President Vladimir Putin has rejected an immediate and full ceasefire in Ukraine, agreeing only to halt attacks on energy infrastructure, following a call with US President Donald Trump.

The Russian leader declined to sign up to the comprehensive month-long ceasefire that Trump’s team recently worked out with Ukrainians in Saudi Arabia.

He said a comprehensive truce could only work if foreign military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine came to an end. Ukraine’s European allies have previously rejected such conditions.

US talks on Ukraine are due to continue on Sunday in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the US envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said.

In the grinding three-year war, Russia has recently been taking back territory in its Kursk region that was occupied by a Ukrainian incursion six months ago.

The results of Tuesday’s Trump-Putin call amount to a retreat in the US position from where it stood a week ago, although the two leaders did agree that further peace talks would take place immediately in the Middle East.

When a US delegation met Ukrainian counterparts in Jeddah last Tuesday, they convinced Kyiv to agree to their proposal for an “immediate” 30-day ceasefire, across land, air and sea.

• Peace talks are in parallel universe, say Ukraine front-line troops
• Is Putin ready for a ceasefire or playing for time?
• Why did Putin’s Russia invade Ukraine?

President Volodymyr Zelensky, who arrived in Helsinki, Finland, for an official visit on Tuesday shortly after Trump and Putin’s call ended, said Ukraine was open to the idea of a truce covering energy infrastructure, but wanted more details first.

He later accused Putin of rejecting a ceasefire following a barrage of Russian drone attacks.

Among the places targeted was a hospital in Sumy, and power supplies in Slovyansk, said Ukraine’s leader.

“Unfortunately, there have been hits, specifically on civilian infrastructure,” Zelensky said on X. “Today, Putin effectively rejected the proposal for a full ceasefire.”

Trump posted earlier on social media that his call with the Russian leader was “very good and productive” and that “many elements of a Contract for Peace were discussed”.

“We agreed to an immediate Ceasefire on all Energy and Infrastructure, with an understanding that we will be working quickly to have a Complete Ceasefire and, ultimately, an END to this very horrible War between Russia and Ukraine,” the US president said on Truth Social.

About 80% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian bombs, Zelensky said last September.

Kyiv has in turn conducted drone and missile strikes deep into Russian territory, on oil and gas facilities.

Following last week’s talks in Jeddah, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said “the ball” was in Russia’s court, after the Ukrainians accepted Washington’s proposal for a full ceasefire.

But the White House’s statement following the Trump-Putin call on Tuesday made no reference to that agreement with Kyiv.

It instead said the two leaders agreed that “the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire”, followed by negotiations over a “maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace”.

But the Kremlin’s own statement on the call noted what it said were a “series of significant issues” around enforcing any agreement with Kyiv. And it said the end of foreign support and intelligence for Ukraine was a “key condition” for Russia.

Trump and Putin agreed to immediate technical-level talks towards a longer-term settlement, which the Kremlin said must be “complex, stable and long-term in nature”.

But it’s unclear if this means further negotiations between the US and Russia, or bilateral talks between Russia and Ukraine.

The Kremlin also said Trump supported Putin’s idea of holding ice hockey matches between professional US and Russian players.

Russia was frozen out of ice hockey events overseas after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Kyiv will probably see the outcome of Tuesday’s much-anticipated phone call as Putin playing for time, while he adds crippling conditions on any settlement.

Putin has previously insisted Russia should keep control of Ukrainian territory it has seized and has called for Western sanctions to be eased as part of any eventual peace settlement.

The Russian leader has already tasted Trump’s readiness to cut off US support to Ukraine, and is trying to get him to repeat it – while tossing the ball back to Kyiv.

Earlier this month the US temporarily suspended military and intelligence aid to Ukraine after Trump and Zelensky had an altercation in the Oval Office.

Trump and his Vice-President JD Vance dressed down Zelensky in front of the world’s media, accusing him of being ungrateful for American support.

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday in Berlin with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the limited ceasefire plan was an important first step, but he again called for a complete ceasefire.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer spoke to Zelensky after the Trump-Putin call and “reiterated [the] UK’s unwavering support”, a Downing Street spokeswoman said.

In the run up to today’s call, Donald Trump made a big deal of his conversation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

But the results look like there’s little to shout about.

The Russian president has given the US leader just enough to claim that he made progress towards peace in Ukraine, without making it look like he was played by the Kremlin.

Trump can point to Putin’s pledge to halt attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for 30 days. If that actually happens, it will bring some relief to civilians.

But it’s nowhere near the full and unconditional ceasefire that the US wanted from Russia.

The “very horrible war” Trump has insisted he can stop is still raging.

And Putin, a man indicted as a suspected war criminal by the ICC, has been given a leg-up back to the top tier of global politics.

Russian state media report that the two presidents’ phone call lasted more than two hours. The Kremlin readout – its account of the call – is also long at 500 words.

It presents the conversation as chatty: they apparently discussed ice hockey, the kind of detail an audience back in Russia will lap up.

After three years as a pariah in the western world, and frosty relations long before that, Russia is back dealing directly with a US administration that wants to engage.

The two leaders are even discussing Middle East peace and “global security”.

The Kremlin must be struggling to believe the transformation.

Ahead of the call, some wondered whether Donald Trump might actually pile some pressure on Russia. After all, it’s been clear for over a week that it was stalling on the ceasefire.

But there’s no sign of a dressing down for Putin like the one Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky had to endure in the Oval Office a fortnight ago.

Both countries’ accounts suggest nothing has changed.

Russia repeats that it wants peace. But instead of grounding its drones and silencing its guns, it’s quibbling over how a still non-existent ceasefire might be monitored.

Meanwhile, it’s adding even more conditions aimed at crippling Kyiv’s ability to resist.

One demand is that the flow of both weapons and intelligence to Ukraine from its allies has to cease.

For Ukrainians, the only sliver of hope is that the US hasn’t agreed to any of this – yet.

They can also point to the call as more proof that Russia has no interest in ending its invasion.

But all that talking will bring Ukraine minimal relief from its suffering.

For US diplomacy, too, it has to be disappointing.

But for the Kremlin it will feel like a pretty decent day, the kind unimaginable before Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa has told the BBC he wants US, European and Brazilian armies to join his “war” against criminal gangs.

He added he wants US President Donald Trump to designate Ecuadorean gangs as terrorist groups, as he has done for some Mexican and Venezuelan cartels.

He also said Ecuadorean law would be respected when asked about his recent partnership with Erik Prince, an ally of Trump and founder of controversial private military firm Blackwater.

Violence has soared in Ecuador in recent years, with gangs battling to control drug trafficking routes. Most of the world’s cocaine is trafficked through Ecuador’s ports.

President Noboa has previously indicated he would like foreign military aid to help tackle drug cartels – but this is the first time he has singled out the US, Brazil and Europe.

Security – and how he is dealing with it – is a top issue for voters ahead of a run-off vote in Ecuador’s presidential election on 13 April.

Noboa has defined his 16 months in office through a tough crackdown on gangs and militarising the streets and prisons – however he has also come under fire from critics who see his tactics as too heavy-handed.

During his term, the murder rate decreased by approximately 16% from 2023 to 2024 but it remains far higher than previous years, and in January 2025 killings hit a record 781 in one month.

In an interview with BBC News, the incumbent president said: “We need to have more soldiers to fight this war.”

“Seventy per cent of the world’s cocaine exits via Ecuador. We need the help of international forces.”

He said what started as “criminal gangs” are now “international narco-terrorist” groups of 14,000 armed individuals.

Donald Trump’s decision to designate some Latin American cartels as terrorist groups has given US law enforcement further powers to fight them.

Noboa told the BBC he wants his US counterpart to do the same with Ecuadorean gangs: “I would be glad if he considers Los Lobos, Los Choneros, Los Tiguerones as terrorist groups because that’s what they really are.”

Noboa has already ordered the foreign ministry to seek cooperation agreements with “allied nations” to support Ecuador’s police and army, and is also seeking parliamentary approval to change the constitution to allow foreign military bases in Ecuador again.

As well as constitutional changes, it would require other nations to be willing to offer this. Deploying armies abroad can be risky and expensive but there is some precedent for it. The US had a military base for its anti-narcotic operations in Ecuador until 2009, before these were banned by former President Rafael Correa.

President Noboa’s challenge will be convincing figures like Donald Trump in the US, or leaders in Europe where many drugs are shipped to, that it is in their interests too to stop cartels and drug trafficking.

On the alliance with Trump ally Erik Prince, which he announced a few days ago, he said: “We’re fighting an unconventional, urban guerilla war. He has the experience. He’s advising our armed forces, our police.”

Mr Prince founded the private military firm Blackwater that has provided security services to US governments but has also been embroiled in controversy. He sold the company in 2010.

Four Blackwater contractors were convicted and jailed for killing 14 Iraqi citizens in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007 and were later pardoned by Trump in 2020.

Does President Noboa want Mr Prince to bring mercenaries to the country?

“Not necessarily mercenaries,” he said. “We are talking about armies. US, European, Brazilian special forces. This could be a great help for us.”

While some supported the move, some Ecuadoreans cited Mr Prince’s past record and feared rights abuses in the country.

When asked about some of Erik Prince’s past controversies, Mr Noboa said Ecuador’s laws must be respected and warfare conducted legally.

But, he added, cartels had “violated every single human right possible for the last five years”.

“They’ve mutilated people. They’ve raped thousands of women. They’ve trafficked human organs. They’ve traded illegal gold. And moved more than 1,000 tonnes of cocaine a year.”

Last year, his iron-fist approach came under fire after four boys were arrested by soldiers over an alleged theft and later found mutilated and burned.

Noboa said those soldiers were in jail pending an investigation but that he would “fight until the end” to convict those responsible.

He maintained the armed forces were acting proportionately in tackling crime and noted an imbalance between his 35,000-strong military and 40,000 armed gang members.

With the record number of killings in January, leading critics argue his strict approach is failing.

During a campaign rally, his left-wing challenger Luisa González said: “The campaign promises made in 2023 were to be delivered in a year and a half. Not two. Not three. Did he deliver? No!”

Noboa said it was normal to see rising violence before elections in his country, but reiterated that Ecuador could not fight this problem alone: “This is a transnational crime without a transnational security policy.”

While Albanian, Mexican and Colombian cartels worked together, there was not a joint security policy among countries affected by drug violence, he said.

Ecuador needs help, he argued, because its economy is smaller than many in Europe or the US where most drugs are shipped to.

He added drug trafficking and illegal mining generated $30bn (£23bn) – around 27% of GDP – annually in Ecuador.

He urged countries where consumption of cocaine is high, like the UK, to do more to tackle this arguing: “The product they’re consuming has a chain of violence and misery.”

Violence and post-pandemic unemployment have driven many Ecuadoreans to flee northward.

They are now one of the top nationalities crossing the dangerous Darien Gap jungle from South to North America.

President Noboa is willing to take back Ecuadorean migrants from the US, but not other nationalities, and said the country was giving returnees technical training and a minimum wage for three months.

For him, the solution is improving “opportunities”.

“We need to develop, as an export-based economy, jobs in Ecuador for these people.”

While he said he “100%” empathised with people fleeing violence, he blamed a past “lack of strong security policy”.

His message to Ecuadoreans now? “Stay – and you’ll see positive results. We’re reducing inflation. Companies are hiring. The economy is recovering.”

Daniel Noboa will face Luisa González in the run-off vote next month.

He received only 0.5% more votes than her in the first round, suggesting the second round could be very close and polarising.

With security the top issue for voters, his success – or not – may depend on whether Ecuadoreans think progress has been good enough.

Chinese state media has welcomed Donald Trump’s move to cut public funding for news outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which have long reported on authoritarian regimes.

The decision affects thousands of employees – some 1,300 staff have been put on paid leave at Voice Of America (VOA) alone since Friday’s executive order.

Critics have called the move a setback for democracy but Beijing’s state newspaper Global Times denounced VOA for its “appalling track record” in reporting on China and said it has “now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag”.

The White House defended the move, saying it will “ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.

Trump’s cuts target the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is supported by Congress and funds the affected news outlets, such as VOA, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe.

They have won acclaim and international recognition for their reporting in places where press freedom is severely curtailed or non-existent, from China and Cambodia to Russia and North Korea.

Although authorities in some of these countries block the broadcasts – VOA, for instance, is banned in China – people can listen to them on shortwave radio, or get around the restrictions via VPNs.

RFA has often reported on the crackdown on human rights in Cambodia, whose former authoritarian ruler Hun Sen has hailed the cuts as a “big contribution to eliminating fake news”.

It was also among the first news outlets to report on China’s network of detention centres in Xinjiang, where the authorities are accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims without trial. Beijing denies the claims, saying people willingly attend “re-education camps” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”. VOA’s reporting on North Korean defectors and the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged cover-up of Covid fatalities has won awards.

VOA, primarily a radio outlet, which also broadcasts in Mandarin, was recognised last year for its podcast on rare protests in 2022 in China against Covid lockdowns.

But China’s Global Times welcomed the cuts, calling VOA a “lie factory”.

“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multi-dimensional China, the demonising narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughing stock,” it said in an editorial published on Monday.

Hu Xijin, who was the Global Times’ former editor-in-chief, wrote: “Voice of America has been paralysed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which has been as vicious to China. This is such great news.”

Such responses “would have been easy to predict”, said Valdya Baraputri, a VOA journalist who lost her job over the weekend. She was previously employed by BBC World Service.

“Eliminating VOA, of course, allows channels that are the opposite of accurate and balanced reporting to thrive,” she told the BBC.

The National Press Club, a leading representative group for US journalists, said the order “undermines America’s long-standing commitment to a free and independent press”.

Founded during World War Two in part to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA reaches some 360 million people a week in nearly 50 languages. Over the years it has broadcast in China, North Korea, communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union. It’s also been a helpful tool for many Chinese people to learn English.

VOA’s director Michael Abramowitz said Trump’s order has hobbled VOA while “America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States”.

Ms Baraputri, who is from Indonesia but based in Washington DC, first joined VOA in 2018, but her visa was terminated at the end of Trump’s first administration.

She rejoined in 2023 because she wanted to be part of an organisation that “upholds unbiased, factual reporting that is free from government influence”.

The recent cuts have left her “feeling betrayed by the idea I had about press freedom [in the US]”.

She is also concerned for colleagues who may now be forced to return to hostile home countries, where they could be persecuted for their journalism.

Meanwhile, the Czech Republic has appealed to the European Union to intervene so it can keep Radio Free Europe going. It reports in 27 languages from 23 countries, reaching more than 47 million people every week.

RFA chief executive Bay Fang said in a statement that the organisation plans to challenge the order. Cutting funding to these outlets is a “reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space”, he said.

RFA started in 1996 and reaches nearly 60 million people weekly in China, Myanmar, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. In China, it also broadcasts in minority languages like Tibetan and Uyghur, apart from English and Mandarin.

“[Trump’s order] not only disenfranchises the nearly 60 million people who turn to RFA’s reporting on a weekly basis to learn the truth, but it also benefits America’s adversaries at our own expense,” Mr Fang noted.

While Chinese state media has celebrated the cuts, it’s hard to know how Chinese people feel about it given their internet is heavily censored.

Outside China, those who have listened to VOA and RFA over the years appear disappointed and worried.

