Just a day ago, Donald Trump was threatening a multi-front trade war with Canada, Mexico and China that would take the global economy into uncharted territory.

Twenty-four hours later, we’re in a rather different place with the tariffs – or taxes – against America’s closest neighbours and trading partners on hold for 30 days.

But the 10% tariffs on all goods imports from China have gone ahead, and Beijing has responded in kind. So what are the potential economic consequences of these opening salvos and could this turn into a broader trade war?

China is subject to significant US tariffs already and has been since Trump’s first term. But the blanket nature of today’s new levies from the White House on every single goods import from China – from toys, to mobile phones, to clothes – is new and significant.

Beijing’s promised tariff retaliation – including new levies on imports from the US of oil, agricultural machinery and some cars – is far less sweeping. Yet the retaliation moves us into the arena of tit-for-tat action, where the country experiencing the tariffs feels it has no choice but to hit back to show its own citizens it can’t be pushed around by a foreign power.

This is the dictionary definition of a trade war – and economic historians warn they tend to generate their own momentum and can rapidly spiral out of control.

Trump has used just about every justification under the sun for tariffs, from raising more tax revenue to boosting American manufacturing and rebalancing trade. But one thing recent days confirm is the new president regards them as a powerful way to compel other nations to do what he wants.

He threatened massive and punitive tariffs on Colombia when it initially refused to accept US flights of its deported nationals, but he lifted the threat when Bogota acquiesced.

The White House might also point to the response of Mexico and Canada yesterday as evidence tariff threats yield results. He had threatened to ride roughshod over his own North American free trade deal unless those nations tightened up on border control. Although how much extra those two countries actually promised yesterday on border security relative to what they were already doing is open to question.

Yet the problem with the White House using tariff threats in this way is that if other countries don’t back down – or agreements are not reached – Trump might well feel he has no choice but to follow through or risk losing all credibility. And the targeted country might feel it has to respond with its prepared countermeasures, even if they would prefer not to.

That high-risk dynamic – where things could slip out of control in an atmosphere of distrust and political pressure – is why many analysts and economists are far from comforted by how things have played out with Mexico and Canada this week.

The other reason many economists fear Trump’s intimidatory tariff diplomacy is its potentially chilling impact on business investment and confidence. US car firms have a deeply integrated industrial base across America, Mexico and Canada. Automotive parts cross those borders multiple times in the vehicle assembly process.

The levying of 25% tariffs on each of those movements would be disastrous for these businesses. Those North American tariffs have been paused for now, but it’s very hard to see US or Canadian automotive executives committing to further investment in those cross-border supply chains any time soon – and perhaps for many years to come.

That will have negative implications for their productivity – and also for the wages of their employees in all three countries. The view of many economists is having cross-border supply chains makes these firms more productive than they would otherwise be and this raises US workers’ wages relative to where they would be if they only manufactured in America.

These same effects apply on a global scale. In light of Trump’s tariff threats against the European Union, how many US firms are likely to be going ahead with planned investments in Europe – and vice versa?

Countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia benefitted indirectly from the US tariffs imposed on China in Donald Trump’s first presidential term, as multinationals shifted manufacturing out of China and into their territories to avoid the taxes and to continue exporting to America. But what if Trump now threatens tariffs against them too?

The huge uncertainty Trump’s tariff threats have injected into the global economy – even if they don’t always translate into actual new taxes – will likely already be doing damage.

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A second woman is confirmed to have died in flooding which has inflicted “incredible” devastation on communities in northern Australia.

Police said the 82-year-old woman’s body was found in a cane paddock in Queensland on Tuesday, two days after a 63-year-old woman died when a dinghy she was in overturned during a rescue attempt.

The region has been inundated since Saturday, with parts of northern Queensland seeing nearly 2m (6.5 ft) of rain.

By Tuesday, conditions were starting to ease – although Queensland Premier David Crisafulli warned it was still “a disaster that’s going to test the resolve of people” during an interview with broadcaster ABC.

He described the devastation as “incredible”, but noted weather conditions had been “really kind” in recent hours. Thousands had begun to return to their homes.

In Townsville, locals woke on Tuesday to grey skies and drizzle, and the news that predicted flooding levels had not materialised there. It was a stark contrast to the intense downpours which have battered the region over the past few days.

“We believe that the danger has passed,” Townsville Local Disaster Management Group chair Andrew Robinson told reporters.

Pointing to earlier forecasts which had suggested up to 2,000 Townsville homes could have faced flood risks, Crisafulli said that “the city had dodged a bullet”.

Local resident Jo Berry told the BBC she and her family were among those returning home on Tuesday, after spending a sleepless night monitoring the rainfall.

“People talk about PTSD when it rains here and I totally understand,” says Ms Berry, formerly from Leicester in the UK.

“We’ve been in the house here for over 20 years, and have been through a few cyclone events and the 2019 flooding so it is not our first rodeo,” she adds, referring to a flooding disaster which caused A$1.24bn (£620m; $770m) in damage.

On Monday night, other local residents told the BBC they were “on a knife edge” as they waited to see whether their houses would survive.

But further north in the state, power outages and damaged roads have made it difficult to assess the full extent of the destruction in towns such as Ingham and Cardwell.

Crisafulli said early reports suggested the damage was “quite frankly incredible” and that Ingham, which is almost entirely without electricity, “remains the biggest challenge”.

“There are people who have been inundated at home, in their businesses and in their farms,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

Footage published in local media showed long lines at the town’s supermarket as people waited for critical supplies. Crisafulli said that amid the blackout the local hospital was operating as normal, and a petrol station was open.

The flooding has caused damage to the area’s homes, crops and coastline, local MP Nick Dametto said in a video posted online.

“The inundation is something that I have never seen before,” he said.

Home to fewer than 5,000 people, Ingham was already reeling after the 63-year-old woman died when a State Emergency Service (SES) dinghy capsized during a rescue attempt on Sunday.

The second woman’s body was found on Tuesday just north of Ingham after a neighbour raised the alarm. She was last seen on Monday night in a house, Queensland Police said in a statement.

More than 8,000 properties remain without power across northern Queensland, according to the state’s energy provider, and the partial collapse of a critical highway continues to hinder efforts to assist some of the hardest-hit areas.

Crisafulli said the recovery effort would “take some time” and that the priority in the coming hours would be to work with the army to get power generators to isolated communities and “bring them back online”.

He added that federal funding would help reconstruct the battered Bruce Highway – the state’s main thoroughfare which stretches 1,673km (1,039 miles) from the south.

Located in the tropics, northern Queensland is vulnerable to destructive cyclones, storms, and flooding.

Speaking to the BBC in Townsville, Scott Heron, a local resident and climate expert, said the latest disaster was not unexpected.

“For a long time, climate scientists have been clear that extreme weather events will become more extreme, and we are seeing that,” said Prof Heron , who works at James Cook University and is the Unesco Chair on Climate Vulnerability of Heritage.

Prof Heron urged politicians to consider this as they planned recovery and rebuilding efforts, such as to the Bruce Highway.

It would be “wasting public money” if infrastructure planning, particularly for long-term projects including roads and bridges, did not “incorporate changing threats due to climate change”, he said.

Australia has banned DeepSeek from all government devices and systems over what it says is the security risk the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup poses.

DeepSeek stunned the world in January when it unveiled a chatbot which matched the performance level of US rivals, while claiming it had a much lower training cost.

Billions of dollars were wiped off stock markets internationally, including in Australia, where stocks tied to AI – such as chipmaker Brainchip – fell sharply overnight.

The Australian government has insisted the ban is not due to the app’s Chinese origins but because of the “unacceptable risk” it poses to national security.

DeepSeek has been approached for comment.

Australia’s move specifically requires any government entities to “prevent the use or installation of DeepSeek products, applications and web services”, as well as remove any previously installed, on any government system or device.

That means a wide range of workers will not be able to use the tools in the country, including those working in such varied areas as the Australia Electoral Commission and Bureau of Meteorology.

It is less clear whether it means DeepSeek would be banned from public sector computers in different areas of the economy, such as schools.

The ban does not extend to devices of private citizens.

Western countries have a track record of being suspicious of Chinese tech – notably telecoms firm Huawei and the social media platform, TikTok – both of which have been restricted on national security grounds.

The initial reaction to DeepSeek – which quickly became the most downloaded free app in the UK and US – appeared to be different.

President Donald Trump described it as a “wake up call” for the US but said overall it could be a positive development, if it lowered AI costs.

Since then, though, doubts about it have started to be voiced.

An Australian science minister previously said in January that countries needed to be “very careful” about DeepSeek, citing “data and privacy” concerns.

The chatbot was removed from app stores after its privacy policy was questioned in Italy. The Italian goverment previously temporarily blocked ChatGPT over privacy concerns in March 2023.

Regulators in South Korea, Ireland and France have all begun investigations into how DeepSeek handles user data, which it stores in servers in China.

The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has also said the US is now looking into possible security implications.

The US Navy has reportedly banned its members from using DeepSeek – though it has not confirmed this to the BBC.

• What data does DeepSeek collect?
• Is China’s AI tool as good as it seems?
• Watch DeepSeek refuse to respond to question about Tiananmen Square

Generally, AI tools will analyse the prompts sent to them to improve their product.

This is true of apps such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini as much as it is DeepSeek.

All of them gather and keep information, including email addresses and dates of birth.

However, security experts have previously warned that anyone working on confidential or national security areas needs to be aware of the risk of whatever they enter into chatbots being kept and analysed by the developers of those tools.

DeepSeek has also faced accusations it has unfairly used US tech.

OpenAI has complained that rivals, including in China, are using its own work to make rapid progress with their own products.

Beijing has made its decision. After days of warning of counter measures and urging Washington to enter negotiations and “meet China halfway”, it has decided to hit back – or at least threaten to retaliate with its own tariffs.

China said it would implement a 15% tariff on coal and liquefied natural gas products as well as a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-engine cars imported from the US from 10 February.

The date is important. It means there is still time for the world’s two largest economies to step back from the brink of a trade war.

The two leaders have scheduled a call later this week, according to the White House, and there are signs, despite today’s announcement, that China is in listening mode and is keeping the door open for talks.

• Trump’s trade war with neighbours is delayed
• Share falls ease after Trump tariff turmoil
• Five ways China is hitting back against US tariffs

Firstly, China’s counter measures are limited in scope compared to Donald Trump’s levy of 10% on all Chinese goods heading to the US.

America is the biggest exporter of liquid natural gas across the world, but China accounts for only around 2.3% of those exports and its major car imports are from Europe and Japan.

This calculated and selective targeting of goods may just be an opening shot by Beijing, a way of gaining some bargaining power and leverage ahead of any talks.

Officials in China may be encouraged by the cordial start to the US-China relationship since Trump took office.

The US president said he had a “very good” phone call with President Xi days before his inaugural ceremony, which was attended by the highest-level Chinese official ever to be dispatched to such an event. He has also suggested that he hopes to work with Xi on resolving Russia’s war in Ukraine.

President Xi might not want to pick a fight with Trump just yet as he is busy trying to shore up his own ailing economy.

This is also familiar territory for both leaders – although they might not be keen to relive the past. There was a honeymoon period in US-China relations during Trump’s last term, before the relationship soured.

It will also be far more difficult for Trump to do a deal with China than with Mexico and Canada – and much will depend on what he wants from Beijing.

China is Washington’s chief economic rival and cutting the country off from major supply chains has been a goal of the Trump administration.

If Trump asks for too much, Xi might feel he can walk away and there will be limits on just how far he is willing to be pushed.

The US president is dealing with a far more confident China than he did back then. Beijing has expanded its global footprint, and it is now the lead trade partner for more than 120 countries.

Over the past two decades, it has also steadily tried to reduce the importance of trade to its economy and ramped up domestic production. Today, imports and exports account for around 37% of China’s GDP, compared with more than 60% in the early 2000s, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The 10% tariff will sting, but Beijing may feel it can absorb the blow – for now.

The fear will be that President Trump is serious about ramping up that percentage to the 60% he pledged during his campaign or that he will continue to use the threat of tariffs as a recurring diplomatic tool to hold over Xi’s head.

If that happens, Beijing will want to be ready and that means having a clear strategy in case this escalates.

The last time the leaders signed a deal it did not end well.

The two countries issued tit-for-tat tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods from 2018.

It lasted more than two years until eventually China agreed to spend an extra $200bn (£161bn) a year on US goods in 2020.

Washington hoped the deal would bring down the huge trade deficit between China and the US, but the plan was derailed by the Covid pandemic and that deficit now sits at $361bn, according to Chinese customs data.

There are also key challenges for China as it is thinking several steps ahead in any negotiation.

Beijing still sells nearly four times more goods to the United States than it buys – and during Trump’s first term in office, it ran out of items to target.

Analysts believe that China is now looking at a wider range of measures than just tariffs to retaliate if the trade war ramps up.

The clock is ticking. This is not a full trade war, yet. Businesses around the world will be watching to see if the two leaders can reach some kind of settlement later this week.

El Salvador has offered to take in criminals deported from the US, including those with US citizenship, and house them in its mega-jail.

The deal was announced after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele during his visit to the central American nation.

Bukele – whose iron-fist approach to gangs has won him plaudits from voters but been heavily criticised by human rights groups – said he had offered the US “the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system”.

Rubio said the US was “profoundly grateful” to Bukele, adding that “no country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this”.

Rubio told reporters: “He has offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those with US citizenship and legal residency.”

Referring to two of the region’s most notorious transnational crime gangs, Rubio added that El Salvador would also take in deported migrants and “criminals from any nationality, be the MS-13 or Tren de Aragua”.

Bukele later confirmed the offer on X, specifying that “we are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted US citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee”.

He added that “the fee would be relatively low for the US but significant for us, making our entire prison sustainable”.

Since he came into office in 2019, Bukele has made cracking down on crime his government’s priority.

The newly built maximum-security jail he referred to, Cecot [Terrorism Confinement Centre], is at the centre of his drive to lock up and punish the most violent gang members.

Take a look at graphs and maps of the mega-jail

The government celebrated the opening of the jail – which it says can hold up to 40,000 inmates – by releasing photos and videos of shaven-headed and tattooed prisoners stripped down to the waist being frogmarched along its corridors.

The treatment of inmates at Cecot, where scores of inmates are locked up in each windowless cell, has been criticised by rights groups.

But Bukele’s crackdown on crime continues to be very popular with the vast majority of Salvadoreans who say they can go about their lives without threats from gang members for the first time in years.

However, some relatives of the tens of thousands of people which have been rounded up and jailed under emergency measures brought in by Bukele say their loved ones have been wrongfully rounded up in sweeping police round-ups.

Amnesty International has criticised the “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence” in the country – a criticism dismissed by Bukele, who points out that his hardline approach to crime last February won him re-election to a second term with more than 84% of the votes.

El Salvador was the second stop on Secretary of State Rubio’s first overseas tour as the US top diplomat.

His first stop was Panama, where he demanded that Panama make “immediate changes” to what he called the “influence and control” of China over the Panama Canal.

On Tuesday, he will hold meetings with officials in Costa Rica and Guatemala expected to focus on migration as well as countering Chinese influence in the region.

Since coming to office, US President Donald Trump has focused on speeding up the removal of undocumented migrants, with the promise of “mass deportations”.

A French national held on death row in Indonesia since 2007 for drug offences is returning to France on Tuesday as part of an agreement made between both countries.

Serge Atlaoui, 61, was accused of being a “chemist” by Indonesian authorities and arrested in 2005 at a factory in Jakarta, where dozens of kilos (pounds) of drugs were found.

An agreement was made between Indonesia and France on 24 January to extradite the father-of-four on “humanitarian grounds” because he has cancer and has been receiving weekly treatment at a hospital.

“It’s a miracle,” his wife Sabine Atlaoui told France’s RTL radio. “He survived 19 years of incarceration. He survived an execution.”

The 61-year-old was handed over to French police at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta and took off on a commercial flight to Paris at 19:35 local time (12:35 GMT), an official told the AFP news agency.

When he lands on Wednesday morning, Atlaoui will be presented to prosecutors “and most likely detained while awaiting a decision” about his future sentencing, his lawyer Richard Sedillot told AFP.

In France, the maximum punishment for a similar crime is 30 years, Indonesia human rights minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra told Reuters.

It will be up to Paris to grant “clemency, amnesty or a reduced sentence”, he said.

Mr Sedillot told AFP he was “delighted” with the extradition and “will now work to ensure that the sentence is adapted to conditions which will allow his release.”

Atlaoui told his family he does not want to meet them at the airport, his wife said.

“He wants to see his family again when he is free,” she told RTL. “Unfortunately, we do not know how long it will take.”

