Firefighters in South Korea are racing to save lives and ancient artefacts from the largest wildfire in the country’s history.

At least 27 people have been killed so far, according to the country’s interior ministry – making the blaze also South Korea’s deadliest. A further 32 people have been injured, some seriously.

Most of those killed were in their 60s and 70s, local officials say.

It is thought the wildfires, which first broke out in south-eastern Sancheong county nearly a week ago, were started accidentally by local human activities.

Fuelled by strong and dry winds, the fires have spread to several neighbouring counties, including Uiseong – where the largest of all the blazes currently is.

The authorities believe this fire broke out while visitors were tending to a family grave in the hills. Video footage from the gravesite shows a lighter on the ground.

Other fires are presumed to have been started from a welding spark, or burning of rubbish.

The fires have burned though more than 35,810 hectares (88,500 acres) so far – about half the size of New York City. As they continue to spread, artefacts including wooden printing blocks and paintings, have been moved from major temples.

The authorities are keeping a close eye on potential damage to two Unesco-listed sites: Hahoe Village and Byeongsan Seowon in Andong City.

The fires have already destroyed the Gounsa temple, which was built in 618 AD and was one of the largest temples in the province.

A Buddhist architectural structure deemed a national treasure from the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) was also destroyed, forestry authorities confirmed.

Tens of thousands of people have so far been ordered to evacuate because of the fires.

Kwon Young-chang, 35, told the BBC that the smoke filled his neighbourhood in Andong, forcing him to head north to Yecheon.

“The damage in Andong is devastating, and our neighbours, who have suffered great losses, are in deep despair,” he said.

Mr Kwon said the official information he had received had been confusing, and that he had been getting updates from local authorities’ social media pages. He feared that older people would not have access to these.

Another Andong resident, who asked not to be named, told BBC Korean that her house, which her family had lived in for more than 30 years, was “completely burnt down” within just a few hours.

“There’s nothing left. You can’t even tell where the house used to be,” she said. “It’s difficult to see the village like this.”

Jang Jung-suk, who lives in Cheongsong County, says her beekeeping site was completely destroyed by the fire.

“We saw really strong winds the day the fire spread to our village. It was hard to even stand still,” Jang said.

After briefly evacuating, she and her husband returned to find their home damaged and their business, which they had been building for five years and were just starting to reach a point of stability with, gone. Jang says her husband couldn’t hold back tears when he saw the damage.

“I’m at a loss. I need to figure out how to start over,” she said.

While the weather rarely causes wildfires on its own, it can give conditions that help wildfires to take hold and spread.

This is exactly what has happened in South Korea. Temperatures several degrees above the seasonal norm have combined with dry ground, strong winds and low humidity to fuel fires that authorities say were ignited by human activity.

Lee Han-gyeong, the government official in charge of emergency response, said “we are witnessing the reality of climate crisis like never before”.

On a hot, humid Thursday night in Saitama, China’s national football team hit its lowest ebb.

With a minute left on the clock and trailing Japan 6-0, Chinese defenders were likely wishing for the sweet relief of the final whistle.

But Japan’s Takefusa Kubo was not feeling charitable. After watching his team-mates toy with their opponents for a while, he received a pass on the edge of the Chinese box and rammed home Japan’s seventh goal.

The ball rocketed into the roof of the net, and the man known as “Japanese Messi” condemned China to their worst-ever defeat in a World Cup qualifier.

The 7-0 spanking in September – described as “rock-bottom” by a Shanghai-based newspaper – followed a year-long line of humiliating defeats which included losses to Oman, Uzbekistan and Hong Kong.

But worse was to come.

A week later dozens of players, coaches and administrators were arrested for gambling, match-fixing and bribery as part of a two-year probe into corruption in the domestic game.

And the defeats have continued. On Tuesday, Australia beat China 2-0 in Hangzhou – cementing them at the bottom of their World Cup qualifying group.

It wasn’t long ago that China had dreamed of becoming a footballing superpower.

The world’s largest population, a thriving economy and a determined Communist Party led by an avid football fan, President Xi Jinping. What could go wrong?

Apparently, quite a lot.

When Xi came to power in 2012, his love for the sport spurred a drive to reform and improve Chinese football. His dream, he once said, was for China to qualify for the World Cup, host it and, ultimately, win it. These were his “three wishes”.

But a decade later, even Xi seemed to have lost the faith. While making small talk with Thailand’s prime minister on the sidelines of an international summit in 2023, the Chinese president was heard saying that China had “got lucky” in a recent victory against Thailand.

“When China’s government puts its mind to something, it very rarely fails,” says Mark Dreyer, a Beijing-based sports writer. “Look at electric vehicles, look at the Olympics. Practically any sector you can think of, China is right up there.”

But football, it seems, could not thrive in the grip of the Communist Party.

A key government report in 2015 noted that The Chinese Football Association (CFA) must have “legal autonomy,” and should be “independent” of the General Administration of Sport (GAS).

Even Xi admitted that if China wanted to succeed, then the Party would have to do what it seldom does: let go.

And yet, Beijing didn’t let go.

“China’s failure in football has become a national embarrassment and figuring out the reasons has become a national obsession,” Rowan Simons, author of Bamboo Goalposts: One Man’s Quest to Teach the People’s Republic of China to Love Football, told the BBC.

“But to me, the reasons are pretty clear and they tell you a lot about how the country is run.”

The problem, he and others argue, is that China’s one-party state imposes decisions from the top. While this is effective for economic growth, it yields poor results in competitive team sports.

Although Fifa prohibits state interference, Chinese football is rife with political appointments. This is common in China, where the Party controls most aspects of public life.

The current president of the CFA, Song Cai, is also a Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party. His work, in turn, is overseen by a senior government official at the GAS.

“Everything has to report upwards to Communist Party bosses. It basically means that non-football people are making football decisions,” Mr Dreyer says. “Football has to be grassroots-led. You start at the bottom of the pyramid and the talent starts to funnel up to the top.”

All major footballing nations have a “pyramid” of leagues. The elite professional clubs sit at the top, supported by a deep pool of semi-professional and amateur teams, all of whose players are vying to work their way up.

Such a pyramid thrives on a culture of playing football, en masse, for fun. The larger the pool to draw from, the better the players at the top will be.

“If you look at every country where football is really successful, the sport has grown organically as a grassroots activity over the past 100 years,” Mr Simons says. “Professional football in China has continually failed because it’s supported by nothing – their pyramid is upside down.”

The statistics bear this out: England’s 1.3 million registered players dwarf China’s fewer-than-100,000 footballers. This is in spite of China’s population being 20 times larger than England’s.

“Kids here don’t grow up with a ball at their feet. Without that, you’re not going to produce elite talent,” Mr Dreyer says.

Top-level football in Europe and South America traces its origins to streets and parks in every town and village. In China, however, the push began in Beijing.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the government set up the country’s first professional league. It created a handful of top clubs in major cities – but neglected the grassroots.

Keen to impress their bosses, officials in this top-down system inevitably opt for a “short-termist” approach that sacrifices genuine improvement over time for quick fixes, Mr Dreyer explains.

Some foreigners who have played in China say such a heavily controlled system also leaves little room for young players to develop a natural understanding of the game.

A European currently playing in China, who did not wish to reveal his name, told the BBC that while many Chinese players are “technically good”, they lack “football IQ” at crucial moments on the pitch.

“Creativity and basic decision-making, which we learn instinctively as a kid, you don’t see so much here,” the player says.

This does not mean that there is not a deep love for football in China.

While the men’s team, currently ranked 90th in the world, is seen as a constant disappointment, the women’s team, ranked 17th, has been a source of pride for years.

Many in China have referred to them as the “real” guozu or national team – and in 2023, a record 53 million people tuned in to watch them play – and lose 6-1 – to England at the World Cup.

The men’s Super League boasts the highest average attendance of any league in Asia. At its peak in the 2010s, it was attracting big-name foreign players as it rode a wave of investment from state-owned enterprises, buoyed by a thriving economy.

But it was short-lived.

Since the pandemic and the subsequent economic slowdown in China, more than 40 professional clubs have folded as state-backed companies started to pull their investments. Private companies, too, have proved fickle in their commitment.

In 2015, the Suning Appliance Group, which also used to own the top Italian club Inter Milan, bought Jiangsu FC. The club went on to win the Super League in 2020. But months later, Suning said they were closing the club to focus on their retail business.

The demise of Guangzhou Evergrande, China’s most successful team ever, is yet another example.

Bankrolled by property giant Evergrande Group, they won trophy after trophy under the management of Italian greats such as Marcello Lippi and Fabio Cannavaro. But as they found glory at home and in Asia, their parent company was overstretching itself in an inflated property market.

Evergrande is now the world’s most indebted property company and the poster-child for China’s real estate crisis, with arrears of more than $300bn (£225bn).

Its former club – now in the hands of new owners – was expelled from the league in January. After years of splurging, the eight-time champions are still struggling to pay off their debt.

But that is not the only crisis engulfing Chinese football. Its rapid rise created another problem: corruption.

“I should have followed the right path. I was just doing what was customary at the time,” says Li Tie, the former manager of China’s national men’s team, in a 2024 documentary.

In that documentary, Li makes a shocking admission: for years he fixed matches and paid bribes to get certain jobs, including 3m yuan (£331,000, $418,500) to become the national team coach in 2019.

Dressed in all-black, he marks a written confession with an inky fingerprint: “I’m very sorry.”

China’s national team was made to watch the documentary by state broadcaster CCTV while preparing for last year’s Asian Cup in Qatar.

The primetime expose, co-produced by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), was the first episode of a four-part series on corruption in China called Continued Efforts, Deepening Progress.

In it, dozens of Chinese officials confess – always to camera – to staggering levels of corruption across a variety of industries.

By airing the football episode first, the authorities signalled their serious concern about graft within the sport.

Li, who appeared in a World Cup and once played for Premier League side Everton, is the most high-profile figure to have been apprehended last year in an unprecedented slew of anti-corruption arrests in Chinese football.

In December, he was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Also publicly shamed in the documentary are former CFA chairman Chen Xuyuan and ex-deputy director of the GAS, Du Zhaocai.

“The corruption of these officials has broken our hearts,” one fan told CCTV. “I’m not surprised,” said another.

The documentary echoed what one ex-national team player told a BBC radio documentary in 2015 in an anonymous interview: that there was a system of “open bidding” among players for their spot in the squad.

“I could have won many more caps, but I didn’t have the cash,” he said.

It would take another 10 years before corruption in football exploded into the spotlight. Some suggest this was prompted by China’s intolerably bad performances on the pitch.

The struggles of China’s men’s football team are all the more stark given how other sports are flourishing in the country.

Decades of investment in infrastructure and training have taken China from a sporting backwater to a medal-winning machine that recently equalled the United States with 40 golds at the Paris Olympics.

But many of these are individual sports – weightlifting, swimming, diving – which require fewer resources and, crucially, less emphasis on community-led grassroots efforts, compared to a game like football.

They are also less lucrative and, therefore, less vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement.

As China’s economy reels from a sustained downturn, its officials have bigger challenges than football woes.

But that is little consolation to fans.

The loss to Japan particularly stung. While Japan have gone from strength to strength over the past two decades, China have failed to qualify for a single World Cup.

The day after the loss, the Oriental Sports Daily did not mince its words: “When the taste of bitterness reaches its extreme, all that is left is numbness.”

According to Mr Dreyer, Japan’s approach is antithetical to China’s: a long-term vision, a lack of political interference and a commercially savvy club structure.

“Even so, the fan culture here [in China] is still remarkably good,” he adds. “They deserve so much more.”

Their disappointment showed following Tuesday’s defeat against Australia – but so did their humour.

“It seems like the national team’s performance is as consistent as ever,” wrote one fan on social media. Another joked that if China wants to continue thriving economically, then its football team must suffer so there is a balance in “national fortune”.

Perhaps they had resigned themselves to what a popular Chinese journalist had written in his blog after Japan beat China.

Football “cannot be boosted by singing odes or telling stories”, he noted. “It needs skill, and physical and tactical training. It cannot be accomplished through politics.”

Ever found yourself speechless in the presence of overwhelming cuteness, like your baby nephew or the cat video you saw on Instagram? There’s now a word for it: gigil.

Gigil () is part of a list of “untranslatable” words, or those that do not have English equivalents, that have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary..

Taken from the Philippines’ Tagalog language, gigil is a “feeling so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to tightly clench our hands, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze whomever or whatever it is we find so adorable”.

Alamak, a colloquial exclamation used to convey surprise or outrage in Singapore and Malaysia, also made the list.

“Wouldn’t it be useful for English speakers to have a specific word for sunlight dappling through leaves… Or a word for the action of sitting outside enjoying a beer?” OED said in its latest update.

People who speak English alongside other languages fill lexical gaps by “borrowing the untranslatable word from another language”. When they do this often enough, the borrowed word “becomes part of their vocabulary”, OED said.

The majority of newly-added words from Singapore and Malaysia are names of dishes, a testament to the nations’ obsessions with food.

These include kaya toast, a popular breakfast option of toasted bread slathered with a jam made from coconut milk, eggs, sugar and pandan leaves;fish head curry, a dish combining Chinese and South Indian influences, where a large fish head is cooked in a tamarind-based curry; and steamboat, a dish of thinly-sliced meat and vegetables cooked in a broth kept simmering in a heated pot.

“All this talk of food might inspire one to get a takeaway, or to tapau,” OED said, referring to another new word which originated from Mandarin and the Cantonese dialect, meaning “to package, or wrap up, food to take away”.

Apart from gigil, the newly-added Philippine words include the national pastime of videoke, the local version of karaoke which includes a scoring system, andsalakot, a wide-brimmed, lightweight hat often used by farmers.

Other Philippine additions include what the OED calls “idiosyncratic uses of existing English words”, such asterror, sometimes used to describe a teacher who is strict, harsh, or demanding.

The OED contains more than 600,000 words, making it one of the most comprehensive dictionaries in the English-speaking world.

Its editors consider thousands of new word suggestions each year. These come from a variety of sources, including its editors’ own reading, crowdsourcing appeals, and analysis of language databases.

Words and phrases from South Africa and Ireland were also part of OED’s latest update.

Strong winds, dense forest and unusually dry weather – that’s the deadly combination that experts say is fuelling the largest wildfires in South Korea’s history.

The inferno in the south-east has burned through 35,810 hectares (88,500 acres) as of Thursday – that’s about half the size of New York City – killing 27 people so far and displacing tens of thousands.

Authorities believe the wildfires started by accident from human activity, but the main drivers of the devastation are dry land, and strong gusts sweeping over inland regions.

The high concentration of pine forest in North Gyeongsang province, where the fires are burning, is also “oiling” the blaze, said a forest disaster expert.

“Pine trees contain resin, which acts like oil, intensifying fires when ignited. This resin causes wildfires to burn faster, stronger, and longer,” said Lee Byung-doo from the National Institute of Forest Science in Seoul.

Andong, one of the worst-hit cities, is known for its tranquil pine forests.

While they provide shelter and food for local wildlife and sometimes help break the wind, pine trees “become problematic during wildfires”, Mr Lee told the BBC.

“Because forests [in South Korea] contain large numbers of pine trees, the areas are particularly vulnerable when fires break out,” he said.

Furthermore, pine trees retain their needles throughout winter, making them susceptible to “crown fires” – wildfires that spread by igniting the dense canopy of branches and leaves. This has contributed to the rapid and extensive spread of the flames over the past week.

Unlike neighbouring countries such as China and North Korea, South Korea has made gains in forest cover over recent years.

“Most mountains are now filled with fallen leaves and pine trees… This accumulation has become a significant factor in accelerating the spread of wildfire,” says Baek Min-ho, a disaster prevention specialist at Kangwon National University.

Climate change is also to blame, experts say.

“This wildfire has once again exposed the harsh reality of a climate crisis unlike anything we’ve experienced before,” South Korea’s disaster chief Lee Han-kyung said on Thursday.

The ideal environment for these record blazes has been building for the past few weeks, which saw temperatures rise above 20C (68F), unusually high for spring. Analysis by Climate Central, which researches climate science, suggests that these high temperatures have been made up to five times more likely by global warming.

The unusual heat dried out the land and air, allowing fires to spread more rapidly, especially when combined with strong winds.

