delicate balancing act between pushing economic growth and keeping its spending in check.

The budget has reiterated a commitment to reducing the government’s deficit, which is the gap between what it earns and spends, to 4.4% by 2026 from 4.8% this year.

Global rating agencies closely watch these numbers, with lower debt figures leading to potentially better investment ratings in the future and a reduction in borrowing costs for the country.

India’s recent slowdown has made the growth versus fiscal prudence trade-off increasingly challenging.

A recent economic survey by the finance ministry expects GDP growth to slow to between 6.3-6.8% in the financial year ending March 2026, in line with the Reserve Bank of India’s forecasts.

With the budget out of the picture, the focus will now shift to the central bank’s monetary policy meeting later this month.

The RBI has maintained policy rates at 6.5% since February 2023, but is likely to begin easing the cost of borrowing as both growth and inflation have begun to come down.

Last week, the central bank announced plans to inject $18bn into the domestic banking system to ease a cash shortage, a move seen by many as a precursor to rate cuts.

A former surgeon who is accused of abusing hundreds of young patients, often while they were under anaesthetic, is set to go on trial this month in the largest child abuse trial in French history.

Joel Le Scouarnec, 73, is accused of assaulting or raping 299 children – the majority former patients of his – between 1989 and 2014, mostly in Brittany.

He has admitted to some charges, but not all.

The trial in Vannes, north- west France, follows a painstaking police investigation lasting several years.

It is likely to raise uncomfortable questions over whether Le Scouarnec was protected by his colleagues and the management of the hospitals that employed him, despite an FBI warning to the French authorities that he had been consulting child abuse websites, after which he was given only a suspended sentence.

A staggering number of opportunities to stop the former surgeon from having contact with children appear to have been missed or rejected.

Members of his own family also knew of Le Scouarnec’s paedophilia but failed to stop him, it is claimed.

“It was the family’s omertà which meant his abuse was allowed to continue for decades,” one lawyer involved in the case told the BBC.

Le Scouarnec, once a respected small-town surgeon, has been in jail since 2017, when he was arrested on suspicion of raping his nieces, now in their 30s, as well as a six-year-old girl and a young patient. In 2020 he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.

After his arrest, police searched his home and found child-sized sex dolls, more than 300,000 child abuse images, and thousands of pages of meticulously compiled diaries in which Le Scouarnec is alleged to have logged assaults he carried out on his young patients over 25 years.

He has denied assaulting or raping children, arguing that his diaries merely detailed his “fantasies”.

In several instances, however, he had also written: “I am a paedophile”.

Le Scouarnec is facing more than 100 rape charges and more than 150 charges of sexual assault.

Some of his former patients, who are all now adults, have said they remember the surgeon touching them under the guise of medical examinations, sometimes even when their parents or other doctors were in the room.

But because a huge number of his alleged victims were under the effect of anaesthetics when it is claimed the assaults took place, they had no recollection of the events and were shocked to be contacted by police and told their names – alongside graphic descriptions of abuse – allegedly appeared in Le Scouarnec’s diaries.

Le Scouarnec felt “all-powerful” and liked the feeling of “flirting with danger” through “calculated transgressions,” French daily Le Monde quoted the court order against the former surgeon as saying.

Some of the alleged victims have said the unsettling revelations helped them make sense of unexplained symptoms of trauma that had burdened them their whole lives.

Lawyer Francesca Satta, who represents several alleged victims, told the BBC that among her clients are “the families of two men who did remember, and who ended up taking their own lives.”

Olivia Mons of the France Victimes association spoke to many of the alleged victims and said several only had blurry recollections of events which they were never able to “find the words to explain”.

When the surgeon’s case came to light, “it provided them with the beginning of an explanation,” Ms Mons said.

But she added that most of the alleged victims were people who had no memories of being raped or assaulted, and who were living ordinary lives before police contacted them. “Today, many of these people are understandably very shaken,” Ms Mons said.

One woman told French media that when police showed her an entry under her name in Le Scouarnec’s diary, memories instantly flooded in. “I had flashbacks of someone coming into my hospital room, lifting the bedsheets, saying he would check if everything had gone well,” she said. “He raped me.”

Margaux Castex, a lawyer for one of the alleged victims, told the BBC her client is “traumatised that he ever gave his trust to a medical professional, and that’s been hard to shake”.

“He wishes he had never been told what happened,” Ms Castex said.

Another woman called Marie, now a married mother in her mid-thirties, said that police came to her house and revealed that her name appeared in the diaries of a surgeon who was accused of child abuse.

“They read out what he had written about me and I wanted to read it back myself but it was impossible,” she told outlet France Bleu. “Can you imagine reading hardcore pornography and knowing that it is about you, as a child?”

Marie said she had seen mental health specialists for years because of “issues” she had with regards to men, and that doctors had wondered whether she had experienced childhood trauma.

“I have to believe that my memory protected me from that. But the [police] examination brought it all back to the surface – images, sensations, memories came back to me day by day,” she said. “Today, I feel this as if it had just happened.”

Marie added that when she was shown a photo of Le Scouarnec, “everything came back to me… I remembered his icy gaze.”

She wondered how the surgeon had been able to commit his alleged crimes unnoticed for so long.

It is a haunting question that is bound to be explored at length during the trial.

The first court proceedings heard claims that several members of Le Scouarnec’s family had been aware since the mid-1980s of his disturbing behaviour towards children, but did not intervene.

His ex-wife has denied knowing what her husband – and father of their three children – allegedly did until he was arrested.

Le Scouarnec – a medical professional and a lover of opera and literature – had long been the pride of his middle-class family. He was a respected small town medical practitioner for many years, which may have afforded him a significant degree of protection in the workplace.

“A huge degree of dysfunction allowed Le Scouarnec to commit his deeds,” lawyer Frederic Benoist told the BBC.

Mr Benoist represents child protection advocacy group La Voix de L’Enfant (The Child’s Voice), which is pressing to highlight what it calls the “crucial institutional and judicial missteps” which allowed Le Scouarnec to allegedly continue abusing children for decades.

In the early 2000s, an FBI alert to the French authorities that Le Scouarnec had been accessing child abuse websites only resulted in a four-month suspended sentence with no obligation to follow medical or psychological treatment.

Mr Benoist said prosecutors never shared this information with the medical authorities and there were no consequences for Le Scouarnec, who continued in his role as a surgeon, often operating on children and managing their aftercare.

When a colleague – who already harboured suspicions against Le Scouarnec – read about the charges against him in the local press in 2006, he urged the regional medical association to take action.

All but one doctor – who abstained – voted that Le Scouarnec had not violated the medical code of ethics, which states that doctors “must in all circumstances be trustworthy and act with integrity and devotion to duty”. No sanctions were imposed.

“We therefore have proof that all these colleagues knew, and none of them did anything,” Mr Benoist said. “There were many circumstances which meant he could have been stopped; he wasn’t, and the consequences are tragic.”

The BBC has approached both the regional medical association and prosecutors for comment.

Le Scouarnec was eventually arrested when the six-year-old victim told her parents that he had assaulted her. By then, he was living like a recluse in a large derelict home, surrounded by child-sized dolls.

Ms Driguez, the nieces’ lawyer, sat opposite Le Scouarnec during the 2020 trial in the south-western town of Saintes. “His answers were cold and calculated,” she said. “He is extremely clever, but showed no empathy whatsoever.”

The trial uncovered more allegations of child abuse within Le Scouarnec’s family, Ms Driguez said, but the former surgeon never had any particular reaction and mostly looked at the floor.

At one point, the court was shown lurid videos of Le Scouarnec and his dolls. “Everyone was watching the screen but I was watching him,” Ms Driguez said. “Up to that point he had always kept his gaze down. But at that moment, he looked up, staring intently at the video. His eyes were twinkling.”

As the city of Vannes prepares to host the trial, three lecture halls in a former university building nearby have been made available to accommodate the hundreds of alleged victims, their legal representatives and families. The trial starts on 24 February and is due to last until June.

Whether the press and the public are allowed in will depend on all of the alleged victims giving up their right to a closed trial.

Many lawyers believe the trial could be a moment of reckoning for the authorities that failed to take provisions against Le Scouarnec, as well as an important moment for the victims to voice their trauma.

Ms Satta said that although many people involved in this case have no memory of what happened to them, they were still victims, adding that the former surgeon had enjoyed the “impunity of silence” for too long.

“The trial will be a moment for the victims to speak out,” Mr Benoist agreed. “It would be terrible, in my eyes, if it was held behind closed doors.”

On a hill above Nuuk’s cathedral stands a 7ft statue of the protestant missionary Hans Egede. He had reopened Greenland’s link with Northern Europe in the early 1700s and laid the groundwork for the establishment of Denmark’s proudest colonial possession.

One day in the late 1970s, the bronze figure was suddenly covered in red paint.

I remember that day well – I passed the statue every day on my mile long walk to school. I spent two years living on Greenland while my father taught geography at Nuuk’s teacher training college.

It was apparent not everyone among the Inuit majority was happy about the changes that Egede had brought to Greenland a quarter of a millennium earlier.

The clinking of beer bottles in filled plastic bags carried home by the Inuit to their tiny apartments – much smaller, usually, than the ones we Danes lived in – was testimony to pervasive alcoholism, one of the ills that Denmark had brought to Greenland, amid a lot that was undeniably good: modern health, good education.

But apart from the paint-covered statue, the dream of Greenland being independent from Denmark was only slowly beginning to manifest itself.

At the Teacher Training College right next to my school, the closest Greenland got to having a radical student movement was developing – some young people at the college demanded to be taught in their native Greenland language.