Atlaoui, a welder from Metz in north-eastern France, has always denied being a drug trafficker.

He claimed to be installing machinery in an acrylic factory, but told AFP in 2015 he “thought there was something suspicious”.

Originally sentenced to life in prison, the verdict was changed to death on appeal by the Indonesian supreme court.

His execution was scheduled for 2015, but paused thanks to pressure from the French government.

Recently, Indonesia has released a number of high-profile detainees imprisoned under the country’s strict drug laws.

Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipina mother who spent nearly 15 years on death row for carrying 2.6kg (5.7lb) of heroin through an Indonesian airport, was extradited in December.

The five remaining members of the “Bali Nine” drug ring returned to Australia the same month.

There are currently 90 foreigners still on death row in the country, including one woman, according to the Ministry of Immigration and Correction.

Thousands of residents are fleeing the Greek island of Santorini amid a wave of seismic activity.

Some 6,000 people have left the island by ferry since Sunday, according to local media, with emergency flights scheduled to leave on Tuesday.

More than 300 earthquakes have been recorded in the past 48 hours near the island – and some experts say tremors may continue for weeks. Authorities have closed schools for the entire week and warned against large indoor gatherings, but Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has urged calm.

Santorini is a popular tourist destination known for its whitewashed buildings, but most of those leaving are locals, as February is outside the peak tourist season.

Several tremors, measuring up to magnitude 4.7, were recorded north-east of Santorini early on Tuesday.

Though no major damage has been reported so far, emergency measures are being taken as a precaution.

Hundreds of people queued at a port in the early hours of Tuesday morning to board a ferry leaving for the mainland.

“Everything is closed. No-one works now. The whole island has emptied,” an 18-year-old local resident told Reuters news agency before boarding the vessel.

In addition to 6,000 people who have left the island by ferry since Sunday, around 2,500 to 2,700 passengers will have flown from Santorini to Athens via plane on Monday and Tuesday, according to Aegean Airlines.

The carrier said it had added three emergency flights to its schedule following a request from the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection.

Santorini is a small island with a population of just 15,500. It welcomes millions of tourists each year.

Kostas Sakavaras, a tour guide who has lived on Santorini for 18 years, left the island with his wife and children on Monday.

“We considered it’s a better choice to come to the mainland as a precaution,” he told BBC News.

“Nothing has been falling, or anything like that,” he said, adding that the worst part had been the sound. “That’s the most scary part of it,” said Mr Sakavaras, who plans to return home once schools reopen.

Schools are scheduled to stay closed on the island until Friday. Authorities have also warned people to avoid certain areas of the island and empty their swimming pools.

Santorini’s Mayor, Nikos Zorzos, said the island was prepared for seismic activity that “may last many weeks”. The island must approach the situation “with patience and calm”, he said on Tuesday.

He added that plans were in place to build shelters and provide food for the population should larger tremors emerge.

Prime Minister Mitsotakis said on Monday that Greece was working to manage “a very intense geological phenomenon”.

Seismologists consider the recent tremors to be minor, but preventive measures have been put in place in case a larger quake occurs.

Emergency services have warned residents to leave the areas of Ammoudi, Armeni and the Old Port of Fira due to landslides.

The South Aegean Regional Fire Department has been placed on general alert and rescue teams have been dispatched, with crews standing watch by large yellow medical tents on the island.

The earthquakes are originating from an area around the tiny islet of Anydros, north-east of Santorini.

Santorini is on what is known as the Hellenic Volcanic Arc – a chain of islands created by volcanoes – but the last major eruption was in the 1950s.

Greek authorities have said that the recent tremors were related to tectonic plate movements instead of volcanic activity.

Scientists cannot currently predict the exact timing, size or location of earthquakes.

But there are areas of the world where they are more likely to occur which helps governments to prepare.

Earthquakes occur as the result of tectonic plates moving either past, below each other or apart. This results in stress that is built up and then released as earthquakes along or near the boundaries of these plates – known as fault lines. Santorini and the Greek Islands are near such a line.

As scientists cannot predict such events the best way to prevent damage or loss of life is for authorities to reduce the vulnerability of their populations. This can be through designing and constructing earthquake-resistant buildings or evacuating residents when earthquakes begin.

Jesse Eisenberg, who starred as Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2010 film The Social Network, has told BBC News he no longer wants to think of himself “as someone associated with someone like that”.

“It’s like this guy is… doing things that are problematic, taking away fact-checking,” Eisenberg told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “[There are] safety concerns. Making people who are already threatened in the world more threatened.”

Meta announced last month it would no longer use independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with X-style “community notes”, where commenting on the accuracy of posts is left to users.

In a video posted alongside a blog post, Mr Zuckerberg said third-party moderators were “too politically biased” and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression”.

But Eisenberg told BBC News he was “concerned”.

“These people have billions upon billions of dollars, like more money than any human person has ever amassed and what are they doing with it?” he said.

“Oh, they’re doing it to curry favour with somebody who’s preaching hate.

“That’s what I think… not as like a person who played in a movie. I think of it as somebody who is married to a woman who teaches disability justice in New York and lives for her students are going to get a little harder this year.”

Meta’s move came as Mr Zuckerberg and other technology executives sought to improve relations with US President Donald Trump, ahead of his inauguration.

Trump and his Republican allies had criticised Meta’s fact-checking policy, as censorship of right-wing voices.

And after the changes were announced, Trump told a news conference he was impressed by Mr Zuckerberg’s decision and Meta had “come a long way”.

Last week, Trump signed a legal settlement that will see Meta pay out roughly $25m (£20m).

He had sued the company and Mr Zuckerberg, in 2021, over the suspension of his accounts after the 6 January Capitol riots.

Eisenberg is promoting A Real Pain, which he wrote, directed and stars in – a comedy drama about two cousins who travel to Poland together to visit Holocaust sites to honour their late grandmother.

The grandmother is based on Eisenberg’s real-life Aunt Doris and was filmed at the home his family used to live in, in Poland.

In the movie, the cousins struggle to reconcile their own modern life problems against the backdrop of one of the 20th Century’s most devastating and horrific events.

Eisenberg’s screenplay has received an Oscar nomination, as has his co-star, Kieran Culkin.

“Grandchildren of Holocaust survivors should wake up every morning and go outside and kiss the ground that they’re alive and thank whatever god they pray to – as the world didn’t want them to be alive,” Eisenberg told Today.

He said he had “tried to connect to bigger things” since making the film.

“I live in a world that feels hedonistic, my life is maybe too easy.”

He added that it was essential the film had a comic feel.

“It would be so sanctimonious without any humour in it.”

Eisenberg was also nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Mr Zuckerberg in The Social Network.

A woman has filed civil lawsuits against Neil Gaiman and his ex-wife in the US, accusing the British author of sexually assaulting her.

The lawsuits against Gaiman and Amanda Palmer were filed in Wisconsin, Massachusetts and New York.

The woman alleges the former couple violated laws on federal human trafficking, with complaints of assault, battery and inflicting emotional distress against Gaiman and negligence against Palmer. She is seeking at least $7m (£5.6m) in damages.

Gaiman, 64, whose books Good Omens, American Gods and The Sandman have been adapted for television, has denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by eight women.

He said he has “never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever”.

The lawsuits claim the woman was befriended by Palmer when she was 22 and homeless in New Zealand and began working for the couple, which is when the assaults began.

According to the lawsuits, Palmer told the woman there had been previous complaints from more than a dozen different women.

Five women, four of whom were among eight featured in a New York Magazine article in January, made allegations about the writer in a Tortoise Media podcast series published in summer 2024.

Gaiman has denied all of the allegations made against him, posting on his blog, on 14 January: “I’ve stayed quiet until now, both out of respect for the people who were sharing their stories and out of a desire not to draw even more attention to a lot of misinformation.

“As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen.”

He acknowledged that he was “careless with people’s hearts and feelings” and could have “done so much better”, but said he does not “accept there was any abuse”.

Since the allegations emerged, publisher Dark Horse Comics cancelled upcoming work by Gaiman and a UK stage adaptation of his book Coraline has been pulled.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has moved to defuse a row with the new US administration over a new land law by speaking to Elon Musk.

Mr Musk is a close adviser to US President Donald Trump, who on Sunday threatened to cut all future funding to South Africa over allegations that it was confiscating land and “treating certain classes of people very badly”.

The South Africa-born tech billionaire joined in the criticism asking on X why Ramaphosa had “openly racist ownership laws”.

Ramaphosa’s office said that in the call to Mr Musk the president “reiterated South Africa’s constitutionally embedded values of the respect for the rule of law, justice, fairness and equality”.

Last month, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law a bill that allows land seizures without compensation in certain circumstances.

Land ownership has long been a contentious issue in South Africa with most private farmland owned by white people, 30 years after the end of the racist system of apartheid.

• South Africans’ anger over land set to explode

There have been continuous calls for the government to address land reform and deal with the past injustices of racial segregation.

In his initial response to Trump, the South Africa’s president said that his “government has not confiscated any land”.

On Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social: “I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”

He later said, in a briefing with journalists, that South Africa’s “leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things”.

“So that’s under investigation right now. We’ll make a determination, and until such time as we find out what South Africa is doing — they’re taking away land and confiscating land, and actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.”

South Africa’s new law allows for expropriation without compensation only in circumstances where it is “just and equitable and in the public interest” to do so.

This includes if the property is not being used and there is no intention to either develop or make money from it, or when it poses a risk to people.

Land ownership has been a burning issue in South Africa for more than a century. In 1913, the British colonial authorities passed legislation that restricted the property rights of the country’s black majority.

The Natives Land Act left the vast majority of the land under the control of the white minority and set the foundation for the forced removal of black people to poor homelands and townships in the intervening decades until the end of apartheid three decades ago.

Anger over these forced removals intensified the fight against white-minority rule.

In 1994, leader of the African National Congress (ANC) Nelson Mandela became the country’s first democratically elected president after all South Africans were given the right to vote.

But until the recently passed law, the government was only able to buy land from its current owners under the principle of “willing seller, willing buyer”, which some feel has delayed the process of land reform.

In 2017, a government report said that of the farmland that was in the hands of private individuals, 72% was white-owned. According to the 2022 census white people make up 7.3% of the population.

However, some critics have expressed fears that the new land law may have disastrous consequences like in Zimbabwe, where seizures wrecked the economy and scared away investors.

• South African president signs controversial land seizure law
• Is South Africa’s land reform a gimmick?
• The groups playing on the fears of a ‘white genocide’

A self-styled “beauty consultant”, whose celebrity client list includes Katie Price, is offering potentially dangerous cosmetic procedures to clients and handing over medication illegally – a BBC investigation has discovered.

Ricky Sawyer specialises in liquid Brazilian butt-lifts (BBLs) – which involves injecting dermal filler into buttocks to lift them and make them look bigger.

BBC News has spoken to five of his clients who needed emergency hospital treatment after their procedures. We have also been shown the testimonies of more than 30 women who say they have been left with serious complications such as sepsis and necrosis (tissue death).

One woman told us she felt at the time she would rather “have died” than continue with the pain she was in following the treatment.

Several local authorities have banned Mr Sawyer from practising in their areas.

Our undercover filming captured Mr Sawyer handing out antibiotics without a valid prescription – a criminal offence. He is not qualified to prescribe and the pills were not labelled for a specific patient.

He also offered to inject increasing doses of local anaesthetic without a prescriber present – again illegal – and did not ask for our reporter’s weight, thus putting her at risk of an overdose.

Posing as a potential client and her friend, we had booked a 45-minute appointment with Mr Sawyer through his Instagram page. We told him we wanted a 200ml (7fl oz) liquid BBL injection costing £1,200. We paid a £200 deposit.

Despite having advertised that all liquid BBLs would be carried out under the guidance of an “ultrasound specialist doctor”, none was present at his pop-up clinic. He was working out of a small room in an east London office block – a non-clinical environment which would have increased the risk of infection.

Within five minutes of being in his office, Mr Sawyer had begun to encourage our reporter to think about increasing the amount of filler. “You might be surprised about how much product you can have and still look natural,” he suggested.

By the end of the appointment, Mr Sawyer had offered to inject a litre of filler – 500ml (almost a pint) per buttock – at a cost of £2,000.

We did not go through with it and later returned to put our allegations to him – but he refused to answer our questions and slammed the door on our reporter.

Reviewing our footage, plastic surgeon Dalvi Humzah, who sits on the Joint Council of Cosmetic Practitioners, said Mr Sawyer’s actions were “shocking”, “very dangerous”, and putting patients at a huge risk of infection and potentially fatal complications.

“Putting that volume in, in one sitting, is really dangerous,” said Mr Humzah. “The buttocks are such a large area that if they become infected it can overwhelm the body and could end in sepsis – or even death.”

The filler used for liquid BBLs is often made up of hyaluronic acid, which is commonly used in facial filling treatments. Because large amounts of the acid are involved in BBLs, and there is a risk of serious side effects such as blood clots and sepsis, it is regarded as one of the most dangerous cosmetic procedures.

Mr Sawyer boasted on camera that he did up to seven procedures a day, six days a week. He can charge thousands of pounds per appointment.

One of the women who said she had experienced serious complications after receiving a liquid BBL from Mr Sawyer was Joanne. A mum of two from south Wales, who only wants us to use her first name, she travelled seven hours to Essex for the treatment.

Having had other cosmetic treatments before and having been persuaded by Ricky Sawyer’s many adverts and celebrity endorsements, a liquid BBL didn’t seem like such a big step to her.

All she wanted, she says, was a “peachy bum”.

But when Joanne arrived, she began to have second thoughts.

She had only been sent a postcode and says she seemed to be walking into an industrial estate.

In the end, she found a small door into a block of flats and says she was told to wait in a “dingy little hallway” for about half an hour.

“I should have turned and ran,” she says, “but I had paid £600 deposit and travelled all this way.”

She was taken into a small room where there “was only a bed, a tiny stool and a worktop”, and that is where she says she first met Ricky Sawyer.

After counting out the rest of her cash – £2,000 in total – she says he told her to stand in front of him while he sat on the stool.

As he started to inject her with a litre (1.8 pints) of filler, the pain quickly became unbearable.

“I felt dizzy, sick and like shaky. My legs didn’t even move properly. And that was all within a minute of him starting,” she says. “I remember looking round and he had white gloves on that were full of blood.”

By the end of the procedure, Joanne was in agony: “I was in so much pain, my bottom was completely disfigured.”

She says she could barely sit down. By the time she got home the swelling had started and she could hardly walk.

“I messaged Ricky loads of times to say how bad I was feeling and how worried I was. He just told me to take my antibiotics.”

By this point, sepsis had begun to set in.

“My temperature kept on going up and I felt terrible,” says Joanne. “I had to phone 999. I was dripping with sweat and screaming.”

In hospital, she was attached to intravenous antibiotics. At one point, a surgeon drew on her buttock to indicate where they might need to cut, because the infection was spreading so quickly.

After messaging Ricky Sawyer saying she was in hospital with sepsis, she says he blocked her from his Instagram account.

Fortunately, Joanne did not need an operation.

Another of Mr Sawyer’s clients, Louise Moller, did need life-saving emergency surgery.

Four days after receiving a liquid BBL at his Essex clinic in October 2023, the 28-year-old from Bolton was in hospital.

She rang her mother, Janet, from Salford Royal’s A&E department saying: “Mum, I think I’m going to die.”

Louise had contracted sepsis and was warned by surgeons that she could die at any minute. To stop the infection from moving through her body, they cut dead tissue out of an area almost covering her entire left buttock.

Janet promised her daughter she would prevent this from happening to anyone else and reported Ricky Sawyer to their local police station in Bolton.

“How can he carry on knowing he could kill someone?” she told the BBC.

However, Louise’s case highlights the difficulty in holding practitioners like him accountable.

Janet says she was told by police in Bolton that the file would need to be passed to Essex Police, where the incident happened.

A prosecution could be difficult however, she was warned, because Louise had signed a consent form.

BBC News has approached both Greater Manchester Police and Essex Police to get an update on the case – both have said it is down to the other to investigate.

From a legal point of view, there is little to stop Mr Sawyer from practising.

Injecting dermal fillers is seen as non-surgical and is unregulated, which means anyone can do it – and they can’t be struck off and stopped.

In September 2024, Alice Webb is believed to have become the first person to die after receiving a liquid BBL in the UK. Her procedure was not carried out by Ricky Sawyer.

Following her death, Save Face – a group that campaigns for greater regulation to cover non-surgical procedures – called for a new law banning liquid BBLs from being carried out by anyone other than surgeons registered with the General Medical Council (GMC).

Save Face’s founder, Ashton Collins, says her organisation has received complaints from 39 women about Ricky Sawyer.