Dense tree cover and strong winds in the fire-hit region also pose substantial challenges to firefighting efforts.

On Wednesday, a 73-year-old pilot died when his firefighting helicopter crashed in Uiseong county. At least three other firefighters have been killed in the blazes.

Most of the 26 people who died are in their 60s and 70s, officials say. South Korea is an ageing society, where one in five people are at least 65 years old.

North Gyeongsang is its second-oldest province, which also explains the relatively high death toll – it is especially difficult to evacuate older people in a disaster because they may have mobility issues or other health risks.

They may also have more difficulty accessing or interpreting evacuation orders.

Three residents of an elderly care facility in Yeongdeok county died on Wednesday, when the car they were in went up in flames. Only one out of four in the vehicle managed to flee in time, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported.

Acting President Han Duck-soo said on Thursday it was “worrying” that many of the victims are elderly, as he ordered the interior minister to relocate to North Gyeongsang to oversee relief efforts.

An Andong resident who evacuated but lost her home told the BBC her family and their neighbours were caught off guard by the fires.

“No one in the village was prepared,” said the woman, who asked not to be named.

“We had to leave with nothing, and all our belongings are gone. Many of the residents are elderly, so I hope the government can provide temporary shelters where people can stay comfortably,” she said.

Historical relics have also been burned to the ground – a significant loss to an area considered one of South Korea’s cultural centres.

These include treasures in two temples, each more than 1,000 years old. One of them, the Gounsa temple, dates back to the Silla dynasty (57BC to 935AD).

President Volodymyr Zelensky was in a buoyant mood when I met him in Paris with a panel of three other European journalists. He had interrupted a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace and went back there for what he called a “tête à tête dinner” after the interview.

Macron had not just rolled out the red carpet for him. The Eiffel Tower, behind Zelensky in a picture window as we talked in one of Paris’s great museums, was lit up in yellow and blue, the colours of the Ukrainian national flag.

The French wanted him to feel as if he was among friends. Zelensky had come to Paris to meet leaders and diplomats from 30 other countries who are working out what they can contribute to the “coalition of the willing”, the group that UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron are trying to organise to offer Ukraine security guarantees if there is a long-term ceasefire.

Zelensky’s welcome in Paris was a clear contrast to the dressing down he was given by US President Donald Trump and his vice president JD Vance when he visited the White House last month.

After their verbal attack, Zelensky was unceremoniously turfed out of the White House and not long afterwards Trump ordered the suspension of American military aid and intelligence to Ukraine.

It was restored after Zelensky, advised by the British, the French and other European allies, went out of his way to mend his fences with Trump and his administration.

He switched to the kind of flattering language Trump demands and agreed to an American plan for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire. He dropped his insistence on US security guarantees first, to underpin any ceasefire.

But even though US military and intelligence assistance is flowing, Trump’s ruthless suspension of it, which cost Ukrainian lives, has left a deep sense of unease in Ukraine and among its European allies.

The evidence is piling up that Trump’s United States is not a reliable ally. It is getting easier to sketch out scenarios in which it might not be an ally at all.

Most European leaders still try to act publicly as if the 80-year-old alliance with the US is healthy. But the gathering of 30 countries in Paris shows they realise they can no longer rely on the benevolence of the United States.

American presidents going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower in the late 1950s have complained, with good reason, about Europeans getting a free ride from the US security blanket over Europe. Trump has finally pulled it away.

During the interview, Zelensky praised the array of plans that are being formulated in western Europe – led by the UK, France and Germany – to spend more on defence.

He suggested that in three to five years, “if everything goes as it is now”, Europe might even catch up with the United States.

At best, that is a highly optimistic estimate, less an accurate forecast and more a gesture of appreciation for European allies who unlike the Americans attach very few conditions and strings to support for Ukraine.

Europe, Zelensky said, “has discipline and no chaos”. That might be seen as an oblique and unflattering comparison with the twists and turns coming out of the Trump White House.

• Russia: Sanctions must be lifted before maritime ceasefire can start
• What is Swift and why is banning Russia so significant?
• Why did Putin invade Ukraine?

I asked him about the conditions Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has attached to the latest small step in the Trump peace initiative, which is a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea.

After Ukraine and Russia held separate meetings with the Americans in Saudi Arabia, the Kremlin issued a statement that required concessions as Russia’s price for a ceasefire.

The most significant demand was for a state-owned Russian bank to be readmitted to the Swift system for international payments. That would open a door back into mainstream global commerce for Russia.

That decision does not depend on Trump, as Swift is based in Belgium.

The European Union foreign affairs spokeswoman responded with a statement saying one of the “main preconditions” for lifting or amending sanctions on Russia was “the end of the Russian unprovoked and unjustified aggression in Ukraine and the unconditional withdrawal of all Russian military forces from the entire territory of Ukraine”.

Even Trump, reluctant to criticise Putin, suggested that Russia might be “dragging its feet” in the negotiations with the US. It reminded him of his own business career.

He told the US cable channel Newsmax that “I’ve done it over the years… I don’t want to sign a contract. I want to sort of stay in the game.”

I asked Zelensky where the push for a ceasefire stood, given Russia’s demands. He called for a resolute response from the Americans.

“If America is going to stand strong and not bend to the conditions of the Russians – we stand on our land.

“We are defending it; we have shown our resilience to everyone… And now it’s very important that our partners would be resilient and strong, at least at the minimum, as we are.”

I asked whether he believed the Americans would, as he put it, stay strong.

“I hope so. I hope so. God bless they will. But we’ll see.”

Zelensky has no choice about stating his faith in Trump’s America, even though he must have grave doubts.

Trump’s decision to punish Ukraine by cutting off military intelligence about Russia missile launches had an immediate and deadly impact, and Zelensky had to work hard to get Trump to relent. He does not want it to happen again.

He was open about why he had to try to stay close to Trump, even as the US president seemed to be prioritising the restoration of relations with Moscow as he repeated Russian propaganda points, not least the lie that Ukraine started the war.

“We needed to unblock the aid from the US. For us, the exchange of intelligence is very important.”

That did not stop Zelensky rebuking comments made by Steve Witkoff, Trump’s super envoy, a real estate billionaire turned diplomat who deals with the Middle East as well as the Russian-Ukraine war.

In an interview last week with Tucker Carlson, a right-wing podcaster in the United States, Witkoff disparaged the drive by the UK’s Starmer and France’s Macron to create the “coalition of the willing” to support Ukraine.

The American said it was a posture and pose, “a simplistic desire” to sound like Winston Churchill. His words fit squarely into what seems now to be a settled view in the Trump Administration that their erstwhile allies in Europe are a parasitical burden on the United States.

What if Witkoff was right? Strip away the insults and recognise that Europe’s richest nations have chosen, for decades, to spend most of their considerable wealth on matters they consider more pressing than their militaries.

Zelensky said Witkoff and others in the Trump administration, had fallen for Russian propaganda.

“I think that Witkoff often quotes the Kremlin narratives… I can’t be ungrateful to the Americans for everything they did, but they are often, unfortunately, under the influence of Russian narratives. And we cannot agree with these narratives.”

Zelensky suggested that Witkoff was better at his old job, developing real estate in Manhattan.

“He doesn’t look like a military man. He doesn’t look like a general, and he doesn’t have such experience. As far as I know, he is very good at selling and buying real estate. And this is a little different.”

President Zelensky, for a man who has lived with immense pressure since Russia’s full scale invasion more than three years ago, was remarkably buoyant, clearly pleased by the reception he had in Paris and the efforts that President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer are making to rally European support and to persuade, even cajole, Trump not to cut intelligence and military support to Ukraine.

Zelensky seemed happy with his new strategy of agreeing to temporary ceasefires to force Putin to show his reluctance to pause the war.

I asked Zelensky how he was dealing with the pressure. His goal, he said, was for his children to be able “to walk down the street and not have to hide.” And how did he think he’d be remembered; as the man who saved Ukraine, or tried to and failed? Zelensky grimaced slightly. Better, he said, than Putin, who was getting old and feared his own people.

“He will die soon. It is a fact. His reign could end before he finishes his historically insignificant and unsuccessful life. This is what he fears.”

Zelensky laughed.

“And I will do everything I can to defend Ukraine as much as I can. And I am definitely younger than Putin.”

Trump might be hoping for a deal by Easter. Zelensky is still looking to the long haul.

What will it take for India’s private companies to begin investing in building new factories and firms?

It’s a question that’s confounded policymakers for years. As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), private investment in India has been on the decline since the global financial crisis of 2007, even while the overall economy clocked world-beating growth rates.

After a long hiatus, the investment rate picked up slightly in 2022 and 2023, but latest data from a leading ratings agency shows private sector expenditure as part of the overall investments in India’s economy dipped again to a decadal low of 33% this financial year.

Analysis from Icra of 4,500 listed companies and 8,000 unlisted companies reveals that while the pace of investments made by listed players moderated, those by unlisted entities actually contracted.

Over the years, several economists have raised similar concerns about a slowdown in private investments.

Banking tycoon Uday Kotak is among many who’ve raised concerns recently about India’s fading “animal spirits”, urging young business owners who had inherited companies to build new businesses rather than sitting tight and managing their existing wealth.

Data from investment advisory firm Value Research shows Indian non-financial businesses were sitting on cash worth 11% of their total assets, corroborating the view that companies are not spending money in making fresh investments.

So why are Indian corporate houses choosing to do that?

Weak domestic consumption in urban areas, muted export demand and an influx of cheap Chinese imports in some sectors were among the factors that “restricted the capacity expansion plans of Indian corporate houses”, Icra’s Chief Rating Officer K Ravichandran said in a note.

But beyond the more immediate reasons, private investment impulse has been low because of “global uncertainties and overcapacity”, India’s economic survey pointed out earlier this year.

Slowing private investments have a direct bearing on India’s growth prospects.

Investments by companies in assets such as factories, machinery or construction – also called gross fixed capital formation – make up around 30% of GDP and are its second largest contributor following private consumption.

India’s full-year GDP is expected to close at 6.5%, sharply lower compared to last year’s 9.2%. Growth has flagged on account of slower consumption.

With all the key levers of growth, including exports, slowing down and US President Donald Trump’s tariffs exacerbating global uncertainties, kick-starting private investment will be fundamental for India to hit its long-term growth targets, experts say.

According to the World Bank’s latest estimates, India will need to grow by 7.8% on average over the next 22 years to achieve its high-income status ambition by 2047.

Key to this would be to increase private and public investment to at least 40% of GDP from 33% currently, the bank estimates.

The government on its part has significantly increased spending, especially on infrastructure. It also cut corporate tax rates from 30% to 22% and doled out billions of dollars in production-linked subsidies to manufacturers over the years. Availability of bank credit isn’t a constraint any longer, and regulation has eased with regulatory restrictions halving between 2003 and 2020.

But none of this has prodded corporate India to boost spending.

According to Sajjid Chinoy, JP Morgan India’s Chief Economist, the big problem is the lack of demand in the economy to justify putting up additional capacities.

India’s post-pandemic recovery has been uneven, with the consumer class not expanding quickly enough. Demand for goods and services has thus been hit, with spending capacity further curtailed by a fall in wages, even though corporate profitability has soared to a 15-year high this year.

“Just because companies are financially strong doesn’t mean they will automatically invest. Companies will only invest if they expect good returns,” Chinoy said at an event in Mumbai earlier this year.

Rathin Roy, a former member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC), points to other deeper structural issues arresting investment appetite.

“Entrepreneurs have been lacking the energy to produce goods that might generate new demand. A classic example of this is construction – where there’s unsold inventory in the urban areas, but an incapacity among builders to go into tier two and tier three towns and tap newer markets,” Roy told the BBC.

He said he also agreed with Mr Kotak’s views on the growing trend of business heirs turning wealth managers rather than building businesses ground up.

“Business houses discovered during Covid-19 that they don’t need to do business to make money. They can just invest and multiply it without building anything new,” said Roy. And these investments aren’t just happening in the domestic stock market. “A lot of money is just flowing out of India and chasing returns elsewhere,” he added.

But things could be turning a corner, according to Icra.

Interest rate cuts as well as a $12bn income tax relief provided to individuals in the federal budget “augurs well for supporting domestic consumption demand”, according to the report.

India’s central bank also says more private companies have shown an intention to invest this year compared to last year, although how much of that intent results into actual money deployed remains to be seen.

The uncertainties related to global trade tariffs could delay any anticipated investment pick-up, according to Icra.

Germany has said it “will not give in” and that Europe must “respond firmly” as US President Donald Trump targets imported cars and car parts with a 25% tax in his latest tariffs.

Other major world economies have vowed to retaliate, with France’s president branding the move “a waste of time” and “incoherent”, Canada calling it a “direct attack”, and China accusing Washington of violating international trade rules.

Shares in carmakers from Japan to Germany sold off. In the US, General Motors dropped 7%, while Ford fell more than 2%.

Trump has threatened to impose “far larger” tariffs if Europe works with Canada to do what he describes as “economic harm” to the US.

• What are tariffs and why is Trump using them?

The fresh car tariffs will come into effect on 2 April, with charges on businesses importing vehicles starting the next day. Taxes on parts are set to start in May or later.

Trump has long maintained the tariffs are part of a drive to help US manufacturing and says if cars are made in America there will be “absolutely no tariff”.

Tariffs are taxes charged on goods imported from other countries.

While the measures can protect domestic businesses, they also raise costs for businesses reliant on parts from abroad.

The companies that bring the foreign goods into the country pay the tax to the government. Firms may choose to pass on some or all of the cost of tariffs to customers.

The US imported about eight million cars last year – accounting for about $240bn (£186bn) in trade and roughly half of overall sales.

Mexico is the top supplier of cars to the US, followed by South Korea, Japan, Canada and Germany.

Analysts have estimated that tariffs on parts just from Canada and Mexico could lead to costs rising by $4,000-$10,000 depending on the vehicle, according to the Anderson Economic Group.

At a press conference on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said it was “not the time” for the US to be imposing tariffs.

“Imposing tariffs means breaking value chains, it means creating in the short term an inflationary effect and destroying jobs,” he said in Paris.

So it is not good for the American or the European economy, in the same way it is not good for the Canadian or Mexican economy.

“All of this is rather a waste of time and will create a lot of worry,” he added, saying that he hoped Trump would reconsider.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said the European Union must “respond firmly”.

“It must be clear that we will not give in to the US. We need to show strength and self-confidence,” he added.

France backs this joint approach, with its finance minister Eric Lombard saying Europe’s “only solution” is to retaliate with tariffs on US products.

“We are in a situation where we are being targeted. Either we accept it, in which case this will never stop, or we respond,” Lombard added.

He emphasised the need to “rebalance the playing field” so the US was “forced to negotiate”.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the tariffs a “direct attack” on his country and its car industry, adding it “will hurt us” but trade options were being discussed.

In the UK, car industry body the SMMT said the announcement of the tariffs by Trump on Wednesday was “not surprising but, nevertheless, disappointing”.

Uniparts founder John Neill said the Trump tariffs were “a gift to the Chinese”, because international consumers would respond to a trade war by buying Chinese alternatives.

Meanwhile, China accused Trump of violating World Trade Organization rules.

“There are no winners in a trade war or a tariff war. No country’s development and prosperity has been achieved by imposing tariffs,” a spokesman for the foreign ministry said.

There are warnings from Japan that there will be a “significant impact” on the economic relationship it shares with the US. A government spokesman described the measures as “extremely regrettable” and said officials have asked the US for an exemption.

In South Korea, a day before the latest levy, Hyundai announced it would invest $21bn (£16.3bn) in the US and build a new steel plant in Louisiana.

Trump hailed the investment as a “clear demonstration that tariffs very strongly work”.

Bosch – based in Germany – says it has confidence in the “long-term potential” of the North American market and will continue to expand its business there.

Every week, JP Gupta’s heart sinks when he hears his son cry on the phone.

The grim ritual began in January when Amit Gupta, a senior Indian technology officer in Qatar, was detained on charges that haven’t been made public yet.

Almost three months on, his family in India say they still don’t know what crime he is accused of.

“He is allowed to speak to us for just five minutes [a week] and all he says is: ‘Dad, I have not done anything wrong’, and then breaks down,” his father says.