By the late 1970s, the capital was called Nuuk and no longer Godthaab, its official name for well over two centuries.

Now, decades on, change is afoot once again, as Donald Trump has his eyes on gaining control of the country.

Asked in January if he would rule out using military or economic force in order to take over the autonomous Danish territory or the Panama canal, he responded: “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two. But I can say this, we need them for economic security.”

Later on Air Force One he told reporters: “I think we’re going to have it,” adding that the island’s 57,000 residents “want to be with us”.

The question is, do they?

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has, meanwhile, insisted Greenland is not for sale. “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders,” she said. “It’s the Greenlanders themselves who have to define their future.”

So, what do the island’s inhabitants want that future to look like – and if it does not involve them being part of the kingdom of Denmark, then what is the alternative?

One poll of Greenlanders suggested only 6% of Greenlanders want their country to become part of the US, with 9% undecided and 85% against. But despite this, Frederiksen knows that the question of what Greenlanders want is a delicate one.

Traditionally, Danes have viewed themselves as the world’s nicest imperialists ever since they started to colonise Greenland in the 1720s.

This self-image has been eroded in recent years, however, by a string of revelations about past high-handedness in dealing with the island’s population.

In particular, there have been reports of serious wrongs committed against Greenlanders – not in the distant past, but within living memory.

This included a controversial large-scale contraceptive campaign. A joint investigation by authorities in Denmark and Greenland is examining the fitting of intrauterine devices (coils) into women of child-bearing age on the island, often without their consent or even their knowledge.

It has been reported this happened to almost half of all the island’s women of child-bearing age between 1966 and 1970.

Last December, Greenland’s prime minister Múte Egede described this as “straightforward genocide, carried out by the Danish state against the Greenland population”.

He made the remark while talking to the Danish Broadcasting Corporation in an interview that dealt generally with relations between Greenland and Denmark.

Also, in the 1960s and 1970s hundreds of children from the island were taken from their mothers, often on dubious grounds, to be reared by foster parents in Denmark. In some cases, this happened without the consent of the biological mothers, and in other instances, they were not informed that their ties with their children would be cut completely.

This left a raw emotional wound that often was not healed decades later. Some of the adopted Greenlandic children were later able to trace their biological parents, but many others were not.

A small group demanded compensation from the Danish state in the summer of 2024. If they are successful, it could pave the way for a large number of similar claims by other adoptees.

Iben Mondrup, a novelist who was born in Denmark and spent her childhood in Greenland, sees the recent events as a rude wake-up call for the Danes who have been accustomed to viewing themselves as a benign influence in Greenland.

“The entire relationship has been based on a narrative that Denmark was helping Greenland, without getting anything in return,” she says.

“We have talked about Denmark as the motherland that took Greenland under its wing and taught it gradually to stand on its own feet. There has been a widespread use of educational metaphors.

“We Danes constantly return to the idea that Greenland owes us something, at least gratitude.”

Opinion polls carried out in recent years indicate a fairly consistent pattern in which around two-thirds of Greenland’s population say they want to be independent. A survey carried out in 2019 showed support of 67.7% for the move among adult Greenlanders.

Jenseeraq Poulsen, director of Oceans North Kalaallit Nunaat, an environmental charity in Nuuk, says: “As I see it, Greenland has now grown up, and our sense of self-worth and our self-confidence requires that we can start making our own decisions as adults on an equal footing with other nations.

“It’s important for a country to not be in a straitjacket,” Nunaat continues.

“We shouldn’t have to ask for permission to do anything. You know the feeling [as a child] when you have to ask your parents something and they say you can’t? That’s what it’s like.”

And yet the word “independence” may not fully capture the complexity of the challenges and choices that Greenland faces, according to Poulsen.

He says he doesn’t like the word “since everyone is interdependent in the modern world”.

He adds: “Even Denmark, which is a sovereign state, is interdependent… I prefer the word statehood.”

Not a huge amount is known about the mechanics of how Trump proposes to acquire Greenland. When he first floated the idea in 2019 he said it would be “essentially a large real-estate deal”.

The extent to which Greenland would remain autonomous under US rule is unclear. So too is how its benefits system would work.

After the proposal to buy the island, Trump has now doubled down on his rhetoric, apparently open to satisfying his territorial ambitions in the North Atlantic by military means.

The visit by Donald Trump Jr and members of Trump’s team added visual emphasis to the then president-elect’s words but not everyone on Greenland was wowed.

“That makes us dig in our heels and say, ‘Please control yourself,'” says Janus Chemnitz Kleist, an IT manager for the Greenland government. “Some people who might previously have had a positive attitude towards closer ties with the United States have started reconsidering.”

Aaja Chemnitz, a member of Danish parliament for the left-leaning party Inuit Ataqatigiit, has her own take on what needs to be done to pave the way for independence, in whatever form that may take.

First, she argues that it is important to reverse what she describes as a mild brain drain out of Greenland. She says only 56% of young Greenlanders who are educated at universities and colleges in Denmark and other countries return upon graduation.

“That’s not a very high number. It would be good if we could make it more attractive for them to return home and take up some of the positions that are important in Greenland society,” she says.

But in her view there is a broader economic issue too.

“Political and economic independence are interconnected,” she says, “and it’s crucial that we cooperate with Denmark on the development of business in Greenland but also work with the Americans on the extraction of raw materials and the development of tourism.”

At present, the Greenland economy is heavily reliant on the so-called block grant, a subsidy paid by the Danish government that in 2024 amounted to the equivalent of around £480m a year.

As this subsidy would likely disappear after independence, one of the most important challenges facing the Greenlanders is to find ways to replace it, explains Javier Arnaut, an economist at the University of Greenland in Nuuk.

“The economy is one of the main factors holding back the movement towards independence,” he says. “The economy is reliant on the Danish block grant, and if it disappeared, Greenland would have a large hole in the public budget that would need to be filled.

“The question is how. If the gap could be filled, for example, by increasing fiscal revenue through projects in mining with new partners, a clearer path towards economic independence could emerge.”

There is another question – not unimportant in a Nordic-style welfare state where a large part of the economy is under government control – of what would happen to all those health and social benefits that Greenland currently receives as a result of its relationship with Denmark.

Currently, these benefits include access to treatment in Danish hospitals.

Ask Greenlanders whether they want separation from Denmark, and most who say they do have a caveat – only if it does not cost them their welfare system.

The question of what happens to the welfare system would be particularly acute in the event of a US takeover of Greenland given the American welfare state is not only smaller than those in the Nordic countries but of those in most other Western countries.

But not everyone is convinced by suggestions that Greenland’s cancer patients, for example, would suddenly have nowhere to go in case of independence. Pele Broberg, Greenland’s former foreign minister and now chairman of the political party Naleraq, cites Iceland, which left the Danish kingdom in 1944 as an example.

“Iceland still sends medical patients to Denmark,” he says. “They still have students studying in Denmark, and vice versa. I have a hard time seeing what kind of obstacles Denmark would like to put up if we decide to leave the kingdom.

“It’s rhetoric meant to scare us from having a discussion about independence,” he argues.

However, some Greenlanders believe that true independence may never be accomplished because of these very concerns. Mr Chemnitz Kleist argues: “The kind of independence that you see in countries like Denmark or Belgium or Angola will never happen here.

“With such a small population, some of it not well educated, and with a complex welfare system which we would like to keep, we can never become independent in the way the word is usually understood.”

All of these issues have been discussed for years, but they have suddenly attained a new sense of urgency with Trump’s apparent bid for control of Greenland.

But regardless of who sits in the White House, the question is whether Greenlanders would see any benefit in raising cooperation levels with the United States – and if so, to what extent?

“Greenland’s national project is all about spreading out the island’s dependence in order to have as many ties as possible with the outside world,” says Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and an expert on the Arctic region.

It is in this context that some Greenlanders are warming to the model of a “free association” with either Denmark or the United States – replicating a similar loose arrangement between the United States and certain islands in the Pacific.

“The problem is that Greenland feels swallowed up by Denmark,” says Mr Pram Gad. “It aims to feel less constrained and less dependent on just one country. Free association is not so much about ‘association’ and more about ‘free’. It’s about having one’s own sovereignty.”

Donald Trump’s threat to take over Greenland may have been unexpected but with the trip to Nuuk his team were well aware there was a thread to be pulled at, that his security concerns come at a time when many Greenlanders are considering their future.

“In recent years all these stories have emerged and placed the modernisation narrative in a different light. The whole idea that Denmark was pursuing an altruistic project in Greenland has been challenged,” says Iben Mondrup.

“The project that the Greenlanders were told was for their own good was actually not good for them after all. This gives rise to all kinds of thoughts about the status of the Greenlanders inside the Danish kingdom. It adds fuel to the criticism that has developed in Greenland in recent years about the idea of a community with Denmark.”

But if it’s not only Denmark and it’s not only America, who else can Greenland turn to? Surveys suggest that a majority of the island’s inhabitants would like to step up cooperation with Canada and Iceland. Mr Broberg, the party chairman, likes the idea, and he throws Norway into the equation as well.

“We have more in common with Norway and Iceland than we have with Denmark,” he says. “All three of us have a presence in the Arctic, unlike Denmark. The only reason I leave open the possibility of a free association with Denmark after independence is it may put some Greenlanders at ease because they are used to the relationship with Denmark.”

Still, the question is: Would Canada and Iceland want to take on the task of providing the social benefits that Greenlanders covet? The answer would almost certainly be no.

In this way, the future presenting itself to the Greenlanders is both exhilaratingly open and at the same time depressingly narrow.

