Friedrich Merz’s conservatives have won Germany’s election, well ahead of rival parties but short of the 30% vote-share they had expected.

“Let’s celebrate tonight and in the morning we’ll get to work,” he told cheering supporters. He said he was “aware of the responsibility that now lies ahead” of him.

The other winner was the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who are celebrating a record second-place result of 20.8%.

The AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, did a victory lap of her supporters, but even her party had hoped for a greater result and the mood at AfD HQ was subdued.

As results came in during the early hours of Monday, it became clear the AfD was far ahead of the other parties in the east, with a projected 34% according to a survey for public broadcaster ZDF.

“Germans have voted for change,” said Alice Weidel. She said Friedrich Merz’s attempt to forge a coalition would ultimately end in failure: “We’ll have fresh elections – I don’t think we’ll have to wait another four years.”

But just as the election map turned light blue in the east, much of the rest of Germany turned black – the colour of the CDU.

After the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition late last year, Merz had asked the electorate for a strong mandate to form a clear-cut coalition with one other party.

That would enable him to solve as many of Germany’s problems as he could in four years, he said, from a stagnant economy to closing its borders to irregular migrants.

German voters had other ideas. They came out in big numbers, with a 83% turnout not seen since before reunification in 1990, but Merz’s Christian Democrats had been looking for more than the 28.6% of the vote they and their Bavarian sister party received.

Merz has ruled out working with the AfD. There is a taboo or “firewall” preventing mainstream parties in Germany from operating with the far right.

But his most likely partner, the Social Democrats, have suffered their worst ever result with 16.4%.

Their leader, outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said the election results were a bitter defeat for the party, and he would not be taking part in negotiations for a coalition.

Because of the CDU’s relatively lacklustre performance, there was initially some doubt that two parties would be enough for a coalition.

Germany has just been through four years of a three-party coalition and the only other realistic partner was the Greens, whose leader, Robert Habeck, Merz had ridiculed as a “representative for heat pumps” on the eve of the vote.

Read more on the German election:

Big challenges ahead for Merz in divided Germany

Merz: Risk-taker who flirted with far right

Merz, 69, has never held a ministerial job, but he has promised if he becomes the next German chancellor to show leadership in Europe and beef up support for Ukraine.

Most Germans have been shocked by the open backing that billionaire Elon Musk and US Vice-President JD Vance gave Alternative for Germany in the election. Vance was accused of meddling in the vote during a visit to Munich, while Elon Musk made repeated remarks on his X platform.

It did Alice Weidel and her party no harm at all, as the AfD enjoyed a 10-point increase in support on four years ago. But she also benefited from a successful TikTok campaign, that drew in big numbers of young voters.

Nevertheless, President Donald Trump welcomed Merz’s victory. He said it was proof that Germans were, like Americans, tired of “the no common sense agenda, especially on energy and immigration”.

If it was an overture, Merz did not take it as one. He told a roundtable TV discussion on Sunday night that it had become clear in the past week that the Trump administration was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”.

Trump has bizarrely described Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator” and he appeared to accuse Kyiv of starting the war, which Russia unleashed on its neighbour exactly three years ago.

Merz said his “absolute priority” would be to “strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can achieve real independence from the US step by step”.

Merz’s victory was quickly welcomed across much of Europe. France’s Emmanuel Macron spoke of uniting at a time of uncertainty to “face the major challenges of the world and our continent”, while UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer sought to “enhance our joint security and deliver growth for both our countries”.

Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats continue to rely on older voters for their success, while voters aged 18-24 appear to be far more interested in both the AfD and another party, the Left, which surged in the polls in recent weeks.

Not long ago the Left was heading out of the parliament with poll numbers well below the 5% threshold.

But a series of TikTok videos showing co-leader Heidi Reichinnek giving fiery speeches in parliament went viral and they ended up close to 9%, and a quarter of the younger vote, according to an ARD survey.

Kyiv no longer looks like a city at war in the way that it was three years ago. The shops are open and commuters get delayed in traffic jams on their way to work. But in the days since 12 February this year when US President Donald Trump rang Russia’s Vladimir Putin to send a 90-minute political embrace from the White House to the Kremlin, 2022’s old nightmares of national extinction have returned. Ukrainians used to get angry about the way that President Joe Biden held back weapons systems and restricted the way Ukraine used the ones that arrived here. Even so, they knew whose side he was on.

Instead, Donald Trump has delivered a stream of exaggeration, half-truths and outright lies about the war that echo the views of President Putin. They include his dismissal of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a dictator who does not deserve a seat at the table when America and Russia decide the future of his country. The biggest lie Trump has told is that Ukraine started the war.

Trump’s negotiating strategy is to offer concessions even before serious talks have started. Instead of putting pressure on the country that broke international law by invading its neighbour, leading to huge destruction and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, he has turned on Ukraine.

His public statements have offered Russia important concessions, declaring that Ukraine will not join Nato and accepting that it will keep at least some of the land it seized by force. Vladimir Putin’s record shows he respects strength. He regards concessions as a sign of weakness.

He has not budged from a demand for even more Ukrainian land than his men now occupy. Immediately after the first talks, held in Saudi Arabia, between Russia and the US since the 2022 invasion, Putin’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov repeated his demand that no Nato troops would be allowed into Ukraine to provide security guarantees.

A veteran European diplomat who has dealt with the Russians and the Americans told me that when the grizzled, highly experienced Lavrov met Trump’s novice Secretary of State Marco Rubio “he would have eaten him like a soft-boiled egg.”

A few days ago, as Trump threw more insults at Ukraine’s president, I went to the heavily guarded government quarter in Kyiv to meet Ihor Brusylo, who is a senior adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky and deputy head of his office. Brusylo acknowledged how much pressure Trump is putting on them.

“It’s very, very tough. These are very hard, challenging times,” Brusylo said. “I wouldn’t say that now it’s easier than it was in 2022. It’s like you live it all over again.”

Brusylo said Ukrainians, and their president, were as determined to fight to stay independent as they had been in 2022.

“We’re a sovereign country. We are part of Europe, and we will remain so.”

In the weeks after Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the sound of battle on the edge of Kyiv echoed around streets that were almost empty. Checkpoints and barricades, walls of sandbags and tank traps welded from steel girders were rushed out onto Kyiv’s broad boulevards. At the railway station, fifty thousand civilians a day, mostly women and children, were boarding trains going west, away from the Russians.

The platforms were packed and every time a train pulled in, came another surge of panic as people pushed and shoved to get on. In those freezing days, in bitter wind and flurries of snow, it felt as if the colours of the 21st century were fading into an old monochrome newsreel that Europeans had believed until then was safely consigned to the vaults of history.

President Zelensky, in Joe Biden’s words, “didn’t want to hear” American warnings that an invasion was imminent. Putin rattling a Russian sabre was one thing. A full-scale invasion, with tens of thousands of troops and columns of armour, surely belonged in the past.

Putin believed Russia’s mighty and modernised army would make quick work of its obstinate, independent neighbour and its recalcitrant president. Ukraine’s western allies also thought Russia would win quickly. On television news channels, retired generals talked about smuggling in light weapons to arm an insurgency while the west imposed sanctions and hoped for the best.

As Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, Germany delivered 5,000 ballistic combat helmets instead of offensive weapons. Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv and once heavyweight boxing champion of the world, complained to a German newspaper that it was “a joke… What kind of support will Germany send next, pillows?”

Zelensky turned down any idea of leaving his capital to form a government in exile. He abandoned his presidential dark suit for military attire, and in videos and on social media told Ukrainians he would fight alongside them.

Ukraine defeated the Russian thrust towards the capital. Once the Ukrainians had demonstrated that they could fight well, the attitude of the Americans and Europeans changed. Arms supplies increased.

“Putin’s mistake was that he prepared for a parade not a war” a senior Ukrainian official recalled, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He didn’t think Ukraine would fight. He thought they would be welcomed with speeches and flowers.”

On 29 March 2022, the Russians retreated from Kyiv. Hours after they left, we drove, nervously, into the chaotic, damaged landscape of Kyiv’s satellite towns, Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel. On the roads the Russians had hoped to use for a triumphant entry into Kyiv, I saw bodies of civilians left where they were killed. Charred tyres were stacked around some of them, failed attempts to burn the evidence of war crimes.

Survivors spoke of the brutality of the Russian occupiers. A woman showed me the grave where she had buried her son single-handed after he was casually shot dead as he crossed a road. Russian soldiers threw her out of her house. In the garden, they left piles of empty bottles of vodka, whisky and gin that they had looted and drunk. Hastily abandoned Russian encampments in the forests near the roads were choked with rubbish their soldiers had discarded over the weeks of occupation.

Professional, disciplined armies do not eat and sleep next to rotting piles of their own refuse.

Three years on, the war has changed. Although Kyiv has revived, it still has nightly alerts as its air defences detect incoming Russian missiles and drones. The war is closer, and more deadly, along the front line, more than 1,000 kilometres long, that runs from the northern border with Russia and then east and south down to the Black Sea. It is lined with destroyed, almost deserted villages and towns. To the east, in what was Kyiv’s industrial heartland of Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian forces grind forward slowly, at a huge cost in men and machines.

Last August, Ukraine sent troops into Russia, capturing a pocket of land across the border in Kursk. They are still there, fighting for land that Zelensky hopes to use as a bargaining chip.

Along the border with Kursk, in the snow-covered forests of north-eastern Ukraine, the geopolitical storm set off by Donald Trump is still not much more than a menacing, distant rumble. It will get here, especially if the US president follows up his harsh and mocking verbal attacks on president Zelensky with a final end to military aid and intelligence-sharing, and even worse from Ukraine’s perspective, an attempt to impose a peace deal that favours Russia.

For now, the rhythm built up in three years of war goes on, and the forest could be a throwback to the blood-soaked twentieth century. Fighting men move silently through the trees, along trenches and into bunkers dug deep into the frozen earth. In stretches of open ground, anti-tank defences made of concrete and steel stud the fields.

The 21st century is more present in the dry and warm underground bunkers. Generators and solar panels power laptops and screens linked to the outside world, and bring in the news feeds.

Just because bad news arrives doesn’t mean that the soldiers look at it. In a deep dug-out lined with bunks made of rough planks from the local sawmill, with nails hammered into the timber to hang weapons and winter uniforms, Evhen, a 30-year-old corporal said he had more urgent matters to think about – his men and the wife and two small children he left at home when he joined up, ten months ago.

That’s a long time on the front line in Kursk. He looks and sounds like a combat veteran. He has faced the North Koreans who have been sent to join the battle there by their leader, Putin’s ally, Kim Jong Un.

“Koreans fight till the end. Even if he is injured and you come to him, he might just blow himself up to take more of us with him.”

All the soldiers we interviewed asked to be referred to by first names for their own security. Evhen seemed relaxed about fighting on without the Americans.

“Help is not something that can last forever. We have it today, we don’t have it tomorrow.”

Ukraine, he said, was making many more of its own weapons. That’s true, especially when it comes to attack drones, but the US still supplies sophisticated systems that have damaged the Russians badly.

Many of the volunteers who took up arms three years ago have either been killed, maimed, or are too exhausted to fight any more. One of Ukraine’s most bitter fault lines runs between those who fight and those who bribe their way out of military service. Evhen said they were better off without them.

“It is better for them to pay not to fight than to come here and run away, tripping us up. It doesn’t bother me much. If they came here, they’d just scarper… they’re deserters.”

War strips away surplus thought. The stakes are straightforward for soldiers preparing to return to the battle in Kursk. Mykola, who commands a company of airborne assault troops, spoke affectionately about the capabilities of their Stryker armoured vehicles, supplied by the Americans.

“Kursk” he says, “shows the enemy, a nuclear weapons state, that a non-nuclear power with a smaller population and a smaller army can come in, capture land and the Russians have been able to do very little about it.”

Putin’s objectives, he said, were clear.

“His task is to seize all of Ukraine, change its legal status, and change the president and government. He wants to destroy our political system and to make Ukraine his vassal state.”

He laughed when I asked whether the Americans and others should trust Vladimir Putin.

“No! I don’t have enough fingers to count how many times Putin lied. To everyone! To the Russians, and to us, and to Western partners. He lied to everyone.”

At a volunteer centre in Kyiv in the first days after the invasion, I met two young students, Maxsym Lutsyk, 19, and Dmytro Kisilenko, 18, who were signing up to fight.

When they lined up alongside men old enough to be their fathers as well as other teenage recruits, they carried camping gear and could have been friends off to a festival, except for their assault rifles. At the time, I wrote “18 and 19-year-old lads have always gone off to war. I thought in Europe we’d got past that.” A few weeks later, Maxsym and Dmytro were in uniform and manning a checkpoint just behind the Kyiv front line, still students joking about their parents.

Both fought in the battle of Kyiv. Dmytro chose to leave the army, his right as a student volunteer, when the fight switched to the east. He is preparing to fight again if necessary, training to be an officer at the National Military University. Maxsym stayed in uniform, serving in the front line in the east for more than two years. Now he is an officer working in military intelligence.

I have stayed in touch with them as, like millions of other young people here, war shapes their adult lives in ways they never expected. Trump’s move towards Moscow makes them feel almost as if they have to start again.

“We mobilised,” Dmytro says. “We mobilised our resources, our people, and I think it’s time that we repeat it once again.”

Unlike the men in the forest on the Kursk border, they follow the news. Donald Trump’s diplomatic and strategic bombshells, starting at the Munich security conference only 10 days ago, reminds them of the infamous deal Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain made at Munich in 1938, forcing Czechoslovakia to capitulate to the demands made by Adolf Hitler.

“It’s similar,” Maxsym said. “The West gives an aggressor an opportunity to occupy some territories. The West is making a deal with the aggressor, with the United States in the role of Great Britain.”

“It’s a very dangerous moment for the entire world, not only for Ukraine,” Maxsym went on. “We can see that Europe is starting to wake up… but if they wanted to be ready for the war, they should [have] begun a few years ago.”

Dmytro agreed about the dangers ahead.

“I think that Donald Trump wants to become like a new Neville Chamberlain… Mr. Trump should be more focused on becoming more like Winston Churchill.”

If you’re a real estate developer, as Donald Trump was before he went into reality TV and then presidential politics, demolition makes money. Acquire a property, tear it down, rebuild and win. The trouble with that strategy in foreign policy is that sovereignty and independence don’t have a price tag. Trump boasts he puts America first, but he is not prepared to accept that non-Americans can feel the same about their own countries.

Since Trump was sworn in for the second time as president of the United States, he has been swinging the wrecking ball. He sent Elon Musk into the federal government to recoup billions of dollars he claims are being stolen or wasted. Abroad, Trump the demolition man has set about the assumptions that underpin the 80-year alliance between the US and European democracies.

Donald Trump is unpredictable, but much of what he is doing he has talked about for years. He is not the first American president to resent the way its European allies have saved money by sheltering behind the US defence budget. The phrase used by his defence secretary Pete Hegseth to his Nato partners, that “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker” was a conscious reference back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

A US government document from 4 November 1959 records his frustration. It says: “The President said that for five years he has been urging the State Department to put the facts of life before the Europeans He thinks the Europeans are close to ‘making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.'”

Trump wants payback. He demanded half a trillion dollars of mineral rights from Ukraine. Zelensky turned that deal down, saying he couldn’t sell his country. He wants security guarantees in exchange for any concessions.

In private, European politicians and diplomats recognise that, with Joe Biden, they gave Ukraine enough military and financial support not to lose to Russia, but never enough to win. The argument for more of the same is that Russia, weakened by sanctions and drained of manpower as its generals squander their men’s lives, will eventually lose a war of attrition. That is far from certain.

Wars usually end with agreements. Germany’s unconditional surrender in 1945 was a rarity. The complaint against Trump is that he has no real plan, so he has followed a gut instinct to get closer to Vladimir Putin, a man he admires. Trump seems to believe that strong leaders from the most powerful states can bend the world into the shape they want. The concessions Trump has already offered to Putin reinforce the idea that his top priority is normalising relations with Russia.

A more credible plan would have been to include a way to make Putin drop ideas that are lodged deep in his geostrategic DNA. One of the strongest is that Ukraine’s sovereignty must be broken and control of the country returned to the Kremlin, as it was in Soviet times and before that in the empire of Russia’s Czars.

It is hard to see how that happens. The idea is as unlikely as Ukraine surrendering its independence to Moscow. Europe’s security is being turned upside down by the war in Ukraine. No wonder its leaders are so badly rattled by all they have heard and seen this month.

Their challenge is to find ways to avoid their young people being forced into the unexpected world of war that has enveloped Maxsym Lutsyk, the 22-year-old Ukrainian combat veteran.

“Everyone changed, and I have changed. I think that every Ukrainian matured during these three years. Everyone who entered the military and everyone who was fighting for such a long time drastically changed.”

A British couple in their seventies have been arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Peter Reynolds, 79, and his wife Barbie, 75, were returning to their home in Bamiyan on 1 February when they were detained.