“Looking back at history, countless exiles, rebels, intellectuals, and ordinary people have persisted in the darkness because of the voices of VOA and RFA, and have seen hope in fear because of their reports,” Du Wen, a Chinese dissident living in Belgium, wrote on X.

“If the free world chooses to remain silent, then the voice of the dictator will become the only echo in the world.”

Israel has “resumed combat in full force” against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday night.

In a defiant video statement, he warned that “negotiations will continue only under fire” and that “this is just the beginning”.

His comments came after Israeli aircraft launched massive airstrikes against what the military said were Hamas targets in Gaza.

More than 400 people have been killed in the attacks, the Hamas-run health ministry said, and hundreds more injured.

The wave of strikes was the heaviest since a ceasefire began on 19 January.

The fragile truce had mostly held until now, but this new wave of attacks suggests plans for a permanent end to the war may be off the table.

The airstrikes which hit Beit Lahia, Rafah, Nuseirat and Al-Mawasi on Tuesday shattered the relative peace that Gazans had been experiencing since January, and hospitals are once again overrun with casualties.

The attacks on Gaza have been condemned by Egypt, a mediator in the talks.

The air strikes are “a blatant violation” of the ceasefire agreement and represent “a dangerous escalation”, said Tamim Khallaf, the spokesman for the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“I was shocked that the war started again, but at the same time, this is what we expect from the Israelis,” Hael a resident from Jabalia al-Balad told BBC Arabic.

“As a citizen, I’m exhausted. We’ve had enough – a year-and-a-half to this! It’s enough,” he added.

Key Hamas figures were killed in the airstrikes, including Major General Mahmoud Abu Watfa, deputy interior minister in Gaza and the highest-ranking Hamas security official.

• Is the war starting again in Gaza?
• Voices from Gaza: ‘Once again, fear has gripped the people’
• Why has Israel bombed Gaza and what next for ceasefire deal?

In his address, Netanyahu said Israel had tried to negotiate with Hamas to release the Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza. He accused Hamas of rejecting the proposals every time.

Israel and Hamas have disagreed on how to take the ceasefire deal forward since the first phase expired in early March, after numerous exchanges of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.

The deal involves three stages, and negotiations on the second stage were meant to have started six weeks ago – but this did not happen.

Instead, the agreement was thrown into uncertainty when the US and Israel wanted to change the terms of the deal, to extend stage one which would see more hostages released.

That would have delayed the start of phase two, which was meant to establish a permanent ceasefire and required Israeli troops to pull out of Gaza.

But Hamas rejected this proposed change to the agreement brokered by US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators, calling it unacceptable.

On Tuesday evening, Netanyahu said Israel would continue to fight to achieve all of its war goals – “to return the hostages, get rid of Hamas and make sure Hamas is not a threat to Israel.”

US President Donald Trump’s administration was consulted by Israel before it carried out the strikes, officials said.

The US National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said: “Hamas could have released hostages to extend the ceasefire, but instead chose refusal and war.”

Hamas warned the resumption of violence by Israel would “impose a death sentence” on the remaining living hostages held in Gaza, and accused Israel of trying to force it into a surrender.

Speaking to the BBC about the attacks, Dr Sabrina Das, an obstetrician training Palestinian doctors in southern Gaza, said: “It was all very sudden… everybody’s mood was just shattered because we knew it was the start of the war again.”

Dr Das said her colleagues in Nasar hospital were “up all night operating” because “mass casualties had started coming in again”.

Mohammed Zaquot, director general of the Gaza Strip’s hospitals, told BBC Arabic “the attacks were so sudden that the number of medical staff available was inadequate for the scale of these large strikes, and additional teams were called in immediately to assist”.

A group representing hostages’ families has accused the Israeli government of choosing “to give up the hostages” by launching new strikes – and has been protesting outside the Israeli parliament.

The news of the strikes terrified some of the families of Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas.

“The Israeli government is not perfect, and Israel is not doing enough, because my brothers are not home”, Liran Berman, whose twin brothers are still being held in Gaza, told the BBC.

“But if Hamas wanted, the hostages would be back. They are in their hands.”

Israel says Hamas is still holding 59 hostages, 24 of whom are believed to be alive.

The war was triggered when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 back to Gaza as captives.

Israel responded with a massive military offensive, which has killed more than 48,500 Palestinians, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says, and caused huge destruction to homes and infrastructure.

It took Arun George half a working life to scrape together £15,000 ($19,460) in savings, which he used to secure a care worker job for his wife in the UK.

But in barely a few months, he lost it all.

Mr George – not his real name as his wife doesn’t want to be identified within their small community for the shame associated with having returned without a job – paid the money in late 2023 to the managers of Alchita Care.

The BBC has seen evidence of the payment to Alchita Care, the private domiciliary care home in Bradford that sponsored his family’s visa. He did it at the behest of a local agent in his town in the southern Indian state of Kerala.

It was the promise of a better life for their child who has special needs that prodded the couple to dip into their savings and take such a risk. But when they got to the UK there was no work.

“We kept chasing the care home, but they made up excuses. After I pleaded with them, they forced us to undergo some unpaid training and gave my wife just three days of work,” Mr George said. “We couldn’t carry on and came back to India a few months later.”

Mr George believes he has been scammed by the company and says the ordeal has set him back at least by a decade financially. His family is just one among hundreds of people from Kerala seeking work in the UK who have been exploited by recruiters, care homes and middlemen.

Most have now given up hope of getting justice or their money.

Alchita Care in Bradford has not responded to the BBC’s questions. Their sponsorship licence – which allows care homes to issue certificates of sponsorship to foreign care workers applying for visas – was removed by the Home Office last year.

But at least three other care workers who sent thousands of pounds to Alchita Care and uprooted their lives from Kerala told us that the jobs they had been promised did not materialise.

One of them, still in the UK, said his condition was so precarious that he was surviving on “bread and milk” from charity shops for the past few months.

Like Mr George, Sridevi (not her real name) says she was charged £15,000 for a visa sponsorship by Alchita Care. She spent another £3,000 to get to the UK in 2023.

She’s unable to return to India, scared of facing family members and friends from whom she took a loan to make the trip.

“I struggle to even pay for my rent and meals,” she said. Her job is a far cry from the stable eight-hour work she was promised, she says. She is sometimes on call from 4am to 9pm, driving from one patient’s home to another, but gets paid only for the few hours she is actually with the patient, and not the full shift.

Thousands of nurses from Kerala, desperate to migrate to the UK every year, are estimated to have been exploited after the government added care workers to the UK’s shortage occupation list during Covid. This allowed people to be recruited from overseas as long as they were sponsored.

• The carers crossing the globe to fill UK shortage

For many, the care worker visa was a golden ticket to a better life as they could take family along.

Baiju Thittala, a Labour party member and the mayor of Cambridge, told the BBC he had represented at least 10 such victims over the last three years.

But the cross-border nature of these exploitative schemes means it has been incredibly hard to pursue justice, he said. Very often the victims have made payments to care homes or middlemen domiciled outside India which leads to “jurisdiction problems”, he added.

Secondly, lawyers are expensive and most care workers, already in deep debt, can hardly afford to fight it out in the courts.

Thittala estimates at least 1,000-2,000 people from Kerala, directly or indirectly victims of these schemes, are still in the UK.

There are also hundreds of people scattered across Kerala’s towns who lost money before they could even leave home.

In the town of Kothamangalam, the BBC spoke to some 30 people who had collectively lost millions of dollars while trying to obtain a care visa that allows professionals to come to – or stay – in the UK to work in the social care sector.

All of them accused one agent – Henry Poulos and his agency Grace International in the UK and India – of robbing them of their life savings through fake job offers and sponsorship letters.

Mr Poulos even made some of them take a 2,500km journey to Delhi for visa appointments that were non-existent, they said.

Shilpa, who lives in the town of Alleppey, told the BBC she had taken out a bank loan at a 13% interest rate to pay Mr Poulos, who gave her a fake certificate of sponsorship.

“I thought the UK would offer a good future for my three daughters, but now I am struggling to pay their school fees,” she told the BBC.

“I have lost everything. My wife had left her job in Israel so that we could move to the UK,” said another victim, Binu, breaking down. He made a comfortable £1,500 with his wife in Israel but has now been forced to take his children out of private school in Kerala because there’s no money anymore.

Neither Mr Poulos nor Grace International responded to the BBC, despite repeated attempts to get in touch with them. The police in Kothamangalam said Mr Poulos was absconding in the UK, and they had sealed his local offices after receiving complaints from six people.

The previous Conservative government in the UK admitted last year that there was “clear evidence” that care workers were being offered visas under false pretences and paid far below the minimum wage required for their work.

Rules to reduce its misuse were tightened in 2024, including increasing the minimum salary. Care workers are also now restricted from taking dependents, making it a less attractive proposition for families.

Since July 2022, about 450 licences allowing employers to recruit foreign workers have been revoked in the care sector.

Since the beginning of this year, sponsors are now also explicitly prohibited by the Home Office from passing on the cost of the sponsor licence fee or associated administrative costs to prospective employees.

Top police officials in Kerala, meanwhile, told the BBC they were still investigating these cases in India and would work with Interpol agencies to crack down on agents, if necessary.

But for the hundreds who’ve already been exploited, justice remains elusive, and still very much a distant dream.

After nine months in space, Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have finally arrived back on Earth.

Their SpaceX capsule made a fast and fiery re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere, before four parachutes opened to take them to a gentle splashdown off the coast of Florida.

A pod of dolphins circled the craft.

After a recovery ship lifted it out of the water, the astronauts beamed and waved as they were helped out of the hatch, along with fellow crew members astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

“The crew’s doing great,” Steve Stich, manager, Nasa’s Commercial Crew Program, said at a news conference.

It brings to an end a mission that was supposed to last for just eight days.

It was dramatically extended after the spacecraft Butch and Suni had used to travel to the International Space Station suffered technical problems.

“It is awesome to have crew 9 home, just a beautiful landing,” said Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator, Nasa’s Space Operations Mission Directorate.

Thanking the astronauts for their resilience and flexibility, he said SpaceX had been a “great partner”.

The journey home took 17 hours.

The astronauts were helped on to a stretcher, which is standard practice after spending so long in the weightless environment.

They will be checked over by a medical team, and then reunited with their families.

“The big thing will be seeing friends and family and the people who they were expecting to spend Christmas with,” said Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut.

“All of those family celebrations, the birthdays and the other events that they thought they were going to be part of – now, suddenly they can perhaps catch up on a bit of lost time.”

The saga of Butch and Suni began in June 2024.

They were taking part in the first crewed test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, developed by aerospace company Boeing.

But the capsule suffered several technical problems during its journey to the space station, and it was deemed too risky to take the astronauts home.

Starliner returned safely to Earth empty in early September, but it meant the pair needed a new ride for their return.

So Nasa opted for the next scheduled flight: a SpaceX capsule that arrived at the ISS in late September.

It flew with two astronauts instead of four, leaving two seats spare for Butch and Suni’s return.

The only catch was this had a planned six-month mission, extending the astronauts stay until now.

The Nasa pair embraced their longer-than-expected stay in space.

They carried out an array of experiments on board the orbiting lab and conducted spacewalks, with Suni breaking the record for the woman who spent the most hours outside of the space station. And at Christmas, the team dressed in Santa hats and reindeer antlers – sending a festive message for a Christmas that they had originally planned to spend at home.

And despite the astronauts being described as “stranded” they never really were.

Throughout their mission there have always been spacecraft attached to the space station to get them – and the rest of those onboard – home if there was an emergency.

Now the astronauts have arrived home, they will soon be taken to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, where they will be checked over by medical experts.

Long-duration missions in space take a toll on the body, astronauts lose bone density and suffer muscle loss. Blood circulation is also affected, and fluid shifts can also impact eyesight.

It can take a long time for the body to return to normal, so the pair will be given an extensive exercise regime as their bodies re-adapt to living with gravity.

British astronaut Tim Peake said it could take a while to re-adjust.

“Your body feels great, it feels like a holiday,” he told the BBC.

“Your heart is having an easy time, your muscles and bones are having an easy time. You’re floating around the space station in this wonderful zero gravity environment.

“But you must keep up the exercise regime. Because you’re staying fit in space, not for space itself, but for when you return back to the punishing gravity environment of Earth. Those first two or three days back on Earth can be really punishing.”

In interviews while onboard, Butch and Suni have said they were well prepared for their longer than expected stay – but there were things they were looking forward to when they got home.

Speaking to CBS last month, Suni Williams said: “I’m looking forward to seeing my family, my dogs and jumping in the ocean. That will be really nice – to be back on Earth and feel Earth.”

The US government has begun releasing a trove of documents on the assassination of President John F Kennedy – a case that still sparks conspiracy theories over 60 years later.

The release follows an executive order in January by President Donald Trump that required unredacted files in the case to be made public.

Historians do not expect many ground-breaking revelations in the records, which they were combing over after Tuesday night’s release. Trump has estimated 80,000 pages of documents will be unsealed.

US authorities have previously released hundreds of thousands of JFK documents, but held some back citing national security concerns. Many Americans still believe the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, didn’t act alone.

Kennedy was shot during a visit to Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963.

It is unclear how much of the Kennedy material released by the National Archives and Records Administration is new.

Many of the documents have previously been released in partially redacted form, according to experts.

“You got a lot of reading,” Trump told reporters on Monday, previewing the release. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”

But some of the hundreds of files unsealed on Tuesday night did appear to have passages blacked out, according to US media, while others were hard to read because they are faded or are poorly scanned photocopies.

A government commission determined that President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran and self-described Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the US.

But opinion polls over decades have indicated that most Americans don’t believe Oswald was the sole assassin.

Unanswered questions have long dogged the case, giving rise to theories about the involvement of government agents, the mafia and other nefarious characters – as well as more outlandish claims.

In 1992, Congress passed a law to release all documents related to the investigation within 25 years.

Both Trump in his first term and President Joe Biden released piles of JFK-related documents, but thousands had still remained partially or fully secret.

Trump’s executive order two months ago also called on government archivists to release files related to the killings of presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, both of whom were gunned down in 1968.

The Republican president had vowed during last year’s White House race to release JFK files, shortly after he secured the endorsement of Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nephew of JFK and son of Robert Kennedy.

Kennedy Jr has gone on to become Trump’s health secretary.

A curfew has been imposed in parts of a city in India’s western state of Maharashtra after Hindu groups demanded the removal of the tomb of Aurangzeb, a 17th-Century Mughal emperor, sparking violence on Monday night.

Vehicles were set on fire and stones were thrown in the Mahal area of ​​Nagpur city.

Police say the situation is now under control and are appealing to people to keep the peace.

The tomb of Aurangzeb, who died more than 300 years ago, has in recent years become a political flashpoint amid growing calls for its removal by hardline Hindu groups.

It is located about 500km (311 miles) from Nagpur in the state’s Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district, which was earlier called Aurangabad after the emperor.

Monday’s violence broke out after two Hindu organisations, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, burnt the emperor’s effigy and chanted slogans demanding the removal of his tomb, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis told the state assembly.

This sparked rumours that some religious symbols had been desecrated. Fadnavis said this led to violence that looked like “a well-planned attack”.