US President Donald Trump has sparked a trade war by declaring he will impose tariffs on imports from his country’s neighbours Canada and Mexico.

Canada has said it will retaliate in kind, and Mexico also pledged to hit back, although it has since been announced that tariffs on the country have been paused for a month.

The three countries have deeply integrated economies and supply chains, with an estimated $2bn (£1.6bn) worth of manufactured goods crossing the borders daily.

Trump says he wants to protect American industry, but many economists warn the taxes, which are due to come into force on Canadian imports on Tuesday, could lead to prices rising for consumers in the US.

That’s because tariffs are paid by the domestic company importing the goods, who may choose to pass the cost on to customers directly, or to reduce imports which would mean fewer products available.

So what could get more expensive?

Cars are likely to go up in price – by about $3,000 according to TD Economics.

That’s because parts cross the US, Canadian and Mexican borders multiple times before a vehicle is assembled.

As a result of higher taxes paid on the importing of parts to build the cars, it is likely the costs will be passed on to customers.

“Suffice it to say that disrupting these trends through tariffs… would come with significant costs,” said Andrew Foran, an economist at TD Economics.

He added “uninterrupted free trade” in the car-making sector had “existed for decades”, which had led to lower prices for consumers.

• LIVE: US markets fall on first trading day since Trump announced tariffs
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Popular Mexican beers Modelo and Corona could get more expensive for US customers if the American companies importing them pass on the increased import taxes.

However, it’s also possible that rather than passing on the cost increase, firms could just import less.

Modelo became the number one beer brand in the US in 2023, and remains in the top spot, for now.

It’s more complex when it comes to spirits. The sector has been largely free of tariffs since the 1990s. Industry bodies from the US, Canada and Mexico issued a joint statement in advance of the tariffs being announced saying they were “deeply concerned”.

They say that certain brands, such as Bourbon, Tennessee whiskey, tequila and Canadian whisky are “recognized as distinctive products and can only be produced in their designated countries”.

So given the production of these drinks cannot simply be moved, supplies might be impacted, leading to price rises. The trade bodies also highlighted that many companies own different spirit brands in all three countries.

Imports of Canadian lumber are set to be hit by import tariffs to the US. Trump has said the US has “more lumber than we ever use”.

However, the National Association of Home Builders has urged the president to exempt building materials from the proposed tariffs “because of their harmful effect on housing affordability”.

The industry body has “serious concerns” that the tariffs on lumber could increase the cost of building homes – which are mostly made out of wood in the US – and also put off developers building new homes.

“Consumers end up paying for the tariffs in the form of higher home prices,” the NAHB said.

When it comes to the trade war with Canada, the “most obvious” household impact is on the price of Canadian maple syrup, according to Thomas Sampson, associate professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

Canada’s billion-dollar maple syrup industry accounts for 75% of the world’s entire maple syrup production.

The majority of the sweet staple – around 90% – is produced in the province of Quebec, where the world’s sole strategic reserve of maple syrup was set up 24 years ago.

“That maple syrup is going to become more expensive. And that’s a direct price increase that households will face,” Mr Sampson said.

“If I buy goods that are domestically produced in the US, but that are produced using inputs from Canada, the price of those goods is also going to go up,” he added.

Canada is America’s largest foreign supplier of crude oil. According to the most recent official trade figures, 61% of oil imported into the US between January and November last year came from Canada.

While 25% has been slapped on Canadian goods imported to the US, its energy faces a lower 10% tariff.

Now the US doesn’t have a shortage of oil, but the type its refineries are designed to process means it depends on so-called “heavier” – i.e. thicker – crude oil from mostly Canada and some from Mexico.

“Many refineries need heavier crude oil to maximize flexibility of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel production,” according to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.

That means if Canada decided in its retaliation to the US tariffs to reduce crude oil exports, that could lead to prices rising at the gas pumps.

One food import that American consumers may see a significant price increase in is avocados. Grown primarily in Mexico due to its warm, humid climate, Mexican avocados make up nearly 90% of the US avocado market each year.

However, with the introduction of new tariffs, the US Agriculture Department has warned that the cost of avocados – along with popular avocado-based dishes like guacamole – could surge, especially by Super Bowl Sunday on 9 February.

US shares have halted their slide, after the president of Mexico said she had reached a deal with US President Donald Trump to suspend tariffs on the country’s goods.

The announcement, which was confirmed by Trump, arrested a global sell-off in financial markets, sparked by his decision to move forward with tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China, and his pledge that tariffs on the EU would “definitely happen”.

After opening down more than 1%, the three major indexes in the US regained some ground, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average off about 0.3%.

Investors are bracing for a turbulent period that could hit the earnings of major companies and dent global growth.

The US dollar strengthened on the currency markets amid the uncertainty, rising to a record high against China’s yuan, while the Canadian dollar plunged to its lowest level since 2003.

Earlier, concerns about the tariffs had hit shares in Asia and Europe. The German and French stock markets fell more than 1.5%, with shares in carmakers among the worst hit, while in London, the FTSE 100 dropped about 1.4%.

“Investors are rattled at the prospects of a full-blown trade war breaking out,” said Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown.

Over the weekend, Trump ordered tariffs of 25% on exports from Canada and Mexico to the US. Chinese-made goods will face a 10% levy, in addition to existing tariffs.

The moves, which Trump has tied to concerns about the flow of illegal drugs and migrants, into the US, target the United States’ three largest trading partners and are expected to lead to major disruption in some of the world’s biggest economies.

Canada and Mexico said they would hit back with retaliatory tariffs while China promised “corresponding countermeasures” and vowed to challenge Trump’s move at the World Trade Organization.

But in a sign of how swiftly the circumstances might change, Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Monday that she had agreed to send 10,000 troops to the border and the tariffs would be on hold for one month, as the two sides continue to negotiate.

Many are still bracing for wider tensions, after Trump said on Sunday that he would “definitely” impose tariffs on the EU, although he said while the UK was “out of line”, a deal could be worked out.

Trump has said he will speak to Canada and Mexico’s leaders on Monday about the tariffs, which are due to come into effect at midnight on Tuesday.

On the Dow, which tracks 30 high-profile companies meant to be representative of the economy, Nike and Apple, which both rely on China for manufacturing, were among the hardest hit, falling about 3%.

Elsewhere, carmakers such as Tesla and General Motors also saw share prices drop.

In Japan, Toyota shares fell 5% and Honda sank 7.2%, while in Europe shares in Stellantis – whose brands include Chrysler, Citroen, Fiat, Jeep and Peugeot – were down 7% and VW dropped roughly 6%.

Shares in drinks maker Diageo – which exports tequila from Mexico to the US – fell 3.8%.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said there was a “sea of red flashing on the markets”.

Tariffs could lead to “higher inflation and put a stop to further interest rate cuts for the time being – exactly the opposite of what equity investors want to happen”, he added.

“Higher prices could hurt demand, and there might be a trickle-down effect that knocks business and consumer confidence and feeds into weaker economic activity.”

The prospect of interest rates staying higher for longer helped to strengthen the dollar.

As well as the dollar rising against China’s yuan and the Canadian dollar, the euro fell to more than a two-year low against the US currency.

Oil prices also rose following news of the tariffs, as traders tried to analyse how tariffs on Canada and Mexico – the two biggest sources of oil imports to the US – would affect the market.

Chief investment strategist at investment bank Saxo, Charu Chanana, warned that while tariffs could be beneficial for the US economy in the short term, in the long run they pose significant risks.

“Repeated use of tariffs would incentivise other countries to reduce reliance on the US, weakening the dollar’s global role,” she added.

Taiwanese actress Barbie Hsu, who was best-known for starring in the hit 2001 TV series Meteor Garden, has died from pneumonia at the age of 48, according to local media.

One of the biggest stars in the Mandarin-speaking world, Hsu became a familiar face even in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand after Meteor Garden was dubbed in local languages.

“I can’t believe it,” read one comment on Chinese social media platform Weibo, echoing the sentiments of millions of shocked fans who have been paying tribute.

She is believed to have fallen ill while visiting Japan. Her sister, Dee Hsu, confirmed her death to Taiwan’s TVBS News on Monday.

“During the Lunar New Year, our family came to Japan for vacation. My dearest sister Barbie has unfortunately left us after getting pneumonia, triggered by influenza,” Dee Hsu said in a statement shared by her manager.

Hsu, who had a history of epilepsy and heart disease, was hospitalised previously due to seizures.

She leaves behind her husband, South Korean singer DJ Koo, and two children from an earlier marriage.

She and her ex-husband, Chinese businessman Wang Xiaofei, were married for 10 years, before an acrimonious divorce in 2021.

Hsu began her career at 17, as part of a pop duo with her sister Dee. They became famous as TV hosts, known for their animated style and sense of humour.

But it was Meteor Garden, a TV adaptation of a 1990s Japanese comic of the same name, that turned Hsu into a star whose fame stretched beyond Chinese entertainment.

In the drama, Hsu played Shancai, a teen from a middle-class family who attends an elite private school and finds herself entangled in a love web with the heirs of wealthy families.

Her four male co-stars in Meteor Garden would later form the Taiwanese boyband F4, one of the most popular Mandopop groups of the 2000s.

On Monday, F4 member Ken Chu shared a black, empty screen as well as a group photo with Hsu on Instagram. Then on Weibo, he wrote: “What a bolt from the blue.”

After Meteor Garden, Hsu starred in more than a dozen TV shows and movies, including popular romantic dramas like Corner With Love and Summer’s Desire.

She took a break from acting in 2012, but continued to appear in reality shows.

Aya Liu, a host and long-time friend of the Hsu sisters, wrote on Weibo that she had met Hsu at a gathering last month, where they had promised to meet more often.