The couple have been running training projects in Afghanistan for 18 years and their daughter, Sarah Entwistle, told the BBC she had not heard from her parents in more than two weeks.

It is not known exactly what the couple were arrested for but projects run by them include one training mothers and children, which had apparently been approved by the local authorities despite a ban by the Taliban on women working and on education for girls older than the age of 12.

The couple, who originally met at the University of Bath, married in Kabul in 1970. Since 2009 they have been running training projects in five schools in Kabul and one project in Bamiyan training mothers and children.

While the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 saw most of their staff leave – along with most westerners – Mr and Mrs Reynolds insisted on staying put.

After their arrest, the couple were initially able to keep in touch with their four children by text message. The family knew that their parents were being held by the interior ministry and were assured by them that they were “fine”.

Three days later, however, the texts stopped. The children have heard nothing since.

Ms Entwistle, who lives in Daventry, Northamptonshire, told the BBC: “It’s been over two weeks since the messages stopped, and they were taken into custody.

“We would like the Taliban to release them to go back to their home and continue their work.”

She told the Sunday Times: “They said they could not leave when Afghans were in their hour of need.

“They were meticulous about keeping by the rules even as they kept changing.”

Their daughter told the Times: “My mother is 75 and my father almost 80 and [he] needs his heart medication after a mini-stroke. They were just trying to help the country they loved. The idea they are being held because they were teaching mothers with children is outrageous.”

The couple were arrested alongside their American friend Faye Hall and a translator from their business, the PA news agency reported quoting an employee.

The employee, who described the pair as “the most honourable people I have ever met”, said Mr Reynolds had been denied access to heart medication and his condition was “not good”.

Ms Entwistle and her three siblings have written a letter to the Taliban, pleading with them to release their parents.

“We do not understand the reasons behind their arrest,” they wrote. “They have communicated their trust in you, and that as Afghan citizens they will be treated well.”

“We recognise that there have been instances where exchanges have been beneficial for your government and western nations. However, our parents have consistently expressed their commitment to Afghanistan, stating that they would rather sacrifice their lives than become part of ransom negotiations or be traded.”

The Foreign Office is aware two British nationals have been detained in Afghanistan. But assistance is limited by the fact that the UK does not recognise the Taliban and has no embassy in Kabul.

Taliban official sources have told the BBC they arrested British nationals, who they believe were working for an non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Bamiyan province.

An official claimed they had been arrested, about 20 days ago, after using a plane without informing Bamiyan police headquarters or the border security forces.

The Taliban announced women would be banned from working for NGOs in 2022 and in December last year Al Jazeera reported the government had said it would close any NGOs employing women.

US President Donald Trump has appointed right-wing commentator Dan Bongino as deputy director of the FBI.

Trump posted on social media that Bongino was “a man of incredible love and passion for our Country” and would serve under newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel.

Bongino, 50, is former NYPD and Secret Service and worked as part of the protection detail for two presidents – George W Bush and Barack Obama.

He hosts a self-titled podcast whose Facebook posts often attract more attention than those of Fox News and CNN combined.

“Thank you Mr President, Attorney General Bondi, and Director Patel,” Bongino wrote on X in a post after Trump’s announcement.

Trump said in his social media announcement on Sunday that Bongino is “willing and prepared to give up” the podcast “in order to serve”.

“Fairness, Justice, Law and Order will be brought back to America, and quickly,” Trump added.

He said Bongino would do an “incredible job” at the FBI.

Bongino, who has run for Congress three times, hosted the now-president on his daily podcast, The Dan Bongino Show, ahead of last year’s election.

Episodes of his programme from the last week include titles such as “Trump Keeps Delivering And The Libs Are Seething” and “The Only People Who Love Crime Are Criminals!!!”

Talking about his career as a prolific conservative political commentator, Bongino said in 2018: “My life is all about owning the libs now.”

With a combative persona, he can often be found firing back at Trump’s detractors on X, including a long-running spat with horror author Stephen King.

Bongino’s new FBI boss Patel was last week narrowly confirmed by the Senate to the lead the law-enforcement agency that he has long attacked.

Democrats had warned he would seek retribution against Trump’s enemies, although the former prosecutor has denied any plans to pursue political vendettas and has promised to “rebuild” the bureau.

For months, Japan’s entertainment industry has been rocked by a scandal that unseated one of its most popular celebrities and put one of its biggest broadcasters at risk.

But some believe it has also marked a turning point in how cases of sexual assault are perceived in Japan – where traditionally victims have been shamed into silence.

At its heart was Masahiro Nakai, a household name and leading presenter for Fuji TV, one of the country’s biggest broadcasters.

Nakai, who is also a former member of J-Pop boy band SMAP, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a dinner party in 2023.

The revelations, which first appeared last December in weekly tabloid magazine Shukan Bunshun, marked the latest of a series of scandals involving celebrities in Japan, including that of late entertainment mogul Johnny Kitagawa, who was found by investigators to have abused hundreds of boys and young men over six decades.

While Nakai didn’t admit guilt, he apologised for “causing trouble” in a statement and said that he had “resolved” the matter with the woman in a settlement, reportedly worth more than half a million dollars.

But as public anger mounted, Nakai, who has also denied using force against the woman, was also forced to announce his retirement from the entertainment industry in January. Another channel, the Tokyo Broadcasting System has also stopped airing a program that Nakai regularly appeared on as an MC.

The impact on Fuji TV has been devastating.

The broadcaster’s reputation is now in ruins, its revenue threatened and some of its top executives have been forced to resign.

High profile companies like Nissan and Toyota were among those who pulled advertising from the broadcaster as public anger mounted. Fuji TV has since admitted it allowed Nakai to continue presenting shows even after finding about the allegations.

“If this had happened 10 years ago, there would not have been this outcry,” Keiko Kojima who worked in Japan’s media industry for 15 years as a TV presenter, told the BBC.

Sexual violence against women is one of Japan’s worst kept secrets. A 2020 survey claimed that more than 70% of sexual assaults in the country go unreported. And according to a 2024 study published in the International Journal of Asian Studies, for every 1,000 rapes in Japan, only 10–20 result in a criminal conviction – and fewer than half of convicted rapists are incarcerated.

“There’s still a prevalent attitude of ‘Shoganai ‘ or ‘there’s nothing you can do’ that is being projected on women – so they’re encouraged to keep silent,” Machiko Osawa, professor emeritus at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo, told the BBC.

She added that women were seldom believed and did not have proper mechanisms to even report such incidents, which contributed to this culture of silence.

Ms Kojima said that the media industry in particular, has long had a culture of impunity and lack of accountability where many young women felt they must keep silent to keep their jobs.

“It was common for men to make rude comments about women’s bodies or appearance or age. I remember my colleagues and I being asked how many people we’ve had sex with,” she said.

“We were expected to reply with a sense of humour without getting angry or offended. I saw sexual harassment and other forms of derogatory treatment of women on a daily basis. For a woman, adapting to these situations was the only way to become a full-fledged TV or media professional.”

The Fuji TV case has also raised the question of whether dinners and drinking parties involving celebrities and young women were common practice.

Although Shukan Bunshun retracted an earlier report that claimed the alleged assault took place at a party organised by Fuji TV, Ms Kojima told the BBC that it was indeed common to use women as “tools for entertaining”.

“In Japanese working culture, it’s an everyday practice to half-forcibly take young female employees to events to entertain clients.”

“Men are happy when young women join them. The idea that women are like a gift and that taking a young woman with you is a way of offering hospitality to the other person is very common.”

That is why the fallout of this scandal has encouraged women’s rights activists.

Minori Kithara, one of the founders of the Flower Demo movement – where groups of sexual violence victims and their supporters gather in public spaces on the 11th of every month – admitted she was surprised at how swiftly and severely the sponsors reacted.

“Even if it’s more of self-preservation than human rights for sponsors, this is a turning point for the MeToo movement in Japan. It’s up to us how big we make it,” she told the BBC.

Nearly 50 companies have walked away from the now tarnished Fuji TV.

The government has also withdrawn all its recent and planned advertisements with the network.

The Japanese government has called on the broadcaster to regain the trust of viewers and sponsors. So far it seems to have done neither.

The scandal and Fuji TV’s role in hiding it, sent the company on a crisis-management frenzy that seems to have dug it deeper into disgrace and fuelled more public anger.

Then Fuji TV president Koichi Minato admitted that the company had known about the allegation shortly after the alleged incident.

But he said they chose not to disclose it at the time because they “prioritised the woman’s physical and mental recovery as well as the protection of her privacy.”

After a press conference which it held in the hope of defusing the outrage turned into a PR disaster, the company held a second one that lasted 10 hours – intended to show remorse.

Both Fuji TV’s chairman Shuji Kano and its President Koichi Minato stepped down – bowing humbly as they announced their resignations.

It was announced that the company’s executive vice president Kenji Shimizu would replace Mr Minato as president.

But these were seen as mere face and revenue saving exercises rather than substantial change, especially because the president’s replacement was of the same leadership cadre.

Professor Osawa told the BBC however, that high profile cases like Fuji TV become important precedents for these patterns to change.

The saga is the latest in a series of high-profile sexual misconduct cases that have generated conversation on women’s rights in Japan.

These include the case of journalist Shiori Ito, who became a symbol of the country’s #MeToo movement when in 2017 she took the rare step of going public with allegations that Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a senior television journalist, had raped her after she met him for drinks. While he denied the allegations, in 2019 she won her civil lawsuit against him.

“People have now started to realise that it was OK to speak out and say that this (sexual harassment) is a problem. We are changing what we take as the norm,” Ms Kojima said.

Ms Kojima and Ms Kithara both say however, that Japan is not moving fast enough.

“I think it’s time for that generation (of media leadership) to step down. The industry needs to create a new corporate culture. The change is slow.” Ms Kojima said.

“The TV industry has long neglected the issue of exploitation and violence and has not dealt with the victims properly. If the root of the problem doesn’t change, the same will happen again.”

Professor Osawa agrees that while change is happening, Japan still has a long way to go. Mainly because of the ubiquitous power imbalance in the country’s male dominated society.

She adds that while women have been part of the workforce for decades they’re still seen as the “caretakers” and men as the “breadwinners” by a society that is still heavily shaped by patriarchal values.

“This is an important time… But it’s unclear how far attitudes will change.” she said.

While Ms Kithara is hopeful, she says she’s still angry: “The sexual violence never stops.”

“I still meet new survivors at Flower Demo (protests) every month and learn what happened to them. We had a high school girl other day. When we started the movement (In 2019) she was probably in Junior High, ” she said.

“One day I hope I will never have to go on a Flower Demo protest again.”

In the three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of photographers have documented the human impact of the war on the front line and in civilian areas.

Some of them have shared stories about their photos which have appeared in BBC coverage since February 2022.

Prior to the full-scale war, this husband and wife team worked as wedding and portrait photographers in the Black Sea port city of Odesa. They soon moved “from capturing love stories, to documenting Russian war crimes”, recalls Vlada.

She knows first-hand the risks in her work. An explosion on a visit to the Donetsk region in 2023 left her with shrapnel lodged deep in her side, which doctors decided could not be removed.

This powerful shot taken by Kostiantyn Liberov in the summer of 2024 was featured in Paul Adams’ report on the Ukrainian offensive over the Russian border in Kursk.

A soldier is seen consoling his desperate comrade after returning from an assault in which a fellow serviceman was killed.

For Liberov, the image mirrors some of the confusion within the military over the operation.

“To lose your friend in an attack inside Russia, rather than defending our country in Ukraine, is very difficult,” he said. “I took this photo because of the emotional impact it had on me. It says a lot about the situation and how hard it was for them.”

Photographing such deeply affecting scenes has taken its toll on local photojournalists. “It’s not something we talk about a lot with colleagues as it’s painful,” says Vlada. “You are in a very hard situation, and no-one quite understands what the solution can be.”

One 2023 photo of hers captures a member of Ukraine’s White Angels police unit after an unsuccessful attempt to convince one of the last remaining residents to leave the eastern city of Aviidvka before Russian forces sweep in.

The story was part of a BBC article on a devastating 24-hour Russian bombardment.

A man had asked the police unit to evacuate his brother from the basement of a burnt out building, and yet he still refused to leave.

“The next day we could not return because of hard shelling,” Vlada remembers. “The situation got much worse and I’m not sure he could have survived. It hurts knowing you cannot return to these places.”

In documenting so much loss and suffering, the couple have found a deeper appreciation of moments of joy.

Dmytro, who has fought in Ukraine for more than a decade, was photographed after his wife gave birth in March 2024.

“We used to take photos of him in the trenches. And then you see this big, brave soldier crying while he takes his small daughter in his hands, and you understand soldiers like him fight for these moments. Not just for themselves, but for everyone in Ukraine.”

Since 2016, Valeria Demenko has chronicled the work of Ukraine’s state emergency service (DSNS) in the north-eastern Sumy region, and she now joins rescue teams deployed to areas hit by Russian shelling.

“It’s always difficult… you never know what danger awaits you. It is especially difficult when residential buildings come under attack”.

One moment engraved on her memory involved a striking image featured in a story in March 2024 showing emergency workers at the scene of a five-storey building that collapsed after Russian shelling, with residents still inside.

Valeria recalls how emergency workers attended the site for four days straight. They found four dead, but never recovered the body of a missing girl.

“There was a doll on one of the upper floors… it meant a child was living there, and there may have been more.”

Although all her colleagues are emotionally stretched, she wants the world to see their work: “We give every last ounce of strength to document Russia’s crimes against peaceful Ukrainians.”

Alexander Ermochenko has spent the past 11 years documenting Ukraine’s war as a photojournalist in the eastern Donetsk region.

He has often reported in Russian-controlled territory too and “never thought I’d be photographing war in my home”.

“The fear on the face of the owner of a destroyed house is the same on both sides of the front. It is always important to show that blood has the same red colour.”

The BBC has less access to photojournalists reporting from Russia, as the Kremlin restricts access to international journalists and Russian news agencies are largely state-run.

The BBC approached a Russia-based photographer to contribute to this story but received no response.

In the above picture, Ermochenko captured jubilant pro-Russian activists on 21 February 2022 after Vladimir Putin declared their eastern region independent. It was published as part of the BBC’s coverage of that fateful moment.

He describes how the photo came about “accidentally” – a powerful reminder of the potential impact of a photographer’s split-second decision to raise their camera.

Ukraine said 300 people were killed when Russian planes bombed Mariupol theatre in March 2022.

The following month, Alexander Ermochenko captured this image, featured in Hugo Bachega’s report, in which the photographer conveys the aftermath of a massacre alongside everyday life.

“The destruction was absolute,” he remembers, “with destroyed nine-storey buildings looking like a Hollywood set. But they are real, and recently inhabited by people.”

“What was most surprising was that life continued, despite the fighting in neighbouring streets. People looked calm, but in fact they were deeply shocked by what was happening.”

This photo, used in our live reporting of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant shelling in November 2022, illustrates the difficulty in photographing the war.

“Pictures of the plant were rare at that time,” says Ermochenko. “It is constantly under guard, though the soldiers themselves perfectly illustrate the situation.”

Despite the challenges he and his colleagues face, he says “the war is not only a part of my professional career, but a big part of my whole life… no matter how difficult it is, I will continue.”

Based in Kyiv, Alina Smutko understands the human impact of this war through her work as a photojournalist and from personal experience.

“I’ve experienced Russian missiles and drone attacks on the city almost non-stop for three years. During this time, I’ve been constantly worried about my parents, child, friends and colleagues.”

She feels lucky that her home is intact and her loved ones alive, after witnessing a missile attack on her neighbourhood from her bedroom window.

Initially, she and her friends and family would check in with each other on a daily basis after the full-scale Russian invasion.

But the frequency of attacks has forced residents to learn to live with the war and maintain as normal a life as possible.

The toll on her profession has been hard.

“We see how our colleagues – photojournalists in particular – were killed or wounded during this invasion. We lost one of our team members, and another colleague has been badly wounded.”

Smutko tries not to “overthink” what she does, but believes it is important to share the effects of the war with the world.

“I think it helps somehow, but I don’t believe in the idea that a picture can stop a war. If it could, we would not have lost so many lives here.”

“I still believe that documenting is important. Because if something hasn’t been photographed, it hasn’t happened.”

“This work has to be done… I just do my best.”

Volodymyr Zelensky said he would be willing to “give up” his presidency in exchange for peace ahead of the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“If to achieve peace you really need me to give up my post – I’m ready. I can trade it for Nato membership, if there are such conditions,” the Ukrainian president said in response to a question during a news conference.

His comments came after US President Donald Trump called Zelensky a “dictator without elections” earlier in the week.

“I wasn’t offended, but a dictator would be,” Zelensky, who was democratically elected in May 2019, responded on Sunday.

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“I am focused on Ukraine’s security today, not in 20 years, I am not going to be in power for decades,” he added.