Amit Gupta is the country head for Indian technology company Tech Mahindra in Kuwait and Qatar. He moved to Doha, Qatar’s capital, for work in 2013.

His father told the BBC that he was “picked up by Qatar state security department officials from a restaurant near his office on 1 January” without being given a reason.

Qatar’s interior ministry has not responded to the BBC’s questions on why Amit Gupta was detained.

The BBC has approached Tech Mahindra for comment.

A company spokesperson earlier said it was in close contact with the family and providing “necessary support” to them.

“We are also actively coordinating with authorities in both countries and adhering to the due process. Ensuring the wellbeing of our colleague is our top priority,” the company said.

Tech Mahindra, an Indian software services and consulting company, operates across 90 countries including Qatar and has more than 138,000 employees.

The Indian government hasn’t officially commented yet on Amit Gupta’s case. But sources in the country’s foreign ministry told the BBC that the Indian embassy in Qatar was “closely following the case”.

“The mission has been in touch with the family, the lawyer representing Amit Gupta and Qatari authorities on a regular basis,” the sources said. “Our embassy continues to provide all possible assistance in the matter.’

Amit Gupta’s wife Aakanksha Goyal, however, says the government should do more to secure her husband’s release.

She wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office, saying that her husband was “under immense mental pressure/trauma”.

“Our frequent appeals to the concerned authorities in Doha have not yet yielded any positive response,” she wrote.

The letter was acknowledged on 18 February and referred to India’s foreign ministry but nothing has happened since then, Ms Goyal told the BBC.

“We have sought a meeting with Prime Minister Modi and Foreign Minister S Jaishankar. Until they intervene, we don’t expect anything will happen,” she said.

In February, Amit Gupta’s parents travelled to Doha and managed to meet him with the help of Indian embassy there.

“When we saw him, he just hugged us and cried. He kept repeating that he had done nothing wrong,” his father said, adding that his son hasn’t been questioned by investigators in Qatar yet.

“If they have not found anything against him, he should be released,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of Indians live and work in Qatar. This is the second high-profile case of Indians being detained or arrested in Qatar to make headlines since 2022.

Last year, a court in the Gulf country released eight former Indian naval officers who had been sentenced to death. Neither Qatar nor India revealed the charges against the men, who were working for a private firm in Qatar. But media reports said the men were charged with spying for Israel.

The commuting of the death sentences was seen as a diplomatic triumph for Modi, whose administration shares a warm relationship with Qatar. In February, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar, paid a state visit to India, accompanied by a high-level delegation. During the visit, the two countries elevated their relationship to a strategic partnership.

While Amit Gupta’s family wait anxiously, Ms Goyal says she is finding it hard to answer questions from their children, aged 11 and four.

“My children keep asking me what happened to their father. My son’s birthday is in April and he is expecting Amit to be there as usual,” she says.

China’s efforts to build up huge business interests across Africa have been accompanied by a careful policy of maintaining neutrality – but the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo has caused a shift in its approach.

Rwanda has been widely accused of stoking the fighting in the mineral-rich region and Beijing, which has close relations with both DR Congo and Rwanda, has in recent weeks joined the criticism.

But it is trying to walk a diplomatic tightrope to maintain good relations with both countries, while also continuing to operate its businesses – and buy crucial minerals.

For decades, China has been careful not to take sides in conflicts in Africa, to avoid causing problems that might interfere with its extensive commercial interests.

Up to now it has shied away from criticising African governments for supporting participants in a conflict.

For example, China has said little about the series of coups since 2020 in West Africa’s Sahel region, except to urge leaders to consider the interests of the people.

Beijing has long pursued a policy of non-interference in another state’s internal affairs, says Prof Zhou Yuyuan, who specialises in African development and security at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS).

It therefore avoids proposing solutions to conflicts, apart from calling for diplomatic or political efforts by international organisations such as the UN or the African Union.

The unrest involving Rwandan-back M23 rebels in eastern DR Congo reared its head again in 2021. The fighters are led by ethnic Tutsis who say they took up arms to protect the rights of the minority group – and because the Congolese authorities reneged on an earlier peace deal.

In its early comments on these developments, China restricted itself to criticising unnamed “foreign forces” for providing support to the M23 fighters.

But in the last few weeks it has broken from its usual practice and referred to Rwanda by name.

This follows major gains by the M23, which since January has captured the key cities of Goma and Bukavu.

“China reiterates its hope that Rwanda will… stop its military support for M23 and immediately withdraw all its military forces from the DRC territory,” China’s UN ambassador said in February.

Prof Zhou notes that though significant, the “wording in general is still relatively mild”.

“China ‘hoped’ that Rwanda would stop its support but did not condemn it,” he says.

However, soon afterwards China backed a UN Security Council resolution which bluntly calls on the Rwanda Defence Forces to “cease support to the M23 and immediately withdraw from DRC territory without preconditions”.

According to Prof Zhou, China’s statements are likely to have been prompted by UN expert reports, which have provided strong evidence of Rwanda’s support for the M23.

“This is a basic consensus in the UN Security Council,” he added.

“The problem has been going on long enough, and everyone knows in their hearts the basic situation. There’s no need to be hush-hush any more.”

Neither China’s mission to the UN nor its embassy in London responded when asked why China had criticised Rwanda.

But the critical importance to China of DR Congo’s renowned mineral wealth may have been a factor.

Fighting in eastern DR Congo has been concentrated in the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, home to many Chinese-run gold mines.

How these mines have been affected by the fighting is so far unclear.

The M23 has also seized territory containing mines for coltan ore, which China imports in large volumes.

The metal tantalum, used in cars and everyday electronics from TV sets to mobile phones, is extracted from this ore, and DR Congo is the source of 40% of the world’s supply.

A UN expert group said in December 2024 that the M23 had smuggled coltan to Rwanda from DR Congo. It also noted that Rwanda’s coltan exports rose by 50% between 2022 and 2023.

Although Rwanda has its own coltan mines, analysts say they could not account for such a large increase in production.

It is not yet clear whether the volume or the price of coltan imported by China has been affected.

Another mineral that China imports from DR Congo is cobalt, which is crucial for the lithium battery industry.

However, China’s cobalt mining operations are primarily based in southern DR Congo, away from the conflict zones in the east.

Dozens of Chinese companies, many of which are state-owned, are also building roads, telecommunications and hydropower facilities in DR Congo. But it seems that the impact on these activities has so far been minimal.

China’s supplies weapons to both Rwanda and DR Congo.

In the past two decades, the Rwandan military has bought Chinese armoured vehicles, artillery and anti-tank missiles, according to the think-tank Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).

China posted a military attaché to the country for the first time in 2024.

While UN experts say the Rwandan military has armed the M23, it is unclear whether the rebel group is using any Chinese weapons.

The Congolese armed forces have bought Chinese armoured personnel carriers and drones.

They also own Chinese tanks, which were bought in 1976 but were still in use as recently as 2022.

It is reported that the drones, at least, have been used in the fight against the M23.

The Rwandan embassy in Beijing said ties with China remained “excellent and productive”, and it was not for Rwanda to comment on China’s statement about the fighting in eastern DR Congo.

The Chinese ambassador to DR Congo, Zhao Bin, held discussions with Congolese Senate President Sama Lukonde in early February but no details of the meeting were made public.

China’s economic activities in the two countries go very deep. They are both part of China’s Belt and Road initiative, designed to stitch China closer to the world through investments and infrastructure projects.

In Rwanda, China has funded stadiums, schools and highways. Chinese loans are also funding infrastructure projects – a loan to fund a dam and irrigation system, worth an estimated $40m (£31m), was confirmed in January.

For years most goods imported into Rwanda have come from China.

When it comes to China’s economic ties with DR Congo, the UN Comtrade Database shows that for years China has been DR Congo’s top trading partner.

China has gone to great lengths to secure access to DR Congo’s mineral wealth.

It extended $3.2bn (£2.5bn) of loans to the country between 2005 and 2022, according to the Chinese Loans to Africa Database run by Boston University, mostly to fund road and bridge construction, and the country’s electricity grid.

China has financed and built other large-scale infrastructure projects in DR Congo, including hydropower plants and a dry port.

These investments may suggest it is in China’s long-term interests to find a resolution to the conflict quickly.

BBC correspondent Mark Lowen has been deported from Turkey after being arrested in Istanbul on Wednesday, the BBC has said.

Lowen had been in Turkey for several days to report on the ongoing protests that were sparked by the Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu’s arrest last week.

Imamoglu – who is being held in jail on corruption charges he denies – is seen as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main political rival.

He has been selected by his party as presidential candidate in the 2028 election.

In a statement issued on Thursday, the BBC said: “This morning (27 March) the Turkish authorities deported BBC News correspondent Mark Lowen from Istanbul, having taken him from his hotel the previous day and detained him for 17 hours.”

On Thursday morning, he was presented with a written notice that he was being deported for “being a threat to public order,” the statement said.

Mark Lowen said: “To be detained and deported from the country where I previously lived for five years and for which I have such affection has been extremely distressing. Press freedom and impartial reporting are fundamental to any democracy.”

The BBC’s CEO of News Deborah Turness added: “This is an extremely troubling incident and we will be making representations to the Turkish authorities.

“Mark is a very experienced correspondent with a deep knowledge of Turkey and no journalist should face this kind of treatment simply for doing their job. We will continue to report impartially and fairly on events in Turkey.”

Thousands of people across Turkey have turned out for protests which have so far seen more than 1,400 people detained.

The protesters say Imamoglu’s arrest is politically motivated, but the justice ministry insists on its judicial independence.

President Erdogan has labelled the demonstrations “evil” and blamed the opposition for “disturbing the peace”.

Several journalists have also been arrested, including a photojournalist from French news agency Agence France Presse and several Turkish reporters. Many were reportedly released on Thursday morning.

Nightly protests have stopped but Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is planning a rally in Istanbul on Saturday.

Fashion retailer H&M is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create digital “twins” of 30 models.

It says it will use the AI doppelgangers in some social media posts and marketing in the place of humans, if given permission by models.

“We are curious to explore how to showcase our fashion in new creative ways – and embrace the benefits of new technology – while staying true to our commitment to personal style,” said its chief creative officer Jörgen Andersson in a statement.

Despite H&M’s claim it would not change its “human-centric approach” some fear the move could impact other models, photographers and make-up artists.

American influencer Morgan Riddle called H&M’s move “shameful” in a post on her Instagram stories.

“RIP to all the other jobs on shoot sets that this will take away,” she posted.

The Swedish fashion giant, which also operates Arket, Cos, Monki, & Other Stories and Weekday, says it has more than 4,000 stores worldwide across 75 markets.

The initiative was first reported by industry publication Business of Fashion.

H&M told the outlet that models would retain rights over their digital replicas and their use by the company and other brands for purposes such as marketing.

Its images are likely to be initially used in social media posts, with watermarks that make their AI use clear, it added.

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok require users to disclose the use of AI to create realistic content, and it is labelled as such to inform audiences.

H&M also said models would be compensated for use of their digital twins in a similar way to current arrangements – which sees them paid for use of their images based on rates agreed by their agent.

Paul W Fleming, general secretary of trade union Equity – which represents fashion models in the UK – said models having full control over their likeness and fair pay for its use was “vital”.

“Whilst we support brands who appear to be moving in this direction, this must be backed up by the widespread adoption of AI protections in union agreements and legislation that protects workers’ rights,” he told the BBC.

Equity, like many other trade unions representing performers and creatives, has been campaigning for better protections for workers amid an explosion of AI-generated content and initiatives online.

“Unfortunately, the current landscape has little to no such protections,” Mr Fleming added, citing mass, illegal scraping of their model members’ work by big tech and AI developers without their consent.

Fashion firms including Hugo Boss and Levi Strauss & Co have also dabbled in using generative AI for product images.

Denim giant Levi’s said in 2023 it would trial the use of AI-generated model images as a way to “increase diversity”.

Following criticism, it clarified it would not scale back live photoshoots with models.

• What is AI, how does it work and what are the concerns about it?

Generative AI can create photo-realistic images in response to simple text prompts at high speed and low cost.

Because of this, it has been seized upon by many industries and firms as a way to meet demands for content such as marketing material.

But its use by fashion and beauty brands has sparked backlash amid concerns its increased adoption could reduce job opportunities.

Some fear it may lead to less work for production staff on photoshoots, including photographers, stylists, make-up artists and lighting assistants.

The company says it is working with Swedish tech firm Uncut on the development of the model’s AI likenesses.

Uncut says on its website it is “helping big brands say goodbye to outdated production methods” and making content creation “simpler, smarter and more affordable”.

For some models, however, having a so-called “AI twin” can allow them to take on more work and avoid travel.

“She’s like me, without the jet-lag,” said model Mathilda Gvarliani in a H&M image shared with Business of Fashion.

Mr Fleming, though, told the BBC that models are still “being forced to sign unfair contracts which deny them their rights to ownership and fair compensation”.

“This is an abhorrent violation when all of our likenesses are incredibly personal to each of us,” he added.

“It took a huge amount of courage to speak out,” NewJeans have told the BBC in their first interview since a court blocked their attempt to leave their record label, in a case that has rocked the K-pop industry.

“This fight is necessary. Although it will be extremely difficult and arduous, we will keep doing what we have done so far and speak up,” said Haerin, one of the members of the five-piece.

“We thought it was important to tell the world about what we’ve been through. All the choices we’ve made so far have been the best choices we could have made.”

NewJeans looked invincible in the charts when they launched what was an unusual rebellion in the high-pressure, tightly-controlled world of K-pop. Hanni, Hyein, Haerin, Danielle and Minji stunned South Korea and fans everywhere with their decision in November to split from Ador, the label that launched them.

They alleged mistreatment, workplace harassment and an attempt to “undermine their careers”, which Ador denies. It sued to enforce their seven-year contract, which is set to expire in 2029, and sought an injunction against any commercial activities by the group.

On Friday, a South Korean court granted it, ordering NewJeans to stop all “independent” activities, including song releases and advertising deals, while the case was still under way. NewJeans has since challenged the injunction in court.

Friday’s ruling was a “shock”, the group told the BBC.

“Some people think that we’re famous enough to do whatever we want and say whatever we please. But the truth is, it’s not like that at all,” Hyein said. “We held it in for a long time, and only now have we finally spoken up about what we think, what we feel and the unfairness we’ve experienced.”

The K-pop industry has repeatedly come under fire for the pressure it puts on its stars not only to perform and succeed, but to appear perfect. But rarely do conflicts spill into the public, exposing stars’ grievances and rifts with their labels.

NewJeans’ dramatic announcement last year followed a long and public spat with Ador and its parent company, Hybe – South Korea’s biggest music label, whose client list includes K-pop royalty such as BTS and Seventeen.

Ador told the BBC in a statement that the contract with NewJeans still stands, adding that “most of their claims have risen from misunderstandings”. The court said that NewJeans did not “sufficiently prove” that Ador had violated the contract, adding that the label had upheld “most of its duties, including payment”.

The girls were rehearsing for a performance in Hong Kong, when news of the ruling dropped. They found out when Minji got a worried message from her mother: “She asked me, ‘are you okay?’ And I was like ‘what happened?'”

“I was stunned,” Minji says. So were the others when she told them. “At first I thought I didn’t hear her properly,” Danielle says. “We were all kind of in shock.”

This was their second of two interviews with the BBC in as many weeks. In the first interview, which happened before the ruling, the group had been excited to release their new single, Pit Stop – their first since they announced their break from Ador and renamed themselves NJZ.

They spoke about how they coped with a difficult period, including finding comfort in cooking. “I’m not really good at it but it’s kind of healing,” Minji had said, before promising to cook an “amazing dinner” for the group.

In the second interview, which was 24 hours after the ruling, they seemed disheartened and unsettled, less sure of what was to come. “If we knew we were gonna go through this, maybe we would have chosen…” Hanni trailed off as she teared up.

Seconds later, she continued: “Even if we do everything we can and it doesn’t work out the way we hope it does, then we’ll just have to leave it to time. I’m sure time would figure it out for us.”

The following night, they took to the stage in Hong Kong and, despite the court order, performed Pit Stop under their new name. But the evening, which they had pitched to fans as a fresh start, ended in tears as they told the crowd they were going on a hiatus.