All the women, she says, have told her they have been left needing urgent hospital treatment. Each of them, she says, had a BBL and suffered complications such as sepsis, necrosis and disfigurement.

“We’ve encouraged these women to report their experiences to the police,” she says. “Some have, and nothing has been done.”

So far, the most effective action has been taken by local authorities, three of which – Glasgow City Council, Epping Forest District Council and Brentwood Council – confirmed they had issued prohibition notices under Health and Safety law to protect the public from serious injury.

But “he just moves on to different areas of the country and carries on”, says Ms Collins.

We put our evidence to the Department of Health and Social Care which said it was “urgently looking at options for tougher regulation”.

It said our findings were “shocking” and that those caught “dispensing medication without a licence should feel the full force of the law”.

We attempted to put our allegations to Ricky Sawyer in person, by confronting him at his east London clinic.

As soon as he saw the camera he tried to slam the door on us, before hiding behind it.

We asked him if he was breaking the law by handing out prescription-only medicine, and if he had anything to say to the women who say they were left with such serious injuries that they needed emergency care.

“No,” he said – and told us to leave.

The dangers of unregulated cosmetic surgery should be taken far more seriously, says Ashton Collins.

“The general vibe that you pick up is that these are silly women that have made silly choices, driven through vanity, and it’s their own fault.”

It is an attitude that needs to change, she adds: “People are out there taking risks with people’s lives, and they can do so with impunity.”

James Wilton was just 18 years old when he volunteered to fight for Ukraine months after finishing college. It was a decision he made with conviction and passion – but it was one which led to his death.

The teenager from Huddersfield was killed in a drone attack in the village of Terny on the eastern front.

“He had his whole life in front of him,” says James’ father, Graham.

“I would swap places with him tomorrow just so he could be sat at home having a pint and watching the darts.

“I’m 52, I have lived my life. He was 18, who knows what he could have done? He didn’t have a life, that’s the worst part of it.”

According to Graham, James had wanted to join the British Army when he left Royds Hall High School aged 16. Instead he chose to enrol on a course in animal land care at Kirklees College.

Aged 17 and nearing the end of his education, Graham says James began to discuss wanting to go to Ukraine to help with the war effort.

Neither Graham, James’ mother, or his older sisters Sarah, 21, or Sophie, 22, had wanted the youngest member of the family to go, but they were unable to convince him to change his mind.

“I sat down with him and had various conversations about why he wanted to do it, what I thought about it, and in the end he decided it was something he wanted to do,” says Graham, who lived with his only son.

“I suppose he thought it was a bit of an adventure and he was going out there to help and hopefully make a difference.”

Graham says he reluctantly supported James, adding: “If I hadn’t have done it I would have woken up one morning and he would have gone.

“Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Could I have changed his mind? No.”

Graham dropped James off at Manchester Airport on 28 April. From there he caught a flight to Krakow then boarded a bus to Ternopil, where he joined up with the International Legion and underwent a basic training programme lasting about four weeks.

Speaking ahead of the third anniversary of the start of the war later this month, Graham says his son and his comrades, who hailed from all over the world and had varying degrees of military experience, were “totally ill-equipped” and used as “cannon fodder”.

Still, he was unaware of James having any regrets about his decision during their regular telephone conversations, which Graham says were borne out of his son’s desire to hold on to some “normality”.

“He met some wonderful people and he would have had a lot of lifelong friends should he have survived.”

James was deployed to the east of the country as he and comrades sought to halt the grinding Russian advance spreading northwards from the occupied Donetsk region.

Graham says his son was on his first mission in July when he was killed running between two trenches in a field with no cover.

They had spoken just the previous night.

“He seemed OK. He did say at some point ‘I don’t think I’m going to be here as long as what I might be. It’s a little bit different to what I thought’.

“I said: ‘It’s up to you. If anything goes wrong or pear-shaped I’ll come and get you’. That was always an option if he decided he didn’t want to be there.”

According to the International Legion website, volunteers, who are paid for their service, can terminate their contract after six months.

“The mission he went on, he didn’t have to go. But because his best mate at the time was going he decided ‘well I’m going as well’.

“Given the circumstances I would have probably done exactly the same.”

In December, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted his country had suffered 43,000 fatalities as a result of the war with another 370,000 soldiers wounded.

The death toll of Russian forces was estimated at about 200,000. Neither of these figures has been independently verified.

Graham made the 1,800-mile trip to Ukraine for his son’s funeral.

Reflecting on his death, he says James died “doing something he felt strongly about”.

“It’s very, very sad and unfortunate that he didn’t get to make as much difference as he would have liked.

“What happened to James unfortunately will probably be happening to someone else in the middle of a field in eastern Ukraine.

“It’s time people back home actually realised what it’s like out there.”

Back at the home Graham and James shared in Lindley, life is “quiet”.

“He grew up to be a nice young man and he would get on with anybody.

“I’ll go home tonight and he’s not sat there playing Playstation, it’s weird.

“We were great. We would sit there and have something to eat and talk about all sorts of stuff. There wasn’t anything, as far as I know, that he wouldn’t tell me, which is why he was open with me when he decided what he was doing.”

The night before James left he had spent the night with his father “laughing and joking” and drinking beer in front of the TV.

Graham’s grief is still raw.

“It’s just so draining. You try not to think about it, you are sort of OK then something comes up and it sets you going again.

“He was possibly a younger version of me. Maybe if I was him at a younger age I would have probably done the same thing.”

West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds

President Donald Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods, citing Beijing’s failure to stop the export of chemicals used in the production of the powerful opioid fentanyl.

The US has long accused Chinese corporations of knowingly supplying groups involved in the creation of the drug. Beijing has hit back with tariffs of its own.

The White House has also accused Canada and Mexico of failing to prevent criminal gangs from smuggling fentanyl into the US.

Trump had planned tariffs against both those countries but he suspended that threat after winning some concessions on increased border security.

Fentanyl is a synthetic drug manufactured from a combination of chemicals. US regulators approved it for use in medical settings as a pain reliever in the 1960s, but it has since become the main drug responsible for opioid overdose deaths in the US.

Over 74,000 Americans died in 2023 after taking drug mixtures containing fentanyl, according to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

It is frequently mixed with other illicit drugs, leading many users to be unaware that the substances they are consuming contain fentanyl.

As little as a two milligram dose of fentanyl – roughly the size of a pencil tip – can be fatal.

Over the past decade, the global fentanyl supply chain has expanded, making it harder for law enforcement and policymakers to control.

China is the primary source of the precursor chemicals used to produce fentanyl.

Since September, 4,500lb (2,040kg) of fentanyl have been seized in the US, according to figures published by US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).

Almost all (98%) was intercepted at the southwest border with Mexico. Less than 1% was seized across the northern US border with Canada. The remainder was from sea routes or other US checkpoints.

According to the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Mexican criminal organisations – including the Sinaloa Cartel – play a key role in producing and delivering fentanyl, methamphetamine and other illicit drugs into the US.

The chemicals used to make fentanyl are sourced from China by traffickers and turned into the finished product in labs in Mexico before being smuggled into the US.

According to the DEA, the Sinaloa Cartel uses a variety of tactics to conceal shipments coming into Mexico, such as hiding the chemicals among legitimate commercial goods, mislabelling the containers, using front companies, and shipping through third party countries.

The Trump administration has accused the Mexican government of colluding with the drug cartels. Mexico’s President Sheinbaum says the claims are “slander.”

In December, shortly after Trump had threatened Mexico with tariffs, the country’s security forces announced their largest ever seizure of fentanyl – equivalent to around 20 million doses.

In 2019, China classified fentanyl as a controlled narcotic and later added some of the chemicals used to make it to the list.

Despite this, the trade in other chemicals involved in the manufacturing of fentanyl – some of which can have legitimate purposes – remain uncontrolled, as those involved in the trade find new ways to evade the law.

A review of several US indictments, which include details of undercover agents communicating with Chinese manufacturers, suggests that some chemical companies in China have been selling chemicals – including controlled ones – in the knowledge that they are intended to make fentanyl.

• US, Mexico, Canada – who got what from tariff stand-off?
• Trump sows uncertainty – and Xi Jinping sees an opportunity
• Trump’s tariffs hit China hard before – this time, it’s ready

Dozens of indictments reviewed by BBC Verify detail instances where Chinese manufacturers have provided instructions on how to make fentanyl from products they sell, through encrypted platforms and cryptocurrency payments.

“So you have these massive loopholes where criminals engage in selling legal products, but they knowingly sell them to criminal entities,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institute.

In a statement, China said it had some of the strictest drugs laws in the world and had conducted joint operations with the US in the past.

“The US needs to view and solve its own fentanyl issue,” it said.

And while China remains the main source of the chemicals used to make fentanyl, the DEA has also identified India as an emerging major source for these chemicals.

In a US indictment from January 2025, two chemical companies in India were charged with supplying the chemicals used to make fentanyl to the US and Mexico.

President Trump has accused Canada – alongside Mexico – of allowing “vast numbers of people to come in and fentanyl to come in” to the US.

According to data from the US Customs and Border Patrol, only about 0.2% of all seizures of fentanyl entering the US are made at the Canadian border, almost all the rest is confiscated at the US border with Mexico.

But in January, Canada’s financial intelligence agency reported that organised criminal groups in Canada are increasingly involved in the production of fentanyl by importing chemicals used to make it and lab equipment from China.

The trade in fentanyl takes place in both directions. In the first 10 months of 2024, the Canadian border service reported seizing 10.8lb (4.9kg) of fentanyl entering from the US, while US Border Patrol intercepted 32.1lb (14.6kg) of fentanyl coming from Canada.

In December, the country pledged C$1.3bn ($900m; £700m) for combating fentanyl and enhancing border security.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

The trade war between the world’s two biggest economies has escalated after China hit back against the introduction of tariffs by the US with measures of its own.

Beijing has set out to target specific American goods with retaliatory taxes, among other measures, following the blanket 10% tariff introduced by President Donald Trump on all Chinese imports to the US.

In some ways, this latest tit-for-tat is nothing new and builds on the long-running trade dispute between the nations, with tariffs having already been imposed and threatened on various goods since 2018.

Trump has said he plans to speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping, so a deal could yet be struck. But if China proceeds with its response on 10 February as planned, what could the impact be?

Part of China’s countermeasures to Trump’s tariffs is to announce import taxes of its own on US coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG) of 10%, and a 15% charge on crude oil.

The response from Beijing means companies wanting to import fossil fuels from the US would have to pay the tax in order to do so.

China is the world’s largest importer of coal, but it gets most of it from Indonesia, although Russia, Australia and Mongolia are also among its suppliers.

When it comes to the US, China has been increasing imports of LNG from the country, with volumes nearly double 2018 levels, according to Chinese customs data.

But its overall fossil fuel trade is modest, with US imports accounting for just 1.7% of China’s total crude oil bought from abroad in 2023. This suggests China is not dependent on the US and so the impact of the tariffs on its economy could be minimal.

Rebecca Harding, a trade economist and chief executive of the Centre for Economic Security think tank, said China could easily source more supplies from Russia, where it has already been buying oil on the cheap as the Kremlin seeks to fund its war effort.

On the flipside, the US is the world’s largest LNG exporter, and so has plenty of other customers, particularly the UK and the European Union.

• What are tariffs and why is Trump threatening to use them?
• Trump sows uncertainty – and Xi Jinping sees an opportunity

As well as fuel, China has slapped a 10% tariff on agricultural machinery, pick-up trucks, and some large cars.

But China is not a big importer of US pick-ups and it gets most of its cars from Europe and Japan, so a 10% tariff on an already small number of imports would not hit consumers too hard.

In recent years, China has increased investments in farm machinery to enhance production and reduce reliance on imports, and to strengthen its food security.

So the introduction of tariffs on agricultural machinery might be another move to try to boost domestic industry.

Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China economics at consultancy Capital Economics, said all the tariff measures were “fairly modest, at least relative to US moves”.

He suggests that China’s targeted goods represent about $20bn (£16bn) worth of annual imports – around 12% of China’s total imports from the US.

“This is a far cry from the more than $450bn worth of Chinese goods being targeted by the US.”

But he said China had “clearly been calibrated to try to send a message to the US [and domestic audiences] without inflicting too much damage”.

The Chinese authorities have also announced some non-tariff measures, one of which is an anti-monopoly investigation into US tech giant Google.

It is unclear what the investigation will involve, but for context, Google’s search services have been blocked in China since 2010.

The company still has some business presence in the country through providing apps and games to the Chinese markets by working with local developers.

But China only generates about 1% of Google’s global sales, which suggests if it cut ties entirely with the country, it wouldn’t be much worse off.

China has added PVH, the American company that owns designer brands Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, to its so-called “unreliable entity” list and accused them of “discriminatory measures against Chinese enterprises”.

The list, which has other US firms on it, was created in 2020 by Beijing amid the heating up of trade tensions.

For Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, being on China’s list will make it harder to do business in the country. They may face sanctions, including fines, and having the work visas of their foreign employees revoked.

Regulators will also go to factories of the firms to investigate operations, according to Andreas Schotter, professor of international business at Western University in Ontario, Canada.

The US has its own “entity list”, which bars certain organisations from buying products from US companies without approval from Washington.

“China is hitting back in the same way President Trump is accusing Chinese companies. This is all part of the US driven de-coupling of the US and China,” Prof Schotter added.

• China probes Calvin Klein over Xinjiang cotton

While tariffs have been placed on the companies wanting to import goods from abroad, China has also imposed export controls on 25 rare metals.

Some of the metals are key components for many electrical products and military equipment.

China has mastered the ability to refine such metals, and produced almost 90% of global refined output.

The restricted list includes tungsten, which is difficult to source and a crucial material for the aerospace industry.

While there are restrictions on exports, Mr Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics, said it was notable that the critical metals China imports from the US, which are used to make high-end chips, semiconductor machinery, pharmaceuticals and aerospace equipment were not targeted in any measures.

The experience of previous rounds of restrictions suggests exports will drop sharply as companies scramble to get licences, a process that takes several weeks.

When it comes to the impact of the restrictions, it appears the US has a plan. On Monday, Trump said he wanted Ukraine to guarantee the supply of more rare earth metals in exchange for $300bn of support in its fight against Russia.

President Donald Trump has suspended for 30 days the hefty tariffs on Mexico and Canada that he threatened after last-minute negotiations with the two US neighbours.

He can point to concessions on border and crime enforcement as a victory. But Canada’s Justin Trudeau and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum also can claim political wins.

A trade war that would send economic shockwaves through North America and beyond is on hold – for now.

So who blinked first and what happens next?

President Trump’s high-stakes confrontation with the United States’ closest trading partners appears to have paid off, with both Mexico and Canada agreeing to stricter border security and taking bigger steps to address fentanyl trafficking.

The strategy to leverage the US economy to force concessions from other countries notches a win for Trump’s “America first” agenda, allowing him to follow through on core domestic issues without American consumers feeling the sting of the economic consequences of a continental trade war.

His tariff playbook is hardly new.

Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium during his first term prompted backlash from Mexico, Canada and the European Union, but economists say those measures were more limited in scope.

This time, Trump has promised sweeping tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and China, which is still set to see a 10% tariff increase on goods starting at midnight on Tuesday.

But it remains unclear whether Trump will follow through on his threats to Canada and Mexico once the 30-day deadline is up. That uncertainty stirs fears that could see businesses reducing their reliance on American markets, holding off on investing in building new factories or hiring workers until the trade stand-off becomes more clear.

• Follow live: China announces retaliatory action as Trump tariffs take effect

That was not a January Arctic blast from the north – it was a widespread sigh of relief from Canadian politicians and business leaders at the 30-day pause on US tariffs.

While the threat of tariffs remains, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can claim a political win: a temporary truce in what was shaping up to be a devastating trade war.

Canadian politicians have been scrambling to figure out what exactly would satisfy Trump – a situation not helped by Canada’s domestic politics, with Trudeau wrapping up his last weeks in power as a lame-duck prime minister.

The border security measures announced on Monday aren’t all new.

In December, Canada announced C$1.3bn ($900m; £700m) in measures that included efforts to disrupt the fentanyl trade, new tools for law enforcement and enhanced co-ordination with US law enforcement.

Canadian surveillance drones and two Black Hawk helicopters recently began patrolling the boundary between the two countries.

Officials have cited those efforts for weeks to show they are taking Trump’s border concerns seriously.

A new element appears to be the appointment of a “fentanyl tsar” and a C$200m intelligence directive to fight organised crime and fentanyl.

One question that remains is what this means for the future of the Canada-US relationship. The partnership between the allies has been deeply shaken by Trump’s economic threats.

Throughout this trade crisis, President Claudia Sheinbaum has called for “cool heads” and “calm”.