According to Ukrainian law, elections are suspended under martial law, which has been in place since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Zelensky is meeting Western leaders on Monday, some in person in Kyiv and some online, as they work out how to provide a post-war security where the US will not.

He said the topic of Ukraine joining Nato would be “on the table” at the meeting but he did not know how the discussions would “finish”. He hoped the meeting would be a “turning point”.

On the topic of Trump, Zelensky said that he wanted to see the US president as a partner to Ukraine and more than a mediator between Kyiv and Moscow.

“I really want it to be more than just mediation…that’s not enough,” he said.

With the White House demanding that it gets access to billions of dollars’ worth of Ukraine’s natural minerals in exchange for the military aid it provided to date – and could in the future – Zelensky said US help so far had been agreed as grants, not loans.

He said he would not agree to a security deal which – in his words – would be “paid off by generation after generation”.

When asked about a potential mineral deal, Zelensky said “we are making progress,” adding that Ukrainian and US officials had been in touch.

“We are ready to share,” the Ukrainian leader said, but made clear that Washington first needed to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin “ends this war”.

Zelensky appeared relaxed as he faced questions from the world’s media. In previous years he had been more impassioned and even emotional, but on Sunday his approach was business-like.

If Ukraine’s leader rejects a Donald Trump-shaped peace proposal he does not agree with – as he suggested today – then it could have lasting consequences for the course of this war.

Zelensky’s comments came hours after Russia launched its largest single drone attack on Ukraine yet, Ukrainian officials said.

On Saturday night, Ukraine’s Air Force Command spokesman Yuriy Ignat said a “record” 267 Russian drones were launched in a single, coordinated attack on the country.

Thirteen regions were targeted and while many of the drones were repelled, those that were not caused destruction to infrastructure and at least three casualties, emergency services said.

Ukraine’s Air Force reported that 138 of the drones were shot down and 119, which were decoy drones, were lost without negative consequences, likely due to jamming.

In Kyiv, the attack meant six hours of air alerts.

In a statement, Zelensky thanked Ukraine’s emergency services for their response and called for the support of Europe and US in facilitating “a lasting and just peace”.

In a post on X, Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska said that “hundreds of drones” had “brought death and destruction” overnight.

“It was another night of explosions, burning houses and cars, and destroyed infrastructure,” she wrote. “Another night when people prayed for their loved ones to survive”.

On Monday, the war will enter its fourth year.

Diplomatic wrangling over a potential peace deal continues, with Ukraine, European allies and the US offering differing visions for how to end the conflict.

The US and Russia held preliminary talks in Saudi Arabia this week – without delegates from Europe, including Ukraine, present – which resulted in European leaders holding a hastily-arranged summit in Paris.

Zelensky criticised Ukraine’s exclusion from the US-Russia talks, saying Trump was “living in a disinformation space” governed by Moscow, prompting Trump to respond by calling the Ukrainian president a “dictator”.

French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to visit Washington on Monday, while UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will be there on Thursday.

Sir Keir has publicly backed Zelensky, reiterating the UK’s “ironclad support” for Kyiv, and said he would discuss the importance of Ukraine’s sovereignty when he speaks to Trump.

Pope Francis – who is in hospital with respiratory illness – wrote in a remarks released on Sunday that the third anniversary of the war was “a painful and shameful occasion for the whole of humanity”.

“In the next 50 years, you will not find one Israeli leader that will propose to you what I propose to you now.

“Sign it! Sign it and let’s change history!”

It was 2008. Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was imploring the Palestinian leader to accept a deal he believed could have brought peace to the Middle East.

It was a two-state solution – a prospect which seems impossible today.

If implemented, it would have created a Palestinian state on more than 94% of the occupied West Bank.

The map Olmert had drawn up now has an almost mythical status. Various interpretations have appeared over the years, but he has never revealed it to the media.

Until now.

In , the latest series from documentary filmmaker Norma Percy available on iPlayer from Monday, Olmert reveals the map he says he showed to Mahmoud Abbas at a meeting in Jerusalem on 16 September 2008.

“This is the first time that I expose this map to the media,” he tells the filmmakers.

It shows, in detail, the territory which Olmert proposed to annexe to Israel – 4.9% of the West Bank.

That would have included major Jewish settlement blocs – just like previous proposals dating back to the late 1990s.

In return, the prime minister said Israel would give up an equal amount of Israeli territory, along the edges of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The two Palestinian territories would be connected via a tunnel or highway – again, something that had been discussed before.

In the film, Olmert recalls the Palestinian leader’s response.

“He said: ‘Prime minister, this is very serious. It is very, very, very serious.'”

Crucially, Olmert’s plan included a proposed solution to the thorny issue of Jerusalem.

Each side would be able to claim parts of the city as their capital, while administration of the “holy basin” – including the Old City, with its religious sites, and adjacent areas – would be handed over to a committee of trustees consisting of Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the US.

The implications of the map, for Jewish settlements, would have been colossal.

Had the plan been implemented, dozens of communities, scattered throughout the West Bank and Jordan Valley, would have been evacuated.

When the previous Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, forcibly removed a few thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it was regarded as a national trauma by those on the Israeli right.

Evacuating most of the West Bank would have represented an infinitely greater challenge, involving tens of thousands of settlers, with the very real danger of violence.

But the test never came.

At the end of their meeting, Olmert refused to hand over a copy of the map to Mahmoud Abbas unless the Palestinian leader sign it.

Abbas refused, saying that he needed to show his experts the map, to make sure they understood exactly what was being offered.

Olmert says the two agreed to a meeting of map experts the following day.

“We parted, you know, like we are about to embark on a historic step forward,” Olmert says.

The meeting never happened. As they drove away from Jerusalem that night, President Abbas’s chief of staff, Rafiq Husseini, remembers the atmosphere in the car.

“Of course, we laughed,” he says in the film.

The Palestinians believed the plan was dead in the water. Olmert, embroiled in an unrelated corruption scandal, had already announced that he was planning to resign.

“It is unfortunate that Olmert, regardless of how nice he was… was a lame duck,” Husseini says, “and therefore, we will go nowhere with this.”

The situation in Gaza also complicated matters. After months of rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled territory, Olmert ordered a major Israeli assault, Operation Cast Lead, at the end of December, triggering three weeks of intense fighting.

But Olmert tells me it would have been “very smart” for Abbas to sign the deal. Then, if a future Israeli prime minister tried to cancel it, “he could have said to the world that the failure was Israel’s fault”.

Israeli elections followed in February. Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a vocal opponent of Palestinian statehood, became prime minister.

Olmert’s plan, and map, faded from view.

The former prime minister says he’s still waiting for Abbas’s reply, but his plan has since joined a long list of missed opportunities to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 1973, the former Israeli diplomat, Abba Eban, quipped that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. It’s a phrase that Israeli officials have frequently repeated in the years since.

But the world is more complicated than that, especially since the two sides signed the historic Oslo Accords in 1993.

The peace process ushered in by a handshake on the White House lawn between former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had moments of genuine hope, punctuated by tragedy. Ultimately, it resulted in failure.

The reasons are complex and there’s plenty of blame to go around but in truth, the stars were never properly aligned.

I witnessed this non-alignment at first hand 24 years ago.

In January 2001, at the Egyptian resort of Taba, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators once again saw the outlines of a deal.

A member of the Palestinian delegation drew a rough map on a napkin and told me that, for the first time, they were looking at the rough outlines of a viable Palestinian state.

But the talks were irrelevant, drowned out by the violence raging on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza, where the second Palestinian uprising, or “intifada”, had erupted the previous September.

Once again, Israel was in the midst of a political transition. Prime Minister Ehud Barak had already resigned. Ariel Sharon comfortably defeated him a few weeks later.

The map on the napkin, just like Olmert’s map eight years later, showed what might have been.

Millie Bobby Brown, Zoe Saldaña, Mikey Madison and Timothée Chalamet were among the stars walking the red carpet ahead of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards on Sunday.

Black was very much the new black as stars posed for pictures in Los Angeles, with a huge number of the nominees wearing dark dresses and tuxedos.

But plenty of stars also added a splash of colour to their outfits ahead of the ceremony, which celebrates the best television and film performances of the last year.

Here are just a few of the stars who posed for photos before the ceremony got under way.

Just occasionally, there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change. 1968, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Paris riots and the anti-Vietnam War protests in America, was one of them. 1989, the year of the Tiananmen massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the implosion of the Soviet empire, was another.

I was on hand to see each of these things happen, and from that perspective it seems to me that, only seven weeks in, 2025 could be a year like that: a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.

The basic reason, of course, is Donald Trump.

Since the end of the World War Two, each one of the 13 US presidents before Trump’s current term in office has at least paid lip service to a set of key geopolitical principles: that America’s own security depended on protecting Europe from Russia, and the non-Communist countries of Asia against China.

Trump has up-ended this approach. He says he’s putting American interests first, way before everything else. Mostly that comes down to the single question of how much it costs the US.

In itself, this is pretty hard for his friends and allies abroad, especially in Europe. But it’s made far more difficult by Trump’s own personality. No US president in modern times, not even Richard Nixon, let his personal characteristics shape his policies like Trump does.

“He’s just like Louis XIV,” one retired American diplomat said to me, referring to France’s self-aggrandising Sun King.

Critics like this believe Trump is both breathtakingly vain, and amazingly thin-skinned at the same time. As a result, the appointees who surround him, people like Elon Musk and JD Vance, perhaps think that their position depends entirely on how much they praise him and back his views.

When President Trump claims, with no evidence, that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is corrupt and has a low approval rating, Musk then takes it further: he piles in to say that Zelensky is despised by the Ukrainian people and is feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.

No one in the Trump circle today, it seems, will cough discreetly and say, “Mr President, maybe you should consider rowing back on that statement.”

Judging from his previous term in office, we can be sure that every one of the people around him knows how he detests being disagreed with. And they will also know that many voters wholeheartedly back Trump’s approach, and feel they have been bankrolling security in a far-off continent.

He has committed himself to stopping the Ukraine war by Easter. He is absolutely correct when he says that President Vladimir Putin is keen on this. Russian troops are, through sheer force of numbers, making slow advances in the eastern part of Ukraine.

But the cost in Russian lives is immense. If the process continues, Russia may have to turn to conscription, which would be dangerously unpopular and might even destabilise Putin’s regime. Everything Trump says about getting peace is music to his ears.

John Bolton, Trump’s far-from-subservient national security adviser during his first administration, said the other day that they’d be breaking out the champagne in the Kremlin when they heard the Trump administration’s peace plan. It certainly felt like a historic moment – not just in Moscow but around the world.

Putin has pointedly backed the idea that Trump really won the 2020 election. It may not be true, but President Putin knows that Trump favours anyone who backs his view of things.

Why, by contrast, have Trump and the people round him come down so hard on President Zelensky? It must partly be because he’s not obediently doing what he’s told, such as returning to the negotiating table and strike a deal on US access to Ukraine’s critical minerals.

At the same time, President Trump understands that Zelensky is the weakest link in the US-Russia-Ukraine trio, and can be squeezed in a way that Putin can’t be. The more pressure that is piled on Zelensky, the quicker a peace deal will come.

President Trump never seems, at least in public, to show much interest in the fine detail of any agreement. It’s the agreement itself that matters to him, even if Ukraine and its allies believe it’s manifestly unfair and allows Russia to come back at some future date and start the war all over again.

British and German diplomats whom I know have been enraged by the way Trump went about getting Russia to the negotiating table. “He had two major cards in his hand,” said one. “The first was Russia’s isolation. Putin would have made plenty of concessions to get himself to the talks with America – only Trump didn’t insist on any concessions at all. He just let him sit down and start talking.”

The other card, the diplomat said, was to insist that Ukraine should be allowed to join Nato. “Trump could have banged away about this and extorted all sorts of agreements from Putin, before finally saying OK, well, Ukraine won’t join Nato in that case.” In European capitals it’s felt that he threw away both of his essential cards before the talks even started, without any preconditions.

Already, though, some European diplomats with experience of US politics are advising their governments that this grand monarchical period in Donald Trump’s presidency, where his advisers defer to him (he literally referred to himself as a “king” this week), won’t last.

Trump currently has control of a pliant Congress and a conservative Supreme Court – but in only 20 months’ time, in November 2026, there will be mid-term elections in the US.

There are signs that inflation is starting to rise in America, and enough people may well be affected badly by the upheavals to want to punish Trump’s Republicans.

If he loses control of one or both Houses, the power he has at present of pushing through every plan and policy, no matter how controversial, will diminish.

But an awful lot can happen in the next year and eight months. Trump’s expansionism might embolden China. A major international trade war, sparked off by Trump’s tariffs, could open up. The European Union seems likely to become politically and economically weaker than ever.

Agreeing peace in Ukraine on Russia’s terms will be something entirely new for the United States. In the great majority of negotiations since 1945, Russia has struggled to get its way because of America’s economic and military strength.

Now President Putin, having made the costly decision to invade Ukraine three years ago, looks likely to get away with it, and prosper.

If that happens, then 2025 will indeed be remembered as a key year: a moment when the history of the world changed, and nothing was ever quite the same again.

Pope Francis remains in a “critical” condition, but “has not presented any further respiratory crises”, the Vatican said in a statement on Sunday.

He was still receiving high-flow oxygen therapy and had undergone blood transfusions. Blood tests also showed he had “initial, mild, renal insufficiency” – a kidney problem – that is “currently under control”, the statement said.

The Vatican said he “continues to be alert and well oriented”.

The Pope was admitted to Rome’s Gemelli Hospital on 14 February after experiencing breathing difficulties for several days, where he was first treated for bronchitis before being diagnosed with pneumonia in both lungs.

On Sunday, the Pope’s thrombocytopenia – a condition that occurs when the platelet count in the blood is too low – was stable, the statement said.

In the morning, the Pope “participated in the Holy Mass, together with those who are taking care of him during these days”, the statement continued.

The Vatican did not offer a prognosis given the “complexity of the clinical picture”.

The new statement comes after the Vatican said on Saturday that the Pope had experienced a respiratory crisis and was in a “critical” condition.

Earlier on Sunday, the Pope issued a statement asking Catholics to pray for him after he was unable to deliver the traditional Angelus prayer in person for the second week running.

The pontiff is particularly susceptible to pneumonia, an infection of the lungs that can be caused by bacteria, viruses or fungi, after he contracted pleurisy – an inflammation of the lungs – as a young man and underwent a partial lung removal.

The leader of the Roman Catholic church has been admitted to hospital multiple times during his 12-year tenure, including being treated for bronchitis at the same hospital in March 2023.

From Argentina, Pope Francis is the first Latin American, and first Jesuit, to lead the Roman Catholic Church.

The Trump administration has placed most United States Agency for International Development (USAID) employees back on administrative leave from midnight on Sunday and laid off hundreds more.

In addition to some 4,200 staff who are being placed on leave, at least 1,600 employees are being fired.

The move comes weeks after President Donald Trump’s initial attempt to eliminate thousands of USAID employees was held up by a legal challenge.

A federal judge temporarily halted the administration’s plan to gut America’s foreign aid agency, but ruled on Friday that the pause would not be permanent. Founded in 1961, USAID employed around 10,000 staff until the recent cost-cutting began.

The notice to USAID employees on Sunday from the Office of the Administrator said that “designated personnel” responsible for critical functions or in leadership would be exempt from administrative leave.

It’s not clear how many employees will be kept on, but USAID had previously deemed 611 personnel to be essential.

The email said USAID intended to fund voluntary return travel for overseas staff.

Around 4,200 employees will be placed on leave, according to the BBC’s US news partner CBS.

The USAID website said there would be a “reduction-in-force” of an additional 1,600 personnel in the US.

That would amount to at least 5,800 USAID employees on administrative leave or laid off – or well over half the agency’s workforce.

The development follows a ruling on Friday by Judge Carl Nichols in Washington DC that the Trump administration could press ahead with its plans to get rid of USAID employees.

Another federal judge said last week that the Trump administration was failing to abide by a ruling requiring the government to continue financing foreign aid already approved by Congress while legal challenges play out.

It is unclear whether those USAID staff being placed on leave will eventually be rehired, or have their positions eliminated, too.

The Trump administration is seeking to shrink the federal workforce and cut costs in a drive led by Elon Musk.

The billionaire Trump adviser asked millions of bureaucrats over the weekend to list their accomplishments from the past week.

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On Saturday, from the stage at a conservative convention near Washington DC, Trump said: “We’ve also effectively ended the left-wing scam known as USAID.

“The agency’s name has been removed from its former building, and that space will now house agents from Customs and Border Patrol.”

Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), a US immigration-enforcement agency, is ready to move into the USAID building in the heart of the nation’s capital.

“CBP has signed a licence agreement to occupy approximately 390,000 usable square feet in the USAID tower,” a CBP spokesperson told Fox News.

Trump and Musk have been critical of America’s sizable overseas spending, and USAID has become a lightning rod for their frustration. Trump and his allies have accused the agency of being too liberal and wasteful.