He said after evening prayers, a crowd of 250 Muslim men gathered and started shouting slogans. “When people started saying they would set vehicles on fire, police used force,” he added.

More than 50 people have been detained and 33 policemen were injured in the incident, Nagpur police commissioner Ravinder Singal told ANI news agency.

Shops and businesses in the central areas of Nagpur remain closed and security has been tightened across the city.

Meanwhile, opposition parties have criticised the state’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government saying “law and order in the state has collapsed”.

The trigger for this week’s violence has been a recent Bollywood film about Sambhaji – a Maratha ruler who clashed with Aurangzeb but lost – and its graphic depiction of him being tortured.

The movie has “ignited people’s anger against Aurangzeb”, Fadnavis told the state assembly on Tuesday.

The issue has been making headlines in the state for days with politicians from Hindu nationalist parties criticising Aurangzeb and calling for his tomb to be removed.

The protesters were also angered earlier this month when Abu Azmi, a regional politician, said that Aurangzeb was not a “cruel administrator” and had “built many temples”.

Azmi also said the emperor’s reign saw India’s borders reaching Afghanistan and present-day Myanmar, and the country was referred to as a golden bird, with its gross domestic product accounting for a quarter of the world’s GDP.

He later told a court his remarks were misinterpreted, but he was suspended from Maharashtra’s state assembly and an investigation was ordered against him.

In 2022, Aurangzeb’s name was trending on social media when the dispute over a mosque – built on the ruins of the Vishwanath temple, a grand 17th-Century Hindu shrine destroyed on Aurangzeb’s orders – broke out as a court ordered a survey to ascertain if the mosque had been built over what was originally a Hindu temple.

His tomb was shut for visitors after a regional politician questioned “the need for its existence” and called for its destruction.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also spoke about “Aurangzeb’s atrocities and “his terror” at an event in Varanasi that year. “He tried to change civilisation by the sword. He tried to crush culture with fanaticism,” Modi said.

Aurangzeb was the sixth emperor of the Mughal kingdom who ruled India for nearly five decades from 1658 to 1707.

He is often described as a devout Muslim who lived the life of an ascetic, but was ruthless in his pursuit of expanding the empire, imposing strict sharia laws and discriminatory taxes.

He was accused of razing Hindu temples, though some critics point out he also built a few.

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from taking any further steps to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

In a ruling Tuesday, Judge Theodore Chuang said the efforts led by Trump ally Elon Musk’s Department for Government Efficiency (Doge) to close the agency likely violated the US constitution “in multiple ways”.

Chuang ordered Doge to restore access to USAID’s computer and payment systems for employees, including those who were placed on leave.

The judge also ruled that termination of USAID employees should stop, but did not order the reinstating of employees previously placed on leave.

The ruling came in a case brought on behalf of 26 unnamed USAID employees who allege in court filings that Musk is following “a predictable and reckless slash-and-burn pattern” in dismantling US government departments.

In a complaint filed on 13 February, lawyers for the employees argued that Musk’s power is illegitimate – as he has not been officially nominated to a government post nor confirmed by the US Senate – and asked for Doge’s activities to be halted and reversed.

USAID was one of the first agencies targeted by Doge for cuts shortly after Trump re-entered the White House in January and ordered a 90-day freeze of all US foreign aid.

Musk and Doge argued in court documents that Musk’s role is advisory only.

But Judge Chuang ruled that Musk and Doge exerted control over USAID and in doing so “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways, and that these actions harmed not only plaintiffs, but also the public interest.”

It’s unclear what effect the ruling will have on USAID operations. Administration officials have said that more than 80% of its activities have been halted.

The Trump administration criticised Tuesday’s ruling.

“Rogue judges are subverting the will of the American people in their attempts to stop President Trump from carrying out his agenda,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, calling the decision a “miscarriage of justice” and vowing to appeal.

Norm Eisen, executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund which represented the USAID employees, called the ruling “a milestone in pushing back on Musk and Doge’s illegality”.

“They are performing surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel, harming not just the people USAID serves but the majority of Americans who count on the stability of our government,” Eisen said.

The ruling is the latest legal setback for the Trump administration. On Monday, another federal judge ordered a halt to the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members.

The judge in that case questioned Department of Justice lawyers about why his order, issued when several deportation flights were in the air, was not immediately implemented and followed.

President Trump called for the impeachment of the judge in that case, which prompted a rare rebuke from the chief justice of the US Supreme Court.

German lawmakers have voted to allow a huge increase in defence and infrastructure spending – a seismic shift for the country that could reshape European defence.

A two-thirds majority of Bundestag parliamentarians, required for the change, approved the vote on Tuesday.

The law will exempt spending on defence and security from Germany’s strict debt rules, and create a €500bn ($547bn; £420bn) infrastructure fund.

This vote is a historic move for traditionally debt-shy Germany, and could be hugely significant for Europe, as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine grinds on, and after US President Donald Trump signalled an uncertain commitment to Nato and Europe’s defence.

However, state government representatives in the upper house, the Bundesrat, still need to approve the moves – also by a two-thirds majority – before they officially become law. That vote is set for Friday.

Friedrich Merz, the man behind these plans and who is expected to soon be confirmed as Germany’s new chancellor, told the lower house during Tuesday’s debate that the country had “felt a false sense of security” for the past decade.

“The decision we are taking today… can be nothing less than the first major step towards a new European defence community,” he said, adding that it includes countries that are “not members of the European Union”.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the vote “excellent news”.

Speaking at a press conference with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, she said the vote “sends a very clear message to Europe that Germany is determined to invest massively in defence”.

Frederiksen meanwhile called it “fantastic news for all Europeans”.

Germany has long been cautious about defence spending, not just for historical reasons dating back to 1945, but also due to the global debt crisis of 2009.

But despite fears the vote would be tight, lawmakers in the end voted in favour of the changes by 513 to 207 – comfortably over the two-thirds majority required.

One leading German newspaper described this vote as “A day of destiny for our nation”.

Under the measure, any spending on defence that amounts to more than 1% of Germany’s GDP would no longer be subject to a limit on borrowing. Until now, this debt brake has been fixed at 0.35% of GDP.

The change could transform the country’s partially neglected armed forces in an era of great uncertainty for Europe.

And this vote was not just about defence. It was also about freeing up €500bn for German infrastructure – fixing things like bridges and roads, but also to pay for climate change measures, something the Green Party insisted on.

Merz, whose CDU party won Germany’s general election last month, proposed the measures swiftly after the win.

In an interview on Sunday he specifically mentioned fears that the US could pull back from defending Europe and Trump’s talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that the “situation has worsened in recent weeks”.

“That is why we have to act fast,” Merz told public broadcaster ARD.

It is a significant political win for Merz, who will, when he takes power as chancellor, now have access to hundreds of billions of euros to invest in the state – what some in Germany have called a “fiscal bazooka”.

It is also an important moment for Ukraine. The defence plans approved today by the Bundestag also allow spending on aid for states “attacked in violation of international law” to be exempt from the debt brake.

That will enable outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz to release €3bn in aid to Ukraine as early as next week.

Merz chose to push the changes through the old parliament, knowing the vote arithmetic was more favourable now than it would be after 25 March, when the new parliament session begins.

The far-right AFD and far-left Linke, which both performed well in February’s election, oppose Merz’s plans.

Merz has still not agreed a coalition deal to govern Germany after his election win, and has announced ambitious plans to have a government in place by Easter.

Coalition negotiations in Germany, however, can drag on for months at a time.

A jury in the trial of a former nurse accused of murdering a woman on a remote Australian beach has been discharged, after they could not reach a verdict.

Toyah Cordingley was stabbed at least 26 times while out walking her dog in October 2018.

The 24-year-old’s body was discovered by her father, half-buried in sand dunes on Wangetti beach between the popular tourist hotspots of Cairns and Port Douglas.

Rajwinder Singh, 40, who travelled to India the day after Ms Cordingley’s body was found, was charged with murder. He was arrested and then extradited to Australia in 2023.

But jurors at Cairns Supreme Court said they were deadlocked, and unable to reach a unanimous decision on his guilt after two-and-half days of deliberations. The judge thanked the jury for their “diligence”.

Under Queensland law, jury verdicts in murder cases must be unanimous. So Mr Singh will face another trial.

Originally from Buttar Kalan in the Indian state of Punjab, Mr Singh had been living in Innisfail at the time of the killing, a town about two hours south from the crime scene.

Prosecutors said they did not have a motive for the killing of Ms Cordingley – a health store worker and animal shelter volunteer – and there was no evidence of a sexual assault.

The trial at Cairns Supreme court heard that DNA highly likely to be Mr Singh’s was discovered on a stick in the victim’s grave.

Data from mobile phone towers also suggested Ms Cordingley’s phone had moved in a similar pattern to Mr Singh’s blue Alfa Romeo car on the day the victim went missing.

The prosecution also suggested the hurried way Mr Singh left Australia without saying goodbye to his family or colleagues pointed to his guilt.

Mr Singh had denied murder – and had told an undercover police officer he had seen the killing, then left the country, leaving behind his wife and children because he feared for his own life.

His defence lawyer said he was “a coward” but not a killer, and accused police of a “flawed” investigation that did not look sufficiently at other possible suspects.

They said DNA found at the scene, including on the victim’s discarded selfie stick, did not match Mr Singh’s profile.

“There is an unknown person’s DNA at that grave site,” defence barrister Angus Edwards told the jury.

The Chinese government has promised new child care subsidies, increased wages and better paid leave to revive a slowing economy. That is on top of a $41bn discount programme for all sorts of things, from dishwashers and home decor to electric vehicles and smartwatches.

Beijing is going on a spending spree that will encourage Chinese people to crack open their wallets.

Simply put, they are not spending enough.

Monday brought some positive news. Official data said retail sales grew 4% in the first two months of 2025, a positive sign for consumption data. But, with a few exceptions like Shanghai aside, new and existing home prices continued to decline compared to last year.

While the US and other major powers have struggled with post-Covid inflation, China is experiencing the opposite: deflation – when the rate of inflation falls below zero, meaning that prices decrease. In China, prices fell for 18 months in a row in the past two years.

Prices dropping might sound like good news for consumers. But a persistent decline in consumption – a measure of what households buy – signals deeper economic trouble. When people stop spending, businesses cut prices to attract buyers. The more this happens, the less money they make, hiring slows, wages stagnate and economic momentum grinds to a halt.

That is a cycle China wants to avoid, given it’s already battling sluggish growth in the wake of a prolonged crisis in the property market, steep government debt and unemployment.

The cause of low consumption is straightforward: Chinese consumers either don’t have enough money or don’t feel confident enough about their future to spend it.

But their reluctance comes at a critical moment. With the economy aiming to grow at 5% this year, boosting consumption is a top priority for President Xi Jinping. He is hoping that rising domestic consumption will absorb the blow US tariffs will inflict on Chinese exports.

So, will Beijing’s plan work?

To tackle its ailing economy and weak domestic demand, Beijing wrapped up its annual National People’s Congress last week with increased investment in social welfare programmes as part of its grand economic plan for 2025.

Then came this week’s announcement with bigger promises, such as employment support plans, but scant details.

Some say it is a welcome move, with the caveat that China’s leaders need to do more to step up support. Still, it signals Beijing’s awareness of the changes needed for a stronger Chinese consumer market – higher wages, a stronger social safety net and policies that make people feel secure enough to spend rather than save.

A quarter of China’s labour force is made up of low-paid migrant workers, who lack full access to urban social benefits. This makes them particularly vulnerable during periods of economic uncertainty, such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

Rising wages during the 2010s masked some of these problems, with average incomes growing by around 10% annually. But as wage growth slowed in the 2020s, savings once again became a lifeline.

The Chinese government, however, has been slow to expand social benefits, focusing instead on boosting consumption through short-term measures, such as trade-in programmes for household appliances and electronics. But that has not addressed a root problem, says Gerard DiPippo, a senior researcher at the Rand think tank: “Household incomes are lower, and savings are higher”.

The near-collapse of the property market has also made Chinese consumers more risk-averse, leading them to cut back on spending.

“The property market matters not only for real economic activity but also for household sentiment, since Chinese households have invested so much of their wealth in their homes,” Mr DiPippo says. “I don’t think China’s consumption will fully recover until it’s clear that the property sector has bottomed out and therefore many households’ primary assets are starting to recover.”

Some analysts are encouraged by Beijing’s seriousness in targeting longer-term challenges like falling birth rates as more young couples opt out of the costs of parenthood.

A 2024 study by Chinese think tank YuWa estimated that raising a child to adulthood in China costs 6.8 times the country’s GDP per capita – among the highest in the world, compared to the US (4.1), Japan (4.3) and Germany (3.6).

These financial pressures have only reinforced a deeply ingrained saving culture. Even in a struggling economy, Chinese households managed to save 32% of their disposable income in 2024.

That’s not too surprising in China, where consumption has never been particularly high. To put this in perspective, domestic consumption drives more than 80% of growth in the US and UK, and about 70% in India. China’s share has typically ranged between 50% to 55% over the past decade.

But this wasn’t really a problem – until now.

There was a time when Chinese shoppers joked about the irresistible allure of e-commerce deals, calling themselves “hand-choppers” – only chopping off their hands could stop them from hitting the checkout button.

As rising incomes fuelled their spending power, 11 November in China, or Double 11, came to be crowned as the world’s busiest shopping day. Explosive sales pulled in over 410 billion yuan ($57bn; £44bn) in just 24 hours in 2019.

But the last one “was a dud,” a Beijing-based coffee bean online seller told the BBC. “If anything, it caused more trouble than it was worth.”

Chinese consumers have grown frugal since the pandemic, and this caution has persisted even after restrictions were lifted in late 2022.

That’s the year Alibaba and JD.com stopped publishing their sales figures, a significant shift for companies that once headlined their record-breaking revenues. A source familiar with the matter told the BBC that Chinese authorities cautioned platforms against releasing numbers, fearing that underwhelming results could further dent consumer confidence.

The spending crunch has even hit high-end brands – last year, LVMH, Burberry and Richemont all reported sales declines in China, once a backbone of the global luxury market.

On RedNote, a Chinese social media app, posts tagged with “consumption downgrade” have racked up more than a billion views in recent months. Users are swapping tips on how to replace expensive purchases with budget-friendly alternatives. “Tiger Balm is the new coffee,” said one user, while another quipped, “I apply perfume between my nose and lips now – saving it just for myself.”

Even at its peak, China’s consumer boom was never a match for its exports. Trade was also the focus of generous state-backed investment in highways, ports and special economic zones. China relied on low-wage workers and high household savings, which fuelled growth but left consumers with limited disposable income.

But now, as geopolitical uncertainties grow, countries are diversifying supply chains away from China, reducing reliance on Chinese exports. Local governments are burdened by debt, after years of borrowing heavily to invest, particularly in infrastructure.

Xi Jinping has already vowed “to make domestic demand the main driving force and stabilising anchor of growth”. Caiyun Wang, a National People’s Congress representative, said, “With a population of 1.4 billion, even a 1% rise in demand creates a market of 14 million people.”

But there’s a catch in Beijing’s plan.

For consumption to drive growth, many analysts say, the Chinese Communist Party would have to restore the consumer confidence of a generation of Covid graduates that is struggling to own a home or find a job. It would also require triggering a cultural shift, from saving to spending.