Even on Friday, she said she was confident of a last-minute reprieve from the 25% tariffs on Mexican goods. And so it proved, following an early morning telephone call with President Trump.

Announcing the agreement soon after, she could barely wipe the smile from her face and her supporters have heralded what they see as a masterclass in how to negotiate with Donald Trump.

Yes, she agreed to send National Guard troops to the border to focus on fentanyl-smuggling, but crucially she secured what she wanted from Trump, too.

As well as the obvious – a pause on tariffs – she also got Trump to “promise” the US would do more to tackle the traffic of high-powered weapons from the US into Mexico, to prevent them from ending up in the arms of cartel gunmen.

But she also bought herself another vital commodity: time.

She now has several weeks to build on the points agreed in that phone call and turn the temporary hold on tariffs into a permanent one.

The expectation is that now Secretary of State Marco Rubio will visit Mexico soon to discuss these matters and a joint group on fentanyl will be established with Mexican and US health and security officials.

If in fact Sheinbaum does manage to prevent further trade hostilities, it will go down as the first significant victory of her new government, having only been in office since October. And it may set the tone for future interactions with President Trump and his administration.

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• BORDER: Six things Trump has done about migration
• PROJECT 25: The right-wing wish list for Trump’s second term

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In many ways Anora feels like a fairy tale. Except that the film’s title character – Ani to her friends – is a stripper and occasional sex worker. And her Prince Charming is the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch.

When he spontaneously proposes, and they get married in Las Vegas, it seems all her dreams are coming true. But she quickly finds that a host of people strongly disapprove of the match.

For Mikey Madison though, it is a dream of a part, where she gets to display everything from steely strength to delicate fragility.

“I recognised from the beginning that she’s a very complicated character, very nuanced,” agrees Mikey Madison.

“I always felt that she was someone who was very vulnerable on the inside. But is constantly covering it up with this hardness or an aggression. But I do think that she’s quite soft inside.

“I think that she’s hopeful that this is her happily ever after, and I think that it’s an opportunity and I like that she doesn’t want to let go of them. And so she’s going to fight to the end to try to save it.”

Both the film, and Madison’s performance in particular, have been gaining huge amounts of awards momentum. It started when the movie premiered at Cannes.

“I have been working for almost a decade now, well trying to work. And that was my ultimate dream, to go to Cannes. And we had a film in the main competition, and then we won [the top prize, the Palme D’Or] and that was crazy in itself.”

She calls “everything that has followed” an “absolutely wonderful, pleasant surprise”.

“Especially because I think I went into it feeling really proud of the film, and like we made something special to us. And the fact that the film is also special to other people is wonderful.

“It’s a dream.”

Madison was relatively unknown before Anora. She had had small parts in the fifth instalment of the Scream horror franchise and in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

The writer and director of Anora Sean Baker had seen her on screen before, and wrote the part of Ani especially for her.

“She’s so unique. Not only in her physicality, but there’s something about her aura,” says Baker. “There’s something.. she’s actually quite subdued, even in real life. Her demeanour is, she’s quite reserved.

“But then suddenly she can explode like no other other person I’ve ever seen, no other actor I’ve ever seen.

“And I was always looking forward to those moments shooting the film, knowing that a scene would call for that. You know, to see that you don’t detect anything, and then suddenly just total eruption. It was incredible to watch.”

The contradictions in Ani, and the shifting genres of the movie were elements that Madison says she embraced strongly during the filming.

“As an actor sometimes I felt like I was shooting a very romantic film, and sometimes it was almost like a horror film, or a drama, or a slapstick comedy. To navigate through my character with all of these different genres was fun. It was a challenge, and I liked it!”

The 25-year-old has been nominated as best actress at every major awards ceremony, including the Golden Globes, the Batfas and the Oscars. And she is probably Demi Moore’s main rival for best actress at the Academy Awards.

Speaking before her Oscar nomination, she said it felt astonishing to be part of the awards conversation.

“I know that I’m incredibly overjoyed, honoured, and humbled that our film is being recognised in this way. But I’m just processing it.

“It’s overwhelming and amazing, and all of the things,” she says, giving every appearance of being overcome by the acclaim her performance has been gathering.

Should Mikey Madison finish off a fairy tale few months by winning best actress at next month’s ceremony, she’ll be one of the youngest ever performers to win that academy award, beaten only by a handful of stars, including Jennifer Lawrence, Marlee Matlin, and Audrey Hepburn.

“It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission,” says John, a software engineer at a financial services technology company. “Just get on with it. And if you get in trouble later, then clear it up.”

He’s one of the many people who are using their own AI tools at work, without the permission of their IT division (which is why we are not using John’s full name).

According to a survey by Software AG, half of all knowledge workers use personal AI tools.

The research defines knowledge workers as “those who primarily work at a desk or computer”.

For some it’s because their IT team doesn’t offer AI tools, while others said they wanted their own choice of tools.

John’s company provides GitHub Copilot for AI-supported software development, but he prefers Cursor.

“It’s largely a glorified autocomplete, but it is very good,” he says. “It completes 15 lines at a time, and then you look over it and say, ‘yes, that’s what I would’ve typed’. It frees you up. You feel more fluent.”

His unauthorised use isn’t violating a policy, it’s just easier than risking a lengthy approvals process, he says. “I’m too lazy and well paid to chase up the expenses,” he adds.

John recommends that companies stay flexible in their choice of AI tools. “I’ve been telling people at work not to renew team licences for a year at a time because in three months the whole landscape changes,” he says. “Everybody’s going to want to do something different and will feel trapped by the sunk cost.”

The recent release of DeepSeek, a freely available AI model from China, is only likely to expand the AI options.

• What is DeepSeek?

Peter (not his real name) is a product manager at a data storage company, which offers its people the Google Gemini AI chatbot.

External AI tools are banned but Peter uses ChatGPT through search tool Kagi. He finds the biggest benefit of AI comes from challenging his thinking when he asks the chatbot to respond to his plans from different customer perspectives.

“The AI is not so much giving you answers, as giving you a sparring partner,” he says. “As a product manager, you have a lot of responsibility and don’t have a lot of good outlets to discuss strategy openly. These tools allow that in an unfettered and unlimited capacity.”

The version of ChatGPT he uses (4o) can analyse video. “You can get summaries of competitors’ videos and have a whole conversation [with the AI tool] about the points in the videos and how they overlap with your own products.”

In a 10-minute ChatGPT conversation he can review material that would take two or three hours watching the videos.

He estimates that his increased productivity is equivalent to the company getting a third of an additional person working for free.

He’s not sure why the company has banned external AI. “I think it’s a control thing,” he says. “Companies want to have a say in what tools their employees use. It’s a new frontier of IT and they just want to be conservative.”

The use of unauthorized AI applications is sometimes called ‘shadow AI’. It’s a more specific version of ‘shadow IT’, which is when someone uses software or services the IT department hasn’t approved.

Harmonic Security helps to identify shadow AI and to prevent corporate data being entered into AI tools inappropriately.

It is tracking more than 10,000 AI apps and has seen more than 5,000 of them in use.

These include custom versions of ChatGPT and business software that has added AI features, such as communications tool Slack.

However popular it is, shadow AI comes with risks.

Modern AI tools are built by digesting huge amounts of information, in a process called training.

Around 30% of the applications Harmonic Security has seen being used train using information entered by the user.

That means the user’s information becomes part of the AI tool and could be output to other users in the future.

Companies may be concerned about their trade secrets being exposed by the AI tool’s answers, but Alastair Paterson, CEO and co-founder of Harmonic Security, thinks that’s unlikely. “It’s pretty hard to get the data straight out of these [AI tools],” he says.

However, firms will be concerned about their data being stored in AI services they have no control over, no awareness of, and which may be vulnerable to data breaches.

It will be hard for companies to fight against the use of AI tools, as they can be extremely useful, particularly for younger workers.

“[AI] allows you to cram five years’ experience into 30 seconds of prompt engineering,” says Simon Haighton-Williams, CEO at The Adaptavist Group, a UK-based software services group.

“It doesn’t wholly replace [experience], but it’s a good leg up in the same way that having a good encyclopaedia or a calculator lets you do things that you couldn’t have done without those tools.”

What would he say to companies that discover they have shadow AI use?

“Welcome to the club. I think probably everybody does. Be patient and understand what people are using and why, and figure out how you can embrace it and manage it rather than demand it’s shut off. You don’t want to be left behind as the organization that hasn’t [adopted AI].”

Trimble provides software and hardware to manage data about the built environment. To help its employees use AI safely, the company created Trimble Assistant. It’s an internal AI tool based on the same AI models that are used in ChatGPT.

Employees can consult Trimble Assistant for a wide range of applications, including product development, customer support and market research. For software developers, the company provides GitHub Copilot.

Karoliina Torttila is director of AI at Trimble. “I encourage everybody to go and explore all kinds of tools in their personal life, but recognise that their professional life is a different space and there are some safeguards and considerations there,” she says.

The company encourages employees to explore new AI models and applications online.

“This brings us to a skill we’re all forced to develop: We have to be able to understand what is sensitive data,” she says.

“There are places where you would not put your medical information and you have to be able to make those type of judgement calls [for work data, too].”

Employees’ experience using AI at home and for personal projects can shape company policy as AI tools evolve, she believes.

There needs to be a “constant dialogue about what tools serve us the best”, she says.

Last month, a school teacher in the western Indian city of Pune found her six-year-old son upset about homework.

“I had erased some words and asked him to write them. I assumed he was angry and that’s why he was not holding the pencil properly,” she told the Indian Express newspaper.

She never imagined his struggle to hold a pencil was the first sign of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), a rare disorder where the immune system attacks nerve cells, causing muscle weakness and paralysis.

Within days, the boy was in intensive care, unable to move his arms or legs. As his condition worsened, he lost the ability to swallow, speak, and eventually breathe, requiring ventilator support. He is now recovering.

The boy is among around 160 reported cases of GBS since early January in Pune, an education and IT hub, ringed by industrial towns and villages. There have been five suspected deaths. Currently, 48 patients are in intensive care, 21 on ventilator, and 38 have been discharged, according to official figures.

GBS begins with tingling or numbness in the feet and hands, followed by muscle weakness and difficulty moving joints. Symptoms worsen over two to four weeks, typically starting in the arms and legs. The reported mortality rate varies between three and 13%, depending on severity and quality of health care support.

The outbreak in Pune is being traced to a pathogen called campylobacter jejuni, a leading cause of foodborne infections, and the biggest driver of GBS worldwide. The link between the two was discovered in the 1990s in rural China, where the pathogen was common in chickens, and GBS outbreaks occurred every monsoon as children played in water contaminated by chicken or duck droppings.

GBS is not entirely uncommon in India. Monojit Debnath and Madhu Nagappa, of Bangalore-based National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), studied 150 GBS patients over a five year period between 2014 and 2019.

Their findings showed 79% of the patients had evidence of prior infections, with a third testing positive for campylobacter. Notably, co-infections were more common, occurring in 65%, suggesting a complex interplay of bacteria and viruses.

More recently, outbreaks linked to the pathogen have been reported from all over the world. In the first seven months of 2023, Peru reported over 200 suspected cases and at least four deaths of GBS, prompting the government to declare a national health emergency and strengthen public health measures. Two-thirds of the cases were linked to campylobacter.

In countries with good hygiene, fewer GBS cases are linked to campylobacter, with respiratory infections being a major contributor, say experts. There have been other triggers as well. In 2015 Brazil reported a cluster of GBS cases linked to the Zika virus. Vaccines can rarely trigger GBS, but one Covid vaccine was reportedly linked to a few hundred GBS cases in the UK in 2021.

“Campylobacter is endemic with hundreds of thousands of cases taking place all the time. It is always existing in the environment,” Hugh Willison, a professor of neurology at University of Glasgow told me.

Yet, it is not easy to develop GBS, scientists say.

There’s a specific strain of campylobacter, which has a sugar-coated outer layer, and in rare cases, its molecular structure matches the coating of human nerve cells.

When the patient’s immune system attacks the bacteria, it may end up targeting the nerves as well – a process called molecular mimicry – leading to GBS. However, a small fraction of campylobacter strains have this nerve-like coat.

“In Pune, a strain of campylobacter with this molecular feature is likely to be circulating, and a surge in infections with this strain consequently leads to a higher number of GBS cases,” says Prof Willison.

Most experts estimate that about one in 100 campylobacter strains carry the GBS risk, and one in 100 people infected with such a strain develop GBS, making the overall risk roughly one in 10,000.

That creates what Prof Willison describes as an “immunological Russian roulette”, triggering an “acute neurological tsunami” that surges through the peripheral nervous system. Once the immune response subsides, the attack wanes – but the body still needs time, medical care, and support to repair the damage.

What makes things worse is that there is no cure for GBS.

In GBS, the body produces antibodies against campylobacter, which then attack the nerves. Physicians use “plasma exchange”, a process that filters blood to remove the harmful antibodies, along with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), a therapeutic antibody derived from normal blood, to help reduce the severity of the disease.

The other challenge is that there is no single test to diagnose GBS. The diagnosis, say physicians, is mainly based on clinical features. It presents itself as a form of paralysis which can be also caused by polio, viruses or rare neurological disease.

“The diagnosis is a constellation of clinical features. Misdiagnosis or no diagnosis or late diagnosis can happen easily,” says Prof Willison.

India’s uneven public health system presents a challenge, as doctors in rural areas may struggle to diagnose GBS. One reason, possibly, why the World Health Organization (WHO) teams are in Pune, is collaborating with federal and state health workers to trace, test, and monitor cases, and analysing trends to support effective treatment.

Authorities say they have surveilled more than 60,000 houses, picked up 160 water samples for tests, and asked people to drink boiled water and eat fresh and clean food, and not have “stale food and partially cooked chicken or mutton”.

While most cases of GBS around the world come from undercooked poultry, it can also spread through water, similar to cholera or salmonella, experts say.

Contaminated water used for washing or preparing street food makes it easy for the bacteria to spread. Clearly, in Pune, a campylobacter strain with the distinctive molecular feature is circulating, affecting a large number of people.

What is not clear is whether this has been due to large scale contamination of water supply or a lot of people consuming infected poultry. “We appeal to people not to panic,” says a health department advisory. But in the face of uncertainty, it is easier said than done.

The Sims was never supposed to be a hit.

Back in the 1990s, when creator Will Wright pitched the game to his bosses, they weren’t convinced by his idea of a “virtual dollhouse”.

A so-called life simulator where players design their own characters, give them personalities and tend to their needs.

Who wants that?

Quite a lot of people, it turns out.

Now, 25 years from its debut, The Sims is one of the best-selling video game series of all time, with an active community of superfans known as Simmers.

The latest instalment, The Sims 4, has been translated into 18 languages and played by 85 million people worldwide, according to publisher Electronic Arts.

The original game’s open-ended nature helped it to become a hit and reach so-called “casual gamers” outside the medium’s more dedicated audience.

Players had the freedom to carefully craft a detailed domestic setting for their digital people, managing their love lives, daily routines, basic needs and hobbies in exacting detail.

But it also allowed them to imagine various torments for their virtual pals. One of the most famous – stranding your Sim in a swimming pool without a ladder – remains a popular meme to this day.

UK-based streamer Jesse, best known as Plumbella, says she became obsessed with the legendary trick when she first played the game at five years old.

The Sims has been part of Jesse’s life ever since, thanks, she says, to the community around it.

Players can create modifications or “mods” that alter different elements from the way the game plays to a characters appearance.

Extra height options, having multiple jobs and neurodivergent personality traits are among some of the popular fan-made add-ons.

For dedicated fans, Jesse says, the longevity comes from building on each other’s creations.

As she puts it: “Take something and customise it and share it with other Simmers.

“It’s really interesting to see the ways that people can come up with to use their game in an interesting way.”

The ability to express yourself in The Sims also made it a popular title among its many players from diverse communities.

Even at its launch in 2000, The Sims included same-sex relationships at a time when choices around sexuality or identity in gaming were rare.

Creator Mollie, who streams as TheEnglishSimmer, makes a lot of LGBT-themed content for her channel.

She says developer Maxis has “always been kind of a spearhead in the gaming industry when it comes to telling diverse stories and wanting to show that representation”.

Mollie says The Sims has given her a platform to find others like her.

“That’s been so wonderful that I have been able to tell my stories and connect with people and they can see themselves represented,” she says.

The Sims has come in for more criticism over the years for its racial representation.

American content creator Amira, known as Xmiramira online, created a custom skin tone pack for The Sims 4 that’s still used by many players today.

“I couldn’t make Sims that either look similar to me or my family, friends. And that’s the case in a lot of games,” says Amira.

“But the difference between The Sims and other games is I can do something about it.”