“It wasn’t any easy decision to make,” Hyein said on stage, as each of them took turns to address their fans. “But at the moment for us, it’s about protecting ourselves, so that we can come back stronger.”

Just three years into their debut, the future of the young stars – they are aged between 16 and 20 – is now in question.

But they tell the BBC that this is not the end of the road for them as they “find more ways” forward. With the legal battle expected to last for months, if not years, Minji says that gives them time to plan what they want to do next.

Ever since they debuted in July 2022, NewJeans have delivered remarkable success with each new release – OMG, Ditto, Super Shy, Attention. A year on, they were the eighth biggest-selling act in the world.

Critics called them a “game-changer” as their uniquely playful blend of 1990s R&B and sugar-coated pop melodies broke through a K-pop market dominated by electronic beats. And their breezy dance moves stood out among super-synchronised videos.

They were still on the rise when Min Hee-jin – Ador’s former boss and their long-time mentor, who launched them – began trading accusations publicly with Hybe. The music label had created Ador, granting Min a minority shareholding and further stock options, before she was removed from her role last August.

Hybe was now accusing her of plotting Ador’s takeover and Min, in an emotional press conference, accused them of undermining NewJeans by launching another girl group with a similar style. The fight got uglier and Min left the company, alleging she was forced out.

That’s when NewJeans broke their silence – they demanded Min’s return in two weeks in a livestream.

They were not able to contact her for a while, Danielle told the BBC in the first interview: “We didn’t know what was happening and we didn’t have a way to support her. That itself was a hard thing because she was always there for us and… in a way a person to look up to.”

Ador had said Min could not return as CEO, but could continue as an internal director and NewJeans’ producer. When Min didn’t return, NewJeans announced that they were leaving Ador and accused the label of not meeting other demands: an apology for alleged bullying and actions against what they claimed were controversial internal reports.

Ador, which denies all these allegations, appears to blame Min for their dispute with NewJeans. “The core of this issue lies in the label’s ex-management providing distorted explanations to their artists, leading to misunderstandings. They can be fully addressed and resolved upon the members’ return to the label,” Ador told the BBC in a statement.

In the months since, Hanni, a Vietnamese-Australian, testified in tears to South Korean lawmakers in an inquiry into workplace harassment. “I came to the realisation that this wasn’t just a feeling. I was honestly convinced that the company hated us,” she told them, after describing several incidents where she said the group felt undermined and bullied.

NewJeans’ case was dismissed because the labour ministry said K-pop stars did not qualify as workers and were not entitled to the same rights.

Then in December, NewJeans took another rare step by supporting fans who were calling for the impeachment of South Korea’s disgraced president, Yoon Suk Yeol who had briefly imposed martial law – the group provided free food and drinks to fans who showed up at the huge protest rallies.

With each round of publicity, there was also criticism, much of it involving their age. Some said they had “crossed the line”, while others called them “stupid and reckless,” and even “ungrateful” for picking a fight with Ador. Others questioned if they were making their own decisions.

Being young doesn’t mean they should be taken less seriously, the group says. “That’s an easy way to devalue the fact that we are actually trying to do something,” Hanni says. “The decisions we’ve made in the past year have been decided through a very, very large amount of discussion between us.”

As the dispute has dragged on, the critics have got louder, dubbing the girls as troublemakers rather than game-changers. Following the ruling, which their critics welcomed, NewJeans say they have been “very aware of the intense scrutiny and judgment” ever since they held that press conference last year.

“There hasn’t been a single moment when we’ve expressed our opinions without worry or tension,” Minji says. “We’ve thought more than anyone else about how much responsibility each of our actions carries, and we’re currently bearing that responsibility ourselves.”

It’s not clear how long their hiatus will last. Ador says it hopes to meet the group soon to discuss the future, but NewJeans insist they don’t feel protected enough to go back.

Their lawsuit with Ador will return to the headlines next week when the hearings begin – and so will all five of them.

The one thing that seems constant is their determination to get through this together.

Two weeks ago, Hanni had said: “We’ve always said to each other, if one person doesn’t want to do it, then we’re not going to do it. It has to be all all five of us that agrees to do it. That’s how we’ve gotten here and that’s how we are going to get to the end.”

On Saturday, she repeated: “We’re gonna get through it.”

Ever found yourself speechless in the presence of overwhelming cuteness, like your baby nephew or the cat video you saw on Instagram? There’s now a word for it: gigil.

Gigil () is part of a list of “untranslatable” words, or those that do not have English equivalents, that have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary..

Taken from the Philippines’ Tagalog language, gigil is a “feeling so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to tightly clench our hands, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze whomever or whatever it is we find so adorable”.

Alamak, a colloquial exclamation used to convey surprise or outrage in Singapore and Malaysia, also made the list.

“Wouldn’t it be useful for English speakers to have a specific word for sunlight dappling through leaves… Or a word for the action of sitting outside enjoying a beer?” OED said in its latest update.

People who speak English alongside other languages fill lexical gaps by “borrowing the untranslatable word from another language”. When they do this often enough, the borrowed word “becomes part of their vocabulary”, OED said.

The majority of newly-added words from Singapore and Malaysia are names of dishes, a testament to the nations’ obsessions with food.

These include kaya toast, a popular breakfast option of toasted bread slathered with a jam made from coconut milk, eggs, sugar and pandan leaves;fish head curry, a dish combining Chinese and South Indian influences, where a large fish head is cooked in a tamarind-based curry; and steamboat, a dish of thinly-sliced meat and vegetables cooked in a broth kept simmering in a heated pot.

“All this talk of food might inspire one to get a takeaway, or to tapau,” OED said, referring to another new word which originated from Mandarin and the Cantonese dialect, meaning “to package, or wrap up, food to take away”.

Apart from gigil, the newly-added Philippine words include the national pastime of videoke, the local version of karaoke which includes a scoring system, andsalakot, a wide-brimmed, lightweight hat often used by farmers.

Other Philippine additions include what the OED calls “idiosyncratic uses of existing English words”, such asterror, sometimes used to describe a teacher who is strict, harsh, or demanding.

The OED contains more than 600,000 words, making it one of the most comprehensive dictionaries in the English-speaking world.

Its editors consider thousands of new word suggestions each year. These come from a variety of sources, including its editors’ own reading, crowdsourcing appeals, and analysis of language databases.

Words and phrases from South Africa and Ireland were also part of OED’s latest update.

For the past 48 hours, top White House officials have faced questions from lawmakers and the press about how a journalist came to join a sensitive group chat for an upcoming military operation – and why President Donald Trump’s national security team was sharing sensitive information in an unsecure manner.

The Atlantic first reported details of the group chat on the platform Signal after its editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added to it. He followed the thread as top Trump administration officials discussed upcoming military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen.

The Atlantic then on Wednesday published the entire text thread that showed the detailed and potentially classified rundown for a March air raids.

While the thread appears to have contained sensitive information, there is still much that remains unknown. Here are four lingering questions regarding so-called “Signal-gate”.

• Read the messages Trump officials exchanged on leaked Signal thread
• Three sensitive messages from Yemen strike Signal chat unpacked and explained
• WATCH: Is the Signal chat leak involving Trump officials a big deal?

The Trump administration maintains the information shared in the chat was not classified.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that “no war plans” were discussed on the chat. Instead, she characterised the information shared as “sensitive policy discussions”.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers during a congressional hearing that the Signal chat was “candid and sensitive”, though “no classified information was shared”.

But under questioning, she and CIA Director John Ratcliffe appeared uncertain about the classification of the attack plan. They later emphasised that Hegseth had the power to classify and declassify the type of details that were shared.

Hegseth has denied sharing classified material, but experts are sceptical that this type of sensitive information would not carry that kind of designation.

Jamil Jaffer, executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University, said that Hegseth did not send “an operational plan for World War Three, or for the Pacific region”.

“But at the same time,” Mr Jaffer said, “these are operational details that could, if released publicly, put American lives at risk or jeopardise the success of the operation.”

In his original article, Mr Goldberg reports that on 11 March he initially “received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz”, Trump’s national security adviser.

Two days later, he writes that he received a notice that he was to be included in a Signal group titled the “Houthi PC small group.”

Mr Goldberg reports that the group received a message from Waltz, which also noted one of his deputies was “pulling together” a team of top staffers relevant to the discussion.

On Tuesday, Trump suggested that a “lower level” staffer for Waltz added Mr Goldberg to the chat.

However, Waltz himself told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham: “I take full responsibility. I built the – I built the group.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was also in the group, said on Wednesday that someone had made a “mistake” in adding Mr Goldberg.

It remains to be seen whether the Republican-controlled Congress will launch oversight investigations.

Republican lawmakers have emphatically supported the Trump administration’s agenda to this point, so it seems improbable that they would support investigations into the Signal chat.

Democrats in the House are reportedly trying to force a vote on a “Resolution of Inquiry” that would require the Trump administration to hand over records related to the incident, according to Reuters, but they do not have a majority.

While some Republicans have raised concerns over the leak, few have appeared eager to cross the president.

The use of Signal to discuss the Houthi strikes posed broader questions about how Trump’s top staffers are sharing and discussing sensitive information.

Gabbard testified on Wednesday that Signal came “pre-installed on government devices”.

She cited guidance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which mentioned Signal as an example of a messaging service with end-to-end encryption.

Ratcliffe earlier testified to Congress that Signal had been installed on his devices when he took over the CIA.

But it remains uncertain if security officials had provided guidance about using Signal for discussing military operations like the strikes against the Houthis.

“Whether these circumstances were approved or not is still not clear,” Mr Jaffer said.

CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, has reported that the US National Security Agency had warned employees against using Signal due to “a vulnerability” that they had identified.

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

Fukushima. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Places that will forever be remembered as the sites of nuclear disasters.

Most people will have heard of them. But fewer are aware of the Windscale fire.

It was one of the world’s first – and remains the UK’s worst – nuclear accident.

A nuclear reactor at the site in Cumbria caught fire on 10 October 1957 and burned for three days, releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere.

Many details of the event were kept quiet for decades, and it is far less famous than some of the more recent examples.

But a new video game has brought the disaster, and the area where it happened, back into the spotlight.

Atomfall is the latest release from Oxford-based Rebellion, best known for its long-running Sniper Elite series.

CEO Jason Kingsley tells BBC Newsbeat he was walking in the Lake District when the idea of using the real-life Windscale story “as a trigger point for a fictionalised version of the disaster” began to take shape.

Atomfall is a survival action game set in the rolling green landscapes of the beauty spot, but on an alternative sci-fi inspired timeline where the area surrounding the plant has become a quarantine zone.

“It went pretty wrong in real life, but it was controlled,” says Jason.

“It was a proper disaster, but it didn’t cause strange glowing plants or mutants or dangerous cults to emerge.”

Although the Windscale fire was “very serious”, Jason says it’s not something that is especially well-remembered, even among locals.

It is estimated about 240 cases of thyroid cancer were caused by the radioactive leak and all milk produced within 310 square miles (800 square km) of the site was destroyed for a month after the fire.

Windscale was eventually renamed Sellafield and produced nuclear power until 2003. It still employs about 10,000 people in the local area.

When Newsbeat visits Cumbria, most young people we speak to say they haven’t heard of the disaster.

And indie game developers Hannah Roberts and Harry Hawson say that they became more aware of it once the game was announced.

For two people like them, who hope to break into the games industry, they’re excited to see a game set in the place where they live.

Hannah, 26, says it’s evident Atomfall’s makers have done their research.

“The actual environments are spot on, they’ve got fantastic Morris dancing stuff going on – it really tickled me when I saw that,” she says.

Hannah says other small details – like black and white Cumbrian signposts – were also pleasing to see.

Atomfall’s setting and its inspiration have made it an anticipated title since it was first revealed last year, and Harry, 23, says that’s been encouraging for him.

“Seeing that such a small space like Cumbria can be taken by the games industry and built upon and people are receptive to that, it’s exciting for the future and I look forward to seeing what’s next for me,” he says.

It’s fairly unusual for high-profile games set in the UK to be set outside London.

While indie games – such as the Shropshire-set Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and last year’s Barnsley-based laughfest Thank Goodness You’re Here! – have ventured further north, bigger games haven’t tended to stray beyond the M25.

Jason says the US is about 40% of the video games market, so it’s important to appeal to players there, and there’s a “natural tendency” to follow the norms.

Being an independent company, he feels, allows Rebellion to do things differently, and Britain offers lots of inspiration for new settings – if you’re prepared to look for them.

“The UK, I think, to understand certain aspects of our culture, you’ve got to dig into it a little bit because we tend to understate things quite a lot.”

Rebellion’s Head of Design Ben Fisher says the goal was to create a “slightly theme parkish” version of the Lake District with accurate details.

“There are things that, as locals, it’s easy for us to forget are unique to Britain, that are unusual,” he says.

The team that worked on the game has members from various countries, Ben says, which helped to highlight things the UK natives might have missed.

“The lead artist on the project is from Seattle and was mystified by dry stone walls,” says Ben.

He adds the team spent time recreating the structures – which are constructed without the use of mortar – to “capture those local details”.

Featuring a local area in a film or TV show can expose a new audience to that place.

“Ultimately, what’s incredibly rewarding about this industry is you can put your ideas down and they can be played by people across the globe,” Jason says.

“And you know, how wonderful is it to sort of talk about the Lake District to people that live in Africa or Southeast Asia or Canada or wherever it might be.

“That’s a kind of form of soft power that very few types of media have.”

Oliver Hodgson, 21, can see Sellafield from his bedroom window.

He hopes that the local area will benefit from some of the soft power Jason describes.

“I think it’s just an incredibly powerful thing for young people in west Cumbria,” he says.

“I think it’s really positive to see such a big gaming developer set a story in Cumbria, which is normally just known for its lakes and mountains,” he says.

Oliver who runs his own PR firm, is working with the creators of a project to create a £4m gaming hub in Whitehaven aimed at boosting digital skills in the area.

Oliver says he’s glad the game has taken its inspiration from Windscale and is drawing attention to the area, as well as switching locals on to their history.

“I think we should own it,” he says.

“The story of the Windscale disaster obviously isn’t a positive one but we can’t rewrite history.

“So acknowledging what happened and teaching and letting young people learn about that history, if this is what brings it into the classroom or on to young people’s phones or their social media, then so be it.”

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

India’s Supreme Court has put on hold a recent high court court which said that “grabbing [the] breasts” of a girl and breaking off the drawstrings of her lower garment could not be considered an attempt to rape.

The Allahabad high court had ruled last week that the offence could only be described as “aggravated sexual assault”, which involves a lesser punishment.

The top court judges said some of the comments in the high court order depicted “a total lack of sensitivity” on the part of the judge who wrote it.

The high court ruling led to outrage in India.

On Wednesday, the two-judge Supreme Court bench of Justice BR Gavai and Justice Augustine described the 17 March order as “shocking”, especially since it was not delivered “on the spur of the moment” but had been well thought through after being reserved for four months.

The top court has now sent notices to India’s federal authorities and state government in Uttar Pradesh, where the court in Allahabad (now called Prayagraj) is located.

According to the prosecution, the case involves an 11-year-old girl whose mother has alleged that the two accused offered a lift to her daughter on their motorbike, promising to drop her home.

She sent the child with the men who were from the same village and known to them.

“The accused persons stopped their motorcycle on the way to the village and started grabbing her breasts,” the high court order said, adding that one of the men dragged her beneath a culvert and “broke her pyjama [lower garment] string”.

She was rescued by some villagers who were passing by and were alerted by her cries for help, forcing her attackers to flee.

The accused have denied the allegations against them.

The high court ruling was based on the argument that “attempt to rape” was different from “preparation”, legal website Live Law reported, quoting from the high court order.

“The prosecution must establish that it had gone beyond the stage of preparation. The difference between preparation and actual attempt to commit an offence consists chiefly in the greater degree of determination,” the order said.

The controversial ruling led to outrage in the country with many describing the judgement as “atrocious”.

Senior lawyer Indira Jaising told a TV channel that what happened with the child “goes beyond preparation” and in legal terms “it is attempt to commit rape”.

“How do you prove intent? It is proved by actions that precede the actual act of rape,” she said, adding that the fact that the girl was dragged to a secluded place meant it had gone beyond preparation.