“China’s extraordinarily low consumption level is not an accident,” according to Michael Pettis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It is fundamental to the country’s economic growth model, around which three-four decades of political, financial, legal and business institutions in China have evolved. Changing this won’t be easy.”

The more households spend, the less there is in the pool of savings that China’s state-controlled banks rely on to fund key industries – currently that includes AI and innovative tech that would give Beijing an edge over Washington, both economically and strategically.

That is why some analysts doubt that China’s leaders want to create a consumer-driven economy.

“One way to think about this is that Beijing’s primary goal is not to enhance the welfare of Chinese households, but rather the welfare of the Chinese nation,” David Lubin, a research fellow at Chatham House wrote.

Shifting power from the state to the individual may not be what Beijing wants.

China’s leaders did do that in the past, when they began trading with the world, encouraging businesses and inviting foreign investment. And it transformed their economy. But the question is whether Xi Jinping wants to do that again.

A political storm is brewing in India, with the first waves already hitting the southern part of the country.

Leaders there are calling for mass mobilisation to protect the region’s political interests amid a heated controversy over the redrawing of electoral seats to reflect changes in population over time.

In a high-stakes push, they are urging citizens to “have more children”, using meetings and media campaigns to amplify their message: that the process of delimitation could shift the balance of power.

“Delimitation is a Damocles’ sword hanging over southern India,” says MK Stalin, chief minister of Tamil Nadu, one of India’s five southern states, and an arch rival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). (The other four are Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Telangana.)

These five states account for 20% of India’s 1.4 billion people. They also outperform the rest of the country in health, education and economic prospects. A child is less likely to be born here than in the north, due to lower population growth rates.

Their leaders are worried that the more prosperous south may lose parliamentary seats in the future, a “punishment” for having fewer children and generating more wealth. Wealthier southern states have always contributed more to federal revenue, with poorer, highly populated states in the north receiving larger shares based on need.

India’s Constitution mandates that seats be allocated to each state based on its population, with constituencies of roughly equal size. It also requires reallocation of seats after each census, reflecting updated population figures.

So India redrew parliamentary seats three times based on the decennial census in 1951, 1961 and 1971. Since then, governments of all stripes have paused the exercise, fearing an imbalance of representation due to varying fertility rates across states.

The next delimitation exercise is set for 2026, but uncertainty looms as India hasn’t conducted a census since 2011, with no clear timeline for when it will take place.

This has set the stage for a potential crisis. “Tamil Nadu is leading the charge and India is on the brink of a federal deadlock,” says Yamini Aiyar, a senior fellow at Brown University

The number of seats in the Lok Sabha – the lower house of parliament representing directly elected MPs – has risen from 494 to 543 and has remained constant since then. The freeze means that despite India’s growing population since 1971, the number of Lok Sabha seats per state has stayed the same, with no new seats added.

In 1951, each MP represented just over 700,000 people. Today, that number has surged to an average of 2.5 million per MP – more than three times the population represented by a member of the US House of Representatives. In comparison, a UK MP represents around 120,000 people.

Experts say all Indians are underrepresented – though not equally so – because constituencies are too large. (The original Constitution capped the ratio at one MP for 750,000 people)

That’s not all. Using census data and population projections, economist Shruti Rajagopalan of George Mason University has highlighted the “severe malapportionment” – unequal distribution of political representation – in India.

Consider this. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous state with over 240 million people, each MP represents about three million citizens.

Meanwhile, in Kerala, where fertility rates are similar to many European countries, an MP represents roughly 1.75 million.

This means the average voter in Kerala in the south has 1.7 times more influence in choosing an MP than a voter in UP in the north.

Ms Rajagopalan also notes that Tamil Nadu and Kerala now have nine and six seats more than their population share, while populous, poorer states like Bihar and UP have nine and 12 seats fewer than their proportion. (Stalin warns that Tamil Nadu could lose eight seats if delimitation occurs in 2026, based on projected population figures.)

By 2031, the problem will intensify: UP and Bihar will fall a dozen seats short of their population proportion, while Tamil Nadu will likely have 11 seats more than its proportion, with other states falling “somewhere in between,” according to Ms Rajagopalan.

“Consequently,” she says, “India is no longer living up to its fundamental constitutional principle of ‘one-person, one vote’.” To make this principle meaningful, constituency sizes must be roughly equal.

Experts have proposed several solutions, many of which will require strong bipartisan consensus.

One option is to increase the number of seats in the lower house.

In other words, India should revert to the original constitutional ratio of one MP for every 750,000 people, which would expand the Lok Sabha to 1,872 seats. (The new parliament building has the capacity for 880 seats, so it would need a major upgrade.)

The other option is for the total number of seats in Lok Sabha to increase to the extent that no state loses its current number of electoral seats – to achieve this the number of seats in the Lok Sabha would need to be 848, by several estimations.

Accompanying this move, experts like Ms Rajagopalan advocate for a more decentralised fiscal system.

In this model, states would have greater revenue-raising powers and retain most or all of their revenue. Federal funds would then be allocated based on development needs. Currently, states receive less than 40% of the total revenue but spend about 60% of it, while the rest is raised and spent by the central government.

A third solution is to reform the composition of the upper house of the parliament. The Rajya Sabha represents states’ interests, with seats allocated proportionally to population and capped at 250.

Rajya Sabha members are elected by state legislatures, not directly by the public. Milan Vaishnav of Carnegie Endowment for Peace suggests a radical approach would be to fix the number of seats per state in the upper house, similar to the US Senate.

“Transforming the upper house into a real venue for debate of states’ interests could potentially soften the opposition to a reallocation of seats in the lower house,” he argues.

Then there are other proposals like splitting big states – India’s top five states have more than 45% share of total seats.

Miheer Karandikar of Takshashila Institution, a Bangalore-based think-tank, cites UP as an example of how big states skew things. UP’s share of total votes cast in India is around 14% currently. He estimates this would likely increase to 16% after delimitation, “which allows it to retain its status as the most significant state politically and in terms of legislative influence”. Splitting a state like UP could help matters.

For now, the anxious southern leaders – whose rhetoric is partly political with Tamil Nadu elections looming next summer – have been joined by counterparts in Punjab to urge the government to maintain current seats and freeze electoral boundaries for the next 30 years, beyond 2026. In other words, it’s a call for more of the same, preserving the status quo.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has made little significant statement so far. Home Minister Amit Shah claimed southern states would not lose “even a single seat” in the upcoming delimitation, though the meaning remains unclear. Meanwhile, the federal government’s decision to withhold education funds and label Tamil Nadu’s leadership as “undemocratic and uncivilised” over a contentious education policy has deepened divisions.

Political scientist Suhas Palshikar warns that the north-south divide threatens India’s federal structure. “The north-south prism is only likely to persuade people and parties of the north to push for a delimitation that would give them an advantage. Such a counter-mobilisation in the north can make it impossible to arrive at any negotiated settlement, Mr Palshikar noted.

He believes that expanding the size of the Lok Sabha and ensuring that no state loses its current strength is not only “politically prudent step”, but something which will “enrich the idea of democracy in the Indian context.” Balancing representation will be the key to preserving India’s strained federal spirit.

A few days after Donald Trump won the US presidential election, Amber Walliser stocked up, spending $2,000 (£1,538) on appliances she believed would get more expensive as the White House started to put new taxes on imports

But that was a temporary splurge. These days, her family is buckling down, worried about job security, and a possible economic downturn, which experts believe could be more likely because of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

It means no new car, or big vacation this year. They have even shelved plans to start trying for a second child.

“We are saving as much as possible, just hoarding cash, trying to bulk up our emergency fund,” the 32-year-old accountant from Ohio said.

Amber’s worries are being echoed across the US, as tariffs and other changes by the White House hit the stock market, spark turmoil for businesses, and add to inflation concerns.

That is the tricky scenario that officials at the US central bank will have to address at their interest rates meeting on Wednesday.

The Federal Reserve, which is supposed to keep both prices and employment stable, typically lowers borrowing costs to help support the economy, or raises them to slow down price rises, as it did when prices shot up in 2022.

Though analysts widely expect the Fed to leave interest rates unchanged on Wednesday, they are far more divided about what to expect in the months ahead, as tariffs could both raises prices and slow economic growth.

“Their job has become a lot harder,” said Jay Bryson, chief economist at Wells Fargo.

In a speech earlier this month, the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, noted that surveys of sentiment have not been good indicators of spending decisions in recent years, when the economy has performed well across many mainstream metrics, despite sour views.

He said policymakers could afford to wait to see the overall impact of the White House policy changes before responding.

But households are responding to the uncertainty now.

After his investments were hit in the recent stock market sell-off, Dave Gold drew up a budget and started slashing his spending.

He cancelled Netflix, challenged himself to avoid Amazon purchases for a month and scaled back his travel, managing to cut his expenses in half.

“It’s just really hard to plan and be confident about what next month looks like,” said the 37-year-old, who lives in Wyoming and works in finance.

“I thought it was time to reel it back in and protect myself in case things do happen,” he added.

Dave is not the only American reigning in their spending. Retail sales also fell last month, while firms from Walmart to Delta Air Lines have warned of slackening demand.

Meanwhile, job growth has slowed and the stock market is now trading at its lowest levels since September.

In this month’s survey of consumer sentiment by the University of Michigan, concerns about the job market surged to the highest level since the Great Recession, while household expectations of long-term inflation also jumped, in the biggest one-month rise since 1993.

Those are troubling signals for the US, in which consumer spending accounts for roughly two thirds of the economy.

“It’s not like the consumer is falling apart, but we’re seeing some cracks,” said Mr Bryson, who puts the odds of a recession at one in three, up from one in five at the start of the year.

“If consumers retrench… the entire economy is going to go down with it,” he said.

White House officials have acknowledged the likelihood of “a little disturbance”, while promising that the short-term pain will lead to long-term gain.

But polls suggest Trump’s handling of the economy is a point of concern for the public, especially for Democrats and independents, but increasingly for Republicans as well.

Software engineer Jim Frazer, who did not vote for Trump, said the administration’s assurances have done little to ease his concerns, as he sees policies change by the hour, the stock market sink, and prices for staples such as eggs rise.

Around the end of last year, the 49-year-old, who lives in Nebraska, purchased a new phone and television, betting such items would be affected by the tariffs Trump said he planned to put on imports from China.

More recently however, he’s trying to cut back, both as a buffer against rising costs and because he has been spooked by the Trump administration’s talk – not just about tariffs, but other moves, like annexing Canada as the 51st state.

He and his wife recently hit pause on their plan to replace an old loveseat, and have scaled back their ambitions for renovating the bathroom.

“I just feel like right now, we need that money squirrelled away in a safe spot,” he said.

“It’s that feeling like we’re heading towards something and we’ve got to get prepared.”

A Palestinian student activist, who was detained by US immigration officers earlier this month, has spoken out for the first time about his arrest.

In a letter dictated over the phone to his family from an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, Mahmoud Khalil said he is a “political prisoner” and that he believes he was targeted for “exercising my right to free speech”.

Born in Syria, Mr Khalil is a green card holder and recent graduate of Columbia University. He was a prominent figure during the Gaza war protests on campus in the spring of 2024.

His arrest has been linked to President Donald Trump’s promise to crack down on student demonstrators he accuses of “un-American activity.”

Trump has alleged repeatedly that pro-Palestinian activists, including Mr Khalil, support Hamas, group designated as a foreign terrorist organisation by the US. The president argues these protesters should be deported and called Mr Khalil’s arrest “the first of many to come”.

The day after, Mr Khalil’s arrest, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reaffirmed the administration’s stance, posting on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

The 30-year-old’s lawyers have argued that he was exercising free speech rights to demonstrate in support of Palestinians in Gaza and against US support for Israel. They accused the government of “open repression of student activism and political speech”.

In his letter, released Tuesday, Mr Khalil said he believes he was arrested because he “advocated for a free Palestine”.

He also detailed his arrest, saying he and his wife were “accosted” on their way home from dinner by Department of Homeland Security agents “who refused to provide a warrant”.

“Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed me and forced me into an unmarked car,” he said, adding that he was not told anything for hours, including the cause for his arrest.

Mr Khalil said he spent the night at 26 Federal Plaza, a federal office building in New York that includes an immigration court. Later, he was transported to a detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he said he was refused a blanket and forced to sleep on the ground.

He was transferred again to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he remains in custody. Mr Khalil’s lawyers have been in court since to fight for his release.

Last week, his lawyers pushed to bring him back to New York and accused the Trump administration of attempting to restrict access to their client. The judge did not issue a ruling at the hearing, but directed prosecutors to prove why the case should take place elsewhere.

In his letter, Mr Khalil called his detention “unjust” and said it was “indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months.”

He added that both administrations have “continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention”. He noted Israel’s resumption of air strikes on Gaza on Monday night that killed 400, according to the Hamas-run health authority.

Mr Khalil also took aim at Columbia University’s leadership for its disciplining of pro-Palestinian students, saying that the school’s actions laid the groundwork for students like him to be targeted.

Columbia University has stated that law enforcement can enter campus property with a warrant, but the school denied that university leadership had invited ICE agents.

Amid the protests early last year, Mr Khalil was briefly suspended from the university, after police swarmed the campus following the occupation of a building.

At the time, he told the BBC that while he was acting as a key protest negotiator with Columbia officials, he had not participated directly in the student encampment because he was worried it could affect his student visa.

Back then, he said that he would continue protesting. But more recently, Mr Khalil’s wife said her husband had grown worried about deportation, after facing online attacks that “were simply not based in reality”.

She said he sent Columbia University an email asking for urgent legal help on 7 March, the day before immigration agents arrested him. Mr Khalil’s wife, who is a US citizen, is now eight months pregnant.

The White House has continued to defend its move.

“This administration is not going to tolerate individuals having the privilege of studying in our country and then siding with pro-terrorist organisations that have killed Americans,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary.

Mr Khalil said his story is a warning to others in the US, saying it is part of a broader strategy by the Trump administration to “suppress dissent.”

“Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs,” he warned.

Documents relating to the Duke of Sussex’s US visa application have been unsealed in court.

They are heavily redacted, however, and no details have been given as to what Prince Harry put on his immigration form.

A US court had ordered the release of the documents based on a freedom of information request by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative US think tank in Washington DC.

The foundation alleges that the prince concealed his past use of drugs, which should have disqualified him from obtaining a US visa.

The allegations centre around his claims in his memoir Spare, where he referred to taking cocaine, marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms.

Application forms for US visas specifically ask about current and past drug use.

Admissions of drug use can lead to non-immigrant and immigrant visa applications being rejected, although immigration officers have discretion to make a final decision based on different factors.

In the event, very little information was disclosed in the documents which were released on Tuesday.

The prince’s visa form has not been released.

Instead, the documents that were released are supporting declarations and court transcripts created in the course of Heritage Foundation’s case.

They reveal that the US government previously told a court that the duke could be subjected to harassment if his visa records were made public.

A chief freedom of information officer within the US Department for Homeland Security (DHS) could be seen to argue that releasing the material “would potentially expose the individual to harm from members of the public”.

The declaration from Jarrod Panter, submitted to the court in April last year, reads: “The USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) routinely protects from disclosure the non-immigrant/immigrant status sought by third parties who do not have permission from the beneficiary to receive this information.