“I didn’t think that would be our last gathering,” Liu wrote. “Rest in peace, the most beautiful queen.”

Hsu was the top trending topic on Weibo on Monday. “She was only 48 years old… this is too sudden. This is a little difficult to accept,” read one comment.

Posts about influenza in Japan were also trending as fans tried to understand how she had fallen sick.

When Meteor Garden aired in the 2000s, at a time when Taiwanese shows and music dominated pop culture in the region, the modern, high-school take on Cinderella was a hit.

Young women took fashion inspiration from Hsu’s Shancai and swooned over F4. The floppy hairstyles sported by the male leads were plastered on walls in hair salons, as young men across South East Asia and East Asia tried to emulate the look.

In the Philippines, a local broadcaster reportedly aired the entire series eight times to satisfy fan demand. Bootleg copies of the series were also sold at roadside stalls.

Meteor Garden’s theme songs were released in other languages, quickly becoming hits on the radio and on TV.

More than 20 years on, the show’s popularity has endured even as remakes attracted new fans. It has inspired versions in Japan, South Korea, China and India.

On social media, tributes to Hsu have poured in from across the region, from Chinese users on Weibo, to Southeast Asian fans on X, to Meta’s Threads, which is particularly popular in Taiwan.

“Big S has always been a part of my youth,” wrote one fan on Threads, referring to Hsu by her nickname.

An X user wrote: “Meteor Garden raised an entire generation of Asians. Thank you Barbie Hsu for giving life to Shancai.”

Elon Musk said the Trump administration would close the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as employees were told to stay home on Monday amid uncertainty about its future.

The billionaire Trump adviser’s comments came amid turmoil after two top security officials were placed on leave. The agency’s website has not worked since Saturday.

But President Trump was less definitive about shuttering the agency, telling reporters on Sunday night that USAID was run by “a bunch of radical lunatics”.

“We’re getting them out,” he said, “and then we’ll make a decision.”

Over the last week, Musk railed against USAID as he sought to assert control over the agency.

On X, the social media platform that he owns, he called it “evil” and a “criminal organisation”. In a live stream on X early Monday, he told followers, “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair. … We’re shutting it down.”

Staffers who work at the agency’s Washington DC headquarters were told to stay home on Monday. Hundreds of employees were also locked out of their email, according to CBS, the BBC’s American news partner.

An effort could be underway to bring the agency, which was established by an act of the US Congress, more directly under the control of Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

Republican congressman Brian Mast, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told “Face the Nation” that USAID is “likely going to be rolled more closely under Secretary Rubio.”

Whether the agency is shut down or restructured, the changes sought by Musk and Trump would have far-reaching implications. USAID distributes billions in aid to non-governmental organisations, aid groups and nonprofits around the world.

With its website down, several key information reserves, including an international famine tracker and decades of aid records, appeared to be unavailable.

Top officials have been placed on leave or resigned in the last two days following clashes with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), a team set up within the administration that Trump has given broad leeway to slash government spending.

It is not, however, an official government agency.

Members of Doge clashed with the security officials after requesting access to a highly secure area used for reviewing classified information, the Washington Post and CNN reported this weekend.

USAID director for security John Vorhees and deputy Director for Security Brian McGill, were both placed on administrative leave as a result, CBS reports.

A top political appointee, chief of staff Matt Hopson, also resigned, the Washington Post reported.

The leader of a pro-Russian paramilitary group in eastern Ukraine has died in hospital after being injured in an explosion in Moscow on Monday morning, Russian media have said.

Armen Sargsyan, the leader of the “Arbat” battalion, was severely injured following a blast in the entrance hall of a residential building in north-west Moscow, 12km (7 miles) from the Kremlin.

He was evacuated to a hospital by helicopter and placed in intensive care after the explosion, but eventually succumbed to his injuries, according to usually reliable Telegram sources.

Others – including one of Armen Sargsyan’s bodyguards – were also reportedly seriously injured, with some sources saying one other person had died.

In December, the Ukrainian security service SBU said “crime boss” Mr Sargsyan was a suspect in “recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine” and added that he had been on an international wanted list since May 2014 for his involvement in murders carried out in the centre of Kyiv.

The SBU added that Mr Sargsyan was part of the inner circle of fugitive former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

“The assassination attempt on Sarkisyan was carefully planned and was ordered. Investigators are currently identifying those who ordered the crime,” TASS quoted a law enforcement official as saying.

Images shared on social media show rubble and plaster strewn across a heavily damaged entrance hall with blown-out windows and doorways.

Olga Voronova, a 36-year-old mother of three who lived in the building next door to the explosion, told AFP news agency that she was “very scared” and did not understand how the blast could’ve happened.

“We have quite serious security guards, they ask every car at the checkpoints, we order passes for guests, even for family members,” she said.

Mr Sargsyan was born in Horlivka, a city in Ukraine’s Donetsk region which has been occupied by Russia since 2014.

In a Telegram post confirming his death, the town’s mayor, Ivan Prikhodko, said Mr Sargsyan’s “most significant achievement was the creation and leadership of a separate special forces battalion”.

Mr Prikhodko said Mr Sargsyan was also the head of the Boxing Federation of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.

The “Arbat” battalion has been known to operate in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops are still present after they launched a surprise offensive in August.

There have been a number of attacks on high profile supporters of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in Moscow and in occupied areas.

Senior Russian naval officer Valery Trankovsky and Russian prison boss Sergei Yevsyukov died after car bombs exploded in Russian-occupied Ukraine in late 2024.

And in December, a high-ranking general in the Russian armed forces and his assistant were killed in Moscow by Ukraine’s security service, a Ukrainian source told the BBC.

In 2010, IP Yadev, a surgeon from the southern Indian state of Kerala, was confronted with one of the hardest decisions of his life.

He had to decide between keeping his father – a terminal cancer patient – alive, and honouring his wish, expressed verbally, to stop all treatments and put an end to his suffering.

“As a son, I felt it was my duty to do whatever I could to prolong my father’s life. This made him unhappy and he ended up dying alone in an intensive-care unit. The doctor’s last efforts to revive him using CPR crushed his ribs. It was a horrible death,” Dr Yadev says.

The experience, he says, deeply impacted him and helped him realise the importance of advance medical directives (AMDs), also known as living wills.

A living will is a legal document that allows a person over 18 years to choose the medical care they would want to receive if they develop a terminal illness or condition with no hope of recovery and are unable to make decisions by themselves.

For example, they could specify that they don’t want to be put on life-support machines or insist that they want to be given adequate pain-relieving medication.

In 2018, India’s Supreme Court allowed people to draw up living wills and thereby choose passive euthanasia, where medical treatment can be withdrawn under strict guidelines to hasten a person’s death. Active euthanasia – any act that intentionally helps a person kill themselves – is illegal in the country.

But despite the legal go-ahead, the concept of living wills hasn’t really taken off in India. Experts say that this has much to do with the way Indians talk, or rather, don’t talk about death. Death is often considered to be a taboo subject and any mention of it is thought to bring bad luck.

But there are now efforts underway to change this.

In November, Dr Yadev and his team launched India’s first programme – at the Government Medical College in Kerala’s Kollam district – to educate people about living wills, offering information in person and over the phone. Volunteers also conduct awareness campaigns and distribute will templates.

Creating a living will requires family members to have open and honest conversations about death. Despite some resistance, activists and institutions are taking steps to raise awareness, and there’s a growing, though cautious, interest.

Kerala leads the way in these conversations. Currently, it has the country’s best palliative care network, and organisations that offer end-of-life care have also started awareness campaigns around living wills.

In March, around 30 people from the Pain and Palliative Care society in Thrissur city signed living wills. Dr E Divakaran, founder of the society, says that the gesture is aimed at make the idea more popular among people.

“Most people have never heard of the term so they have many questions, like whether such a directive can be misused or if they can make changes to their wills later on,” Mr Yadev says, adding that most inquiries have come from people in their 50s and 60s.

“Right now, it’s the educated, upper-middle class that’s making use of the facility. But with grassroot awareness campaigns, we’re expecting the demographic to widen,” he says.

According to the Supreme Court order, a person must draft the will, sign it in the presence of two witnesses, and have it attested by a notary or gazetted officer. A copy of the will must then be submitted to a state government-appointed custodian.

While the guidelines exist on paper, many state governments are yet to set up mechanisms to implement them. This is what Dr Nikhil Datar, a gynaecologist from Mumbai city, realised when he made his living will two years ago as there was no custodian to whom he could submit it.

So he went to court and it resulted in the Maharashtra government appointing about 400 officials across local bodies in the state to serve as custodians of living wills.

In June, Goa state implemented the Supreme Court’s orders around living wills and a high court judge became the first person in the state to register one.

On Saturday, Karnataka state ordered district health officers to nominate people to serve on a key medical board required to certify living wills. [Two medical boards have to certify that a patient meets necessary criteria for the implementation of a living will before medical practitioners can act on it.]

Mr Datar is also advocating for a centralised digital repository for living wills, accessible nationwide. He has also made his own will available for free on his website as a template. He believes a will helps prevent problems for both families and doctors when a patient is in a vegetative state and beyond recovery.

“Very often, family members don’t want the person to endure more treatment but because they can’t care for the patient at home, they keep them in the hospital. Doctors, bound by medical ethics, can’t withhold treatment, so the patient ends up suffering with no way to express their wishes,” Mr Datar says.

Living wills aren’t just about choosing passive euthanasia. Dr Yadev recalls a case where a person wanted his will to specify that he should be placed on life support if his condition ever required it.