Amira’s Melanin Pack was a hit when it was released, and she’s since worked with Maxis and Electronic Arts on officially adopting more skin tones into the game.

“For me that’s a big part of why I’ve played the game for so long,” she says.

“I can do what I want, I can make a Sim with any body type, complexion, hair, whatever I want to do, it’s one of the most customisable games I have.”

Amira says she’s noticed more and more games offering the ability to choose different skin tones, body types and hairstyles without the need for third-party add-ons.

While The Sims is often seen as a leader when it comes to inclusivity in gaming, some people are uncomfortable with its approach.

Zoe Delahunty-Light, a video producer at website Eurogamer, commends The Sims for making “great strides” with diversity and working with creators to build authentic representation into the game.

But she does point out that much of the work was done first, for free, by modders.

The official Lovestruck add-on, Zoe says, introduces polyamorous relationships to the game and costs £30 ($37).

“So it can feel like it is squeezing as much money as it can out of people who desire representation the most, which is pretty audacious,” she says.

The game has also been criticised over a lack of inclusion for players with disabilities, both in their ability to modify its controls and see themselves on screen.

“The game still lacks the option to change key binds, which is a basic accessibility issue,” says Zoe.

Developer Maxis has previously said it’s discussing the introduction of more accessibility features to the game.

It has added certain features – such as visible hearing aids – to improve the representation of disability in the game.

As The Sims celebrates its anniversary, the new US government has introduced policies to scale back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Critics argue these schemes are discriminatory and used to push political agendas, while supporters argue that they work to combat inequalities.

The tech industry has followed suit, with companies such as Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, scrapping its DEI efforts and also cutting moderation teams.

There’s a question over whether this could impact gaming, where companies are often criticised for failing to adequately tackle racial and gender-based harassment on their platforms.

“The bigger concern is that this will be seen as a green light for certain groups of toxic gamers to become more open about their own hateful views, making inclusive spaces more important than ever,” says Zoe.

Simmer Amira says it’s especially important for a life simulation game such as The Sims to include as many people as possible.

“Everybody should be able to, for the most part, make themselves with little to no issue,” she says.

Jesse adds: “A lot of people don’t get to experience things that other cultures experience and it’s a really great way to implement learning about it in everyday life.

“I think that goes a long way to acceptance as well.”

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

A man who ran the entire length of Africa has announced his next challenge – running the full length of New Zealand.

Russ Cook, nicknamed Hardest Geezer, completed his previous endurance challenge in April last year after 352 days.

The 27-year-old, from Worthing, West Sussex, is to run the 1,864 mile (3,000km) Te Araroa Trail in March, which will see him take on 60 ultramarathons while navigating mountains, forests, coastlines and cities.

“After a big challenge, it took some time for the body to get back to reality. But I’m feeling fresh and ready for the next one,” he said.

Mr Cook added: “Luckily a lovely British diet of sausage rolls and roast dinner really sorted me out.

“I put some timber back on and now we’re ready to go again.

“It’s going to be a spicy one.”

Mr Cook said: “New Zealand is somewhere I have always wanted to go. It’s the adventure capital of the world.”

“It’s going to be an absolute brutal one on the legs, like I’ve never done before,” he said.

He says he expects the 300,000-foot (91,440m) total elevation to be the most challenging part of his journey.

During the challenge, he is due to bungee jump off Auckland Harbour Bridge, canyon swing in Queenstown and sky dive in Abel Tasman.

Mr Cook raised more than £1m for charity during his previous challenge in Africa, despite complications with visas, health scares, geopolitical issues and an armed robbery.

The extreme challenge began at South Africa’s most southerly point on 22 April 2023, and finished more than 10,190 miles (16,400km) north in Tunisia.

He had originally planned to complete the equivalent of 360 marathons in 240 days, but extended the challenge due to the complications.

His New Zealand challenge is due to begin in March and is expected to take about 10 weeks to complete.

It is a 900-page policy “wish list”, a set of proposals that would expand presidential power and impose an ultra-conservative social vision.

During his campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly disavowed Project 2025, after a backlash over some of its more radical ideas.

But he has nominated several of its authors to fill key government positions, and many of his initial executive orders closely follow proposals outlined in the document.

Here’s your guide to Project 2025, which lays out one vision of how Trump might govern over the next four years.

Project 2025 is a product of the Heritage Foundation, one of Washington’s most prominent right-wing think tanks. It first produced policy plans for future Republican administrations in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was about to take office.

It has produced similar documents in connection with subsequent presidential elections, including in 2016, when Trump first won the presidency.

That’s not unusual – it’s common for US think tanks of all political stripes to propose policy wish lists for future governments.

There’s no denying Heritage has been influential during Republican presidencies. One year into Trump’s first term, the think tank boasted that the White House had adopted nearly two-thirds of its proposals.

Its latest set of recommendations was unveiled in April 2023, but went largely unnoticed outside of policy circles until the heat of the presidential campaign, when Democratic opposition to the document ramped up.

Democratic politicians launched a “Stop Project 2025 Task Force” and even set up a tip line to collect insider information on Heritage’s activities.

The Harris campaign and its surrogates consistently brought up the project in interviews and speeches.

Trump began actively pushing away from the document in July 2024.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The team that created the project was chock-full of former Trump advisers, including director Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management while Trump was president. Dans later left the project.

But other Project 2025 authors have been welcomed into government jobs.

Russell Vought wrote a key chapter in the document and served as the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform policy director.

Vought, who served in Trump’s first administration, was again nominated by the president to lead the Office of Budget Management, which administers the $6.75tn (£5.44tn) federal budget.

Other Project 2025 authors nominated to government positions include John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick to lead the CIA; Brendan Carr, chosen to oversee the Federal Communications Commission; Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”; Paul Atkins, nominated to head the Securities and Exchange Commission; and trade advisor Peter Navarro.

More than 100 conservative organisations contributed to the document, Heritage says, including many that will now be hugely influential in Washington.

The document itself sets out four main policy aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.

Some of the proposals have already formed the basis for Trump’s executive orders – although in a number of cases they are also mentioned in other policy documents, including the Republican platform and Trump’s Agenda47 campaign manifesto.

Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control – a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory”.

In practice, that would streamline decision-making, allowing the president to directly implement policies in a number of areas.

The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.

The document labels the FBI a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization”. It calls for drastic overhauls of the agency and several others, as well as the complete elimination of the Department of Education.

Shortly after being sworn in, Trump moved to eliminate job protections for career civil servants, and freeze federal spending.

Through Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, the White House has moved to chop billions in federal spending, although the details and legal status of the cuts are hazy at best. DOGE is not an official government department, but rather an outside team advising Trump with broad authority from the president.

It’s clear however that Trump intends to take a sledgehammer to the federal government as it currently stands – a goal broadly in line with Project 2025 suggestions.

The mentions of abortion in Project 2025 – there are about 200 of them – have sparked some of the most contentious debate.

The document does not call for an outright nationwide abortion ban, and Trump says he would not sign such a law.

However, it proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, and using existing but little-enforced laws to stop the drug being sent through the post.

The document proposes new data collection efforts on abortion and more generally suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”.

Trump, by contrast, has generally said that abortion laws should mostly be left to individual states.

However, during confirmation hearings, Trump’s nominee for health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, said the president had ordered him to examine the safety record of mifepristone and left open the possibility of further regulation of the drug.

Trump also issued an executive order designed to stop federal funds being used for abortion, a move that was outlined in detail in the Project 2025 document.

Increased funding for a wall on the US-Mexico border – one of Trump’s signature proposals in 2016 – is proposed in the document.

But Trump’s signature immigration policy – a pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants – is not spelled out in any detail in Project 2025.

The document does include language calling on Trump to “thoroughly enforce immigration laws”.

But in the main chapter dealing with immigration, Project 2025 authors suggest dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and combining it with other immigration enforcement units in other agencies, creating a much larger and more powerful border policing operation.

Other proposals include eliminating visa categories for crime and human trafficking victims, increasing fees on immigrants and allowing fast-tracked applications for migrants who pay a premium.

But it was mass deportations – not a bureaucratic shuffle, visa changes or a longer, taller border wall – that was Trump’s top pitch to voters.

On this issue, his administration promises to go in a slightly different direction – and potentially much further – than the Project 2025 proposals.

Energy policy is a broad area of agreement between Trump and the Project 2025 proposals, summed up by one of the president’s campaign slogans: “Drill, baby, drill”.

The new administration wants to ramp up fossil fuel production and has taken the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which seeks to limit emissions and global warming.

Project 2025 proposes slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the next president to “stop the war on oil and natural gas” – ideas that the Trump campaign has enthusiastically taken up.

The document sets out two competing visions on tariffs: one suggesting boosting free trade and another pro-tariff position.

Trump has clearly sided with the latter camp, announcing import taxes targeting Canada, Mexico and China.

The economic advisers of Project 2025 suggest that a second Trump administration should slash corporate and income taxes, abolish the Federal Reserve and even consider a return to gold-backed currency.

While the president has made comments about proposals in some of these areas, the economic talk in the early days of his administration has been dominated by tariffs.

Almost immediately upon taking office, Trump moved to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs and decreed that government departments would recognise only two genders.

Those moves are broadly in line with Project 2025, which took aim at DEI and gender terminology as part of what it describes as a wider crackdown on “woke” ideology.

The document also calls for greater school choice – essentially subidising religious and private schools with public funds – which was also the subject of an early Trump executive order.

And it calls for abolishing the Department of Education, another idea that Trump has signalled he supports.

In other proposals, Project 2025 suggests banning pornography and shutting down tech and telecoms companies that allow access to adult material.

This has so far not been a focus of the new administration, which has drawn support from a number of top tech bosses.

Trump’s views on the tech industry have regularly shifted, and don’t appear to have much to do with sexual content.

The writing of Project 2025 was a massive undertaking, backed by a $22m (£17m) budget from Heritage.

It includes strategies for implementing policies, such as the creation of a database of conservative loyalists to fill government positions, and a programme to train those new workers.

There are clear areas of agreement and overlapping personnel. However, many of the themes of Project 2025 were independently being touted by the Trump campaign.

It’s very early in Trump’s second term, and still unclear how far the president will be able to go in reshaping the vast US federal government.

Democrats have indicated they will continue to oppose the proposals and highlight Project 2025’s influence.

And many of the president’s executive orders and other actions will continue to face political and legal challenges.

The future of the US government’s main overseas aid agency has been cast into doubt, with employees locked out and the Trump administration planning to merge it with the US Department of State.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) would continue to function as a branch of the state department, but the plan involves a significant reduction in its funding and the workforce, CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, reports.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused USAID’s leadership of “insubordination” and said he was now its “acting head”.

US President Donald Trump and one of his top advisers, billionaire Elon Musk, have been strongly critical of the agency.

But the move to shut it down could have a profound impact on humanitarian programmes around the world.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was set up in the early 1960s to administer humanitarian aid programmes on behalf of the US government around the world.

It employs around 10,000 people, two-thirds of whom work overseas. It has bases in more than 60 countries and works in dozens of others. However, most of the work on the ground is carried out by other organisations that are contracted and funded by USAID.

The range of activities it undertakes is vast. For example, not only does USAID provide food in countries where people are starving, it also operates the world’s gold-standard famine detection system, which uses data analysis to try to predict where food shortages are emerging.

• Democrats say move to shutter aid agency ‘unconstitutional’: Follow Live
• Trump considers merging USAID into US State Department

Much of USAID’s budget is spent on health programmes, such as offering polio vaccinations in countries where the disease still circulates and helping to stop the spread of viruses which have the potential to cause a pandemic.

The BBC’s international charity BBC Media Action, which is funded by external grants and voluntary contributions, receives funding from USAID. According to a 2024 report, USAID donated $3.23m (£2.6m), making it the charity’s second-largest donor that financial year.

According to government data, the US spent $68bn (£55bn) on international aid in 2023.

That total is spread across several departments and agencies, but USAID’s budget constitutes more than half of it at around $40bn.

The vast majority of that money is spent in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe – primarily on humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

The US is the world’s biggest spender on international development – and by some margin.

To put it into context, the UK is the world’s fourth-largest aid spender. In 2023, it spent £15.3bn – around a quarter of what the US provided.

Trump is a long-term critic of overseas spending and has said it does not represent value for money for American taxpayers. He has singled out USAID for particularly strong criticism, describing senior officials there as “radical lunatics”.

Abolishing the agency would likely enjoy popular support. Opinion polls have long suggested that American voters favour slashing foreign aid spending. According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, polling data going back to the 1970s has indicated broad support for cuts.

One of Trump’s first actions after returning to office was signing an executive order pausing almost all international spending for 90 days while a review could be carried out.

A memo was then issued by the State Department which halted the vast majority of work being done on the ground. Waivers were later issued for humanitarian programmes, but the announcement upended the world of international development and caused widespread disruption to services.

Programmes including those providing medication to the world’s poorest and installing clean water supplies had to stop overnight. One veteran humanitarian worker told the BBC the pause was “like an earthquake across the aid sector”.

Tensions between the White House and USAID escalated over the weekend when officials working for Elon Musk – who Trump has tasked with identifying spending cuts in the federal budget – were reportedly denied access to secure financial data at USAID headquarters. Two senior security officials there were placed on leave in the aftermath, according to reports.

On Monday, Musk – who was speaking in a public conversation on X, the social media platform he owns – said: “With regards to the USAID stuff, I went over it with [the president] in detail and he agreed that we should shut it down.”

USAID’s website has gone offline and employees were told to stay at home on Monday.

Later on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused USAID’s leadership of “insubordination” and said he was now its “acting head”. He added that “a lot of functions” carried out by the agency would continue but that spending “has to be in alignment with the national interest”.

While it is clear the White House wields significant influence over USAID, that power is theoretically limited.

USAID came into being after Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1961. That law mandated for a government agency to be set up and tasked with administering overseas spending.

Shortly after, then-President John F Kennedy set up USAID using an executive order. Another law was passed in 1998 which confirmed USAID’s status as an executive agency in its own right.

In short, that means Trump cannot necessarily simply abolish USAID by signing an executive order, and any attempt to do so would almost certainly face strong challenges in the courts and Congress.

Closing USAID altogether would likely require an act of Congress – where Trump’s Republican Party holds slim majorities in both houses.

One of the options reportedly being considered by the Trump administration is effectively making USAID a branch of the State Department, as opposed to it being a government agency in its own right.

That type of arrangement would not be completely unheard of: in 2020, then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson merged the Department for International Development with the Foreign Office.

Ministers said at the time that it would ensure international spending supported the government’s wider foreign policy goals – but critics warned it would reduce expertise in the aid sector and damage the UK’s overseas standing and influence.

Given the disproportionate amount of funding which comes from the US, any changes to how that money is spent will doubtless be felt around the world.

USAID’s activities range from providing prosthetic limbs to soldiers injured in Ukraine, to clearing landmines and containing the spread of Ebola in Africa. The effects could be truly global.

After the 90-day overseas spending freeze was announced, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “every dollar” must be “justified” by evidence that it makes the US safer, stronger and more prosperous.

Democratic Party politicians have called the moves illegal and have said they would jeopardise national security, citing reports that prison guards in Syria, who were charged with securing thousands of Islamic State fighters, nearly walked off the job when US funding was temporarily cut off.

Trump has made it clear he wants overseas spending to be closely aligned with his “America First” approach and the international development sector is braced for more shockwaves.

There are also questions about how much the US will spend overseas in years to come, as Musk – empowered by Trump – attempts to cut billions from the government’s budget.

Last month, a school teacher in the western Indian city of Pune found her six-year-old son upset about homework.

“I had erased some words and asked him to write them. I assumed he was angry and that’s why he was not holding the pencil properly,” she told the Indian Express newspaper.

She never imagined his struggle to hold a pencil was the first sign of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), a rare disorder where the immune system attacks nerve cells, causing muscle weakness and paralysis.

Within days, the boy was in intensive care, unable to move his arms or legs. As his condition worsened, he lost the ability to swallow, speak, and eventually breathe, requiring ventilator support. He is now recovering.

The boy is among around 160 reported cases of GBS since early January in Pune, an education and IT hub, ringed by industrial towns and villages. There have been five suspected deaths. Currently, 48 patients are in intensive care, 21 on ventilator, and 38 have been discharged, according to official figures.

GBS begins with tingling or numbness in the feet and hands, followed by muscle weakness and difficulty moving joints. Symptoms worsen over two to four weeks, typically starting in the arms and legs. The reported mortality rate varies between three and 13%, depending on severity and quality of health care support.

The outbreak in Pune is being traced to a pathogen called campylobacter jejuni, a leading cause of foodborne infections, and the biggest driver of GBS worldwide. The link between the two was discovered in the 1990s in rural China, where the pathogen was common in chickens, and GBS outbreaks occurred every monsoon as children played in water contaminated by chicken or duck droppings.