“To release such information would potentially expose the individual to harm from members of the public who might have a reason to manipulate or harass individuals depending on their status in the United States.”

The declaration added: “To release his exact status could subject him to reasonably foreseeable harm in the form of harassment as well as unwanted contact by the media and others.”

Sam Dewey from the Heritage Foundation told the BBC that he believes the DHS has not provided all its papers. He said he is “frustrated” and that this is “not the end of the road”.

Dewey expects the next move to be a “sort of filing” that could lay out the next steps, adding: “We may well have another lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security.”

He accuses the prince of privilege, alleging he has benefitted from his “wealth and status” by being allowed to live in the US.

In his controversial memoir, published in January 2023, Prince Harry wrote that he first tried cocaine at the age of 17.

“It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t make me particularly happy, as it seemed to make everyone around me, but it did make me feel different, and that was the main goal,” he added.

He also wrote about using marijuana, saying “cocaine didn’t do anything for me”, but “marijuana is different, that actually really did help me”.

Cocaine is a highly addictive drug, with a range of short and long-term effects, according to the NHS. Marijuana (cannabis) can make some existing mental health symptoms worse and has been linked with the possible development of mental health issues.

The court’s decision that the files be released came after a 2024 ruling which said there was not enough public interest in disclosing Prince Harry’s immigration records.

The Heritage Foundation contested that ruling and pushed for the judgement to be changed.

Prince Harry moved to the US with his wife Meghan in 2020 after stepping down as a working royal. It is not clear what visa he entered the country on, while the duchess is a US citizen.

President Donald Trump previously ruled out deporting Prince Harry in February, telling the New York Post: “I’ll leave him alone… He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.”

Meghan has been a vocal critic of Trump in the past, labelling him a “misogynist”.

The BBC has contacted the duke’s office for comment.

Voting, enjoying Christmas dinner and keeping fit in zero gravity – that’s just some of what has kept Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams busy during their prolonged stay on the International Space Station (ISS).

After nine months, the pair are finally making their way home in a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

So what has life been like for the Nasa astronauts orbiting 250 miles (400km) above us, and how have they passed the time?

Of course there was a lot of serious space stuff to keep them occupied.

Suni, 59, and Butch, 62, have been helping ongoing missions at the station with maintenance and experiments, and have conducted spacewalks.

Suni ventured outside in mid-January with fellow astronaut Nick Hague to perform repairs on the craft. She and Butch went out together later in the month.

Their tasks included repairing equipment that governs station orientation, adding light filters on the NICER X-ray telescope, and replacing a reflector device on an international docking adapter.

Butch and Suni have taken the situation in their stride, saying in a news conference in September that they have been trained to “expect the unexpected”.

They have definitely had opportunities for reflection about life back home – and for watching a lot of sunrises and sunsets.

As the space station makes 16 orbits of Earth every 24 hours, it travels through 16 sunrises and sunsets, treating those on board to a sunrise or sunset every 45 minutes.

Living with such a unique view of the Earth gives plenty of room for contemplating it, something Suni has acknowledged.

“It opens up the door to making you think a bit differently. It’s the one planet we have and we should be taking care of it,” she said.

“There are so many people on Earth sending us messages it makes you feel right at home with everybody.”

Butch and Suni and the two other Americans who were on board with them, Don Pettit and Nick Hague, each had the opportunity to vote in last year’s US election.

“It’s a very important duty that we have as citizens,” Suni said to reporters.

Butch said Nasa had made it “very easy” for them to be included in elections.

To facilitate their voting, the Mission Control Center in Houston sent ballot papers via encrypted email to the ISS.

The astronauts then filled them out and transmitted them to satellites which relayed them to a ground terminal in New Mexico.

From there, landlines transmitted the ballots to Mission Control, who then electronically sent them to the astronauts’ county clerks for filing.

For Butch, the day starts at 04:30, and as for Suni, she makes a slightly kinder 06:30 start.

Both have said they enjoy the two hours or more of exercise they must do daily to combat the loss of bone density from living in space.

“Your joints don’t hurt, which is quite nice,” Butch has said.

Three different machines help to counter the effect of living in zero gravity.

The Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED) is used for squats, deadlifts, and rows that work all the muscle groups. For treadmills crews must strap in to stop themselves floating away, and there is also a cycle ergometer for endurance training.

At Christmas, astronauts on the International Space Station posted a festive message in which they wished their friends and family on Earth a merry Christmas.

The team dressed in Santa hats and reindeer antlers, throwing the slowly gyrating microphone to each other to speak while candy canes floated around their heads.

It was a chance for the crew to let their hair down, though in Suni’s case it was more a case of letting it ‘up’. Zero gravity has given her a style that would take a lot of product to achieve on Earth.

One of Butch and Suni’s final duties on board the ISS was to make their replacements feel welcome.

On 16 March a SpaceX capsule carrying a new crew arrived at the ISS. It was a deeply significant event for Butch and Suni, as it paved the way for them to come home.

Butch rang a ceremonial bell as Suni handed over command to cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin.

On Tuesday, they finally undocked from the ISS at 05:05 GMT (01:05 EDT) and are set to splash down off the coast of Florida later the same day, at 21:57 GMT (17:57 EDT).

At least 12 people have been killed after a plane crashed off the Caribbean coast of Honduras on Monday evening, officials said.

The aircraft – operated by Honduran airline Lanhsa – crashed into the sea within a minute of take-off from the island of Roatán.

The Honduran national police and fire department separately said five people had been rescued, while one person is yet to be found.

The cause of the crash is not yet known, but Roatán’s mayor told local media it wasn’t because of the weather, which was normal. The Honduran Civil Aeronautics Agency said an investigation was under way.

The Jetstream 32 aircraft had taken off from the island’s Juan Manuel Gálvez International Airport at 18:18 local time (00:18 GMT on Tuesday), and was bound for Golosón International Airport in La Ceiba on the Honduran mainland.

Civil aviation official Carlos Padilla said, quoted by AFP news agency, that the plane “made a sharp turn to the right of the runway and fell into the water”.

In a statement on social media, the government expressed “solidarity” with the families of the victims.

“The Government of Honduras deeply regrets the tragic accident in Roatán and joins in the national mourning,” it added.

Following the crash, Honduran President Xiomara Castro “immediately activated” the country’s emergency committee, comprised of all emergency services including the military, police, fire department, Red Cross and the Ministry of Health.

Writing on X, she said the committee team was “working tirelessly” to provide assistance.

“May God protect people’s lives,” Castro added.

Videos shared by officials on social media showed rescue teams working in darkness along a rocky coastline, with small boats and stretchers.

In a post on X accompanied by photos, the Honduran armed forces said survivors with injuries were taken to a hospital in the city of San Pedro Sula by air force planes.

According to local media reports, among the dead was well-known Honduran musician Aurelio Martinez Suazo.

Suazo was a member of the Garifuna, a people of mixed indigenous and Afro-Caribbean descent originating from the island of St Vincent which has a distinct musical style.

Six key breeding areas are to be safeguarded to help save the African penguin, following a landmark court order in South Africa.

Last year scientists warned that the species was declining by around 8% every year and could become extinct within a decade.

The court has imposed no-fishing zones around the breeding colonies to prevent so-called purse seine fishing vessels, which use large nets, from catching sardines and anchovies for the next 10 years.

The order is the result of an out-of-court settlement reached before a three-day High Court hearing was due to start between conservation groups, the commercial fishing industry and the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE).

Last year, BirdLife South Africa and the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (Sanccob) started the legal action – the first case of its kind in South Africa.

They alleged that ministers had failed to adequately protect the endangered species after failing to implement key recommendations from a scientific panel brought in by the government to assess the risk to the African penguin.

They argued the continuation of “inadequate” interim closures to fishing vessels around the breeding colonies, which are mainly in the Western Cape, had been allowed.

The Biodiversity Law Centre, which represents the groups, said the number of penguins had dwindled from 15,000 in 2018 to just under 9,000 at the end of 2023.

It said if the current rates of decline persisted the African penguin could be extinct by 2035.

The order, issued by the Pretoria High Court on Tuesday, outlines no-go zones for the commercial sardine and anchovy fishing vessels around six key African penguin breeding colonies: Dassen Island, Robben Island, Stony Point, Dyer Island, St Croix Island and Bird Island.

The DFFE has two weeks to make sure the permit conditions and the closures are implemented.

Nicky Stander, head of conservation at Sanccob, said the journey was far from over.

“The threats facing the African penguin are complex and ongoing – and the order itself requires monitoring, enforcement and continued co-operation from industry and the government processes which monitor and allocate sardine and anchovy populations for commercial purposes,” she said.

The anchovy and sardine fishing industry said it was pleased an agreement had been made, saying the decision was halfway between the interim closures and the area closures requested by conservation groups.

It also added that the perception that the fishing industry was the primary cause of the decline of the penguin population was false.

The order will last for the next 10 years, bringing it to 2035 which is when scientists predicted the penguin would be extinct.

Its progress will be reviewed six years from now.

• Pink flamingos ‘seized from smugglers’ in Tunisia
• Elephant tusks worth $11m destroyed from African stockpile
• How an undercover sting outwitted pangolin traffickers

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become one of the few world leaders to join Truth Social, the social media platform owned by US President Donald Trump.

In his first post on Monday, Modi shared a photo with Trump taken in Houston, Texas, during his 2019 US visit and said he was “delighted” to be on the platform.

Trump launched Truth Social in February 2022 after he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden and was temporarily banned from major social networks like Twitter and Facebook, which accused him of inciting violence.

As of 03:30 GMT, Modi had 21,500 followers and was following Trump and US Vice President JD Vance.

On Monday, Trump shared a link to an interview which Modi did with podcaster Lex Fridman where the Indian prime minister spoke on a range of topics, including his life journey, the Gujarat riots of 2002 and India’s relationship with China.

Much of Truth Social’s functionality is identical to X, formerly Twitter. Users are able to post ‘truths’ or ‘retruths’ as well as send direct messages. Adverts on the platform are called ‘sponsored truths’.

Truth Social is owned by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG). Trump took the company public in March 2024 and now owns about 57% shares in the firm.

Kuwaiti-headquartered investment firm ARC Global Investments and some former Apprentice contestants also have a sizeable stakes, though those holdings are currently subject to legal fights.

The US president has 9.28m followers on Truth Social, far fewer than the 87m he has on X.

According to data compiled by Bloomberg, traffic at Truth Social remains minuscule relative to its competitors, with its total user numbers trailing X by 400 times.

TMTG reported losses of $400m (£308m) in 2024 and a revenue of $3.6m. It has a market valuation of $4.45bn.

Hong Kong property tycoon Lee Shau-kee, who was once the richest man in Asia, has died at the age of 97.

The announcement was made by his property firm Henderson Land Development, of which he was chairman for more than 40 years.

The company said in a statement that Lee had died “in the company of his family” but did not specify a cause.

He was one of the city’s richest men. In February, Forbes put his net worth at just under $30bn (£23bn).

Lee was born in China’s southern Guangdong Province and moved to Hong Kong as a young man, where he began his business career in gold and foreign currency exchange before switching to real estate.

He established Sun Hung Kai Properties (SHKP) – one of the city’s largest property developers – in 1958, alongside two other founders.

Lee – who was nicknamed “Uncle Four” as he was the fourth eldest of his siblings – then struck out on his own in 1976 and founded Henderson Land Development, which his two sons took over following his retirement in 2019.

In 1996, he was named the richest man in Asia and the world’s fourth wealthiest person.

He was also a philanthropist and made significant contributions to education centres and to programmes aimed at job development. In 2007, he was awarded Hong Kong’s highest honour – the Grand Bauhinia Medal – in recognition for his contributions to society.

“Dr Lee was an outstanding business leader and entrepreneur who had made significant contributions to Hong Kong’s economic development, as well as the city’s prosperity and stability,” the city’s Chief Executive John Lee said in a statement.

Chinese state media has welcomed Donald Trump’s move to cut public funding for news outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which have long reported on authoritarian regimes.

The decision affects thousands of employees – some 1,300 staff have been put on paid leave at Voice Of America (VOA) alone since Friday’s executive order.

Critics have called the move a setback for democracy but Beijing’s state newspaper Global Times denounced VOA for its “appalling track record” in reporting on China and said it has “now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag”.

The White House defended the move, saying it will “ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.

Trump’s cuts target the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is supported by Congress and funds the affected news outlets, such as VOA, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe.

They have won acclaim and international recognition for their reporting in places where press freedom is severely curtailed or non-existent, from China and Cambodia to Russia and North Korea.

Although authorities in some of these countries block the broadcasts – VOA, for instance, is banned in China – people can listen to them on shortwave radio, or get around the restrictions via VPNs.

RFA has often reported on the crackdown on human rights in Cambodia, whose former authoritarian ruler Hun Sen has hailed the cuts as a “big contribution to eliminating fake news”.

It was also among the first news outlets to report on China’s network of detention centres in Xinjiang, where the authorities are accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims without trial. Beijing denies the claims, saying people willingly attend “re-education camps” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”. VOA’s reporting on North Korean defectors and the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged cover-up of Covid fatalities has won awards.

VOA, primarily a radio outlet, which also broadcasts in Mandarin, was recognised last year for its podcast on rare protests in 2022 in China against Covid lockdowns.

But China’s Global Times welcomed the cuts, calling VOA a “lie factory”.

“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multi-dimensional China, the demonising narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughing stock,” it said in an editorial published on Monday.

Hu Xijin, who was the Global Times’ former editor-in-chief, wrote: “Voice of America has been paralysed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which has been as vicious to China. This is such great news.”

Such responses “would have been easy to predict”, said Valdya Baraputri, a VOA journalist who lost her job over the weekend. She was previously employed by BBC World Service.

“Eliminating VOA, of course, allows channels that are the opposite of accurate and balanced reporting to thrive,” she told the BBC.

The National Press Club, a leading representative group for US journalists, said the order “undermines America’s long-standing commitment to a free and independent press”.

Founded during World War Two in part to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA reaches some 360 million people a week in nearly 50 languages. Over the years it has broadcast in China, North Korea, communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union. It’s also been a helpful tool for many Chinese people to learn English.

VOA’s director Michael Abramowitz said Trump’s order has hobbled VOA while “America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States”.

Ms Baraputri, who is from Indonesia but based in Washington DC, first joined VOA in 2018, but her visa was terminated at the end of Trump’s first administration.

She rejoined in 2023 because she wanted to be part of an organisation that “upholds unbiased, factual reporting that is free from government influence”.

The recent cuts have left her “feeling betrayed by the idea I had about press freedom [in the US]”.

She is also concerned for colleagues who may now be forced to return to hostile home countries, where they could be persecuted for their journalism.

Meanwhile, the Czech Republic has appealed to the European Union to intervene so it can keep Radio Free Europe going. It reports in 27 languages from 23 countries, reaching more than 47 million people every week.

RFA chief executive Bay Fang said in a statement that the organisation plans to challenge the order. Cutting funding to these outlets is a “reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space”, he said.

RFA started in 1996 and reaches nearly 60 million people weekly in China, Myanmar, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. In China, it also broadcasts in minority languages like Tibetan and Uyghur, apart from English and Mandarin.