“He explained that his only child was living abroad and that he didn’t want to die until his son got to meet him,” Mr Yadev says. “You have the freedom to choose how you want to die. It is one of the greatest rights available to us, so why not exercise it?” he says.

Healthcare advocates say that conversations around palliative care are slowly growing in the country, giving an impetus to living wills.

Dr Sushma Bhatnagar of Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences says the hospital is launching a department to educate patients about living wills. “Ideally, doctors should discuss living wills with patients, but there’s a communication gap,” she says, adding that training doctors for these conversations can help ensure a person dies with dignity.

“Throughout our lives, our choices are coloured by our loved ones’ wishes or by what society thinks is right,” Mr Yadev says.

“At least in death, let us make choices that are in our interest and fully our own.”

Sunday night saw Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar win big at the Grammy Awards, which was dedicated to fundraising for wildfire relief efforts in Los Angeles.

It also saw plenty of memorable performances, impassioned speeches and stunning red carpet looks for everyone to emulate over the course of the next year (leather chaps are back, in case you were wondering).

Let’s take a closer look at some of the other highlights and lowlights from the ceremony.

Well, now we’re in a pickle.

On her eighth solo record, Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé sang about the Grammys’ constant, stubborn refusal to award her album of the year.

“” she sang. ““

But now she won, for the album that contains that very lyric. Will she have to go back and re-record it? At the very least, we expect a rewrite on the tour she just announced.

Joking aside, this victory was long, long overdue.

In 2017, Adele even flirted with the idea of handing back her album of the year trophy, saying the music on her album, 25, couldn’t compare to Beyoncé’s “monumental… beautiful and soul-baring” Lemonade.

Eyebrows were raised again in 2023, when Harry Styles’ fun, but conceptually flimsy, Harry’s House bested Beyoncé’s Renaissance – a meticulous exploration of how oppressed black and queer musicians found salvation through house music.

In the end, it took Beyoncé to approach a genre that conservative Grammy voters could understand – country – in order to secure a victory.

But that’s not to downplay the scale of her achievement. Cowboy Carter is a masterpiece that weaves hundreds of musical threads into a thesis about America’s cultural past, and the futility of gatekeeping musical genres along racial lines.

The arguments it makes are both timely and urgent, without suffocating the songs.

As the second part of a planned trilogy, this surely won’t be Beyoncé’s last trip to the podium.

Sabrina Carpenter has literally been practising for this moment all her life. She made her TV debut in 2011, aged 12 years old, and has been hovering on the fringes of pop superstardom pretty much ever since.

So, after a huge breakthrough in 2024, she was primed and ready for the Grammy stage.

Or was she?

She emerged in a razzle-dazzle showgirl outfit and instantly missed her spotlight. Then she dropped the cane she was supposed to dance with. And, as she descended a grand pearlescent staircase, she suddenly disappeared through a trap door.

Luckily, it was all a humorous ruse! Carpenter skipped back to the stage for a big band version of Espresso, complete with ankle-endangering tap routine.

After changing into a blue, crystal-studded Victoria’s Secret bodysuit, she segued effortlessly into Please, Please, Please… And then the set collapsed on her.

As she leapt into the safety of a dancer’s arms, she couldn’t contain her laughter.

It was a perfect piece of vaudeville, and the audience lapped it up. Host Trevor Noah, however, wasn’t so impressed.

“That was amazing and funny, which I didn’t appreciate,” the comedian said. “Really, Sabrina? You’re just gonna take my job like that?”

Five years ago, people were stunned when The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights – the most-streamed song of all time – failed to pick up a single Grammy nomination.

Among those people were Abel Tesfaye – aka The Weeknd himself.

He declared the awards were “corrupt” and criticised their lack of “transparency”. Since then, he’s refused to submit any of his music for consideration.

So it was something of a coup when he gave an unannounced, unexpected performance in the middle of Sunday’s ceremony.

He was introduced by the Recording Academy’s CEO, Harvey Mason Jr, who acknowledged the star’s criticisms, and described his efforts to revamp the Grammys’ electorate, by boosting the number of women and people of colour.

After that, the star took to the stage with two songs from his brand new album, Cry For Me and Timeless.

It was meant to be a celebration of people’s ability to learn and grow, but the music was so oppressively drab – with the Weeknd constantly shrouded in smoke and shadow – that you wondered whether he’d simply returned to sabotage the Grammys from within.

BBC Sound of 2025 winner Chappell Roan cantered into the Grammys with a theatrical performance of Pink Pony Club – her love letter to LA, as well as a celebration of queer discovery.

Backed by dancers dressed as rodeo clowns, Roan – herself wearing a sequinned cowboy hat and sparkly boots – rode a a giant pink carousel pony, complete with an 80s perm.

“‘My Little Pony’ grew up!” joked host Trevor Noah afterwards.

The performance was part of a segment that raised awareness and funds for wildfire relief.

Roan, real name Kayleigh Amstutz, later received a standing ovation for using her best new artist winning speech to call on record labels to provide up-and-coming artists with liveable wages and healthcare.

Quite a night for the 26-year-old, who might be feeling a little horse in the morning.

Rapper Kanye West arrived on the red carpet dressed in black with his wife Bianca Censori, who was, to all intents and purposes, naked.

As the couple stopped to pose for cameras, the Australian model removed her black fur coat to reveal a sheer body stocking that left little to the imagination.

The pair then made a swift exit, electing to skip the ceremony, driving off into the LA night.

Early reports suggested they had been kicked out, but the BBC understands they left of their own accord, with one source saying that West, “walked the carpet, got in his car and left”.

They may well have been home by the time West’s track Carnival lost out to Kendrick Lamar in the best rap song category.

But he probably won’t mind: He already has 24 Grammy awards, and now he has the headlines he craves, too.

Among the three awards Charli XCX picked up was one of the night’s most obscure: Best artwork.

At first glance, that might seem odd. The album cover is a plain green square, with the word “brat” printed in a deliberately low-resolution Arial font.

But the cover took five months to put together, with designer Brent David Freaney testing around 500 shades of green to produce a garish, nausea-inducing effect.

Charli wanted the artwork to be deliberately off-putting – reflecting the album’s dual themes of partying and self doubt. And she said it was important to challenge the convention of women dressing provocatively to promote their music.

“Why should anyone have that level of ownership over female artists?” she asked Vogue magazine.

She added: “I wanted to go with an offensive, off-trend shade of green to trigger the idea of something being wrong. I’d like for us to question our expectations of pop culture – why are some things considered good and acceptable, and some things deemed bad?

“I’m interested in the narratives behind that and I want to provoke people. I’m not doing things to be nice.”

Towards the end of the ceremony, the star’s live performance of Von Dutch and Guess saw her transform the biggest and glitziest night in music into a packed and sweaty nightclub.

Emerging from a black SUV, she strutted towards the camera, throwing a glass of champagne against the wall of a parking garage, before launching into what appeared to be an underground rave.

As the performance progressed, she appeared on stage with model Julia Fox and hundreds of dancers, who were then showered in underwear (a reference to the song’s lyrics).

The Grammys said all of the unworn garments were donated to domestic violence survivors after the show.

I can’t be the only person desperate to know what Taylor is whispering, right?

Beyoncé’s stunned reaction to winning best country album is a gif that will never stop gif-ing.

The Grammys have a wobbly history with hip-hop. They didn’t introduce a rap category until 1989, a full decade after the Sugarhill Gang introduced the genre to a wide audience with Rapper’s Delight. And no rap act has won album of the year since OutKast in 2001.

So it was a rare victory when Compton-born rapper Kendrick Lamar won all five of the awards in which he was nominated for Not Like Us, a furious takedown of his musical rival, Drake.

Among those awards were the prestigious record and song of the year – categories that have only ever recognised a rap song once before (Childish Gambino’s This Is America in 2019).

Lamar didn’t perform at the ceremony – he plays the Super Bowl halftime show next week instead – but, dressed head to toe in denim, he delivered a powerful message to Grammy voters.

“At the end of the day, nothing is more powerful than rap music. I don’t care what it is. We are the culture… respect the art form”.

Music lost one of its biggest legends in 2024, when Quincy Jones died at the age of 91.

As the producer for everyone from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson, the Grammys gave him a star-studded send-off that lasted almost 20 minutes.

Cynthia Erivo and Herbie Hancock played a beautiful version of Fly Me To The Moon; while Stevie Wonder’s sang We Are The World with choirs from two schools affected by the devastating LA fires.

But it was Janelle Monaé’s performance of Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough that blew the roof off.

Dressed in MJ’s Billie Jean outfit, she pirouetted and moonwalked and jumped on the tables as if she’d been possessed by the man himself.

Towards the end of the performance, she threw off her jacket to reveal a t-shirt bearing the legend “I Love QJ”.

And guess who caught it and wore it for the rest of the night?

Taylor Swift.

Even with 94 awards to consider, some people will get overlooked – but nobody expected two of the Grammys’ biggest darlings to go home empty-handed.

Taylor Swift was blanked despite scoring six nominations. Voters clearly decided that The Tortured Poets Department wasn’t worthy of comparison with her four previous album of the year winners (Fearless, 1989, Folklore and Midnights).

Billie Eilish’s wipeout was even more unexpected. She had been the bookmakers’ favourite for album of the year, for her third release Hit Me Hard And Soft – but she lost all seven of the categories she was nominated for.

Still, there was a lot of competition this year, especially in the pop categories. And Swift has spoken in the past about how losing album of the year for Red inspired her pop opus, and biggest-seller to date, 1989.

Don’t count either of these artists out just yet.