India’s Women and Child Welfare Minister Annapurna Devi told news agency Press Trust of India that “the high court ruling has no place in a civilised society and that it will have an adverse impact on society”.

On a hot, humid Thursday night in Saitama, China’s national football team hit its lowest ebb.

With a minute left on the clock and trailing Japan 6-0, Chinese defenders were likely wishing for the sweet relief of the final whistle.

But Japan’s Takefusa Kubo was not feeling charitable. After watching his team-mates toy with their opponents for a while, he received a pass on the edge of the Chinese box and rammed home Japan’s seventh goal.

The ball rocketed into the roof of the net, and the man known as “Japanese Messi” condemned China to their worst-ever defeat in a World Cup qualifier.

The 7-0 spanking in September – described as “rock-bottom” by a Shanghai-based newspaper – followed a year-long line of humiliating defeats which included losses to Oman, Uzbekistan and Hong Kong.

But worse was to come.

A week later dozens of players, coaches and administrators were arrested for gambling, match-fixing and bribery as part of a two-year probe into corruption in the domestic game.

And the defeats have continued. On Tuesday, Australia beat China 2-0 in Hangzhou – cementing them at the bottom of their World Cup qualifying group.

It wasn’t long ago that China had dreamed of becoming a footballing superpower.

The world’s largest population, a thriving economy and a determined Communist Party led by an avid football fan, President Xi Jinping. What could go wrong?

Apparently, quite a lot.

When Xi came to power in 2012, his love for the sport spurred a drive to reform and improve Chinese football. His dream, he once said, was for China to qualify for the World Cup, host it and, ultimately, win it. These were his “three wishes”.

But a decade later, even Xi seemed to have lost the faith. While making small talk with Thailand’s prime minister on the sidelines of an international summit in 2023, the Chinese president was heard saying that China had “got lucky” in a recent victory against Thailand.

“When China’s government puts its mind to something, it very rarely fails,” says Mark Dreyer, a Beijing-based sports writer. “Look at electric vehicles, look at the Olympics. Practically any sector you can think of, China is right up there.”

But football, it seems, could not thrive in the grip of the Communist Party.

A key government report in 2015 noted that The Chinese Football Association (CFA) must have “legal autonomy,” and should be “independent” of the General Administration of Sport (GAS).

Even Xi admitted that if China wanted to succeed, then the Party would have to do what it seldom does: let go.

And yet, Beijing didn’t let go.

“China’s failure in football has become a national embarrassment and figuring out the reasons has become a national obsession,” Rowan Simons, author of Bamboo Goalposts: One Man’s Quest to Teach the People’s Republic of China to Love Football, told the BBC.

“But to me, the reasons are pretty clear and they tell you a lot about how the country is run.”

The problem, he and others argue, is that China’s one-party state imposes decisions from the top. While this is effective for economic growth, it yields poor results in competitive team sports.

Although Fifa prohibits state interference, Chinese football is rife with political appointments. This is common in China, where the Party controls most aspects of public life.

The current president of the CFA, Song Cai, is also a Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party. His work, in turn, is overseen by a senior government official at the GAS.

“Everything has to report upwards to Communist Party bosses. It basically means that non-football people are making football decisions,” Mr Dreyer says. “Football has to be grassroots-led. You start at the bottom of the pyramid and the talent starts to funnel up to the top.”

All major footballing nations have a “pyramid” of leagues. The elite professional clubs sit at the top, supported by a deep pool of semi-professional and amateur teams, all of whose players are vying to work their way up.

Such a pyramid thrives on a culture of playing football, en masse, for fun. The larger the pool to draw from, the better the players at the top will be.

“If you look at every country where football is really successful, the sport has grown organically as a grassroots activity over the past 100 years,” Mr Simons says. “Professional football in China has continually failed because it’s supported by nothing – their pyramid is upside down.”

The statistics bear this out: England’s 1.3 million registered players dwarf China’s fewer-than-100,000 footballers. This is in spite of China’s population being 20 times larger than England’s.

“Kids here don’t grow up with a ball at their feet. Without that, you’re not going to produce elite talent,” Mr Dreyer says.

Top-level football in Europe and South America traces its origins to streets and parks in every town and village. In China, however, the push began in Beijing.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the government set up the country’s first professional league. It created a handful of top clubs in major cities – but neglected the grassroots.

Keen to impress their bosses, officials in this top-down system inevitably opt for a “short-termist” approach that sacrifices genuine improvement over time for quick fixes, Mr Dreyer explains.

Some foreigners who have played in China say such a heavily controlled system also leaves little room for young players to develop a natural understanding of the game.

A European currently playing in China, who did not wish to reveal his name, told the BBC that while many Chinese players are “technically good”, they lack “football IQ” at crucial moments on the pitch.

“Creativity and basic decision-making, which we learn instinctively as a kid, you don’t see so much here,” the player says.

This does not mean that there is not a deep love for football in China.

While the men’s team, currently ranked 90th in the world, is seen as a constant disappointment, the women’s team, ranked 17th, has been a source of pride for years.

Many in China have referred to them as the “real” guozu or national team – and in 2023, a record 53 million people tuned in to watch them play – and lose 6-1 – to England at the World Cup.

The men’s Super League boasts the highest average attendance of any league in Asia. At its peak in the 2010s, it was attracting big-name foreign players as it rode a wave of investment from state-owned enterprises, buoyed by a thriving economy.

But it was short-lived.

Since the pandemic and the subsequent economic slowdown in China, more than 40 professional clubs have folded as state-backed companies started to pull their investments. Private companies, too, have proved fickle in their commitment.

In 2015, the Suning Appliance Group, which also used to own the top Italian club Inter Milan, bought Jiangsu FC. The club went on to win the Super League in 2020. But months later, Suning said they were closing the club to focus on their retail business.

The demise of Guangzhou Evergrande, China’s most successful team ever, is yet another example.

Bankrolled by property giant Evergrande Group, they won trophy after trophy under the management of Italian greats such as Marcello Lippi and Fabio Cannavaro. But as they found glory at home and in Asia, their parent company was overstretching itself in an inflated property market.

Evergrande is now the world’s most indebted property company and the poster-child for China’s real estate crisis, with arrears of more than $300bn (£225bn).

Its former club – now in the hands of new owners – was expelled from the league in January. After years of splurging, the eight-time champions are still struggling to pay off their debt.

But that is not the only crisis engulfing Chinese football. Its rapid rise created another problem: corruption.

“I should have followed the right path. I was just doing what was customary at the time,” says Li Tie, the former manager of China’s national men’s team, in a 2024 documentary.

In that documentary, Li makes a shocking admission: for years he fixed matches and paid bribes to get certain jobs, including 3m yuan (£331,000, $418,500) to become the national team coach in 2019.

Dressed in all-black, he marks a written confession with an inky fingerprint: “I’m very sorry.”

China’s national team was made to watch the documentary by state broadcaster CCTV while preparing for last year’s Asian Cup in Qatar.

The primetime expose, co-produced by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), was the first episode of a four-part series on corruption in China called Continued Efforts, Deepening Progress.

In it, dozens of Chinese officials confess – always to camera – to staggering levels of corruption across a variety of industries.

By airing the football episode first, the authorities signalled their serious concern about graft within the sport.

Li, who appeared in a World Cup and once played for Premier League side Everton, is the most high-profile figure to have been apprehended last year in an unprecedented slew of anti-corruption arrests in Chinese football.

In December, he was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Also publicly shamed in the documentary are former CFA chairman Chen Xuyuan and ex-deputy director of the GAS, Du Zhaocai.

“The corruption of these officials has broken our hearts,” one fan told CCTV. “I’m not surprised,” said another.

The documentary echoed what one ex-national team player told a BBC radio documentary in 2015 in an anonymous interview: that there was a system of “open bidding” among players for their spot in the squad.

“I could have won many more caps, but I didn’t have the cash,” he said.

It would take another 10 years before corruption in football exploded into the spotlight. Some suggest this was prompted by China’s intolerably bad performances on the pitch.

The struggles of China’s men’s football team are all the more stark given how other sports are flourishing in the country.

Decades of investment in infrastructure and training have taken China from a sporting backwater to a medal-winning machine that recently equalled the United States with 40 golds at the Paris Olympics.

But many of these are individual sports – weightlifting, swimming, diving – which require fewer resources and, crucially, less emphasis on community-led grassroots efforts, compared to a game like football.

They are also less lucrative and, therefore, less vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement.

As China’s economy reels from a sustained downturn, its officials have bigger challenges than football woes.

But that is little consolation to fans.

The loss to Japan particularly stung. While Japan have gone from strength to strength over the past two decades, China have failed to qualify for a single World Cup.

The day after the loss, the Oriental Sports Daily did not mince its words: “When the taste of bitterness reaches its extreme, all that is left is numbness.”

According to Mr Dreyer, Japan’s approach is antithetical to China’s: a long-term vision, a lack of political interference and a commercially savvy club structure.

“Even so, the fan culture here [in China] is still remarkably good,” he adds. “They deserve so much more.”

Their disappointment showed following Tuesday’s defeat against Australia – but so did their humour.

“It seems like the national team’s performance is as consistent as ever,” wrote one fan on social media. Another joked that if China wants to continue thriving economically, then its football team must suffer so there is a balance in “national fortune”.

Perhaps they had resigned themselves to what a popular Chinese journalist had written in his blog after Japan beat China.

Football “cannot be boosted by singing odes or telling stories”, he noted. “It needs skill, and physical and tactical training. It cannot be accomplished through politics.”

US President Donald Trump says he may cut tariffs on China to help seal a deal for short video app TikTok to be sold by its owner ByteDance.

Trump also said he was willing to extend a 5 April deadline for a non-Chinese buyer of the platform to be found.

In January, he delayed the implementation of a law passed under the Biden administration to ban TikTok.

The legislation, which was signed into law in 2024, cited national security grounds for the sell or be banned order.

“With respect to TikTok, and China is going to have to play a role in that, possibly in the form of an approval, maybe, and I think they’ll do that,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

“Maybe I’ll give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done,” he added.

Trump also said he expected at least the outline of a deal to be reached by the 5 April deadline.

• What does Trump’s executive order mean for TikTok and who might buy it?

In response to the comments, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said Beijing “has repeatedly stated its position. China’s opposition to the imposition of additional tariffs has always been consistent and clear”.

Trump made the comments after announcing new import taxes of 25% on all cars and car parts coming into the US in a move that threatens to widen the global trade war.

The BBC has contacted TikTok for comment.

The biggest sticking point to finalising a deal to sell the TikTok business, which is worth tens of billions of dollars, has always been securing Beijing’s agreement.

Trump has previously tried to use tariffs as leverage in the negotiations.

On his first day back in the White House, on 20 January, the president threatened more import duties on China if it did not approve a TikTok deal.

The hugely popular app is used by around 170 million Americans.

Trump, who called for TikTok to be banned in his first term as president, now has an account on the platform.

He has more than 15 million followers and has said he received billions of views on the app during his presidential election campaign.

Separately, the US increased levies on all imports from China to 20% this month.

That doubled the tariffs Trump imposed on the world’s second largest economy on 4 February.

On 10 February, China responded with its own tariffs, including a 10-15% tax on some US agricultural goods.

Beijing has also targeted various US aviation, defence and tech firms by adding them to an “unreliable entity list” and imposing export controls.

The 10% levy doubled to 20% on 4 March.

China has urged the US to return to dialogue with Beijing as soon as possible.

US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has released a social media video filmed inside a controversial mega-prison in El Salvador, thanking the country and its president for “bringing our terrorists here and incarcerating them”.

Secretary Noem was in the country to tour the facility, where US officials recently sent 238 Venezuelans.

In a cell behind her as she spoke were dozens of bare-chested and tattooed Salvadorean members from the MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs.

The trip suggests President Trump does not intend to back down from his immigration policy in the face of an injunction, upheld by an appeals court, on removing the Venezuelans from US soil under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

Secretary Noem described the prison as “one of the tools in our toolbox” and warned people that “if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face”.

As part of her visit, she is due to meet Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele, an ally of US President Donald Trump, who had the Terrorism Confinement Centre (Cecot) facility built as part of his own crackdown on gang crime in El Salvador.

President Bukele made the offer to incarcerate deportees and prisoners from the US at the Cecot during a recent visit to the Central American nation by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The move has prompted an outcry in the US and Venezuela, with several family members of the deportees insisting their relatives do not belong to any gang.

As Secretary Noem was being shown around the notorious facility on Wednesday, the Trump Administration received another setback in its effort to send foreign nationals there.

An appeals court in Washington DC upheld a decision by a lower court to put a temporary injunction on the deportation of Venezuelan immigrants under the 1798 act, which allows for the expulsion of foreign citizens with little due process.

The use of the act has drawn an outcry from immigration lawyers and activists who argue that some men accused of being gang members have been sent to El Salvador and locked up in the mega-prison on the basis of little evidence, including simply having tattoos.

Human rights groups have warned that the jail, in which inmates are held in windowless cells and sleep on bare metal bunks, is a “concrete and steel pit”.

The White House continues to insist that all those they rounded up are dangerous gang members and were carefully vetted.

However, several of their family members in Venezuela say their loved ones had no prior convictions.

The deportation of 238 Venezuelans to the Cecot earlier this month has also put the Trump Administration into open conflict with a federal judge, James Boasberg, over the use of the centuries-old law to justify their quick deportation.

Judge Boasberg has since imposed an injunction on further deportations under the law, which was last invoked during World War Two.

The fate of the Venezuelans has also come under severe criticism by a Washington Court of Appeals judge who said that even “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act”.

The comparison prompted a furious reaction from senior officials in the Trump Administration.

Meanwhile, lawyers in El Salvador, apparently acting in coordination with the Venezuelan government, have lodged a petition with the Salvadorean Supreme Court to try to secure the immediate release of the men.

The deportations to El Salvador under Trump’s second term are part of the president’s long-running campaign against illegal immigration in the US.

He won over voters on the campaign trail, in part, by promising to enact the largest deportation operation in US history.

In January, Trump signed an executive order declaring Tren de Aragua and MS-13 foreign terrorist organisations.

While irregular border crossings have plummeted to the lowest number in decades since Trump took office, the Republican president has reportedly been frustrated by the relatively slow pace of deportations so far.

Poland has temporarily suspended the right of migrants arriving in Poland via its border with Belarus to apply for asylum.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced it would be happening after the controversial bill, which will allow Polish authorities to suspend this right for up to 60 days at a time, was signed into law by President Andrzej Duda.

Tusk had said it would be adopted “without a moment’s delay” while Duda said the changes were needed to strengthen security on the country’s borders.

But the law has been criticized by rights groups including Human Rights Watch, which said the EU should take legal action against Poland if it was implemented.

The group urged the country’s parliament last month to reject the bill, saying it “flies in the face of Poland’s international and EU obligations” and could “effectively completely seal off the Poland-Belarus border, where Polish authorities already engage in unlawful and abusive pushbacks”.

The government said previously the suspension would only be applied temporarily to people who pose a threat to state security, for example “large groups of aggressive migrants trying to storm the border”.

Exemptions will be made for unaccompanied minors, pregnant women, the elderly or unwell, anyone exposed to “real risk of serious harm” by being returned and citizens of countries accused of conducting the instrumentalization of migration – like Belarus

Tusk has dismissed criticism from human rights groups.

“Nobody is talking about violating human rights, the right to asylum, we are talking about not granting applications to people who illegally cross the border in groups organised by Lukashenko,” he said in October.

Since 2021, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Finland have seen a huge increase in the number of people crossing into their countries illegally from Belarus and Russia.

Polish authorities have sent thousands of troops and border guards to police its border with Belarus and built a 5.5-metre-high steel fence along 186 km of the frontier where at times several thousand migrants have been left stranded.

Rights groups estimate more than one hundred people have died on the borders between Belarus and Poland, Lithuania and Latvia since 2021.

EU eastern flank countries and the European Commission have accused the Belarusian and Russian authorities of weaponising migration to create a new route into the EU to destabilize the bloc.

Popular Indian comedian Kunal Kamra has refused to apologise after jokes he made during a stand-up show angered supporters of a top politician in Maharashtra state.

Clips of the jokes – some of them were directed at the state’s Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde – had gone viral.