GBS is not entirely uncommon in India. Monojit Debnath and Madhu Nagappa, of Bangalore-based National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), studied 150 GBS patients over a five year period between 2014 and 2019.

Their findings showed 79% of the patients had evidence of prior infections, with a third testing positive for campylobacter. Notably, co-infections were more common, occurring in 65%, suggesting a complex interplay of bacteria and viruses.

More recently, outbreaks linked to the pathogen have been reported from all over the world. In the first seven months of 2023, Peru reported over 200 suspected cases and at least four deaths of GBS, prompting the government to declare a national health emergency and strengthen public health measures. Two-thirds of the cases were linked to campylobacter.

In countries with good hygiene, fewer GBS cases are linked to campylobacter, with respiratory infections being a major contributor, say experts. There have been other triggers as well. In 2015 Brazil reported a cluster of GBS cases linked to the Zika virus. Vaccines can rarely trigger GBS, but one Covid vaccine was reportedly linked to a few hundred GBS cases in the UK in 2021.

“Campylobacter is endemic with hundreds of thousands of cases taking place all the time. It is always existing in the environment,” Hugh Willison, a professor of neurology at University of Glasgow told me.

Yet, it is not easy to develop GBS, scientists say.

There’s a specific strain of campylobacter, which has a sugar-coated outer layer, and in rare cases, its molecular structure matches the coating of human nerve cells.

When the patient’s immune system attacks the bacteria, it may end up targeting the nerves as well – a process called molecular mimicry – leading to GBS. However, a small fraction of campylobacter strains have this nerve-like coat.

“In Pune, a strain of campylobacter with this molecular feature is likely to be circulating, and a surge in infections with this strain consequently leads to a higher number of GBS cases,” says Prof Willison.

Most experts estimate that about one in 100 campylobacter strains carry the GBS risk, and one in 100 people infected with such a strain develop GBS, making the overall risk roughly one in 10,000.

That creates what Prof Willison describes as an “immunological Russian roulette”, triggering an “acute neurological tsunami” that surges through the peripheral nervous system. Once the immune response subsides, the attack wanes – but the body still needs time, medical care, and support to repair the damage.

What makes things worse is that there is no cure for GBS.

In GBS, the body produces antibodies against campylobacter, which then attack the nerves. Physicians use “plasma exchange”, a process that filters blood to remove the harmful antibodies, along with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), a therapeutic antibody derived from normal blood, to help reduce the severity of the disease.

The other challenge is that there is no single test to diagnose GBS. The diagnosis, say physicians, is mainly based on clinical features. It presents itself as a form of paralysis which can be also caused by polio, viruses or rare neurological disease.

“The diagnosis is a constellation of clinical features. Misdiagnosis or no diagnosis or late diagnosis can happen easily,” says Prof Willison.

India’s uneven public health system presents a challenge, as doctors in rural areas may struggle to diagnose GBS. One reason, possibly, why the World Health Organization (WHO) teams are in Pune, is collaborating with federal and state health workers to trace, test, and monitor cases, and analysing trends to support effective treatment.

Authorities say they have surveilled more than 60,000 houses, picked up 160 water samples for tests, and asked people to drink boiled water and eat fresh and clean food, and not have “stale food and partially cooked chicken or mutton”.

While most cases of GBS around the world come from undercooked poultry, it can also spread through water, similar to cholera or salmonella, experts say.

Contaminated water used for washing or preparing street food makes it easy for the bacteria to spread. Clearly, in Pune, a campylobacter strain with the distinctive molecular feature is circulating, affecting a large number of people.

What is not clear is whether this has been due to large scale contamination of water supply or a lot of people consuming infected poultry. “We appeal to people not to panic,” says a health department advisory. But in the face of uncertainty, it is easier said than done.

Beijing has made its decision. After days of warning of counter measures and urging Washington to enter negotiations and “meet China halfway”, it has decided to hit back – or at least threaten to retaliate with its own tariffs.

China said it would implement a 15% tariff on coal and liquefied natural gas products as well as a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-engine cars imported from the US from 10 February.

The date is important. It means there is still time for the world’s two largest economies to step back from the brink of a trade war.

The two leaders have scheduled a call later this week, according to the White House, and there are signs, despite today’s announcement, that China is in listening mode and is keeping the door open for talks.

• Trump’s trade war with neighbours is delayed
• Share falls ease after Trump tariff turmoil
• Five ways China is hitting back against US tariffs

Firstly, China’s counter measures are limited in scope compared to Donald Trump’s levy of 10% on all Chinese goods heading to the US.

America is the biggest exporter of liquid natural gas across the world, but China accounts for only around 2.3% of those exports and its major car imports are from Europe and Japan.

This calculated and selective targeting of goods may just be an opening shot by Beijing, a way of gaining some bargaining power and leverage ahead of any talks.

Officials in China may be encouraged by the cordial start to the US-China relationship since Trump took office.

The US president said he had a “very good” phone call with President Xi days before his inaugural ceremony, which was attended by the highest-level Chinese official ever to be dispatched to such an event. He has also suggested that he hopes to work with Xi on resolving Russia’s war in Ukraine.

President Xi might not want to pick a fight with Trump just yet as he is busy trying to shore up his own ailing economy.

This is also familiar territory for both leaders – although they might not be keen to relive the past. There was a honeymoon period in US-China relations during Trump’s last term, before the relationship soured.

It will also be far more difficult for Trump to do a deal with China than with Mexico and Canada – and much will depend on what he wants from Beijing.

China is Washington’s chief economic rival and cutting the country off from major supply chains has been a goal of the Trump administration.

If Trump asks for too much, Xi might feel he can walk away and there will be limits on just how far he is willing to be pushed.

The US president is dealing with a far more confident China than he did back then. Beijing has expanded its global footprint, and it is now the lead trade partner for more than 120 countries.

Over the past two decades, it has also steadily tried to reduce the importance of trade to its economy and ramped up domestic production. Today, imports and exports account for around 37% of China’s GDP, compared with more than 60% in the early 2000s, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The 10% tariff will sting, but Beijing may feel it can absorb the blow – for now.

The fear will be that President Trump is serious about ramping up that percentage to the 60% he pledged during his campaign or that he will continue to use the threat of tariffs as a recurring diplomatic tool to hold over Xi’s head.

If that happens, Beijing will want to be ready and that means having a clear strategy in case this escalates.

The last time the leaders signed a deal it did not end well.

The two countries issued tit-for-tat tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods from 2018.

It lasted more than two years until eventually China agreed to spend an extra $200bn (£161bn) a year on US goods in 2020.

Washington hoped the deal would bring down the huge trade deficit between China and the US, but the plan was derailed by the Covid pandemic and that deficit now sits at $361bn, according to Chinese customs data.

There are also key challenges for China as it is thinking several steps ahead in any negotiation.

Beijing still sells nearly four times more goods to the United States than it buys – and during Trump’s first term in office, it ran out of items to target.

Analysts believe that China is now looking at a wider range of measures than just tariffs to retaliate if the trade war ramps up.

The clock is ticking. This is not a full trade war, yet. Businesses around the world will be watching to see if the two leaders can reach some kind of settlement later this week.

El Salvador has offered to take in criminals deported from the US, including those with US citizenship, and house them in its mega-jail.

The deal was announced after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele during his visit to the central American nation.

Bukele – whose iron-fist approach to gangs has won him plaudits from voters but been heavily criticised by human rights groups – said he had offered the US “the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system”.

Rubio said the US was “profoundly grateful” to Bukele, adding that “no country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this”.

Rubio told reporters: “He has offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those with US citizenship and legal residency.”

Referring to two of the region’s most notorious transnational crime gangs, Rubio added that El Salvador would also take in deported migrants and “criminals from any nationality, be the MS-13 or Tren de Aragua”.

Bukele later confirmed the offer on X, specifying that “we are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted US citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee”.

He added that “the fee would be relatively low for the US but significant for us, making our entire prison sustainable”.

Since he came into office in 2019, Bukele has made cracking down on crime his government’s priority.

The newly built maximum-security jail he referred to, Cecot [Terrorism Confinement Centre], is at the centre of his drive to lock up and punish the most violent gang members.

Take a look at graphs and maps of the mega-jail

The government celebrated the opening of the jail – which it says can hold up to 40,000 inmates – by releasing photos and videos of shaven-headed and tattooed prisoners stripped down to the waist being frogmarched along its corridors.

The treatment of inmates at Cecot, where scores of inmates are locked up in each windowless cell, has been criticised by rights groups.

But Bukele’s crackdown on crime continues to be very popular with the vast majority of Salvadoreans who say they can go about their lives without threats from gang members for the first time in years.

However, some relatives of the tens of thousands of people which have been rounded up and jailed under emergency measures brought in by Bukele say their loved ones have been wrongfully rounded up in sweeping police round-ups.

Amnesty International has criticised the “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence” in the country – a criticism dismissed by Bukele, who points out that his hardline approach to crime last February won him re-election to a second term with more than 84% of the votes.

El Salvador was the second stop on Secretary of State Rubio’s first overseas tour as the US top diplomat.

His first stop was Panama, where he demanded that Panama make “immediate changes” to what he called the “influence and control” of China over the Panama Canal.

On Tuesday, he will hold meetings with officials in Costa Rica and Guatemala expected to focus on migration as well as countering Chinese influence in the region.

Since coming to office, US President Donald Trump has focused on speeding up the removal of undocumented migrants, with the promise of “mass deportations”.

Thousands of residents are fleeing Santorini after hundreds of earthquakes were recorded near the Greek island in the last 48 hours.

About 9,000 people have left the island since Sunday, with additional emergency flights scheduled to leave on Tuesday.

More than 300 earthquakes have been recorded in the past two days near the island, and some experts say tremors could continue for weeks. Authorities have closed schools and warned against large indoor gatherings, but Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has urged calm.

Santorini is a popular tourist destination but most of those leaving are locals, as February is outside the peak tourist season.

Dozens of tremors have been recorded in the Aegean Sea north-east of Santorini so far on Tuesday, with a large earthquake measuring magnitude 5 striking mid-afternoon.

Several days of continuous seismic activity has led some residents to sleep in their cars – afraid to spend the night in their homes in case walls or ceilings cave in.

No major damage has been reported on the island so far, but emergency measures are being taken as a precaution.

Hundreds of people queued at a port in the early hours of Tuesday morning to board a ferry leaving for the mainland.

“Everything is closed. No-one works now. The whole island has emptied,” an 18-year-old local resident told Reuters news agency before boarding the vessel.

Local media reports around 6,000 people have left the island by ferry since Sunday, and a further 2,500 to 2,700 passengers will have flown from Santorini to Athens via plane on Monday and Tuesday, according to Aegean Airlines.

The carrier said it had added nine emergency flights to its schedule following a request from the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection.

In recent days, an estimated 9,000 people in total have fled Santorini – a small island with a population of just 15,500.

The island welcomes millions of tourists annually, but bookings this time of year are minimal, so local residents and workers make up the majority of evacuees.

Kostas Sakavaras, a tour guide who has lived on Santorini for 18 years, left the island with his wife and children on Monday.

“We considered it’s a better choice to come to the mainland as a precaution,” he told BBC News.

“Nothing has been falling, or anything like that,” he said, adding that the worst part had been the sound. “That’s the most scary part of it,” said Mr Sakavaras, who plans to return home once schools reopen.

Schools are scheduled to stay closed on the island until Friday. Authorities have also warned people to avoid certain areas of the island and empty their swimming pools.

Santorini’s Mayor, Nikos Zorzos, said the island was prepared for seismic activity that “may last many weeks”. The island must approach it “with patience and calm”, he said on Tuesday.

He added that plans were in place to build shelters and provide food for the population should larger tremors emerge.

On Tuesday morning, representatives from the government, armed forces and emergency services met at the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection to discuss the situation.

The prime minister will chair a similar meeting on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Mitsotakis said on Monday that Greece was working to manage “a very intense geological phenomenon”.

Seismologists consider the recent tremors to be minor, but preventative measures have been put in place in case a larger quake occurs.

Emergency services have warned residents to leave the areas of Ammoudi, Armeni and the Old Port of Fira due to landslides.

The South Aegean Regional Fire Department has been placed on general alert and rescue teams have been dispatched, with crews standing watch by large yellow medical tents on the island.

Concern remains high over the hundreds of earthquakes in the region of the Greek Cyclades Islands, with scientists rapidly analysing data to better understand the phenomenon.

Most of the strongest earthquakes are originating from an area around the tiny islet of Anydros, north-east of Santorini.

With seismic activity remaining intense in the region, scientists are on alert not only for Santorini, but also for Amorgos, Anafi and Ios.

In the event of a larger earthquake, the main issue is the resistance of buildings, especially in Santorini, due to the peculiarities of the soil.

Santorini is on what is known as the Hellenic Volcanic Arc – a chain of islands created by volcanoes – but the last major eruption was in the 1950s.

Greek authorities have said that the recent tremors were related to tectonic plate movements instead of volcanic activity.

Scientists cannot currently predict the exact timing, size or location of earthquakes.

But there are areas of the world where they are more likely to occur which helps governments to prepare.

Earthquakes occur as the result of tectonic plates moving either past, below each other or apart. This results in stress that is built up and then released as earthquakes along or near the boundaries of these plates – known as fault lines. Santorini and the Greek Islands are near such a line.

As scientists cannot predict such events, the best way to prevent damage or loss of life is for authorities to reduce the vulnerability of their populations. This can be through designing and constructing earthquake-resistant buildings or evacuating residents when earthquakes begin.

Serial killer Lucy Letby did not murder any babies, a panel of international medical experts has claimed.

Letby, now 35, is serving 15 whole life prison sentences after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others.

The 14-strong panel attributed some of the deaths at the Countess of Chester’s neonatal unit between June 2015 and June 2016 to natural causes, and alleged others had been due to “bad” medical care.

Letby’s legal team has applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) for her case to be investigated as a potential miscarriage of justice.

The lengthy and medically technical press conference was organised by Letby’s legal team who had said the panel would present “significant new medical evidence”.

Panel chairman Dr Shoo Lee, a Canadian neonatal care expert, said there were alternative explanations for each of Letby’s convictions for murder or attempted murder.

Dr Lee said he became involved in the case after learning that an academic paper he co-authored on air embolism, one of the methods Letby was said to have used to attack babies, had formed part of the prosecution case in her trial.

He said the 14 experts, including medical professionals from Canada, the US, Japan, Germany, Sweden and the UK, had looked at 17 cases at the heart of Letby’s prosecution and had compiled an “impartial evidence-based report”.

The report presented at the conference was a summary of the panel’s findings, and the full report would be submitted to Letby’s legal team, Dr Lee said.

Dr Lee provided what he said were highly detailed grounds baby-by-baby for concluding that none of the murders occurred.

He added: “We did not find any murders. In all cases, death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care.”

“Lucy was charged with seven murders and seven attempted murders”, he said.

“In our opinion, the medical opinion, the medical evidence doesn’t support murder in any of these babies.

“Our full report will go to Lucy’s barrister later this month, and then it’ll be up to him and the courts to decide what next to do.”

During Letby’s trial, the prosecution referred to the 1989 paper by Dr Lee that looked at cases of air embolus, referring to injuries caused when air is injected into a baby’s arteries or veins after staff at the Countess of Chester reported skin discoloration on some of the babies.

In the cases Dr Lee analysed in his paper, those injuries had happened accidentally.

The prosecution argued that one of the methods Letby used to injure or kill babies was to inject air into their veins and used Dr Lee’s paper to back that claim.

In the paper, Dr Lee described a distinct discoloration on the babies’ skin in 10% of cases.

However, at the press conference Dr Lee said in all of the cases in his paper air was injected into the babies’ arteries, not their veins.

He said that the skin discolouration described in the paper was not possible when air was injected into the veins.

Dr Lee said he had recently updated his academic paper and found no cases of skin discolouration linked to air embolism by the venous system.

He prefaced his remarks by saying that the thoughts of each panel member were with the families of the babies who had died.

Former neonatal nurse Letby lost two bids to challenge her convictions at the Court of Appeal last year.

The prosecution’s medical case was scrutinised by the Court of Appeal in May last year and found to be safe – and the judges noted Letby herself did not present any experts at her trial offering an alternative view.

Dr Lee gave evidence to the Court of Appeal as part of Letby’s application for leave to appeal, but three senior judges said his conclusions did not leave the convictions unsafe.

The judges concluded there had been no prosecution expert evidence diagnosing air embolus solely on the basis of skin discolouration.

Earlier, the CCRC said Letby’s lawyers had applied to the commission to investigate her case as a potential miscarriage of justice.