There’s a reason they keep inviting Trevor Noah back to host the Grammys: He’s got the tone right.

He’s relaxed, he’s engaged with the music, and his humour never punches down.

Here are some of his best quips from the night:

• “Yesterday, Beyonce announced her new tour. Everyone saw that. I will say, though, Beyonce, there’s tariffs. We can’t afford a new tour, right? Maple syrup is about to be $50.”
• “Taylor Swift could become the first artist ever to win album of the year five times. Which means she would break the record of four wins, set all the way back in 2024 by Taylor Swift. I’m just gonna say Taylor, if you break Taylor’s record, the Swifties are gonna come for you. And you don’t wanna mess with them.”
• “The Beatles are nominated tonight for Record of the Year. Yes, the legendary band from Liverpool used AI to put out a new song after 53 years. So good luck to the Beatles. I think if they win, this could open up a few doors for them.”
• “And who knows, through the power of AI, one day, we could even get another Rihanna album.”

Donald Trump imposed tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada and China over the weekend.

The US president said tariffs are needed to “protect” Americans from the “major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs”, including fentanyl.

Trump told the BBC that tariffs on EU goods could happen “pretty soon” – but suggested a deal “can be worked out” with the UK.

He also floated the idea of an additional 10% across-the-board tariff on all goods imported into the US.

Tariffs are taxes charged on goods imported from other countries.

Trump is imposing a 25% tariff on goods shipped from Canada and Mexico. So, a product worth $4 will face an additional $1 charge applied to it.

There will be a 10% charge on goods imported from China.

Tariffs against China and Canada are expected to go into effect on 4 February at 00:01 am EDT (05:01 GMT).

Tariffs against Mexico will go into effect a month later.

This type of tariff – charging a percentage of a product’s value – is most common. Another type of tariff imposes a fixed figure on imports, whatever their value.

Companies that import goods from abroad pay the tariffs to the US government. However, economists say these additional costs are usually passed on to the consumer through higher prices.

The announcement is Trump fulfilling a campaign promise of introducing import duties against some of America’s closest trading partners.

Trump said this will boost US manufacturing.

The tariffs will grow the US economy, protect jobs, and raise tax revenue, he argues.

Trump says he is using tariffs not just for economic reasons, but also to “combat the scourge of fentanyl”, a powerful drug that causes tens of thousands of overdose deaths in the US each year.

His administration says chemicals used to make the drug come from China, while Mexican gangs supply it illegally and have fentanyl labs in Canada. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said less than 1% of fentanyl entering the US comes from his country.

• Six things that could get more expensive for Americans after Trump tariffs
• Booze, oil and orange juice: How Canada could fight Trump tariffs

At the same time Trump is placing economic pressure on these trading partners, he has stated a desire for Canada to join America as the 51st state, an idea Trudeau has firmly rejected.

In response to Trump’s announcement, Trudeau declared retaliatory 25% tariffs on 155bn Canadian dollars’ worth ($107bn; £86bn) of US goods on Saturday.

“Now is the time to choose products made right here in Canada,” Trudeau wrote on social media. “Check the labels. Let’s do our part. Wherever we can, choose Canada.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has directed the Secretary of Economy to impose a plan including “tariff and non-tariff measures in defence of Mexico’s interests”.

In a statement, China’s foreign ministry said in a statement that it “firmly deplores and opposes this move” and will “take necessary countermeasures”.

“Trade and tariff wars have no winners,” said a spokesperson at China’s Washington embassy.

Together, China, Mexico and Canada accounted for more than 40% of imports into the US last year.

In Trump’s previous time in office, he applied less restrictive tariffs on China.

This time around, the tariffs appear to apply to most categories of goods.

There is, however, a carve-out for Canadian energy, which will be tariffed at 10% instead of 25%.

Goods from Mexico such as fruit, vegetables, spirits and beer are expected to get more expensive because of the tariffs.

Canadian goods such as steel, lumber, grains and potatoes are also likely to get pricier.

It is expected that the car manufacturing sector could see the brunt of the effects of the tariff.

Vehicle parts cross the US, Mexican and Canadian borders multiple times before a vehicle is completely assembled.

The average US car price could increase by $3,000 because of the import taxes, financial analyst TD economics suggested.

On Sunday, Trump said tariffs would also be imposed on the EU and the UK.

The president told the BBC both were acting “out of line”, but because the EU was acting worse it could see tariffs “pretty soon”.

Trump suggested a solution for the UK could be “worked out” as he was “getting along very well” with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

The UK’s Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, has said that he thinks the UK should be excluded from any tariffs because the US currently exports more products to the UK than it imports from the US.

“I think we’ve got an argument to engage with,” Reynolds told the BBC.

The UK exports pharmaceutical products, cars and scientific instruments to the US.

Last year, the US had a trade deficit of $213bn with the EU – which Trump described as “an atrocity”.

The EU has said it would “respond firmly” to any tariffs.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said a trade war with the US would mean “the one laughing on the side is China”, adding: “We need America, and America needs us as well.”

US companies Harley Davidson, which manufactures motorcycles, and whiskey distilleries such as Jack Daniel’s have previously faced tariffs from the EU.

Economists suggest that a portion of the cost of tariffs ends up being paid by consumers.

Sellers may raise the price of goods they are importing for consumers.

Economic studies of the impacts of tariffs imposed by Trump during his first term in office show the burden was ultimately borne by US consumers.

From 2018 to 2023, tariffs on imported washing machines saw the price of laundry equipment rise by 34% in the US, according to official statistics, before falling once the tariffs expired.

Some experts suggest that these new tariffs could prompt a wider trade war and exacerbate inflation.

Capitol Economics said the annual rate of inflation could increase from 2.9% to as high as 4% because of the newly announced tariffs.

If that happens, US inflation would return to the levels seen in mid-2023.

The 67th Grammy Awards have been held in Los Angeles, with more than 90 prizes handed out over the course of the night.

Here are the winners in all the main categories.

Album of the year

• André 3000 – New Blue Sun
• Sabrina Carpenter – Short n’ Sweet
• Charli XCX – Brat
• Jacob Collier – Djesse Vol 4
• Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft
• Chappell Roan – The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
• Taylor Swift – The Tortured Poets Department

Record of the year

• The Beatles – Now And Then
• Beyoncé – Texas Hold ‘Em
• Sabrina Carpenter – Espresso
• Charli XCX – 360
• Billie Eilish – Birds of a Feather
• Chappell Roan – Good Luck, Babe!
• Taylor Swift ft Post Malone – Fortnight

Song of the year

• Beyoncé – Texas Hold ‘Em
• Sabrina Carpnter – Please Please Please
• Billie Eilish – Birds Of A Feather
• Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars – Die With a Smile
• Chappel Roan – Good Luck, Babe!
• Shaboozey – A Bar Song (Tipsy)
• Taylor Swift ft Post Malone – Fortnight

Best new artist

• Benson Boone
• Sabrina Carpenter
• Doechii
• Khruangbin
• Raye
• Shaboozey
• Teddy Swims

Best pop vocal album

• Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard And Soft
• Ariana Grande – Eternal Sunshine
• Chappell Roan – The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
• Taylor Swift – The Tortured Poets Department

Best pop solo performance

• Beyoncé – Bodyguard
• Charli XCX – Apple
• Billie Eilish – Birds of a Feather
• Chappell Roan – Good Luck, Babe!

Best pop duo/group performance

• Gracie Abrams ft Taylor Swift – Us
• Beyoncé ft Post Malone – Levii’s Jeans
• Charli XCX & Billie Eilish – Guess
• Ariana Grande, Brandy & Monica – The Boy Is Mine

Best dance/electronic recording

• Disclosure – She’s Gone, Dance On
• Four Tet – Loved
• Fred Again & Baby Keem – Leavemealone
• Kaytranada ft Childish Gambino – Witchy

Best dance/electronic album

• Four Tet – Three
• Justice – Hyperdrama
• Kaytranada – Timeless
• Zedd – Telos

Best dance/pop recording

• Madison Beer – Make You Mine
• Billie Eilish – L’Amour De Ma Vie [Over Now Extended Edit]
• Ariana Grande – Yes, and?
• Troye Sivan – Got Me Started

Best traditional pop vocal album

• Cyrille Aimée – À Fleur De Peau
• Lake Street Dive – Good Together
• Aaron Lazar – Impossible Dream
• Gregory Porter – Christmas Wish

Best Latin pop album

• Anitta – Funk Generation
• Luis Fonsi – El Viaje
• Kenny García – García
• Kali Uchis – Orquídeas

Best rock performance

• The Black Keys – Beautiful People (Stay High)
• Green Day – The American Dream Is Killing Me
• Idles – Gift Horse
• Pearl Jam – Dark Matter
• St. Vincent – Broken Man

Best rock song

• The Black Keys – Beautiful People (Stay High)
• Pearl Jam – Dark Matter
• Green Day – Dilemma
• Idles – Gift Horse

Best rock album

• The Black Crowes – Happiness B******s
• Fontaines DC – Romance
• Green Day – Saviors
• Idles – TANGK
• Pearl Jam – Dark Matter
• Jack White – No Name

Best alternative music album

• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Wild God
• Clairo – Charm
• Kim Gordon – The Collective
• Brittany Howard – What Now

Best alternative music performance

• Cage The Elephant – Neon Pill
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Song of the Lake
• Fontaines D.C. – Starburster
• Kim Gordon – Bye Bye

Best metal performance

• Judas Priest – Crown of Horns
• Knocked Loose Featuring Poppy – Suffocate
• Metallica – Screaming Suicide
• Spiritbox – Cellar Door

Best rap performance

• Cardi B – Enough (Miami)
• Common & Pete Rock ft Posdnuos – When The Sun Shines Again
• Doechii – Nissan Altima
• Eminem – Houdini
• Future, Metro Boomin & Kendrick Lamar – Like That
• GloRilla – Yeah Glo!