Members of the Shiv Sena party, which is led by Shinde, vandalised the hotel in Mumbai – the capital of Maharashtra – where the show was held.

A police case was also registered against Kamra and politicians from the state’s ruling coalition have asked him to apologise.

In a statement released on Monday night, Kamra said he would “co-operate with the police and courts for any lawful action” taken against him.

“But will the law be fairly and equally deployed against those who have decided that vandalism is the appropriate response to being offended by a joke?” he added.

Police arrested 12 people for the vandalism at the hotel, which housed a comedy club where the show was filmed. They were later released on bail.

As the controversy raged, Shinde said he did not support the vandalism, but added that “the other person should also maintain a certain standard”.

“There is freedom of expression. We understand satire. But there should be a limit,” he told BBC Marathi.

Kamra is a well-known name in the Indian comedy scene, with his political satire and stand-up shows getting millions of views on social media.

In his latest show – called Naya Bharat (New India) – Kamra refers to Shinde’s 2022 defection from the Shiv Sena party which triggered a major political crisis in the state.

The move led to a split in the Shiv Sena – India’s Election Commission later recognised Shinde’s group as the “real” Shiv Sena. The party is now part of the governing coalition in Maharashtra along with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Nationalist Congress Party.

In the show, Kamra sang a parody of a Bollywood song where he indirectly referred to Shinde as a traitor, outraging his supporters.

It’s not clear when the show was filmed at the hotel but the reactions this week were swift.

After Shiv Sena workers ransacked the venue, the studio Habitat – which often hosted stand-up comedy shows – said it was shutting down until it figured out “the best way to provide a platform for free expression without putting ourselves and our property in jeopardy”.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, Mumbai’s civic authorities, also demolished some structures at the hotel, citing alleged building violations.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who is from the BJP, criticised Kamra, asking him to apologise. “None of us are against freedom of speech. We support satire or even political satire and we do not paint it differently,” he said.

Both he and Shinde accused Kamra of speaking on behalf of the opposition.

A lawmaker from Shinde’s party also said in a video that Shiv Sena workers would pursue Kamra across the country and he would be forced to leave India.

In his statement, Kamra said he would not “hide under [his] bed”, waiting for the outrage to die down.

“As far as I know, it is not against the law to poke fun at our leaders and the circus that is our political system,” he said.

Opposition leaders have supported Kamra.

Uddhav Thackeray, chief of Shinde’s former party – the Shiv Sena (UBT) – said Kamra had not done anything wrong.

“He stated the facts and voiced the public opinion,” he added.

Indian comedians have often faced legal action over comments and jokes. In 2021, Munawar Faruqui spent days in jail after being accused of hurting Hindu religious sentiments in jokes that – it turned out – he didn’t actually crack.

Actor and comedian Vir Das also faced outrage and police complaints after a show in the US where he described India as a country of two sides where people “worship women during the day but gang rape them at night”.

The head of Turkey’s main opposition party has told the BBC that protests will continue “in every city” until either early presidential elections are called, or the jailed mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, is released from prison.

Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the mayor’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), said the nationwide protests would include a very large demonstration this Saturday in Istanbul. That will open the party’s campaign to make Imamoglu the country’s next president in elections that are due in 2028, he said.

“In every city we go to, we will have the biggest rallies in their history,” Ozel declared.

“The belief in Ekrem Imamoglu and in democracy will make the protests bigger and stronger,” he told us at his party headquarters in Istanbul, as visitors, staff and advisors bustled in and out.

The opposition has brought huge crowds onto the streets – the biggest seen here in over a decade – since Imamoglu was arrested seven days ago.

Alongside the mass demonstrations, there have also been mass arrests – more than 1,400 people and counting, including seven Turkish journalists who were reporting on the protests.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has plenty of strong supporters, has condemned the demonstrations as “street terrorism” and accused protesters of attacking the police and damaging public property.

He said the opposition’s “show” would eventually fade.

Ozel spoke to the BBC fresh from a visit to Silivri Prison, a high-security campus on the outskirts of Istanbul where Imamoglu is being held.

“He is in solitary confinement, but he’s in good condition and has not been mistreated so far,” he told us.

Ozel said the corruption case against Istanbul’s mayor was “a scam designed to discredit him”.

As an example, he cited allegations that Imamoglu bought land cheaply years ago, and the low purchase price may have been a bribe. “The truth was that small payment was just the deposit for the land,” he said.

• Why are thousands of people protesting in Turkey?
• Protests are about far more than fate of Istanbul’s mayor
• Ekrem Imamoglu – Turkey’s presidential hopeful who is under arrest

Imamoglu denies all the charges against him, including “establishing a criminal organisation, taking bribes, extortion, and rigging a public tender”.

He says his arrest was a coup. Turkish officials say the courts here are independent. Human rights organisations strongly dispute that.

Ozel said Imamoglu was arrested for one simple reason – to prevent him becoming Turkey’s next president. Opinion polls suggest the mayor might be able to do that – if he’s not behind bars.

“Erdogan has thrown a three-time election winner in jail… in front of the whole world,” Ozel said.

“Suddenly he is jailing someone who is fighting against him in a normal political way. It’s like your rival coming and slicing the ball in a football game, because you are winning.”

The opposition party believes the response of Turkish society and the international community will be key in deciding if Imamoglu remains behind bars.

But Ozel said the CHP felt “abandoned” by the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his party.

“While all of Europe is reacting, the English Labour Party, and Starmer have said nothing. The cradle of democracy – England – and our brother party, the Labour party, how can they stay silent? We are really hurt.”

A few hours before that comment on Tuesday, Starmer’s spokesman said that there was “an ongoing domestic Turkish legal process” and the UK “expects Turkey to uphold the rule of law”.

If the mayor is not released, the CHP plans to keep fighting for the presidency.

“If they keep Ekrem Imamoglu locked up and hinder his candidacy,” Ozel said, “any member of CHP can be a candidate and would be elected with 65% to 70%”.

A Kenyan police officer deployed in Haiti as part of the international security force has been killed after an attack by suspected gang members, the country’s transitional council says, after he was initially reported missing.

“This valiant policeman, committed to the side of the Haitian forces to fight against insecurity, has made the ultimate sacrifice for a better future,” read a statement from Haiti’s Presidential Transitional Council (CPT).

The officer was identified as Benedict Kabiru. His mother spoke to local media, saying she was overwhelmed with emotion.

“I am a single mother. He was my only hope,” she said.

The CPT statement did not disclose whether the officer’s body had been retrieved.

The Kenyan authorities confirmed the officer was missing but are yet to comment on his reported killing.

There has been widespread opposition in Kenya to the deployment of police officers to Haiti to quell the violence in the gang-run Latin American country.

People have called on the officers to be returned home due to the dangers they face.

But in a phone call on Tuesday evening, President William Ruto and US State Secretary Marc Rubio reaffirmed their commitment to the mission.

The US is one of the main funders of the Kenya-led mission to help Haiti tackle its gang problem.

The CPT said those responsible were “either armed criminals or accomplices”, and that they would face justice.

It added that the authorities would continue to work with their national and international partners to “restore stability and build a Haiti where security and justice prevail”.

The attack happened on Tuesday during a patrol operation in the town of Pont-Sondé, the Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission to Haiti said.

This is not the first Kenyan fatality among the roughly 800 police officers deployed to Haiti.

Last month, a 26-year-old police constable was fatally wounded during an operation in Ségur-Savien.

Samuel Tompoi Kaetuai’s body was flown back and he was laid to rest this month.

Kenya has deployed at least 800 police officers under the MSS mission to Haiti to help combat gangs.

The force was sent to Haiti in June last year to help restore order to the country, where gangs have seized control of almost the entire capital, Port-au-Prince, as well as many rural areas.

More than 5,500 people were killed in gang-related violence in Haiti in 2024 and more than a million people have fled their homes.

• The men fighting gang leader Barbecue for power in Haiti
• On patrol with Kenyan forces inside Haiti’s gang warzone
• Kenyan police taunted as they square up to Haiti’s gangs
• How gangs came to dominate Haiti

The detention of South Sudan’s First Vice-President Riek Machar has effectively collapsed the 2018 peace deal that ended the country’s five-year civil war, his party has said.

An armed convoy led by top security officials, including the defence minister, entered Machar’s residence in the capital, Juba, and disarmed his bodyguards late on Wednesday, said the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement In Opposition (SPLM/IO).

Machar was detained alongside his wife Angelina Teny, who is the country’s interior minister, the party added.

The US has urged the authorities to free Machar, while the UN, African Union and neighbouring countries have all expressed their concern.

The UN Mission in South Sudan, Unmiss, warned that the world’s newest nation risked losing the “hard-won gains of the past seven years” if it returned to “a state of war”.

“Tonight, the country’s leaders stand on the brink of relapsing into widespread conflict,” the mission said in a statement on Wednesday.

The government is yet to comment on Machar’s reported house-arrest.

But addressing religious leaders on Wednesday, President Salva Kiir said “he will never return the country to war”.

Tensions have been building between Machar and the president for several weeks.

The two leaders agreed in August 2018 to end the civil war between their forces that killed nearly 400,000 people. But over the last seven years their relationship has become increasingly strained amid ethnic tensions and sporadic violence.

Earlier this week, the UN said that barrel bombs believed to contain a highly flammable liquid had been used in airstrikes during fighting between the army and a rebel group previously linked to Machar.

“The arrest and detention of H.E Dr Riek Machar effectively brings the [peace] agreement to a collapse,” SPLM/IO deputy leader Oyet Nathaniel Pierino told journalists on Thursday.

“The prospect for peace and stability in South Sudan has now been put into serious jeopardy,” he added.

A similar warning was issued by the UN mission in the country, which said the country’s leaders “stand on the brink of relapsing into widespread conflict”.

Tension remains high in Juba with a heavy military presence reported around Machar’s home.

“The public are in a panic,” civil society leader Edmund Yakani told the AFP news agency.

“There is a high chance of full-scale war but it will be more deadly and more violent because of [the need] for revenge,” he added.

But Pierino called on SPLM/IO members and the public to remain calm as diplomatic efforts continue to resolve the situation.

Reath Muoch Tang, chairman of the party’s foreign relations committee, said Machar was under house-arrest, but that security officials initially tried to take him away.

“An arrest warrant was delivered to him under unclear charges,” Tang said in a statement, calling the action a “blatant violation of the constitution and the Revitalized Peace Agreement”.

The UN mission warned that violations of the 2018 peace deal “will not only devastate South Sudan but also affect the entire region”.

The British and US embassies have scaled down their diplomatic staff and urged their citizens to leave the country while the Norwegian and German embassies have closed their operations in Juba.

The US has called on President Kiir to free his rival from the reported house-arrest, urging the two leaders to show commitment to peace.

“We urge President Kiir to reverse this action & prevent further escalation of the situation,” the US Bureau of African Affairs wrote on X.

The escalating tensions come amid renewed clashes between forces loyal to the two rivals in the northern town of Nasir in the oil-rich Upper Nile State.

• Mystery in South Sudan after sacked spy boss mired in gun battle
• Salva Kiir: The president in a cowboy hat

Germany has said it “will not give in” and that Europe must “respond firmly” as US President Donald Trump targets imported cars and car parts with a 25% tax in his latest tariffs.

Other major world economies have vowed to retaliate, with France’s president branding the move “a waste of time” and “incoherent”, Canada calling it a “direct attack”, and China accusing Washington of violating international trade rules.

Shares in carmakers from Japan to Germany sold off. In the US, General Motors dropped 7%, while Ford fell more than 2%.

Trump has threatened to impose “far larger” tariffs if Europe works with Canada to do what he describes as “economic harm” to the US.

• What are tariffs and why is Trump using them?

The fresh car tariffs will come into effect on 2 April, with charges on businesses importing vehicles starting the next day. Taxes on parts are set to start in May or later.

Trump has long maintained the tariffs are part of a drive to help US manufacturing and says if cars are made in America there will be “absolutely no tariff”.

Tariffs are taxes charged on goods imported from other countries.

While the measures can protect domestic businesses, they also raise costs for businesses reliant on parts from abroad.

The companies that bring the foreign goods into the country pay the tax to the government. Firms may choose to pass on some or all of the cost of tariffs to customers.

The US imported about eight million cars last year – accounting for about $240bn (£186bn) in trade and roughly half of overall sales.

Mexico is the top supplier of cars to the US, followed by South Korea, Japan, Canada and Germany.

Analysts have estimated that tariffs on parts just from Canada and Mexico could lead to costs rising by $4,000-$10,000 depending on the vehicle, according to the Anderson Economic Group.

At a press conference on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said it was “not the time” for the US to be imposing tariffs.

“Imposing tariffs means breaking value chains, it means creating in the short term an inflationary effect and destroying jobs,” he said in Paris.

So it is not good for the American or the European economy, in the same way it is not good for the Canadian or Mexican economy.

“All of this is rather a waste of time and will create a lot of worry,” he added, saying that he hoped Trump would reconsider.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said the European Union must “respond firmly”.

“It must be clear that we will not give in to the US. We need to show strength and self-confidence,” he added.

France backs this joint approach, with its finance minister Eric Lombard saying Europe’s “only solution” is to retaliate with tariffs on US products.

“We are in a situation where we are being targeted. Either we accept it, in which case this will never stop, or we respond,” Lombard added.

He emphasised the need to “rebalance the playing field” so the US was “forced to negotiate”.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the tariffs a “direct attack” on his country and its car industry, adding it “will hurt us” but trade options were being discussed.

In the UK, car industry body the SMMT said the announcement of the tariffs by Trump on Wednesday was “not surprising but, nevertheless, disappointing”.

Uniparts founder John Neill said the Trump tariffs were “a gift to the Chinese”, because international consumers would respond to a trade war by buying Chinese alternatives.

Meanwhile, China accused Trump of violating World Trade Organization rules.

“There are no winners in a trade war or a tariff war. No country’s development and prosperity has been achieved by imposing tariffs,” a spokesman for the foreign ministry said.

There are warnings from Japan that there will be a “significant impact” on the economic relationship it shares with the US. A government spokesman described the measures as “extremely regrettable” and said officials have asked the US for an exemption.

In South Korea, a day before the latest levy, Hyundai announced it would invest $21bn (£16.3bn) in the US and build a new steel plant in Louisiana.

Trump hailed the investment as a “clear demonstration that tariffs very strongly work”.

Bosch – based in Germany – says it has confidence in the “long-term potential” of the North American market and will continue to expand its business there.

President Volodymyr Zelensky was in a buoyant mood when I met him in Paris with a panel of three other European journalists. He had interrupted a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace and went back there for what he called a “tête à tête dinner” after the interview.

Macron had not just rolled out the red carpet for him. The Eiffel Tower, behind Zelensky in a picture window as we talked in one of Paris’s great museums, was lit up in yellow and blue, the colours of the Ukrainian national flag.

The French wanted him to feel as if he was among friends. Zelensky had come to Paris to meet leaders and diplomats from 30 other countries who are working out what they can contribute to the “coalition of the willing”, the group that UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron are trying to organise to offer Ukraine security guarantees if there is a long-term ceasefire.

Zelensky’s welcome in Paris was a clear contrast to the dressing down he was given by US President Donald Trump and his vice president JD Vance when he visited the White House last month.

After their verbal attack, Zelensky was unceremoniously turfed out of the White House and not long afterwards Trump ordered the suspension of American military aid and intelligence to Ukraine.

It was restored after Zelensky, advised by the British, the French and other European allies, went out of his way to mend his fences with Trump and his administration.

He switched to the kind of flattering language Trump demands and agreed to an American plan for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire. He dropped his insistence on US security guarantees first, to underpin any ceasefire.

But even though US military and intelligence assistance is flowing, Trump’s ruthless suspension of it, which cost Ukrainian lives, has left a deep sense of unease in Ukraine and among its European allies.

The evidence is piling up that Trump’s United States is not a reliable ally. It is getting easier to sketch out scenarios in which it might not be an ally at all.

Most European leaders still try to act publicly as if the 80-year-old alliance with the US is healthy. But the gathering of 30 countries in Paris shows they realise they can no longer rely on the benevolence of the United States.

American presidents going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower in the late 1950s have complained, with good reason, about Europeans getting a free ride from the US security blanket over Europe. Trump has finally pulled it away.