“[Trump’s order] not only disenfranchises the nearly 60 million people who turn to RFA’s reporting on a weekly basis to learn the truth, but it also benefits America’s adversaries at our own expense,” Mr Fang noted.

While Chinese state media has celebrated the cuts, it’s hard to know how Chinese people feel about it given their internet is heavily censored.

Outside China, those who have listened to VOA and RFA over the years appear disappointed and worried.

“Looking back at history, countless exiles, rebels, intellectuals, and ordinary people have persisted in the darkness because of the voices of VOA and RFA, and have seen hope in fear because of their reports,” Du Wen, a Chinese dissident living in Belgium, wrote on X.

“If the free world chooses to remain silent, then the voice of the dictator will become the only echo in the world.”

A man who President Vladimir Putin appointed as the Governor of Sevastopol after Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia has gone on trial accused of breaching UK financial sanctions against him.

Dmitrii Ovsiannikov is accused of receiving more than £75,000 from his wife Ekaterina Ovsiannikova and a new Mercedes Benz SUV from his brother Alexei Owsjanikow.

Between them, the three defendants at Southwark Crown Court face 10 charges of breaching the sanctions, and two charges of money laundering. They deny all the charges.

Dmitrii held a senior position in Crimea for three years and the court heard he was also Russia’s Deputy Minister for Industry and Trade.

Two years after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, President Vladimir Putin appointed Dmitrii Ovsiannikov as acting governor of the “strategically significant” city of Sevastopol in Crimea, the jury were told.

In 2017, elections were held there for the position of governor and Mr Ovsiannikov won.

Paul Jarvis, for the prosecution, said he “was an important political figure within the Russian Federation” though Dmitrii Ovsiannikov later resigned from the position in July 2019.

As a result of his senior job in illegally annexed Crimea, the EU imposed financial sanctions on Mr Ovsiannikov saying that among other things he had “called for Sevastopol to become the southern capital of the Russian Federation.”

When the UK left the EU, the UK imposed financial sanctions on him too. He later challenged the EU sanctions and had them lifted, but the UK sanctions still apply.

They are called the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019. The regulations make it a criminal offence to try to get round the sanctions.

The trial is the first criminal case involving the breach of the Russia Regulations.

In August 2022, Dmitrii Ovsiannikov travelled to Turkey from Russia and applied for a British passport.

Despite the fact that the UK sanctions still applied, the jury heard that he was granted a passport in January 2023, which he was entitled to because his father was born in the UK.

Mr Jarvis said: “The father of Dmitrii and Alexei had been born in Bradford, United Kingdom, in 1950. Their mother was Russian. Dmitrii and Alexei hold British passports by virtue of their father being a British citizen.”

Dmitrii Ovsiannikov then arrived in Britain on 1 February 2023, moving into his brother’s house in Clapham, where his wife and two younger children were already living and attending private school.

On 6 February, Dmitrii Ovsiannikov applied for a Halifax bank account, saying on the form that he was single, but also saying that he was living in Clapham with his wife.

Over the next two and a half weeks Ekaterina Ovsiannikova transferred £76,000 into her husband’s account allowing him to put down a deposit on a Mercedes Benz GLC 300 SUV.

However, the bank later realised he was on the UK sanctions list and froze the account.

After this, he went back to the dealership and recovered his deposit. His brother Alexei Owsjanikow bought the car instead, paying more than £54,000 the prosecution said.

The prosecution say that when Mr Ovsiannikov’s wife sent him the £76,000 and his brother bought the car they were in breach of the Russia Regulations.

Mr Jarvis told the jury that “they maintain that they either did not know that Dmitrii was a designated person or they did not realise that as a designated person he was not permitted to receive that type of help”.

He also added that Dmitrii Ovsiannikov must have known he was subject to UK sanctions, because on 7 February 2023 he was applying for them to be lifted and had included his unique ID number and group ID number from his sanctions listing on the form.

Speaking to the jury, Mr Jarvis said that this showed that Mr Ovsiannikov was aware of the sanctions “and he must have made his nearest and dearest aware of that too”.

In January 2024 all three defendants were arrested and interviewed by police.

Four months later, Alexei Owsjanikow paid more than £40,000 in school fees for his brother’s two youngest children who were at the Royal Russell School in Croydon – also a breach of the sanctions.

Paul Jarvis told the jury that in a police interview Alexei accepted that he had paid the school fees, but he maintained that the payments did not amount to a breach of the Russian Regulations because he believed that Ekaterina was solely responsible for those fees and not Dmitrii.

The trial is expected to continue at Southwark Crown Court for three weeks.

Eight countries – six of them in Africa, including Nigeria, Kenya and Lesotho – could soon run out of HIV drugs following the US government’s recent decision to pause foreign aid, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said.

US President Donald Trump announced the freeze on his first day in office in January as part of a review into government spending.

“Disruptions to HIV programmes could undo 20 years of progress,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned.

It could also lead to more than 10 million additional cases of HIV and three million HIV-related deaths, he added, noting this was “more than triple the number of deaths last year”.

Nigeria, Kenya, Lesotho, South Sudan, Burkina Faso and Mali – as well as Haiti and Ukraine – would run out of live-saving anti-retroviral (ARV) medicines in the coming months, Dr Tedros said at a press conference on Monday.

Trump’s executive order paused foreign aid support for an initial duration of 90 days in line with his “America First” foreign policy.

It has affected health programmes around the world, leaving shipments of critical medical supplies, including HIV drugs, greatly hampered.

The majority of the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) programmes have since been terminated.

Despite a waiver issued in February for the US’s ground-breaking HIV programme, its work has severely impacted.

Known as the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), it relies on logistical support from USAID and other organisations hit by the turmoil.

It has led to the “immediate stop to services for HIV treatment, testing and prevention in more than 50 countries”, Dr Tedros said.

Launched in 2003, Pepfar has enabled some of the world’s poorest people to access anti and has been credited with saving more than 26 million lives worldwide.

During his first days in office, Trump also announced that the US would pull out of the WHO, affecting funding for the global health agency.

“The US administration has been extremely generous over many years. And of course, it’s within its rights to decide what it supports and to what extent,” Dr Tedros said.

“But the US also has a responsibility to ensure that if it withdraws direct funding for countries, it’s done in an orderly and humane way that allows them to find alternative sources of funding.

An estimated 25 million people are living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, which is more than two-thirds of the global total 38 million people living with the disease.

In Nigeria, nearly two million people are living with HIV, with many relying on receiving aid-funded medicines.

Kenya has the seventh-largest number of people living with HIV in the world, at around 1.4 million, according to WHO data.

“We ask the US to reconsider its support for global health, which not only saves lives around the world, it also makes the US safer by preventing outbreaks from spreading internationally,” Dr Tedros said.

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After nine months in space, Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have finally arrived back on Earth.

Their SpaceX capsule made a fast and fiery re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere, before four parachutes opened to take them to a gentle splashdown off the coast of Florida.

A pod of dolphins circled the craft.

After a recovery ship lifted it out of the water, the astronauts beamed and waved as they were helped out of the hatch, along with fellow crew members astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

“The crew’s doing great,” Steve Stich, manager, Nasa’s Commercial Crew Program, said at a news conference.

It brings to an end a mission that was supposed to last for just eight days.

It was dramatically extended after the spacecraft Butch and Suni had used to travel to the International Space Station suffered technical problems.

“It is awesome to have crew 9 home, just a beautiful landing,” said Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator, Nasa’s Space Operations Mission Directorate.

Thanking the astronauts for their resilience and flexibility, he said SpaceX had been a “great partner”.

The journey home took 17 hours.

The astronauts were helped on to a stretcher, which is standard practice after spending so long in the weightless environment.

They will be checked over by a medical team, and then reunited with their families.

“The big thing will be seeing friends and family and the people who they were expecting to spend Christmas with,” said Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut.

“All of those family celebrations, the birthdays and the other events that they thought they were going to be part of – now, suddenly they can perhaps catch up on a bit of lost time.”

The saga of Butch and Suni began in June 2024.

They were taking part in the first crewed test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, developed by aerospace company Boeing.

But the capsule suffered several technical problems during its journey to the space station, and it was deemed too risky to take the astronauts home.

Starliner returned safely to Earth empty in early September, but it meant the pair needed a new ride for their return.

So Nasa opted for the next scheduled flight: a SpaceX capsule that arrived at the ISS in late September.

It flew with two astronauts instead of four, leaving two seats spare for Butch and Suni’s return.

The only catch was this had a planned six-month mission, extending the astronauts stay until now.

The Nasa pair embraced their longer-than-expected stay in space.

They carried out an array of experiments on board the orbiting lab and conducted spacewalks, with Suni breaking the record for the woman who spent the most hours outside of the space station. And at Christmas, the team dressed in Santa hats and reindeer antlers – sending a festive message for a Christmas that they had originally planned to spend at home.

And despite the astronauts being described as “stranded” they never really were.

Throughout their mission there have always been spacecraft attached to the space station to get them – and the rest of those onboard – home if there was an emergency.

Now the astronauts have arrived home, they will soon be taken to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, where they will be checked over by medical experts.

Long-duration missions in space take a toll on the body, astronauts lose bone density and suffer muscle loss. Blood circulation is also affected, and fluid shifts can also impact eyesight.

It can take a long time for the body to return to normal, so the pair will be given an extensive exercise regime as their bodies re-adapt to living with gravity.

British astronaut Tim Peake said it could take a while to re-adjust.

“Your body feels great, it feels like a holiday,” he told the BBC.

“Your heart is having an easy time, your muscles and bones are having an easy time. You’re floating around the space station in this wonderful zero gravity environment.

“But you must keep up the exercise regime. Because you’re staying fit in space, not for space itself, but for when you return back to the punishing gravity environment of Earth. Those first two or three days back on Earth can be really punishing.”

In interviews while onboard, Butch and Suni have said they were well prepared for their longer than expected stay – but there were things they were looking forward to when they got home.

Speaking to CBS last month, Suni Williams said: “I’m looking forward to seeing my family, my dogs and jumping in the ocean. That will be really nice – to be back on Earth and feel Earth.”

President Vladimir Putin has rejected an immediate and full ceasefire in Ukraine, agreeing only to halt attacks on energy infrastructure, following a call with US President Donald Trump.

The Russian leader declined to sign up to the comprehensive month-long ceasefire that Trump’s team recently worked out with Ukrainians in Saudi Arabia.

He said a comprehensive truce could only work if foreign military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine came to an end. Ukraine’s European allies have previously rejected such conditions.

US talks on Ukraine are due to continue on Sunday in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the US envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said.

In the grinding three-year war, Russia has recently been taking back territory in its Kursk region that was occupied by a Ukrainian incursion six months ago.

The results of Tuesday’s Trump-Putin call amount to a retreat in the US position from where it stood a week ago, although the two leaders did agree that further peace talks would take place immediately in the Middle East.

When a US delegation met Ukrainian counterparts in Jeddah last Tuesday, they convinced Kyiv to agree to their proposal for an “immediate” 30-day ceasefire, across land, air and sea.

• Peace talks are in parallel universe, say Ukraine front-line troops
• Is Putin ready for a ceasefire or playing for time?
• Why did Putin’s Russia invade Ukraine?

President Volodymyr Zelensky, who arrived in Helsinki, Finland, for an official visit on Tuesday shortly after Trump and Putin’s call ended, said Ukraine was open to the idea of a truce covering energy infrastructure, but wanted more details first.

He later accused Putin of rejecting a ceasefire following a barrage of Russian drone attacks.

Among the places targeted was a hospital in Sumy, and power supplies in Slovyansk, said Ukraine’s leader.

“Unfortunately, there have been hits, specifically on civilian infrastructure,” Zelensky said on X. “Today, Putin effectively rejected the proposal for a full ceasefire.”

Trump posted earlier on social media that his call with the Russian leader was “very good and productive” and that “many elements of a Contract for Peace were discussed”.

“We agreed to an immediate Ceasefire on all Energy and Infrastructure, with an understanding that we will be working quickly to have a Complete Ceasefire and, ultimately, an END to this very horrible War between Russia and Ukraine,” the US president said on Truth Social.

About 80% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed by Russian bombs, Zelensky said last September.

Kyiv has in turn conducted drone and missile strikes deep into Russian territory, on oil and gas facilities.

Following last week’s talks in Jeddah, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said “the ball” was in Russia’s court, after the Ukrainians accepted Washington’s proposal for a full ceasefire.

But the White House’s statement following the Trump-Putin call on Tuesday made no reference to that agreement with Kyiv.

It instead said the two leaders agreed that “the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire”, followed by negotiations over a “maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace”.

But the Kremlin’s own statement on the call noted what it said were a “series of significant issues” around enforcing any agreement with Kyiv. And it said the end of foreign support and intelligence for Ukraine was a “key condition” for Russia.

Trump and Putin agreed to immediate technical-level talks towards a longer-term settlement, which the Kremlin said must be “complex, stable and long-term in nature”.

But it’s unclear if this means further negotiations between the US and Russia, or bilateral talks between Russia and Ukraine.

The Kremlin also said Trump supported Putin’s idea of holding ice hockey matches between professional US and Russian players.

Russia was frozen out of ice hockey events overseas after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Kyiv will probably see the outcome of Tuesday’s much-anticipated phone call as Putin playing for time, while he adds crippling conditions on any settlement.

Putin has previously insisted Russia should keep control of Ukrainian territory it has seized and has called for Western sanctions to be eased as part of any eventual peace settlement.

The Russian leader has already tasted Trump’s readiness to cut off US support to Ukraine, and is trying to get him to repeat it – while tossing the ball back to Kyiv.

Earlier this month the US temporarily suspended military and intelligence aid to Ukraine after Trump and Zelensky had an altercation in the Oval Office.

Trump and his Vice-President JD Vance dressed down Zelensky in front of the world’s media, accusing him of being ungrateful for American support.

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday in Berlin with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the limited ceasefire plan was an important first step, but he again called for a complete ceasefire.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer spoke to Zelensky after the Trump-Putin call and “reiterated [the] UK’s unwavering support”, a Downing Street spokeswoman said.

Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Russia’s Kursk region have described scenes “like a horror movie” as they retreated from the front lines.

The BBC has received extensive accounts from Ukrainian troops, who recount a “catastrophic” withdrawal in the face of heavy fire, and columns of military equipment destroyed and constant attacks from swarms of Russian drones.

The soldiers, who spoke over social media, were given aliases to protect their identity. Some gave accounts of a “collapse” as Ukraine lost Sudzha, the largest town it held.

Ukrainian restrictions on travel to the front have meant it is not possible to get a full picture of the situation. But this is how five Ukrainian soldiers described to us what had happened.

On 9 March, “Volodymyr” sent a Telegram post to the BBC saying he was still in Sudzha, where there was “panic and collapse of the front”.

Ukrainian troops “are trying to leave – columns of troops and equipment. Some of them are burned by Russian drones on the road. It is impossible to leave during the day.”

Movement of men, logistics and equipment had been reliant on one major route between Sudzha and Ukraine’s Sumy region.

Volodymyr said it was possible to travel on that road relatively safely a month ago. By 9 March it was “all under the fire control of the enemy – drones around the clock. In one minute you can see two to three drones. That’s a lot,” he said.