The cutbacks to USAID have already upended the global aid system. Hundreds of programmes have been frozen in countries around the world since the president announced his intentions in January.

The US is by far the biggest single provider of humanitarian aid around the world. It has bases in more than 60 countries and works in dozens of others, with much of its work carried out by its contractors.

Former USAID chief Gayle Smith previously told the BBC: “When you pull all of that out, you send some very dangerous messages.

“The US is signalling that we don’t frankly care whether people live or die and that we’re not a reliable partner.”

A former aide to the Prince of Wales has said the royal was at his “lowest” after the Princess of Wales was diagnosed with cancer.

In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia, Jason Knauf, formerly the chief executive of William and Kate’s Royal Foundation, said: “It was awful, absolutely awful. It’s the lowest I’ve ever seen him.

“Within a couple of weeks, if you’re Prince William, you find out that both your wife and your father have cancer. I couldn’t believe it.”

Both the King and the Princess of Wales were treated for cancer last year. Kate is now in remission and Charles is having ongoing treatment.

Mr Knauf, 43, stepped down from his position at the end of 2021.

Catherine’s diagnosis was made public in March last year, and Mr Knauf said: “The problem was that all this crazy conspiracy theory stuff kicked off in the background, online. ‘Was she really ill?’.

“But they didn’t want to say yet that she had cancer because they hadn’t told the children and they were still working through how to tell the children.”

Speaking to reporters last year at the end of his visit to South Africa, Prince William, 42, talked about how he has coped after both his wife and his father were diagnosed with cancer, describing the past year as the “hardest year” of his life.

“It’s been dreadful. It’s probably been the hardest year in my life. So, trying to get through everything else and keep everything on track has been really difficult,” he said after being asked how his year has been after a difficult year for the Royal Family.”

Mr Knauf also previously worked for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

In October 2018, while working for the couple as their communications secretary, Mr Knauf made a bullying complaint against Meghan.

He wrote of his concerns to William’s then private secretary in an email, in an apparent attempt to force Buckingham Palace to protect staff.

The duchess’s legal team strenuously denied the allegation.

Discussing William’s relationship with Harry, Mr Knauf said: “It’s very difficult to have this stuff play out in the public eye, but he’s chosen to keep his thoughts on it private, and I think all of us who know him really have to respect that we should do the same.

“But I will say, of course, it’s been hard and sad, especially for all of us who know both of them.

“I worked really closely with the two of them and we had lots of great times.”

Mr Knauf has previously expressed regret in not giving evidence in the Duchess of Sussex’s High Court case against the publisher of the Mail on Sunday, the Court of Appeal.

Meghan won her privacy case against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) in 2021, when the High Court found its publication of her letter to her father – sent in August 2018 – was unlawful.

Mr Knauf was made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (RVO) in the 2023 New Year Honours List.

Before joining the royal household the American-born former corporate affairs executive worked for a range of institutions, from the office of the New Zealand prime minister to HM Treasury and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Mr Knauf led a review of the Royal Foundation’s role and structure from March 2019, before becoming its chief executive in September of that year.

He oversaw the launch of the Foundation’s Earthshot Prize – William’s £50 million environmental prize, now an independent charity, which recognises solutions, ideas and technologies that “repair the planet”.

“It’s like we’ve got a second chance, and we’re taking every opportunity,” Catherine Canning says.

In 2008, her husband John was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) – a lung disease – and he said he had to rely on oxygen 24 hours a day and would get out of breath even when walking short distances.

The 66-year-old used to go ballroom dancing on a weekly basis with Catherine, but had to stop when his condition deteriorated around the time of the Covid pandemic.

John eventually had a double lung transplant in April 2023, which meant the couple, from Leicestershire, can dance together again, and they have a cruise of the Mediterranean booked this year.

When asked about their first dance together after the transplant, Catherine, 60, said: “It was the best feeling, but it was also the thought that somebody else had given John that chance as well.

“I got the biggest grin on my face. I was crying.

“We were with a brilliant group of friends who have supported us an awful lot throughout this, as well as our family who have been brilliant, but these group of friends are like the family we’ve chosen.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, so I was crying and laughing and smiling. And I went wrong – even though it was a simple dance.

“It was just unbelievable, because I never thought I’d be back dancing with him again.”

John, who lives with his wife in Barrow-upon-Soar, had lung volume reduction surgery in 2020, which did not work, meaning he was recommended for a transplant.

He was told it could take him up to a year to find a donor when he was added to the transplant list in February 2023.

But just over four weeks later, he received a call to say doctors had found lungs for him.

Despite it emerging that one of the lungs contained an infection that could not be removed, another pair was found a week later.

The family travelled to the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, where John had the operation.

Catherine said: “Having said goodbye to him in the lift at the hospital as he went for the operation, I got down on the ground floor of the hospital with my son and just burst into tears.

“My son was with me, and he was brilliant, and as John’s always said, it’s probably more difficult for me than it ever was for him, going through the operation.”

After his surgery, John said he could notice an improvement as soon as he woke up after spending 10 hours on the operating table.

He said: “I’m not limited to oxygen tanks and walking for a few minutes without getting breathless.”

Last year, he walked 3.1 miles (5km) at Nottingham’s Harvey Hadden Stadium as part of the British Transplant Games, which he described as “emotional”.

On 20 January, or Blue Monday – dubbed by some as the most depressing day of the year – the couple sent a voice note to BBC Radio Leicester, when listeners were asked what they had to be cheerful about.

The note said they would celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary this year, and had booked a Mediterranean cruise just a few weeks after John came out of hospital.

Catherine said it came “completely out of the blue” when she was subsequently contacted by the BBC to elaborate on her story.

The pair have also urged people to talk to their loved ones about their wishes to donate organs after death.

They said: “Each year, hundreds of opportunities for transplants are missed because families aren’t sure what to do.

“Two minutes to register your decision to become an organ donor, and you could save up to nine lives.”

For months, Japan’s entertainment industry has been rocked by a scandal that unseated one of its most popular celebrities and put one of its biggest broadcasters at risk.

But some believe it has also marked a turning point in how cases of sexual assault are perceived in Japan – where traditionally victims have been shamed into silence.

At its heart was Masahiro Nakai, a household name and leading presenter for Fuji TV, one of the country’s biggest broadcasters.

Nakai, who is also a former member of J-Pop boy band SMAP, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a dinner party in 2023.

The revelations, which first appeared last December in weekly tabloid magazine Shukan Bunshun, marked the latest of a series of scandals involving celebrities in Japan, including that of late entertainment mogul Johnny Kitagawa, who was found by investigators to have abused hundreds of boys and young men over six decades.

While Nakai didn’t admit guilt, he apologised for “causing trouble” in a statement and said that he had “resolved” the matter with the woman in a settlement, reportedly worth more than half a million dollars.

But as public anger mounted, Nakai, who has also denied using force against the woman, was also forced to announce his retirement from the entertainment industry in January. Another channel, the Tokyo Broadcasting System has also stopped airing a program that Nakai regularly appeared on as an MC.

The impact on Fuji TV has been devastating.

The broadcaster’s reputation is now in ruins, its revenue threatened and some of its top executives have been forced to resign.

High profile companies like Nissan and Toyota were among those who pulled advertising from the broadcaster as public anger mounted. Fuji TV has since admitted it allowed Nakai to continue presenting shows even after finding about the allegations.

“If this had happened 10 years ago, there would not have been this outcry,” Keiko Kojima who worked in Japan’s media industry for 15 years as a TV presenter, told the BBC.

Sexual violence against women is one of Japan’s worst kept secrets. A 2020 survey claimed that more than 70% of sexual assaults in the country go unreported. And according to a 2024 study published in the International Journal of Asian Studies, for every 1,000 rapes in Japan, only 10–20 result in a criminal conviction – and fewer than half of convicted rapists are incarcerated.

“There’s still a prevalent attitude of ‘Shoganai ‘ or ‘there’s nothing you can do’ that is being projected on women – so they’re encouraged to keep silent,” Machiko Osawa, professor emeritus at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo, told the BBC.

She added that women were seldom believed and did not have proper mechanisms to even report such incidents, which contributed to this culture of silence.

Ms Kojima said that the media industry in particular, has long had a culture of impunity and lack of accountability where many young women felt they must keep silent to keep their jobs.

“It was common for men to make rude comments about women’s bodies or appearance or age. I remember my colleagues and I being asked how many people we’ve had sex with,” she said.

“We were expected to reply with a sense of humour without getting angry or offended. I saw sexual harassment and other forms of derogatory treatment of women on a daily basis. For a woman, adapting to these situations was the only way to become a full-fledged TV or media professional.”

The Fuji TV case has also raised the question of whether dinners and drinking parties involving celebrities and young women were common practice.

Although Shukan Bunshun retracted an earlier report that claimed the alleged assault took place at a party organised by Fuji TV, Ms Kojima told the BBC that it was indeed common to use women as “tools for entertaining”.

“In Japanese working culture, it’s an everyday practice to half-forcibly take young female employees to events to entertain clients.”

“Men are happy when young women join them. The idea that women are like a gift and that taking a young woman with you is a way of offering hospitality to the other person is very common.”

That is why the fallout of this scandal has encouraged women’s rights activists.

Minori Kithara, one of the founders of the Flower Demo movement – where groups of sexual violence victims and their supporters gather in public spaces on the 11th of every month – admitted she was surprised at how swiftly and severely the sponsors reacted.

“Even if it’s more of self-preservation than human rights for sponsors, this is a turning point for the MeToo movement in Japan. It’s up to us how big we make it,” she told the BBC.

Nearly 50 companies have walked away from the now tarnished Fuji TV.

The government has also withdrawn all its recent and planned advertisements with the network.

The Japanese government has called on the broadcaster to regain the trust of viewers and sponsors. So far it seems to have done neither.

The scandal and Fuji TV’s role in hiding it, sent the company on a crisis-management frenzy that seems to have dug it deeper into disgrace and fuelled more public anger.

Then Fuji TV president Koichi Minato admitted that the company had known about the allegation shortly after the alleged incident.

But he said they chose not to disclose it at the time because they “prioritised the woman’s physical and mental recovery as well as the protection of her privacy.”

After a press conference which it held in the hope of defusing the outrage turned into a PR disaster, the company held a second one that lasted 10 hours – intended to show remorse.

Both Fuji TV’s chairman Shuji Kano and its President Koichi Minato stepped down – bowing humbly as they announced their resignations.

It was announced that the company’s executive vice president Kenji Shimizu would replace Mr Minato as president.

But these were seen as mere face and revenue saving exercises rather than substantial change, especially because the president’s replacement was of the same leadership cadre.

Professor Osawa told the BBC however, that high profile cases like Fuji TV become important precedents for these patterns to change.

The saga is the latest in a series of high-profile sexual misconduct cases that have generated conversation on women’s rights in Japan.

These include the case of journalist Shiori Ito, who became a symbol of the country’s #MeToo movement when in 2017 she took the rare step of going public with allegations that Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a senior television journalist, had raped her after she met him for drinks. While he denied the allegations, in 2019 she won her civil lawsuit against him.

“People have now started to realise that it was OK to speak out and say that this (sexual harassment) is a problem. We are changing what we take as the norm,” Ms Kojima said.

Ms Kojima and Ms Kithara both say however, that Japan is not moving fast enough.

“I think it’s time for that generation (of media leadership) to step down. The industry needs to create a new corporate culture. The change is slow.” Ms Kojima said.

“The TV industry has long neglected the issue of exploitation and violence and has not dealt with the victims properly. If the root of the problem doesn’t change, the same will happen again.”

Professor Osawa agrees that while change is happening, Japan still has a long way to go. Mainly because of the ubiquitous power imbalance in the country’s male dominated society.

She adds that while women have been part of the workforce for decades they’re still seen as the “caretakers” and men as the “breadwinners” by a society that is still heavily shaped by patriarchal values.

“This is an important time… But it’s unclear how far attitudes will change.” she said.

While Ms Kithara is hopeful, she says she’s still angry: “The sexual violence never stops.”

“I still meet new survivors at Flower Demo (protests) every month and learn what happened to them. We had a high school girl other day. When we started the movement (In 2019) she was probably in Junior High, ” she said.

“One day I hope I will never have to go on a Flower Demo protest again.”

While drinking tree sap does not immediately sound appealing, Canadian producers are hoping that it will be the next must-try soft drink around the world.

We have all heard of maple syrup, which is made by boiling down the sap of maple trees to produce a thick, sweet, golden-to-brown coloured syrup that is typically poured over pancakes.

What is far less well known is that you can drink the sap itself, which is called maple water. Clear in colour, it contains just 2% natural sugars, so it is only slightly sweet.

A small but growing number of producers in Canada are now selling this maple water in bottles or cartons, after first giving it a filter and pasteurisation to kill off any microbes.

“People feel like they’re drinking the wild Canadian forest,” says Yannick Leclerc of Maple3, a producer of maple water drinks, based in Quebec City.

Advocates point to the fact it is a natural drink, and makers hope that it can steal some sales from the existing similar product – coconut water. The latter is made from water that naturally forms inside coconuts.

As Canada is far and away the world’s largest producer of maple syrup – accounting for more than 80% of production – it is understandable that the nascent maple water sector is also Canadian. Furthermore, it is centred on the province of Quebec, which makes 90% of Canada’s maple syrup.

Mr Leclerc says that Maple3 is one of the pioneers of the sector. “Nobody [previously] thought about keeping the sap for its hydration purposes verses just boiling it into syrup.”

He founded the company back in 2013 with business partner Stéphane Nolet. In recent years an increasing number of other producers have entered the marketplace.

Mr Leclerc claims that Maple3 has doubled its annual profits since 2021, with sales not just rising across Canada, but in 12 other countries, including France, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. Some 75% of its sales now come from overseas, and it sells both still and sparkling maple water, and fizzy versions with added natural fruit flavourings.

“It’s more than just a local product at this point,” adds Mr Leclerc.

For the maple water industry as a whole, one recent report predicts big growth. It estimated that global sales in 2024 totalled $506m (£409m), with that expected to jump to $2.6bn by 2033.

By comparison, worldwide sales of coconut water reached $7.7bn in 2023, with that expected to grow to $22.9bn by 2029. So maple water has a long way to catch up.

Meanwhile, the global value of the maple syrup market was $1.7bn last year, according to one study.

Beth Czerwony, a dietician with the non-profit medical centre Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, says the growing popularity of maple water is linked to its perceived health benefits.

“When the sap itself is filtered through the tree, it ends up absorbing a bunch of antioxidants,” she says. “So they’re gonna end up having a better performance and a faster workout recovery.”

However, one medical study from 2019 concluded that maple water was “was not superior in rehydration” to normal water.

Jeremy Kinsella owns The Soda Pop Bros in Windsor Ontario, which sells soft drinks under its own brand name, as well as imports from around the world.

His family have been in the industry for nearly a century, and in his lifetime he has seen a fair share of trends come and go.

He says that if maple water is to go mainstream it needs the financial backing and promotion of one of the huge global soft drinks firms.

“It will take a larger soda manufacturer for it to really catch on,” he says.

Mr Kinsella also says that the price of maple water is currently too high. “When it comes down to it, someone’s looking at a can of Coke for a buck and they’re looking at a can of maple water for three bucks, they’re going to try it a couple of times and go back to Coke,” he says.

Marketing maple water more would certainly help it increase sales, says John Tomory, who helps run Pefferlaw Creek Farms in Uxbridge, Ontario. He and his brothers have been making maple syrup commercially for almost 10 years, and for the past four they have also been selling the sap to a Canada brand called Sap Sucker. This makes sparkling sap water with different added flavours, from lime to grapefruit, and lemon to orange.

Mr Tomory says he agrees with this approach to make the sap more interesting. “I know a lot of people have tried just selling the sap as it is, just basic sap from the tree and it’s still, but they haven’t really caught on,” he says.

“So I think carbonating it and adding fruit flavour makes it more interesting. That’s the real innovation.”

Back at Maple3 in Quebec, Mr Leclerc also thinks that the sparkling version of the drink could be the more popular: “It has perks that a normal sparkling water doesn’t have,” he says, such as a more interesting flavour, without having all the bad stuff that [regular] soda has.”

Thousands of villagers in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh are protesting against a multi-million-dollar river-linking project which, they say, will rob them of their homes and livelihoods.

The Ken-Betwa project, with a budget of 440bn rupees ($5.06bn; £4.05bn), will channel excess water from the Ken river in Madhya Pradesh to the Betwa river in the neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state through a network of tunnels, canals and a dam.

It is the first of 16 such river-linking projects earmarked under India’s National Perspective Plan for water resource development in the 1980s. The plan faced multiple delays – mainly due to environmental concerns and political disputes – before the government cleared it in 2021.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for its construction in December last year.

The project is supposed to help the drought-prone Bundelkhand region – which includes parts of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh – where arid climate and unpredictable rainfall patterns have led to decades of poverty and underdevelopment.