The body said it would now assess the application and determine whether there was new evidence which presented a reasonable chance of a conviction being overturned.

A CCRC spokesperson said: “We are aware that there has been a great deal of speculation and commentary surrounding Lucy Letby’s case, much of it from parties with only a partial view of the evidence.

“We ask that everyone remembers the families affected by events at the Countess of Chester Hospital between June 2015 and June 2016.”

Mark McDonald, Lucy Letby’s barrister, said that because her previous legal team had not called a medical expert at her trial, the information presented was “new, fresh evidence”.

He said the nurse was convicted because of the medical evidence, and if that was wrong any circumstantial evidence would “fall away”.

“The most important thing, the reason why Lucy Letby was convicted, was because of the medical evidence that was presented to the jury that today has been demolished,” he said.

Veteran MP Sir David Davis, who has been assisting Letby’s legal team, described her convictions as “one of the major injustices of modern times”.

President Donald Trump has suspended for 30 days the hefty tariffs on Mexico and Canada that he threatened after last-minute negotiations with the two US neighbours.

He can point to concessions on border and crime enforcement as a victory. But Canada’s Justin Trudeau and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum also can claim political wins.

A trade war that would send economic shockwaves through North America and beyond is on hold – for now.

So who blinked first and what happens next?

President Trump’s high-stakes confrontation with the United States’ closest trading partners appears to have paid off, with both Mexico and Canada agreeing to stricter border security and taking bigger steps to address fentanyl trafficking.

The strategy to leverage the US economy to force concessions from other countries notches a win for Trump’s “America first” agenda, allowing him to follow through on core domestic issues without American consumers feeling the sting of the economic consequences of a continental trade war.

His tariff playbook is hardly new.

Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium during his first term prompted backlash from Mexico, Canada and the European Union, but economists say those measures were more limited in scope.

This time, Trump has promised sweeping tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and China, which is still set to see a 10% tariff increase on goods starting at midnight on Tuesday.

But it remains unclear whether Trump will follow through on his threats to Canada and Mexico once the 30-day deadline is up. That uncertainty stirs fears that could see businesses reducing their reliance on American markets, holding off on investing in building new factories or hiring workers until the trade stand-off becomes more clear.

• Follow live: China announces retaliatory action as Trump tariffs take effect

That was not a January Arctic blast from the north – it was a widespread sigh of relief from Canadian politicians and business leaders at the 30-day pause on US tariffs.

While the threat of tariffs remains, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can claim a political win: a temporary truce in what was shaping up to be a devastating trade war.

Canadian politicians have been scrambling to figure out what exactly would satisfy Trump – a situation not helped by Canada’s domestic politics, with Trudeau wrapping up his last weeks in power as a lame-duck prime minister.

The border security measures announced on Monday aren’t all new.

In December, Canada announced C$1.3bn ($900m; £700m) in measures that included efforts to disrupt the fentanyl trade, new tools for law enforcement and enhanced co-ordination with US law enforcement.

Canadian surveillance drones and two Black Hawk helicopters recently began patrolling the boundary between the two countries.

Officials have cited those efforts for weeks to show they are taking Trump’s border concerns seriously.

A new element appears to be the appointment of a “fentanyl tsar” and a C$200m intelligence directive to fight organised crime and fentanyl.

One question that remains is what this means for the future of the Canada-US relationship. The partnership between the allies has been deeply shaken by Trump’s economic threats.

Throughout this trade crisis, President Claudia Sheinbaum has called for “cool heads” and “calm”.

Even on Friday, she said she was confident of a last-minute reprieve from the 25% tariffs on Mexican goods. And so it proved, following an early morning telephone call with President Trump.

Announcing the agreement soon after, she could barely wipe the smile from her face and her supporters have heralded what they see as a masterclass in how to negotiate with Donald Trump.

Yes, she agreed to send National Guard troops to the border to focus on fentanyl-smuggling, but crucially she secured what she wanted from Trump, too.

As well as the obvious – a pause on tariffs – she also got Trump to “promise” the US would do more to tackle the traffic of high-powered weapons from the US into Mexico, to prevent them from ending up in the arms of cartel gunmen.

But she also bought herself another vital commodity: time.

She now has several weeks to build on the points agreed in that phone call and turn the temporary hold on tariffs into a permanent one.

The expectation is that now Secretary of State Marco Rubio will visit Mexico soon to discuss these matters and a joint group on fentanyl will be established with Mexican and US health and security officials.

If in fact Sheinbaum does manage to prevent further trade hostilities, it will go down as the first significant victory of her new government, having only been in office since October. And it may set the tone for future interactions with President Trump and his administration.

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The trade war between the world’s two biggest economies has escalated after China hit back against the introduction of tariffs by the US with measures of its own.

Beijing has set out to target specific American goods with retaliatory taxes, among other measures, following the blanket 10% tariff introduced by President Donald Trump on all Chinese imports to the US.

In some ways, this latest tit-for-tat is nothing new and builds on the long-running trade dispute between the nations, with tariffs having already been imposed and threatened on various goods since 2018.

Trump has said he plans to speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping, so a deal could yet be struck. But if China proceeds with its response on 10 February as planned, what could the impact be?

Part of China’s countermeasures to Trump’s tariffs is to announce import taxes of its own on US coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG) of 10%, and a 15% charge on crude oil.

The response from Beijing means companies wanting to import fossil fuels from the US would have to pay the tax in order to do so.

China is the world’s largest importer of coal, but it gets most of it from Indonesia, although Russia, Australia and Mongolia are also among its suppliers.

When it comes to the US, China has been increasing imports of LNG from the country, with volumes nearly double 2018 levels, according to Chinese customs data.

But its overall fossil fuel trade is modest, with US imports accounting for just 1.7% of China’s total crude oil bought from abroad in 2023. This suggests China is not dependent on the US and so the impact of the tariffs on its economy could be minimal.

Rebecca Harding, a trade economist and chief executive of the Centre for Economic Security think tank, said China could easily source more supplies from Russia, where it has already been buying oil on the cheap as the Kremlin seeks to fund its war effort.

On the flipside, the US is the world’s largest LNG exporter, and so has plenty of other customers, particularly the UK and the European Union.

• What are tariffs and why is Trump threatening to use them?
• Trump sows uncertainty – and Xi Jinping sees an opportunity

As well as fuel, China has slapped a 10% tariff on agricultural machinery, pick-up trucks, and some large cars.

But China is not a big importer of US pick-ups and it gets most of its cars from Europe and Japan, so a 10% tariff on an already small number of imports would not hit consumers too hard.

In recent years, China has increased investments in farm machinery to enhance production and reduce reliance on imports, and to strengthen its food security.

So the introduction of tariffs on agricultural machinery might be another move to try to boost domestic industry.

Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China economics at consultancy Capital Economics, said all the tariff measures were “fairly modest, at least relative to US moves”.

He suggests that China’s targeted goods represent about $20bn (£16bn) worth of annual imports – around 12% of China’s total imports from the US.

“This is a far cry from the more than $450bn worth of Chinese goods being targeted by the US.”

But he said China had “clearly been calibrated to try to send a message to the US [and domestic audiences] without inflicting too much damage”.

The Chinese authorities have also announced some non-tariff measures, one of which is an anti-monopoly investigation into US tech giant Google.

It is unclear what the investigation will involve, but for context, Google’s search services have been blocked in China since 2010.

The company still has some business presence in the country through providing apps and games to the Chinese markets by working with local developers.

But China only generates about 1% of Google’s global sales, which suggests if it cut ties entirely with the country, it wouldn’t be much worse off.

China has added PVH, the American company that owns designer brands Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, to its so-called “unreliable entity” list and accused them of “discriminatory measures against Chinese enterprises”.

The list, which has other US firms on it, was created in 2020 by Beijing amid the heating up of trade tensions.

For Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, being on China’s list will make it harder to do business in the country. They may face sanctions, including fines, and having the work visas of their foreign employees revoked.

Regulators will also go to factories of the firms to investigate operations, according to Andreas Schotter, professor of international business at Western University in Ontario, Canada.

The US has its own “entity list”, which bars certain organisations from buying products from US companies without approval from Washington.

“China is hitting back in the same way President Trump is accusing Chinese companies. This is all part of the US driven de-coupling of the US and China,” Prof Schotter added.

• China probes Calvin Klein over Xinjiang cotton

While tariffs have been placed on the companies wanting to import goods from abroad, China has also imposed export controls on 25 rare metals.

Some of the metals are key components for many electrical products and military equipment.

China has mastered the ability to refine such metals, and produced almost 90% of global refined output.

The restricted list includes tungsten, which is difficult to source and a crucial material for the aerospace industry.

While there are restrictions on exports, Mr Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics, said it was notable that the critical metals China imports from the US, which are used to make high-end chips, semiconductor machinery, pharmaceuticals and aerospace equipment were not targeted in any measures.

The experience of previous rounds of restrictions suggests exports will drop sharply as companies scramble to get licences, a process that takes several weeks.

When it comes to the impact of the restrictions, it appears the US has a plan. On Monday, Trump said he wanted Ukraine to guarantee the supply of more rare earth metals in exchange for $300bn of support in its fight against Russia.

Five people have been shot at an education centre in central Sweden, police say.

The shooting happened in Orebro, 200km (124 miles) west of the capital, Stockholm, on Tuesday afternoon.

Police said “the danger is not over” and warned the public to stay away. All of the people injured have been taken to hospital and four have undergone operations for their injuries.

One person is critically injured, said Jonas Claesson, who represents local health services in the area.

Claesson added that there could be more people wounded in the attack, but police said they cannot confirm at this time whether anyone has been killed.

“This is currently seen as an attempted murder, arson and aggravated weapons offence,” police said in a statement.

Police heard reports of a shooting taking place at Risbergska school – an adult education centre – at 12:33 local time (11:44 GMT). The facility sits on a campus that is home to other schools.

These centres are attended primarily by people who have not finished primary or secondary school.

Police have started an investigation and have evacuated nearby schools, local police chief of Orebro, Roberto Eid Forest, said at a news conference.

He also confirmed the suspect is a man, but did not provide any additional details about the individual.

An update on the Swedish police website said officers “suspect one of the people in the hospital is the perpetrator”.

Earlier, students at several nearby schools were being kept indoors “for security purposes”.

“We don’t want members of the public to go there,” Forest warned.

Nearby hospitals are clearing their emergency rooms and intensive care units to free up space for patients, local reports said.

Teacher Lena Warenmark told SVT, Swedish public radio, she heard around 10 gunshots close to her study.

The Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said that today is “a very painful day for all in Sweden” as he shared that those who had a “normal school day” replaced “with terror” are all in his thoughts.

“Being confined to a classroom with fear for your own life is a nightmare that no one should have to experience,” Kristersson said in a post on X.

“The government is in close contact with the Police Authority and is closely monitoring developments.”

His justice minister, Gunnar Strommer, echoed those remarks, telling local broadcaster SVT “the news of an attack at Orebro is very serious”.

A news conference will be held later tonight by the Swedish government about the incident, local media report.

The Trump administration reportedly intends to merge the US government’s main overseas aid agency with the state department, as workers were asked to stay out of its Washington headquarters.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters he was now the acting head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the agency that distributes billions of dollars in aid around the world.

Democratic lawmakers have called it an “illegal, unconstitutional” move that would hurt poor people abroad, harm national security and reduce US influence on the global stage.

President Donald Trump and one of his top advisers, billionaire Elon Musk, have been strongly critical of the agency.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump alleged the agency run by “radical left lunatics” was getting away with “tremendous fraud”, but did not provide names or details.

USAID was established in 1961 by President John F Kennedy, and has around 10,000 employees and a budget of nearly $40bn (£32.25bn), out of a total of $68bn in US government foreign aid spending.

Calling USAID “a completely unresponsive agency”, Secretary Rubio said that a lot of functions of the organisation “are going to continue”.

“They’re going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy,” he told reporters in El Salvador.

It’s not clear how the administration plans to implement such a change.

A former USAID official hit back at Rubio and Trump, saying the organisation represented “the best and brightest that the American government has to offer”. Speaking to the BBC, Gillian Caldwell described “absolute chaos and fear” at USAID, as Trump’s team had “literally decapitated the agency”.

USAID will remain a humanitarian aid entity, despite its merger into the state department, three officials told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

The developments follow comments from Musk, who heads an unofficial cost-cutting agency, that the administration was planning to shut USAID down.

Over the weekend, two top security officials were placed on leave and the agency’s website went dark. Workers have since been told to stay at home. Hundreds of employees have also been locked out of their email, according to an internal message obtained by the BBC.

• What is USAID and why is Trump reportedly poised to close it?
• How a US freeze upended global aid in a matter of days

Global aid was upended in a matter of days late last month, after President Trump froze all foreign assistance provided by the US on his return to the White House.

The turmoil was felt in countries including Afghanistan, where American aid has been funding life-saving services for women and children. One midwife told the BBC that all medical centres funded by USAID had closed and dozens of workers had told to stay at home.

In Syria, a “stop work” message was also received by hundreds of staff operating the Al-Hol displacement camp in the north-east. There, it is the job of humanitarian workers to stabilise the site – which holds 40,000 people, mostly women and children – displaced from areas previously controlled by the Islamic State group.

Outside USAID offices, Democratic Party lawmakers said the moves were against the law and that shuttering the agency would harm national security.

“It’s not only a gift to our adversaries… it is plain illegal,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, suggesting that the likes of China and Russia could be emboldened by weakened American influence on the world stage.

The situation in Syria was cited by Congressman Johnny Olszewski, who also represents Maryland. “This is real life, this is dangerous and this is serious,” he said.

Others alleged that Musk was motivated by his business interests.

“Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China, and China is cheering at this action today,” claimed Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

Musk has been put in charge of an initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), a team that is not an official government body but given broad leeway by Trump to slash government spending.

Its legal status is unclear, as is its authority to order the shutdown of government programmes without consulting Congress in the case of USAID, for example. Doge has already been the subject of several court challenges.

Over the weekend, Musk posted dozens of messages including allegations that the agency was rife with fraud and corruption.

On X, the social network that he owns, he called USAID “evil”, a “criminal organisation” and a “radical-left political psy op” – short for “psychological operation”, a term commonly used online to allege a conspiracy or cover-up.

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.”

On Monday, US media – citing unnamed White House sources – said Musk had been given an unpaid job as a part-time “special government employee”, a status which would potentially make him subject to several rules about financial disclosures and conflicts of interest.

At the White House, Trump defended Musk’s handling of the situation, saying the tech tycoon had “access only to letting people go that he thinks are no good, if we agree with him, and it’s only if we agree with him”.

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said.

USAID distributes billions in aid to non-governmental organisations, aid groups and non-profits around the world.

With its website down, several key information hubs, including an international famine tracker and decades of aid records, were unavailable.

Top officials have been placed on leave or resigned in the last several days following clashes with Musk’s Doge, including over requests that employees of the unofficial department be given access to a highly secure area used for reviewing classified information, the Washington Post and CNN reported this weekend.

“No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances,” Katie Miller, Doge spokesperson, wrote on X.

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, USAID chief of staff Matt Hopson, also resigned, the Washington Post reported.

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, 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, local broadcasters 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.”

The US trial of the man charged with stabbing writer Sir Salman Rushdie two and a half years ago is due to begin on Tuesday after it was twice delayed.

Hadi Matar was charged with attempted murder and assault for the August 2022 attack that left Mr Rushdie blind in one eye.

Mr Matar, 27, has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The jury is due to be selected on Tuesday at Chautauqua County Court in New York. The trial will reportedly see Mr Rushdie give evidence and face the accused in court.

It had originally been scheduled to begin in January 2024 but Mr Matar’s defence team appealed for the trial to be delayed on the grounds that Mr Rushdie’s then upcoming book – a memoir about the attack – could be used as evidence and the defendant’s team wished to review its contents first.

Then in October, the trial was placed on hold after Mr Matar’s legal team made a request to move the trial to another county.

As reported by the New York Post, Mr Matar’s lawyers argued the defendant risked an unfair trial at the Chautauqua County Court in Mayfield, given the publicity around the high-profile case and the lack of an Arab-American community in the small county.

The request was unsuccessful and the trial will take place in Chautauqua County as planned.

In August 2022, the Indian-born British-American author was put on a ventilator and spent six weeks in hospital after being stabbed up to 10 times on stage at an event in New York state.

Mr Matar, who was 24 at the time, is accused of sprinting on stage and carrying out the attack.

The injuries resulted in damage to Mr Rushdie’s liver, lost vision in one eye and a paralysed hand caused by nerve damage to his arm.

The Satanic Verses author, who is due to appear in court during the trial, previously told BBC Newshour he was unsure if he wanted to face his alleged attacker in court.