“We have all the logistics here on one Sudzha-Sumy highway. And everyone knew that the [Russians] would try to cut it. But this again came as a surprise to our command.”

At the time of writing, just before Russia retook Sudzha, Volodymyr said Ukrainian forces were being pressed from three sides.

By 11 March, Ukrainian forces were battling to prevent the road being cut, according to Telegram messages from “Maksym”.

“A few days ago, we received an order to leave the defence lines in an organised retreat,” he said, adding that Russia had amassed a significant force to retake the town, “including large numbers of North Korean soldiers”.

Military experts estimate Russia had amassed a force of up to 70,000 troops to retake Kursk – including about 12,000 North Koreans.

Russia had also sent its best drone units to the front and was using kamikaze and first-person-view (FPV) variants to “take fire control of the main logistics routes”.

They included drones linked to operators by fibre-optic wires – which are impossible to jam with electronic counter-measures.

Maksym said as a result “the enemy managed to destroy dozens of units of equipment”, and that wrecks had “created congestion on supply routes”.

The situation on that day, 11 March, was described as “catastrophic” by “Anton”.

The third soldier spoken to by the BBC was serving in the headquarters for the Kursk front.

He too highlighted the damage caused by Russian FPV drones. “We used to have an advantage in drones, now we do not,” he said. He added that Russia had an advantage with more accurate air strikes and a greater number of troops.

Anton said supply routes had been cut. “Logistics no longer work – organised deliveries of weapons, ammunition, food and water are no longer possible.”

Anton said he managed to leave Sudzha by foot, at night – “We almost died several times. Drones are in the sky all the time.”

The soldier predicted Ukraine’s entire foothold in Kursk would be lost but that “from a military point of view, the Kursk direction has exhausted itself. There is no point in keeping it any more”.

Western officials estimate that Ukraine’s Kursk offensive involved about 12,000 troops. They were some of their best-trained soldiers, equipped with Western-supplied weapons including tanks and armoured vehicles.

Russian bloggers published videos showing some of that equipment being destroyed or captured. On 13 March, Russia said the situation in Kursk was “fully under our control” and that Ukraine had “abandoned” much of its material.

In social media posts on 11-12 March, a fourth soldier, “Dmytro” likened the retreat from the front to “a scene from a horror movie”.

“The roads are littered with hundreds of destroyed cars, armoured vehicles and ATVs (All Terrain Vehicles). There are a lot of wounded and dead.”

Vehicles were often hunted by multiple drones, he said.

He described his own narrow escape when the car he was travelling in got bogged down. He and his fellow soldiers were trying to push the vehicle free when they were targeted by another FPV drone.

It missed the vehicle, but injured one of his comrades. He said they had to hide in a forest for two hours before they were rescued.

Dmytro said many Ukrainians retreated on foot with “guys walking 15km to 20km”. The situation, he said, had turned from “difficult and critical to catastrophic”.

In a message on 14 March, Dmytro added: “Everything is finished in the Kursk region… the operation was not successful.”

He estimated that thousands of Ukrainian soldiers had died since the first crossing into Russia in August.

A fifth soldier sounded less gloomy about the situation. On 13 March, “Artem” sent a Telegram message from a military hospital, where he was being treated for shrapnel wounds suffered in a drone attack.

Artem said he had been fighting further west – near the village of Loknya, where Ukrainian forces were putting up a stiff resistance and “fighting like lions”.

He believed the operation had achieved some success.

“It’s important that so far the Armed Forces of Ukraine have created this buffer zone, thanks to which the Russians cannot enter Sumy,” he said.

Ukraine’s top general, Oleksandr Syrskyi, insists that Ukrainian forces have pulled back to “more favourable positions”, remain in Kursk, and would do so “for as long as it is expedient and necessary”.

He said Russia had suffered more than 50,000 losses during the operation – including those killed, injured or captured.

However, the situation now is very different to last August. Military analysts estimate two-thirds of the 1,000 sq km gained at the outset have since been lost.

Any hopes that Ukraine would be able to trade Kursk territory for some of its own have significantly diminished.

Last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believed the Kursk operation had “accomplished its task” by forcing Russia to pull troops from the east and relieve pressure on Pokrovsk.

But it is not yet clear at what cost.

Israel has “resumed combat in full force” against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday night.

In a defiant video statement, he warned that “negotiations will continue only under fire” and that “this is just the beginning”.

His comments came after Israeli aircraft launched massive airstrikes against what the military said were Hamas targets in Gaza.

More than 400 people have been killed in the attacks, the Hamas-run health ministry said, and hundreds more injured.

The wave of strikes was the heaviest since a ceasefire began on 19 January.

The fragile truce had mostly held until now, but this new wave of attacks suggests plans for a permanent end to the war may be off the table.

The airstrikes which hit Beit Lahia, Rafah, Nuseirat and Al-Mawasi on Tuesday shattered the relative peace that Gazans had been experiencing since January, and hospitals are once again overrun with casualties.

The attacks on Gaza have been condemned by Egypt, a mediator in the talks.

The air strikes are “a blatant violation” of the ceasefire agreement and represent “a dangerous escalation”, said Tamim Khallaf, the spokesman for the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“I was shocked that the war started again, but at the same time, this is what we expect from the Israelis,” Hael a resident from Jabalia al-Balad told BBC Arabic.

“As a citizen, I’m exhausted. We’ve had enough – a year-and-a-half to this! It’s enough,” he added.

Key Hamas figures were killed in the airstrikes, including Major General Mahmoud Abu Watfa, deputy interior minister in Gaza and the highest-ranking Hamas security official.

• Is the war starting again in Gaza?
• Voices from Gaza: ‘Once again, fear has gripped the people’
• Why has Israel bombed Gaza and what next for ceasefire deal?

In his address, Netanyahu said Israel had tried to negotiate with Hamas to release the Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza. He accused Hamas of rejecting the proposals every time.

Israel and Hamas have disagreed on how to take the ceasefire deal forward since the first phase expired in early March, after numerous exchanges of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.

The deal involves three stages, and negotiations on the second stage were meant to have started six weeks ago – but this did not happen.

Instead, the agreement was thrown into uncertainty when the US and Israel wanted to change the terms of the deal, to extend stage one which would see more hostages released.

That would have delayed the start of phase two, which was meant to establish a permanent ceasefire and required Israeli troops to pull out of Gaza.

But Hamas rejected this proposed change to the agreement brokered by US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators, calling it unacceptable.

On Tuesday evening, Netanyahu said Israel would continue to fight to achieve all of its war goals – “to return the hostages, get rid of Hamas and make sure Hamas is not a threat to Israel.”

US President Donald Trump’s administration was consulted by Israel before it carried out the strikes, officials said.

The US National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said: “Hamas could have released hostages to extend the ceasefire, but instead chose refusal and war.”

Hamas warned the resumption of violence by Israel would “impose a death sentence” on the remaining living hostages held in Gaza, and accused Israel of trying to force it into a surrender.

Speaking to the BBC about the attacks, Dr Sabrina Das, an obstetrician training Palestinian doctors in southern Gaza, said: “It was all very sudden… everybody’s mood was just shattered because we knew it was the start of the war again.”

Dr Das said her colleagues in Nasar hospital were “up all night operating” because “mass casualties had started coming in again”.

Mohammed Zaquot, director general of the Gaza Strip’s hospitals, told BBC Arabic “the attacks were so sudden that the number of medical staff available was inadequate for the scale of these large strikes, and additional teams were called in immediately to assist”.

A group representing hostages’ families has accused the Israeli government of choosing “to give up the hostages” by launching new strikes – and has been protesting outside the Israeli parliament.

The news of the strikes terrified some of the families of Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas.

“The Israeli government is not perfect, and Israel is not doing enough, because my brothers are not home”, Liran Berman, whose twin brothers are still being held in Gaza, told the BBC.

“But if Hamas wanted, the hostages would be back. They are in their hands.”

Israel says Hamas is still holding 59 hostages, 24 of whom are believed to be alive.

The war was triggered when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 back to Gaza as captives.

Israel responded with a massive military offensive, which has killed more than 48,500 Palestinians, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says, and caused huge destruction to homes and infrastructure.

In the run up to today’s call, Donald Trump made a big deal of his conversation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

But the results look like there’s little to shout about.

The Russian president has given the US leader just enough to claim that he made progress towards peace in Ukraine, without making it look like he was played by the Kremlin.

Trump can point to Putin’s pledge to halt attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for 30 days. If that actually happens, it will bring some relief to civilians.

But it’s nowhere near the full and unconditional ceasefire that the US wanted from Russia.

The “very horrible war” Trump has insisted he can stop is still raging.

And Putin, a man indicted as a suspected war criminal by the ICC, has been given a leg-up back to the top tier of global politics.

Russian state media report that the two presidents’ phone call lasted more than two hours. The Kremlin readout – its account of the call – is also long at 500 words.

It presents the conversation as chatty: they apparently discussed ice hockey, the kind of detail an audience back in Russia will lap up.

After three years as a pariah in the western world, and frosty relations long before that, Russia is back dealing directly with a US administration that wants to engage.

The two leaders are even discussing Middle East peace and “global security”.

The Kremlin must be struggling to believe the transformation.

Ahead of the call, some wondered whether Donald Trump might actually pile some pressure on Russia. After all, it’s been clear for over a week that it was stalling on the ceasefire.

But there’s no sign of a dressing down for Putin like the one Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky had to endure in the Oval Office a fortnight ago.

Both countries’ accounts suggest nothing has changed.

Russia repeats that it wants peace. But instead of grounding its drones and silencing its guns, it’s quibbling over how a still non-existent ceasefire might be monitored.

Meanwhile, it’s adding even more conditions aimed at crippling Kyiv’s ability to resist.

One demand is that the flow of both weapons and intelligence to Ukraine from its allies has to cease.

For Ukrainians, the only sliver of hope is that the US hasn’t agreed to any of this – yet.

They can also point to the call as more proof that Russia has no interest in ending its invasion.

But all that talking will bring Ukraine minimal relief from its suffering.

For US diplomacy, too, it has to be disappointing.

But for the Kremlin it will feel like a pretty decent day, the kind unimaginable before Donald Trump returned to the White House.

The US government has begun releasing a trove of documents on the assassination of President John F Kennedy – a case that still sparks conspiracy theories over 60 years later.

The release follows an executive order in January by President Donald Trump that required unredacted files in the case to be made public.

Historians do not expect many ground-breaking revelations in the records, which they were combing over after Tuesday night’s release. Trump has estimated 80,000 pages of documents will be unsealed.

US authorities have previously released hundreds of thousands of JFK documents, but held some back citing national security concerns. Many Americans still believe the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, didn’t act alone.

Kennedy was shot during a visit to Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963.

It is unclear how much of the Kennedy material released by the National Archives and Records Administration is new.

Many of the documents have previously been released in partially redacted form, according to experts.

“You got a lot of reading,” Trump told reporters on Monday, previewing the release. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”

But some of the hundreds of files unsealed on Tuesday night did appear to have passages blacked out, according to US media, while others were hard to read because they are faded or are poorly scanned photocopies.

A government commission determined that President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran and self-described Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the US.

But opinion polls over decades have indicated that most Americans don’t believe Oswald was the sole assassin.

Unanswered questions have long dogged the case, giving rise to theories about the involvement of government agents, the mafia and other nefarious characters – as well as more outlandish claims.

In 1992, Congress passed a law to release all documents related to the investigation within 25 years.

Both Trump in his first term and President Joe Biden released piles of JFK-related documents, but thousands had still remained partially or fully secret.

Trump’s executive order two months ago also called on government archivists to release files related to the killings of presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, both of whom were gunned down in 1968.

The Republican president had vowed during last year’s White House race to release JFK files, shortly after he secured the endorsement of Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nephew of JFK and son of Robert Kennedy.

Kennedy Jr has gone on to become Trump’s health secretary.

Documents relating to the Duke of Sussex’s US visa application have been unsealed in court.

They are heavily redacted, however, and no details have been given as to what Prince Harry put on his immigration form.

A US court had ordered the release of the documents based on a freedom of information request by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative US think tank in Washington DC.

The foundation alleges that the prince concealed his past use of drugs, which should have disqualified him from obtaining a US visa.

The allegations centre around his claims in his memoir Spare, where he referred to taking cocaine, marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms.

Application forms for US visas specifically ask about current and past drug use.

Admissions of drug use can lead to non-immigrant and immigrant visa applications being rejected, although immigration officers have discretion to make a final decision based on different factors.

In the event, very little information was disclosed in the documents which were released on Tuesday.

The prince’s visa form has not been released.

Instead, the documents that were released are supporting declarations and court transcripts created in the course of Heritage Foundation’s case.

They reveal that the US government previously told a court that the duke could be subjected to harassment if his visa records were made public.

A chief freedom of information officer within the US Department for Homeland Security (DHS) could be seen to argue that releasing the material “would potentially expose the individual to harm from members of the public”.

The declaration from Jarrod Panter, submitted to the court in April last year, reads: “The USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) routinely protects from disclosure the non-immigrant/immigrant status sought by third parties who do not have permission from the beneficiary to receive this information.

“To release such information would potentially expose the individual to harm from members of the public who might have a reason to manipulate or harass individuals depending on their status in the United States.”

The declaration added: “To release his exact status could subject him to reasonably foreseeable harm in the form of harassment as well as unwanted contact by the media and others.”

Sam Dewey from the Heritage Foundation told the BBC that he believes the DHS has not provided all its papers. He said he is “frustrated” and that this is “not the end of the road”.

Dewey expects the next move to be a “sort of filing” that could lay out the next steps, adding: “We may well have another lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security.”

He accuses the prince of privilege, alleging he has benefitted from his “wealth and status” by being allowed to live in the US.

In his controversial memoir, published in January 2023, Prince Harry wrote that he first tried cocaine at the age of 17.

“It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t make me particularly happy, as it seemed to make everyone around me, but it did make me feel different, and that was the main goal,” he added.

He also wrote about using marijuana, saying “cocaine didn’t do anything for me”, but “marijuana is different, that actually really did help me”.

Cocaine is a highly addictive drug, with a range of short and long-term effects, according to the NHS. Marijuana (cannabis) can make some existing mental health symptoms worse and has been linked with the possible development of mental health issues.

The court’s decision that the files be released came after a 2024 ruling which said there was not enough public interest in disclosing Prince Harry’s immigration records.

The Heritage Foundation contested that ruling and pushed for the judgement to be changed.

Prince Harry moved to the US with his wife Meghan in 2020 after stepping down as a working royal. It is not clear what visa he entered the country on, while the duchess is a US citizen.

President Donald Trump previously ruled out deporting Prince Harry in February, telling the New York Post: “I’ll leave him alone… He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.”

Meghan has been a vocal critic of Trump in the past, labelling him a “misogynist”.

The BBC has contacted the duke’s office for comment.

It took Arun George half a working life to scrape together £15,000 ($19,460) in savings, which he used to secure a care worker job for his wife in the UK.

But in barely a few months, he lost it all.

Mr George – not his real name as his wife doesn’t want to be identified within their small community for the shame associated with having returned without a job – paid the money in late 2023 to the managers of Alchita Care.

The BBC has seen evidence of the payment to Alchita Care, the private domiciliary care home in Bradford that sponsored his family’s visa. He did it at the behest of a local agent in his town in the southern Indian state of Kerala.