The government says that once completed in 2030, it will help irrigate 1.06 million hectares of land, provide drinking water to 6.2 million people and generate 130MW of hydropower and solar energy.

But at least 10 villages, including vast swathes of precious forest land, will be submerged to build the dam’s reservoir and 11 more villages will be displaced for constructing the canal, affecting more than 7,000 families, district officials say.

“Our livelihoods are tied to this land – we don’t know what the future holds for us anymore,” said Tulsi Adivasi, who is among the thousands of villagers protesting against the project.

Most of them belong to the indigenous Gond and Kol tribes, who live along the edge of forests and depend on farming for a living.

Environmental experts warn the project will submerge nearly 98 sq km (38 sq miles) of the Panna Tiger Reserve, a 543 sq km sanctuary that successfully brought tigers back from local extinction in 2009.

This could undo years of conservation efforts. “It’s unprecedented. We have never seen a core area of a national park being used for such a large-scale infrastructure project before,” says environmentalist Amit Bhatnagar.

In 2019, a panel of experts constituted by India’s top court had also raised concerns about the project, questioning its economic viability and impact on the region’s wildlife. The government, it said, should explore alternative irrigation methods in the river basin.

Independent studies on river-linking projects in India have made similar observations.

A 2023 study published in the Nature Communications journal states that such endeavours “may worsen the water stress across the country, making these projects ineffective or possibly even counterproductive”.

Baleshwar Thakur, who heads the National Water Development Agency, however, defended the project, saying authorities had conducted a thorough research and acquired all environmental clearances for the project.

“We have also designated additional land to offset the loss of tiger habitats and will rehabilitate other species affected by the project as well,” he said.

The government official admitted that there would be a potential “challenge” to the biodiversity of the region, but said that “the benefits of the project outweigh the adverse impacts”.

The assurances have done little to comfort the villagers.

In the heart of Daudhan, 48-year-old Mahesh Adivasi sat with a group of men, who voiced their dissent in the form of a protest song.

“Ken-Betwa dam is built by the government, it gives others water but drowns us,” they sang, the lyrics capturing their anguish.

The village is one of the poorest areas in the region, lacking basic facilities such as clean drinking water and electricity.

The bitter irony of the river project isn’t lost on its people – they ask why they are being asked to abandon their homes to provide electricity in 13 other districts when their own village has never had power.

“We have seen generations pass without progress. Now, we are being asked to sacrifice our lives for others’ progress. What about us?” Mahesh Adivasi said.

The government has offered villagers an optional compensation plan, where they can either opt for a piece of land along with 750,000 rupees ($8,655; £6,842) or a one-time payout of 1,250,000 rupees. For those who own land, an additional amount based on the land’s value will also be given.

Mr Thakur said that about 90% of the people had chosen to take the lump sum amount. “In the meantime, the government has started looking for alternative government land to resettle the villagers,” he added.

But locals say the amount being offered is insufficient. Tulsi Adivasi showed BBC Hindi a government notice which evaluated his house at 46,000 rupees.

“Can a house be built with this much money?” he asked.

Others complain they have not been informed when they must evacuate or where they’d be resettled, fuelling anxieties about their future.

“The project should have been a blessing for our village but, the truth is, it will plunge us further into darkness,” said Lakshmi Adivasi, 20.

Questions have also been raised against the claim that the project is meant to channel excess water from the Ken river.

Critics point out that the government has relied on outdated data from 2003, without independent verification, to calculate the river’s annual yield.

Mr Thakur denied the allegation and said authorities “have all the data to continue with the project”.

Mr Bhatnagar, the environmentalist, said that by going ahead with the project, the government was setting “a dangerous precedent” for similar development programmes to be carried out in other geologically sensitive areas.

“And for those affected, it once again underscores how development in India often comes at the cost of the most marginalised,” he added.

When Annie Makeeva set out from London on a solo trip to Vietnam in December 2022, she never imagined she would be sexually assaulted by a pair of violent “incels” – men who blame women because they are unable to find a sexual partner.

It happened on the first day of her holiday, after Annie had cycled 10km (six miles) into the remote Cat Tien National Park, in the south of the country.

“I decided to cycle along the jungle track and then hike to Crocodile Lake which is their star attraction. I stopped at the end of the track and I saw two guys there – fellow tourists, I assumed.”

But minutes later they followed her into the jungle and attacked her.

“As they walked past me the first man reached out and grabbed me.

“He then said something in Vietnamese to his friend who was on the other side of me. And I looked to see if this friend was coming to my rescue, or was he also going to attack me. And it turns out, yes, he wanted to attack me as well.

“They were both groping me. I shouted for help and realised no-one could hear me.”

Annie, who is from west London, said she got “really scared” when the men began to restrain her and tried to push her down to the floor. She managed to break free and hide behind a tree.

When one of the men again caught hold of her and looked back to his friend for a moment, she punched him hard on the back of the neck, disorientating him.

At this point Annie got out her phone to take a photograph of the men, and this prompted the other man to offer her money to keep quiet.

When she wouldn’t take the money, the power balance shifted and the men began to back off. They made off the way they had come.

Annie then had to decide whether to go in the same direction as the men to where she had left her bike, and cycle 10km back to the hotel, or try to go another 5km onwards to where she knew there would be a park ranger and potentially other tourists who might help her. She decided on the latter.

BBC London has seen a photo of Annie’s bruised upper torso. She did not want this image to be used in this story.

The men were eventually detained by police at the same hotel where Annie was staying.

She says the police decided it was an opportunistic rather than planned attack and it is not clear what penalty, if any, they faced.

Annie contacted the Foreign Office the next day. A spokesperson told the BBC: “We supported a British woman in Vietnam and were in contact with the local authorities.”

Annie told BBC London that when she rechecked the Foreign Office’s advice for female travellers in Vietnam, the guidance had been updated from what it said before her visit.

Struggling to come to terms with what had happened to her, Annie decided to try to find out whether the men had done this before.

She had been encouraged to take a photo of the men’s confiscated ID cards at the hotel and when she returned to the UK she used this information to look up their social media accounts.

What she found horrified her.

“It’s full of violent imagery. It’s extremely misogynistic, it promotes violence against women, violence against western tourists specifically.

“There are pictures of weapons, including handmade weapons, target practice. They describe women as ‘sluts’ and ‘livestock’. And they also keep a tally of women they have attacked. They boast about their attacks and they make fun of us. It’s really chilling.”

One of the men’s social media accounts shows an image of a naked woman being beheaded and the words “the future of women”. Another is full of obscene videos of him masturbating to pornography.

“They’re incels. They’ve posted on their social media accounts explaining that they haven’t been able to find someone to date, someone to be intimate with. They have created this echo chamber of violence against women.

“They made it very difficult for me to go back to my regular life. I stopped hiking. I didn’t like to leave my house at night or really any time,” says Annie, holding back tears.

“I became hypervigilant and that is really exhausting. Can I cross the park to go to my yoga class? Who is behind me on the Tube? Can I even trust the colleague who gets in the lift with me?”

Annie, who works as a translator, says she wants to drive awareness of male violence towards women.

“I also want to protect any women travelling to that area, any time soon.”

She added: “There may be other women out there were attacked who don’t know by whom and why.”

The BBC has contacted the Vietnamese police and the men themselves, via their social media accounts, for comment. So far there has been no response.

Annie is certain there are more victims – something that’s evident from the men’s social media activity.

“In total there have been eight attacks against western tourists, three against local women and one against a Chinese tourist,” says Annie.

“I know that are there other victims out there. I feel extremely lucky in a way because the situation could have been a lot worse.”

For as long as Nelly Naisula Sironka can remember she has never wanted children – and with one irreversible decision the 28-year-old Kenyan has ensured she never will get pregnant.

Last October, she took the definitive step of undergoing a sterilisation procedure known as tubal ligation – permanently closing the door on motherhood.

“I feel liberated,” the organisational development expert tells the BBC, adding that it has ensured her future is now entirely her own.

The operation prevents pregnancy by blocking a woman’s fallopian tubes and is sometimes referred to as “getting your tubes tied”.

Between 2020 and 2023, roughly 16,000 women in the East African country underwent tubal ligation, according to Kenya’s health ministry.

It is unclear, however, how many of these women were childless at the time of the procedure.

Yet Dr Nelly Bosire says the kinds of women coming forward seeking sterilisation in Kenya is changing.

“Traditionally, the most common candidates for tubal ligation were women who already had multiple children,” the Nairobi-based gynaecologist told the BBC.

“But now, we are seeing more women with fewer children opting for the procedure.”

Sterilisation is only recommended for women who are certain they do not want to have biological children in the future, as reversal is difficult.

“Doctors don’t typically encourage tubal ligation because the success rate of a reversal is very poor,” said Dr Bosire.

Despite coming from a large family, Ms Sironka said she never felt pressured to start her own – though societal norms in Kenya do place an expectation on women to have children.

She credits her father with her stance as he encouraged her to focus on education – and gave her a love of reading.

Books by US feminist authors like Toni Morrison, Angela Davis and bell hooks were a revelation.

“I interacted with women’s life stories that didn’t feature children at all,” said Ms Sironka, who is now the chief of operations at Feminists in Kenya, an organisation which works to end gender violence.

“It made me realise that a life like this was possible.”

She had contemplated sterilisation for years, but decided to go ahead after saving up the money for the operation and finding herself in a stable job that allowed her to take time off.

It cost her 30,000 Kenyan shillings (£190; $230) at a private hospital.

Ms Sironka felt that women’s rights were being eroded around the world – especially as women in the US lost the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, which also influenced her decision.

It made her fear that a woman’s right to control her own body might be eroded elsewhere – and that she should do the procedure while she still could.

“Within Africa and in America, there has been a rise in fascism and authoritarian regimes, a perfect example of such is Kenya,” she argued.

When she told her family, it did not come as a surprise to them, as she had always been very vocal about her desire for a child-free life.

And as for dating and relationships?

“I’m still thinking about it,” she said with a shrug.

And Ms Sironka is not alone in choosing a child-free life, challenging traditional expectations of womanhood.

Across social media, there are those speaking openly about their choice not to have children and undergo sterilisation.

Among them is Muthoni Gitau, an interior designer and podcaster.

She shared her tubal ligation journey in a 30-minute YouTube video last March, explaining her decision to have the procedure.

“I think the first time I ever articulated… [that] I did not want to have children, I was about 10,” she told the BBC.

Her mother was heavily pregnant at the time, and a random question about her future popped into the conversation.

“I saw a possible partner. I saw travelling. I just never saw children,” she said.

Like Ms Sironka, Ms Gitau’s decision was driven by a strong conviction to live life on her own terms.

After trying birth control pills, which she said made her nauseous, she sought a more permanent solution.

When she first approached a doctor about tubal ligation at the age of 23, she was met with resistance.

She was given what felt like a sermon about how children were a blessing from God.

“He asked me, ‘What if I meet someone who wants kids?'” she said.

The doctor seemed to have more consideration for an “imaginary person” rather than the actual patient sitting in front of him, she said.

Ms Gitau said the dismissal was “heart breaking”. It was another decade before her wish was finally granted.

Dr Bosire points out that a significant challenge in Kenya is getting medics to shift their mindset and truly appreciate a patient’s right to make decisions about their health.

“This ties in with our culture, where people believe it isn’t normal for women to want a tubal ligation,” she said.

Another Kenyan gynaecologist, Dr Kireki Omanwa, admitted the issue was a matter of debate amongst colleagues and in medical circles.

“It remains inconclusive,” he told the BBC.

But Ms Gitau was not deterred and last year approached another doctor – this time at a non-governmental organisation that provides family planning services.

She was armed with a bullet-point list of reasons to support her decision and was relieved to find there there was no pushback: “The doctor was very kind.”

Currently single, she is living happily with her decision, which she feels gives her control over her own life.

The 34-year-old is also happy with the reaction to her video – and relieved that there has been no major backlash.

She says most people online have been cheering her on, which has seen her confidence grow.

“Women can contribute to the world in so many other ways,” she said.

“It does not have to be through raising a whole human being. I am grateful to live in a generation where choice is a thing.”

• Forced sterilisation in South Africa: They removed my uterus
• ‘I was sterilised for being HIV positive’
• Kenya femicide: Why men fail to condemn deadly misogyny
• HIV and forced sterilisations: How four Kenyan women found justice
• A Kenyan woman’s murder exposes the country’s toxic online misogyny

Friedrich Merz’s conservatives have won Germany’s election, well ahead of rival parties but short of the 30% vote-share they had expected.

“Let’s celebrate tonight and in the morning we’ll get to work,” he told cheering supporters. He said he was “aware of the responsibility that now lies ahead” of him.

The other winner was the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who are celebrating a record second-place result of 20.8%.

The AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, did a victory lap of her supporters, but even her party had hoped for a greater result and the mood at AfD HQ was subdued.

As results came in during the early hours of Monday, it became clear the AfD was far ahead of the other parties in the east, with a projected 34% according to a survey for public broadcaster ZDF.

“Germans have voted for change,” said Alice Weidel. She said Friedrich Merz’s attempt to forge a coalition would ultimately end in failure: “We’ll have fresh elections – I don’t think we’ll have to wait another four years.”

But just as the election map turned light blue in the east, much of the rest of Germany turned black – the colour of the CDU.

After the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition late last year, Merz had asked the electorate for a strong mandate to form a clear-cut coalition with one other party.

That would enable him to solve as many of Germany’s problems as he could in four years, he said, from a stagnant economy to closing its borders to irregular migrants.

German voters had other ideas. They came out in big numbers, with a 83% turnout not seen since before reunification in 1990, but Merz’s Christian Democrats had been looking for more than the 28.6% of the vote they and their Bavarian sister party received.

Merz has ruled out working with the AfD. There is a taboo or “firewall” preventing mainstream parties in Germany from operating with the far right.

But his most likely partner, the Social Democrats, have suffered their worst ever result with 16.4%.

Their leader, outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said the election results were a bitter defeat for the party, and he would not be taking part in negotiations for a coalition.

Because of the CDU’s relatively lacklustre performance, there was initially some doubt that two parties would be enough for a coalition.

Germany has just been through four years of a three-party coalition and the only other realistic partner was the Greens, whose leader, Robert Habeck, Merz had ridiculed as a “representative for heat pumps” on the eve of the vote.

Read more on the German election:

Big challenges ahead for Merz in divided Germany

Merz: Risk-taker who flirted with far right

Merz, 69, has never held a ministerial job, but he has promised if he becomes the next German chancellor to show leadership in Europe and beef up support for Ukraine.

Most Germans have been shocked by the open backing that billionaire Elon Musk and US Vice-President JD Vance gave Alternative for Germany in the election. Vance was accused of meddling in the vote during a visit to Munich, while Elon Musk made repeated remarks on his X platform.

It did Alice Weidel and her party no harm at all, as the AfD enjoyed a 10-point increase in support on four years ago. But she also benefited from a successful TikTok campaign, that drew in big numbers of young voters.

Nevertheless, President Donald Trump welcomed Merz’s victory. He said it was proof that Germans were, like Americans, tired of “the no common sense agenda, especially on energy and immigration”.

If it was an overture, Merz did not take it as one. He told a roundtable TV discussion on Sunday night that it had become clear in the past week that the Trump administration was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”.

Trump has bizarrely described Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator” and he appeared to accuse Kyiv of starting the war, which Russia unleashed on its neighbour exactly three years ago.

Merz said his “absolute priority” would be to “strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can achieve real independence from the US step by step”.

Merz’s victory was quickly welcomed across much of Europe. France’s Emmanuel Macron spoke of uniting at a time of uncertainty to “face the major challenges of the world and our continent”, while UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer sought to “enhance our joint security and deliver growth for both our countries”.

Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats continue to rely on older voters for their success, while voters aged 18-24 appear to be far more interested in both the AfD and another party, the Left, which surged in the polls in recent weeks.

Not long ago the Left was heading out of the parliament with poll numbers well below the 5% threshold.

But a series of TikTok videos showing co-leader Heidi Reichinnek giving fiery speeches in parliament went viral and they ended up close to 9%, and a quarter of the younger vote, according to an ARD survey.

Kyiv no longer looks like a city at war in the way that it was three years ago. The shops are open and commuters get delayed in traffic jams on their way to work. But in the days since 12 February this year when US President Donald Trump rang Russia’s Vladimir Putin to send a 90-minute political embrace from the White House to the Kremlin, 2022’s old nightmares of national extinction have returned. Ukrainians used to get angry about the way that President Joe Biden held back weapons systems and restricted the way Ukraine used the ones that arrived here. Even so, they knew whose side he was on.

Instead, Donald Trump has delivered a stream of exaggeration, half-truths and outright lies about the war that echo the views of President Putin. They include his dismissal of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a dictator who does not deserve a seat at the table when America and Russia decide the future of his country. The biggest lie Trump has told is that Ukraine started the war.