Best melodic rap performance

• Jordan Adetunji ft Kehlani – Kehlani
• Beyoncé ft Linda Martell & Shaboozey – Spaghettii
• Future & Metro Boomin ft The Weeknd – We Still Don’t Trust You
• Latto – Big Mama

Best rap song

• Rapsody ft Hit-Boy – Asteroids
• Kanye West & Ty Dolla $Ign – Carnival
• Future & Metro Boomin ft Kendrick Lamar – Like That
• GloRilla – Yeah Glo!

Best rap album

• J Cole – Might Delete Later
• Common & Pete Rock – The Auditorium, Vol 1
• Eminem – The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce)
• Future & Metro Boomin – We Don’t Trust You

Best country solo performance

• Beyoncé – 16 Carriages
• Jelly Roll – I Am Not Okay
• Kacey Musgraves – The Architect
• Shaboozey – A Bar Song (Tipsy)

Best country duo/group performance

• Kelsea Ballerini With Noah Kahan – Cowboys Cry Too
• Brothers Osborne – Break Mine
• Dan + Shay – Bigger Houses
• Post Malone ft Morgan Wallen – I Had Some Help

Best country song

• Shaboozey – A Bar Song (Tipsy)
• Jelly Roll – I Am Not Okay
• Post Malone ft Morgan Wallen – I Had Some Help
• Beyoncé – Texas Hold ‘Em

Best country album

• Post Malone – F-1 Trillion
• Kacey Musgraves – Deeper Well
• Chris Stapleton – Higher
• Lainey Wilson – Whirlwind

Best R&B performance

• Jhené Aiko – Guidance
• Chris Brown – Residuals
• Coco Jones – Here We Go (Uh Oh)
• SZA – Saturn

Best R&B song

• Kehlani – After Hours
• Tems – Burning
• Coco Jones – Here We Go (Uh Oh)
• Muni Long – Ruined Me

Best progressive R&B album

• Durand Bernarr – En Route
• Childish Gambino – Bando Stone And The New World
• Kehlani – Crash

Best R&B album

• Lalah Hathaway – Vantablack
• Muni Long – Revenge
• Lucky Daye – Algorithm
• Usher – Coming Home

Best African music performance

• Yemi Alade – Tomorrow
• Asake & Wizkid – MMS
• Chris Brown ft Davido & Lojay – Sensational
• Burna Boy – Higher

Producer of the Year, Non-Classical

• Alissia
• Dernst “D’Mile” Emile II
• Ian Fitchuk
• Mustard

Songwriter of the Year, Non-Classical

• Edgar Barrera
• Jessi Alexander
• Jessie Jo Dillon
• Raye

Best comedy album

• Ricky Gervais – Armageddon
• Jim Gaffigan – The Prisoner
• Nikki Glaser – Someday You’ll Die
• Trevor Noah – Where Was I

Best compilation soundtrack for visual media

• The Color Purple – Various Artists
• Deadpool & Wolverine – Various Artists
• Saltburn – Various Artists
• Twisters: The Album – Various Artists

Best score soundtrack for visual media (includes film and televison)

• Laura Karpman – American Fiction
• Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – Challengers
• Kris Bowers – The Color Purple
• Nick Chuba, Atticus Ross & Leopold Ross – Shōgun

Best score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media

• Pinar Toprak – Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
• Bear McCreary – God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla
• John Paesano – Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Wilbert Roget, II – Star Wars Outlaws

Best song written for visual media

• Luke Combs – Ain’t No Love In Oklahoma (From Twisters: The Album)
• *NSYNC & Justin Timberlake – Better Place (From Trolls Band Together)
• Olivia Rodrigo – Can’t Catch Me Now (From The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes)
• Barbra Streisand – Love Will Survive (From The Tattooist of Auschwitz)

Best audio book narration

• George Clinton – …And Your Ass Will Follow
• Guy Oldfield – All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words
• Dolly Parton – Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones
• Barbra Streisand – My Name Is Barbra

Best music video

• A$AP Rocky – Tailor Swif
• Charli XCX – 360
• Eminem – Houdini
• Taylor Swift ft Post Malone – Fortnight

Best music film

• June
• Kings From Queens
• Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple
• The Greatest Night In Pop

Best jazz vocal album

• Christie Dashiell – Journey In Black
• Kurt Elling & Sullivan Fortner – Wildflowers Vol 1
• Milton Nascimento & Esperanza Spalding – Milton + Esperanza
• Catherine Russell & Sean Mason – My Ideal

Best jazz instrumental album

• Ambrose Akinmusire ft Bill Frisell & Herlin Riley – Owl Song
• Kenny Barron ft Kiyoshi Kitagawa, Johnathan Blake, Immanuel Wilkins & Steve Nelson – Beyond This Place
• Lakecia Benjamin – Phoenix Reimagined (Live)
• Sullivan Fortner – Solo Game

Best alternative jazz album

• Arooj Aftab – Night Reign
• André 3000 – New Blue Sun
• Robert Glasper – Code Derivation
• Keyon Harrold – Foreverland

Best jazz performance

• The Baylor Project – Walk With Me, Lord
• Lakecia Benjamin feat. Randy Brecker, Jeff “Tain” Watts, & John Scofield – Phoenix Reimagined (Live)
• Chick Corea & Béla Fleck –Juno
• Dan Pugach Big Band feat. Nicole Zuraitis & Troy Roberts – Little Fears

Best musical theatre album

• Merrily We Roll Along
• The Notebook
• The Outsiders
• Suffs
• The Wiz

Best opera recording

• Adams: Girls Of The Golden West – John Adams, conductor (Los Angeles Philharmonic; Los Angeles Master Chorale)
• Catán: Florencia En El Amazonas – Yannick Nézet-Séguin (The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; The Metropolitan Opera Chorus)
• Moravec: The Shining – Gerard Schwarz, conductor (Kansas City Symphony; Lyric Opera Of Kansas City Chorus)
• Puts: The Hours – Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor (Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; Metropolitan Opera Chorus)

Best orchestral performance

• John Adams: City Noir – Fearful Symmetries & Lola Montez Does The Spider Dance – Marin Alsop, conductor (ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra)
• Kodály: Háry János Suite; Summer Evening & Symphony In C Major – JoAnn Falletta, conductor (Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra)
• Sibelius: Karelia Suite, Rakastava, & Lemminkäinen – Susanna Mälkki, conductor (Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra)
• Stravinsky: The Firebird – Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor (San Francisco Symphony)

A pub landlady has said there has been a global response to the story of her offering a free pint every time Nottingham Forest scored – only for them to win 7-0.

Beccy Webster, who runs the Gedling Inn in Nottinghamshire, admitted Nottingham Forest’s victory over Brighton on Saturday led to her giving away nearly 300 pints at a cost of up to £1,500.

She said she had messages from as far afield as Australia, the US, Brazil and Poland – as well as numerous media interviews – “mostly seeing if we were still in business”.

She added: “It’s been overwhelming – but it’s been lovely to have something good come from what looks like a loss.”

The venue in Main Street had only publicised the offer 45 minutes before the match got under way.

Ms Webster expected the Reds to score “two or three” and had been upstairs feeding her baby when the goals started to go in.

She said: “It was as I was coming down the stairs the third went in and I began to wonder if I had made a mistake.”

But she decided to stick by the deal despite her partner suggesting they call it off.

“I said we had to carry it through and stick to our word and we have to back Forest all the way,” Ms Webster added.

She said she didn’t think about how much it was costing as “everyone was having such a good time”.

“I haven’t added up the total because I’m still in shock,” Ms Webster joked.

“But I would say over £1,000, maybe close to £1,500, but I’m hoping to get some help from the brewery.

“It would be nice if [club owner] Evangelos Marinakis could cover the bill – but actually if he came to visit we would give him a free pint, he is doing such a great job.”

With Nottingham Forest having such a good season and sitting third in the Premier League, Ms Webster said they had to make decision on how to mark upcoming games.

She added: “We will definitely do offers and deals for future matches but I’m not sure it will be free pints for goals.

“Maybe, maybe not, watch this space.”

Forest’s 7-0 victory over Brighton came just a week after The Reds fell to a 5-0 defeat away at Bournemouth.

It’s towards the end of our interview that Bill Gates reveals new numbers on how much his charitable Foundation has now spent in its efforts to combat preventable diseases and reduce poverty.

“I’ve given over 100 billion,” he says, “but I still have more to give.”

That’s dollars, just to clarify, worth about £80bn.

It’s roughly equivalent to the size of the Bulgarian economy or the cost of building the whole HS2 line.

But to put it in context, it’s also around the same as just one year of Tesla sales. (Tesla owner Elon Musk is now the richest man on the planet, a position Gates held for many years.)

The co-founder of Microsoft and his fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett are combining their billions through the Gates Foundation he originally set up with his now ex-wife Melinda.

Gates says philanthropy was instilled in him early on. His mother regularly told him “with wealth came the responsibility to give it away”.

His Foundation’s 25th anniversary is in May, and Gates exclusively revealed the $100bn figure to the BBC.

He tells me, for his part, he enjoys giving his money away (and around $60 billion of his fortune has gone into the Foundation so far).

When it comes to his day-to-day lifestyle, he doesn’t actually notice the difference: “I made no personal sacrifice. I didn’t order less hamburgers or less movies.” He can also, of course, still afford his private jet and his various huge houses.