“I’m in two minds about it,” he said. “There’s one bit of me that actually wants to go and stand on the court and look at him and there’s another bit of me that just can’t be bothered.”

Henry Reese, moderator of the event Mr Rushdie was attending at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York state, was also injured in the attack.

Separate to the Chautauqua County Court charges, Mr Matar was charged by a federal court with providing material support to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah, according to an indictment unsealed last July.

Hezbollah is designated a terrorist organisation by Western states, Israel, Gulf Arab countries and the Arab League.

Mr Rushdie, now 77, is an acclaimed writer who previously spent several years in hiding after the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses – a fictional story inspired by the life of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad – triggered threats against his life.

The surrealist, post-modern novel sparked outrage among some Muslims, who considered its content to be blasphemous – insulting to a religion or god – and was banned in some countries.

A year after the book’s release, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for Mr Rushdie’s execution. He offered a $3m (£2.5m) reward in a fatwa – a legal decree issued by an Islamic religious leader.

Australia has banned DeepSeek from all government devices and systems over what it says is the security risk the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup poses.

DeepSeek stunned the world in January when it unveiled a chatbot which matched the performance level of US rivals, while claiming it had a much lower training cost.

Billions of dollars were wiped off stock markets internationally, including in Australia, where stocks tied to AI – such as chipmaker Brainchip – fell sharply overnight.

The Australian government has insisted the ban is not due to the app’s Chinese origins but because of the “unacceptable risk” it poses to national security.

DeepSeek has been approached for comment.

Australia’s move specifically requires any government entities to “prevent the use or installation of DeepSeek products, applications and web services”, as well as remove any previously installed, on any government system or device.

That means a wide range of workers will not be able to use the tools in the country, including those working in such varied areas as the Australia Electoral Commission and Bureau of Meteorology.

It is less clear whether it means DeepSeek would be banned from public sector computers in different areas of the economy, such as schools.

The ban does not extend to devices of private citizens.

Western countries have a track record of being suspicious of Chinese tech – notably telecoms firm Huawei and the social media platform, TikTok – both of which have been restricted on national security grounds.

The initial reaction to DeepSeek – which quickly became the most downloaded free app in the UK and US – appeared to be different.

President Donald Trump described it as a “wake up call” for the US but said overall it could be a positive development, if it lowered AI costs.

Since then, though, doubts about it have started to be voiced.

An Australian science minister previously said in January that countries needed to be “very careful” about DeepSeek, citing “data and privacy” concerns.

The chatbot was removed from app stores after its privacy policy was questioned in Italy. The Italian goverment previously temporarily blocked ChatGPT over privacy concerns in March 2023.

Regulators in South Korea, Ireland and France have all begun investigations into how DeepSeek handles user data, which it stores in servers in China.

The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has also said the US is now looking into possible security implications.

The US Navy has reportedly banned its members from using DeepSeek – though it has not confirmed this to the BBC.

• What data does DeepSeek collect?
• Is China’s AI tool as good as it seems?
• Watch DeepSeek refuse to respond to question about Tiananmen Square

Generally, AI tools will analyse the prompts sent to them to improve their product.

This is true of apps such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini as much as it is DeepSeek.

All of them gather and keep information, including email addresses and dates of birth.

However, security experts have previously warned that anyone working on confidential or national security areas needs to be aware of the risk of whatever they enter into chatbots being kept and analysed by the developers of those tools.

DeepSeek has also faced accusations it has unfairly used US tech.

OpenAI has complained that rivals, including in China, are using its own work to make rapid progress with their own products.

Five men have been sentenced to death by hanging in Nigeria’s Kano state for the 2023 murder of a woman they accused of witchcraft.

The convicted men attacked Dahare Abubakar, 67, as she was working on her farm, beating and stabbing her to death.

Ms Abubakar’s family went to the authorities and the suspects were swiftly arrested in a village 45km (28 miles) from Kano – the largest city in northern Nigeria.

The case gained attention across the country and raised discussions over how people in rural areas continue to be murdered following witchcraft accusations.

The ones who make the claims without any proof believe that those they accuse are responsible for either a death of a family member, sickness or misfortune.

Giving his ruling, Judge Usman Na’abba said the the prosecution had proven its case against the five men beyond reasonable doubt.

The prosecutor, Abba Sorondiki, said he hoped the judgement would deter others from making wrongful accusations and then taking matters into their own hands.

The court heard that the victim was murdered after the sick wife of one of the accused, Abdulaziz Yahaya, had a dream that she was being pursued by Ms Abubakar, who was holding a knife.

Yahaya then organised a group to confront Ms Abubakar, which resulted in her murder.

“There have been similar cases like this but this is the first time we are seeing up to five people sentenced to death for murder over wrongful witchcraft accusation,” Mr Sorondiki told the BBC.

The victim’s son, Musa Yahaya, said that the day his mother was killed was the worst day of his life and that he was pleased to see justice being served.

“I am happy because they would get the same treatment they meted out to my mother,” he said.

Defence lawyer Ma’aruf Yakasai said his clients plan to appeal against the verdict.

The death penalty is rarely carried out in Nigeria and those convicted often spend the rest of their lives in prison on death row.

• The man battling Nigeria’s ‘witch-hunters’
• The hunt for Nigerians who can change into cats
• How talk of witches stirs emotions in Nigeria
• Accused of witchcraft then murdered for land

US President Donald Trump has taken the first step towards setting up a sovereign wealth fund for the United States, and suggested that it could end up buying TikTok.

The president signed an executive order on Monday, to kickstart the process, saying the fund would soon be “one of the biggest”.

More than 90 countries have sovereign wealth funds, investing surplus income for the benefit of future generations. However, the US currently runs a budget deficit.

“We’re going to create a lot of wealth for the fund,” Trump told reporters, without clarifying where the money would come from.

When Trump first floated the idea of a sovereign wealth fund during his election campaign, he suggested it could be funded by “tariffs and other intelligent things”.

He has already announced plans to impose tariffs on imports from America’s three biggest trading partners – China, Mexico and Canada.

But on Tuesday the levies on Mexico and Canada were paused for 30 days.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the fund would be set up within the next 12 months and that the plan was to monetise assets currently owned by the US government “for the American people”.

Saudi Arabia and Norway have two of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, supported by the proceeds of fossil fuel sales. They invest in companies and projects around the world.

President Trump has previously said that a US sovereign wealth fund would finance “great national endeavours” including infrastructure projects such as airports, roads as well as medical research.

After signing the executive order for the fund’s creation, he also floated the idea that it could buy up the social media platform TikTok.

The Chinese-owned social media company was briefly taken offline in the US last month, over national security concerns, after the previous administration ordered its owner to sell its US operations or face a ban.

Trump has delayed the ban, promising to find a solution, after TikTok’s US users protested at its shutdown.

“We’re going to be doing something, perhaps with TikTok, and perhaps not,” Trump said. “If we make the right deal, we’ll do it. Otherwise, we won’t… we might put that in the sovereign wealth fund.”

However, the president has also recently said that technology giant Microsoft was in discussions to acquire TikTok and that he would like to see a “bidding war” over the sale of the social media app.

Other big names in tech, including Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, have also been floated as possible buyers.

Imprisoned rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs is expected to face more than 10 new civil lawsuits in the coming days, according to a lawyer who represents dozens of accusers.

The announcement from Tony Buzbee came as he filed another legal case in New York on behalf of an unnamed male, who claims he was assaulted by the music mogul in 2015.

The lawsuit states the accuser, a 23-year-old man, was performing at an event that Combs was attending, and hoped to be signed to his label, Bad Boy Records. The accuser said he was drugged at an afterparty and assaulted, the suit states.

A spokesperson for Combs did not immediately respond but the rapper has vehemently denied the allegations against him – which has included drugging, assaulting and raping people.

He’s also facing federal charges in a racketeering and sex trafficking scheme, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Mr Buzbee, who is based out of Texas, has played a key role in numerous cases against Combs over the past year, including one that also named Jay-Z as a defendant (Jay Z has denied these allegations and asked the court to dismiss the case).

He said he plans to file more than 10 lawsuits in the next seven to 10 days, as a deadline approaches on 1 March in New York – the last day of a law that allows victims of past sexual assault to file civil lawsuits, despite an expired statute of limitations.

The new lawsuit stems back to 2015 when the plaintiff secured an opportunity to perform at a nightclub in the Los Angeles area, where Combs was in attendance.

Combs’ associate informed the accuser that the rapper had heard of his talent and would be watching, the lawsuit states. He was told that if he performed well, Combs might be interested in discussing a deal with Bad Boy Records – a successful record label the rapper founded in 1993.

• BBC Sounds: Get the latest updates on the Diddy allegations in the weekly podcast, Diddy On Trial
• ‘He thought of himself as a king’: The parties that led to Diddy’s downfall

After what the plaintiff believed to be an “excellent performance”, he was invited to attend an afterparty, where the VIP section contained “countless bottles of Combs’ vodka, Ciroc,” as well as “substances such as marijuana, cocaine, and ecstasy”, the lawsuit states.

An associate of the music mogul handed the accuser a drink, saying it was from Combs. After drinking it, the plaintiff “quickly felt lightheaded” and realised he had been “drugged”, the lawsuit states. He then lost consciousness.

The lawsuit states that while he drifted in and out, he observed Combs and his entourage allegedly engaging in “group sexual activity” with attendees who appeared “either drugged, unconscious, or as if they were paid escorts.”

He said he woke up to being assaulted by Combs, the lawsuit states. When he tried to leave, Combs’ security intervened and the rapper threatened to derail his career chances, the lawsuit alleges.

Combs is currently facing more than 30 civil lawsuits alleging sexual assault and misconduct. He’s currently in a New York jail awaiting a federal criminal trial on sex trafficking and racketeering.

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 Netanyahu’s 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 held 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 indicated that it considered the meeting with Witkoff in Washington to mark the scheduled start of negotiations about the second stage of the ceasefire deal.

Following his talks with the presidential envoy, the PM’s office announced that Israel was preparing for a “working-level delegation to leave for Doha at the end of this week in order to discuss technical details related to the continued implementation of the agreement”.

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.

However, he told reporters on Monday that he had “no guarantees that the peace is going to hold”. Witkoff added: “It’s holding so far, so we’re certainly hopeful.”

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 normalise 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.”

A second woman is confirmed to have died in flooding which has inflicted “incredible” devastation on communities in northern Australia.

Police said the 82-year-old woman’s body was found in a cane paddock in Queensland on Tuesday, two days after a 63-year-old woman died when a dinghy she was in overturned during a rescue attempt.

The region has been inundated since Saturday, with parts of northern Queensland seeing nearly 2m (6.5 ft) of rain.

By Tuesday, conditions were starting to ease – although Queensland Premier David Crisafulli warned it was still “a disaster that’s going to test the resolve of people” during an interview with broadcaster ABC.

He described the devastation as “incredible”, but noted weather conditions had been “really kind” in recent hours. Thousands had begun to return to their homes.

In Townsville, locals woke on Tuesday to grey skies and drizzle, and the news that predicted flooding levels had not materialised there. It was a stark contrast to the intense downpours which have battered the region over the past few days.

“We believe that the danger has passed,” Townsville Local Disaster Management Group chair Andrew Robinson told reporters.

Pointing to earlier forecasts which had suggested up to 2,000 Townsville homes could have faced flood risks, Crisafulli said that “the city had dodged a bullet”.

Local resident Jo Berry told the BBC she and her family were among those returning home on Tuesday, after spending a sleepless night monitoring the rainfall.

“People talk about PTSD when it rains here and I totally understand,” says Ms Berry, formerly from Leicester in the UK.

“We’ve been in the house here for over 20 years, and have been through a few cyclone events and the 2019 flooding so it is not our first rodeo,” she adds, referring to a flooding disaster which caused A$1.24bn (£620m; $770m) in damage.

On Monday night, other local residents told the BBC they were “on a knife edge” as they waited to see whether their houses would survive.

But further north in the state, power outages and damaged roads have made it difficult to assess the full extent of the destruction in towns such as Ingham and Cardwell.

Crisafulli said early reports suggested the damage was “quite frankly incredible” and that Ingham, which is almost entirely without electricity, “remains the biggest challenge”.

“There are people who have been inundated at home, in their businesses and in their farms,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

Footage published in local media showed long lines at the town’s supermarket as people waited for critical supplies. Crisafulli said that amid the blackout the local hospital was operating as normal, and a petrol station was open.

The flooding has caused damage to the area’s homes, crops and coastline, local MP Nick Dametto said in a video posted online.

“The inundation is something that I have never seen before,” he said.

Home to fewer than 5,000 people, Ingham was already reeling after the 63-year-old woman died when a State Emergency Service (SES) dinghy capsized during a rescue attempt on Sunday.

The second woman’s body was found on Tuesday just north of Ingham after a neighbour raised the alarm. She was last seen on Monday night in a house, Queensland Police said in a statement.

More than 8,000 properties remain without power across northern Queensland, according to the state’s energy provider, and the partial collapse of a critical highway continues to hinder efforts to assist some of the hardest-hit areas.

Crisafulli said the recovery effort would “take some time” and that the priority in the coming hours would be to work with the army to get power generators to isolated communities and “bring them back online”.

He added that federal funding would help reconstruct the battered Bruce Highway – the state’s main thoroughfare which stretches 1,673km (1,039 miles) from the south.

Located in the tropics, northern Queensland is vulnerable to destructive cyclones, storms, and flooding.

Speaking to the BBC in Townsville, Scott Heron, a local resident and climate expert, said the latest disaster was not unexpected.

“For a long time, climate scientists have been clear that extreme weather events will become more extreme, and we are seeing that,” said Prof Heron , who works at James Cook University and is the Unesco Chair on Climate Vulnerability of Heritage.

Prof Heron urged politicians to consider this as they planned recovery and rebuilding efforts, such as to the Bruce Highway.

It would be “wasting public money” if infrastructure planning, particularly for long-term projects including roads and bridges, did not “incorporate changing threats due to climate change”, he said.

A police officer has denied he claimed to have experienced harassment from Chelsea and Australia striker Samantha Kerr “purely to get a criminal charge over the line”.

The footballer, 31, denies causing racially aggravated harassment to PC Stephen Lovell during an incident at Twickenham police station in south-west London in the early hours of 30 January 2023.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) authorised the Met Police to charge Ms Kerr after PC Lovell submitted a second witness statement, a jury at Kingston Crown Court heard.

The CPS initially ruled that the evidence did not meet the threshold to charge Ms Kerr following the officer’s first statement, given 10 months before the second.

Footage from the officer’s body-worn camera was played to the jury on Monday, in which Ms Kerr uses an expletive and tells the officer he is “stupid and white”.

The court heard that PC Lovell gave a witness statement on 30 January 2023 and a second on 5 December.

Grace Forbes, defending, questioned PC Lovell about his two statements.

She told the court: “Your first statement made no mention of stupid and white having had an impact.”

PC Lovell confirmed it did not.

When asked if he was “determined” to pursue Ms Kerr “through the criminal courts”, the officer replied: “Yes.”

“The CPS identified that there was no evidence of harassment, alarm or distress being caused,” Ms Forbes said.

“[I am] going to suggest you are claiming to have experienced this impact purely to get a criminal charge over the line.”

PC Lovell denied this.

Prosecution barrister Bill Emlyn Jones KC asked PC Lovell if he had been concerned about describing his feelings when he gave his first statement.

On re-examination, PC Lovell said Ms Kerr’s words made him feel “belittled and upset”.

He added: “I didn’t make something up to get a charge over the line.”

PC Lovell told the court that in his second statement he said Ms Kerr’s words had left him feeling “shocked, upset and humiliated” and that her comments about race “were too far and I took great offence to them”.

He was asked by the prosecution if that statement was true, to which he answered “yes”.

Ms Kerr confirmed she had been drinking on a night out with her partner, fellow footballer Kristie Mewis, when she was sick out of the window of a taxi on the way home.

The pair were driven to Twickenham police station by the taxi driver who complained the passengers refused to pay clean-up costs and smashed the vehicle’s rear window, it is alleged.

The court was played the audio recording of a voluntary police interview given by Ms Kerr on 30 January 2023.

Ms Kerr said that she had felt “very threatened for my life” in the taxi, saying the driver had locked the doors, and that she “didn’t feel heard or protected in the police station”.

Ms Kerr initially said she did not recall saying the words “stupid and white” to PC Stephen Lovell.

After she was played the police body worn footage she was asked if she had made PC Lovell feel harassed, alarmed or distressed.

She said: “No, not at all.”

Asked if she was aware her words could be perceived as racist, she replied in the interview, “I am aware anything could be perceived as racist for sure”.

“I was obviously intoxicated and I shouldn’t have been so front-footed,” she added.

The trial continues.