Trump’s negotiating strategy is to offer concessions even before serious talks have started. Instead of putting pressure on the country that broke international law by invading its neighbour, leading to huge destruction and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, he has turned on Ukraine.

His public statements have offered Russia important concessions, declaring that Ukraine will not join Nato and accepting that it will keep at least some of the land it seized by force. Vladimir Putin’s record shows he respects strength. He regards concessions as a sign of weakness.

He has not budged from a demand for even more Ukrainian land than his men now occupy. Immediately after the first talks, held in Saudi Arabia, between Russia and the US since the 2022 invasion, Putin’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov repeated his demand that no Nato troops would be allowed into Ukraine to provide security guarantees.

A veteran European diplomat who has dealt with the Russians and the Americans told me that when the grizzled, highly experienced Lavrov met Trump’s novice Secretary of State Marco Rubio “he would have eaten him like a soft-boiled egg.”

A few days ago, as Trump threw more insults at Ukraine’s president, I went to the heavily guarded government quarter in Kyiv to meet Ihor Brusylo, who is a senior adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky and deputy head of his office. Brusylo acknowledged how much pressure Trump is putting on them.

“It’s very, very tough. These are very hard, challenging times,” Brusylo said. “I wouldn’t say that now it’s easier than it was in 2022. It’s like you live it all over again.”

Brusylo said Ukrainians, and their president, were as determined to fight to stay independent as they had been in 2022.

“We’re a sovereign country. We are part of Europe, and we will remain so.”

In the weeks after Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the sound of battle on the edge of Kyiv echoed around streets that were almost empty. Checkpoints and barricades, walls of sandbags and tank traps welded from steel girders were rushed out onto Kyiv’s broad boulevards. At the railway station, fifty thousand civilians a day, mostly women and children, were boarding trains going west, away from the Russians.

The platforms were packed and every time a train pulled in, came another surge of panic as people pushed and shoved to get on. In those freezing days, in bitter wind and flurries of snow, it felt as if the colours of the 21st century were fading into an old monochrome newsreel that Europeans had believed until then was safely consigned to the vaults of history.

President Zelensky, in Joe Biden’s words, “didn’t want to hear” American warnings that an invasion was imminent. Putin rattling a Russian sabre was one thing. A full-scale invasion, with tens of thousands of troops and columns of armour, surely belonged in the past.

Putin believed Russia’s mighty and modernised army would make quick work of its obstinate, independent neighbour and its recalcitrant president. Ukraine’s western allies also thought Russia would win quickly. On television news channels, retired generals talked about smuggling in light weapons to arm an insurgency while the west imposed sanctions and hoped for the best.

As Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, Germany delivered 5,000 ballistic combat helmets instead of offensive weapons. Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv and once heavyweight boxing champion of the world, complained to a German newspaper that it was “a joke… What kind of support will Germany send next, pillows?”

Zelensky turned down any idea of leaving his capital to form a government in exile. He abandoned his presidential dark suit for military attire, and in videos and on social media told Ukrainians he would fight alongside them.

Ukraine defeated the Russian thrust towards the capital. Once the Ukrainians had demonstrated that they could fight well, the attitude of the Americans and Europeans changed. Arms supplies increased.

“Putin’s mistake was that he prepared for a parade not a war” a senior Ukrainian official recalled, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He didn’t think Ukraine would fight. He thought they would be welcomed with speeches and flowers.”

On 29 March 2022, the Russians retreated from Kyiv. Hours after they left, we drove, nervously, into the chaotic, damaged landscape of Kyiv’s satellite towns, Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel. On the roads the Russians had hoped to use for a triumphant entry into Kyiv, I saw bodies of civilians left where they were killed. Charred tyres were stacked around some of them, failed attempts to burn the evidence of war crimes.

Survivors spoke of the brutality of the Russian occupiers. A woman showed me the grave where she had buried her son single-handed after he was casually shot dead as he crossed a road. Russian soldiers threw her out of her house. In the garden, they left piles of empty bottles of vodka, whisky and gin that they had looted and drunk. Hastily abandoned Russian encampments in the forests near the roads were choked with rubbish their soldiers had discarded over the weeks of occupation.

Professional, disciplined armies do not eat and sleep next to rotting piles of their own refuse.

Three years on, the war has changed. Although Kyiv has revived, it still has nightly alerts as its air defences detect incoming Russian missiles and drones. The war is closer, and more deadly, along the front line, more than 1,000 kilometres long, that runs from the northern border with Russia and then east and south down to the Black Sea. It is lined with destroyed, almost deserted villages and towns. To the east, in what was Kyiv’s industrial heartland of Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian forces grind forward slowly, at a huge cost in men and machines.

Last August, Ukraine sent troops into Russia, capturing a pocket of land across the border in Kursk. They are still there, fighting for land that Zelensky hopes to use as a bargaining chip.

Along the border with Kursk, in the snow-covered forests of north-eastern Ukraine, the geopolitical storm set off by Donald Trump is still not much more than a menacing, distant rumble. It will get here, especially if the US president follows up his harsh and mocking verbal attacks on president Zelensky with a final end to military aid and intelligence-sharing, and even worse from Ukraine’s perspective, an attempt to impose a peace deal that favours Russia.

For now, the rhythm built up in three years of war goes on, and the forest could be a throwback to the blood-soaked twentieth century. Fighting men move silently through the trees, along trenches and into bunkers dug deep into the frozen earth. In stretches of open ground, anti-tank defences made of concrete and steel stud the fields.

The 21st century is more present in the dry and warm underground bunkers. Generators and solar panels power laptops and screens linked to the outside world, and bring in the news feeds.

Just because bad news arrives doesn’t mean that the soldiers look at it. In a deep dug-out lined with bunks made of rough planks from the local sawmill, with nails hammered into the timber to hang weapons and winter uniforms, Evhen, a 30-year-old corporal said he had more urgent matters to think about – his men and the wife and two small children he left at home when he joined up, ten months ago.

That’s a long time on the front line in Kursk. He looks and sounds like a combat veteran. He has faced the North Koreans who have been sent to join the battle there by their leader, Putin’s ally, Kim Jong Un.

“Koreans fight till the end. Even if he is injured and you come to him, he might just blow himself up to take more of us with him.”

All the soldiers we interviewed asked to be referred to by first names for their own security. Evhen seemed relaxed about fighting on without the Americans.

“Help is not something that can last forever. We have it today, we don’t have it tomorrow.”

Ukraine, he said, was making many more of its own weapons. That’s true, especially when it comes to attack drones, but the US still supplies sophisticated systems that have damaged the Russians badly.

Many of the volunteers who took up arms three years ago have either been killed, maimed, or are too exhausted to fight any more. One of Ukraine’s most bitter fault lines runs between those who fight and those who bribe their way out of military service. Evhen said they were better off without them.

“It is better for them to pay not to fight than to come here and run away, tripping us up. It doesn’t bother me much. If they came here, they’d just scarper… they’re deserters.”

War strips away surplus thought. The stakes are straightforward for soldiers preparing to return to the battle in Kursk. Mykola, who commands a company of airborne assault troops, spoke affectionately about the capabilities of their Stryker armoured vehicles, supplied by the Americans.

“Kursk” he says, “shows the enemy, a nuclear weapons state, that a non-nuclear power with a smaller population and a smaller army can come in, capture land and the Russians have been able to do very little about it.”

Putin’s objectives, he said, were clear.

“His task is to seize all of Ukraine, change its legal status, and change the president and government. He wants to destroy our political system and to make Ukraine his vassal state.”

He laughed when I asked whether the Americans and others should trust Vladimir Putin.

“No! I don’t have enough fingers to count how many times Putin lied. To everyone! To the Russians, and to us, and to Western partners. He lied to everyone.”

At a volunteer centre in Kyiv in the first days after the invasion, I met two young students, Maxsym Lutsyk, 19, and Dmytro Kisilenko, 18, who were signing up to fight.

When they lined up alongside men old enough to be their fathers as well as other teenage recruits, they carried camping gear and could have been friends off to a festival, except for their assault rifles. At the time, I wrote “18 and 19-year-old lads have always gone off to war. I thought in Europe we’d got past that.” A few weeks later, Maxsym and Dmytro were in uniform and manning a checkpoint just behind the Kyiv front line, still students joking about their parents.

Both fought in the battle of Kyiv. Dmytro chose to leave the army, his right as a student volunteer, when the fight switched to the east. He is preparing to fight again if necessary, training to be an officer at the National Military University. Maxsym stayed in uniform, serving in the front line in the east for more than two years. Now he is an officer working in military intelligence.

I have stayed in touch with them as, like millions of other young people here, war shapes their adult lives in ways they never expected. Trump’s move towards Moscow makes them feel almost as if they have to start again.

“We mobilised,” Dmytro says. “We mobilised our resources, our people, and I think it’s time that we repeat it once again.”

Unlike the men in the forest on the Kursk border, they follow the news. Donald Trump’s diplomatic and strategic bombshells, starting at the Munich security conference only 10 days ago, reminds them of the infamous deal Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain made at Munich in 1938, forcing Czechoslovakia to capitulate to the demands made by Adolf Hitler.

“It’s similar,” Maxsym said. “The West gives an aggressor an opportunity to occupy some territories. The West is making a deal with the aggressor, with the United States in the role of Great Britain.”

“It’s a very dangerous moment for the entire world, not only for Ukraine,” Maxsym went on. “We can see that Europe is starting to wake up… but if they wanted to be ready for the war, they should [have] begun a few years ago.”

Dmytro agreed about the dangers ahead.

“I think that Donald Trump wants to become like a new Neville Chamberlain… Mr. Trump should be more focused on becoming more like Winston Churchill.”

If you’re a real estate developer, as Donald Trump was before he went into reality TV and then presidential politics, demolition makes money. Acquire a property, tear it down, rebuild and win. The trouble with that strategy in foreign policy is that sovereignty and independence don’t have a price tag. Trump boasts he puts America first, but he is not prepared to accept that non-Americans can feel the same about their own countries.

Since Trump was sworn in for the second time as president of the United States, he has been swinging the wrecking ball. He sent Elon Musk into the federal government to recoup billions of dollars he claims are being stolen or wasted. Abroad, Trump the demolition man has set about the assumptions that underpin the 80-year alliance between the US and European democracies.

Donald Trump is unpredictable, but much of what he is doing he has talked about for years. He is not the first American president to resent the way its European allies have saved money by sheltering behind the US defence budget. The phrase used by his defence secretary Pete Hegseth to his Nato partners, that “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker” was a conscious reference back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

A US government document from 4 November 1959 records his frustration. It says: “The President said that for five years he has been urging the State Department to put the facts of life before the Europeans He thinks the Europeans are close to ‘making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.'”

Trump wants payback. He demanded half a trillion dollars of mineral rights from Ukraine. Zelensky turned that deal down, saying he couldn’t sell his country. He wants security guarantees in exchange for any concessions.

In private, European politicians and diplomats recognise that, with Joe Biden, they gave Ukraine enough military and financial support not to lose to Russia, but never enough to win. The argument for more of the same is that Russia, weakened by sanctions and drained of manpower as its generals squander their men’s lives, will eventually lose a war of attrition. That is far from certain.

Wars usually end with agreements. Germany’s unconditional surrender in 1945 was a rarity. The complaint against Trump is that he has no real plan, so he has followed a gut instinct to get closer to Vladimir Putin, a man he admires. Trump seems to believe that strong leaders from the most powerful states can bend the world into the shape they want. The concessions Trump has already offered to Putin reinforce the idea that his top priority is normalising relations with Russia.

A more credible plan would have been to include a way to make Putin drop ideas that are lodged deep in his geostrategic DNA. One of the strongest is that Ukraine’s sovereignty must be broken and control of the country returned to the Kremlin, as it was in Soviet times and before that in the empire of Russia’s Czars.

It is hard to see how that happens. The idea is as unlikely as Ukraine surrendering its independence to Moscow. Europe’s security is being turned upside down by the war in Ukraine. No wonder its leaders are so badly rattled by all they have heard and seen this month.

Their challenge is to find ways to avoid their young people being forced into the unexpected world of war that has enveloped Maxsym Lutsyk, the 22-year-old Ukrainian combat veteran.

“Everyone changed, and I have changed. I think that every Ukrainian matured during these three years. Everyone who entered the military and everyone who was fighting for such a long time drastically changed.”

Volodymyr Zelensky said he would be willing to “give up” his presidency in exchange for peace ahead of the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“If to achieve peace you really need me to give up my post – I’m ready. I can trade it for Nato membership, if there are such conditions,” the Ukrainian president said in response to a question during a news conference.

His comments came after US President Donald Trump called Zelensky a “dictator without elections” earlier in the week.

“I wasn’t offended, but a dictator would be,” Zelensky, who was democratically elected in May 2019, responded on Sunday.

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“I am focused on Ukraine’s security today, not in 20 years, I am not going to be in power for decades,” he added.

According to Ukrainian law, elections are suspended under martial law, which has been in place since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Zelensky is meeting Western leaders on Monday, some in person in Kyiv and some online, as they work out how to provide a post-war security where the US will not.

He said the topic of Ukraine joining Nato would be “on the table” at the meeting but he did not know how the discussions would “finish”. He hoped the meeting would be a “turning point”.

On the topic of Trump, Zelensky said that he wanted to see the US president as a partner to Ukraine and more than a mediator between Kyiv and Moscow.

“I really want it to be more than just mediation…that’s not enough,” he said.

With the White House demanding that it gets access to billions of dollars’ worth of Ukraine’s natural minerals in exchange for the military aid it provided to date – and could in the future – Zelensky said US help so far had been agreed as grants, not loans.

He said he would not agree to a security deal which – in his words – would be “paid off by generation after generation”.

When asked about a potential mineral deal, Zelensky said “we are making progress,” adding that Ukrainian and US officials had been in touch.

“We are ready to share,” the Ukrainian leader said, but made clear that Washington first needed to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin “ends this war”.

Zelensky appeared relaxed as he faced questions from the world’s media. In previous years he had been more impassioned and even emotional, but on Sunday his approach was business-like.

If Ukraine’s leader rejects a Donald Trump-shaped peace proposal he does not agree with – as he suggested today – then it could have lasting consequences for the course of this war.

Zelensky’s comments came hours after Russia launched its largest single drone attack on Ukraine yet, Ukrainian officials said.

On Saturday night, Ukraine’s Air Force Command spokesman Yuriy Ignat said a “record” 267 Russian drones were launched in a single, coordinated attack on the country.

Thirteen regions were targeted and while many of the drones were repelled, those that were not caused destruction to infrastructure and at least three casualties, emergency services said.

Ukraine’s Air Force reported that 138 of the drones were shot down and 119, which were decoy drones, were lost without negative consequences, likely due to jamming.

In Kyiv, the attack meant six hours of air alerts.

In a statement, Zelensky thanked Ukraine’s emergency services for their response and called for the support of Europe and US in facilitating “a lasting and just peace”.

In a post on X, Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska said that “hundreds of drones” had “brought death and destruction” overnight.

“It was another night of explosions, burning houses and cars, and destroyed infrastructure,” she wrote. “Another night when people prayed for their loved ones to survive”.

On Monday, the war will enter its fourth year.

Diplomatic wrangling over a potential peace deal continues, with Ukraine, European allies and the US offering differing visions for how to end the conflict.

The US and Russia held preliminary talks in Saudi Arabia this week – without delegates from Europe, including Ukraine, present – which resulted in European leaders holding a hastily-arranged summit in Paris.

Zelensky criticised Ukraine’s exclusion from the US-Russia talks, saying Trump was “living in a disinformation space” governed by Moscow, prompting Trump to respond by calling the Ukrainian president a “dictator”.

French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to visit Washington on Monday, while UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will be there on Thursday.

Sir Keir has publicly backed Zelensky, reiterating the UK’s “ironclad support” for Kyiv, and said he would discuss the importance of Ukraine’s sovereignty when he speaks to Trump.

Pope Francis – who is in hospital with respiratory illness – wrote in a remarks released on Sunday that the third anniversary of the war was “a painful and shameful occasion for the whole of humanity”.

“In the next 50 years, you will not find one Israeli leader that will propose to you what I propose to you now.

“Sign it! Sign it and let’s change history!”

It was 2008. Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was imploring the Palestinian leader to accept a deal he believed could have brought peace to the Middle East.

It was a two-state solution – a prospect which seems impossible today.

If implemented, it would have created a Palestinian state on more than 94% of the occupied West Bank.

The map Olmert had drawn up now has an almost mythical status. Various interpretations have appeared over the years, but he has never revealed it to the media.

Until now.

In , the latest series from documentary filmmaker Norma Percy available on iPlayer from Monday, Olmert reveals the map he says he showed to Mahmoud Abbas at a meeting in Jerusalem on 16 September 2008.

“This is the first time that I expose this map to the media,” he tells the filmmakers.

It shows, in detail, the territory which Olmert proposed to annexe to Israel – 4.9% of the West Bank.

That would have included major Jewish settlement blocs – just like previous proposals dating back to the late 1990s.