During the interview, Zelensky praised the array of plans that are being formulated in western Europe – led by the UK, France and Germany – to spend more on defence.

He suggested that in three to five years, “if everything goes as it is now”, Europe might even catch up with the United States.

At best, that is a highly optimistic estimate, less an accurate forecast and more a gesture of appreciation for European allies who unlike the Americans attach very few conditions and strings to support for Ukraine.

Europe, Zelensky said, “has discipline and no chaos”. That might be seen as an oblique and unflattering comparison with the twists and turns coming out of the Trump White House.

• Russia: Sanctions must be lifted before maritime ceasefire can start
• What is Swift and why is banning Russia so significant?
• Why did Putin invade Ukraine?

I asked him about the conditions Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has attached to the latest small step in the Trump peace initiative, which is a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea.

After Ukraine and Russia held separate meetings with the Americans in Saudi Arabia, the Kremlin issued a statement that required concessions as Russia’s price for a ceasefire.

The most significant demand was for a state-owned Russian bank to be readmitted to the Swift system for international payments. That would open a door back into mainstream global commerce for Russia.

That decision does not depend on Trump, as Swift is based in Belgium.

The European Union foreign affairs spokeswoman responded with a statement saying one of the “main preconditions” for lifting or amending sanctions on Russia was “the end of the Russian unprovoked and unjustified aggression in Ukraine and the unconditional withdrawal of all Russian military forces from the entire territory of Ukraine”.

Even Trump, reluctant to criticise Putin, suggested that Russia might be “dragging its feet” in the negotiations with the US. It reminded him of his own business career.

He told the US cable channel Newsmax that “I’ve done it over the years… I don’t want to sign a contract. I want to sort of stay in the game.”

I asked Zelensky where the push for a ceasefire stood, given Russia’s demands. He called for a resolute response from the Americans.

“If America is going to stand strong and not bend to the conditions of the Russians – we stand on our land.

“We are defending it; we have shown our resilience to everyone… And now it’s very important that our partners would be resilient and strong, at least at the minimum, as we are.”

I asked whether he believed the Americans would, as he put it, stay strong.

“I hope so. I hope so. God bless they will. But we’ll see.”

Zelensky has no choice about stating his faith in Trump’s America, even though he must have grave doubts.

Trump’s decision to punish Ukraine by cutting off military intelligence about Russia missile launches had an immediate and deadly impact, and Zelensky had to work hard to get Trump to relent. He does not want it to happen again.

He was open about why he had to try to stay close to Trump, even as the US president seemed to be prioritising the restoration of relations with Moscow as he repeated Russian propaganda points, not least the lie that Ukraine started the war.

“We needed to unblock the aid from the US. For us, the exchange of intelligence is very important.”

That did not stop Zelensky rebuking comments made by Steve Witkoff, Trump’s super envoy, a real estate billionaire turned diplomat who deals with the Middle East as well as the Russian-Ukraine war.

In an interview last week with Tucker Carlson, a right-wing podcaster in the United States, Witkoff disparaged the drive by the UK’s Starmer and France’s Macron to create the “coalition of the willing” to support Ukraine.

The American said it was a posture and pose, “a simplistic desire” to sound like Winston Churchill. His words fit squarely into what seems now to be a settled view in the Trump Administration that their erstwhile allies in Europe are a parasitical burden on the United States.

What if Witkoff was right? Strip away the insults and recognise that Europe’s richest nations have chosen, for decades, to spend most of their considerable wealth on matters they consider more pressing than their militaries.

Zelensky said Witkoff and others in the Trump administration, had fallen for Russian propaganda.

“I think that Witkoff often quotes the Kremlin narratives… I can’t be ungrateful to the Americans for everything they did, but they are often, unfortunately, under the influence of Russian narratives. And we cannot agree with these narratives.”

Zelensky suggested that Witkoff was better at his old job, developing real estate in Manhattan.

“He doesn’t look like a military man. He doesn’t look like a general, and he doesn’t have such experience. As far as I know, he is very good at selling and buying real estate. And this is a little different.”

President Zelensky, for a man who has lived with immense pressure since Russia’s full scale invasion more than three years ago, was remarkably buoyant, clearly pleased by the reception he had in Paris and the efforts that President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer are making to rally European support and to persuade, even cajole, Trump not to cut intelligence and military support to Ukraine.

Zelensky seemed happy with his new strategy of agreeing to temporary ceasefires to force Putin to show his reluctance to pause the war.

I asked Zelensky how he was dealing with the pressure. His goal, he said, was for his children to be able “to walk down the street and not have to hide.” And how did he think he’d be remembered; as the man who saved Ukraine, or tried to and failed? Zelensky grimaced slightly. Better, he said, than Putin, who was getting old and feared his own people.

“He will die soon. It is a fact. His reign could end before he finishes his historically insignificant and unsuccessful life. This is what he fears.”

Zelensky laughed.

“And I will do everything I can to defend Ukraine as much as I can. And I am definitely younger than Putin.”

Trump might be hoping for a deal by Easter. Zelensky is still looking to the long haul.

Victims have been conned out of millions of pounds in a whisky barrel investment scam, a BBC investigation has found.

Hundreds of people were duped into ploughing their life savings and pensions into casks that were overpriced or did not exist, while some individual casks were sold multiple times to different investors.

The victims include one woman with terminal cancer who invested £76,000 and another woman who spent more than £100,000 on casks which experts say were only ever worth a fraction of the price they paid.

The BBC can reveal that police are investigating three Scotch whisky companies over fraud allegations, with investments running into the millions.

The market’s popularity has grown rapidly in recent years because of the reports of huge returns being made from rare whiskies.

Investors buy a cask of whisky when it is first produced and then hope that it rises in value as the spirit ages in the barrel.

It takes three years for spirit to become Scotch whisky in a cask, and investors are encouraged to keep barrels for up to 10 years or more to maximise returns.

There are many legitimate traders – but a lack of regulation has enabled fraudsters to exploit the market. They use misleading claims and even outright fabrications to lure in unsuspecting investors.

There is no central authority regulating or tracking the ownership of casks, making it difficult to verify claims.

As a result, many investors find themselves entangled in complex legal disputes or left with assets worth far less than they were led to believe.

Alison Cocks, from Montrose, invested £103,000 in a company called Cask Whisky Ltd, run by a man calling himself Craig Arch.

She initially bought a single whisky cask for £3,000, and at first everything appeared legitimate.

Mrs Cocks was given certificates, and the company provided an online portal where she could track her investment. Her portfolio appeared to grow, on paper at least.

Comforted by the projected returns she was being promised, which started at 12% and were forecast to increase to as much as 50% over time, she was convinced to invest more.

She bought another three casks for a total of £100,000.

However, she said that the problems started when she told the company she wanted to sell.

“Suddenly they didn’t want to talk to me anymore. They were avoiding my calls. I was really panicking,” she said.

“I decided I would start investigating my own casks.

“On my certificates, it showed where my casks were, allegedly. When I actually contacted those warehouses, they weren’t there.”

Mrs Cocks was told by independent whisky valuers that she paid five times what her barrels were actually worth.

She has since been able to track down three of the four casks in warehouses, but none is in her name. One has also been bought by someone else.

The most expensive cask she bought – which cost her £49,500 – does not exist.

Alison Cocks is one of 200 people who invested with Cask Whisky Ltd and are trying to work out if they actually own their casks.

The BBC has discovered that Craig Arch – the company’s CEO – is actually Craig Brooks, a disqualified director and convicted fraudster.

In 2019, Brooks and his brother were jailed for a £6.2m fraud, where 350 victims were cold called and convinced to invest in carbon credits and “rare earth metals”.

The City of London Police Serious and Organised Crime team is now investigating Brooks’ whisky company.

But the BBC can also reveal that Brooks is running another cask whisky company, Cask Spirits Global Ltd, under another false name, Craig Hutchins.

As a disqualified director, it is illegal to run or control a company.

Yet, using the name Hutchins, Brooks told an undercover BBC reporter that he was in charge of “decision making” and that he dealt with finances.

When confronted, Brooks admitted his name was not Hutchins, but maintained all of the whisky casks he sold existed. He said he never told the reporter he made the company decisions.

Another company, called Whisky Scotland, has also left a trail of dissatisfied investors.

They include NHS worker Jay Evans, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2021. She put her home in Brighton on the market so she could make investments to provide long-term security for her loved ones.

She invested almost £76,000 in Whisky Scotland after being promised lucrative returns from a company director.

Mrs Evans, 54, sold her home and moved to Peacehaven in East Sussex, then used the money from the sale to invest in seven casks.

The company’s director sent her voicemails from across the world, telling her she was his “favourite ever client” and that he would “always look after her”.

But two of the casks did not exist, and the other five had been sold at a much higher cost than their true worth.

Mrs Evans has been told it would take 25 years to recoup what she has paid.

The company and directors have now vanished. Its Glasgow office is just a rented space and a BBC reporter was told they were never there.

“They’ve made somebody who’s facing end of life at an early age, they’ve made it infinitely more difficult. None of it will matter to people like this,” Mrs Evans said.

Her wife Susie Walker said it was “heart-breaking” that the money Jay had worked for had gone overnight, and that she would now need to carry on working.

Self-employed locksmith Geoff Owens, from Wrexham, invested his life savings – more than £100,000 – with Whisky Scotland.

He and other investors are now trying to track down their casks and their investments.

Mr Owens says he will not stop until he finds out what has happened to his money.

“No-one is going to rip me off and walk away from this, without me facing you,” he said.

“I will get an army together who you’ve ripped off, and we will try and do something about it.”

The BBC asked the directors of Whisky Scotland for a comment. They did not respond.

Martin Armstrong runs Whisky Broker, a bonded warehouse in Creetown, near Dumfries, which stores 48,000 casks.

He says he is being contacted “almost every day” by investors looking for casks sold by unscrupulous companies.

Asked if he thought that fraud could ever be so rife in the sector, he said: “No. But I knew it was possible.

“When there’s money involved, then everything follows.”

Kenny Macdonald – a legitimate whisky cask broker who runs his own company, Dram Mor – said there were other “good guys” operating in the industry.

He said there were “a huge amount of people” who were “profiteering” – but that in those cases, investors were at least getting a product.

“And then you get the ones who are downright nasty. And they’re selling somebody a piece of paper, for a cask that just never existed.

“The sharks are circling. They know there’s blood. They can smell it.

“And unfortunately, in this particular case, the blood is whisky.”

When Jeffrey Goldberg published a bombshell story outlining how some of the most senior US officials had mistakenly shared sensitive information with him, he obtained the biggest scoop of the year. The Atlantic editor also became the prime target for every senior Trump administration official in Washington.

In the last couple of days, he’s been called a “loser” and a “sleazebag” by President Donald Trump, as well as a liar and “scum” by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, who appeared to have mistakenly added Goldberg to a group chat earlier this month.

Before he became a political lightning rod, however, Goldberg watched on his phone as cabinet officials – including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, CIA director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – discussed the sensitive details, timings and targets of an upcoming military operation in Yemen. They did not seem to notice his presence.

In an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, he told me it all began when he got a message on his phone, via the publicly available Signal messaging app, which allows users to send each other encrypted messages. It’s popular among journalists and government officials. An account under Waltz’s name had messaged him, which he assumed was a hoax.

“I wish there was a Le Carré quality here, you know,” he said, referring to the late British spy novelist. “But he asked me to talk. I said yes. And next thing I know, I’m in this very strange chat group with the national security leadership of the United States.”

• Read the messages in full
• Three sensitive messages analysed
• WATCH: How big a deal is this?

As the fall-out of the episode has engulfed Washington, Waltz has taken responsibility for mistakenly adding Goldberg to the group chat, suggesting that he meant to invite somebody else.

He has insisted that he has never met the editor, saying: “I wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, if I saw him in a police lineup”.

By Goldberg’s account, the two have actually met several times, though he declined to go into detail about their relationship.

“He can say obviously whatever he wants, but I’m not commenting on my relationship or non-relationship,” Goldberg told me. “As a reporter, I’m just not comfortable talking publicly about relationships that I may or may not have with people who are news makers.”

Still, one thing is clear: you must already have someone’s contact information to reach them on Signal, and so Waltz had Goldberg’s phone number. The top security adviser has said he has asked Elon Musk, tech billionaire and the White House’s government efficiency czar, to investigate how the mistake happened – a move that was ridiculed by Goldberg.

“Really, you’re going to put Elon Musk onto the question of how somebody’s phone number ends up in someone’s phone? I mean you know, most 8-year-olds could figure it out,” he said.

The bigger question? “Should you, as national security officials, be doing this on Signal on your phone?” Goldberg said.

• Six unanswered questions

In his Monday Atlantic story – the first to report his access to the chat – Goldberg withheld the precise details that were shared around the bombing mission that attacked Houthi rebel targets in Yemen on 14 March. But Trump administration officials downplayed the report, calling him a liar and challenging his claims that classified information was shared.

And so two days later, the magazine printed the full text messages, including several from Hegseth that included operational specifics. I asked him if that was a tough decision to make.

“Once Donald Trump said there was nothing to see here, essentially, and once Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe said there was no sensitive information, no classified information, et cetera – we felt like, hm, we disagree,” he said. “They’re saying that, and we’re the ones who have the texts, so maybe people should see them.”

There are text messages in the group chat – sent before the first wave of strikes – detailing exactly when F-18 fighter jets would take off, when the first bombs would drop on Houthi targets and when Tomahawk missiles were going be fired. Hegseth has pushed back, saying they were clearly not “war plans” and none of it was classified information.

President Trump expressed his support for Hegseth on Wednesday, saying he was “doing a great job” and describing Goldberg as a “sleazebag”. The White House has also attempted to argue that the information shared was not technically war planning.

Goldberg did not appear swayed by their insults and claims.

“If Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, is texting me, telling me the attack was about to be launched on Yemen – telling me what kind of aircraft are going to be used, what kind of weapons are going to be used, and when the bombs are going to fall two hours after the text is received – that seems sensitive information, war-planning information to me,” he said.

This isn’t the first time that the veteran editor has been on the receiving end of Trump’s ire: in 2020 he published a piece in The Atlantic where senior military officials quoted Trump as having referred to fallen American soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”, something the president and his administration have vigorously denied.

I asked him how he felt about the vitriolic personal attacks against him, coming from the very highest levels of the government.

“This is their move. You never defend, just attack,” Goldberg said. “So I’m sitting there, minding my own business. They invite me into this Signal chat and now they’re attacking me as a sleaze bag, I don’t even get it.”

Trump has, so far, been defending his national security team and doesn’t seem inclined to sack anyone over what he is calling a press “witch-hunt”. But Goldberg says there’s a widespread feeling in the White House that Waltz made a serious error, as well as deeper concern about how the incident is being handled.

“If you’re a Air Force captain, currently working with the CIA and the State Department, and you mishandled sensitive information the way that they’ve obviously mishandled sensitive information? You’d be fired, you’d be prosecuted,” Goldberg said.

He said there is now some “buzz” among the ranks around the apparently differing accountability standards for leaders in the Trump administration.

Goldberg didn’t stick around in the chat for the fallout. He decided the responsible thing to do was to leave the group. Some journalists have expressed incredulity that he would voluntarily exit.

But what happens next will play out in the White House and Congress, where Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans have demanded an investigation.

“There’s a part of me that would love to see what else is happening in there. But there’s a lot of different issues here related to law and ethics and all kinds of other issues that I really can’t go into, ” Goldberg said. “Believe me when I say that I made that decision with good advice from various parties.”

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

A Turkish student attending Tufts University was arrested by US immigration officials in Massachusetts and is being held in detention in Louisiana.

Rumeysa Ozturk was detained on Tuesday outside Boston, as she was walking to an Iftar meal to celebrate Ramadan. Video shows masked, plain-clothes officers handcuffing and leading her to an unmarked car.

Tufts said in a statement that it had been told by officials that the student visa held by Ms Otzurk, who is a doctoral student, had been revoked.

Ms Otzurk participated in pro-Palestinian protests as a legal US resident. Her arrest follows the White House’s crackdown on what it has classified as antisemitism on US campuses.

Critics say the allegations are false. They allege that US officials are violating students’ right to free speech and are incorrectly accusing them of being anti-Jewish.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered that Ms Ozturk, 30, be detained in Massachusetts, and that prosecutors provide at least 48 hours notice if they intend to move her out of the state.