He plans to give away “the vast majority” of his fortune, but tells me he has talked “a lot” with his three children about what might be the right amount to leave them.

Will they be poor after he’s gone? I ask him. “They will not,” he replies with a quick smile, adding “in absolute, they’ll do well, in percentage terms it’s not a gigantic number”.

Gates is a maths guy and it shows. At Lakeside School in Seattle, in eighth grade, he competed in a four-state regional maths exam and did so well that, at 13, he was one of the best high school maths students of any age in the region.

Maths terminology comes second nature to him. But to translate, if you’re worth $160bn, which Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index claims he is, even leaving your children a tiny percentage of your fortune still makes them very rich.

I’m with one of only 15 people on the planet who are centibillionaires (worth more than $100bn), according to Bloomberg. We’re in his childhood home in Seattle, a mid-century modern four-bedroom house set into a hill, and we’re meeting because he’s written a memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, focusing on his early life.

I want to find out what shaped a challenging, obsessive child who didn’t fit the norm into one of the tech pioneers of our age.

He’s brought along his sisters, Kristi and Libby, and all three excitedly tour the home where they grew up. They haven’t been back in some years and the current owners have refurbished (fortunately, the Gates siblings seem to approve of the changes).

But it’s bringing back memories including, as they walk into the kitchen, of the now-long-gone intercom system between rooms beloved by their mother. She used it to “sing to us in the morning”, Gates tells me, to get them out of their bedrooms for breakfast.

Mary Gates also set their watches and clocks eight minutes fast so the family would work to her time. Her son often rebelled at her efforts to improve him, but now tells me “the crucible of my ambition was warmed through that relationship”.

He puts his competitive spirit down to his grandmother “Gami”, who was often with the family in this house and who taught him to outsmart the competition early on with games of cards.

I follow him down the wooden stairs as he heads off to find his old childhood bedroom in the basement. It’s a neat guest room now, but young Bill spent hours, even days, in here “thinking”, as his sisters put it.

At one point, his mum was so fed up with the mess that she confiscated any item of clothing she found on the floor and charged her stubborn son 25 cents to buy it back. “I started wearing fewer clothes,” he says.

By this time, he was hooked on coding and, with some tech-savvy school friends, had been given access to a local firm’s one computer in return for reporting any problems. Obsessed with learning to program in those nascent days of the tech revolution, he would sneak out at night through his bedroom window without his parents knowing to get more computer time.

“Do you think you could do it now?” I ask.

He starts unwinding the catch and opens the window. “It’s not that hard,” he says with a smile as he climbs up and out. “It’s not hard at all.”

There is a famous early clip of Gates in which a TV presenter asks him if it’s true he can jump over a chair from a standing position. He does it right there in the studio. I’m in the Gates childhood bedroom for something that feels like “a moment”. The guy’s nearly 70. But he’s still game.

He seems at ease – and it isn’t just because we’re in a familiar environment. In the memoir, he’s revealed publicly for the first time that he thinks if he were growing up today, he’d probably be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

The only time I met him before was in 2012. He barely looked me in the eye as we did a quick interview about his goal to protect children from life-threatening diseases. There was certainly no pre-interview small talk. I wondered after our interaction whether he was on the spectrum.

The book lays it out: his ability to hyperfocus on subjects he was interested in; his obsessive nature; his lack of social awareness.

He says at elementary school he turned in a 177-page report on Delaware, having written off for brochures about the state, even sending stamped addressed envelopes to local companies asking for their annual reports. He was 11.

His sisters tell me they knew he was different. Kristi, who’s older, says she felt protective of him. “He was not a normal kid… he would sit in his room and chew pencils down to the lead,” she said.

They’re obviously close. Libby, a therapist, tells me she wasn’t surprised to hear he believes he is on the spectrum. “The surprise was more his willingness to say ‘this might be the case’,” she says.

Gates says he hasn’t had a formal diagnosis and doesn’t plan to. “The positive characteristics for my career have been more beneficial than the deficits have been a problem for me,” he says.

He thinks neurodiversity is “certainly” over-represented in Silicon Valley because “learning something in great depth at a young age – that helps you in certain complex subjects”.

Elon Musk has also said he is on the spectrum, referencing Asperger’s syndrome. The Tesla, X and SpaceX billionaire is famously courting Donald Trump, as are the other modern-day tech bros, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos among other Silicon Valley attendees at Trump’s inauguration.

Gates tells me although “you can be cynical” about their motives, he too reached out to the president. They had a three-hour dinner on 27 December “because he’s making decisions about global health and how we help poor countries, which is a big focus of mine now”.

I ask Gates, himself a target of some pretty wild conspiracy theories, what he thinks of the decision taken by Zuckerberg after Trump’s election to dump fact-checking in the US on his sites. Gates tells me he’s not “that impressed” by how governments or private companies are navigating the boundaries between free speech and truth.

“I don’t personally know how you draw that line, but I’m worried that we’re not handling that as well as we should,” he says.

He also thinks children should be protected from social media, telling me there’s a “good chance” that banning under-16s, as Australia is doing, is “a smart thing”.

Gates tells me “social networking, even more than video gaming, can absorb your time and make you worry about other people approving you” so we have to be “very careful how it gets used”.

As for Trump’s first pick for US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who claims he isn’t anti-vaccination but has promoted debunked claims about vaccines, Gates makes short shrift. He tells me RFK Jr is “misleading people”.

The Bill Gates origin story isn’t rags to riches. His dad was a lawyer, money wasn’t tight, although the decision to send their son to private school to try to motivate him was “a stretch, even on my father’s salary”.

If they hadn’t, we might never have heard of Bill Gates.

He first got access to an early mainframe computer via a teletype machine at the school, after the mothers held a jumble sale to raise the money. The teachers couldn’t figure it out, but four students were on it day and night. “We got to use computers when almost nobody else did,” he says.

Much later, he would set up Microsoft with one of those school friends, Paul Allen. Another, Kent Evans, Gates’ best friend, would die tragically age 17 in a climbing accident. As we walk around Lakeside School, we pass the chapel where they held his funeral and where Gates remembers crying on the steps.

Together, they’d had big plans. When they weren’t on computers, they were reading biographies to work out what factors made people successful.

Now Gates has written his own. His philosophy? “Much of who you are was there from the start.”

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Sir Keir Starmer is heading to Brussels to join a gathering of European Union leaders – the first time a British prime minister has done so since Brexit.

Starmer is heading over the English Channel for talks focused on defence and security co-operation and will also meet Nato secretary general Mark Rutte.

The trip is part of what he calls a “reset” between the UK and the European Union.

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The government has promised the UK will not re-join the EU’s single market or customs union, or sign up to freedom of movement.

But ministers do want what they see as a better relationship on defence and security, crime and trade.

They hope to sort this out by the spring and finalise it at a UK-EU summit, possibly in April or May.

Leaders of the European Union’s 27 member states are gathering for what is described as an “informal retreat” at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels – a 16th century palace in heart of the Belgian capital.

The backdrop is clear: the ongoing war in Ukraine and the return of Donald Trump to the White House.

The EU acknowledges it needs to take greater responsibility for its own defence – a key and recurring demand of President Trump, as he threatens the bloc with import taxes or tariffs.

The prime minister said: “President Trump has threatened more sanctions on Russia and it’s clear that’s got Putin rattled. We know that he’s worried about the state of the Russian economy.

“I’m here to work with our European partners on keeping up the pressure, targeting the energy revenues and the companies supplying his missile factories to crush Putin’s war machine.

“Because ultimately, alongside our military support, that is what will bring peace closer.”

But Trump’s cryptic, threatening and yet tantalising comments overnight on trade with the UK, where he said Britain was “out of line” on trade things “can be worked out”, neatly illustrate a dilemma Whitehall’s been conscious of ever since the president’s re-election.

If the UK shimmies towards Brussels that will likely tread on Washington’s toes; overdo the overtures in the Oval Office and the EU will be miffed. After Monday’s visit to Brussels, the prime minister is expected in the US in the next few weeks.

The UK is also exploring closer ties with the EU on dealing with serious and organised crime, and, crucially, trade.

Allowing food and animal products to be traded more freely is being discussed, as is cooperation on energy with a possible tie-up between the UK and the EU’s emission trading schemes.

The mutual recognition of professional qualifications and allowing touring musicians to travel more easily are also themes of interest.

Plenty in the EU are keen on a youth mobility scheme allowing young people from the UK and the EU to travel much more easily.

But such a scheme will sound to some rather like freedom of movement, albeit for a narrow chunk of the population and so may be a hard sell for the UK politically.

It is also likely, given the respective sizes of the EU and the UK, that more young people from the EU would come to the UK than vice versa.

Ministers have rejected the idea so far.

The EU has also floated the UK joining what is known as the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention.

The Convention isn’t quite a customs union but removes customs on the components that go into a product that are sourced from the other countries signed up to it.

Notably, the UK has not ruled out signing up to this and it is not seen by the government as a breach of its red lines.

Some sectors, such as the car industry, with its ‘just in time’ supply chains, would likely welcome such a move but other manufacturers would be exposed to greater competition.

Leading the technical negotiations for the UK is Michael Ellam, who worked in Downing Street when Gordon Brown was prime minister.

Ellam has been tasked with managing what is known as the “EU Relations Secretariat” within the Cabinet Office, which the prime minister set up shortly after the general election to lead on his planned “reset” with the EU.

As the negotiations continue, Starmer knows he faces political pressure from both sides of the argument.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has claimed “the Labour government are trying to reopen the divisions of the past and edge us back into the EU”.

Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, has said the government should be negotiating to re-join the customs union.

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