In return, the prime minister said Israel would give up an equal amount of Israeli territory, along the edges of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The two Palestinian territories would be connected via a tunnel or highway – again, something that had been discussed before.

In the film, Olmert recalls the Palestinian leader’s response.

“He said: ‘Prime minister, this is very serious. It is very, very, very serious.'”

Crucially, Olmert’s plan included a proposed solution to the thorny issue of Jerusalem.

Each side would be able to claim parts of the city as their capital, while administration of the “holy basin” – including the Old City, with its religious sites, and adjacent areas – would be handed over to a committee of trustees consisting of Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the US.

The implications of the map, for Jewish settlements, would have been colossal.

Had the plan been implemented, dozens of communities, scattered throughout the West Bank and Jordan Valley, would have been evacuated.

When the previous Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, forcibly removed a few thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it was regarded as a national trauma by those on the Israeli right.

Evacuating most of the West Bank would have represented an infinitely greater challenge, involving tens of thousands of settlers, with the very real danger of violence.

But the test never came.

At the end of their meeting, Olmert refused to hand over a copy of the map to Mahmoud Abbas unless the Palestinian leader sign it.

Abbas refused, saying that he needed to show his experts the map, to make sure they understood exactly what was being offered.

Olmert says the two agreed to a meeting of map experts the following day.

“We parted, you know, like we are about to embark on a historic step forward,” Olmert says.

The meeting never happened. As they drove away from Jerusalem that night, President Abbas’s chief of staff, Rafiq Husseini, remembers the atmosphere in the car.

“Of course, we laughed,” he says in the film.

The Palestinians believed the plan was dead in the water. Olmert, embroiled in an unrelated corruption scandal, had already announced that he was planning to resign.

“It is unfortunate that Olmert, regardless of how nice he was… was a lame duck,” Husseini says, “and therefore, we will go nowhere with this.”

The situation in Gaza also complicated matters. After months of rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled territory, Olmert ordered a major Israeli assault, Operation Cast Lead, at the end of December, triggering three weeks of intense fighting.

But Olmert tells me it would have been “very smart” for Abbas to sign the deal. Then, if a future Israeli prime minister tried to cancel it, “he could have said to the world that the failure was Israel’s fault”.

Israeli elections followed in February. Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a vocal opponent of Palestinian statehood, became prime minister.

Olmert’s plan, and map, faded from view.

The former prime minister says he’s still waiting for Abbas’s reply, but his plan has since joined a long list of missed opportunities to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 1973, the former Israeli diplomat, Abba Eban, quipped that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. It’s a phrase that Israeli officials have frequently repeated in the years since.

But the world is more complicated than that, especially since the two sides signed the historic Oslo Accords in 1993.

The peace process ushered in by a handshake on the White House lawn between former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had moments of genuine hope, punctuated by tragedy. Ultimately, it resulted in failure.

The reasons are complex and there’s plenty of blame to go around but in truth, the stars were never properly aligned.

I witnessed this non-alignment at first hand 24 years ago.

In January 2001, at the Egyptian resort of Taba, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators once again saw the outlines of a deal.

A member of the Palestinian delegation drew a rough map on a napkin and told me that, for the first time, they were looking at the rough outlines of a viable Palestinian state.

But the talks were irrelevant, drowned out by the violence raging on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza, where the second Palestinian uprising, or “intifada”, had erupted the previous September.

Once again, Israel was in the midst of a political transition. Prime Minister Ehud Barak had already resigned. Ariel Sharon comfortably defeated him a few weeks later.

The map on the napkin, just like Olmert’s map eight years later, showed what might have been.

A British couple in their seventies have been arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Peter Reynolds, 79, and his wife Barbie, 75, were returning to their home in Bamiyan on 1 February when they were detained.

The couple have been running training projects in Afghanistan for 18 years and their daughter, Sarah Entwistle, told the BBC she had not heard from her parents in more than two weeks.

It is not known exactly what the couple were arrested for but projects run by them include one training mothers and children, which had apparently been approved by the local authorities despite a ban by the Taliban on women working and on education for girls older than the age of 12.

The couple, who originally met at the University of Bath, married in Kabul in 1970. Since 2009 they have been running training projects in five schools in Kabul and one project in Bamiyan training mothers and children.

While the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 saw most of their staff leave – along with most westerners – Mr and Mrs Reynolds insisted on staying put.

After their arrest, the couple were initially able to keep in touch with their four children by text message. The family knew that their parents were being held by the interior ministry and were assured by them that they were “fine”.

Three days later, however, the texts stopped. The children have heard nothing since.

Ms Entwistle, who lives in Daventry, Northamptonshire, told the BBC: “It’s been over two weeks since the messages stopped, and they were taken into custody.

“We would like the Taliban to release them to go back to their home and continue their work.”

She told the Sunday Times: “They said they could not leave when Afghans were in their hour of need.

“They were meticulous about keeping by the rules even as they kept changing.”

Their daughter told the Times: “My mother is 75 and my father almost 80 and [he] needs his heart medication after a mini-stroke. They were just trying to help the country they loved. The idea they are being held because they were teaching mothers with children is outrageous.”

The couple were arrested alongside their American friend Faye Hall and a translator from their business, the PA news agency reported quoting an employee.

The employee, who described the pair as “the most honourable people I have ever met”, said Mr Reynolds had been denied access to heart medication and his condition was “not good”.

Ms Entwistle and her three siblings have written a letter to the Taliban, pleading with them to release their parents.

“We do not understand the reasons behind their arrest,” they wrote. “They have communicated their trust in you, and that as Afghan citizens they will be treated well.”

“We recognise that there have been instances where exchanges have been beneficial for your government and western nations. However, our parents have consistently expressed their commitment to Afghanistan, stating that they would rather sacrifice their lives than become part of ransom negotiations or be traded.”

The Foreign Office is aware two British nationals have been detained in Afghanistan. But assistance is limited by the fact that the UK does not recognise the Taliban and has no embassy in Kabul.

Taliban official sources have told the BBC they arrested British nationals, who they believe were working for an non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Bamiyan province.

An official claimed they had been arrested, about 20 days ago, after using a plane without informing Bamiyan police headquarters or the border security forces.

The Taliban announced women would be banned from working for NGOs in 2022 and in December last year Al Jazeera reported the government had said it would close any NGOs employing women.

For months, Japan’s entertainment industry has been rocked by a scandal that unseated one of its most popular celebrities and put one of its biggest broadcasters at risk.

But some believe it has also marked a turning point in how cases of sexual assault are perceived in Japan – where traditionally victims have been shamed into silence.

At its heart was Masahiro Nakai, a household name and leading presenter for Fuji TV, one of the country’s biggest broadcasters.

Nakai, who is also a former member of J-Pop boy band SMAP, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a dinner party in 2023.

The revelations, which first appeared last December in weekly tabloid magazine Shukan Bunshun, marked the latest of a series of scandals involving celebrities in Japan, including that of late entertainment mogul Johnny Kitagawa, who was found by investigators to have abused hundreds of boys and young men over six decades.

While Nakai didn’t admit guilt, he apologised for “causing trouble” in a statement and said that he had “resolved” the matter with the woman in a settlement, reportedly worth more than half a million dollars.

But as public anger mounted, Nakai, who has also denied using force against the woman, was also forced to announce his retirement from the entertainment industry in January. Another channel, the Tokyo Broadcasting System has also stopped airing a program that Nakai regularly appeared on as an MC.

The impact on Fuji TV has been devastating.

The broadcaster’s reputation is now in ruins, its revenue threatened and some of its top executives have been forced to resign.

High profile companies like Nissan and Toyota were among those who pulled advertising from the broadcaster as public anger mounted. Fuji TV has since admitted it allowed Nakai to continue presenting shows even after finding about the allegations.

“If this had happened 10 years ago, there would not have been this outcry,” Keiko Kojima who worked in Japan’s media industry for 15 years as a TV presenter, told the BBC.

Sexual violence against women is one of Japan’s worst kept secrets. A 2020 survey claimed that more than 70% of sexual assaults in the country go unreported. And according to a 2024 study published in the International Journal of Asian Studies, for every 1,000 rapes in Japan, only 10–20 result in a criminal conviction – and fewer than half of convicted rapists are incarcerated.

“There’s still a prevalent attitude of ‘Shoganai ‘ or ‘there’s nothing you can do’ that is being projected on women – so they’re encouraged to keep silent,” Machiko Osawa, professor emeritus at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo, told the BBC.

She added that women were seldom believed and did not have proper mechanisms to even report such incidents, which contributed to this culture of silence.

Ms Kojima said that the media industry in particular, has long had a culture of impunity and lack of accountability where many young women felt they must keep silent to keep their jobs.

“It was common for men to make rude comments about women’s bodies or appearance or age. I remember my colleagues and I being asked how many people we’ve had sex with,” she said.

“We were expected to reply with a sense of humour without getting angry or offended. I saw sexual harassment and other forms of derogatory treatment of women on a daily basis. For a woman, adapting to these situations was the only way to become a full-fledged TV or media professional.”

The Fuji TV case has also raised the question of whether dinners and drinking parties involving celebrities and young women were common practice.

Although Shukan Bunshun retracted an earlier report that claimed the alleged assault took place at a party organised by Fuji TV, Ms Kojima told the BBC that it was indeed common to use women as “tools for entertaining”.

“In Japanese working culture, it’s an everyday practice to half-forcibly take young female employees to events to entertain clients.”

“Men are happy when young women join them. The idea that women are like a gift and that taking a young woman with you is a way of offering hospitality to the other person is very common.”

That is why the fallout of this scandal has encouraged women’s rights activists.

Minori Kithara, one of the founders of the Flower Demo movement – where groups of sexual violence victims and their supporters gather in public spaces on the 11th of every month – admitted she was surprised at how swiftly and severely the sponsors reacted.

“Even if it’s more of self-preservation than human rights for sponsors, this is a turning point for the MeToo movement in Japan. It’s up to us how big we make it,” she told the BBC.

Nearly 50 companies have walked away from the now tarnished Fuji TV.

The government has also withdrawn all its recent and planned advertisements with the network.

The Japanese government has called on the broadcaster to regain the trust of viewers and sponsors. So far it seems to have done neither.

The scandal and Fuji TV’s role in hiding it, sent the company on a crisis-management frenzy that seems to have dug it deeper into disgrace and fuelled more public anger.

Then Fuji TV president Koichi Minato admitted that the company had known about the allegation shortly after the alleged incident.

But he said they chose not to disclose it at the time because they “prioritised the woman’s physical and mental recovery as well as the protection of her privacy.”

After a press conference which it held in the hope of defusing the outrage turned into a PR disaster, the company held a second one that lasted 10 hours – intended to show remorse.

Both Fuji TV’s chairman Shuji Kano and its President Koichi Minato stepped down – bowing humbly as they announced their resignations.

It was announced that the company’s executive vice president Kenji Shimizu would replace Mr Minato as president.

But these were seen as mere face and revenue saving exercises rather than substantial change, especially because the president’s replacement was of the same leadership cadre.

Professor Osawa told the BBC however, that high profile cases like Fuji TV become important precedents for these patterns to change.

The saga is the latest in a series of high-profile sexual misconduct cases that have generated conversation on women’s rights in Japan.

These include the case of journalist Shiori Ito, who became a symbol of the country’s #MeToo movement when in 2017 she took the rare step of going public with allegations that Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a senior television journalist, had raped her after she met him for drinks. While he denied the allegations, in 2019 she won her civil lawsuit against him.

“People have now started to realise that it was OK to speak out and say that this (sexual harassment) is a problem. We are changing what we take as the norm,” Ms Kojima said.

Ms Kojima and Ms Kithara both say however, that Japan is not moving fast enough.

“I think it’s time for that generation (of media leadership) to step down. The industry needs to create a new corporate culture. The change is slow.” Ms Kojima said.

“The TV industry has long neglected the issue of exploitation and violence and has not dealt with the victims properly. If the root of the problem doesn’t change, the same will happen again.”

Professor Osawa agrees that while change is happening, Japan still has a long way to go. Mainly because of the ubiquitous power imbalance in the country’s male dominated society.

She adds that while women have been part of the workforce for decades they’re still seen as the “caretakers” and men as the “breadwinners” by a society that is still heavily shaped by patriarchal values.

“This is an important time… But it’s unclear how far attitudes will change.” she said.

While Ms Kithara is hopeful, she says she’s still angry: “The sexual violence never stops.”

“I still meet new survivors at Flower Demo (protests) every month and learn what happened to them. We had a high school girl other day. When we started the movement (In 2019) she was probably in Junior High, ” she said.

“One day I hope I will never have to go on a Flower Demo protest again.”

Key US departments within the Trump administration have told staff not to comply with a Saturday email from Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative asking what they accomplished in the past week.

The FBI, state department and Pentagon were among agencies that instructed employees not to answer the message. Other department heads advised staff to comply, while some told workers to wait for further guidance before responding.

Musk said failure to respond by Monday at midnight would be interpreted as the employee resigning. President Donald Trump has yet to comment on the email.

The conflicting guidance caused confusion for hundreds of thousands of government bureaucrats as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) task force leads an outside effort to aggressively reduce government spending.

The message sent to millions of federal employees on Saturday evening came after Musk posted on his social media platform X that government staff would “shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week”.

In a copy of the email obtained by the BBC, employees were asked to respond explaining their accomplishments from the past week in five bullet points – without disclosing classified information.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government’s human resources agency, confirmed the email was authentic.

The message did not mention whether declining to comply could affect employment status, despite Musk’s social media assertion that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation”.

Newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel told his staff in a separate email later on Saturday that they should “pause any responses”.

“FBI personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information,” Patel wrote in a message obtained by CBS News.

“The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with the FBI procedures.”

The state department sent a similar message, saying leadership would respond on behalf of the agency.

“No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” an email from Tibor Nagy, acting undersecretary for management, said.

The Pentagon told its staff: “When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM.”

The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave their employees similar instructions, according to reports.

• Thousands of USAID workers placed on leave, Trump administration says
• List weekly accomplishments or resign, Musk tells US federal workers
• Musk wields his Doge chainsaw – but is a backlash brewing?

In a sign that the OPM email may have come as a surprise to many agencies, a senior figure at the Department of Justice wrote to staff on Saturday evening to say: “Media reports indicate the email was distributed to employees throughout the federal government.”

The message added that “at this point, we have no reason to believe this message is spam or malicious”.

Later on Saturday evening, a follow-up email was sent clarifying that the OPM message was “legitimate” and that “employees should be prepared to follow the instructions as requested”.

The justice department message also came with a warning to staff: “Do not include any sensitive, confidential, or classified information in your response. Should you have any questions about the contents of your response please contact your supervisor.

“If we receive additional guidance or information, I will update all employees, as necessary.”

Agencies such as the Department of Transportation, the Secret Service and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency also encouraged their staff to comply, reports said.

Other departments, including the National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, requested that employees await further guidance.

OPM did not immediately respond to the BBC’s inquiry about whether some staff might be exempt.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees, criticised the message as “cruel and disrespectful” and threatened to sue.

It is unclear how the email affects any of the roughly three million federal workers who may not have had access their emails this weekend.

Other government employees, such as those at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, were placed on leave in the last month.

The message came hours after Trump praised Musk’s work on social media, adding: “I would like to see him get more aggressive.”

The Democratic ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hit out at the directive in a letter to the OPM.

Congressman Gerry Connolly of Virginia wrote that the agency should “immediately clarify that federal employees’ nonresponse to this ill-conceived, weekend email does not constitute resignation”.

“This threat is illegal, reckless, and yet another example of the cruel and arbitrary chaos Mr Musk is inflicting on the people’s government and its dedicated public servants.”

Most Republican members of Congress have been defending Musk and his broader efforts.

Congressman Mike Lawler of New York told ABC on Sunday that Musk’s efforts were a “comprehensive, forensic audit of every department and agency in the federal government”.

But Senator John Curtis, a Republican representing Utah, criticised Musk’s methods, even as said he supported the ultimate goal of Doge.

“If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like, please put a dose of compassion in this. These are real people. These are real lives. These are mortgages,” Curtis told CBS.

US President Donald Trump has appointed right-wing commentator Dan Bongino as deputy director of the FBI.

Trump posted on social media that Bongino was “a man of incredible love and passion for our Country” and would serve under newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel.

Bongino, 50, is former NYPD and Secret Service and worked as part of the protection detail for two presidents – George W Bush and Barack Obama.

He hosts a self-titled podcast whose Facebook posts often attract more attention than those of Fox News and CNN combined.

“Thank you Mr President, Attorney General Bondi, and Director Patel,” Bongino wrote on X in a post after Trump’s announcement.

Trump said in his social media announcement on Sunday that Bongino is “willing and prepared to give up” the podcast “in order to serve”.

“Fairness, Justice, Law and Order will be brought back to America, and quickly,” Trump added.

He said Bongino would do an “incredible job” at the FBI.