But according to federal records, she is currently being kept in Louisiana – about 1,500 miles (2,400km) away.

US Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a post on X that Ms Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans”.

“A visa is a privilege not a right,” she wrote, including a photo of Ms Ozturk’s arrest.

It is currently unclear what charges she is facing or how she allegedly supported Hamas.

The Tufts University statement said that it had no advance knowledge of the arrest, which took place off-campus.

“From what we have been told subsequently, the student’s visa status has been terminated, and we seek to confirm whether that information is true,” it said.

Ms Otzurk’s arrest follows the high-profile detention or attempted arrest of university students who have organised in support of the Palestinians.

On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt its efforts to arrest and deport a Columbia University student.

Yunseo Chung, 21, a legal permanent resident who moved to the US from South Korea as a child, had filed a lawsuit alleging immigration officials had executed search warrants at multiple Columbia facilities, including her dormitory.

Ms Chung’s lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, called the New York federal judge’s ruling “sensible and fair”, according to Politico.

He said her client “no longer has to fear” arrest or being sent to a faraway prison “simply because she spoke up for Palestinian human rights”.

The Columbia student’s lawsuit also names other students facing deportation, including Cornell doctoral candidate Momodou Taal and Columbia international student Ranjani Srinivasan, whose visa was revoked.

One of the highest profile cases thus far involves Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent pro-Palestinian activist, who remains in a Louisiana detention facility without charges.

The heightened activity by immigration officials is a part of President Donald Trump’s promise to combat antisemitism, written into an executive order in January.

Since then, the administration has revoked $400m in Columbia funding over allegations the university failed to combat antisemitism on its campus, and threatened to do the same to other universities.

The administration has also moved to deport multiple students across the country and called for students to “self-deport”.

Trump officials have cited the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the State Department to deport non-citizens who are “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the US.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has argued this statute grants broad deportation authority, stating visa and green-card holders can be removed “for virtually any reason”.

Civil rights groups, including the ACLU, have condemned the administration’s actions.

In an open letter to universities, the ACLU warned: “The federal government cannot mandate student expulsions or threaten funding cuts to suppress constitutionally protected speech.”

BBC correspondent Mark Lowen has been deported from Turkey after being arrested in Istanbul on Wednesday, the BBC has said.

Lowen had been in Turkey for several days to report on the ongoing protests that were sparked by the Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu’s arrest last week.

Imamoglu – who is being held in jail on corruption charges he denies – is seen as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main political rival.

He has been selected by his party as presidential candidate in the 2028 election.

In a statement issued on Thursday, the BBC said: “This morning (27 March) the Turkish authorities deported BBC News correspondent Mark Lowen from Istanbul, having taken him from his hotel the previous day and detained him for 17 hours.”

On Thursday morning, he was presented with a written notice that he was being deported for “being a threat to public order,” the statement said.

Mark Lowen said: “To be detained and deported from the country where I previously lived for five years and for which I have such affection has been extremely distressing. Press freedom and impartial reporting are fundamental to any democracy.”

The BBC’s CEO of News Deborah Turness added: “This is an extremely troubling incident and we will be making representations to the Turkish authorities.

“Mark is a very experienced correspondent with a deep knowledge of Turkey and no journalist should face this kind of treatment simply for doing their job. We will continue to report impartially and fairly on events in Turkey.”

Thousands of people across Turkey have turned out for protests which have so far seen more than 1,400 people detained.

The protesters say Imamoglu’s arrest is politically motivated, but the justice ministry insists on its judicial independence.

President Erdogan has labelled the demonstrations “evil” and blamed the opposition for “disturbing the peace”.

Several journalists have also been arrested, including a photojournalist from French news agency Agence France Presse and several Turkish reporters. Many were reportedly released on Thursday morning.

Nightly protests have stopped but Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is planning a rally in Istanbul on Saturday.

What will it take for India’s private companies to begin investing in building new factories and firms?

It’s a question that’s confounded policymakers for years. As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), private investment in India has been on the decline since the global financial crisis of 2007, even while the overall economy clocked world-beating growth rates.

After a long hiatus, the investment rate picked up slightly in 2022 and 2023, but latest data from a leading ratings agency shows private sector expenditure as part of the overall investments in India’s economy dipped again to a decadal low of 33% this financial year.

Analysis from Icra of 4,500 listed companies and 8,000 unlisted companies reveals that while the pace of investments made by listed players moderated, those by unlisted entities actually contracted.

Over the years, several economists have raised similar concerns about a slowdown in private investments.

Banking tycoon Uday Kotak is among many who’ve raised concerns recently about India’s fading “animal spirits”, urging young business owners who had inherited companies to build new businesses rather than sitting tight and managing their existing wealth.

Data from investment advisory firm Value Research shows Indian non-financial businesses were sitting on cash worth 11% of their total assets, corroborating the view that companies are not spending money in making fresh investments.

So why are Indian corporate houses choosing to do that?

Weak domestic consumption in urban areas, muted export demand and an influx of cheap Chinese imports in some sectors were among the factors that “restricted the capacity expansion plans of Indian corporate houses”, Icra’s Chief Rating Officer K Ravichandran said in a note.

But beyond the more immediate reasons, private investment impulse has been low because of “global uncertainties and overcapacity”, India’s economic survey pointed out earlier this year.

Slowing private investments have a direct bearing on India’s growth prospects.

Investments by companies in assets such as factories, machinery or construction – also called gross fixed capital formation – make up around 30% of GDP and are its second largest contributor following private consumption.

India’s full-year GDP is expected to close at 6.5%, sharply lower compared to last year’s 9.2%. Growth has flagged on account of slower consumption.

With all the key levers of growth, including exports, slowing down and US President Donald Trump’s tariffs exacerbating global uncertainties, kick-starting private investment will be fundamental for India to hit its long-term growth targets, experts say.

According to the World Bank’s latest estimates, India will need to grow by 7.8% on average over the next 22 years to achieve its high-income status ambition by 2047.

Key to this would be to increase private and public investment to at least 40% of GDP from 33% currently, the bank estimates.

The government on its part has significantly increased spending, especially on infrastructure. It also cut corporate tax rates from 30% to 22% and doled out billions of dollars in production-linked subsidies to manufacturers over the years. Availability of bank credit isn’t a constraint any longer, and regulation has eased with regulatory restrictions halving between 2003 and 2020.

But none of this has prodded corporate India to boost spending.

According to Sajjid Chinoy, JP Morgan India’s Chief Economist, the big problem is the lack of demand in the economy to justify putting up additional capacities.

India’s post-pandemic recovery has been uneven, with the consumer class not expanding quickly enough. Demand for goods and services has thus been hit, with spending capacity further curtailed by a fall in wages, even though corporate profitability has soared to a 15-year high this year.

“Just because companies are financially strong doesn’t mean they will automatically invest. Companies will only invest if they expect good returns,” Chinoy said at an event in Mumbai earlier this year.

Rathin Roy, a former member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC), points to other deeper structural issues arresting investment appetite.

“Entrepreneurs have been lacking the energy to produce goods that might generate new demand. A classic example of this is construction – where there’s unsold inventory in the urban areas, but an incapacity among builders to go into tier two and tier three towns and tap newer markets,” Roy told the BBC.

He said he also agreed with Mr Kotak’s views on the growing trend of business heirs turning wealth managers rather than building businesses ground up.

“Business houses discovered during Covid-19 that they don’t need to do business to make money. They can just invest and multiply it without building anything new,” said Roy. And these investments aren’t just happening in the domestic stock market. “A lot of money is just flowing out of India and chasing returns elsewhere,” he added.

But things could be turning a corner, according to Icra.

Interest rate cuts as well as a $12bn income tax relief provided to individuals in the federal budget “augurs well for supporting domestic consumption demand”, according to the report.

India’s central bank also says more private companies have shown an intention to invest this year compared to last year, although how much of that intent results into actual money deployed remains to be seen.

The uncertainties related to global trade tariffs could delay any anticipated investment pick-up, according to Icra.

Ever found yourself speechless in the presence of overwhelming cuteness, like your baby nephew or the cat video you saw on Instagram? There’s now a word for it: gigil.

Gigil () is part of a list of “untranslatable” words, or those that do not have English equivalents, that have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary..

Taken from the Philippines’ Tagalog language, gigil is a “feeling so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to tightly clench our hands, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze whomever or whatever it is we find so adorable”.

Alamak, a colloquial exclamation used to convey surprise or outrage in Singapore and Malaysia, also made the list.

“Wouldn’t it be useful for English speakers to have a specific word for sunlight dappling through leaves… Or a word for the action of sitting outside enjoying a beer?” OED said in its latest update.

People who speak English alongside other languages fill lexical gaps by “borrowing the untranslatable word from another language”. When they do this often enough, the borrowed word “becomes part of their vocabulary”, OED said.

The majority of newly-added words from Singapore and Malaysia are names of dishes, a testament to the nations’ obsessions with food.

These include kaya toast, a popular breakfast option of toasted bread slathered with a jam made from coconut milk, eggs, sugar and pandan leaves;fish head curry, a dish combining Chinese and South Indian influences, where a large fish head is cooked in a tamarind-based curry; and steamboat, a dish of thinly-sliced meat and vegetables cooked in a broth kept simmering in a heated pot.

“All this talk of food might inspire one to get a takeaway, or to tapau,” OED said, referring to another new word which originated from Mandarin and the Cantonese dialect, meaning “to package, or wrap up, food to take away”.

Apart from gigil, the newly-added Philippine words include the national pastime of videoke, the local version of karaoke which includes a scoring system, andsalakot, a wide-brimmed, lightweight hat often used by farmers.

Other Philippine additions include what the OED calls “idiosyncratic uses of existing English words”, such asterror, sometimes used to describe a teacher who is strict, harsh, or demanding.

The OED contains more than 600,000 words, making it one of the most comprehensive dictionaries in the English-speaking world.

Its editors consider thousands of new word suggestions each year. These come from a variety of sources, including its editors’ own reading, crowdsourcing appeals, and analysis of language databases.

Words and phrases from South Africa and Ireland were also part of OED’s latest update.

A courtside showdown, verbal swipes and accusations of lying.

Sports pundits annoying players with comments is nothing new, but the viral beef between Los Angeles Lakers legend LeBron James and basketball analyst Stephen A. Smith has seemingly got a more personal touch.

And the feud has entered another quarter.

After scoring a late winner for the Lakers against the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday, LeBron posted a video of Stephen boxing – complete with a mocking “WHOMP WHOMP” sound effect.

That came after Stephen claimed he “would have immediately swung” had LeBron put his hands on him during a tense confrontation earlier this month.

It all started after the game between the New York Knicks and LA Lakers on 6 March, when a video went viral which showed LeBron berating Stephen.

At the time, Stephen said it was to do with LeBron defending his son Bronny, following criticism over the amount of game time he was getting and suggestions he was only “in the NBA because of his dad”.

LeBron, 40, is the leading scorer in the NBA’s history and he and Bronny are the competition’s first father-son duo to share the court.

“That wasn’t a basketball player confronting me; that was a parent, and that was a father. And I can’t sit here and be angry,” Stephen said, later adding the hostility left him feeling “sad”.

In a new interview with ESPN this week, LeBron says he has no issues with criticism of a player’s performance but couldn’t tolerate personal attacks.

He adds that Stephen has repeatedly spoken about what happened, like he’s “on a Taylor Swift tour run right now”.

“I didn’t wanna address it. I wasn’t going to address it, but since the video came out, I feel the need to address it,” LeBron said.

He felt Stephen “missed the whole point” and he would never stop people from criticising players.

“But when you take it and get personal with it, it’s my job to not only protect my damn household but protect the players.”

He adds that Stephen would be “happy as hell” that LeBron’s talking about him, saying “he’s gonna be smiling ear-to-ear”.

Responding to that interview, Stephen claimed that “LeBron James is full of it”.

“And in this particular instance, as it pertains to his son, he is a liar. And he went on national television… and he lied again.”

He adds that during the initial confrontation, he didn’t know LeBron would “roll up on me”.

“But when he said what he had to say, I was in no position to give any kind of retort without making a scene,” he says.

Stephen goes on to claim that if LeBron put his hands on him, he “would have immediately swung on him”, while accepting he’d likely lose any physical confrontation.

Stephen adds he didn’t think the situation would escalate to the point of violence, but was shocked at how everything had taken place.

“The real point at hand is this: LeBron James continues to lie,” he says.

“He hoodwinked you all into thinking that he was upset about criticism about his son.”

Stephen insists his criticism was always professional and accused LeBron of “a lot of shady stuff”.

“This passive-aggressiveness, and the two-facedness, smile in your face and dig you behind the back… Which is why I don’t like him. And he don’t like me.

“But it doesn’t stop me from being fair and calling it like I see it.

“Because there’s one person in this ordeal that’s telling the truth, and it’s me.”

Stephen has previously praised Bronny’s skills after a strong performance against the Milwaukee Bucks, saying he was “impressed” and “might have been wrong”.

“I’ve always believed that this kid has the potential, once I watched him, to be in the NBA.”

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Every week, JP Gupta’s heart sinks when he hears his son cry on the phone.

The grim ritual began in January when Amit Gupta, a senior Indian technology officer in Qatar, was detained on charges that haven’t been made public yet.

Almost three months on, his family in India say they still don’t know what crime he is accused of.

“He is allowed to speak to us for just five minutes [a week] and all he says is: ‘Dad, I have not done anything wrong’, and then breaks down,” his father says.

Amit Gupta is the country head for Indian technology company Tech Mahindra in Kuwait and Qatar. He moved to Doha, Qatar’s capital, for work in 2013.

His father told the BBC that he was “picked up by Qatar state security department officials from a restaurant near his office on 1 January” without being given a reason.

Qatar’s interior ministry has not responded to the BBC’s questions on why Amit Gupta was detained.

The BBC has approached Tech Mahindra for comment.

A company spokesperson earlier said it was in close contact with the family and providing “necessary support” to them.

“We are also actively coordinating with authorities in both countries and adhering to the due process. Ensuring the wellbeing of our colleague is our top priority,” the company said.

Tech Mahindra, an Indian software services and consulting company, operates across 90 countries including Qatar and has more than 138,000 employees.

The Indian government hasn’t officially commented yet on Amit Gupta’s case. But sources in the country’s foreign ministry told the BBC that the Indian embassy in Qatar was “closely following the case”.

“The mission has been in touch with the family, the lawyer representing Amit Gupta and Qatari authorities on a regular basis,” the sources said. “Our embassy continues to provide all possible assistance in the matter.’

Amit Gupta’s wife Aakanksha Goyal, however, says the government should do more to secure her husband’s release.

She wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office, saying that her husband was “under immense mental pressure/trauma”.

“Our frequent appeals to the concerned authorities in Doha have not yet yielded any positive response,” she wrote.

The letter was acknowledged on 18 February and referred to India’s foreign ministry but nothing has happened since then, Ms Goyal told the BBC.

“We have sought a meeting with Prime Minister Modi and Foreign Minister S Jaishankar. Until they intervene, we don’t expect anything will happen,” she said.

In February, Amit Gupta’s parents travelled to Doha and managed to meet him with the help of Indian embassy there.

“When we saw him, he just hugged us and cried. He kept repeating that he had done nothing wrong,” his father said, adding that his son hasn’t been questioned by investigators in Qatar yet.

“If they have not found anything against him, he should be released,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of Indians live and work in Qatar. This is the second high-profile case of Indians being detained or arrested in Qatar to make headlines since 2022.

Last year, a court in the Gulf country released eight former Indian naval officers who had been sentenced to death. Neither Qatar nor India revealed the charges against the men, who were working for a private firm in Qatar. But media reports said the men were charged with spying for Israel.

The commuting of the death sentences was seen as a diplomatic triumph for Modi, whose administration shares a warm relationship with Qatar. In February, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar, paid a state visit to India, accompanied by a high-level delegation. During the visit, the two countries elevated their relationship to a strategic partnership.

While Amit Gupta’s family wait anxiously, Ms Goyal says she is finding it hard to answer questions from their children, aged 11 and four.

“My children keep asking me what happened to their father. My son’s birthday is in April and he is expecting Amit to be there as usual,” she says.