It was the promise of a better life for their child who has special needs that prodded the couple to dip into their savings and take such a risk. But when they got to the UK there was no work.

“We kept chasing the care home, but they made up excuses. After I pleaded with them, they forced us to undergo some unpaid training and gave my wife just three days of work,” Mr George said. “We couldn’t carry on and came back to India a few months later.”

Mr George believes he has been scammed by the company and says the ordeal has set him back at least by a decade financially. His family is just one among hundreds of people from Kerala seeking work in the UK who have been exploited by recruiters, care homes and middlemen.

Most have now given up hope of getting justice or their money.

Alchita Care in Bradford has not responded to the BBC’s questions. Their sponsorship licence – which allows care homes to issue certificates of sponsorship to foreign care workers applying for visas – was removed by the Home Office last year.

But at least three other care workers who sent thousands of pounds to Alchita Care and uprooted their lives from Kerala told us that the jobs they had been promised did not materialise.

One of them, still in the UK, said his condition was so precarious that he was surviving on “bread and milk” from charity shops for the past few months.

Like Mr George, Sridevi (not her real name) says she was charged £15,000 for a visa sponsorship by Alchita Care. She spent another £3,000 to get to the UK in 2023.

She’s unable to return to India, scared of facing family members and friends from whom she took a loan to make the trip.

“I struggle to even pay for my rent and meals,” she said. Her job is a far cry from the stable eight-hour work she was promised, she says. She is sometimes on call from 4am to 9pm, driving from one patient’s home to another, but gets paid only for the few hours she is actually with the patient, and not the full shift.

Thousands of nurses from Kerala, desperate to migrate to the UK every year, are estimated to have been exploited after the government added care workers to the UK’s shortage occupation list during Covid. This allowed people to be recruited from overseas as long as they were sponsored.

• The carers crossing the globe to fill UK shortage

For many, the care worker visa was a golden ticket to a better life as they could take family along.

Baiju Thittala, a Labour party member and the mayor of Cambridge, told the BBC he had represented at least 10 such victims over the last three years.

But the cross-border nature of these exploitative schemes means it has been incredibly hard to pursue justice, he said. Very often the victims have made payments to care homes or middlemen domiciled outside India which leads to “jurisdiction problems”, he added.

Secondly, lawyers are expensive and most care workers, already in deep debt, can hardly afford to fight it out in the courts.

Thittala estimates at least 1,000-2,000 people from Kerala, directly or indirectly victims of these schemes, are still in the UK.

There are also hundreds of people scattered across Kerala’s towns who lost money before they could even leave home.

In the town of Kothamangalam, the BBC spoke to some 30 people who had collectively lost millions of dollars while trying to obtain a care visa that allows professionals to come to – or stay – in the UK to work in the social care sector.

All of them accused one agent – Henry Poulos and his agency Grace International in the UK and India – of robbing them of their life savings through fake job offers and sponsorship letters.

Mr Poulos even made some of them take a 2,500km journey to Delhi for visa appointments that were non-existent, they said.

Shilpa, who lives in the town of Alleppey, told the BBC she had taken out a bank loan at a 13% interest rate to pay Mr Poulos, who gave her a fake certificate of sponsorship.

“I thought the UK would offer a good future for my three daughters, but now I am struggling to pay their school fees,” she told the BBC.

“I have lost everything. My wife had left her job in Israel so that we could move to the UK,” said another victim, Binu, breaking down. He made a comfortable £1,500 with his wife in Israel but has now been forced to take his children out of private school in Kerala because there’s no money anymore.

Neither Mr Poulos nor Grace International responded to the BBC, despite repeated attempts to get in touch with them. The police in Kothamangalam said Mr Poulos was absconding in the UK, and they had sealed his local offices after receiving complaints from six people.

The previous Conservative government in the UK admitted last year that there was “clear evidence” that care workers were being offered visas under false pretences and paid far below the minimum wage required for their work.

Rules to reduce its misuse were tightened in 2024, including increasing the minimum salary. Care workers are also now restricted from taking dependents, making it a less attractive proposition for families.

Since July 2022, about 450 licences allowing employers to recruit foreign workers have been revoked in the care sector.

Since the beginning of this year, sponsors are now also explicitly prohibited by the Home Office from passing on the cost of the sponsor licence fee or associated administrative costs to prospective employees.

Top police officials in Kerala, meanwhile, told the BBC they were still investigating these cases in India and would work with Interpol agencies to crack down on agents, if necessary.

But for the hundreds who’ve already been exploited, justice remains elusive, and still very much a distant dream.

Sir Gareth Southgate says he fears young men are spending too much time gaming, gambling and watching pornography – and they need better role models beyond online influencers.

In a wide-ranging talk for the BBC’s annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, the ex-England men’s football manager spoke about his own experience of missing a crucial penalty at Euro 96, saying he didn’t let it define him.

“That pain still haunts me today,” he said, “and I guess it always will.”

Referencing his own experiences, he said the UK needed to do more to encourage young people – especially young men – to make the right choices in life and to not fear failure.

Rather than turning to teachers, sports coaches or youth group leaders, Sir Gareth said he feared many young men were searching for direction online. There, he said they were finding a new kind of role model, one that too often did not have their best interests at heart.

“These are callous, manipulative and toxic influencers, whose sole drive is for their own gain,” he said.

“They willingly trick young men into believing that success is measured by money or dominance, that strength means never showing emotion, and that the world, including women, is against them.”

Sir Gareth spoke about missing the crucial penalty in the 1996 Euros semi-final, when England lost to Germany.

“Missing that penalty was undoubtedly a watershed moment that made me stronger, a better man,” Sir Gareth said at the lecture. “It forced me to dig deep, and revealed an inner belief and resilience I never knew existed.”

He contrasted his own miss with Eric Dier’s successful penalty kick against Colombia in 2018, when – with Sir Gareth as manager – England won a World Cup penalty shootout for the first time.

During the intervening 22 years, he said there had been a change in mindset among England players.

“In 1996, I had walked 30 yards to the penalty spot believing I would miss,” he said. “In 2018, Eric had walked 30 yards to the penalty spot believing he would score.”

During Sir Gareth’s career as a defender and midfielder, he played for Crystal Palace, Aston Villa and Middlesbrough and was in the England squad between 1995 and 2004. He took over as manager in 2016 and led the team to the 2018 World Cup semi-final, 2022 World Cup quarter-final and Euro finals in 2020 and 2024.

He stepped down as manager in July, two days after England lost to Spain in the Euros.

Sir Gareth has been credited with revitalising the England team and was knighted in the King’s New Year Honours in December.

He is the latest in a line of academics, business leaders and other notable figures to deliver the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, which has been held most years since 1972 in memory of the broadcaster.

Previous speakers have included King Charles III, when he was the Prince of Wales, tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Gates, and Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Sir Gareth’s talk focused on the importance of belief and resilience for young men, and he cited three things needed to build these: identity, connection and culture.

He referred to a report, released earlier this month by the Centre for Social Justice, which said boys and young men were “in crisis”, with a “staggering” increase in those not in education, employment or training.

“Too many young men are isolated,” Sir Gareth said in his talk. “Too many feel uncomfortable opening up to friends or family. Many don’t have mentors – teachers, coaches, bosses – who understand how best to push them to grow. And so, when they struggle, young men inevitably try to handle whatever situation they find themselves in, alone.”

“Young men end up withdrawing, reluctant to talk or express their emotions,” he added. “They spend more time online searching for direction and are falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography.”

He also said young men don’t get enough opportunities to fail and learn from their mistakes.

“In my opinion, if we make life too easy for young boys now, we will inevitably make life harder when they grow up to be young men,” he said. “Too many young men are at risk of fearing failure, precisely because they’ve had so few opportunities to experience and overcome it. They fail to try, rather than try and fail.”

The ex-footballer also reflected on what his career has taught him about belief and resilience.

“If I’ve learned anything from my life in football, it’s that success is much more than the final score,” he said. “True success is how you respond in the hardest moments.”

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture with Sir Gareth Southgate is broadcast at 10.40pm on BBC One and available on iPlayer now

A few days after Donald Trump won the US presidential election, Amber Walliser stocked up, spending $2,000 (£1,538) on appliances she believed would get more expensive as the White House started to put new taxes on imports

But that was a temporary splurge. These days, her family is buckling down, worried about job security, and a possible economic downturn, which experts believe could be more likely because of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

It means no new car, or big vacation this year. They have even shelved plans to start trying for a second child.

“We are saving as much as possible, just hoarding cash, trying to bulk up our emergency fund,” the 32-year-old accountant from Ohio said.

Amber’s worries are being echoed across the US, as tariffs and other changes by the White House hit the stock market, spark turmoil for businesses, and add to inflation concerns.

That is the tricky scenario that officials at the US central bank will have to address at their interest rates meeting on Wednesday.

The Federal Reserve, which is supposed to keep both prices and employment stable, typically lowers borrowing costs to help support the economy, or raises them to slow down price rises, as it did when prices shot up in 2022.

Though analysts widely expect the Fed to leave interest rates unchanged on Wednesday, they are far more divided about what to expect in the months ahead, as tariffs could both raises prices and slow economic growth.

“Their job has become a lot harder,” said Jay Bryson, chief economist at Wells Fargo.

In a speech earlier this month, the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, noted that surveys of sentiment have not been good indicators of spending decisions in recent years, when the economy has performed well across many mainstream metrics, despite sour views.

He said policymakers could afford to wait to see the overall impact of the White House policy changes before responding.

But households are responding to the uncertainty now.

After his investments were hit in the recent stock market sell-off, Dave Gold drew up a budget and started slashing his spending.

He cancelled Netflix, challenged himself to avoid Amazon purchases for a month and scaled back his travel, managing to cut his expenses in half.

“It’s just really hard to plan and be confident about what next month looks like,” said the 37-year-old, who lives in Wyoming and works in finance.

“I thought it was time to reel it back in and protect myself in case things do happen,” he added.

Dave is not the only American reigning in their spending. Retail sales also fell last month, while firms from Walmart to Delta Air Lines have warned of slackening demand.

Meanwhile, job growth has slowed and the stock market is now trading at its lowest levels since September.

In this month’s survey of consumer sentiment by the University of Michigan, concerns about the job market surged to the highest level since the Great Recession, while household expectations of long-term inflation also jumped, in the biggest one-month rise since 1993.

Those are troubling signals for the US, in which consumer spending accounts for roughly two thirds of the economy.

“It’s not like the consumer is falling apart, but we’re seeing some cracks,” said Mr Bryson, who puts the odds of a recession at one in three, up from one in five at the start of the year.

“If consumers retrench… the entire economy is going to go down with it,” he said.

White House officials have acknowledged the likelihood of “a little disturbance”, while promising that the short-term pain will lead to long-term gain.

But polls suggest Trump’s handling of the economy is a point of concern for the public, especially for Democrats and independents, but increasingly for Republicans as well.

Software engineer Jim Frazer, who did not vote for Trump, said the administration’s assurances have done little to ease his concerns, as he sees policies change by the hour, the stock market sink, and prices for staples such as eggs rise.

Around the end of last year, the 49-year-old, who lives in Nebraska, purchased a new phone and television, betting such items would be affected by the tariffs Trump said he planned to put on imports from China.

More recently however, he’s trying to cut back, both as a buffer against rising costs and because he has been spooked by the Trump administration’s talk – not just about tariffs, but other moves, like annexing Canada as the 51st state.

He and his wife recently hit pause on their plan to replace an old loveseat, and have scaled back their ambitions for renovating the bathroom.

“I just feel like right now, we need that money squirrelled away in a safe spot,” he said.

“It’s that feeling like we’re heading towards something and we’ve got to get prepared.”

Sir Gareth Southgate says he fears young men are spending too much time gaming, gambling and watching pornography – and they need better role models beyond online influencers.

In a wide-ranging talk for the BBC’s annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, the ex-England men’s football manager spoke about his own experience of missing a crucial penalty at Euro 96, saying he didn’t let it define him.

“That pain still haunts me today,” he said, “and I guess it always will.”

Referencing his own experiences, he said the UK needed to do more to encourage young people – especially young men – to make the right choices in life and to not fear failure.

Rather than turning to teachers, sports coaches or youth group leaders, Sir Gareth said he feared many young men were searching for direction online. There, he said they were finding a new kind of role model, one that too often did not have their best interests at heart.

“These are callous, manipulative and toxic influencers, whose sole drive is for their own gain,” he said.

“They willingly trick young men into believing that success is measured by money or dominance, that strength means never showing emotion, and that the world, including women, is against them.”

Sir Gareth spoke about missing the crucial penalty in the 1996 Euros semi-final, when England lost to Germany.

“Missing that penalty was undoubtedly a watershed moment that made me stronger, a better man,” Sir Gareth said at the lecture. “It forced me to dig deep, and revealed an inner belief and resilience I never knew existed.”

He contrasted his own miss with Eric Dier’s successful penalty kick against Colombia in 2018, when – with Sir Gareth as manager – England won a World Cup penalty shootout for the first time.

During the intervening 22 years, he said there had been a change in mindset among England players.

“In 1996, I had walked 30 yards to the penalty spot believing I would miss,” he said. “In 2018, Eric had walked 30 yards to the penalty spot believing he would score.”

During Sir Gareth’s career as a defender and midfielder, he played for Crystal Palace, Aston Villa and Middlesbrough and was in the England squad between 1995 and 2004. He took over as manager in 2016 and led the team to the 2018 World Cup semi-final, 2022 World Cup quarter-final and Euro finals in 2020 and 2024.

He stepped down as manager in July, two days after England lost to Spain in the Euros.

Sir Gareth has been credited with revitalising the England team and was knighted in the King’s New Year Honours in December.

He is the latest in a line of academics, business leaders and other notable figures to deliver the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, which has been held most years since 1972 in memory of the broadcaster.

Previous speakers have included King Charles III, when he was the Prince of Wales, tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Gates, and Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Sir Gareth’s talk focused on the importance of belief and resilience for young men, and he cited three things needed to build these: identity, connection and culture.

He referred to a report, released earlier this month by the Centre for Social Justice, which said boys and young men were “in crisis”, with a “staggering” increase in those not in education, employment or training.

“Too many young men are isolated,” Sir Gareth said in his talk. “Too many feel uncomfortable opening up to friends or family. Many don’t have mentors – teachers, coaches, bosses – who understand how best to push them to grow. And so, when they struggle, young men inevitably try to handle whatever situation they find themselves in, alone.”

“Young men end up withdrawing, reluctant to talk or express their emotions,” he added. “They spend more time online searching for direction and are falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography.”

He also said young men don’t get enough opportunities to fail and learn from their mistakes.

“In my opinion, if we make life too easy for young boys now, we will inevitably make life harder when they grow up to be young men,” he said. “Too many young men are at risk of fearing failure, precisely because they’ve had so few opportunities to experience and overcome it. They fail to try, rather than try and fail.”

The ex-footballer also reflected on what his career has taught him about belief and resilience.

“If I’ve learned anything from my life in football, it’s that success is much more than the final score,” he said. “True success is how you respond in the hardest moments.”

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture with Sir Gareth Southgate is broadcast at 10.40pm on BBC One and available on iPlayer now