Bongino, who has run for Congress three times, hosted the now-president on his daily podcast, The Dan Bongino Show, ahead of last year’s election.

Episodes of his programme from the last week include titles such as “Trump Keeps Delivering And The Libs Are Seething” and “The Only People Who Love Crime Are Criminals!!!”

Talking about his career as a prolific conservative political commentator, Bongino said in 2018: “My life is all about owning the libs now.”

With a combative persona, he can often be found firing back at Trump’s detractors on X, including a long-running spat with horror author Stephen King.

Bongino’s new FBI boss Patel was last week narrowly confirmed by the Senate to the lead the law-enforcement agency that he has long attacked.

Democrats had warned he would seek retribution against Trump’s enemies, although the former prosecutor has denied any plans to pursue political vendettas and has promised to “rebuild” the bureau.

A former aide to the Prince of Wales has said the royal was at his “lowest” after the Princess of Wales was diagnosed with cancer.

In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia, Jason Knauf, formerly the chief executive of William and Kate’s Royal Foundation, said: “It was awful, absolutely awful. It’s the lowest I’ve ever seen him.

“Within a couple of weeks, if you’re Prince William, you find out that both your wife and your father have cancer. I couldn’t believe it.”

Both the King and the Princess of Wales were treated for cancer last year. Kate is now in remission and Charles is having ongoing treatment.

Mr Knauf, 43, stepped down from his position at the end of 2021.

Catherine’s diagnosis was made public in March last year, and Mr Knauf said: “The problem was that all this crazy conspiracy theory stuff kicked off in the background, online. ‘Was she really ill?’.

“But they didn’t want to say yet that she had cancer because they hadn’t told the children and they were still working through how to tell the children.”

Speaking to reporters last year at the end of his visit to South Africa, Prince William, 42, talked about how he has coped after both his wife and his father were diagnosed with cancer, describing the past year as the “hardest year” of his life.

“It’s been dreadful. It’s probably been the hardest year in my life. So, trying to get through everything else and keep everything on track has been really difficult,” he said after being asked how his year has been after a difficult year for the Royal Family.”

Mr Knauf also previously worked for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

In October 2018, while working for the couple as their communications secretary, Mr Knauf made a bullying complaint against Meghan.

He wrote of his concerns to William’s then private secretary in an email, in an apparent attempt to force Buckingham Palace to protect staff.

The duchess’s legal team strenuously denied the allegation.

Discussing William’s relationship with Harry, Mr Knauf said: “It’s very difficult to have this stuff play out in the public eye, but he’s chosen to keep his thoughts on it private, and I think all of us who know him really have to respect that we should do the same.

“But I will say, of course, it’s been hard and sad, especially for all of us who know both of them.

“I worked really closely with the two of them and we had lots of great times.”

Mr Knauf has previously expressed regret in not giving evidence in the Duchess of Sussex’s High Court case against the publisher of the Mail on Sunday, the Court of Appeal.

Meghan won her privacy case against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) in 2021, when the High Court found its publication of her letter to her father – sent in August 2018 – was unlawful.

Mr Knauf was made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (RVO) in the 2023 New Year Honours List.

Before joining the royal household the American-born former corporate affairs executive worked for a range of institutions, from the office of the New Zealand prime minister to HM Treasury and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Mr Knauf led a review of the Royal Foundation’s role and structure from March 2019, before becoming its chief executive in September of that year.

He oversaw the launch of the Foundation’s Earthshot Prize – William’s £50 million environmental prize, now an independent charity, which recognises solutions, ideas and technologies that “repair the planet”.

Pope Francis remains in a “critical” condition, but “has not presented any further respiratory crises”, the Vatican said in a statement on Sunday.

He was still receiving high-flow oxygen therapy and had undergone blood transfusions. Blood tests also showed he had “initial, mild, renal insufficiency” – a kidney problem – that is “currently under control”, the statement said.

The Vatican said he “continues to be alert and well oriented”.

The Pope was admitted to Rome’s Gemelli Hospital on 14 February after experiencing breathing difficulties for several days, where he was first treated for bronchitis before being diagnosed with pneumonia in both lungs.

On Sunday, the Pope’s thrombocytopenia – a condition that occurs when the platelet count in the blood is too low – was stable, the statement said.

In the morning, the Pope “participated in the Holy Mass, together with those who are taking care of him during these days”, the statement continued.

The Vatican did not offer a prognosis given the “complexity of the clinical picture”.

The new statement comes after the Vatican said on Saturday that the Pope had experienced a respiratory crisis and was in a “critical” condition.

Earlier on Sunday, the Pope issued a statement asking Catholics to pray for him after he was unable to deliver the traditional Angelus prayer in person for the second week running.

The pontiff is particularly susceptible to pneumonia, an infection of the lungs that can be caused by bacteria, viruses or fungi, after he contracted pleurisy – an inflammation of the lungs – as a young man and underwent a partial lung removal.

The leader of the Roman Catholic church has been admitted to hospital multiple times during his 12-year tenure, including being treated for bronchitis at the same hospital in March 2023.

From Argentina, Pope Francis is the first Latin American, and first Jesuit, to lead the Roman Catholic Church.

Key US departments within the Trump administration have told staff not to comply with a Saturday email from Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative asking what they accomplished in the past week.

The FBI, state department and Pentagon were among agencies that instructed employees not to answer the message. Other department heads advised staff to comply, while some told workers to wait for further guidance before responding.

Musk said failure to respond by Monday at midnight would be interpreted as the employee resigning. President Donald Trump has yet to comment on the email.

The conflicting guidance caused confusion for hundreds of thousands of government bureaucrats as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) task force leads an outside effort to aggressively reduce government spending.

The message sent to millions of federal employees on Saturday evening came after Musk posted on his social media platform X that government staff would “shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week”.

In a copy of the email obtained by the BBC, employees were asked to respond explaining their accomplishments from the past week in five bullet points – without disclosing classified information.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government’s human resources agency, confirmed the email was authentic.

The message did not mention whether declining to comply could affect employment status, despite Musk’s social media assertion that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation”.

Newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel told his staff in a separate email later on Saturday that they should “pause any responses”.

“FBI personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information,” Patel wrote in a message obtained by CBS News.

“The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with the FBI procedures.”

The state department sent a similar message, saying leadership would respond on behalf of the agency.

“No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” an email from Tibor Nagy, acting undersecretary for management, said.

The Pentagon told its staff: “When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM.”

The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave their employees similar instructions, according to reports.

• Thousands of USAID workers placed on leave, Trump administration says
• List weekly accomplishments or resign, Musk tells US federal workers
• Musk wields his Doge chainsaw – but is a backlash brewing?

In a sign that the OPM email may have come as a surprise to many agencies, a senior figure at the Department of Justice wrote to staff on Saturday evening to say: “Media reports indicate the email was distributed to employees throughout the federal government.”

The message added that “at this point, we have no reason to believe this message is spam or malicious”.

Later on Saturday evening, a follow-up email was sent clarifying that the OPM message was “legitimate” and that “employees should be prepared to follow the instructions as requested”.

The justice department message also came with a warning to staff: “Do not include any sensitive, confidential, or classified information in your response. Should you have any questions about the contents of your response please contact your supervisor.

“If we receive additional guidance or information, I will update all employees, as necessary.”

Agencies such as the Department of Transportation, the Secret Service and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency also encouraged their staff to comply, reports said.

Other departments, including the National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, requested that employees await further guidance.

OPM did not immediately respond to the BBC’s inquiry about whether some staff might be exempt.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees, criticised the message as “cruel and disrespectful” and threatened to sue.

It is unclear how the email affects any of the roughly three million federal workers who may not have had access their emails this weekend.

Other government employees, such as those at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, were placed on leave in the last month.

The message came hours after Trump praised Musk’s work on social media, adding: “I would like to see him get more aggressive.”

The Democratic ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hit out at the directive in a letter to the OPM.

Congressman Gerry Connolly of Virginia wrote that the agency should “immediately clarify that federal employees’ nonresponse to this ill-conceived, weekend email does not constitute resignation”.

“This threat is illegal, reckless, and yet another example of the cruel and arbitrary chaos Mr Musk is inflicting on the people’s government and its dedicated public servants.”

Most Republican members of Congress have been defending Musk and his broader efforts.

Congressman Mike Lawler of New York told ABC on Sunday that Musk’s efforts were a “comprehensive, forensic audit of every department and agency in the federal government”.

But Senator John Curtis, a Republican representing Utah, criticised Musk’s methods, even as said he supported the ultimate goal of Doge.

“If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like, please put a dose of compassion in this. These are real people. These are real lives. These are mortgages,” Curtis told CBS.

Indian authorities have banned two highly-addictive opioids in response to a BBC investigation which found they were fuelling a public health crisis in parts of West Africa.

In a letter seen by the BBC from India’s Drugs Controller General, Dr Rajeev Singh Raghuvanshi said permission to manufacture and export the drugs had been withdrawn

BBC Eye found one pharmaceutical company, Aveo, had been illegally exporting a harmful mix of tapentadol and carisoprodol in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and Cote D’Ivoire.

India’s Food and Drug Administration said the company’s factory in Mumbai had since been raided and its entire stock seized.

The circular from Dr Raghuvanshi, dated to Friday, cited the BBC investigation in his decision to ban all combinations of tapentadol and carisoprodol, which was to be implemented with immediate effect.

He said this also came after officials had looked into “the potential of drug abuse and its harmful impact on population”.

Tapentadol is a powerful opioid, and carisoprodol is a muscle relaxant so addictive it is banned in Europe.

Carisoprodol is approved for use in the US, but only for short periods of up to three weeks. Withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, insomnia and hallucinations.

The combination of the two drugs is not licensed for use anywhere in the world as they can cause breathing difficulties and seizures and an overdose can kill.

Despite the risks, these opioids are popular street drugs in many West African countries, because they are so cheap and widely available.

Publicly-available export data show that Aveo Pharmaceuticals, along with a sister company called Westfin International, has shipped millions of these tablets to Ghana and other West African countries.

The BBC World Service also found packets of these pills with the Aveo logo for sale on the streets of Nigeria, and in Ivoirian towns and cities.

Nigeria, with a population of 225 million people, provides the biggest market for these pills. It has been estimated that about four million Nigerians abuse some form of opioid, according to the nation’s National Bureau of Statistics.

As part of the investigation, the BBC also sent an undercover operative – posing as an African businessman looking to supply opioids to Nigeria – inside one of Aveo’s factories in India, where they filmed one of Aveo’s directors, Vinod Sharma, showing off the same dangerous products the BBC found for sale across West Africa.

In the secretly recorded footage, the operative tells Sharma that his plan is to sell the pills to teenagers in Nigeria “who all love this product”.

Sharma in response replies “OK,” before explaining that if users take two or three pills at once, they can “relax” and agrees they can get “high”.

Towards the end of the meeting, Sharma says: “This is very harmful for the health,” adding that “nowadays, this is business”.

Sharma and Aveo Pharmaceuticals did not respond to a request for comment when the BBC’s initial investigation was published.

India’s Food and Drug Administration said a sting operation saw Aveo’s entire stock seized and further production halted in a statement on Friday. Further legal action will be taken against the company, it added.

The agency said it was “fully prepared” to take action against anyone involved in “illegal activities that tarnish the reputation of the country”.

The FDA has been instructed to carry out further inspections to prevent the supply of the drugs, it said.

One person has been killed and five police officers injured in a knife attack in the eastern French city of Mulhouse.

A 37-year-old Algerian man was arrested at the scene and the prosecutor has opened a terrorist inquiry because the suspect reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar”, or “God is great”.

The man injured two police officers seriously, one in the neck and one in the chest. A 69-year-old Portuguese man who tried to intervene was stabbed and killed.

The suspect was subject to a deportation order because he was on a terrorism watch list, according to the local prosecutor. President Emmanuel Macron said there was “no doubt it was an Islamist terrorist attack”.

After expressing his condolences to the family of the victim, Macron added: “I want to reiterate the determination of the government, and mine, to continue the work to eradicate terrorism on our soil.”

The attack took place at about 16:00 local time (15:00 GMT) on Saturday near a busy market in Mulhouse, which is close to the borders with Germany and Switzerland.

The police officers were on patrol at a demonstration taking place in support of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I have lived in France for 41 years and I have never experienced something like this,” Cemalettin Canak, 55, told the Reuters news agency.

“It has shocked me a lot,” he added. “Now when I go to the market, I will be a little nervous.”

Of the two officers taken to hospital, the one injured to the chest was later discharged, prosecutors told the AFP news agency, while three others suffered minor injuries.

“Horror has seized our city,” Mulhouse mayor Michele Lutz wrote on Facebook.

French Prime Minister François Bayrou posted on X that “fanaticism has struck again and we are in mourning”.

“My thoughts naturally go to the victims and their families, with the firm hope that the injured will recover,” he said.

Visiting the scene on Saturday evening, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau told broadcaster TF1 that the suspect had been found to have a “schizophrenic profile” following his arrest.

He also said France had attempted to expel the suspect 10 times, and each time Algeria had refused to accept him.

He called for the establishment of a new “balance of power” with Algeria, and told reporters “we must change the rules” on how detention centres operate.

There was no immediate public comment from Algeria in response.

A British archaeologist believes his team may have found a second tomb in Egypt belonging to King Thutmose II.

The potential find comes just days after Piers Litherland announced the discovery of a tomb more than a century since Tutankhamun’s was revealed.

Mr Litherland told the Observer he suspects this second site will hold the pharaoh’s mummified body.

The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization displays a mummy said to be that of Thutmose II, but some Egyptologists believe that his body may have been misidentified over the years since the pharaoh died.

Archaeologists believe the first tomb was emptied six years after burial, due to a flood, and relocated to a second.

Mr Litherland thinks the second tomb lies below a 23-metre (75 ft) man-made pile of limestone, ash, rubble and mud plaster, that was designed by ancient Egyptians to look like part of a mountain in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near the city of Luxor.

The first was located behind a waterfall, and it is thought to have flooded as a result.

When Egyptologists were searching for the initial tomb, they found a posthumous inscription that indicated the content could have been moved to a second location nearby, by Thutmose II’s wife and half-sister Hatshepsut.

The British-Egyptian team are now working to uncover the tomb by hand, after attempts to tunnel into it were deemed as being “too dangerous”.

“We should be able to take the whole thing down in about another month,” Mr Litherland said.

The crew found the first tomb in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh.

“Part of the ceiling was still intact: a blue-painted ceiling with yellow stars on it. And blue-painted ceilings with yellow stars are only found in kings’ tombs,” said Mr Litherland.

He told the BBC’s Newshour programme earlier this week that he felt overwhelmed by the find.

“The emotion of getting into these things is just one of extraordinary bewilderment because when you come across something you’re not expecting to find, it’s emotionally extremely turbulent really,” he said.

Thutmose II is best known for being the husband of Queen Hatshepsut, regarded as one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and one of the few female pharaohs who ruled in her own right.

Thutmose II was an ancestor of Tutankhamun, whose reign is believed to have been from about 1493 to 1479 BC. Tutankhamun’s tomb was found by British archaeologists in 1922.

Israel has expelled the residents of three refugee camps in the occupied West Bank as it steps up a major month-long operation in the Palestinian territory.

Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said the camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams were now “empty” and would be occupied by the Israeli military for the coming year.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it has deployed a tank division around the city of Jenin – the first time it has done so since 2002. The Palestinian Authority condemned the move.

The UN said earlier this month that Israel’s operation, which began on 21 January and was intensified in recent days, had led to the “forced displacement” of 40,000 people.

“So far, 40,000 Palestinians have evacuated from the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams, which are now empty of residents,” Israel Katz said in a statement.

“I have instructed [troops] to prepare for a prolonged presence in the cleared camps for the coming year and to prevent the return of residents and the resurgence of terrorism.”

He also said that Israel had instructed the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) to stop operating in the area.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, described the decision to deploy tanks as a “dangerous Israeli escalation that will not lead to stability or calm”.

The IDF said in a statement that its forces are “continuing the operation to thwart terrorism” and are expanding their “offensive activity” – which so far has involved drones, tanks, special forces, border police, and operatives from the intelligence agency Shin Bet.

The UN said on Thursday that since Israeli operations began on 21 January, 51 Palestinians, including seven children, have been killed in Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas governorates, as well as three Israeli soldiers.

The offensive has caused severe damage to water and sanitation infrastructure, disrupting access to water to “tens of thousands of people”, it said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Tulkarm refugee camp on Friday and ordered the army to intensify “operational activity”, his office said.

“We are entering terrorist strongholds, flattening entire streets that terrorists use, and their homes. We are eliminating terrorists, commanders,” Netanyahu said.

His visit followed the explosion of three buses in Tel Aviv, which Israeli officials described as a “suspected terror attack” that was caused by bombs of the kind previously found in the West Bank.

Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War and has since built about 160 settlements housing some 700,000 Jews. The settlements are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.